The Ripper Affair

“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?

A second faint green radiance bloomed, in the opposite corner. Clare kept the pistol trained. “Aberline?”

A retching cough, before the inspector’s calm, hopeless voice. “Yes, Mr Clare?”

“I am sorry to have brought you here.” I am sorry for more, did you but know.

At least the inspector was a gentleman in extremis. “Quite all right, old boy. Couldn’t be helped.” The words trembled, firmed. “We shan’t get out this way, you know. It’s blocked.”

A series of alternatives clicked through Clare’s faculties, discarded as they arose. A means could be found to ignite the coal, but the fumes and smoke would asphyxiate them before doing any good.

He was savagely weary, even though physically unharmed. Apparently, there were limits to even Miss Bannon’s gifts.

Emma. Are you alive?