With Fate Conspire Read online

  Damn near every last one of them, mortal and faerie alike, was gathered about the machine, arguing in several different languages at once. Lady Feidelm and Wrain; a Chinese faerie named Ch’ien Mu, a Swedish mathematician named Ulrik Segerstam; Niklas von das Ticken had even hauled his brother Wilhas away from sitting over the Calendar Room like an anxious mother hen. The tallest of the fae, a dark-skinned genie, noticed Hodge first and gave him a respectful bow. “Lord Benjamin. Are you all right?”

  Hodge had tried to tell Abd ar-Rashid the bows and titles and so on weren’t necessary. What few courtiers he had left spent their time idling in one of the palace’s remaining gardens and ignoring his commands. The genie, as the Academy’s Scholarch or senior Master, had more authority and did more of actual use than Hodge himself. But Abd ar-Rashid seemed to believe the courtesies were all the more important in these degenerate times, and acted accordingly.

  The concern in his deep-set eyes made Hodge reach up to touch his own face. His fingers came away spotted with blood. There were two scratches on his cheek: mementos of that black dog leaping on him. Hodge considered saying as much, but remembered fae and mortals all around them; he might not care about courtesies, but admitting that one of his own nominal subjects had knocked him down in Blackfriars was a bit much. “Cut myself shaving,” Hodge said blandly, and gestured at the loom. “You lot look excited. Tell me you ’ave good news.”

  “We do. Or rather, Ch’ien Mu does.” Abd ar-Rashid waved the Chinese faerie forward.

  When Ch’ien Mu first came to the Onyx Hall, the embroidered silks he wore had been been splendid things, with dragons coiling sinuously about his shoulders and arms; but unless one was a philosopher, constantly in the library, the Galenic Academy was not a good place for clothes. The silks were much mended, and the dragons glared morosely at the barriers of thread that blocked their movement.

  They still distracted Hodge terribly, but Ch’ien Mu’s mind was clearly on other matters. He shuffled a few steps closer and bowed, but instead of folding his hands inside his sleeves—his customary posture while lecturing—he literally rubbed them together with excitement as he spoke. “The threads no more break! It is, as I suspect, a thing of configuration—though my assumption that the helical is the most stable proves very wrong; we try both solar and lunar configurations, but—”

  “Master Ch’ien Mu.” Hodge pinched the bridge of his nose, knowing the faerie would go on for half an hour if not stopped. “I knows ’ow to read, and that’s about where it ends. Just tell me what you’ve got.”

  This seemed to be a more difficult request than he’d thought. The faerie opened and closed his mouth a few times, as if trying and failing to find words for what was in his head. Hodge doubted it was a problem with his English; more likely the fellow was having trouble bringing his thoughts down from the rarefied heights of theory into simple reality. It was a trouble many of the Academy Masters shared. In the end, the Master gave up and gestured at Niklas.

  The red-bearded dwarf grinned and spun a small wheel. The small aetheric engine at his feet hummed to life; then he and Ch’ien Mu together made incomprehensible adjustments to a series of pipes and vessels that sat at the base of the loom. Those, Hodge recognized; they were a sort of alchemical retort, used to distill purified forms of the faerie elements, fire and water and earth and air. After a moment, shimmering threads of something that was not quite light began to lace themselves through the loom, forming what Hodge, with his extremely limited knowledge of weaving, knew was the warp: the lengthwise threads that formed the base of fabric.

  Except what this loom wove was not precisely fabric. Ch’ien Mu fed one end of a linked chain of crystal plaques into something on the side of the loom, and then Niklas slammed a lever down with a heavy thunk. Powered by the aetheric engine, the loom sprang into motion.

  Warp threads rose and fell, and the shuttle holding the weft flew back and forth between them. There was a general stampede to the far side of the loom, which Hodge joined, and there he witnessed a miracle.

  Growing in the air on the other side of the machine was a glamour. Four isolated bits of gold—golden fur—four paws, it was, and as the legs lengthened above them Hodge suspected it was a lion. He’d seen more impressive illusions before; the fae could do tremendous things when they put their minds to it. But there was no mind involved here: the loom was doing the work. Jacquard had invented something like this years ago, to weave brocaded fabrics more rapidly and accurately than a human weaver could hope to achieve. Ch’ien Mu and the others had found a way to do it with a glamour.

  “Bloody ’ell,” Hodge whispered, and grabbed hold of Abd ar-Rashid before he could fall over.

  Some of it was just the general infirmity that plagued him nowadays. The Onyx Hall drew on his strength to survive the iron threat driving its breakdown, and it was always worse after he’d gone above—necessary departures, for the sake of his mortal sanity, though he kept them as infrequent as he dared. But the rest of his sudden weakness …

  It was blinding, delirious hope.

  If they could weave the elements of faerie reality into whatever shape they described with those crystal plaques, then they could weave new material for the Onyx Hall.

  The genie supported him with one arm under his shoulders, and called for someone to bring a chair. Hodge allowed himself to be lowered into it, too dazed to care about the indignity. Never mind the wings and automata and all the rest; this had been the chiefest project of the Galenic Academy since its founding more than a hundred years ago. Find some way of mending the Onyx Hall. Stop, or better yet undo, the decay that had been going on since the beginning of the eighteenth century.

  Hodge had known, even before he became Prince, that it wasn’t likely to happen. The creation of the palace had been a legendary work, carried out ages before, by a faerie woman and a mortal man. But they were long dead, and so were the powers that had helped them: Gog and Magog, the giants of London, murdered. Father Thames, silenced by iron. Hodge couldn’t hope to equal their deeds. He’d devoted his time and energy to slowing the disintegration of the Hall, holding together what remained of London’s faerie court, and preparing for the exodus he knew must inevitably come.

  An exodus they might—perhaps—be able to avoid after all.

  Someone pressed a cup into his hand, and he drank instinctively. Mead, sweet and fortifying, slid down his throat. Then Master Wrain was there, showing a distress Hodge didn’t understand at all. “My lord—”

  If he was being formal, then something really had gone wrong. “What?”

  With deep reluctance, the sprite said, “It doesn’t last.”

  Hodge’s gaze went past him to the lion, which was now almost completed. The tail lashed, and the paws shifted in place; it was peculiar to see something so apparently real still missing the bulk of its head. No sign of unraveling—but it was in the protected space of the Galenic Academy. The oddly warped relationship between the City and the palace that reflected it meant the Academy lay uncomfortably close to the railway works even now proceeding down Cannon Street—but not so close that it was one of the bad patches of the Hall, where the decay was at its worst.

  What the loom produced was pure faerie material. It wouldn’t survive for long, if it came into contact with mortal banes.

  “How long?” he asked, and downed another gulp of mead.

  Niklas answered for Wrain and Ch’ien Mu, in a gruff voice still colored by traces of a German accent. “Ve haven’t tested it yet. It vould slow the problem—”

  “But at a cost,” Wrain finished, when Niklas hesitated. “It wouldn’t just unravel; the elements that make it up would be destroyed. And we cannot generate those out of nothing. To craft new pieces of the Hall, we would have to distill the raw substance out of existing materials.”

  In other words, render down the contents of the palace. If that would even be enough. Hodge was out of mead; he stared moodily into the empty cup. Given time, they might be able to find
other sources—but even with this machine, time was sorely lacking.

  Well, he could set someone to looking, and in the meantime, try to solve the underlying problem. “What would make it last longer?”

  Because this was the Academy, he didn’t get a wave of helpless shrugs; he got a deluge of speculative answers, everyone talking over each other. “The original anchoring—”; “—given the capacity of the human soul to shelter—”; “—a more suitable weft, perhaps—”; “—perhaps the Oriental elements—”; “—write to Master Ktistes in Greece; he might—”

  Hodge put up his hands, and the speculation trailed into silence. “You don’t know. All right. Get to work on finding out. Wilhas, is the Calendar Room still usable?”

  Niklas’s brother, blond haired to his red, chewed on his lips inside the depths of his beard. “Yes. For now. But from the map you showed me, the tracks vill run very close to the Monument. Ven they put those in, it may destroy the room.”

  Taking with it anyone inside. But they had to risk it; the Calendar Room, a chamber beneath the Monument to the Great Fire, contained time outside of time. With it, the fae could do months or years of research and planning, at a cost of mere days in the world. “I’ll keep my eye on the newspapers and railway magazines,” Hodge said, as if he did not read them incessantly already. “We should ’ave some warning before they lay any track.”

  Nods all around. Wrain began to discuss with the others who would go into the Calendar Room, and who would stay outside. The other machine, their calculating engine, could possibly be used to determine what variable might be added to increase durability; they could look for sources of material. If worse came to worst, they could unravel select parts of the Hall, to weave protection around places like this, that needed to survive.

  None of it was anything he could contribute to, not personally. Suppressing a groan, Hodge pushed himself to his feet. “Right, you get to that. Let me know when you’ve got some answers.” For now, the most useful thing he could do for them all was to stay alive.

  Memory: April 12, 1840

  She both dreaded and longed for the dreams.

  Dreaded, because without a doubt they were signs of the madness her mother warned her about, a shameful inheritance from her shameless and lunatic father. But longed for, because in these dreams she could permit her creativity free rein; her conversational partners not only welcomed but encouraged her wildest flights of fancy, never once murmuring about hereditary insanity.

  “Of course he will never get it built,” she said to the inhuman creatures that sat on the other side of the tea table. “I hold Mr. Babbage in the greatest esteem, but he lacks the social gifts that would gain him the cooperation of others; and without that, he will never have the funding or assistance he requires.”

  The taller and more slender of her guests grimaced into his tea. The name of this one was Wrain, and he was a dear friend of her dreams; she had imagined conversations with him many times over the years. “You don’t say so,” the spritely gentleman muttered, with delicate irony. “We thought to offer him our own assistance, but…”

  “But he is even ruder than I am,” the shorter and stockier fellow said cheerfully, with a distinct German accent. She hesitated to call this one a gentleman, given his dreadful manners. Properly he was Mr. von das Ticken, but Wrain mostly just called him Nick.

  Because it was a dream, she could allow herself to laugh. “Oh dear. The two of you, attempting to converse … that cannot have ended well.”

  “It went splendidly,” Wrain said, “for all of thirty seconds. But we have begun to pursue the notion on our own, you know; it’s too great a challenge to forego.”

  Of course he was building it; these were her dreams, after all, and she would dearly love to see the Analytical Engine in operation. That Wrain was not presenting it to her right now could only mean that her mind had not yet fully encompassed Babbage’s intricate and brilliant design. Such insufficiency, however, did not stop her imagination from leaping ahead. “At this point the challenges are quite mundane, simple matters of obtaining funding and suitable engineers. I have already begun to look beyond.”

  “I think you underestimate the difficulty of the engineering,” Wrain said dryly, but he was half-drowned out by Nick’s expression of sudden, sharp interest: “Vat do you mean by ‘looking beyond’?”

  Happiness lifted her spirit, like a pair of bright wings. These two would not mock her, or warn that she had best confine herself to what was mathematically and scientifically possible. She could tell them whatever she dreamt of, however outrageous. “If we—by which I mean my dear Babbage, of course—can design an Analytical Engine to calculate the answers to equations, can we not design other sorts of engines for other sorts of tasks?”

  Frowning, Wrain said, “You mean, other devices that can be instructed by cards?”

  “Precisely! Engines which can perform complex tasks, more rapidly and accurately than any human operator could achieve. Composing music, for example: provide the machine with cards that instruct it as to the form of a song—a hymn, perhaps, or a chorale, or even a symphony—and then, by execution of the operations, the engine returns a new composition.” Her love for music was an abiding thing, close kin to her love of mathematics, though she suspected her mother—for all the woman’s knowledge of the latter subject—never quite understood the similarities between the two. “It wants only some means of presenting notes and their relationships in suitably abstract form. Well, that and the design of the engine itself, which of course is no simple matter; I expect it would require tens of thousands of gears, more even than the Analytical Engine.”

  Wrain’s mouth fell open by progressive stages during this speech; Nick had gone still as a stone. After a dumbfounded pause, the spritely gentleman said, “With sufficiently abstract representation—”

  “Anything,” Nick breathed, staring off into the distance like he had seen a vision of Heaven itself. “Music. Pictures. It could write books. It could—”

  His voice cut off. She felt as if she were flying, lifted above the clay of this earth by the power of her own ingenuity. Only gradually did she realize that while her companions, too, were flying, the path they followed was a very specific one. Wrain and Nick were staring at one another, communicating in half-spoken words and abrupt gestures, too excited to get their thoughts out of their heads before leaping on to the next. “Like a loom,” Wrain said; Nick answered him, “But our notation,” and the gentleman nodded as if his dwarfish companion had made a very good point.

  It produced a strange feeling in the depths of her mind. If these were her dreams, then why did it feel as if they had abruptly become about something she didn’t understand? A touch of fear stirred. Perhaps Mother is right, and this is the beginnings of madness.

  Wrain leapt to his feet and seized her hand, shaking it up and down as if she were a man. His grip felt very hard, and very real. “Ada, dearest Ada, thank you. Oh, I have no idea how to build this thing—we lack even the notation by which to instruct it; I mean, the system of notation we have is dreadfully inadequate, it would not suffice for a Difference Engine, let alone more—but until you spoke I never even conceived of such a device. Not for our own purposes. Will you help us?”

  Baffled, increasingly unsure of everything, Ada said, “Help you with what?”

  Nick laughed, a rolling guffaw that made her certain he, at least, was deranged. “Building an engine of magic calculation. Something of gears and levers and wheels, that can tell us how to create things, faerie enchantments, too complex for us to imagine on our own. And perhaps, in time, to make them for us.”

  No, there was no doubt at all. Ada had taken the first step—or perhaps more than one—down the path of madness her father had followed. Faeries and enchantment, exactly the sorts of things of which her mother disapproved. If she did not turn back now, gambling, poetry, and sexual immorality were sure to follow.

  But she did not want to abandon her friends, even i
f they were phantasms of her diseased mind. Could she not allow herself a little madness, and trust to prayer and the rigorous strictures of science to keep the rest at bay?

  Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of the infamous poet Lord Byron and his mathematical wife Annabella Milbanke, suspected she knew the answer to that—and it wasn’t in her favor.

  “Please, Ada,” Wrain entreated her. “I have seen the disaster that is Babbage’s notes; I daresay you understand them better than he does himself. Or at least can explain them to others, which he patently cannot. We will not be able to do this without help.”

  It would have taken a harder soul than Ada Lovelace’s to say no to that desperately hopeful expression. With a feeling of both doom and delight, she said, “Charles Babbage is too rude and too sane to ever help you in this matter. Poor though my own intellect may be, I will bend it to your cause.”

  Islington, London: March 14, 1884

  Eliza had spent the days leading up to the meeting of the London Fairy Society imagining how things might go. The people might prove to be nothing more than a cluster of bored wives, reading collections of stories from the folk of rural England, clucking their tongues and sighing over the loss of a peasant society none of them had ever seen in person. They might be a group of scholars, documenting that loss and forming theories about what defect of education or brain made peasants believe such ridiculous things. They might be the kind of people Eliza had seen at Charing Cross last fall—working hand-in-glove with the faeries to sow chaos among decent folk.

  She imagined telling the story of how Owen was stolen away, to the shock and sympathy of her listeners. She imagined haranguing the society’s leader until he told her where to find a faerie. She imagined finding a faerie there in person and shaking the truth out of him.

  She never got around to imagining how she would get into No. 9 White Lion Street.