The central columns, marching away into an impossible vanishing point, were painted with relief grotesques in gold leaf. The plastered, chequered floor and the battened ceiling swam around them, like two chess boards about to slap together.
The air was full of howling voices, and none of them were human.
Gripping Uptil tight by the hand, Agnew floundered into the screaming void, the wind licking at his clothes.
"This is bad, isn't it?" yelled Uptil over the howl.
"It's not getting any better," agreed Agnew.
A figure crouched just ahead of them in the thaumaturgic onslaught. They leaned into the wind, and fought their way to his side.
Agnew grabbed the bewildered man, bellowing into his ear over the roar.
"Sir Rupert! Where is he?"
"Down in that!" answered de Quincey, shielding his eyes against the surge. "God help us, but he's probably dead already!"
"Not Triumff," muttered Agnew confidently, his words torn out of his mouth and lost in the gale.
The cat shook itself and moved on past them, head down, hackles up.
Agnew and Uptil left de Quincey, and fought their way down the impossibly elongated room. The wind tore at them so hard that it was difficult to walk.
They came to Mother Grundy, who stood her ground, beset by the hurricane. She was casting her worst, her most potent and seldom-touched spells into the maelstrom, which ate them like popcorn. By her side, Giuseppe Giuseppo was holding up his little book with one hand to read from it, and had the other outstretched to deliver ferocious Magicks of his own into the storm.
Few things in nature could have withstood a massed assault of such power: the concerted sorcery of La Spezia and Ormsvile Nesbit.
Few things except this.
"It's not enough!" screamed Giuseppe. "Even together, it's not enough!"
"I know," she said.
Ahead of them all, Triumff waded deeper into the blistering blur of the storm's heart, Gull's sword in his hand. Just ahead, through the chaos, he could see Jaspers in the mutated space by the Cantrip altar, simpering at the talisman he clutched in his hands. The great orbs of Cantriptic power on the altar smoked, and glowed with infernal excitement.
Gripping the sword tight, Triumff lunged at Jaspers.
There was suddenly someone in his way. Triumff was facing himself. A smiling Triumff made of black and white light had risen to block Triumff's path.
"What the hell?" Triumff declared, recoiling.
A second black and white Triumff appeared, and then a third. As one, they raised their swords and came for him.
Triumff fought back, dancing on his feet as he tried to keep three swords at bay. All three of his mirror-foes were smiling the same sick smile.
He got under one guard, and performed the unnerving act of killing himself. The smiling black and white Triumff vanished with a pop of bad air.
The other two monochrome visions were still at him. Triumff dodged and fought to keep out of their sword-room. Gull's sword clashed with the phantom blades so fast and furiously that it sounded like someone shaking a sack of cutlery. One sword tip sliced into his thigh. The muscle immediately went cold and distant.
Triumff lashed out, decapitating one of his phantom selves, which vanished like a collapsing mist. Two more black and white Triumff's rose up in its place to meet him.
"Oh, this isn't fair!" Triumff shouted.
As he wheeled and duelled with his other selves, he saw Jaspers rise, crushing the last talisman in his fingers, crumbling out the dust. Jaspers was laughing.
"Triumff!" he bayed. "Late again!"
The Cantriptic cyclone seemed to shift up a gear, and the air around them started to boil and flicker.
With a curse, Triumff impaled one of his phantom selves, and smacked another reeling with a blow from his knucklebow. The third and final black and white ghost locked him in a ferocious round of thrust and parry. The sick smile never left its face, not even when he finally ran the blade of Gull's sword through its chest.
The thing popped and fizzled away, but the violence of its disintegration tore Gull's rapier from Triumff's grip.
With no time left to recover it, he leapt at Jaspers anyway.
The Divine, his mouth still twisted in a leer, met his assault with surprising strength. He staggered back only a step or two as Triumff slammed into him, and then resisted Triumff's pressure, gripping his arms and forcing him backwards. Triumff realised that there was no longer anything especially human about the thing he was confronting.
"What are you?" he hissed, straining with every ounce of strength left in him.
"The last thing you'll ever see!" laughed the Divine, and threw Triumff backwards.
Triumff struggled to rise, but Jaspers reached out an open palm, and a wall of pressure pinned Triumff down. He felt the invisible barrier pressing upon him, crushing him into the chequerboard floor, stifling him.
The Cat passed Triumff with a tigerish bound, and hit Jaspers like an alley cat taking a rat. It raked its claws across his torso and face. Jaspers shrieked in pain, his agony lost in the wind. At the same moment, the pressure relaxed, and Triumff was free to move again. He grabbed the Couteau Suisse from his waist.
"A rapier? First time? Just this once?" he pleaded at it as he pressed the trigger.
Jaspers regained his footing and knocked the Cat aside. His robes were claw-torn across his chest and soaked in blood. One stripe of the Cat's claws had put a cut down Jaspers's face so nasty, it had almost hooked out his eye. Venomously, he blasted Magick at the Cat, and sent the animal tumbling across the room.
The Couteau Suisse did not produce a rapier blade as instructed. It instead sprouted a long, sleek whaler's harpoon of bright steel.
"You'll do," he said, hefting it up.
"Jaspers!" he yelled. "Stop this now! Stop this now, damn you!"
"I'm afraid I can't help you!" Jaspers yelled back.
"You already haven't," Triumff replied, and hurled the Couteau Suisse, point first.
Only the basket guard prevented the sharp missile from passing entirely through Jaspers's body. He reeled with the impact, and then turned, slowly, until he was facing the pulsing, blinding altar. He reached up to the weapon embedded in his chest, his hands wet with his own blood.
Then he pitched forward, head first, into the Cantriptic orbs.
Despite the riotous festivities in the City, all of London heard the boom. From one side of the Square Mile to the other, the revellers stopped what they were doing, drink or pipe or taper or skyrocket in hand, and turned to look south-west.
A ring of fire, a doughnut-shaped crown of white-green fire, surged up into the vault of night, mocking the sputtering, sparking fires of the festival. A reverberative boom thumped across the City sky, shaking casements, rattling tiles, echoing along streets and off the vast monuments of St Paul's and the Abbey. The boom echoed on, shaking away into the night, and the Shires beyond London, like the footsteps of a giant out there in the dark.
Those close to the river saw the Powerdrome ablaze with green fire, and cried out the loudest "oooohhh" of the night as one of the great smokestacks leaned and tumbled into the Thames tide.
The great ring of fire overhead dissipated and burned out.
In that single instant, all London sobered up, and knew, with uneasy heart, that something of note had just occurred. Something momentous had just come to an end, but no one was quite sure what.
CHAPTER THE LAST.
Afterwards.
There is money in ignorance.
This fact I have been fortunate to discover since the incidents I have just related for you.
Every soul in London and beyond wanted to know in detail the events of those bloody few days, and few members of the journalistic trade were in such a well-informed position to tell the tale as I, your servant, Wllm Beaver. From dawn on Aftermath Sunday, I began my work, compiling the evidence and the tale for public examination. Of course, in briefer articles
, other less-informed reporters have related the events in the broadsheets and pamphlets. This is the first time the entire story has been described within one cover.
Thanks must go to Sir Rupert, ultimately the hero of the hour, who first drew me into this affair, and then, in the tea house on Skitter Lane, suggested I become the custodian of posterity.
So then: a ring of fire that scorched the heavens, a resounding boom that split the sky, a city full of people turning their faces upwards in astonishment. In such a way was it done with. At five and twenty past one o'clock in the morning of Sunday, the fourteenth of May, two thousand and nine, the infernal threat to both Her Majesty and the City of London was overthrown.
Of course, no ending is ever clean. There are other matters, which must be tied up before I lay down my pen.
London was without power for all of Sunday and into Monday, before a Union gang under the command of Natterjack (whose fortitude, stamina and gymnastic fluency with English vulgarity were remarked upon by all) were able to restore a partial supply from a Powerdrome substation at Westminster. Emergency auxiliary stations were being put together on sites across the City. The Powerdrome would be out of commission for at least a year, and the Exchequer coffers would be vexed to afford the rebuilding.
For many days more, a pall of smoke hung over the town, legacy of the boisterous fireworks and the detonation at Battersea. The sun wheezed and blinked down through the rosy smog, and, for a while, people got used to the smell of blackpowder and charred sugar.
Around the twenty-ninth, a westerly wind took up, and cleansed the City's air at last, breezing the sky porcelain-blue again, and puffing away the traces of soot. It carried away the last vestiges of Lord Slee's curse, and took with it, out of the Thames estuary and to the sea, a number of ships from the Deptford yards. The Seagrim, under the command of Captain Granville Dymoke, was to make haste for Spain, to present a formal report of events to the Escorial. Ambassador Chantain of the Diplomatic School was aboard to make sure the statements and details were unfolded in proper mien, and a detachment of Royal Huscarls was aboard to make sure the noble house of de la Vega didn't quibble about making reparations for the late Regent's part in the affair. The GreatHarriet, commanded by Commodore Renard, put out for the Mediterranean, returning a certain resident of La Spezia home with an honour guard. And the Blameless
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
On the Monday morning following the Masque, as an army of household staff attacked the lawns and fields of Richmond with brooms and shoulder-slung litter baskets, Sir Rupert attended the cardinal at the Palace. The tents and marquees were being disassembled and loaded onto ox-carts. Chamber attendants were stripping the Palace walls of bunting. There was a jaunty air to the place: a busy, milling throng of tired, but spirited people.
Sir Rupert left his horse with an ostler in the Privy Yard, and strode along the main pathway towards the great closed tennis-play, which Woolly had converted into his inquest offices.
The workload before the cardinal was immense: the repairs, the political wheeling that would follow the new vacancies at Court, the inquests into how the conspiracy got so far, the thorough review of Church security, the general and Herculean acts of appeasement and public relations that would have to be undertaken to stabilise society at large.
Canvas sheets and matting had been laid down over the play's polished boards, and a score of junior secretaries and curial officers sat at rows of desks, sorting through documents, and sifting information. Every few seconds another courier strode into the chamber, passing a predecessor on the way out, and delivered more reports to the clerical workers. Intelligence was pouring in from all around the countryside, as parish after parish responded to the affair, and thoroughly checked itself over. So far, no further traces of the conspiracy had been found.
England was giving itself a medical, and the workers in the Richmond tennis-play were the cold probe of the stethoscope.
Triumff walked into the hive of industry, nodded to a couple of senior curates who recognised him, and made for the partitioned side-office at the end of play beneath the quarré. He could hear Woolly's voice from within.
The cardinal was at his desk, conversing with four curates and a secretary from the Privy Council. They seemed to be discussing a point of law, which, if carried over, would allow the Crown to seize Salisbury's lands as a penalty for his treason. Salisbury was doomed to meet with the axeman on Wednesday, and Woolly was deciding the fate of his heirs and dependants.
When he saw Triumff enter, Woolly dismissed the clerics, and ushered his guest to a seat.
Sir Rupert sat slowly, as carefully as his mending injuries would allow. Only a small bandage on his right hand gave away his hurt, but Woolly knew that a great deal more bandage wrapped his back, arms and thighs. The impact of Jaspers's body had exploded the Cantriptic orbs, and Triumff had been peppered by crystal shards before the force of the phlogestonic blast had lifted him sheer to the end of the chamber.
"I didn't expect you here so soon. Should you not be resting?"
Triumff shook his head.
"I have the Queen's own physician at my chamber door every quarter-hour," he said, "two of the Guild elders treating me to post-Goetic shock therapy, Agnew concocting every remedy in his damned family herbal, and Doll fussing around me as if I was a newborn babe."
Woolly smiled.
"You deserve no less, Sir Rupert," he said. "You have done the Unity a great service in the last days, at no small risk to yourself."
"This hour has had many heroes, your worship: Gull, de Quincey, the old dam from Suffolk, the Italian fellow"
Woolly got to his feet, and smoothed his velvet gown.
"Indeed," he said, "and each will be rewarded and celebrated as is his or her due. Lord Gull is to be decorated and made a gift of lands. De Quincey is to be given a stipend and a promotion. Mother Grundy and Giuseppe Giuseppo, both of whom came to our aid unbidden, are to be rewarded with whatever they desire."
"But for them," said Triumff with heartfelt relief, "the Cantrip explosion would have levelled London. Only their Arte contained it and focused it up out of harm's way."
"So it would seem," Woolly said, frowning. "I would dearly love to know how they did that, but it would be churlish and unseemly to interview those who have selflessly aided us." Woolly reached into his desk drawer and produced two sealed envelopes and a small felt pouch.
"Other matters I can attend to now," he said, handing one of the envelopes to Triumff. "Please convey this to your man, Agnew. It is a letter of gratitude and commendation signed by Her Majesty. There is also a bank draft for twenty guineas that he may lavish on himself and your noble savage."
Triumff chuckled and took the envelope. Woolly handed him the second. "It is said, a third man assisted in their part of the affair, a man who perhaps was once of the Service. I will not press you concerning him, for I believe he lives in a clandestine manner. If you ever happen across him, give him this: twenty guineas, and an invitation to approach me once more. The Unity has need of honest, well-trained men in these days."
Woolly slid the pouch across the table. "For your lady, Mistress Taresheet, an item of jewellery from the Queen's jewelbox, which Her Majesty hopes will convey both her appreciation of the performance, and her gratitude for Mistress Taresheet's swift and successful action."
"You don't need to pay us all off, your worship. We did what we did because it mattered."