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 m
ovement 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.”
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.