The Ripper Affair (Bannon and Clare) Read Online Free

shreds of truthtelling and inkwell charms unravelling as their physical bases lay broken–bubbled and croaked, probably close to dying. She paid him little mind. “Archibald. Dear God.”
    He did not move. Muscle under the flour-pale skin of his narrow back did not flicker, and for a moment something black lodged in her throat. Was he… despite the Stone’s gift, was he…?
    “I hear his heartbeat,” Mikal murmured. “But not… the other’s.”
    Ludovico
. It was unquestionably the assassin she had blood-bound to Clare, the most intelligent and reliable of his ilk she had ever come across during her erstwhile service to the Crown. One of his hands was whole and uninjured, slack against the stone pavers lining the floor. His fingernails, of course, were filthy, and for some reason that detail caused a great calm to descend upon her.
    Who did this?
    For the moment, it did not matter. First things must be tidied, Clare must be made safe, and… Ludo. There were arrangements to be made for his eternal rest. She owed him as much, at least.
    Then,
she told Clare silently,
I shall visit vengeance upon whoever did this
.
    Mikal’s hand had tensed, fingers digging painfully into her shoulder. Did he think she would buckle? Swoon, like some idiot woman? Or was he relieved at the fact that it was the assassin who lay dead, and not the mentath? Who knew?
    “Turn loose of me,” she managed, and her tone was ice. The words echoed in the suddenly empty room, and the wreckage quivered. She rearranged the ætheric strings that had become tangle-frayed, and the air-cleansing charm crackled as she set it free. “Help Clare. And for God’s sake let us have some order here.”

Chapter Five

Quite Possibly Your Regard
    T here was a sense of motion, and jolting.
    A carriage?
For a moment the protective blankness his faculties were swathed in threatened to thin–or worse, shatter completely.
    So he withdrew, and for a long while there was nothing, until he heard her voice again. Cultured and soft, and yet brisk as ever. “Yes, there… Carry him to his room. Mr Finch, there are arrangements to be made. Alice, please tell Madame Noyon I require her–I shall be wearing mourning. Horace, fetch wax and parlieu, I shall be sealing a room. Mikal–oh, yes, thank you. Quite.”
    More motion, outside the cotton-muffling. Sadly, his flesh would not allow him to retreat much longer. Certain pressures were building, not the least the urge to availhimself of a commode or its equivalent. Even a stinking alley would do.
    Memory rose–Valentinelli, his eyes a-glimmer in the dark of a filthy dockside lane, amused at Clare’s distaste for such quarters.
When you are done pissing,
mentale,
there is work to be done.
    The choking sensation must have been leftover smoke. For a moment his brain shivered inside its hard bone casing and the edifice of Logic a mentath built to house the constant influx of perception and deduction threatened to crumble. If it failed him, he would be lost–his fine faculties a useless mix of porridge and ash, the irrelevance every mentath feared even more than the loss of mental acuity descending upon him.
    Mentaths did not go mad, but they could retreat into phantasies of logic, building a rational inward castle that bore no relevance to the outside world at all. A comfortable room in some asylum would be the rotting end of such an event. He would no doubt have every manner of care–
she
would do no less–but still, it was a fate to be feared.
    Softness about his frame, and familiar smells. Leather, dust scorched away by cleansing-charms; linen and paper, and a breath of Londinium’s acrid yellow fog. His body was demanding to be heard. He turned away, into the blackness. It was his friend, that mothering dark, and something in him shivered once more.
    Impossible. It is impossible, irrational, miraculous—
    On that road, however, lay something very close to madness.
    “Archibald?” Quite unwontedly tender, now. Miss