CHAPTER 69

THE ALP SPEAKS TO A DOG WITH NO BARK

The Alp had found its prey.

Jed had trailed it to the section of Haymarket known, because of the extraordinarily high density and brazenness of its prostitutes, as Hell Corner, and then trotted back with it to Golden Square, twenty paces behind, close to the wall, an unnoticed dog in a city full of strays.

The girl was gin-numbed and happy enough at the thought of the promised coins she would be going home with. She even liked the fact that the gentleman whose arm she was limpetted to appeared not to wish to speak: she favoured the shy ones because the business tended to be over quicker with them.

Hodge seemed to step out of thin air, straddling the pavement in front of them, a short man with a dog who circled in from behind and stood growling at his feet. Hodge held out a fist with a bloodstone ring on it, his eyes boring into the Alp’s.

“By the Powers, and as a Free Companion of the London Oversight, I charge you that you allow yourself to be manacled and accompany me peaceably to the Privy Cells in the Sly House to await judgement.”

The girl stared at him through a gin-fuelled haze.

The Alp’s face retained its studied blankness.

Hodge raised the ring higher.

The Alp raised one eyebrow to match it. And then it just shrugged and tried to walk forward.

Hodge stepped in front of it, ring still raised. The Alp worked its mouth, as if moistening something that was desiccated from long disuse.

And then it spoke.

“Look like man but your stench is dog. Perhaps that is what you are: little dog with no bark…”

Its voice was rusty and disdainful, its lisping high German intonation adding an extra air of supercilious amusement to it.

“What can you do to me? Here? Now? In front of all these innocent, unaware people? All these… witnesses?”

The Alp smiled, a disturbing sight, not least because it had no teeth at all, just expanses of pink gum, so that the inside of its mouth was more like that of a fish or a baby than a grown human, a toothlessness which also explained the severity of its lisp.

“Out of the road, silly little doggie, or you shall have the kick you so richly deserve.”

Hodge looked round at the crowded street, at the girl holding the Alp’s arm, her eyebrows rising into a taut curve of incomprehension.

“See,” said the Alp. “So much people. What can you do?”

“This,” Hodge said, and raised his ring to his own forehead as if wiping his brow, and pressed the seal into his skin.

“Ic adeorce,” he muttered, and then attacked without a hint of warning.

He didn’t even lose his smile. In fact it widened as he leapt across the scant yard separating them and hit the Alp full in the throat with both of his hands which closed like steel traps around it as he bulled it backwards across the road, heading for the mouth of an alley.

No one noticed. No one commented or raised their voice or pointed. No one saw them. It was not that Hodge had become invisible. It was not that kind of magic, which only exists in fairy-tales: it was the other real kind, the sort of workaday sleight which just makes coincidences happen at the right time. The simple thing which happened was that as soon as the old Anglo-Saxon words came out of Hodge’s mouth, everyone in the immediate area had their attention taken by something else. They weren’t all looking at the same other thing; they were each distracted by something different, the things which caught their eyes being as dissimilar as the eyes themselves. In fact the only thing that all these disparate momentary distractions had in common was that they were not Hodge.

The force of his attack tore the Alp from the girl’s tight grasp and left her literally spinning in the middle of the street.

Hodge attacked like a terrier, straight in, no preamble, determined to be at it and done with it as fast as possible.

There was a horse trough in the alley and he ran the Alp back until the lip of the trough caught the breath-stealer behind the knees and it went over backwards.

Hodge went with it, shoving it under water and holding it there as the Alp’s hands flailed at his face. Hodge bunched himself up and jammed a knee into its solar plexus, and was rewarded by a great bubble of air belching up from the gagging mouth below him.

“By the Powers,” Hodge gritted. “By Law and Lore, for lives taken–your life.”

The Alp stopped struggling.

After a clear minute, Hodge let go his grip on his throat and looked down at the motionless face beneath the water. As the ripples stilled he peered down at it as if somehow the memory of it would obliterate the other memories of the two dead women in their beds.

The face below him did not move. The eyes stared back at him, unblinking.

Jed growled from the side of the trough. Hodge shook his head as if to clear it, then stood, knee-deep in the water, legs either side of the Alp’s body.

“Your kind cannot die while there is a vestige of breath left in you. That I know,” he said, and stepped up onto the Alp’s chest.

There was a final stream of bubbles as he bore down on the breath-stealer, and then with a final convulsion the Alp truly began to expire, its hair going grey and lines appearing on its face as age claimed its true portion before death took it for ever. It aged twenty years in a moment.

Hodge stepped out of the trough and looked into the street. Without surprise he saw The Smith saying something to the girl who sneezed and then just walked away, face blank with forgetting. The Smith walked into the alley, clapped a hand on Hodge’s shoulder and looked down into the trough.

“He’s gone,” he said. “And so that’s that.”

“I’d thought he would wither and betray his great age once dead,” said Hodge, sounding strangely hollow even to his own ears.

“He was a young ’un. That’s all,” said The Smith, taking a second look. “And you killed him, just as you said you would.”

“He was a killer. And Law and Lore…” began Hodge.

“Killing him was right enough by Lore and Law,” agreed The Smith, cutting him off. “Just might not have been the other thing you don’t like.”

Hodge met his eye.

“Sensible, you mean?”

The Smith shrugged and put an arm round his shoulder, leading him back out into the light.

“Well. It would have been nice to know how he got here, or what he was doing, since the Raven says there’s a connection with the house on Chandos Place…”

They walked east for a while, through crowded streets that Hodge wasn’t really seeing. Jed trotted beside him, looking up every now and then to check up on his friend.

“Better now?” said The Smith as they passed the City of York tavern. He jerked his head at the ancient door. “Better enough for a restorative ale? To celebrate?”

Hodge shook his head.

“Doesn’t feel like a victory,” he said.

“Death never does, old friend,” said The Smith. “Death is no one’s victory but its own.”