Free The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) by Catherine Webb Page B

heavy constriction in his throat, a drying shrinking at the back of his neck, a dull weight in his chest, until his eyes started to burn with it. He twisted, reaching down to his own ankle and prising at the stone-hard things that seemed to have caught at his foot, wrenching at them with all his might, pulling with an instinctive, terrified strength that only emerged when the brain was too busy suffocating to question the acts of the body. He felt something snap, something made brittle and hard by the cold, until with a kick, the heavy thing at his ankle fell away, scratching and tearing thin lines across his flesh, bringing hot blood back to numb skin. Lyle kicked for the surface, trusting entirely to instinct, and his head bumped against the wooden top and for a moment he hammered against it, trying to find a way out in the pitch darkness, trying to find the rope, a stair, a ladder, anything to guide him out of this airless wet tomb, driving his palms against the wood until his ears burned and even the instincts started to fade into dull pink numbness.
    For a moment - just a moment - Lyle drifted in the place between entrapment and escape, where thoughts were thought without words, and blood circulated on momentum only. He thought he heard ... he heard . . .
     
    Hark, hark ...
     
    And he heard ...
     
    Blacks and bays,
    Dapples and greys ...
     
    And just a few feet away, the wood above his head shattered, splintering inwards and downwards, an explosion of sound and sensation and air into that airless blackness, tearing the water into a thousand drops with light and motion, as Thomas, face beetroot red from the effort, threw his axe aside and pulled Lyle up from the waters of the lower deck.

CHAPTER 5
    Housekeeping
    It took two blankets, a shot of whisky, a large mug of hot pea soup and half an hour by the fireside of the Hanged Sailor - a dockside tavern which had a reputation for frequently storing more bodies in the cellar than barrels, such was the local clientele - before Lyle turned from blue to merely bleached white and the sound of his teeth chattering was no longer loud enough to disturb drunks sinking into oblivion on the other side of the room. It took another half hour, sitting staring into the fire with an expression of determination, before a little colour returned to his cheeks and he announced in the first normal voice of the hour’s wait, ‘I think, perhaps, it might be time to risk a pair of shoes.’
    Only when Tess had gone in search of dry socks and Thomas was staring in horrified fascination at the other inhabitants of the tavern did Lyle carefully examine his ankle, red and sore from the thing that had gripped it in the hold of the Pegasus , and notice without word or expression the tiny claw-like marks where the same thing had finally let go, like the shallow scratching of a cat, or of fine needles, or even, if he were given over to such imaginative fancies, the claws of a very small gargoyle.
    By the time they left the tavern, the streets outside had changed. No longer was the day blue-grey from the thick fog, but had deepened to an almost impenetrable deep bruised black that made light from any doorway into a fuzzy-edged square and framed every window with an uncertain wobble of darkness. The church bells, however, announced it to be no later than three in the afternoon. Already the lamplighters were beginning to drag out their ladders, and the bobbies walked with their shuttered lanterns lit. What light didn’t come from the yellow glow of fires and candles was weak and grey, more like the light of the moon than the sun. Fresh snow piled up against every doorway and down every street, and still it fell, until many of the weaker roofs creaked. In darker corners of the darker houses, icicles formed inside the walls. Everything except the blurred light seemed drained of colour, so that the shadows of people moved in a black-and-white world, the sounds of which were muffled by the snow and