The Ripper Affair (Bannon and Clare)

  Miles Crawford. The name of her captor. All the rage, all the terror in the world held in those syllables. She had been outplayed by him, and her Shields had paid the price. If not for Mikal’s disobedience—

  Remember your purpose. Which is not to relive that moment.

  Then why had she done this? Perhaps for no other reason than the one she had given a man who had not listened.

  If not for luck, I could have been any one of them. All of them, or more. Or less, as the world would have it.

  Perhaps he did not mean to marry the Promethean to his own flesh. And yet, marrying it to hers would be problematic as well. He could not tell, of course, that she had given the second wyrm’s heart to another, or even if she had taken it for herself. The beauty of the Philosopher’s Stone was its ability to pass undetected by even the finest unphysical senses. Just as a wyrm could lay undetected beneath a tower for aeons, as the world turned about it. Would the Stone bar another item’s introduction into the body it protected from harm and decay?

  You shall give me the world.

  Perhaps…

  The connection trembled just out of reach. Something, some symmetry, was escaping her. Just as the nature of the Promethean had—

  Wait.

  If Llew had created a Promethean, and fed it on unfortunates in Whitchapel… no. That was wrong.

  The only certainty was that a Promethean had been created. Perhaps it had chosen its own meat and drink, as it were.

  You have more enemies than you know, sparrow-witch.

  A Prime always did.

  Ætheric force twitched restlessly. Come Tideturn, she might be able to find a crack or a chink in the restraints. They felt supple, slightly elastic, but any pressure against them would make the entire trap harden. Elegant, and just the thing to keep a Prime still and quiet.

  If you did not mind said Prime losing her mind from the very fact of being trapped.

  She might become just as mad as he was. Except he was not lunatic, really. Simply ambitious. He saw no reason to cap his ambition, any more than Emma did.

  The only cap to my ambition is myself. What is the cap to his, I wonder?

  The gleaming knife trembled upon the stone, turning on its tip rather like a ballerina en pointe. Its slight scraping would have sent a shiver down her back, if she could move.

  She essayed a slight humming noise, deep in her throat. The gag would keep her from shaping Words, true. Much could be done with tone and—

  Blackness devoured her vision. Panic, as her nose was stoppered as well as her mouth. Sorcerous training could not control the fear of strangulation, and she went limp. Air returned, as did consciousness.

  There was a soft, mocking laugh. She could not see him, and the restraints made the sound echoing and unearthly.

  “You think I’d leave you any opening, my darling? No.” He scraped back into sight, moving a little more easily. More damp, splashing sounds.

  Emma squeezed her eyelids shut. Hot water trickled between her lashes. Then she let them open just a fraction, disliking the dark.

  “I respect you. Not like that magical whore. It took me by surprise, her luring you into the open. I had hoped to bring you out a different way.” A shadow flickered between her and the yellow-rose glow of the lamps. “But here you are. And in such good time, too.”

  Think, Emma. Think.

  Unfortunately, he straightened, metal and bone clicking as the ruins of his body shook about him. He reached out, and Emma’s eyes opened wide.

  His misshapen right hand closed about the knife, and he lifted it free of the stone with a physical and ætheric effort. He turned, and the tenderness on his features was almost worse than the glitter of insane calm in his dark eyes. Thin threads of yellow shone in the muddy irises, a reminder she did not need of Mikal.

  Her Shield was most likely frantic by now. How much time had passed? Was it midnight yet? Could Clare find her? They were underground, could Mikal sense her with any accuracy once he was close enough?

  Do not worry upon them, Emma. You have more than enough to occupy you here.

  Llew shuffled toward her. “X—z˙’t’ks’m,” he breathed, a sorcerous Word that bent strangely as it was uttered. The knife shimmered with ætheric force, and the smoky egg containing the Promethean convulsed afresh.

  Her Discipline stirred, sleepily.

  Too late, she began to understand what he meant to do, and how stupid she had been to use herself as a lure.

  He began to chant, the language of Making and Naming alternating as he described what he wished the sorcerous force to shape itself as, how it would affect the tangled fleshly snarl of the physical and the gossamer of the unseen. Stone shivered uneasily as the taproots driven into Whitchapel stirred, only faint echoes where Emma had cleared them but driven deep in many other places. Many, many other victims had fallen–the creature found its own meat and drink, but its creator had been busy with murder, too.

  Lines of force coalesced, becoming visible to Sight, and Llewellyn raised the knife. His mouth grinned and slavered over the consonants as he described her death, and what that ending would fuel.

  The Promethean was nearing the end of its infancy. It needed a vessel, a mockery of birth. The knife lowered, and a faint piping reached Emma’s ears–souls, straining for release, perhaps. Each of the victims crying out, a chorus of the damned.

  The smoky egg over the obsidian–it was an unholy altar, she realised, another mockery, yet the form was completely appropriate to the Work Llew was attempting–drifted free of its moorings. The two live coals of the Coachman’s eyes glared from a suggestion of a face, and Emma’s entire body tensed, as if it could deny the coming violation.

  The knifetip touched her throat.

  Chapter Forty-One

  To Crithen’s Church

  It was no use. Clare pushed the carriage door open as the clockhorses shrilled. If they went any further, the carriage would become well and truly mired in the crowd, and Harthell’s steady cursing was already lost under the noise. Screams of frightened women, breaking bottles and tearing wood, the roiling of men’s voices. From somewhere torches had arrived, for the gaslamps were guttering, their wickcharms dying. The throng ahead filled the main thoroughfare of High Whitchapel Road, and the press of the crowd even on this small tributary was becoming rather worrisome.

  Leather Apron! Leather Apron!

  The public, that great beast–or at least a healthy slice of it–had lost patience with the keepers of order.

  In her very bed, he did, and they do nothing, all high and mighty! Heard he opened her up, even her face. Welladay, the Metropoleans don’t care as long as he kills poor frails. Our girls, they are, even if low.

  Lining High Whitchapel were shops and better-to-do homes; the crowd pressed uneasily against them. The carriage had not yet become a target, but it was only a matter of time.

  Aberline was beside him, casting an eye over the heaving mass. The fog had greyed as if dawn was incipient; Clare’s pocket-watch told him that indeed, sunrise was very close, with Tideturn not far behind. More glass shattered, and Harthell cursed again.

  “We shall not stir a foot in this,” Clare observed. Soon they may take a mind to upend the carriage.

  “Not without sorcery or a regiment.” Aberline, sour-faced, had regained some of his colour. Mikal was silent, but his tension was clearly apparent.

  “Ho! Pico, come down. Harthell, take the carriage home.” Clare had to shout. “We shall proceed—”

  A different sound pierced the seashell roar. High and chilling, a silverwhistle.

  “Oh, blast it all.” Aberline leapt from the carriage, landing heavily on blackened, broken cobbles. “Waring, you bloody fool. He’s called in—”

  “Headcrackers. And possibly a regiment,” Clare said, grimly. “Or two. There will be blood shed this dawn.”

  “Other sorcerers will muddy the waters.” Mikal had grasped Aberline’s elbow as the crowd surged around them. A toothless bel
dame in red calico shrieked, falling against a sturdy flashboy with an Altered left hand, metal sharpened and gleaming as he thrust her away with a curse. “How close are we?”

  “To Crithen’s? A ten-minute walk, were this a fine morning. Today…” Aberline indicated the throng at the juncture of Bent and High Whitchapel.

  Harthell evidently agreed with Clare’s estimation of the situation, for he wheeled the carriage hard right and vanished down Tehning Cross; the crack of his whip sent a chill up Clare’s spine. Set it aside. What may be done? Think!

  Mikal glanced up, studying the rooftops. “I think—”

  Whatever he had meant to say was lost in an angry roaring. Beneath it, drumbeats, and the clopping of hooves in unison. Yet it was not from that end of Whitchapel the flaming lucifer that set off a crowd’s tinder dropped.

  It was from the other end, and as soon as Clare heard the sound, his heart sank.

  Ever afterwards, none could discern from the conflicting reports who had given the City Streamstruth Regiment the order to fire upon the crowd. The volley was enough to cause a few moments’ worth of shocked silence.

  There is a moment when a crowd ceases to be a mass of separate beings, when it becomes a single mind and turns upon its tormentor. Or simply, merely upon anything within reach. Once it becomes such an organism, it tramples, heaves, tosses, and smashes with no restraint.

  Being caught in the jaws of that monster was not acceptable.

  Mikal shoved Aberline to the side of the street, where an open dosshouse door showed a slice of yellow lamplight. “Go!” he cried, and pushed Clare for good measure. Pico hopped in their wake with youthful alacrity, and it was Mikal again, suddenly before them, who kicked at the door even as a burly just-awakened stout in braces and a thread-bare shirt sought to slam it against sudden danger.

  A quick strike, Mikal’s hand blurring, and the dosshouse doorman folded; Pico shoved the door closed and sought a means to bar it.

  Clare found himself gasping for breath. How annoying. Still, they were out of danger for the moment, and Mikal evidently had some manner of plan.

  “Up,” the Shield said. “Find a staircase.”

  “And then what?” Pico enquired, shoving a flimsy chair against the dosshouse door. The entry hall was dingy and smelled overwhelmingly of cabbage and unwashed flesh; on the ground the doorman stirred slightly. Pico thought a moment, then grabbed both the supine man’s wrists. Aberline helped him drag him for the door, and Clare’s protest died unspoken. The wood cracked and heaved; outside, the sound of the crowd was now a wild howling of pain.

  “Then,” the Shield said, “we run. And you pray to whatever god you choose that we find my Prima.”

  Clay tiles scratching underfoot; timber creaking uneasily when a man’s weight touched it. Mikal, impatient with their slow progress, nevertheless shepherded them carefully.

  The geography of Londinium appeared much altered when seen from this vantage. Ground became tile and sloped roofs, streets long channels separating thin island-fingers. Crossing the channels was either nerve-wracking–a slide and a leap, Mikal’s hand flashing forwards to drag a man onto solid safety–or entirely irrational, a matter of clinging to the Shield and closing one’s eyes while he leapt in some sorcerous fashion. Each time he did so, hopping across thoroughfares as if it was child’s play, Clare’s most excellent digestion threatened to unseat itself.

  At least now he knew how the man kept up with Miss Bannon’s carriage.

  Clare peered at the sky as Pico slithered down the roof-slope behind him, boots scraping dry moss and accumulated soot. Even here, life clung to gullies and cracks; he saw hidden courts, walled off by the rapid building of slum-tenements, with the remains of old gardens gone to seed. Twisted trees no eye but the sky had viewed for years, and even grass and weeds clinging in rain-gutter sludge. Londinium’s roofs were a country of mountainous desert, concealing throbbing life and violent motion beneath its crust.

  Whitchapel was ablaze, figuratively and actually. Two fires had started, one near the border of Soreditch and another, from what Clare could tell, sending up a black plume from the slaughteryard near Fainmaker’s Row. Yellowing fog swirled uneasily, and the virulent green of Scab held to mere fringes and dark alleys.

  Cries and moans, the roaring of a maddened crowd, more sharp volleys of rifle fire. Had the Crown authorised such a deadly response? Was it the Old City, nervous at the proximity of the restless poor? Waring was merely a commissioner, he could not have taken the step without approval from the Lord Mayor or the Crown—

  “Mind yourself,” Pico said, grabbing his sleeve. “Look. Crithen’s, just there.”

  Clare peered down. Mikal landed atop the slope with a slight exhalation of effort, and Aberline retched once, quietly.

  “Enough power to feel the effects,” the Shield said, soft and cold. “And should I need to, Inspector—”

  “Cease your threats.” Aberline sounded pale. “I told you I would do my best.”

  “Mr Mikal?” Clare’s voice bounced against the rooftop. “A moment, if you please?”

  “What?”

  “It is past dawn.”

  Mikal was silent for a long moment. There was a flash of yellow as he checked the sky, and Pico moved along the edge of the roof.

  Clare cleared his throat. “Do you have any idea why Londinium is still, well, subject to Night? Is this sorcery?”

  “Perhaps.” The Shield halted, still with a hand to Aberline’s elbow. “A Work meant to replace a ruling spirit, or create a new one… perhaps this is an effect. My Prima would know. Are we close?”

  “The place is there.” Clare pointed, as Pico had. “Though I must say, it does not look in the least churchlike.”

  It was a slumping, blasted two-storey building, set between two ditches that served, if Clare’s nose was correct, as nightsoil collectors. Also, if his vision was piercing the dimness correctly, a dustheap or two. “I cannot even tell… was it a house?”

  “They call it church because Mad Crithen nailed his victims to the walls.” Pico sounded dreadfully chipper. “He was popish, he was. Leastways, that’s how I heard it.”

  “Mad Crithen?”

  “A murderer.” Breathless, Aberline shook free of Mikal. “Lustmorden, but with a religious… he crucified his victims. I read of it in Shropeton’s analysis of—”

  “There’s a way down!” Pico shimmied lithely over the edge of the roof and vanished. “Here!”

  Clare patted his pistol, secure in its holster. “It is extremely likely there will be unpleasantness within. I cannot think this sorcerer will not guard his lair.”

  “He may not need to.” Mikal pointed. “Look.”

  A subtle wet gleam in the ditches, and stealthy movement in the shadows. Skeletal shapes, in ragged threadbare clothes, and under the sound of riot and mayhem, a queer sliding whisper.

  “Scab. In the ditches.” Aberline sucked in a sharp breath. “And… starvelings? Here?”

  “Starvelings?”

  “Marimat.” Mikal’s mouth turned the syllables into a curse. They made little sense to Clare, but he shivered anyway. “Of course. Come, quickly. We must reach the place before they can hold it.”

  “I don’t suppose you—”

  But Mikal had already embraced Aberline’s stout waist with his arm, and flung them both from the roof with a rattle and a peculiar whooshing. Clare scrabbled for the place Pico had disappeared, and the lad’s disgusted curse from below was lost in a rising, venomous hiss.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  No More

  The prick of the knifetip made a vast stillness inside Emma Bannon. The world shrank, Time itself stretching and slowing.

  And so I die.

  It pressed further, and the smoke-egg floated free of the obsidian’s tethering influence. As it did, it grew heavier, blacker, and the block of glassy stone crackled. Thin fissures threaded its surface, and the lamplight now reflected wetly from its shifting planes.

&n
bsp; Ah. Much more of the inner workings of Llewellyn’s creation became apparent to her. The insistent pressure at her throat mounted, and the following moments were, paradoxically, endless… and too quick to contain everything that occurred within them.

  Emma turned inward, into that stillness, her eyes forgotten in that quick motion. It was not a physical movement, and her slackened muscles meant the restraints about her loosened.

  Raw aching places inside her woke in a blinding sheet of pain, and she trembled on the thin edge of forcing her spirit free by an effort of will, stoppering her lungs and heart before the mad Prime she had once loved could cut her throat.

  To do so would deny him his victory–where else would he find such an apt victim for this, the last murder to fuel an unholy transformation?

  No.

  They burst upon her, the murders she had felt and those she had not. Cleaving of flesh and bright copper fear, gin fumes and desperation. Their lives, colourless drudgery and danger, painful except when the gin soaked through and insulated against hunger, the men and their grasping, hurtful hands. A sweet word in the darkness, coaxing them to take one more customer. A faceless thing, and the blade so sharp it almost did not hurt as they were unseamed… hot blood, the merciful blackness swallowing them whole.

  I could have been any one of them.

  None knew from whence sorcerous talent sprang. A lucky chance, and she had been lifted from the mire–but her skirts were still draggled, and she would never be allowed to forget.

  At the very floor of Emma’s consciousness, a barred door.

  He seeks to give life. I am of the Black, my Discipline is Endor… and there is no better way to cheat him of his prize.

  Her throat swelled, a trickle of blood tracing white skin. The restraints, sensing a gathering, tightened. The constriction, sudden and unbearable, roused the same blind fury that had once caused sickly green flame to sprout from a drunken man’s skin and clothes. The same will, fed and exercised, grown monstrous, able to endure temporary confinement only because she had suffered it, in one form or another, her entire life.