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Back Cardinal Black Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Title Page
  2. One: Into the Storm
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Two: London Calling
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Three: The Malignant Seven
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Four: Squirrels and Cats
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-One
  37. Thirty-Two
  38. Five: Revelation
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. About the Author

To get his mind off these ramblings he set about returning the ten gold bars to their pockets in the satchel. The pockets seemed snug enough to secure them for the normal use of a gentleman, but not accounting for someone violently slinging them out. This of course would have to go with them to the house and the meeting.

When Matthew slid the fifth bar in, something made a strange rustling noise he could not readily identify.

He looked inside but there was nothing but the five bars in their pockets. Still … there had been a sound from within the satchel that signified something else was contained in there … somewhere.

He removed the five bars and put them aside. He sat on the floor with the satchel, his fingers searching within. In another moment he identified four small metal snaps at the corners of what he’d thought to be a leather lining but was instead a false front hidden behind the arrangement of pockets for the bars. He unsnapped those and was able to remove the entire back portion of the satchel, which he placed beside himself on the floor.

Revealed was a parchment document, larger than the invitation, about six inches wide by eight inches in length. As he drew it out, Matthew found that it was one sheet of five possibly cut from a roll of parchment due to the uneven edges. He put them out side by side on the floor, and then he got up and fetched the nearest lantern for better illumination than the dawn’s murky light.

The first sheet showed a strange illustration that Matthew thought ought to be out of the pages of The Lesser Key of Solomon. It was the depiction of a dragon with four wings, the mouth open and breathing fire. The next sheet truly gave Matthew pause, for it was a painstaking study of the wings with measurements marked not in inches but in feet. The third sheet showed the same to the head of the dragon and the fourth to the body and the forked tail, all the measurements carefully marked. It appeared that a professional draftsman had produced these plans, because Matthew realized that’s exactly what they were. And the fifth sheet: a clockwork mechanism operated by what appeared to be a large teakettle, with valves running the length of the dragon and into the wings as well.

He’d never seen anything like this and had no idea what it was for. The thing was a machine of some kind, certainly, but beyond that he was lost.

Disturbingly, he calculated that the dragon’s entire structure was somewhat over twenty feet in length, the span of the wings easily forty feet.