Real, but unimportant. The days when the Onyx Hall did not shake periodically were long enough ago that he couldn’t remember them. Even away from the Fleet entrance, these tremors were reasonably common. Some claimed they were caused by the trains, but Dead Rick doubted it; the trains ran many times each day, through Blackfriars Station to Mansion House and back, and the quakes were not that frequent.
Frequent enough, though, that he’d learned to ignore them. Dead Rick, jarred from his sleep, growled and lowered his head to his paws once more, waiting for the disturbance to end.
It didn’t.
A whine rose in his throat as the trembling went on. No, not trembling; this wasn’t the usual effect. The trains, or whatever caused the quakes, made everything rattle, as if something heavy were being dragged across a wooden floor. This—
Suddenly afraid, he rose to his feet. Then left them again, staggering and collapsing to the stone, as the palace twisted.
For one horrific moment, he had an impression of the Onyx Hall as a beast: an enormous creature, writhing in pain, trying to throw off its tormentor and failing. Nadrett sometimes flogged the people who angered him, making the rest of his followers watch. This was like being inside the faerie chained to the post, feeling the body around him flinch and cringe, recoiling at each fresh blow, trying and failing to avoid the next.
Only a moment; then the impression faded. But Dead Rick, tasting blood where he’d bitten his tongue, knew that nothing had improved. He’d just lost that moment of sympathy, the connection between his mind and whatever spirit might personify the palace.
What in Mab’s name is going on?
His three faerie lights were whirling in agitation—no, only two; the third had somehow escaped. Or been snuffed out? Dead Rick changed to man form, rushing it as much as he could, swallowing a yelp as his body protested the speed. Then he yanked aside the cloth covering the entrance and squirmed through the broken rock to the passage beyond.
He almost didn’t make it; the stones had shifted, narrowing the gap. The collar of his waistcoat caught on something and tore. Terror at the thought of being crushed by a further collapse propelled him forward, until he tumbled into the corridor. For once Dead Rick didn’t care if anyone saw him come from a supposedly closed passage; he was just grateful for the free air. When he looked up, though, he found himself alone.
Another shift, back to dog form; he’d needed his hands to climb, but now four feet would be more stable than two. The tremors hadn’t stopped: occasionally there would be a brief pause, an instant of calm, as if the Hall were fighting against whatever was hurting it, but always another wrench followed, all the worse for that fleeting respite.
Sounds echoed off the black stone from both directions. Shouts, screams, someone weeping; also noises that told him some of his fellow shape-changers had made the same calculation he had. Dead Rick picked a direction and ran.
In the first chamber he came to, all was chaos. A human child sat on the floor, naked and bawling, surrounded by panicking fae. Dead Rick saw a sprite he knew, and slipped through the press until he was close enough to shift back again and speak. “Pollikin—what the bleeding ’ell is going on?”
The sprite opened his mouth to answer. As he did so, however, one of those pauses came; and by now they’d happened enough times that everyone knew what it meant. The noise in the room dropped sharply, half the fae holding their breath—and the pause stretched on, and on, just long enough for the hopeful to think that maybe the trouble was over.
Then the palace bucked around them as if it were a tatterfoal trying to throw off its rider. Pollikin fell into Dead Rick, and they both went down, the skriker cracking his head against the stone.
But it didn’t hurt as much as it should have. As if the stone were not quite there.
“Blood and Bone,” Dead Rick whispered. His eyes met Pollikin’s, and he saw his terror echoed in the sprite’s eyes.
One shove got Pollikin off him; another brought Dead Rick to his feet. For one crazed moment, he wished Nadrett were there—simply because the master would know what to do, and would give Dead Rick some kind of direction, if only by running. But there was no one to lead him, and everyone else in the room looked even more panicked and lost than he was. Seizing on his one good thought—Nadrett running for his life—Dead Rick drew in a lungful of air and bellowed as loudly as he could, “Get out of ’ere, damn it!”
A few fae started moving before he’d even said the words, probably from sheer unfocused panic. Others stared at Dead Rick. He fought the urge to hit them. “The palace is breaking,” he said. By now he had something like silence, aside from the screaming mortal boy, but his voice was still loud, as if his heart were pounding each word out of his mouth. “Never mind if you don’t ’ave bread; right now, London’s safer than this place is. Get out of ’ere.” They were still staring at him, the stupid sods. The stone writhed around him again, and he could almost hear it howl in pain. “Go!”
As if the command had unlocked a door, the room sprang into motion. And sound; screams immediately drowned out the child’s. Dead Rick fought his way through to where he’d last seen the boy, and found him curled into a tight ball on the floor, bleeding where the stampeding feet had kicked him in passing. The skriker grabbed the boy around the middle and tucked him under one arm, using the other to shove people out of the way.
By now the motion had become a river, a torrent of bodies sweeping through the far door and into the warren beyond. Here and there a faerie battled the flow, and soon Dead Rick realized why; they were rushing to save what they owned, whether that was Goblin Market wealth or the few scraps they’d brought when they fled their homelands.
And then he remembered his own scraps, hidden behind the rockfall.
Instinct told him stop; he had to go back! But the moment his feet slowed, a satyr slammed into him from behind, making Dead Rick stagger and nearly drop the child. The boy wailed and clung to the skriker’s hip. Ash and Thorn, I can’t just abandon ’im.
He pressed his back to the wall, on the edge of the flood, and looked back desperately. The bread, he had to get the bread at least; if this wasn’t just a break, if this was the death convulsion of the entire Onyx Hall, then he would need bread to have any hope of making it out of London alive.
But the boy he carried was scarcely more than an infant. Even if he could walk on his own, he’d never survive this chaos, let alone find an exit. And Dead Rick wouldn’t care to wager on the likelihood that being mortal would save this child from whatever was about to happen to the faerie palace.
Nobody would help him. There were fae who believed in the value of mortal life—but none of them lived in the Goblin Market.
Well, maybe one does. And ’e’s a fucking idiot.
Dead Rick shifted the boy higher, cradling him against his chest, and rejoined the river’s flow.
There weren’t many directions it could go. The warren had many passages, but few exits. Two corridors led toward the rest of the Onyx Hall, which might or might not be safe. One chamber contained a hole where the fabric of the palace had frayed thin enough that the two worlds touched; it led into the great intercepting sewer, where he’d sent Irrith. And the last led up: a proper entrance, from the days when the Hall was built, giving into the cellar of a pub near Billingsgate Market.
Dead Rick and the boy were going up, whether they liked it or not.
Along with dozens of other fae. The pace slowed to a crawl as they drew near the entrance, bodies packing in tighter and tighter until Dead Rick was afraid the boy would be crushed. Forget the boy; I might be crushed. This wasn’t any orderly procession; fae were elbowing and shoving, using claws if they had them, and then Dead Rick heard a gunshot, deafening in the tight space. But if it was supposed to scare anyone into getting out of the way, it failed. Everyone was already as scared as they could get. And if the shot was aimed at a body… Dead Rick stepped on something soft and bony a little while later, and smelled blood, but didn’t look down to see its source.