She almost missed Lune’s response in all the noise. “They say, you know—some scholars do—that not all faerie souls come to an end when their life does. That some go onward, though where, they do not know: perhaps Heaven or Hell, or the deep reaches of Faerie, or somewhere else entirely.”
Curious, Irrith asked, “Do you believe it?”
“I do.”
They were no longer riding in a straight line along the river; with London stretching so far north, they had to make gentle bends, sweeping the city and even crossing into Southwark. Their ghostly horde grew ever larger. Lune tried turning to survey their ranks, but quit when she slipped in her saddle. “I’ve seen it happen—at least, I think so. The faerie in question vanished, so who can say what happened to her. But I believe her spirit continued on.”
Irrith had heard the stories, but dismissed them as—well, as mortals dismissed stories of faeries. Charming fictions. Then again, faeries were not fictions, so perhaps their continuance wasn’t, either. But this wasn’t the certainty mortals had, one of two choices, or maybe Purgatory if the Catholics were right. It was a true mystery, with nothing but guesses to light the path, and all of those guesses possibly wrong. Maybe there was nothing for the fae but black void, the end of all existence.
“Which would you choose?” Irrith asked. They were crossing above the western city now, from the hovels of Seven Dials to the townhouses of Grosvenor Square. She wondered who left more ghosts, the poor or the wealthy. The poor died in greater numbers, certainly, but who clung harder to this world?
The Queen bent her head until her chin almost touched the black shadow of her riding jacket. “Sometimes I envy the mortals their assurance of continuation. But when I am weary, then I think it preferable to end as we do—a true end, with nothing after. Rest at last.”
Valentin Aspell’s voice whispered in memory, saying, a sacrifice.
Weariness. Had it worn on Lune so much she would welcome that end? Especially if it would save her people?
Irrith suddenly wished she’d never come out this night, never accepted Lune’s invitation to ride at her side. And she spared an additional wish that they’d been riding sticks of transformed straw instead, rather than two faeries who had no doubt been eavesdropping on this entire conversation.
Fortunately, they were almost done. Lune had timed their ride well, no doubt from centuries of experience: as they flew above Hyde Park, leaving the habitations of London behind, distant church bells began to toll. Twelve strokes for midnight, and Irrith twisted in her saddle to watch as behind them, the ghosts began to fade away. Their mighty host, a thick veil of white, thinned and fluttered apart, voices whispering their last. He’ll regret. Remember me. My child…
Then the thirteen fae and their mounts were alone in the night sky, with Teyrngar loping a circle around them, and it was All Saints’ Day.
“What would you choose, Irrith?” The Queen patted her mount’s neck with her crippled hand, and he turned homeward. “I doubt He would permit us into Heaven, but if you had a choice between the torments of Hell, or nothing whatsoever.”
Irrith didn’t even have to think about it. “Hell. Anything’s more interesting than just stopping.”
Lune’s smile shone briefly in the night. “I am not surprised. Well, fate willing, you will not face that choice soon.”
Despite the press of time, Galen hesitated to tell anyone what Abd ar-Rashid had said. He had James Cole, the mortal keeper of the Onyx Court’s library, dig out what old alchemical manuscripts they possessed, and lost himself in a welter of incomprehensible symbolism: green lions and dragon’s teeth, playing children and mating dogs, severed heads and homunculi and strange hermaphrodites. He could make little sense of it, but the genie was right on one count; the image of the moon queen appeared again and again.
In the end, there was nothing he could do but tell Lune. She listened in silence, and when he was done, merely said, “We should discuss this with Dr. Andrews.”
Summoning him would invite an audience of courtiers, or else avid whispers when Lune sent them away; instead, the Queen and Prince went to his laboratory. Since their conversation a few weeks before, the doctor had set up an entire table full of pendulums, whose purpose Galen could not begin to guess.
Andrews himself looked like a corpse that had not slept in a week, but febrile vitality shone in his eyes as he came forward to greet them. “You’ve come at a happy time—I have something to show you.”
Heedless of Galen’s half-voiced protest, the doctor hurried over to the table. “I’ve weighted these bobs differently, with different substances,” Andrews said, “and timed them against that clock.” He nodded at a regulator positioned on the wall behind. “It’s a repetition of an experiment Newton performed in the early 1680s, which caused him to discard his notion of aether. Let me show you—”
It was clear he wouldn’t be easily diverted, but he could be sped along. “You needn’t repeat the experiment again,” Galen said. “We trust your work. Just tell us your conclusion.”
“Aether does exist.”
Lune stood a short distance away, hands gently clasped against her skirts. “I fear I haven’t Lord Galen’s education, Dr. Andrews. What does that mean?”
“Aether,” he repeated, pronouncing the word clearly. “Said by Aristotle to be the fifth element, the quintessence. At the time that Newton performed this experiment, the thought was that aether existed everywhere, penetrating all solid things. His pendulums showed that it did not. My pendulums show that it does.”
Galen understood his point—to an extent. “Another facet of reality that’s different in faerie spaces. But what is the significance?”
“Faerie spaces! Exactly, Mr. St. Clair. I propose—though I’ve had little time to think it through; I’ve only just finished the calculations for the pendulums—that it is the presence of aether which defines faerie spaces, and differentiates them from ordinary ones. And furthermore, it may resolve a conundrum I’ve been pondering for some time now.”
His voice, Galen noticed, was lighter than it had been, as if Andrews were speaking using only his throat, not the resonance of his chest. A sign of the man’s agitated excitement? Or a symptom of his worsening illness? I fear we’ll lose him before we’re done. I would fear to lose him at all, but I’m not sure it can be avoided—not by any means short of the philosopher’s stone.
“The Dragon,” Andrews said, recalling Galen to himself, “is a spirit of fire. So people have told me on many occasions. And I’ve heard the tale of its exile, the light of its heart being projected onto the comet. But what of its body? Is it a spirit, or a creature?”
Lune, the only one of them who had seen it with her own eyes, said, “It had a body. What we placed in the prison was its heart.”
“Then what was its body composed of?” Andrews asked. “If the spirit is fire, and if those elements obtain in this world—”
“Aether.” Now Galen saw what he aimed at. “You think faerie bodies are aethereal.”
“They could be. The transmission of your Dragon to the comet could, I think, have given it an airy component, which is why I judge it to be sophic sulphur, which shares the qualities of fire and air. And at present—if I am right—it is fire and air without aether, for it is without a body.” Andrews’s vitality seemed to drain away all at once. His hand groped vaguely in the air; then he turned, searched, and found a chair next to his main working table, into which he sank with a sigh. “But we have only one half of the equation. We still need sophic mercury.”