The man who opened it didn’t look like an Arab. Nor did he seem quite like a fae; whatever Abd ar-Rashid did to disguise himself, it didn’t feel the same as an English glamour. But she knew it was an illusion, and knew it was him.
And he knew it was her—or at least a faerie. He backed up sharply. Irrith held her hands out, soothingly. “It’s me. Irrith. I’m just here to ask you something.”
The strange-looking man hesitated, but finally beckoned her in, and closed the door behind her.
“It would have been a lot easier to find you if you hadn’t vanished,” Irrith said, glancing around. The genie appeared to live in a single room, with few possessions: a narrow bed, a few cushions, a shelf of books. She supposed exotic silks were unlikely, if he was trying to live as an Englishman, or whatever he was supposed to be. His clothing wasn’t English, though it was less showy than what he normally wore.
“I know,” he said, and his voice was the same, accent and all. “That was the hope.”
She turned to face him, surprised. “You didn’t want to be found? Why?”
His illusion didn’t drop away like a glamour, either. His flesh looked like it was shifting, rippling into a different shape, and darkening as it went. It steadied into the genie’s familiar face, and a frown. “I suggested alchemy to the Prince, and to Dr. Andrews. I determined the best source for sophic mercury. I helped devise a plan for the use of that mercury. I, a foreigner, did all these things, and because of it, Dr. Andrews attempted to murder your Queen. And you ask why I wish not to be found?”
Irrith hadn’t thought of that. Neither Galen nor Lune blamed him, so far as she knew, and no one else had said anything in her hearing—but then, she hadn’t spent any time listening for it, either.
She ducked her chin, embarrassed. “How long will you hide for?”
“There is a ship leaving for Cairo in five days.”
“Cairo? Where is—” It didn’t matter where Cairo was. “You’re leaving?”
He nodded.
“What, you’re just going to run away? Better hope we can keep the clouds up for five more days; otherwise your ship may burn before you can get on it.” The floorboards creaked mightily beneath Irrith’s feet as she stamped toward him. “You’d best not hope to come back, either. Because if you run away, people really will think you had something to do with Dr. Andrews’s plan.”
The genie was at least a foot taller; he held his ground as she glared up at him. “They already do. How can I convince them otherwise?”
He wanted to. She heard it in his voice, and she believed it. Irrith’s anger melted away, and left behind something like her usual grin. “You can help me. Which is what I came for in the first place. There’s a challenge on, to see who can throw their life away more uselessly, the Queen or the Prince. I’m trying to stop them. But right now, our only other plan is to stab the Dragon with a big icy spear. We need something better.”
Abd ar-Rashid frowned thoughtfully and moved away, pulling two battered cushions from inside the chest at the foot of his bed. He gestured for Irrith to sit on one, and by the time she’d done so, a coffee urn and two bowls had appeared from nowhere. Sighing inside, she accepted one, and hoped he would get distracted before she had to drink it.
“Beyond the spear,” she said, “there are two other possible plans. One is that Galen thinks gold could be used to trap the Dragon. I don’t quite understand his argument, but it has to do with that flodgy—oh, I can never remember the word—”
“Phlogiston,” he murmured.
“Yes, that. Some philosopher Galen knows says it goes into materials that aren’t already full of it, and so if we trapped it in something already full of fire, it wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. They’re planning to use sun-gold.”
The genie’s frown deepened, and he cupped his coffee as if it held the answer. “Because gold does not calcine. It melts, though, and very easily. This trap might work for a time, yes—but not for long.”
As Irrith had feared. “Can you find a way to keep it from melting?”
“In the time we have? I doubt it very much.”
We. He wasn’t getting on that ship to Cairo, Irrith suspected. Not unless the Onyx Court was destroyed in the next five days. “The other possibility is the philosopher’s stone. Even if we had sophic mercury, though, the Queen’s afraid it would just create a Dragon nobody can destroy, that would still burn down London.”
Abd ar-Rashid jerked, and his coffee almost slopped onto the floor. “But—the philosopher’s stone is perfection. Something that brings perfection to others. Surely—”
Irrith raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to gamble London’s future on ‘surely’? Maybe the best way to perfect things is to destroy them, so something better can be built in their place.”
Alarm filled the genie’s dark eyes. “I had not thought of that.”
None of you did. That was the problem with bringing scholars together. Clever as they were, sometimes they forgot their ideas were more than pretty shapes in their minds.
He sipped his drink, frowning once more. “No, we do not want a perfect Dragon. Even supposing we had the mercury with which to make one.”
They wanted the opposite. And that gave Irrith an idea so startling, she spilled her own coffee. It scalded her hands, but she hardly noticed. “What if we went the other way?”
“What do you mean?”
“Alchemy perfects things, right?” She put down her cup before she could lose the rest of its contents. “What if you went the other way? Reverse alchemy. Use it to make something imperfect. We’ve said all along that the Dragon is too powerful to be killed. But if we can weaken it, make it vulnerable—”
It was wild speculation, and maybe complete nonsense. The genie’s eyes widened, though, and he fair floated up from the cushion on which he sat. His mind had gone elsewhere, and his body only followed. “Combine it with something that is not pure. The alchemists combined many impure things, misunderstanding their own work, and achieved no particular result—but they were working with mute substances, not things of faerie.” His gaze sharpened, as if his mind had come back from a voyage into possibility. “I do not know if it would work.”
Irrith bit her lip so hard it almost bled. “It must.” The alternative was too dreadful to think of. Lune dead, or Galen, or both. We have to try.
Galen came through the front door of his chambers and stood blankly for a moment. The hearth was cold and black; the only illumination came from a faerie light, that whisked back to its sconce when its limited awareness realised someone had entered. Beyond that, the room lay still.
Of course. Edward was at Sothings Park. Podder was dead, and the knights who guarded Galen below didn’t know he’d returned. In his absence, charms were enough to protect his chambers, while the knights prepared for battle.
He should light a fire. The Onyx Hall was a chilly place, and the gloom pressed in on him. But he was still standing there when he felt eyes upon him.
Galen turned and found Irrith in the open doorway. His heart skipped a beat at the sight of her. She’d discarded the civilised fashions of the Onyx Hall for rougher garb—perhaps what she wore in the Vale. A short tunic over hose, displaying a figure that, while slender, was not boyish. She shifted from one foot to the other, hands tugging at the hem of the tunic, and said, “I… was looking for you.”
Waiting for him, judging by how quickly she’d appeared. Galen reached the obvious conclusion. “Are you leaving?”