Through moaning, fog-choked, eerily calm Londinium the sorceress rode, and she arrived at no conclusion.
As soon as the bay’s hooves touched down on the white pavers inside the Black Gate, Emma tasted the chaos and fear roiling through the Collegia’s sensitised fabric. The Great School shook, its white spires flushed with odd rainbow tints and its defences, invisible and barely visible, quivering with distress.
She took the most direct route to the Hall of Mending at a trot, and the Collegia servant who took her horse had a fever-bright glare and an oddly lumbering gait. Emma merely nodded and mounted the steps with a stride a trifle too free to be a lady’s, the great Doors opening creak-slowly. She nipped smartly between them, rather as if she were a student again…
… and plunged into a maelstrom.
The white pennants and hangings had been taken down, and the floor was splashed with scarlet. Cots lay in even rows, then jammed into corners, while Menders and their apprentices hurried from one to the next, seeking to dull the pain of sorcerers who lay twisting and screaming as their bodies warped under a double lash of disease and ætheric eruption. Bannon actually stepped back, almost blundering into a young apprentice who hissed “Mind yourself!” and scrambled away, his arms full of bloody rags.
The low sinuous altarstone throbbed as well, flushed with pink as its energies, collected over generations, were now plumbed to aid in Mending.
It did not look as if it was doing much good. As she hurried down the central aisle, looking for a particular set of broad crippled shoulders, a lean hieromancer in his traditional blue jacket thrashed off a narrow cot and screamed a high piercing note of pain, and his body disintegrated under a wave of twisting irrationality. His flesh parted with sick ripping sounds, and the blood that spilled out crystallised into what looked like rubies, gem-bright droplets that chimed as they hit the floor.
Good God. Emma did not halt, ducking the fine mist of fluid turned to stone and hurrying past as Menders converged, charms flashing valorously but ineffectively. Sweat had collected along Emma’s lower back, and she felt the death of the hieromancer, brushing her with soft-feathered fingers.
Her Discipline responded, the deeper fibres of her body and mind twitching. She shuddered, and just then caught sight of Thomas Coldfaith.
His regular ungainly walk, shuffling and pulling his recalcitrant clubbed foot, was even more painful; his twisted face florid with Morris’s plague and streaks of pinkish rheum streaking his scar-pocked cheeks. His wonderful eyes were bloodshot, and he appeared not to notice her. His Mender’s robe was grey, not white, not his usual jay’s-bright plumage, and spattered beside with all manner of fluids. He had just straightened from another cot, where a dead body lay slumped, twisting and jerking as it turned itself inside out and spattered the surrounding area with entrails and foul blackish, brackish semi-liquid.
She arrived before him with no memory of the intervening space, the feather-tickles all over her body most distracting despite her training’s tight reining.
Once or twice before, the Hall of Mending had been full of such suffering. Only then none of Emma’s Discipline had been alive to witness it, for those of the Endor had been killed as soon as certain… troubling signs… were noticed.
Menders, however, had ever been cosseted.
“Thomas.” She caught his arm, her gloved fingers slipping slightly against the slickness coating his robe. “You called for me.”
He blinked, bleary, and the red film over his irises and whites turned his gaze to a chilling blankness. “Em?”
“I am here.” The same dry rock in her throat. “Thomas…”
“And untouched. That is good.” A weary nod of his proud, misshapen head. “Though why I am surprised, I do not know.”
Her temper and conscience both pinched, but the sea of noise about them overwhelmed both. “There may be a cure. I can bring you to it.” Clare will help. He must be very far along now. Childish faith, perhaps, but she ignored such an estimation.
More blinking, and Coldfaith swayed, as if undecided.
Enough. She slipped her arm through his and began to urge him along. They can do without you, Thomas. We need a quiet corner, and I shall…
What was she contemplating? The weight in her chest was terrible. Even more dreadful was the shaking through his body, communicating to hers in a flood of loose-kneed, swimming dismay.
“Em.” Coldfaith halted. “I wished to see you, before I did what I must.”
All her gentle urging could not move him. She clasped his arm more tightly, set her heels, and pulled a little more firmly. “Come with me. Please.”
“No.” A terrible clarity bloomed in his dark gaze, behind the film of blood. “Emma.”
“Thomas – Tommy.” As if they were students again, young and bright and struggling. “Come.”
He freed himself of her grasp, gently but decidedly. “I wished to see you once more,” he repeated. “And to tell you I have not been kind to you. Before our Disciplines, Em, I had… thoughts.” He murmured something she could not quite catch, and as she leaned closer to him among the buffet of the crowd, he coughed. Bright red spattered along her shoulder, but she did not care. “I… I must tell you. Em. Yes, must tell Em…”
Another ripple through him, and she caught at his elbow again. A Mender hurrying behind her bumped against her skirt and hissed an imprecation, having little patience for the obstruction it represented. A sea of coughing rose through the Hall’s capacious entrance, more screams, and moaning.
Even though the Church held the ætherically talented as doomed to a purgatory at best and deep hellfire at worst, the sorcerers still called for God in extremis. Some of them even called for mothers they did not remember, for the Collegia was mother and father once a sorcerous child was taken.
None called for their fathers.
Thomas tacked away, slipping through her fingers with a feverish dexterity. He made for the pink-stained altar-stone, and as he did, a vast stillness descended upon the Hall.
Between one step and the next, Emma froze. She strained against air thick and hard as glass, drawing in a torturous lungful of stabbing air as Thomas reached the stone. He stood, his head down, for a long moment, and she knew what the silence and the difficulty in breathing meant.
Here in the Hall of his Discipline, Thomas Coldfaith was about to open the deepest gates of his sorcery. And Emma, an interloper with stinging eyes and a traitorous stone spike in her chest, was pinned as a butterfly on velvet, unable to act.
No. Thomas, no.
What had he meant to tell her?
He stretched his arms wide, rather as a tau-corpse would, and the silence became unbearable. The Hall’s light brightened, scouring Emma’s skull, nails through her sensitive eyes and her lungs refusing to work, a crushing upon throat and ribs and bones, her dress flapping and ruffling as streams of disturbed æther swirled past, whipping toward the hunchbacked sorcerer.
It was an act spoken of in whispers long after, how the greatest Mender of his generation opened the gates to his Discipline, becoming the throat Mending sang through. How several of the dying writhed before closing their eyes in peace, whatever hurtful blooming of the irrational wedded to the invisible vermin eating their flesh soothed away. How there was a shadow in the midst of the Hall of Mending’s brightness, but it fled as Coldfaith cried one Word, the contours of which echoed and rambled through the Hall’s nautilus-curved halls and inner recesses for decades afterwards, a Word like a name, full of longing and frustrated love, a depth of passion scarcely hinted at during a lifetime’s watching and waiting.
There was only one sorcerer who could have explained the mystery of that Word, but she did not. None would have listened to her talk of Mending, for it was not her Discipline, and in any case, how could she explain how she knew?
She knew, for it was her own name: a Word that expressed a thin nervous fire-proud girl with brown curls seen through the eyes of a misshapen boy. The Word rang and rum
bled and echoed, and when the door of his Discipline closed, the Menders found one of their own before the now-dark and drained altarstone, bending and coughing great gouts of scarlet blood that stained the pale flooring and would not be scrubbed away by bleach, carbolic, or sorcery.
Mending, as always, had exacted a price. Thomas Coldfaith’s body twisted and shuddered as flesh transmuted itself to smoke-dark glass, particles grinding finer and finer until they shredded into dark vapour that streamed out through the vast open doors and dissipated over Londinium.
He failed, but not entirely. Afterwards, the sorcerous of the Empire did not die of irrationality. They simply, merely, died of the plague’s convulsions and boils. A small mercy, perhaps, but all the twisted King of Menders (for so he was afterward called) could grant.
And Emma Bannon, Sorceress Prime, left the Collegia grounds on her bay clockhorse. None remarked her presence there that day, and it was perhaps just as well.
For had they addressed her, she would have struck them down with a Prime’s vengeance. In each of her pupils the leprous green spark of her own Discipline had strengthened, and that fire would not extinguish easily.
Chapter Thirty
The Island’s Heart
The coughing had taken on a wet, rheumy quality that would have been of great concern if Clare was inclined to pay it any mind. The bowl catching their crimson-laced, coughed-up effluvia had to be emptied regularly, else it slopped over onto the stony floor. Even the traceries of steam rising from their skin was tinged with red, or the film over their eyes gave everything a rubescence.
Clare had tossed his jacket and shirt over the desk chair, his narrow chest with its sparse hair visibly sunken as his body, held to its task by his faculties and a mentath’s disciplined Will, struggled under the burden. Vance was hardly better, his larger frame scarecrow-wasted and his eyes glittering through the red film. He had stripped down to an undershirt of grey linen, and it did Clare much good to notice the criminal mentath was not quite so fastidious in his underdress as he was in his outer.
They both moved slowly. Past words now, they shuffled about the workroom, its chill that of a crypt. Bubbling alembics as the muscovide was distilled, and they need not culture the new plague, for their own secretions teemed with Morris’s deadly gift to mankind. A single glance, or the offer of a freshly sterilised glass dropper, was all they needed.
Outside the workroom, Londinium writhed. The fog, normally venom-yellow, turned grey and greasy with the smoke from the bonfires some of the bodies were tossed onto.
On the fourth day, Miss Bannon appeared. “Clare?” Her gaze was somewhat odd, and he shelved the observation with a mental shudder. He had limited resources, and could not spare them. Not with this matter before him.
Even a mentath’s determination would only stretch so far.
“Working.” He coughed. “Tomorrow. Come back.”
She stood in the door of the workroom, her small hands turned to fists, and after a long while, Clare noticed she had gone. The green pinpricks in her pupils seemed more the product of his fever than of her illogical sorcery. Her house was an island on a sea of chaos, and even the Crown had ceased sending missives.
Britannia, it seemed, was occupied with other matters.
None of the servants took ill, and meals arrived on silver trays and were sent away untouched. They were not quite of the usual quality, but Clare – when he expended any thought on the matter at all, which was briefly at best – realised that Londinium’s supplies must be thin indeed at the moment.
An island, yes. But at the island’s heart, two small grains of grit, their accretions of bloody phlegm and various odd bits of rubbish from their experiments carted away by pale, trembling servants who nonetheless did not cough and choke, nor grow fevered.
He supposed, when he thought on it – never for very long, there was too much else to be done – that both he and Vance would not live to see the fruits of their labour. There was no word of other mentaths succumbing to the disease, but of course, the broadsheets would not be interested in such things.
On the fifth day, Miss Bannon appeared as he had directed, standing in the door. She wore no jewellery, which was the first oddity; the second was her haggardness, her gaze burning in the peculiar way of sorcerers – as if she had forgotten her very self, or some vast impersonal thing was looking out through her skull. It was not the same terrible presence as Britannia peering forth from Her chosen vessel, for Britannia was recognisable in some essential way sorcery was not.
Clare spat at the bowl, accurately. A great deal of practice had refined such an operation – three coughs, deep and terrible, working the weight free of his chest, the roll of the tongue packing the bloody sludge into a compact mass, then the expectoration – just enough of an arc to land it in the bowl with a wet plop! It exhausted him, and he leaned against the table, clutching a small glass vial.
Vance swayed. “Muscovide,” he croaked. “Who. Would have –” a series of coughs, and he spat as well – “thought?”
Quite. But Clare could not speak. His heart, labouring under the strain, thundered in his ears. He held the vial up, and Vance took it, shook it critically.
“Will it. Work?” The criminal mentath – at least he was, Clare thought hazily, a very fine lab assistant – reached for the spæctroscope. It took him two tries to curl his bloodstained fingers about the dial of the resolutia marix.
This was the last test, and Clare’s faculties blinked for a moment. He surfaced through a great quantity of clear, very warm water to find himself standing, head down, breathing thickly like a clockhorse suffering metallic rheum, staring as Vance eased a dropperful of the thin red substance from the vial into the scope’s dish, where a mass of plague was no doubt writhing and wriggling.
“Suction… tube,” Vance wheezed. “It must be… introduced… under the skin.”
Miss Bannon said something about a needle, and a Discipline.
“Perhaps.” Vance coughed again. “We shall… see.” His breathing failed for a moment, he swayed again, then leaned down to the spæctroscope’s viewpiece.
Clare found his head turning. He stared at Miss Bannon, in her severe black, with no jewels swinging at her ears or glittering at her fingers. You could not tell she was a sorceress except for those green pinpricks in her pupils, the smudges underneath dark as charcoal and her curls more unevenly dressed than he had ever seen them. Had Madame Noyon taken ill?
Her lips moved. Something about Ludovico. Was he dead, then?
A vast weightlessness settled on his chest. The relief was immense, and as his knees failed, Clare realised he was expiring.
It did not hurt. That was the first surprise.
The second was Miss Bannon’s wiry strength as she caught him, easing his fall, His field of vision swung to include Vance, who was staring down at him with a peculiar, saddened expression.
Had the cure not worked? But that was impossible, every other test had been—
Vance’s knees buckled. His fingers were at his trouser pocket, and Clare thought slowly that it was important, something about that was vitally important.
Miss Bannon did not move to catch Vance as he folded to the floor. Instead, she bent over Clare, and the sound of her ragged breathing was the last he heard before darkness took him. It was perhaps as well he did not hear what followed.
For Emma Bannon, finally, wept.
Chapter Thirty-One
Unwise and Unbecoming
“Put him to bed.” Emma’s throat was afire, her eyes dry-burning. She had not slept in days, it seemed, and Mikal was just as haggard.
Ludovico still clung to life; the black boils had burst and he merely lay, weak but still breathing, bandages changed every few hours as the suppurating wounds healed. His dark eyes were those of a captive hawk, sullen and hot with weakness he raged against even as his strength gathered and his body fought off the ravages of whatever dreadful illness he had contracted. It was not the Red, that much
was certain; his boils had been black, and Clare was in no condition to answer any questions.
Marcus hefted Clare’s shoulders. “Light as a feather, he is.”
Gilburn grunted, heaving the mentath’s lower half. “Not from this end, sir.”
It is Clare, do not… She could not even finish the thought. Instead, she stood in the fœtid workroom, staring at the heap of sodden cloth that had been Francis Vance. There was a slow-burning ember still clasped in the man’s vitals, but it was more than likely the foxfire of nerves and meat slowly leaching of fevered life.
In any case she did not care. “Put that outside. The pickers will take it.”
“Yesmum.” Finch’s face did not wrinkle with distaste, but it might have been a near thing. “Mum?”
Small flames danced under boiling alembics; the floor was a mess of slippery substances perhaps better left unexamined. Papers with odd notations were strewn about, some crumpled, others merely drifting to scatter on the sludge. The water-closet was likely to be a horror. She could charm it clean, and she would.
But not at this moment. It was terrible to see – Clare was normally so precise, even when a certain question or series of experiments took hold of his nimble brain. The only time she had ever seen disorder was when his faculties were underused and he began to suffer the mentath’s curse.
Boredom. If not trained and used, logic, like sorcery, turned on its helpless bearer.
Finch cleared his throat.
She surfaced. The broadsheets were full of wild speculation. And sending any of the servants out into Londinium was becoming problematic in the extreme. “Yes?”
“Another summons, mum. From the Crown.” Was there a moment of fear in his tone, a slight catch to the words?
“Yes.” She turned, slowly, in a full circle. The walls were flecked and splashed with various substances. Perhaps a flame-scouring would be in order.
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