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with a cane. `Why don't you come with me, Robbie? I can show you just what I mean ...' The tower's spiral stairway went up and up. George paused halfway on a gantry and waited for me, absently rapping the great single bell. Dust and plaster rained down on me. The air boomed. The Advocates' Chapel's main spell, he explained, scampering ahead of me again, wasn't just bound into the foundations. It wove all the way up to the spire and through the walls and around the buttresses in aethered strips of engraved copper. Once that was unbound, the entire building would become as frail as paper. But the weight of the stones still seemed impossibly solid as I peered down from the tower's high balcony at the turning lights of the Strand. Guildhalls. Theatres. Glowing tramlines and telegraphs bound up in a vast cat's-cradle which I thought, for a dizzying moment, might catch us as we fell. `There's Anna!' he shouted. `She's outside!' She was easily recognisable in a red beret, standing beside the silver of Sadie's coat amid the angels in the graveyard. She looked up, her face a small white heart. George had roped lanterns around the spire to illuminate it. The night wind licked over us and London shimmered and yellowed as he showed me the verdigrised copperplate engravings which were bolted to each side of the four compass-facing pediments. I traced their swirls and felt a thrill of something heavy, musty. `Now just listen ...' George spoke slowly, his voice wavering up and down a long semitone. There was a gritty rumble beneath us, like a millstone turning. `Now . . .' He grabbed the crowbar he'd leaned against the parapet just as my fingers were snaking towards it. `We'd better get back down ...' To unbind the spell which sustained this ugly old building, to unlock its buttresses and foundations as a guildsman might twist open a seal, it was necessary to know the entire charm which had bound it, and which existed in its entirety, so George claimed, within the scrolled lines of the drawing he'd stolen from the libraries of his guild. But that wasn't enough. Copper strips were buried in the rubble beneath the Portland stone facing, and the strengthening chants which long dead workmen had infused into them had to be exposed. He hefted his crowbar. A winged white marble memorial unpeeled and shattered across the aisles. George's forehead was cut. His thin body was smeared and shining. `This place isn't safe!' I shouted. `Why don't you do what Anna asks and go outside?' `Ha! Anna!' The dank building gave a groan. `She's always right about everything, isn't she? And I don't suppose I have been myself lately. It must have been something I've eaten. Clams it was, I think . . .' He spat dust from his mouth. `God, I can still taste the foul things. Like salt and some sort of rotting weed.' The traffic was hooting outside. A police bell was ringing. `Maybe they were cuckoo-clams can you have such a thing? God knows we sluice enough aether and filth into the Thames.' He drew me to the apex of the church, the point beneath the centre of the tower, which tunnelled up above us now like a crystal grotto as engine ice Page 177 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html began to seep out of the stone. He swept the glittering dust away from the key-plate which bound all the other spells and lay embedded in the paving. It was circular, and the points and ornamentations were pooled with vivid enamels which rippled in the light of George's lantern. When he touched his fingers to them, the colours were already wet. He smeared them across his face and started chanting. The phrases were convoluted and ragged. Some wooden part of the tower must have caught light from the heat of one of the many lanterns, for wafts of smoke were beginning to trail around us. `You've done enough!' I yelled. George turned to me. `This is just the beginning.' He spat and coughed. `Didn't I tell you England needs a sign the very opposite of Hallam Tower?' He was empty-handed now and I grabbed his shoulders in an attempt to drag him outside, but he threw me off with an easy shrug, tossing me back across the aisles. His strength, pouring into him as the power drained from the church, was prodigious. `People have noticed you, George. They'll believe and understand isn't that what you wanted?' `Tell that to the cavalry captain!' He wiped his mouth with his paint-smeared hands. `Tell that to all the rest of the people who died and suffered on Butterfly Day. But you're right, Robbie this isn't safe. You should go out . . .' Then he raised a hand. An expression of puzzlement, bizarre in its ordinariness, crossed the paint-smeared mask of his face. `But wait just one moment. I've been meaning to ask you something. It's about Anna ...' A blistering wave of heat and plaster dust swept over us as an archway collapsed. `Fact is, I'm not sure that she's entirely who she claims to be. Those parents of hers there aren't any proper records. Odd, isn't it?' He shook his head. `You're the only person who remembers her as a child. I've been to her room in Kingsmeet oh, I know it was most unguildsmanly of me ... Nearly burnt myself on the tiny vial she keeps on the dresser. Why on earth should Anna need acid, and a pipette? And when she rescued me on Butterfly Day it wasn't really Anna at all. You do understand me, don't you? You of all people. You do realise that it's not just ' He licked the dust from his lips. ` those damn clams I ate ...' `George Robbie!' Anna emerged from the dust and flames. `There you are Anna! Just in time as always.' `Look,' she began. `Whatever happened to you, George, it wasn't ' `Can't you see?' He spread his arms. `This is what England needs.' He turned slowly. `This church. Me ...' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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