Hodge’s voice came out a near-inaudible rasp. “You’ll ’ave to. Swore an oath; I can’t tell you where the Stone is. But lift me up, and I’ll show you where to go.”
The London Stone, Onyx Halclass="underline" September 2, 1884
Eliza followed Dead Rick’s lurching run, one hand pressed to her side as if she could push away the stitch of pain there. When they came into the Onyx Hall, there had been a terrifying moment of dislocation, as if something were trying to rip her insides clear out of her body; she and Dead Rick had fallen hard when they finally made it through, and the skriker had begun crawling before the floor settled, even though it seemed the ceiling could fall in on him at any moment.
The Goodemeades had spoken of destruction; so had Dead Rick. None of it had meant much to Eliza, until now. Until she felt their world tearing apart around her.
And now they were braving it in search of the Queen, the faerie woman who ruled over this dying place. No—in search of Nadrett, and revenge.
Hodge gestured Dead Rick to the left, then through an arch. In the distance, Eliza could hear cries of fear, the sounds of other people running. She cast a nervous glance at the walls around them, which seemed on the verge of collapse. We only need a few minutes more.
A sudden tremor sent Dead Rick sprawling. Hodge grunted in pain as he hit the floor. Eliza caught herself against the wall, then went to help the Prince. His pointing hand stopped her. “Not far. She walled ’erself in. But if Nadrett’s there—”
Eliza didn’t wait for anything more. Gripping the knife and the water so tight her knuckles ached, she ran in the direction Hodge pointed.
The first room was hung with faded tapestries and cluttered with rubbish, echoes of a forgotten past. Eliza had no eyes for them: her gaze went straight to the right-hand wall, where broken black stone formed a jagged mouth. Weapons raised, Eliza hurled herself through to the room beyond.
The woman within sat in serene perfection, eyes closed, heedless of her surroundings. Her cloth-of-silver gown was old-fashioned, with the full crinoline and sloping shoulders of decades past; it shone in the dim light of the room. She shone, pale skinned and silver haired, like some poet’s vision of the moon, and a sword was thrust into the black stone at her feet.
So arresting a sight was she, it took Eliza a full second to notice the other faerie in the room—the creature that had been the source of all her pain.
She’d expected something more. Some grand demon, maybe not horned and clawed and dripping venom, but showing outward sign of his evil. Instead she saw a faerie much like any other: dressed like a man, in the tattered elegance she associated with the leaders of gangs in the slums of London.
Holding a gun to the woman’s head.
“Stop!” Dead Rick wrenched the vial from Eliza’s grip, when she would have hurled her water at the other faerie. “Stop,” he repeated in a whisper, and she felt the skriker tremble against her back.
Nadrett’s laugh held all the malice she’d imagined in her nightmares. “That’s right, dog. You know what this means, even if that mortal bitch don’t. I pulls the trigger, and this all comes tumbling down.”
Fear roughened Dead Rick’s voice, alongside the anger. “You’ll die with us.”
“Maybe so,” Nadrett said, seemingly unconcerned. “But you ready to kill everybody else, too? No, I don’t think so. You’ve got your memories back, don’t you? Which means you remember fighting for this place. Being a good little dog for the Queen. She wouldn’t want you to throw that away, now would she?” He gestured at Eliza. “Are you ready to kill ’er, your little mortal pet?”
Dead Rick slid in front of Eliza, pushing her back with gentle, shaking hands. She retreated, thinking of that terrible dislocation as they came into the Onyx Hall. It would be like that again, if the Queen died. Only worse.
The skriker said, “What do you want?”
Nadrett’s lip curled. “Your guts on an iron platter would be a pleasant start. Or no, I’ve got a better idea—I want all of your memories gone again, all except this moment. So the only thing you remember is ’ow you failed, and fell back into being my crawling, whining cur.”
Eliza dug her fingers into the black stone of the wall at her back, gripping it as if that were the one thing keeping her from leaping at Nadrett. The malevolence of him turned her stomach. This was what had broken Owen; this was what Dead Rick had lived under for years, until the kindness and trust in him had been beaten almost to death.
Dead Rick snarled low in his throat, but said, “I mean right now. You came for Lune. You planning to walk out with ’er? Take ’er away from that? Might as well shoot ’er, and you know it.”
He’d jerked his chin upward on the word “that.” Following his motion, Eliza saw a stone in the ceiling above Lune that did not belong with the rest of the palace. It was a simple, rounded block of limestone, pitted and chipped, scored with grooves along its tip, as if carriage wheels had ground across it for years—but it hung ten feet above their heads. Surely nothing could touch it up there, least of all carriages.
Then she realized she’d seen it before, during her costerwoman days. Or rather, a stone just like it, set into the outside wall of St. Swithin’s Church. An old relic that they called the London Stone.
“I ain’t got no interest in seeing everybody die,” Nadrett said, in answer to Dead Rick. “You ought to know that, dog; if there ain’t no fae in London, I ain’t got nobody to make a profit from. So ’ere’s what we’re going to do.
“You’re going to go out and tell everybody there’s a new place for them to live. Out in West Ham. Anybody as wants to stay in London can, so long as they pays my price. You clear them out of this place; that Prince of theirs ’as enough bread piled up to give everybody a bite. Once that’s done… You see that camera over there?”
Eliza couldn’t risk taking her attention off Nadrett, but out of the corner of her eye she could just glimpse a box on a tripod stand. “I use that camera,” Nadrett said. “I take the Queen’s soul. I carry it off to West Ham, and use ’er and that dead Prince to pour what’s left of this place into what I’ve got waiting there. New faerie realm, new ’ome for everybody. Ain’t it grand?”
Eliza’s heart lurched against her ribs. So that was how he would do it: with human souls and the captured spirit of the Queen. That was the secret they had risked themselves to capture.
Or rather, destroy.
“Sounds very grand—except for one thing.” Her voice shook: with rage, with fear, with the fruitless need to do something. She couldn’t possibly kill him before he shot the Queen. But if she made him angry enough… “We blew your machine to pieces.”
It almost worked. Nadrett snarled in fury, and Dead Rick tensed, about to throw himself forward in that moment of distraction. But Nadrett saw it, and spat a curse. “One inch, dog, and I blows the Queen’s brains out.”
Let him.
It was a stupid, reckless, suicidal thought—so Eliza believed, at first. But the tone wasn’t reckless in the least; it was perfectly calm.
And it wasn’t her thought.
The whisper ghosted into her head, and no one else seemed to hear it. Let him fire. If you can hear me… make Nadrett do it.
Madness. They would all die; Dead Rick had said so. But Eliza would have put her hand on the Holy Bible and sworn her oath to God that the whisper came from the silver-haired woman in the chair: the Queen of the Onyx Court.
Whose mind she was somehow feeling, as if the woman were a ghost she had raised.
Trust me.