The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [129]
The dead man shuddered, and swayed, and stumbled to one side. Quire whipped the sword back out of its flesh. He might have hit the heart, he thought; he was not sure. Ruthven was whimpering, or moaning; blood bubbled at his lips.
Quire heard the wooden railings along the landing groan as the huge figure fell against them. Its torso bent back for a moment, over the balustrade. Quire darted in again and stabbed the long blade upwards, into the exposed chin. It went up through the jaw and mouth and lodged somewhere in the bone of the skull. The creature spasmed, and it arched over the handrail into the deep space of the stairwell. The handrail cracked and split, the balusters splayed apart, and the creature fell backwards, pulling the sword from Quire’s hand and taking it down, jutting from its chin. Quire had one last glimpse of Ruthven’s rolling, anguished eyes, and then the man was snatched away and went plunging after his creation, his arm still locked in its iron grip.
By the time Quire reached the foot of the stairs, flames were already licking around the bodies. The hall carpet was alight, and the wallpaper on the walls nearest the cellar stairs was burning, coming away in black cindery sheets that swirled about and rose to be consumed in the roiling fire spreading itself across the ceiling.
The heat was too ferocious for Quire to get near the two twisted corpses, but he was not minded to do so anyway. Neither looked likely to rise again.
He ran to the front door and hauled it open, and rushed out into Melville Street, and away into the quiet Edinburgh night.
Nobody Sees William Hare
Mathieu Durand looked to Quire to be on the very brink of death. Both the Frenchman himself and Agnes McLaine insisted otherwise. Durand’s version was that he was indeed fatally ill, but that his final decline was further off than he had expected; Agnes’ was that Durand was a morose, fatalistic fool whose mortal dread of Blegg was doing as much to drag him down as any magics that might have been laid upon him, and if he could but shake himself free of it, he might well recover. Despite their differences, they seemed to Quire to have developed a certain rough affection—or respect, at least—for one another during their enforced cohabitation.
For all Quire knew, Durand deserved to die; perhaps that he had broken with Ruthven and Blegg did not excuse his earlier part in their transgressions. Quire chose not to judge that.
“What man would not prefer to die with the soil of his homeland under his feet?” Durand said as the three of them worked their slow way along the Leith seafront.
Quire had his hand under Durand’s arm to give him some support, and Agnes had found him a dusty, battered old walking stick from somewhere that he leaned heavily on. He was much reduced, even from the comparatively delicate figure he had cut when Quire first saw him, what felt an age ago in the drawing room of Ruthven’s house.
“Do you know,” Quire said, “the first time I met you, I guessed you might be quiet because you could not speak more than a word or two of English. Couldn’t have been much more wrong about that, could I?”
There was a broad expanse of dark, muddy sand laid out before them. The tide had retreated so far that the little breakers were mere flecks of white. Almost in those waves, at the very border between land and sea, a horse went pounding along the beach in full gallop. Its rider was crouched over its neck, tiny. The great horse stretched its long legs, and its mane and tail streamed out on the wind. The sand made fountains at its heels.
Quire