The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  She found the rickety steps leading into the narrow and gloomy area in front of the basement. She stepped over the two drunks on the ground in front of the door and pushed inside.

  It was a drinking den, but at this hour the tables were empty except for another pair of sleeping inebriates, and the child thief with the baby, sitting at a table in the corner, rocking it gently.

  “Is that your baby?” said the girl from Skibbereen.

  “It is,” she answered without looking up.

  “Well, he’s a beauty and no mistake. How old is he?”

  “He’s young,” she said.

  “Young, is it?” smiled the night nurse. “And there’s you no Methuselah either, to be sure.”

  The child thief continued rocking the baby.

  “And how old are you?” said the night nurse, looking closely at her. “Why, you can’t be more than fourteen or fifteen, though you’re tall for your age.”

  “I’m old enough,” said the girl, a hint of defiance creeping into her voice.

  “Sure you are, mavourneen,” said the night nurse. “And when the baby is grown, you’ll be what–thirty and a bit and he’ll be a strapping lusty lad of sixteen or so, is that the size of it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said the child thief, looking up at the smiling night nurse and seeing her properly for the first time. Her eyes widened in recognition.

  “I’m Caitlin Sean ná Gaolaire. I’m from Skibbereen. My family call me Cait, but here’s the thing of it: I have two things that you don’t know I have. I have a straight razor just here, in my sleeve. And I have your family there, in the bag.”

  The girl’s eyes slid around Cait, looking for an escape route.

  “Now you can keep quiet as you like, but lie to me again and I’m as like to use that razor just so you can tell people the Cait really does have your tongue.”

  She paused, thinking.

  “Mind you, you’d have to write to tell them, wouldn’t you?” she mused. “But maybe that won’t make the joke any less funny.”

  “How did you find me?” said the changeling.

  “That would be telling,” said Caitlin Sean ná Gaolaire. “Give me the child.”

  The girl kept hold of the bundle.

  “You’re thinking you still have a chance. You’re trying to work out the play. But you see the thing is, the game’s over. There was a trap. You fell in it.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Law and Lore.”

  “You are The Oversight?” said the changeling, eyeing the door.

  Caitlin threw back her head and laughed. One of the drunks woke and looked at her.

  “Go back to sleep,” she said looking right back at him. He closed his eyes and put his cheek back down into the warm pool of gin drool on the tabletop.

  “I’m not a joiner. I work alone. I’m fiagaí.”

  “I don’t know what that is—”

  “I’m a hunter. I’ve tracked you all the way here.”

  The girl nodded slowly, her pallor increasing.

  “You’re a venatrix.”

  Caitlin shrugged her assent.

  “Same rose, different name. I’ve been following your trail all the long winding way from Skibbereen,” she said.

  The girl swallowed thickly, as if she was resisting the urge to vomit.

  “Skibbereen?”

  “Arrah, surely you remember it: halfway between Ballydehoy and the Stones at Drombeg? It’s the loveliest spot in all of County Cork, and Cork’s a little green slice of heaven itself, if you believe in such things. I’m sure you remember it–faith, it’s the place you stole the Factor’s baby two summers ago.”

  The girl looked at her. Mouth slack.

  “Carroty hair, not as dark as mine, lovely green eyes, scatter of freckles just where they should be and a birthmark shaped like the Heir Islands on the underside of her left upper arm, nothing big, but pale and distinctive. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking—” began the girl, and then her eyes were caught by the flash of steel that Caitlin revealed by a seemingly unconscious flick of her wrist, the distinctive lever shape on the end of a bone-handled straight razor tucked snugly into her cuff.

  “Your family is in the bag, changeling. You are free to leave, but if you do, I’ve already promised to drown him in the Fleet Ditch, along with the two flat-irons that are in the bag with him. But whatever you choose, you leave the true child here. I must have it back in its bed before it is missed.”

  “One thing,” gulped the girl. “I don’t understand this: I made the man of the house want you. I did it to make him drug the wife and be… distracted with you. I don’t understand.”

  Caitlin Sean ná Gaolaire no longer looked soft and gentle as she shook her head sadly.

  “I’m not here to give you a lesson, girl. I hunt. I remedy. Occasionally, if it feels right to me, I punish. But, to be quick, because the night is half over and there are things to be done, what you don’t understand is that in any game the best thing to do is make your opponent make her mistakes for you. And the easiest way to do that is to let them think they have control. Confidence is a double-edged blade, sure enough: it’ll cut back and kill you if you let it.”

  She held out her hand for the baby.

  “I’m not confident that you’re not going to kill us,” swallowed the girl.

  “Well, I’m not a savage or a monster,” said Caitlin. “But that depends on whether you take me to the true baby from the Factor at Skibbereen.”

  “I can’t,” said the changeling.

  “No,” said Caitlin. “You just think you can’t. You haven’t thought hard enough on it. A night in the Sly House will put you right. And if not, we shall have another talk about it. Put the baby on the table.”

  Still the girl wouldn’t quite let herself put the stolen child down.

  “It’s not your last card–stop trying to think how to play it. I’m a nice enough girl myself, but if you don’t do what I say I’d as soon cut your head off and be done with you. And however fast you think you are, I’m ten times quicker. I’d have to be in my line of work, wouldn’t I, dear?”

  The girl nodded. She put the baby bundle on the table amid the dirty glasses. Caitlin Sean ná Gaolaire was not lying. Her hand flashed silver and there was a click. The girl gasped and sat down, trying to staunch the blood she knew must be gushing from her wrist.

  “No, no, no,” said Cait. “I have not cut you at all. It’s just the cuffs, see?”

  The girl looked down and before she could fully raise her hand off the wound that was not there, Cait had snapped the thin iron manacle around her other wrist too.

  “It burns,” hissed the girl.

  “Then hurry up,” said Caitlin. “Pick up your brother in that bag and let’s be returning the true babby to the poor doctor and his wife, and then off to the Sly House with you. I’ve a favour to ask The Oversight, and like anything unpleasant I’d as soon get it over with quickly.”

  CHAPTER 16

  SHARP

  He did not know how long the small nun had been watching him, because he seemed not to quite hear the polite clearing of her throat, neither the first time she did it, nor indeed the fourth.

  He only noticed her when she reached a tentative hand out and tugged insistently at his sleeve.

  Even then he did not move with his customary speed and decisiveness: he remained as he had been, leaning across the passage of mirrors in a kind of slumped diagonal, the black mirror less than a foot from his nose.

  He blinked, less in surprise than at the harsh brightness he had been avoiding but because, catching sight of himself again in the hated multiplicity of mirrors, Sharp was shocked to see how groggy and unshaven he looked, like a man waking up from a deep slumber. He was almost more shocked by that than by the unexplained and unnoticed appearance of the nun.

  “Vous ne pouvez pas rester dans les miroirs!” she hissed urgently from behind a hand that covered her
mouth. “Vous allez mourir!”

  She was not just short–in fact, little as a child–but was small-boned and birdlike, delicate as a wren, the victim of some deficiency in nature or nutrition. Unlike a child, her pale flesh, where it emerged from the dusty grey-white of her habit, was wrinkled with age. The skin stretched across the back of the hand covering her mouth was almost translucent, like parchment. The deep hood of her wimple overhung her eyes, and indeed her whole tiny body was in danger of being overwhelmed by the comparative bulk of her robes. Her feet, just visible beneath the hem of her garment were bare like his own and painfully thin, with the bones clearly outlined, more akin to birds’ feet than human ones.

  “Vous ne pouvez pas rester ici!” she repeated. “Vous allez mourir!”

  Sharp had shared Sara Falk’s education as they had grown up together. He understood French well and spoke it passably, but it was not a skill he had anticipated using when he had set off into the mirrors on his quest for Sara.

  She tugged again at his sleeve.

  “Les ténèbres viendront pour vous!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said in French. “I do not… I cannot…”

  The words seemed to be locked in treacle, and would not come easily.

  “The darkness will come for you,” she repeated, “if you stay.”

  She tugged at him, harder this time. His hands seemed reluctant to unglue themselves from the black mirror. His muscles protested, his feet ached, his back was sore and he realised that he had been stuck in one position for considerably longer than he had thought. He pulled his hands away from the mirror surface, fighting an almost magnetic pull that wanted to keep them there. He rubbed his eyes and cleared his throat.

  “I am searching for someone,” he said, stumbling to find the right French words. “Do you speak English?”

  “No,” she said. “You are lost.”

  “I am searching for a young woman–her name is Lucy,” he said. “With a hand. An extra hand. That is, who has stolen a hand…”

  He was aware that he was sounding quite as incoherent as the jumbled thoughts inside his head. Tiredness was part of it, but there was more.

  “The hand has rings on it. And a glove. It… they… my friend needs them. Sara. That is why I must find her. Not my friend. The French girl who stole the hand.”

  He sounded worse than incoherent. He sounded mad.

  The little nun looked around him and then turned to check behind herself in a bobbing and sharply alert movement which amplified her likeness to a bird.

  “You are worse than lost. You are drawn to the darkness.”

  He shook his head.

  “No. Indeed I am sworn against it.” He bunched his hand and showed her his ring. “I am of The Oversight of London.”

  The words gave him a moment’s strength, reminding him of who he was. The ring made no impression on her that he could tell, but then her eyes remained hidden and unreadable in the shadow of her wimple. She stretched out her other hand and pointed at the black mirror.

  “Sworn you may be, monsieur, but you have been staring into that mirror for an age.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “It was a moment…”

  She shook her head.

  “You are not attuned to the mirrors. You have lost hold on time already. You think you have been in them for minutes, hours, yes? You may well have been in them for days, weeks, months even.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes,” she insisted. “You have lost the ability to judge this. It will not be long before you lose everything else.”

  He felt vomitous and hungry at the same time. His head was pounding and it seemed as if he were having to strain his thoughts through several thick layers of flannel. He knew there were things he should be doing, and questions he should already have asked.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “I am no one,” she said. “When I was someone, I had a name. Now I am just myself. You must leave the mirrors.”

  “I cannot,” he said. The flannel in his head was getting more and more impenetrable. It was as if drinking the blackness from the mirror had left him with a colossal and growing hangover. He held out his ring again. “I seek a hand that wears this ring. A gloved hand. A woman’s hand.”

  She pecked her head forward and went momentarily still. Then she bobbed back.

  “I have seen a ring like this,” she said.

  “Can you take me to it?” he asked, the words tumbling out before he could consider them.

  “I can take you to the last place I saw it,” she said with a shrug. “If I told you I could do more, I would be lying.”

  Sharp could tell a liar by instinct. He could also look deep into their eyes and turn their minds so that anything hiding beneath their words was visible to him. The tone of her voice told him she was telling the truth. But that truth seemed so unlikely, so opportune, so convenient that the part of him that mistrusted everything, even his own judgement, struggled to make itself heard through the clothiness in his head.

  “May I see your face, sister?” he said.

  “My eyes, you mean?” she said. “You would read my mind, Mr Oversight, to see if I am lying?” She held out the simple cross that hung round her neck. “Is not it enough that I swear on this cross?”

  “Without meaning to give offence, sister, I have encountered as many men who hide their sins behind their religious paraphernalia as I have those who live up to what their crosses or stars or what-not are meant to represent.” He smiled. He felt more like his old self.

  “If you could look into my true eyes, you would see they were blue and clear and innocent, though a little clouded by sadness and betrayal, I fear,” she said, still keeping her head down and the eyes in question in the shadow of her hood. “You would find nothing to object to in them.”

  “Then please be so kind as to look at me,” he said. “I mean no harm by it.”

  He knelt in front of her, bringing his head down to her level. She looked away, her hand clamped over her mouth.

  “And I mean you no harm,” she said. “But you cannot look into those eyes. Those eyes are lost to me.”

  “Lost?” he said, reaching a hand gently towards her shoulder, intending to turn her towards him. She flinched away, as if sensing his movement.

  “Lost and long gone,” she said. “I am not the woman I was. But I am still not a liar. I am, however, what you see—” She turned her head towards him. “—an abomination. Please forgive me.”

  Her face was taut with age, the skin stretched over a delicacy of bone and sinew that would always have been frail but once would have been beautiful too. The eyes that looked out of the somehow still gentle face were not blue or clear or saddened. They were black. As black and shiny as the teeth she revealed as she took her hand away from her mouth and reached into the folds of her robe.

  “You are a Mirror Wight,” he said in English, as his hand instinctively made its own journey inside his coat to find the comforting handle of his last knife.

  She shrugged.

  “What you call me does not matter. What I am is this, and being this I have my own needs and customs.” Her hand emerged from her garment with a flash of metal that made Sharp step back and draw his own blade.

  The black eyes fixed on him, her face caught between understanding and reproach. She crouched and placed the thing she had taken from her habit on the mirrored floor, then hopped back away from it.

  It was a small tin beaker, battered and worn, no larger than an egg-cup.

  Sharp thought of all he had been told about Mirror Wights and looked around him in case there were more surprises waiting beyond the ambit of his vision.

  She twitched her head towards the cup.

  “I don’t need much, sir, but I do need some. You do not have to fill the cup, but the small amount that you can well spare will benefit me more than I can say. And in return I will take you to the place I last saw that ring.”

  Sharp looked at her. Though bett
er than it had been, his head still felt claggy and thick, and his thoughts moved sluggishly and with unaccustomed difficulty.

  “Measure twice, cut once,” he said in English.

  “Sir?” said the nun, head twitching towards him, the black eyes as beady as a crow’s.

  “Something a friend once told me,” he said in French. “It means: make a decision and then examine it again to make sure it is the right one.”

  “There are others like me in the mirrors,” she said. “None of them would ask for so little blood. And many of them would not ask at all. They would just take it.”

  “They could try,” he said, spinning the knife in his hands.

  He bungled it, his thumb closing too soon and knocking the blade to the floor where it spun and clattered against the mirrors, coming to rest at her feet.

  He couldn’t believe he’d dropped his knife. He never fumbled. Deftness was part of who he was.

  She bent and stood again, his knife in her hands. She turned it over and looked at it with interest.

  “Pretty,” she said, and looked up at him with a smile. He knew it was a measure of just how far gone he was that his last blade was now in her hands.

  He had no doubt he could best her, blade or no blade, if it came to it. He could imagine how easily her bones would crack and snap, but he shuddered at the thought of it.

  She spun the knife, checked it and then held it out, haft first, towards him.

  “It is your choice. I will not force you. I am an abomination through necessity, not inclination. I remember what it was to be like you.”

  He took the knife from her, conscious that he snatched at it a little too eagerly. He felt disconcertingly clumsy. He felt worse when he saw he was standing over her with the blade pointing towards her throat. He stepped back, smiled apologetically and then slipped the blade back into his belt with as little awkwardness as he could manage.

  She stooped and retrieved her cup. Even clasped in her small hands, it looked pitiably small.