A Star Shall Fall (33 page)

They shared something indeed, turning on him. “We physicians of learning are finished with that idea,” Abd ar-Rashid said, his accented reply interweaving with Andrews’s heated, “Only quacks and unlettered country doctors still follow that notion.” Then they both stopped, each eyeing the other like a pair of wary tomcats.

“Paracelsus,” Dr. Andrews said, as if testing something.

The genie nodded. “
Iatrochimie
—I do not know it in English—though little was the understanding of chemistry to guide him, and he went wrong often.”

Which was perfectly incomprehensible to Galen, but Andrews nodded grudgingly in return. Though the two embracing each other as brothers in medicine seemed unlikely, at least Andrews was no longer regarding the Arab as he might a precocious child. “A different perspective might be refreshing, I suppose,” the doctor allowed. “I would be interested to hear what you learned in Paris, sir. My correspondence with gentlemen there has fallen sadly by the wayside during my illness.”

Which left the genie, who had recovered a kind of blankness that Galen suspected meant his thoughts were not fit to be shared. “Lord Abd ar-Rashid,” Galen said, “if you would consent to work with Dr. Andrews, addressing a certain philosophical problem we face, then her Grace and I would be most grateful. We could offer you lodgings within the Onyx Hall, and the protection of mortal bread, should you need it.”

The genie thawed a bit at the offer of hospitality—or perhaps it was the philosophical problem. If he was half so curious as reports made him out to be, then that would be like the scent of game to a bloodhound. And he’d made some acquaintances among the fae of the Onyx Hall; if he didn’t already know of the comet, he would soon. Galen had judged, and Lune agreed, that there wasn’t much to be gained in trying to keep that secret from the foreigner. Much better to offer him honesty, and see if they could gain his help.

“O Prince,” Abd ar-Rashid said at last, “the lodgings and the bread I need not. But I appreciate the offer. If Dr. Andrews agrees, so, too, do I.”

It was the best he was likely to get. Galen could only hope this partnership would grow less thorny over time. Abd ar-Rashid might make a valuable addition to their scholarly circle. He had, after all, studied in foreign lands, where many strange things were known.

“Good,” Galen said, with heartier cheer than he felt. “Then I shall leave you to your conversation, gentlemen, and see about fetching you a salamander.”

The Onyx Hall, London: September 1, 1758

Irrith held the pole at arm’s length, walking with slow care to ensure the brass box swinging from the wood didn’t accidentally brush into her. Even with that precaution, she could feel the heat radiating from the metal. The salamander had been
most
unhappy when she slammed the lid shut on its head.

She had to bang the end of the pole into the door in lieu of a knock. Podder opened it, and shied back when he saw her burden. Edging past the nervous hob, Irrith came into Dr. Andrews’s laboratory.

The mortal man was waiting for her, along with Galen and a dark foreigner she’d seen around the Onyx Hall. He must be the Arabic genie Segraine had mentioned, Abdar-something. “Ah, my dear, very good,” the doctor said, waving her forward, toward a contraption Irrith recognized as being one of Niklas von das Ticken’s discarded Dragon-cages. It stood well above the bare floor, on a slab of stone, with a bucket of water waiting at each corner. “In here, if you would.”

She dropped the brass box inside and slid the pole free. “He’s been burning since I grabbed him,” she said by way of explanation. “Can’t touch the latch, but if you have something long enough to reach through . . .”

Their servant Podder fetched a thin-bladed knife and handed it to Galen, who approached the cage warily. After some fumbling, he succeeded in lifting the latch, and the salamander immediately poured free of its prison. The creature hissed and spat sparks when it discovered the new confinement of the cage.

“Take good care of that one,” Irrith said, leaning on her pole. “It was a right bastard to catch; I don’t fancy going after another.”

Dr. Andrews was peering through the bars, drawing closer and closer; he leapt back when a lick of flame almost singed his nose. Rubbing his hands with undisguised eagerness, he said, “I fear we may need several, my dear. The chances of our correctly extracting pure phlogiston on the first attempt are dubious at best.”

“Pure
what
?”

“Phlogiston.” Galen smiled at her. He looked happy, she realized; he truly enjoyed this sort of thing, poking and prodding at creatures to learn what made them go. Far more than he enjoyed politics, and she could understand that very well. “Fire—in its pure form.”

Irrith grinned back. “I can spare you the effort, then. Here’s your flodgy-thing.” She prodded the salamander with the end of her pole. It attacked the wood with astonishing speed; fast as she drew back, she didn’t save the tip from catching fire. “See?”

With two delicate fingers, Galen guided the burning end down into a bucket, where it died in a hiss of steam. “We know the nature of the salamander, Irrith; that’s why we asked you to catch one. But we need to separate the fire from the creature.”

“But the fire
is
the creature,” Irrith told him. Clearly he did
not
understand, whatever he claimed. “That’s what a salamander
is
: elemental fire.”

“That is an outdated theory, my dear,” Andrews said. She was beginning to grit her teeth every time he called her that. Irrith didn’t need her title, but she would have appreciated the simple courtesy of her name—especially coming from someone whose entire span, cradle to grave, was scarcely a flicker of her own. “Robert Boyle showed the insufficiency of the classical elements as a means of describing the world, so that now we think there are many more elements, though so far the definition of them has proved beyond us. Phlogiston may be one of them, but it is not elemental fire, and this creature cannot be composed of it.”

Irrith had forgotten the Arab, standing silent watch over this exchange; she jumped when he spoke. “The lady is correct. Created were my kind out of smokeless fire. This salamander is the same, perhaps.”

Andrews’s mouth took on a sour cast, and Irrith smirked at him. “See? Faeries are different.”

The mortals against the immortals. Galen was even standing next to Dr. Andrews, though the genie was a little distance away, half-aloof. In mollifying tones, the Prince said, “It doesn’t work that way, Irrith. The whole object of natural philosophy is to discover the laws of the world—laws that must and do apply in all places equally.”

“
The
world! But we’re in a different one, aren’t we? Or halfway between two, I suppose.” She gestured with the charred pole, skimming it over the cage in a shallow arc just for the pleasure of watching Dr. Andrews twitch apprehensively. “I bet you have a law saying time has to pass at the same speed everywhere, but faerie realms don’t obey that one, either.”

Galen hesitated, but Dr. Andrews did not. “Let me demonstrate something to you, my dear. I haven’t yet devised an experiment to investigate the illusions spoken of at Midsummer, but I can show you something simpler.”

He went to one corner of the room, where various prisms, lenses, mirrors, cards, and other items were piled on a table. “Mr. St. Clair, are you familiar with the basics of optics? Excellent. Then if you would aid me—I intend to conduct Newton’s
experimentum crucis
. That should be enough to begin with.”

Together the men set up a pair of prisms and two cards, one with a small hole pierced in it. “Now,” Andrews said, holding up a small box, “this contains a faerie light, which we may use as our source. In Newton’s time, there were two competing theories of light: one being that a prism creates its rainbow effect by ‘tinging’ the light as it passes through, and the other being that it merely bends the light, separating its different components by the different angles of their passage. That latter is the true theory, as I will now show. If we pass our source through the first prism—” Lifting the box’s hinged flap, he created a rainbow against the first card. Podder whispered to the faerie lights around the room, so that they dimmed and the rainbow appeared more clearly. “Thank you, Podder. Now, if we position this card so that the hole permits the violet light through, we may send that portion through a second prism, and when it strikes the second card—Mr. St. Clair, if you would—”

Galen moved the pieces into position. A moment later, the card fluttered from his hand, whispering to a halt on the stone.

But not before everyone had seen a second, stranger rainbow cast across its white face.

In the near darkness, Dr. Andrews stuttered, “I—it should have—”

“Been violet.” The genie’s accented voice lent a touch of strangeness to an already strange scene. “As in Newton’s essay ‘Of Colours.’ But he used sunlight.”

Not a faerie light. Irrith heard a creak: Andrews collapsing into a chair, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Podder hastily brightened the room again, revealing the doctor white as a sheet, and hardly breathing.

“Our world is different,” Irrith said, and thought it very virtuous of herself that she let only a little of her smugness show through.

The urge to gloat faded, however, when she saw Galen. He was still on his feet, but he looked almost as appalled as Dr. Andrews, as if someone had come along and told him Heaven was empty, with no one watching over him. “What?” Irrith said, uncertain now. “Isn’t this good? You have what you were after.”

Galen’s head moved side to side, blindly; it might have been stirred by the wind. “No. It isn’t good. Because if nature as we understand it does not operate the same here . . .”

Dr. Andrews’s whisper would have been inaudible in a less-silent room. “Then nothing we know is of any use.”

“I do not think so.”

That came from the genie. Abd ar-Rashid, that was his name. He looked from Andrews to Galen to Irrith, then went on in a more judicious manner. “It is only my idea, uncertain in truth. But I am wondering, for some time . . .” His sharp-tipped fingers played against each other, a nervous gesture that made him seem much more familiar than foreign. “That which is right in your world, appears to be wrong in ours. Perhaps that which is wrong in your world becomes right, in places such as this.”

“Earth, water, air, and fire,” Irrith said. She pursed her lips in doubt. “For salamanders and sylphs and the like, maybe—but we aren’t all elemental creatures.”

“No. But mixtures of those four, perhaps, as not true of mortal substances.”

Andrews was still white and unreassured. “But there have been many wrong ideas—more wrong ideas than right. How are we to know which ones apply?”

Galen exhaled sharply; it might have been a laugh. Certainly a faint, mad light was growing in his eyes. “Even as Boyle did, and Newton, and all the others. We experiment. At great speed, I should think; though once the Dragon is disposed of, we’ll have greater leisure to explore the laws of faerie science.”

Those two words formed such an incongruous pair that Irrith stifled her own laugh. She didn’t want to mock the Prince. On the other hand, she knew enough of what he meant by experimentation to doubt whether it would work; surely her world and the people who inhabited were not some kind of clockwork device, predictable once one found the gears. But he seemed to think it worth pursuing, and he knew enough of faerie things that she trusted he would get something of use out of it.

Abd ar-Rashid said, “Speaks alchemy of four elements, and three principles, and such. These ideas from Arabia, and I know something of them; perhaps they are of some use here.”

It brought Andrews upright in his chair, and then onto his feet once more. “Yes. It failed the mortals who tried it, but it should be easy enough to determine whether we find different results in this place.” The hand-rubbing was back, this time with blazing eagerness that made him look almost healthy for a moment. “Come, gentlemen. Mr. St. Clair is right. We haven’t a moment to waste.”

The Onyx Hall, London: September 15, 1758

Lune came to Galen in his own chambers—a startling reversal of their usual habit. Once they were settled in the parlor, she dismissed Edward Thorne and her own attendants, with Sir Peregrin to guard the door and make certain no one listened in.

“The Delphic tripod has been delivered to the Greeks,” she said, without preamble. “We have their agreement, and their aid. In three days’ time, we shall take action to hide this island from the comet. The effect will not be complete until a fortnight has passed; Savennis has advised Irrith that it would be more effective to link it to the waning of the moon, rather than the new moon itself. But when it is done, we should—I hope—have some protection.”

Galen’s muscles kept drawing themselves tight, despite efforts to release them. “For how long?”

The Queen shook her silver head. “No one can say for sure. This has never been done before.”

She didn’t ask what progress he made, with Dr. Andrews and his scholarly coterie. Their reports to her were quite thorough. So far it was more theory than experiment, but they had done enough to confirm the genie’s suggestion, that the old model of matter, discredited for the natural world, was yet applicable to the supernatural. It felt like a step backward: symbolic laws in place of mechanical ones, effects governed more by poetry than physics. The Royal Society would weep if it knew. So long as their circle could manipulate it to their benefit, though, Galen did not care what basis faerie science operated on.

Lune broke his distracted reverie. “There is one other change you should be aware of.”

Something in her tone warned him. Gut tightening again, Galen waited for her to go on.

“I will not be there with you.”

It struck like a blow. “At Greenwich?” She nodded. “But—why?”

By way of answer, she handed him a folded piece of paper, that he soon recognized as one of the Onyx Hall’s news-sheets.
The Ash and Thorn
, of course, and when he unfolded it he saw immediately what provoked her declaration. The article was unsigned, but it might as well have borne the identification
A Sanist.