The Ripper Affair

Chapter Fourteen For Want Of A Pause

The 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.