The Red Plague Affair

Chapter Twenty-Two Unlucky Enough to Live

It was a long way, and she was in no fit condition to be seen in public. Still, Emma kept her head down, cracked cobbles ringing under her boots, and Mikal’s presence ensured she was not troubled by catcall or jostle even in the crowd. Yellow fog crept between the buildings, threaded between carriage-wheel spokes, touched hat and hair and hand with cold, sinister damp. It was a slog-souper tonight, the fog lit from within by its own faint venomous glow, and even the air-clearing charm every Londinium sorcerer learned early and used daily could not keep its salt-nasty reek from filling the nose.

She alighted from the hansom, Mikal having ridden with her instead of running the rooftop road for once, and brushed futilely at her skirts. Then she had set off, as Mikal tossed the fare to the muffled driver.

I am a needle, seeking north. Except she knew very well what she sought, and it was east. The Eastron End, as a matter of fact. Her jewellery sparked in fitful waves, golden charter charms spinning through metal and stone. Her hair, dressed as well as she could manage without the benefit of a mirror, was still dishevelled enough to annoy her whenever a dangling curl swung into her field of vision. The throbbing pulse-noise of Londinium at night rose and fell, just as the roar of the wind and steady wingbeats had while she was strapped into the chariot.

Mikal must have been weary, but he made no demur. The only mark of their voyage was his windblown hair and his haggard air, his coat hanging from an oddly wasted frame. He would need physical sustenance to repair the damage, and soon.

Still, she walked. The hired hansom had let her loose at Aldgate, where the æther still resonated with the impress of the ancient barrier. The Wall still stood, of course, but the Ald had shivered itself to pieces during one of Mad Georgeth’s fits of pique. Sometimes smoke still rose from the blackened cobbles, and traffic – both carriage and foot – was always pinched here, no matter the hour.

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 radius 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.