With Fate Conspire (59 page)

An echo of her words in the Academy; she kept saying it, though fortunately never where anyone else could hear. Dead Rick squeezed her fingers. “You can. You ain’t one of them fake ones; you’ve got the knack for it. And you’re in the right place. They’ll come, never fear.”

If they could. Just because Galen St. Clair haunted the Hall after his death didn’t mean the ghosts of the other Princes could be drawn back. But Eliza needed confidence as much as anything else, so he gave it to her, and was repaid in the strength of her grip. “You ready?” he asked, and biting her lip, she nodded.

They’d set a chair facing Lune’s, a little distance from the London Stone. With the Queen insubstantial from the effort of holding her realm together, she had no hand for Eliza to take; Hodge had offered, but in the end the mortal woman had refused. “I’d feel a fraud,” she’d said, and Dead Rick understood why. His restored memories included a few recollections of spiritualist meetings; the theatrical ritual some mediums engaged in bordered on the ludicrous. Instead it was this: Lune in her trance, with Hodge at her left hand, and Eliza facing them in her chair.

She’d spent days preparing for this, listening to stories about the past Princes, those men who had ruled the Onyx Court alongside their immortal Queen. As many days as they dared: according to the railway newspapers, a test train would be traveling around the entirety of the Inner Circle tomorrow. The proper opening of the new stations was not planned until the beginning of October; Cyma was doing her best to persuade certain gentlemen the date should be
after
the eclipse. But if the Hall were to last until then, the Queen would need more strength.

The Irishwoman shifted on her seat, brushing sweat-lank strands of hair from her face. She took a breath, and then another, each one slower and deeper than the one before. Silence settled over the room like a blanket, her breathing the only sound.

Dead Rick clamped his arms across his ribs, and waited.

The moments passed, one by one. Hodge swayed, then steadied.
We should ’ave given ’im a chair, whether ’e wanted it or not.
Eliza’s breathing had gone all but inaudible, though the scent of her sweat grew. The woman held her breath—then let it out explosively. “I can’t do it.”

He crossed to her before anyone else could move, kneeling and gripping her cold, shaking hands. “Yes, you can.”

“I
can’t
—”

“I’ll ’elp you.” Dead Rick tightened his grip. “Skriker, ain’t I? I knows death. Look into my eyes, and I’ll show you.”

Just like they had done seven years before. They’d both traveled a long road to come back to where they started, and been changed by the journey. Not weakened—
no,
Dead Rick thought,
she’s stronger than she ever was.
The Eliza of seven years ago could not have done this. But the one in front of him, he believed, could.

She sniffed back the wetness of tears and clutched his fingers painfully tight. Dead Rick stared up at her, not moving, not blinking, casting his thoughts upon death. Age, the rot of the body, impending calamity that cut the thread of life short. The final breath, rattling free of the chest. Eyes clouding over. Blood growing cold. And the soul, slipping free … had this been All Hallows’ Eve, it would have been as easy as breathing, but they could not wait for that night to come. Instead he filled his mind with ages of such nights, reaching for the connection he felt then, the sense that one could pass across that boundary with only a blink.

Eliza’s hands grew colder and colder, and her breathing stilled almost to nothing.

Barely moving his lips, Dead Rick whispered, “Call ’em.”

In a voice so distant it might have arisen from some source less material than lungs and throat, Eliza began to recite the names of the Princes of the Stone.

“Michael Deven. Antony Ware. Jack Ellin. Joseph Winslow.”

Through the stone beneath his knees, Dead Rick felt Lune reach out, echoing Eliza’s call.

“Alan Fitzwarren. Hamilton Birch. Galen St. Clair. Matthew Abingdon.”

Behind Eliza’s left shoulder, a glimmer, taking familiar shape. Galen’s ghost was certainly here.

“Robert Shaw. Geoffrey Franklin. Henry Brandon. Alexander Messina.”

Names Dead Rick remembered. He’d been here almost since the beginning—not the earliest days of the Hall, but not long after Lune became Queen. Memories swirled through his head: faces, voices, the individual habits of each man who stood at Lune’s side, for thirty years or three.

“Benjamin Hodge,” Eliza whispered, and began the litany again.

A chill that had nothing to do with cold swept through the room. Dead Rick’s vision blackened at the edges, as if he were holding his breath—but this was different; the blackness closing in was not any kind of blindness. He could still see through it, could see
more clearly,
the ghostly figure of Galen St. Clair whispering along with Eliza and Lune.

Hodge joined them; so did Dead Rick. The names echoed off the stone, again and again, a mesmerizing litany. The room grew colder still, and then the air began to thicken into shapes.

Alexander Messina came first, the most recently dead: a dark man, showing his Italian ancestry, and dressed like a prosperous tradesman. Then the others, in irregular order: Colonel Robert Shaw, color bleeding slowly into his red-coated uniform. Dr. Jack Ellin, mouth ready for its usual wry smile. Dr. Hamilton Birch, a man in his middle years, showing no sign of the unnatural age that had killed him. Sir Antony Ware, a solid and dependable presence. Matthew Abingdon and Joseph Winslow; Alan Fitzwarren and Henry Brandon and Geoffrey Franklin, bearded and clean-shaven, dressed in all the styles of centuries past.

Michael Deven came last of all, into the gap at Lune’s right hand. A dark-haired Elizabethan gentleman, in doublet and hose, and Dead Rick felt the swell of unspeakable joy in Lune’s heart, as the man she had loved three hundred years ago returned at last to her side.

Joy, and also the lifting of his hackles. Not at the ghosts, but at the
tension
shivering through the air. It was as if cords stretched from each dead man and the single living one to the London Stone, and those cords were drawn to their tightest. At the same time, the stone beneath his feet suddenly felt more
stonelike,
in a way he had forgotten—not the photographic loss of his memories, but simply the forgetfulness brought on by more recent experience. Not until now, when the solidity returned, did he realize how insubstantial the Onyx Hall had grown over the last century and more of decay.

The Princes had come to serve their realm one final time. With this strength behind her, Lune—and the palace—would survive what was to come.

Dead Rick hoped.

“Eliza,” he whispered, rising to a crouch. “It’s done. Time to go.”

She did not respond.

Alarmed, he repeated her name, more loudly, then reached out for her shoulder. But he paused before he could shake it, because fear gripped his heart: What if disturbing her caused the ghosts to vanish?

She spoke without warning, in a flat, distant voice, like a badly recorded phonograph cylinder. “I am the channel through which they pass. While I remain, so do they.”

Meaning that if he woke her from this trance, they
would
vanish.
Blood and Bone.
He hadn’t thought of that.

September sixteenth. Eighteen days until the eclipse. Could they risk letting the ghosts go after the test train was done? Dead Rick knew without asking anyone what the answer would be. Even if they knew for certain there would be only one test, and no other trains until the formal opening, the risk of collapse was too great.

In the world outside, such a duration would kill her. But this was a faerie realm, where time and the body did not behave as they otherwise might. With care, she might survive.

Might. Or might not.

Guilty horror ate away at Dead Rick’s heart, like acid.
I should’ve warned ’er.
He should have
guessed
.

Then he wondered if Eliza had—and had chosen not to say anything.

She ought to bloody well hate us,
he thought. She certainly had, when they came face-to-face in the library. She had hated
him
. But once she learned the truth—once she saw him restored—

Stupid whelp. You got what you wanted. Your friendship back, and now she might die ’elping you.

No. He wouldn’t let that happen.

Gently, so as not to disturb her, the skriker bent his head until his brow touched hers, his hand upon the back of her neck. “I’ll see you through this,” he whispered.

Releasing her was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but one thought made it possible. If she were to survive until the eclipse—her and Hodge both—they would need the Goodemeades’ help.

The London Stone, Onyx Hall: October 4, 1884

By they time the engineers were done, machinery filled the outer chamber almost to the ceiling. If they could have fit it into the room with Lune and the ghosts, they would have done; Niklas said it should be as close to the center point as possible. But the sprawling mass was far too large, and there was a risk of disrupting the ghosts besides.

Instead it trailed through the available space: calculating engine and loom, elemental generators filled with raw material and aetheric filters to process it, photographic machinery and all the secondary pieces that joined the whole together. A portion even extended into the chamber of the Stone, to draw on the link between Lune, the Princes, and the realm, and to capture the ideas of London in
their
heads. “After all,” Lady Feidelm had said, “between themselves, they have three hundred years of the city’s past; and that, too, is worth including.”

It was the brainchild of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, Joseph Marie Jacquard and the Galenic Academy of Faerie Sciences: the Ephemeral Engine. Nobody seemed to know who had coined the name, but they were all using it.

The last pieces were coming in now: photographic plates sensitized outside, where the Earth had cast the moon into shadow. Yvoir had babbled something about a morphetic configuration of the vitreous humor and lunar caustic coating the plates, and what followed that had been even less comprehensible, but Dead Rick understood the effect: they would not have to bear the plates around the city, or shove cameras into anyone’s faces while asking them to reflect upon London. They had gathered tokens from select individuals, so that tonight the plates would receive impressions from their dreams, even at a distance; and once imprinted, would be added in to the calculations.

Wrain, standing by the calculating apparatus, said, “I am ready.”

“As am I,” said Ch’ien Mu, by the loom.

More confirmations, all around the chamber. Dead Rick took a deep breath, and went into the chamber of the Stone.

The ghosts still stood in a ring around the center chair, where Eliza sat unmoving. Despite being fed Rosamund and Gertrude’s best fortifying mead, she was nearly as pale as a ghost herself; Dead Rick half feared his hand would go through her arm, that she, like Lune, had gone insubstantial. But she was a human, composed of matter as well as spirit, and her arm was solid—if ice cold.

Leaning to whisper in her ear, he said, “It’s time.”

There were mirrors around the room, to assist the Princes in focusing what they held upon Lune; from her it would transfer to the machinery, and so the process would begin. Wilhas von das Ticken waited by the first lever, ready to set everything in motion as soon as Dead Rick gave the signal.

He
felt
the pressure of it, the strain: twelve ghosts, one living man, and a faerie Queen struggling to shift the weight of the entire Onyx Hall. It wasn’t a matter of the few chambers that remained; there was more to it than that, he sensed, though he did not understand how. Perhaps this was what the others meant, when they said it was impossible to make a new palace as the first one had been made; the burden was too great for ordinary souls to bear, be they mortal or fae, and the greater powers that had once helped were now gone.

What would they do, if the Queen and her Princes could not complete their task?

Dead Rick looked up to ask Wilhas that very question, and choked on it as he saw movement in the outer room. With a few swift strides, he moved to block the hole broken in the wall, so that no one could pass.

Only those needed to operate the machine were supposed to be present: Wrain, Ch’ien Mu, and the von das Tickens, and Dead Rick for Eliza’s sake. But in came the Goodemeades—somewhat battered by their passage through the only remaining entrance—and between them, looking faintly ridiculous leaning on the two tiny brownies, Valentin Aspell.

With Irrith behind him, gun in hand as if she planned to shoot him should he so much as breathe wrong. “He insisted,” the sprite said, in response to the stares.

Aspell’s smile was twisted. He looked like death: gaunt and weak, and lucky to be alive. But alert enough to answer Dead Rick’s question before the skriker could ask it. “After a hundred years of dreams in this place, I cannot let go of it easily. And when the Goodemeades told me what you intended, I knew you had overlooked something. I forgive the sisters forgetting, as they scarcely understand this contraption you have built; and Hodge, of course, has been dying for years. It does much to explain his intellectual deficiency. But tell your medium, she must call two more ghosts.”

Dead Rick managed to tear his gaze away from Aspell long enough to glance at Hodge. The Prince showed no sign of hearing; the trance into which this communion had put him was too deep to be disturbed. The man who had barely risen from his bed to come here stood as steady as a rock—had stood thus for
days
. He might as well not have been flesh anymore. So it was the Goodemeades Dead Rick addressed when he asked, “What does ’e mean?”

“Suspiria and Francis Merriman,” Rosamund said.

The names meant nothing to Dead Rick. Gertrude said, “They’re the ones who made the palace. They had help, but they were the heart of it—Suspiria was the Hall’s first Queen. Aspell said, and Hodge agreed, that they’re still here. In the London Stone. Now Aspell insists you need them.”