A Quantum Mythology Read Free

was communing with it. The Hellaquin got out of bed and started to dress himself quickly.
    A short while later, there was a gentle tap at the door and the Hellaquin opened it. The Knight saw that the other man was already dressed and simply nodded.
     
    The Hellaquin was sure the powerful black horse was almost as unnatural as he and the Knight were. He had no wish to ride behind the other man but Baphomet had told the Knight that something was happening at that very moment, and they needed to move fast.
    The city was under curfew, and as they galloped through the streets they were challenged by a number of the redcoats. Few, however, were prepared to fire on someone of the Knight’s obvious station in life, regardless of how disreputable his companion looked.
    Only one had dared fire his musket. The Hellaquin felt the projectile hit his back like the blow from a mace, but his leather coat had hardened with the impact and the ball had not gone through. The bruise healed so quickly it practically never existed.
     
    Tendrils of wood and lead had grown from the pistol, passing through his hand and his arm, consuming – or transforming – his flesh as they wove in and out of it. The bones in his arm had broken to accommodate the pepperbox pistol and he felt other, smaller strands growing inside his body, his head. Then the demon in the gun started speaking to him. It told him what to do. Showed him.
    He had killed his own family first. Killed both their children in front of their screaming mother as, sobbing, he shouted at her about all the times he had betrayed her with other women, most of whom he had paid. The devil had laughed as he wept. When his friend came running to investigate the gunfire, he shot to wound. Then he left a bloody trail behind him as he dragged his friend through the house so the other man could watch his family die in front of his eyes, succumbing to the wound in his stomach as he did so. Then, slowly and with purpose, he descended the stairs and entered the town house’s servants’ quarters. He shot a footman but only injured him. The rest had fled screaming into the night.
    He went to sit in his old friend’s study. He wanted to put the pistol-limb to his head and pull the trigger, but the demon in the gun did not want him to die just yet. It had told him so. The demon liked the way the man made it feel.
    There is no hell , the demon told him. No place for me but here.
    So Sir Ronald Sharpely wept and reloaded the weapon and wondered when the crowd gathering outside would come for him. Or would it be the city watch, or even the redcoats themselves? The devil in the gun – in him, now – revelled in his thoughts, though it knew the best, the sweetest, had already come and gone.
     
    The first time he saw heat, like a desert serpent, was when the Hellaquin realised how truly damned he was. How far from God. So much further than all the killing, the stealing, the drinking and the whoring could ever have taken him.
    It was a narrow four-storey stone town house in a row of similar buildings on Duke Street in the desirable suburb of Aston. It looked new and expensive, and his own cottage in Cheshire could have fitted many times within the vast swathe of lawn at the back of the house. He was standing in the shadows of the trees at the bottom of the garden, observing the crowd that had gathered on the recently cobbled street in front of the house.
    The Hellaquin unwrapped the waxed leather from around the yew stave and flexed the wood to warm it up before stringing it. Even with his considerable strength, that was a challenge. He selected a number of arrows from the case, each one handmade from ash, each one hardened by the dripping of his blood onto the wood, each one just over two feet long. The arrowheads were armour-piercing bodkins made from something called adamantine, which the Knight had told him, long ago, just meant very, very hard. He had chosen these arrows over the ones that contained his