The Ripper Affair (Bannon and Clare) (27 page)

^“
C
urse 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.

C
hoking. 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 she 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.

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.

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.