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

world who wanted to understand the rules of places like this: not quite Faerie, not quite Earth, but taking on a bit of the nature of both. Some of those who came were philosophers, and they spent their time in the library or various sitting rooms, arguing questions like what ancient curse made iron anathema to European fae, or how it was that a genie could serve the Mohammedan God—but the Presentation Hall which now opened up before him was for the inventors.
    As with the Great Exhibition, their work ranged from the practical to the inexplicable. Hodge was very glad of the aetheric engine, which had saved them from the need to find a giant to wind the enormous clock in the Calendar Room every year, but what was the use of an automaton that sang songs like a phonograph? Or a fountain that could be made to pour out any kind of drink? Or the enormous paper wings stretching high overhead?
    In truth, the only thing he cared about these days lay at the back end of the long chamber, taking up more space every time he came to visit.
    His arrival barely made a ripple in the flow of activity. Passing fae tugged their forelocks briefly—or bowed, in the case of those foreigners for whom it was the customary sign of respect—but otherwise went about their business. Hodge would have done away with even that interruption, if he could; his father had been a bricklayer, and would have laughed himself sick to know his son had become a faerie Prince. An accident of birth, he thought wryly, not for the first time. I was born poor enough to get my start inside the old walls of London—and that’s what matters ’ere, more than blood or breeding.
    Not that anybody knew his father had been a bricklayer. Hodge kept that back out of a peculiar kind of shame: he didn’t want anyone knowing his father had laid bricks for the very thing now destroying this place. And then been drowned, when the River Fleet burst its sewer and flooded the railway works. Fate had a sharp sense of humor, as far as Hodge could tell.
    Two enormous machines lay at the far end, on either side of the door to the Academy library. One was a thing of gears and levers and cranks and dials, those latter marked with a range of alchemical and other symbols. All Hodge understood about that one was that it was some form of calculating machine; the symbols were a language the scholars had developed for describing the elemental makeup and configuration of faerie things, and the engine helped them predict how such things would interact.
    Without it, devices like the one across the central aisle would be nearly impossible to build. This one, Hodge understood even less about, except that it resembled nothing so much as a deranged loom—and it had the Academy Masters very excited indeed.
    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