Deliver us from Evil (43 page)

'For who knows what other fruits our journey may not bear?'

'A most positive attitude. Who can know indeed?' Lord Rochester smiled suddenly. 'And so prepared yourself, Lovelace. Let us delay no more. We leave within the hour for Amsterdam.'

'. . . soaring pierce The flaming limits of the universe,

Search heaven and hell, find out what's acted there,

And give the world true grounds of hope and fear

The Earl of Rochester,
'A
Satyr Against Mankind'

‘
I
t is fitting,' said Robert, 'for a man who would soar high above his own mortal baseness, that you are come to Amsterdam, where so many wonders and riches are raised upon such shit.'

‘I
t is indeed,' nodded Lord Rochester, 'a veritable blood-drinker of a city.' He paused, and gazed about him.
I
do not wonder the Pasha is come here to recover.'

'Recover?' asked Robert.

Lord Rochester stared
at
him sharply. 'Did
I
not mention,' he murmured, 'that the Pasha has been sick?' 'You did not.'

Lord Rochester shrugged faintly. 'Then that was most remiss of me.' But he said no more and instead leaned back in the boat, trailing his fingers through the water as though lost in contemplation. Robert turned from him to stare ahead again. For a long while, the nearer the boat had drawn to Amsterdam, the less he had been able to see of the city, for his view had been obscured by a great forest of shipping which made those of London seem the merest woods, so vast was its extent. For all that it was night, Robert could still hear a babel of cries and orders being shouted from the docks; and on the faint summer breeze there were borne to him a thousand different smells, perfumes and spices from every corner of the globe. Mingled with them all, though, was the native scent of mud, growing steadily stronger as the docks were left behind and the boat began to pull into a network of canals. Away from the harbour front, the water seemed thicker and the darkness more profound, as though they were passing, Robert thought suddenly, into the very body of the city, and were afloat upon its blood. He glanced round again at his companion. Lord Rochester was leaning forward now, his expression tense and alert. He spoke something to the oarsmen; then pointed ahead towards the canal's right bank. Robert too gazed ahead. He could see now how the bank was lined with buildings of extraordinary magnificence, warehouses and private homes, their ornate gables etched against the stars, their fronts freshly painted, so that their gleam in the dark was like that of pale flesh. Robert remembered the bodies in Wolverton Hall, and shivered, despite the prickling heat. He drew a cloak about him, and stared ahead again with redoubled dread and hope. Only one of the houses on the canal seemed derelict, its ruin all the more evident for the splendour of its neighbours; and it did not surprise him to see that the boat was veering slowly towards it. There were steps, greasy with weeds, which led down to the water; the boat drifted slowly to a halt, and was moored by their side; and then Robert followed Lord Rochester up on to the bank.

The door of the house opened as the two men approached it. Lord Rochester passed inside; Robert followed him. There was no sign of the servant who must have opened the door, nor any sound, and Robert would have guessed the entire house to be empty save that along the walls great torches had been lit, burning with heatless, ash-white flames. The scene they illuminated was one of magnificent desolation, a room which stretched so far back that it was lost in darkness, and contained nothing at all but bare boards, and a single staircase sweeping upwards until it too, like the room, was lost in the dark. Lord Rochester crossed to it, his footsteps echoing through the vast stillness, and began to climb the steps. Robert paused a moment before following; for he realised, gazing about him, that the proportions of the room were impossibly large. He stared after his companion, whose form was already fading into the darkness; then began to follow him up the stairway, up and up. At length he paused a moment more, and gazed back down the stairs at the room he had left. It seemed even vaster and emptier than it had done from the floor, and Robert rubbed his eyes and shook his head, for he dreaded to think what place he had entered. Yet it was too late to turn; and so he stumbled on upwards until suddenly, through the shadows, he saw a wall ahead of him, and an open door. Lord Rochester was walking through it. Robert clutched at the crucifix he wore about his neck; then he began to hurry. He approached the doorway, he passed through it. .. . At once, as he did so, he was doubled up with pain, such as he had not felt since the passageways of Wolverton Hall.

He fell to the ground, clawing at his stomach as though the agony-were something he might tear out with his hands. So searing was it that he was rendered unconscious of all that was about him; but dimly, through the mists of pain, he heard a haunting, silver-toned voice. 'The medicine. Give it to him. Quick.' He felt himself being held in someone's arms; and then a bottle was placed between his lips. He swallowed. An acrid, burning liquid scalded his throat. He swallowed again, trying not to choke; and felt the pain in his guts gradually starting to grow numb.

it seems,' said the voice, 'we share a linked ailment, you and
I
.'

Robert stared about him. He was in a room with its windows open to the stars. It was airy and large, but not impossibly so, and it was as though - he thought - having passed through the door, he had returned to the everyday world. Yet the fittings of the room, when he stared at them more closely, seemed exotic and strange: there were cushions piled everywhere, and thick patterned rugs; jewelled and golden censers filled with burning incense; no furniture at all save for low, silk-lined couches. On one of these a man lay hunched, his body twisted as though in terrible pain, so that he seemed barely able to move; and Robert knew, as he walked round to face him, that this could only be the Pasha. For his eyes were a blood-drinker's, incandescent and profound, and his skin gleamed like silk illumined from inside; but stretched tight, very tight, across the contours of his bones. He would have been handsome had his face not been so haggard, and so deathly pale that he scarcely seemed a Turk; yet still, intermingled with his suffering, were the marks of wisdom and incalculable age, so that Robert, kneeling by the Pasha's side, felt he was in the presence of some mighty angel, fallen from Heaven but still stamped with the greatness of his former state.

'Not an angel,' murmured the Pasha, 'but only a man, many years - centuries - a millennium ago.'

Robert gazed at him in shock, then narrowed his eyes. 'You can read my thoughts?' he asked. 'And yet
I
had thought my mind was closed to your breed?'

The Pasha smiled faintly. 'As
I
told you, we are linked by a common suffering - and also, it would seem, by something more as well.'

'Then tell me ...' Robert stared at him in sudden, desperate hope. 'Tell me what it is . . . tell me what you know . . .'

'First...' The Pasha's voice seemed hoarse with pain, and it faded away upon a rattle of breath. He struggled to reach for a tall, fluted bottle; but his arm was too weak, and Lord Rochester had to pick it up for him. It contained a black, viscous liquid, which Robert recognised from its smell as the liquid he had been given when he had entered the room. Like a priest with a goblet of communion wine, Lord Rochester raised the bottle to the Pasha's lips, and tipped it gently as the Pasha began to drink.

‘I
t must be a wondrous medicine,' said Robert, watching as the Pasha appeared to revive, 'to cure us both with such rapid ease.'

'As wondrous,' Lord Rochester answered, 'as it is also secret and rare. And yet
I
have spoken of it to you before, Lovelace, for this is that same
mummia
which
I
gave to the Marquise.'

Robert gazed at the liquid in fascination. 'And what is it,' he murmured, 'which can have such effect?'

Lord Rochester smiled at him coldly, and gestured towards some bottles gathered by the wall. Robert crossed to them. Each one was filled with a clear, thick substance; and in each was suspended a part of some limb. Robert knelt down by the nearest bottle. It contained a hand, so black and shrivelled that it seemed almost a claw, floating ponderously in the liquid like some blind, sea-bred thing.

it is crushed,' said the Pasha, 'and mingled with wine, that it may be consumed more easily and the taste be concealed.'

'And .. .' - Robert stared again in disgust at the floating hand -'and these are severed from the corpses of your victims?'

The Pasha shook his head, if only they were,' he answered, 'it would save much effort and expense, for indeed, there is nothing in the world so valuable nor so difficult to find.'

'What marks them, then, to render them so priceless?'

The Pasha smiled. 'You intrude upon dark and ancient mysteries, my friend.'

intrude?' Robert laughed balefully. 'No.
I
have long been lost amidst them.'

The Pasha's thin smile broadened. He picked up the bottle of liquid by his side and, raising it to the moonlight, gazed at it a while,
I
call it
mummia,'
he murmured at last, 'for that is the name by which it must be ordered, when
I
speak to the merchants who bring it to me here from the tombs of Egypt. For you should know, Lovelace, that it was the practice of the ancients to embalm their dead - and that these dead are plundered, and hawked in the Cairo bazaars, to be used in medicines or worn as idle charms. So it is easy enough for me to have them bought - and yet in truth, for my purposes, barely one in an infinitude of such corpses ever serves.'

'Why, sir,' asked Robert, 'what qualities do you require them to possess, which are so hard to discover?'

'A secret long sunk into dust, abandoned within temples lost beneath the sands and forgotten, forgotten, these many centuries now. In Egypt it was guarded, and Ur, and Hindustan, where bodies may still be found and dragged from mouldy graves. The ancient Hindoos called such corpses
Raktavija -
"seed-blood" - a fitting name, Lovelace, for the blood-line was fostered and protected by the priests from generation to generation, so that each parent's blood served to seed that of the child. The lines are long dead now; yet they were royal, and so their tombs may sometimes be discovered undisturbed, and traded to those who can comprehend their worth.' The Pasha gestured towards the windows, and the great host of masts stretching far out from the docks. 'And that is why,' he whispered,
I
wait in Amsterdam, the great market of the world, where everything and anything may be purchased in the end.'

Robert sat in silence, gazing at the row of bottles and their sticks of withered flesh; then he turned a
gain, to stare into the Pasha's
pain-haunted eyes. 'And for what purpose,' he whispered slowly, 'was this "seed-blood" bred?'

'To serve as a charm, and an antidote.'

'Against what?'

'Can you not guess?'

'Tell me.'

The Pasha sighed, and for a long while gazed in silence through the window at the moon. 'He has had many titles,' he murmured at last. 'Seth, he was named by the ancient priests, the spirit of darkness which haunted the deserts and rose upon the burning winds of the night. Azrael, we Muslims call him now, the angel of death. Your own religion too has its names for him; you do not require me to repeat them all to you.'

'And so he is indeed, then ...' - Robert swallowed, and hugged himself - 'he is indeed whom the Marquise claimed him to be?'

'The Prince of Hell?' The Pasha smiled and shrugged. 'It is true, he bears his own hell with him, for he is evil, Lovelace, and deadly, almost beyond comprehension. And yet .. .' - the Pasha paused, his smile still lingering faintly on his lips - 'we must trust he is no god.'

'What reasons do you have for saying that?'

The Pasha pointed to the
mummia.
'Would a god be kept at bay by a sludge of flesh and wine?'

Robert gazed at him with sudden, feverish hope. 'And what else?' he whispered. 'There must be more. Please -
I
have to know - for
I
am sworn to destroy him.'

The Pasha met his eyes for a moment; then he began to laugh and Robert felt a flush of mingled anger and despair. 'My ambition, then, is so contemptible?' he asked.

'Not contemptible,' answered the Pasha, 'but over-reaching, perhaps.' He reached for a knife, then parted his robe to expose his naked chest. He sliced the blade across his rib-cage and a thin liquid, so watery that it was almost clear of red, dribbled down his side. 'My blood,' the Pasha whispered, 'was once ruby-thick and rich without price, for
I
was -
I
am - the greatest of my kind. And yet see!' He touched his wound and raised his finger to the stars. '
I
was grievously wounded,' he whispered distantly, as though to himself. He glanced at Lord Rochester. 'You remember, my Lord, when you discovered me upon the road - was
I
not almost a corpse?'