The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(78)

At the same moment I pulled the piece of bone out from the crevice and rolled it up in the cool, loose folds of the silver net. Across the room, the giant floating shape crumpled in on itself like a punctured balloon. My ears popped; the Limbless was gone.

Roars of fury sounded in the garden. Someone somewhere fired a gun; I felt an impact on the wall behind me. I left the swaddled Source lying, got to my feet unsteadily. Hands grasped me; Lockwood was pulling me back across the room. ‘No good waiting,’ he said, ‘the door’s bust, Luce. They’re in. Quill’s gone upstairs to help Holly. You come with me.’

We ran through another arch into the rapier room. The air was filled with smoke, with flecks of dwindling ghost-fog, with sparks of burning magnesium. The still shapes of Esmeralda and Floating Joe hung on their chains. A thin wire extended from Esmeralda’s left leg and trailed away behind a pile of salt sacks in the furthest corner.

Lockwood grasped the wire. He pulled me down behind the sacks.

We waited.

Noises beyond the arch. A man with a long knife stole into sight. Despite his bulk, he moved silently through the swirling smoke. He glanced up the iron stairs, then looked into the rapier room. This made him stop abruptly. He had seen the dummies’ misshapen forms hanging on their chains in the soft darkness. They must have been an unnerving sight. A torch beam flashed briefly; it picked out their straw hands, their painted faces. Just dummies … The man returned his torch to his belt and inched into the room, knife at the ready. Softly, softly, he padded across the space, making for the doorway to the storeroom, which was near the pile of sacks where we were hiding. As he reached the middle of the room, Lockwood yanked on the wire, causing Esmeralda to swing abruptly towards him like a floating ghost. With a stifled curse the man reacted; his knife stabbed straight into the centre of her stuffed straw stomach, where it burst one of the magnesium flares we had hidden there. Searing white flames erupted from the dummy’s torso in a spreading ring, ripping her apart, engulfing the man next to her. He toppled to the floor in a cloud of burning straw, then rose again, screaming, his hair awash with pale magnesium fire. Frantically beating at his head, he turned, collided briefly with the wall, then careered away towards the office.

We got up from behind the sacks. In the midst of the swirling silver-grey smoke, the dummy’s head hung swinging from the chain. Her body was gone.

‘Good old Esmeralda,’ Lockwood said. ‘Fell in action. We should get upstairs.’

Up the iron staircase, round and round. A bullet cracked against the metal tread beneath my feet, sending out a brief, bright spark. We burst into the kitchen. Holly and Kipps were standing side by side across the fragments of the fallen garden door. Two men in black clothes were attempting to get in. They had bludgeons, which they were swiping frantically left and right. Kipps and Holly swung their rapiers in furious, complex arcs, driving the men back, slicing gouges in the bludgeons, holding the line.

A familiar face appeared in the dark behind the men. I caught a flash of pink cheeks, of blue and bulging eyes. ‘Out of the way, you idiots,’ Sir Rupert Gale said. ‘I’ll deal with them.’

At once Lockwood was there beside Kipps and Holly. ‘Fall back,’ he shouted. ‘Get upstairs.’ Footsteps sounded behind us on the iron staircase. I took my final flare and lobbed it at the doorway, sending Sir Rupert leaping back into the garden. Even as the explosion sounded, we were already out in the hall and swinging round to climb the stairs.

On the landing I could feel the pulsations of the gate beyond the bedroom door. George sat calmly in his chair. He had been fixing up makeshift spears, using broom and mop handles and some knives from the kitchen. He nodded at us as we piled up alongside him. ‘Sounds a bit warm down there.’

‘It is.’ One side of Lockwood’s coat was black and steaming, presumably from his fight with the Limbless. His pale face was ablaze with energy. ‘You all right, George?’ he asked. ‘Weapons ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘Carpet ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Sir Rupert Gale’s here.’

George nodded. ‘Knew he’d want to get in on the act.’

There were loud thuds; boots on stairs; shouted commands echoing in the depths of the house. Then, rising above it all, a cry of rage in the kitchen.

Holly jumped. ‘What’s that?’

George rose slowly from his chair. ‘Looks like Sir Rupert just found the little cartoon of him I drew on the kitchen table. Well, when I say little, I mean filling the entire thinking cloth. It’s amazing how perfectly that cloth accommodates a picture of a man bending over. I only just found space for my accompanying message.’

‘Which was …?’ Lockwood was readying one of the spears at the top of the stairs.

He told us.

‘Gosh,’ Holly said. ‘I’m not surprised he’s a bit cross.’

‘What’s particularly good,’ George said, ‘is that Winkman’s men will have seen it too. That,’ he added, ‘is what is known as psychological warfare. It’ll destabilize Sir Rupert, make him mad and reckless.’

‘That’s good, is it?’

A red face materialized at the bottom of the staircase. Lockwood hurled the spear; the face jerked back at the last instant and the point embedded itself in the floor.