The Red Plague Affair

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.

And while she was at it, the entire rotting city could be cleansed, could it not? A small matter, for a Prime. One had only to will it, and the entire world could drown in such a flame.

It was building that was the difficult bit.

You are not thinking clearly. The heaviness in her chest, the Philosopher’s Stone, knocked free of Llewellyn Gwynnfud’s dead hands… it made her proof against this decay, and was no doubt the reason her servants did not suffer.

But such protection did not extend to Clare. He was not servant or Shield. He was simply, merely…

… what?

What is he to me? Dare I name it?

Horace and Teague appeared; Finch directed them to lay Vance’s body outside the gate for the corpse-pickers. “The Lady wishes it so. Come, hurry along, men.”

The Lady wishes it so. “Finch.” Rusty and disused, as if she had not spent the past few days roaming her library reciting cantos until her tongue went numb, to keep from unleashing a torrent of hurtful sorcery.

“Yesmum?”

“Have Harthell saddle the bay again, please. If the maids go a-market with Cook, one of the footmen should accompany them – armed. Mikal?”

“Is still at Mr Ludovico’s bedside, mum.”

“Send someone to watch Ludo, then, and tell Mikal I require him.” Though he will not be happy; I left him like a pin holding a dress-fold and did not return to retrieve him, or give him lee to depart his post. “No doubt he will wish the black saddled, as well.”

“Yesmum. Mum?”

She turned her attention fully onto him, but he did not blanch. A tilt to her head, and she saw the lines graving deeper into his dry skin, the looseness under his chin, the way his collar cut into the papery flesh.

Finch was ageing, too. But she was not. As long as she bore the Stone, she would not, and the thought was enough to send a shiver down her spine.

The butler clasped his hands behind his back. “We are grateful to be in your service, mum. There’s talk in the servant’s quarters, and right glad we are you… well, you are our mistress.” His laborious accent changed, and it was the slur and slang of his youth wearing through the words now. “Do you close your doons, missan, an’ we shall all stay wit’you.”

Why, Finch. “I am pleased to hear it. I do not think I shall be required to close the house, though. Britannia dares not imprison me.” For if she did, she would not have me to do certain disagreeable tasks.

There might be others, though. A sorcerer as invisible as herself, perhaps part of Society, perhaps not, dogging her footsteps and leaving her posies.

“No matter how remiss I have been in answering summons,” she finished. “Thank you, Finch. Please hurry.”

He did, and Emma drifted to the door in his wake. She said a single Word, and the lamps dimmed; another, and the flames under the alembics died. She left the workroom in shadow, and when she closed the door, it thudded as a crypt door would, sealing the mess inside.

The pall over Buckingham boiled with the ruling spirit’s displeasure. It wreathed the spires of the Palace, it came down almost to the ground, and its thunderstorm-blackness was spangled with flashes of crackling diamond-hard white.

That is quite… She could find no words. A coughing groom took her horse, and Mikal’s too. Kerchiefs knotted around the lower half of many a face, some soaked in various substances, made Londinium into a city full of highwaymen who sometimes collapsed, coughing bloody sputum and convulsing. The corpsepickers sang, and if not for the grey of the fog – for bodies were burning, and the city full of sweet roasting as well as coalstink – it might have been a pleasant day.

After all, it was not raining.

Haggard Coldwater Regiment guards stood at their posts; she stalked past them despite an attempt to bar her passage. Mikal produced the summons, the paper snow-white and the seal upon it sparking just as the blackness overhead did. The sight of the seal answered all questions, or perhaps it was the expression on her Shield’s lean face.

Under the pall, the light was wan and anaemic, and the corridors of the Palace were oddly empty. Though she could hear motion, scurryings in the walls, as it were, she relied on the guards at each doorway to point her to the Queen’s location.

Stalking along, her head high and her dress – mourning, again, but this one much more wilted than her garments were wont to be – rustling as she moved, her hair dressed indifferently and bare of any jewellery, she was an unprepossessing figure at best. The charged atmosphere shivered as she moved through it, a Prime’s approach through the thick sensitised æther that of a storm approaching.

Did Victrix feel it?

I hope she does.

The royal apartments, in contrast to the rest of the Palace, were a hive of activity. Physickers and white-robed Menders, a few scarlet-striped Hypatians, more than one Minister in a wig and some of Court grimly determined to be seen as loyal at this extremity, handkerchiefs lifted to their mouths as Emma swept past, Mikal holding the summons aloft as if it were a banner. It was the bedchamber, she found, and though she had a summons, she might be called upon to cool her heels.

Then I will leave. I have other matters to attend to.

As in, watching Clare die? Her skin contracted, a shiver running through her, and she eyed the heavy door to the royal bedchamber, the rose-petalled crest of the house of Henry the Wifekiller worked into the ancient wood and painted over many a time.

“Bring her in,” the air whispered, Britannia’s tones shivering through the heads of those assembled without passing through their ears. Emma blinked, but her step did not falter. She passed through the bedchamber doors with her head held high.

Alexandrine Victrix, ruler of Empire, lifted her tearstained face from the counterpane and fixed Emma with a baleful eye. “You,” she said, and the word held a long hiss of displeasure. “I sent for you!”

Her eyes were black from lid to lid, the dust over Britannia’s glare scorched away, the stars burning in that blackness forming constellations that would make a mortal dizzy if he gazed too deeply. She was on her knees next to a high-heaped bed, and the room was littered with physicker’s tools, full of a sweet-burning smell, and tropical-hot. The Queen’s pregnancy was more visible now, perhaps because she was merely in a dressing gown, and her dark hair hung in rivulets down her back.

On the bed, under the many blankets – they must have thought to sweat something out of him – lay the Consort, the ruby swellings under his chin grotesquely shiny as the fluid within them strained for release. He coughed weakly, a thick chesty sound, and the bubbling of bloody film at the corners of his eyes was the only colour in the room that did not seem bleached by Victrix’s fury.

Emma came to a halt as the door swung shut behind her. Mikal stayed outside; her single scorching look had expressed her desire to face this alone.

“You,” Victrix repeated, and it was curious how certain Emma could be that it was the mortal Queen speaking, though the spirit of rule shone out through her eyes. “How dare you bring this into Our presence!”

For a few moments, Emma could hardly credit her ears. Then she realised the nature of the accusation, and her chin lifted. “You sent me to recover Morris, Your Majesty. I did. I even did my best to bring him to you before he expired – at Your express command. Had You seen fit to be more open with me about the nature of his filthy ‘experiments’, much of this could have been avoided.” There is my gauntlet, Majesty. Return it if you dare.

For a moment she could not believe she had addressed the Queen so. But the vision of Clare, his sunken cheeks afire and his body held to the task before him with sheer will, rose before her. And it was Victrix’s game – the game of empire, of weapons and conquest – that had birthed this monstrosity.

And not only Clare, but Londinium suffered under its lash as well.

“Our Consort sickens.” Victrix almost howled the words, and the pall over the Palace rattled ominously with thunder. “There must be a remedy!”

She is only a woman, after all, and one with a heart. Something inside Emma’s chest cracked slightly. “I am engaged upon—”

It was, she would remember, the last few moments of the Bannon who had sworn service not just aloud, but in the secret chambers of her very self.

Angry colour suffused Victrix’s cheeks, less tender now than when they were crowned. “Engaged? Engaged? Engage more thoroughly!” Everything in the room jumped slightly, and Alberich moaned.

Do I look as if I have been taking the waters at Bath? Heat mounted in Emma’s own cheeks, and the two women were perhaps just as scarlet-cheeked as the Consort now. “I cannot create sheer miracles—”

“You are a filthy sorceress, what else are you good for?” the Queen cried, in a paroxysm of rage. “Creeping in corners, a shameless proudnecked hussy airing before her betters!” She lifted a trembling, ring-jewelled hand, the gems scintillating with fury, and pointed. “If he dies, if you have killed him, I will punish—”

Emma inhaled sharply. The ice was all through her, now. The crack in her chest whistled a cold, clear draught right down to her very core. “I did not loose this madness upon the world, Victrix. Your own Crown did that, with no help from me. It is unwise – and unbecoming – for you to speak so.”

“Get out! Do not return until you have found the remedy, and if my Consort dies I will have your head!”

“You are,” she informed the screeching woman, “welcome to try to separate said head from my shoulders.” But it is a task you had best be prepared for the unpleasantness of, and the trouble and expense. I am not some cowering, simpering aristocrat.

What was she thinking?

She did not make a courtesy, either. She turned on her heel, not trusting her voice should she speak further. There were Words crowding her throat and a suspicious looseness at the very lowest floor of her soul – the barred door of her Discipline, ready to open and swallow her whole.

If she loosed it in this fashion, a raging conduit for the power of the Endor, it would not be Thomas Coldfaith’s act of sacrifice.

No, it would be… otherwise. And the first place that freed sorcery would strike was the suck-sobbing woman crouched at the bedside of her husband, with the ruling spirit watching – coolly, calculating – through her madness.

Victrix beat her small plump hands on the counterpane, and Emma’s passage threw the door back, the wood splintering in a long vertical crack as her control slipped a fraction. The material of her dress scorched, a new layer of reek added to the sweetbriar-sickness, the choking atmosphere of the Red.

Mikal’s fingers closed about her arm, and such was Emma Bannon’s countenance that none dared question or halt them as the Shield, perhaps sensing the danger, ushered her from the room stinking of sweetness and smoke.