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.
Chapter Forty-Five
A More Difficult Problem
“Curse 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.
Chapter Forty-Six
Pronounced Once Before
Choking. 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.