Dominion Read online

  “No I bleedin’ ain’t,” he said. “Underground. I don’t like it. Very thin Veils down there. Too bleedin’ thin.”

  Well, that was worth remembering. I hadn’t known that, I have to admit. About the Veils being thinner underground or about Wormwood not liking it down there. Both of those things were well worth knowing as far as I was concerned.

  The Veils, in case you didn’t know, are the things that keep the dimensions apart. When people like us talk about Veils we mostly mean the ones between Earth and Hell, but I suppose there are others too. Either way they’re ridiculously old and vitally important, and in some places they’re starting to wear a bit thin. Places like London, and Edinburgh, and some of the other spooky old cities around the world too I don’t doubt. I wouldn’t really know, I’m not exactly what you’d call well-travelled.

  Don’t ask me what they really are or how they work because I haven’t got a bloody clue, but the general opinion of people cleverer than me is that the Veils are alive somehow. I must admit that thought sort of creeps me out, which means I try not to think about it.

  “Right,” I said. I swallowed the last of my whisky and rather reluctantly put the glass down on the table between us. “I’d better be off then. Night, Wormwood.”

  * * *

  I was there on time the next evening, despite almost falling over that sodding cat on my way out of the front door again. I could have kicked that fucking thing, I really could. I got a cab to the station and caught an overground to London Bridge then rode the Tube into Bank with five minutes to spare. I’m not a big fan of trains as it goes, but a cab all the way into central London seemed a bit extravagant at the time. Fuck knows why, looking back on it. I still hadn’t quite got the hang of living off Trixie at that point. I knew it didn’t bother her, but I have to admit it still sort of bothered me.

  The gnome was waiting for me on the platform, hunched against the tiled wall and trying to look inconspicuous. It was a wizened little thing in baggy old jeans and a stained red hoodie, the hood pulled right forward over its eyes. It had its hands stuffed deep into its pockets.

  “You must be the wizard,” it said by way of introduction. “Come on then, this way.”

  It led me down a side corridor and had a furtive look around before it fished in the pocket of its hoodie and produced a big jingling bunch of keys. It used one to open a grey metal door marked with the Transport for London logo and a stern sign that read “Strictly No Admittance. Unauthorised Persons Will Be Prosecuted”.

  The gnome held the door open for me and locked it carefully behind us again, then ushered me down a cramped corridor lit by overhead neon tubes and lined with bundles of neatly caged cables. It ended in another door marked “High Voltage: Danger of Death”. The gnome unlocked it with a different key, then we were heading down a spiral metal staircase. The gnome rifled through its keys and opened a further series of industrial doors as we went, each of them covered in increasingly hostile-looking warning signs. I wasn’t too sure what a yellow triangle with a picture of a black lightning bolt and “Danger 22kV” written under it meant, but it didn’t look very bloody welcoming, that was for damn sure.

  The gnome locked each door carefully again behind us as we went, always going down. We were well below the deepest tracks now, down in the bowels of London somewhere between the Tube and the sewers.

  “So,” the gnome said after a while, “you’re the hero who’s going to save us from the Rotman, then.”

  I stared at it.

  “You what?” I said.

  And that’s how I came to be far too far underground with the gnomes of the earth, looking for something called the Rotman.

  Chapter 5

  “Tell him about the Rotman,” Janice said.

  Alice turned her weeping blind eyes towards me and giggled.

  “Have you ever seen a travelling cat?” Alice asked me. “Wherever you are, that’s where it’s at.”

  It was just a bit of nonsense doggerel, I’m sure, but it made me think all the same. How many times had I seen that horrible one-eyed ginger tom now, and in how many places? That, now that I actually thought about it, was a bit odd. Not as bloody odd as poor rotting Alice, I grant you, but odd none the less.

  “Oh hush with that,” Janice said. “The Rotman, Alice.”

  “I can see his tusks,” Alice said, although from the look of her eyes I doubted she had seen anything for a good while. “They glisten with bile, and his eyes glow like fire.”

  She lapsed back onto her soggy blanket, breath wheezing in her throat. If that was all we were going to get out of her, it wasn’t very helpful to say the least.

  “Where did you see him?” I asked, after a moment.

  “Below,” Alice whispered. “In the deep warren. I ran away.”

  Dear God, it goes deeper than this? What a cheerful thought that wasn’t.

  “‘Course you did, Alice,” said Janice. “It’s all right. I would have run too.”

  She hadn’t run fast enough though, had she, poor little Alice? I wondered just how much exposure to the Rotman it had taken to turn her into the gangrenous horror that lay on the cot in front of us. I had a nasty suspicion it probably hadn’t been a hell of a lot. Bloody Wormwood, I’d skin him alive for getting me into this. Well, obviously I’d ask Trixie to do it for me, but you know what I mean.

  Alice lay there wheezing, her breath gradually slowing to the rhythm of sleep. Janice touched my arm with her claws and steered me back into the chamber with the carved table and benches.

  “How long has she been like that?” I asked her.

  “A couple of weeks,” Janice said. “It wasn’t so bad to start with. Mother treated her with root and rhyme, but she just kept getting worse. I don’t think she’s got very much longer.”

  I looked at Janice’s ugly, pointed little face and my heart went out to her.

  “She’s your sister, isn’t she?” I asked her.

  Janice nodded. “Yes,” she said.

  I reached out and put a hand gently on her shoulder. She stiffened for a moment, then just sort of sagged weakly against me and started to cry. She cried almost silently, trembling and giving out the occasional wet sniffle. I held her awkwardly for a few minutes until she got herself under control and pulled away.

  “We ought to go on,” she said. “You’ll want to see the matriarch, I’m sure.”

  I wasn’t all that sure I did to be perfectly honest, but I supposed it would have been rude to say so. I let Janice lead me down another tunnel, sloping downwards and curving around on itself until I was sure we must be pretty much underneath the place we had started from. The ground felt spongy underfoot, and when I turned to look behind me I could see that our footprints were gradually filling up with an oily looking liquid. Given that I was fairly sure the tunnels were cut through solid rock, just the sight of footprints wasn’t a good sign. God only knew what the wet stuff was.

  “Don’t touch the walls or anything,” Janice said, when she saw what I was looking at. “The warren is starting to get infected now.”

  She led me down another tunnel and we finally started to see some more gnomes. I’m sorry but they really do all look the same. Now I’m sure that’s wildly unfair and they would probably say the same thing about us, but at the time that doesn’t actually help. If they had all been dressed the same as Janice I’d have lost her in a heartbeat, but luckily it seemed she had dressed up specially to venture out into the Tube station. The others wore a motley collection of, I suspected, whatever they had found discarded in the Tube, or nothing at all apart from footwear. There was a pair of jeans here, a jacket or a sweater there, but even the naked ones were all wearing shoes or boots or trainers of some sort. That didn’t do much for my confidence in the state of the ground underfoot. Their clothes were obviously for protection not for warmth or reasons of modesty.

  “We don’t wear clothes normally,” Janice said, as if she’d read my thoughts. “But that stuff that oozes out of the r
ock burns if you get it on your skin for too long.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  I tried to remember what the soles of my shoes were made of, and couldn’t. I hoped it was something fairly robust. The last thing I wanted was burned feet – I had to climb all the way back up out of here at some point, after all.

  Janice led me through an opening and into a big, low chamber, and there she was.

  “Don, this is the matriarch,” she said.

  “Um,” I said. “Evening.”

  This chamber was a lot more impressive than the rest of the warren had been so far, that was for sure. The light was brighter in here for one thing, enough for me to see that the walls were covered in carvings. Some were bas reliefs showing gnomes at work, tunnelling and carving and… well, I’m not too sure what they were doing in some of them. Gnome things, I supposed. I dare say I wouldn’t have understood even if someone had explained it to me, which they didn’t. The rest were intricate three-dimensional geometric designs of the sort that made me think of advanced mathematics. I knew damn well I wouldn’t understand those.

  At the far end of the room, under a large carved pattern of interlocking cubes, was a raised dais. On top of it, all one part with it as far as I could see in fact, stood a throne. There was a gnome sitting up there. She stood up and I looked at her tiny little bald ratty face, extra wizened even by gnome standards and creased with deep lines around her big eyes. She was wearing a shiny purple raincoat of the sort that had been fashionable with a certain kind of faux-bohemian Notting Hill housewife a few years ago, the fabric hanging from her in folds that made it look like a robe. There were a few other gnomes milling about in the room, watching us.

  “This is the hero?” the matriarch asked.

  “Well,” said Janice, awkwardly, “sort of. I mean, I think so, Highness.”

  “Look, I think there might have been some sort of misunderstanding,” I said. “I don’t know who you think I am exactly but–”

  “We made a pact with an archdemon, long ago,” the matriarch of the gnomes cut in. “The lord Wormwood came to us for the Words of Unbinding, and we gave them to him. In return, when the rhyme of prophecy turned and our hour of need came upon us, he promised to send us the hero who would deliver us. That hour has come, and so must come the hero.”

  “That’s all well and good,” I said, picturing Wormwood roasting over a slow fire, “but I think–”

  “That would be you,” she interrupted me again. “You will stop the one my children call the Rotman.”

  I frowned at that. This creature obviously knew things, just as Wormwood had said. I wasn’t quite sure what Words of Unbinding were, but I’d have bet good money they were something to do with how Wormwood had escaped from whoever had summoned him in the first place, and how he had managed to remain on Earth ever since. This was more than a small favour he owed the gnomes, the lying little git.

  Still, like I said, she obviously knew a few things.

  “That’s what the girls call it, yeah,” I said. “I’d be more interested to hear what you call it, Highness.”

  “I call it what it is,” she said. “I call it by its name. I call it Bianakith.”

  * * *

  “Bianakith?” echoed the Burned Man. “Oh fuck me, that’s not good.”

  “No it bloody isn’t,” I said, turning the book around in my hands to hold the page where the Burned Man could see it. “Look, it’s right here in the Testament of Solomon. Blah blah ‘demon of decomposition and disease; he layeth waste to houses and causeth flesh to decay and all that which is similar.’ Oh fucking joy. Oh yeah, and this bit here – ‘doth torment his victims by making their bodies waste away and their flesh unto rot, even though they be still living.’ Poor little Alice, old Solomon wasn’t kidding about that part.”

  “Who the fuck is Alice?”

  “A gnome I met,” I said. “What was left of her, anyway. She saw the Rotman, this Bianakith, and apparently it saw her too. Just for a moment and not up close and she legged it sharpish, and she still looks unto a fucking month-old corpse.”

  “Shame,” said the Burned Man in a tone that meant it couldn’t care less. “Anyway, do you really think I don’t know this shit? You’ve got an old bloody book, whoopee for you. I know this cunt, Drake. Me and Bianakith are from the same fucking neighbourhood, you know what I mean?”

  Shit, I supposed they were at that.

  “So fill me in,” I said.

  The Burned Man shrugged. “To be fair your book’s pretty much got the gist of it,” it admitted. “Bianakith is plague walking. It’s the Wasteland on legs, you understand me? Anything this fucker comes near will die horribly, or corrode or rot or fall apart. Your little Alice never stood a fucking chance. I mean, it’s thick as shit and twice as ugly, but you don’t want to get anywhere near it, get it?”

  “Jesus,” I muttered.

  What a lovely fucking thought that wasn’t.

  “Still, it’s not really our problem, is it?” the Burned Man said. “Just tell Wormwood to go fuck himself or you’ll set Blondie on him. Job done.”

  I sighed and put the book down. Sometimes I let myself forget exactly what the Burned Man was but it was usually quick enough to remind me, one way or another.

  “It’s not really that simple,” I said.

  “Sounds it to me,” it said.

  It wasn’t though. I hadn’t stayed any longer with the matriarch of the gnomes than I’d had to, and shortly after my audience was over I had let Janice guide me back to the surface. It was the early hours of the morning by then and all the Tube stations were shut, so we ended up finally poking our heads above ground out of a manhole cover near St Paul’s. Finding a cab to take me home had been fun and games, what with how I smelled by then, and it was getting light by the time I got in and started rooting through my books. One thing I had noticed on our long, smelly climb back up to civilisation was just how far and how badly the rot was spreading.

  “You haven’t been listening,” I told the Burned Man. “It’s rotting down there, you understand me? Everything that central London stands on top of is rotting and crumbling and basically trying to turn into rancid soup. How long do you think it’s going to be until things start to fall into the ground?”

  “Ah,” it said. “Fuck, you might have a bit of a point there. That wouldn’t be good. The Veils are so bloody thin underground that I dread to think what might start shoving its way through if those thin bits weren’t buried any more.”

  I rubbed my temples in frustration. That wasn’t really what I’d been getting at, obviously, but then the Burned Man didn’t think like you or me. Or like anything human for that matter. The potential for tens of thousands of deaths obviously hadn’t even crossed its mind. That or it simply didn’t care, one or the other.

  “Yeah that too,” I said. “Fuck knows what we’re going to do about it though. The bloody gnomes seem to think I’m some sort of fucking foretold hero who’s going to kick the Rotman’s arse and save them all.”

  The Burned Man snorted with laughter at that. “You?” it sneered. “A hero?”

  “Yeah, exactly,” I said, although I could almost have taken offence at that. “Not going to happen. Though I can’t say I much fancy trying to summon and bind this thing either.”

  “Well, for one that would be a spectacularly messy way to commit suicide,” the Burned Man said, “and for another it’s not even possible, you pillock. You can’t summon something that’s already on Earth, remember?”

  It shook its chains bitterly at that, and stifled a small cough.

  Of course you can’t, I thought. I knew that, now that I thought about it. That was the whole principle that kept the Burned Man itself safely out of harm’s way and stuck in the fetish on my altar – while it was there, in a fixed place on Earth, it couldn’t be summoned anywhere else by anyone else so it could never escape the way Wormwood apparently had. Its whole original escape plan had revolved around getting free of t
hat fetish, after all.

  “Yeah, good point,” I said. “Sorry, it’s been a long day. I need a shower and some kip.”

  “You need a shower, I’ll give you that much,” it said. “You fucking stink.”

  “Thanks pal,” I muttered. “More to the point though, what are we going to do about this? Come on, you’re usually full of bright ideas.”

  “Usually, but not right now,” the Burned Man admitted. “I mean, like I said, I know Bianakith and I’m afraid it’s way beyond anything you can summon and send against it. What with your pussy limits on ingredients it is, anyway. I’ll have to give this one a bit of thought.”

  Summoning doesn’t run on wishful thinking, sadly. Every real working needs to be powered by something, and the best source of magical power is always lifeblood. I use toads, usually. Partly because it’s traditional and partly because toads are so bloody horrible I don’t feel guilty about it. Occasionally I might need something a bit bigger, a goat for example, but only for what I would regard as the really big shit. The Burned Man’s view of my “pussy limits” amounted to my refusal to carry out human sacrifice, just for the record. It’s a lovely little thing, it really is.

  “Well have a good hard think about it,” I said. “It’s been on the rampage down there for weeks at least, I dare say it’ll keep another day or two. Meantime I’ve still got old Mrs Page to sort out. I’ll squeeze the hexring and whatnot out of Wormwood tonight so at least we can get that done.”

  “Whatever,” it said, quite obviously not interested in a job that wasn’t going to pay a penny.

  “Anyway, I’m going to clean up and go to bed.”

  I left it to it and headed for the bathroom, noticing as I went that it was daylight outside now. I often end up practically nocturnal when I’m working, up all night and snatching what sleep I can get during the day. Unfortunately Trixie didn’t seem to work the same way. The bathroom door was locked and I could hear the shower running.

  “For fucksake,” I muttered as I went to make a coffee instead.