Her Discipline stirred, sleepily.
Too late, she began to understand what he meant to do, and how stupid she had been to use herself as a lure.
He began to chant, the language of Making and Naming alternating as he described what he wished the sorcerous force to shape itself as, how it would affect the tangled fleshly snarl of the physical and the gossamer of the unseen. Stone shivered uneasily as the taproots driven into Whitchapel stirred, only faint echoes where Emma had cleared them but driven deep in many other places. Many, many other victims had fallen–the creature found its own meat and drink, but its creator had been busy with murder, too.
Lines of force coalesced, becoming visible to Sight, and Llewellyn raised the knife. His mouth grinned and slavered over the consonants as he described her death, and what that ending would fuel.
The Promethean was nearing the end of its infancy. It needed a vessel, a mockery of birth. The knife lowered, and a faint piping reached Emma’s ears–souls, straining for release, perhaps. Each of the victims crying out, a chorus of the damned.
The smoky egg over the obsidian–it was an unholy altar, she realised, another mockery, yet the form was completely appropriate to the Work Llew was attempting–drifted free of its moorings. The two live coals of the Coachman’s eyes glared from a suggestion of a face, and Emma’s entire body tensed, as if it could deny the coming violation.
The knifetip touched her throat.
Chapter Forty-One
To Crithen’s Church
It was no use. Clare pushed the carriage door open as the clockhorses shrilled. If they went any further, the carriage would become well and truly mired in the crowd, and Harthell’s steady cursing was already lost under the noise. Screams of frightened women, breaking bottles and tearing wood, the roiling of men’s voices. From somewhere torches had arrived, for the gaslamps were guttering, their wickcharms dying. The throng ahead filled the main thoroughfare of High Whitchapel Road, and the press of the crowd even on this small tributary was becoming rather worrisome.
Leather Apron! Leather Apron!
The public, that great beast–or at least a healthy slice of it–had lost patience with the keepers of order.
In her very bed, he did, and they do nothing, all high and mighty! Heard he opened her up, even her face. Welladay, the Metropoleans don’t care as long as he kills poor frails. Our girls, they are, even if low.
Lining High Whitchapel were shops and better-to-do homes; the crowd pressed uneasily against them. The carriage had not yet become a target, but it was only a matter of time.
Aberline was beside him, casting an eye over the heaving mass. The fog had greyed as if dawn was incipient; Clare’s pocket-watch told him that indeed, sunrise was very close, with Tideturn not far behind. More glass shattered, and Harthell cursed again.
“We shall not stir a foot in this,” Clare observed. Soon they may take a mind to upend the carriage.
“Not without sorcery or a regiment.” Aberline, sour-faced, had regained some of his colour. Mikal was silent, but his tension was clearly apparent.
“Ho! Pico, come down. Harthell, take the carriage home.” Clare had to shout. “We shall proceed—”
A different sound pierced the seashell roar. High and chilling, a silverwhistle.
“Oh, blast it all.” Aberline leapt from the carriage, landing heavily on blackened, broken cobbles. “Waring, you bloody fool. He’s called in—”
“Headcrackers. And possibly a regiment,” Clare said, grimly. “Or two. There will be blood shed this dawn.”
“Other sorcerers will muddy the waters.” Mikal had grasped Aberline’s elbow as the crowd surged around them. A toothless beldame in red calico shrieked, falling against a sturdy flashboy with an Altered left hand, metal sharpened and gleaming as he thrust her away with a curse. “How close are we?”
“To Crithen’s? A ten-minute walk, were this a fine morning. Today…” Aberline indicated the throng at the juncture of Bent and High Whitchapel.
Harthell evidently agreed with Clare’s estimation of the situation, for he wheeled the carriage hard right and vanished down Tehning Cross; the crack of his whip sent a chill up Clare’s spine. Set it aside. What may be done? Think!
Mikal glanced up, studying the rooftops. “I think—”
Whatever he had meant to say was lost in an angry roaring. Beneath it, drumbeats, and the clopping of hooves in unison. Yet it was not from that end of Whitchapel the flaming lucifer that set off a crowd’s tinder dropped.
It was from the other end, and as soon as Clare heard the sound, his heart sank.
Ever afterwards, none could discern from the conflicting reports who had given the City Streamstruth Regiment the order to fire upon the crowd. The volley was enough to cause a few moments’ worth of shocked silence.
There is a moment when a crowd ceases to be a mass of separate beings, when it becomes a single mind and turns upon its tormentor. Or simply, merely upon anything within reach. Once it becomes such an organism, it tramples, heaves, tosses, and smashes with no restraint.
Being caught in the jaws of that monster was not acceptable.
Mikal shoved Aberline to the side of the street, where an open dosshouse door showed a slice of yellow lamplight. “Go!” he cried, and pushed Clare for good measure. Pico hopped in their wake with youthful alacrity, and it was Mikal again, suddenly before them, who kicked at the door even as a burly just-awakened stout in braces and a thread-bare shirt sought to slam it against sudden danger.
A quick strike, Mikal’s hand blurring, and the dosshouse doorman folded; Pico shoved the door closed and sought a means to bar it.
Clare found himself gasping for breath. How annoying. Still, they were out of danger for the moment, and Mikal evidently had some manner of plan.
“Up,” the Shield said. “Find a staircase.”
“And then what?” Pico enquired, shoving a flimsy chair against the dosshouse door. The entry hall was dingy and smelled overwhelmingly of cabbage and unwashed flesh; on the ground the doorman stirred slightly. Pico thought a moment, then grabbed both the supine man’s wrists. Aberline helped him drag him for the door, and Clare’s protest died unspoken. The wood cracked and heaved; outside, the sound of the crowd was now a wild howling of pain.
“Then,” the Shield said, “we run. And you pray to whatever god you choose that we find my Prima.”
Clay tiles scratching underfoot; timber creaking uneasily when a man’s weight touched it. Mikal, impatient with their slow progress, nevertheless shepherded them carefully.
The geography of Londinium appeared much altered when seen from this vantage. Ground became tile and sloped roofs, streets long channels separating thin island-fingers. Crossing the channels was either nerve-wracking–a slide and a leap, Mikal’s hand flashing forwards to drag a man onto solid safety–or entirely irrational, a matter of clinging to the Shield and closing one’s eyes while he leapt in some sorcerous fashion. Each time he did so, hopping across thoroughfares as if it was child’s play, Clare’s most excellent digestion threatened to unseat itself.
At least now he knew how the man kept up with Miss Bannon’s carriage.
Clare peered at the sky as Pico slithered down the roof-slope behind him, boots scraping dry moss and accumulated soot. Even here, life clung to gullies and cracks; he saw hidden courts, walled off by the rapid building of slum-tenements, with the remains of old gardens gone to seed. Twisted trees no eye but the sky had viewed for years, and even grass and weeds clinging in rain-gutter sludge. Londinium’s roofs were a country of mountainous desert, concealing throbbing life and violent motion beneath its crust.