“Mr Clare,” she heard herself say, as if from a great distance, “it would be very well if you were to retreat from that spot. Quickly.”
“Prima?” Mikal’s single word, shaded with a different question.
Her free arm, rigidly pointing at the floating pebble, trembled. “Take Clare halfway down the stairs.” Mikal hesitated, and her temper almost snapped. “Now, Shield.”
He turned loose of her with less alacrity than she would have liked, but he obeyed. At least Clare knew better than to question at this juncture. For a moment it was as if Time itself had turned back and it was one of the many investigations or intrigues between their inauspicious first meeting and the crushing denouement of the Plague affair. The only thing missing was Ludovico’s silent sneer as he hustled Clare to safety or took up a guard post down the hall, which he might have done if he could have moved more quickly than Mikal.
Do not think upon that, Emma.
Instead, she focused, tucking the irritating veil aside as her jewellery flamed with heat, its ætheric charge responding to the spreading disturbance. The pebble still hung in midair, and she wondered if any of those who sheltered here noticed the spot, or if they simply felt the chill and avoided even glancing at something inimical. Even a lowly charter with barely the ability to trace a symbol in quivering air could have sensed the disturbance, and probably found other accommodations forthwith.
If there were any to be had; shelter of any kind was expensive in Whitchapel.
She extended a few thread-delicate tendrils of awareness to discern the true shape of the tangle. It throbbed, an abscess under the surface of the visible, a monstrous root driven deep through the real and almost-real. Emma risked another light touch, as a woman would pass her hand down a pinned dress-fold to discern if it would hang true. Intuition plucked at the knot, finding its shape and the likely directions it would bulge upon being observed.
She could have patiently unpicked it, inch by careful inch. It would have been better to refuse Victrix outright than to hurry now, and yet the sooner she found precisely what manner of disturbance this was, she could leave the entire displeasing mess behind her.
The solution, as ever, was to simply cast her net and see what rose with it to the surface. Training clamped its iron grasp about her body and she exhaled smoothly, stepping deliberately forward into the small pond of concentrated irrationality.
The gin, false friend, hung thick and close inside her head, veils of welcome warmth. A rancid burp, the simmering smell of her own clothes, as familiar-strange as this wide-hipped body, loose and sagging with despair. Stumbling, falling against the wall, she turned to see him, his hat pulled low and only the suggestion of a chin under its shade.
Twas not his features she was interested in, but the pence burning in her hot palm. A man paid before he received, that was the best way of business, even for one as curst as old Marta. He had not demurred.
“Le’s ha’at thee, then,” she slurred, and that was when a jet of light cleaved the gloom.
She did not feel the first blow. It was the warm gush down her front that warned her, but her throat was full of that darkness, the same covering his face. It crawled down as if it wished to inhabit her stomach, and the knife came up again.
He fell upon her, and her fist clenched, but only because she thought, “Not m’pence, needs it for a doss I do”, before the void swelled obscenely past her stomach, clawing at her vitals, and she knew no more.
Emma staggered, the shock of her knees hitting the filthy floor only slightly cushioned by her skirts. Her spine stiffened, bending backward as if on a medieval spikehoop, and she was not conscious of her own voice: a high curlew cry that punched a perfect, circular hole in the bleached, sagging wall. Her jewellery blazed, diamonds at her throat emitting shrieking stress-screams, and the jet earrings shattered, their shards driven outwards as if propelled by burning gunpowder. Later, she would find the silver cuffs heat-rippled and all but useless for carrying ætheric force.
Still, they had performed another service: keeping her from being overwhelmed.
Tension snapped and she was thrown back, hitting something almost-soft and tumbling, a brief moment of merciful unconsciousness before the pain swallowed her whole. Even then training did not fail her, but behaved even more mercilessly, shunting the force of the blow aside as the entire building–and the street outside–shivered like a whipped cur. Her own shrieks rattled the walls, plaster dust falling fine and thin, Mikal’s answering curse lost under a wall of rushing noise as he lowered her, his fingers biting cruelly as he sought to stop the wild thrashing.
He had left Clare to see to her, and she did not even recognise the fact.
One of a Shield’s functions was to conduct such an overflow away from her, but this was too immense. A high ringing noise, a wet snapping, peeling sound, and the world settled into its accustomed dimensions again with a thump. Emma sagged, vicious-toothed trembling all through her as hot pain pounded between her temples.
Silence filled the dark stairwell. Soon there would be shouts, and running feet. Even in Whitchapel, such an event as this would not go unremarked.
“Prima?” Mikal, raggedly. “Emma?”
One last pang, ripping through her, phantom blade cleaving flesh and breastbone. She curled around the blow, blind and witless, and Mikal held her down. It passed, and the shuddering, great gripping waves of it, began anew.
“Saw it,” she managed. “I saw it!” Which meant the sorcery performed here, driving itself through the physical and ætheric, had found some resonance within her, and jolted home with explosive force.
The pebble completed its fall, and pinged against the floor. It did not sound right; the entire area bounded by the cold had been changed smoothly and seamlessly to glass. One could peer down into a dim, narrow hallway underneath, and the circular hole punched in the wall had thin, knife-sharp crystalline edges. A nasty smell boiled through, whistling darkness loaded with the breath of the privy-closet that had hidden behind.
At the moment, the crushing ache in her skull and the savage pain all through her body somewhat precluded examining the damage further. Now she was well and truly involved in this affair–all for the want of a pause before leaping in. “I…” She coughed, retching, her stomach threatening to unseat itself. “Hurts.”
“Pax, Prima. I am here.” Was Mikal shaking too, or was it merely her own shivering?
“Dreadful,” she managed, in a colourless little voice. “Home. Shield… home.”
“Yes.”
With that assurance she let go of consciousness again, retreating to the deepest parts of herself as her violated mind sought to compass what had happened.
Two ideas followed her, both equally chilling.
The first was He had no face.
The second? But he had a knife.
Chapter Fifteen
Unremembering Such A Thing
The return to Mayefair proved long and tense, the streets clogged with shouting, heaving traffic. It was also cramped, for Mikal cradled the sorceress’s small form and ignored Clare entirely, studying her wan, slack face as if it held a secret and feeling for her throat- or wrist-pulse at intervals.
Clare did not feel it quite proper to venture forth again that day, even though Miss Bannon was in no condition to attend dinner and would consequently care little about his absence. He was to visit another Yard, and he had an inkling of which, yet he could not leave while the sorceress, pale and so unconscious she represented quite a deadweight, was abed. Mikal carried her upstairs, and Madame Noyon fluttered about fussing at the lady’s maids to help tend their mistress.
Clare himself went straight for the smoking room and its heavy walnut sideboard. His hand shook slightly as he poured himself a very healthy measure of brandy, and he downed it with quite unseemly haste. It left a burning in its wake, and he had to suppress a rumbling of the rudest sort from his scorched throat.
So much illogic could unsettle even the fines
t mind, he told himself, and his, while acceptable indeed, was not of that calibre. He could have Finch send out to an apothecary’s for coja, and yet the thought of its deadly stinging did not soothe as much as it could.
No, the brandy was far better. He eyed the sideboard. This being Miss Bannon’s house, there was no stinting in quantity or quality. Should he be so unfortunate as to feel a lack, no doubt any of the other liquids in crystal decanters would do, even the vitae. He had never drunk to excess–the consequent blunting of a mentath’s faculties was unacceptable–but he could at this moment bloody well see the attraction.
A rather awful day, all told. The sounds Miss Bannon had made–terrifying, wrenching cries, loaded with horrifying, illogical force. No doubt there would be a great deal of speculation over the burst of sorcery, and her carriage may have been remarked.
Dreadful indeed. The sound of earth hitting a coffin lid again, rattling through his skull vehemently, over a spatter of blood. Even he knew that for a sorceress to spill that most precious of vital fluids in such a place was dangerous.
“Eh, mentale. Drinking to death now?”
Clare whirled. The room was empty, its heavy dark wainscoting and fancifully painted ceiling–cavorting satyrs and nymphs, perhaps Miss Bannon’s comment on a man’s ideas–just the same as they always had been. The billiard table, where sometimes the clack of heavy striking reverberated as he cogitated upon a particular matter and Miss Bannon sipped her rum, was just the same, covered with its loose canvas because he had not availed himself of its geometric soothing for quite some time.
His sensitive nostrils flared. A breath of dirt, the smoke of a snuffed candle. And the strong oiled-metal smell of a man who lived by violence, his wits sharp and his pockmarked cheeks sallow.
Impossible. The silver globe-lights were not flickering. It was his eyelids, falling and rising with extraordinary rapidity as his faculties sought to discern the evidence of the real from heated phantasy. Simply impossible.
There was no Neapolitan lounging near the door, where he was wont to pause before edging in to select a cigar from the silver-chased humidor–long, slender, floral in taste, and utterly strange in his blunt, dirty fingers.
“Merely the strain,” Clare muttered, the words falling into dead, heavy air. He had never noticed before how close it was in this particular room without a woman’s light laughing questions, a muttered reply in Calabrian when a man forgot himself and the tone of his youth wore through his careful mask. Or the clack of the heavy billiard-spheres providing their own music, smoke hanging in the air before being whisked toward the fireplace with a charm-crackle. “A dreadful day. A dreadful week. A touch more brandy, and some rest. For my nerves.”
As if a mentath was prey to such a thing as shattered nerves. It was ridiculous to even suggest.
And yet.
He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, turned back to the sideboard and poured another generous measure. No, not rest. Rest would not do him any good at all. Only work would cure this uneasiness, the feeling that the earth itself would cease obeying its laws of proper quiescence or motion and begin behaving as irrationally as sorcery itself.
“Experiments.” He gazed at the hand holding the tumbler of brandy, amber liquid trembling. Familiar as his own breath, that fleshly appendage, and the possibilities began to swirl inside his skull.
He did not realise, as he swilled the brandy and poured himself another, that he had left the crushed papers detailing Marta Tebrem’s injuries, and statements given by witnesses, in Miss Bannon’s carriage, where Harthell would find them and hand them to Finch without comment, to be placed upon Miss Bannon’s study desk. It was a shocking sign of absent-mindedness in so normally precise a man.
Indeed, had Clare even an inkling of unremembering such a thing as said papers, he might have thought his condition warranted no little concern. As it was, he simply poured and swallowed until the decanter was empty, and left the smoking room and its shrouded table with a hurried, slightly rolling gait.
He did not feel inebriated in the least.
Chapter Sixteen
Rare And Wondrous
Waking after such an atrociously uncomfortable event could not possibly put one in a cheerful mood. Especially when said waking was triggered by an amazing, thumping bang from the depths of her house, and Mikal’s muttered curse as he flung her bedroom door open.
Without knocking.
“He will kill himself, Prima.” The Shield’s eyes were alight and his dark hair disarranged, as if he had run his hands back through it. “Or one of the servants. Or he may even bring the house down around our ears.”
Emma sighed, turning over and burying her face in the pillow. Even though the room was dark, her head ached abominably, and any hint of light scored her irritated eyes. “Unlikely,” she muttered, “on all three accounts. Go away.”
He reached her bedside, touched her shoulder with two careful fingers. “I hesitated to wake you. But he will harm someone, perhaps even himself.”
The last thing I remember… She shuddered as the recollection rose. Yet unconsciousness had blunted its sharp edges, and training had drained the venom. At least, enough for her to consider the vision calmly.
She had experienced Tebrem’s death, stroke for stroke.
She had also, more to the point, disrupted whatever that death had been meant to achieve or cement. A spreading, deepening stain, with all the febrile tension of Whitchapel’s poverty and violence–even in that semi-respectable building–to feed it. Now began the difficult but less dangerous work of deducing what she could of the murderer’s method and intention–then descending upon said murderer with the force of law, and the more considerable force of Emma’s irritation.
Speaking of deduction, she finally emerged from the haze of restorative slumber as another thump rattled the house. It was not a sorcerous sound, for the defences on her abode rippled only in response to her attention. “What on earth is he doing?”
“He is locked in the workroom, and since Tideturn all manner of noises have issued forth. The door is solid, and in any case…”
“Yes.” She blinked, yawned daintily, pushing the pillow and his fingers away with a measure of regret. An attempt to force the workroom door would trigger certain protections and a Prime’s will might strike before she was fully conscious. “Very well. Send up Severine and the maids. I shall sally forth and find out what he is about. But only after I’ve a bath and perhaps some chocolat–I feel dreadful.”
“No doubt. Dare I ask what that was?” He all but glared at her, as if she were an errant child.
She decided she did not wish to have such a conversation with Mikal just at the moment, and so feigned to misunderstand his meaning. “I gather he was chasing a set of mad political dynamitards; no doubt they opened up a fascinating and explosive line of enquiry for his active little brain. You are dismissed, Shield.”
For a long moment he stayed precisely where he was, waiting. When it became clear she would not speak further, he sank back on his heels. “Prima?”
“If you are not promising to bring me chocolat as quickly as possible, or informing me of a sudden disaster levelling the whole of Londinium, I do not think I am disposed to hear you.” A stretch informed her of her body’s protest over yesterday’s–at least, she hoped it was yesterday and that she had not been abed for more than a Tideturn or two–events, and she took stock. Stiffness in the lower back, her arms ached, and her head throbbed as if she had been at the rum a bit too much.
“Then I shall not speak.” His face closed in on itself; he spun on one heel, stalking for the door. A bright tang of lemon-yellow irritation was clearly visible to Sight.
Emma exhaled sharply, returning her focus fully to the physical world.
When we do have a conversation, Shield, it will be on my terms, and mine alone.
She finished her stretch, tasted morning in her mouth, and allowed herself a grimace. Her eyes were sandy and her hair was a b
ird’s nest, like a witch’s tangled mane. All in all, though, she felt surprisingly hale.
That was odd, wasn’t it? She had grown accustomed to a feeling of well-being, since she had awakened from the Red with none of the scarring or other ill effects that disease normally entailed. It was similar to the Philosopher Stone’s heavy warm weight, but without the crushing burden of… guilt? Her accursed conscience had weighed on her more and more, the longer she bore the Stone plucked from Llewellyn Gwynfudd’s… body?
Perhaps it had not been ejected from his corpse. Had it been clasped in his hand as he performed the movements to aid him in remembering the cantos of his brilliant, earthshaking, and utterly insane act of sorcery?
Her return to the site of his demise had gathered no proof: only hole-eaten, anonymous bones, gryphon as well as human, drained even of the ætheric traces of their living. The shock of such a Major Work unravelling had bleached the environs into a sorcerous null-point; truth be told, she had not wished to find a distinguishing mark that proved some of the bones were his. She had seen his corpus shred as his interrupted Work tore him apart; it was enough.
She had privately thought, for a very long while, that his talk of a second Stone had been merely a ploy to cause her some hesitation. In the end, she had always been disposable to him.
Emma settled back among the pillows as another rattling thud from downstairs rocked the house. Oh, for God’s sake. A moment’s worth of attention informed her that the stone walls of Clare’s workroom were as solid as ever, and the door–reinforced with sorcery and iron, just to be certain–was likewise. There was precious little he could do to himself, with that single Stone safely wedded to his lean, no-longer-aging body. And just at the moment, she was… a trifle peeved.
Did she wish to think upon such a thing now?
Well, at least she had a few precious moments of solitude to pause in reflection.