A Quantum Mythology (4 page)

The stink. Hands grabbing at her. Tangwen was kicked, punched, bludgeoned, clawed with long, ragged nails as she slashed out with the knife and cut and cut. They didn’t appear to care that her knife bit into their flesh again and again as they forced her back into the red-frothed water. She saw the navigator swing the skull-headed club but they were all around her by the time he went down.

She felt herself go over as she sucked in her last, deep breath before she was under the shallow water again. She tried to fight free, but as more and more hands held her down, as more of her own blood leaked out into the stinging salt water, as the need to take another breath grew stronger and stronger, the panic came and she started to thrash around ineffectually.

Suddenly she could move again. Something bumped her under the water. A weight fell on her. She struggled free and sat up in the red-tinged shallows.

A number of the moonstruck were being forced back towards land by a tall, powerfully built, brown-skinned man with no hair. He was swinging a long-hafted axe with a double-crescent bronze head at them. A decapitated body bumped against her, pushed by the gentle movement of the waves. There was another body nearby, a huge bloody rent in its midriff.

Someone grabbed her arm. She turned to stab them and realised she’d lost her knife. The navigator let go of her, recoiling, his hands held up. He was trying to help her. He said something, nodding at the axeman. She recognised the word
Kush
. It was the brown-skinned man’s name.

‘We must help Kush,’ Germelqart repeated helplessly. The young woman turned from him and started feeling around in the silt under the red water. He saw the haft of his weapon bobbing in the gentle waves, anchored by its lime-cement-filled skull. He grabbed it and tried to run after Kush, but had to settle for stumbling.

Tangwen squeezed sand through her fingers as they closed around the hilt of her knife. Up and down the beach she could see survivors dragging themselves from the water only to be set upon by the moonstruck. All the while the
dryw
, wearing flayed faces, stood on the dunes, watching. The
dryw
with the filthy white hooded robes, who had been sent here to tend to the mad.

‘We have to help the survivors,’ she muttered to herself. Then she shouted it at Germelqart’s back in a language the navigator would struggle to understand. She stood up in the water and staggered after the two foreign traders.

Taking the horses onto the causeway had been a huge mistake. Ysgawyn could see that now. It was overconfidence, arrogance. He had underestimated the ability of the Atrebates’ warband and their allies from the Otherworld. He was not going to make the same mistake again.

It had cost them a number of warriors and more horse when they were forced off the causeway and into the swampy ground on the westernmost island. They had also lost Gwydion, his second-in-command and the Corpse People’s warleader. It was just another thing Ysgawyn was going to take out on the flesh of any Atrebates survivors.

Much of the lime had been washed off their faces, bodies and armour when they were forced to pick their way back north through the marshland to the causeway. Now they looked less like the corpses they tried so hard to emulate.

They had made it back to the mainland and were standing among a large field of tree stumps where the Lochlannach had chopped wood to fuel the burning, crumbling wicker man. The clear-cut swathe was a scar on the landscape.

They had been too busy trying to navigate through the marshland and pull their people and beasts from the sucking mire to have seen the battle, or the wicker man ignited. The wind had taken the smell of cooking meat the other way, but they still heard the screams. Even from so far away they had watched the angry red sea seethe and boil under the pulsing blue rip in the air, the gateway to Annwn. They had cheered when Arawn manifested as a mass of black maggots eating the sky. But their death god had not consumed the land. The gateway had closed. Ynys Prydein, the Isle of the Mighty, had not become Ynys Annwn, the Isle of the Dead.

He could see it in the eyes of his people. Despite the blessings of Crom Dhubh, despite having stolen the power of god-touched heroes by eating their flesh, his people were beginning to doubt their invincibility. In fact, having seen how the Atrebates warband and their allies had shepherded their comrades to Annwn, the Corpse People were beginning to doubt they were dead at all.

As Ysgawyn sat on one of the few surviving horses, hand gripping the hilt of his longsword so tightly that his knuckles had gone white, he knew that his people needed a victory. More fundamentally, they needed to hurt others and then kill them.

Somewhat worryingly he had watched his allies, the blank-faced warriors from the Otherworld, sail east against the wind. The giants had slipped beneath the waves. Whether they swam beneath the black
curraghs
or returned to their sunken homeland, he did not know.

They had all seen movement on the western isle, further inland from the causeway. They were not sure who or what it was but the movement was strange. It did not look like the movement of man or beast, and there had been a lot of it. It had started in the south but appeared to be getting closer, and it was making what was left of Ysgawyn’s warband even more nervous. There was something disturbing and unnatural about all that movement.

‘What are we doing?’ one of his warband asked. The young Corpse People warrior was looking to the south and west, where the sun had turned to red as it sank beyond the horizon. Under the lime and bravado, he looked little more than a well-built, frightened boy. The warrior was young enough that Ysgawyn hadn’t bothered to learn his name.

‘We’re waiting for survivors,’ Ysgawyn told him and then raised his voice. ‘Don’t you wish to avenge your humiliation?’ he demanded.

‘Our disgrace,’ one of the long moustaches said. Owen, he was called, well built and with scars to wear, he was one of the older members of the warband. He had been a good friend of Gwydion’s.

Ysgawyn seethed with anger at the correction but knew he could do nothing about it without alienating the warband further.

‘It is the time between times,’ Owen added. ‘The connections to the Otherworld grow in strength. The borders have been broken here this day. We should leave.’ Grumbles of agreement rose from the rest of the warband.

When did you become a
dryw
?
Ysgawyn wondered.

There was movement in the dying light. They heard a distant splash and saw ripples in the water by the shore of the western isle, about half a mile from their position.

‘I think the Atrebates’ bitch goddess has given birth to some awful thing to revenge herself on us,’ said the young warrior who had spoken first. His fear spread like a sickness through the warband.

Ysgawyn opened his mouth to curse them for cowards, though the fear was not unknown to him, either. Then the thing surged from the water and mud of the marshy terrain close to where they stood.

Stinger-tipped tendrils of translucent flesh, like those he had seen on the strange sea creatures that sometimes washed up on the shore, flew from a maw filled with rows of predatory teeth. Its mouth was surrounded by multi-segmented, spear-like mandibles. It writhed up, eyeless and wormlike, its body covered in thick shell-like armour. It surged across the land towards them, moving with surprising speed with a rapid, rippling movement.

Some readied spears or reached for swords, bracing shields, whilst others ran. Even Otherworldly steeds reared in terror at the massive creature, which was growing as they watched.

Cries of fear turned into cries of agony as tendrils wrapped around the men, their touch burning exposed skin as they were lifted into the air and dragged towards the maw – men or beasts, it didn’t matter.

Ysgawyn fought frantically to control his rearing horse as his men ran past him. One of them was yanked backwards into the air by the creature’s tendrils and his horse bolted from the thing. Later he would tell himself there was nothing he could have done, that the horse was too frightened for him to stand his ground. Now, with the cries of terror and agony of his own people in his ears, all he wanted to do was flee.

Despite himself, he looked back. His men weren’t dying. The thing’s mouth had distended to further enormity and sprays of liquids hit men and beast alike. Their skin sloughed off as their flesh fused with that of their steeds, and they screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

As he turned away to concentrate on riding north towards the hill that overlooked the three islands, he caught a glimpse of the western isle in his peripheral vision. The isle appeared to seethe as if it had a life of its own.

4

Birmingham, 1791

There was a lot of screaming. The Hellaquin caught a glance from upstairs of the dead man’s skin crawling, demons and devils moving in his flesh as the Knight’s necromancy tore word after word from the corpse through its gritted teeth. The Hellaquin heard the demon spit and curse at the Knight, shouting imprecations and threats, but in the end the devils in the Knight’s blood had proven stronger. It told the Knight that the cursed pepperbox pistol had come from one of the gun works on Steelhouse Lane. By then the house was ablaze and an even larger crowd had gathered. The two of them left via the back garden.

‘They’ll blame the Dissenters,’ the Hellaquin muttered.

‘Let them,’ the Knight said icily.

More redcoats spotted them as the Knight’s powerful horse carried them back into the city, heading for Steelhouse Lane. It was difficult to avoid the soldiers in the city at the moment. A mounted officer had even given chase, but the Knight’s steed easily outdistanced him. The officer fired at them on the gallop but the pistol ball went wide.

‘This is the place,’ the Hellaquin said when they finally reached their destination. His eyes read the plaque in the darkness as if it were broad daylight. His ability to read had also come from the chalice. The Knight moved up next to the Hellaquin, keeping an eye out all around, a pistol in each hand. The Hellaquin knew that the Knight would have no qualms about killing common soldiers if any of the redcoats found them. The Knight glanced down at the lock and then at the Hellaquin.

‘You are just as capable of picking locks as I,’ the Hellaquin growled.

‘Except I have no picks, and surely it’s much more appropriate for one of your station than for one of mine?’

The Hellaquin bit back a reply, reaching instead into his arrow case. He pulled out his picks and went to work on the lock. It was a complex modern design, very much what you would expect from Birmingham, and it gave him some trouble.

Quentin Padget felt the steel against his skin in his sleep, but it was the strong hand holding his mouth shut that woke him. The master gunsmith found himself looking down the rifled barrel of a pistol whose workmanship he had to admire, he recognised it as one of Nock’s pieces.

‘My apologies,’ the well-dressed pistoleer told him. There was another much larger figure behind him. Padget was surprised to see that the larger figure appeared to be holding a longbow with an arrow nocked. They must have come through the workshop and somehow not woken any of the apprentices. Padget started to panic. He tried to move his head to see if his wife Susan, lying next to him, was all right, but strong fingers held him still. ‘We would not have come upon you unannounced if it was not a desperate situation, but we must know certain things and we will have our knowledge. Now, if I let you go you must be quiet and still, else my large companion will murder and rape all here, possibly myself included. Do you understand?’

Padget saw the large man with the bow turn and look at the well-dressed pistoleer, but he could not make out the hulking brute’s expression in the darkness of his room above the workshop. He managed to nod and the fingers came away from his mouth. He looked over at Susan and was astonished to find that she was somehow still asleep.

‘Please—’ he begged.

‘No extraneous information, just answer our questions and we will be on our way.’ Padget had no idea what ‘extraneous’ meant, so he kept quiet. ‘A man bought a pepperbox pistol here recently—’

‘Sir Ronald Sharpely—’ Padget began.

‘No,’ the pistoleer said gravely. ‘I have not asked you anything yet.’

Padget felt his bowels turn to ice water. He saw the bowman glance at the man with the pistols again.

‘Who made the pistol?’ the well-dressed man asked.

‘I did,’ Padget said as a tear ran down his cheek. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m a master craftsman. I always look after a client of Sir Ronald’s standing. One of my finest pieces.’ Padget had a horrible feeling that the pistoleer had lost someone to the pepperbox in a duel and decided that the seven-barrel pistol had provided an unfair advantage. The well-dressed man appeared to be studying him. Even in the gloom it felt as if the pistoleer was looking into him somehow.

‘No,’ the well dressed man finally said, thoughtfully.

Padget almost pissed himself. ‘Sir, I promise—’

‘Quiet,’ the pistoleer said. Padget only just resisted the urge to sob. ‘Someone else worked on it.’

The Hellaquin observed the poor man the Knight was terrorising. The Knight had made sure the gunsmith’s wife would sleep through the ordeal by using a needle of Cathayan manufacture to drug her as she slept. He watched realisation followed by relief spread across the terrified man’s face at the Knight’s question.

‘Yes, sir – a clockworker and toymaker, he did the pan mechanism.’

‘And where may we find him?’

‘He has a workshop on Snow Hill, sir.’

‘And where does he come from?’ the Knight asked.

The Hellaquin looked sharply in his direction. Why hadn’t the Knight asked for the clockworker’s name first?

‘Austria, I think, maybe Switzerland, one of the Germanic countries, certainly.’

‘And his name?’

‘Silas Scab.’

The Knight let the name hang in the silence of the night for a while. The Hellaquin only noticed because he was looking for it and could see perfectly in the dark, but there was a moment of recognition on the Knight’s face, and then it was gone.

‘Where exactly on Snow Hill?’ the Hellaquin asked. He felt bad because the man jumped at the sound of his voice and a wet patch started to appear on the bedclothes. The gunsmith told them.

The Knight was holding up a tiny, ornately decorated brass egg.

‘There’s life in this – I can see the light of it. I wonder if this is an unborn baby scorpion?’ He put it down. The workshop in the ‘toy’-making district of Snow Hill was immaculate. ‘Toy’ referred to all manner of small metal goods from buttons to buckles, but it was clear that Silas Scab was a clockworker of prodigious talent. The workshop was so full of ticking, moving gears and springs that, to the Hellaquin, it appeared to be alive in the most unnatural way.

They had let themselves in again, though the lock had broken a number of his picks and then stabbed him with a needle coated in a venom that would have felled a normal man.

‘You know this man?’ the Hellaquin asked the Knight.

‘No,’ the Knight finally answered, but from the tone of his voice the Hellaquin knew there was something the Knight wasn’t telling him.

‘Who’s in there?’ a voice asked from outside. The accent was English.

The Hellaquin and the Knight looked at each other. They had been quiet and careful. Nobody should have heard them. The Knight moved quickly to one side of the double doors that opened into the workshop, drawing one of his flintlock pistols as he went. Then he nodded to the Hellaquin.

‘It’s the Watch – the door was open. What business is it of yours?’ the Hellaquin demanded with an authority he’d learned commanding mercenaries in France. The door was pushed open a crack by the barrel of a musket, and an old but still hale-and-hearty-looking man peered in. The Knight placed the barrel of the pistol against the man’s head.

‘Do please come in,’ he said politely. The man looked irritated but not frightened.

‘How did you know we were in here?’ the Hellaquin demanded, worried that they had come upon another of their kind.

‘Master Scab asked me to keep an eye on his place. He gave me one of them clocks. He said that if I ever saw the bird it meant there were someone in here. I thought he was talking nonsense meself – till the damned bird woke me up.’

The Hellaquin glanced at the Knight, who shrugged.

‘And where is Mr Scab?’ the Knight asked.

‘I don’t know,’ the man said stubbornly.

‘You’re lying.’

‘What if I am? I can’t see sneak thieves or assassins meaning anything but ill to Mr Scab, who’s always done right by me.’

The Hellaquin saw the expression of exasperation on the Knight’s face. The Knight was always confused whenever anyone whom he perceived to be lower than him in station didn’t just do exactly what he wanted when he wanted it done.

‘You realise I have a pistol clapped to your head,’ the Knight pointed out.

‘That hadn’t entirely escaped my notice, but it’s not the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at me, and I’ve lived a good, long life.’

Despite the man’s words, the Hellaquin could see the man was frightened.

‘That is your prerogative,’ the Knight said and cocked the pistol. ‘I’ll tear what I want to know from your steaming carcass.’

‘Wait,’ the Hellaquin said, not least because a shot would bring the redcoats and the actual Watch running. ‘He’ll do it,’ he told the man.

The old man turned to look at the Knight. Even in the darkness his eyes had adjusted enough to see the bored expression on the Knight’s face.

‘I believe you,’ the man finally said.

‘Is this Scab worth dying for?’ the Hellaquin asked.

‘I’m guessing he is polite but distant,’ the Knight said. ‘Pleasant enough, but you’ve always felt there was something not quite right about him.’

‘I just thought he was one of them Quakers.’

The Knight’s laughter was humourless.

‘He’s killed a young boy and a whole family in the last few days – that we know of,’ the Hellaquin said.

The old man looked between them both, then appeared to come to a decision: ‘He’s gone up to Soho. Old Man Boulton saw some of his work and asked for him.’

‘Who?’ the Knight asked.

‘Mr Matthew Boulton, the manufacturer, James Watt’s partner.’

‘The steam-engine man?’ the Knight asked.

‘Yes.’

‘And where can we find Mr Boulton?’

‘At this hour? Abed.’

‘I will shoot you,’ the Knight promised.

‘Try Soho House.’

The Knight removed the pistol from the old man’s head.

‘Go away and tell nobody that you spoke with us.’

‘Why don’t you go away, because I live here and I’ll call the Watch?’

The Hellaquin knew that the Knight was getting ready to kill the old man just to make his life easier.

‘Leave him,’ the Hellaquin said firmly. The Knight looked surprised that the Hellaquin would speak to him so, but he walked out of the workshop.

Soho House was a grand, three-storey rectangle with columns. It was faced in white-painted slate, giving it the appearance of having been constructed from large bricks of stone.

The drawing room was lined with dark wood panelling and bookshelves, and the fireplace still contained the dying embers of last night’s fire. The Knight was seated in a leather-upholstered chair, glancing between the tasteful finery of the room and the hastily dressed Boulton, who stood in front of the fire.

He was a formidable-looking grey-haired man in his sixties with a hawk-like nose and dark eyes. Despite the sternness of his features, the Hellaquin thought he could see a kindliness about the man. He was dressed in a black velvet housecoat, a silk waistcoat and a ruffed shirt that somehow managed not to be too ostentatious.

‘I am not in the habit of accepting visitors this late at night, regardless of how histrionic they are. What is this nonsense you told Evans?’ he demanded.

‘Do you know a Silas Scab?’ the Hellaquin asked.

Boulton’s eyes narrowed. ‘What business is that of yours?’

The Hellaquin opened his mouth to reply but the Knight beat him to it.

‘Just answer the damned question so we can get on with our business,’ the Knight demanded. He could have been talking to a stable boy. The Hellaquin let out a sigh as Boulton turned on the Knight, his face like thunder.

‘Get out of my house before I have you beaten out of it!’ Boulton demanded, barely able to talk through his anger. The Hellaquin could see his point. It didn’t matter what your ‘station’ was in society, you didn’t speak to a man that way in his own house.

The Knight looked equally furious at being threatened. The Hellaquin saw the other man’s hand creeping towards a blade, or maybe a pistol. The archer grabbed the Knight’s arm. The Knight looked about ready to kill both of them.

‘Decide what’s important here,’ the Hellaquin hissed, ‘or walk away.’ He watched the Knight control his temper with some difficulty.

‘Take your hand off me,’ the Knight said quietly, dangerously. The Hellaquin let go of him. ‘I’ll leave you to converse peasant to peasant.’ The Knight stood and strode out of the room. Boulton, his face a mask of fury, watched him go. If he heard the Knight’s parting comment, he said nothing.

‘Quickly tell me why you are here,’ Boulton said, turning on the Hellaquin when he heard the front door close.

‘Silas Scab has killed nine people that we know of. He is a lunatic and we believe he will kill again.’

‘Why should I believe you?’ Boulton demanded. ‘Where is your proof?’

‘We have witnesses … back in the city—’

‘You are a bad liar, sir!’

The Hellaquin shouldn’t have lied, he knew that. You didn’t get to be as wealthy – and obviously powerful – as Boulton without a degree of shrewdness.

‘He kills families in the most horrible ways, causes as much pain as he can. You have to believe me. He is possessed by devils.’

The Hellaquin read the expression of distaste on Boulton’s face as he said this last, and he knew he’d made another mistake. Boulton might believe in god but he was a man of his age, of science and clanking steam, clockwork and machinery. There was little room in this new world for devils. But then, surprisingly, Boulton’s face softened.

‘That at least is true, or you believe it so. Tell me, are you suffering a religious mania?’

‘I’m not that kind of man. I believe what I’m forced to because of what I’ve seen. If they had told you of Watt’s steam engine when you were a child, would you have believed them?’ The Hellaquin was all but pleading. Boulton thought on this.

‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘That I had to see to believe as well.’ Boulton was staring at the strange, burly man who had come unbidden to his house as he tried to make a decision.