With Fate Conspire (60 page)

By the way she said it, she agreed with him, however reluctantly. But Eliza had already maintained the connection for days, holding twelve ghosts at once; it was a feat of endurance that made Dead Rick shudder to think of it, and now Aspell wanted her to call two more. If she tried, she might lose the lot.

If she didn’t try, then the Ephemeral Engine was useless.

But at least that wouldn’t put ’er in danger.

He wished now they
had
brought in the medium Cyma spoke of, or one of the ones Mr. Myers suggested. It might have been possible for them to share the burden, though he’d never seen it tried. But all they had was Eliza, and no second chance: if this failed, he doubted they would be able to try again.

“Iron burn your soul, Aspell,” Dead Rick growled, and went to kneel once more in front of his friend.

In a voice meant only for her ears, he said, “Eliza. I’ve got one more thing to ask of you—but it’s
your choice,
you ’ear me? If you don’t think you can do it—if you think it’s too dangerous—then don’t try. We’ll find another way. I don’t want you getting killed for this.”

No answer. Of course not; he hadn’t yet told her what they needed. He just hoped that was it, and not Eliza being unable to answer.

The words dragged out of him. “We needs two more spirits. They ain’t far; they’re in the Stone. Can—can you sense ’em? Do you think you could call ’em? Would that be something you could do?”

He waited, not breathing, for Eliza’s response. Some kind of nod or shudder; something to say yes or no, that she could try it or could not. He couldn’t bring himself to
look,
to see if her death hovered near. If it did … he could not guess what he would do.

Then Eliza spoke. Two names she could not have overheard, two names she could only have gotten through her gift: either from the ghosts around her, or from those she now called. “Suspiria. Francis Merriman.”

The London Stone rang like a bell.

Two last figures flared into view, behind Eliza’s chair. A slender man, black hair falling loose around his sapphire-blue eyes, and a faerie woman, tall and regal, Lune’s dark shadow.

Two spirits, bound within the Stone for more than three hundred years.

A perfect ring, surrounding Dead Rick and Eliza. Fourteen men, and the two Queens they’d served. Among them, they held everything the Onyx Hall had ever been, from the moment when Suspiria and Francis Merriman called London’s shadow forth from the sun’s eclipse until these final, fragmented days.

Held it ready for the machine.

Dead Rick could scarcely breathe for the power choking the air. It poured out of them all: the ghosts, and the fae, and himself; and Eliza most of all, holding them by force of will, here in the living world where they did not belong, and
Blood and Bone she’s going to fucking kill ’erself
—

He couldn’t draw enough air to shout the cue. But through the pulse thundering in his ears, Dead Rick heard someone say, “Do it.”

A flash of light, a rattle and a metallic
clank
—and the Ephemeral Engine shuddered into motion.

*   *   *

The world blinked. Not darkness, but a fleeting eclipse of reality: a shutter snapping open and closed. The first stage of the machine captured the Onyx Hall itself, held in the Princes’ heads, in the memories of its Queens, and translated it into the language necessary for the calculating apparatus.

In another part of the Engine, other images of London took shape. Photographic plates, sensitive to the evanescent touch of dreams, caught images out of the minds of Londoners: high and low, young and old, English and immigrant alike. Light streamed through, here stopped by the shape of the image within, there permitted through, rendered from one kind of abstraction to another.

Then the calculation began, metal wheels and crystal gears and rods and levers clicking smoothly into action. Poor subtracted from rich, East End multiplied against West, all the interactions and operations that made up the intricate and ever-changing reality of London. New plates slotted into position, received the imprint of intermediate concepts, slid aside until they were needed once more. Again and again the machine elaborated upon its calculations, first-order answers becoming variables for the second round, second for the third, third for the fourth, until it seemed there would never be an end—

But in time the machine ground out a plate, larger than those used within its confines, and this slid along a chain until it clanked into place alongside the elemental generators.

There was not enough material within them to create an entire palace large enough to shelter the fae who called London home. But if the Engine worked—if it created a structure that could withstand the strains of the world in which it stood—in time, that could be the starting point for more.

Earth and air, fire and water. The arms of the loom began to move, first a rattle, then a thunder, heddles rising and falling to change the warp, a shuttle of ectoplasmic aether flying back and forth, and on the far side of the mechanism, an image began to grow.

Dead Rick
felt
it, like the touch of Faerie itself. A power beyond any he’d known in this world—but no, it wasn’t that distant realm; it was something else, born of the union between mortal ingenuity and faerie enchantment. What they sent through the Engine was not a series of cold numbers, abstracted from their meaning, but rather thoughts, dreams, beliefs, everything that London meant to those who dwelt within its reach. And the Engine, animated by such power, became more than mere metal and glass.

Dreams flooded in, faster and faster. Like wildfire, the thought of London spread from those early dreamers to inflame the minds around them. First the sleepers where they lay in their beds; then those who kept wakeful watch in these late hours of the night. A maid in Camden Town, sitting red-eyed over her mistress’s pelisse, mending it for the morrow. A Lambeth solicitor, reading through the documents of a case, in search of anything that might spare his client from prison. An omnibus conductor, trudging on aching feet home to his flat in Battersea, beneath the light of the eclipsed moon. One by one, then by the hundreds, they found their thoughts turning to the city in which they dwelt, and those thoughts, high and low alike, took shape on glass in what remained of the Onyx Hall.

Which began to unravel.

The generators had run dry, but the Engine did not stop; it drew in the substance of the palace around it. Rumbling filled the air, ominous and low beneath the noise of the machine. Dead Rick clutched at Eliza’s chair, terrified of disturbing her—but all at once fear overwhelmed that consideration and he seized her hands. His vision blurred, swam, reality falling apart around him. The palace was going; they had to get out!

But there was no escaping this final collapse. What door would they pass through, what floor would they walk upon? They hung in a shuddering maelstrom, everything breaking apart, the only solid thing their hands joined together in a desperate clasp. Something was growing, in the distance, right next to them, a radiant weave too bright to look upon, and they teetered upon its brink, an instant from falling.

The weave exploded.

Images, sounds, scents, textures; all burst outward in an unstoppable flood as time opened up. Five different cathedrals to St. Paul, spired and domed, in wood and in stone. Three Royal Exchanges. Whitehall Palace, vanishing in fire; docks growing like man-made lakes in the Isle of Dogs. A wall along the river’s north bank, open wharves, a walkway of stone. Buildings rose and fell and rose again, some too tall to believe, while sewers threaded through the ground below. The clop of horses’ hooves, the rattle of carriage wheels, the thunder of trains—and even stranger sounds, that had not been heard in London yet: music from no visible source, and a low growling in the air, as shapes like coaches without horses flooded the streets.

Men in doublets, top hats, Roman armor; women in crinolines and farthingales and glittering dresses that scarcely covered anything at all. Indians. Germans. Chinese. Iceni. People who dwelt there thousands of years before the Onyx Hall ever was; people who would dwell there in centuries to come. The flood kept going, into the past, into the future, everything the city had been, everything it could be—for Francis Merriman had been a seer, and through him, they saw it all.

London.

*   *   *

The weave flung itself outward, sweeping through the City of London, Westminster, Southwark, Whitechapel, and beyond. Every hair on Dead Rick’s body stood on end. He
had
a body; gravity had returned, and so had air, and the proper spaces between things. He wasn’t in every London at once, all the centuries interlaced; he was in a room, clutching Eliza, and the simultaneous pressure and tension that had threatened to destroy him were gone.

Nearby, the Ephemeral Engine clattered away, tireless and steady.

Movement in his arms. Warmth, too, and when he drew back enough to see, Eliza’s eyes were open and alert. She had survived.

And so, he realized, had he.

Dead Rick sagged to the floor, exhausted beyond the telling of it. The tiles were cool against his cheek, and he might have stayed there forever; but Eliza, damn her, had actual energy, though Mab knew where she’d gotten it. She tugged at his arm. “Dead Rick—come and see.”

With great effort, he braced his other hand against the stone—
Stone? Weren’t it tiles, a moment ago?
—and pushed himself to his feet.

The room kept shifting. It wasn’t just his imagination; every time his attention drifted, something changed, and if he tried to follow it his brain might melt. Dead Rick kept his eyes on Eliza, on her hand in his, and followed her through the gap in the wall to where the bulk of the Ephemeral Engine stood.

The gears still turned, the rods still rose and fell; on the far side of the weaving apparatus, something still shimmered. People circled the Engine, whispering quietly; the Goodemeades were hugging one another and sniffling. Irrith stood a few steps away, staring unblinking at the machine. “Shouldn’t—shouldn’t it be stopping now?”

Wilhas laughed, a sound of mixed astonishment and glee. Wrain licked his lips and said, “It—may never stop.”

“But if it keeps weaving—” Eliza said.

The palace was growing still. Dead Rick could feel it, if he concentrated. He imagined it expanding, farther and farther, until it covered not only London but England, Europe, the
world
 …

Wrain said, “It has to keep going. I think. This place … doesn’t
resist
the world outside. Not like the old one did. It will break down; rooms will fade and go away. But the Engine will gather their substance back in and weave them anew. It hasn’t
made
a palace—well, it has—what I mean is, it
is making
a palace, and will go on doing so. For as long as it needs to. That’s how it will last.”

So it wouldn’t cover the world. Dead Rick suspected its boundaries would be those of London: the farther one got from areas that could truly be considered part of the city, the weaker the Engine’s power would be, and the faster it would fray. If the city grew more, though—

It
would
grow more. He’d seen it, through Francis Merriman’s eyes.

The thought brought Dead Rick around in a sudden whirl, to stare into the room he and Eliza had left behind.

Benjamin Hodge lay on the floor, curled fetal on his side. Eliza cried out and ran toward him; Dead Rick opened his mouth, but she saw the truth for herself soon enough. Hodge stirred as she touched his shoulder, and opened weary eyes.

“She’s gone,” Hodge said.

The room around him was empty. The ghosts had dissipated, Galen St. Clair and all the rest, Francis, Suspiria.

Lune.

Her chair remained, a battered thing beneath the London Stone, and a crack piercing the floor where Sword had been, with a pair of embroidered silver shoes between. These alone marked the Queen’s fourteen-year battle to preserve her realm, and the three hundred years of her reign.

Dead Rick knew a few things about death. The scholars of the Academy said faerie souls and faerie bodies were not separate things, that the latter was the former made solid. When most fae died, their souls were destroyed; there was no afterlife for them, whether Heaven or Hell, and their bodies soon crumbled to nothing.

Soon, but not immediately. Sometimes, though, when a faerie died, she vanished on the spot. And then, they said, it meant her spirit had moved on, going to somewhere beyond anyone’s ken.

Suspiria had gone into the London Stone, following the bond placed there when the Onyx Hall was created. Where Lune had gone, now that she was free of both body and Hall, Dead Rick could only guess—Faerie, perhaps—but wherever it was, he suspected Michael Deven was there with her. Lune’s love, and the first Prince of the Stone. They, and their predecessors, had moved on at last.

Dead Rick joined Eliza, and between them they got Hodge on his feet. The man was still old before his time, still exhausted; his years holding the palace together had taken things from him that could never be restored. But he was alive, and while the Onyx Hall was gone, something new had taken its place. Lune’s last Prince had served her, and her realm, very well.

The von das Tickens stayed to watch over the Engine, already conducting an argument in German that sounded more excited than angry. The rest of them, those dedicated few who had witnessed the rebirth, went out through a portal that shifted from wooden beams to brass arch to cleanly carved stone, to explore the new faerie realm of London.

The Angel, Islington: October 6, 1884

Benjamin Hodge did not look like a man who should be out of his sickbed. “I would have been happy to come to you below,” Frederic Myers said, as one of the coaching inn’s young maidservants set hot meat pies on the table before them.

Hodge waited until she was gone, then shook his head with a weary grin. “I spent fourteen years ’ardly daring to come up ’ere, for fear the place would fall apart as soon as I turned my back. And believe me, it ain’t good for one of us to stay down there so long. It’s a breath of fresh air, being outside.”