The Iron Wyrm Affair

Chapter Eleven Unpleasantness is Not Over

I must reach home. The bright blood welling beneath her gloved hand clasped to her ribs splattered her skirt, and she was no doubt leaving a trail a mile wide. Ætheric strings quivered; the effort to mislead the parties searching for her consumed most of her waning strength. Why is there never a hansom?

She could barely hail one as it was, bleeding so badly. Not to mention a respectable driver might not stop, even if her glamour held. Another fiery pang rolled through her as the æther twisted, a screaming rush of air almost touching her disarranged curls, and for a moment the effort of blurring what an onlooker would see almost failed. Fresh hot claret slid between her fingers.

If not for her corset stays, she might well have been a dead woman. They had turned the knife a fraction, slowing it, and the man attacking her had died of a burst of raw shrieking sorcerous power. Konstantin had not lied; he had given her all the information she could reasonably suppose he had. But those who had engaged the services of one of the actual rooftop assassins – Charles Knigsbury was at least one of his names, a flashboy who had procured the protection from the abortionist on his own account – had also thought to ensure said assassin would not open his lips to one Emma Bannon.

Or indeed, to anyone.

The sorcery she had used on the small, rat-faced flashboy still stinking of gunpowder and terror had triggered a larger explosion of hurtful magic; Knigsbury’s body had literally shredded itself to pieces, and a fine cloud of mist-boiled blood had coated the inside of his stinking Dorset Alley doss. The resultant ætheric confusion had allowed her to slip away, but moments later she had felt the passage of an invisible bird of prey, and deduced the flashboy was bait of a different sort.

Well, I did think to spring a trap or two today. An unsteady, hitching noise escaped her; she reached out blindly and braced herself against a soot-laden brick wall. It looked vaguely familiar, a corner she saw almost every day, albeit usually through a carriage window. The rain intensified, threading through her glamour with tiny cold trickles, and she was well on her way to looking like a drowned cat.

A drowned, bleeding cat. Her knees buckled.

Emma, this will not do. Stand up! The snap of command was not hers. For a moment she was in the girls’ dormer at the Collegia again, her hair shorn and her skin smarting from the scrubbing, an orphan among the bigger girls who knew what to do and where to go – and how to bully the newcomer. And Prima Grinaud, the high magistrix of the younger classes, wasp-waisted and severe in her black watered silk, snapping sharply whenever Emma cried. Stop that noise. Collegia sorceresses do not snivel.

And little Emma had learned. Unfortunately, all that learning now seemed likely to pour out on to a filthy Londinium street.

No, not filthy. There’s the hedge. I am nearly home. Instead of brick, her free hand scraped the laurel hedge, washed with rain and glowing green even through the assault of smoke. Was it smoke? It certainly clouded her vision, but she smelled nothing but the familiar wet stone and Londinium coal stink.

And the sharp-sweet copper tang of blood.

No, it wasn’t smoke. Her sensitive eyes were merely failing her. It had been so bright earlier, even through the lowering clouds; her head hurt, a spike of pain through her temples. The gate quivered, iron resonating with distress; for a moment she was unable to remember the peculiar ætheric half-twist that would calm the restive guardian work wedded to metal and stone.

Either that, or she was clutching the wrong gate. But no, she blinked hazily several times and looked up as another wave of sorcery slid past her, ruffling her hair and almost, almost catching the edge of her skirts. When they found the blood trail—

I am home. Numerals made of powdery silver metal danced, charter symbols racing over their surface in golden crackles: 34½, a sweeter set of digits she had never seen. The high-arched gate trembled until she calmed it and found the breath to hum a simple descant.

Or she tried to. It took her a long while of sipping in air suddenly treacle-thick.

Finally she managed it. The gate shuddered and unlatched, one half sliding inward; veils of ætheric energy parted just as the next wave of sorcerously fuelled seeking tore past, arrowing unerringly for her as she tipped herself forward. It nipped at her heels, the sympathetic ætheric string from her own blood yanking, seeking to drag her backwards into the street.

But she was safely inside her own gate, the defences on her sanctum snapping shut, and Emma Bannon went to her knees on the wet, pretty front walk, lilac hedges snapping and thrashing as the house recognised her and filled with distress. Rain pattered down; she went over sideways, her hand still clamped to the wound. Another hot gush of blood; she heard running feet and exclamations, and she struggled against the grey cotton cocoon closing around her.

Thank goodness this dress was already ugly, she thought.

And, I must live. I must.

I know too much to die now.