The Ripper Affair

Aberline halted as well, quite amazingly pale under the muck and dust he was covered with. He grimaced as he shifted his weight. Pico’s breathing was stertorous in the stillness, but the lad was holding up gamely. With his hair knocked out of its careful slick-back and his eyes wide, he looked rather young.

And fragile.

“Mikal?” Clare whispered.

“I think…” The Shield shook his head, as if tossing away said thought. “Come.”

Clare, his faculties straining under the weight of what he might be about to witness, had a very rational thought. We should have brought a lanthorn.

As if in answer, a sound rose from the hole. Long, and loud, it stripped the hair from their fevered brows and brushed against their clothing.

Later, Clare could not think quite what the sound had been. A rumble, a moving of earth, the roar-breath of a massive fire, the sea suckling at its rocky confines? No, too much. Perhaps it was the internal shifting of a lie told or found out, or a betrayal that struck one to a heart’s core–but that was ridiculous. It was merely Feeling, and Clare should set it aside.

Aberline gasped, rocking back on his heels, but Mikal’s reaction was even more marked.

“Emma!” he screamed, and leaped forwards into the dark, his footsteps, for once, heavy with reckless speed.

The massive sound did not echo, but it left some imprint on the space around the three left in Mikal’s wake, broken only by a thin, light, unholy tapping Clare had heard before: footsteps of a creature that carried a sharp-ended whip. The healed slice along his forearm send a pang up to his shoulder.

Clare also heard, as if in a nightmare, a slow, soft, draining hiss.

Chapter Forty-Four In The Final Weighing

The first surprise was that it did not hurt. The knife cleaved flesh, yes, and there was a hot jet of salt-crimson blood.

Then… droplets hung in midair, and the blooming within her was a sweet pain. Her Discipline roared, needing no chant to shape it. No, when a Discipline spoke, the entire sorcerer was the throat it passed through.

It required only the strength to submit. As long as that strength lasted, wonders could be worked.

What had she done? Turned inward, yes, and found… what?

Not m’pence, Marta Tebrem whispered. Needs it for my doss, I do.

They spun around her, sad women and merry, dead on a knife or by a strangle, in childbed or by fever, by gin or misadventure, in hatred or in desperation, by folly or chance. She was of the Endor, but even more importantly, she was of their number, and the spark that rose within her was both negation and acceptance.

Some of them had wished for release from the miserable drudgery and endless pain. There was the acceptance.

Yet even louder, and containing the acceptance as a shell contains a nut, the denial.

No. I will not.

Should not, or could not, those were incorrect. The refusal was a hard shell, wrapped about the tender thing called a soul trapped in a fragile and perishable body.

Beat me, hurt me, kill me, I will not.

Or perhaps the refusal was merely her own, even her Discipline bending to a will grown strong by both feeding and confinement.

They streamed through her, the women of Whitchapel, and their cries were the same as the Warrior Queen Boudicca in her chariot–a vessel of Britannia dishonoured, slain in battle, but still remembered.