“Suspiria and Francis Merriman,” Rosamund said.
The names meant nothing to Dead Rick. Gertrude said, “They’re the ones who made the palace. They had help, but they were the heart of it—Suspiria was the Hall’s first Queen. Aspell said, and Hodge agreed, that they’re still here. In the London Stone. Now Aspell insists you need them.”
By the way she said it, she agreed with him, however reluctantly. But Eliza had already maintained the connection for days, holding twelve ghosts at once; it was a feat of endurance that made Dead Rick shudder to think of it, and now Aspell wanted her to call two more. If she tried, she might lose the lot.
If she didn’t try, then the Ephemeral Engine was useless.
But at least that wouldn’t put ’er in danger.
He wished now they had brought in the medium Cyma spoke of, or one of the ones Mr. Myers suggested. It might have been possible for them to share the burden, though he’d never seen it tried. But all they had was Eliza, and no second chance: if this failed, he doubted they would be able to try again.
“Iron burn your soul, Aspell,” Dead Rick growled, and went to kneel once more in front of his friend.
In a voice meant only for her ears, he said, “Eliza. I’ve got one more thing to ask of you—but it’s your choice, you ’ear me? If you don’t think you can do it—if you think it’s too dangerous—then don’t try. We’ll find another way. I don’t want you getting killed for this.”
No answer. Of course not; he hadn’t yet told her what they needed. He just hoped that was it, and not Eliza being unable to answer.
The words dragged out of him. “We needs two more spirits. They ain’t far; they’re in the Stone. Can—can you sense ’em? Do you think you could call ’em? Would that be something you could do?”
He waited, not breathing, for Eliza’s response. Some kind of nod or shudder; something to say yes or no, that she could try it or could not. He couldn’t bring himself to look, to see if her death hovered near. If it did… he could not guess what he would do.
Then Eliza spoke. Two names she could not have overheard, two names she could only have gotten through her gift: either from the ghosts around her, or from those she now called. “Suspiria. Francis Merriman.”
The London Stone rang like a bell.
Two last figures flared into view, behind Eliza’s chair. A slender man, black hair falling loose around his sapphire-blue eyes, and a faerie woman, tall and regal, Lune’s dark shadow.
Two spirits, bound within the Stone for more than three hundred years.
A perfect ring, surrounding Dead Rick and Eliza. Fourteen men, and the two Queens they’d served. Among them, they held everything the Onyx Hall had ever been, from the moment when Suspiria and Francis Merriman called London’s shadow forth from the sun’s eclipse until these final, fragmented days.
Held it ready for the machine.
Dead Rick could scarcely breathe for the power choking the air. It poured out of them alclass="underline" the ghosts, and the fae, and himself; and Eliza most of all, holding them by force of will, here in the living world where they did not belong, and Blood and Bone she’s going to fucking kill ’erself—
He couldn’t draw enough air to shout the cue. But through the pulse thundering in his ears, Dead Rick heard someone say, “Do it.”
A flash of light, a rattle and a metallic clank—and the Ephemeral Engine shuddered into motion.
The world blinked. Not darkness, but a fleeting eclipse of reality: a shutter snapping open and closed. The first stage of the machine captured the Onyx Hall itself, held in the Princes’ heads, in the memories of its Queens, and translated it into the language necessary for the calculating apparatus.
In another part of the Engine, other images of London took shape. Photographic plates, sensitive to the evanescent touch of dreams, caught images out of the minds of Londoners: high and low, young and old, English and immigrant alike. Light streamed through, here stopped by the shape of the image within, there permitted through, rendered from one kind of abstraction to another.
Then the calculation began, metal wheels and crystal gears and rods and levers clicking smoothly into action. Poor subtracted from rich, East End multiplied against West, all the interactions and operations that made up the intricate and ever-changing reality of London. New plates slotted into position, received the imprint of intermediate concepts, slid aside until they were needed once more. Again and again the machine elaborated upon its calculations, first-order answers becoming variables for the second round, second for the third, third for the fourth, until it seemed there would never be an end—
But in time the machine ground out a plate, larger than those used within its confines, and this slid along a chain until it clanked into place alongside the elemental generators.
There was not enough material within them to create an entire palace large enough to shelter the fae who called London home. But if the Engine worked—if it created a structure that could withstand the strains of the world in which it stood—in time, that could be the starting point for more.
Earth and air, fire and water. The arms of the loom began to move, first a rattle, then a thunder, heddles rising and falling to change the warp, a shuttle of ectoplasmic aether flying back and forth, and on the far side of the mechanism, an image began to grow.
Dead Rick felt it, like the touch of Faerie itself. A power beyond any he’d known in this world—but no, it wasn’t that distant realm; it was something else, born of the union between mortal ingenuity and faerie enchantment. What they sent through the Engine was not a series of cold numbers, abstracted from their meaning, but rather thoughts, dreams, beliefs, everything that London meant to those who dwelt within its reach. And the Engine, animated by such power, became more than mere metal and glass.
Dreams flooded in, faster and faster. Like wildfire, the thought of London spread from those early dreamers to inflame the minds around them. First the sleepers where they lay in their beds; then those who kept wakeful watch in these late hours of the night. A maid in Camden Town, sitting red-eyed over her mistress’s pelisse, mending it for the morrow. A Lambeth solicitor, reading through the documents of a case, in search of anything that might spare his client from prison. An omnibus conductor, trudging on aching feet home to his flat in Battersea, beneath the light of the eclipsed moon. One by one, then by the hundreds, they found their thoughts turning to the city in which they dwelt, and those thoughts, high and low alike, took shape on glass in what remained of the Onyx Hall.
Which began to unravel.
The generators had run dry, but the Engine did not stop; it drew in the substance of the palace around it. Rumbling filled the air, ominous and low beneath the noise of the machine. Dead Rick clutched at Eliza’s chair, terrified of disturbing her—but all at once fear overwhelmed that consideration and he seized her hands. His vision blurred, swam, reality falling apart around him. The palace was going; they had to get out!
But there was no escaping this final collapse. What door would they pass through, what floor would they walk upon? They hung in a shuddering maelstrom, everything breaking apart, the only solid thing their hands joined together in a desperate clasp. Something was growing, in the distance, right next to them, a radiant weave too bright to look upon, and they teetered upon its brink, an instant from falling.
The weave exploded.
Images, sounds, scents, textures; all burst outward in an unstoppable flood as time opened up. Five different cathedrals to St. Paul, spired and domed, in wood and in stone. Three Royal Exchanges. Whitehall Palace, vanishing in fire; docks growing like man-made lakes in the Isle of Dogs. A wall along the river’s north bank, open wharves, a walkway of stone. Buildings rose and fell and rose again, some too tall to believe, while sewers threaded through the ground below. The clop of horses’ hooves, the rattle of carriage wheels, the thunder of trains—and even stranger sounds, that had not been heard in London yet: music from no visible source, and a low growling in the air, as shapes like coaches without horses flooded the streets.