A Star Shall Fall

Together the men set up a pair of prisms and two cards, one with a small hole pierced in it. “Now,” Andrews said, holding up a small box, “this contains a faerie light, which we may use as our source. In Newton’s time, there were two competing theories of light: one being that a prism creates its rainbow effect by ‘tinging’ the light as it passes through, and the other being that it merely bends the light, separating its different components by the different angles of their passage. That latter is the true theory, as I will now show. If we pass our source through the first prism—” Lifting the box’s hinged flap, he created a rainbow against the first card. Podder whispered to the faerie lights around the room, so that they dimmed and the rainbow appeared more clearly. “Thank you, Podder. Now, if we position this card so that the hole permits the violet light through, we may send that portion through a second prism, and when it strikes the second card—Mr. St. Clair, if you would—”

Galen moved the pieces into position. A moment later, the card fluttered from his hand, whispering to a halt on the stone.

But not before everyone had seen a second, stranger rainbow cast across its white face.

In the near darkness, Dr. Andrews stuttered, “I—it should have—”

“Been violet.” The genie’s accented voice lent a touch of strangeness to an already strange scene. “As in Newton’s essay ‘Of Colours.’ But he used sunlight.”

Not a faerie light. Irrith heard a creak: Andrews collapsing into a chair, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Podder hastily brightened the room again, revealing the doctor white as a sheet, and hardly breathing.

“Our world is different,” Irrith said, and thought it very virtuous of herself that she let only a little of her smugness show through.

The urge to gloat faded, however, when she saw Galen. He was still on his feet, but he looked almost as appalled as Dr. Andrews, as if someone had come along and told him Heaven was empty, with no one watching over him. “What?” Irrith said, uncertain now. “Isn’t this good? You have what you were after.”

Galen’s head moved side to side, blindly; it might have been stirred by the wind. “No. It isn’t good. Because if nature as we understand it does not operate the same here…”

Dr. Andrews’s whisper would have been inaudible in a less-silent room. “Then nothing we know is of any use.”

“I do not think so.”

That came from the genie. Abd ar-Rashid, that was his name. He looked from Andrews to Galen to Irrith, then went on in a more judicious manner. “It is only my idea, uncertain in truth. But I am wondering, for some time…” His sharp-tipped fingers played against each other, a nervous gesture that made him seem much more familiar than foreign. “That which is right in your world, appears to be wrong in ours. Perhaps that which is wrong in your world becomes right, in places such as this.”

“Earth, water, air, and fire,” Irrith said. She pursed her lips in doubt. “For salamanders and sylphs and the like, maybe—but we aren’t all elemental creatures.”

“No. But mixtures of those four, perhaps, as not true of mortal substances.”

Andrews was still white and unreassured. “But there have been many wrong ideas—more wrong ideas than right. How are we to know which ones apply?”

Galen exhaled sharply; it might have been a laugh. Certainly a faint, mad light was growing in his eyes. “Even as Boyle did, and Newton, and all the others. We experiment. At great speed, I should think; though once the Dragon is disposed of, we’ll have greater leisure to explore the laws of faerie science.”

Those two words formed such an incongruous pair that Irrith stifled her own laugh. She didn’t want to mock the Prince. On the other hand, she knew enough of what he meant by experimentation to doubt whether it would work; surely her world and the people who inhabited were not some kind of clockwork device, predictable once one found the gears. But he seemed to think it worth pursuing, and he knew enough of faerie things that she trusted he would get something of use out of it.

Abd ar-Rashid said, “Speaks alchemy of four elements, and three principles, and such. These ideas from Arabia, and I know something of them; perhaps they are of some use here.”

It brought Andrews upright in his chair, and then onto his feet once more. “Yes. It failed the mortals who tried it, but it should be easy enough to determine whether we find different results in this place.” The hand-rubbing was back, this time with blazing eagerness that made him look almost healthy for a moment. “Come, gentlemen. Mr. St. Clair is right. We haven’t a moment to waste.”

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON

15 September 1758

Lune came to Galen in his own chambers—a startling reversal of their usual habit. Once they were settled in the parlor, she dismissed Edward Thorne and her own attendants, with Sir Peregrin to guard the door and make certain no one listened in.