Passengers were flooding off the train, parting around their little group as if it were nothing more than a rock in the stream, of no interest to the water flowing by. Porters farther down were unloading the trunks and smaller valises, making room for the new baggage. Her trunk would make it onto the train, and so might Frederic Myers—but she would not.
It had been foolish to think that she might escape.
Awkwardly, hampered by the fashionably narrow skirt of her dress, Louisa knelt on the filthy platform. Another eternity of servitude… but it was worth it, to see Frederic safe. “I will serve you faithfully. Master.”
“Good—but not good enough,” Nadrett said, and snapped his fingers, gesturing for the other fae to move along. Grabbing her by the arm and hauling her to her feet, he said, “You’ll ’ave company before we’re done today.”
West Ham, London: August 26, 1884
Dead Rick could scarcely bring himself to look at either of his companions. He felt like he was seeing two of each, and not because of the absinthe; those effects had only lasted for a day or so. No, he saw Eliza and Owen with two sets of memories: his own, and those of Nadrett’s dog.
It wasn’t honest to divide himself like that, and he knew it. However much he wished to deny it, the last seven years were as much a part of him as the ages that went before—ages his mind was still sorting into order, below the level of his awareness. And losing his memories hadn’t completely changed who he was; some things went beyond simple recollection, into his nature as a faerie. But he had no better way to describe the strange disconnection he felt when he looked around, seeing two meanings to a single thing. Owen was both the mute, broken shell he’d found cowering in the Academy library, and the good-natured boy who’d had such hopes for bettering his family’s condition. Eliza was both the furious young woman who tried to beat him senseless, and the fierce girl who’d protected him against those tormenting lads.
Two of most things; three of them. Because what those two had become, in the aftermath of Owen’s healing, were different yet again.
He wanted so badly to have back the warmth they’d shared—a warmth that, thanks to the absinthe, he remembered as if it were just a few days ago. Owen had forgotten it, though, and as far as Eliza was concerned, it had long since died and been left to rot. At this point they operated in a state of uneasy truce; Dead Rick didn’t dare hope for more.
Fed on Eliza’s bread, he took the surface path to West Ham, following the road as its name changed from Aldgate to Whitechapel to Mile End to Bow. “The place makes sense,” he said to break the silence, as the buildings around them began to thin. “The big sewer runs right from the Goblin Market to the pumping station out ’ere, don’t it? Easy road for Nadrett’s men.” He didn’t like to think who he might have met, if he’d had to go by the road below.
“Yes,” Eliza said, but the conversation died there.
The strange mixing of his memories disoriented him, with its insistence on remembering Londons that were centuries gone. Tower Hamlets, they called this area; once it had been an area of hamlets, little villages scattered like seeds among fields that fed the City. Now all the villages had run together like stains, and the weeds of industry had taken root, choking the green grass with brick and soot.
As if she, too, could not bear the silence between them, Eliza said abruptly, “When this is done, perhaps I’ll get myself a factory job. It can be good work, it can—better than being in service.”
Dead Rick blinked. With his mind so filled by the past, it was hard to see the present, much less the future; but to Eliza, this must look very different. She saw not destruction, but opportunity. Which of them was right? Were either of them? Mortals had been arguing this very point amongst themselves for years. But it made him remember something Irrith said once, about why Lune ruled with a Prince at her side. Because they helped her see what she otherwise could not.
None of it was important, not right now—and yet, he needed the distraction, because if he let himself think about Nadrett he wouldn’t be here, walking calmly down the street with Eliza and Owen; he would have long since taken to his heels, intent on nothing more than finding his former master and tearing out the bastard’s throat. Which would have gotten him killed, and he knew it—assuming he could even find Nadrett—but the feral rage pumping through his veins with every beat of his heart didn’t care. It had waited too long already for its satisfaction.
The road sharpened its gentle bend northward. In the distance to the right, Dead Rick could see the ornate exterior of the pumping station, which brought all the filth up to a level where it could be vented into the river, safely downstream of the city. “Recognize anything?” he asked Owen.
The boy shook his head. He still communicated more in gestures than in words when he could, but sometimes Dead Rick thought that born of a similar confusion to the one in his own mind: whatever had been taken from him by Chrennois’s cameras, and given back by the baptism, Owen was still sorting it into order. And pieces of it were clearly missing.
Dead Rick frowned at the pumping station. “If they been coming up out of the sewers, I can try to find a scent. But it ain’t going to be Nadrett crawling up out of the muck, and I don’t know who it will be.”
“Might there be guards?” Eliza asked. Dead Rick nodded. “Then we’ll try the town first.”
She guided her companions past the depot for the Great Eastern Railway and into West Ham itself, working her way along Stephens Road toward Plaistow, with Dead Rick in dog form sniffing everything they passed, and Owen shaking his head. As sites for faerie palaces went, this one was frankly terrible: a grim industrial suburb, with nothing much to recommend it. Would Nadrett really come here? Eliza held an aetheric versorium like the one Dead Rick had used to find the Aldersgate entrance, but its needle only pointed at the skriker, with never a twitch in another direction.
Owen said the area smelled right, though—coal and marsh air and the stench of a leatherworks—and so they went on, up and down each near-lifeless street, watching in all directions for danger. At the corner of Liddington Road, the boy stopped with a whimper.
The building his eyes had fixed upon was unremarkable, a squat, hulking mass of mud-yellow London brick. Its walls were as uninviting as the Bank of England’s; only a thin line of windows ran along the upper reaches, leaving the rest of the surface featureless and blind. A warehouse, perhaps, or a factory, with nothing obviously faerie about it.
They pulled back swiftly, of course, out of sight of the building. Dead Rick held out a hand, and Eliza gave him the versorium; angle it how he might, the needle did not point at the building. Owen insisted this was the place, though.
“What in Mab’s name is ’e doing in there?” Dead Rick muttered. Surely if it were a new faerie realm, the versorium would sense it.
Eliza risked another glance around the corner, though Owen twitched as if to pull her back. “I don’t see anyone,” she said. This was not a busy part of town; at the moment, they were the only ones on the street. “But there could be any number of people inside.”
“In cages,” Owen said, in a voice made tight with fear.
She stroked his shoulder, calming him. “We’ll get them out. We just have to figure out how.”
Not easily, that much was certain. Eliza was the safest of them for scouting; with her bonnet pulled forward, she made a circuit of the building’s perimeter, up Liddington Road and down the nameless alley on the other side. What she reported back cemented Dead Rick’s unease. There were only three entrances into the building, two of them narrow, the third a set of double doors that looked to be securely barred from within. If Hodge could bribe Charcoal Eddie or somebody else capable of flying to look through the windows beneath the roof’s edge, they might be able to get some sense of what was inside, but Dead Rick wouldn’t care to bet on it. Which meant whatever forces Hodge sent would be going in blind.