Chapter 37
THE CELLAR
LIZZY
I had never seen a London intersection deserted in mid-morning. Even the cries of the fleeing Londoners were distant.
Mary dropped stiffly from the saddle ladder to the cobblestones beside me. She worked her neck with a grunt and squinted at the intersection signs. “I thought we would land at Chathford House.”
“Then everyone would see Yuánchi arrive at a Darcy residence. This is nearer our goal.” My own legs were complaining, but I could hardly stretch on a public street. “The faster we are there, the more advantage of surprise.”
On our fifth pass over the city, crossing a disreputable slum of warehouses and tanners, I felt the oily dark corruption of a dosed wyfe. We had landed a quarter mile away.
“Surprise?” Mary said dubiously. “People ran. People see us now!” Although the street had emptied while Yuánchi circled to land, heads crowded every window.
“All they see are two bizarrely dressed people,” I pointed out.
“Help me.” I unbuckled the saddlebag, which appeared tiny strapped to Yuánchi but was tremendous by usual standards.
I could have packed three spring bonnets and not creased a ribbon, but as we each grabbed a bundle, the cloth and colors were far more prosaic.
I thought to Yuánchi, Hide outside London. I shall call when we are ready.
You need my protection.
I need protection that fits through a door. Go. But frighten away these watching people.
His lithe neck bent until his muzzle faced straight upward like a fountain as tall as a building. He spread the nearest joints of his wings from his body, keeping the rest pinched closed to fit between the buildings. The breadth of one wing curved over us like a sheltering roof.
Close your eyes.
“Take off your spectacles,” I said to Mary. Once she fiddled them off—she had tied them to a leather lace behind her head—I pulled her surprised face against my shoulder. “Hide your eyes. And cover your ears!” Her palms clamped in place just before I buried my own eyes in her shoulder.
We were near Yuánchi’s chest, and through my own pressed palms, I heard a rumble.
It was not inhalation—this was nothing so mundane as breath—but a building tension like the thousand miniature hisses and groans of a steam boiler at high pressure.
Then the corners of my buried eyelids flared white, heat flashed every exposed inch of skin, and a roar—did something that loud even have a sound?
—shook my lungs within my chest. It ended in a moment, even before my skin goosebumped in instinctive animal fright.
By the time we lifted our heads, Yuánchi was trotting down the street, his tail held awkwardly high so he would not accidentally crush us.
In a dozen strides he reached the next corner.
He peered both ways, doubtless curious but looking remarkably like a cautious walker, then spread his wings and rose in a thunder of wind. In seconds, he was out of sight.
I tugged Mary’s hand. “We can be gone while their eyes are dazzled.”
“Look at the sky,” she cried.
It was a day of high thin cloud and spotty low puffs, but above us, a round of pure blue sky was spreading.
In the center, the air glowed in shimmering greens and yellows that folded like giant butterfly wings.
As they faded, leaving a roiling fringe of cloud at the circle’s edge, I pulled Mary toward the wharves.
We ducked into an alley, stripped off our heavy leather coats and caps, and pulled on our nondescript brown riding hoods. A few inches of Mary’s trousers were exposed, but no one would care if we did not enter a respectable establishment. I doubted that was our destination.
“This is madness,” Mary muttered, flapping her shapeless garment.
“Says the sister who waited all night to ambush me.”
“You are mad,” she clarified.
“That is a symptom of my impending death,” I said, peeking around the corner. There was a distant din from some unseen crowd, but in view there was only a pair of men, pointing skyward and conversing rapidly.
I closed my eyes, settled my excitement, and easily located the pocket of vileness.
“This way—” I began, then opened my eyes to see Mary’s cheeks wet with tears.
My own heart seized. “Mary, you must not, or I will dissolve in a puddle beside you, and we will achieve nothing.” Her throat lurched through a swallow, then she dashed her tears off and nodded.
We hurried on. The road was still vacant. That was odd. A dragon sighting, however frightening, should draw the indomitable curious of London.
One street short of the wharves, I stopped at the corner of a rundown, nondescript wooden building. It leaked a reek of dead fish far worse than the usual wet odor of the Thames.
“The wyfe is there…” I began, then hesitated. I was long past committed to this plan, but the realization of imminent violence froze me. What if I lost my mind? What if I hurt Mary?
Mary was surveying the exterior with the obsessive focus she applied to books in dead languages.
She sniffed the air. “This is very likely where Miss Bathurst was kept. The odor. The district. It is all correct.” She faced me, recognized my hesitation, and her expression became determined.
“Lizzy, these men are murderers and fiends. English law would hang them many times over.”
“I know.” At least my hesitation suggested I would not be possessed by the mad, vengeful thrill of battle. “Let us begin.”
I closed my eyes and fell into… not calm, but a balanced and honed focus. I drove the boundaries of my mind outward. Not just awareness, but influence. The strength to command, if needed. The distant sounds of the city vanished, and my headache went with them. I had not noticed it lingering.
The blur of the dosed wyfe resolved, but faint. An old dose, faded. She was below the street and near the back of the building. A cellar.
There were draca all about us, a few nearby, many more distant, each an intoxicating spark, tiny and young or aged and wise.
I began surveying them for suitability, then discarded delicacy and sent a summons: Help me!
It rang out in all directions, even sweeping over the Thames and up the far shore.
“Aid is on the way,” I said, opening my eyes. “A great deal of aid.”
The door was weathered wood planks with a shuttered face-sized peephole. I looked for a doorbell, then felt foolish when Mary pounded on the wood with her fist.
Steps approached, and the peephole shutter opened. Suspicious eyes gleamed. A guttural man’s voice said, “Who are you?”
“We have a message from Mr. Tinsdale,” I said. I did not know how Mr. Tinsdale was involved with the dagger, but there were so many hints, his name must be known.
The eyes flicked between Mary and me, then the voice said, “Frig off.” The peephole slammed.
Behind us, a patter of running paws approached. I touched Mary’s shoulder, moving her to one side of the door while I stepped the other way, then I chose one of the heftier draca minds and pictured the door as an obstacle.
A lindworm, thirty pounds of locking scales, dense draca bone, and surging muscle shot between Mary and me, level with my chest from his running leap.
He cannoned into the door with the violent clap of a sledgehammer striking a pile of loose wood.
The door burst open, shuddering on its hinges and scattering a splintered locking beam across the stone floor.
The man whose suspicious eyes had watched us stood, jaw hanging. He was tall, ill-fed and hunched, and sported a greasy black beard, a grubby shirt that may once have been white, and trousers drooping from a rope belt.
Scaled shapes streamed past Mary’s and my feet like a metallic brook—roseworms, tunnelworms, a ferretworm, a tyke.
In the room, window glass smashed inward as draca leaped through, snarling in their peculiar, whistling way.
The lindworm, recovered from his spectacular entrance, leaped again, butting the man in his chest and flattening him on the ground where he vanished under a wave of draca.
“Stop!” I cried. Gory memories of my aunt’s small tyke killing a French spy filled my mind, and I ran into the room, fearing I was too late. But the man was intact, not shredded, although winded and furious. He was surrounded by draca, several perched on his body, all with fangs bared and hissing.
“Stay very still,” I advised him. My floppy hood was like looking through a tunnel, so I yanked it down.
This single room spanned the entire building.
The only concealment was three vertical timbers to support the roof joists, a stove and stone chimney against a wall, and a modest pile of crates that would have barely hidden a child.
Scattered trash and two open, shallow crates of rotting fish completed the picture.
“Who else is here?” I said.
“Ain’t no one,” the man spat, rebellious but nervous.
Mary was dashing around the room, frantic with haste and half-tripping over the milling draca. “She is not here!”
“There is a cellar,” I said and pointed to the crates.
Mary pushed the piled crates aside. They were empty and fell easily, revealing a wooden hatch with a rusted iron handle. Before I could stop her—anything might be down there—she hauled the handle with two hands and threw the hatch aside to clatter on the floor.
The hatch left a square of shadow in the stone floor. Mary knelt at the edge, then recoiled with a grimace. Slitting her eyes and nostrils in distaste, she leaned in again. “I need light. I cannot go down in the dark.”
I grabbed a stick of kindling from a pile by the stove and took it to her.
“Light it.” The stench from the hole hit my face, vile with ammonia that made my eyes stream and my stomach flip.
I knew Mary was desperate to find her friend, and abruptly I feared the worst. “Mary, do not go down until we know more.”