The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [118]
Flames were licking up around the railings on the landing. Quire shrank away from them. His hand found the hilt of the sabre and he took a firm grip of it. Blegg was still upright, still pawing at his burning scalp as if impotently trying to pat the flames out. It was difficult to be sure through the obscuring, shifting veils of smoke, but Quire thought Blegg’s face was blackening. Charring.
He moved closer, and hacked at Blegg with the sabre, desperate to put an end to this. The heat coming from the burning man was too much for him to get a great deal of force behind his blows, but they were enough to topple Blegg backwards, and he broke through the window behind him. The sudden gust of wind sucked a great roaring sheet of flame up the staircase and across Blegg’s body. He hung there for a moment, half in and half out of the window, then his legs came up and he tumbled backwards out of the house.
Quire went to Dunbar, who was battered and bruised and pale. But still breathing; not strongly or deeply, but still breathing. Quire called to him, and lifted him from the bed, but Dunbar did not stir.
The room overlooked the farmyard. Merry Andrew was sitting cross-legged by the cart, clutching his shoulder. Mowdiewarp was kneeling beside the unmoving Spune. Quire kicked out the window, and shouted, again and again, at Mowdiewarp until the sheer noise of it penetrated the man’s fug of bewildered disbelief and persuaded him to leave Spune’s side. Quire lowered Dunbar down to him. He lowered himself from the window after, and dropped the last half-dozen feet. He turned his ankle as he landed, and for a moment thought he had broken it, so sharp was the pain. But the bone held.
He hobbled around to the back of the farmhouse, coughing at the smoke that had settled into his lungs, watching great clouds of the stuff spilling out from the building.
Blegg was gone, leaving only a filthy, black, oily smear on the ground where he had fallen.
XXVII
All Hallows’ and All Saints’
All Hallows’ Eve was a night of rude celebration in Edinburgh’s Old Town. The poor and unwashed folk of the city fashioned from that fell night, when the lore of their forefathers told them that the Devil and his spirits stalked the darkness, an excuse for light and merriment and drinking.
In every tenement, no matter how squalid, how impoverished, there would somewhere be dancing and noise late into the night, as if by that commotion the evils lurking without might be held at bay. The Old Town seldom slept deeply, or for long, but on this night more than any other it shrugged off the darkness and busied itself deep into the wee small hours. The whisky shops, strewn in dense profusion along almost every street and wynd, stayed open late, lighting their windows with lamps and drawing in a constant stream of drunken customers, seeking to replenish their dwindling supplies. They brought empty bottles, and the whisky sellers filled them up from tapped barrels and sent them on their way; then, an hour or two later, the same folk would stagger in off the street, with the same bottle, empty once more, to be filled.
There were scuffles in the street, the whisky-fed frustrations and rivalries of the Old Town boiling up. It was in the nature of the place that with the release of celebration came too the release of its darker side, for the one could not be set free without the other. Small violences were done amidst the songs and the jigs; hard words said amidst the laughter. Everywhere, voices were loud, whether in argument or frenzied pleasure.
Some there were who tried to sleep amidst the tumult. They could not escape it, though, not in this layered, crowded place where folk lived as dense as bees in their hives.
Mrs. Conway, in her room in the