Humming an old lullaby beneath her breath, Mrs. Darragh bent over her son and kissed his forehead. “Sleep, my boy,” she whispered. “Sleep.”
The Galenic Academy, Onyx Halclass="underline" August 17, 1884
Yvoir’s workshop stank of chemicals. Dead Rick made the mistake of trying to smell them apart, and sneezed four times in quick succession. The French faerie smiled at him. “Be glad you aren’t mortal. I’m fairly certain the compounds they use have killed a number of photographers.”
“And yours are safer, are they?”
He shrugged. “To mortals, perhaps not. But we are not so easily killed, are we? A moment, please.” Yvoir returned his attention to the bowl in front of him, and the strainer balanced on its rim. The latter held a stone-green blob that jiggled as the faerie lifted it and scraped viscous material away from its underside.
Fascinated despite himself, Dead Rick asked, “What is that?”
“Cockatrice egg.” Yvoir carelessly dumped the yolk into a bucket on the floor. “Almost any sort of egg should work, but I find the albumen of a cockatrice egg is more stable, if slower to develop the image.”
Dead Rick came closer, peering into the bowl, which proved to hold a large quantity of clear, viscous sludge. “This is for photographs, then.”
Yvoir nodded and tossed the strainer into a basin of water, then wiped his hands clean on a towel. “Not like yours, though. Have a seat, and I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.”
The skriker’s heart beat more quickly at the words. The message hadn’t said anything about Yvoir’s progress, just that the scholar wanted to talk to him. He hadn’t quite dared let himself hope that the news would be good. Too excited to relax, he perched on the edge of the chair and said, “Can you put them back?”
“This is what I called you for, is it not? I have a sense now of what Chrennois did.” Yvoir steepled his fingers and glanced around his workshop. The walls were covered in more photographs than Dead Rick could count, of all different kinds; some had the silver gloss of daguerreotypes, while others glowed a warm amber, or showed the delicate colors of hand-tinting. Mostly they showed people—fae were always fascinated by people—but a few depicted landscapes, sometimes from as far away as Egypt or China.
His accent thickened by distraction, Yvoir said, “They are not quite photographs, not in the way I have created. Not images. You could not put them up on the wall like these. Chrennois was finding a way to capture the… essence of things.”
The essence of Dead Rick’s memories. A growl rose in his throat at the thought, but he swallowed it down.
Yvoir searched through a pile on the table by his left arm and produced one of the thin glass plates. Dead Rick had spent untold hours staring at them, after the failed attempt on Aldersgate. The other faerie was right; they didn’t show images like a photograph. Still, he thought he could see something swimming in their depths—as if, should he stare long enough, he could make out the secrets they held. He’d gone half blind trying.
“This,” Yvoir said, tapping the glass—Dead Rick held his breath in apprehension—“is like a daguerreotype. It is on glass instead of copper, but I believe it was coated in moon-silver and then in some fashion sensitized before being exposed, though I do not know how. Willow smoke, perhaps. Are you familiar with the alchemical connections of willow and the moon?”
Dead Rick waved off what sounded like an impending lecture. “Just get to the bit that’ll ’elp me.”
The Frenchman blinked as if not at all clear why anyone would want to skip the details, but he obeyed. “The coating on the plate was made reactive to things less visible than light—thoughts, passions, memories. Which is very intriguing—and so is this.” His stained fingernail traced a nearly imperceptible line down the center of the rectangular plate, which Dead Rick had noticed before. “It seems he took two photographs at once.”
“Two?” Dead Rick frowned. “What in ’ell would ’e want with two?”
Yvoir smiled, like a conjurer about to reveal his completed trick. “Have you ever seen a stereograph?”
Dead Rick shook his head.
The other faerie bounded to his feet and went to the nearest wall, hand floating across the assortment of pictures. “It should be… ah, yes. Here.” He lifted a frame down, then rummaged in a cabinet until he found a small wooden contraption with a clamp at one end. After a bit of fumbling, he got the picture out of its frame and put it in the clamp, then handed the whole to Dead Rick. “Look through the lenses.”
He glanced at the picture before doing so, and saw it was a pair of identical images, showing some tremendous chasm in the wilderness, probably on the American frontier. When he put his eyes to the lenses, though, the two images blended into one—and came to life. He pulled back with a stifled yelp, and found Yvoir grinning at him; grinding his teeth, Dead Rick looked again.
Nothing moved; it wasn’t “life” in that sense. But he felt as if he were standing where the photographer had been, seeing not a flat image, but depth. “’Ow in Mab’s name…”
“It mimics the way your eyes work,” Yvoir said. “You see a slightly different image with each eye, so if the photographer takes two images the correct distance apart, and you view the prints the same way, it creates the effect of proper vision. Don’t you see? It’s like an illusion that mortals have learned to make for themselves!”
The excitement in his voice made Dead Rick sour. Putting down the stereograph, he said, “It weren’t no illusion they did to me.”
Yvoir sobered quickly. “No, of course not. But the point is that the stereoscopic image has depth, in a way that a flat photograph does not. I suspect this is the key to your memories being taken from you. If we were to use Chrennois’s techniques, but with only one lens, we would make only a copy—of a memory, or a thought; perhaps even a soul.” He looked thoughtful. “Or perhaps not. Souls are more complicated. The stereoscopic camera may be a necessity for that. But had Nadrett wished only to copy your memories, he could have done so, I think.”
It lent credence to the idea that Nadrett had wanted to destroy them completely. Or at least a specific one. “You know about this passage to Faerie business?” Dead Rick asked. Yvoir nodded. “’Ow could that fit in with this?”
The thoughtful look deepened to a frown. “I do not know. Stereography creates depth; I could imagine that being useful if one wishes to make a path that leads somewhere else. But photographs to make a path?”
“Photographs of ghosts and souls,” Dead Rick reminded him.
Yvoir nodded acknowledgment of his point. “If I were to do this, I would be photographing faerie minds, not mortals. Gather different notions of Faerie, perhaps—copies only—from those with clear memories of it, and then set them side by side. It would create something that is a combination of the two, and more than a flat image. But I still do not see how that makes a path through to Faerie, even with depth.”
Neither did Dead Rick. Maybe Hodge was right, and the answers lay in his own glass plates. “Well, put my memories back in my ’ead, and I’ll tell you if the answer’s in there somewhere.”
The faerie put up an apologetic hand. “I cannot—not yet.”
The skriker’s mood was an unstable thing these days, swinging easily from hope to rage. He almost put his fist into Yvoir’s face. “What do you mean, you can’t? Why call me ’ere, then? All this bloody lecturing about things what don’t matter, but when it comes to the only thing that does, you’re bloody useless!”
He knew he was angry; he didn’t realize how much until Yvoir flinched back. “Soit patient s’il te plaît! I mean, I know how to do it—I believe so, at least—but it cannot be done yet. You must be patient.”