The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  She stepped out of the chair she had been sitting in and dragged it up to the table. She spun it and straddled it, leaning forward and resting her arms on the back as she looked into Lucy’s and then Charlie’s eyes.

  “You’ll be wanting to know the trick of recognising them and stopping that slipperiness?”

  They nodded. The Smith and Cook exchanged a look. Cait held her palms out.

  “Put your hands against mine,” she said. Lucy and Charlie each pressed a palm to Cait’s. Charlie felt self-conscious about the dry warmth of her skin against his own. She moved her hands back so there was a half-inch gap between them.

  “Now close your eyes. Clear your mind, and tell me what you notice.”

  Charlie could still feel the warmth of her hand across the gap. More than that, he could feel a kind of buzz, or a vibration.

  “Feel it?” said Cait.

  “There’s a reverberation,” said Lucy.

  “Well, that’s another fine word and if it means a hum in the air like a hive full of bees, you’re spot on,” said Cait. “But there’s something else.”

  “I can only feel a warmth and the hum,” said Charlie.

  “It’s not a feeling thing,” said Cait. “You have other senses than touch, do you not? Why, as many as the fingers on your hand if you trouble to count them.”

  “Fish,” said Lucy suddenly. “There’s a smell of fish. Clean fish, fresh fish–not sea fish.”

  Charlie inhaled and smiled.

  “Yes. Freshwater fish,” he said. “Like a trout.”

  “There you go,” said Cait. “Open your eyes. A changeling sends a vibration through the air as it walks, and when it’s changing it’s even stronger. And there’s always that clean fish smell about them–nothing unpleasant, just…”

  “Slippery,” said Charlie.

  “Like a salmon,” agreed Cait.

  “Wait,” said Lucy. “Does that mean you’re a changeling too?”

  “Faith no, not a bit of it,” said Cait with a wink. “Just good at pretending.”

  The Smith nodded.

  “Like a salmon,” he said. “That’s a good lesson. They won’t forget.”

  Cait looked almost pleased at his grudging approval.

  “Arrah now, sometimes show works better than tell,” she said.

  “Most times, in fact,” said The Smith. “You learn more by doing than listening. Anything you choose to teach them while you’re with us would be gratefully accepted, I assure you. You have gifts to give, and though I accept your decision to walk the lone path as a venatrix, it always seems a shame to me that you solitary ones have no one to pass your wit and knowledge on to. For you clearly have both in abundance.”

  Cait inclined her head slightly, taking the compliment. Cook looked at The Smith and then at Lucy. She raised her eyebrows theatrically as if to indicate that she thought a certain man who should be old enough to know better was a bit taken with the girl from Skibbereen.

  “Well, teaching’s an honourable thing and an undervalued thing,” Cait said, “and sure, wouldn’t I have been lost and floundering had I not had a wise old soul who took me under her wing as a mentor when I was green as new mown grass? I’m happy to share any useful scraps with these two while I’m enjoying your hospitality, and small thanks it is by comparison with all the delicious meals I’m getting used to. Going to quite spoil me for anyone else’s cooking for the rest of my life, I can see that now, and what I can’t see the waistband of my skirt’s telling me, and no mistake.”

  Cook harrumphed, and looked embarrassed and pleased in equal measure.

  “How do you do that?” said Charlie. “With the changelings?”

  “Do what?” Cait said.

  “Make yourself seem like them–I mean, send out vibrations and their smell. I mean… are you sure you’re not some kind of… Are you a changeling?”

  Cait snorted back a laugh.

  “I’m a hunter, Charlie boy. And so it helps to be good at disguise and mimicry. It’s like other trackers have birdcalls to bring in their prey, it’s just a trick. I’ve the knack of sending out a resonance. The fish smell?”

  She reached back and pulled a newspaper wrapped package into view.

  “Two trout from Billingsgate market this morning. For my tea. And your education…”

  The passage of time seemed to accelerate for both Lucy and Charlie as the late and lazy summer began to feel more like autumn. In part this was because they were both kept busy learning and doing what Cook described as “getting good and seasoned”. Once it became apparent that the venatrix now had her own reasons for staying in London, awaiting the return of Lady of Nantasket, the ship that had taken the object of her hunt across the Atlantic, The Smith and the others seemed to relax about her. The two younger members of the Hand enjoyed walking the city with Cait almost as much as they liked doing so with Hodge. She was sharp and observant, and had the knack of alerting them to anomalies in such a way that made them feel partners in the enterprise, rather than mere students. She was, in simple terms, fun. Partly this was her nature, partly it was perhaps because she was so much closer to their own age than the other members of the Hand. And partly she was herself diverted by the great teeming variety the city presented them with, being herself, as she said, “no more than a simple country girl from the rolling green”, and some of her wonder and mirth at the city was passed on to them. She was also a steadying influence on Lucy, who was able to talk to her about her misgivings about The Smith. When she first broached it, she had felt she was betraying a confidence, maybe even being needlessly open about a fear she would more normally have kept to herself, but Cait had listened to her carefully and seriously. And then she had said that in her mind, misgivings were always useful, and that she should listen to them and be willing to change her views if experience added new information to the picture.

  “It’s important to have strong beliefs and opinions,” she said, “because you want to steer your own life according to your own lights. But the other side of being strong like that is you have to be open to the fact that you might be wrong, and be willing to change those opinions if the evidence rises up and smacks you in the eye.”

  And because Cait had doubts about being part of a group like The Oversight but was willing enough to work with them on a temporary basis, Lucy decided she was, for the moment, in the right place, where the benefits outweighed the dangers. And the education she was getting was undoubtedly both strange and useful.

  Hodge was a good teacher in a wholly different way to Cait. He knew the city from rooftop to riverbed with the compendious detail of a true native. London was in his blood, and indeed the scars on his body attested to the fact that, like the pugnacious Jed who was now always at his side, quite a lot of his blood was spread around London in return.

  What Charlie and Lucy didn’t fully pick up on was the fact that the three other members of the Hand were exhausted and worried. They were all attuned to something lurking around them without being able to fully apprehend the shape of it. They knew the Safe House was being watched, and were sure that the eyes turned towards it from the shadows belonged to the House of Templebane, but since watching was not a transgression of Law or Lore, they were unable to act fully against it. Hodge did suggest that they should confront Issachar but the others dissuaded him, since not knowing the full extent of his interest or indeed his powers made this, for them, an unchancy thing to do.

  “You’re scared,” Hodge said to The Smith one evening when they were alone, except for Charlie who was sitting in a corner determinedly practising igniting candles without a match, a skill he was still irritatingly less adept at than Lucy.

  The Smith just looked at him.

  “Standing still in a fight is a good way to lose it,” said Hodge.

  “We are not in a fight,” said The Smith after a long silence. “We are in a war. We have always been in conflict, but things are changing. The Sluagh send one of their own into the city to help work o
ut a stratagem directly against us in concert with other ‘normal’ enemies. Think how painstakingly that Sluagh, who died killed by his own bone pet, must have picked his way here through a maze of iron railway tracks and barriers of flowing water. Imagine the dedicated hatred necessary for one of them to do that.”

  “But still you are frightened,” said Hodge. “You do not want to confront this Templebane because you fear his reach. And that is not worthy of us. Not worthy of Sharp. Or Sara. Or any that have gone before.”

  “If some of those who went before had been a little more frightened, it is likely they would not now be gone and we would not be in such a parlously reduced state,” said The Smith. “So that argument cuts no ice with me, old friend. Fear is a perfectly good whetstone to keep us keen and ready.”

  “Those are just bloody words,” said Hodge, who was at the core of his being a creature of action.

  “More than words,” said The Smith. “They are armour against folly. You know the saying… fools rush in… And we must think of the future.”

  Hodge snorted and tapped the handle of the knife at his belt.

  “I’m no fool, Smith. And you know damn well that we are both far from what credulous folk who believe in such things call angels either.”

  He stood and made for the door.

  “Where are you going?” said The Smith.

  “The one bright spot on the horizon is that the Irish terrier bitch Jed’s taken a spark to seems to be in season and is disposed to spend some time with him,” said Hodge. “Only the uncooperative pimping bastard that thinks he owns her has got her shut up in a back closet behind a tall wall until it passes.”

  “And?” said Cook.

  “And Jed would like a bit of a hand getting over,” said Hodge, as if it was obvious. “Over the wall. They’ll make some fierce, clever pups they will and all. And like you just said, Smith, got to think of the future.”

  He nodded at Charlie.

  “And it’s a crime for a growing boy not to have a dog of his own.”

  Charlie watched him leave, listening to the excited scrabbling of Jed’s claws as he raced to the door, and realised that although he hadn’t really considered it, a dog would indeed be a splendid thing to have at his side in whatever was to come in the years ahead.

  CHAPTER 27

  AMOS BOUND

  Amos helped the Ghost search the shoreline the second day they were at the seaside. They trudged a mile and more along the beach, heads down, looking for sea-glass, glass with its original shininess frosted and its sharp edges smoothed and rounded by the action of the waves tumbling broken bottle shards back and forth among the stone pebbles. It was a strangely hypnotic thing to do, with the sound of the surf in his ears and the heat of the sun on his back. He scanned the endless variety of sea-shaped shingle ribboning away in front of him, trying to keep alert to the anomalies, the gleam of colour among the brown, white and grey of the flint pebbles. He found one piece that looked promising but the Ghost rejected it wordlessly, tossing it away into the salt water before continuing with her own perusal of the shoreline. He began collecting stones with holes in them instead, looping them on a piece of old twine he found tangled round a salt-bleached fragment of wood.

  “Why are you collecting those?” said the Ghost.

  He just shrugged and carried on.

  “People used to think you could only see uncanny things by peering at them through a holed stone,” she said. “It’s not true though.”

  He knew this was right: he remembered the Sluagh, certainly the uncanniest things he had ever seen, materialising out of the darkness in the field behind the inn, just before he had run and fallen into the canal, the night he’d killed the tinker. He’d seen them straight, with no gimmick like a holed stone.

  Why are you collecting sea-glass pebbles?

  She didn’t answer him. She just crunched ahead, looking at the line where the wet stones met the dry.

  What do you need them for?

  “I don’t need them,” she said quietly, after a while. “They’re not for me.”

  Her eyes seemed to be sharper than his, because by the time they turned and headed back along the beach her pockets rattled with sea-glass in several shades of blue, green and orangey-brown. She rejected the two pieces he found because they were clear glass, now tumbled to a dull white.

  “No one has white eyes,” she sniffed, an explanation that clearly meant something to her but which left him none the wiser.

  He carried on finding stones with holes worn in them, and by the time they got back to the boat he had a heavy loop of them swinging from his fist.

  “Looks like a necklace,” she said.

  He nodded. He didn’t tell her the swung weight of it also felt like a weapon. He hung it from the back of his pack and left it there.

  They sat by the fire again as the sun dropped behind the edge of the world, and they talked about many things, but the one that stuck in his mind was the matter of The Oversight and their ongoing conflict with the Sluagh. She spoke of them with a strange mix of regret and something close to contempt, as if–he thought–she was talking of an old friend who had somehow betrayed her. He’d heard of the Free Company while listening in to conversations had behind closed doors in the counting house, but he’d never been quite sure what they did or why the Templebanes were opposed to them. Having himself had a terrifyingly close run with the Sluagh, he thought any people who were against them were probably more to be liked than feared, whatever the Ghost felt about them.

  That night, for the first time since they stopped by the sea, he slept badly, gripped by a nightmare from which he woke groggy and disorientated, the kind of psychic fouling you make yourself stay awake after in order that the memory of it is washed away before closing your eyes and again risking sleep. Only when he was sure that the taste of the dream had faded entirely did he let himself drift off again. And then he had the dream all over again anyway: it was a gory replay of the death of Mr M’Gregor, a version where Amos was trapped in a great hall, full of doors, and he was chased by something, and each time he opened a door to escape there was someone from his past standing there with a horse-pistol like M’Gregor’s, and no matter what he did–run away, try and slide past, plead, cajole, warn–they all just put the barrel beneath their chin and pulled the trigger happily, often laughing as they painted the door lintels and ceilings with the inside of their heads. It was the species of dream where you know it’s a dream while you are bogged in it, and that the relief of consciousness is just a hair’s breadth away, if only you could escape the inexorable tug of the illusion in which you’re mired. He woke gasping, his hands clawing at the night air, as if he had pulled himself out of the pit of sleep by main force alone.

  The Ghost was sitting in the moonlight, very still, looking at him.

  I was trapped in a nightmare, he thought, sitting up.

  “I saw,” she said. “But it’s all right now. We can go.”

  Go?

  She stood and looked away back up the runnel towards the high chalk beyond.

  “It’s time,” she said. “Full moon. It’s not safe here any more.”

  Maybe he was still disorientated by the vividness of the carnage and the impotence and the guilt in his dreams, or perhaps it was the deep conviction in her tone, but he felt a chill shudder through him as he stood and looked around. Their safe haven did not look so welcoming somehow. The sea was too calm. The cliffs seemed to have grown taller while at the same time the moon appeared to have come unnaturally close, hanging over the water and silvering it from horizon to shore. The intense reflection of its brightness made a thick streak of light which ran across the surface of the Channel from horizon to shore, a band of illumination that seemed to be ominously pointing directly at them.

  Without much noticing how he got his boots on or hoisted the tinker’s pack back onto his shoulders, Amos found himself hurrying away from the shingle, back up the slope towards the high chalk.

 
; It felt as if it took longer to get back up to the top than it had to descend the sweep of land, not in that it took more energy, which it did, but more as if the ground had stretched in their absence. Much as the flat sea was rendered unworldly in the exceptional brightness of the low-hanging moon, the smoothness of the grass all around them no longer seemed at all familiar. There was not a whisper of wind, and all he could hear was the sound of their feet and the swing of the stones on the back of his pack, scuffing the canvas as they moved. He could also hear his heart pound and the noise of his breathing as they laboured upwards. For the longest time, he felt as if the arc of the slope ahead of them never changed, as if he was still dreaming, as if that dream was of walking ever onwards round a featureless grassy ball with no beginning or end, doomed to toil for ever over the endless curve, like a man trapped and tethered to a moon-washed treadmill. His eyes blinked in relief when he finally made out the shape of rocks breaking the featureless swell, humped round the sheep crossroads on the high ridge ahead.

  The relief lasted until they reached the junction and the Ghost stopped and spoke to the rocks.

  “I thought we would have to wait for you.”

  And then the rocks replied, standing up, revealing that they were not rocks at all, but men who had been crouched motionless in the moonlight.

  “Why are you surprised?” the tallest one said. “You called us last moonrise.”

  He was a head taller than Amos. Even in the brightness of the night, it was hard to make out whether the expression on his face was kind or hostile because the normal, readable contours of his visage were broken up and obscured by the twisting tangle of dark tattoos that covered it. The tattoos extended up the shaven sides of his head to the crest of hair that ran down it, in the kind of long top-knot favoured by the distant Mohawk tribes of North America, a striking engraving of which Amos had once seen in the window of a printers in Cheapside. There was some kind of ornament or animal fixed to the very front of the hair, so that it squatted over the midpoint of his brow like the figurehead of a ship. Amos had the initial thought that it was some kind of giant beetle: it was humped and shiny enough with a kind of hard chitinous surface, but as the man angled his head to look back at him, he realised it was the skull of an animal, painted black. It was larger than a rabbit’s skull. From the patchwork of black and white fur that made up the man’s coat, he decided it must be a badger. It was an odd detail for him to be focusing on, he realised even as he made the thought, because that was not the most striking thing about the man, not the bones he wore plaited into his mohawk, nor the ones that fastened his clothes. Not even the sickle-shaped blade he held loose in one hand was the most striking thing, nor the tattoos. All of these were mere minutiae. The full horror of the thing was that the man that bore them was not a man. Nor was he, or at least his type, unknown to Amos. He was the thing he had been running from since he stepped off Mountfellon’s coach.