“I don’t breach client confidentiality without a damned good reason.”
“Don’t play games with me, girl.”
“I think a game is exactly what you want. You keep alluding to my father and to answers, but you’re not giving any. What game are you up to? You show up from nowhere and you know too much. Then you vanish and suddenly there are demi-vamps on my tail.”
“’Twasn’t my work as done that.”
“Really? How did you know where to find me today? Or yesterday?”
“I told you—I had a premonition. That’s one of my particular talents. Yours seems to be giving offense.”
“And here I thought it was attracting pains in the ass like you.”
Marsden’s pale, eyeless face was smooth and cool as the stones we stood on. For once I couldn’t see someone grinding ideas and lies into a response, but he was thinking. After a moment, he spoke again, chuckling a bit.
“He’s lost his control.”
“Excuse me?”
“Edward. He sent you to Purcell. But Purcell’s not there. The empire is failing—he’s been pulling strings in London for a dog’s age, but they’ve been cut, haven’t they? Edward’s panicking. He hasn’t any more idea what’s going on than you do.”
“And you do?”
“In no wise.”
“Then how do you propose to help me?”
He laughed. “I’m not here to help you, girl. I’m here to stop you.”
CHAPTER 31
“Stop me from doing what? How can you possibly stop me when you don’t even know what I’m doing?” I spoke boldly enough, but I didn’t know the answer, either, and I was afraid of him. I pushed myself back two silent steps. Whatever else Marsden was, he was a Greywalker and one with more experience than I had. It would only take a step out of our charmed circle by the tomb to be back in the churning power of the Grey. I wanted a head start.
“I don’t give a tinker’s damn what you’re up to for Kammerling. It’s what you may become that cannot be allowed. That is what I must put a stop to.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He cocked his head and adjusted his stance a little to face the sound of my voice. It hit me that in this Grey-free pocket, he was truly blind; he couldn’t see me at all so long as I stuck close to the Soanes’ tomb.
“You’re meant to take up where your dad wouldn’t go,” Marsden whispered. “He didn’t hop the stick because he could see ghosts, and he wasn’t mad, neither. He tried to put a stop to the Pharaohn’s plans by destroying the tooclass="underline" himself. He didn’t know about me before him or that you’d be next in line.”
“Next in line for what? You make it sound like this runs in the family.” I wasn’t sure it didn’t, but I hoped that wasn’t true.
“Not exactly, but the possibility was strong in your case, and what your dad did made it stronger. It only needed a bit of pushing in the right direction and you’d be perfect for the job. And he’s pushed you ever since your dad blew his own head off. You’re knees deep in death, tangled up in the Grey since you was a child. He just needed you to die a little. Then he could shape you a bit while you were out of this armor of flesh.” He whipped out the cane and struck me on the shoulder. “Ah, there you are.”
“Ow! Who? Shape me into what? A Greywalker? I think it’s too late to put a stop to that.” I stopped talking and eased aside, keeping on my toes to make less noise on the stonework and get a little closer to the steps.
“The Pharaohn-ankh-astet. The king of worms. He has a plan. Has had since he and Edward first faced off here. two, three hundred years ago or more. I can’t tell you what it is—I don’t know—but whatever it is, you can be assured it is terrible. And he needs a Greywalker. A particular type. And as he couldn’t find one, he thought he’d make one.”
“Make one?” That rang an uncomfortable bell for me. I paused and stepped back to where I’d stood a moment earlier. “Sekhmet said something about the asetem-ankh-astet. Who’s this Pharaohn?” I hoped it wasn’t who I thought.
Surprise reshaped his face. “You’ve talked to the Lady of Dread?”
“You didn’t know that? I thought you knew everything I did and everywhere I went.”
“I have the curse of premonition, but it’s not a bloody crystal ball, my girl,” he spat. “When and where did you converse with her?”
“Today. In front of Sotheby’s. She told me Will was missing, that the asetem were involved. That’s why I went to see Michael, which was where the Red Guard picked us up after I chopped up the golem standing in for Will.”
He stopped and tapped his chin with the handle of his cane, thinking. “She let you live. And the asetem. No, that can’t be right. It can’t. That’s how the trouble started.” He flicked the cane back up and jabbed me in the chest, shoving me back over the low parapet surrounding the sunken tomb.
I rolled aside on the grass, kicking the cane out of his hands. Then I tucked up my knees and flipped myself to my feet. Marsden was more spry than I’d have thought and hopped up onto the wall after me, his hands scrabbling like spiders for the missing cane.
“Damn you. I’m sorry to do this, but I have to.” He pounced in my direction and I danced farther back, but I moved too far, and the roaring song of London and the gasping mutters of the churchyard’s ghosts deafened me for an instant. Marsden could see me like I was spotlit and rushed forward, shoving me hard against and then through the fence in a flash of cold and a tearing of temporaclines across my back. He propelled me backward, toward the large old tree he’d pointed at earlier.
Several hundred tombstones had been arranged around Hardy’s tree in a spreading sunburst; rank after rank of grave markers, their memento mori animated into chattering skulls with gleaming golden eye sockets by the tangled and knotted threads of a thousand displaced ghosts. The shrieking of them rose in pitch as Marsden pushed me back. I whipped a look over my shoulder. Where the tree stood in the normal, the Grey showed only a howling void—a hole where the energy around it had twisted up into a vortex. The hole was more than big enough to swallow me and the sound it made was like the baying of starving hounds.
Primal fear ripped through me at the sound. I did not want to be forced into that hungry void. I knew with bone-certainty that what went in never came out. I dug my feet into the grass and ducked, toppling Marsden over my back.
Something rustled and groaned, tipping out of a crypt with the cry of stone crumbling against stone. I glanced around and saw a pair of something tall and skeletal rushing toward me from the direction of the tiny stone building of St. Pancras Old Church.
Marsden pushed me again toward the sucking void of the old tree. “Bloody hell, they’re on to us. Got to. get rid. of. you.”
The white things, looking like undead famine survivors as they finally closed the gap between us, grabbed at Marsden and me. Marsden spun around, smashing his fists into the thing that had grabbed him.
“Gi’roff, y’soulless bastard!” he yelled.
The thing’s ribs collapsed where he struck it, but it kept on struggling, trying to throw him into the vortex. The other clutched me, keeping me away from the void.
I didn’t want its help, sure that whatever it was saving me for was worse than Marsden. I struggled with it, kicking it with the heels of my boots. I felt the brittle bones beneath its stretched white skin shatter and it fell against me, not letting go its grip on my arms.
I spun and stopped short and hard, the creature slingshotting off one arm to flail wildly at me, trying to reassert its hold. I ran toward the vortex, bashing at its remaining fingers until it lost its grip and fell away. I kicked it and it tumbled into the whirling hole in the Grey, vanishing with its empty mouth agape as if it would scream if it only could. The vacuum of magic tugged at me and I fought my arm free, feeling the edges of the thing bend and flex like rubber as they clung to me. I struggled and twisted my hand loose, feeling a tiny bit of the emptiness break away and spin off into another sucking black hole the size of a pinhead. But the original hole was no smaller. Instead it had grown ragged around the edges and seemed to be reaching for more substance to swallow. I had to crawl across the tombstones, digging in with my fingers and toes against the magical tide, to get out of its pull.