The Ripper Affair

The Bulldog barked, and the flash destroyed his vision for a moment. The nearest starveling folded down, its head a battered mess, that green dust sliding out with its terrible, soft hissing sound.

The Coachman screamed again, a wailing infant under a steadily growing pile.

A woman’s voice, freighted with terrible power. “K—g’z’t!”

Slow grinding, the noise of mountains rubbing together.

Clare surfaced with a jolt. He found himself sprawled on coal, Pico’s boot in his back, as starvelings cowered at the end of the cellar. The leprous-green radiance at the opposite end of the cellar had intensified, and under it, he could see a thin shape.

It was Miss Bannon, in the rags of her mourning dress and petticoats. The shadow behind her was Mikal, propping her up as her knees buckled. Clare squinted, and saw a glaring scar on her white throat, under a layer of filth. She had clapped one naked hand to her equally naked neck–her jewellery was gone, and it was queerly indecent to see her so. The pale glow, a different green than the starvelings’ dust, but equally irrational, issued from about her, a corona of illogical illumination.

“Back,” she husked, a dry croaking word. “Back, Marimat. They are mine, they are not for you.”

The starvelings writhed. One final, weak little cry from the Coachman-creature, silenced with a last nasty crunching. A sigh rippled through the starvelings, a wet wind on dry grass.

“Sssssparrow-witch.” A thick, burping chuckle; it was one of the starvelings, but some other dark intelligence showed in its empty, rolling eyes. “Did you enjoy your ssssssojourn?”

“Quite diverting, twice-treacherous one.” Miss Bannon’s expression was just as empty, a terrible blank look upon her childlike features. “But I am at home again, Maharimat of the Third Host, and they are not for you.”

“Little sssssparrow.” The starveling twitched forward. “You are flessssh, and you are weak. How will you ssssstop my children?”

“How indeed.” The sorceress’s chin lifted. “I am Prime.” Her tone had lost none of its terrible, queer atonality. “Set yourself against me, creature of filth, and find out.”

The hush that descended seemed to last a very long while. But the starvelings, cloaked in their mumbling hiss, drew back in a wave. The ones that could not climb the lath-ladder fell and split open, the green dust spreading and rising in oddly angular curls on a breeze from nowhere.

He wondered what might grow from that dust. Was that how the Scab spread?

The starvelings left behind a curled, battered, unspeakably chewed and quickly rotting body curled in the ruins of a coachman’s cloth, and a tangled whip shredding itself as it jerked and flopped, the bright metal at its ravelled end chiming before it blackened and twisted like paper in a fire. There was a creaking and a crack, a final obscene wet chuckle, and the lath-ladder plunged down, shivering into sticks.

The Coachman was indisputably dead. Its ruin fell apart with a wet sliding, and green smoke rose. It shredded, making for a moment the likeness of an anguished face, and the soughing that slid through the cellar lifted sweat-drenched hair and a pall of coal-dust.

Coughing, Clare lowered the pistol. Behind him, Aberline retched again, deeply and hopelessly. Pico breathed a term that was an anatomical impossibility, but nevertheless managed to express his profound, unbelieving relief at this turn of events.

Miss Bannon stayed upright for a long moment before crumpling, and Mikal caught her. His expression, before the green flame winked out, was full of the same devouring intensity Clare had witnessed only once before, in front of his mistress’s bedroom door, in the dark, after he had worked a miracle to save her from the Red Plague.

What would he call such a twisting of a man’s features? Was there a word for it? Did it matter?

It did not. For he found, to his dismay, that he recognised the look, though he could not name and quantify it. It found an echo within himself, one which could not be spoken of or even thought too deeply upon lest it break his overstrained faculties.

So Archibald Clare sagged back against the coal and closed his eyes. In a moment he would set his wits to the matter of bringing them out of this awful place.

For now, though, he simply lay there, and felt the breath moving in, and out, of his thankful, whole, undamaged, and quite possibly immortal frame.

Chapter Forty-Eight To Sting, Or To Soothe

The fussing was not to be borne. “Tighter,” Emma said, and the corset closed about her cruelly. “Enough, thank you. Severine, I am quite well.”

“Mais non, madame.” The round woman in her customary black was pale, but she forged onwards. “You can barely stand, and monsieur le bouclier said you were to sleep until—”