The Red Plague Affair: Bannon & Clare: Book Two

by Lilith Saintcrow

  “I am told it must be introduced under the skin? Vance mentioned as much, before he…”

  “Yes. There are many methods… I say, Miss Bannon, are you quite certain? Of his… demise?”

  “Very much so, Clare.” There was a rustle as she stood. “I shall search your workroom, then, and the matter of disseminating the cure is easy enough. You have done very well, sir.”

  He nodded, a yawn fit to crack his jaw rising from the depths of his chest. His heart thudded along, sedately observing its beat. Though his ribs seemed a trifle heavy, didn’t they? A warmth quite unlike anything he had felt before, but perhaps it was merely a…

  Miss Bannon breathed a word, the exact contours of which he could not remember as soon as they left the quivering air, and Clare fell into a dreamless, restorative slumber.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  A Close-Run Race

  Tarshingale was easily found, and explanations given; the man’s gaze was quite disconcerting and he had given her short shrift until Clare’s name was mentioned and the vials and notations – which might as well have been in some tongue of the Indus for all she could make sense of them, though she had prudently retained a copy – shown. She left the man in his bespattered coat with instructions on how to gain admittance to the Palace; no doubt the cure would be administered to Alberich very soon.

  If he was not already dead. She had not bothered to check the broadsheets. She told herself it did not matter now.

  King’s Hospital, bursting at the seams with victims of the Red crammed four to a bed, was also full of moaning and screaming. It reminded her uncomfortably of the one time she had ever braved the halls of Bethlehem Hospital; the cries of Bedlam held an edge of misery this place lacked, though it was a very close-run race indeed. At least the very bricks of King’s were not warped as Bedlam’s were.

  Harthell and Mikal had stayed with the carriage, both were armed with a brace of pistols as well, though the coachman would be of little use except to frighten away the jackals who would prey when the city’s forces of order were occupied with other matters.

  Besides, she had taken care not to be alone with Mikal since Clare’s… cure.

  The exhaustion was all through her. She had forgotten how weary flesh could become without the bolstering of a wyrm’s heart, the Philosopher’s Stone granting all manner of immunities.

  Even a Prime’s strength had limits.

  Still, her head came up as her fingers touched Mikal’s. Instead of stepping up into her carriage, she dropped his hand and turned swiftly, as if stung, twitching her skirts back and sweeping her hair from her face.

  “Penny, madam?” the shambling man asked, querulous, and Mikal moved forward – and halted as her hand, clothed in the tattered rags of a black lace glove, caught his sleeve. “Penny for a poor man? Ha’pence? Farthing?”

  The importunate sir was dressed in stinking oddments as well, and under his soft slouching hat the gleam of his changeable eyes was sunken. He had shaved his fair moustache and was far thinner than he had been the first time she had seen him. He halted, and the ghost of amusement on his filthy, crusted mouth was almost too much to be borne.

  “Dr Vance.” She shook her head, once, sadly. “You rather hoped I would throw your corpse out.”

  “No other way to leave your tender care, my dear.” He had a tin cup with a few thin farthings in it; he shook it and the coins rattled. “We have business, you and I.”

  She should, she supposed, evince some surprise, but it was useless. “Indeed we have. Pray do enter the carriage, sir. We may at least speak privately there.”

  He stretched out his legs. Harthell cracked the whip, and Mikal, settled watchfully next to Emma, was tense as a wound clockspring.

  As badly as the resurrected criminal’s clothes were tattered, he did not smell. Which was either an oversight to his costume, a mark of his fastidiousness… or the sweetstink of Londinium roasting under the Red had deadened Emma’s nose.

  “You introduced the cure under your skin in some manner while I was occupied with Clare.” She nodded, once, slowly. “You must have been very amused at my questions about that method of applying said cure.”

  “I expected no less than brilliance from you, my dear, which you have amply demonstrated. I shall be on my way, soon, to sell the lovely cure I helped create at a high price before it becomes common. Profit does not linger.”

  The missing canisters are in your hands. She was suddenly quite certain of that, though she could not tell if it was intuition or simple logic. But you had no choice but to work for a cure once you were trapped in my house. Interesting. “Nor does vengeance.”

  “I rather suspected you would feel so, yes.” He tipped the slouching hat back with one soot-blackened fingertip. “You do not strike me as a forgiving woman.”

  I have never been. Least of all to myself. “The thought of striking you dead at this very moment amuses me mightily. Why should I not?”

  “Because you will calculate that the dissemination of this marvellous remedy, no matter what profit I gain from it, is worth letting me go unhindered. Especially since it has reached the Continent, and no doubt the shores of the New World as well.” And d—n the man, but he sounded so very certain.

  Just as Clare did, when he knew beyond a doubt what calculation should be attempted to bring the world to rights.

  She tapped her fingers on her knee, exactly once. Her back had straightened, and she felt almost herself again, despite the heat of the day. It was uncomfortably close in the carriage, and her underarms were damp. Her corset, filthy as it was, scraped against her skin. It had no doubt worn her into a rash. “The satisfaction of knowing you will no longer be a bother may outweigh that philanthropic interest.”

  “It will not, Miss Bannon. You are a creature of Justice, however odd your method of applying it.” He leaned back against the cushions. “I must say, you have a splendid carriage. I quite admire it.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Thank you.”

  The silence that fell was not quite comfortable. Her breathing came a trifle short, but she could attribute that to her damnable corset.

  Finally, she sighed. The weariness that had settled on her pressed deeper, into her very bones. At the moment, she very much missed the warmth of the Stone in her chest.

  And yet she did not miss the crushing upon her conscience that bearing the Stone had brought her. How Llew would laugh, were he alive to guess such a weakness on her part.

  “You shall cease being a nuisance to Mr Clare.” She eyed him closely. “Or I shall cut out your heart, sir, and feast upon it.” There is more than enough of your bodily fluids – and your clothing, sir – left at my house for me to practise a nasty sympathy or two upon.

  “That,” Dr Francis Vance said, with a wide white smile on his haggard, Red-ravaged face, “is my promise to you, dear lady. Do take care of Clare, he is a giant among mentaths.”

  With that, he reached for the carriage door and was gone even as the conveyance rolled. Emma caught Mikal’s arm.

  “Let him go,” she said, and surprised herself.

  For her pained, unamused laugh turned into a deep, wracking cough, and her forehead was clammy-damp.

  Mikal had turned pale, even under his dark colouring. “Prima…”

  She gestured for silence, and he subsided. Emma studied his face as the carriage rolled, Harthell gaining as much speed as he dared on the choked thoroughfares, moans and cries and coughs rising in a sea around them. The cup of the city brimmed over, and she found she could not say what she wished.

  I am sorry, Mikal. For you shall very shortly be cast adrift, and I am selfish, for I cannot cling to this manner of life any more. No matter my responsibility to you, to them… to Her…

  She coughed again, her fingers in their torn and stained gloves pressing over her mouth, and they came away dripping with red. “Oh, dear,” she murmured, and pitched aside, into Mikal’s arms.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

&
nbsp; A Stone is a Stone

  The house rang with terror and footsteps. Clare tacked out into the hall, the weakness in his limbs quite shockingly intense despite his rather extraordinary feeling of well-being. He fumbled at his jacket buttons, finally inducing the little beasts to behave, and looked up to see Madame Noyon, her grey-streaked hair piled loosely atop her head and her face tearstained, hurry past with an armful of linen.

  “I say,” he began, but the housekeeper vanished down the hall. I say!

  One of the lady’s maids – Isobel, the scarred one – leaned against the wall by Valentinelli’s door, dumbly staring after Noyon with glittering eyes. Her cheeks were wet, and she had the look of a young woman who had just been rather viciously stabbed in the heart.

  “I say,” Clare approached her. “Isobel, dear, what is it? What is the—”

  “It’s Missus,” she whispered, through pale, perhaps-numb lips. Her indenture collar was oddly dark, the powdery metal’s radiance dimming. “She’s taken the ill, she has. We’re likely next, she wot was holding it back an’all!”

  What? For a moment, his faculties refused to function, despite the tests he had administered to them that very morning, lying in his freshly made bed and quite comfortable at last. He stood very still, his head drooping forward and taking in the girl’s feet in their pert, sensible boots.

  Bannon does have a weakness for sensible footwear, for herself and her servants alike. He shook his head, slowly. “Ah. Well. There is not a moment to lose, then. I must—”

  “GET OUT!” It was a scream from the top of the stairs leading to Miss Bannon’s chambers. Mikal’s voice, and it shook the entire house in quite a different manner than Miss Bannon’s return or her anger.

  Madame Noyon came hurrying down them, paper-pale and shaking afresh. She babbled in French, Horace and the blonde Eirean maid Bridget behind her chattering in proper but horribly disjointed Englene, and it took quite some time for him to gather a coherent picture of what had transpired.

  The Shield had evicted them from his mistress’s chambers, quite rudely. While Clare rested himself, Miss Bannon had taken ill; she had passed through the swellings and the convulsions were upon her.

  It is too late. The pain in his chest was not angina, it was… something else.

  He did not have time to discern its source, or so he told himself.

  Clare bolted for the workroom.

  The stench was terrible. He reeled into the stone room, and it was a very good thing he had not been able to stomach much of any provender lately, for his cast-iron mentath’s digestion did not seem to have survived the illness quite as well as the rest of him.

  It was dark, and his boots slipped in a crust of God alone knew what on the floor. How had they stood it down here?

  He found his way by touch to the desk, slipping and sliding. His hip banged a table and something fell, shattering. Perhaps it was a fresh load of plague-freighted marrowe-jelly, but he cared little, if at all.

  The drawer slid open, and his questing fingers found nothing but a small jewelled box. He swore aloud, a series of vile terms no gentleman should give voice to, and fumbled more deeply in the drawer, and still his sensitive fingertips found nothing but wood, dust, and the box of coja.

  The vials he had hidden here, as well as in the pockets of his jacket… gone.

  He turned, sharply, snatching up and hurling the tiny box across the room. The crack of its breaking was lost in the sound working free of his throat.

  It could not be a sob. Mentaths were not prey to Feeling in such an intense fashion. Feeling was to be examined, thoroughly in some cases, then accounted for and set aside so one could function.

  He swallowed something that tasted of iron. Staggered for the door, his legs a newborn colt’s. Retraced his route through the house, and found a hall crowded with servants. Ludovico was there too, leaning on Gilburn, haggard and swearing steadily, monotonously, in pure noble Italian. He was pale, his pitted cheeks so thinned his face had become a skeleton’s grin. La strega, he would murmur, then demone maledetta, and finally donna dolce, and other terms that would have been quite revealing, had Clare cared to apply deduction to them.

  They clustered at the foot of the stairs, Miss Bannon’s collection of castaways, the servants making a soft noise every time the light of their indenture collars dimmed. Clare pushed through them, blindly.

  No. Please… dear God, not Emma. I thought she was immune!

  “The Shield,” Finch whispered, grabbing at Clare’s sleeve. “He is beside himself. He will—”

  “I do not care,” Clare said, almost gently, and freed himself of the man’s grasp. He put his hand to the balustrade, lifted his foot.

  He was halfway up and heard it, her laboured breathing and soft choked cries as the convulsions came. The hall stretched away, as in nightmares, and the entire house shivered again, a chill racing through each plank and bit of plaster, from foundations to high lovely roof. The door to her dressing room was open, and gaslamps hissed. The witchlights in their cages of silvery metal dimmed, hissing as well, turning bloody-hued as the indenture collars dimmed, brightening as they brightened.

  She fights for life, our dear sorceress. The dry barking sound from his throat had to be a laugh. It could not be otherwise. For what other sound could he make? Mentaths did not weep.

  There was another sound – a dry sliding. There was light from underneath what had to be Miss Bannon’s bedroom door. An odd scent, too – smoky and musky, a resinous incense, perhaps, but of no kind Clare was familiar with. And the sweetness of Morris’s plague, its sickening candy-touch burning through her slight body.

  Even a will as indomitable as hers could not stave off this catastrophe. Clare’s knees weakened. He forced them to straighten, and later he was vaguely surprised that he had been inside her dressing room… and not seen a single thing other than that door of pale wood with a stripe of violent yellow light leaking from underneath it.

  The sound became a slicing, a wet noise as if flesh was pulled from flesh in a slaughteryard. Clare shuddered, reaching before him for the handle. He was weaving as if drunk, his feet leaving dark crusted prints. The incense smell turned thick and cloying, and he heard Mikal’s voice, singing in a queer atonal hissing manner.

  What is he doing?

  There was another cry, and this one raised every hair on Clare’s shivering body. The bright yellow light stuttered, thundering as a runner’s pulse, and Clare found himself on his knees, shaking his head, not quite aware of what had happened.

  Silence, thick and velvet.

  The hinges creaked slightly as the pale door opened. Behind it, all was dark. A viscous blackness as if of an Indus midnight, its face a sheer wall, almost… alive.

  Staggering out of the gloom came the Shield. For a moment he looked oddly… transparent. His eyes burned, a yellow fire brighter than Londinium’s usual fog, and the reek of musk-burning smoke was so strong it nearly knocked Clare flat.

  “Nå helaeth oavied, nagáni.” The man stumbled, caught himself, and swept the door closed behind him with such violence it almost splintered. He leaned back, his shoulders meeting it with an oddly light thump, but as he slid down to sit on the carpeted floor he gained solidity.

  Clare blinked. It had to be a trick of his recovering vision. Mikal’s eyes half-lidded, their yellow gleam dimming for a moment. “Ah.” He coughed, but it was a dry sound, not the wet thickness of the plague. “Clare.” As if reminding himself who the mentath was.

  Clare’s breath caught in his throat. “Emma,” he whispered. The silence was deathly. 24½ Brooke Street held its breath, too.

  “She… will live.” He flinched as Clare leaned forward, though there was a great deal of space between them. “Do not touch me!”

  Clare subsided. Below, at the foot of the stairs, a susurration. Sooner or later they would creep up – Valentinelli first, most likely – to see what had transpired here.

  “Mikal.” He wet his dry lips, settled back
on his dirty heels. Winced as he thought of what he had tracked over the carpets and flooring. “What… what did you…”

  The man’s grin was a feral baring of strong white teeth, the canines curved and oddly distended, and Clare recoiled from its cheerful hatred. For a moment, the Shield’s pupils appeared… different, but when Clare examined him afresh, he found they were circular, and normal.

  Only a trick of the light. Only that. The witchlights strengthened in their cages, losing their deadly sputter-hissing and growing steadily more brilliant.

  “Mentath.” Mikal shut his yellow eyes. His calloused hands, empty and discarded, lay to either side of his body. “Remember what I am about to tell you.”

  “I hear you,” Clare muttered numbly.

  “There is a proverb among my kind.” Another dry half-cough, but he was already looking better, his colour improving. “A stone is a stone, and a heart is a heart.” A long pause. “Do you understand?”

  What on earth… “No,” he admitted. “No, I do not.”

  “Good.” Mikal settled more firmly against the door. “Tell them she lives, she will live, and not to come up the stairs. Or I shall strike to kill.”

  He cleared his throat. “Erm, yes. Well, they will be relieved, but—”

  “Go.” Mikal’s frame twitched once, terribly, as if his skin were merely a cover over something not… quite…

  Clare did not remember gaining his feet. He recoiled, and stumbled down the stairs. They caught him at the bottom, and he managed to give his message. And afterwards, he remembered nothing more until he awoke two mornings later in his own bed.

  “You told Her Majesty?” She was propped on several pillows, wan and too thin, her hair loosely pulled back but still glossy and vigorous. There was an uncomfortable vitality burning in her gaze, but Clare ascribed it to the tonics Madame Noyon insisted on dosing her with at two-hour intervals, from Tideturn dawn to Tideturn dusk.