A Star Shall Fall (54 page)

The girl inside the shop listened to Irrith silently, as the sprite tried to describe the bowl; then she vanished, still without a word, through the curtain behind the counter. A moment later, a gray-haired Jew came out. “Why do you look for him?” Schuyler asked, wariness clear even through his accent.

“I need his help,” Irrith said, realizing too late that she might have sounded more sympathetic as a woman. Schuyler looked as if he expected Irrith to assault the Arab when she found him.
Around here, that’s probably a fair fear.
The docks were just a stone’s throw away, with all their drunken sailors.

After a moment Schuyler jerked his thumb to the side. “End of the street. There is a house with lascars in it; he lives on the top floor.”

She found the dark-skinned sailors, and the staircase that served their house. Irrith took the steps three at a time, and pounded on the door at the top.

The man who opened it didn’t look like an Arab. Nor did he seem quite like a fae; whatever Abd ar-Rashid did to disguise himself, it didn’t feel the same as an English glamour. But she knew it was an illusion, and knew it was him.

And he knew it was her—or at least a faerie. He backed up sharply. Irrith held her hands out, soothingly. “It’s me. Irrith. I’m just here to ask you something.”

The strange-looking man hesitated, but finally beckoned her in, and closed the door behind her.

“It would have been a lot easier to find you if you hadn’t vanished,” Irrith said, glancing around. The genie appeared to live in a single room, with few possessions: a narrow bed, a few cushions, a shelf of books. She supposed exotic silks were unlikely, if he was trying to live as an Englishman, or whatever he was supposed to be. His clothing wasn’t English, though it was less showy than what he normally wore.

“I know,” he said, and his voice was the same, accent and all. “That was the hope.”

She turned to face him, surprised. “You didn’t want to be found? Why?”

His illusion didn’t drop away like a glamour, either. His flesh looked like it was shifting, rippling into a different shape, and darkening as it went. It steadied into the genie’s familiar face, and a frown. “I suggested alchemy to the Prince, and to Dr. Andrews. I determined the best source for sophic mercury. I helped devise a plan for the use of that mercury. I, a foreigner, did all these things, and because of it, Dr. Andrews attempted to murder your Queen. And you ask why I wish not to be found?”

Irrith hadn’t thought of that. Neither Galen nor Lune blamed him, so far as she knew, and no one else had said anything in her hearing—but then, she hadn’t spent any time listening for it, either.

She ducked her chin, embarrassed. “How long will you hide for?”

“There is a ship leaving for Cairo in five days.”

“Cairo? Where is—” It didn’t matter where Cairo was. “You’re
leaving
?”

He nodded.

“What, you’re just going to run away? Better hope we can keep the clouds up for five more days; otherwise your ship may burn before you can get on it.” The floorboards creaked mightily beneath Irrith’s feet as she stamped toward him. “You’d best not hope to come back, either. Because if you run away, people really
will
think you had something to do with Dr. Andrews’s plan.”

The genie was at least a foot taller; he held his ground as she glared up at him. “They already do. How can I convince them otherwise?”

He wanted to. She heard it in his voice, and she believed it. Irrith’s anger melted away, and left behind something like her usual grin. “You can help me. Which is what I came for in the first place. There’s a challenge on, to see who can throw their life away more uselessly, the Queen or the Prince. I’m trying to stop them. But right now, our only other plan is to stab the Dragon with a big icy spear. We need something better.”

Abd ar-Rashid frowned thoughtfully and moved away, pulling two battered cushions from inside the chest at the foot of his bed. He gestured for Irrith to sit on one, and by the time she’d done so, a coffee urn and two bowls had appeared from nowhere. Sighing inside, she accepted one, and hoped he would get distracted before she had to drink it.

“Beyond the spear,” she said, “there are two other possible plans. One is that Galen thinks gold could be used to trap the Dragon. I don’t quite understand his argument, but it has to do with that flodgy—oh, I can never remember the word—”

“Phlogiston,” he murmured.

“Yes, that. Some philosopher Galen knows says it goes into materials that aren’t already full of it, and so if we trapped it in something already full of fire, it wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. They’re planning to use sun-gold.”

The genie’s frown deepened, and he cupped his coffee as if it held the answer. “Because gold does not calcine. It melts, though, and very easily. This trap might work for a time, yes—but not for long.”

As Irrith had feared. “Can you find a way to keep it from melting?”

“In the time we have? I doubt it very much.”

We.
He wasn’t getting on that ship to Cairo, Irrith suspected. Not unless the Onyx Court was destroyed in the next five days. “The other possibility is the philosopher’s stone. Even if we had sophic mercury, though, the Queen’s afraid it would just create a Dragon
nobody
can destroy, that would still burn down London.”

Abd ar-Rashid jerked, and his coffee almost slopped onto the floor. “But—the philosopher’s stone is perfection. Something that
brings
perfection to others. Surely—”

Irrith raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to gamble London’s future on ‘surely’? Maybe the best way to perfect things is to destroy them, so something better can be built in their place.”

Alarm filled the genie’s dark eyes. “I had not thought of that.”

None of you did.
That was the problem with bringing scholars together. Clever as they were, sometimes they forgot their ideas were more than pretty shapes in their minds.

He sipped his drink, frowning once more. “No, we do not want a perfect Dragon. Even supposing we had the mercury with which to make one.”

They wanted the opposite. And that gave Irrith an idea so startling, she spilled her own coffee. It scalded her hands, but she hardly noticed. “What if we went the other way?”

“What do you mean?”

“Alchemy perfects things, right?” She put down her cup before she could lose the rest of its contents. “What if you went the other way? Reverse alchemy. Use it to make something
im
perfect. We’ve said all along that the Dragon is too powerful to be killed. But if we can weaken it, make it vulnerable—”

It was wild speculation, and maybe complete nonsense. The genie’s eyes widened, though, and he fair floated up from the cushion on which he sat. His mind had gone elsewhere, and his body only followed. “Combine it with something that is
not
pure. The alchemists combined many impure things, misunderstanding their own work, and achieved no particular result—but they were working with mute substances, not things of faerie.” His gaze sharpened, as if his mind had come back from a voyage into possibility. “I do not know if it would work.”

Irrith bit her lip so hard it almost bled. “It must.” The alternative was too dreadful to think of. Lune dead, or Galen, or both.
We have to try.

The Onyx Hall, London: April 13, 1759

Galen came through the front door of his chambers and stood blankly for a moment. The hearth was cold and black; the only illumination came from a faerie light, that whisked back to its sconce when its limited awareness realized someone had entered. Beyond that, the room lay still.

Of course. Edward was at Sothings Park. Podder was dead, and the knights who guarded Galen below didn’t know he’d returned. In his absence, charms were enough to protect his chambers, while the knights prepared for battle.

He should light a fire. The Onyx Hall was a chilly place, and the gloom pressed in on him. But he was still standing there when he felt eyes upon him.

Galen turned and found Irrith in the open doorway. His heart skipped a beat at the sight of her. She’d discarded the civilized fashions of the Onyx Hall for rougher garb—perhaps what she wore in the Vale. A short tunic over hose, displaying a figure that, while slender, was not boyish. She shifted from one foot to the other, hands tugging at the hem of the tunic, and said, “I . . . was looking for you.”

Waiting for him, judging by how quickly she’d appeared. Galen reached the obvious conclusion. “Are you leaving?”

Startlement pulled her straight. “What? No! Is that how you think of me, as someone who runs away?”

He remembered her charging across the ice, pistol in hand, to free Lune. The marks of her exposure in the world above had largely faded now, but there was still a hollowness to her, shadows in her cheeks and along the line of her collarbone. No, she was not the sort to run away.

“I’m sorry,” Galen said, turning back toward the hearth. It was easy enough to do his servants’ work, here in this faerie palace; all it took was a whispered request, and fire bloomed in the empty grate. “I’ve been with the von das Tickens. The news isn’t good. Niklas says gold would only hold the Dragon a little while, before it melted.”

Irrith closed the door behind her. “Abd ar-Rashid said the same thing. But he suggested—well, I did, but he agreed—that we might be able to weaken the Dragon by doing the alchemical thing badly. On purpose. Combining it with something impure, to make it imperfect. And therefore vulnerable.”

Silence followed, in which Galen fancied he could hear the beating of both their hearts. The pieces hovered in his mind, not quite coming together. A vessel of sun-gold. Filled with something lacking in phlogiston, that would draw the Dragon in, as air was drawn into a vessel from which it had been pumped. Something impure, so they could enact the “chemical wedding” of the philosophers, with opposite intent.

But what thing?

“Water and earth,” Irrith said, like a schoolboy recalling his—her—lessons. “Cold and wet. It has to have no fire in it, but it also has to be flawed.
Not
Lune. Something that’s vulnerable.”

“Something,” Galen whispered, “that is mortal.”

Her mouth fell open by degrees, as if all the world had slowed. Irrith stood perfectly still at the edge of the carpet, not breathing. Any more than Galen was.

“Mortal,” he repeated, more strongly. “Bind the Dragon’s spirit into a vessel that can be destroyed—that can be
killed
. You might not even have to do anything; the mere presence of such power might annihilate the vessel, and by doing so, take the Dragon with it.” How could the words be so steady, so calm, as if he were speaking of philosophy only, with no application to life?

Irrith’s voice was not so steady. “There are plenty of stray dogs in Lo . . .”

She couldn’t even finish it. Galen was shaking his head. “No. It needs more than a dog.”

“Then a beggar. Plenty of those, too. Snatch one off any street corner—”

“An innocent?” he demanded. His own calm slipped. “Someone ignorant of this world, this war, tied down for the slaughter without even knowing why? I’ll be damned first! It must be someone willing, Irrith.”

His declaration hung in the air. She could make the tally as well as he could. Edward Thorne was half-faerie. Mrs. Vesey? Delphia? There were others in the Hall or associated with it, various lovers and pets of faerie courtiers, many of them with no awareness of the larger faerie world, its politics and dangers. It would be his duty as Prince to go among them, to question one after another, asking who would lay down his life for the good of London.

And perhaps one might agree. Perhaps.

But he could never bring himself to ask.

She shook her head, a tiny movement at first, then a more vehement one. “No, Galen.”

“I am willing,” he said, and if it was ragged, it was also true.

“No, no,
no
—” Irrith spun and crossed the room, hands in the air as if to ward off his statement, and then without warning she seized the nearest thing that came to hand and hurled it across the room. Porcelain shattered against the far wall. “No! You aren’t going to do it!”

“Yes. I am.” Peculiar joy was filling the hole inside him, driving back the fear. “Who better, Irrith? If the Prince will not sacrifice himself for the good of his people, who will? I’ll renounce my connection to the Hall—”

The firelight caught Irrith’s face, revealing fury. “Do you think this will make her love you?”

The chain of her question dragged him back to earth. “What?”

“Lune. That’s why you’re doing this, isn’t it? Because you love her, and you want some grand gesture to show it, saving the Onyx Court single-handed. You think she’ll finally love you, then. You’re an
idiot,
Galen. Her heart was given centuries ago, and not to you.”

He flinched. It struck too near the mark. He
had
dreamt like that, too many times, but such dreams could not survive the light of day. “No. I—I know she will never love me.”

“Then what?” Her contempt lashed out like a whip. “That when you’re gone, she’ll understand? These years you’ve been in the Hall, worshipping at her feet, laughed at by all the courtiers who have seen it a thousand times before, a poor little mortal pining for his faerie lover. But once you’re
dead,
oh, yes,
then
we’ll understand. We’ll see what your devotion was worth.

“You won’t be here to see it, though. Because you’ll be gone. Do you imagine yourself looking down from Heaven, seeing us all mourn you as you deserve?” Irrith’s eyes blazed green, burning with inhuman light.
“What makes you think you’re going to Heaven at all?”

Galen’s heart pounded once, hard enough to shake his entire body, and then it stopped.

The sprite’s slender frame was rigid with emotion. The only thing moving was her breast, heaving with her shallow gasps. Then it slowed, and Irrith said, more quietly but with no less force, “I don’t know your divine Master. But I know this much: he does not love suicides. And what would you call it, when a man embraces death for love of a faerie queen?”