The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) Read online

  Thomas smiled wanly. ‘Perhaps he didn’t think it was important? ’

  Lyle glowered. ‘After breaking the necks of these two strong men, this mysterious killer leaves the ship with a man wearing expensive leather shoes and who may or may not have spoken with an American accent. Why? Why are two people dead, why is Lord Lincoln not telling me everything again, why is everything like this? This ship, this place, this time, these people? Why? ’

  ‘Because . . . because . . .’ Thomas realized he’d started speaking, so might as well finish. He took a deep breath. ‘This is all the work of foreign agents, sir, bent on disparaging Her Most Royal Majesty and bringing disrepute on the Empire of Gloriana Brita—’

  He’d gone a bit too far. ‘Thomas,’ snapped Lyle, ‘you have a gift for observation and logical thought, but . . . but . . .’ He waved his hands in the air, struggling for the right combination of insult and tact, and couldn’t find it in either his mind or heart. ‘Urgh!’

  Snow fell. It drifted through the fog and landed lightly in Tess’s hair where she sat on deck. Curious, she held out a hand and caught a fat feather of snow. Bringing the snowflake close to her nose, she could see each individual crystal that made it up. Tess blew gently, so that it rose from her hand and drifted back into the fog. She heard the sound of a door closing on deck and half-saw Lyle and Thomas emerge from the cabin, then heard Lyle walk to the edge of the ship, where he peered down. She said cheerfully, ‘It’s leanin’ more than it was, Mister Lyle.’

  ‘The ice is thicker too,’ murmured Lyle.

  ‘Ain’t that a good thing?’

  ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t feel cold enough. But I suppose that’s just proof of how unreliable human instinct can be.’

  The snow kept falling, more than just silent. It seemed to drain the noise out of the surrounding area, and make people talk in whispers. For a second Lyle thought he heard . . . something. He was aware of the gentle humming of the boat as it slipped further into the water, the distant buzz of the city, the creak of the ice as it pressed against the old, cracked timbers.

  For a second, just a second, a ditty sprang to his mind, and he whispered, almost inaudibly, a tuneless chant, ‘Hark, hark, the dogs do bark . . .’ He realized Thomas was watching him, and stopped, smiling weakly. ‘Chin up, lad. How bad can things get?’

  ‘I’m cold,’ moaned Tess. ‘It’s cold an’ it’s dark an’ I’m hungry an’ it’s co-o-ld.’

  ‘Yes, Teresa,’ sang out Lyle. ‘Thank you for your observations. ’

  The four of them shuffled along a dark corridor that stank of tar, salt, rot and neglect. Lyle went first, followed closely by Tess and Tate, the dog having quickly worked out which human was most likely both to feed him, and to run away from danger. Last came Thomas, struggling along with the bulk of Lyle’s newly purchased equipment, back pressed to the walls, head constantly turning as if he expected something to emerge out of the dark at a second’s notice. The dark and cold here combined into something almost suffocating, shutting down every faculty except, worst of all, imagination.

  A creak like Father Time rolling over in an old wooden bed made Thomas snap his head up with a sharp intake of breath, fingers tightening instinctively as he peered through the dark. Tess jumped. Lyle swallowed and forced a smile. ‘It’s just the ship.’

  ‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’ Thomas was white.

  Another creak. It was the sound of tortured wood being pushed from every direction at once, by the freezing water inside and by the water freezing outside, ice slowly forming in every cranny and expanding, forcing the planks apart bit by bit. It was the sound of a thousand microscopic splinters ripping out of the ship itself with each second, amplified and deepened by the water sloshing around inside and out, until the noise rolled and rumbled down every corridor and made the rigging slap loudly against the mast above.

  Lyle found a lantern, sniffed it, hung it up on a hook over the stairwell, pulled out a packet of fat, smelly phosphorus matches, struck one idly on the sole of his shoe and lit the lantern with it, while the match belched dirty smoke and dirty yellow light. The light didn’t so much dispel the darkness as make it more obvious where the deepest darkness lay. It reflected off the black water that filled the stairwell below, lapping almost at their feet.

  The silence that fell between the striking of the match and the rumble of the dying ship was almost painful. If Thomas strained, he could just hear the gentle slapping of the water, but even that was subdued by the ice slowly infecting it. The sounds of the usually roaring London docks seemed distant, like a circus heard far off. Even the rats were quiet.

  ‘The rats are probably gone,’ said Lyle quietly, as though reading Thomas’s mind, if not his pallor. Thomas swallowed, and said nothing. Lyle smiled absently. ‘Rats are very clever creatures. In many ways you have to admire them. They’re the ultimate in survival.’

  This didn’t reassure Thomas in the slightest.

  He heard a little gurgling noise and jumped back with a cry, banging his head against the wall as something cold and wet brushed his feet. He looked down and saw that the black water which had been crawling up the side of the stairwell had reached over and was now pouring in a thin sheen across the deck, rushing past his feet in silence. He could feel its cold through his shoes, but immediately flushed hotly at his own cry.

  ‘This ship will go soon.’ Lyle seemed almost sad, as if the ship was a living creature about to die, or a creation of his own. Standing ungainly on one foot, Lyle began pulling off his shoes, tying them together by the laces, and dipping his feet, a toe at a time, into the water, flinching at the cold. Thomas half-moved to take his off, and Lyle said, ‘No, not you, lad.’ Tess rolled her eyes and grabbed at the pipe and bellows slung over Thomas’s shoulder.

  ‘You can do the blowin’,’ she said happily. ‘’Cos I’m a lady.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Teresa?’ He hesitated. When no more information was forthcoming, he hazarded, ‘Forgive me ... which blowing?’

  Tess was jamming the bellows into one end of the flexible leather pipe. ‘The blowin’ what’s goin’ to help Mister Lyle do the swimmin’.’

  Thomas glanced over at Lyle, who had stripped down to shirt and trousers, and was staring at the black water with an uneasy expression.

  ‘Mister Lyle?’ he squeaked.

  ‘Yes, lad?’

  ‘Are you sure this is ... I mean, do you feel that . . . I’m sure that I could go without any difficulty, perhaps I ought to . . .’

  ‘Not a chance, lad.’

  ‘Oh. But I’m -’

  Lyle raised a warning finger.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good lad. Now, just pump those bellows, all right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Lyle turned to Tess, who wordlessly shoved a long, round thing at him that Thomas realized was made of two tin cans hammered together. Peering down, he saw that the top can was empty, but that a small hole had been bored in its bottom, where it slotted into the second tin. Lyle took it in one hand and wrapped the hosepipe tightly round his wrist, so his end was closed, and a long slack ran from it to the bellows where Thomas stood.

  Tess stepped back quickly as Lyle struck another match and held it over the two tins. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. She shrugged. ‘I ain’t entirely certain it ain’t goin’ to blow up, Mister Lyle. But if it does, it ain’t my fault.’

  ‘Thank you, Teresa. That’s very reassuring.’

  Lyle looked down into the dark water lapping at the top of the stairwell, took a deep breath, screwed his eyes up tight and dropped the match into the can. When the tins didn’t blow up, he opened a cautious eye and let out a long breath. Something fizzed inside the can, hesitated and exploded with white light, almost too bright to look at. The tin immediately heated up until it was almost too hot to hold. Tate whimpered. Tess felt a smile start, an unstoppable grin of delight, which even her better judgement couldn’t suppress. London’s burning, London’s burning . . .

  Lyle
shuffled forward into the stairwell, feeling his way down. The water rose up around his ankles, to his knees, and he started to turn white. ‘My God,’ Thomas heard him whisper. ‘That’s cold.’

  He sank lower, shoulders vanishing under the black, murky water. He dragged the torch down - the light flickered, but kept on burning, strong and white. Lyle hesitated as the water lapped at his chin, took a deep breath, and slid down into blackness.

  There is a kind of cold that isn’t felt in shivers or in ice on the skin. It is a bone-deep cold, that turns all joints to stone and makes every toe and every hair ache with the weight of ages. It makes the smallest motions, even the twitching of a finger, an act of intense will, and the lifting of a feather tantamount to the lifting of stone. And today, so it seemed, it was making a special two-limbs-locked-up-for-the-price-of-one offer.

  Lyle swam through the black water of the flooded lower deck of the Pegasus, which was illuminated a garish greeny-white by his torch of tin cans and magnesium, and hoped that this was going to prove worth his while. He didn’t like dark places, especially not when they were cold, wet, dark places full of odd shadows, although his dislike of them was nothing compared to his dislike of heights. So he swam on, telling himself that it was for the greater investigative purpose, as if this were a holy mantra.

  The ship creaked again. In the water, the sound was louder, deeper and seemed to make his ears hum for a long time after. He could feel the bending of the old, battered wood as shivers in the water, which was full of little drifting splinters and wisps of dirt, the origin of which he didn’t dare speculate on. Lyle kept one fist closed tightly round the end of the hosepipe as he swam, but every now and again paused to hold the pipe to his mouth and take in a quick breath of air, which tasted hot and dirty and came in tiny shallow gulps.

  He swam, skin whiter now than his shirt, squinting through the cloudy water. Things had come loose from their moorings, and the lighter boxes were drifting gently through the water, bumping against each other and rolling over, while the heavy boxes sat, sliding loosely on the floor of the ship, weighed down by their contents. Something cold brushed Lyle’s ankle and he jerked, torch slipping in his hand and starting to slide downwards. An eel, slim and dirty, wriggled past him and into the gloom of the ship. He took a hasty breath of air from the pipe and swam to catch the torch and hold it up again, half-blinded by the stinging water and the cold that seemed to dull colour and thought.

  The circle of faint light in which he swam fell on something lying half-open in a corner. He pulled himself towards it, feet now numb from the cold, and heard again the agonized creak of the dying ship, felt the weight of water above and below, and heard ringing in his ears and the incredible weight of his own limbs dragging him down.

  The thing that was half-open looked like a coffin, made entirely of stone. It was dull and crude and slab-like, and looked as if it was designed to contain a figure slightly larger than Lyle, in both height and width. But instead of tapering towards the toes it was square. On the lid was a very large, slightly crooked cross. Lyle ran his fingers over one side of it, but his white fingertips, tainted pale blue, couldn’t feel anything. He swung round gracelessly, clinging on to the edge of the coffin, and dragged himself bodily down until his nose almost touched the sarcophagus. He saw what his fingers were too numb to feel - the small marks around the centre and edges, where a crowbar had been inserted - and felt almost relieved to see a sign of foul play. Heavy on the floor lay half of a broken stone seal. He half-swam, half-bent down and picked it up, turning it this way and that to see again the crooked cross, shattered in two. He dropped the seal, brought the torch closer until he imagined he could feel its warmth on his cheek, and peered at the coffin lid. Inside the lid, underneath the giant cross, there were hundreds of little scratches.

  And there it was. The sense of dread, a deep, old suspicion, colder than the ice in his blood, began to settle over him. He ran his hands over the inside of the coffin lid, but it was a futile gesture and he knew it. Even if his fingers couldn’t feel precisely, he could count the marks - five parallel lines here, five parallel lines there - and knew that hands had clawed at the inside of this lid in the past, trying to get out. Lyle suddenly felt very alone and exposed, his mind drifting into places where the rest of him didn’t want to be.

  About to push away, his eye caught, just in one corner, another very small mark. He moved closer and peered at it, no larger than the area inside his hooped finger and thumb. The light from the torch began to flicker erratically, the hissing flame drawing down lower. But as the white magnesium flare began to die, he saw by the dirty yellow light two cogs, one set inside the other, counting down the minutes to midnight, or noon, whichever one it was, and he thought of the ring he had pulled from Stanlaw’s dead white hand, and shuddered through the frozen weight of his own skin.

  He turned to swim away, and a pair of eyes, stone cold, angry and hateful, glared back at him. He choked on his own cry, bubbles exploding from his nose and mouth and briefly blinding him, and kicked out instinctively. His foot struck something hard and sharp, which rolled away, spinning off into the darkness, taking the hate-filled eyes with them. Something went thump in the dark. He hesitated, leaning back into the shadows of the alcove which held the stone coffin, his lungs suddenly burning and the ringing in his ears rising to a new and insistent pitch. He held the pipe to his mouth and breathed, until the pipe was just a thin contracted rope behind him, all the air sucked out.

  The warmer air was calming, but not much. He swam, very cautiously, torch held out at arm’s length, until he saw the eyes again, this time glaring up at the ceiling. They belonged to a small stone gargoyle: huge eyes in a small face, a chin so sharp it could have cut diamond, and eight razor-sharp stone claws at the end of stick-like arms, ready to scratch and tear. The little stone monstrosity was scarred and scratched from its journey, especially around the hands, but now lay on the bottom of the deck staring at nothing with a furious expression, as if about to demand a refund and ticket to a better destination, or else.

  There was a sound in the hold that was louder here. It was the sound of ice gently bumping against the walls of the deck, and the whisper of water rushing in and out, like a whale breathing. Lyle followed the drag and push of the water until his hand bumped up against the wall of the ship. He let himself hang in front of the black tear in the ship’s side, running the light round the edges of the torn and shattered wood. It wasn’t a very large hole, but it had clearly been enough to seal the fate of the Pegasus for ever. He levered himself down and turned his head this way and that, trying to see clearly the cuts that had broken the wood. He was beginning to feel warm now, a pink warmness all over that he knew was a bad sign. The light was almost out, and giving off a dirty yellow vapour that made the greenish water seem even dirtier and more sickly. In its last glow he reached out and touched the marks around the wood. They were small but deep, and clearly had been administered with some considerable strength to have torn the planks apart.

  In the dying light, Mister Horatio Lyle saw, quite clearly against one of the planks, eight tiny claw marks, like the hands of the glaring gargoyle, and in his heart of hearts, he knew it was a clue. The thought terrified him. He spun in the water, less aware of his own weight now as nerves started to shut down in the cold; and, as if it wanted to provide an appropriate comment on this discovery, and to make its participation in the affair noticed and appreciated, the torch gave one last hiss, and went out, plunging him into darkness.

  For a second, fear was colder than the ice in Lyle’s blood. He had the feeling of being watched, of something else outside peering in, of a consciousness down there apart from the fish and shimmering eels that had crawled through the shattered wood. He felt along the length of the hosepipe, using it to pull himself forward, back towards a distant patch of slightly patchier darkness where the water lapped up from the hold, and though he knew not to fear, there it was, the drumming in his ears, the hammering in his che
st, the heavy pulse of the blood under his skin, beating out a tiny rhythm, catching at the senses like a half-heard Hark, hark ...

  He felt something move in the water, and knew he hadn’t imagined it, and thought that he should have. He thought of fish nibbling at bare toes and eels rubbing against frozen skin and the terror was there, bubbling just below the iron vault of his scientific objectivity, and he tugged at the hosepipe now, using it more as a rope than a supply of air, and the pressure was there in the water again, a ripple of displacement behind him where there should have been none and something closed around his ankle - oh God, something hard and colder even than he was, clutching at his skin, digging into it, dragging him back with a strength and a grip that amazed him.

  He flailed uselessly in the water against it, but it didn’t let go, dragging him down like a stone, pulling his hands free of the hosepipe and its precious air, so that it twisted and bubbled wildly around his face, stinging his eyes as he was pulled back down. He kicked at the invisible, unseen thing, but it didn’t seem to care. The dead torch fell from his fingers, and he felt sorry that Tess wouldn’t be able to keep it as a souvenir, and wondered that he should think of a thing like that at a time like this, with the air burning hotter in his lungs, bubbling out of his lips in its desperation to get out and be replaced, a heavy constriction in his throat, a drying shrinking at the back of his neck, a dull weight in his chest, until his eyes started to burn with it. He twisted, reaching down to his own ankle and prising at the stone-hard things that seemed to have caught at his foot, wrenching at them with all his might, pulling with an instinctive, terrified strength that only emerged when the brain was too busy suffocating to question the acts of the body. He felt something snap, something made brittle and hard by the cold, until with a kick, the heavy thing at his ankle fell away, scratching and tearing thin lines across his flesh, bringing hot blood back to numb skin. Lyle kicked for the surface, trusting entirely to instinct, and his head bumped against the wooden top and for a moment he hammered against it, trying to find a way out in the pitch darkness, trying to find the rope, a stair, a ladder, anything to guide him out of this airless wet tomb, driving his palms against the wood until his ears burned and even the instincts started to fade into dull pink numbness.