The Iscariot Sanction (44 page)

Somehow, through the deafening noise that was, in part, created by his own involuntary screams, he knew the source of the shadowy thing. It had come from the carriage.

John did not know how he had reached the upended royal coach, or when, but he found himself digging through the rubble. His father was dead, his face already ashen, lips blue. Beside him was Kate Fox, the noted medium, the progenitor of the Awakening and all the terrors that had followed it. Her face was contorted in such an expression of horror that it was terrible to behold. Her head was spun right around, facing backwards—facing the sky. Shadows leaked from her, drifting upwards like smoke. The shadow on the sky had come from her. John knew, though he could not explain how he knew, that the Fox woman had been holding back this terrible thing alone since her sister had died. John had been too young to be aware of it at the time, but the story of the famous Fox sisters was taught to every new recruit at the academy. Margaret Fox had been assassinated in New York by a group of conspirators claiming affiliation with the Latter Day Saints. Her death had unleashed psychic devastation across America, causing half of Manhattan to fall into the sea. Kate Fox had fled to England, becoming a political exile. With her as a bargaining tool, the government had restored British interests in the recently formed Confederate States. The Knights Iscariot, in slaying Kate Fox, had unleashed something more terrible upon the world than they could have dreamt of. If ever Lord Hardwick had needed to succeed in his great plan, the escape plan John had once heard him speaking of, it was now. But Lord Hardwick was dead.

John fell to his knees and wept. His father—tyrant, and would-be saviour—was gone. A few yards from Marcus Hardwick’s body, protruding from a mound of bricks and ashes like a sapling from dirt, was a hand, festooned with jewelled rings.

Queen Victoria was dead.

Kate Fox, Lord Marcus Hardwick and the Queen. All claimed by the vampires’ bomb. And with their deaths, John felt a desolation such that he had never felt in all the years since the Riftborn had first made ingress into the world. He felt the death of hope.

He knelt within that terrible shadow, with that wailing in his ears, in his head, for how long he could not say. Someone, far away, was shouting his name, and he could not answer, so complete was his numbness.

‘John! For heaven’s sake get away from there!’

A hand grabbed John’s shoulder, and eventually he felt himself being dragged away from the body of his father. John realised he was kicking and screaming in resistance, until at last a hand slapped him hard across the face. He saw Smythe standing over him, and he stared at the surgeon dumbly.

John watched, childlike and passive, as Smythe rolled up the sleeve of his jacket and administered an injection into the vein at the crook of his left elbow. John was puzzled at first, and then felt a cold tingling sensation sweep over him, travelling up his arm and through his body with remarkable speed, until his brain felt it might freeze in his head. He gasped for air, and then came to his senses at last, though his head swam.

‘What…’ he stuttered.

‘Had to think on my feet, old fellow, with a bit of help from the Serbian. Morphine, mundane etherium—a few other things it’s best not to think about. You’ll feel wretched in the morning; we all shall. If we see the morning.’

Smythe helped John up. The voices in his head became whispers of unfulfilled promises. The scratching in his skull lessened to a distant itch.

‘Mundane etherium?’ John asked. It had never had any effect on a normal human, as far as he knew. Its source was a closely guarded secret, although the rumours of its origins were ghastly to say the least. Ghastly enough to make him baulk at the thought of having it inside him.

Smythe shrugged. ‘Worth a try. It seems to work, too.’

John looked about, and his heart sank. The streets were in chaos. Now that he was able to focus, John saw… things… slip in and out of reality, occupying spaces that they should not. The Riftborn cavorted through the streets, creatures of shadow and fire, driving men to commit foul atrocities in their name, or flaying the weak themselves with scissor-like claws. The shadow was present too, though now it came only sometimes into view, when John looked upon it askance. It avoided his scrutiny, but it was always there, in his mind’s eye. John shuddered. His eyes alighted once more upon the sundered carriage, and he stepped backwards, stumbling weakly as Smythe helped to steady him.

‘We have to get out of here,’ Smythe said. ‘The drug will protect us, but I don’t know for how long. They feed off fear and madness. Look to your training, John. Don’t let your grief make you weak. Close your mind, and hold on to something stronger.’

‘Hold on to what?’ John said. He was consumed by grief, and felt very weak indeed.

‘Anger,’ Smythe said. ‘Here, take this.’ He handed John a Tesla pistol, and a brown leather belt stuffed with etherium capsules. ‘There’s not much of this stuff, so use it wisely. Now, are you ready?’

‘I am,’ John said, surprising himself with the determination in his voice, although he had never felt more timid.

‘St. Katharine Docks?’

John only nodded, and climbed down the mound of debris that had become his father’s grave.

* * *

The ground beneath Lillian’s feet began to tremble. Great chunks of masonry fell to earth, smashing into the pavements of Smithfield, crushing many who had been driven to inhuman revelry in the streets by the madness of the cyclopean shadow. A sound like thunder came from the south, accompanied by the crash of waves as though the ocean itself were lapping at London’s door. Lillian wondered if things could get any worse.

The Riftborn turned from her, flowed around her like water, as though she were anathema to them. It was human souls they craved. She moved quickly through the ruins of her city, jumping over chasms as they opened in the earth. The sky was redder, brighter than ever before. She looked ahead, to the west, to her destination. She had to shield her eyes from the roiling elements; those same senses that allowed her to tell human from vampire, and to see the Riftborn for what they were, now pained her as she tried to get her bearings. The sky was both dark and bright to her inhuman eyes, dazzling in its horror. Squawking, flapping night-terrors danced amidst the flames above the Tower of London on leathery wings, paying balletic tribute to the clawed shadow that seemed to tear upwards from the heart of the City like a kraken, leaving desolation in its wake.

Ahead of her, watching her laboured progress through the hellish streets, were three dark figures. She knew them for what they were. Even had the faint corona of amber light not shone from them, their violet eyes glimmered like stars as they fixed her with malevolent intent.

Come with us.

It was a whisper, it sounded somewhere deep in her head. In her blood.

Lillian ejected the unused etheric cartridge from her pistol, and cranked the generator handle.

The central figure remained stock-still, but the two that flanked it swept forward. They were single-minded in their approach, moving swiftly, low to the ground, like hunting hounds. Lillian stopped dead; she would only have time for one shot with the Tesla pistol, but it was not the only weapon she had taken from the stores.

They arrived almost simultaneously. Lillian was still until the last possible moment, for the creatures were as capable as she of dodging bullets. Only when they were almost upon her did she throw herself sideways, beneath the grasping, clawed hands of the first hunter, and away from the second. She slid across the broken ground, her jodhpurs tearing, but she managed to spin around to face her attackers, who were already converging upon her. Now they were together, lined up for the shot. She pulled the trigger.

As the blue light flared from the pistol, and the air fizzed hot and bright, the first hunter leapt away, shielding its eyes from the blinding flash. The second, its view impaired by its fellow, was struck with the full force of the lightning. A gargled, inhuman scream carried over the sound of crackling energy, and the creature’s charred, twitching form was thrown backwards, falling into a chasm that had split the road in twain. The first hunter recovered and pounced before Lillian had gotten to her feet, while she was still fumbling at her belt for another weapon. She felt hands close around her arms for but a moment, and then was thrown bodily towards the yawning crevasse. She hit the cobblestones hard, and with dismay saw the Tesla pistol slide into the dark abyss.

From the corner of her eye, Lillian saw the ragged, crow-black form of the hunter leap towards her. Her hand gripped the hilt of the large knife she had procured, and she paused as though injured, masking the blade. She felt the change in the air as the hunter drew near, smelled its deathly odour. It landed lightly, silently, beside her, and rough, clawed hands grabbed at her. A gargling, avian click came from its throat, was answered in kind by the third hunter, who had maintained its aloof distance.

The creature’s arms, sinewy and strong, lifted her up as though she weighed nothing, and in that instant Lillian swept the knife outwards, towards its throat. It was a large blade, a Bowie knife from the Confederate States, and its gleaming edge flashed towards the target. The hunter’s reactions were startlingly quick, and it flinched back, although the knife must have been longer than it expected, for the tip of the blade still cut a furrow in its pale, wasted flesh. Pink blood oozed thickly from the wound. The vampire did not falter, but clawed at her wrist in an attempt to rip the knife from her hand. Lillian was ready, her own strength formidable, her academy combat training telling. She parried its flailing claws and it lunged forwards, but Lillian sidestepped nimbly, slashing across its ribs. Strike, parry, riposte; the hunter’s attacks were lightning-fast, but it was savage, its style crude. Lillian doubted it had ever fought an opponent who was not only its rival in strength and speed, but also clinical and well drilled.

The hunter was strong. Perhaps, as Cherleten had intimated, it had lived for an extraordinarily long time, and grown more powerful with age. In any case, when its blows did land, they jarred Lillian to the bone. A clubbing right hand had her seeing stars, but again she recovered and spun about on her heel, throwing the hunter off-balance and sending it flailing. This time, she drove straight with the knife, thrusting it between the hunter’s shoulder blades. It thrashed and spun so wildly that the knife was wrenched from Lillian’s grasp. It reached futilely for the handle, but it was buried too deep.

Lillian rushed at the creature and pushed it with all her might towards the yawning precipice that ran across Upper East Smithfield, and was already now breaching the formidable brown-brick walls of the Royal Mint.

The hunter did not fall. It teetered upon the brink, balancing precariously with supernatural grace, and then turned, grabbing Lillian by the hair and pulling her with it.

For a moment Lillian felt weightless, hanging in space, gazing down into an abyss. Below them, the crack in the earth seemed to extend impossibly far, into a black void punctuated by starlight. But those points of light were not stars; they were eyes. Riftborn, in their thousands, climbing upwards from the bowels of the earth, from Hell itself.

Lillian reached out in desperation, her hand finding purchase upon a cobblestone, her body slamming hard into the ground. She cried out as the hunter’s weight yanked her hair so hard she thought her neck might break. She felt the claws scrabble at her jacket as it pulled itself up. The guttural cry of its leader rose in pitch and volume. It was angry; its fellow-creature was risking the life of their prize. Lillian understood, and even as she felt the hard fingernails digging into her back, she knew that she was not expendable, that these creatures had been sent to kidnap her. The thing scrabbling at her, hanging from her as a dead weight, was trying to save itself at her expense, and that clearly was not part of the plan. So the hunters were not, after all, mindless fiends, but could fear for their lives. She could use that.

She was losing purchase on the cobblestones. The creature’s arm was around her throat now as it climbed, pushing down on her as it dragged itself up. And then a shadow stood over them both: the third hunter. It grabbed Lillian’s hand, lifting her out of the pit with the other hunter still holding onto her. With its other hand, the lead hunter swatted aside its subordinate, causing it to relinquish its grip on Lillian. Lillian snatched the hilt of the Bowie knife, which slid from the vampire’s back as it fell screaming into the abyss.

Lillian struck at her rescuer before the monster had time to restrain her. The blade bit into necrotic flesh, between the ribs. The hunter snarled and twisted away with such force that the blade snapped, leaving Lillian holding the hilt. She threw it down, ducking forwards to avoid flailing claws, drawing a .22 pistol from her boot-holster in one fluid motion.

She fired twice without aiming, hitting only shadows. The hunter fled, its wound not slowing it one jot. Lillian felt her heart beating hard for the first time since her transformation.

‘Lillian!’

She looked up to see a horse, and upon it her brother, and Smythe. They had pulled up on the other side of another great crack in the road, and even now demonic eyes turned to behold them hungrily.

‘Do not let that creature escape!’ she shouted.

‘Leave it, Lillian, we have to—’

She saw the shadowy figure of the hunter leap a great height through the breached wall of the Royal Mint, and at once gave chase. Her brother would help her or not as he saw fit, but the hunter represented her best chance of tracking down de Montfort, of taking the fight to the enemy, of revenge.

She smiled to herself as she heard the whinny of the horse, and the sound of hooves upon cobblestones as John tried to find another way around. If she were any judge, he would help her regardless of his own agenda, as he always had.

She followed the hunter through the elegant courtyard of the Royal Mint, now awash with blood and filled with panicked screams, and out into the next street. Its footfalls were almost silent, but it moved with unerring speed and unwavering energy. Lillian pursued as fast as she could, surprised that her limbs still did not tire. As she passed through the gate she was forced to dodge aside as a manhole cover exploded upwards from the road ahead upon a jet of incandescent flame. As she turned, she stumbled headlong into a mob of wretched lunatics. A man with jagged shards of glass protruding from his face yanked violently at Lillian’s hair; an old woman, an eye hanging from its socket and pendulous breasts exposed, cackled maniacally as she swung a plank of charred wood with glee. Behind them, the press of the mob came on like a tide, invisible Riftborn cavorting amidst their number.