A Star Shall Fall

In certain lights, there might almost be a face within the dark mass. A long snout here; two indentations there, that might be eyes, set predatorlike in the dust and ice. Hunger stirs within the dream. The sun’s radiance is warming the comet: heat, light, fire. Things the sleeper remembers. Like calls to like, and it is kindred to the sun, a wayward child sent farther than it was ever meant to go. There is nothing to burn, out here in the black; even the strongest spirit is vanquished by this absolute cold. They crafted better than they knew, those enemies, those jailers, when they banished their foe; this prison is a torture beyond any it has ever known.

But release is coming. Heat, light, fire. Things the sleeper remembers.

Things it will know again, and soon.

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON

2 April 1758

Niklas von das Ticken glared at Irrith as she came through the pillars into the antechamber of the Calendar Room. She could never tell whether he hated her particularly, or whether he turned that expression on the world as a whole. Even his conversations with his brother sounded like arguments—though admittedly, everything sounded like an argument in German. Either way, the red-bearded dwarf soon turned his scowl back to the half-built contraption on his worktable, ignoring Irrith as if she weren’t there.

That suited her just fine. Wilhas was far more pleasant to talk to anyway. “What’s he building, a birdcage?” Irrith asked, not caring if the other dwarf overheard.

“Drachenkäfig. A Dragon-cage,” Wilhas said. His fierce and bloodthirsty grin faded a moment later. “That is the idea. So far, though…”

“It doesn’t work.” Irrith didn’t ask why he wasn’t working on it inside the Calendar Room. She’d made that mistake precisely once, and gotten as her reward a half-hour diatribe from Niklas—she’d timed it by the assorted clocks—all throat-hacking consonants and spittle, the gist of which was that the chamber’s time out of time was only useful if you didn’t need to keep coming out to fetch things or question someone or test your results. And apparently that happened often.

Someone was in the Calendar Room right now, to judge by the closed door. Or more than one someone, perhaps. Wilhas talked endlessly about Körpertage, which Irrith didn’t fully understand; it had something to do with each person inside using up one day for every day the group remained in the room—but the sum of the collected time was great enough that no one other than Wilhas was overly concerned about how many they might be using.

If they didn’t find a solution, they’d never get a chance to use the remaining days anyway.

Irrith gave the Dragon-cage a dubious look. So far it was little more than a haphazard assortment of metal strips, like a barrel that had sprung all its staves, then lost about two-thirds of them. Whatever metal Niklas was using, it didn’t seem like much of a prison.

“That isn’t iron, is it?” she asked. Ktistes had made a passing comment about the dwarves trying to find a way to forge iron so it wouldn’t bother fae, but so far as she knew, nothing had come of it.

Wilhas shook his head, and she breathed a little more easily. Iron would seem like the logical choice; after all, the Dragon was just a kind of salamander—a really, really overgrown salamander—and therefore a creature of faerie-kind. But the box Lune had imprisoned the beast in at the end of the Great Fire had been solid iron, and that only worked for a little while. The Dragon’s power was just too great to be confined so easily.

Still, the box had given them ten years of peace, and its weakening structure held together for another six, until they hit upon the idea of exiling the Dragon to a comet. If Niklas could achieve half that result, it would still be more than they had now.