A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifty Six: That Bowler-Hatted Bastard

Elsie unfroze the gargoyle with a few, whispered words. Jack didn't catch them. He usually had a good ear for languages, but this one was raspy and low and seemed to mainly take place at the back of the speaker's throat. 

Still, it had an amazing effect on the gargoyle. There was a sound of cracking stone. A few shards of granite clattered to the ground. And then it was alive again – the same sleek, grey, hateful shape that had pursued Ellini over the rooftops, its shoulders rising and falling with laboured breaths.

The creature's nostrils flared as it tried to get the measure of the situation, and then it sank – no, it cringed – into a bow at Elsie's feet. It could only have got lower if it had raked up handfuls of earth and dug a hole for itself – and it looked as though this was something the creature was longing to do.

Jack didn't pity it in the slightest, but neither could he spare the energy to hate it like he used to. All his hate – all his everything – was fixed on the owner of the fire-mines, that bowler-hatted bastard who had previously seemed so out-of-reach. The idea that he might be seconds away from learning his name, discovering his hiding-place, fixing his hands around the man's throat, was so beguiling that he hardly dared to breathe in case the opportunity took fright and ran away.

Elsie could sense it, in her innocent way. She was nervous. But she didn't understand hatred yet. And besides, she wanted to know the master's name herself, for the same reason she wanted to know everything: because ignorance upset her.

The gargoyle spoke a few words of the guttural demon language, without raising its snout from the ground, and Elsie translated:

"He says he's not fit to breathe the same air as us."

"Tell 'im he's right," said Jack.

"Um. I'll probably just get straight to the point," she said, with an uneasy smile.

She had no taste for vindictiveness. That was Danvers again. Jack wondered if Dr Faustus had influenced her personality three hundred years ago as much as Danvers was influencing it now.

"I'll ask him who his master was," she went on.

"Are you so sure he's not their master anymore?"

Elsie gave this due consideration. "I don't think they can have a master anymore, now that I'm awake. I'm their consciousness, if that makes sense. I don't rule them, I sort of... reflect them. Do you see?"

Jack didn't, but he was too impatient to say so. He waved his hand in the direction of the gargoyle, who had been snorting patiently behind her all this time.

"Ask him."

The strange hissing passed between them again, like venting steam, punctuated with the occasional English word – in the gargoyle's case, wrapped around an unwieldy tongue that might as well have been made of stone. Jack made out 'Lord' and 'smear', which didn't make a lot of sense until Elsie turned to him with inappropriate excitement and said:

"I was expecting some kind of sorcerer – you know, to be the head of an Order of mystics that employs demons. But he's a business tycoon. He inherited the fire-mines. They made him a peer of the realm for philanthropic donations."

These words passed through Jack's mind in a haze. He scanned them for the name of the hated man and, when he found that they didn't contain it, he set them aside.

"He's not even a new-breed," Elsie continued. "Just a human with inherited interests."

"What's his name?" said Jack, with an irritable swipe of his hand, as though he was trying to wave away the extraneous information.