‘Quare!’ hissed Longinus from behind the flames.
Quare rushed to the pallet, snatched up the coat, which he bundled into his arms, along with his tricorn, and, leaving the makeshift club behind, but clutching his sword and belt, ducked under the cowl of the fireplace.
‘Jump,’ came Longinus’s voice from out of the shadows. ‘It is quite safe, you shall see.’
He heard the click of the lock turning in the door behind him. Without a backward glance, Quare closed his eyes and jumped over the burning logs, feeling the heat of the flames lick across his shins.
‘Good man.’ Strong hands took hold of him and pulled him forward, out of the heat and the smoke.
Opening his eyes, Quare found himself in a small, square room with a bell pull in one corner and a railing that ran horizontally, at waist height, around each of the three walls; each wall bore a sconce with a burning candle. ‘Why, it’s the stair-master,’ he breathed in wonder.
‘Quite,’ said Longinus even as the door to the chamber slid shut, cutting off the shouts of consternation from the cell Quare had just vacated. ‘You would be surprised, I think, to learn just how widely the stair-master may travel throughout the guild hall. Or perhaps not, knowing Master Magnus as you did. He was a man who prepared for every eventuality save one: the bizarre circumstances of his own death.
But
who in this world could have prepared for such a demise? Who could have imagined that such a timepiece could exist?’ He gave a sharp tug to the bell pull, and the chamber began to move, lurching backwards so suddenly that Quare nearly fell, righting himself only with difficulty by dropping his coat, hat and sword belt and grabbing hold of the rail with both hands.
‘Wh-where are we going?’ he gasped out.
‘Up,’ said Longinus. And, as if that had been a signal, or rather a command, the stair-master jerked to a halt and then shot upwards. Quare’s stomach lagged behind, and his knees almost buckled. ‘Steady on, Mr Quare,’ said Longinus. ‘I hope you are not afraid of heights.’
Quare shook his head, speech beyond him for the moment. He noted that Longinus had belted on a sword, and also that two large cloth bundles, each black as pitch and secured with an assortment of leather straps and clasps, were leaning against one wall of the now smoothly ascending chamber. The bundles looked unwieldy and lacked, as far as he could see, any shoulder straps. He could not imagine what purpose they might serve. Longinus wore a hint of a superior smile on his face as he regarded Quare, who continued to cling to the rail.
‘How high are we going?’ he asked, for, as the seconds ticked by, it seemed impossible to him that they had not yet reached the apex of the guild hall … assuming that was indeed their destination.
‘Why, all the way to the top, of course,’ said Longinus, and again, as if his words had served as a signal, the stair-master jerked, less violently than before, then glided to a stop. The door slid open upon a moonlit rooftop wreathed in drifting tendrils of fog; Quare had not realized how much time had gone by since his incarceration.
‘Buckle on your sword belt,’ Longinus instructed. ‘Gather up your coat and one of those bundles, and follow me.’ He had already lifted one of the bundles himself, which he proceeded to carry out of the stair-master.
Quare buckled on his belt, picked up his coat and hat and the remaining bundle – which was heavier than it appeared, and covered with an unfamiliar substance that clung to his fingers – and followed Longinus onto the rooftop. From this height, Quare could see much of the surrounding roofscape of London, though indistinctly, as a mass
of
bulky shadows and spindly shapes in which, here and there, like the stars above, tiny flames winked without providing much illumination. To the south, through tears in the curtain of fog and coal smoke, he saw the dull shine of the Thames, a length of tarnished pewter. He was reminded of his rooftop pursuit of Grimalkin – had it really been only two nights ago? But the difference was that the roof of the guild hall was substantially higher than the surrounding buildings, and Quare saw no way to leap from their present perch to an adjoining one, as he had done while scrambling after Grimalkin. They were trapped. Did Longinus mean to betray him?
‘Stop gawking and come over here,’ said Longinus. ‘You will have plenty of time later to admire the view.’ The servant – though Quare supposed he could no longer think of him in that way – was kneeling beside a brick wall some distance away. He had his bundle open and spread out before him. As Quare approached, he saw that there was a large metal canister near by, from which a tube extended into the midst of the opened bundle. There was a hissing sound, as of escaping air.
‘What are you doing? What is that thing?’
‘Lay your bundle down there,’ Longinus replied, pointing to the wall where the canister stood.
Quare placed bundle, hat and coat where Longinus had indicated, then turned, his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘I want answers, Longinus. And I want them now. Why have you brought me here?’
‘You fool!’ the other hissed. ‘We don’t have time for this! Even now the Old Wolf’s men are climbing towards us – they will not let us escape if they can help it.’
‘Escape? Why, there is no escaping this rooftop – not unless we can sprout wings and fly!’
Longinus laughed and got to his feet. ‘We shall do the next best thing. Behold another of Master Magnus’s wondrous inventions: the Personal Flotation Device. It will lift us from this rooftop and carry us safely through the air.’
Quare’s mouth dropped open. ‘Are you mad?’
‘You know as well as I what Master Magnus was capable of. This canister, which is connected to a substantial reservoir beneath the roof, is filled with flammable air, a gas that is lighter than the air around us –
so
much lighter that it provides sufficient buoyancy to lift a heavy object … a person, in this case. The device itself consists of a leather harness and a sphere of sailcloth coated with the sap of a Brazilian tree – the natives call it
caoutchouc
, or so I am told. This sap holds the gas within, while permitting the bladder to expand. Once airborne, the device can be manoeuvred by dropping carefully calibrated weights – packets of sand of varying sizes – and by releasing controlled bursts of flammable air from the sphere.’
‘You
are
mad!’
‘I have used the Personal Flotation Device many times, Mr Quare. It is quite safe, over relatively short distances.’
‘Right. Safe, is it? I suppose that’s why the gas is called “flammable air”. Because it is so much safer than ordinary air. You know, the nonflammable kind.’
‘The gas is dangerous only if it comes into contact with a spark or flame.’
‘Oh, that’s very comforting. And if it does?’
‘Then, Mr Quare, we shall both go out in a blaze of glory. But if you would rather return to your cell or remain here on the rooftop to await the arrival of Malrubius and his men …’
Quare grimaced. ‘I take your point. How does the damned thing work?’
‘There is not sufficient time to train you in its operation, unfortunately, so I am going to tether us together. Once you are aloft, touch nothing, do nothing, unless at my direction. Is that clear?’
‘As crystal,’ he replied.
‘Put on your coat,’ Longinus directed. ‘You’ll be glad of the warmth, believe me.’
Quare did so, donning his hat as well. Then Longinus fitted him into the leather harness, strapping it snugly about his thighs and across his torso and shoulders. All the while, the sailcloth bladder expanded, retaining its spherical shape; it was bigger than he had realized, perhaps twice his own size, if not more. Soon the sphere rose gently off the roof and into the air, a dark moonlet seeking its rightful place in the sky. Quare could feel it tugging at him. By that time, moving with practised efficiency, Longinus had opened the second bundle and spread it out,
attaching
a second tube – or ‘umbilical’, as he put it. As the device began to inflate, he strapped himself into its harness, spurning Quare’s offer of help.
‘You would only hinder me,’ he said, ‘or fail to secure the straps properly, and, in your ignorance, however well-meaning, kill us both.’
The whole operation did not take more than a few minutes, objectively speaking, yet all the same, Quare felt as if time had slowed to a crawl. He kept expecting to see armed men burst onto the rooftop, and so fixated was his anxious stare on the trap door that gave access to the roof that he was taken by surprise when, in a gust of wind, the sphere to which he was attached raised itself higher still, pulling him off his feet in the process. There he remained, dangling in the air above the rooftop like a puppet from its strings, secured only by the taut umbilical and the tether with which Longinus had bound their harnesses together. His hands clung to the ropes of the harness that rose from his shoulders to the sphere above as if by doing so he might somehow pull the device back to earth. It was all he could do not to scream. Then another gust of wind snatched the tricorn from his head, and he cursed loudly at the loss of it.
‘A moment more,’ Longinus said. He, too, would have risen into the air were it not for a pair of cables running from his harness to moorings set into the roof. His sphere bobbed below Quare like a cork.
Seeming to strain with the effort, Longinus bent over the canister and turned a small wheel there. Then he slipped the cables from the moorings. Both inflated spheres sprang upwards, carrying their human cargoes along. The umbilicals, pulled free of the spheres, fell back to the rooftop; even amidst his terror, Quare retained sufficient presence of mind to marvel at Master Magnus’s ingenious design, which must have included some sort of self-sealing mechanism.
‘
Allez-houp!
’ cried Longinus.
Quare contributed an incoherent cry of his own as the bladders zoomed up and away – and not a moment too soon, for even as the rooftop receded dizzyingly below them, the trap door opened. ‘Longinus!’ Quare shouted, hoping his voice could be heard over the rush of the wind.
If Longinus responded, Quare didn’t hear it. He watched in
near
-panic as the men on the rooftop – four of them, as small now as dwarfs, and a fifth, seemingly smaller still: Master Malrubius, nearly as spherical as the inflated bladder that had swept him aloft – raised what could only be pistols and seemed to follow their progress through the air, tracking them with steady hands. Quare felt as if he must loom as vast and ungainly in their sight as an airborne elephant. He cursed as a cluster of bright flashes marked the flintlocks’ firing and strove to somehow make himself smaller. He recalled very well what Longinus had told him about the result should the flammable air in the bladders encounter a spark or flame, and he wondered what effect the strike of a ball would have. Even if the gas in the bladder did not ignite, it was a long way down.
But the bullets did not find their marks – at least in so far as Quare could determine. Certainly he had not been struck, and it didn’t seem that the bladder carrying him ever higher and farther away had suffered injury, either. Nor did it appear that Longinus or his Personal Flotation Device had been hit. And their attackers could not reload fast enough to fire again. Quare watched in amazement, his heart aflutter like a frantic bird, as the men dwindled into insignificance, soon swallowed by shadows and the night.
They had done it. They were free.
A giddy exhilaration swelled in his breast, as if he had just swallowed a dram of strong liquor; under its influence, he could not forbear from shouting in triumph. Even his terror at dangling in mid-air like a mouse caught in the talons of an owl contributed to his sense of having escaped not only his prison cell and the fate Sir Thaddeus had planned for him but the laws of nature itself, as if it were an enchantment and not the application of scientific principles that had lofted him high above the city.
Here the air belonged to a colder season. For once, Quare was glad of Mr Puddinge’s coat, for despite its stench – which the wind of their swift passage kept at bay – it provided some welcome insulation from that same wind’s icy probings. Still, the exposed flesh of his hands and face soon began to sting, and his eyes to water; his mouth had grown so dry that he clamped it resolutely shut.
Longinus soared ahead of him, a dark shape visible against the softer
coal
of the night sky, where a ceiling of high cloud was silvered with moonlight, suggesting nothing so much to Quare at this moment as the surface of a great sail carrying the entire planet shiplike through the ether. That sail was torn in places, and through the ragged gaps he could see the glimmer of stars far brighter, it seemed, than he had ever perceived them from the level of the streets, even on moonless nights, and the moon, too, though not yet full, seemed, as it drifted behind the clouds, a brighter presence than he had known, a place it might, perhaps, be possible to travel to by this same method. What a journey that would make! What wonders might he find there!
But there were wonders nearer to hand. A wider rent had opened in the clouds, and in the plangent wash of moonlight the whole of London was revealed, extending as far as he could see. From his unaccustomed vantage, it seemed a different city than the one he had come to know, a fairy metropolis spun out of shadow and suggestion, of soft, silvery light and slate-grey webbings of fog, insubstantial as a dream. He passed over a weird terrain of rooftops and spires, chimneys belching smoke, deep valleys of streets, and squares in which the occasional torch flickered like a lonely star reflected in the mirror of a placid lake. There was no sound from below, only the rushing of the air, as noisy – and cold – as if he had plunged his head beneath a freezing cataract. Perhaps they had reached the moon after all, and this was no earthly city but the capital of some lunar country …
The undulating thread of the Thames, stitching in and out of the darker fabric of the night, gave Quare the means to orient himself, and he realized with a shock of recognition that he was passing almost directly above his lodgings – former lodgings, rather. Below him, Mrs Puddinge was no doubt enjoying the slumber of the just. What would she think if she looked up and saw her dead husband’s coat flapping overhead like a ragged spirit condemned to an eternity of restless wandering?