With Fate Conspire by Marie Brennan Read Free Book Online Page A

Westminster, away from Dead Rick.
    Who waited to be sure the man wouldn’t turn back, then stuffed his knife back into its sheath and tore open the soggy, greasy newspaper. Inside was a sausage roll. Not caring if the thing was soaked with river water, he sank his teeth into the end and ripped a chunk free.
    Eating it was like wrapping a warm blanket around himself when he’d been standing all this while in the freezing winter air. The pipes in the Embankment, the gaslight lamps above, the bridges behind him—all became nothing more than human artifacts, bits of metal wrought into useful shapes. A church bell could ring in his ear now, and he would only laugh at it. Mortal food, given in tithe to the fae: the only thing that let them walk the streets of London in safety.
    And desperately hard to come by, nowadays. Nadrett’s caged mortals served many different purposes, but all of them were forced to tithe bread each day, until they were sold off or ate faerie food or died. It went a long way toward making up for the loss of belief among the people above, who no longer set out food for the faeries, except in scattered pockets far out in the countryside; a long way, but not far enough, not with all the refugees crowding into the Hall. If Dead Rick wanted any hope of surviving once the Market was gone, he had to get some for himself.
    He already regretted eating that bite. It meant he had one bite less with which to pay off his debts, or escape London when the time came. But with all these banes around him … he hadn’t been above in ages, had forgotten how terrible it felt.
    He sighed, staring at the torn roll.
    Then he looked around, at the city he almost never saw. London, full of mortals—not caged and broken, but free men and women and children, millions of them, living in blissful ignorance of the decay beneath their feet. And untouched by the faerie stain that would make them unable to tithe. The longer Dead Rick stayed out here, the greater the odds of his master noticing—but the bite he’d eaten protected for a whole day. With that in his stomach, he could find somebody else to jump, get more bread, prepare for the end that was coming.
    He would pay a price for it—he always did—but this once, it might be worth it.
    Dead Rick stuffed the remainder of the roll into the pocket of his coat and concentrated. Not much; he wasn’t one of those fae who took pride in all the faces he could invent, making himself look like a fine gentleman or a little boy or anything else. He was satisfied with looking like himself—just without the faerie touch. For his purposes, it was enough.
    Then, whistling “Bedlam Boys” to himself, he set off in search of another poor bastard to rob.
    The Galenic Academy, Onyx Hall: March 10, 1884
     
    What remained of the faerie palace tended to alternate between rooms overstuffed with refugees and long, empty stretches abandoned even by ghosts. As Benjamin Hodge approached the entrance to the Galenic Academy, the only sound was his own boots scuffing across the floor. But once he passed beneath the silver-and-gold arch, with its motto of SOLVE ET COAGULA curving above his head, noise began to filter down the black corridor. Even before he could make out any details, the sound raised his spirits: this was the one part of the Onyx Hall that felt alive with hope, instead of despair.
    Or maybe madness was a better word than hope . Hodge was too young to have seen the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in ’51, but he imagined it must have been a lot like this: a motley assortment of people from all over the world, crowding around displays ranging from the useful to the bizarre, in a crazed display of what human invention could do.
    Human invention, and faerie: while there were mortals down here, they were far outnumbered by faerie-kind. The international bit still held, though. For the last century and more, the Galenic Academy had been a place of pilgrimage for anyone from either