The Merchant of Dreams (49 page)

“Just like old times,” he said with a grin.

Mal vaulted onto the coping, sitting astride the wall, and Ned handed him up a lightwater lantern. What had once been an elegant paved courtyard surrounded by evergreen shrubs was now waist deep in weeds, its topiary outgrown and curtained in tangles of wild rose and woodbine. He scanned the shadows for movement. Nothing, not even a pigeon or rat disturbed by the light. He transferred the lantern to his left hand, swung his other leg over the wall and jumped down. Still nothing. He drew his rapier, slow and silent, then glanced back through the gate. Charles stood frozen, his face pale as the stucco’d wall.

“Art craven, brother?” Mal said quietly.

Charles pulled a face. “Don’t teach thy grandame to suck eggs. I were hunting these creatures before you were breeched.”

“Then come on over. And be quick about it.”

Two hands appeared on the stone coping, then Charles hauled himself over the wall to land with a crunch on a frost-shattered flowerpot.

“Jesu–!”

“Quiet!” Mal glared at him. “Or would you fight them all at once?”

His brother gave him a sour look and drew his own sword. “After you.”

Mal picked his way through the weeds and toppled statuary towards the palazzo entrance.

“Door’s shut,” Charles whispered. “Perhaps they climbed up the vine and went in through a window.”

Mal followed his gaze.

“I don’t think so. Take another look at the door. No–” he barred Charles’ way with an arm. “Don’t go any closer. Just look.”

“It’s slightly askew,” his brother said. “And there are scrapes along one edge.”

“Torn off its hinges by clawed hands,” Mal said, “and put clumsily back in place to keep out the light. It’ll be a bastard to open quietly.”

“It’s the only way in. Unless you fancy climbing that vine?”

“I think the time for stealth is over. Let’s announce ourselves, shall we?”

He strode up to the door of the palazzo, planted one foot against it and pushed. The great bronze slab teetered for a moment then fell edgeways onto the marble floor with a deafening crunch. He tensed, blade at the ready, half-expecting the creatures to charge them, but no sound came from the palazzo except the dying echoes of the door’s fall.

“They won’t approach the light unless cornered,” Charles said in a low voice. “Be careful.”

Mal clambered over the fallen door, lantern held high. The swaying light reflected off polished marble surfaces, trailing dark shadows in its wake. Directly ahead an arched doorway gave access to the
piano terreno
, shrouded in darkness. To their left a flight of marble steps led up to the
piano nobile
, its treads half hidden by a thick layer of plaster debris and dead leaves. No tracks disturbed the carpet of decay. So, the devourers were down here. Mere feet away, perhaps. He took a deep breath and advanced through the archway.

The unearthly skrayling light gleamed on pale marble pillars veined with dark reddish brown like dried blood. Broken crates and barrels littered the store-room floor, but enough remained intact to hide a score of devourers. Mal held up his lantern, keeping it well out of his eye line. A dark smear of blood and fur halfway up a pillar suggested he wouldn’t have to worry about rats.

“There!” Charles leant around him, pointing with his blade.

“Where? I saw nothing.”

“A movement, I swear.”

“It was probably just your lantern. Hold it by the neck, like this. It won’t burn.”

He advanced into the storeroom, yard by yard, the scraping of grit under the soles of his boots barely audible over the gentle lap of the canal outside. He drew in an unsteady breath and forced himself to loosen his grip on the rapier’s hilt. Sweat trickled down his back and yet he felt cold as death, as if the damp air were leaching the life from his bones. Every movement became an effort, like wading through honey…

“Look sharp, lad!” His brother’s voice cut through the fog in his head.

Mal tried to shake off his lethargy. They were here all right, their nightmare miasma bending nature to its will, making everything seem unreal. All the shadows in the room were moving now, and not just because of their lanterns. He tried to count the moving shapes but his eyes slid off them as if not wanting to see. Six? Eight? A dozen? It didn’t really matter, as long as they didn’t leave here alive.

“Hold the doorway,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll try to flush them out of hiding.”

He flung his left arm in a wide arc, sending glowing droplets of lightwater splashing across the wall. A devourer shrieked as if scalded and ran past Mal in a sooty blur. He heard Charles scream, though whether in pain or fury, he couldn’t tell.

“Come on, then,” Mal growled at the shadows, holding up the lantern, “who wants some?”

It was an empty threat; he could not spare much more and have enough light left for his own protection. He circled round the broken wreck of a gondola and lunged towards the darkness pooling inside its black-painted cabin. A shriek split the air as the point of the rapier penetrated something brittle, like a dried-up corpse. Maggots flowed out of the gondola cabin in a pale stream, spilling around his feet. Cursing, Mal stamped on a few before backing off. They squelched underfoot and disappeared.

“One down, methinks!” he called back to Charles.

“Two!” Charles replied. “But another got past me.”

Coby crouched at the foot of the bridge steps, staring at the palazzo. She heard shouting from inside, and her stomach flipped over. It took all her self-control not to climb over the wall and join the fray, but she knew Mal was relying on her to hold the line. She glanced briefly towards Ned and Gabriel, who crouched shoulder to shoulder on the other side of the steps. Neither of them was a fighter, any more than she was. What use were any of them against demons as strong and deadly as lions?

A moment later a dark shape bounded across the garden and leapt up onto the wall. It hesitated for a moment in the glare of the lanterns. Coby raised her pistol and pulled the trigger.

For a horrible moment she thought the creature would move before the gunpowder caught, but then the pistol kicked in her hands and the devourer flew backwards off the wall as if punched. Coby blinked through the smoke, her ears ringing. Was it dead?

She laid the first pistol at her feet then drew the second. Not a moment too soon. The devourer reappeared on top of the wall. She cocked the pistol and fired. A thump and rattle of claws as the creature hit the cobbles – then it sprang up and bounded across the square, its neck snaking as it sought her out. She forced herself to stare at the ground.
It won’t attack unless you look at it
. She didn’t know how she knew this, but it felt right and true. Sweat prickled in her armpits and her heart beat so hard she thought it would burst from her ribs. Slowly she put the pistol on the ground next to its mate and reached for her dagger.

A flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, almost too fast to see. Unable to help herself she looked up. The devourer swiped at her with claws the size of meathooks. She rolled sideways, crying out with pain as a lock of hair was torn from her scalp, but came up in a fighting crouch, dagger in hand. The devourer gathered itself for a pounce. Too late. Ned ran up behind it and hacked at its neck with his sword. The heavy blade caught in the creature’s flesh and the two figures struggled for a moment.

Ned tore his blade free and struck again, severing the devourer’s head this time. Dark blood splashed across the cobbles and disappeared with a hiss like water on hot iron. The creature collapsed in a heap only inches from Coby and began to dissolve. She scuttled backwards up the steps as the pool of black fluid spread towards her, but it seeped away through the stones and was gone. Ned helped her to her feet.

“Thank you!” she gasped.

Ned inclined his head in acknowledgement and retreated up the steps to command the high ground. Coby went back to pick up her pistols, shaking her head in despair. If bullets were so little use against the devourers, what was she to defend herself with next time?

Mal spitted another devourer on his rapier and withdrew the blade as the creature collapsed into a tarry heap on the floor. He was breathing heavily now, and the sword felt like lead in his hand – no, that was just the illusion the devourers were trying to force upon him. He closed his eyes for a moment and brought to mind the hollow in the hills, the way Olivia had taught him, but the image would not come. Had the devourers destroyed it when they had come through? He opened his eyes again. If magic would not avail him, he must force his flesh to obey his own will and not theirs.

There was no time to put his earring back in. Blood and iron, that would break the spell just as easily. Gritting his teeth he swiped his left little finger down the rapier’s blade, feeling metal grate on bone. The pain brought him wide awake. With an incoherent shout of fury he charged the thickest knot of shadows and the devourers fled from the cold light and colder steel. One, trapped between a crate and the far wall, folded in on itself until it was no bigger than a cat. Mal advanced on it, grinning, but as he prepared to lunge the creature flew up, claws slashing at his face. Mal raised the lantern, splashing them both with the glowing fluid, but the devourer was already gone. Blood streamed down into his left eye where one of its claws had opened a gash from eyebrow to scalp. Cursing, Mal wiped the blood away and turned to pursue his attacker.

A cry rent the air. Charles had dropped his sword and was now grappling with something that looked like an emaciated horse with the spiny carapace and eyestalks of a crab. Mal sprinted across the storeroom – too late. The creature’s jaws snapped around Charles’ throat and blood fountained over them both.

“No!”

Mal slid his rapier under the carapace, twisting the blade as he went. The creature squealed like a boiling lobster and released its prey, then dissolved into acrid smoke. Coughing, Mal knelt and tried to stem the blood flowing from his brother’s neck.

Charles’ eyes fluttered open, and his lips moved silently. Mal hushed him, swallowing past the lump in his own throat, but he knew it was hopeless. His hands were already slick with warm blood, and if he stayed here, another devourer might finish them both off.

“I have to go,” he said. “Sleep well, brother.”

Charles nodded and closed his eyes again. Mal wiped his bloody hands on his doublet, picked up his sword and lantern and got to his feet.

“Come on then, you craven skulking night-spawn! What are you waiting for?”

Only silence greeted him. After a moment he realised that the oppressive miasma was gone too. Four dead, but at least one had slipped past them in the chaos, probably more. He backed around towards the archway leading to the staircase. A clear trail now led through the debris, revealing cracked and worn treads, but the stairs looked sound enough. Well, there was only one way to find out. With a prayer to Saint Michael he made his way cautiously up to the
piano nobile
.

Ned stood at the top of the bridge steps, watching for Mal to come out of the palazzo. He had to come out. They hadn’t come all this way to die at the hands of some foreign witch’s hell-spawn. He edged a little closer to Gabriel, wishing his lover had stayed behind at the embassy and yet glad he had not.

A scream, faint but all too human. Hendricks leapt to her feet and ran across the square to the palazzo gate.

“Come back, you stupid wench!” Ned shouted after her.

“Let her be,” Gabriel said softly. “Would you hold back if it was me in there?”

“No, but – Christ’s balls!”

Another devourer leapt over the wall, landing light as a cat halfway across the square. A second followed, and they flowed around one another in an eye-deceiving blur of smoky black, snaking across the open space towards the bridge.

Ned advanced down the steps, hefting his sword. “Come on then. Which of you’s first, eh?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Ned! Get back up here!”

Ned descended the last step into the square. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gabriel leap down to stand beside him.

“What are you doing? Get behind me.”

Instead Gabriel stepped forward, his cudgel held to one side as if about to discard it.

“Leave him alone,” Gabriel said softly. “It’s me you want.”

“No!”

He dashed forward, putting himself between Gabriel and the devourers. The dark shapes swerved in opposite directions, curving round to try and slip past them and over the bridge. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his lover, Ned braced himself to stop the nearest one. The creature dodged his blade, claws scrabbling for purchase on the canal bank.

“Can’t swim, eh?” Ned kicked it in the side of the jaw and followed up his attack with a roundhouse swing of the sword. More by luck than skill he severed a leg and it toppled into the water, squawking.

He turned to see if Gabriel need help with his own attacker, and something hit him square in the chest. A devourer. Ned fell backwards, winded. Teeth like daggers of ice closed around his right wrist and he dropped the sword with a scream.

“Ned!”

Gabriel’s iron-shod cudgel smashed into the creature’s eyeball, through its skull and out the other side. The cruel teeth withdrew as the devourer faded into nothingness, but Ned’s arm still burned as if branded. Gabriel’s pale face loomed over him.

“Ned? Ned? Don’t die on me…”

Then he was falling into blissful oblivion, far from all pain.

Coby huddled against the palazzo wall, trying not to puke at the memory of that… thing crunching Ned’s wrist like a dog with a new bone. She had failed to stop the demons and now her friends were suffering. Lead bullets were useless – but what about iron ones? She put down her guns and reached behind her neck, managing to unfasten the necklace on the third attempt. If lodestone protected against evil spirits, perhaps it would also kill them.

She swabbed out the still-warm barrel of each pistol and gingerly poured in a measure of black powder, then cut the waxed thread of the necklace and slid off two of the beads. The dark metal spheres were a bit smaller than her usual shot, but they had to be better than nothing. She shoved the rest of the necklace into her pocket and finished loading and priming the pistols. The next devourer to emerge from the palazzo would not be so lucky as the last.