The Princes had come to serve their realm one final time. With this strength behind her, Lune—and the palace—would survive what was to come.
Dead Rick hoped.
“Eliza,” he whispered, rising to a crouch. “It’s done. Time to go.”
She did not respond.
Alarmed, he repeated her name, more loudly, then reached out for her shoulder. But he paused before he could shake it, because fear gripped his heart: What if disturbing her caused the ghosts to vanish?
She spoke without warning, in a flat, distant voice, like a badly recorded phonograph cylinder. “I am the channel through which they pass. While I remain, so do they.”
Meaning that if he woke her from this trance, they would vanish. Blood and Bone. He hadn’t thought of that.
September sixteenth. Eighteen days until the eclipse. Could they risk letting the ghosts go after the test train was done? Dead Rick knew without asking anyone what the answer would be. Even if they knew for certain there would be only one test, and no other trains until the formal opening, the risk of collapse was too great.
In the world outside, such a duration would kill her. But this was a faerie realm, where time and the body did not behave as they otherwise might. With care, she might survive.
Might. Or might not.
Guilty horror ate away at Dead Rick’s heart, like acid. I should’ve warned ’er. He should have guessed.
Then he wondered if Eliza had—and had chosen not to say anything.
She ought to bloody well hate us, he thought. She certainly had, when they came face-to-face in the library. She had hated him. But once she learned the truth—once she saw him restored—
Stupid whelp. You got what you wanted. Your friendship back, and now she might die ’elping you.
No. He wouldn’t let that happen.
Gently, so as not to disturb her, the skriker bent his head until his brow touched hers, his hand upon the back of her neck. “I’ll see you through this,” he whispered.
Releasing her was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, but one thought made it possible. If she were to survive until the eclipse—her and Hodge both—they would need the Goodemeades’ help.
The London Stone, Onyx Halclass="underline" October 4, 1884
By they time the engineers were done, machinery filled the outer chamber almost to the ceiling. If they could have fit it into the room with Lune and the ghosts, they would have done; Niklas said it should be as close to the center point as possible. But the sprawling mass was far too large, and there was a risk of disrupting the ghosts besides.
Instead it trailed through the available space: calculating engine and loom, elemental generators filled with raw material and aetheric filters to process it, photographic machinery and all the secondary pieces that joined the whole together. A portion even extended into the chamber of the Stone, to draw on the link between Lune, the Princes, and the realm, and to capture the ideas of London in their heads. “After all,” Lady Feidelm had said, “between themselves, they have three hundred years of the city’s past; and that, too, is worth including.”
It was the brainchild of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, Joseph Marie Jacquard and the Galenic Academy of Faerie Sciences: the Ephemeral Engine. Nobody seemed to know who had coined the name, but they were all using it.
The last pieces were coming in now: photographic plates sensitized outside, where the Earth had cast the moon into shadow. Yvoir had babbled something about a morphetic configuration of the vitreous humor and lunar caustic coating the plates, and what followed that had been even less comprehensible, but Dead Rick understood the effect: they would not have to bear the plates around the city, or shove cameras into anyone’s faces while asking them to reflect upon London. They had gathered tokens from select individuals, so that tonight the plates would receive impressions from their dreams, even at a distance; and once imprinted, would be added in to the calculations.
Wrain, standing by the calculating apparatus, said, “I am ready.”
“As am I,” said Ch’ien Mu, by the loom.
More confirmations, all around the chamber. Dead Rick took a deep breath, and went into the chamber of the Stone.
The ghosts still stood in a ring around the center chair, where Eliza sat unmoving. Despite being fed Rosamund and Gertrude’s best fortifying mead, she was nearly as pale as a ghost herself; Dead Rick half feared his hand would go through her arm, that she, like Lune, had gone insubstantial. But she was a human, composed of matter as well as spirit, and her arm was solid—if ice cold.
Leaning to whisper in her ear, he said, “It’s time.”
There were mirrors around the room, to assist the Princes in focusing what they held upon Lune; from her it would transfer to the machinery, and so the process would begin. Wilhas von das Ticken waited by the first lever, ready to set everything in motion as soon as Dead Rick gave the signal.
He felt the pressure of it, the strain: twelve ghosts, one living man, and a faerie Queen struggling to shift the weight of the entire Onyx Hall. It wasn’t a matter of the few chambers that remained; there was more to it than that, he sensed, though he did not understand how. Perhaps this was what the others meant, when they said it was impossible to make a new palace as the first one had been made; the burden was too great for ordinary souls to bear, be they mortal or fae, and the greater powers that had once helped were now gone.
What would they do, if the Queen and her Princes could not complete their task?
Dead Rick looked up to ask Wilhas that very question, and choked on it as he saw movement in the outer room. With a few swift strides, he moved to block the hole broken in the wall, so that no one could pass.
Only those needed to operate the machine were supposed to be present: Wrain, Ch’ien Mu, and the von das Tickens, and Dead Rick for Eliza’s sake. But in came the Goodemeades—somewhat battered by their passage through the only remaining entrance—and between them, looking faintly ridiculous leaning on the two tiny brownies, Valentin Aspell.
With Irrith behind him, gun in hand as if she planned to shoot him should he so much as breathe wrong. “He insisted,” the sprite said, in response to the stares.
Aspell’s smile was twisted. He looked like death: gaunt and weak, and lucky to be alive. But alert enough to answer Dead Rick’s question before the skriker could ask it. “After a hundred years of dreams in this place, I cannot let go of it easily. And when the Goodemeades told me what you intended, I knew you had overlooked something. I forgive the sisters forgetting, as they scarcely understand this contraption you have built; and Hodge, of course, has been dying for years. It does much to explain his intellectual deficiency. But tell your medium, she must call two more ghosts.”
Dead Rick managed to tear his gaze away from Aspell long enough to glance at Hodge. The Prince showed no sign of hearing; the trance into which this communion had put him was too deep to be disturbed. The man who had barely risen from his bed to come here stood as steady as a rock—had stood thus for days. He might as well not have been flesh anymore. So it was the Goodemeades Dead Rick addressed when he asked, “What does ’e mean?”