The Red Plague Affair tb&ca-2

by Lilith Saintcrow

  She hesitated for a bare moment before turning due east, and the buildings rose, the reek thickening at the back of her throat.

  Whitchapel swallowed them both, and Mikal drew closer. On a night such as this, even the threat of sorcery might not keep a band of predators, flashboy or other, from trying their luck. The gaslamps sang their dim hiss-song inside angular cups of bleary streetlamp glass, their faint glow merely refracting from the fog’s droplets and making possible danger even less visible.

  Any carriage or cart rumbling through echoed against cobbles thick with the green Scab, organic matter having long lost its individual character. Excrement – animal and human – foodstuffs too rotted to scavenge, small carcasses, rat, insect, who knew – bubbled as the slime worked at them in its own peculiar fashion… there were other less-savoury substances in the coating, and Emma’s skin turned rough with gooseflesh as she remembered slipping barefoot through its slick resiliency.

  The Scab grew nowhere but Whitchapel, and it thickened at night. It covered a flashboy’s footsteps and swallowed a drab’s last cries; it clawed up buildings every evening and retreated steaming from the touch of morning sun. If there was any sun to be had, that is, in the alleys beneath frown-leaning slumhouses that almost met over the narrow twist-curved streets. Some bits of Whitchapel were scrubbed by sunshine, and it was those the sorcerously talented unlucky enough to live in the borough clustered in.

  Between one step and the next, Emma halted. Her hands, occupied by holding her skirts free of the worst of the muck, trembled. It was a sign of weakness she should not allow, except her traitorous body would not listen.

  Mikal was very close. “Tideturn,” he breathed into her hair.

  A wave of gold rose from the Themis, and the renewal of ætheric force made her blind for a few precious seconds. The Scab hissed with displeasure as golden charter symbols burned through its hide, and the steam from the touch of Tideturn added another choking layer to the fog.

  When her vision cleared, Emma found her hands much steadier and her head clearer as well. Whitchapel seethed about her, an unlanced boil. Someone in an alley was coughing, great hacking retches, and there was the splorch-skim of running feet.

  “Mikal?” she whispered.

  “Here.” An immediate answer. “Prima…”

  “I feel it.” And she did. The disturbance in the æther that was another sorcerer, a vast storm-approach prickling that was another Prime. “Be at ease, Shield.”

  It stayed with her, the consciousness of being followed. She set off again, and even blinded, she could have found her way.

  There is the church. Barred every night, and there the ragpicker’s workhouse. There is Jenny Anydill’s doss, and the Mercoran brothers lived there. That was a grocer’s stall, and there was the market aisle.

  Now there was a tavern, spilling raucous screams and gin-fuelled hilarity into the fog-soaked dark. This deep into the Scab, the streetlamps were broken or dying, and the yellow-tinged dark was full of stealthy movement. Flashboys, their Alterations metal-gleaming or blackened with soot, stalked among the alleys, and there were wars fought in the country of these bleak nights respectable Londinium never suspected.

  She hurried now, nipping between two buildings, through a space so small her skirts brushed either side. Mikal exhaled softly, his worry a burning dull-orange, and she followed the labyrinth twists without needing to see.

  So little changed.

  It even smells the same. The Scab, the cheap gin, a breath of rotting brick, something dying, a raft of excrement reek, the boiled odour of piss left in puddles. The years dropped away and she was six again, a thin scrap of a girl with black-burning eyes and an unlucky streak of uncontrolled ætheric potential.

  The buildings leapt away as if stung, and she skidded to a halt. The dimensions of the empty space were unseen but felt by instinct, judged by fingertip and echo. Her breath came harsh and tearing, and Mikal’s grasp on her upper arm was a sweet pain. It nailed her to the present moment even as she drowned in memory.

  The cobble underneath her left boot was broken. She felt its slide as the Scab worked through it; the slop of Whitchapel’s skin against her boots would leave acid traceries on the leather, corrosion on the dainty buttons.

  She raised her free hand and pointed. Witchlight bloomed, a point of soft silvery radiance. It was good practice to make it so dim, but it still scorched her dark-adapted eyes.

  The tiny point hovered uncertainly, then dashed across the courtyard. It came to rest between two barred doors of old, dark wood, daubed with rancid oil to protect them from the Scab.

  “Emma?” For the first time in her memory, Mikal sounded… very uncertain. His hand gentled on her arm, but whether his grasp was meant to steady her or halt further flight she could not tell.

  “Right there.” The words rode a soft sipping inhale. After the throat-slit and the blood, and all the screaming. “That was where they found me. The Collegia childhunters. I caused… quite a disturbance, even so young.”

  He said nothing, but his fingers loosened further. The other Prime was very close. She could almost taste the peculiar “scent” of another sorcerer, the personality building delicate overlapping traceries within the disturbance of the æther. It was akin to many layers of gossamer fabric with wires underneath: nodes and lines of force under a many-layered shroud.

  Come and face me, if you dare. She did not quite send the message out in the invisible way available to any sorcerer above Mastery, but the other Prime would feel her quality of attention and remark upon it.

  The Whitchapel night held its breath, and Emma let her skirts drop. Pretending she was not mired in filth would gain her nothing. Seeking to become Respectable did not succeed overmuch when one had been born here, and when one’s memory held the image of a maybe-mother, her raddled face under a mask of caked powder, her throat pumping bright scarlet blood as the father – or whoever was the father that day – laughed his small whistling laugh, his knuckles greased with grime and blood.

  Then he turned his attention to me, and I ran. And here was where they caught me. I thought they were his flash-boys, and I bit one of them – the childhunter with the red thread in his hair. A shudder worked its way through her. I paid for that. “Mikal.”

  “Emma.” Again, an immediate response. Was he worried? She was not acting like herself.

  Who would I be, then?

  “Shall I acquire more Shields?” As if she did not care. She stared at the witchlight, its burning becoming more intense as her attention steadied. “What say you?” Her tone changed, she found the slurring accent that lay beneath every thought. “I bin a-doight tha’ the nanny I get ain’ no more; needin’ flashboy to dockie m’sweet navskie.”

  So easily, the Whitchapel dialect rolled off her tongue. The amazing thing was not that it was still there. No, the amazement of it was that once she began, she could not fathom why she had been forcing her tongue to respectable upper-crust Englene to begin with.

  And, as she had suspected, it drew out the other sorcerer.

  “Speaking in tongues?” The voice was cold, lipless, and freighted with a Prime’s force. It touched the filthy cobbles, slid along the brick walls and the shivering doors, and was obviously charmed to provide misdirection. “Bannon, Bannon. You are a wonder, Prima.”

  And youna gen’l’man looksee to fine a drab, roughuntumble from tha sound o’it. She inhaled smoothly, kept herself still and dark as a deadly pool of Scab itself. Had she drawn the other here as part of a plan, or had she merely, blindly, leapt?

  Does it matter? It sounded strange to her, the clipped cultured tones of her education. Mikal had gone still as an adder in a dark hole next to her, and he would be waiting for the other’s Shields to show themselves.

  They did not. The sense of presence leached away, and Emma Bannon found herself staring at a sputtering witch-light in a filthy Whitchapel courtyard that held only memories, the Scab burned away from her and Mikal in a several-feet r
adius of scorched cobble. Had she let her temper loose here? Or had the slime merely reacted?

  It is only the past, Emma. It cannot wound you.

  But she did not believe it.

  “Prima.” Mikal was pale, and he had her arm in a bruising-tight grip again. “Who hunts you now?”

  I do not know. “Come.” She sought to step away, but he would not turn loose. “Mikal. Cease. I am well enough.”

  “You…” But he subsided as she drew herself up, chin lifting and the stink of Whitchapel suddenly fresher. Perhaps it was just that she had forgotten how to breathe in such environs. And remembered only once the dialect had found her throat afresh.

  “Take me home.” She shut her eyes, let the mothering dark return. “I… take me home.”

  “Yes, Prima.” Did he sound satisfied?

  And did she imagine the hissing of the sibilant on his tongue, so like the gryphons’?

  Oh, Mikal. I do need more Shields.

  For she had a strong inkling that Britannia had begun to see the end of a certain Sorceress Prime’s use, and had resolved to lay such a tool aside – suitably blunted, of course. And Emma did not intend to be placed in a drawer quite yet – or to become unsharp.

  No matter how many of her own pawns she would have to sacrifice, in answer to Britannia’s gambits.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  In Cleaner Places

  Clare, shuttered lanthorn held aloft, stood amid the wrack and ruin of Mr Morris’s empire, gazing about with bright sharp interest. Miss Bannon, bless her thoroughgoing heart, had provided him with every address she had been availed of for Morris, and he was slightly gratified to find his faculties were not undimmed and that he was most certainly able to deduce which one to visit first.

  “Be careful of the glass,” he murmured again, and Valentinelli cast him a dark look. “It is, after all, what killed the Shield.”

  “Really?” Vance, examining a fire-scarred table, very carefully did not remove his hands from his pockets. “Introduction under the skin, I presume. The vestiges left here… hrm.”

  It was not a gentle death. “It seems Morris sought to remove evidence, or cleanse this place. Though why he would remains a mystery; it is quite out of character for him.”

  “A man’s character may have hidden depths.” Vance turned in a slow circle, his own gaze roving. “We are here, old chap, because…?”

  Have patience, sir. All shall be revealed. His fingers found a starched white handkerchief in a convenient pocket, and Clare stepped gingerly, broken glass crunching underfoot. The cloth, wrapped about his hand, was thin insurance, but all he possessed. Traceries of steam rose from their skin – it was a chill night in Bermondsey, and Londinium’s grasping oily fog pressed thick against the walls.

  Valentinelli had gone pale, and there was a fire in his close-set eyes that promised trouble. He watched Vance rather as he had been wont to watch Mikal during the first days of Clare’s acquaintance with the sorceress and her staff; Clare spared an internal sigh and scanned the floor, dim lanthorn-glow filtering through raised dust. “Should be here… somewhere. Close.”

  He carefully toed aside an anonymous jumble of cloth and splintered wood. Nothing in it should slice the leather of his boots, but still. “Aha.”

  The trapdoor had seen heavy use, if the marks around it were any indication. The thick iron ring meant to provide leverage to heft it was rubbed free of rust, polished by gloved hands. “This is what we are here for.”

  “Always down.” Valentinelli gave a sigh that would have done an old woman proud. “Why we cannot hunt in cleaner places, mentale? Always down in the shite.”

  “Miss Bannon is far more equipped to hunt in Society.” Clare’s amusement did not hold an edge, but it was close. At least, now it is. Her childhood was perhaps entirely otherwise. “And that is as it should be. Whether we like it or not, my assassin, we are more suited to the mire than our fair sorceress.” He wrapped his protected hand about the ring and heaved, and was gratified when the trapdoor lifted, a slice of fœtid darkness underneath dilating. It thudded down, and the draught from below the warehouse was an exhalation of disturbed dust, rot, and the peculiar sourness of earth lain beneath a covering, free of cleansing sunlight, for a very long time.

  Rickety wooden stairs under the lanthorn’s gleam; he eased the shutters as wide as they would go since there was little chance of a night-watchman seeing a suspicious glow here. Vance made a small clicking noise with his tongue, and Clare deduced the man was most pleased.

  “What have we here?” Vance’s footsteps were cat-soft, but the floor still creaked alarmingly. “Oh, Clare. You are a wonder.”

  “It is elementary, sir.” Of a sudden, Clare was exhausted. “I wondered, why here? And I bethought me of the past.”

  Valentinelli shouldered him aside, a knife suddenly visible in one calloused hand. “What down here, mentale?”

  “Nothing alive,” Clare reassured him. “Everything in this excavation is likely to be mummified as the ancient Ægyptios. But here is where Morris found his prime cause, and no doubt considered himself lucky. The plague was a hardy beast two hundred years ago.” His mouth was dry, and as Valentinelli tested the stairs and Clare followed, debated the advisability of explicitly mentioning that here was most likely the original source of the illness that had killed Eli and Tarshingale’s patients, and decided against it.

  There was no profit, as Vance might say, in stating the obvious.

  Down, and down, the sour earth crumbling away from the sides of the passage; shovel-marks were still impressed on damp clay soil. Clare’s throat was full of an acid clump, and he restrained himself from coughing and spitting by an act of sheer will.

  The earthen strata changed colour, and the first skeletons appeared. Valentinelli crossed himself, and Vance made an amused noise.

  “The Dark Plague,” the criminal mentath breathed. “Quite. The damp eats at dead tissue, but lower down no doubt there are bodies preserved by the clay. And in those bodies…”

  “The plague. Which Morris set himself to resurrect, to prove the Pathological Theory or merely to show it could be done. I would give much to know…” Clare did not finish the sentence. Anything he wondered now was immaterial.

  “Archibald.” For the first time, Francis Vance sounded serious. “If I may address you thus, that is…”

  “For the time being, Francis, you may.” Clare lifted the lanthorn, and Valentinelli breathed out through his nose, the only sign of disgust he would allow himself.

  “Very good. Archibald, my friend, we are too late. The genie, as it were, has escaped the lamp.”

  “You have read Galland, I see. Yes. The dreadful spirit is loose in the world, and our task now is to find a second spirit to oppose it.” Clare could see the marks where samples had been scraped from the earthen walls; Morris had a fondness for femurs, it seemed. Scraps of ancient flesh hung on yellowed bone, a rat’s corpse worked half-free of the wall and stared with a wide-open snarl, other detritus poured into what had been a grave for the many instead of for one.

  Even in death, the space a body took up in Londinium was expensive, and obeyed certain laws of supply and rent, as Locke would have it. Smith and Cournot had refined the principle, of course, and Clare suddenly saw the pages of text before him, clear as a bell. It was an effort to bring his attention to the present moment.

  I am frightened, he realised, and my faculties seek to inure me to Feeling. Did Vance feel this terror? Was a criminal capable of such dread?

  “A cure? Dear man, you are an optimist.” And yet Vance’s amusement might have been a similar shield, for his tone was not quite steady, and he almost tripped on a stair-tread as earth shifted and the rat’s corpse twitched. “Ah. Good heavens, not very stable, down here.”

  “No, Dr Vance. I am no optimist.” Clare’s fist was damp, for the handkerchief was collecting sweat in his palm. “I am merely a man who sees what must be done. We shall come to Morris’s working area v
ery soon, Ludovico. When we do, you shall hold the lanthorn.”

  And may God and Science both have mercy upon us.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Burden Of Service

  Stepping into her own house was tinged with a variety of uncomfortable relief, almost as if she had retired to a bolt-hole. To be Prime was to fear very little, but she was well on her way to seeing enemies in every shadow.

  And for all I know, there may be. Especially if Britannia has another sorcerer dogging my footsteps. And the scene in the Hall probably did not inspire confidence or soothe Her. After all, Victrix – and Britannia Herself – could not know what Morris’s fevered rantings might have told her.

  And there was the question of the two canisters, disappeared. Emma sighed, working her fingers under her hair, leaning against her front door.

  Mikal echoed her sigh, his shoulders dropping. He finally broke the silence between them that had held all the way from Whitchapel. “Another sorcerer?”

  “A Prime, no less.” Wearily, Emma scrubbed at the skin over her skull. It would disarrange her hair most dreadfully, but she was past caring. Is Clare here? He should be, if I have to stir one step to seek him out tonight I shall be quite cross. Even the simple act of concentrating enough to discern who was within her walls seemed far too great an expenditure of precious energy.

  The house was awake, in any event, and Mr Finch came stiffly down the stairs, his dusty black making the long thin lines of his gaunt body even slimmer. His indenture collar brightened visibly as he laid eyes on her. “Madam.” He showed no surprise at her dishevelment – of course, he was phlegmatic in the extreme, as well as accustomed to the various states of disarray she suffered in Britannia’s service. “Mr Clare left, with his… guest. Shall I have Madame Noyon…?” His eyebrows rose, and his face was truly like a death’s head.