The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (20 page)

Thomas almost choked. ‘Ah . . . well, it was . . . there was . . .’ Memories flooded back. It felt wrong to talk about it in this house, at this time, to a lady who he knew Lyle regarded as a suspect, to someone with such eyes and such a voice.

‘It was . . . nothing.’ The words killed him to say it. ‘An accident at St Paul’s Cathedral. It was my privilege to be able to assist in some small measure.’

‘Oh, it can hardly have been
small,
surely!’

‘Well . . . I say small, but . . . naturally . . . I mean . . . well . . .’ Thomas took a deep breath. ‘So tell me about yourself, my lady.’

‘Me?’ She laid her fingertips over her heart, as if astonished that anyone could want to know. ‘Oh, I’m hardly interesting at all. Not like you. I travel a lot, I
love
to explore and meet new people. I think it’s what I live for, you know.’

An idea struck him. ‘Have you ever been to America, my lady?’

‘Why, yes, I have. Are you interested in America? Terrible state at the moment, of course, such problems. Oh, it hardly bears speaking of . . .’

Thomas felt as if he had struck gold. ‘My family has an interest in America. Some people we once met were terribly keen on cotton, although,’ he almost bounced up and down with excitement, desperate for Lyle to see how clever he was being, ‘I’m told that in some areas they can be very unsound on religious matters.’

And then, to his shock, Lady Diane Lumire, the most mysterious lady in London, or at least that part of London which could buy Somerset and have change left over, giggled, ‘Oh, my dearest, you are absolutely right! What terrible dears these Americans are.’

 

Darkness. Lyle’s footsteps sounded hollow and lonely on the stones. Tate’s snuffling somewhere in the gloom had grown into monstrous proportions. Every few paces Tate would stop and something warm would brush against Lyle’s feet as though to say,
no, this isn’t wise, let’s go back now
. . .
please
. . .

When the darkness became so thick that it seemed to stop all senses beyond sight, and it was impossible even to guess where the walls were or where to move to carry on in a straight line, Lyle dug into his pockets. His fingers passed through layers of glass tubes and rolled fabrics and tools and bits of stray wire and loose change and the occasional compromising paper wrapper that at one time had hidden a secret, guilty caramel. One day, he promised himself, he’d organize his pockets.

He found what he was looking for in his inner pocket, the bulb trailing wires and, deeper yet into his voluminous coat, a small magnet, encased in a cylinder of tightly wrapped wire. A handle was attached to one end of the magnet. He twisted the wires leading to the bulb around the small nodes at either end of the coiled wire, and started turning the handle. A glow dawned inside the fat bulb, the thick black filament giving off acrid smoke that clouded the yellow light.

The light didn’t exactly illuminate the corridor he stood in so much as merely give gloomy definition to where one wall began and another ended. The floor was stained with puddles of dirty water, frozen over, and Lyle’s breath fizzled off the hot bulb where it touched it. Tate began to whine.

They walked carefully down the corridor. It took an eternity. Tate grew quieter as they neared the blackness towards the end where the faintest of lights seemed to stop, until even the padding of his paws was inaudible. As Tate grew quieter, Lyle walked slower, until they stopped dead at the end of the corridor. The hand that turned the magnet fell to his side. The bulb went out.

Lyle listened.

He could hear himself breathing. And if he strained, he could hear Tate taking shallow, scared breaths. Beyond the door that shuttered the end of the corridor, he could hear nothing. Not a breath, not a murmur, not a creak. He reached out in the darkness and felt the rough, thick wood of the door and the pocked iron. His fingers danced across a locked padlock, a closed bar.

He could smell something old and dry. It reminded him of baked clay, or dry loam, but it was subtle and hard to place.

A little sound behind the door. The tiniest of chinks. The sound of something pushing against the flagstones. Lyle dug hastily into his pocket, pulling out a little clouded glass sphere and a box of matches. He struck a fat match on the wall and, in the dull yellow light, he held it underneath the sphere. The sphere began to smoke and turn white before, with a sudden hiss, it exploded in burning brightness, almost too hot and too bright to look at. Lyle shook the match out, raised the sphere up to eye height and peered through the keyhole.

For a second, just a second, two stone-grey eyes stared, unblinking, back at him. Lyle gave a cry and jumped away, dropping the matches, just as the eyes retreated from the sudden and blinding light into the darkness again. Tate started barking furiously, but from behind the door there wasn’t a sound. Lyle, not taking his eyes off the door, bent down to pick up the matches, still holding up the light. As his fingers closed over the matches, the ground shook. It was more powerful this time, a deep, low humming that travelled right up the toes and came out at the ears. It knocked Lyle off his feet, and he landed with an undignified thump. Without glancing back, Tate exploded past him, heading away from the door at speed. Lyle crawled towards the buckling wall and clung to it for support as around the door the stones bent and twisted, grinding in their old mortar, which erupted in a shower of dust, as if squeezed out by unbearable pressure. Lyle heard a low, painful creak, saw a couple of stones splinter, then watched as cracks began at ground height and raced upwards towards the ceiling, crawling into the roof like poison ivy, running over his head and onwards, chasing after Tate’s vanishing tail.

Frozen with fascination and horror, Lyle turned and looked at the doorway. With a final heave, the stones around the hinges shattered, flew outwards, taking with them a large part of the wall and the door itself, and flung themselves down the corridor, before exploding into splinters just beyond Lyle’s head.

The rumble died. Then the cracking of tortured masonry, a slow, drawn-out sound. Lyle stared up at the ceiling by the dying light of the globe in his hand. A tiny crack snaked a few cautious inches from the main river of destruction through the ceiling, stopped, snaked another inch, stopped again to creak luxuriously in an agony of indecision, and stayed, giving off a shower of dust that rained down on Lyle, turning his sandy hair grey. The light in his hand went out. In the darkness something moved laboriously. Lyle froze. He heard another long, slow creaking, and the trickle of falling masonry. He forced himself to take gentle breaths, utterly silent, utterly still, as if his heart weren’t racing in his chest and every nerve didn’t scream for air and relief.

He felt something move just to his right, and knew it wasn’t Tate;
felt
something huge and heard a hard footstep, as if the owner wore shoes made of steel or stone. Long, slow footsteps. He counted them, tried to calculate the stride by how long it took, relatively, for each step to get closer proportional to the sound increasing and how, if the sound increased at a rate of so many micro-decibels per step and the distance was, say, ten metres between here and there, divided by steps taken and . . .

There was a movement right by him. He glanced up in the darkness, and imagined he saw a shape looming above him. He looked into the darkness, and felt that it was looking back. As quietly as possible, pretending not to move, he slid his hand into his pocket.

Where there hadn’t been anything, there was suddenly a hand round his throat. The shock was, if anything, worse than the sudden pressure, as he gasped, letting out what little air was in his lungs anyway, and grabbed at the arm which dragged him up as if he were a shuttlecock. With just one hand. He had never felt a grip like it, and hoped he never would again, if there was to be an ‘again’. He thought,
About six foot three and horrendously strong, kills without qualms, what a stupid way to die
. . .

Still in his pocket, he loosened a match from the box, moving the tips of his fingers only and very, very determinedly not looking down, not that there was anything to be seen in the dark. He found to his surprise that he could still breathe: tight, shallow breaths that came in gasps through a wall of fire. He slid the match out of the box, turning it this way and that until he felt the phosphorus end, dusty under his nails.

When the voice finally came, it sounded like a deep rumble right in Lyle’s ear, although he felt no breath.
‘What. Are. You.’
Whoever owned the voice clearly wasn’t impressed.

‘No one!’ squeaked Lyle. ‘Lost! Misguided! But essentially well-meaning!’ And then, because in all circumstances his natural sense of curiosity had an unhealthy power over other instincts, he added faintly, ‘Who are you?’

The grip tightened, and Lyle realized that what little air he’d had before had been luxury.

Lyle felt another hand move near by, and thought of twisted necks. ‘Can I just . . . ask a question?’ he croaked as the hand moved towards his head.

‘Are you Lucan Sasso?’

The question seemed to take the man by surprise. The grip lightened for a second, then tightened. Lyle heard a slow, uneasy shuffling in the dark, and felt the sudden confusion, almost fear, rolling out of the gloom. Then, quieter, but no less menacing for it,
‘I was.’

‘You murdered Captain Fabrio and Mr Stanlaw?’

‘Punishment.’
Then, almost uneasily,
‘How do you know . . . that name?’

‘Little birdy. Will you come peacefully?’

Silence, followed by an incredulous,
‘Would you die so?’

‘Thought not. One last question.’ Lyle’s eyes were watering, his face bulging, turning blue in places. ‘Are you right-handed?’

The hand closed against the side of his head, fingers tightening, pushing against bone.

‘Thought so.’

Lyle dragged the match out of his pocket; and even that was a movement too much. He’d always meant to take other exercise than the obligatory five hundred metres legging it, and now he realized why. He twisted the match round and slashed it against the wall behind him. Dull yellow phosphorus light erupted, singeing his fingers. For a second, taken by surprise, the hand around his throat relaxed. Lyle kicked out at whatever was there, and nearly broke his toes. In the dull light he saw, just for a second, a pale face, grey eyes and steel-grey hair. He stabbed upwards at the cold eyes with the flaming match and the man reeled back. Lyle slid out of his grip, threw the match towards his face, turned and ran, following Tate’s furious howling at the end of the corridor.

From the first step, something was wrong. He kept stumbling, tripping over rubble, and in the darkness something seemed to be moving: not footsteps, but a prolonged drag. Something bumped against his ankle and he tripped, catching himself on the wall. The stones were warm to the touch despite the bitter cold, and almost hummed under his fingers, a little rhythm that reminded him of a nursery rhyme long forgotten . . .

He kept running, fingers trailing the wall to feel the way. Overhead, there was a hideous creaking noise that grew louder and louder and seemed to be racing him, until something long, dark and deep passed him by above, showering dust as it went.

Lyle was already pulling out a match and a little glass sphere, swinging round into the turn at the end of the corridor, before the whole ceiling collapsed on top of him.

CHAPTER 15

‘Who the hell are you?’

Tess, caught halfway between the desk and the window, froze in the candlelight, her jacket bulging with stolen papers. For a second she stayed that way, face twisted and pensive, eyes on the door. Then she straightened up, folded her arms and said, ‘Ah, yes, well, you may ask that.’

‘Yes,’ said the American voice like maple syrup, ‘I may, this being my room.’

‘
Ah
. Well . . . since you’re clearly ignorant, I’ll tell you.’

The shadow in the door was blacker than the gloom outside, and outlined a tall, well-built man standing with utter confidence. Tess began to move cautiously, putting the bed between her and him.

‘Yes. Do tell me,’ said the American voice.

‘Well I . . .
I
. . . am Lady Teresa de . . . Stepney! And I have been sent by the Pope! To see if you’re doing your priesting proper.’

The shadow drifted into the room. She saw a man with burning auburn eyes set in a dark face of a consistency achieved only by practising the same fervoured look for hours in front of an eager audience. He was wearing black. Quietly and carefully he shut the door behind him. Tess backed away until she was standing at the head of the bed, the huge Bible on the pillow beside her.

‘You’d . . . be Ignatius, right?’

‘I am Ignatius Caryway,’ said the auburn voice as the man advanced, ‘but I don’t see how a little lady like you should know that.’