The Ripper Affair

“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.