With Fate Conspire by Marie Brennan

remembered fae and mortals all around them; he might not care about courtesies, but admitting that one of his own nominal subjects had knocked him down in Blackfriars was a bit much. “Cut myself shaving,” Hodge said blandly, and gestured at the loom. “You lot look excited. Tell me you ’ave good news.”
    “We do. Or rather, Ch’ien Mu does.” Abd ar-Rashid waved the Chinese faerie forward.
    When Ch’ien Mu first came to the Onyx Hall, the embroidered silks he wore had been been splendid things, with dragons coiling sinuously about his shoulders and arms; but unless one was a philosopher, constantly in the library, the Galenic Academy was not a good place for clothes. The silks were much mended, and the dragons glared morosely at the barriers of thread that blocked their movement.
    They still distracted Hodge terribly, but Ch’ien Mu’s mind was clearly on other matters. He shuffled a few steps closer and bowed, but instead of folding his hands inside his sleeves—his customary posture while lecturing—he literally rubbed them together with excitement as he spoke. “The threads no more break! It is, as I suspect, a thing of configuration—though my assumption that the helical is the most stable proves very wrong; we try both solar and lunar configurations, but—”
    “Master Ch’ien Mu.” Hodge pinched the bridge of his nose, knowing the faerie would go on for half an hour if not stopped. “I knows ’ow to read, and that’s about where it ends. Just tell me what you’ve got .”
    This seemed to be a more difficult request than he’d thought. The faerie opened and closed his mouth a few times, as if trying and failing to find words for what was in his head. Hodge doubted it was a problem with his English; more likely the fellow was having trouble bringing his thoughts down from the rarefied heights of theory into simple reality. It was a trouble many of the Academy Masters shared. In the end, the Master gave up and gestured at Niklas.
    The red-bearded dwarf grinned and spun a small wheel. The small aetheric engine at his feet hummed to life; then he and Ch’ien Mu together made incomprehensible adjustments to a series of pipes and vessels that sat at the base of the loom. Those, Hodge recognized; they were a sort of alchemical retort, used to distill purified forms of the faerie elements, fire and water and earth and air. After a moment, shimmering threads of something that was not quite light began to lace themselves through the loom, forming what Hodge, with his extremely limited knowledge of weaving, knew was the warp: the lengthwise threads that formed the base of fabric.
    Except what this loom wove was not precisely fabric. Ch’ien Mu fed one end of a linked chain of crystal plaques into something on the side of the loom, and then Niklas slammed a lever down with a heavy thunk . Powered by the aetheric engine, the loom sprang into motion.
    Warp threads rose and fell, and the shuttle holding the weft flew back and forth between them. There was a general stampede to the far side of the loom, which Hodge joined, and there he witnessed a miracle.
    Growing in the air on the other side of the machine was a glamour. Four isolated bits of gold—golden fur—four paws, it was, and as the legs lengthened above them Hodge suspected it was a lion. He’d seen more impressive illusions before; the fae could do tremendous things when they put their minds to it. But there was no mind involved here: the loom was doing the work. Jacquard had invented something like this years ago, to weave brocaded fabrics more rapidly and accurately than a human weaver could hope to achieve. Ch’ien Mu and the others had found a way to do it with a glamour.
    “Bloody ’ell,” Hodge whispered, and grabbed hold of Abd ar-Rashid before he could fall over.
    Some of it was just the general infirmity that plagued him nowadays. The Onyx Hall drew on his strength to survive the iron threat driving its breakdown, and it was always