The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (2 page)

And from the darkness of the thick London night, something rises up, looks around, and for the first time in the city’s memory, hears its song, and remembers an older time, and looks down into two terrified faces and remembers the fear and the anger that has been burning inside for too long. And it says,
‘You would have tamed me. Learn, even changed with the dark, I cannot be tamed!’

And, somewhere close, Old Edgar, king of the beggar men, wakes from a shivering, frost-touched sleep under the pier, where the sewers give a little warmth against the cold and the wind can’t quite reach its pale blue finger, and hears a scream - and another - above the whisper of the snow and the lapping of the water, which in the places where the sunlight never reaches has already started to freeze. The shrieks are cut off, as if the air that should be rushing by in a high, tight wail has suddenly found itself with nowhere to go. He shivers, and knows that tonight he’ll have nightmares to contend with, as well as the cold.

And there is a carriage, snow still heavy on the roof, and a voice, like rich maple syrup, like an autumn tree bending in the breeze, murmurs, ‘Welcome to London, your grace.’

And a man taller than most men, who walks with bare feet on the ice and feels no cold, looks round, hears the hum of the street and smells the darkness and the history pouring out of every crooked alley, off every slanting rooftop, climbing up from every broken cobble and drifting away from every cooling, toppling chimney and says, like a man coming home,
‘
Yes
.’

CHAPTER 1

Morning after snowfall was, for a very brief moment, before the feet and the smoke of the city corrupted it, fresh and clean, or at least as fresh and clean as the city of London was likely to get, all things considered.

The bells proclaimed the hour to be eight of the morning, and grey sunlight, embarrassed to be up this late when most folk of the city had been working for a good three hours already on a breakfast of cress, black bread and dripping, seeped across the white fields of Hampstead Heath. It crawled through the old trees, where pigeons nestled against each other to combat the cold; it slid past the high mansion walls of the very rich, which looked down on the black and grey city sprawled higgledy-piggledy below.

The light drained the colour out of a brown and white dog with huge ears trailing in the snow, that lay, wrapped in a tartan blue blanket by a black tree heavy with snow, and slept.

As it slept, it snored. Loudly. One long ear twitched in time to the tail, the very end of which flexed between the snores in a rhythmical sequence that would have impressed even the most stringent of conductors.

Somewhere, just below the verge of the hill, voices, too lively for the black pall of smoke that rose out of the chimneys below and the heavy, snow-weighted clouds above, drifted into the air.

‘I said put it
there
.’

‘You said left!’

‘
That
way!’

‘That’s
right
!’

An embarrassed pause. ‘Oh.’ Then, just in case, ‘
Is
it?’

‘I think you’ll find it is.’

‘Are you
sure
?’

The dog in the thick blue blanket, which itself seemed greyer for the monochrome landscape, stopped snoring, opened a single lethargic eye, and regarded the world over the end of its large brown nose. Unimpressed, it closed the eye again, and snoozed on.

A man appeared from behind a thicket of leafless twigs, carrying a box of heavy tools and a large watering can smelling of oil. He strode past the dog, oblivious to anything but his task, humming under his breath. His head was bare, despite the cold, revealing sandy-red hair, looking as if it couldn’t decide whether to be entirely yellow or entirely ginger and had settled for a reluctant compromise. His face was young enough to still be deemed handsome, and old enough to be deemed respectable, though he had always suspected that respectability was just another way of paying tax. Grey eyes blinked at the grey landscape, and found themselves uninspired.

There was the sound of feet crunching snow, accompanied by voices, rapidly getting closer. The man stopped to listen, head on one side, as if trying to understand an eccentric social ritual.

The voices drifted closer.

‘Well, if you
will
light the fuse what do you expect?’

‘I was going to attempt to put it out . . .’

‘By steppin’ on it?’

‘I’m sure it could have worked and I feel sure that if you’d given me the opportunity, rather than just grabbing me in that undignified manner . . .’

Two shapes appeared over the rise of the hill. One, a tall, skinny boy with yellow hair, wore a greatcoat that was clearly designed to give him a certain aged gravitas, but flapped embarrassingly around the wrists and ankles. The other, a girl somewhat shorter and younger than he was, bounded along at a lively pace, and was wearing so many layers of thick clothes in so many faded and stained colours, it was hard to tell where one garment began and the other ended. When the boy spoke, it was as if he had stolen all the vowels from her, so that each syllable dripped good diction, while she often stopped short of a full word, as if expecting any intelligent listener to surmise immediately what it was she could be talking about.

Today, and not for the first time, the girl was dragging her elder companion by the sleeve and, sighting the sandy-haired man, she called out in a sing-song voice, ‘Mister Lyle? That ain’t a clean coat what you’re wearin’?’

The man addressed as ‘Mister Lyle’ looked down at himself, as if he hadn’t given the idea much thought. ‘Well, I suppose it’s relatively -’

Somewhere, just below the hill, something exploded. The noise sent birds, sleeping a second ago, racing for the sky, and set dogs barking all around. The shock wave caused trickles of snow to run off the branches of the trees, shook what few withered leaves still remained from the bushes, swirled the powdered snow in eddies and, in the direction of the actual blast itself, lifted up a fat, mammoth-sized spoonful of black earth and white snow, threw it twenty feet into the air, pushed it outwards, and then slowly dropped it down again with a
squishplopsquish
noise.

The dog, snoozing in the blanket, twitched its nose disdainfully, and kept on dreaming of biscuits yet to come.

There was a long silence, while everyone and everything waited for something else to happen. When it didn’t, Horatio Lyle picked himself up from where he’d dived on to the ground, brushed the worst of the snow and dirt off his front self-consciously, ran a hand through his hair in a nervous gesture that belied his deliberately calm face, and surveyed the crater below.

When he spoke, his voice had a weary alertness and lilt that softened some vowels and gave some consonants a crippled edge, so that every costermonger in the street would touch their hand to their forehead in respect for a gentleman, and every gentleman would retreat a little polite pace, in suspicion of a man who couldn’t quite be of
their
class. It was a hard voice to place, so most people identified it as ‘not mine’ and left it at that.

He said, ‘Now, do you think it was a problem with the chemical composition and ratios, or with the packaging?’

The three regarded the crater a little longer. In his blanket, the dog made a contented snorting noise. Finally the boy, brushing snow out of his hair and off his greatcoat that barely disguised the thinness of his frame, said hopefully, ‘Do you think we can . . . have it filled in?’

Lyle didn’t answer. His eyes had settled on a dark shape beyond the crater, that was slowly getting closer, and a frown had started to draw together across his face.

The girl, however, turned and stared at her companion. ‘Uh?’

‘No one need ever know . . .’

‘It’s a hole in’a ground, bigwig!’

‘Perhaps it could serve as an ornamental fishpond?’

‘A
pond
?’

The boy shuffled, his feathers rumpled. ‘Well, what would
you
do with it?’

The girl didn’t hesitate. ‘We walk away, all polite, and if any bigwigs send the bobbies after, we can hide out in this place I know ’til the cry’s gone down an’ then . . . and
then
. . .’ she was warming to her topic, ‘
then
, ’cos you see, I’ve been thinkin’ about this,
then
Mister Lyle can take us to see Paris and Venice and that place with the big castles . . .’

‘Where? Specifically.’

‘. . . an’ when we come back it’ll all be better an’ no one will ever know.’ She beamed, pleased at her idea, and waited for everyone to agree.

Lyle didn’t reply. His eyes were fixed on the dark figure who had clambered nearer and was now fairly distinct in a huge black cloak lined with silk, a top hat so tall and shiny it seemed almost a pity to expose it to hair on one side and rain on the other, and a walking cane, topped with ivory. Behind him trailed a couple of men who had the detachment of people hired to be respectful, but only to one man, and downright offensive to everyone else. As they drew nearer, the dog’s nose twitched and both eyes opened. It stared at the man and started to whimper, trying to crawl, if such was possible, further into the blanket.

The girl followed Lyle’s eyes, saw what he saw and immediately, without seeming physically to move, attempted to shuffle round behind Lyle and pretend she wasn’t there. The boy looked up, saw the man, brightened and exclaimed, ‘Why, good morning, my lord, is it not a fine morning for a ramble across . . .’

Lyle put a very firm hand on the boy’s shoulder, and he closed his mouth hastily. The man didn’t seem to have noticed any of them. He stopped on the edge of the crater and peered down into it. Still examining it, he said mildly, ‘Crisp morning, is it not, Mister Lyle?’ Somehow, Lyle was always
Mister
Lyle. No one had worked out why, but then, no one had ever dared question it either.

‘A little cold, Lord Lincoln.’

‘I see you’ve been conducting ... experiments.’

Now the boy too began to edge round behind Lyle, and pretend he wasn’t there.

‘That’s right.’ Lyle could have been talking about the weather for all the expression he showed.

The man shifted ever so slightly, leaning on his ivory-capped walking cane and looking as pained as his limited range of expressions would permit. ‘I wonder,’ he began, voice clipped with vowels so precise they could have taken a job as an acupuncturist, ‘was it entirely necessary to conduct these experiments in the memorial flower bed of Lord Wessex’s third cousin killed in the Crimea?’

A flicker of something uncomfortable started at the edge of Lyle’s eyes, though he tried to hide it. ‘I’m sure Lord Wessex’s third cousin would have been only too pleased to give of his flower bed for the sake of scientific endeavour.’

‘What, pray,’ only Lord Lincoln could give ‘pray’ so many teeth, ‘is this scientific endeavour?’

Lyle hesitated. Lincoln raised one - just one - eyebrow. In Lincoln’s case, Lyle was willing to believe that the cold menace distilled into that single look was genetic, rather than acquired through the usual hard practice all people secretly undertake to learn how to raise just one eyebrow, and felt his toes start to go numb. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said dully, and led the way.

A few minutes later, when everyone else was gone, the dog untangled itself from the blanket where it had been snoozing, stood up, looked at the crater, regarded the path its master had taken up the Heath, considered its options, and then very calmly claimed a little bit of Hampstead Heath as forever part of its domain.

When that was done, it trotted after Lyle, and wondered what mess he was going to get into today.

 

Hampstead Heath, which was gradually becoming the ambling grounds of the city rich who sometimes felt the need for a little ‘untamed’ space, but without straying too far from their clubs, had recently acquired a new addition to its usually austere hillside. Half-hidden under the night’s snow, a straight stone path dropped rapidly through the heath towards the sprawled grey city below. Someone had driven several large roman candles into the earth beside this path, and filled over the many pot-holes with rickety wooden planks, to create an even surface. Standing at the top of it was a large wooden shed, looking as if a gentle breeze might knock it over, with half the main door open.

Lyle stood just inside this structure, and beamed at the thing it held.

The thing was a monster of struts and strains, a body of stretched canvas and wood carved so thin you could almost see the ground through it. The wheels underneath the main body were harsh metal things that gleamed, the two seats were crisscrossed with nailed-down ropes, the back wing stood up at least as tall as the boy, and the mess of ropes and pulleys and struts that pushed at the various crudely attached gears and flaps gave the impression that the thing was merely a prediction of what would happen when the shed that housed it collapsed.