Most of what he wrote consisted of the alchemical and arcane symbols the scholars used in their science, and those, Dead Rick could not read. Two things, however, Abd ar-Rashid wrote in plain English, letters big enough to be seen from across the Presentation Halclass="underline" CONFORMATION? and FOUNDATION?
He tucked the pen away and clapped his hands sharply, halting a discussion that had begun to veer off in a dozen directions, each less comprehensible than the last. “If we are to make a new faerie realm,” Abd ar-Rashid said, “then we must address these two questions, before we go any further. Supposing we overcome the obstacles to making the substance itself—which may be within our grasp—what will be its conformation, and to what will it be anchored?”
At Dead Rick’s side, Eliza looked completely lost. Pretending for a moment he knew the first thing about these matters, he leaned toward her ear and muttered, “Like this place. It reflects the City of London—the way it was when the palace were first made—and it’s anchored to certain bits up above.”
She nodded, frowning. “The Goodemeades told me. The old wall, the Tower, and so on.”
“Right. Too much of that’s broke, though, so we needs to pick something new.”
What the “something new” should be rapidly became the primary point of discussion. Someone rolled out a huge map of the city and stuck it to the wall; this had lines marked on it for both the Underground and overground railways, and everyone was arguing over which landmarks to choose for the new foundation. Geographical arrangement, symbolism, and distance from the tracks seemed the primary points of contention, as Wilhas von das Ticken and a Spanish-accented mortal began a vigorous debate over the relative merits of a pentagram versus a hexagram.
That Myers fellow leapt into it with a will, but others sat back, looking as useless as Dead Rick felt. Louisa Kittering, he saw, was murmuring to Cyma; Bonecruncher was spinning a gun around one finger; Sir Cerenel’s violet eyes had fixed on the far wall as if determined not to show how lost he was. Eliza, to his surprise, was listening closely, though unless she’d spent the last seven years studying the Pythagoras fellow that the Spaniard was going on about, she couldn’t possibly understand it any better than Dead Rick did.
As if feeling the weight of his gaze, she glanced sideways at him, and her brow furrowed. “Are they stupid, or am I?”
“I’m pretty sure I am,” he muttered. “You actually follow them?”
“No—but I think I see a problem, all the same.” She shifted her stool closer, an intent look in her eyes. “Tell me if I’m wrong. Isn’t yer problem right now that yer foundation is cracked, because the things ye used for it got moved or destroyed?”
Dead Rick frowned. “Yes, but they’re choosing new things—”
“Which might be destroyed in a hundred years, or ten,” Eliza said. “Oh, I suppose no one will be in a hurry to knock down Nelson’s Column, but still—that doesn’t mean the problem goes away. Does it?”
He cocked his head, listening as best as he could to the conversation. They were talking now about the significance of the original anchor points, their symbolic meaning and the effect that had on the Onyx Hall. Trying to find new anchors that would carry similar meaning, or better. But it all still sounded like physical things, and to his way of thinking, Eliza was right. The Great Fire had destroyed much of the City of London, and came terrifyingly close to destroying the Onyx Hall, too. Anything man-made could be unmade, too.
Natural features, then—but no, those didn’t work either, did they? All those bridges spanning the Thames, some of them with iron, and the various embankments narrowing and shaping its course. The Walbrook, buried underground, and the Fleet, too; year by year, London buried more of its rivers. Hills were flattened, valleys filled in. Mortals might not see it, with their short and blinkered lives, and the timeless memories of fae might overlook it; but with his memories half in a tangle still, Dead Rick knew very well how much London had changed.
The more firmly they planted their feet on the ground, the more vulnerable they were to an earthquake.
What could they choose, that couldn’t be destroyed?
Eliza didn’t think Dead Rick’s words were meant for her; he spoke them under his breath, his teeth clenched hard together. “Fucking Nadrett. Useful after all, you bastard.”
Before she could ask what he meant by that, the skriker shot to his feet. He wasn’t tall, nor large of build, but the sudden conviction in his posture made him seem twice his usual size. In a growl that cut straight through the clamor, he said, “You’re wasting your bleeding time.”
Few of the expressions he received were friendly. Dead Rick still looked and sounded exactly like what he was: a black dog, a goblin creature from the Goblin Market, uneducated and barely literate. Neither the scholars nor the swells here much liked being told they were wasting their time by someone who had, until recently, been Nadrett’s dog. But even the glaring ones had given him their attention, and that was enough. Shaking his head, Dead Rick said, “Eliza ’ere already figured it out. You can’t just pick new places; you’ll end up ’aving to do this again in a few ’undred years. Or less.”
Ch’ien Mu snapped, “Must have anchor! Describe in symbol, tell machine, so machine go—”
He waved his hands, clearly frustrated with the way his mind had outpaced his English. Wrain said, “We realize the problem, Dead Rick, but—” Ch’ien Mu spat something out in rapid Chinese, and Wrain translated. “With samples from the locations we choose, we can create instructions for the loom; without that, we don’t have conformation or foundation. We must work with what we have, flawed though it may be.”
“And ‘a few ’undred years’ is more time than we have now,” someone else said in a nasty tone.
Dead Rick took no offense at the mockery. “Ain’t it better to pick something that ain’t flawed? Something that can’t be destroyed, that’ll go on forever—or as close to forever as any of us needs.”
Several people seemed ready to shout him down, but Abd ar-Rashid spoke before they could. “What do you have in mind?”
Dead Rick grinned, in a way that made Eliza’s stomach tense in both apprehension and excitement. “London.”
A full three seconds of silence followed, before a skinny mortal said, “What the blazes do you think we’ve been discussing?”
“Not the stuff in the city,” Dead Rick said, still grinning. “The city itself. The idea of the place. So long as there’s Londoners, there’ll be a London, right? Ash and Thorn—I’m the last bleeding sod to tell you we should thank Nadrett for anything, but ’e got Chrennois to figure out a way for photographing things that can’t be touched. So photograph the city, the idea of it. Use that for your foundation. It’ll fall apart when the city gets abandoned, maybe—but by then, we won’t need it no more. Because there won’t be no London to live in.”
More silence. Then Irrith said, “But how in Mab’s name do we photograph that?”
“We don’t have to,” Wrain said, leaping up in excitement. He flung one arm out toward the large machine that sat at the other end of the room, across from where the loom had been. “We can calculate it instead. Once we know how to represent the nature of London in symbolic notation, we can use that to instruct the loom. A conceptual conformation and foundation, instead of a physical one!”