The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Plenty of time to rest when you’re dead,” he said, thinking again of Cook as he did so, these being the words with which she had turfed him out of his box-bed behind the kitchen range on every morning of his youth, before he graduated to his own rooms on the upper floors of the house.

  He reached for the hole which was angled at roughly forty-five degrees, being offset on the arc where the cavern wall swept up to become the roof. His fingers scrabbled awkwardly for a grip on the stone lip, missed, clawed out again and held. He pulled himself into the side, managing to wedge the barrel staves into the hole far enough to be able to hold himself in place against the circular current. He then took his free hand and snatched one of the lit candles from those lashed to the staves, and threw it through the chink.

  He saw it bounce and bob in the space beyond. He jammed his face to the hole and peered awkwardly at what was there.

  He saw a narrow passage hacked through the rock, like a mineworking, no more than five feet high. The wall opposite was cut into low rectangular galleries walled in by hedges of regularly shaped stones, curiously bobbled and rounded like flints, laid in a repetitive texture that was anomalously somehow like knitting. In the rest of the snatched view he was allowed before the candle he had thrown was carried away by the shallow stream of water flowing off to the left of the chink, he saw a sooty line snaking along the roof, evidence of miners’ candles at one time, and just before the light disappeared he saw someone staring at him–and then the candle bobbed around the curve of the wall and the face he had glimpsed was gone.

  “Help!” he shouted. “If there is anyone there, please help!”

  No one answered.

  The only sound was the water flowing through the hole and splashing to the floor of the passage beyond. He scrabbled for another candle, lit it and jammed it through the hole, this time keeping hold as he squinted through the narrowed opening–obstructed as it now was by his arm–his eyes searching for the face glimpsed opposite.

  Two black eyes stared back at him, unmoved and unmoving.

  “Help!” he rasped.

  Then he realised what he was looking at. Not a face, or at least not a face that could respond. Rather he was staring into the underpinnings of a face, into the eye sockets of a skull wedged into the hedge of strangely regular stones opposite. Except now that he had identified the skull, he realised what the “hedge” was really made of. He had after all spent enough time moving similar things and laying them out on the now sunken floor far below his feet to recognise them for what they were. Not stones, but the knuckle ends of human femurs in their hundreds, stacked on top of each other to make a wall of bones, a wall that the skull had been placed in to make a kind of grim decoration.

  Not a mineworking then, he thought, staring back into its mockingly vacant orbits. A catacomb.

  He felt the water rushing past his chin, flowing out of the cavern into the passage beyond.

  Not a passage, he corrected himself. A galleried sepulchre.

  As good a place as any to die.

  He held on and closed his eyes. The cold was making him sleepy. He was too tired to think straight. Maybe if he just dozed for a moment, maybe if he just let sleep take him briefly, he would awake with a clearer head. Sleep. Just a nap for a minute or two and then he would revive.

  He forced his eyes open.

  “No” he said.

  This was how the cold took you. He’d seen it in the dead of winter, in icily forgotten garrets and unfrequented alleys choked with snow: people died of cold calmly in the end. It wasn’t a violent thing. Exposure snuck up on them like a friend, whispered that if they folded themselves in slumber they would be warmer, or at least not notice the chill. Then they closed their eyes and drifted off into the long sleep, quietly and inoffensively, until they just forgot to take the next shallow breath and the heart kicked for the last time, and all was still.

  He wasn’t going to go like that.

  The sound of the water debouching from the narrow chink into the catacomb passage had changed. It was quieter, less gushing. His heart rose again. He had been wrong. The flow was slowing. He had another look through the hole.

  The sound had not changed because the flow had slowed. It had changed because the distance the water had to fall had shortened considerably.

  The water level in the passage outside was now rising. Simple physics annihilated his last hope: once the passage filled to the top of the chink, he would be stuck on the wrong side, with maybe three inches of headspace, a wafer-thin air pocket that would run out in minutes.

  He was dead in the water.

  CHAPTER 37

  THE STONE SEA BY MOONLIGHT

  High on the Steinernes Meer, the rolling limestone karst that tops the central plateau of the Berchtesgaden Alps, a middle-aged woman was screaming at the sky.

  It was a clear, crisp night gripped in an unnatural stillness that had in it neither hint nor even memory of wind. The entire lofty and untravelled wilderness of wave-like ridges, gorges and swallow holes was silvered by a high hunter’s moon that hung above air so fresh and thin that the bright scrabble of stars overhead seemed close enough to touch.

  The woman’s screaming was rhythmic and wordless, each primal shriek an outraged howl of denial stabbed into the cold heart of the night. She had left her husband and the boy in the lonely shepherd’s hut on the edge of the high summer pasture far below on the Salzburgerland side of the massif and had climbed for nearly two hours to gain the perfect solitude of the Stone Sea in order that she could make this noise alone and unheard. The tracks of her tears glistened in the moonlight and her mouth gaped like a cavern as she howled her grief into the upper void. Her grey hair–which she had unbound from its usual plaited crown–hung loose over her dark loden cloak, and partly hid the swollen goitre that bulged her neck, a small blight disguised by the wide ribbon of the embroidered Kropfband she wore like a collar. Goitres were not unusual among the inhabitants of this mountainous part of middle Europe; they were a direct effect of their iodine-deprived diet and were not–as the lowland dwellers often ignorantly and unkindly claimed–a consequence of generations of inbreeding.

  She was thus not a comely woman, but the purity of her grief gave her a strange and honest dignity that any observer would immediately have responded to with sympathy and humane fellow feeling. She, however, did not want sympathy or indeed observation, and that is why she had climbed so high before allowing herself to let the nakedness of her pain become visible as she keened into the moonlight, clutching a crumpled letter in her hands as she did so.

  It was in one of the gaps between her screams, as she drew breath, that she heard the goat-bell far away to her left.

  She swallowed the next scream and listened without breathing.

  Once more she heard the distinctive jangle, definitely higher and thinner than a cowbell, though she knew she was at an altitude and on terrain that no mere cow could achieve or even contemplate. Cows never came above the summer pastures far below. Only a goat was nimble or stubborn enough to come this high on its own, and the only reason one would depart from the more usually travelled lower slopes was to escape a predator.

  The thought that there might be a wolf or even a bear in the vicinity was one of the reasons the woman was listening now instead of screaming.

  The bell jangled on, intermittent and irregular, as if the hidden goat were picking its way across the jumbled ground, slowly getting closer. The woman tucked the crumpled letter into the bodice of her dirndl, swept her hair back and tied it out of her face, then picked up the long alpenstock from the rocks beside her, holding its spiked end forward as she peered towards the approaching goat-bell. She heard a foot scuff and a sudden intake of breath.

  Not a hoof scuff.

  A foot.

  So not a goat. Or not just a goat, she thought as she retreated into the shadow of the rock behind her.

  And then she heard the child’s voice.

  “Hansi? Oh, Hansi, where are
you, you stupid animal? Father is going to kill me…”

  The woman relaxed. The mystery was revealed. A child, a girl child, clearly left in charge of the family goats, had lost an animal and was so scared of the consequences that she was still out on the mountain looking for it.

  The woman half smiled in relief and wiped her eyes. A child was no threat to her. Indeed somebody else’s lost child provided an opportunity for her to distract herself from the sadness contained in the letter she had placed back inside her bodice. She kept still, thinking that if she waited, the goat would stumble into her and she could grasp it before it ran away, and then she could call to the girl and tell her she had the errant animal safely waiting for her. It was no time of night for any child to be out on her own. There were bad things in the dark, things just as happy to prey on little girls as wandering goats.

  The animal in question stopped just on the other side of a jagged boulder, about ten feet away from her. She sensed it was listening.

  “Hansi? You silly thing, where are you now?”

  The girl’s voice was still a way off, sounding increasingly strained and desperate. The goat moved a little, making its bell jingle once, but then it stopped.

  The woman had enough experience of goats to know it was quite likely to wait until the girl got really close before nimbly eluding her again in a game that could go on until dawn, or until the child fell off something steep and fatal in the darkness.

  The woman reversed the alpenstock, thinking to use the crook to hook the goat by the collar should it try to run, and then, holding her breath and concentrating on moving very silently, she eased round the boulder.

  The goat was hidden in deep moon shadow on the other side. She heard a faint tink from the bell and waited for her eyes to adjust. She could make out a shape that was definitely not rock, and then, just as she realised it was perhaps a rather larger goat than she had imagined, the bell tinkled again and the shape moved, emerging into the moonlight.

  “Frau Wachman?”

  The goat-bell hung on the end of a hunter’s crossbow, just below the steely tip of a very sharp bolt that was aimed right at her.

  She did not move, which was a credit to her since a very cold shiver went down her spine, not so much at the sight of it as the sound of the very calm and measured voice of the shadowed man, a man whose voice she had never heard before but who seemed, uncannily, to know her name.

  “Frau Wachman?”

  “Who are you?” she said, her mouth suddenly dry.

  “I am Otto von Fleischl.”

  The shiver that had gone down her spine reversed and ran back up it. She felt the hairs stand on the back of her neck at the name.

  “Von Fleischl? You are—?”

  “The Schattenjäger. Yes.”

  True to his name, the figure stayed in the throw of darkness behind the unwavering crossbow stuck out into the moonlight. The woman thought of hurling herself sideways around the curve of the boulder and running, but the barren immensity of the Stone Sea lay between her and the sheltering trees, and she knew the crossbow bolt would find her long before she reached them. She had been right: there were dangerous things abroad in the darkness.

  Her bowels felt loose and untrustworthy at the thought of exactly how dangerous. She knew the dark stories of the Schattenjäger, the Shadowhunter, and had lived in the mountains long enough to know dark stories were often far truer than the things that people safe in the well-lit flatland towns thought was fact.

  “And if the bolt did not reach you, I would,” said the little girl’s voice right in her ear. The child had somehow come around and behind her without her hearing a thing. Except the voice was different now, older and just as calm as the Schattenjäger’s.

  She felt a tickle in her hairline and knew without looking that a long and very sharp hunter’s knife was resting against the base of her skull, and that any attempt to run would end with one fast thrust between the cervical vertebrae, severing her spinal cord and paralysing her from the neck down. She also knew from the way the unseen knife-holder had read her thoughts that the other part of those dark stories was true, and so she knew who she was too. The girl was the Shadowhunter’s Knife.

  “You are the Schattenjägermesser?”

  The girl grunted in what might have been amusement.

  “A stupid name. I am just plain Ida Laemmel. Put your hands behind your back, very slowly, please.”

  The woman thought for a moment about trying to run. She had no doubt that this would end swiftly and badly for her, but though she was terrified, she was not a coward, and she knew that once they had her, they might use her to find her husband and the boy, and just because she was in their clutches did not mean she was powerless: she could still save the others. She would make them kill her.

  Yet she did not want to die. Despite the great loss and the grief she had been howling at the moon only moments before, she wanted to live. But she was logical, and she loved her husband. She—

  Ida Laemmel hit her astonishingly hard, a small bony fist sledgehammering her in the kidneys. She gasped and dropped to one knee, agonised and winded, her wide mouth gaping. She was unable to resist the girl who gripped her right hand and snapped something metallic tight around her thumb, then used it like a painful restraining lever as she dragged the left hand across and snapped metal over the thumb on that hand, so that by the time she got her first breath her hands were thumb-cuffed behind her.

  “Ida—” said the figure in the shadows, a note of light-hearted reproach in his voice.

  Ida Laemmel stepped in front of Frau Wachman. She was shockingly young, with two long pigtails, shockingly pretty, even in the moonlight, and most shockingly of all, wearing not a skirt but trousers. Specifically she was wearing Trachten, men’s hunting costume, the soft and soundless deerskin full-length lederhosen that clung tight to her calves, and a matching short jacket. The soft suede of her costume had been dyed black or dark green, so that she appeared to be clothed in shadow. She had a small crossbow slung on her back, the expected knife in one hand and a thin silvery chain in the other.

  “She was about to run,” she said. “Her husband is in a summer hut on the high pasture. She didn’t want us to know.”

  Frau Wachman felt a pain worse than the one in her kidneys. Just by thinking of her husband, she had betrayed him to this–this monster who could read her thoughts.

  “Monster is an unkind word,” said Ida. Tugging gently on the silver chain, which Frau Wachman now realised was attached to the small but horribly effective thumb-cuffs behind her.

  “We are not monsters…” said the Hunter, emerging into the moonlight.

  He too wore the dark deerskin Trachten of his accomplice, but where her head was bare, he wore a low-brimmed felt hat above unwavering, flinty eyes and a black beard that jutted down off his chin like a spade.

  “… you know who we are.”

  Frau Wachman looked from one to the other. And then she spat defiantly.

  “I do. And I curse you for what you are doing.”

  “Curse us all you like in your head, but make a noise to warn your husband and not only will we do what we are doing, but what we do to him will be much, much worse than what we will do if you are quiet,” said the Shadowhunter. “And since you know who we are, you know we do not deal in threats. Only certainty.”

  If they had needed to descend on the Bavarian side of the massif, they would have been in shadow and the going would have been slower as they picked their way off the stony tops and headed back down to the tree line and the high pastures below; as it was, they wound their way towards the upper slopes of the valley on the Austrian side in full moonlight which made their passage easier and faster. Frau Wachman walked between her two captors, led by a chain held by the disturbingly pretty and innocent-looking girl with the knife, at every step conscious of the sharp crossbow bolt aimed at her back by the following Shadowhunter.

  Before long they could see a distant light or two far belo
w them on the valley floor, the usual and expected static ones made by the odd, unshuttered farmhouse windows on the winding road towards Saalfelden, and a line of moving lights inching their way along the silver streak of river that cut through the fertile bottom lands. The line of lights caught her attention. Why—?

  “You know why,” said the girl ahead of her without turning or stopping her nimble-footed descent.

  “Because they are looking for monsters in the dark,” spat Frau Wachman. “With scythes and pitchforks to cut them into ribbons.”

  “And guns,” said the voice behind her. “They have guns too.”

  “Just as well they are down there and we are up here then, eh?” said the girl.

  The Schattenjäger grunted.

  “They’re not hunting monsters,” he said. “Not yet.”

  Frau Wachman kicked at the shale they were walking across, sending a small landslide skittering down the slope towards the trees below. Maybe the noise would alert her husband. She banished the thought as soon as she had it, hoping the disconcerting girl with the pigtails and the lethal blade was not listening to her mind all the time. She tried to fill her head with something else instead. She thought of food. Of cooking. Of how much she loved the doing of it, the warm kitchen, the steady certainty of preparation, of assembling the ingredients and then measuring and chopping and slicing and mixing, and the heat of the oven and the waiting and checking and seasoning. She thought of her kitchen and her table, and thinking of the table she thought of the faces gathered round it in the glow of the lamp hung from the rafter above, but then she thought of her son and the letter, the letter that had brought her to the Steinernes Meer in the first place, the damned—