With Fate Conspire (22 page)

Sounds echoed off the black stone from both directions. Shouts, screams, someone weeping; also noises that told him some of his fellow shape-changers had made the same calculation he had. Dead Rick picked a direction and ran.

In the first chamber he came to, all was chaos. A human child sat on the floor, naked and bawling, surrounded by panicking fae. Dead Rick saw a sprite he knew, and slipped through the press until he was close enough to shift back again and speak. “Pollikin—what the bleeding ’ell is going on?”

The sprite opened his mouth to answer. As he did so, however, one of those pauses came; and by now they’d happened enough times that everyone knew what it meant. The noise in the room dropped sharply, half the fae holding their breath—and the pause stretched on, and
on,
just long enough for the hopeful to think that maybe the trouble was over.

Then the palace bucked around them as if it were a tatterfoal trying to throw off its rider. Pollikin fell into Dead Rick, and they both went down, the skriker cracking his head against the stone.

But it didn’t hurt as much as it should have. As if the stone were not quite there.

“Blood and Bone,” Dead Rick whispered. His eyes met Pollikin’s, and he saw his terror echoed in the sprite’s eyes.

One shove got Pollikin off him; another brought Dead Rick to his feet. For one crazed moment, he wished Nadrett were there—simply because the master would know what to do, and would give Dead Rick some kind of direction, if only by running. But there was no one to lead him, and everyone else in the room looked even more panicked and lost than he was. Seizing on his one good thought—Nadrett running for his life—Dead Rick drew in a lungful of air and bellowed as loudly as he could,
“Get out of ’ere, damn it!”

A few fae started moving before he’d even said the words, probably from sheer unfocused panic. Others stared at Dead Rick. He fought the urge to hit them. “The palace is breaking,” he said. By now he had something like silence, aside from the screaming mortal boy, but his voice was still loud, as if his heart were pounding each word out of his mouth. “Never mind if you don’t ’ave bread; right now, London’s safer than this place is. Get out of ’ere.” They were still staring at him, the stupid sods. The stone writhed around him again, and he could almost hear it howl in pain.
“Go!”

As if the command had unlocked a door, the room sprang into motion. And sound; screams immediately drowned out the child’s. Dead Rick fought his way through to where he’d last seen the boy, and found him curled into a tight ball on the floor, bleeding where the stampeding feet had kicked him in passing. The skriker grabbed the boy around the middle and tucked him under one arm, using the other to shove people out of the way.

By now the motion had become a river, a torrent of bodies sweeping through the far door and into the warren beyond. Here and there a faerie battled the flow, and soon Dead Rick realized why; they were rushing to save what they owned, whether that was Goblin Market wealth or the few scraps they’d brought when they fled their homelands.

And then he remembered his own scraps, hidden behind the rockfall.

Instinct told him stop; he had to go back! But the moment his feet slowed, a satyr slammed into him from behind, making Dead Rick stagger and nearly drop the child. The boy wailed and clung to the skriker’s hip.
Ash and Thorn, I can’t just abandon ’im.

He pressed his back to the wall, on the edge of the flood, and looked back desperately. The bread, he
had
to get the bread at least; if this wasn’t just a break, if this was the death convulsion of the entire Onyx Hall, then he would need bread to have any hope of making it out of London alive.

But the boy he carried was scarcely more than an infant. Even if he could walk on his own, he’d never survive this chaos, let alone find an exit. And Dead Rick wouldn’t care to wager on the likelihood that being mortal would save this child from whatever was about to happen to the faerie palace.

Nobody would help him. There were fae who believed in the value of mortal life—but none of them lived in the Goblin Market.

Well, maybe one does. And ’e’s a fucking idiot.

Dead Rick shifted the boy higher, cradling him against his chest, and rejoined the river’s flow.

There weren’t many directions it could go. The warren had many passages, but few exits. Two corridors led toward the rest of the Onyx Hall, which might or might not be safe. One chamber contained a hole where the fabric of the palace had frayed thin enough that the two worlds touched; it led into the great intercepting sewer, where he’d sent Irrith. And the last led up: a proper entrance, from the days when the Hall was built, giving into the cellar of a pub near Billingsgate Market.

Dead Rick and the boy were going up, whether they liked it or not.

Along with dozens of other fae. The pace slowed to a crawl as they drew near the entrance, bodies packing in tighter and tighter until Dead Rick was afraid the boy would be crushed.
Forget the boy;
I
might be crushed.
This wasn’t any orderly procession; fae were elbowing and shoving, using claws if they had them, and then Dead Rick heard a gunshot, deafening in the tight space. But if it was supposed to scare anyone into getting out of the way, it failed. Everyone was already as scared as they could get. And if the shot was aimed at a body … Dead Rick stepped on something soft and bony a little while later, and smelled blood, but didn’t look down to see its source.

A gust of air made him shiver, despite the frantic heat of so many fleeing bodies. Then Dead Rick realized it wasn’t physical cold. Up ahead, the passage ended in a chamber scarcely large enough for two or three desperate fae, and above lay the mortal world.

Flapping wings shot overhead, some bird-shaped faerie bolting for safety. She didn’t quite make it. The bird flew into the chamber and up; then she fell again, screeching as the atmosphere outside forced her body into a woman’s form. Dead Rick, holding the boy almost on his shoulder to protect him, shuddered in sympathetic pain.

Then he was in the chamber at last, with dubious salvation above. He could feel the chill of nearby iron—tools, barrel hoops, all the metal humans could not seem to do without—but right now, it felt safer than the Hall behind him. The ladder that should lead into the cellar, though, was splintered and broken, only one cracked rung still holding the legs together.

Here, at least, something like help was to be had; the fae behind him, eager to take his place, were more than willing to shove him upward if that would speed his progress. With his free hand Dead Rick clawed for the hard-packed dirt of the cellar floor, bare feet twisting in someone’s grasp, trying not to crush the child he’d brought all this way. He ended up heaving the boy up and onto the floor, then dragging himself after, curving his back over the mortal to protect him when somebody else staggered and fell over them both.

Gasping, he crawled clear, flinching away from the iron all around them.
It’s no worse than Blackfriars. You survived that, remember?
But he didn’t know how long he would have lasted, if he hadn’t caught that tosher with food.

All at once his will gave out. Dead Rick collapsed against a wall, the rough brickwork scratching him where his waistcoat had torn, and watched fae escape the Onyx Hall. Already they packed the cellar; some must have gone upstairs, into the pub on the ground floor. What would the mortals think, with faeries flooding into their midst like that?

It might not even matter. For all Dead Rick knew, this was the end; whatever indomitable will held the Onyx Hall together had finally given out, just as his own had, and now that shadowy reflection would at last fray into nothingness. And the fae who called it home would scatter to the four winds: some going to Faerie, some finding refuge in what other courts remained, some dying under the oppressive weight of the mortal world’s hostility.

Dead Rick didn’t know which of those fates would be his. And lying against the wall, with a mortal child crying into his bruised ribs, he couldn’t much bring himself to care.

PART TWO

May–August 1884

A Lord of Steam and Iron am I

A monster in the land;

While puny men of bone and blood

Are slaves at my command.

—“Monster Science,” nineteenth-century song

Thy form is clothed with wings of iron gloom;

But round about thee, like a chain, is rolled,

Cramping the sway of every mighty plume,

A stark constringent serpent fold on fold:

Of its two heads, one sting is in thy brain,

The other in thy heart; their venom-pain

Like fire distilling through thee uncontrolled.

—James Thomson, “To Our Ladies of Death”

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born …

—Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grandê Chartreuse”

If she had breath, she would be gasping for air. Exquisite agony still lances through her body, new knives to join the old. When they pierced her, all control vanished; there was no thought, no endurance, nothing but an endless, voiceless scream.

She claws it down, forces herself to think past the pain. Forces her body to stillness, accepting the fresh mutilation. Fighting it will only hurt her more, and so she
bends
herself around it, drawing back the bleeding edges of her flesh. The further she retreats, the less it hurts, but she knows this has consequences she cannot accept. What those consequences are, she cannot recall, but that much stays with her: that she
must not
retreat too far.

Pain has the power to startle her, to weaken her control, but it is not the real threat. Her own response is. Like a woman above a great drop, clinging to the edge of a blade, she must not loosen her grip—whatever it costs her in blood.

She remembers this, though she cannot remember why.

And so she will cling on, until memory fades, and oblivion claims her at last.

White Lion Street, Islington: May 16, 1884

The maid escorted Frederic Myers into the ground floor parlor, where Mrs. Chase sat with her mending. The old woman rose as he entered, despite his exhortations for her to remain seated; she moved remarkably well for a woman of her age.
Or perhaps it is not so remarkable,
he thought, remembering what he knew of her. There was more in Heaven and Earth than even the Society for Psychical Research dreamt of in their philosophy.

“They’re downstairs,” Mrs. Chase said, “but not yet started, I think. I must wait for a few more guests; you may go on down.”

She went to a patch of wall left oddly bare of any pictures or furniture, and brushed her hand over the roses that sprawled across the wallpaper. At her touch, they came to life. The blossoms acquired depth and scent; the vines twined themselves into a flowery arch; and then the wall within that arch was not there anymore, and a set of worn wooden steps led downward.

Myers’s breath quickened at the sight. He’d seen it only once before, and could no more catch the manner of its happening this time than he could the first. They would not let him study it, not yet; for now, he was only a guest in this home.
Both
of these homes: the one above, and the one below.

Hat in hand, and ducking his head to avoid scraping it against the low ceiling, Myers descended into the hidden realm of Rose House.

Voices trailed up the staircase toward him, one of the Goodemeades speaking. He could not yet tell them apart, not without seeing the embroidery on their aprons. “… loom-thing, whatever Wrain and Ch’ien Mu are calling it,
ought
to help—but the best it can do is to slow the problem.”

“It may cushion folk against more incidents like last week,” her sister said, and then Myers emerged into the sitting room below.

The second speaker proved to be Rosamund Goodemeade, who popped to her feet the moment she saw him. “Mr. Myers! Oh, I’m so glad you could join us again. Please, do be seated—”

She scarcely came to his belt, but somehow managed a presence much larger than her actual size. Aside from the height, she was almost precisely as she had been when he came to his first meeting of the London Fairy Society back in March: the same honey-colored curls, the same friendly demeanor. Just a foot shorter, and with an odd cast to her features that marked her not as human, but faerie.

Mrs. Chase had said nothing of that when she approached him at the April meeting about joining a second, more select group. Explanations had waited until he came to tea a week later—explanations, and a test; his reactions then, he suspected, had determined whether they would open the rose arch in the wall and admit him to the Goodemeades’ home below. He had passed, and thereby joined the
real
London Fairy Society.

It was not a topic he’d ever known much about. Myers’s notion of “fairies” owed a great deal to the sort of sentimental picture books published for children nowadays, with delicate winged creatures floating about flower gardens. Instead he found himself in an underground house furnished like an idyllic, rustic cottage, taking tea with a mixture of mortals and fae, none of whom were tiny and possessed of wings. The Goodemeades, while small, were plump, homespun creatures; Lady Amadea was the height of an ordinary woman and statuesque in her beauty. Another short fellow, by the name of Tom Toggin, had a face that could have belonged to some lady’s Chinese pug—though he assured Myers that goblins were often
far
uglier than he.

And then there were the mortals: men and women carefully selected by the Goodemeades, judged trustworthy enough to know the secret of the faeries’ presence in London. Myers made his greetings to them, then settled himself in a comfortable chair, waiting for the meeting to begin.