With Fate Conspire (5 page)

Riverside, London: March 10, 1884

Rank moisture made the stone slick under Dead Rick’s feet. The area always smelled of damp; in the Onyx Hall’s twisted reflection of London above, this was the waterfront, the areas corresponding to the bank of the Thames. Distance from the wall had preserved it against the crumbling caused by the wall’s destruction, but the iron gas mains that ran alongside the new sewers brought their own kind of decay.

As the growing foulness underfoot proved. Dead Rick picked his way carefully, but it didn’t help him when the walls suddenly trembled around him, and the floor jerked beneath his feet; his heel slipped in something softly disgusting, and only a quick clutch at the wall saved him. He waited there, every muscle tense, until the shaking had stopped.

Train.
Mostly they went unfelt, even though iron rails ran through the ground all the way from Blackfriars to Mansion House. The Onyx Hall’s enchantments—what remained of them—protected against that disruption; the palace might lie beneath London, but that didn’t mean the engines of the underground railway came charging in and out of their chambers. But this, one of the surviving entrances to the Hall, lay near where the line to Blackfriars Station crossed the buried River Fleet, and so the tremors came through more often.

Here, the truth couldn’t be ignored. Forget the broken wall; forget the cast-iron pipes laid alongside the sewers. Forget the buildings torn down in the city above. This would be what destroyed the Hall in the end: the mortals’ Inner Circle Railway, a ring of iron whose southern reach would spit the palace like a slab of meat over the fire.

Once it was complete. A pair of Cornish knockers in the Market were taking wagers on how long the Hall would survive, after that. So far the numbers ranged from a month to ten minutes. And unless something went disastrously wrong, the railway would be finished before the end of the year.

What would happen then, Dead Rick didn’t know. He was certain of one thing, though: when that day came, it would be every dog for himself. Nadrett wouldn’t protect him. So Dead Rick needed to be ready, and that meant taking care of his debts now, so he’d have something to hoard against that inevitable end.

The darkness had become absolute—no faerie lights to mark his path—but up ahead he heard the rush of water. Nadrett forbade the skriker to leave the Market without permission, but he’d come this way a few times on orders, and knew what to look for; soon his searching hands found the bronze ring bolted into the floor, and the thick rope knotted through it. He wrapped both hands around it tight, gradually trusting his weight to the line as the floor sloped away beneath him, feeling the black stone of the Onyx Hall end, and the brick of the Fleet conduit begin.

Then the brick ended, and there was nothing to do but screw together his trust and leap.

The wet rope shot through his hands, then burned as he seized it tight once more. For a moment, all that existed was sound and the rope: water below, rough hemp in his hands, and the giddy relief of not having fallen.
Still glad of that, am I? I suppose if I’m going to die, I want it to be somewhere better than ’ere.

Dead Rick lowered himself into the water, moving carefully at the end. When it rained, the Fleet could rise high enough to drown a man. But the weather outside must have been dry, for when his feet settled flat, the water only came to his knees.

He reached into the pocket of the ulster he’d put on. The coat’s sleeves annoyed him, but less than slinging a bag over his shoulder, and sometimes a man needed big pockets. Dark lantern, candle stub, lucifer; he struck the latter against the wall, and a moment later had light.

Not that there was much to see. The tunnel of arched brick stretched in both directions, entombing the River Fleet below the streets of London. But this was one of the few places where strangers could conceivably stumble into the Onyx Hall, and Dead Rick preferred to keep them out. He found the brick tied at the end of the rope, gave the hole above a measuring look, and on his first try sent the brick sailing back through, taking the rope with it. Any faerie who wanted in could go by another door.

Dead Rick began to make his way downstream, lantern held high. Plenty of threats could kill a man down here—pockets of bad air, sudden floods, fellow travelers—but the one that worried him most lurked within the water itself. River hags were cruel creatures to begin with, and the hag of the Fleet had only gotten worse with time. She’d kill anyone, now, mortal or fae. And while the light might draw her attention, if it came to a fight, Dead Rick wanted to see her coming. With his free hand he drew a bronze knife, and then he quickened his pace.

A shudder of relief went through him at the first hint of fresh air. Dead Rick laughed quietly, shaking his head. “Tough bloke you are,” he muttered. “Spend your days in the Goblin Market, then run away from Blacktooth Meg like a—”

A splash stopped that comparison short. Dead Rick sank into a crouch, knife at the ready—but it wasn’t the hag. Up ahead, a patch of lesser blackness marked the end of the conduit, where the buried river gave onto the Thames; a silhouette had just moved into view there. Dead Rick blew out his light, but it was too late. The figure began to run.

The hunter in him had to pursue. It was why Nadrett used him in matters like the night garden chase; black dogs were a kind of goblin, terrifying as only a death omen could be, and in the countryside they still hounded men to their ends. The mortality in humans drew them, whether death stood near or far off. Dead Rick would have had to try very hard not to chase the man once he began to run.

But his quarry didn’t get very far. Emerging into the sickly brown fog, Dead Rick found the man hip-deep in a sinkhole on the Thames bank, floundering in the waters of a receding tide. The fellow went still when he felt the knife’s edge scrape his throat.

A tosher, Dead Rick guessed—one of the men who scavenged through the sewers, hunting out refuse that could be resold. Armed with a knife of his own, but more inclined to run than fight. It was a piece of luck, coming across him right here at the mouth of the Fleet; that might save Dead Rick an unpleasant hunt through London. It was an hour before dawn yet, he judged, and with so few people on the streets, he could have been hunting a long time.

Even coming out this far made his skin crawl like he was covered in spiders. The Blackfriars bridges leapt across the Thames, nearly overhead: long arches of wrought iron. A smaller piece lay inside the man’s coat, the knife he used against competitors in his trade. Dead Rick was sensitive enough that his bare feet could even feel a tiny bit of iron in the riverbank nearby, some piece of scrap not yet found and resold by a mudlark. Unprotected, shivering at so much danger so close, he pressed harder than he needed to with the knife, drawing a line of blood.

“I’ve got sixpence in my pocket,” the man gasped, stiffening under his hands. “It’s yours, take it—”

“I don’t want your tin,” Dead Rick said. People always offered money first; after that, their minds went straight to enemies. Before the man could ask who sent him, the skriker growled, “Food. ’Ave you got any?”

A portion of the fear dissolved into confusion. “Food?”

“Bread. A sandwich, or biscuits, anything you might ’ave on you.”

Despite the knife at his throat, the man tried to twist around to stare at his attacker. “You chased me because you’re
’ungry
?”

Seizing a double handful of the man’s torn coat, Dead Rick hauled him free of the sinkhole and slammed him down again, on his back in the shallow water. “Next time I cut your throat and answer the question myself.
’Ave you got food on you?
” Not that it would do him much good to kill the man—but threats did a fine job of helping a man concentrate.

His captive nodded. The motion was spastic; after a moment, Dead Rick realized the tosher was trying to point at his right pocket, without moving anything more than his head. Grunting, the skriker dragged him a little farther up, until they were clear of the water and on what passed for solid ground. Then he shoved a searching hand into the man’s pocket and came out with a packet of old newspaper. The whole thing was soaked now with filthy river water, but grease had stained one end, and the aroma of sausage wafted from it.

“Oi, you there! What do you think you’re doing?”

The question carried such an air of self-satisfied authority, Dead Rick thought at first it came from a constable. He crouched instinctively. Nadrett’s trips above sometimes brought trouble from the peelers, and some of those bastards were too ready with their revolvers. But when he looked up, it was only a man—some sod farther up the shore, in between two of the wharves.

Dead Rick measured the distance between him and the newcomer, wondering if he could change midleap and rip the bastard’s throat out. Man form or no, Dead Rick was still obviously fae, and it wasn’t safe to walk around London like that.

But the stranger’s eyes narrowed, and not like those of a man wondering what he was staring at it. The fellow came forward with three quick strides and said, “You’re jumping ’im for bread, ain’t you? Fucking goblins. Well, I’m the Prince of the Stone, and I’m telling you, let ’im go.”

A disbelieving bark escaped Dead Rick’s mouth. “You? The bleeding Prince of the Stone?”

He’d never seen the man himself, only heard stories. Nadrett often complained about the Prince, poking his nose where it didn’t belong. Oh, supposedly the man’s nose belonged everywhere; he was the mortal ruler of the Onyx Court, after all, consort to London’s faerie Queen, with authority over everything having to do with his kind. Only there wasn’t an Onyx Court anymore: just a group of self-indulgent courtiers enjoying their last pleasures, and a cockney Prince trying to pretend he had control over anything at all. As for the Queen, she’d been gone for years.

Dead Rick peered through the darkness, sniffing past the reek of the Thames for the man’s scent. He could smell the faerie touch that bound the Prince to the Onyx Hall, and see its effect on the fellow’s face: he had a strange young-old look, like a man aged long before his time. Well, that was no wonder, with the palace crumbling apart; they said it had drained the Queen down to almost nothing, in the years before she vanished. Dead Rick would be surprised if the Prince had much more in him.

He’d put one foot on the tosher’s chest to hold him in place; now he felt the man shift restlessly, confusion winning out over fear. The brief flash of sympathy Dead Rick had felt for the aging, exhausted Prince faded, driven back by more important concerns. “This ain’t any business of yours,” he said to the Prince.

“The devil it ain’t. That bastard you’ve got there can barely feed ’imself; you can’t just go stealing ’is food so you can cause more trouble up ’ere!”

The Prince’s sanctimonious reply would have been annoying enough if it were accurate. His complete lack of understanding made Dead Rick furious. Cause trouble? He
wished
he could afford to waste bread on that. Instead he was out here, with the Blackfriars bridges hanging over his head like two axes waiting to fall, because he needed some kind of insurance against the future, and didn’t want his ears cut off by any of the half-dozen fae to whom he owed a debt. And every minute this Prince stood there lecturing him was another minute Dead Rick had to put up with a weight of iron that made him want to howl and run for home.

So he didn’t bother answering. Instead he just snarled, and threw himself forward.

Trying to change shape out here felt like breaking all of his bones, individually. The iron fought him: it didn’t care whether he was man or beast, but it hated letting him shift between the two. When Dead Rick hit the Prince, he was caught halfway in between, a roaring monstrosity, bowling the man down in a tangle of fur and skin and teeth.

Pain stopped him from doing more; his momentum took him into the wooden pillar of a crane, where an iron nail seared against his back like fire and ice. Dead Rick howled, writhing, and abruptly was in human form again. He lay panting on the ground, trying not to vomit, until he had control enough of his muscles to raise his head.

By then he was alone. The tosher had fled, and so, apparently, had the Prince.

So much for ’im and ’is orders.
It seemed the man knew just how far his authority went.

Dead Rick forced himself to his feet. Down in the mud, his knife and the packet of newspaper lay untouched; the tosher hadn’t bothered to collect his food before fleeing. But it wasn’t any use to Dead Rick without the man.

It needed no dog’s nose to track him. The footprints were clear in the mud, heading west, under the bridges and up onto the massive wall of the Embankment. Dead Rick gritted his teeth and began to lope after him. There were iron pipes behind the granite exterior of the river frontage, but that was still better than the bridges, and Dead Rick was light on his feet; he gained rapidly.

The tosher heard him coming, and spun to face him, knife in hand. Dead Rick held out the packet and his own knife alike. Up here, he didn’t have much time; the peelers
did
watch the Embankment walk. “I ain’t done with you yet. But you do what I tells you, and you’ll get out of ’ere without a scratch. Understand?”

Clearly not, but the man nodded warily, willing to listen whatever this apparent lunatic had to say if it meant saving his own skin. “Take this,” Dead Rick said, tossing the packet back at him. “Now put that down at your feet and say, ‘A gift for the good people.’”

“What?”

Not quite as cowed by fear as Dead Rick thought. “Do it, or lose an ear. Your choice.”

Shaking his head, the man dropped the packet onto the stone of the footpath. “A gift for the good people. Now what?”

“Back up.” He obeyed. In one swift move, Dead Rick snatched up the packet and retreated. “Now you go. Back home, or into the sewers; I don’t care which. Just get out of my sight.”

The tosher didn’t have to be told twice. He turned and continued running upriver, toward Westminster, away from Dead Rick.