Quinn was still staring at Dead Rick, but he answered her. “To find your boy?”
“No, that bit I’ve done. ’Tis the one responsible I’m going after now.”
He sat quietly as she explained it to him, though once or twice his hand drifted for a notebook, out of habit, before being called back. Nothing of the Onyx Hall, Hodge had insisted when they asked him; if what they found in West Ham saved the palace, they didn’t want to lose it promptly after to a throng of hostile neighbors or curious explorers. But that Nadrett was possibly trying to make a shelter for himself, yes, and that he was apparently using ordinary humans to build it.
That he would defend the place. And that there were things men could do—especially mortal men—to fight back.
By the time she was done, Quinn’s eyes had taken on a glazed cast. None of it, she suspected, was much like the fairy tales he’d grown up with. But he shook it off, alert once more, after she’d been silent for a few seconds. Then he grimaced. “I’ll help ye myself, just to see the truth of it with my own eyes. But it’s a devil of a hard thing to arrange more. Even if ye knew for sure he’s the one kidnapping these folk, that isn’t Special Branch business.”
“But dynamite is,” Dead Rick said, drawing Quinn’s attention once more. “Nadrett supplied the Fenians. For Charing Cross, and Praed Street, and the four in May. I doubt ’e’s the only one they gets it from, but cut ’im off, and you’ve at least done them a blow.”
“How do you know?” Quinn asked. Not suspiciously, but dutifully; he would have asked Queen Victoria herself where she got her information, if she offered some to him.
Dead Rick’s answering grin was fit for a death omen, even on his human-looking face. “I carried it to ’em myself.”
Eliza hastened to assure Quinn that Dead Rick had not cooperated by choice, but the sergeant waved it away. “’Tisn’t the first time I’ve taken help from somebody inside,” he said absently. “Christ, though—I can’t just go up to Williamson and say, give me a dozen fellows to hunt the faeries.”
What came next was properly Dead Rick’s to offer, but they’d agreed it would be better coming from Eliza. “There are ways to … persuade them,” she said. Nervousness made her fumble the words she’d chosen in advance. “And to make it so they aren’t too clear afterwards on what they saw—”
“Stop,” Quinn said. Not loudly, not angrily, but it cut her off like a knife. “I do not know what you might be thinking, but I won’t have your faeries fiddling with the heads of my boys. They know what they’re doing, or they don’t come at all. Do you understand me?”
She did—but she also knew what the other side feared. “Sergeant, they’re afraid, too. They might not be hiding much longer, the good ones won’t; but they don’t want the first news of them to be a fellow like Nadrett. They’d be hunted for sure, then. So unless you can persuade your boys to be keeping quiet…”
Quinn seemed to be chewing on the insides of his cheeks. He rose from his chair and paced the room, casting the occasional glance at the door, as if thinking about the men outside. Eliza and Dead Rick let him keep his peace. Finally he said, “How many would ye be needing? Not how many ye’d like, but what would be enough to try with.”
Eliza turned to Dead Rick. He knew far better than she did what kind of defenses Nadrett might have, and what men could do against them. He said, “If they’re brave, ’alf a dozen. Two for each door. Religious, if you can.”
The sergeant breathed out a quiet laugh. “That will be the easy bit. Half a dozen, then? So five, aside from me.” He shook his head, like a man about to take a wager he knew he should refuse. “They won’t all be Special Branch, but this won’t be an official operation, either. All right, Miss O’Malley—ye’ll have yer men.”
West Ham, London: September 2, 1884
Dead Rick watched Eliza pace up and down the edge of Stephens Road, hands knotted behind her back, a general waiting for her troops to arrive. The upcoming assault was as much hers as anybody else’s: she didn’t know as much about tactics or charms as Sergeant Quinn or Sir Peregrin, but she had the connection to both worlds, so everybody on both sides looked for answers to come through her. And it had been her idea to begin with.
An audacious idea, that might yet blow up in all their faces. But they had run out of time for caution, and every faerie with a sense of self-preservation had already left the Onyx Hall. What they had left were the desperate and the mad. A few more of those than expected, at that: in addition to the three knights of the Onyx Guard, Irrith, and Bonecruncher, they’d managed to rouse out Niklas von das Ticken, the puck Cuddy, and even Kutuhal, the monkey fellow that had come with them to Aldersgate. Dead Rick didn’t know if he was coming out of curiosity, loyalty to his Academy fellows, or vengeance for the dead naga, but ultimately the reason didn’t matter. The Indian cove had a strong arm, which was all they really needed.
So there were three fae for each door, and the rest of their forces should be here soon enough.
“Can you tell?” Eliza asked abruptly.
It made him jump a bit; he was as tense as she. When he cocked his head at her quizzically, she made a brief, abortive gesture at the rest of the fae, waiting in a clump some distance away. “Whether they’re going to die.”
Dead Rick’s hackles rose at the question. He shook his head. “No. It don’t work on fae.” Their deaths were always too far off to sense, until the moment they happened.
“But you’ll know about the mortals.”
“Only if I look.”
Eliza shivered, and looked down. “Don’t look.”
He wished, with sudden intensity, that he were in dog form; he would have gone and slipped his head under her hand. It was the sort of thing he would have done before, and he thought she might not refuse it now—but he wasn’t sure.
Hoofbeats and the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels gave him no time in any case. A boxlike carriage with iron-barred windows approached along Stephens Road, and drew to a halt nearby. Sergeant Quinn jumped down from the front seat. With an effort at humor, Dead Rick said, “Planning on arresting ’em, are you?”
“There might be fellows that need arresting,” Quinn said. “The iron bars could be useful around the others.”
The carriage’s back door opened, and men began climbing out. None were in uniform, but they all had the sturdy, hard-bitten look of police constables. Also the ill-disguised nerves of men who knew they had not signed up for an ordinary fight. How Quinn had recruited them, Dead Rick didn’t know, and didn’t care to ask. After what Eliza had said, he couldn’t not look—and as he expected, the possibility of death hovered not far from each man. Not a certainty, and that was something; but this might yet go very badly indeed.
He wasn’t about to tell them, though. Without preamble, Eliza said, “It’s this way,” and their pitiful army moved up toward Liddington Road.
Three doors to assault; three groups to assault them. Dead Rick and Niklas were under Sir Peregrin’s command. Quinn had mustered six additional constables instead of five, so the sergeant himself came with their group; they would be taking the large double doors on the southern end of the building. Eliza joined them as well. One hand gripped a knife; the other, a vial of water, ready to be thrown. Whether it would have any effect coming from a mortal’s hand, nobody knew, but it might at least scare Nadrett—or rather, Seithenyn.
Dead Rick was looking forward to seeing the bastard drown.
Around the corner from the building, they paused to make their final preparations. The fae tied green bands around their left arms, to distinguish them from the others inside. Every mortal had come wearing a cross or crucifix, in addition to the weapons of revolver and water. Niklas daubed their eyes with some kind of ointment, mixed by someone in the Academy; it should help them see through charms of confusion. As a final touch, each constable turned his coat inside out—whereupon Dead Rick’s gaze slid right past them, refusing to notice Quinn and the other two men standing just feet away.
It settled on Eliza instead. “You should ’ide yourself,” he said.
She shook her head, surprising him not at all. “I want that bastard to see me. I want to look him in the eye.”
No time to argue; the other groups would be moving into position already. Peregrin beckoned them forward, and together they ran to the double doors.
Which burst open, the bar holding them shut splintering into two broken ends. Dead Rick tried to watch the constables do it, but he only saw Eliza and the fae run through the gap. Inside lay a shallow room, filled with empty crates and some odd bits of machinery, with another set of doors and a staircase leading up. Peregrin ordered Niklas and P.C. Butler to check above, but the door at the top was locked, and they retreated rather than make noise by bashing through.
The one at the bottom was barred from their side; no need to break this one down. Someone Dead Rick couldn’t see lifted the bar, and it swung open enough for a man to slip through.
But no one moved forward, and Dead Rick froze, every hair on his body standing on end. Something hung on the other side, fluttering in the shifting air: a length of cloth, shimmering all colors and none.
No. Not cloth. Looking at it, Dead Rick shivered down to the bone. The stuff twanged discordantly against his skriker instincts: something not quite of death, but not far distant, either.
At his side, Eliza let out a stifled moan. Her eyes were wide, when he turned to her, and she looked rather like he felt. Memory swam up from the absinthe-riddled depths of his mind: teaching her to call ghosts, because she was a born medium.
Mouthing the words more than speaking them, he whispered, “What in Mab’s name is that?” The only thing he could think was, it felt like ghosts, like the stuff the physical ones were made of—but not even quite like that.
Eliza shook her head, as baffled and unnerved as he. The fabric covered the entire doorway, in overlapping sheets; they would either have to go through, or try another door. And he wouldn’t be surprised if the others were similarly draped.
A skriker couldn’t see faerie deaths, and he certainly couldn’t see his own. Gritting his teeth, Dead Rick muttered an oath, and flung himself through.
The caress of the fabric over his shoulders made his skin try to shudder right off his body, but what he found on the other side was a complete anticlimax:
An empty room.
It was a huge, echoing space, going up to the clerestory windows above, with a walkway overlooking from the second floor. Another set of stairs up to it lay by the wall at the far end. There were doors along the walkway, but everything he could see was silent and still.
“Blood and Bone,” Dead Rick whispered to himself. “What is going on?”
Movement along the wall made him jump, but it was just Bonecruncher, coming through the near entrance, and Irrith through the far. A familiar scent told him Eliza had followed behind him, and one by one the others came through as well, to stare about in confusion.
The answers had to lie in the fabric. Dead Rick turned to examine it. Not death, and not ghosts, though something like each. That it was Nadrett’s work, he had no doubt—but what was it, and why was it draping the entire inside surface of this building?
“Wait,” Eliza said. Not to Dead Rick; she was staring toward someone his eye refused to see. Of course; the inside-out coats wouldn’t confuse her mortal eyes at all. “They think they see something,” she told the fae, “and I do, too—up ahead—wait!” she cried, and leapt forward as if to catch someone; whereupon she vanished.
Dead Rick flung himself after her.
Three steps in, the entire room changed. Rattling, clanking sound filled his ears; the smell of oil and grease and unwashed humans filled his nose; and in the center of the floor stood an enormous machine.
It transfixed his gaze, a hulking monstrosity unlike any he’d ever seen before. No, not true: it reminded him of the thing he’d seen in the Academy, that strange loom, except only part of this seemed to be weaving anything. People stood all around it: boys and girls, men and women, at least a dozen of them at a glance, all working away in the dim light as if they hadn’t noticed anyone rushing in.
Dead Rick’s skriker instinct crawled along his bones, confused and afraid. Death—but not.
Every last one of them was more empty than Owen had been.
And while one end of the machine was producing more of that strange, shimmering fabric, a man at the other end was setting into place something Dead Rick recognized all too well: a photographic plate.
“Mab’s bleeding ’eart,” Dead Rick whispered, almost voiceless with horror. “It’s their bloody souls.”
A bullet cracked into the floor not a foot away. Dead Rick spun, gun coming up instinctively, and he fired; he caught a brief glimpse of Gresh on the walkway above, before the goblin pulled back through a doorway. The skriker yelled, even as common sense told him Peregrin and the others wouldn’t hear; the illusion concealing this place wouldn’t let his voice past. Better ’ope they follow, he thought grimly, grabbing Eliza and dragging her toward cover beneath the walkway. Else I am about to die.
They did—or at least the fae did; Dead Rick’s eye still refused to track the constables, though he could see their effects. One of the mortals around the machine staggered, blood bursting from his shoulder; he regained his footing and went about his work as if nothing had happened. “Don’t shoot ’em!” Dead Rick bellowed, wondering who had done it. “Get the bastards up above!”
But by then it was chaos. Nadrett’s men came out of concealment at various places around the floor, their protection broken by crucifixes and the devout faith of the mortals holding them. They wrestled with fellows they couldn’t see, and then someone tore Quinn’s coat off, exposing the sergeant to hostile eyes. Bullets rained down from above. “We’ve got to get up there,” Dead Rick snarled.
“In the first room,” Eliza said breathlessly, knife and water in white-knuckled grips. “The staircase—”
Had to lead up to the walkway. Dead Rick gauged the distance to that door, wondering what their chances were. Then his nose caught the acrid smoke of a fuse. He tackled Eliza to the ground an instant before the dynamite exploded.
Metal screamed in protest. It wasn’t any bomb, thrown from above; someone had jammed a stick into the machine itself. Bonecruncher, Dead Rick thought, through the ringing in his ears. He couldn’t hear the gears and rods grinding against one another, but through the haze he saw an entire section shudder to a halt.
It was as good a distraction as any. Dead Rick ran for the door, setting his teeth against the ghastly feel of the soul-fabric against his skin. Up the stairs—Blood and Bone; Eliza had followed him—where he shot the lock off the door at the top, and then he was back in the main room, this time at one end of the walkway.
Old Gadling stood nearest. Dead Rick transformed midleap, and the ease of it shocked him so much he bowled the thrumpin over and went sprawling himself. He’d eaten bread, of course—but even with that protection, he usually felt the iron, the mortal world frowning at his change.
Not here. Aside from the iron the constables had brought in, the prayers wielded as shields, he might have been on the most deserted moor in all of Yorkshire. As if nothing outside this building existed.
Nothing outside the fabric.
He rose to his paws in time to see Eliza wrestle Gadling over the walkway rail. The thrumpin fell with a surprised yell, and then Dead Rick moved on, past Gresh, past a faerie he didn’t recognize, toward the far wall, where Cerenel had lost his gun and was using a knife to drive Nithen up the other staircase. None of them mattered, except that they’d helped defend this atrocity; the only one who mattered was Nadrett. Dead Rick couldn’t carry water in this form, but his teeth would do well enough, if only he could find a target for them. Where did that bastard go?
Eliza went through one of the doorways; he followed close on her heels. The rooms on the far side were smaller, and they had Nadrett’s scent on them, but t
he master was nowhere to be found. Just tools, and cameras, and bits of machine, and a scrawny faerie cowering under a table, pleading for mercy.
And a room full of cages, twins to the ones Nadrett kept in the Goblin Market. These, too, were filled with people, and Dead Rick recognized two of them.
They wore the same face, and the same expressions of terror. But only one of them might be able to tell Dead Rick what he wanted to know. He shifted to man form and snapped, “Cyma! Where the bleeding ’ell is Nadrett?”
“He went back to the—”
Her words dissolved in a wail of horrified dismay. Unthinking, he had called her by her faerie name, and unthinking, she had answered. Louisa—the real Louisa—clutched her double’s shoulder, but it was too late; the symmetry of their appearances shattered, leaving behind one mortal girl and one former changeling.
Cyma gasped for air, clinging to Louisa and the side of the cage. Eliza pressed her hands to her mouth, staring at them both, and the expression on her face made Dead Rick feel a brief stab of guilt. I didn’t mean to do it. But it was too late now.
“Find a key,” he said to Eliza, and she began searching while he crouched down to grip the bars of the cage. “Cyma—Blood and Bone, I’m sorry, but you’ve got to tell me. I ain’t letting Nadrett get away. Where is ’e?”
She swallowed back tears and turned her pale face up far enough for him to see. “He went back to the Onyx Hall. Dead Rick, he’s going after Lune.”
The skriker’s heart stopped. He couldn’t even think of a curse vile enough to suffice. Lune—if Nadrett did anything to her—
Eliza threw a key to someone he could not see and dragged Dead Rick to his feet, breaking his paralysis. “I know where we can hire a cab. Come on.”
The Prince’s Court, Onyx Hall: September 2, 1884
I can’t die. Not now. Sweet mother of—oh Christ it ’urts—don’t let me die—
The earthquake went on and on, inside and out. Hodge wasn’t even trying to stand; he’d flung himself flat when the first tremor hit, pressing his body against the black stone of the floor, throwing every atom of his strength into the Onyx Hall. He could hear Lune’s scream in his head, a constant shriek of agony, never needing to pause for breath; his own throat was mute, paralyzed by pain.