The Edinburgh Dead

Kites

Durand shook. Not from cold, that was certain; which left fear or fever. Quire suspected it was both.

The Frenchman had a sheen of sweat across his brow, and his eyes were red-rimmed, looking sore. Sick, then. It had come on quickly and without warning, within an hour or two of his arrival in Agnes McLaine’s house. Now, as the morning advanced, it had a firm grip of him. The fear had preceded it, and persisted still. Durand might be reconciled to his change of allegiance, but he was still quite clearly most fearful of its consequences. Neither the sickness nor his terror had yet silenced him, though.

“When I went into exile from my homeland,” he said, “I was forced to abandon most of my private collections. Too heavy, you see. Too difficult to transport. What I did bring with me to your country was only the best, the most significant.

“Clay tablets, in particular. Ancient texts. Magical texts, from Babylonia, Ur, Akkad. Mesopotamia. The oldest of old times, you understand, when Man lived in a wholly magical world?”

He looked questioningly from Quire to Agnes. Quire offered no response. He was standing by the window, holding the blanket just far enough away from the glass to give him a view out on to the narrow, crowded street. He was listening intently to what Durand said, but his eyes were mostly on the good people of Leith. He absently scratched at the cuff of the overly tight shirt he wore. Agnes had found him some clothes to replace the harlequin costume, but they did not fit him well.

Agnes, though, smiled and nodded encouragingly to the Frenchman. He sat on the bed, cocooned in her blankets, hugging them to him as if desperate for protection against the iciest of blasts.

“Tablets that were gathered together in Egypt,” Durand continued, “long before the days of Alexander, long before the rise of Rome. Two thousand years they lay buried in the dust of empire, until it was my privilege to uncover them, following in the wake of Napoleon’s armies. To become their… I do not know the word. Keeper? No, not quite. Custodian, perhaps. I took them from Egypt to France, and from France, when the time came, to England, and then here.”

“Are you following all this?” Quire asked Agnes, without looking away from the bustling scene outside the window.

“Close enough,” she said.

Her pipe had been lit for several minutes now, and had filled the room with floating strata of fine smoke, undulating slowly.

“I fell in with John Ruthven,” Durand said, suppressing a cough and pulling his blankets tighter about him. “By chance, or by fate. He was the magister. The chief of our quartet: me, Ruthven, Carlyle, Blegg.”

Quire turned aside from the window then, irresistibly summoned by those names, which between them held all the answers he so desired. Durand, Ruthven, Carlyle, Blegg. There was the skein in need of untangling.

“Carlyle made the equipment,” Durand said. “The electrical equipment. I did not entirely understand it, then or now, but there is galvanic stimulation of nerves. The heart is made to beat once more, do you see?”

Durand’s bleary eyes were weeping, though whether it was from sickness, or sorrow, or fear, Quire did not know. Agnes gestured with her pipe for Durand to continue, and he obediently did so. He was a husk of a man, much reduced in stature and will. Resigned, Quire suspected, to death. Or worse.

“Others in Italy and Germany, and my own homeland, showed it long ago: the movement of a corpse when electrical force is passed through it. Ruthven found a way to harness it, though. To make use of it. That was the greatest of his insights.

“So. Carlyle to make the equipment. Ruthven to apply it. They began with dogs, before ever I became a party to their enterprise. Ruthven had crude magics, then. He was… fumbling, you would say; fumbling in the dark. But he is a Prometheus, make no mistake. He found light, out there in that dark, and brought it forth. He learned to do things that surpass the wildest dreams of the ancients, and the most unlikely hopes of the present.”

Quire returned his attention to the street. The life of Leith continued outside, oblivious and indifferent to the madness being described in the little room. He was envious of the mundane concerns he knew ran through the men and women going up and down the narrow street: the simple desires and hungers, the vague hopes and small sadnesses. He would much rather have himself filled up with such things than with the memories and the furies and the fears that occupied him now.

“A great man,” Durand was saying, “but one who succumbed to temptation. He had to reach further, deeper. He began to work upon human corpses. He wanted to restore life. No; more than that. He wanted to restore souls. It was a noble ambition. So I thought, when I became privy to it. But he had not succeeded. His experiments… well, let us say no more than that they did not succeed. Except Blegg. Blegg is different.”

“What about Blegg?” Quire asked sharply.

“A moment, please.” Durand coughed, a loose rattle in his chest. “I will come to the matter of Blegg in a moment. I allied myself with Ruthven, and I brought my own secrets. Recipes for preservative elixirs, something for the hearts that Carlyle’s machines revived to pump around the body. Invocations and bindings, recorded on tablets older even than Egypt; transcribed on to the hands of the corpses, they bind an animating force to the flesh.”

“Not a soul, though,” Agnes said quietly, and Durand hung his head. Shivered.

“No, not a soul. Never a soul. In that, we all fell short of our ambitions. Formless, mindless things that we brought forth and incarnated in the dead. Animating force, nothing more. Fierce. Savage, without the dominating will of a mind to guide it. And never lasting. Always, the bindings failed in time; the body failed. Then it was burned, and the next was begun.”

“You dug up graves to get the bodies,” Quire said.

“Oui. Blegg did. The invention of that foul habit at least is not amongst our sins. You had body snatchers aplenty before ever the dead began to flow through Ruthven’s door.”

“Aye.”

“It became too much for Carlyle. He took to drinking, then tried to remove himself from the affair entirely. The dogs did it for him. Anyway, after your exploits at Duddingston, the grave robbing stopped. Of late they have been buying bodies, letting others do the digging—or the killing, I know not which—on their behalf. They’ve abandoned the farm, brought the apparatus to Ruthven’s house, in the cellar. Blegg pays a man called Hare, and the corpses… well, they appear in Melville Street.”

“You say Blegg is something different, though?” rasped Quire, his impatience rising like bile. “Not like these other… creatures Ruthven has made?”

“Blegg. Oui. He is something different, something very old. I think the madness that is in that house—it came with him, I think. The worst of it.

“You understand: it is not Blegg, not his mind or his spirit, that occupies his form. Whoever Blegg was, he died before I ever met him. I never knew quite how, though I always had the feeling that he was somehow the first real victim in all of this. Anyway, Ruthven, in his careless explorations, woke something else in Blegg’s corpse. Invited something in. Something that is much more than the dull animal spirits of the others.”

“Do you believe all of this?” Quire asked Agnes softly.

She had sat quite still all through Durand’s speech, save for the flex in her cheeks and lips as she drew smoke down into her chest and let it leak out again. She blinked, very slowly, very heavily, and looked up.

“Maybe,” she said.

She pointed at the morose Frenchman with the stem of her pipe.

“Look at him. Sick to the very root of him, and it’s no natural sickness, I can tell you that.”

“No,” Durand grunted. “It is Blegg, telling me to come home. Like a man calling out for his straying dog. He and Ruthven think—wrongly, as it happens, but no matter—they think there are further secrets I can yet uncover for them. If I do not heed his call, I will be dead long before I could offer testimony at any trial of your foes, Monsieur Quire. They are not careless in such matters.”

“Not that any’d give much credence to such testimony in these times, eh?” Agnes said to Quire. “Not talk of dead men rising, and spells dug up out of deserts.”

“No. There’ll be no trial, I think.”

He absently let the blanket fall back across the window.

“I have to go,” he muttered. “I have to find Dunbar. You’re sure you’re willing to watch over Durand?”

“Aye.” Agnes nodded. “They’ll not find him here, and it might be I can do something for his fever.”

“They will mean to kill you, assuredly,” Durand said in a matter-of-fact tone to Quire.

“They will try, I know. Perhaps I will kill them.”

The Frenchman grunted, and wiped a weary hand across his damp brow.

“You will not find it easy to kill what is in Blegg. Not easy at all. Still the heart, remove the binding spells from the skin of his hands. Destroy the body, utterly, to its last scrap. And even then…”

Durand shrugged, which made him cough and tremble once more. It took a moment or two for him to recover, before he could speak again.

“He is an old thing. Not like we poor mortals. It takes no more than a fever to put an end to us.” He smiled bitterly. “Should you see Mr. Blegg in your travels, perhaps you could enquire whether he has some little figure of me—made of clay or wood, most likely—about his person.

“He is a great one for making such things. Each of the dead we have raised had one of its own, as part of the binding of flesh and spirit. He hides them away somewhere up on that great hill of yours—Arthur’s Seat. It is a place of old power, evidently. One might be used just as well, I suspect, in the right hands, to separate flesh and spirit. It would need some part of me—hair, perhaps—but he might easily have obtained such a thing while I slept.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” Quire said.

“Thank you. He will not part with it, of course, but you could ask. This is not how I would choose to die. Ha. How many of us choose how we die, though?”

A flock of kites swept and swirled across the wind. Half a dozen of them, each tethered to the earth, to the hand of a child, by a long, taut string. Each straining against that tether, trying to tear itself free and escape into the sky’s embrace; go dancing off with the wind into the distance.

They floated close by Holyrood Palace, rising up from the fields just to the east of it. There was little by way of flat ground in the King’s Park, and what there was drew families. The parents brought their children, and the children brought paper kites, painted with faces and trailing sinuous tails of ribbon bows. The grass was grazed low by sheep and cattle, and for the younger children in particular it must have felt like a limitless, soft expanse, fit for running and falling and tumbling.

Quire knew, for his friend had told him often enough, that Wilson Dunbar’s was one of those families to be found here, on any Sunday suited to the flying of kites. He walked across the turf towards them with a feeling of sick dread in the pit of his stomach.

He could hear the kite strings thrumming in the wind, and the crack and snap of their long tails. If he had closed his eyes, it could have been the rigging on a fleet of little boats, stirring. The laughter of children fluttered around and through it, light and joyous. Dunbar should be here, a part of it. This, Quire thought miserably, was what he had taken the man away from.

Ellen Dunbar was standing with her back to him, watching her sons happily wrestle with the straining kites, dragging them across the breezes, shouting encouragement up to them. Quire did not know the boys well, for he had never intruded much upon the privacy of Dunbar’s familial life, but he knew how precious that life was. He envied it, though the envy had never troubled their friendship.

“Hello, Ellen,” he said as he drew near.

She half-turned to him, not wanting to lose sight of the boys. The wind that buoyed the kites above them lifted her hair.

“Adam,” she said quietly. “Where is my husband?”

“I thought perhaps he might be here.”

“And I thought he might still be with you, sleeping off drink on a floor somewhere.”

She kept her voice calm and subdued, but Quire could hear the cords of anger, of worry, tight within it. She hid it well. When the boys glanced back from their games with the sky, they saw only their mother in easy conversation with the man they knew as a friend of their father’s.

“So not here, not with you,” Ellen said. “Where is he, then? I don’t know what games the two of you were playing last night, Adam, but I’ll be needing my husband back.”

“I will find him,” Quire said, his guilt souring in his gut. “I promise you that.”

“Be sure you do. Be sure you do.”

Quire stood there, at her shoulder, watching the kites. His gaze drifted up towards the rough, rising swell of Arthur’s Seat. Jackdaws and ravens were cavorting on the boisterous air, up above the high ground, like scrappy black kites launched by the great hill itself. But not tethered, those wilder flags; riding the wind freely, ever on the border between being its master and being mastered by it. Revelling in their nature.

“Get along, please, Adam,” Ellen said. “I don’t want the boys thinking something’s wrong. I don’t want them talking to you.”

Quire approached the Holy Land cautiously, discreetly, in expectation of trouble. It had already proved itself a less anonymous hiding place than he had—perhaps foolishly—hoped. He might not have gone there at all, but for his desire to arm himself. His one remaining pistol and his French sabre resided there, under Cath’s bed.

He found nothing untoward as he turned into Leith Wynd. All was quiet, as only a Sunday could make the Old Town quiet. Those out on the streets were, most of them, in their best church attire, and though some of the shops were open and some stalls doing a sluggish trade, it was not a day for toil.

Quire would not permit himself to relax into the general mood of calm, though. He climbed the stair of the Holy Land quietly, alert to any hint of danger. There was nothing but the usual stale stink of the place, and the light breezes ebbing and flowing through the window apertures.

For all his caution, he was taken entirely unawares by what awaited him within the room he shared with Cath. Isabel Ruthven was seated on the bed.

Cath was kneeling at the fire grate, blowing to put some life into the embers there. She looked up as Quire entered, and smiled broadly at him.

“Ah, Mr. Quire,” Isabel said, before either he or Cath could speak. “I was assured you would appear here sooner or later, and I’m glad it was not too much later. There’s just starting to be a little chill on the air, don’t you think?”

She wore a short, light coat, the bell of her skirts blooming out from under it. Her hands, neatly folded in her lap, were clad in very soft, tan-coloured gloves.

“Here I am,” he said flatly. “Cath, could you leave us alone for a bit?”

Cath’s expression faltered. She caught the leaden tone in Quire’s voice.

“Leave the fire be,” he said, and she rose to her feet, and brushed her hands off on her skirt.

“I’ll see if Emma’s about,” she said, moving carefully past Quire towards the door.

She paused at his shoulder, and whispered to him.

“Did I not do right, letting her in, Adam? Only she said she knew you, and needed to see you quite urgent.”

“It’s all right,” Quire said.

He had not taken his eyes from Isabel Ruthven since entering the room, and did not do so now, as the door scraped shut behind Cath and he edged backwards to set his heel firmly against the base of it. He did not want anyone bursting in behind him.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Oh, dear. I hoped we might attempt, at least, a little civility.”

“That would depend on why you’re here, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose it might. I fear I am about to disappoint you, then. I have a message for you, Mr. Quire.”

Quire curled his lip in distaste. It had not occurred to him to count Isabel Ruthven amongst the ranks of his enemies. But little about that household had been as it seemed, so he supposed he should not be entirely surprised.

“Ruthven’s got you running foul little errands for him now, has he? Like some scullery maid?”

“Oh, don’t be so wearisome. I’d not run errands for John if my life depended upon it. He’s been no husband to me for years.”

“Blegg, then?”

“Blegg, as you so rudely put it. An entirely different proposition. Really rather intoxicating, when one develops a taste for men possessed of real power. Do you think me dreadful?”

She tossed the question out on to the air like a diaphanous handkerchief, without the slightest interest in what he truly thought. He told her anyway.

“Dreadful. Aye, that might be one word for it.”

She smiled once more, wholly unperturbed by his rasping hostility. She tugged at her delicate calfskin gloves, tightening them over her hands.

“It is rather sad, to see a man such as yourself so overmatched. So out of his depth.”

“Might want to wait a wee while yet, before coming to that opinion.”

“How exciting,” she said drily. “You really don’t understand, do you, you poor man? Still you do not grasp who you are dealing with. My husband is quite untouchable, Mr. Quire. Quite untouchable. He counts as a friend everyone whose influence can help to keep him safe. I should know, for I’ve watched every penny we once had to our name flow out through the door in the service of that very aim.”

“Best give me your message, before I run short on patience.”

“Ah. Very well. I’m told that your friend is at my husband’s farm, and if you would be so good as to bring Mathieu Durand there, an exchange of some sort will be transacted.”

“Cold Burn Farm.”

“Indeed. Do you know it?”

Quire could not tell if her placid innocence was feigned or genuine, and did not greatly care. She was no fool, and could not be unaware how crude and cruel was the business she transacted.

“In any case,” Isabel said, “you have until nightfall tomorrow, I understand, to complete the rendezvous. That’s what Durand’s people would call it, I think? I’m told he is probably gravely ill by now, and will likely expire if you delay beyond that, which would be unfortunate for all concerned. I know I would regret it, myself; I always rather liked the man, for all his somewhat feeble, miserable manner. I do hope it won’t come to that.”

Quire regarded her coldly for a moment or two, staring into her bright eyes, wondering at the poison beneath that fair exterior. Slowly, deliberately, he hawked up a gobbet of spittle into his mouth and spat at her feet.

She looked down at the unsightly, muculent smear on the floorboards, then at Quire. She arched her eyebrows, and rose from the bed.

“And what if I made a prisoner out of you?” Quire said. “Would that not put your menfolk at something of a disadvantage?”

She laughed.

“Oh, I’m not nearly so precious to either of them as Mathieu is. My husband would be inconvenienced by my disappearance only until he concocted some explanation for it that satisfied the gossips of the New Town. And as for Mr. Blegg… I am not so foolish as to think it would trouble him overmuch either.”

Quire moved aside from the door and pulled it open. Isabel Ruthven gave him a buoyant nod as she drifted past him and out on to the stair. He slammed the door behind her, hard enough to shake its feeble hinges.