The Ripper Affair

The last man–one of many, she thought perhaps he might have been a carter or even a flashboy, though she could not remember any Alteration on his gin-thickened frame–had announced his intention to sell Emma into a bawdyhouse if one could be found that would take a skinny brat, and the mother had turned on him with drunken fury. Whether it was because some spark of natural feeling for her burdensome child remained, or simply that said burden represented a shilling or two the raddled woman felt should not go to the broad-faced, rotten-toothed monsieur who had paid for their doss that long-ago night was unclear.

What was perfectly clear was the blade as it flicked, unseaming the mother’s neck. A horrid scarlet necklace, a spray of crimson, and the burning in a thin child’s chest had ignited.

The man had dropped the knife and screamed, beating at leprous-green flames erupting suddenly, sorcerously, from his skin and clothes.

A second beggar’s burning, there in the reek and the dark. The child had run away, and been caught in a net other than the one she had feared.

Emma halted in a pool of darkest shadow, the glamour held close. Brass thunder unheard by most filled the air, and from one end of the street, a flood of ætheric force roared from the direction of the Themis’s cold, deep lapping.

Tideturn.

Golden charter symbols crawled over Emma’s skin. The shadows did not hide their flashing, but the malodorous passageway she stood swaying in was luckily empty of any witness. When the flood receded, she blinked and shook her shawl-covered head, expecting at any moment to feel Mikal’s hand upon her arm and his quiet word of orientation.

Instead, she heard the scraping of tiny paws, a muffled squeak. Her skin sought to crawl, training clamped upon the waste of energy and it passed. She knew that sound, of course–grey whip-tailed rats with beady dark eyes, sensing in her stillness a possible weakness. The scuffing sounds retreated, and her nose wrinkled slightly, fresh strength filling her limbs.

She took careful stock of her surroundings again. Dorsitt Street was not strictly as she remembered it. Emma was uncertain whether this was a comfort or a danger, and took another few moments to study what she could.

Of course even squalor would change over time. It was still cramped and clotted with refuse, but the carts that had crouched here selling all manner of items were gone. The public houses thumped with the sounds of drunken revelry, but the flashboys did not congregate in their doors here, as was their usual wont.

Even a fast, murderous, well-Altered flashboy might well fear the creature hunting in Whitchapel.

A door slammed, raucous laughter and yellow gleams of gaslight spilled onto the street, and Emma drew further back into shadow. Three women, shapes very much like her own, with bonnets instead of shawls, hurried tipsily down Dorsitt toward the other ginhouse; the one in the middle had evidently been their first stop.

“Lea’ off, Nan,” one slurred petulantly, and her companions laughed.

“Black Mary, Black Mary,” one chanted, with a lisp that spoke of missing teeth. “High-mighty Jinnit.”

“I’us in France ons’t,” Black Mary retorted, hotly. She sounded young, and would be successful while that youth lasted. “I’en spek Westend dravvy, I may.”

A small smile touched Emma’s lips. The slurring song of Whitchapel cant was strangely soothing. I was in France once. I even speak proper Englene, I may. Perhaps her sad little story was told to draw custom. Or perhaps she had been to France, such a thing was not impossible.

Emma’s slight smile faded as she turned away from Dorsitt, picking her way with care further down the passage. The smell, oh, it was familiar. Coal and grease, rotting vegetables, spoiled meat. Rancid, unwashed bodies crammed into tiny rooms, the sooty trembling flames of rag wicks in fat.

The only thing missing was the thick greenness of Scab. She caught herself placing each foot carefully, a slip-sliding movement because the resilient ooze underneath should have been thick in this darkness.

She could feel ancient crumbling bricks, cobbles in some places. Her throat was so dry. The walls of the passage were only hinted at by some sense that extended around her, invisible fingertips brushing. Even her sensitive vision could not pierce this gloom.

Her skin chilled. Her skirts dragged; the quality of the cloth would outweigh the slight value of her life in this slice of Londinium. Yet she let the glamour unravel as she stepped carefully, shedding one more garment between herself and the past.

There, on the left, was the door. A window with a broken pane–it had been whole once. Another door had been cut further down the passage, but there was no true exit to the street save the one she had entered.