“You cannot know that,” said the Sluagh on Amos’s back.
“She cannot see the future,” said the one on his legs.
“No one can see the future,” said Badger Skull. “Much is possible, many things that light-drenched folk cannot or do not dare to imagine. But not that.”
“I can feel it though,” she said. “I can feel the future.”
“It is not possible,” he said. “You are mad.”
“She looks mad,” chuckled the sharp-bottomed Sluagh, shifting again.
“Can a Glint survive without a heart-stone?” she said.
Badger Skull grunted.
“For a time,” he said, “and then she becomes depleted. Then disordered. Then crazed. And then she dies.”
“How long a time?” asked the Ghost.
“Three years, four years maybe, not much more,” said Badger Skull. “There was a gang of monks up Lindisfarne way once put a Glint in a cell for her own good, thinking she was possessed but not wanting to burn her. Being ‘kind’ men. Was said she screamed solid for close to five years before she died. Monks took to suffering her cries as part of their penance. Such is the kindness of the light-dwellers. But we never heard of a Glint living stoneless longer than that.”
“You’re sure of that?” she said.
“Sure as the moon is silver, and that darkness swallows light,” said the Sluagh.
“I was a Glint,” she said. “I am a Glint. And my heart-stone was taken from me, with much else, fifteen years ago.”
“That’s not possible,” said Badger Skull.
“Yet here I am,” she said. “Not the girl I was. Not possible. Not the Glint I was. Something different. Something beyond. Something that feels the future tugging at me like the pull of an outgoing tide.”
“So what are you?” said Badger Skull.
“I told you,” she said. “I am vengeance.”
“And you would be revenged upon Mountfellon,” he said.
“Mountfellon must die,” she replied. “I will show you how to take the flag he holds, and in return you will bring him to me.”
“You wish to kill him yourself.”
“Never send a man to do a woman’s job,” she replied. “I will not believe he is dead until I see the life run out of his eyes. This I have felt so strongly that yes, I have almost seen it.”
“And the boy?”
“The boy is the key that will unlock everything. He is already linked by blood and place to Mountfellon. He is a weapon. I will tell you how to use him.”
“Why will he do what we want?” said Badger Skull. “He is not vengeance. He is just a mute, dark-skinned boy with his head in a bag.”
“He is the Bloody Boy,” she repeated. “I have felt it.”
The Sluagh snorted again.
“I know nothing of your ‘Bloody Boys’. Madness.”
“No,” she said. “Once I was a Glint. Then my heart-stone was taken. Instead of dying I endured. I don’t know why. But maybe through the crucible of madness I changed. Once, what happened in the past left a magnetic tug that I was able to attach to, like a lodestone. Now, what is going to happen exerts its own attraction, a disturbance in the ether, as if I am glinting forward rather than backward in time…”
“Enough,” said Badger Skull. “Too much talk clouds things. I have decided. It shall be done. There is too much to be gained not to attempt it. And if it fails, then only time is lost. Time, and your life. And his.”
“It will not fail,” said the Ghost. “I have felt it.”
The Sluagh looped a noose around Amos’s forehead, tightening it so that the rope bit in to the depression below his brow, forcing his eyes closed, seeming to push the eyeballs back into their sockets. That was painful enough, but then they pulled the end of the rope down his back, through his legs and fed it up through the rope tying his hands together in front of him, and tugged it tight. His back arched, the rope cut painfully between his legs, and they tied it off so that he was kneeling with his head held backwards and his neck unprotected and open to whatever weapon they had prepared for it.
He felt like a bull at the slaughterhouse.
He grunted at them in protest, but all that got was laughter and a shove that sent him over on his side. Then, as he regained the breath that had been jarred from him, one of the Sluagh straddled him and sat on his side.
“Be still and thole it, boy,” he said, “for this will hurt.”
He bucked in terror as he felt the sharp cut of the razor at his neck. But he did not feel the following tug of a blade through veins and tendons, spilling his life away into the grass below. There was no cut. He felt the sting and then the withdrawal and then another sting, and then another. It was not a blade. It was a pin. Or a needle. Or a thorn. He was being slowly and deliberately pricked in a line around his neck. Once he realised they were not going to cut his throat, or at least not now, he relaxed as much as he could and tried to think.
“Thole it”, he thought. What is “thole”?
Endure. Abide. Survive, answered the Ghost. This will not kill you.
What is it? He winced as the sharp pricking continued around his neck.
It is a tattoo. They are marking you.
Why?
He had a horror of finding himself with a writhing face covered in interlocked curlicues like the Sluagh.
“He wants to know what you are doing to him,” said the Ghost. “He does not want a face like yours.”
The Sluagh sitting astride him answered. It was Badger Skull. Amos heard him spit in contempt.
“He does not merit a face like ours. A face like ours is earned.” He leant down and cuffed the back of Amos’s head, sending it forward, making the rope across his eyes dig in and sending simultaneous shafts of pain between his legs and flashes of light behind his eyelids.
“It is old power, boy. It is not a shadow-mark, for you have not repudiated the light. It is a mark of ownership, a tithe on your future, a guarantor, if you will, of your subservience and compliance to our will.”
“The white tattoo,” said the Ghost, a note of wonder in her voice.
“You have heard of it?”
“I must have,” she said. “Long ago, when I knew things.”
“It is a warrandice,” said the Sluagh, carrying on with the painful perforation of Amos’s neck. “An oath-lock, if you will. And if you won’t, in fact. When the band is finished you will take a vow to do as we ask, and to do so for a fixed term. The tattoo is white, which on most is next to invisible. On you it will be a noticeable band. As the term nears completion the tattoo will begin to blacken from first prick to last. If you do as you have sworn before blackness meets blackness, the tattoo will fade without harm. But if you fail or break your word and the black band completes itself, whatever hangs below it will shrivel and die. And since in your case that is your whole body, I suggest you try very hard to do as we ask.”
Badger Skull slopped something wet into his hand, and then smeared it in Amos’s neck. For a moment he thought it was a balm, something to take away the sting of the needle and whatever it was they were using as ink. It was an unexpected kindness, the soothing, cooling wetness against the rawness. Amos reached out with his mind for the Ghost, but she was suddenly closed to him as the line of the tattoo began to burn with a flaring intensity that stunned him rigid, and then dropped him into the dark well of unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 30
A FORTUITOUS CONVERGENCE
That Sara and the nun eventually crossed paths within the vastness of the mirrored maze was providential, but not entirely the result of luck, or rather, if it was luck, then it was the happy accident of Sara’s doggedness and education, for she had been trained to deal with chaos or complexity by being methodical. Alone, Raven-less and lost, she had kept hold of that initial plan to quarter the mirrors by walking in a slowly expanding square spiral made by keeping point of her paces and always turning in the same direction. And eventually her feet found his trail
again.
She strode past it, so desperately involved in counting–and not losing count–that she didn’t realise what had happened until several paces later. Then she had stopped, scarcely believing her plan had–so many, many tens of thousands of paces later–actually worked. She walked carefully backwards, subtracting steps from her tally as she went in case what she had felt was a false trail, in order that she could get back on track if it were so. At this stage, the careful husbanding of the sum of her paces had become so important and relentless that the fact she was doing it to find Sharp had almost escaped her. The walking and counting and turning were almost all she could remember.
And then she found his trail a second time. She just stood there, letting the familiarity of his trace note resonate up through her, spreading warmth and vitality up the length of her body until it reached her face, where it emerged in a wide smile.
“There you are,” she said. “There you are.” She had almost forgotten how much the sense of Sharp was folded around her life, something that had always been there, something that felt like home. She wiped her eyes and began to follow the trail.
Only after she had got to a hundred and thirty did she realise she no longer needed to keep count of her paces any more. She grinned wider and picked up the pace.
The nun had not told Sharp how little she expected to find a disembodied hand in the mirrors. She thought it was–as had in fact happened–much more likely to have found itself separated by a mirror breaking as it was transitioning from one location in the outer world to another, and thus to be outside the mirrors entirely.
With that in mind, she had determined that it would be useful to retrace Sharp’s passage through the mirrors in order perhaps to find this elusive girl who had stolen a hand, but more expediently to find her way back to his point of entry to the mirrored world, and so contact the woman he spoke of, this Sarah Falk, to ask her to come and show herself to Sharp. Finding the hand thief seemed a much more unlikely prospect since the nun felt sure the girl would only have used the mirrors as a means of escape, not as a hiding place, and so would now be far beyond the looking-glass realm. Much easier to find this Falk, she thought. Her head was full of her new plan, a kind of secret elation that she had serendipitously found a way to enlist a powerful group such as The Oversight in prosecuting the vengeance she sought. And it was not only vengeance, for she still retained a small corner of her heart that was not entirely wighted, where a sympathy with the normal world and its inhabitants remained alive. The Citizen, architect of the Disaster, executioner of so many thousands more than just those of The Oversight who he had conspired to drown as they had come to stop him was a living peril to humanity. He was, in his perversion, the definition of inhumanity. The little nun hated him, but still some part of her also still loved the world from which she was banished.
She was thinking on this as she retraced Sharp’s steps, and then suddenly found the passage ahead was occupied. She backed up on instinct. She was, after all, the most timid of the Mirror Wights, and had stayed safe by relying on her caution.
But then she spotted the rings and the gloves on the advancing woman, and as the woman stopped as she in turn saw the nun, she also noticed the long white plait of her hair whip as Sara turned quickly to see if she had just walked into another ambush, and she knew her. Sharp’s description had been precise and vivid.
“You are Sara Falk,” she said.
Sara had already produced a knife in each hand and was crouched in anticipation of attack.
“Mr Sharp sent me to find you.”
“To find me?” said Sara. “Who are you?”
“To find your hand, in fact,” said the nun. “But I see you have already recovered it.”
Sara stared at her.
“I am a Mirror Wight, as you see,” said the nun. “But I do not lie.”
“Where is Sharp?” said Sara, still trying to work out what the ambush was.
“He is trapped but I can take you to him,” said the nun. “Follow me if you would see him.”
“I would,” said Sara. She sheathed one knife back in her belt, but she kept the other in her right hand. “And I will cut your damned head off if you try to trick me.”
“I do not lie,” said the nun with a shrug.
“Neither do I,” said Sara as she followed her down the passage of reflections. “Neither do I.”
CHAPTER 31
NIGHTWALKERS ALL
Amos, mute then betrayed and now marked, travelled with the Sluagh and the Ghost. They rode with them on small, tough little ponies whose manes clattered with the bones and bird skulls plaited into them. He found the first few hours hard and painful on parts of himself that were not used to taking such a consistent pummelling, but he soon adjusted to the way of riding and was beginning to feel easier on a horse, although he was far from comfortable about anything else.
The warrandice scribed on his neck was sufficient coercion that he was neither bound nor hobbled to ensure that he didn’t escape. The itching tattoo round his neck was sufficient reminder of what lay ahead for him if he tried to run, and the truth of it is that even if he had taken flight, he wouldn’t have begun to know where to flee to for help.
He did think of running to London and throwing himself on the mercy of his fathers, but neither Issachar nor Zebulon had ever shown any sign of supranatural abilities, their power being based on knowledge and stratagem and an ability to influence others by more mundane methods. He knew of The Oversight, but didn’t think for a moment they would help him even if they could. It wasn’t that he shared the Ghost’s equivocal view of them; it was that he was too clearly of the other party, being a notional Templebane. He knew that by now his fathers’ latest move against them, taken in conjunction with Mountfellon, would have come to fruition, which would either have reduced the Free Company’s effectiveness, erased it entirely–or failed. And if it had failed, then there could be no worse introduction to them than the name of Templebane.
So he travelled as the Sluagh travelled: by night and along forgotten paths which wound through the landscape with as much complexity as the dark markings on their bodies, avoiding running water and railways, keeping where possible to the watersheds and ridgelines of the country. His days became nights and his world slowly began to stand on its head. The Ghost, once her treachery was made plain, seemed to give it no further thought and accompanied him as before, almost as a friend and mentor rather than his very real persecutor.
She was clearly elated that a revenge she had spent a lifetime anticipating was to be hers, and hers so very soon. He heard her talk quite openly about this to the Sluagh, who were, despite their habitual air of disdain for mere daywalkers, clearly fascinated by what she told them he had done to M’Gregor’s mind.
“He is the perfect weapon, this boy,” she said. “He has already proved himself to Mountfellon. Iron is no obstacle to him, nor running water. He will penetrate the ironbound perimeter of Gallstaine, bending the mind of any who hold the gates and doors, and once inside he will exact my revenge on Francis, and then you may have the thing he has so securely hidden away from you for all these years.”
Francis was, Amos knew, the given name of the austere Mountfellon. The way that the Ghost began calling him increasingly by the more intimate name the closer they got to Rutlandshire seemed to indicate to Amos that she was returning to the point in her history where the viscount had violated their one-time friendship so brutally. The betrayal of faith, coming from someone who had once clearly been close to her, had made it unforgiveable.
They spoke of this one night during a pause the progress of the troop as he was unbound and directed to enter a toll keeper’s cottage where he stole–on her instructions–paper, pen and ink from a table they had spied through a window. She wanted to write a letter of introduction that he could present to the gatekeeper at Gallstaine, to get him on the premises, the only obstacle she could see being his frustrating inability to speak for himself.
; Don’t worry, she told him. I will pen a letter stipulating that it can only be released from your hand to Francis’s. That will pique his interest and guarantee you get close enough to work your power on his mind.
Her grin in the moonlight was disturbingly hungry.
You call him Francis.
Do I?
You have begun to, yes.
Well, we were children together once.
Friends.
Friends, yes. And now we are to be intimates again. Perhaps that is why I am slipping into the old way of talking of him…
Intimates?
The smile she gave him in the moonlight was stark and terrible.
There is nothing more intimate than revenge. As he once saw the hope die in my eyes, I will lean in and see him see me, and know it is more than hope that will be dying in his eyes, and that I am the means of his punishment.
Amos didn’t waste breath pointing out that he was going to be the one with blood on his hands. He had tried to talk his way out of his fate more than once as they travelled, and knew she saw him as no more than an instrument in the matter, a dagger or a vial of poison, and that she was the hand that wielded him. She had supreme confidence that, when faced with Mountfellon, Amos would make him turn his mind and then his own hand against himself in the way M’Gregor had done. It did not occur to her that he might not be able to do it.
You did what you did to M’Gregor because you thought you were going to die. You will do what you will do to Francis because you KNOW you will die if you cheat the warrandice around your throat. Fear of death will again unlock your power.
On another night, the troop of Sluagh paused at a field in what Amos thought was most likely a part of Gloucestershire. He had been picking up geographical hints from milestones and fingerposts which they passed along the way. He was a little surprised at how far west they had come, but then the Ghost explained that they were taking a crooked path across the country to get around the great and–to them–insurmountable obstacle of the Thames. He had just noticed a sign pointing towards a nearby hamlet reading Seven Springs when they diverted from their course which had, for that last few miles, been shadowing the Cirencester road, and paused.
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