The Ripper Affair (Bannon and Clare)

  How does it feel, sir? Does it satisfy your hunger? She coughed again, a second blood-clot forced free of her lungs, and when she spat the hot nasty pellet aside she found she could breathe much more easily.

  One thing left to do. She was so weary.

  He had taken her shoes off. Barefoot as a Whitchapel drab, she tottered across the intervening space. “Llew.” A harsh croak; she would never sing as a lady.

  Oh, I pretend, and I put on a good show. But in the end, I suppose it’s taken a Whitchapel girl to bring him down.

  I wonder if it took one to build an Empire, too?

  Immaterial. She found her voice again. “Llewellyn.” What did she have to say?

  His mad muddied gaze was a dumb animal’s. What must it be like, for Will and Stone to scrape a body together from the wreckage of a Major Work gone wrong? Had the bleached bones at Dinas Emrys been host to his consciousness?

  Had he watched her stand over them, expressionless, for a half-hour before she turned and walked away? Could he have seen that without eyes?

  Amid the broken, metal-laced ribs of his chest, the Stone gleamed.

  “Emma,” he breathed, and his deformed hands twitched. One of them had kept the knife hilt clasped tight, and still knotted about it. The blade was no longer shining, but twisted and blackened. In its heart, a thin line of crimson.

  The whip, and the knife. The Promethean is above, and will begin to murder. She set herself, and leaned drunkenly forward.

  “Emma!” A cry from behind her.

  Her fingers, blackened by dirt, soot, and her own blood, curled about a warm pulsing.

  “Emma,” Llew breathed. Had he remembered her name, and forgotten his own?

  “Llewellyn Gwynnfud.” A wetness on her cheeks, scalding, as the lamplight scoured her eyes. “I loved you, once.”

  The curled, useless knifeblade twitched. His mouth opened, perhaps to curse her, perhaps to plead.

  Emma Bannon set her heels, gathered her strength, and pulled, with flesh and ætheric force combined.

  A vast wrenching crack.

  The lamps snuffed themselves as a moaning wind rose. She fell backwards, collapsing in filthy water, the second Philosopher’s Stone clutched to her chest.

  Very close now, a howling.

  Mikal.

  He screamed her name, but if he had followed her this far, he would be able to proceed in her direction without light. She clasped the warm hardness of the Stone to her chest, and with the last scrap of ætheric force she possessed, breathed a Word she had pronounced once before.

  In the dark, bones ground themselves to powder as the glassy broken altarstone shivered afresh.

  Frantic splashing, and he blundered into the darkness, his irises yellow lamps and his hands a clutching relief as they bruised her, wrenched her upward and away.

  As she had hoped, though perhaps not in the way she had planned, Mikal had found her.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  An Echo Within Himself

  A snowdrift of pale, emaciated bodies falling through the opening overhead, making very little sound as they dropped upon the Coachman’s convulsing form. The starvelings’ jaws worked restlessly, clicking and grinding small, discoloured teeth together as they smothered the creature.

  It was deadly, and it ripped at their frail forms, but it could find nothing in them to eat. Rancid green dust slid from the rents torn in their stretched-tight flesh, the Coachman’s slaver turning vilely luminescent as it mixed with that granular decay.

  Clare kept the pistol trained. The scene before him was revolting, but even worse, it was irrational, and the throbbing in his temples was his faculties straining to make what he saw obey the dictates of Logic and Reason.

  Do not look away.

  The hissing became the soap-slathered gurgle of wash-water sliding down a pipe. The thing’s struggles were weakening, and its whip was lost under an undulating mass of starvelings. Its long, spidery fingers kept seeking for the handle, blindly, but even had it found the braided leather it could not possibly have untangled it from the writhing.

  Keep looking. The Bulldog’s nose trembled. Behind him, Aberline was violently sick; he muttered something about the sorcery, and then wet, crunching noises began.

  The Coachman screamed, a miserable baby-cry. It squirmed, and cloth ripped. The starvelings’ clever, bony, insistent fingers peeled away scraps of muffler, of a different frock coat than the one the creature had worn before, of shirt. A button shone, describing an arc and catching a gleam from somewhere–where, Clare never discerned, for it was dark as sin, and his night-adapted eyes could only see suggestions lit by the Coachman’s glowing slaver as the starvelings commenced their meal.

  “Climb,” Pico said, his voice breaking boyishly. “Come on, Clare!”

  He kept the gun’s snout level and steady. “Go on,” he heard himself say, as if in a terrible dream. Was this, indeed, what dreaming felt like? “I shall hold them back.”

  For some of the starvelings had noticed, in their wandering, lethargic way, the living meat upon the pile of coal. They dragged each other upright with terrible blind insistence, shuffling across the cellar floor. Closer, and closer, and he had five bullets. They would have to count. He could perhaps empty the chambers and reload as they retreated up the coal-hill, but there was the blockage in the chute to consider.

  I believe we are all going to die here, even Mikal. I wonder, will they chew me to pieces? Am I proof against that? Or smothering?

  And… Emma. They had brought the beast to bay, but what of the sorcerer?

  A second faint green radiance bloomed, in the opposite corner. Clare kept the pistol trained. “Aberline?”

  A retching cough, before the inspector’s calm, hopeless voice. “Yes, Mr Clare?”

  “I am sorry to have brought you here.” I am sorry for more, did you but know.

  At least the inspector was a gentleman in extremis. “Quite all right, old boy. Couldn’t be helped.” The words trembled, firmed. “We shan’t get out this way, you know. It’s blocked.”

  A series of alternatives clicked through Clare’s faculties, discarded as they arose. A means could be found to ignite the coal, but the fumes and smoke would asphyxiate them before doing any good.

  He was savagely weary, even though physically unharmed. Apparently, there were limits to even Miss Bannon’s gifts.

  Emma. Are you alive?

  The Bulldog barked, and the flash destroyed his vision for a moment. The nearest starveling folded down, its head a battered mess, that green dust sliding out with its terrible, soft hissing sound.

  The Coachman screamed again, a wailing infant under a steadily growing pile.

  A woman’s voice, freighted with terrible power. “K—g’z’t!”

  Slow grinding, the noise of mountains rubbing together.

  Clare surfaced with a jolt. He found himself sprawled on coal, Pico’s boot in his back, as starvelings cowered at the end of the cellar. The leprous-green radiance at the opposite end of the cellar had intensified, and under it, he could see a thin shape.

  It was Miss Bannon, in the rags of her mourning dress and petticoats. The shadow behind her was Mikal, propping her up as her knees buckled. Clare squinted, and saw a glaring scar on her white throat, under a layer of filth. She had clapped one naked hand to her equally naked neck–her jewellery was gone, and it was queerly indecent to see her so. The pale glow, a different green than the starvelings’ dust, but equally irrational, issued from about her, a corona of illogical illumination.

  “Back,” she husked, a dry croaking word. “Back, Marimat. They are mine, they are not for you.”

  The starvelings writhed. One final, weak little cry from the Coachman-creature, silenced with a last nasty crunching. A sigh rippled through the starvelings, a wet wind on dry grass.

  “Sssssparrow-witch.” A thick, burping chuckle; it was one of the starvelings, but some other dark intelligence showed in its empty, rolling eyes. “Did you enjoy your
ssssssojourn?”

  “Quite diverting, twice-treacherous one.” Miss Bannon’s expression was just as empty, a terrible blank look upon her childlike features. “But I am at home again, Maharimat of the Third Host, and they are not for you.”

  “Little sssssparrow.” The starveling twitched forward. “You are flessssh, and you are weak. How will you ssssstop my children?”

  “How indeed.” The sorceress’s chin lifted. “I am Prime.” Her tone had lost none of its terrible, queer atonality. “Set yourself against me, creature of filth, and find out.”

  The hush that descended seemed to last a very long while. But the starvelings, cloaked in their mumbling hiss, drew back in a wave. The ones that could not climb the lath-ladder fell and split open, the green dust spreading and rising in oddly angular curls on a breeze from nowhere.

  He wondered what might grow from that dust. Was that how the Scab spread?

  The starvelings left behind a curled, battered, unspeakably chewed and quickly rotting body curled in the ruins of a coachman’s cloth, and a tangled whip shredding itself as it jerked and flopped, the bright metal at its ravelled end chiming before it blackened and twisted like paper in a fire. There was a creaking and a crack, a final obscene wet chuckle, and the lath-ladder plunged down, shivering into sticks.

  The Coachman was indisputably dead. Its ruin fell apart with a wet sliding, and green smoke rose. It shredded, making for a moment the likeness of an anguished face, and the soughing that slid through the cellar lifted sweat-drenched hair and a pall of coal-dust.

  Coughing, Clare lowered the pistol. Behind him, Aberline retched again, deeply and hopelessly. Pico breathed a term that was an anatomical impossibility, but nevertheless managed to express his profound, unbelieving relief at this turn of events.

  Miss Bannon stayed upright for a long moment before crumpling, and Mikal caught her. His expression, before the green flame winked out, was full of the same devouring intensity Clare had witnessed only once before, in front of his mistress’s bedroom door, in the dark, after he had worked a miracle to save her from the Red Plague.

  What would he call such a twisting of a man’s features? Was there a word for it? Did it matter?

  It did not. For he found, to his dismay, that he recognised the look, though he could not name and quantify it. It found an echo within himself, one which could not be spoken of or even thought too deeply upon lest it break his overstrained faculties.

  So Archibald Clare sagged back against the coal and closed his eyes. In a moment he would set his wits to the matter of bringing them out of this awful place.

  For now, though, he simply lay there, and felt the breath moving in, and out, of his thankful, whole, undamaged, and quite possibly immortal frame.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  To Sting, Or To Soothe

  The fussing was not to be borne. “Tighter,” Emma said, and the corset closed about her cruelly. “Enough, thank you. Severine, I am quite well.”

  “Mais non, madame.” The round woman in her customary black was pale, but she forged onwards. “You can barely stand, and monsieur le bouclier said you were to sleep until—”

  “Mikal does not dispose of me, Severine. I dispose of myself, thank you, and if you truly wish to help, stop this fretting and tell Mr Finch I am not receiving unless the widow calls.” He will know what that means. “And make certain Mr Clare and Philip are properly attended to.”

  “Stubborn,” Severine said, under her breath, and as she flounced from the dressing room Bridget and Isobel brought forth a dress from a tall birchwood wardrobe.

  The housekeeper was met at the door by a silent Mikal, who held it courteously for her and slid into the dressing room without bothering to knock.

  “She is quite worried.” He halted, watching as the dress was lifted over Emma’s head. Quick fingers put everything to rights, brushing black silk tenderly, and Emma told herself that the trembling in her knees would fade. This was no time to appear weakened.

  “Worry is acceptable.” Her breath came short. It was the corset, she told herself. “Ordering me about is not. Loosen the neck a trifle, Isobel. I rather dislike being throttled so.”

  Isobel hurried to obey. She did not remark upon the glaring scar ringing her mistress’s throat. It would pale and shrink, as the Stone in her chest–a familiar, heavy, warm weight, how had she lived without it?–worked its slow wonder.

  She had not needed whatever miracle Mikal had wrought–or had she? Would she have survived, even with the flood of her Discipline sustaining her?

  Her plan had succeeded. They had indeed come to find her. Now, though, she wondered if she had been quite wise to treat Mikal so.

  “Isobel, fetch a bit more chocolat, please. And Bridget, I have a mind to refill that perfume flask–no, the green one. Yes. Do hurry along to Madame Noyon and have her do so, then come back to attend to my hair. Yes, girls, off with you.”

  They exchanged a dire look, Bridget’s freckles glaring against her milky cheeks, but they obeyed. Familiarity could only be stretched so far, here at 34½ Brooke Street.

  That left her alone with her Shield, with stockinged feet, her hair undone and not a scrap of jewellery to armour her.

  He was just the same, except for the marks of exhaustion about his eyes. Tall and straight in olive-green velvet–he had, apparently, decided he no longer mourned. Or perhaps he wished her to insist.

  She wet her lips with a nervous flicker of her tongue. Wished she had not, for his gaze fastened upon her mouth. Her legs were most unsteady, but her stays helped to bolster her, at least to some degree.

  “It was necessary.” She plunged ahead, for his expression was set and quiet, and she did not like the… what was it, that she felt? Uncertainty? “I could not have you following me too soon. And… whatever you performed upon me, Mikal, I could not—”

  “You do not have to explain yourself to your Shield, Prima.” He took two steps towards her, halted.

  They regarded each other, Shield and sorceress, and the sounds of movement elsewhere in the house were very loud behind their silence.

  Perhaps I wish to. Emma swallowed, dryly, acutely conscious of the movement of muscle in her vulnerable throat. “Mikal…”

  He looked away, at the open wardrobe. Dresses peeked out, in the darker jewel-shades she preferred. She would mourn properly for Ludovico, now. When she shed the black, perhaps there were other things she would shed as well.

  Except the names of her failures, the rosario she repeated to puncture her own arrogance. Harry. Thrent. Namal. Jourdain. Eli.

  Ludovico.

  She braced herself. Lifted her chin, aware that the scar would show. It was time, she decided, for Mikal to receive some measure of truth from her. “I would not care to lose you, Shield.”

  As if she were the Shield, and he, her charge.

  A slight smile. “I would not care to be lost.”

  Did it mean he forgave her? Dare she ask? It was Mikal, why on earth should she feel this… was it fear? A Prime did not stoop to fearing a Shield. Or craving forgiveness from one of that brotherhood.

  Then why were her palms a trifle moist, and her heart galloping along so?

  She gathered herself, again. Chose each word carefully, enunciated it clearly. “One day, Mikal, I shall ask precisely what feat you performed while I suffered the Plague. I shall further ask why Clare knew of it, and I did not.”

  He still examined her dresses. “On that day I shall answer, Prima.”

  It was not satisfying at all. “Are you… distressed? By… recent events?”

  He finally turned to face her again. The smile had broadened, and become genuine. He closed the remaining distance between them with a Shield’s quiet step, and his fingers were warm on her cheeks.

  His mouth was warm too; she did not realise he had driven her back until her skirts brushed the dressing table and her shoulders met the wall to its side, her own fingers tangling in his hair and her body suddenly enclosed in a di
fferent confinement, one that robbed her of breath and the need to brace her knees.

  He held her there, tongue and lips dancing their own Language of fleshly desire, and when she broke away to breathe he printed a kiss on her cheek, another on her jaw, a third behind her ear where the hollow of flesh was so exquisitely vulnerable.

  “A heart is a heart,” he breathed, against the side of her scarred throat. “And a stone is a stone.”

  What on earth does that mean? She stored the question away, stroked his dark hair. He was shaking, or was it that her own trembling had communicated to him?

  “You are my Shield,” she whispered, and drew her hands away. Laid her head upon his shoulder, for once, and allowed the will that kept her upright to slacken for a few moments.

  He held her, rested his chin atop her tangled curls. His reply was almost inaudible.

  “You are my heart.”

  Like any reprieve, it did not last very long. In short order she had descended to the solarium, her hair finally set to rights, silver chalcedony rings upon three of her fingers, her ear-drops of marcasite and jet comforting weights, and a twisted golden brooch bearing a teardrop of green amber pinned to her bosom.

  Finch cleared his throat.

  Emma glanced up from the hellebore, which was springing back quite nicely under its charm-globe. “Ah. Finch. Is Mr Clare awake?”

  “Yesmum. He is in the drawing room.” Finch blinked once, rather like a lizard. He looked grave, but no more than usual. “With a certain personage, mum. Two certain personages.”

  “Ah.” She studied the hellebore for a few more moments. “I am… sorry that you must endure the inspector’s presence.”

  “Quite all right, mum.” Did he sound slightly shocked? “I… have every confidence, thank you. In your, erm, protection.”

  At least someone does. She was hard-pressed not to smile. “Good. I take it the second personage is a widow?”