late to place any credence in mortality. Nor was he thinking clearly enough to consider what he should do now that the Old Wolf was once again helpless before him. Instead, the sight of the blood leaking from the Old Wolf’s side inspired only a frantic need to get away before the hunter could begin to feed again. He turned back to the door, wrenched it open, and staggered through.
A pair of guardsmen lay unconscious or dead just outside; he didn’t stop to check their condition but stumbled past them down the corridor, until he reached the closet by which he, Longinus and Pickens had entered this floor of the guild hall in quest of the object he now possessed – or, rather, that possessed him. He ducked inside.
The candle Longinus had lit was still burning, and by its light Quare opened the hinged false front of the stacked barrels that concealed the mechanism responsible for bringing them all here. He stepped in without hesitation, and the platform, registering his weight, began to descend into darkness.
When it stopped, he fumbled about his person until he produced the vial Longinus had given him – he shook it, and in the bloom of greenish light beheld the storeroom and the still-unconscious bodies of Master Malrubius and the guardsman. He feared the hunter would add these men to its ever-growing list of victims, but it seemed sated for now – though it also seemed to Quare that he could sense the watchful presence of Magnus and whatever entity lurked behind him – not the dragon, for that was as yet unborn, but some primal consciousness, dimly awakened, out of which the dragon would emerge, shaped by the blood and will of the humans it had consumed … and not only the humans, for he sensed Magnus’s cats as well, arrogant and disdainful and savagely competent killers. Magnus would never control such a creature, Quare knew: he might at best hope to influence it. But it seemed clear that the stronger influence went in the other direction, and Magnus had already been warped far out of true.
At any rate, Magnus kept his silence for now, no doubt because Quare was doing what he would have wished him to do in any case. He was bringing the hunter out of the guild hall. He was taking the first steps that would lead him across the Channel, to fresh horrors. Quare thought with dread of those who waited there, English and French alike, soldiers and civilians, none of them suspecting the doom he was about to bring upon them. Yet what choice did he have? He could not protect them; he could not even protect himself.
There was no courage left inside him. All was madness and despair. As if to underscore his helplessness, Quare felt a pulse from the hunter prodding him on. He was not just holding the thing any more – or so, at least, it seemed to him. The hunter, the egg, was part of him now, as if his fingers had sunk into its substance and fused with it as intimately as the flesh and bone of Longinus’s leg had meshed with his artificial foot. He would have cut the hand from his arm if he could, but he knew that he would never be permitted to free himself in such a manner. Nor could he call to Tiamat; he could not even shape the dragon’s name in the privacy of his thoughts. His thoughts were no longer private.
A second, more forceful pulse sent him scrambling from the platform and out of the storeroom. He did not pause to determine if the passage outside was clear; he did not bother to try to keep quiet; he fled headlong, as if pursuing Furies were at his back. But nothing pursued him. Whatever Furies there were, he carried with him.
Thus did Quare retrace the route by which Longinus had spirited them into the guild hall. He did not encounter another person and soon found himself at the stone wall separating the lowest level of the hall from the London underground. He did not pause there, either, but scraped through, hurrying into the rough-hewn passage that led downwards, into the domain of the Morecockneyans.
19
Magic of a Most Ordinary Kind
IT WAS NOT until he’d left the passage behind and burst into the cavern beyond that Quare remembered Cornelius and Starkey. He’d left the two men bound and gagged near the entrance to the passage, but they