The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) Read Free Page A

looking as if a gentle breeze might knock it over, with half the main door open.
    Lyle stood just inside this structure, and beamed at the thing it held.
    The thing was a monster of struts and strains, a body of stretched canvas and wood carved so thin you could almost see the ground through it. The wheels underneath the main body were harsh metal things that gleamed, the two seats were crisscrossed with nailed-down ropes, the back wing stood up at least as tall as the boy, and the mess of ropes and pulleys and struts that pushed at the various crudely attached gears and flaps gave the impression that the thing was merely a prediction of what would happen when the shed that housed it collapsed.
    Peering out from behind Lyle, the girl examined it. Teresa Hatch, though she always insisted that she only ever worked on the thing because Lyle paid her three shillings a week and gave her a place to stay, food and, unless she found a particularly good hiding place, regularly enforced hot baths, had to admit a certain attachment to the monster. There had come a point a few months after the night when she had first met Mister Lyle, during an attempt which had gone wrong to ... relocate . . . some of his property, when she had realized that not absolutely everything he said was nonsense.
    To Tess the thing was known, if only in the privacy of her imagination, which understood when it was best to be silent, as ‘the big flappy thing with wings’.
    To Lyle, who believed very firmly in precision with regard to scientific endeavour, it was ‘the pressure-differential-velocity aeronautical device’ and never anything else, however difficult it was to say in a hurry.
    To the boy, whose dream it was and who, as if that wasn’t enough, secretly had a poetical vein, it was and would always be ‘Icarus’. He wasn’t sure why he’d chosen this name, and had the sneaky suspicion not only that it had unhappy mythological connotations, but also that if he dared tell the other two labourers on its production, they would give him that look, that two-pronged attack of two pairs of eyes that always managed to make him feel like a five-year-old and want to curl up in a hole and whimper. So he said nothing, and kept his poetic inclinations to himself.
    The three of them waited for Lincoln’s reaction. Even the dog, who generally showed nothing but disdain for the work of any creature foolish enough to think that two legs were better than four, waited. Tess idly reached into her pocket, and gave him a walnut. He ate happily.
    When Lord Lincoln finally spoke, it was so suddenly that Tess almost jumped. ‘Tell me - are those things wings?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Lyle in the same voice the inventor of the wheel must have used when asked if it rolled.
    ‘Do they . . .’ Lincoln searched for an appropriate word, ‘... flap?’
    ‘They do not !’ Indignation was plastered across Lyle’s face. ‘They’d have to ...’ the word seemed acid in his mouth, ‘ flap far too fast or be far too large to push a sufficient amount of air to create lift. The wings are shaped,’ he said, warming to his topic as he saw the potential to enlighten the ignorant, ‘in order to allow for a faster acceleration of air above than below, thus reducing the pressure above and creating a difference in the forces acting. You see,’ he bounded towards the wings, eyes sparkling, ‘the curve of the wing, which I refer to as an “air splitting and differentiating curve”, for the simple way it . . .’
    ‘Does it work?’ There was a gleam of shrewdness in Lincoln’s eye that Lyle didn’t like. It was almost hungry, like a starved snake.
    Lyle swallowed. ‘Well, theoretically.’
    ‘You haven’t tested it?’
    Silence. Tess said quickly, ‘We was testing the prop ... propel . . . the thing that blows up and makes it go faster, this mornin’. That’s why you mustn’t arrest Mister Lyle and chop his head off in the Tower for treason, ’cos he was only blowin’ up