With Fate Conspire (57 page)

“His original interest was in the notion of the ‘astral plane’—a place where spirits dwell. I believe he was interested in establishing some dominion there, if he could. A different portion of my research, however, proved more fruitful to him: the physical manifestation of spirits. I theorized that
ectoplasm,
as I called it—the ghost-substance—was an emanation created by the human soul itself.”

Here Fjothar took up the thread. He was a svartálfar, with patches of wiry hair sticking out in all directions; he had a habit of pulling on these as he spoke. “We all know that mortal souls can shelter fae against iron and faith; it is that property which allows tithed bread to do its work, and also protects changelings who take a mortal’s place. With Mr. Myers’s help—and, I suspect, the assistance of Red Rotch, a former Academy scholar who was killed some time ago in the Goblin Market—Nadrett discovered that ectoplasm is in fact
solid aether
. And it retains its protective capability.”

With her usual bluntness, Irrith said, “But if we have to grind people’s souls down into thread to make use of it, then we might as well put our coats on now, because that isn’t going to happen.”

They had gathered in the Presentation Hall, all those who remained, to pool their knowledge and answer the final question: could they, with the Academy’s wisdom and Nadrett’s machines, with their memories of the past and their visions of the future, find a way to build a new palace? They made a strange assortment, ranged across the benches and chairs and boxes scavenged for seating; not just scholars, but courtiers and mortal allies and Goblin Market refugees. Everyone who cared enough to risk staying.
Damned if I know what I can add,
Dead Rick thought wryly,
but I ain’t about to run now. Not after what I said to Lune.

They’d salvaged what they could from West Ham. Whether anything could be done for the empty human shells that had operated the machines was doubtful; Mrs. Chase was attempting to find caretakers for them all. Those faeries not killed had fled, and nobody had the energy to chase them, nor to do more than beg the constables not to speak of what they’d seen. All their remaining will went into the scientific problem instead. Parts of the equipment were intact or repairable, and some fellow with a strong stomach had examined the fabric for its secrets—but could they turn any of it to good?

Bonecruncher helped Rosamund up onto a barrel so she could stand high enough to be seen by the others. “A human seer helped before,” the brownie said, once she had everyone’s attention. “Back when the Hall was created. He and a faerie woman worked together to do it, and his spirit is part of what has protected this place. One possibility—and it’s only a possibility, mind you—is that somebody else could do the same.”

Creaks and scuffing sounded around the room, as every mortal in the place shifted and tried to avoid meeting anyone’s eye, lest they be asked to volunteer. Not just the men; Dead Rick saw Eliza bite her lip. If she tried to do it, he would stop her.

But her thoughts, it seemed, went in another direction. Hesitantly, as if not sure she had the right to speak up in this place, Eliza said, “Would ghosts do? Could ye … harvest this stuff from them somehow, without harming them?”

“I know a genuine medium,” Cyma offered, from where she sat on the far side of the room, a wide-eyed Louisa Kittering at her side.

So do I,
Dead Rick thought. Did Eliza mean to offer her services? Before she could, though, others in the room took the idea and began to elaborate upon it. Ch’ien Mu, the Chinese faerie in charge of the great loom, seemed very excited by the prospect; he began muttering, “Weft thread! I say before, if we have aether for weft, it is stable.” Fjothar tried to explain something about the configuration created by Nadrett’s machine, but it was lost in the hubbub, scholars and nonscholars alike flinging suggestions atop one another, making a confused jumble of it all.

Dead Rick couldn’t understand more than one word in ten. Instead he watched Abd ar-Rashid. The Scholarch listened quietly for a time, hands folded behind his back, before bringing out something like a golden pen. Without speaking, the genie began to move the pen through the air, and lines of glowing gold appeared in its wake, as if he were writing on an invisible slate.

Most of what he wrote consisted of the alchemical and arcane symbols the scholars used in their science, and those, Dead Rick could not read. Two things, however, Abd ar-Rashid wrote in plain English, letters big enough to be seen from across the Presentation Hall:
CONFORMATION?
and
FOUNDATION?

He tucked the pen away and clapped his hands sharply, halting a discussion that had begun to veer off in a dozen directions, each less comprehensible than the last. “If we are to make a new faerie realm,” Abd ar-Rashid said, “then we must address these two questions, before we go any further. Supposing we overcome the obstacles to making the substance itself—which may be within our grasp—what will be its conformation, and to what will it be anchored?”

At Dead Rick’s side, Eliza looked completely lost. Pretending for a moment he knew the first thing about these matters, he leaned toward her ear and muttered, “Like this place. It reflects the City of London—the way it was when the palace were first made—and it’s anchored to certain bits up above.”

She nodded, frowning. “The Goodemeades told me. The old wall, the Tower, and so on.”

“Right. Too much of that’s broke, though, so we needs to pick something new.”

What the “something new” should be rapidly became the primary point of discussion. Someone rolled out a huge map of the city and stuck it to the wall; this had lines marked on it for both the Underground and overground railways, and everyone was arguing over which landmarks to choose for the new foundation. Geographical arrangement, symbolism, and distance from the tracks seemed the primary points of contention, as Wilhas von das Ticken and a Spanish-accented mortal began a vigorous debate over the relative merits of a pentagram versus a hexagram.

That Myers fellow leapt into it with a will, but others sat back, looking as useless as Dead Rick felt. Louisa Kittering, he saw, was murmuring to Cyma; Bonecruncher was spinning a gun around one finger; Sir Cerenel’s violet eyes had fixed on the far wall as if determined not to show how lost he was. Eliza, to his surprise, was listening closely, though unless she’d spent the last seven years studying the Pythagoras fellow that the Spaniard was going on about, she couldn’t possibly understand it any better than Dead Rick did.

As if feeling the weight of his gaze, she glanced sideways at him, and her brow furrowed. “Are they stupid, or am I?”

“I’m pretty sure
I
am,” he muttered. “You actually follow them?”

“No—but I think I see a problem, all the same.” She shifted her stool closer, an intent look in her eyes. “Tell me if I’m wrong. Isn’t yer problem right now that yer foundation is cracked, because the things ye used for it got moved or destroyed?”

Dead Rick frowned. “Yes, but they’re choosing new things—”

“Which might be destroyed in a hundred years, or ten,” Eliza said. “Oh, I suppose no one will be in a hurry to knock down Nelson’s Column, but still—that doesn’t mean the problem goes away. Does it?”

He cocked his head, listening as best as he could to the conversation. They were talking now about the significance of the original anchor points, their symbolic meaning and the effect that had on the Onyx Hall. Trying to find new anchors that would carry similar meaning, or better. But it all still sounded like physical things, and to his way of thinking, Eliza was right. The Great Fire had destroyed much of the City of London, and came terrifyingly close to destroying the Onyx Hall, too. Anything man-made could be unmade, too.

Natural features, then—but no, those didn’t work either, did they? All those bridges spanning the Thames, some of them with iron, and the various embankments narrowing and shaping its course. The Walbrook, buried underground, and the Fleet, too; year by year, London buried more of its rivers. Hills were flattened, valleys filled in. Mortals might not see it, with their short and blinkered lives, and the timeless memories of fae might overlook it; but with his memories half in a tangle still, Dead Rick knew very well how much London had changed.

The more firmly they planted their feet on the ground, the more vulnerable they were to an earthquake.

What could they choose, that couldn’t be destroyed?

*   *   *

Eliza didn’t think Dead Rick’s words were meant for her; he spoke them under his breath, his teeth clenched hard together.
“Fucking Nadrett. Useful after all, you bastard.”

Before she could ask what he meant by that, the skriker shot to his feet. He wasn’t tall, nor large of build, but the sudden conviction in his posture made him seem twice his usual size. In a growl that cut straight through the clamor, he said, “You’re wasting your bleeding time.”

Few of the expressions he received were friendly. Dead Rick still looked and sounded exactly like what he was: a black dog, a goblin creature from the Goblin Market, uneducated and barely literate. Neither the scholars nor the swells here much liked being told they were wasting their time by someone who had, until recently, been Nadrett’s dog. But even the glaring ones had given him their attention, and that was enough. Shaking his head, Dead Rick said, “Eliza ’ere already figured it out. You can’t just pick new places; you’ll end up ’aving to do this again in a few ’undred years. Or less.”

Ch’ien Mu snapped, “Must have anchor! Describe in symbol, tell machine, so machine go—”

He waved his hands, clearly frustrated with the way his mind had outpaced his English. Wrain said, “We realize the problem, Dead Rick, but—” Ch’ien Mu spat something out in rapid Chinese, and Wrain translated. “With samples from the locations we choose, we can create instructions for the loom; without that, we don’t have conformation
or
foundation. We must work with what we have, flawed though it may be.”

“And ‘a few ’undred years’ is more time than we have now,” someone else said in a nasty tone.

Dead Rick took no offense at the mockery. “Ain’t it better to pick something that ain’t flawed? Something that can’t
be
destroyed, that’ll go on forever—or as close to forever as any of us needs.”

Several people seemed ready to shout him down, but Abd ar-Rashid spoke before they could. “What do you have in mind?”

Dead Rick grinned, in a way that made Eliza’s stomach tense in both apprehension and excitement. “London.”

A full three seconds of silence followed, before a skinny mortal said, “What the blazes do you think we’ve been discussing?”

“Not the stuff
in
the city,” Dead Rick said, still grinning. “The city
itself
. The
idea
of the place. So long as there’s Londoners, there’ll be a London, right? Ash and Thorn—I’m the last bleeding sod to tell you we should thank Nadrett for anything, but ’e got Chrennois to figure out a way for photographing things that can’t be touched. So photograph the city, the
idea
of it. Use that for your foundation. It’ll fall apart when the city gets abandoned, maybe—but by then, we won’t need it no more. Because there won’t be no London to live in.”

More silence. Then Irrith said, “But how in Mab’s name do we photograph
that
?”

“We don’t have to,” Wrain said, leaping up in excitement. He flung one arm out toward the large machine that sat at the other end of the room, across from where the loom had been. “We can calculate it instead. Once we know how to represent the nature of London in symbolic notation, we can use that to instruct the loom. A
conceptual
conformation and foundation, instead of a physical one!”

The genie was writing this in the air as he spoke, in glowing letters of gold. Like a teacher waiting to see what his pupils knew, he said, “What, then, is the nature of London?”

Not far from Eliza, the Goodemeades had been whispering to each other. Now Rosamund cleared her throat and scrambled back up onto the barrel. “Gertie and I have been here longer than just about anyone. Longer than the Onyx Hall, even. London is, and always has been, the heart of England.”

“They say that one in ten Englishmen lives here,” Gertrude added. “Maybe more. Nowadays it isn’t the only city—there’s Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and so on—but they’re not a tenth the size of London.”

Sounds of startlement, from a few of the fae; none of the mortals looked surprised.
These creatures may know history,
Eliza thought,
but they don’t know the world around them very well.
Even she knew about those cities—many of them swelled by the emigration of her own people.

“Size is not the only thing that makes London the heart of England,” Sir Cerenel added. “The government is here, too. Or rather, in Westminster—but I suppose that is part of London now, isn’t it? Queen Victoria and Parliament are also England’s heart, and they are here.”

Not as much since Her Nibs went into mourning and never came out.
Eliza couldn’t help but notice, too, the way they kept speaking of
England
. Not Britain, or the United Kingdom. Three hundred years and more, they’d been here. It showed.

Louisa Kittering spoke up boldly. “You mustn’t forget money, either. All the trade that comes into London, and the banks, and the investors; I don’t know what fraction of the nation’s wealth is here, but it must be vast. Anyone who wishes to count for anything must come to London eventually, if only for the Season.”

One of the mortal men gave a dry laugh. “You and Sir Cerenel are talking about the same thing, really: power. That’s what London is about. It is the heart of power. And the trappings of power follow with it, all the fashion and art and commerce and such.”

Voices rose up in agreement, murmuring about the elegant terraces of houses, the museums, the grand monuments, all embroidering upon the theme of London’s glorious power. Eliza sagged in her chair, excitement draining away. She’d felt, for a few moments, as if she belonged—but not in this conversation. This was for the Louisa Kitterings of the world, the educated folk and the wealthy, the privileged swells, whether they were faerie or mortal. At her side, Dead Rick was equally silent; their eyes met, and his lip curled upward cynically. She knew what he was thinking, as clearly as if he’d said it.
That ain’t
my
London.