Other pressures crowding upon her flesh, as well. Ludovico. Clare. Victrix. This faceless man with his shining knife. Mikal himself, and all those of her household. Her collection of drifting souls, each one an anchor.
Without those weights, would she rise from the surface of the earth?
And where would she float to? There was no escape. The only solution was to arrange her immediate surroundings as comfortably as possible, which meant dealing with this affair quickly, directly and ruthlessly.
She swallowed, her throat obeying with a dry click. “Come along then.” She reclaimed her hand, and his expression did not change.
It was not as comforting as she might have wished, but at least it freed her for other worries. Chief among them was what, precisely, she might endure on Bucksrow, at the site of the second murder.
“A cart driver found her.” Soft, thoughtfully. Strengthening cloud-filtered sunlight had scorched Bucksrow clean of its thin coating of Scab, but the cobbles and pavers held thin whorls and traceries of its green, burrowing into the cracks between to wait for darkness. “The Hospital is there.” She pointed at its distant, looming bulk, more sensed than seen through the fog. Her forehead furrowed in a most unladylike manner. “But there is little trace of disturbance. How very curious.”
Cracked and missing cobbles, crumbling paving, timbers blackened with age and paint peeling–where the Scab had not eaten it–from whatever it coated.
Mikal took in the surroundings. “She was certain this…” It was eminently clear who he meant, both by the stress on the she and the suggestion of a lip-curl.
“Was an act by our quarry, yes.” Emma drew her fur-lined mantle closer. Its surface glimmered with moisture, and it did nothing to stave off the cold that descended upon her. Autumn had arrived. Soon after, winter. A further chill coursed down her back. “I am quite certain this is the place.”
“Bloodstain.” He pointed, a swiftly elegant gesture, tendons standing out on the back of his hand. “Right before the stable doors.”
He did not mention that the Scab had been scorched away there too, and no thin traces of green remained even in the crevices.
Emma glanced at the street again. Something about the angle of the stain was not quite right. “Locked after dark, one presumes.” A steady, warm exhalation enfolded them both–the dryness of hide and mane, the sharp mechanical tang of oil for clockhorse gears. She extended a tendril of awareness, probed ever so gently. “I wonder…”
She stepped forward, directly onto the darkened paving stones. Her corpus had braced itself for an uncomfortable experience, and the complete lack of one demanded a response. Her training dug its clawed fingers in her vitals, and she shook the sensation away. “Hm. Mikal?”
“I am here, Prima.”
Of course you are. But it was the response she had wanted. She closed her eyes, tugging on invisible threads in the tangled snarl of the fleshly world.
There. A raw, aching space inside her throbbed in response and she leaned forward, barely conscious of Mikal’s fingers closing about her arm. He braced her, and she gave up outward consciousness, plunging in.
One string, a spider’s thread of wrong amid all the myriad twisted, tangled knots.
Salt against abraded flesh, copper terror flooding a mouth not her own, a rocking motion and the crack of a whip.
Her head snapped aside. Reflex let the blow slide away, her body stiffening only slightly. Impressions flashed through her, a tide of hot sourness and deep-driving pain, a warm gush down her front.
“Carriage,” she gasped.
Another rehearsal. It did not go as well as the preceding, I should think.
“Here now! What are you aboot?”
It was a florid, stocky man with a coachman’s cap, massive side-whiskers and shoulders giving him the appearance of a walrus. He had barrelled from the stable’s stinking depths, and as Emma thudded home into her own flesh she was aware of high shrills of equine fright and loud crunching bangs.
Mikal barely glanced at the man. He steadied her, and the faint smile on his lean face would have been chilling even had she not understood its meaning. No. She shook her head, fractionally, and his free hand fell away from a knife hilt.
“I say, what are you—?” The worthy took in the quality of her dress and Mikal’s coat, and the Shield’s knives. The noise from inside mounted another notch, and Emma dispelled a shudder. “Miss, are you quite well?”
A cough to clear her desert-dry throat, and she found her voice. “Yes. Quite. Thank you. The horses seem… upset.”
He tipped his cap back, scratched under its brim. “Been sparky ever since the bad doins, Miss. Did you come to see that’un? Blood was right there. I says to my mate, I says, What is this coming to? Even a frail shouldna be done a’ that.”
“Was there anything surpassing strange about… it?” Her head felt too large for her neck, but the words must have come out naturally, for he considered them, his work-hardened hands dropping to his sides. “Other than, oh—!” A helpless movement, she fell into playing the part of a too-gently-bred idiot with the usual effortlessness. Such a persona would make the man facing her much more at ease, and for a moment she wondered what the world would be if it did not require such guile to make headway in.
“Wellnow.” He stuck his thumbs in his braces and took up a widespread stance as the banging and clattering inside mitigated somewhat. “I told the leather bulls, I did. I locked up nice and proper, and came i’ the morn to find the nasty had been left here. Paid a pretty penny to get rid of any bad mancy, too. But the one who came out, he said there weren’t nothing more than a tangle there, took my coin and off he went.”
“Indeed,” she murmured. “Was he a fair hand with sorcery, then?” Since you obviously did not dare refuse payment.
He shrugged, made as if to spit aside, and visibly reconsidered in the face of her quality. “I’m no magicker. Fellow from two streets over, name of Kendall.” He visibly enjoyed telling the story of the body on the doorstep, though it became clear he had not been the one to find it, only coming across it while the first on the scene–a rather unfortunately-named chandler–had been running to fetch assistance.
She managed to elicit the sorcerer Kendall’s address and soothed the stablemaster as well as she was able with her head pounding badly enough to cloud her vision. He took her welling eyes as a sign that she was affected by the poor unfortunate’s fate, and waxed rhapsodic about the quantity of blood, and how the belly had been opened just as a fish’s. How the horses still shied coming out, and how his trade had been disrupted by the crowds come to see, of which she was presumably a late member. She appeared to hang on his every word and finally made a subtle gesture, whereupon Mikal stepped forward with a few pence for the man’s pains.
The stable had returned to its former quiet, but Emma could taste the high brassy tang of horse-fear.
She could also taste the sourness of her own, as well. Her stays cut most abominably, and her dress was soaked under her arms and at the small of her back.
Mikal turned as the stableman shuffled back into his dark domain, his broad back vanishing like a spirit’s. “Prima?”
“This Kendall. Two streets away. It might be profitable to visit him.”
“Indeed. You’re… pale.”
No doubt. Her mantle, drawn close, could not ease the shudders seeking to grip her. She denied them outright, her jewellery warming comfortingly. “I suspect I shall be much more so before this affair is over. I have a rather curious thought.”