With Fate Conspire (56 page)

Dead Rick snarled low in his throat, but said, “I mean right now. You came for Lune. You planning to walk out with ’er? Take ’er away from that? Might as well shoot ’er, and you know it.”

He’d jerked his chin upward on the word “that.” Following his motion, Eliza saw a stone in the ceiling above Lune that did not belong with the rest of the palace. It was a simple, rounded block of limestone, pitted and chipped, scored with grooves along its tip, as if carriage wheels had ground across it for years—but it hung ten feet above their heads. Surely nothing could touch it up there, least of all carriages.

Then she realized she’d seen it before, during her costerwoman days. Or rather, a stone just like it, set into the outside wall of St. Swithin’s Church. An old relic that they called the London Stone.

“I ain’t got no interest in seeing everybody die,” Nadrett said, in answer to Dead Rick. “You ought to know that, dog; if there ain’t no fae in London, I ain’t got nobody to make a profit from. So ’ere’s what we’re going to do.

“You’re going to go out and tell everybody there’s a new place for them to live. Out in West Ham. Anybody as wants to stay in London can, so long as they pays my price. You clear them out of this place; that Prince of theirs ’as enough bread piled up to give everybody a bite. Once that’s done … You see that camera over there?”

Eliza couldn’t risk taking her attention off Nadrett, but out of the corner of her eye she could just glimpse a box on a tripod stand. “I use that camera,” Nadrett said. “I take the Queen’s soul. I carry it off to West Ham, and use ’er and that dead Prince to pour what’s left of this place into what I’ve got waiting there. New faerie realm, new ’ome for everybody. Ain’t it grand?”

Eliza’s heart lurched against her ribs. So that was how he would do it: with human souls and the captured spirit of the Queen. That was the secret they had risked themselves to capture.

Or rather, destroy.

“Sounds very grand—except for one thing.” Her voice shook: with rage, with fear, with the fruitless need to
do
something. She couldn’t possibly kill him before he shot the Queen. But if she made him angry enough … “We blew your machine to pieces.”

It almost worked. Nadrett snarled in fury, and Dead Rick tensed, about to throw himself forward in that moment of distraction. But Nadrett saw it, and spat a curse. “One inch, dog, and I blows the Queen’s brains out.”

Let him.

It was a stupid, reckless, suicidal thought—so Eliza believed, at first. But the tone wasn’t reckless in the least; it was perfectly calm.

And it wasn’t her thought.

The whisper ghosted into her head, and no one else seemed to hear it.
Let him fire. If you can hear me … make Nadrett do it.

Madness. They would all die; Dead Rick had said so. But Eliza would have put her hand on the Holy Bible and sworn her oath to God that the whisper came from the silver-haired woman in the chair: the Queen of the Onyx Court.

Whose mind she was somehow feeling, as if the woman were a ghost she had raised.

Trust me.

The tenuous sense of connection faded as Eliza shifted forward, releasing her grip on the wall. Nadrett redirected his snarl to her. “That goes for you, too, bitch.”

In the end, Eliza was sure of one thing: that it would be better to kill every faerie in this place, even Dead Rick, and herself with them, than to let Nadrett tear people’s souls out and feed them into his terrible machine.

“Devil take you,” she said, and threw herself at Nadrett.

The sound of gunfire was deafening in the small space. Eliza never made it near her target; Dead Rick caught her, in a desperate, failed attempt to prevent disaster. But as her ears rang with the aftermath of the shot, as smoke wisped through the cool, dry air, the expected earthquake did not begin.

And Lune sat, untouched, in her chair.

Nadrett stared, disbelieving, at the Queen. So did Dead Rick; so did Eliza. The pistol was an inch from her head; he could not possibly have missed. The wall showed a fresh pockmark where the round had struck, and the line between the two went straight through her skull.

Trembling, Nadrett reached out with his free hand to touch Lune’s hair.

His fingers went right through.

“What in Mab’s name…?” he whispered.

Clinging to Dead Rick, Eliza felt the growl in the skriker’s chest, before it ever became audible. Then understanding caught up, and she released him, freeing his arm to throw.

A tiny arc of water leapt from the vial, cloudy and stinking of the Thames from which it had been drawn. In a fierce, triumphant growl, Dead Rick snarled, “Seithenyn, I name you, and mark you for death. Let the waters of Faerie carry out their curse!”

Only a few droplets of water caught Nadrett. Nowhere near enough to hurt anyone. The entire vial couldn’t have hurt a man, even if poured into his lungs. Nadrett raised his gun again, and Eliza thought they were dead; Lune might survive that, but she and Dead Rick never would. Before Nadrett’s arm made it all the way up, though, the water began to
move
.

Move, and grow. It twisted up from the floor, from his sleeve and collar where the droplets had landed, twining into ropes and waves. Nadrett screamed, trying to claw it away, but the water only clung to his hands, like animate tar; then, understanding, he tried to run.

He didn’t get more than three steps. The waters raged higher around him, a whirlpool binding his body tight, and in their surface Eliza thought she saw faces: beautiful nymphs, twisted hags, and through them all, the solemn, bearded face of an old man. A voice spoke, resonant but clotted with mud and filth, the voice of the Thames itself. “For the destruction you wrought, and the death of Mererid our daughter, we bring this justice upon you.”

Nadrett’s scream died in a choking cough. Then there was only rushing water; then silence, as it drained away, leaving only a damp slick on the floor.

Dead Rick spat at it. “Wanted to tear your throat out, you bastard. But they ’ad first claim.”

Sick to her stomach, Eliza turned away. To the broken edge of the wall that had closed Lune into this chamber—Lune, who was some kind of ghost. Beyond its edge she found Hodge, limp on the floor, having dragged himself almost to the Queen before his strength gave out. Eliza knelt and rolled him onto his back, fearing the worst, but Hodge opened his eyes. “Is she…”

Eliza didn’t know how to answer. Instead she slipped her arm around his chest and helped him upright, and together they staggered back into the chamber of the London Stone.

Dead Rick gestured helplessly toward the Queen. “Lune—”

Hodge stretched one hand out to the wall. Not for support; his fingers touched the stone, and he closed his eyes. After a moment, Eliza did the same.

She felt that presence again, tenuous and weak, but undeniably there. A sense of gratitude breathed over her, so painfully weary that it brought a gasp of tears into Eliza’s own throat.
I began to suspect some time ago. I have poured so much of myself into the Hall, I am no longer in my body; the Hall
is
my body. The scholars would say my spirit has released its grip upon the aether that made it solid. I could not hold both that and the palace at once.

It was more than just words. The Queen’s whisper carried with it overtones of sensation and memory that gave Eliza vertigo: in that moment, she came untethered from human notions of time and existence, growing into something vaster and more elemental than her poor mortal mind could conceive. But then, as from a distance, she felt Hodge’s arm tighten around her shoulders, and she knew she wasn’t alone; he was mortal, too, if not entirely so, and he helped anchor her to the reality she understood, against the tide of the Queen’s ancient soul.

Whether she heard Dead Rick’s voice with her ears or her mind, Eliza didn’t know. “Your Grace. I should ’ave stopped ’im sooner—”

No need for apology.
Another wash of weariness, so intense Eliza wondered how anyone, human or faerie, could bear it.
I know of your purpose in West Ham. Did he have an answer? Can his … machines be used?

It must have been mental communication, for Eliza felt the surge of Dead Rick’s repugnance alongside her own. “No,” she said, and then words failed her; they did not suffice to describe the horror of what Nadrett had built.

But it seemed the Queen took the sense of it from her mind, for she felt Lune’s grim resignation.
Then we do not have long. At most, until the first train passes by the London Stone above. Perhaps not even that long. Hodge … the time has come. The Onyx Court must flit; the Hall can shelter us no more.

“No!” That
was
out loud, and it came from Dead Rick. Hand still on the wall, Eliza opened her eyes, and saw the skriker fall to his knees at the feet of his phantom Queen. “We can’t just bloody well give up. There
’as
to be a way to save the palace.”

Hodge slipped from Eliza’s arm to lean against the stone, exhausted. His answer was flat and unyielding. “There ain’t. We’ve tried. I wish it weren’t true—but your time ’ere is done.”

The naked despair on Dead Rick’s face echoed through the stone, into Eliza’s own heart. “But this is our
home
.”

His words tore her in half. One piece growled that it would be good riddance; after all the evil the fae had done, London would be better off without them. No more Nadretts, stealing people and memories and souls, profiting from the misery and suffering of others. These were not godly creatures; they were alien, and unwanted. The occasional exception—Dead Rick, the Goodemeades—did not redeem the rest of their kind.

The other piece of Eliza had heard such words before—coming from men like Louisa Kittering’s father.

Maggie Darragh, starving in Whitechapel, until her anger could only express itself in dynamite. James O’Malley, who’d stolen more than a few things in his time, and other crimes besides. All the drunkards and thieves and murderers, the unwashed pestilential masses of Irish hidden away in their rookeries, where the respectable folk of London didn’t have to see them; some were bad at heart, and others were led into sin by those around them, and still others had it forced upon them by circumstance. And then there were the men like Patrick Quinn, that those respectable folk liked to forget: decent, hardworking Irish, not living in poverty, not committing crimes, but they couldn’t redeem their race in the eyes of those who judged.

Eliza had told Quinn that London was her home. It was Dead Rick’s home, too—and Lune’s, and the Goodemeades’, and all the other fae who sheltered in the dying ruins of the Onyx Hall, criminal and citizen alike. How could she look him in the eye and say he had to leave, that his kind were not wanted here?

This moment wasn’t hers; she was all but a stranger here, ignorant of so much that she hardly dared open her mouth. But she had to do something to lift the blackness from Dead Rick’s heart, and so she said, “How did this place get made? Can’t you make another one?”

The fierce blaze in the skriker’s eye repaid her courage tenfold. “You said it two ’undred years ago, your Grace—that if the palace burned down, we’d build another one! If we can’t save the Hall, then let it go, and start over!”

But Hodge shook his head. “The giants of London are dead; Father Thames ’asn’t spoken in more than a ’undred years; the city’s shot through with iron. We know what they did the first time, but the world’s changed too much for that to work.”

“Then find a
new
way,” Eliza said, with all the bold confidence of a woman who had no idea what such a way might be, but wasn’t letting that stop her. “Pull Nadrett’s machines to bits and figure out how to make them work with something other than souls.”

For a moment, she thought Hodge would say no. The weariness was in him, too, going beyond what she thought any man could endure; it would have been easier for him to give up, to send the faeries away, and then to die alongside Lune, with the last of the Onyx Hall.

But he wasn’t some overbred twig off the royal tree of Europe. This Prince was made of sterner stuff, and had the will to go down fighting. “It can’t ’urt to try,” Hodge said, and managed a smile. “Any more than not trying will. I can only die once.”

Dead Rick stood, bowing to both the Queen and the Prince, and said, “I think I might know somebody who can ’elp you put that off a bit.”

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: September 7, 1884

The closing of the Inner Circle had, in one brutal move, severed the Onyx Hall into two pieces, along the line of Cannon Street. For days afterward, the southern half shuddered through its death throes, the last of the Goblin Market fracturing smaller and smaller, taking with it anyone, faerie or mortal, not smart enough to run for the door while they could.

For the northern half, survival took precedence over security: Dead Rick and Eliza helped the Academy’s engineers dismantle the great loom and move it to the chamber outside where Lune sat in desperate trance, supported by the ghost of Galen St. Clair. The young man had not hesitated, once Yvoir freed his spirit from the plate found in the West Ham factory; he had only to hear that Lune needed his aid, and went immediately to her side. In the meanwhile, Bonecruncher and others had braved the dying southern half to gather as much material as they could, salvaging it to feed the loom, so they could weave protection for what had become the two most vital pieces of the Hall.

The London Stone and the Galenic Academy.

The former would hold their present for as long as it could. The latter, perhaps, held their future.

It was the irrational hope born in those moments after Nadrett’s death: that they could, in these final days, discover some acceptable use for the horror he had invented. Some way to make a new home for themselves, on some foundation other than the destruction of mortal souls.

“I’m sorry to say that was, in part, my doing,” said the bearded man who presented himself to the Academy, five days after the raid. The Goodemeades had brought him, introducing the fellow as Frederic Myers, of the London Fairy Society. “I do not remember the details—it seems that memory has somehow been taken from me—but according to what Fjothar and I have reconstructed, some years ago, Nadrett sought out my expertise on ghosts.