To Rescue Tanelorn (49 page)

Stormbringer was still in his hand, unscabbarded. He did not wish to sheathe the blade until the last of that strange Law-light was gone from it. At this moment he understood how the conflict in him between his loyalty to Chaos and his yearning for Law was no simple one and perhaps would never be resolved. Perhaps there was no need to resolve the conflict. Perhaps, however, it could be reconciled.

They walked between the worlds.

They walked for timeless miles, taking this path and then another through the great silver lattice of the moonbeam roads, while everywhere the multiverse blossomed and warped and erupted and glowed, a million worlds in the making, a million realms decaying, and countless billions of mortal souls full of aspiration and despair, and they talked intimately, in low voices, enjoying conversations which only one of them would remember. It seemed sometimes to Elric that he and Count von Bek were the same being, both echoes of some lost original.

And it seemed sometimes that they were free for ever of the common bounds of time or space, of pressing human concerns, free to explore the wonderful abstraction of it all, the incredible physicality of this suprareality which they could experience with senses themselves transformed and attuned to the new stimuli. They became reconciled to the notion that little by little their bodies would fade and their spirits blend with the stuff of the multiverse, to find true immortality as a fragment of legend, a hint of a myth, a mark made upon our everlasting cosmic history, which is perhaps the best that most of us will ever know—to have played a part, no matter how small, in that great game, the glorious Game of Time…

CRIMSON EYES

CRIMSON EYES

(1994)

Crimes of the City

W
E ARE ALL
familiar with the wave of murders, scandals and suicides coinciding with the collapse of BBIC and culminating on Christmas Eve with the bizarre death of a profoundly unpopular Prime Minister.

“That poor fellow captained the most incompetent crew of self-impressed scamps ever to tangle themselves in the rigging of the ship of state,” declared Sir Seaton Begg, heading the investigation. “But, however apt, I wouldn’t wish a fate like his on anyone.” A Callahan Home Office appointee, Begg had led the inquiry into the financial affairs of his own nephew, Barbican Begg, whose mighty frauds had drained the country.

Barbican himself had disappeared, but the aristocrats, politicians and famous plutocrats left to face trial made a sensational list, especially as they began to be killed. Barbican Begg himself had been married to the Prime Minister’s sister, Wendy, who had overdosed two years earlier. A certain coolness between the two men had not interfered with their association. The government depended heavily on Begg’s help. It had continued to endorse BBIC while the cabinet gave authority to large-scale money laundering in the British Caribbean territories, for Begg was underwriting some of its most lunatic flotations.

The first murders in what soon emerged as a pattern had been discovered a year earlier, preceding Barbican Begg’s exposure by months. At Marriage’s Wharf, Wapping, three armed skinheads had been killed by a large blade leaving a single, identical wound which at first looked like the imprint of a pair of lips. The detective in charge believed the skinheads to have been slaughtered in self-defense. KGB, he thought. There was something subtly Slavic about the method. A former MI5 man, given to unfashionable and oversubtle analysis, he could not easily explain the corpses’ grotesque colour nor the hideous terror marking the dead faces, unless, he suggested, the blade had been poisoned.

The pathologist brought in was a retired Scotland Yard man whom Begg had known in his private detective days. Dr. “Taffy” Sinclair’s respect for Begg was returned. In the past, Dr. Sinclair had discovered causes of death previously never imagined but admitted bafflement in this case. “Clearly they were all stabbed,” he told his old colleague over Christmas pints of foaming Ackroyd’s at The Three Revenants, “yet I couldn’t swear they’d been stabbed to death.” The pathologist’s high, pale forehead had creased in a frown. “It’s fanciful, Begg, but if you asked how they’d died I’d have to say, well, that something was
sucked
out of them. Not blood, especially. Not even their lives, really. Something worse. And by some filthy means, too.” He shuddered.

Seaton Begg had inspected several victims. Long after the Marriage’s case, a senior Lloyd’s officer was discovered in a Streatham brothel. His costume had greatly excited the popular imagination but Begg had been impressed by his horrified expression, the peculiar silvery sheen of the skin, the bloodless wound like a kiss. Save for the wound’s position, the Prime Minister had died in exactly the same way. “As if their souls had been drained?” Begg ordered two more pints of Vortex Water.

Sinclair was enthusiastic. “Quite. It’s not the first time you and I have run up against so-called black magic, but this affair beats everything, eh? Witnesses?”

Begg had no useful witnesses. Those who had heard voices from the Prime Minister’s sitting room could not tell if the other speaker was native or foreign. Someone had glimpsed what he described as a “stained-glass window” full of every imaginable colour which seemed to take the shape of a jeweled cup, its gold and silver blazing so powerfully he was almost blinded before it vanished. The piteous, bloodcurdling cry awakened Downing Street at 4 a.m. Someone heard the front door close. Sleeping soldiers and police outside were discovered unhurt. “But I’m seeing two chaps tomorrow morning who sound better. One claims he spotted the murderer leaving BBIC on the night in question, when most of Barbican’s closest associates called a crisis meeting at their HQ and were identically murdered. Noises, like music or singing, and a brilliant glow were reported, but the assassin was invisible. I gather my first witness believes he saw the Devil.”

Begg added: “Only once before have I felt so thoroughly in the presence of the Supernatural. Rationally we must assume this is a clever murderer using superstition to terrify his victims in advance, enabling him to kill them without any significant resistance. That night he murdered fourteen of the City’s cleverest men, including Sir John Sheppard, Lord Charles Peace, Duval of the Credite Lyonesse, Thomas King, Ricky Turpin and all three Al Glaouis. Only a day later he killed a whole school of Wall Street sharks over here in similar haste—Bass, Floyd, Cassidy, J.W. Harding, the James brothers, Schultz, the Bush boys and several others equally renowned. Not a bad score.”

“You don’t suggest this chap’s done the world a favour?”

“Those who feed like parasites upon their fellows pretty much deserve to have the life sucked out of them, I’d say. The amounts of laundered crack money alone were obscene. This business sickens me, old man. Cabinet ministers are dying faster than they can resign. I’ve no love of the vigilante, but I cannot say I mourn the rascals’ passing. My chief regret is that they did not die with their Swiss account numbers branded on their foreheads.”

Begg’s uncharacteristic pronouncements surprised Sinclair. “You seem to have more sympathy for the assassin than his prey.”

“Absolutely true,” Begg agreed. “Believe me, Taffy, it’s my very sympathy which should soon bring me face to face with our murderer!”

An Interview with Lady Ratchet

The Prime Minister had not been the only politician to die violently on Christmas Eve. Over in Limehouse, in identical circumstances, while his wife and children were at church praying for his mediocre soul, the education minister, Oswald Quelch, was discovered at the centre of a pentacle, not part of the seasonal decorations, designed to save him from the demon he believed he had summoned.

Seaton’s first witness claimed to have bumped into the murderer as he was leaving Eel House, Quelch’s eighteenth-century merchant’s mansion. There were only two entrances to Eel House—the first from the river, the second from a low gate into an apparently dead-end alley where Ken “Corky” Clarke, a small-time sneak-thief, had been, as he put it, “catching his breath” in the heavy fog so characteristic of London since the repeal of the Clean Air Act. Hearing a soft movement behind him, he had turned to see what he first took to be two disembodied eyes…

“Red and troubled as the flames of Hell, Sir Seaton. Coming out of that evil, muddy fog. I swear I hadn’t had a drop.” Corky’s gin-bloated features contradicted his claim, but Begg was inclined to believe him. It was Boxing Day. They sat together in Begg’s rather austere morning chamber at Sporting Club Square where pale light, filtering through old lace, gave the room a silvery, rather unreal, appearance.

Clarke had glimpsed bone-white skin “like a leper’s,” a dark cape revealing a scarlet lining and the hilt of a massive sword in black, glowing iron, set with a huge ruby. “I thought he must be the Devil, Sir Seaton. You would have done, too. He came at me so sudden and horrible! His eyes pulled my heart out of my chest and left me gasping, tasting that sharp, oily fog as if it was the sweetest air of Kent, and so grateful for my life! I heard his footsteps, light and bright like a woman’s, tapping off up Salt Pie Passage. Oh, Lord, sir! I never want to endure that again. I thought all my sins had caught up with me. Those crimson eyes! I’m a new man now, sir, and conscience-bound to answer your poster.”

“Mr. Clarke, you’ve done well and I commend you!” Seaton Begg was excited. “You bring to mind an old neighbour of mine!” Corky’s description had triggered a train of thought Begg was anxious to pursue. “I note you’ve joined Purity Bottomley’s Born Again Tolstoyans and work for the relief of the homeless. Good man!” He pressed a couple of “shields” into the fellow’s palm.

“God bless you, Seaton Begg!”

“It’s you, Mr. Clarke, God will surely bless! Soon all Britain will have reason to thank you. Farewell, my good chap. I must shortly interview my next witness.” And with a flourish Begg opened the door for the reformed crook, telling his housekeeper, Mrs. Curry, to preserve his peace at all costs for the next hour. Whereupon he went immediately to his shelves, selecting a large German quarto, a jar of his favourite M&E and a baroque meerschaum. Reading eagerly he flung himself down at his table, his pipe already forgotten. Begg was smiling thoughtfully to himself when Mrs. Curry announced his next visitor.

Hamish Ogilvy worked as a porter-attendant at the New Billingsgate Fish Museum. Still in his uniform, he was a small, eager man with a soft Highland accent. On special leave, he was clearly in awe of the famous Seaton Begg as the investigator kindly coaxed his story from him.

On the night of the BBIC murders, Ogilvy, staying late in attendance on a pregnant cuttlefish, had missed the evening bus and decided to risk the walk to Liverpool Street. Ogilvy was soon lost in another fog, arriving at last in Crookburn Street at the corner of Sweetcake Court where BBIC’s brutal architecture was softened by the weather. Pausing to read a sign, he heard a cab behind him. Hoping to ask his way, he saw the cab had come for a shady figure hurrying from BBIC. “I saw her face through the taxi window, Sir Seaton. She was staring back, terrified out of her skin. It was that poor, loony Mrs. Ratchet, who used to be in the government. Pale as a ghost. I could almost hear her teeth chattering.”

Ogilvy was also rewarded and thanked, though less enthusiastically. Reluctantly Begg decided to follow up the account. Apart from Barbican Begg, Lady Ratchet was the only surviving BBIC director. Under the impression that she was variously the English Queen, the Israeli Prime Minister, the American President and Mary, Queen of Scots, she was at best an unreliable witness. She had moved South of the River on the assumption that her enemies could not cross running water and refused all visitors, even relatives. She went out only to “go over my books.” She did not trust modern electronics so her accountants kept a large ledger which she inspected every month. She agreed to a telephone interview only after Begg threatened, under his new powers, forcible entrance of her Esher Tudor castle.

Gentle and firm as possible with the babbling old creature, Begg believed a small, cunning and perfectly coherent mind lay beneath “interference” designed to bully and exhaust opposition. Steadfastly he refused her threats, whines, pathetic lies and claims and continued to demand an account of her whereabouts on the night of the murders. “Nonsense,” she insisted, “I was never there. I was not very well that evening. A touch of Alzheimer’s. My doctor will swear to it. I was at the pictures. Whoever you saw, it wasn’t me. An imposter. You’d better question your chum Elizabeth. She never liked me. They were after the cup, too, you know. They said it was theirs by right. Poppycock! They knew how much it was worth. We planned to set up an office in York. But it’s not safe there any more.”

Begg insisted he meet her and talk “chiefly for your own protection.” Eventually he persuaded her, by wonderfully veiled threats, to meet him or be arrested for murder.

“Very well, Sir Seaton.” She was suddenly brisk. “I respect your family name. Be ready to receive me this evening at six o’clock in Sporting Club Square. But please be prepared also to take responsibility for your actions…”

“I am very grateful, Lady Ratchet. By the by, would you try to recall on your way if you ever knew a fellow by the nickname of ‘Crimson Eyes’?”

A cold pause. At length Lady Ratchet replaced the receiver.

The Last Victim

Heavy snow was falling as the Boxing Day sun set over Sporting Club Square. Lady Ratchet, mad as she was, had never been late. Begg went to his sitting room windows and pulled back the rich, tawny Morris curtains on which the firelight made a new, dancing geometry. He peered through the blackness, through the big white flakes, through the sharply defined branches of plane trees, down into the square, towards the elaborate iron gates where “Mad Maggie” would enter.

At three minutes to six he was sure he heard a taxi setting down. Since then, save for the occasional muffled stamping of snow-laden feet, the Square had grown silent. Glancing again at his gleaming Tompion, Begg saw that it was four minutes past the hour. At that moment the soft winter air was pierced by the high-pitched shriek of a police whistle. Begg started, as if struck by a new idea, and hurried to don his overcoat. He reached the policeman outside the gates in less than a minute. “What’s up, officer?”

The answer lay before them, already touched by a thickening layer of snow. Begg instantly recognized the frail, twisted little body from the shoes subtly clashing with the skirt. It was poor old “Mad Maggie.” Noting the black leather trophy case in her left hand, Begg knelt beside the body, feeling uselessly for a pulse. The corpse seemed to shrivel as he watched, as if it had been animated solely by its owner’s lunacy. Her face stared up at him through snow still melting on her fading paint. It was an expression of unmitigated terror. There was no sign of a wound. Maggie had died clutching at her own throat. Who had known she was on her way to see him?