With Fate Conspire (6 page)

Who waited to be sure the man wouldn’t turn back, then stuffed his knife back into its sheath and tore open the soggy, greasy newspaper. Inside was a sausage roll. Not caring if the thing was soaked with river water, he sank his teeth into the end and ripped a chunk free.

Eating it was like wrapping a warm blanket around himself when he’d been standing all this while in the freezing winter air. The pipes in the Embankment, the gaslight lamps above, the bridges behind him—all became nothing more than human artifacts, bits of metal wrought into useful shapes. A church bell could ring in his ear now, and he would only laugh at it. Mortal food, given in tithe to the fae: the only thing that let them walk the streets of London in safety.

And desperately hard to come by, nowadays. Nadrett’s caged mortals served many different purposes, but all of them were forced to tithe bread each day, until they were sold off or ate faerie food or died. It went a long way toward making up for the loss of belief among the people above, who no longer set out food for the faeries, except in scattered pockets far out in the countryside; a long way, but not far enough, not with all the refugees crowding into the Hall. If Dead Rick wanted any hope of surviving once the Market was gone, he had to get some for himself.

He already regretted eating that bite. It meant he had one bite less with which to pay off his debts, or escape London when the time came. But with all these banes around him … he hadn’t been above in ages, had forgotten how terrible it felt.

He sighed, staring at the torn roll.

Then he looked around, at the city he almost never saw. London, full of mortals—not caged and broken, but free men and women and children, millions of them, living in blissful ignorance of the decay beneath their feet. And untouched by the faerie stain that would make them unable to tithe. The longer Dead Rick stayed out here, the greater the odds of his master noticing—but the bite he’d eaten protected for a whole day. With that in his stomach, he could find somebody else to jump, get more bread, prepare for the end that was coming.

He would pay a price for it—he always did—but this once, it might be worth it.

Dead Rick stuffed the remainder of the roll into the pocket of his coat and concentrated. Not much; he wasn’t one of those fae who took pride in all the faces he could invent, making himself look like a fine gentleman or a little boy or anything else. He was satisfied with looking like himself—just without the faerie touch. For his purposes, it was enough.

Then, whistling “Bedlam Boys” to himself, he set off in search of another poor bastard to rob.

The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: March 10, 1884

What remained of the faerie palace tended to alternate between rooms overstuffed with refugees and long, empty stretches abandoned even by ghosts. As Benjamin Hodge approached the entrance to the Galenic Academy, the only sound was his own boots scuffing across the floor. But once he passed beneath the silver-and-gold arch, with its motto of
SOLVE ET COAGULA
curving above his head, noise began to filter down the black corridor. Even before he could make out any details, the sound raised his spirits: this was the one part of the Onyx Hall that felt alive with hope, instead of despair.

Or maybe
madness
was a better word than
hope
. Hodge was too young to have seen the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in ’51, but he imagined it must have been a lot like this: a motley assortment of people from all over the world, crowding around displays ranging from the useful to the bizarre, in a crazed display of what human invention could do.

Human invention, and faerie: while there were mortals down here, they were far outnumbered by faerie-kind. The international bit still held, though. For the last century and more, the Galenic Academy had been a place of pilgrimage for anyone from either world who wanted to understand the rules of places like this: not quite Faerie, not quite Earth, but taking on a bit of the nature of both. Some of those who came were philosophers, and they spent their time in the library or various sitting rooms, arguing questions like what ancient curse made iron anathema to European fae, or how it was that a genie could serve the Mohammedan God—but the Presentation Hall which now opened up before him was for the inventors.

As with the Great Exhibition, their work ranged from the practical to the inexplicable. Hodge was very glad of the aetheric engine, which had saved them from the need to find a giant to wind the enormous clock in the Calendar Room every year, but what was the use of an automaton that sang songs like a phonograph? Or a fountain that could be made to pour out any kind of drink? Or the enormous paper wings stretching high overhead?

In truth, the only thing he cared about these days lay at the back end of the long chamber, taking up more space every time he came to visit.

His arrival barely made a ripple in the flow of activity. Passing fae tugged their forelocks briefly—or bowed, in the case of those foreigners for whom it was the customary sign of respect—but otherwise went about their business. Hodge would have done away with even that interruption, if he could; his father had been a bricklayer, and would have laughed himself sick to know his son had become a faerie Prince.
An accident of birth,
he thought wryly, not for the first time.
I was born poor enough to get my start inside the old walls of London—and that’s what matters ’ere, more than blood or breeding.

Not that anybody knew his father had been a bricklayer. Hodge kept that back out of a peculiar kind of shame: he didn’t want anyone knowing his father had laid bricks for the very thing now destroying this place. And then been drowned, when the River Fleet burst its sewer and flooded the railway works. Fate had a sharp sense of humor, as far as Hodge could tell.

Two enormous machines lay at the far end, on either side of the door to the Academy library. One was a thing of gears and levers and cranks and dials, those latter marked with a range of alchemical and other symbols. All Hodge understood about that one was that it was some form of calculating machine; the symbols were a language the scholars had developed for describing the elemental makeup and configuration of faerie things, and the engine helped them predict how such things would interact.

Without it, devices like the one across the central aisle would be nearly impossible to build. This one, Hodge understood even less about, except that it resembled nothing so much as a deranged loom—and it had the Academy Masters very excited indeed.

Damn near every last one of them, mortal and faerie alike, was gathered about the machine, arguing in several different languages at once. Lady Feidelm and Wrain; a Chinese faerie named Ch’ien Mu, a Swedish mathematician named Ulrik Segerstam; Niklas von das Ticken had even hauled his brother Wilhas away from sitting over the Calendar Room like an anxious mother hen. The tallest of the fae, a dark-skinned genie, noticed Hodge first and gave him a respectful bow. “Lord Benjamin. Are you all right?”

Hodge had tried to tell Abd ar-Rashid the bows and titles and so on weren’t necessary. What few courtiers he had left spent their time idling in one of the palace’s remaining gardens and ignoring his commands. The genie, as the Academy’s Scholarch or senior Master, had more authority and did more of actual use than Hodge himself. But Abd ar-Rashid seemed to believe the courtesies were all the more important in these degenerate times, and acted accordingly.

The concern in his deep-set eyes made Hodge reach up to touch his own face. His fingers came away spotted with blood. There were two scratches on his cheek: mementos of that black dog leaping on him. Hodge considered saying as much, but remembered fae and mortals all around them; he might not care about courtesies, but admitting that one of his own nominal subjects had knocked him down in Blackfriars was a bit much. “Cut myself shaving,” Hodge said blandly, and gestured at the loom. “You lot look excited. Tell me you ’ave good news.”

“We do. Or rather, Ch’ien Mu does.” Abd ar-Rashid waved the Chinese faerie forward.

When Ch’ien Mu first came to the Onyx Hall, the embroidered silks he wore had been been splendid things, with dragons coiling sinuously about his shoulders and arms; but unless one was a philosopher, constantly in the library, the Galenic Academy was not a good place for clothes. The silks were much mended, and the dragons glared morosely at the barriers of thread that blocked their movement.

They still distracted Hodge terribly, but Ch’ien Mu’s mind was clearly on other matters. He shuffled a few steps closer and bowed, but instead of folding his hands inside his sleeves—his customary posture while lecturing—he literally rubbed them together with excitement as he spoke. “The threads no more break! It is, as I suspect, a thing of configuration—though my assumption that the helical is the most stable proves very wrong; we try both solar and lunar configurations, but—”

“Master Ch’ien Mu.” Hodge pinched the bridge of his nose, knowing the faerie would go on for half an hour if not stopped. “I knows ’ow to read, and that’s about where it ends. Just tell me what you’ve
got
.”

This seemed to be a more difficult request than he’d thought. The faerie opened and closed his mouth a few times, as if trying and failing to find words for what was in his head. Hodge doubted it was a problem with his English; more likely the fellow was having trouble bringing his thoughts down from the rarefied heights of theory into simple reality. It was a trouble many of the Academy Masters shared. In the end, the Master gave up and gestured at Niklas.

The red-bearded dwarf grinned and spun a small wheel. The small aetheric engine at his feet hummed to life; then he and Ch’ien Mu together made incomprehensible adjustments to a series of pipes and vessels that sat at the base of the loom. Those, Hodge recognized; they were a sort of alchemical retort, used to distill purified forms of the faerie elements, fire and water and earth and air. After a moment, shimmering threads of something that was not quite light began to lace themselves through the loom, forming what Hodge, with his extremely limited knowledge of weaving, knew was the warp: the lengthwise threads that formed the base of fabric.

Except what this loom wove was not precisely fabric. Ch’ien Mu fed one end of a linked chain of crystal plaques into something on the side of the loom, and then Niklas slammed a lever down with a heavy
thunk
. Powered by the aetheric engine, the loom sprang into motion.

Warp threads rose and fell, and the shuttle holding the weft flew back and forth between them. There was a general stampede to the far side of the loom, which Hodge joined, and there he witnessed a miracle.

Growing in the air on the other side of the machine was a glamour. Four isolated bits of gold—golden fur—four paws, it was, and as the legs lengthened above them Hodge suspected it was a lion. He’d seen more impressive illusions before; the fae could do tremendous things when they put their minds to it. But there was no mind involved here: the loom was doing the work. Jacquard had invented something like this years ago, to weave brocaded fabrics more rapidly and accurately than a human weaver could hope to achieve. Ch’ien Mu and the others had found a way to do it with a glamour.

“Bloody ’ell,” Hodge whispered, and grabbed hold of Abd ar-Rashid before he could fall over.

Some of it was just the general infirmity that plagued him nowadays. The Onyx Hall drew on his strength to survive the iron threat driving its breakdown, and it was always worse after he’d gone above—necessary departures, for the sake of his mortal sanity, though he kept them as infrequent as he dared. But the rest of his sudden weakness …

It was blinding, delirious hope.

If they could weave the elements of faerie reality into whatever shape they described with those crystal plaques, then they could weave new material for the Onyx Hall.

The genie supported him with one arm under his shoulders, and called for someone to bring a chair. Hodge allowed himself to be lowered into it, too dazed to care about the indignity. Never mind the wings and automata and all the rest; this had been the chiefest project of the Galenic Academy since its founding more than a hundred years ago.
Find some way of mending the Onyx Hall.
Stop, or better yet undo, the decay that had been going on since the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Hodge had known, even before he became Prince, that it wasn’t likely to happen. The creation of the palace had been a legendary work, carried out ages before, by a faerie woman and a mortal man. But they were long dead, and so were the powers that had helped them: Gog and Magog, the giants of London, murdered. Father Thames, silenced by iron. Hodge couldn’t hope to equal their deeds. He’d devoted his time and energy to slowing the disintegration of the Hall, holding together what remained of London’s faerie court, and preparing for the exodus he knew must inevitably come.

An exodus they might—perhaps—be able to avoid after all.

Someone pressed a cup into his hand, and he drank instinctively. Mead, sweet and fortifying, slid down his throat. Then Master Wrain was there, showing a distress Hodge didn’t understand at all. “My lord—”

If
he
was being formal, then something really had gone wrong. “What?”

With deep reluctance, the sprite said, “It doesn’t last.”

Hodge’s gaze went past him to the lion, which was now almost completed. The tail lashed, and the paws shifted in place; it was peculiar to see something so apparently real still missing the bulk of its head. No sign of unraveling—but it was in the protected space of the Galenic Academy. The oddly warped relationship between the City and the palace that reflected it meant the Academy lay uncomfortably close to the railway works even now proceeding down Cannon Street—but not so close that it was one of the bad patches of the Hall, where the decay was at its worst.

What the loom produced was pure faerie material. It wouldn’t survive for long, if it came into contact with mortal banes.