The Ripper Affair (Bannon and Clare) (7 page)

^“
M
arian Nickol, called Polly, though the inquest will legally ascertain her identity.” Clare blinked owlishly at the scrawls upon the thin paper as the carriage jolted. “Found by a carter on Bucksrow, near the Hospital. Slashed throat. Abdominal injuries… Omentum, uterus… sharp object… peculiar, most peculiar.”

“Indeed,” Miss Bannon murmured. She had a queer look upon her soft little face: distant, as if listening to faraway music.

A copy of the particulars of this and another murder had been prepared in advance of their arrival, and Clare had noticed Miss Bannon’s tiny
moue
of distaste when
that
was discovered. Perhaps she resented the Queen’s easy assumption of her pet sorceress’s service? How could Her Majesty be certain, though, given how Miss Bannon
had scrupulously avoided such service for… how long now?

When the Consort had died of a fever perhaps typhoid in origin–his health never having been very strong after the Red Plague had wracked Londinium–Miss Bannon had not worn mourning, as many of Britannia’s subjects affected. Indeed, she had merely drunk a little more rum than was her wont at supper, and retreated to her study instead of to the smoking room, where Clare was habituated to sit and discuss various and sundry with her afterwards, as if she were a man at a dinner party.

The particulars were an easily solved conundrum. Britannia had more than one sorcerer or mentath in Her service, and the pages could easily have served another. He brought his attention back to the report, which held the details of the body’s discovery as well. “The first–Marta Tebrem–was found in Whitchapel, too. Georgeyard Building. Stairs–first-floor landing. Dashed odd, that.”

“Not if she was an unfortunate.” Her gloved hands were clasped together a trifle too tightly. “I would be surprised if she did not bring a customer to that place more than once. Or if she sheltered there, to sleep.”

“Ah.” He coughed slightly. “Yes. I see.”

She sat bolt upright, as usual, and had tucked the veil aside for the nonce. Two spots of hectic colour burned high up on her soft cheeks, and he was struck by how impossibly
vital
she appeared. Primes had long lives, certainly… he had taken it for granted that she would outlast him.

What an unpleasant thought.
And followed by others equally unprepossessing, much like a steam-locomotive dragging carriage after carriage.

Even steam-locomotives possessed charmed whistles, and sorcerous reinforcement upon their boilers. A triumph of Science, yes, but larded with irrational sorcery.

One would have to go far, Clare had found, to escape such things.

“Out of the rain, and dark,” Miss Bannon continued, “though I would chance a guess that the first victim was also much under the influence of gin the night of her misfortune. We cannot rule the choice of venue as hers until we examine it. The murderer may have taken her to the building while she was not quite of right mind, impersonating a client for her bodily services.”

Of course, they would start with the first murder, and take the chain of deduction from there. It was how they began an affair such as this if time permitted, seeking the site of the first event they could distinguish. There was a certain comfort in the habit, Clare supposed. “She was last seen with a Guardsman, it says.”

“Of course that may have been…” When she did not continue, he looked up from the papers. She stared out the window, and her fierce gaze was not ameliorated by matted eyelashes and reddened, brimming eyes. Her left hand had clenched, and she had sunk her pearly teeth into her lower lip, cruelly.

For the first time since he had met her, Clare was witnessing her wholly unguarded sentiments. The moment
was so novel he almost crushed the papers as the carriage rocked itself, and his mouth had gone dry.

It took another cough before he could speak, and the sound served to alert her to his scrutiny. She smoothed her expression with amazing rapidity, and reached up to free the veil from its fastening. Her rings flashed, a heatless fire.

“Miss Bannon—”

“The morning has disarranged me.” Her face was swallowed by darkness again. “Please, continue. I shall be better shortly.”

“Miss Bannon, I—”

“The report, Clare. Please do continue.”

He swallowed dryly, and forced himself to concentrate. “The medical examiner, in both cases, was quite thorough. There seems nothing missing from the notes. The most recent gentleman performing that duty–Killeen? Yes, that is his name–shall no doubt be at the Nickol inquest.”

“Which you shall attend.”

“Should time permit. Will you?”

“No.” A slight shake of her veiled head. “I think I shall be hunting for clews in other quarters. There was a great deal of… disturbance about the body. I am uncertain what to make of it, and I think I shall be
quite
occupied in ferreting out the source.”

“Hm.” He digested this, and halted before he could make the quick glance aside that would ascertain whether or not Valentinelli had anything to add. The rattling of pebbles against a coffin’s lid rolled inside his skull,
deafening like the roar of traffic and crowd noise outside. “You are expecting further unpleasantness, sooner rather than later.”

“Oh, yes. The first murder appears, if I may make a ghastly observation, merely a rehearsal. First we shall view the scene of Tebrem’s discovery.”

Did he imagine the slight unsteadiness of her tone? It could be blamed upon the carriage ride–Clare steadied himself as the conveyance rattled again. “And then?”

“Then we shall view the second, and return home for dinner–I am quite sorry, but we shall likely miss tea. Tomorrow, you shall visit quite another Yard.” She returned her now-loosened hands to her black-clad lap, and Clare found himself wondering if her face was contorting again behind the veil. “If I may presume to suggest as much.”

“Of course.” He looked back at the paper. “I was dashed brutal to you, Emma. I apologise.”

“Unnecessary, sir.” Yet the words remained thoughtful, rather than dismissive. “I understand a temperament such as yours would find such a revelation quite a shock. Pray set yourself at ease.”

He was not quite ready, he decided, to be treated with such cool politeness. He had seen her employ such a tone before, to set an overly familiar interlocutor back on his heels, so to speak. Were he not a mentath, Clare acknowledged, such a realisation might sting. Nevertheless, he soldiered on. “No reason to act so ungentlemanly, indeed. I am… I was fond of Ludovico, but—”

“As was I,” she said, colourlessly. “Do continue with the recitation of facts from these papers, sir. There is a mystery at hand, and I wish it unravelled as soon as possible, so I may return to my accustomed habits.”

T
he Georgeyard Building had been new a decade ago, and clung to shabby respectability by teeth and toenails. Of course, it was off Whitchapel High Street, so the question of its respectability was an exceeding open one.

The day had brightened enough that the Scab’s vile green, velvety organic ooze had retreated under muffled sunlight’s lash, leaving an evil oily steam instead of its usual thick rancid coating over the cobbles.

Not to worry, though. It will return with darkness.
So would Emma, if she gained nothing with this visit. For now, though, she followed Clare, their treads echoing in the dark.

She was glad of the stairwell’s dimness; her eyes were burning from even the cloudy sunshine outside.

Or from something else.

Nothing you need take account of, Emma. Do what duty demands here, and retreat as soon as you may.

Why had she agreed to this? Merely because Clare had immediately assumed she would, or because she had felt some twinge of fading… what, for Victrix? Because she feared eccentricity was pressing in upon her too soon, her mental faculties becoming brittle? Perhaps because if she had not, she would have had to solve the questions gathering about her Shield?

Mikal followed her, taking care not to crowd too closely. The first floor came quickly, and she all but staggered when the disturbance in the æther pulsed sharply. All other considerations fled. “There,” she managed, through numb lips, and pointed with a rigid arm. “
Right
there.”

Mikal leapt up the last two stairs, caught her other arm. “Prima?”

“I am well enough. It is simply… I have never…”
I have not ever seen this before. I have never even
heard
of such a disturbance.
A Prime’s memory was excellent, her education the best the Collegia could provide, and there was precious little sorcery she had not witnessed or read of. “What
is
this? It is still echoing. And she was discovered last
month
!”

“Miss Bannon?” Clare sounded nervous, for once. “There is a rather definite drop in physical temperature here. Remarkable. And…” He bent rapidly, and plucked something from the floor. “How very odd. Look.”

It was a small pebble, no doubt carried in from outside, on a shoe or in a cuff. He turned it in his long capable
fingers, then flicked it into the corner where the disturbance was greatest.

She stepped forward as well, Mikal moving with her. The Shield’s grasp was a welcome anchor as she felt the chill difference in temperature, sharp as a falling knifeblade.

The stone hung, turning, in midair. A simple piece of cracked gravel, rough and clotted with dirt that unravelled in fine twisting threads. Now she could see the canvas-covered floor quivering through a curtain of disturbed, snarling æther. A stained piece of wooden wall, heavily scarred with use, was bleached as its physical matrices warped.

“Mr Clare,” she heard herself say, as if from a great distance, “it would be very well if you were to retreat from that spot. Quickly.”

“Prima?” Mikal’s single word, shaded with a different question.

Her free arm, rigidly pointing at the floating pebble, trembled. “Take Clare halfway down the stairs.” Mikal hesitated, and her temper almost snapped. “
Now
, Shield.”

He turned loose of her with less alacrity than she would have liked, but he obeyed. At least Clare knew better than to question at this juncture. For a moment it was as if Time itself had turned back and it was one of the many investigations or intrigues between their inauspicious first meeting and the crushing denouement of the Plague affair. The only thing missing was Ludovico’s silent sneer as he hustled Clare to safety or took up a guard post down the
hall, which he might have done if he could have moved more quickly than Mikal.

Do not think upon that, Emma
.

Instead, she
focused
, tucking the irritating veil aside as her jewellery flamed with heat, its ætheric charge responding to the spreading disturbance. The pebble still hung in midair, and she wondered if any of those who sheltered here noticed the spot, or if they simply felt the chill and avoided even glancing at something inimical. Even a lowly charter with barely the ability to trace a symbol in quivering air could have sensed the disturbance, and probably found other accommodations forthwith.

If there were any to be had; shelter of any kind was expensive in Whitchapel.

She extended a few thread-delicate tendrils of awareness to discern the true shape of the tangle. It throbbed, an abscess under the surface of the visible, a monstrous root driven deep through the real and almost-real. Emma risked another light touch, as a woman would pass her hand down a pinned dress-fold to discern if it would hang true. Intuition plucked at the knot, finding its shape and the likely directions it would bulge upon being observed.

She could have patiently unpicked it, inch by careful inch. It would have been better to refuse Victrix outright than to hurry now, and yet the sooner she found precisely what manner of disturbance this was, she could leave the entire displeasing mess behind her.

The solution, as ever, was to simply cast her net and see what rose with it to the surface. Training clamped its
iron grasp about her body and she exhaled smoothly, stepping deliberately forward into the small pond of concentrated irrationality.

The gin, false friend, hung thick and close inside her head, veils of welcome warmth. A rancid burp, the simmering smell of her own clothes, as familiar-strange as this wide-hipped body, loose and sagging with despair. Stumbling, falling against the wall, she turned to see him, his hat pulled low and only the suggestion of a chin under its shade.

Twas not his features she was interested in, but the pence burning in her hot palm. A man paid before he received, that was the best way of business, even for one as curst as old Marta. He had not demurred.

“Le’s ha’at thee, then,” she slurred, and that was when a jet of light cleaved the gloom.

She did not feel the first blow. It was the warm gush down her front that warned her, but her throat was full of that darkness, the same covering his face. It crawled down as if it wished to inhabit her stomach, and the knife came up again.

He fell upon her, and her fist clenched, but only because she thought,
“Not m’pence, needs it for a doss I do”,
before the void swelled obscenely past her stomach, clawing at her vitals, and she knew no more.

Emma staggered, the shock of her knees hitting the filthy floor only slightly cushioned by her skirts. Her spine
stiffened, bending backward as if on a medieval spikehoop, and she was not conscious of her own voice: a high curlew cry that punched a perfect, circular hole in the bleached, sagging wall. Her jewellery blazed, diamonds at her throat emitting shrieking stress-screams, and the jet earrings shattered, their shards driven outwards as if propelled by burning gunpowder. Later, she would find the silver cuffs heat-rippled and all but useless for carrying ætheric force.

Still, they had performed another service: keeping her from being overwhelmed.

Tension snapped and she was thrown back, hitting something almost-soft and tumbling, a brief moment of merciful unconsciousness before the pain swallowed her whole. Even then training did not fail her, but behaved even more mercilessly, shunting the force of the blow aside as the entire building–and the street outside–shivered like a whipped cur. Her own shrieks rattled the walls, plaster dust falling fine and thin, Mikal’s answering curse lost under a wall of rushing noise as he lowered her, his fingers biting cruelly as he sought to stop the wild thrashing.

He had left Clare to see to her, and she did not even recognise the fact.

One of a Shield’s functions was to conduct such an overflow away from her, but this was too immense. A high ringing noise, a wet snapping, peeling sound, and the world settled into its accustomed dimensions again with a thump. Emma sagged, vicious-toothed trembling all through her as hot pain pounded between her temples.

Silence filled the dark stairwell. Soon there would be
shouts, and running feet. Even in Whitchapel, such an event as this would not go unremarked.

“Prima?” Mikal, raggedly. “
Emma?
”

One last pang, ripping through her, phantom blade cleaving flesh and breastbone. She curled around the blow, blind and witless, and Mikal held her down. It passed, and the shuddering, great gripping waves of it, began anew.

“
Saw
it,” she managed. “
I saw it!
” Which meant the sorcery performed here, driving itself through the physical and ætheric, had found some resonance within
her
, and jolted home with explosive force.

The pebble completed its fall, and pinged against the floor. It did not sound right; the entire area bounded by the cold had been changed smoothly and seamlessly to glass. One could peer down into a dim, narrow hallway underneath, and the circular hole punched in the wall had thin, knife-sharp crystalline edges. A nasty smell boiled through, whistling darkness loaded with the breath of the privy-closet that had hidden behind.

At the moment, the crushing ache in her skull and the savage pain all through her body somewhat precluded examining the damage further. Now she was well and truly involved in this affair–all for the want of a pause before leaping in. “I…” She coughed, retching, her stomach threatening to unseat itself. “
Hurts
.”

“
Pax
, Prima. I am here.” Was Mikal shaking too, or was it merely her own shivering?

“Dreadful,” she managed, in a colourless little voice. “Home. Shield…
home
.”

“Yes.”

With that assurance she let go of consciousness again, retreating to the deepest parts of herself as her violated mind sought to compass what had happened.

Two ideas followed her, both equally chilling.

The first was
He had no face
.

The second?
But he had a knife.