The Iscariot Sanction (18 page)

They entered the small ground-floor study, and Sir Toby lit an oil lamp, eschewing modern electrical lighting, just as he did at his club office. The room was cold, the fire having died out hours ago.

‘Whiskey?’ Sir Toby asked.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Mind if I do?’ The Lord Justice took out the glass and decanter.

‘Not at all.’

‘So, you’d best spit it out—what has you so agitated, Sir Arthur?’

‘I have received a premonition. A fearful one. I believe that something is amiss with the Hardwicks. Particularly, Lillian is in danger. I can sense it most keenly.’

‘She is in particular danger? Or she is the only one you can sense?’

Had he spoken with Lord Hardwick? Or was he simply every bit as astute as his reputation suggested? ‘I… I do not know for sure. The former, I believe.’

Sir Toby Fitzwilliam looked thoughtful, his craggy face crumpling as he pondered something, though his thoughts were unfathomable, even to one such as Sir Arthur Furnival. In the end he exhaled deeply, and seemed to come to some decision. He pointed to the corner of the room.

‘Within the parcel over there is a painting. It arrived this afternoon.’

At first, Sir Arthur did not take the judge’s meaning, but then it became clear. ‘A painting… from
him?
’

‘I’ve been expecting as much. That cabman you sent to the Nightwatch… Dresden? It transpires that he did take our suspect to one more destination the night Molly Goodheart was killed.’

‘The House of Zhengming?’

Sir Toby nodded. He set down his whiskey and strode to the parcel. He removed the paper from the two-foot-high canvas, and held the revealed painting to the light. Sir Arthur did not move—he would not touch an object created by the Artist. The celestial had a damnable power, and given Arthur’s unique skills in psychometry, nothing good could come of it. His eyes widened as he took in the painting; its complexity and detail astonishing, its mood resonating through the room as though it were painted in pure emotion rather than merely oils.

‘I am afraid your powers are slipping, Sir Arthur,’ the commander of Apollo Lycea said. ‘I already know of the dangers ahead. The appropriate authorities have been notified, and the Nightwatch stands ready. But there is little else to be done.’

‘Send me. If I leave now I could find them, and—’

‘You will do no such thing. Lieutenant and Agent Hardwick will survive this night; of that I am certain. I will not risk the life of another agent to confirm what our psychic intelligence has already divined.’

‘How can you be so sure? Even the Nightwatch cannot—’

Sir Toby held up a hand. ‘This is not the only painting dispatched by the Artist today. Lord Hardwick has one, as does the Home Secretary. And we intercepted two others. They form pieces of a puzzle—one that the Artist, for reasons of his own choosing, wishes us to solve.’

‘What would you have me do, Sir Toby?’ Sir Arthur asked.

‘Nothing. Go home and try to get a good night’s sleep. I will see you at the club bright and early tomorrow, because if what we have learned is correct, something portentous is about to happen. I am sure you would not have the events depicted here come to pass?’

As Sir Arthur made his way home, his thoughts were crowded by the ominous painting. A castle on a high cliff, burning, the flames spiralled high into the dark sky, forming great tendrils, around which winged Riftborn swooped. The landscape stretching out before the castle was made entirely of corpses. And over it all, standing at the forefront of the chaos, with a face so impassive it might as well have been sculpted of marble, was Lillian Hardwick.

John grappled with the thing at the window desperately, fending off its claws and gnashing teeth. He saw Tesla from the corner of his eye, flailing about as the coach went over yet another hillock and veered around an awkward bend. John heard Lillian cry out in alarm, but he could do nothing but fight for dear life, and try not to be scratched for fear that whatever had befallen his sister would also befall him.

With all the strength he could muster, John finally wrenched his left arm away from the beast, and smashed his elbow into its face. It thrust an arm into the carriage to save itself from falling, but for the scant seconds John was free he had reached to his ankle and snatched out his knife. With a vicious backhand swipe, he drew the blade across the monster’s throat and it fell from the window, but the immediate avian croak it gave was a sure indication that the creature was not dead, even if it was out of the running.

John slammed the window shut and clambered at once to the other side of the carriage, dismayed to find no sign of Lillian. Tesla, on the other hand, was rummaging through his kit bag.

‘Mr. Tesla,’ John said, ‘if there is anything in that bag of tricks that can help us, now would be the time to find it.’

‘A minute,’ Tesla said.

That was more time than they had. More time than Lillian had. John took up his pistol and looked out of the flapping door, out into the gloomy countryside that sped past them at a rate of knots. With a deep breath he hauled himself into the cold air.

* * *

The hunchbacked creature—Lillian still could not bring herself to think of it as a ‘vampire’—hoisted her off her feet. Lillian looked over its sloping shoulders and saw the rumbling carriage with its faceless driver hurtling after them through the mists. She tried to prise the creature’s clawed hands from her collar, but it was possessed of a strength that belied its scrawny frame. She kicked at it, but drew little more than a flinch and the hideous, throaty growl that she had come to associate with her nightmares. She did not understand how the beast remained upright on the moving coach, and feared they would both be thrown from the roof at any moment.

Do not be afraid. Let me in and we can be together.

In her panic, she had allowed her defences to slacken again. But the voice no longer filled her with dread, nor did she feel any compulsion to obey it. If anything, it made her realise that the goal of the monster before her was not to hurt her, but to abduct her.

Lillian gambled on her intuition, and let go of the creature’s arms, staring fearlessly into its sparkling, violet eyes. It did not drop her, but instead hissed, tilting its head to scrutinise her. The fetid stench of the thing’s rotting flesh was nauseating. Lillian reached up for her hairpins slowly, focusing all the time on her mental defences, to mask her intention from the Majestic who whispered to her. Her fingers closed around the delicate weapons.

‘Lillian! By God!’

John had clambered up to the coach roof. The creature started, and turned its attention away from Lillian to face this new threat, and in that instant Lillian struck. The two pins slid into the beast’s papery hide, either side of the throat, thrusting upward into its skull. With an ear-piercing scream that caused Lillian physical pain, the creature fell limp, and rolled from the roof of the carriage as Lillian fell onto the roof face-first. She looked up to catch the briefest glimpse of a naked, lily-white corpse vanishing beneath the wheels of the pursuing vehicle, before she began to slip from the roof. Terror gripped her as she struggled for purchase. She was half-over the stowage compartment, staring down at the muddy road, when she felt a hand grip her arm, and finally she steadied herself. To her great relief, it was John who now held her, and not another creature.

‘Get back!’ she yelled. ‘I’m all right, and I know what to do.’

He tried to argue, but she silenced him with a hard glare. John ducked as a low-hanging branch whipped over his head, nodded to his sister, and swung himself back into the coach.

Don’t be a fool. Let me in, or you all shall die.

Looking at the black coach that pursued them, Lillian felt the call strongly. The voice in her head presaged the throbbing of the wound at her shoulder, and she knew the two were linked. Was de Montfort aboard that coach, she wondered? Was he the creature that even now exerted influence over her? Or was it some other who tugged at her, impelling her to join them? She wanted it to be so. She felt her heart lurch at the realisation that she was no longer in command of her emotions. Deep down she ached to be united with whatever dark lord summoned her. And that thought sickened her, made her grit her teeth in determination, and drove her to fight. She would not allow some inhuman creature to sway her from her course.

The shrouded coachman cracked his whip once more. Another wiry, pale figure emerged from the carriage, crawling spider-like along its side, and onto the horses that panicked, wild-eyed at the thing’s touch. Something inside Lillian told her to give herself to the creature, to let it carry her off into the night and end the chase. She glowered, and instead reached down and took out the derringer from her boot, holding the small gun tight. She stared down the violet-eyed beast that jerked and scuttled over the team of horses towards her. It reached the lead horse, and crouched low, ready to leap at Lillian. She took aim at the horse.

Before she could pull the trigger, her defiance turned to surprise as a loud fizzing noise filled the air, accompanied by a flash of blue light that—for a second—turned the night to day. A coruscating arc of electrical energy flashed from below her, from the coach window, and struck the pale creature in the chest. Its gleaming white skin charred and peeled instantly. Its body was wreathed in bands of lightning, which leapt from the horses to the ghoulish beast in flickering bands. As the creature fell between the animals and into the road, the horses shied off to the right, crashing through a dark hedgerow and falling in a tangled, whinnying heap. The carriage itself broke away, bouncing over a ditch and flipping end over end, the black-swathed driver flying through the air.

Lillian barely had time to register what had happened when she was almost thrown from her position by another jolt from their coach as Selby fought to keep his own team from panicking.

She grabbed the ropes of the stowage tight, and shouted back over her shoulder as loud as she could. ‘Selby, pull up! Pull up, I say!’

It took some time to come to a halt, and when they did the enemy was out of sight. Lillian climbed from the roof of the coach, fighting the urge not to be sick.

Tesla disembarked nervously, still holding the strange weapon, which smoked ominously. John followed, Webley revolver in hand.

‘Selby, everything all right?’ John called.

Jim Selby climbed down from his seat, legs visibly shaking. He took off his hat, clutching it tight as he nodded to John.

‘We need to search the wreckage,’ said Lillian, pointing back along the road.

‘I’m not sure, sis. Maybe we should make our getaway while we can. That was a damned close-run thing.’

‘No, John,’ said Lillian, gritting her teeth. ‘We need to go back there, and make sure there are no survivors.’

She could not—would not—say that she wanted to put a stop to the voices in her head, to the nightmares. Perhaps John knew; he nodded assent. Lillian led the way, treading down long, damp grass, wading knee-deep through it as the cold wind picked up, causing the black field to ripple like a vast lake, and the upended coach to creak, its one good wheel spinning awkwardly on its axle in the breeze. Her hands were held outwards from her sides, each holding a small knife, as she trod cautiously, deliberately, towards the wreck.

Lillian remembered a time, long ago when, as a little girl, she had stolen from her bed in the middle of a winter’s night, and had walked through the long, wet grass of the fields behind her old family home. She had not thought of that episode in the longest time, except in her dreams. She had been caught up in a terrible storm that night, and had awoken lost and frightened, cold and soaked through, almost a mile from home. Her enduring memory was of being swept up in her father’s arms, having almost drowned in the river. Marcus Hardwick had seemed impossibly huge, enfolding her in the bundles of his overcoat and running back home with her. She had almost died of pneumonia shortly afterwards. She vaguely remembered her mother and father and older brother sitting in a dimly lit room, their faces lined with worry. When she had pulled through, something within her had changed. Her parents did not notice it at first, but eventually they came to know that their daughter was no longer the carefree girl they had known. The brush with death had taught her, even at that tender age, to pursue her goals relentlessly, and hang the consequences. This had often brought her into conflict with her father. Indeed, the last time she remembered feeling any true bond of love between them was when she had been carried back to the house in his arms.

The creature before her now was like a parody of that memory. A pile of heavy black cloth given form and life, a ragged creature dragging itself away from the wreckage of the coach. It redoubled its efforts when it sensed the approach of its enemies, and began to crawl more frantically when John put a bullet in the head of a pale-skinned monster that hung limply from the window of the coach wreck. Lillian saw that the driver’s legs were shattered—he was dragging them piteously.

She marched over to the stricken man, kicking him over onto his back. He lashed out at her with a large hand, which she at once knocked aside and trod upon. He grunted, but said nothing.

At Lillian’s signal, John stepped forward and tore the muffler and hat from the man’s head. No monster was revealed beneath, and Lillian knew without her brother’s confirmation that this could not be de Montfort.

He was a man, large and sallow-skinned, face podgy and devoid of expression. He babbled something incoherent, and then said only, ‘Mercy.’ Lillian knew at once that he was a simpleton, some poor imbecile employed to the cause of the Knights Iscariot because he could know no better.

As if to confirm her thoughts, Tesla spoke. ‘It has always been the way,’ he said. ‘The Knights Iscariot can rarely pass for normal men—those of sharp wits fear and despise them. So they look to these poor unfortunates to do their bidding—brain-damaged wretches whose only experience is servitude.’