Horatio Lyle (33 page)

Lyle grabbed one end of the rope and kicked the sandbags off. They plummeted away towards the ground far below, pulling the rope down after them. As the rope raced through the pulley, Lyle shot upwards, arms screaming indignantly, hands slipping and burning on the raw, wet rope, banging his legs against the side of the scaffold as he rose. For a brief second he saw the surprised face of Dew and then he was rising up past him, trying not to look down. The rope swung wildly and knocked him towards the dome.

Lyle landed on the third level of scaffolding, banging against the wet, smooth metal of the dome, rolling away and nearly falling. One hand slipped off the edge of the scaffold. He looked down, and thought he was going to be sick, heard the sound of running feet below him. He ran for the next ladder, while overhead sheet lightning rippled across the sky and the wind whirled round the white eye of the storm that still hung directly over the cathedral. Lyle heard gunfire a long way below, but couldn’t make himself care, not with the water in his eyes and the aching in his legs. He started climbing again, and heard the thunderous sound of Dew scrambling up the next ladder along, his head appearing less than thirty yards away just above the planks at its top as Lyle reached the fourth level of scaffolding.

The scaffolding was narrowing, getting smaller by degrees as it crawled up the side of the dome towards the peak - Dew was only fifteen yards away. Lyle crawled up to the next level, and saw that there was just one ladder, surrounded by sandbags and damp rope. He ran towards it and, as he did so, Dew appeared over the ladder at the opposite end of the walkway. At the moment that Lyle put his foot on the ladder up to the top of the dome, Dew’s hand closed around his ankle, and the Plate slipped from Lyle’s pocket.

 

Smoke and sparks exploded around the altar of the church as Tess hurled down the last test tube and ran towards the guardsmen. There were fewer of them than there had been, and those that were left were confused. But there were also fewer Tseiqin. As she ran for cover behind a pillar, she saw Thomas cowering with a group of guardsmen reloading their rifles behind a long wooden pew. A volley of crossbow bolts slammed into the bench, the tips peeking through the other side. She ducked down at the base of the pillar and saw that one of the tables of candles for commemorating the deceased had been knocked over. Saying a quick apology to the God she hoped wasn’t up there, she grabbed the nearest still-flickering candle and lobbed it towards the altar. It trailed hot wax as it flew, and bounced off the stones of a pillar behind which a Tseiqin was hiding. She grabbed another missile and threw it, sending Tseiqin scampering for cover. From behind the bench, guardsmen rose up, fired and instantly ducked for cover again. The sound of gunfire echoed round the cathedral. Tess risked a glance out from around the pillar, and a crossbow bolt nearly took her ear off. The Tseiqin were half-indistinct shapes behind the smoke, but so were the guardsmen.

She heard a clattering outside. Men exploded through the doors. Tess saw dark blue uniforms, and recognized their wearers as policemen. One man stepped forward. It was Charles. A crossbow bolt bounced off the stone beside him; he frowned but didn’t flinch. Seeing Tess he said briskly, ‘You? Is that Horatio who’s causing all of this?’

‘Have you seen Mister Lyle?’

‘Not lately. You?’

She shook her head. Charles sighed. ‘Right, well, I suppose we ought to restore a little order here.’

 

Lyle fell, the Plate bouncing away from his stretched fingertips. Dew crawled past and
over
him, digging an elbow into the small of Lyle’s back as he went, stretching for the Plate. Lyle felt anger rise up inside him, and rolled savagely to one side, knocking Dew off. Dew slammed against the scaffold, his back precariously close to the edge, knees bent, arms trying to catch a pole to hold him in. Lyle ran for the Plate again, the wind pushing against him, then he bent down, curled his fingers round it, and heard a cracking sound behind him. Dew was on his feet, and he had a loose section of pole in his hands. Lyle paled and backed away as Dew swung it loosely, enjoying the feeling of weight at the end of his arms. Lyle ducked to avoid the first swipe, which bounced off the dome.

Far below, Tess heard the echoes of the strike, and felt her stomach turn.

As Dew swung again, lazily, Lyle raised the Plate, and the pole bounced off it without a scratch. Lyle dropped to the floor, slid his knees out over the edge of the planks, grabbed hold of a pole with his spare hand and swung himself off, sliding down until he landed hard on the next layer of planks. Beside a pile of sandbags he saw a loose pole, shorter and slimmer than the monstrous weapon Dew wielded like a feather. He grabbed it in one hand just as Dew dropped lightly down from the layer above, streaming with water from the rain and still clasping the pole. He advanced towards Lyle, who fought the instinct to run.

Lyle brought the pole up clumsily in one hand, feeling it slip through his bloody fingers. Dew just grinned, swiping easily at it like a cat playing with string. The blow almost knocked the pole from Lyle’s hand. Lyle hesitated, then tossed the Plate down at Dew’s feet. Dew frowned, then in a single movement reached forward to grab it. Lyle ran at him, both hands on the pole, bringing it up towards Dew. It struck somewhere soft, and Dew bent over with a little
umph
. In the same movement Lyle bent, grabbed the Plate, kicked Dew very firmly in the kneecap, tossed the pole aside and swung on to the ladder. He crawled up, and up again, until he stood on the very top of the scaffold, staring at the golden cross that crowned the cathedral. It was half-melted from the lightning strike, the thick cable trailing limply around it. Lyle sidled towards it, clenching his bloody fingers tighter on to the Plate, heart pounding. He looked at the sky above, at the clouds spiralling, at the night. He looked at the city, spread out before him like a carpet.

He heard the sound of his own breathing. He heard carts rattling far away, the rigging by the Thames, the tide changing, the dogs barking, the cats fighting, the inn doors banging, the windows creaking, the rain falling. He saw the messy, higgledy-piggledy streets stretching away, pinpricked with light. He saw the rain shining on the cobbles. He tasted the cold wind and the dirty rain, smelling of a million lives scratching across the old stones day after day, of tar and orange peel, of salt and dried fish, of iron and coal. He thought about it, smiled, looked at the storm and held up the Plate.

Mr Dew, bloody and dishevelled, hit him over the back of the head with a pole.

CHAPTER 25

The Tseiqin fell back under a rush of police and guardsmen, slowly pressed into the far end of the church, beyond the altar. They fought furiously, but the soldiers were angry now at the loss of their comrades, and with the extra police swinging truncheons and the weapons of the fallen, fought with more confidence. As they advanced, the pathway to the stairs cleared. Tess grabbed Charles by the sleeve, and she, Thomas and the bemused copper followed Tate as he bounded, yapping furiously, up the steps, smelling his master at hand. The stairs seemed to go on for ever, endless spirals and corridors, working through the intestines of the cathedral. Tess could hardly breathe, and her legs screamed at her to stop, but still Tate was barking ahead, galloping up the stairs as fast as his paws would allow him. They reached a shattered door out into the storm and piled past it. From there they looked at a dark scaffold above, and then beyond, towards the gleam of the cross. Tate started howling at the sky, water streaming off his fur. Thomas said, ‘There are people up there!’ Tess said nothing. She felt the compass, still in her pocket. As Thomas rushed for the ladder, Charles in tow, she stood still, and looked at the compass. The North-aligned needle was pointing directly towards the top of the dome. Even though that wasn’t where North lay.

 

Pain was happening. Lyle knew that much. He tried to get up, and a boot connected with his side. He collapsed, tasting blood in his mouth. His bloody fingers danced blindly across the planks, and touched the very edge of the warm stone Plate, which was still giving off white sparks. A boot landed on his fingers and pressed down. Dew’s face swam into focus.

‘Mister Horatio Lyle,’ he whispered. ‘This is a pleasure.’

Lyle tried to speak, but could only cough blood. Dew reached past him and picked up the Plate. Smiling, he held it to the sky, letting the water fill its bowl while Lyle lay helpless and watched. The water blended with Lyle’s blood. Dew slowly turned, so that Lyle could see everything in perfect detail.

‘I pity your kind,’ said Dew softly. ‘Animals grown too intelligent for their own petty needs. I pity your death. It is trivial. Your kind will come and go like the tide. Nothing you do will ever change Earth. It will endure with or without you. You cannot make or create. You can only change what is there, and eventually, it will change back. What a futile life; what a futile death.’

Lyle crawled on to his knees, curled in over the pain that seemed to want to slither out of his skin. He looked into the face of Dew as, grinning like a shark, Dew tipped back the Plate and drank the bloody water trapped in its bowl. Lyle didn’t move. Dew lowered the Plate again, eyes shut as if to savour the taste, water trickling down either side of his mouth. He let out a long, relaxed breath, and opened his eyes. They were pure white. He turned over his hand. Where it had held the pole, the skin was burnt. But even as Lyle watched, it started to heal.

‘Do you see your own end, Mister Lyle?’ asked Dew quietly.

Lyle licked the rainwater around his lips, swallowed as much as he could, and felt the croak of words come to him. He tried to speak. The words were faint and hoarse, but came nonetheless. ‘You bloody fool,’ he muttered. ‘Didn’t your mother tell you not to stand in high places during thunderstorms?’

As the look of fear flashed across Dew’s face, Lyle staggered on to his feet and grabbed Dew’s hands. They burnt his fingers to touch; they seemed to crackle with electricity. He dragged them up, pulling the Plate still clenched in Dew’s fingers with him, until the Plate was high above them both and his face was an inch from Dew’s. Lyle screamed with the wind and the rain, ‘
This thing is still magne—
’

Lightning struck.

 

Later, Tess thought that perhaps the lightning hadn’t fallen from the sky to the ground, but perhaps the ground had gone up to the sky, all corners of the earth folding in on each other towards that one point of blinding light. The sky cracked in two, the dome of the cathedral ran with white fire, and the Plate, held up as an offering, the highest point in all of London, turned white and exploded.

Shards of white stone bounced down the side of the dome, rolled along the stone of the walkway, slid through the gaps between the balcony, and fell away to earth. Tess heard them hit a long way down, little thuds in the night, like heavy balls bouncing against hard wood floors. A piece rolled near her foot, ricocheted off it, and lay in the pooling water, steaming. She looked at the compass in her hand. The needle was slowly turning, to spin towards true magnetic North. The rain was slackening. The wind was dying down. As it blew this way and that, it brought with it Tate’s intermittent howl.

The thunder rolled, one last time. It poured through the narrow, dirty black streets, slid into the gaps between cobbles, rippled across the water of the river, made the still bells hum, and passed on, spreading out into the countryside beyond, where it bent the grass, whispered in the trees and eventually died away.

Clouds raced along like frightened fish, trying to pretend they hadn’t been there, spreading out in wisps that faded into the night. Behind them, the stars were wetly visible, made larger and more twinkling by the water still hanging heavy in the air. The moon was huge on the horizon, silver light slowly spreading and catching the rain as the clouds retreated.

A black shape slid off the dome, rolling down the damp metal like a barrel down a hill, smoke rising from its feet, falling in total silence; it hit the base of the dome with a little splash, tumbled until it bounced against the stone balcony, then didn’t move. The rain slowly pooled around it, sliding off it in trickles, mingling with the blood on its fingers. The figure blended with the night, just another statue in a cathedral of stone shapes, and, as the lights of distant lamps multiplied, and as the men shouted and the dog barked and the rain fell, still, he did not move.

 

Afterwards, an intrepid bobby climbed up to the top of St Paul’s Cathedral to survey the damage. Between all the shattered wood and twisted metal of the scaffold, past the half-melted golden cross, with the gold pooled in thick blobs below it, revealing the cheaper metal underneath, he found a pair of empty, smoking black shoes, and a very large scorch mark.

And later, much later, searching the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, they found Lady Lacebark lying against one of the tombs. She had just time to hiss, ‘
Feng xiansheng, ni shi . . .
’ before she died. Dead, she seemed almost skeletal, her face fixed in a scowl even after all strength had left it, her hands too long, her arms so thin you could wrap your fingers round the elbow joint easily, her neck so long and white it could hardly have supported the weight of her head. They buried her outside a small country church in Scotland, in a very, very deep grave.