The Ripper Affair

Chapter Forty-Four In The Final Weighing

The first surprise was that it did not hurt. The knife cleaved flesh, yes, and there was a hot jet of salt-crimson blood.

Then… droplets hung in midair, and the blooming within her was a sweet pain. Her Discipline roared, needing no chant to shape it. No, when a Discipline spoke, the entire sorcerer was the throat it passed through.

It required only the strength to submit. As long as that strength lasted, wonders could be worked.

What had she done? Turned inward, yes, and found… what?

Not m’pence, Marta Tebrem whispered. Needs it for my doss, I do.

They spun around her, sad women and merry, dead on a knife or by a strangle, in childbed or by fever, by gin or misadventure, in hatred or in desperation, by folly or chance. She was of the Endor, but even more importantly, she was of their number, and the spark that rose within her was both negation and acceptance.

Some of them had wished for release from the miserable drudgery and endless pain. There was the acceptance.

Yet even louder, and containing the acceptance as a shell contains a nut, the denial.

No. I will not.

Should not, or could not, those were incorrect. The refusal was a hard shell, wrapped about the tender thing called a soul trapped in a fragile and perishable body.

Beat me, hurt me, kill me, I will not.

Or perhaps the refusal was merely her own, even her Discipline bending to a will grown strong by both feeding and confinement.

They streamed through her, the women of Whitchapel, and their cries were the same as the Warrior Queen Boudicca in her chariot–a vessel of Britannia dishonoured, slain in battle, but still remembered.

Still alive, if only in the vast storehouse of memory a ruling spirit could contain.

No. I live.

The heart struggled, the lungs collapsing with shock. Her murderer crowed with glee, his purpose achieved, his chant becoming the savagery of an attacker’s, almost swallowing the sound of sorcery spilling through the bloody necklace of a cut throat.

I live.

They burst free of her not-quite-corpse–for the throat-cutting does not kill immediately, for a few crucial moments the sorceress, her Discipline invoked, was between living and dead. A threshold, a lintel, a doorway…

… and Death itself, the other face of the coin called Life, for a bare moment gave a fraction of the citizens of its dry uncharted country their mortal voices back.

The unsound was massive, felt behind eye and heart and throat…

… and it struck down the man who had sought to give a mockery of Life with a flood of leprous-green flame.

He squealed, beating at the fire that erupted from his slowly regrowing mortal flesh, but such is the nature of Death’s burning that it consumes metal, red muscle, rock itself, the dry fires of stars and the tenderness of green shoots, all in their own time.

He fell against the obsidian altar, and the sound of its shattering was lost in another–the scream of a malformed soul given half-life, brushed with a feather of sorcery and set free.

The Promethean fled, shrieking, and on a wooden shelf in a stone womb underneath Londinium, a sorceress’s mortality writhed.

For a dizzying moment she trembled between, neither alive nor dead, as the sisters of murder and confinement clamoured for her voice to be added to their number.

No.

In the end, the choice was hers alone. If she suffered under the lash of living in a world not made for her sex, it was the price extracted for protecting those upon whom her regard fell. Those she protected–did her arrogance extend so far as to think she was, in her own way, their final keeper?

To rule is lonely, and there was the last temptation.

The pieces of her erstwhile lover’s spell curled about her. Her mortal death could fuel its completion, for she had taken from him, again, everything.

He had wrought too well, when he sought the perfect victim. In that perfection itself lay his undoing.

Oh yes, it was possible. To take the shards and knit them together, to drive the taproot deep into the shimmering field of pain and Empire, and to become what he had wished to create: a spirit of rule.

One last, painless lunge, and she would Become.

She could be what she had pledged to serve and turned against. She could drain the vital force of the ancient, weary being who charted Empire’s course. She could wrap herself in its vestments and strike down the physical vessel of that being, choose a vessel of her own and arrange not merely her household but the world itself to her liking.

It would take so little. In the end, only the decision to do mattered.

And yet.

For the final time, the will holding the door open for Discipline spoke. The choice was made, had always been made, for she was as she had been created, and the pride she bore would not allow her to become an usurper.

Her answer was clear, if only in the shuttered halls of a human heart–that country where sorcery and even Death are only guests. Tolerated, but, in the final weighing, negligible.

I live.

I live.

I live.