Vanished (15 page)

The building must have dated from a time when anyone my height was a giant, and I could feel cobwebs from the ceiling snatching at my hair. The room was dark as the inside of Jonah’s whale. But I had no time to study it before the man leapt at me, snarling.

I didn’t want him getting those claws or teeth into my hands or face. I sidled quickly and put my left shoulder against the wall, bracing while I drew up my right leg and kicked out sideways at his chest level. My foot met the triangular delta of his pecs with a wet thump and he spat sticky ivory phlegm as his breath was jarred from his lungs. His arms flew forward and those ebony claws pierced the denim of my pants legs, nicking the flesh below as they dragged back down toward my ankle.

The—whatever he was—collapsed backward, flipping onto his back and then up again, hissing. He whirled, his hands outflung, trying to flay me as he spun closer, herding me into a corner.

It was hard to see the material obstacles in the dim room, so I dropped out of the normal and threw myself down, rolling forward through the mist and light of the Grey. The room was still there and still cluttered, but at least I could see it. And the thing pursuing me.

Grey walls are thin, but they’re solid enough for me when I’m deep in that world. I planted my foot against the nearest one as I ran toward it and took two long, driving steps up the wall, putting myself over the monster’s head. I flipped and dropped back down behind him as gravity grabbed hold, landing on my feet. The misty floor bounced and groaned as I hit it. I pulled back to normal.

The creature turned, gaping, and I punched my left elbow into one of his staring fog-lamp eyes. He fell back again, but this time he rolled onto his belly and tried to squirm away. I dove on him, pinning his wriggling, slimy body to the ground facedown. I snatched for his flailing arms and yanked them behind him, feeling one pop from the shoulder socket. He gave a gurgling scream and thrashed before going limp under me.

I didn’t trust him, so I didn’t move off, in spite of the smell that came from him. “Where is John Purcell?” I demanded, pulling on his arms a little more.

He yowled, “Don’t know!”

“Did you kill him, drive him away?”

“No! Master Purcell left me. He gone away and not come back,” the creature panted. I could see the hint of gill slits under his jaw.

“How long ago?” I asked, letting the pressure on his arms ease.

The creature sighed in relief. “I don’t know. Without the tide I can’t tell.”

“You’re a river creature, then? From the Thames?”

“Yeah. Master Purcell caught me and kept me for his slave,” he spat. “He paid a witch to give me this physog.”

I caught myself frowning at the term. “Physog?”

“Face! She made me look like one of you, damn her.”

I thought about that a moment. It had the pathetic ring of truth in anger. “What does Purcell call you?” I demanded, putting a little pressure on him through the Grey.

The thing fought against telling me, and I pushed harder on the magical compunction to answer until he made a bubbling sound and muttered, “Jakob.”

“All right, Jakob. If I let you up, will you swear not to attack me again?”

“I protect my master and what’s his.”

“I’m not looking for your master to do him harm. We have a friend in common who’s worried about him.”

Jakob wiggled, testing my hold, but I didn’t let go and he did himself pain wrenching at my grip on his arms. He gave up and flopped limp against the floor. “I swear. I won’t attack you . . . this time.”

I didn’t let on that I’d noticed the situational clause of his promise. I’d just have to stay out of this thing’s way if there was a next meeting—I had the strong impression he held grudges and didn’t like being beaten.

I let go and moved off him, getting distance between myself and the creepy aquatic creature.

He rolled onto his back as I backed up to a chair and sat to watch him. One eye was shut and swollen purple, misshaping his face even as he morphed back to the seeming of human. He cupped one hand over the injured eye and glanced at me from the good one, showing his needle teeth as they slithered back into his human mouth. Looking at him in the Grey, there was nothing human about the mutant froglike monstrosity with its shark maw and spine-clawed, webbed hands. I preferred to look at it in a more normal plane—which also held the smell a bit at bay.

He crouched on the floor with his knees drawn up and his chin resting on them. His arms circled loosely around his shins, the one a little lower than the other due to the dislocated shoulder. He glowered at me.

“Who sent you for Master Purcell?”

“An old friend whose business he tends.”

Jakob sniffed. “That’s nothing.”

“And that’s all you need to know. I need to know what’s become of Purcell and the business he was taking care of.”

The creature shrugged. “Some of them blood drinkers came in the night—late, as the river sang of the rising tide—and took him.”

“How long ago?”

“I can’t count your time—s’meaningless.”

Before I tried again, I considered: He was a creature from the tidal river. Sunrise and sunset meant little to him. But tides and moon phases would.

“How many high tides since Purcell was taken?”

He almost smiled. “Thirty-seven.”

Unless the Thames was a freak of nature, it had two high and two low tides per day. . . . So Purcell had been missing for eighteen and a half days, give or take a bit. Financial investments and power rarely fall apart from a mere fortnight’s absence, so someone had done something beyond just grabbing Edward’s British comptroller. “Blood drinkers” Jakob had called them, so vampires were responsible; and since I’d rarely heard of the sanguinary brotherhood cooperating with humans willingly, it looked increasingly like the vampires of Clerkenwell had moved against Edward personally. “At whose instigation and why?” would be the next questions to answer, but that was going to be a lot tougher without tipping Edward’s hand.

If it wasn’t tipped already. There was still the matter of someone or something following me.

“Who sent them?” I asked, knowing vampires rarely acted on their own unless they were planning a coup, and even then they tended to gather cronies and work as a pack. I hoped Jakob would be able to tell me who was behind Edward’s problem so I could get back to worrying about my own.

“I dunno! Their king or queen, the little one—or whatever they call it, I s’pose.”

“Did the vampires take anything besides Purcell?” I asked.

“Papers.” Jakob flung his good arm toward a doorway behind him. “From the table in there.”

“What sort of papers?”

He giggled. “No idea. I can’t read your scratchings.”

“So you never did any paperwork for him, didn’t carry any of those things to anyone else?”

Jakob nodded. “I’ve done, but only to fetch and carry and pay.”

“To whom recently?”

He giggled again; it sounded like bubbles in an aquarium. “Y’think I know, or could say? One small-eyed, ugly face is very like another. Only the smell of your blood tells you apart.” He leaned forward, showing his teeth again. “Can you smell living blood? Would y’know the scent of one or another of you if I told you? The blood drinkers, they smell of their meals and their death. And you, you smell of . . .” He took a deep breath through slitted nostrils. Then he pulled a face. “You smell . . . of water and gun smoke, death in steel, blood . . . and too much magic.” Jakob scooted backward. “I don’t care for your stink.”

“I could do without yours, too, frog-boy.”

He flashed his teeth but said nothing. A lot of magical bindings cease at death, but Purcell had been dead to begin with, so I wasn’t sure how the magic would hold up if Purcell was dead in a more permanent way. Would Jakob keep on thinking he had a master long after Purcell was nothing but an empty coffin and a forgotten name? I wasn’t sure.

I changed tack. “May I see the desk?”

Jakob shrugged. “Can’t do more harm.”

I took that for sufficient invitation and stood up to cross into the far room. Jakob took a desultory swipe at me as I passed and I kicked at him with equal interest.

The room must have started as a dining room. The tall narrow windows peered out at the next building with only the thinnest view of the sky above, but light still managed to find its way down the gap between the buildings and lend a wan illumination to the place. It was a clever security system for a vampire in its way, the daylight being a natural barrier to others and ensuring that the owner would always be awake when the room was habitable. Purcell had clearly not been having any dinner parties; the room was strewn with detritus, ripped paper, upended boxes and furniture, torn curtains, and general upheaval—and not all of it was recent. The table that must have served as a desk had been toppled onto one side, upsetting an old-fashioned ink bottle so it had stained the thick old Oriental rug below. A small pile of recent correspondence was neatly stacked on the one remaining intact chair—Jakob’s concession to duty—but other than that, there wasn’t much chance of finding anything useful in the heap.

I picked up the letters and shuffled through them. One was from TPM in Seattle; several others appeared to be advertising, or regular bills. I tore open the TPM letter, but it was only Edward asking after Purcell and what was going on with some import duty. There was a related note from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs requesting payment of overdue duties on the import of half a dozen Greek amphorae, and another note about rents in someplace called Bishop’s Stortford. Useless. I put the envelopes back on the chair and returned to the main room, where Jakob glowered at me but did nothing as I wandered around and took a look at the rest of the tall, shallow house.

In the basement were seventeenth-century kitchens, long abandoned, and a storage room that had been made over into Purcell’s resting place far from the sun and difficult to storm. A wrecked safe stood ajar next to an ornate copper coffin and a massive double wardrobe filled with fashionable and expensive business clothes from several eras. The upper rooms were bedrooms and a tiny Victorian bathroom with an only slightly newer toilet and a massive claw-footed tub that appeared to be Jakob’s sleeping place. A delicate French commode cabinet, wedged between the utilities, was filled with waterlogged trinkets and bits of jewelry. The attic was a wonderland of antiques and trunks filled with ancient odd and ends. My collector’s sensibilities were overwhelmed, but judging by the dust, nothing had been disturbed in ages. I took nothing and put things back into their respective places, turning away to find Jakob silently watching me with his one good fog-lamp eye.

Jakob made a face. “I don’t know an’ I don’t care.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t be upset if he were dead.”

He snorted. “I wouldn’t care were he gone forever, though would he were floating in the river where I might find him and eat his heart—if he has one.”

“Bloodthirsty little monster, aren’t you?”

He smiled and bowed his head. “Are y’done now? There’s naught else to see and naught to tell.”

“I have one question. What was the last thing you did for your master? What job? Where did it take you?”

He made a coughing noise and scrambled down the narrow staircase ahead of me. “I carried a letter to a place what smelled of old things and sanctified theft. A big white shop with pots in the window and there was a black stone creature over the door—half a woman with a lion’s head. She don’t like me.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

Jakob snorted again and led me down until we were back in the original sitting room I’d first entered. He scrambled to the door and held it open for me, stooped and inhuman now that I could better see him.

“Now go on your way. I’ve done with you.”

I took the hint and left. I held my shudders until I was out in Jerusalem Passage again where the sunlight had slipped to an obtuse angle and long shadows had moved into the corners and overhangs. I looked around—more in reaction to Jakob than anything else—and started back toward St. John’s Lane.

Traffic was much thicker and I realized I’d been in Purcell’s house long enough for rush hour to overtake me. The clerk in the newsagent’s had mentioned an Underground station nearby, and I paused near the priory gate to look at the system diagram on the back of my map book.

Farringdon. Right. I started off down St. John’s Lane, thinking I would cross at Albion Place. But somehow I didn’t find it.

The slanting light of afternoon played tricks on me in the Grey, and I turned onto a street much narrower than I’d expected. I seemed to be walking forever without finding any other large lane or roadway that crossed the street I was on. I turned south onto an even smaller lane, sure I’d become entirely turned around but would see a larger street soon if I kept going—I was still in the City of London and, as the driver had said, it was only one square mile. As I turned, the worlds quaked and the road jarred under my feet in a way I hadn’t felt in nearly two years. Thick silver fog pressed close and receded to take misty shapes.

It reminded me so much of my first encounters with the Grey after I’d died for those two fateful minutes that I was disoriented and a bolt of unaccustomed fear shot through me. I stopped and looked around, trying to get my bearings for where or when in the Grey I was, slowing the racing of my heart and telling myself this was not the first time. There wasn’t a monster waiting to snap me up in its grinding jaws or a vampire with an agenda waiting to plunge a knot of Grey into my chest and give me a “gift” I never wanted. Not this time.

The path ahead was very narrow—just about wide enough for two people to walk abreast, but no more—and the buildings loomed over the street in a drunken, tilted fashion. Some of them were brick and stone and others were faced with plaster over wood or something much rougher. The smell of horse droppings and garbage filled the air, and I could hear a chattering of distant voices coming from several directions.

I’d “slipped”—inadvertently stepped sideways through space and time to emerge someplace I had no control over because the Grey had wanted me so badly. I’d learned to control that slippage long ago, so I wondered why it was happening now. The narrow alley gave no clue.

I crept forward, noticing that my feet were just a little above the ground. I wasn’t entirely in the visible plane of time but physically in another with a higher street level while I could only see this one. I moved down the alley, which opened a little into a small courtyard for about half a block. The court was lined with narrow, ramshackle houses on one side and a stable yard on the other—which explained the odor. Twilight already held sway in this slice of the past, and I could see a candlelit window at the end of the alley with the preternatural clarity of something magical afoot. It was so blatant that I had to assume something or someone wanted me to see whatever unearthly thing had happened by its long-ago light. I sighed and shuffled across the road I couldn’t see to the tiny house on the south end of the darkened alley.

I looked in through the window and saw a young man and an older one sitting at a worktable in an old kitchen. Both the men were bearded and had dark hair that flowed from under close-fitting caps and hung over their collars. They wore robes of some kind that looked like daily clothes, not costumes or ceremonial vestments. An iron pot steamed on a hook over the fire in an open hearth. A third man slumped in a shadowy corner farther from the fire, looking either deeply asleep or dead drunk. A clutter of bottles sat on the table in front of him, so I was betting on the latter.

The oldest man put a slab of marble on the table between himself and the younger man, pushing aside a collection of bowls and bottles and what looked like surgical instruments. He stood up and fetched a ladleful of whatever was bubbling in the pot and poured it slowly onto the marble so it steamed off the cool stone.

“Quick, work it together,” he ordered the younger man. “Don’t let it run off the stone.”

The younger man plunged his hands into the steaming mess and exclaimed in pain. “Ah! It burns, Master Simeon!”

“Of course, Ezra. It’s just been boiling. It will cool swiftly, but it must be worked together first.” Simeon returned the ladle to the pot and sat back down, helping Ezra keep the runny glop on the marble, scraping, turning, poking, and squeezing it together until it had cooled into a soft, steaming lump the color of shale.

“You must have all four elements to create life: earth and water, air and fire,” the older man lectured, oblivious to the heat of the material they worked with.

“Is it not blasphemy to create life—to play at godhood?” Ezra asked, keeping his eyes on the stiffening pile of goo.

Simeon spit on the floor. “This for your blasphemy. Dabbling in magic is forbidden as it is. But this is not truly life, boy. Only a shadow that lasts a mere instant. A semblance.”

Ezra scowled as he worked, not seeming satisfied with the excuse but not arguing, either. A vulpine intelligence gleamed in his eyes.

They rolled the lump into a cylinder and Simeon turned it over to Ezra. “Pinch it into form but leave openings in the chest and head.”

Ezra, his hands reddened and blistered, formed the cylinder into a rough human shape about as big as his hand. He pushed his fingernails into the clay to create gaping wounds in the head and chest of the figure.

“This is the water and earth,” the instructor said, watching his student work. Then he handed the young man a small knife. “Breath comes last, but for now we need the fire of life. I think a bit of ear will do.”

Ezra looked startled. The older man pointed to the drunk at the end of the table. “His, you fool. Not yours.”

Nervous, Ezra crept up on the sleeping man and pinched at his right ear.

“Don’t shilly-shally! We must finish while the clay is hot! He shan’t feel a thing—he’s too gone in drink,” his instructor chided. “Just nip off the lobe and have done!”

With a swift, guilty swipe, the younger man sliced off a chunk of the sleeping man’s right earlobe. The drunk squalled like a branded calf. Then he shook himself, blinked, and dropped his head back onto his chest, unconscious again. Ezra scurried back with his prize, blood spattered on his hands and the sleeves of his robe.

His instructor pointed at the clay figure. “A drop or two in the head and the chest. Then your ring. And close it up quickly.”

“What? My ring? Why?” Ezra objected.

His master pinched him on the arm with a vicious twist. “Do as I say! Quickly, quickly!”

Ezra did as he was bidden, squeezing the little bit of earlobe over the pits in the figurine’s head and chest before wrenching the small silver ring from his pinkie and dropping it into the chest cavity. He pinched the clay closed, making the figure look as whole as possible.

“It needs a face, nincompoop,” Simeon chided. “You can’t breathe life into it if it hasn’t got a mouth or nostrils.”

Ezra shaped a rough face onto his doll, featuring an oversized nose and hollow eyes over a small slash of a mouth. The older man muttered some words and circled his finger counterclockwise over the little figure. In a moment the effigy turned brick red and a small white cloud of steam puffed from it.

“Ah, fire. Indeed. Well done,” the teacher added offhand.

Ezra beamed.

Simeon looked at the little red figure. “You’ve made the nose big enough to breathe the whole stink of London into. Well, no matter—this shan’t walk abroad for long. Now speak the words, breathe them into it.”

“The . . . Name?”

“No, dunderhead!” the older man shouted, cuffing Ezra over the ear with a sharp clap of his hand. “You’re the one who was so concerned about playing at God. You’ve far too filthy a soul to speak the Name and live. Call down a very apocalypse upon the lot of us, you would!” He pointed with the knife at something carved into the tabletop. “Those words, boy. Those. And only those! Don’t get any be-damned ideas above yourself—talent or no, you’re still only a bloody apprentice. Drink the wine there, then speak. And don’t touch the golem with your muddy hands while you do it—you’ll undo the stoking of the fire.”

Ezra scowled, but he took a swig of wine from a nearby wooden cup—which made him sputter for a moment and turn a bit blue. Then he leaned forward and whispered into the little figure’s face. His breath left his mouth as sparkling white vapor and wreathed around the inert little man of red clay before it seemed to be sucked into the figure’s mouth and nose. Ezra leaned back, his eyes huge as he stared at the thing on the table. The golem had changed color and grown hair. Now it looked like a tiny version of the drunk at the end of the table, except this one had a complete right ear.

Master Simeon circled his finger over the homunculus again, clockwise this time, murmuring more words that froze in the air as crystalline shapes before they dissolved and spiraled down into the clay figure in a stream of blue smoke.

Ezra shuddered until he doubled over and heaved up the wine in a red mess that shattered on the packed dirt floor like thin glass. Icy mist rose off the shards while they melted in the heat of the fire and the wine soaked into the ground. The wine-red mud heaved and rippled with tiny stalagmites that fell away in a moment.

“Oh,” the younger man moaned. “I don’t feel well.”

“That’s because we used the blood of a drunkard. What the one feels the other feels.” Simeon grinned like a wolf. “But as he’s an accomplished souse and you’re a blushing lily who barely tastes the seder wine, it’s not surprising you feel wretched.”

“How does it work? And when will it stop?” Ezra asked, swallowing hard.

“Your ring, boy. It is the channel. Your dear possession or your likeness joined in the clay to the blood or meat of the man knits together both your sensations in the golem. Watch.”

The hand-high man on the table sat up and looked around. Simeon waved the knife in front of its face.

“What do you see, creature?”

The drunk at the other end muttered, “Knife.”

Ezra drew a sharp breath, staring into the middle distance as if he, too, saw a knife where none could be.

The sorcerer poked the creature with the knife. “And what do you feel?”

Ezra yelped. The drunk whimpered in his sleep.

“Cold,” said the golem.

“It—he doesn’t feel pain?” Ezra stammered, rubbing his belly in the same spot where Simeon had stabbed the figurine.

“Of course not. It is not a man, only an homunculus of clay.” He rose and walked to stand over the sleeping drunk, raising his eyebrows in speculation. Then he jabbed his knife point into the man’s arm and jerked it away again.

Both the drunk and the student shouted in pain and alarm. Simeon eased the irritated souse back to the floor and sent him back to sleep with the soporific contents of another bottle. Then the sorcerer returned to the table and resumed his seat. “If I were to stab you, he would not notice—it’s not
your
blood that ties you together, but the ring,” Simeon said. “I can wield my knife against this little creature much more easily than torturing the real one—unless I wanted to. But if we removed the ring, you would feel nothing.”

Ezra narrowed his eyes and looked speculative. “Without the ring I feel nothing and the golem is but a mindless slave who knows no pain. . . . We could raise an army of these things—”

Simeon gave a harsh laugh. “All the size of your fist. And they’d last no longer than an hour or the first rain. You need a great deal more material than a mere drop or two of blood to make one as large as a man that walked a week or more.”

Ezra cut a glance at the drunk, his eyes gleaming.

“Do not think you can divide him up like a beeve at the market,” the older man snapped. “You need the man living, for the image to live. Dead men power nothing, nor do they speak. You must be content with this.”

“Surely, we can do better. . . . I can think of a way, I’m certain. . . .”