Lilith Saintcrow: The Red Plague Affair

He was still seeking to speak Valentinelli’s name when the pain clove his chest and felled him. The thick darkness was full of things no gentleman would wish soiling his cloth, and Clare’s busy faculties, starlike, winked out.

Inside the stoic, well-bred walls of 34½ Brooke Street, Mayefair, Londinium, a quiet bustle of orderly activity was shattered.

“ Strega! ” a familiar voice bellowed, and Emma Bannon, Sorceress Prime, arrived at the bottom of the fan-shaped stairs in a silk-skirted rush. Mikal was there in his tails and snow-white shirt, easing a dead man’s lanky frame to the floor, and the smell hit her.

Dear God, what is this? Her half-unbuttoned dress whispered as she flicked her fingers, a cleansing charm rising with a Minor Word and scorching the air of her parquet-floored foyer. Her dark curls, almost-dressed in anticipation of Lady Winslet’s ball, tumbled about her face as she recognised the long, beaky-nosed corpse who, contrary to her expectations, drew in a rattling breath, clutching at his left shoulder and jerking his limbs in a decidedly odd fashion.

Next to him, pock-faced and hollow-eyed Ludovico Valentinelli was spattered with effluvium as well, but she had little time to wrinkle her nose.

Her other Shield, tall dark Eli, arrived at a run. He was further along in the dressing process than Mikal, since both of them were to attend her tonight. Still, his starched shirt was unbuttoned, and his jacket knocked askew.

Clare’s breath rattled. Angina. It is his heart , she realised, the spark of life in Archibald Clare’s body guttering like a candleflame in a draughty hall. “Fetch me crystali digitalia !” she barked, and Eli leapt to obey, taking the stairs three at a time. Her workroom would admit him, and he knew enough to take care with any experiments in progress – especially the æthericial commisterum. “Ludo, what on earth?” She did not expect him to answer.

“ Strega —” The Neapolitan was almost beyond words, but Emma was already on her knees. She was barefoot, too – the ball would not start for some while yet, and she had intended to be only slightly late. Only fashionably so, as it were.

Later than her night’s quarry. It was always advisable to surprise one’s prey.

Mikal, his yellow irises bright in the foyer’s dimness, spared the Italian a single glance, bracing Clare’s shoulders.

A Major Word took shape on Emma’s lips, sliding free whole and bloody, red sparks of sorcery fountaining. The four plain silver rings on her left hand fluoresced as she pulled stored ætheric force from them, heavy garnet earrings swinging against her cheeks warming and sparking as well. She would, in all eventuality, need the force she was expending later tonight – but just at the moment, she did not care. Her right hand, a large bloody stone in its antique silver setting flashing on the second finger, clamped to Clare’s chest and her senses dilated. She located the source of the distress, feeling about inside his flesh with several nonphysical senses, and determination rose bitter-bright inside her.

Not your time yet, sir. Not while I am here to gainsay it.

The heart, determined muscle that it was, twitched under her ætheric pressure. She forced it into a rhythm that matched her own, exhaling sharply as her concentration narrowed. There was some damage, true, but all in all the organ had carried on gamely.

She was not surprised. He could be provokingly stubborn, her mentath. “The golden orb in the library,” she heard herself say, from very far away. “And three surdipped hawk feathers, Mikal. Bring.”

He did not protest at leaving her alone and distracted with Valentinelli, for once. Which was very good, because Clare’s tired heart began to resist the pressure of her will, and the sorceress was suddenly very occupied in keeping Archibald Clare’s blood moving at its required pace. At least her Discipline, Black though it was, gave her sufficient knowledge of the body’s processes to keep extinction from Clare’s doorstep in this instance.

I do hope his faculties have not been damaged . The flow of ætheric energy through her hands intensified, scorch-hot. The mentath, a logic-machine trapped in frail, weary flesh, coughed and convulsed again.

Strange, he looks old now. Perhaps it was merely that his colour was very bad. Then again, he was not a young man. He had been a vigorous thirty-three when she met him, but the years since had kept up their steady wearing away at him, drop by drop.

And Clare was congenitally unable to cease pursuing trouble of the most exotic sort. He was not engaged in a life that would permit much rest, and the wear and tear on his physicality was marked.

A chant rose to her lips, the language of Mending forced to her will – for her Discipline was not of the White branch, and Mending obeyed her only reluctantly. Still, she was Prime, and such a designation required a will that brooked very little bridle – and could force even the most reluctant branch of sorcery to its bidding.

A rolling sonorous roil, the entire house suddenly alive with rushing crackles, its population of indentured servants so used to the feel of tremendous sorcery running through its halls they hardly paused in their appointed duties.

Eli arrived, not breathless but with his dark hair disarranged. He measured out two tiny venom-purple crystals of the digitalia , dropped them into Clare’s fishworking mouth, and clamped the mentath’s jaw shut for a few seconds to make certain they would stay in. Then he settled back on his heels, watching the Sorceress Prime’s face, alight with crawling golden charter charms screening her flesh as she half sang, her evening dress pulled askew and white shoulders rising from a silver and blue froth of gauze and lace. The charter symbols, ancient runic patterns of Wheel and Plough, Stone and Blossom and others less willing to be named or pronounced, invaded Clare’s pasty skin as well, and finally Eli glanced up at the Neapolitan assassin. “Looks as if you’ve had rather a night of it.”

Ludovico shrugged. For once, he did not sneer, perhaps a mark of his agitation. Or perhaps his lips were sealed by the filth coating him, smeared on his face as if he had bathed in a foul-ditch. Under that mask, his colour was very bad indeed – not that his sallow, ratlike features would ever win regard for blooming beauty, indeed. At least the dirt masked the pox scars on his cheeks.

Mikal reappeared, yellow eyes alight as he shouldered his fellow Shield aside. In one hand he held an apricotsized globe of mellow gold; the three feathers, coated with a black tarry substance, shivered in his other. The sorceress, dark gaze full of a terrible blank presence , swayed slightly as she chanted. The charter symbols glowed crimson as they ran down her left side, clustering high under the ribs, crawling over the pale slope of one breast like a cupped hand.

A shudder ran through her swelling song, the mentath’s filth-caked bootheels drumming the parquet as his body thrashed, and Mikal leaned forward, offering the globe and the feathers.

Who knew what objects would be required for any act of sorcery? It was, by its very definition, an irrational art. Many sorcerers were magpies, since one could not tell what physical item – if any – would be required for a Work. Some Primes sniffed disdainfully and said the best sorcery was unanchored in the physical… but those of a practical bent understood that the ease of a Work moored in an object of reasonable permanence was in most cases a desirable thing.

Sorcery flashed, ætheric energy coalescing into the visible for a brief moment, and Ludovico Valentinelli crossed himself, breathing a foul wondering curse in his native tongue. His pox-pocked face, under its splattering of black matter, was flour-pale.