The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [127]
Ruthven looked down at the blade, hefted it in his hand.
“You don’t think much of my cane-sword, then, Mr. Quire? I paid a hefty price for it, long ago. Never had cause to use the thing.”
He dropped it, and it rang upon the hard floor.
“Is Blegg here?” Quire asked. “Anyone else?”
Ruthven shook his head.
“I don’t know where Mr. Blegg is. I’m rather glad to find you don’t either, mind you.”
“What’s his real name? The name of whatever it is walking around in his skin.”
“Ha. You have come a long way in your understanding, Mr. Quire, but even I cannot tell you that. He is what he is, and it has no name that I know of. A force of Nature, or of Hell, or of the human soul. I don’t know. He exists, that is all; perhaps he was always done so, wearing one form or another.”
“Weir’s amongst them.”
“Very good. Yes, Major Weir’s amongst them. Until they burned him out.”
“Come away from the stairs,” Quire said, giving the muzzle of his pistol a twitch.
Ruthven complied, but there was nothing meek in his manner. He seemed to Quire undismayed by being under the gun’s shadow.
“I want to see what’s behind this door back here,” Quire said.
“Do you?” said Ruthven with raised, almost mocking, eyebrows. “The key’s on a hook beside you.”
Quire dared a glance, and sure enough a heavy iron key hung on a rusty hook in the wall within his reach, revealed now by the light of Ruthven’s lamp.
“Open it for me,” Quire said.
“I am thinking of leaving Edinburgh, you know,” Ruthven said as he pushed the key into the lock. “Perhaps travel for a while, and put all this behind me.”
He twisted the key, seeming to struggle, as if the mechanism was stubbornly resisting him.
“Would that not suffice to rid me of you, Mr. Quire? I would dearly like to be rid of you.”
“And I you,” Quire grunted, “but no, it won’t suffice. Not for what happened to Wilson Dunbar. Not for all that you’ve done.”
“Ah, well,” sighed Ruthven, and the key turned in his hand and he pushed the door open.
He stepped back, holding the lamp up high, and extended his arm to invite Quire in.
“After you,” Quire said.
Ruthven did as he was told, and Quire followed him into the room. He had only a moment to take in the extraordinary display that greeted him. Shelves of stoppered jars and vases; a table laden with curving, bulbed glass vials with tubes extending from them like a beetle’s legs, and with bowls and tumblers and burners; another shelf holding a row of skulls. Boxes everywhere. Two huge barrels, covered over with a sheet. On a narrow bench against the wall, three tall stacks of metal discs laid one atop the other, with burnished copper rods attached to them.
All of that was glimpsed in the barest instant, for the only thing Quire truly saw was the tall man standing naked in the corner, his skin puckered and loose, his big hands entirely covered in illegible inscriptions, a horizontal slit in his chest as if a knife had been put in there. And dead eyes, falling upon Quire as the loathsome figure turned to look at him.
“Tell it to stand still,” Quire shouted.
He kept the pistol on Ruthven, though he yearned to turn it upon this naked monstrosity.
“Tell it to stand still,” he shouted again.
“Be still,” Ruthven said, and for the first time, Quire caught the quaver of nervousness in his voice.
The dead man took a step forward, lifting its long arms. Making fists of its hands, great cudgels of skin and bone and slack flesh.
“Be still,” Ruthven said more urgently, edging closer to Quire.
The naked figure rushed suddenly forwards. Quire snapped the pistol round and fired into its chest. The shot was deafening, shaking the air of that confined space. Quire’s target was so close that the pistol sprayed hot powder across the pallid skin, and he saw the black, burned hole the ball made in it. The monster staggered slightly sideways, but did not fall, and made of its imbalance a smooth, reaching movement. It seized the rim of one of those barrels with both hands and swung it up and around. It shattered one of the shelves