The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  “And we know she made amends by bringing Sara’s hand back,” Cook said.

  “And then apparently made amends by bringing Sara’s hand back,” agreed The Smith.

  “You don’t trust her,” said Hodge.

  “I am going to take her to live with me on the Isle of Dogs. I do not think she should sleep in the Safe House again until she is… trained.”

  “You’re going to test her,” said Cook.

  “I am going to train her. And yes, I am going to test her.”

  “And then?” said Hodge.

  “And then we are going to take this fight to our enemies before they can come back to us. We will find out who they are. We will find out what they want. We will find out how they are connected. And then…”

  “We will destroy them,” said Cook, tying the bandage off. “That is your plan?”

  “You have a better one?”

  “No,” she admitted. “But if the Disaster teaches us anything it is that we are better at protection than destruction. We are guards, not soldiers.”

  “Then perhaps I have phrased it badly, old friend,” he said. “Think of this as a medical procedure. The healthy body that we are sworn to protect is assailed by a virulent and malicious canker that has whittled us down to a shadow of our former strength. I am not advocating a war. I am preparing a calm and determined excision of an invasive and potentially fatal tumour.”

  She looked down the corridor towards the hidden door behind which lay the Murano Cabinet that had swallowed up both Mr Sharp and Sara Falk.

  “But our sharpest blades are both gone into the mirrors,” she said.

  The Smith followed her gaze.

  “I am The Smith,” he said. “I would not be much of one if I couldn’t fashion new weapons.”

  “The girl?” she said again. “But the girl—”

  “But the girl is not the only option,” he said. “I have a sense something is changing.”

  CHAPTER 4

  A DOUBLE JEOPARDY: SECOND PART

  Further west, in the crooked house on Chandos Place, Francis Blackdyke, Viscount Mountfellon, was on the verge of falling out with his co-conspirator and guest, the aged Frenchman known as The Citizen. Mountfellon was still irked by the balking of his plans and the near-drowning he had suffered as he and Templebane sought to bring about the demise of the meddling society known as The Oversight on the cold waters of Blackwater Reach. The Citizen was irritatingly unmoved by the inconveniences thus visited on the noble Lord, and was much more concerned with the death of the Green Man upon whom he had been experimenting on in the soundproofed basement of the house. The Green Man, a supranatural variant who was–like many supranatural creatures–hypersensitive and violently allergic to iron, had been subjected to a long and painful process whereby The Citizen tried to overcome his mortal antipathy by giving transfusions of blood into which were mixed solutions of green vitriol, or iron sulphate.

  Ultimately The Citizen’s enthusiasm for increasing the concentration of the solutions had been stronger than the Green Man’s constitution, and though he had shown a small but promising initial desensitisation to iron, after weeks of rising doses his heart had simply burst.

  The Citizen had just confirmed this through a precise dissection of the cadaver and was standing over it in a leather apron, his arms bloodied to the elbows as he conversed with the nobleman whose hospitality he relied upon.

  “I merely said that although they had won a round, we would undoubtedly win the bout,” said Mountfellon. “And the trophies that go with it.”

  He had brought a decanter of brandy and two glasses. He poured drinks for them both and slid one towards The Citizen as he drank his own down in two fast gulps. He looked at the eviscerated corpse of the Green Man lying on the slab between them with a dispassionate interest.

  “Everything is a game to you British,” said The Citizen, reaching for a towel. “It is an infantile obsession.”

  “Infantile, sir?” said Mountfellon, bridling.

  The Citizen waved a hand airily as if no insult were intended.

  “I speak as one who was once similarly illusioned, Milord. When I was younger, in my prime, full of the follies of youth, mistaking my strength and vigour for actual experience, I relished having strong enemies against which to test my own merit. Very much like your British compulsion, it was, I suppose, a kind of sensibility that I had picked up from the ancien régime under whose yoke I had been educated. That I broke that very regime and extirpated it, root and branch, does not hide the ironic fact that I was formed by the thing we revolted so successfully against…”

  “And yet there is a king again in France, so your extirpation can only be seen as partial,” said Mountfellon sourly.

  The Citizen turned his head to look at him in slow surprise.

  “You are very out of sorts, Milord, to be contradicting me so bluntly.”

  Mountfellon waved a hand in what was perhaps an unconscious mimicry of his earlier airy dismissal, and reached for the decanter.

  “I was nearly shot to blazes and then drowned. But please continue…”

  The Citizen stared at him without blinking, his parchment-white face unnaturally still and unreadable. Then he exhaled, as if having decided not to spring across the table and attack Mountfellon directly, and took a sip from the other glass.

  “I was only going to observe that once upon a time I liked to test my strength against a strong enemy. It was conceited and it was a kind of faux chivalric urge that made me think so. What I NOW think is that I prefer my enemies bled white and powerless. I have no energy or interest in the struggle or the game. I only wish to exterminate and destroy. They are not adversaries; they are mere obstacles, and I now know, from my studies, that power is the only thing that matters at all. Chivalry, testing oneself, the very illusion of individual will: all a mirage that is obliterated by the bright cleansing light of pure power.”

  “So you would bleed The Oversight?” scowled Mountfellon.

  “They are bled already,” he said with a dismissive shrug. “That they were moving their precious artefacts from the Safe House by the river is a sign of desperation. And however much they mauled your hired bravos, they will have taken further hurt too. So we must now eradicate them for ever.”

  Mountfellon carefully placed his glass back on the table.

  “I do not wish to eradicate them before we have those artefacts or the contents of that damned Red Library in our hands, my dear Citizen. I will not countenance a wholesale destruction of that valuable storehouse of knowledge,” he said. “We have spoken of this.”

  “Of course,” purred The Citizen. “Why? Do you think I do not remember every conversation we have ever had? Do you begin to mistrust me?”

  “You have a bloodthirsty streak,” said Mountfellon. “It is the only thing I mistrust in you, if I might be blunt.”

  “If you were truly being polite, Milord, you should perhaps have asked if you might be blunt before you were so,” said The Citizen, his lips twisting into a smile like a withered rose. “But I have no shame about it. There is something profoundly cleansing in the flow of blood. And there is power in it. As you yourself know from your experimental practice.”

  “There is a difference between a lack of false sentiment about blood-letting consequent on valid experimentation, and an actual appetite for it,” said Mountfellon.

  “Are we falling out, Milord?” said The Citizen, the smile beginning to curdle a little.

  “Not at all,” said Mountfellon. “We are speaking frankly to one another as equals should. I do not want your enthusiasm to precipitate a bloodbath that would deprive us of treasures which a slower and more methodical assault might assure us of.”

  “And yet only moments ago you were seething and saying they had nearly shot you to blazes!” said The Citizen.

  “A loss of dignity and my life briefly in peril does not mean they can unman my mind,” said Mountfellon. “I am a Natural Philosopher and a Man of Sci
ence. That they cannot change. I will have their chattels and their knowledge, and then as much blood can flow as you like.”

  He sank another brandy and pointed at the open chest cavity, and the flaps of green-tinged flesh that had been expertly flensed back like pages in a folio to expose the organs within.

  “Now, sir, now that we are fast friends again, do pray tell me precisely how its heart burst.”

  CHAPTER 5

  THE NEXT STEP

  Having taken her first pace through the mirror, Sara Falk did not take the subsequent step without careful thought. Instead, once the Raven had comprehensively marked the point of their ingress for future reference, she closed her eyes and stood there, trying to clear her mind and feel the atmosphere of the long corridor. The truth is that she had no detailed plan: all she knew she had to do was to find Mr Sharp. He had gone into the mirrors in order to find her hand because on it was the ring containing her heart-stone, the absence of which had been causing her to sicken and fade away. It had been an heroically doomed gesture, a measure born of desperation, since his chance of finding the hand was remote in the extreme. The hand had been returned to her by other means, and now she was honour-bound to follow him into the wilderness of mirrors and try and bring him home. And in truth it was more than honour that bound her to this, she knew: it was affection, a connection that had grown between them as they themselves had grown up together, an attachment that had increased and strengthened in intensity all the more for being unvoiced over the years, much as a banked-up fire will burn longer and hotter than one that quickly expends its energy in wild and demonstrative flames. She had known her quest for him was quite as quixotic as his for her, but that had not stopped her from embarking on it.

  Indeed hers was more liable to failure since he had taken the Coburg Ivory into the mirrors with him, a device known as a “get-you-home”, to enable him to navigate the maze with some small chance of success. She had no such get-you-home beyond the signature of the Raven, so casually squittered across the glass at her feet. It was because her quest was so desperate that she had embarked on it so quickly, without giving herself time for second thoughts–the very thoughts that were now preventing her taking the second step.

  “I can’t feel anything,” she said. “I thought I would perhaps… sense him. I thought I would.”

  The Raven clattered its beak again. Sara looked at it, and raised an eyebrow.

  “I remember many games,” she said. “Which one do you mean?”

  The Raven did not answer. Instead it dropped daintily to the floor in front of her, neatly avoiding the mess, and pecked pointedly at her boots.

  “Oh,” said Sara after a moment. “That game.”

  Sara was a Glint. She wore gloves most of the time because when she touched things like walls and buildings she could draw the past out of them, like a recording she felt as strongly as if she was living it herself. The most traumatic events left the strongest signatures in stone, and because of that Glinting was not for the faint of heart. Indeed many who had the gift thought themselves mad or accursed until they learned to control it. As a young girl, Sara had been trained to it. She had mastered her ability until it became a gift and not the blight she had initially assumed. And one of the ways she had gained control over her glinting was in a game called “follow-my-leader”. She had played it with The Smith when she was no taller than his hip, and she had played it with Hodge when she was a little older, and the game would begin like this: she would take off her shoes and close her eyes. The other would then walk away into the backstreets around Wellclose Square, and lose themselves in the milling populace of the neighbourhood. Sara would wait for them to disappear, count to a hundred and then follow them. To begin with she just got lost, confused and footsore. Those early games ended with The Smith turning back and finding her. And then he told her what to do: he told her to keep her eyes closed and trust her feet.

  The first time she did this it was terrifying. She had once tried to explain to Cook what it felt like, but it was almost impossible to put into coherent sentences, because it was a kind of synaesthesia, a sensation that she could only express in terms of an unrelated sense, like coloured hearing or a perfumed sound. It was like feeling a strain of music beneath her feet and then walking down it as it unravelled in a narrow ribbon through the warp and weft of the much larger fabric woven by all the other people on the street. Hodge had told her it must be very like what the dog Jed experienced when following a scent trail through the competing stinks of the city. Sara knew Sharp’s trace as if it was colour and smell and sound all together: it was the admixture, along with Cook’s, that she most closely associated with home; it was like a warm, held note on a cello, something solid that she could cleave to through the competing melodies of an orchestra playing a symphony all around it. Often, in the more crowded parts of London, it actually felt as if several different symphonies were being performed by rival orchestras trying to drown each other out, but as she played the game more and more she began to get the hang of it, and developed a kind of sensory concentration that enabled her to track her quarry through the tangled distractions, even with her eyes open.

  In time she became very good at follow-my-leader, so good that she would quickly work out where The Smith or Hodge was headed, and conspire to arrive before they did by taking a shortcut. This trick was enabled by their habit of ending at a pie shop or a bakery in order to reward the young girl for hunting them, and with enough training she came to know their favourite purveyors of treats and eatables. Following with her feet was different to feeling the past with her hands. She had wondered if it was something to do with the thickness of skin on her soles, but on this neither The Smith nor Hodge could enlighten her.

  “Always been like that,” said The Smith. “Most Glints can’t do it, and those that can feel with their feet don’t feel the same way with the rest of their body. It just happens that way.”

  Sara had not played the game for a long time, not much at all since she had grown to womanhood: any time The Oversight had required tracking skills, Jed and Hodge had provided them. A grown woman walking barefoot through London’s questionable alleys drew attention to herself in a way a child would not.

  “Well,” said Sara. “There’s no one watching us now.”

  And with that she bent, put the candle on the ground and took off her boots. She added the knife she had carried in one hand to the knife in her belt, and then closed her eyes. The Raven watched her flex her feet. They were long and elegant, and she rippled her toes like a pianist stretching her fingers.

  “This will take a moment,” she said. “Bear with me.”

  The Raven shrugged and looked around. Sara’s face became calm as she steadied her breathing and reached out with her mind, trying to grasp what her feet were reading. The first thing she had to do was to steel herself against feeling ridiculous and unexpectedly vulnerable. She had chosen her clothes and boots and weapons with a view to feeling protected and ready for anything that might come her way, and now that she had taken her boots off and was barefoot on the cold glass floor, she felt both childlike and considerably less guarded than she had expected to. At some level she felt naked. She tried to banish the thought, but failed. And then remembering that the trick to not thinking about a thing was to think of something else, she concentrated on the unusually smooth surface beneath the soles of her feet, and that led to her noticing what overlaid the smoothness and then she smelled something like a coloured noise, something impossible and familiar, and before she realised that she was sorting out things beneath her feet, she had relaxed.

  “Oh,” she said.

  And a smile flicked up the corners of her mouth.

  “This is going to be simpler than I thought.”

  The Raven, attuned as it habitually was to things ordinary ravens did not bother themselves with, noted that her breathing was slowing down and her pulse was starting to ease off the trip-hammer rapidity it had been climbing towards. It note
d she was feeling relief. It heard her stifle something that might even have been a stillborn chuckle.

  Sara was, behind her closed eyes, exultant. The mirrors were not like an alley through the East End of London: they felt much more like forgotten corridors, disregarded parts of a great house down which very few people had ever ventured. The strands meshed beneath her feet were few and easily differentiated: if the musical analogy was held to, she was going to have to keep track of one instrument in a small group, a trio or a quartet perhaps, not a series of competing orchestras, and better than that she could sense Sharp’s strong, rounded note very clearly.

  She opened her eyes and looked ahead. Although the passage through the repeated mirrors was only as visible as far as the light thrown by the candle she held, she now felt less fear of what lay ahead, because whatever it was, Mr Sharp was there too.

  “This way,” she said.

  And she reached out her foot and silently took the second step. And then the next. And though her eyes were open, they were unfocused in the way she had learned to master while playing the game as a child: she saw but did not look. She was, however, vaguely buoyed by the light she carried banishing the shadows ahead.

  It was perhaps good for her morale that she did not notice how, as she moved forward with that cheering candle held high, the darkness closed in solidly behind her.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE IMPOSSIBLE THING

  M’Gregor woke with a hand over his mouth and a knife at his throat. The Warden of the Andover Workhouse gurgled and bucked and then, as he felt the sharp bite of steel on his neck, he stilled.