He wasn’t about to tell them, though. Without preamble, Eliza said, “It’s this way,” and their pitiful army moved up toward Liddington Road.
Three doors to assault; three groups to assault them. Dead Rick and Niklas were under Sir Peregrin’s command. Quinn had mustered six additional constables instead of five, so the sergeant himself came with their group; they would be taking the large double doors on the southern end of the building. Eliza joined them as well. One hand gripped a knife; the other, a vial of water, ready to be thrown. Whether it would have any effect coming from a mortal’s hand, nobody knew, but it might at least scare Nadrett—or rather, Seithenyn.
Dead Rick was looking forward to seeing the bastard drown.
Around the corner from the building, they paused to make their final preparations. The fae tied green bands around their left arms, to distinguish them from the others inside. Every mortal had come wearing a cross or crucifix, in addition to the weapons of revolver and water. Niklas daubed their eyes with some kind of ointment, mixed by someone in the Academy; it should help them see through charms of confusion. As a final touch, each constable turned his coat inside out—whereupon Dead Rick’s gaze slid right past them, refusing to notice Quinn and the other two men standing just feet away.
It settled on Eliza instead. “You should ’ide yourself,” he said.
She shook her head, surprising him not at all. “I want that bastard to see me. I want to look him in the eye.”
No time to argue; the other groups would be moving into position already. Peregrin beckoned them forward, and together they ran to the double doors.
Which burst open, the bar holding them shut splintering into two broken ends. Dead Rick tried to watch the constables do it, but he only saw Eliza and the fae run through the gap. Inside lay a shallow room, filled with empty crates and some odd bits of machinery, with another set of doors and a staircase leading up. Peregrin ordered Niklas and P.C. Butler to check above, but the door at the top was locked, and they retreated rather than make noise by bashing through.
The one at the bottom was barred from their side; no need to break this one down. Someone Dead Rick couldn’t see lifted the bar, and it swung open enough for a man to slip through.
But no one moved forward, and Dead Rick froze, every hair on his body standing on end. Something hung on the other side, fluttering in the shifting air: a length of cloth, shimmering all colors and none.
No. Not cloth. Looking at it, Dead Rick shivered down to the bone. The stuff twanged discordantly against his skriker instincts: something not quite of death, but not far distant, either.
At his side, Eliza let out a stifled moan. Her eyes were wide, when he turned to her, and she looked rather like he felt. Memory swam up from the absinthe-riddled depths of his mind: teaching her to call ghosts, because she was a born medium.
Mouthing the words more than speaking them, he whispered, “What in Mab’s name is that?” The only thing he could think was, it felt like ghosts, like the stuff the physical ones were made of—but not even quite like that.
Eliza shook her head, as baffled and unnerved as he. The fabric covered the entire doorway, in overlapping sheets; they would either have to go through, or try another door. And he wouldn’t be surprised if the others were similarly draped.
A skriker couldn’t see faerie deaths, and he certainly couldn’t see his own. Gritting his teeth, Dead Rick muttered an oath, and flung himself through.
The caress of the fabric over his shoulders made his skin try to shudder right off his body, but what he found on the other side was a complete anticlimax:
An empty room.
It was a huge, echoing space, going up to the clerestory windows above, with a walkway overlooking from the second floor. Another set of stairs up to it lay by the wall at the far end. There were doors along the walkway, but everything he could see was silent and still.
“Blood and Bone,” Dead Rick whispered to himself. “What is going on?”
Movement along the wall made him jump, but it was just Bonecruncher, coming through the near entrance, and Irrith through the far. A familiar scent told him Eliza had followed behind him, and one by one the others came through as well, to stare about in confusion.
The answers had to lie in the fabric. Dead Rick turned to examine it. Not death, and not ghosts, though something like each. That it was Nadrett’s work, he had no doubt—but what was it, and why was it draping the entire inside surface of this building?
“Wait,” Eliza said. Not to Dead Rick; she was staring toward someone his eye refused to see. Of course; the inside-out coats wouldn’t confuse her mortal eyes at all. “They think they see something,” she told the fae, “and I do, too—up ahead—wait!” she cried, and leapt forward as if to catch someone; whereupon she vanished.
Dead Rick flung himself after her.
Three steps in, the entire room changed. Rattling, clanking sound filled his ears; the smell of oil and grease and unwashed humans filled his nose; and in the center of the floor stood an enormous machine.
It transfixed his gaze, a hulking monstrosity unlike any he’d ever seen before. No, not true: it reminded him of the thing he’d seen in the Academy, that strange loom, except only part of this seemed to be weaving anything. People stood all around it: boys and girls, men and women, at least a dozen of them at a glance, all working away in the dim light as if they hadn’t noticed anyone rushing in.
Dead Rick’s skriker instinct crawled along his bones, confused and afraid. Death—but not.
Every last one of them was more empty than Owen had been.
And while one end of the machine was producing more of that strange, shimmering fabric, a man at the other end was setting into place something Dead Rick recognized all too welclass="underline" a photographic plate.
“Mab’s bleeding ’eart,” Dead Rick whispered, almost voiceless with horror. “It’s their bloody souls.”
A bullet cracked into the floor not a foot away. Dead Rick spun, gun coming up instinctively, and he fired; he caught a brief glimpse of Gresh on the walkway above, before the goblin pulled back through a doorway. The skriker yelled, even as common sense told him Peregrin and the others wouldn’t hear; the illusion concealing this place wouldn’t let his voice past. Better ’ope they follow, he thought grimly, grabbing Eliza and dragging her toward cover beneath the walkway. Else I am about to die.
They did—or at least the fae did; Dead Rick’s eye still refused to track the constables, though he could see their effects. One of the mortals around the machine staggered, blood bursting from his shoulder; he regained his footing and went about his work as if nothing had happened. “Don’t shoot ’em!” Dead Rick bellowed, wondering who had done it. “Get the bastards up above!”
But by then it was chaos. Nadrett’s men came out of concealment at various places around the floor, their protection broken by crucifixes and the devout faith of the mortals holding them. They wrestled with fellows they couldn’t see, and then someone tore Quinn’s coat off, exposing the sergeant to hostile eyes. Bullets rained down from above. “We’ve got to get up there,” Dead Rick snarled.
“In the first room,” Eliza said breathlessly, knife and water in white-knuckled grips. “The staircase—”
Had to lead up to the walkway. Dead Rick gauged the distance to that door, wondering what their chances were. Then his nose caught the acrid smoke of a fuse. He tackled Eliza to the ground an instant before the dynamite exploded.