The door at the bottom of her soul creaked. No more.
A shattered hulk of a sorcerer, his rasping voice raised in a chant of a Discipline not his own, tensed. Next would come driving the knife home, and the creature–his only issue, a son who might be grateful–would feast upon this sacrifice. And she, she, would be given a gift of blackness and no more pain.
Black chartersymbols woke, racing along Emma Bannon’s skin. Her eyelids snapped wide, and each pupil kindled with a bright, leprous-green flame. The charter symbols crawled up her legs, rushed over her torso in a wave, devoured her arms–still encased in shredded mourning cloth–and flowed under her hair, smearing across her slackened face in their hurrying.
They reached the knifepoint digging into her flesh, a cascade of pale green sparks fountaining from the contact.
Inside her, the hurtful flower of her Discipline bloomed.
Llewellyn Gwynnfud, still chanting, pushed down.
He dragged the razor-sharp blade across his former lover’s throat.
Chapter Forty-Three
A Betrayal That Struck One
The starvelings were skeletal corpses, still animate through some feat of sorcery. There were so many, shuffling forward with the slowness of the damned, their hands held out. Those soft, insistent graspings could drag a man down, and then they would cluster him, pressing life and breath away with that soft, low, terrifying hissing. They had narrowly avoided losing Pico, and Clare tipped the empty cartridges out of his Bulldog as he sprinted for the door of Mad Crithin’s Church.
Mikal wrenched the worm-holed, flimsy wooden door open. It had been chained with iron, and the cylinder-lock dangling from rusted metal links was new, though smeared with grease to disguise any shine. The chain snapped, broken links cascading in a chiming stream, and an exhalation of neglect and rot swallowed them all. Aberline’s ankle, twisted just after the man wrenched starvelings from Pico’s slim frame with a roaring fit for a lion, was already swollen.
Clare gained the dubious safety and Mikal slammed the door to. “Brace… it,” the Shield managed, breathlessness the only indication of the efforts he had made so far. “Hurry.”
Does he think we treating this as a Sunday amble? Clare did not waste his own breath on a sharp reply. Pico, his jacket in tatters and his fine waistcoat ripped, was already shoving a jumble of broken wood that had once been a secretary against the door. Mikal’s boots slipped slightly on grime-caked wooden boards, and cords stood out on the Shield’s neck as he sought to hold the entry against the soft, deadly pressure from outside.
Aberline hobbled, dragging a sprung-stuffing chair across the uneven boards. Clare’s lungs protested, he whooped in a deep breath, reloading his Bulldog. When that operation was finished, he helped Pico drag another piece of shattered furniture against the door; next came a huge, shipwrecked chunk of masonry helpfully fallen from somewhere.
The soft scraping from outside did not lower in volume at all. That was quite chilling, Clare allowed, and proceeded to ignore it. He straightened, dusting his hands. “Where now?”
“Down-cellar.” Aberline leaned heavily upon Pico. “Good God, is Thin Meg mad?”
“Has she ever been sane?” Mikal’s laugh was a marvel of restrained rage. “My Prima visited her, she knew far more than she allowed.”
“Ah. And Bannon believed what Meg said?” Aberline sounded as if he rather did not credit the notion.
“I should think not. She is too wise to believe many things.” Mikal pointed at a far corner, between mounds of wrecked wood and marble. “There, I would say.”
The walls had been torn through, and there were fittings–brass, copper, other materials–that could have been sold. Yet Clare did not think those who passed through, no matter what crypt below Londinium they aimed for, would take anything from this sad, ramshackle place. There was a faint chill exhalation from every surface, and the darkness seemed altogether too thick to be mere shadow.
“Been two years since I last,” Pico breathed, once. “Hasn’t changed a bit.”
“It never does.” Aberline, shortly.
They were making a great deal of noise, but Clare saw no point in quieting them. Mikal was a ghost, and he kept Aberline well within sight.
The cellar was reached through a hole hacked in the floor of what might have been a sitting room, once. There was a ladder made of what looked like nailed-together bits of lath, though it was surprisingly solid.
Aberline made a short pained sound when he landed, and would have toppled if not for Mikal’s steadying.
Even here, things were not quite right. A drift of coal, worth good money, clustered against the closer end of the cellar, though the chute it would have been poured through seemed blocked.
Rather good thing, too, Clare thought, and shivered at the idea of hearing soft starveling hisses in the dark.
Aberline had struck a lucifer, and Clare saw a yawning hole in the ground opposite the coal-pile. It looked far too large for its own borders, one of Londinium’s more irrational corners, and a familiar pain gripped his temples.
Mikal paused. His dark head came up, a stripe of blood and dirt on his cheek black in the lucifer’s glare.
Aberline halted as well, quite amazingly pale under the muck and dust he was covered with. He grimaced as he shifted his weight. Pico’s breathing was stertorous in the stillness, but the lad was holding up gamely. With his hair knocked out of its careful slick-back and his eyes wide, he looked rather young.
And fragile.
“Mikal?” Clare whispered.
“I think…” The Shield shook his head, as if tossing away said thought. “Come.”
Clare, his faculties straining under the weight of what he might be about to witness, had a very rational thought. We should have brought a lanthorn.
As if in answer, a sound rose from the hole. Long, and loud, it stripped the hair from their fevered brows and brushed against their clothing.
Later, Clare could not think quite what the sound had been. A rumble, a moving of earth, the roar-breath of a massive fire, the sea suckling at its rocky confines? No, too much. Perhaps it was the internal shifting of a lie told or found out, or a betrayal that struck one to a heart’s core–but that was ridiculous. It was merely Feeling, and Clare should set it aside.
Aberline gasped, rocking back on his heels, but Mikal’s reaction was even more marked.
“Emma!” he screamed, and leaped forwards into the dark, his footsteps, for once, heavy with reckless speed.
The massive sound did not echo, but it left some imprint on the space around the three left in Mikal’s wake, broken only by a thin, light, unholy tapping Clare had heard before: footsteps of a creature that carried a sharp-ended whip. The healed slice along his forearm send a pang up to his shoulder.
Clare also heard, as if in a nightmare, a slow, soft, draining hiss.
Chapter Forty-Four
In The Final Weighing
The first surprise was that it did not hurt. The knife cleaved flesh, yes, and there was a hot jet of salt-crimson blood.
Then… droplets hung in midair, and the blooming within her was a sweet pain. Her Discipline roared, needing no chant to shape it. No, when a Discipline spoke, the entire sorcerer was the throat it passed through.
It required only the strength to submit. As long as that strength lasted, wonders could be worked.
What had she done? Turned inward, yes, and found… what?
Not m’pence, Marta Tebrem whispered. Needs it for my doss, I do.
They spun around her, sad women and merry, dead on a knife or by a strangle, in childbed or by fever, by gin or misadventure, in hatred or in desperation, by folly or chance. She was of the Endor, but even more importantly, she was of their number, and the spark that rose within her was both negation and acceptance.
Some of them had wished for release from the miserable drudgery and endless pain. There was the acceptance.
Yet even louder, and containing the acceptance a
s a shell contains a nut, the denial.
No. I will not.
Should not, or could not, those were incorrect. The refusal was a hard shell, wrapped about the tender thing called a soul trapped in a fragile and perishable body.
Beat me, hurt me, kill me, I will not.
Or perhaps the refusal was merely her own, even her Discipline bending to a will grown strong by both feeding and confinement.
They streamed through her, the women of Whitchapel, and their cries were the same as the Warrior Queen Boudicca in her chariot–a vessel of Britannia dishonoured, slain in battle, but still remembered.
Still alive, if only in the vast storehouse of memory a ruling spirit could contain.
No. I live.
The heart struggled, the lungs collapsing with shock. Her murderer crowed with glee, his purpose achieved, his chant becoming the savagery of an attacker’s, almost swallowing the sound of sorcery spilling through the bloody necklace of a cut throat.
I live.
They burst free of her not-quite-corpse–for the throat-cutting does not kill immediately, for a few crucial moments the sorceress, her Discipline invoked, was between living and dead. A threshold, a lintel, a doorway…
… and Death itself, the other face of the coin called Life, for a bare moment gave a fraction of the citizens of its dry uncharted country their mortal voices back.
The unsound was massive, felt behind eye and heart and throat…
… and it struck down the man who had sought to give a mockery of Life with a flood of leprous-green flame.
He squealed, beating at the fire that erupted from his slowly regrowing mortal flesh, but such is the nature of Death’s burning that it consumes metal, red muscle, rock itself, the dry fires of stars and the tenderness of green shoots, all in their own time.
He fell against the obsidian altar, and the sound of its shattering was lost in another–the scream of a malformed soul given half-life, brushed with a feather of sorcery and set free.
The Promethean fled, shrieking, and on a wooden shelf in a stone womb underneath Londinium, a sorceress’s mortality writhed.
For a dizzying moment she trembled between, neither alive nor dead, as the sisters of murder and confinement clamoured for her voice to be added to their number.
No.
In the end, the choice was hers alone. If she suffered under the lash of living in a world not made for her sex, it was the price extracted for protecting those upon whom her regard fell. Those she protected–did her arrogance extend so far as to think she was, in her own way, their final keeper?
To rule is lonely, and there was the last temptation.
The pieces of her erstwhile lover’s spell curled about her. Her mortal death could fuel its completion, for she had taken from him, again, everything.
He had wrought too well, when he sought the perfect victim. In that perfection itself lay his undoing.
Oh yes, it was possible. To take the shards and knit them together, to drive the taproot deep into the shimmering field of pain and Empire, and to become what he had wished to create: a spirit of rule.
One last, painless lunge, and she would Become.
She could be what she had pledged to serve and turned against. She could drain the vital force of the ancient, weary being who charted Empire’s course. She could wrap herself in its vestments and strike down the physical vessel of that being, choose a vessel of her own and arrange not merely her household but the world itself to her liking.
It would take so little. In the end, only the decision to do mattered.
And yet.
For the final time, the will holding the door open for Discipline spoke. The choice was made, had always been made, for she was as she had been created, and the pride she bore would not allow her to become an usurper.
Her answer was clear, if only in the shuttered halls of a human heart–that country where sorcery and even Death are only guests. Tolerated, but, in the final weighing, negligible.
I live.
I live.
I live.
Chapter Forty-Five
A More Difficult Problem
“Curse the man,” Aberline muttered. “Curse him, I say.” Creaking, groaning sounds. “I am not venturing into that hole.” He lit another lucifer. He was using them recklessly, having a pocketful of them–perhaps it was part of an inspector’s duty, to have one when necessary? “Clare, your pistol—”
“Five shots.” He lifted the Bulldog calmly. “Then they will swarm us as I seek to reload. Pico?”
“I’ve a blade or two.” The youth spat aside, still bracing Aberline from the side. The whites of his eyes gleamed. “I don’t fancy being suffocated by Thin Meg’s children, mind you.”
Who is this Meg? She sounds atrocious. Then again, Londinium was full of such creatures. Had he not seen a dragon in Southwark, once? The irrationality of the memory no longer bothered him overmuch, in the face of the current situation.
Clare tilted his head. They were drawing closer, those light, unholy, dancing footsteps. “We may have a more difficult problem in a few moments, gents. To the coal-pile, quickly!”
“What about him?” Pico’s chin jutted toward the hole.
Perhaps he shall solve that problem for us. Or be solved himself. “He is well-equipped to handle himself, and he will find Miss Bannon. We are not so durable, and I can hear that thing coming. To the coal, now. Come, Aberline!”
Groaning sounds, scraping, from overhead. The starvelings had patiently, inch by inch, pushed the blockage at the door aside. Or they had found some other means of entry. Even the skeletons had some weight, and enough of them could work their way around every obstacle. Those fingers of theirs, dead-white and squirming…
A rustling, and a thump. A pale shape fell past the lath-ladder, hit the packed dirt of the cellar floor, and lay there twitching.
Tiptap. Tiptap. Tip tip tap tap tip tap tip tap—
They reached the coal. Aberline flung himself upon its hard pillow with a grunt, and Clare whirled, his Bulldog’s stout nose coming up. He would at least sell their lives dearly. “Climb the coal,” he hissed, fiercely, as the starveling made a convulsive, tired movement. It was insane, to think of anything so skeletal moving, a glitter of mad intelligence in its yellowed, sunken eyes. “Climb, damn you!”
Tiptap. Tiptaptiptaptiptap.
The Coachman burst from the dark hole Mikal had vanished into, its eyes red coals, and Clare bit back a cry. The thing was terribly solid now, and its face was no longer mercifully obscured. A ruin of runnelled flesh, broken glass-sharp teeth, wide sunken nostrils, hands of clawed monstrosity. It ran with a queer lurching grace, one shoulder occasionally hitching higher than the other as if it was a hunchback, and as it ran its bones crackled.
It paid no attention to the men on the hillock of cursed coal. Instead, it hurled itself on the single starveling that had fallen down–a pebble in the face of a larger avalanche–and buried its face in the skeletal creature’s midriff. The howling that rose was a broken-glass scraping against sanity, but Clare, for once, did not look away.
He watched the irrationality unfolding before him as Aberline cursed, Pico let out a strangled noise, and several small soft plops sounded as more starvelings fell through the hole to swarm the unholy thing consuming one of their number.
Chapter Forty-Six
Pronounced Once Before
Choking. A clot of soft rock in her throat, forced free, she spat a wad of blood and phlegm aside and inhaled. Her breath died on a scream; the lamp-flames trembled. The altar was grinding itself to pieces, shards of obsidian piercing the body that had fallen across it, and her cry was matched by another–a rusty, horrific sound.
She landed in wet noisome filth, falling from the shelf that had kept her free of the squelching. This far below Londinium, the Themis’s puddled feet were at the bottom of every hole. Her skirts and petticoats were flayed to ribbons, but her stays were still intact, and she was glad of their support as s
he screamed, throat afire with the memory of a scarlet necklace-wound.
A sobbing inhale, she fought the urge to scream again. It hurt, ætheric force bleeding through rips and rents, her self forced into a brutalised container. Her Discipline receded, the touch of sunheat on burned and blistered skin all along her internal pathways.
Retreating little tips and taps, she heard the Promethean fleeing. Tortured breathing that was not her own echoed as the obsidian shredded, thrusting its fragments heavenward with popping and sharp glass-singing noises.
What happened?
The memory of infinity receded, training forcing it aside. Black flowers bloomed at the corners of her vision, and the idea of just collapsing into the sludge beneath her was wonderfully enticing.
Get up. The Promethean is gone. Finish what you came for.
The question was, just what exactly had she endured this for? Certainly not Britannia.
Oh, d—n it all, Emma. Get UP.
She levered herself painfully to her feet. Her hair was a tangled mess, full of dirt and heaven alone knew what; her dress was all but gone. She used the wooden shelf she had been lain upon to finish the job of hauling herself upright, and saw with no real surprise that she had been sharing that hard narrow couch with an ancient skeleton. The skull was shattered, the brown bones traced with green–mildew, moss, perhaps even Scab.
A shudder wormed through her. She hunched her shoulders, like a child expecting a sharp corrective blow, and turned her head aside from the skull’s grimace.
The second pair of lungs working in this small stone cube were Llewellyn Gwynnfud’s. The shattered block of glassy volcanic stone had turned to fanglike fragments, and speared through his body, regrowing flesh and metal Alterations pierced alike. Steaming crimson blood and thick black oil-ichor coated the larger shards. As she watched, the obsidian fractured again, and the wreck of a sorcerer made another wretched sound as fresh spears pierced him.