The Ripper Affair

Chapter Forty-Three A Betrayal That Struck One

The starvelings were skeletal corpses, still animate through some feat of sorcery. There were so many, shuffling forward with the slowness of the damned, their hands held out. Those soft, insistent graspings could drag a man down, and then they would cluster him, pressing life and breath away with that soft, low, terrifying hissing. They had narrowly avoided losing Pico, and Clare tipped the empty cartridges out of his Bulldog as he sprinted for the door of Mad Crithin’s Church.

Mikal wrenched the worm-holed, flimsy wooden door open. It had been chained with iron, and the cylinder-lock dangling from rusted metal links was new, though smeared with grease to disguise any shine. The chain snapped, broken links cascading in a chiming stream, and an exhalation of neglect and rot swallowed them all. Aberline’s ankle, twisted just after the man wrenched starvelings from Pico’s slim frame with a roaring fit for a lion, was already swollen.

Clare gained the dubious safety and Mikal slammed the door to. “Brace… it,” the Shield managed, breathlessness the only indication of the efforts he had made so far. “Hurry.”

Does he think we treating this as a Sunday amble? Clare did not waste his own breath on a sharp reply. Pico, his jacket in tatters and his fine waistcoat ripped, was already shoving a jumble of broken wood that had once been a secretary against the door. Mikal’s boots slipped slightly on grime-caked wooden boards, and cords stood out on the Shield’s neck as he sought to hold the entry against the soft, deadly pressure from outside.

Aberline hobbled, dragging a sprung-stuffing chair across the uneven boards. Clare’s lungs protested, he whooped in a deep breath, reloading his Bulldog. When that operation was finished, he helped Pico drag another piece of shattered furniture against the door; next came a huge, shipwrecked chunk of masonry helpfully fallen from somewhere.

The soft scraping from outside did not lower in volume at all. That was quite chilling, Clare allowed, and proceeded to ignore it. He straightened, dusting his hands. “Where now?”

“Down-cellar.” Aberline leaned heavily upon Pico. “Good God, is Thin Meg mad?”

“Has she ever been sane?” Mikal’s laugh was a marvel of restrained rage. “My Prima visited her, she knew far more than she allowed.”

“Ah. And Bannon believed what Meg said?” Aberline sounded as if he rather did not credit the notion.

“I should think not. She is too wise to believe many things.” Mikal pointed at a far corner, between mounds of wrecked wood and marble. “There, I would say.”

The walls had been torn through, and there were fittings–brass, copper, other materials–that could have been sold. Yet Clare did not think those who passed through, no matter what crypt below Londinium they aimed for, would take anything from this sad, ramshackle place. There was a faint chill exhalation from every surface, and the darkness seemed altogether too thick to be mere shadow.

“Been two years since I last,” Pico breathed, once. “Hasn’t changed a bit.”

“It never does.” Aberline, shortly.

They were making a great deal of noise, but Clare saw no point in quieting them. Mikal was a ghost, and he kept Aberline well within sight.

The cellar was reached through a hole hacked in the floor of what might have been a sitting room, once. There was a ladder made of what looked like nailed-together bits of lath, though it was surprisingly solid.

Aberline made a short pained sound when he landed, and would have toppled if not for Mikal’s steadying.

Even here, things were not quite right. A drift of coal, worth good money, clustered against the closer end of the cellar, though the chute it would have been poured through seemed blocked.

Rather good thing, too, Clare thought, and shivered at the idea of hearing soft starveling hisses in the dark.

Aberline had struck a lucifer, and Clare saw a yawning hole in the ground opposite the coal-pile. It looked far too large for its own borders, one of Londinium’s more irrational corners, and a familiar pain gripped his temples.

Mikal paused. His dark head came up, a stripe of blood and dirt on his cheek black in the lucifer’s glare.

Aberline halted as well, quite amazingly pale under the muck and dust he was covered with. He grimaced as he shifted his weight. Pico’s breathing was stertorous in the stillness, but the lad was holding up gamely. With his hair knocked out of its careful slick-back and his eyes wide, he looked rather young.

And fragile.

“Mikal?” Clare whispered.

“I think…” The Shield shook his head, as if tossing away said thought. “Come.”

Clare, his faculties straining under the weight of what he might be about to witness, had a very rational thought. We should have brought a lanthorn.

As if in answer, a sound rose from the hole. Long, and loud, it stripped the hair from their fevered brows and brushed against their clothing.

Later, Clare could not think quite what the sound had been. A rumble, a moving of earth, the roar-breath of a massive fire, the sea suckling at its rocky confines? No, too much. Perhaps it was the internal shifting of a lie told or found out, or a betrayal that struck one to a heart’s core–but that was ridiculous. It was merely Feeling, and Clare should set it aside.

Aberline gasped, rocking back on his heels, but Mikal’s reaction was even more marked.

“Emma!” he screamed, and leaped forwards into the dark, his footsteps, for once, heavy with reckless speed.

The massive sound did not echo, but it left some imprint on the space around the three left in Mikal’s wake, broken only by a thin, light, unholy tapping Clare had heard before: footsteps of a creature that carried a sharp-ended whip. The healed slice along his forearm send a pang up to his shoulder.

Clare also heard, as if in a nightmare, a slow, soft, draining hiss.