As if they already knew. The Goodemeades, and Mrs. Chase; the new Louisa Kittering, and this unknown Cyma: How much information had they shared among them?
It didn’t matter, so long as she got Owen back. Eliza ate as fast as she could, and then Mrs. Chase hired a carriage to take them into the City. Along the way, the sisters extracted a promise from Eliza: that she would offer no harm to anyone who didn’t offer it first. “And that’s harm of all kinds,” Gertrude added. “Fists and feet, any iron or weapons you might have on you—”
“Am I at least allowed to talk?” Eliza asked, meaning it as a jest.
“So long as you don’t speak of religious matters,” the woman answered her seriously.
Of course: holy things had power against faeries. So long as she had her voice, she wasn’t unarmed.
It gave her courage, but only a little. She was going among faeries. And the Goodemeades had made it clear that the experience would be even more strange than she could imagine.
But they’ve done it, and so has Mrs. Chase; gone in, and come out again to tell the tale. You can do the same. You will.
The carriage took them to a narrower road south of Cannon Street. In the light of the gas lamps, Eliza spotted the plaque on the walclass="underline" Cloak Lane. Mrs. Chase paid the driver and waited until he was gone, though it didn’t mean they were alone on the street. Giving no heed to the people around them, the old woman took Eliza by the hands. “Trust me,” she said earnestly, for all the world as if the trust of an Irish workhouse convict was a valuable thing to have. “We—myself and the sisters both—will make certain you are safe.”
Eliza pulled her hands free. “Just take me to him.”
“Watch closely, then,” Rosamund said, turning to face the buildings at their side. “If you don’t, you’ll never see it.”
Before Eliza could ask her what she meant by that, the buildings began to shift.
They moved without moving: surely the brick walls stayed exactly where they were, but somehow there was a space between them. It was unmistakable—yet people walked on past, stepping off the pavement into the street to avoid the four women, without ever glancing at the impossibility happening just a few feet away. The gap widened until it was large enough to admit them, and then it stopped; and Rosamund glanced over her shoulder. “Come along, then. It won’t stay open for long.”
Eliza’s heart was beating far too fast, but it was excitement as much as fear. Clenching her hands into fists, she followed Rosamund through the faerie door.
Aldersgate, Onyx Halclass="underline" August 6, 1884
“Qu’est-ce que vous faites ici?”
Rootlike stone tendrils were still crawling off Dead Rick’s body when Chrennois spoke. The sprite stood at a table, surrounded by crystal bottles and shallow tubs, and he blinked as if utterly astonished to see visitors.
The other creature in the room didn’t bother with questions. It dove at Dead Rick and his ally with all three heads.
Milord dropped to the floor, slipping out of the entrance’s grasp just as two sets of the serpent’s fangs gashed through the air where he had been. Stone broke in the creature’s mouth. Dead Rick, still trapped, beat desperately at the third head with his free arm, knocking it aside. Then he was clear, and threw himself out of the entrance alcove as the heads came in for another strike.
Blood and Bone—“only Chrennois,” like ’ell. Dead Rick slashed wildly with his knife, and winced when his ally’s gun fired, deafening in the small room. So that’s where the fucking naga went.
It was small comfort to know who’d bought the three-headed snake from the Market. That didn’t tell him how to stop the thing from killing him. Which it was energetically trying to do; its orders from Nadrett clearly said to kill anyone who entered without permission. A second gunshot, and a third. Everything was chaos and noise and scaly coils of snake. Dead Rick’s back slammed into the shelves along one wall, setting the crystal bottles to rocking; he heard Chrennois crying out in alarm. Grabbing the nearest bottle with his free hand, the skriker hurled it, and was rewarded with a hiss from the naga—from all three mouths, and from its skin. Acid. He threw more bottles.
Then they all crashed to the floor, as the naga’s tail swept around to seize Dead Rick. The creature pinned his arms, and reared its heads back to attack. Two more shots: the naga’s body jerked, and one of its heads sagged limply. Dead Rick took advantage of the pause to shift to dog form, gasping as the muscular coils pressed against his changing limbs, and then bit as hard as he could into the topmost coil, digging for the flesh underneath the scales.
The naga dropped him. Dead Rick landed with agility that would have done a cat proud. His knife lay on the floor nearby, but that would require changing again; instead he leapt for another head, seizing it just beneath the jaw, where it couldn’t bite him. Half of him expected to feel fangs in his back at any instant, from the other surviving head, but instead he was dragged along as the naga lunged for Milord and his gun. Blood burst into his mouth; if a snake had a throat, he’d just torn that one out. Dead Rick turned without pausing and leapt upon the remaining head, biting and clawing into the eyes, and then Milord fired his last shot, and the naga finally went still.
Dead Rick spat out a mouthful of foul-tasting blood and flesh and whirled again, intending to deal with Chrennois—but the sprite lay motionless on the floor, in a growing pool of his own blood.
Milord shook his head when Dead Rick’s gaze shifted to him. “An unfortunate accident. The naga moved as I fired.”
Maybe it was true; maybe it wasn’t. Probably is; I think ’e wanted to question Chrennois.
He didn’t feel much pity for the frog, and only a little more for the dead snake; the creature had been trying to kill him, after all. Changing back to man form, and then spitting more to clear his mouth, Dead Rick took stock of the room.
It looked as if it had been enlarged at one point; the entrance had dropped them in a narrow alcove, which widened to perhaps ten feet for half the room’s length, before opening up into something more like a proper chamber. Shelving blocked one archway at the far end, with rubble visible behind, but the other was open.
His ally asked, “Do you think you can recognize the plate in which they trapped the ghost?”
“Recognize it? No. Find it? Maybe.” He didn’t even know what a photographic plate looked like—but he had other things to look with than eyes. Dead Rick plucked a clean rag from the table by Chrennois’s body and wiped the blood off himself as best as he could, then licked an unstained corner for good measure. With the reek of naga thus reduced, he put his head warily through the open archway.
The naga was the only defender here; nothing else could fit. A rockfall closed off the end of the second chamber, and what little space remained was filled with crates. Dead Rick sniffed experimentally. Naga, hawthorn wood, chemicals, and straw.
Behind him, Milord said, “I’ve found his cameras. They’re all empty.”
Dead Rick joined him at the table. There were three cameras, two like the one he’d seen in the sewers, with pairs of lenses rather than single ones set into the front boards. Putting his nose right up against the wood, he sniffed along them both. As he’d hoped, the second still carried a faint stink of the sewers. Now, let’s ’ope Chrennois ain’t been crawling around there regular.
There were a lot of crates in the side room, but one was much smaller, laid atop the others near the door, and it held an elusive trace of sewer reek. “That one?” Milord asked, watching from the door. When Dead Rick nodded, he took it down and pried the lid free. The skriker couldn’t see what was inside, but a triumphant smile curved Milord’s lips. “Excellent. And more quickly found than I expected. We cannot stay long, of course—but let us take a brief look at the materials Chrennois has been using; they may be enlightening, and useful in dealing with this.” He clapped the lid back down and retreated to the larger room.