The Ripper Affair

Chapter Forty-One To Crithen’s Church

It was no use. Clare pushed the carriage door open as the clockhorses shrilled. If they went any further, the carriage would become well and truly mired in the crowd, and Harthell’s steady cursing was already lost under the noise. Screams of frightened women, breaking bottles and tearing wood, the roiling of men’s voices. From somewhere torches had arrived, for the gaslamps were guttering, their wickcharms dying. The throng ahead filled the main thoroughfare of High Whitchapel Road, and the press of the crowd even on this small tributary was becoming rather worrisome.

Leather Apron! Leather Apron!

The public, that great beast–or at least a healthy slice of it–had lost patience with the keepers of order.

In her very bed, he did, and they do nothing, all high and mighty! Heard he opened her up, even her face. Welladay, the Metropoleans don’t care as long as he kills poor frails. Our girls, they are, even if low.

Lining High Whitchapel were shops and better-to-do homes; the crowd pressed uneasily against them. The carriage had not yet become a target, but it was only a matter of time.

Aberline was beside him, casting an eye over the heaving mass. The fog had greyed as if dawn was incipient; Clare’s pocket-watch told him that indeed, sunrise was very close, with Tideturn not far behind. More glass shattered, and Harthell cursed again.

“We shall not stir a foot in this,” Clare observed. Soon they may take a mind to upend the carriage.

“Not without sorcery or a regiment.” Aberline, sour-faced, had regained some of his colour. Mikal was silent, but his tension was clearly apparent.

“Ho! Pico, come down. Harthell, take the carriage home.” Clare had to shout. “We shall proceed—”

A different sound pierced the seashell roar. High and chilling, a silverwhistle.

“Oh, blast it all.” Aberline leapt from the carriage, landing heavily on blackened, broken cobbles. “Waring, you bloody fool. He’s called in—”

“Headcrackers. And possibly a regiment,” Clare said, grimly. “Or two. There will be blood shed this dawn.”

“Other sorcerers will muddy the waters.” Mikal had grasped Aberline’s elbow as the crowd surged around them. A toothless beldame in red calico shrieked, falling against a sturdy flashboy with an Altered left hand, metal sharpened and gleaming as he thrust her away with a curse. “How close are we?”

“To Crithen’s? A ten-minute walk, were this a fine morning. Today…” Aberline indicated the throng at the juncture of Bent and High Whitchapel.

Harthell evidently agreed with Clare’s estimation of the situation, for he wheeled the carriage hard right and vanished down Tehning Cross; the crack of his whip sent a chill up Clare’s spine. Set it aside. What may be done? Think!

Mikal glanced up, studying the rooftops. “I think—”

Whatever he had meant to say was lost in an angry roaring. Beneath it, drumbeats, and the clopping of hooves in unison. Yet it was not from that end of Whitchapel the flaming lucifer that set off a crowd’s tinder dropped.

It was from the other end, and as soon as Clare heard the sound, his heart sank.

Ever afterwards, none could discern from the conflicting reports who had given the City Streamstruth Regiment the order to fire upon the crowd. The volley was enough to cause a few moments’ worth of shocked silence.

There is a moment when a crowd ceases to be a mass of separate beings, when it becomes a single mind and turns upon its tormentor. Or simply, merely upon anything within reach. Once it becomes such an organism, it tramples, heaves, tosses, and smashes with no restraint.

Being caught in the jaws of that monster was not acceptable.

Mikal shoved Aberline to the side of the street, where an open dosshouse door showed a slice of yellow lamplight. “Go!” he cried, and pushed Clare for good measure. Pico hopped in their wake with youthful alacrity, and it was Mikal again, suddenly before them, who kicked at the door even as a burly just-awakened stout in braces and a thread-bare shirt sought to slam it against sudden danger.

A quick strike, Mikal’s hand blurring, and the dosshouse doorman folded; Pico shoved the door closed and sought a means to bar it.

Clare found himself gasping for breath. How annoying. Still, they were out of danger for the moment, and Mikal evidently had some manner of plan.

“Up,” the Shield said. “Find a staircase.”

“And then what?” Pico enquired, shoving a flimsy chair against the dosshouse door. The entry hall was dingy and smelled overwhelmingly of cabbage and unwashed flesh; on the ground the doorman stirred slightly. Pico thought a moment, then grabbed both the supine man’s wrists. Aberline helped him drag him for the door, and Clare’s protest died unspoken. The wood cracked and heaved; outside, the sound of the crowd was now a wild howling of pain.

“Then,” the Shield said, “we run. And you pray to whatever god you choose that we find my Prima.”

Clay tiles scratching underfoot; timber creaking uneasily when a man’s weight touched it. Mikal, impatient with their slow progress, nevertheless shepherded them carefully.

The geography of Londinium appeared much altered when seen from this vantage. Ground became tile and sloped roofs, streets long channels separating thin island-fingers. Crossing the channels was either nerve-wracking–a slide and a leap, Mikal’s hand flashing forwards to drag a man onto solid safety–or entirely irrational, a matter of clinging to the Shield and closing one’s eyes while he leapt in some sorcerous fashion. Each time he did so, hopping across thoroughfares as if it was child’s play, Clare’s most excellent digestion threatened to unseat itself.

At least now he knew how the man kept up with Miss Bannon’s carriage.

Clare peered at the sky as Pico slithered down the roof-slope behind him, boots scraping dry moss and accumulated soot. Even here, life clung to gullies and cracks; he saw hidden courts, walled off by the rapid building of slum-tenements, with the remains of old gardens gone to seed. Twisted trees no eye but the sky had viewed for years, and even grass and weeds clinging in rain-gutter sludge. Londinium’s roofs were a country of mountainous desert, concealing throbbing life and violent motion beneath its crust.

Whitchapel was ablaze, figuratively and actually. Two fires had started, one near the border of Soreditch and another, from what Clare could tell, sending up a black plume from the slaughteryard near Fainmaker’s Row. Yellowing fog swirled uneasily, and the virulent green of Scab held to mere fringes and dark alleys.

Cries and moans, the roaring of a maddened crowd, more sharp volleys of rifle fire. Had the Crown authorised such a deadly response? Was it the Old City, nervous at the proximity of the restless poor? Waring was merely a commissioner, he could not have taken the step without approval from the Lord Mayor or the Crown—

“Mind yourself,” Pico said, grabbing his sleeve. “Look. Crithen’s, just there.”

Clare peered down. Mikal landed atop the slope with a slight exhalation of effort, and Aberline retched once, quietly.

“Enough power to feel the effects,” the Shield said, soft and cold. “And should I need to, Inspector—”

“Cease your threats.” Aberline sounded pale. “I told you I would do my best.”

“Mr Mikal?” Clare’s voice bounced against the rooftop. “A moment, if you please?”

“What?”

“It is past dawn.”

Mikal was silent for a long moment. There was a flash of yellow as he checked the sky, and Pico moved along the edge of the roof.

Clare cleared his throat. “Do you have any idea why Londinium is still, well, subject to Night? Is this sorcery?”

“Perhaps.” The Shield halted, still with a hand to Aberline’s elbow. “A Work meant to replace a ruling spirit, or create a new one… perhaps this is an effect. My Prima would know. Are we close?”

“The place is there.” Clare pointed, as Pico had. “Though I must say, it does not look in the least churchlike.”

It was a slumping, blasted two-storey building, set between two ditches that served, if Clare’s nose was correct, as nightsoil collectors. Also, if his vision was piercing the dimness correctly, a dustheap or two. “I cannot even tell… was it a house?”

“They call it church because Mad Crithen nailed his victims to the walls.” Pico sounded dreadfully chipper. “He was popish, he was. Leastways, that’s how I heard it.”

“Mad Crithen?”

“A murderer.” Breathless, Aberline shook free of Mikal. “Lustmorden, but with a religious… he crucified his victims. I read of it in Shropeton’s analysis of—”

“There’s a way down!” Pico shimmied lithely over the edge of the roof and vanished. “Here!”

Clare patted his pistol, secure in its holster. “It is extremely likely there will be unpleasantness within. I cannot think this sorcerer will not guard his lair.”

“He may not need to.” Mikal pointed. “Look.”

A subtle wet gleam in the ditches, and stealthy movement in the shadows. Skeletal shapes, in ragged threadbare clothes, and under the sound of riot and mayhem, a queer sliding whisper.

“Scab. In the ditches.” Aberline sucked in a sharp breath. “And… starvelings? Here?”

“Starvelings?”

“Marimat.” Mikal’s mouth turned the syllables into a curse. They made little sense to Clare, but he shivered anyway. “Of course. Come, quickly. We must reach the place before they can hold it.”

“I don’t suppose you—”

But Mikal had already embraced Aberline’s stout waist with his arm, and flung them both from the roof with a rattle and a peculiar whooshing. Clare scrabbled for the place Pico had disappeared, and the lad’s disgusted curse from below was lost in a rising, venomous hiss.