Riverside, Onyx Halclass="underline" July 24, 1884
Dead Rick’s hackles rose uneasily when he returned to the chamber where he spoke to the voice. It looked worse than ever, cracks mazing the stone until he feared it would fall to gravel at a touch. He stretched one hand out, then stopped, fingers a breath away from touching. It’s the Queen, Irrith said. Trying to keep this place together. Blood and Bone—’ow long ’as she been doing this? Fourteen years since she vanished; he’d asked. But the struggle must have begun long before that.
Back when he was a Queen’s man. “Don’t give up,” he whispered, as if she could hear him through the black stone. “Not yet.”
“Did you say something?”
The skriker jerked his hand back. It was his ally, of course, not Lune; but it made his skin jump all the same. “No, nothing.”
“What a pity,” the voice said, in cold tones. “I was hoping you might finally have word for me of where Chrennois is.”
Dead Rick sat down on the last intact bench, hoping it wouldn’t break beneath him. “’E ain’t ’ere, I’m telling you. Not in any bit of the palace. I’ve searched.”
In the course of their conversations, there had been moments of something like rapport: not friendship—nothing so warm as that—but accord, a feeling that they were working toward the same end, and could lay aside the wary suspicion of the Goblin Market. All that vanished as if it had never been, obliterated by the sudden malice of the voice’s response. “You could not possibly have searched the entire palace yourself. You must have had help from others.”
He had. Irrith’s first report had come while he lay at Nadrett’s feet, watching his master examine a string of mortal slaves; a beetle had crawled into his ear and whispered the sprite’s short message. The sheer audacity of it startled him almost as badly as the bug had. It brought no useful news, though; just the assurance that they were searching. Every message since then had been the same. And Dead Rick scoured every surviving inch of the Market, without luck. Either Chrennois had been taken by one of the smaller earthquakes that continued to rock the palace, or he was somewhere else entirely.
Dead Rick thought of the grief in Irrith’s eyes, and Nadrett’s boot on his neck. The sprite knew his memories were gone; she’d offered to do something about that. And she was brave enough—mad enough—to charge into the Goblin Market to save a flock of mortal children, and to tweak Valentin Aspell’s nose. If he told her about the glass, would she help him steal his memories back?
Maybe. The possibility was enough to make him brave. “I didn’t ’ave much choice,” Dead Rick told the voice, setting his shoulders as if for a fight. “This place may be ’alf gone, but I can’t search it all, not with Nadrett watching me so often. So sure, I got ’elp. If you don’t like it, then you can shove off.”
“Do not tempt me,” the voice said, each word cold and sharp as winter ice. “You are not indispensable, skriker, and if you ruin what I have spent all this time preparing, I will not hesitate to walk away from our arrangement. You may think you no longer need me, but believe me, you are wrong.”
His newfound courage faltered. Differences of accent aside, the voice momentarily sounded so much like Nadrett… seven years of brutal control made Dead Rick want to crawl, show throat, beg for mercy. Swallowing hard, he said, “You said you thought I could be subtle; well, this is the best I could do. Anything else would ’ave gotten me killed, or taken so long we’d all be out on the streets anyway. Besides, all they know is where ’e ain’t—and that’s no use to anybody.”
The voice made an impatient, irritated noise. “They must be wrong. The compounds would not survive long above. The mortal world behaves according to a set of strict natural laws; Faerie follows no laws at all, at least not consistently. Only in the spaces in between can something like this photography be carried out, where the laws are different, but discoverable and amenable to our use.”
It sounded like something an Academy scholar would say. Could Dead Rick have been wrong when he assumed his ally was a Goblin Market faerie? If so, he would stand no chance of guessing the voice’s identity—not when he didn’t even remember the Academy fae he had once known.
He wished he dared ask Irrith—it would simplify things so much, if he uncovered his ally’s secret—but the risk was too great, at least for now. “Someplace else, then,” Dead Rick said. “A faerie realm, but not this one.”
“Close enough by to be of use to Nadrett? The Goodemeades would never let him into Rose House, and there are no others within London.”
There had never needed to be, not when the palace was a city unto itself. Even in its fractured state—
Dead Rick’s eyes widened. ’E’d ’ave to be a bloody madman. That didn’t mean it was impossible, though. Fae dared the bad patches of the Onyx Hall when they wanted to escape the notice of others; that was why he and the voice met here, where no one else was likely to go. A daring enough faerie could take it one step further. “Maybe ’e’s in another part of the palace.”
“Another—” The question cut off short, as his ally realized what he meant. Dead Rick caught the soft exhalation of breath, understanding and incredulity. When the voice resumed, it raced quickly through thoughts much like those in the skriker’s own mind. “One of the bad patches, perhaps, that no longer leads where it used to; except that those are known, and in the public view. There might be an exception, but the more likely answer is some isolated fragment still attached to an entrance.”
The places where the Onyx Hall connected to the City of London above. A great many of them had been lost, in the course of the palace’s decay. Dead Rick curled his lip in a bitter snarl. “I’m no bleeding use to you, then; I don’t remember where they was.”
“I do,” the voice murmured, lost in thought. “Both above and below, but I think it will be necessary to search from the City. If such a thing exists, it would be perfect for Nadrett’s purposes: he and Chrennois enter only from the mortal world, without anyone to see, but the enchantments on the faerie side give them a protected space in which to work. The question is where, and that, you will have to answer for me.”
Dead Rick startled. “Me? Why?”
“Because I have no means of tracking them. The only way for me to determine if their laboratory lies on the other side of an entrance would be to try walking through it, and I don’t fancy playing that particular game of chance. It would be a terrible disappointment if I buried myself in airless dirt or scattered my soul to the four winds, when I am so close to achieving my objectives.”
It almost sounded like humor. Dead Rick was glad the voice had regained a measure of good feeling, but not so glad he lost sight of his own difficulties. “I can’t go up there.”
“I’ll supply you with bread.”
“To ’ell with the bread! Well, I need that, too, I suppose, but Nadrett’s the real problem. I go missing again, ’e’ll ’ave my fucking ’ead off. And then ’e’ll make my ’ead tell ’im where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing. You don’t want me spreading your secrets around, then send some other dog.”
The silence lasted so long, he wondered if the voice had gone to do just that. Dead Rick wasn’t being a coward; in this case, preserving his own hide went hand in hand with preserving his ally’s. But it seemed the other had simply been thinking the matter through, for when the reply came at last, it didn’t sound angry at all. “I will take care of Nadrett.”
Dead Rick frowned. “Take care of ’im? How?”
“I won’t kill him, if that’s what you’re hoping for,” the voice said dryly. “Not yet. But I think I can arrange a distraction, so that he’ll not realize you’ve gone missing. You will have to be quick—the quicker the better—but a couple of hours should be sufficient for you to visit all the lost entrances, and look for signs that anyone has been through them recently.”