Pax Britannia: Human Nature by Jonathan Green Page B

man here will drop you."
    Wraith grimaced and made a sound like an animal snarl. "Idiot!" he hissed.
    "What, you or me?"
    With a roar born of frustration, rage and despair, Gabriel Wraith sprang at Ulysses, suddenly all semblance of composure gone.
    Ulysses raised his own blade just in time to parry the maniac's descending sweep. So angry was the man that, what skill and finesse he might have had was lost as blind rage took over. Ulysses sidestepped and kicked out at the same time, sending his opponent sprawling across the remarkable Turkish carpet that covered the floor of Wraith's consultation chamber.
    Before he could recover himself, Nimrod stepped forward, the barrel of the pistol pointed directly at Wraith's face. The rogue's features lost what little colour they still retained as he realised that he had come to the end of the line.
    "Go on then - kill me, if that's what you're going to do. Just don't make a damned meal of it."
    "Don't be so bloody stupid," Ulysses laughed. "I've not hunted you through Whitechapel and chased you over rooftops simply to kill you now. As you said yourself, Mr Magpie, we have unfinished business you and I."
    Wraith looked up into Ulysses' cruelly smiling face and felt his bowels turn to water. He suddenly felt much worse than he had done when he just thought that Ulysses was going to have him killed.
    "I hope you have a head for heights," Ulysses hissed as Nimrod delivered a blow to the head with the butt of his pistol.
     
    Slowly a bleary consciousness returned and Gabriel Wraith opened his eyes. He immediately let out a wail of fear as the street appeared four storeys above him, gently swaying from side to side. His head felt thick, engorged with the blood that seemed to be collecting within his skull. The shock of his situation merely helped to bring him round more completely.
    Gradually reality reasserted itself and he realised the seriousness of his predicament. He looked up, straining his neck and could see the cord around his ankle just as he became aware of the dull throb there. Beyond that lay only the dark pall of the Smog, under-lit a satanic red by the blinking lights of the city below, the Overground network a dark spider's web against it. The cord ran up and over a bent aerial mast and back to a window on the fourth floor of the house.
    "Ah, you're awake. Had a nice sleep, did you?"
    Wraith froze. The familiarity of the voice cut through him like a blade of ice and brought with it sudden remembrance of the night-time chase over the rooftops of Whitechapel and Quicksilver's sudden attack within his own home.
    Wraith's lip curled into an angry sneer. "Quicksilver, you bastard," he snarled. "What are you doing? What, precisely, do you think you are doing?"
    "I'll give you a clue," Quicksilver said, the same cruel smile still locked on his face. "Nimrod?"
    At once the line holding him up went slack and suddenly he was falling. The cord whizzed over the mast, accompanied by the sharp smell of scorched rope.
    He cried out in fear as the slabs of the pavement and the points of the railings shot rapidly closer.
    He was only vaguely aware of Quicksilver shouting for his manservant to halt his descent.
    "You said... you weren't... going to... kill me!" the panicking Wraith protested, as he panted for breath. "That's what you said!"
    He could see Quicksilver's manservant now, standing at another window on the top floor of the house, the rope held tightly in his great bunched fists.
    "I said I hadn't come all this way to kill you then ," the other clarified, an expression of cruel delight etched onto his clean cut aristocratic features. "But your fate now depends on whether you answer my questions truthfully. You see, there are things that you know Wraith - or should that be Magpie? - things that I need to know."
    "And what makes you I'll give you the answers?" Wraith retorted pathetically, making one last ditch attempt at a rebellious front.
    "Because I believe you to be a sensible