A Star Shall Fall

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 realised; 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“That is an outdated theory, my dear,” Andrews said.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.”