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.
Chapter Forty-Seven
An Echo Within Himself
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?