Lilith Saintcrow - The Red Plague Affair

To soothe his nerves; perhaps it is why he smiles so. “The swellings are of particular concern. They seem quite painful, and he is only semi-conscious.”

“ Emma …” the Shield moaned. “ Prima …”

“I am here,” she said from other side of the bed, quietly but with peculiar authority. “ Pax , Shield. I am here.”

He subsided, lapsing back into his delirium. The bed with its green-vined counterpane was narrow, and the Shield apparently had a fondness for botanical prints. His room was small but very well appointed, and Clare thought it was tiny because Eli preferred it so. The closeness perhaps reminded him of some childhood comfort.

Darlington felt the patient’s pulse, and Clare’s estimation of the man rose a notch as he noted the quality of the man’s touch. His blunt fingers were surprisingly delicate, and he preferred the Chinoise method of seeking several “levels” of heart’s-gallop, gathering information from each. The round man peeled back one of Eli’s eyelids, just as Clare had, and almost recoiled from the thin film of blood over the eyeball. “ Most unusual.” He glanced up at Emma, his gaze bloodshot but bright blue. “Are you certain there is no sorcerous origin to this?”

Miss Bannon’s gaze did not move from Eli’s contorted features. “I can find no breath of sorcery about his illness. If there was, I would have already dispelled it.”

“Well. Hrm. It is not consumption, not cholera… It is no doubt a miasma, or a form of pox, and a rubescent one at that.” He tested one of the swellings again, and the Shield’s body twitched. “Ice to bring the fever down. A preparation of laudanum to ease him and make him quiet. I shall lance one of these boils and see what manner of substance is contained therein.”

There was another quiet commotion – a copper tub was being hauled through the door, and servants behind with buckets of steaming water. The tub was set just so, and Miss Bannon gestured. Gilburn and the black-haired Marcus set about stripping the Shield, being careful when he flinched, and Miss Bannon’s fingers flicked. Sorcery hummed, the sound indistinguishable from the low contralto tone in her throat until her voice turned into words. “He shall not struggle so, now.”

“I say …” Darlington glanced at the sorceress. “ Do leave his undergarments in place!”

The hum vanished, replaced with the unsound-crackle of live sorcery. “I hardly think he is capable of shame, in this state.” But Miss Bannon nodded, and the buckets, sloshing with catch charms to keep the water in place during its transport, were emptied with murmurs over the tub. It was quick work to fill it, running feet in the corridor from the washroom down the hall, and the house trembled again. Her small right hand sketched a symbol in empty air, and it flamed with a cold blue radiance; she uttered a short word Clare could not… quite … remember once it had been spoken.

The copper tub creaked alarmingly, and frost traced tiny sharpfeather patterns on its sides. Horace and Marcus heaved, and thin threads of sorcery sparked and crackled as the deadweight of an unconscious body was eased.

“Gently,” Miss Bannon murmured. “Let me adjust… there.”

“Fascinating,” Clare breathed. “You do not require an ice wagon then.”

“Any competent charmer could do the same.” Miss Bannon’s gaze was fixed, a ringing in the air like a wet wineglass’s rim stroked gently but firmly. “Do test it, physicker, and see if it… yes? Very good. Ease him in.”

A splash and a howl as the shock of temperature change met fevered skin. Clare might have winced, but he was observing events and effects with great interest. The physicker busied himself with a tray of shining implements, selecting a few that looked more like instruments of torture and laying them aside.

“Well, whatever comes from those swellings will give us a clue. A most singular illness.” Darlington clicked his tongue twice, testing the sharpness of a lancet. “ Most singular.”

“There may be other remedies.” Miss Bannon’s queer flat murmur as she kept the sorcery steady was chilling. “You two shall keep my Shield alive while I pursue them.”

Clare did not have the heart to tell her that he already doubted, very much, whether the Shield would survive the night. Later, he thought he had perhaps done both her and the young Liverpool man a grave disservice…

… but at that moment, all he felt was slight impatience, waiting for the body to be brought from the ice bath so he could gather more valuable data.

The great Collegia, the massive main heart of Londinium’s – and hence, of the Isle’s – sorcerous population, seemed to stand on empty air. Charm-tangled lattices of support and transferral cradling its tiered white-stone edifices were clearly visible to Sight, but to the ordinary it appeared that the Collegia and its parklike grounds merely… floated. It drifted in a slow, majestic pattern above Regent’s Parque, a nacreous glow in the dusk. Tideturn had come and gone, the golden flood of ætheric force sweeping up the Themis and filling every charmer, witch and sorcerer with a fresh charge to be used in service to their fellows – or in service to their selfish desires.

Emma normally almost-enjoyed visits to the Collegia’s grounds. Tonight, however, she cursed inwardly and monotonously as she moved along a path of white crushed shell, her stride so energetic even Mikal sounded short of breath.

“Prima.” Again, he attempted to engage her attention. “ Emma . Listen to—”

“Cease your chatter.” Sharper than she had ever addressed him, and breathless besides. “I am in a very great hurry, as you can see.”

“The sorcerer. Half-Indus, correct? As you suspect I am. I would tell you—”

“No.” She halted, her skirts snapping as her forward motion was arrested. Turned on one heel, and faced him fully. A curl had come free, it fell in her face. That was almost as provoking as his continued attempts to speak. “I do not wish to know , Mikal.” How much plainer can I be? “Especially if such knowledge will force me to act in a… certain manner. Look about you, look where we are . Have you no sense?”

He stared at her, yellow irises alight in the gloaming. She studied him afresh, this Shield who had come to her service in the worst of ways.

“I have often wondered,” she continued, in a much more well-bred tone, “why you killed Miles Crawford.”

And there was another wonder: that she could say the name so calmly, robbing it of its power. Still, the memories rose – to be restrained, helpless, while another sorcerer prepared to tear one’s ætheric talent out by the roots, was a thing almost guaranteed to drive a Prime past the brink of sanity. A Prime’s will did not take a bridle lightly, if at all; it was that ill-defined quality of resolve that made a Prime, along with the ability to essay a split of focus and fuel into more than one Major Work at once.

To feel the bonds again, to hear her own despairing cries, to hear the sounds Crawford made as his throat was slowly crushed while water dripped and uncontained sorcerous force hummed its unformed song… it was enough to make one shudder, and it took all Emma’s considerable willpower to quell the unwelcome movement.

Here between the House of Mending’s white bulk and a low, sorcerously smoothed stone wall bordering a tidy herb garden, Mikal studied her for a long moment. Finally, his tongue crept out and wet his lower lip. “How long you have waited to ask me. I thought you knew.”

That is quite irrelevant. “Answer me, Shield.”