A Star Shall Fall (11 page)

She figured out for herself that one of the places on that list was nowhere near the wall.

Most people wouldn’t have noticed. The Onyx Hall was a rabbit warren, tangled threads with even less rhyme or reason than the streets above; moreover, the warped reflection from above to below meant the bad patches weren’t at the edges of the palace, but rather snaked tortuously through its middle. But there was an inconsistency in the centaur’s list, and it wedged itself into a corner of Irrith’s mind like a bit of grit in her shoe, chafing her. And when she realized what was bothering her—why, then there was nothing to do but seek out the cause.

Not Ktistes. He would only lie again. Irrith went to the source.

The passage toward the supposed bad patch ran behind the bathing chambers, where salamanders curled beneath great copper boilers of water that could be tipped into the pools. The entrance to the passage was barred by two waist-height bronze pillars supporting a rowan-wood beam. It was no real barrier; rowan might not like the fae, but a simple branch could hardly stop anyone continuing on. The point was to warn the idle traveler that she should go no farther.

Irrith was not an idle traveler. She was bored beyond the telling of it: the bribe Tom Toggin had given her to bring the delivery to London was all but spent, leaving her with no bread to go safely above, and little to amuse her down here. Investigation at least promised a bit of entertainment. She ducked under the beam, and continued down the passage.

The blackness closed in around her, broken only by the faerie light she’d brought along, and carried doubt with it. Maybe this
was
a bad patch. Maybe she was about to find that out the hard way.

Upon that thought, disorientation struck her, and Irrith staggered. When she straightened, she found herself staring at the rowan-wood barrier, and the ordinary corridor beyond.

Ktistes had warned her of this. One of the first effects of the fraying was that fae might enter one part of the Onyx Hall and end up in another one entirely, though the centaur feared worse might happen in time. This, clearly, was what he meant.

Or perhaps it was just meant to seem that way.

Some of the pucks in the Vale adored this charm, disorienting a traveler so that he wandered into a stream or a bull’s enclosure. But there were ways around such tricks—if it was indeed a trick.

Irrith squared her shoulders and began walking backward, searching for the floor with her toes, one careful step at a time.

She felt the unease—the vertigo—but this time it was like rain, slipping off an oilcloth cloak. Irrith grinned in satisfaction.
Caught you.

Then the floor gave way beneath her and she fell.

Her chin smacked against the lip of the hole and she tasted blood, but she managed to stop her fall, fingers straining along the edge of the black stone. Irrith waited until her head cleared, then dragged herself painfully upward until she could fling a leg onto the floor and roll to safety.

She lay panting for a moment, then spat out the blood and peered over the edge. The bottom of the pit was well-padded with cushions.
Definitely the Queen’s work. Most of the people who keep secrets in this place would fill it with spikes instead.

The pit crossed the corridor from one side to the other, but it wasn’t so wide that an agile sprite couldn’t leap it. Irrith took the precaution of a silencing charm before she made her attempt, and tucked into a tidy somersault on the other side. Two obstacles cleared, and she was careful as she went onward, lest she run headlong into a third. But the remainder of the passage was clear, and then it turned a corner, into a short, pillared vault with old-fashioned round arches, the antechamber to a larger, well-lit room beyond. From that room came an angry voice.

“Dieser verdammten Federantrieb brechen andauernd!”

The words were abrupt and loud enough that Irrith almost jumped from her skin, before she heard them properly. Once she did, she blinked—for that was certainly not English.

Nor was the second voice that answered him.
“Aber natürlich! Ich
sage
dir doch, dass er soviel Zugkraft nicht aushalten werden.”

The tone was bickering, and resigned; the words weren’t directed at her. Concealing herself behind a pillar, Irrith peeked into the chamber Ktistes and the Queen did not want her to find.

Two fae grumbled over a pair of worktables strewn with unfamiliar oddments and tools. The tables would scarcely have been knee-height to a human, and even for Irrith they were low, but they perfectly suited the two, who were hob-size and thick with muscle. The implements they held were incongruously delicate in their blunt-knuckled hands, and both, she saw, had tied their long beards out of the way, the better to see the tiny things they peered at.

What
were
they working on? Irrith risked a longer look. The faerie lights above the tables reflected off minute bits of metal, too small to identify at this distance. But she noticed something odd: a quiet, regular rattle, underlying the humming of the blond-bearded faerie.

The chamber, she realized, was filled with clocks.

One perched atop a bracket on the wall behind the strangers. Two pendulum clocks stood in opposite corners, and a very small piece teetered on the edge of a table, a breath away from falling. A pocket-watch on the floor below it seemed to have fallen already.

Tom Toggin had brought clocks to the Vale. And Irrith had heard rumors, about the crazy German dwarves that came to England with the new German king, and now made clocks and watches for the Queen.

But what were they doing, hidden away down here?

She was still trying to figure that out when every clock in the room began to chime the hour. It wasn’t just the ones she could see; from the sound of it, the entire wall to both sides of the entrance, invisible from her concealment behind the pillar, was covered in clocks. And the two dwarves literally dropped the pieces they were working on in order to hurry to a door on the other side of the chamber.

Its face held what looked like sundial, though what use one could be in the sunless realm of the Onyx Hall, Irrith didn’t know. Its blade spun without warning, making her twitch; then the red-bearded dwarf seized hold of it, and two things happened at once: first, the bronze-bound door creaked open, and second, a sound too deep to hear shook the very marrow of Irrith’s bones.

A sound like the single
tick
of the Earth’s own clock.

Her teeth ached with the force of it, and her skull rang like a drum. Irrith had heard many tremendous sounds in her life, up to and including the roar of the Dragon itself, but she’d never encountered anything like this—as if she’d just heard one of the numberless moments of her immortal life tick away.

She was still standing there, jaw hanging slack, when the door finished opening and a puck stepped out and saw her.

“Hey, you! What do you think you’re doing here?”

The looks on the two dwarves’ faces would have been comical, if only she could have stayed to appreciate them. But instinct set in, as if she were running wild in the forests of Berkshire, and Irrith bolted.

She didn’t get very far. Three strides took her to the far end of the pillared vault, and then she ran full-force into something that felt remarkably like an invisible wall.

A voice came through the ensuing fog, but she couldn’t have said whether it spoke German or English. By the time she had her senses back, she was surrounded: the two dwarves and the puck stood over her, where she had collapsed on the floor. All three wore identical expressions of suspicion.

The red dwarf demanded, “Vy vere you spying on us?”

Resisting the urge to mock his thick German accent—she was, after all, caught in their trap—Irrith said, “I wasn’t spying.”

“Vat do you call it ven you hide and vatch vat others are doing?”

Could he have chosen a question with more
W
s in it? Irrith stifled a laugh. Her face felt too bruised for laughing, anyway. “I call it curiosity.”

The third faerie scowled. He, at least, was English: a lubberkin, though surprisingly warlike. “Curiosity. Right. You just happened to slip past the defenses because you were curious.”

Did he expect those defenses would make her
less
curious? They just made it obvious there was something to find. The red-bearded dwarf was much more menacing. He cracked his knuckles and said, “Ve vill dispose of her.”

“Now see here,” Irrith said hastily, climbing to her feet and mustering as much dignity as she could manage, so soon after knocking herself silly. “I’m a lady knight of the Onyx Court.”

“So?” the dwarf said, unimpressed.

The lubberkin drew the blond one aside and bent to mutter in his ear. Irrith, losing a staring match with the other dwarf, could still overhear the whisper. “She might be a Sanist. Watch her; I’ll go inform the Queen.”

A Sanist?
Irrith didn’t ask. The puck searched her for weapons and found none, then said, “I’ll be back soon to deal with you. Don’t try anything foolish.” Then he walked out through the same pillars that had stopped Irrith before, leaving her with two German dwarves and a suspicion that maybe she should have asked Ktistes after all.

“Interesting,” Lune said, one slender fingertip tapping against her cheek.

She said nothing more, but Galen relaxed. Family affairs had kept him from coming below for several days after his encounter with Dr. Andrews, and in the interval he’d had more than enough time to question his notion of working directly with the man. If Lune agreed, though . . .

“The decision is in your hands,” she said. “If you believe it would be useful to bring this man into the Onyx Court, that is within your prerogative as Prince.”

Which he knew, full well. Lune had explained it when she chose him for the position. He had authority over all matters involving the interaction between mortals and fae, including the decision to bring them below. This was the first time, however, that Galen had attempted to exercise that prerogative.

The prospect made him nervous in the extreme. There were ways to repair the mistake if someone chose poorly—but far better, of course, not to err in the first place. The watchful gaze of Lune’s Lord Keeper, Valentin Aspell, made him dreadfully aware of that. “I won’t do it yet,” Galen said, and made himself stop twisting his fingers. “I don’t know the man well enough—and it’s worth exploring his knowledge further, to be sure it’s worth the effort. But I’ll inform you before I reveal anything to him.”

One of Lune’s gentleman ushers entered the privy chamber, then, and bowed deeply. “Madam, the lubberkin Cuddy is here, but will not tell me his business. He insists it is worthy of your attention.”

The usher had doubt writ large on his feathered face, but Lune and Galen both straightened. Cuddy was out already? A quick count in his head told Galen that the timing was right; it had been eleven days, though just barely. And anything he had to tell them so soon after his emergence was certainly worthy of the Queen’s time.

Lune gestured Aspell out. “We will hear Cuddy alone, Lord Valentin. Make certain we aren’t disturbed for anything less than the Dragon itself.”

The serpentine lord bowed himself out. A moment later, Cuddy entered, and the usher closed the door behind him. “Majesty,” the lubberkin said, going to one knee, “there was a spy, outside the dwarves’ workshop, who observed me coming out. I fear the Sanists have found the room at last.”

Galen’s gut tightened. “Who is the spy?”

The lubberkin shook his head. “I don’t know her name. I could describe her—”

“No need,” Lune said. “We will go see her ourselves. Is she secure?”

Cuddy leapt to open the door for her, but took care to answer before he turned the handle. “The brothers are watching her, in the pillar trap. I don’t know how she made it past the others; I came immediately to you, madam.”

Then they were out into the more public space of the presence chamber, where some of the more favored courtiers congregated in idleness. All surged to their feet as the usher announced, “The Queen, and the Prince of the Stone!” A wave of bows and curtsies eddied around them as they passed, and curious whispers rose in their wake.

They went by a secret path, one of many that honeycombed the Onyx Hall, until they reached the entrance to the main passage. Cuddy moved the rowan-wood barrier aside, and Lune laid a palm upon the stone of the floor. The defenses, recognizing her touch, let them pass unhindered.

Two stocky figures waited at the edge of the pillar-trap, and one slender one that leapt to her feet as they approached. Galen recognized her instantly, and was surprised at himself; there were many fae in the Onyx Hall, and he’d seen her only twice. But Irrith had made a vivid impression—though that impression consisted mostly of mud.

“Your Grace!” she exclaimed, and dropped back down.

Galen winced. Her knees must have struck the floor hard, though she didn’t make a sound. Lune said, in a tone both startled and wary, “Irrith? Sun and Moon—what are you doing here?”

“Proving that Ktistes is a bad liar,” the sprite said. Then, belatedly noticing her own impudence, she added, “Madam.”

“The centaur?” Galen shook his head in confusion. “What do you mean, he’s a liar?”

She hesitated, one hand going to the stone as if to push herself upright, before remembering no one had given her permission to rise. “He told me this was a bad patch. Because of the wall. But it isn’t near the wall at all, is it? I think we’re somewhere around Fish Street. My lord.”

Her accuracy startled Galen. Few fae attempted to trace the connections to London above, beyond the entrances. Only he and Lune, bound into the sovereignty of the Onyx Hall, understood them instinctively.

“The way was barred with rowan wood,” Lune said. Since that first exclamation, the emotions had drained out of her voice, leaving it cool and unreadable. “Even if you believed the reason to be false, you knew you were forbidden to pass. And if that had not made it clear, the other defenses must have. Yet you continued on. Why?”