With Fate Conspire (53 page)

It had been foolish to think that she might escape.

Awkwardly, hampered by the fashionably narrow skirt of her dress, Louisa knelt on the filthy platform. Another eternity of servitude … but it was worth it, to see Frederic safe. “I will serve you faithfully. Master.”

“Good—but not good enough,” Nadrett said, and snapped his fingers, gesturing for the other fae to move along. Grabbing her by the arm and hauling her to her feet, he said, “You’ll ’ave company before we’re done today.”

West Ham, London: August 26, 1884

Dead Rick could scarcely bring himself to look at either of his companions. He felt like he was seeing two of each, and not because of the absinthe; those effects had only lasted for a day or so. No, he saw Eliza and Owen with two sets of memories: his own, and those of Nadrett’s dog.

It wasn’t honest to divide himself like that, and he knew it. However much he wished to deny it, the last seven years were as much a part of him as the ages that went before—ages his mind was still sorting into order, below the level of his awareness. And losing his memories hadn’t completely changed who he was; some things went beyond simple recollection, into his nature as a faerie. But he had no better way to describe the strange disconnection he felt when he looked around, seeing two meanings to a single thing. Owen was both the mute, broken shell he’d found cowering in the Academy library, and the good-natured boy who’d had such hopes for bettering his family’s condition. Eliza was both the furious young woman who tried to beat him senseless, and the fierce girl who’d protected him against those tormenting lads.

Two of most things; three of
them
. Because what those two had become, in the aftermath of Owen’s healing, were different yet again.

He wanted so badly to have back the warmth they’d shared—a warmth that, thanks to the absinthe, he remembered as if it were just a few days ago. Owen had forgotten it, though, and as far as Eliza was concerned, it had long since died and been left to rot. At this point they operated in a state of uneasy truce; Dead Rick didn’t dare hope for more.

Fed on Eliza’s bread, he took the surface path to West Ham, following the road as its name changed from Aldgate to Whitechapel to Mile End to Bow. “The place makes sense,” he said to break the silence, as the buildings around them began to thin. “The big sewer runs right from the Goblin Market to the pumping station out ’ere, don’t it? Easy road for Nadrett’s men.” He didn’t like to think who he might have met, if he’d had to go by the road below.

“Yes,” Eliza said, but the conversation died there.

The strange mixing of his memories disoriented him, with its insistence on remembering Londons that were centuries gone. Tower Hamlets, they called this area; once it
had
been an area of hamlets, little villages scattered like seeds among fields that fed the City. Now all the villages had run together like stains, and the weeds of industry had taken root, choking the green grass with brick and soot.

As if she, too, could not bear the silence between them, Eliza said abruptly, “When this is done, perhaps I’ll get myself a factory job. It can be good work, it can—better than being in service.”

Dead Rick blinked. With his mind so filled by the past, it was hard to see the present, much less the future; but to Eliza, this must look very different. She saw not destruction, but opportunity. Which of them was right? Were either of them? Mortals had been arguing this very point amongst themselves for years. But it made him remember something Irrith said once, about why Lune ruled with a Prince at her side. Because they helped her see what she otherwise could not.

None of it was important, not right now—and yet, he needed the distraction, because if he let himself think about Nadrett he wouldn’t be here, walking calmly down the street with Eliza and Owen; he would have long since taken to his heels, intent on nothing more than finding his former master and tearing out the bastard’s throat. Which would have gotten him killed, and he knew it—assuming he could even
find
Nadrett—but the feral rage pumping through his veins with every beat of his heart didn’t care. It had waited too long already for its satisfaction.

The road sharpened its gentle bend northward. In the distance to the right, Dead Rick could see the ornate exterior of the pumping station, which brought all the filth up to a level where it could be vented into the river, safely downstream of the city. “Recognize anything?” he asked Owen.

The boy shook his head. He still communicated more in gestures than in words when he could, but sometimes Dead Rick thought that born of a similar confusion to the one in his own mind: whatever had been taken from him by Chrennois’s cameras, and given back by the baptism, Owen was still sorting it into order. And pieces of it were clearly missing.

Dead Rick frowned at the pumping station. “If they been coming up out of the sewers, I can try to find a scent. But it ain’t going to be Nadrett crawling up out of the muck, and I don’t know who it
will
be.”

“Might there be guards?” Eliza asked. Dead Rick nodded. “Then we’ll try the town first.”

She guided her companions past the depot for the Great Eastern Railway and into West Ham itself, working her way along Stephens Road toward Plaistow, with Dead Rick in dog form sniffing everything they passed, and Owen shaking his head. As sites for faerie palaces went, this one was frankly terrible: a grim industrial suburb, with nothing much to recommend it. Would Nadrett really come here? Eliza held an aetheric versorium like the one Dead Rick had used to find the Aldersgate entrance, but its needle only pointed at the skriker, with never a twitch in another direction.

Owen said the area smelled right, though—coal and marsh air and the stench of a leatherworks—and so they went on, up and down each near-lifeless street, watching in all directions for danger. At the corner of Liddington Road, the boy stopped with a whimper.

The building his eyes had fixed upon was unremarkable, a squat, hulking mass of mud-yellow London brick. Its walls were as uninviting as the Bank of England’s; only a thin line of windows ran along the upper reaches, leaving the rest of the surface featureless and blind. A warehouse, perhaps, or a factory, with nothing obviously faerie about it.

They pulled back swiftly, of course, out of sight of the building. Dead Rick held out a hand, and Eliza gave him the versorium; angle it how he might, the needle did not point at the building. Owen insisted this was the place, though.

“What in Mab’s name is ’e
doing
in there?” Dead Rick muttered. Surely if it were a new faerie realm, the versorium would sense it.

Eliza risked another glance around the corner, though Owen twitched as if to pull her back. “I don’t see anyone,” she said. This was not a busy part of town; at the moment, they were the only ones on the street. “But there could be any number of people inside.”

“In cages,” Owen said, in a voice made tight with fear.

She stroked his shoulder, calming him. “We’ll get them out. We just have to figure out how.”

Not easily, that much was certain. Eliza was the safest of them for scouting; with her bonnet pulled forward, she made a circuit of the building’s perimeter, up Liddington Road and down the nameless alley on the other side. What she reported back cemented Dead Rick’s unease. There were only three entrances into the building, two of them narrow, the third a set of double doors that looked to be securely barred from within. If Hodge could bribe Charcoal Eddie or somebody else capable of flying to look through the windows beneath the roof’s edge, they might be able to get some sense of what was inside, but Dead Rick wouldn’t care to bet on it. Which meant whatever forces Hodge sent would be going in blind.

“Who the ’ell is ’e going to send, anyway?” Dead Rick muttered, after they’d retreated to a safe distance. The Onyx Guard, the closest thing Lune had ever had to an army, was down to three knights: Peregrin, Cerenel, and Segraine. Irrith could shoot, and so could Bonecruncher; Niklas von das Ticken could, too, if dragged out of the Academy. Dead Rick himself would fight. Perhaps a few others, especially if Hodge offered something valuable in return. But Nadrett had a great deal more than half a dozen bullies working for him, and the means to hire more, too.

“You have magic—” Eliza said.

Dead Rick snorted. “And so does ’e. It’s Nadrett’s territory, too, so ’e’ll ’ave prepared it. If we ’ad enough bodies to throw at it, I’d say damn the charms, we can just storm the place. But we’ve got ’alf a dozen people and a Prince who would fall over if you blew on ’im too ’ard.”

In her eyes, he saw the same frustrated desperation that burned in his own heart. They were this close; it simply wasn’t conceivable that they could admit defeat now. “There has to be a way,” Eliza said.

The skriker closed his eyes in thought. He’d never been a general, not even before his memories were taken—but he did know a thing or two about fighting dirty. The weak point was the windows: too high to be used for invasion, too small to let people through at speed.
Which do you want more? Answers, or revenge?
He knew which one Eliza would say. “Give up on finding out what ’e’s doing in there, and chuck dynamite in through the top. Blow Nadrett straight to ’ell.”

The resulting silence gave him time to regret his words. The salvation of the Onyx Hall might lie inside that building; could he really sacrifice it, just to make amends?
You don’t know ’e really ’as anything,
Dead Rick thought, and knew it was a justification. And a thin one at that.

Eliza whispered, “Dynamite.”

Owen yelped, and Dead Rick’s eyes flew open. “There might be people in there—” the boy protested, far too loudly.

She threw her hands up, stopping his appalled protest. “No, not blowing it up! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph; I would never hurt innocents. And there might be something in it the fae need. But Dead Rick—you said that if you had enough people, you could storm it. Was that true?”

“Where the bleeding ’ell do you think you’re going to get an army?” he asked in disbelief.

Eliza drew in a careful breath, looking as if she was questioning her own sanity. “From the Special Irish Branch.”

Scotland Yard, Westminster: August 27, 1884

No one clapped Eliza in chains when she walked into the offices of Scotland Yard. She felt foolish for expecting it; she was, after all, just a poor woman from Whitechapel, not some famous murderer or highwayman. The number of constables who knew her name, let alone what she looked like, was probably rather small. But she was walking into the lion’s den, and she could not help but be afraid.

The man at the front barely even looked up at her. “State your business.”

Eliza licked her dry lips, and had to make a conscious effort not to hide behind an English accent. “I’d like to speak to Sergeant Quinn.”

“Which one?”

They had more than one man of that name and rank? She tried to remember his Christian name. “Patrick Quinn, of the Special Irish Branch.”

The man jerked his thumb at the door she had come through, back out into the road of Great Scotland Yard. “Small building across from the Rising Sun. First floor, off to your left; look for the name. He might not be in, though.”

Eliza hadn’t considered that possibility. What if they tried to make her talk to Chief Inspector Williamson, the man in charge of the branch? She could hardly ask
him
for help. And if she walked in, she might not walk out again, except in chains.

Dead Rick’s sharp ears must have caught what the man said, or maybe he just smelled her fear, for he rose from his slouch by the door and came to her side. “You can do this,” he murmured in her ear. “Come on.”

He’d promised he would see her safely out, whatever happened. Taking a deep breath, Eliza went in search of Special Branch.

They weren’t hard to find. Repairs still marked the northeastern corner of the building, where the bomb had exploded in May; inside, the words
SPECIAL IRISH BRANCH
were painted black and gold on the door. It hung slightly ajar. Eliza listened at the gap, but heard nothing, and at last forced herself to knock and put her head in. “Hello?”

The man inside didn’t wear a uniform, any more than Quinn had; Special Branch constables rarely did. Their job wasn’t to patrol the streets and frighten off criminals by their presence; they operated like spies, more effective when not noticed. Eliza wasn’t surprised to hear the Irish tinge to his answer. “Can I help you?”

Edging into the room, with Dead Rick close behind, Eliza said, “We need to speak to Sergeant Quinn. He—he told me to come to him if I had information.”

“And you would be?”

She’d gone back and forth on the question of what name to use. But it was likely all these men knew the aliases she’d gone by before; even calling herself some form of Elizabeth might get their attention. And a totally new name would mean nothing to Quinn. Still, her heart pounded louder as she said, “Eliza O’Malley.”

The man straightened immediately. She spooked, one hand going to the door as if pulling it shut behind her when she fled would do any good, but his manner wasn’t hostile; more like a dog that just heard an interesting sound. He beckoned her farther in. “No, it’s all right—the sergeant will be glad to hear you’ve come. I’m P.C. Maguire. No need to be scared, Miss O’Malley. Quinn’s just down this way; you and your friend just follow me.”

Deeper into the lion’s den. Maguire led them through a large room with several men at work in it, to a smaller office holding four desks. Two were in use, and Quinn almost knocked a stack of papers off his when he sprang to his feet. “Miss O’Malley!”

The head of the other man came up sharply. Was her name so notorious? “Sergeant Quinn. I—I have some information you might want to be hearing.” She glanced at Maguire and the other man. “Can we speak to you alone?”

Quinn frowned slightly, at her and Dead Rick both. She’d gotten the skriker to put on shoes, at least, but he still wore no shirt beneath his stained waistcoat, and generally looked like a ruffian. “If ’tis police business, ye should know, I’ll be sharing it with the others. We can’t do our work, otherwise.”