The Ripper Affair (Bannon and Clare) (26 page)

T
he 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.

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.

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.

T
he 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.

T
he 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 as 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.