With Fate Conspire (54 page)

“’Tis what I told you of before,” Eliza said. Habits of reticence made it hard to say the rest, even though these men certainly knew. “In the workhouse.”

He hadn’t forgotten. Quinn’s eyes widened fractionally, but his tone was perfectly level as he said, “All right. Maguire, Sweeney—let us have the room. And no listening at keyholes, ye mind!”

Dead Rick clearly did not trust it; he listened at the door, then nodded that the men were walking away. Quinn, in the meanwhile, dragged two chairs from the neighboring desks over to his own, and sat facing Eliza, bracing his elbows on his knees. “You gave me a fair surprise, you did, vanishing from the workhouse like that. How did you get
Miss Kittering
to arrange your release?”

“She took pity on me,” Eliza said briefly, not wanting to have to invent an explanation for whatever the changeling had done. “Sergeant, have you found any proof of what I told you?” He shook his head, and opened his mouth to answer, but she stopped him with a raised hand. “I brought some for you.”

She would have expected Dead Rick to hesitate. His hatred of Nadrett ran deep, though; if stopping that monster meant showing his faerie face to half of Scotland Yard, he might have done it. Quinn’s chair scraped backward across the floor, and she knew the skriker had dropped his glamour.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Quinn whispered.

“Wrong on all counts,” the skriker said with aplomb. “Though it’s an ’onest mistake to make. You believe ’er yet? I don’t want some cove walking in ’ere while I’m ’alf naked.”

Eliza hadn’t heard such lightheartedness from him since before Nadrett stole his memories. The warmth it produced gave her the confidence to say to Quinn, “I showed you because I need your help. Yours, and as many more as you can get.”

Quinn was still staring at Dead Rick, but he answered her. “To find your boy?”

“No, that bit I’ve done. ’Tis the one responsible I’m going after now.”

He sat quietly as she explained it to him, though once or twice his hand drifted for a notebook, out of habit, before being called back. Nothing of the Onyx Hall, Hodge had insisted when they asked him; if what they found in West Ham saved the palace, they didn’t want to lose it promptly after to a throng of hostile neighbors or curious explorers. But that Nadrett was possibly trying to make a shelter for himself, yes, and that he was apparently using ordinary humans to build it.

That he would defend the place. And that there were things men could do—especially mortal men—to fight back.

By the time she was done, Quinn’s eyes had taken on a glazed cast. None of it, she suspected, was much like the fairy tales he’d grown up with. But he shook it off, alert once more, after she’d been silent for a few seconds. Then he grimaced. “I’ll help ye myself, just to see the truth of it with my own eyes. But it’s a devil of a hard thing to arrange more. Even if ye knew for sure he’s the one kidnapping these folk, that isn’t Special Branch business.”

“But dynamite is,” Dead Rick said, drawing Quinn’s attention once more. “Nadrett supplied the Fenians. For Charing Cross, and Praed Street, and the four in May. I doubt ’e’s the only one they gets it from, but cut ’im off, and you’ve at least done them a blow.”

“How do you know?” Quinn asked. Not suspiciously, but dutifully; he would have asked Queen Victoria herself where she got her information, if she offered some to him.

Dead Rick’s answering grin was fit for a death omen, even on his human-looking face. “I carried it to ’em myself.”

Eliza hastened to assure Quinn that Dead Rick had not cooperated by choice, but the sergeant waved it away. “’Tisn’t the first time I’ve taken help from somebody inside,” he said absently. “Christ, though—I can’t just go up to Williamson and say, give me a dozen fellows to hunt the faeries.”

What came next was properly Dead Rick’s to offer, but they’d agreed it would be better coming from Eliza. “There are ways to … persuade them,” she said. Nervousness made her fumble the words she’d chosen in advance. “And to make it so they aren’t too clear afterwards on what they saw—”

“Stop,” Quinn said. Not loudly, not angrily, but it cut her off like a knife. “I do not know what you might be thinking, but I won’t have your faeries fiddling with the heads of my boys. They know what they’re doing, or they don’t come at all. Do you understand me?”

She did—but she also knew what the other side feared. “Sergeant, they’re afraid, too. They might not be hiding much longer, the good ones won’t; but they don’t want the first news of them to be a fellow like Nadrett. They’d be hunted for sure, then. So unless you can persuade your boys to be keeping quiet…”

Quinn seemed to be chewing on the insides of his cheeks. He rose from his chair and paced the room, casting the occasional glance at the door, as if thinking about the men outside. Eliza and Dead Rick let him keep his peace. Finally he said, “How many would ye be needing? Not how many ye’d
like,
but what would be enough to try with.”

Eliza turned to Dead Rick. He knew far better than she did what kind of defenses Nadrett might have, and what men could do against them. He said, “If they’re brave, ’alf a dozen. Two for each door. Religious, if you can.”

The sergeant breathed out a quiet laugh. “That will be the easy bit. Half a dozen, then? So five, aside from me.” He shook his head, like a man about to take a wager he knew he should refuse. “They won’t all be Special Branch, but this won’t be an official operation, either. All right, Miss O’Malley—ye’ll have yer men.”

West Ham, London: September 2, 1884

Dead Rick watched Eliza pace up and down the edge of Stephens Road, hands knotted behind her back, a general waiting for her troops to arrive. The upcoming assault was as much hers as anybody else’s: she didn’t know as much about tactics or charms as Sergeant Quinn or Sir Peregrin, but she had the connection to both worlds, so everybody on both sides looked for answers to come through her. And it had been her idea to begin with.

An audacious idea, that might yet blow up in all their faces. But they had run out of time for caution, and every faerie with a sense of self-preservation had already left the Onyx Hall. What they had left were the desperate and the mad. A few more of those than expected, at that: in addition to the three knights of the Onyx Guard, Irrith, and Bonecruncher, they’d managed to rouse out Niklas von das Ticken, the puck Cuddy, and even Kutuhal, the monkey fellow that had come with them to Aldersgate. Dead Rick didn’t know if he was coming out of curiosity, loyalty to his Academy fellows, or vengeance for the dead naga, but ultimately the reason didn’t matter. The Indian cove had a strong arm, which was all they really needed.

So there were three fae for each door, and the rest of their forces should be here soon enough.

“Can you tell?” Eliza asked abruptly.

It made him jump a bit; he was as tense as she. When he cocked his head at her quizzically, she made a brief, abortive gesture at the rest of the fae, waiting in a clump some distance away. “Whether they’re going to die.”

Dead Rick’s hackles rose at the question. He shook his head. “No. It don’t work on fae.” Their deaths were always too far off to sense, until the moment they happened.

“But you’ll know about the mortals.”

“Only if I look.”

Eliza shivered, and looked down. “Don’t look.”

He wished, with sudden intensity, that he were in dog form; he would have gone and slipped his head under her hand. It was the sort of thing he would have done before, and he thought she might not refuse it now—but he wasn’t sure.

Hoofbeats and the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels gave him no time in any case. A boxlike carriage with iron-barred windows approached along Stephens Road, and drew to a halt nearby. Sergeant Quinn jumped down from the front seat. With an effort at humor, Dead Rick said, “Planning on arresting ’em, are you?”

“There might be fellows that need arresting,” Quinn said. “The iron bars could be useful around the others.”

The carriage’s back door opened, and men began climbing out. None were in uniform, but they all had the sturdy, hard-bitten look of police constables. Also the ill-disguised nerves of men who knew they had not signed up for an ordinary fight. How Quinn had recruited them, Dead Rick didn’t know, and didn’t care to ask. After what Eliza had said, he couldn’t
not
look—and as he expected, the possibility of death hovered not far from each man. Not a certainty, and that was something; but this might yet go very badly indeed.

He wasn’t about to tell them, though. Without preamble, Eliza said, “It’s this way,” and their pitiful army moved up toward Liddington Road.

Three doors to assault; three groups to assault them. Dead Rick and Niklas were under Sir Peregrin’s command. Quinn had mustered six additional constables instead of five, so the sergeant himself came with their group; they would be taking the large double doors on the southern end of the building. Eliza joined them as well. One hand gripped a knife; the other, a vial of water, ready to be thrown. Whether it would have any effect coming from a mortal’s hand, nobody knew, but it might at least scare Nadrett—or rather, Seithenyn.

Dead Rick was looking forward to seeing the bastard drown.

Around the corner from the building, they paused to make their final preparations. The fae tied green bands around their left arms, to distinguish them from the others inside. Every mortal had come wearing a cross or crucifix, in addition to the weapons of revolver and water. Niklas daubed their eyes with some kind of ointment, mixed by someone in the Academy; it should help them see through charms of confusion. As a final touch, each constable turned his coat inside out—whereupon Dead Rick’s gaze slid right past them, refusing to notice Quinn and the other two men standing just feet away.

It settled on Eliza instead. “You should ’ide yourself,” he said.

She shook her head, surprising him not at all. “I want that bastard to see me. I want to look him in the eye.”

No time to argue; the other groups would be moving into position already. Peregrin beckoned them forward, and together they ran to the double doors.

Which burst open, the bar holding them shut splintering into two broken ends. Dead Rick tried to watch the constables do it, but he only saw Eliza and the fae run through the gap. Inside lay a shallow room, filled with empty crates and some odd bits of machinery, with another set of doors and a staircase leading up. Peregrin ordered Niklas and P.C. Butler to check above, but the door at the top was locked, and they retreated rather than make noise by bashing through.

The one at the bottom was barred from their side; no need to break this one down. Someone Dead Rick couldn’t see lifted the bar, and it swung open enough for a man to slip through.

But no one moved forward, and Dead Rick froze, every hair on his body standing on end. Something hung on the other side, fluttering in the shifting air: a length of cloth, shimmering all colors and none.

No. Not cloth. Looking at it, Dead Rick shivered down to the bone. The stuff twanged discordantly against his skriker instincts: something not quite of death, but not far distant, either.

At his side, Eliza let out a stifled moan. Her eyes were wide, when he turned to her, and she looked rather like he felt. Memory swam up from the absinthe-riddled depths of his mind: teaching her to call ghosts, because she was a born medium.

Mouthing the words more than speaking them, he whispered, “What in Mab’s name
is
that?” The only thing he could think was, it felt like ghosts, like the stuff the physical ones were made of—but not even quite like that.

Eliza shook her head, as baffled and unnerved as he. The fabric covered the entire doorway, in overlapping sheets; they would either have to go through, or try another door. And he wouldn’t be surprised if the others were similarly draped.

A skriker couldn’t see faerie deaths, and he certainly couldn’t see his own. Gritting his teeth, Dead Rick muttered an oath, and flung himself through.

The caress of the fabric over his shoulders made his skin try to shudder right off his body, but what he found on the other side was a complete anticlimax:

An empty room.

It was a huge, echoing space, going up to the clerestory windows above, with a walkway overlooking from the second floor. Another set of stairs up to it lay by the wall at the far end. There were doors along the walkway, but everything he could see was silent and still.

“Blood and Bone,” Dead Rick whispered to himself. “What is going
on
?”

Movement along the wall made him jump, but it was just Bonecruncher, coming through the near entrance, and Irrith through the far. A familiar scent told him Eliza had followed behind him, and one by one the others came through as well, to stare about in confusion.

The answers had to lie in the fabric. Dead Rick turned to examine it. Not death, and not ghosts, though something like each. That it was Nadrett’s work, he had no doubt—but what
was
it, and why was it draping the entire inside surface of this building?

“Wait,” Eliza said. Not to Dead Rick; she was staring toward someone his eye refused to see. Of course; the inside-out coats wouldn’t confuse her mortal eyes at all. “They think they see something,” she told the fae, “and I do, too—up ahead—
wait
!” she cried, and leapt forward as if to catch someone; whereupon she vanished.

Dead Rick flung himself after her.

Three steps in, the entire room changed. Rattling, clanking sound filled his ears; the smell of oil and grease and unwashed humans filled his nose; and in the center of the floor stood an enormous machine.

It transfixed his gaze, a hulking monstrosity unlike any he’d ever seen before. No, not true: it reminded him of the thing he’d seen in the Academy, that strange loom, except only part of this seemed to be weaving anything. People stood all around it: boys and girls, men and women, at least a dozen of them at a glance, all working away in the dim light as if they hadn’t noticed anyone rushing in.

Dead Rick’s skriker instinct crawled along his bones, confused and afraid.
Death—but not.