Was her opponent Diabolic after all?
Emma put her head down. Tideturn grew closer, and she moved slowly because the rushing had filled her ears. Without Mikal, she would be blind and vulnerable when the golden flood from the Themis filled the city.
A sorceress, even a Prime, could vanish into the sinks of the Eastron End; but once, long ago, she had not feared these streets. Did a fish fear the water it breathed? The danger was simply air or rain, and when she had been plucked from it by the Collegia childcatchers she had suffered the gasping every fish performed when torn from its habitat.
Where the beggar burned.
She remembered, oh yes. A sweet-roasting stink, the crowd’s laughter, flames. After that, her mother–was it correct to call that poor creature a mother? She had fallen far, the woman who birthed Emma Bannon; her respectable husband’s death in a fire started by a drunken brawl meant poverty, shame, hopelessness. The men she gave herself to, while her youth lasted, had perhaps been kind enough. Some of them even spoke of marriage again, but it all came to naught.
Emma, grown weedlike and stunted in the Scab’s blight, learning to scurry and steal. Learning the cant and argot of the flashboys and the unfortunates, cuffed when she was noticed and learning to be watchful. Inside her, a spark of ruined pride, and the deeper flame of sorcerous talent.
The last man–one of many, she thought perhaps he might have been a carter or even a flashboy, though she could not remember any Alteration on his gin-thickened frame–had announced his intention to sell Emma into a bawdyhouse if one could be found that would take a skinny brat, and the mother had turned on him with drunken fury. Whether it was because some spark of natural feeling for her burdensome child remained, or simply that said burden represented a shilling or two the raddled woman felt should not go to the broad-faced, rotten-toothed monsieur who had paid for their doss that long-ago night was unclear.
What was perfectly clear was the blade as it flicked, unseaming the mother’s neck. A horrid scarlet necklace, a spray of crimson, and the burning in a thin child’s chest had ignited.
The man had dropped the knife and screamed, beating at leprous-green flames erupting suddenly, sorcerously, from his skin and clothes.
A second beggar’s burning, there in the reek and the dark. The child had run away, and been caught in a net other than the one she had feared.
Emma halted in a pool of darkest shadow, the glamour held close. Brass thunder unheard by most filled the air, and from one end of the street, a flood of ætheric force roared from the direction of the Themis’s cold, deep lapping.
Tideturn.
Golden charter symbols crawled over Emma’s skin. The shadows did not hide their flashing, but the malodorous passageway she stood swaying in was luckily empty of any witness. When the flood receded, she blinked and shook her shawl-covered head, expecting at any moment to feel Mikal’s hand upon her arm and his quiet word of orientation.
Instead, she heard the scraping of tiny paws, a muffled squeak. Her skin sought to crawl, training clamped upon the waste of energy and it passed. She knew that sound, of course–grey whip-tailed rats with beady dark eyes, sensing in her stillness a possible weakness. The scuffing sounds retreated, and her nose wrinkled slightly, fresh strength filling her limbs.
She took careful stock of her surroundings again. Dorsitt Street was not strictly as she remembered it. Emma was uncertain whether this was a comfort or a danger, and took another few moments to study what she could.
Of course even squalor would change over time. It was still cramped and clotted with refuse, but the carts that had crouched here selling all manner of items were gone. The public houses thumped with the sounds of drunken revelry, but the flashboys did not congregate in their doors here, as was their usual wont.
Even a fast, murderous, well-Altered flashboy might well fear the creature hunting in Whitchapel.
A door slammed, raucous laughter and yellow gleams of gaslight spilled onto the street, and Emma drew further back into shadow. Three women, shapes very much like her own, with bonnets instead of shawls, hurried tipsily down Dorsitt toward the other ginhouse; the one in the middle had evidently been their first stop.
“Lea’ off, Nan,” one slurred petulantly, and her companions laughed.
“Black Mary, Black Mary,” one chanted, with a lisp that spoke of missing teeth. “High-mighty Jinnit.”
“I’us in France ons’t,” Black Mary retorted, hotly. She sounded young, and would be successful while that youth lasted. “I’en spek Westend dravvy, I may.”
A small smile touched Emma’s lips. The slurring song of Whitchapel cant was strangely soothing. I was in France once. I even speak proper Englene, I may. Perhaps her sad little story was told to draw custom. Or perhaps she had been to France, such a thing was not impossible.
Emma’s slight smile faded as she turned away from Dorsitt, picking her way with care further down the passage. The smell, oh, it was familiar. Coal and grease, rotting vegetables, spoiled meat. Rancid, unwashed bodies crammed into tiny rooms, the sooty trembling flames of rag wicks in fat.
The only thing missing was the thick greenness of Scab. She caught herself placing each foot carefully, a slip-sliding movement because the resilient ooze underneath should have been thick in this darkness.
She could feel ancient crumbling bricks, cobbles in some places. Her throat was so dry. The walls of the passage were only hinted at by some sense that extended around her, invisible fingertips brushing. Even her sensitive vision could not pierce this gloom.
Her skin chilled. Her skirts dragged; the quality of the cloth would outweigh the slight value of her life in this slice of Londinium. Yet she let the glamour unravel as she stepped carefully, shedding one more garment between herself and the past.
There, on the left, was the door. A window with a broken pane–it had been whole once. Another door had been cut further down the passage, but there was no true exit to the street save the one she had entered.
She remembered running, bare child’s feet slipping in thick Scab, bursting out into the whirl of Dorsitt Street on a late-summer evening, gold in the air and the rank ripe heat simmering all of Londinium on a plate.
The child-catchers had felt the ætheric disturbance, a powerful burst of untrained sorcery. Given chase, and finally brought her to bay in a blind court not far from here. How she had struggled, and bit, wild with terror, thinking only He has come to kill me too.
The door was locked. Emma cast a glance over her shoulder, then regarded the broken window for a few moments. A whispered charm, a breath of sorcery, and the lock yielded. She felt a twinge at her trespassing, set it aside. Foxfire light glimmered from her necklace, just an edge of illumination to show the dimensions of the sad little hole.
Where the dial spun, the starveling whispered again, and to Emma’s relief, the room was changed. A different bed was placed in an opposite corner, and the shabby hob had a cheapmetal kettle on it and nothing more. The floorboards were familiar, though a dark stain had been scrubbed away in one rotting corner.
She went unerringly to that corner. Knelt, her fingers just as deft as they had been in childhood. Perhaps, she thought, and her lips shaped a different word.
Please. Let it be gone, and me a fool.
If what she sought had vanished, she could call Marimat the Fallen’s whispers a feint, and retreat into her house’s safety. Let Clare think what he would, let Aberline go his merry way, and make to Mikal some manner of restitution for the display she had forced him to endure.