Whitchapel was ablaze, figuratively and actually. Two fires had started, one near the border of Soreditch and another, from what Clare could tell, sending up a black plume from the slaughteryard near Fainmaker’s Row. Yellowing fog swirled uneasily, and the virulent green of Scab held to mere fringes and dark alleys.
Cries and moans, the roaring of a maddened crowd, more sharp volleys of rifle fire. Had the Crown authorised such a deadly response? Was it the Old City, nervous at the proximity of the restless poor? Waring was merely a commissioner, he could not have taken the step without approval from the Lord Mayor or the Crown—
“Mind yourself,” Pico said, grabbing his sleeve. “Look. Crithen’s, just there.”
Clare peered down. Mikal landed atop the slope with a slight exhalation of effort, and Aberline retched once, quietly.
“Enough power to feel the effects,” the Shield said, soft and cold. “And should I need to, Inspector—”
“Cease your threats.” Aberline sounded pale. “I told you I would do my best.”
“Mr Mikal?” Clare’s voice bounced against the rooftop. “A moment, if you please?”
“What?”
“It is past dawn.”
Mikal was silent for a long moment. There was a flash of yellow as he checked the sky, and Pico moved along the edge of the roof.
Clare cleared his throat. “Do you have any idea why Londinium is still, well, subject to Night? Is this sorcery?”
“Perhaps.” The Shield halted, still with a hand to Aberline’s elbow. “A Work meant to replace a ruling spirit, or create a new one… perhaps this is an effect. My Prima would know. Are we close?”
“The place is there.” Clare pointed, as Pico had. “Though I must say, it does not look in the least churchlike.”
It was a slumping, blasted two-storey building, set between two ditches that served, if Clare’s nose was correct, as nightsoil collectors. Also, if his vision was piercing the dimness correctly, a dustheap or two. “I cannot even tell… was it a house?”
“They call it church because Mad Crithen nailed his victims to the walls.” Pico sounded dreadfully chipper. “He was popish, he was. Leastways, that’s how I heard it.”
“Mad Crithen?”
“A murderer.” Breathless, Aberline shook free of Mikal. “Lustmorden, but with a religious… he crucified his victims. I read of it in Shropeton’s analysis of—”
“There’s a way down!” Pico shimmied lithely over the edge of the roof and vanished. “Here!”
Clare patted his pistol, secure in its holster. “It is extremely likely there will be unpleasantness within. I cannot think this sorcerer will not guard his lair.”
“He may not need to.” Mikal pointed. “Look.”
A subtle wet gleam in the ditches, and stealthy movement in the shadows. Skeletal shapes, in ragged threadbare clothes, and under the sound of riot and mayhem, a queer sliding whisper.
“Scab. In the ditches.” Aberline sucked in a sharp breath. “And… starvelings? Here?”
“Starvelings?”
“Marimat.” Mikal’s mouth turned the syllables into a curse. They made little sense to Clare, but he shivered anyway. “Of course. Come, quickly. We must reach the place before they can hold it.”
“I don’t suppose you—”
But Mikal had already embraced Aberline’s stout waist with his arm, and flung them both from the roof with a rattle and a peculiar whooshing. Clare scrabbled for the place Pico had disappeared, and the lad’s disgusted curse from below was lost in a rising, venomous hiss.
Chapter Forty-Two
No More
The 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.
Chapter Forty-Three
A Betrayal That Struck One
The 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.