Necropolis

urgent and that he should get out of its way. Sure enough, just as he threw himself into a doorway, a police car shot past, immediately followed by a second, both of them heading the way he had just come. He knew that he had to get out of sight before any more arrived. He crossed another wide avenue and began climbing uphill.
    And then he heard something coming through the darkness. It was the last thing he would have expected in a modern city, and at first he thought he must be mistaken. The clatter of metal against concrete.
    Horse's hooves…
    A man appeared, riding a horse through a set of red traffic lights. The hooves were striking the surface of the road with that strange, unmistakable rhythm, and the echo was being trapped, thrown back and forth between shop windows. The horse paused under a streetlamp, and in the yellow glare, Matt saw that it was even more horrible than he had imagined. It was skeleton-thin, and in an act of dreadful cruelty, someone had driven a knife into its head, the blade pointing outward, so that it looked like a grotesque version of a unicorn.
    Matt saw it and remembered Jamie telling him about the fire riders who had taken part in the battle ten thousand years before. Was this one of them? As the man and the beast went past, he ducked behind a parked car, watching them in the side mirror until they had disappeared from sight.

    He was about to stand up, then froze as something huge fluttered through the darkness, high above the skyscrapers. Matt didn't see what it was but guessed that it was some sort of giant bird, maybe even the condor that had been part of the Nazca Lines. It was there, a sweeping shadow, and then it had gone. He knew now that the whole city was possessed: the roads, the water, the very air. It could only be a matter of time before he was seen and captured. Every moment he was on the street, he was in terrible danger.
    He waited until he was sure there was no one around, then straightened up and hurried on his way, keeping close to the buildings so that he could throw himself into the shadows if anyone approached. He came to a junction. A car had swerved and crashed into a post. It was completely smashed up, its horn blaring. Matt could see the driver, half hanging out of the front door, pinned in place by his seat belt, his head and chest covered in blood. No one was coming to help.
    A street sign. Matt looked up and read two words directly above him.
    harcourt road
    . The name meant something.
    "Paul Adams has returned to Wisdom Court…It is here, on Harcourt Road."
    He remembered Han Shan-tung, talking to him in the study, pointing it out on the map. Suddenly he knew what he had to do. Somehow he had stumbled onto the right road. If Paul Adams was at the flat, maybe he would let him in. At the very least, he would have somewhere to stay until the break of day.
    "Help me…"
    The man in the car wasn't dead. His eyes, very white, had flicked open. He seemed to be crying, but the tears were blood. There was nothing Matt could do for him. He turned away and began to run.
    The road seemed to go on forever. Matt went past more shopping malls, a hospital, a huge conference center. He didn't see any more police cars, but he heard them in the distance, their sirens slicing through the air. At one point, a taxi rushed past, zigzagging crazily on the wrong side of the road. He turned a corner and came upon a tram, parked in front of an office building. It was an old-fashioned thing. Apart from the Chinese symbols, it was like something that might have driven through London during the Second World War. And it was full of people. They were just sitting there, slumped in their seats, unmoving. Matt didn't know if they were alive or dead, and he didn't hang around to find out. He guessed they were a mix of both.
    Somehow he found his way to Wisdom Court. He had only glanced at the map when he was in Macao and he'd gotten no more than an overview of the city. But there it was, suddenly in front of him, the name on a block of stone and behind it a driveway leading up to a fountain, a wide entrance, and, on each side, a statue of a snarling lion. The building was very ordinary, shrouded in darkness, but there was one light burning on the twelfth floor — Matt counted the windows — and he thought he saw a curtain flicker as somebody moved behind.
    The driveway hadn't been swept. It was strewn with dead leaves and scraps of paper. The fountain had been turned off. As he