He whirled suddenly enough that she almost ran into him. “Because there’s two kinds of people in the Onyx Hall,” he snarled, inches from her face. “The ones as are too soft-hearted to kill mortals, and the ones as don’t care a twopenny damn what ’appens to anybody else. The first keep thinking there’s got to be some other way, and the second are too busy getting their own to do anything useful.”
Eliza set her jaw. “And which kind are you?”
His mouth twisted with self-loathing humor. “The third kind. What gets buggered up the arse by the second.”
He started off again. After a moment, she followed. He didn’t remember anything, the little green-eyed faerie had said. In the library, Eliza had been too angry to think much about what he said and did, but observing him now, the difference was painfully obvious. His face might be the same, but the man beneath it had changed profoundly.
Or had he? They could make illusions to cover their real bodies; maybe they did the same with their behavior. It could have been an act, before, and only now was she seeing the real Dead Rick.
She didn’t think so, though. He’d always been such a bad liar. And the man he’d become was too raw for him to mask, even when he tried.
That makes two of us, Eliza thought.
They tried docks and pubs, boardinghouses and brothels. In desperation, Eliza pointed Dead Rick north, into Whitechapel; Whelan was a Galway man, and might have looked to others from that county for help.
They asked in all the quarters Eliza could think of, but with no luck. Not until they left one of the narrow back courts into which the poor Irish crowded, and Dead Rick stopped, then knelt without warning to sniff the base of a brick wall.
He gathered odd stares from those passing by. “What is it?” Eliza whispered, crouching over him.
The faerie grimaced. “Piss and puke. Might ’ave been ’im. Three days ago, would be my guess.” He straightened and scratched at the back of his neck with dirty fingernails. “’E don’t smell too good. Sick, I mean.”
Sick. Eliza grabbed Dead Rick’s arm, dragging him up Turner Street, following a hunch.
The Royal London Hospital lay a stone’s throw away on Whitechapel Road, across from the Jews’ cemetery. Its beds were filled with the sick poor, and more waited for the next that might open up; sometimes the nurses didn’t even have time to change the sheets before a patient took the place of a corpse. Fortunately, when Eliza gave her name as Whelan and claimed Dónall as her father, she discovered he wasn’t in the infectious ward. When she asked what ailed him, the nurse snorted. “Too much drink, not enough food, old age … he’ll recover or he won’t; there isn’t much we can do for him. But Father Tooley asked that we give him a bed, so.”
Father Tooley? Whelan hadn’t set foot in a church since coming to England, but as the priest had once said, it didn’t matter how far a sheep had strayed from the flock; it still needed a shepherd’s care.
They were directed to a third-floor ward, thick with the smells of chemicals and sickness. Eliza spotted Whelan along the left wall, but when she tried to hurry to his side, Dead Rick’s hand clamped around her arm like a vise. “Careful. ’E’s dying.”
She froze. “What? How can you tell?”
His hard mouth twisted in something that wasn’t a smile. “Skriker, ain’t I? Death omen. I know when a man’s about to snuff it.”
They’d said he wasn’t infectious—but doctors had been wrong before. “What’s killing him?”
“Who knows? I don’t see the way, only the when. Don’t touch ’im, is all.”
He released her arm, and Eliza went forward more carefully. Not that she’d been intending to throw her arms around Whelan in the first place, but now she kept a wary distance. “Mr. Whelan … Dónall Whelan, can you hear me?”
He didn’t look like a dying man, any more than usual. But he didn’t rouse at her voice, until she wrapped her shawl over her hand—she hadn’t had gloves since the workhouse—and touched his shoulder. A firmer shake brought his head rolling across his pillow, and he opened his rheumy eyes. At first she wasn’t sure he recognized her, but then he said, “You’re no nurse.”
“I’m not.” Eliza wet her lips. Damn that faerie. The questions she wanted to ask had all but flown her mind; all she could think was that the man in front of her was dying. “Has it come to such a bad pass, Dónall Whelan, that you’d be looking to the priests for help?”
He mumbled something indistinct, and probably sacrilegious. Then, more clearly, he said, “I’ll be up and about soon enough—if these doctors don’t kill me. Never trust a doctor. Did you find the girls? The ones from West Ham?”
She swallowed. Those disappearances that Whelan had told her about in May. She’d clean forgotten about them, with everything that happened in between.
Instinct made her look up at Dead Rick, but he just shrugged. Whelan followed her gaze. “Who’s that?” He blinked, as if he could not quite focus on the skriker. For once, he didn’t reek of spirits; it must be illness that blurred his eyes.
Eliza bit her lip, wondering how to answer. With the truth; he deserves it. “It’s a faerie, Mr. Whelan,” she said, addressing him with far more courtesy than she’d used in the past. “I found them, just like I said I would. And I found Owen. That’s why I’ve come, because Owen needs your help.”
“A fairy?” He reached out blindly. Dead Rick hesitated, until Eliza gestured impatiently; then he took Whelan’s hand, his thin lips pressed together until they nearly disappeared.
Eliza said, “Yes, Mr. Whelan, a fairy. Just like you used to see, back in Ireland.”
His laugh was a dry, hacking thing, indistinguishable from a cough. “Never saw one,” he whispered, when he could speak. “Only ever knew what my father said. The rest, I made up.”
Her heart sank into her gut. She’d always thought the fairy doctor half a fraud; but it was another thing entirely to hear him confess himself one complete. “All the changelings you said you’d driven out—”
“Stories, lass. Stories.” He turned to look at her, still gripping Dead Rick’s hand. “Did they work?”
“I never tried them,” she lied. What was she supposed to do—tell this broken and dying old man he’d done her no good at all? But no, he’d done some; she was sure her farce with the furniture had confused the new Louisa Kittering. Just not enough to make the changeling admit what she was. “What Owen needs is something else. He’s half gone, Mr. Whelan—like they tried to make him a changeling, but it went wrong. He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t seem to understand much; he doesn’t even recognize his name. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who remembers it. Like it’s been taken from him somehow.”
Whelan’s breath rasped in and out for a few moments, and his eyes drifted shut; she was afraid he’d fallen asleep, or worse. Then he spoke. “To prevent a child from being taken changeling, you baptize him.”
“Owen was baptized. It didn’t save him.”
He mustered enough energy to be impatient with her. “If he’s lost his name, you give him a new one. Baptism, lass. To wash their stain from him.”
Dead Rick grimaced when she turned to him. “It turns a faerie human; it ought to do some good for ’im.”
“But what about his memories? Will he get those back?”
The skriker shook his head, free hand twisting up to show he didn’t know. Whelan mumbled, “At least he’ll be human.”
It wasn’t everything, but it was more than nothing. Especially if it kept Owen from wasting away after he left the faeries’ realm. “Thank you,” Eliza said, and strengthened her voice. “You should get some rest, now.”
Whelan nodded, already drifting off. His hand slipped from Dead Rick’s and fell to the mattress. For a moment Eliza thought Whelan had died, but the skriker shook his head again. When they were a few steps from the bed, she asked him quietly, “How long?”
“Tomorrow,” Dead Rick said. “At the latest.”
She didn’t dare wait that long; t
oo many people had seen her, and might tell Special Branch where she’d gone. Eliza hadn’t decided yet what to do about her impulsive confession to Quinn, back in the workhouse, and he wasn’t the only man working for them. Still, Whelan had awoken pity in her heart. She hated to leave him here, forgotten and alone.
Dead Rick stepped into the path of a passing nurse. The woman opened her mouth to snap at him, but closed it when he lifted his hand, a silver crown winking between his fingers. “The Irishman there. This is for ’is care. You give ’im a good supper, and some whiskey if ’e wants it; you treat ’im well, understand?” His voice hardened. “If you don’t, I’ll know.”
She bobbed a curtsy, and snatched the coin from his hand. “Treat ’im like a prince, I will, sir.”
Eliza stood, openmouthed, as the nurse hurried on down the ward. When Dead Rick saw it, he shrugged uncomfortably. “Irrith says I used to be a decent cove. I figures, if that’s true, maybe I should act like one.”
A decent cove who didn’t mind the occasional threat—but that was more like the faerie she’d known, seven years ago. “The money’s faerie silver,” he added roughly, before she could say anything. “It’ll turn to a leaf tomorrow.”
She closed her mouth and followed him to the stairs.
The Prince’s Court, Onyx Hall: August 15, 1884
“Still no sign of him,” Bonecruncher said, wiping blood from his face and dabbing his nose, which seeped red. A souvenir of his venture into the increasingly chaotic Goblin Market. “I can tell you one thing, though: it isn’t some cunning plan of his. Unless Aspell really thinks he’ll gain something by letting his entire gang fall apart for lack of leadership.”
The barguest didn’t sound like he believed it, and neither did Hodge. They knew Aspell had been shot, with iron. Had he crawled off somewhere to die? Dead Rick had said it didn’t look like a lethal wound, but the death might have been too far off for him to sense.
Hodge didn’t care much what happened to the old traitor, just the photograph he’d been carrying. Admittedly, the Prince had bigger problems than a cove who was already dead. The impending end of the Onyx Hall, for example. Common sense said he should let Galen St. Clair go.
But one thing stopped him: Lune. He knew the stories; she’d loved her first Prince, Sir Michael Deven, hundreds of years ago. His successors had been friends and partners, nothing more. Still, she cared about them, all those names carved into the memorial in the ruins of the night garden. Just as she cared for her subjects, and her realm—but if Hodge couldn’t save those, he could at least save one bloody ghost.
And there was the faintest outside chance that it might do some larger good. Nadrett, after all, had taken that photograph for a reason. If only they could figure out what it was.
A question from Bonecruncher interrupted his thoughts. “Guess who else is missing from the Market?”
Quite a lot of fae; there wasn’t much Market left to hold them, not with the Inner Circle so close to completion. But Bonecruncher wouldn’t have said anything if he just meant the general exodus. Stomach sinking, Hodge asked, “Who?”
“Nadrett. And about half his lieutenants, too.”
Hodge stared, not sure whether to be overjoyed or appalled. His heart settled on the latter; instinct—not to mention his entire reign as Prince—told him that anything Nadrett did couldn’t be good. Including going away. “Where’s ’e gone?”
Bonecruncher shook his head, then dabbed again at his face. “Got my nose broken for asking. But it isn’t like Aspell, vanishing without a trace. Nadrett’s people, the top ones, know what’s going on. They just aren’t telling.”
His pulse quickened. Maybe it ain’t just humbug. Hodge believed there was something going on, deep within Nadrett’s lair—but surely if it were a passage to Faerie, they would know by now. People were fleeing, the palace emptying at a steady rate; if they could flee beyond this world, rumor would have spread like wildfire. Could be Nadrett just didn’t have it finished, but something about that didn’t fit together in Hodge’s mind.
He would ask the Academy blokes, but first, he had someone better. A former minion of Nadrett’s, who had no reason to love him now. And he’d been meaning to deal with the blighter anyway.
“Bring Dead Rick to me,” he said.
* * *
I wonder if ’e realizes I’m the one as knocked ’im down in Blackfriars.
Dead Rick had vaguely hoped Abd ar-Rashid’s comment about turning him over to Hodge had been something to mollify the girl. But that would require his luck turning good, and aside from getting his memories back, he hadn’t seen much sign of that happening. Yvoir was doing his best to sort out what exactly Chrennois’s cameras had done, but so far he had nothing useful to say, and they were running out of time.
At least the Prince’s court wasn’t much to speak of. Dead Rick had nothing to go by save Cyma’s occasional nostalgic recollections, but he had an imagination; what he’d imagined for the court had been a lot grander than this. There was little ceremony, and even he could recognize the spindly furniture as old-fashioned. The Prince himself dressed like a working man, even down here, in trousers and shirt probably bought ready-made, if not secondhand. It gave Dead Rick the thin consolation that his punishment might be something as ordinary as a beating. Hodge didn’t look like the sort to get creative.
To be honest, he looked too tired for it. Maybe the darkness that night in Blackfriars had just hidden the sick exhaustion in the man’s face, but Dead Rick would have bet anything other than his memories that the Prince had weakened more since then, as the rails raced to join up in Cannon Street. All those earthquakes, at best half suppressed. The Queen’s got it worse, he thought, remembering what Irrith had said. He wondered if the rest of what she’d said was true, that Hodge heard the Queen screaming.
The Prince sat with his face in his hands, scrubbing wearily at his eyes; then he drew in a breath and straightened. It was just three of them in the room, Hodge and Dead Rick and one of the Prince’s knights, Sir Cerenel. Dead Rick wasn’t even chained. Without warning, Hodge said, “Passages to Faerie. What do you know about ’em?”
Dead Rick blinked in surprise. He’d expected the Prince to read him a lecture about that mortal boy, not question him. Stupid of him; of course Hodge would want to know about Nadrett. “Scarce more than I did when I saw Irrith in the Market. Got the notion from Aspell; ’e comes to me—in secret; I didn’t know it was ’im—saying Nadrett’s trying to find a way to make one. I been looking for months, though, and the only thing I found was this business with the photos.”
“I know about those. But what’s ’e using them for?”
The question had been plaguing Dead Rick since that moment in the sewers. He wasn’t any closer to an answer now than before. “Blowed if I know. I can’t even invent nothing. It don’t make sense.”
Hodge pinched the bridge of his nose. “But you know Nadrett. Better than any of us do. Even if you don’t know ’ow the thing works, you can guess about ’im.”
Dead Rick would have preferred never to think about the bastard again, except to tear his throat out. He couldn’t get there without doing this first, though. “’E loves power; that’s what I know. Loves being the biggest rat in the sewer, with everybody afraid of ’im or owing ’im debts. If this place weren’t falling apart, ’e’d probably stay right where ’e is, fighting Hardface and all the rest until there ain’t nobody to challenge ’im no more. I’ll lay a clipped penny to a loaf of bread, ’e wants to make sure ’e don’t lose that when this all falls down. And that means making sure ’e’s got something everybody wants.”
“Something everybody wants,” Hodge muttered, “and people to sell it to. Did you know ’e’s vanished from the Market?”
“What?”
“Some of ’is lieutenants, too. We’re thinking they’ve shoved off to Faerie already. But I keep wondering: Why would ’e go, and leave everybody else behind? What use is it being a king in Faerie, if you’ve
got nobody to rule over? Does ’e think ’e’s going to conquer ’imself a kingdom there, using cameras?”
Dead Rick frowned. “Could be ’e’s making ready for people to follow—”
“Then why ain’t ’e saying nothing? Getting everybody outside the door, ready to leap through?” Hodge got up from his chair and paced, not like a man with too much energy, but like one who simply couldn’t bear to remain still. “Something ’ere don’t make sense.”
Sourly, Dead Rick said, “I ain’t the one to tell you. My ’ead’s more ’ole than memory, you know.”
Hodge stopped, muttered to himself, turned back to face him. “Why did ’e take your memories, anyway?”
With Dead Rick’s mind buried in the other matter, it took him a moment to understand Hodge’s. “What?”
“I ’eard what ’e did to you. What was the point? What was ’e going to use ’em for?”
“Nothing,” Dead Rick said, frowning. Irrith had told him to trust Hodge; he made himself answer more fully. “That is—they was just for keeping me in line, is all. Whenever I disobeyed ’im, ’e broke one. ’E wouldn’t do that, right, if ’e was going to use ’em for something else?”
“Probably not. But do you think you knowed something, and ’e wanted to steal it, or—”
The Prince stopped again, and they both stared at each other. “Or destroy it,” Dead Rick said, with lips and tongue that had gone quite numb.
He’d never prodded too hard at that ragged, bleeding edge within his spirit, the place where everything had been torn away. It hurt too much, and Nadrett seemed to know when he was thinking about it; his master had kept him close in those early days, and broken more than a few memories to teach his dog his place. But now—
“What’s the first thing you remember?” Hodge asked.