by Molly Tanzer
“We’re getting close,” said George.
“Yes, I see.” Evadne’s heart fluttered.
“Nervous? Take this, it’ll help.” He offered her what appeared to be a Communion wafer, save that it did not have a cross stamped on it.
“What is it?”
“Protection.”
She stared at him, still not reaching for it. “Protection of what sort?”
George looked amused. “Demons give their followers . . . gifts. Rewards for their service. Every demon’s is different . . . Sometimes it is unnatural beauty; sometimes it is something more advantageous in a fight, like the ability to mesmerize people, or become invisible. I like to be cautious. After all, we know this man is sacrificing children, but we don’t know which demonic entity he’s working for.”
“How many demons are there?”
“How many people are there?” He shook his head. “They—demons—cannot live in our world without help, without something to host them. Their bodies cannot survive here, but their will, their thoughts . . . those can cross the boundaries of our separate realities. That is what a diabolist summons: a demon’s intelligence—its will.”
“I see,” said Evadne, even though she didn’t, not really.
“It is a tricky thing to negotiate. No human can communicate directly with a demon; that would kill someone if they tried. We mere mortals can only experience their thoughts, their feelings. The awareness of their desire. That’s why it’s so easy to be tricked or betrayed by their race. Think of it this way: if it’s difficult for one person to tell if another is lying, even when they’re speaking face to face, then you can see the impossibility of understanding diabolic deals that are communicated largely by emotion or sensation.”
Evadne took the wafer and contemplated it. “I still don’t understand why someone would do this,” she said.
“Communicate with a demon? Of course you don’t. You’re like a hothouse flower.” Evadne didn’t appreciate this compliment; it reminded her of Lady Henry, and therefore, her sister. George must have noticed, as he amended himself. “What I mean is that you are an innocent—a ferocious innocent, though, like”—Please don’t say Athena, thought Evadne—“Jeanne d’Arc. Pure, martial, full of ideals, but unable to comprehend the true villainy of the world.”
“That’s possibly overstatement.”
“Is it? What care you for what a demon might offer? You do not wear cosmetics, so you must not yearn for eternal youth. You will step out in clothes other than the latest trends, or what is fashionable within some social circle, so you’re obviously unconcerned with fame or beauty. You are devoted to hard work and earning what you want, so pleasure or wealth or whatever else, obtained by mesmerism or some other means, would not tempt you.” He shrugged. “Demons prey on our lower natures, and you don’t seem to have one.”
Evadne thought of words she’d said to her sister in anger; her resentment of Freddie; her neglect of her mother, who had so desired a letter; her treatment of Jonas. But the compliment George had paid her was too delicious to deny, so she did not.
“I’d advise eating that now, so you have a bit of time to digest it. That’s the building there.” He pointed past her ear, out the cab window. She didn’t turn; she’d see it soon enough.
“What will happen to me if I . . .”
His smile was playful. “Has everything I’ve shown you, or done, served to make you healthier, stronger, and better?”
“Yes . . .”
“Well?”
Evadne’s eyes tracked back to what she held in her hands.
“It’s a holy wafer. If you don’t trust me to protect you, do you trust . . .” His gaze flicked heavenward.
She made her choice, put it on her tongue. It was vaguely sweet, and melted away quickly into a paste.
The coach rolled to a stop. George hopped out, paid the cabdriver, and then turned to offer Evadne a hand. She frowned, remembering her earlier thought that George, unlike Jonas, would not offend her independence, and elected to alight upon the street without aid.
“Old habits die hard,” said George. “You’re right, Gray, I wouldn’t offer assistance to any of the others; it was an unworthy impulse. But let me say, in my own defense, that I did not offer you my aid because I think you weak . . . rather, well . . .”
He trailed off, leaving Evadne breathlessly curious. She tried to get herself under control; the others were leaning up against an adjacent boarding house. Though ordinarily her comrades appeared quite gentlemanlike, tonight they did not look like men she would approach, even if she were in desperate need. They looked seedy and threatening as they waved without much interest at George, who ambled over. Evadne tried to imitate his casual gait, but she was too nervous.
“It’s that one,” said George softly, nodding at the tallest of the buildings in the row.
“Do you know which floor?” asked Reid, his thick brow furrowed.
George shook his head. “I suspect the roof,” he said. “If it is to be done on the full moon, why not under it?”
“See?” said Trawless to Evadne. “He understands the way they think.”
Evadne nodded, though that still really remained to be seen. Their talk in the cab had convinced her that George knew quite a lot about the subject. Whether it was a subject worth knowing anything about, that was another matter. Surely alchemists believed their own claims.
She was ready to find out for certain. Energy filled her; she felt strong and powerful, ready to do . . . something. Everyone else was in the same place, stomping and champing like standing horses. George popped one of his pastilles, winced, and then after massaging his throat, went up and tried the doorknob.
It was open. He raised a finger to his lips, and clutching his sword cane at the ready, eased it open.
The house was dark; the hall, empty. They made for the stairs off to the left, but then a woman—older, hard-faced—came out of one of the shut doors, and looked understandably surprised to see them. When her eyes found Evadne’s face in the crowd, she smiled cruelly.
George broke off from the group and went over to her. “Dear lady,” he said, extracting a wallet from inside his jacket, “forgive our intrusion, but we mean you and your house no harm. We merely wish to gain access to the roof.” He produced a ten-pound note; this liberal sum, more than his reassuring tone, seemed to assure the landlady of George’s sincerity. She reached for it, but he held it back.
“What you want with the roof?” she asked, her accent coarse and thick, eyes on the money.
“To look at it,” said George, carefully keeping impatience from his voice.
She peered at him, mouth twisted with suspicion.
“Surely you have been paid less to accommodate far more unusual requests,” said George.
Her laugh was somewhere between a donkey’s bray and a fairy-tale witch’s cackle.
“Right,” she said. “I’ll take you to the attic. There’s a window that leads onto a ledge; from there you can get yourself onto the roof to do whatever you want with that one.” She nodded in Evadne’s direction; Evadne almost flew at the horrible old woman. She was full of hot, angry energy, could barely keep still, and the idea of attacking this wretched crone who had implied—she didn’t want to think about what the woman had implied—would make her feel much, much better. But Trawless put his hand on her shoulder, and shook his head slightly.
“Do you have a ladder that might enable us to scramble onto the roof a bit more easily?” said George, ignoring the woman’s vileness.
“No,” she said, to Evadne’s surprise. “Someone took it, a few days ago, and hasn’t given it back.”
“Who is this someone?”
“New tenant,” said the woman. “He’s only been here a few months, keeps mostly to himself. Borrows the ladder occasionally. As he pays for the privilege, I don’t ask what he does with it—something you gents can likely understand.”
“Indeed,” said George as Evadne bristled. “Well,
shall we repair to the attic?”
Her eyes dropped to the note. He gestured up the stairs with it, and she nodded.
Evadne was on the tip of her toes as she followed the woman upstairs; she had to fight with herself to not take them two at a time, to jump up and down, bounce, or otherwise tire herself out. The others, save George, seemed in much the same state. Her nervousness had evaporated. She was now ready for whatever might occur. When she saw that the window was already open, the cool summer wind blowing the sheer curtains like ghostly arms, she felt no apprehension whatsoever; all she wanted was to get up to the roof and see what was there.
“Thank you, good lady,” said George. “But I’m afraid we must part ways here.”
“Never happier,” she said, and left them, the note clutched in her dirty fingers.
Evadne had never climbed out of a window before, much less onto a narrow cornice, but she did so without fear. George had gone first, and when she emerged to see him urging the rest of them up the very ladder they had requested, he had a look of savage triumph on his face.
“Just as I suspected,” he whispered. “Stay out of sight. I’ll go up first, you follow then fan out behind me. Weapons in hand. Evadne . . . get your cloak off but keep it close; you can throw it if need be.”
A scream cut the air—a child’s cry, and George turned pale.
“Now!” he said, and scrambled up the ladder.
They all followed without hesitation; Evadne pulled off the cloak when she reached the top, winding it around her fist, and kept close to Trawless, who was just in front of her.
There were chimneys and other structures that threw weird shadows across the roof; they darted from one to the next until Evadne saw a brief flare of light. Getting closer to the center of the roof, she saw more clearly that they were candles, arranged in a pattern—the pattern George had divined on his map. An odor reached her nose. Flowers. It was not a smell she associated with this part of London, or its rooftops; her shoes were already black with soot, and everything she touched soiled her fencing gloves.
The flowers were piled in sad, wilted heaps between the flames, and in the center of it all was a child—a girl, naked and obscene. Her body was on display in the most profane way Evadne could imagine: on her back, arms and legs spread, her pale hair like a halo on the dirty ground.
To think, she had doubted George could produce evidence of people consorting with demons!
To Evadne’s astonishment, the girl did not look terrified. Her eyes were blank as she stared up at the night sky without seeing it. Her jaw was moving, but she was not speaking—she was chewing, slowly, like a cow with its cud.
“I know you’re here!” called a voice from the darkness—a voice with an animal quality to it, rather like a bark. Evadne couldn’t locate its source until the speaker moved, rising up from the ground like some terrible ghost. Cloaked, on his knees, he looked malformed; his long fingers, thin and bony like a skeleton’s, held a flower of the same sort that lay heaped on the ground. He fed it to the child, and she ate it mindlessly.
“You are accused of consorting with demons,” said George, his sword in one hand, cane sheath in the other.
“Accused by whom?”
Strangely, Evadne felt no fear of this man, but she was appalled to see he was naked under the robe. In spite of this, she forced herself to keep her eyes on him.
He threw back the hood, revealing a gaunt and terrible face. His hair was close-cropped and patchy, as if with mange.
“By we six,” declared George. “You have kidnapped and killed several children already—we will not allow you to complete whatever you are attempting here. Do you surrender? If you come quietly, no harm will come to you.”
“I do not surrender.” His voice really did sound odd—uncanny. The hairs prickled on the back of Evadne’s neck, and she shifted from foot to foot to keep warm.
“You are outnumbered, sir!”
“Ah, but it is you who are at a disadvantage!”
From nowhere, he produced a knife, an ugly-looking blade that had the horrible appearance of bone. As he held it aloft it gleamed in the moonlight, and then it flashed again—down, into the girl’s stomach. A hot putrid stench obscured the sickly aroma of wilting flowers as her insides spilled out.
“No!” George bounded forward, they all did, but it was too late. The man was upon her, and he was eating what he had torn out of her, slurping it up with as much gusto as a hungry mutt at a bowl of offal. It got all over him, down his front, even his man’s parts, but especially his face and neck, before George got close enough to kick him off the girl. Rolling him over with his foot and pinning him, George held him at sword point.
“Do you yield, sir!” he cried, blade at the man’s throat.
The man laughed, and then something happened Evadne would never have believed if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.
At first she thought it was just the steam rising from the girl’s sliced-open body, which, being warmer than the night, was releasing little tendrils of hot smoke. But no—the man’s body shivered and split and fell apart like a melon falling off the back of a cart. George cursed and stepped away as each of the chunks writhed and re-formed into . . . Dorina would call them homunculi. Evadne had no idea why her mind went to that place at that moment, but she had spent many hours of her life looking at Dorina’s books of Renaissance triptychs full of little children with the faces of old men. But these weren’t old men . . . No, each wore the face of the man who had killed the girl who now lay still, dead, eyes open, mouth gaping, on the roof of the boarding house. They were naked, and their hands were too big, and their feet were too big. Everything about them was wrong, the way they writhed about before getting up, the way they shook themselves like wet dogs, the way they started jabbering with their too-familiar mouths that were full of unfamiliar pointed teeth as well as multiple tongues. Their language actually physically hurt Evadne’s ears, and her eyes and nose, as well.
Evadne thought about George’s earlier promise that they would not kill the man, just bring him in to present him to the police, but things had gone wrong—wrong enough that he ran one of the horrors through with his sword and yanked it back, his rapier blade covered with steaming purple blood. The homunculus squawked as the blade pierced its chest; after he withdrew it, it writhed horribly, and then it went still. “Get them!”
George’s command ought to have been unnecessary, but it woke Evadne from her stupor. She had been frozen, numbly staring. It was time to act.
Seeing the destruction of their fellow, the homunculi went berserk, running all over the place, scattering like frightened children on their short, fat little legs away from those who hunted them. Evadne set her sights on one of the scuttling horrors and chased it down. She had never been so swift in her life, or so strong, or nimble. Yes, she slipped in soot as the thing started to scale one of the chimneys to get away from her, but she caught her balance and threw her cloak at it, covering it. It scrabbled at the cloth with its huge fingers as Evadne yanked on it, reveling in the sheer might of her arm, pulling it down to her level with one tug.
It fell with a thump far too heavy for something so small. Writhing under the cloak, it uttered a little mewling cry, wordless but full of significance. She commenced stabbing it, over and over again—her arm felt as if it would never grow tired. She only stopped when the thing’s purple blood was seeping through the rips in George’s cloak, pooling underneath it. It did not shine, like oil; rather, it seemed to suck in light.
She turned, sickened. A quick look over her shoulder showed Stockton was in a bad way. One of the creatures was worrying his calf with its teeth. He couldn’t quite get his sword around to stab it, and it was ignoring the strikes of his cane sheath. The rest of her friends were occupied with homunculi of their own, so she took a step to aid her friend until she heard George call, “Gray!”
Another of them went scurrying past her, and without hesitation she ran after it. Unlike the first, w
hen it heard her footfalls, this one turned and began to speak to her, its tongues slithering and slipping over one another. She saw the motion with her eyes, but she also felt it inside her mind. It reached its hands out to her, hands that were the size of an adult human man’s. Evadne saw it coming for her as she felt wetness on her face, under her eyes, beneath her ears and nose, and reacted from instinct, getting her arm up before lunging at it with all her might.
It was the most basic of fencing attacks—get your arm up, then step and thrust—but long, ago, Freddie had taught her well when he said it would save her more often than any fancy attack or parry. Endlessly, she had practiced arm up, step, thrust until it became pure instinct, and she was grateful, for it saved her then. She was strong, she was fast, and her blade pierced the creature’s left eye with such force that it broke through the other side of its skull, where it fountained gore from both ends, spraying her and the ground behind it. The enraged thing kept speaking, kept struggling on her blade until it died.
She stared at the sight, completely horrified.
Then George was by her side, his hand on her shoulder. She startled away from him, dropping the blade, nearly casting it away from her. He raised his hands in a gesture of peace.
“Sorry!” She shook her head. “It . . .”
“That did not go well,” he admitted. “We were too late. Or rather, I did not anticipate what would happen if he began the ritual too early.”
“Too . . .”
“Early.” George picked up her rapier, and with his foot, slid the carcass off the blade. Wiping it on the creature’s skin, he handed it back to her. “I very much doubt he intended to destabilize like that . . . I don’t know to whom he was praying, so I can’t say what his goal was, but I’m guessing it wasn’t”—he gestured to the massacre—“this.”
“Destabilize.” She sounded stupid even to her own ears.
