The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  Biles was persuaded that he wanted nothing more than to help Whitlowe and Amos carry this long and cumbersome object out of the room, down the long stairs and out onto the turning circle. If Amos had not seen a wheelbarrow propped against the tunnel mouth, he would no doubt have persuaded him to help them carry it to the very perimeter of the estate or beyond. As it was, they put the box across the width of the barrow and Amos persuaded old Biles that he was tired and might do well to return to his station and go to sleep, perhaps remembering to forget, when he woke, that he had been party to such a smooth and deceptive act of burglary.

  Whitlowe accompanied Amos all the way back to the gate-house by way of the tunnel. The ironbound wheel of the barrow made little noise on the matting as they passed, and the slope was so much in their favour that Amos was running in order to prevent the heavy barrow escaping him by the time they got to the end.

  The Sluagh were ranged across the end of the tunnel, beyond the iron gates, waiting.

  There was something predatory in their stance, in the way their eyes did not waver from the approaching box, and the almost palpable sense they emitted of being about to pounce.

  Amos felt suddenly protective of the sniffing child jogging beside him. He stopped messily, leaning back on the barrow handles and digging his heels in and scraping to a lopsided halt. He reached over and took Whitlowe’s chin, turning his face to his. He found his eyes and locked on.

  Go inside. Go to sleep. Forget all this. Hurry.

  Whitlowe nodded and trotted obediently over to the gate-house and disappeared within. Amos had no idea if him telling the boy to forget this would mean that he would, but there was no harm in trying because the memories wouldn’t do much to make the child grow up into a secure and confident young man. He would be stalked with nightmare visions like the line of Sluagh for the rest of his life, always knowing what the night truly contained. Maybe Amos had spared him that.

  He bunched muscle and pushed the barrow back into action, wheeling the ungainly box out into the road.

  There. Your bloody flag. I’ve done your will. Take this damned warrandice off me.

  He hadn’t known he was so angry. He’d been too scared to notice.

  The Sluagh–to his surprise–stepped back from the box.

  What?

  The Ghost pushed through the crowd.

  “Ironbound box,” she said, voice curdled with scorn. “Poor things can’t open it.”

  Badger Skull threw him a rope.

  “Tie it to the handles,” he said, attaching the other end to his pony. “We will drag it to the dewpond and you will open the box for us.”

  “What about Mountfellon?” said the Ghost, tight with anger. “I give you the tool who can enter Gallstaine and get you what you have never managed to regain, and you cheat me?”

  “No one has cheated you. It would not have been… useful to let the boy die without achieving something rather than nothing,” said the chief. “But yes, we owe you a debt.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You are welcome,” he replied. “The payment is: we will let you live.”

  She took a half-pace back in shock. Then the import of his words sunk in and her face twisted in rage.

  “BUT I DO NOT WANT TO LIVE!” she shrieked.

  “Then find a cliff or a river or a blade,” shrugged Badger Skull. “Talk to your Bloody Boy. He has ideas about these things…”

  She caught at his sleeve and bellowed into his face.

  “BUT BEFORE I GO, MOUNTFELLON MUST DIE!”

  He pushed her away and snapped his fingers at Amos.

  “Is it done? Have you tied the rope?”

  Amos felt the warrandice twinge around his neck. He found it hard to breathe for a moment, and then he bent and knotted the rope to the handle on the end of the box.

  The Sluagh headed up the hill, led by the pony pulling the box across the rough grassland.

  Amos followed. As he passed the Ghost, who was standing stock-still in the middle of the road, she clawed out a hand and gripped his arm.

  “Mountfellon must die,” she said quietly.

  I will not kill for you. Not now I do not have to. I will never kill again.

  She snatched at him and pulled him close. He found he flinched, expecting her to pour bile on him or shout in his face, but her eyes were both oddly sympathetic and unhinged.

  “You will, you will,” she breathed. “Even if you won’t you will. For are you not the bloodiest of boys?”

  He couldn’t stay with her so he shook himself loose and hurried up the hill to join the Sluagh.

  Amos had seen some bad things in his short life and, as we know, done at least two of them. He had run errands through Smithfield Market and the slaughterhouses attendant on it often enough to be inured to the sounds and smells of common or garden butchery: what he found at the top of the hill around the moonlit dewpond was a different order of thing, though it had superficial similarities. Below the surface, however, coming off it like a hum, he could feel but not hear a deep sense of wrongness and foreboding shot through with a strange mix of despair and exultation. He’d never felt anything quite so strong or so hard to put a name to. It was terrifying, and all the more so for being intangible. It was like one of those unvoiceable screams running around the inside of his skull–like them, but a hundred times more intense, to the point where the mere feel of it made it hard to breathe.

  The Sluagh had some power over the herd of cattle they had assembled on one side of the pond, for the animals stayed calm and compliant, even as they were led one by one into the water. The Sluagh had stripped to the waist and removed their boots and, in some cases, their leggings and britches.

  Their bare flesh was just as marked as their faces, so that even when near naked they appeared to be garbed in dense intertwined patterns. All the designs were different, the only consistencies being that each one had a perfect black circle placed just off-centre on their chest, favouring the left side, and each had an animal scribed on their back, like a personal totem. A tall Sluagh with a picture of a bull straddling his scapula stood up to his waist in the middle of the pond, among some new hummocks in the flat water, a short crookbacked bronze blade waiting easily in his right hand.

  And this is where the bad thing happened, because as one of the hummocks twitched reflexively, Amos realised he was looking at a cow’s body. And then he saw the Bull Sluagh reach out a hand to the next cow being led towards him, and then, with a low calming noise, draw it closer. Amos saw the large trusting eyes of the cow reflecting the moon above, and then there was another reflection moving fast, in and out below the cow’s throat, and the cow seemed to just cough and shiver a little and then the eyes rolled and it stumbled deeper into the water, and then the Sluagh opened the artery in its throat wider and the blood plumed out and gurgled up through the surface of the water, and the Sluagh was already pushing the body aside and reaching for the next animal.

  Why?

  Nobody answered him, all eyes too intent on the methodical carnage in hand.

  The docile complicity of the waiting cows made it all the more horrific.

  Amos staggered between the Sluagh, looking for Badger Skull. He found him standing over the ironbound box, stripped to his breeks, revealing the tattoo of a snarling badger emblazoned among the dense thicket of spiked lines cocooning his back.

  You don’t have to do this!

  Badger Skull didn’t waste time looking at him.

  “You know nothing of what we must do. We need a blood mirror to open the door to the Other place.”

  No.

  “Open this box,” the Sluagh said. “I would see our flags before we send them away and remove the Iron Law warrandiced into them.”

  He grinned at Amos.

  “Please. It is my last request. Our people have not laid eyes on the magnificence of our true flags since long before what your kind call history began. It will be a great thing to be the first living Sluagh to see the majesti
c sigils of our great days one time before consigning them to the Other. So open the box now, and then the warrandice you carry will be discharged, and you will live, Bloody Boy.”

  I am not the Bloody Boy.

  The Sluagh cocked his head at him. Then laughed, a short bark of mirth, and palmed him hard in the chest. Amos stumbled, his heel catching on the edge of the box, and then windmilled backwards into the dewpond. He hit it with a flat smack and a furious splashing and spluttering noise as he went under and tore himself back onto his feet. He swallowed water and spat it out, except it tasted thicker and more metallically rank than water and he looked down at himself and saw why the Sluagh were all pointing at him and laughing.

  “You see,” said the chief. “You truly are the Bloody Boy. Come and open this now.”

  Amos was drenched in the blood of the thirty or more dead cows now beginning to clog the dewpond, gory from head to foot.

  He spat his mouth clear of the taste as best he could and walked out of the bloodbath and knelt by the box.

  He didn’t know why he was crying, but he was.

  He worked the iron bolts, loosening them and then dragging them back. One stuck and he hammered at it with the heel of his hand, oblivious or uncaring of the pain. The bolt freed and he threw back the lid.

  The moonlight slashed over the contents, revealing them in all their ancient glory.

  Amos began shaking, his silent sobs doing a disconcerting thing of changing to uncontrolled soundless laughter without warning.

  “What?” said the Sluagh, stepping close and looking down.

  Amos’s blood-covered hand pointed into the box.

  See the magnificence of your true flags. The majesty of your sigils.

  The box was full of dust and tatters.

  “What happened?” said the Sluagh. “What happened to them?”

  Time.

  It wasn’t the right moment for an answer like that, Amos realised this the instant he saw Badger Skull reach for his bronze blade. He flinched away. But the Sluagh just used the blade to sift through the remnants. The rags were so fragile that they went to dust as soon as he stirred them, as if they had been just sitting in the dark waiting for this final indignity.

  The Sluagh met Amos’s eye, and then his hand lashed out like a snake striking and he had him by the throat.

  And then the Sluagh smiled.

  “Can you feel it?”

  Amos could feel the blade at his neck, no question. He felt the nip and then the sharp bite of the blade, and then a searing, horrible feeling that was both blunt and acute, and he knew the Sluagh had cut his throat while smiling into his eyes.

  “Gah,” he said, astonished to hear a noise coming from his own mouth, now, after all this time, right at the end. “Gah!”

  “It’s all right, Bloody Boy,” said the Sluagh gently. “It always hurts at the end.”

  He stood and stepped back, kicking the lid of the box shut with a thump.

  Amos tried to hold the blood-slick flaps of his throat closed, but he couldn’t find them. All he could find was more blood.

  “Gah!”

  “You said that,” said the Sluagh.

  You said you would save me!

  “I did,” said the Sluagh. “You felt the pain as the warrandice flowed out of you back into my blade. You’re free.”

  Amos scrabbled at his severed throat again. And again he could find no purchase on his wound. And this time he understood that this was because there was no wound.

  I thought—

  “No, you didn’t,” said the Sluagh. “You panicked. I told you. You can’t do those two things at the same time. Fear kills thought.”

  You don’t mind about the flag?

  Badger Skull looked surprised.

  “I mind a lot. I would like to have seen it once in my life. But I can do nothing about that. And since the warrandice is still held by the dust of what it once was, the plan is the same. We will open this door and send it out of this world. And then we will be free from the cursed Iron Law.”

  He grinned, showing a wickedly hooked eye-tooth Amos had not noticed before.

  “And that is when we will be free again. And then our enemies will begin to pay for the past. Now, go or stay, for we must get this done before day comes.”

  Amos began to walk away. And then, not knowing where to go, he just turned and sat and watched. He watched because he had to. He had to see something that made sense of all the placidly dying animals, something that made sense of the blood and the death.

  Nothing he saw made the least bit more sense of it for him. But he watched wide-eyed anyway. Maybe, he wondered at some point, he was watching because he was ignobly revelling in the fact he had cheated the death sentence of the warrandice, contrasting his continuing vitality with the deaths of the cattle. He dismissed the thought but the possibility of it remained like a bad taste at the back of his mind. He saw more than fifty cows and one bull led into the pond and watched as their lives were bled out of them. The water became thicker and more viscous with each act of slaughter. The moonlight didn’t allow colour, but he could see how thick the blood was by the black stains on the Sluaghs’ legs as they walked in and out. When every animal was dead, Badger Skull said something to a Sluagh with a raven totem scarified across his back.

  The Raven Sluagh clambered out into the centre of the carcase-jammed pond carrying a bag inside which something was flapping and trying to escape. He pulled out a large crow, maybe actually a raven. Before Amos could blink, he cut its head off and emptied its blood into the pond below. All the other Sluagh gave a loud shout of approval as he did so.

  Then he hopped back to the edge of the pool, using the dead cows as stepping-stones. As soon as he was clear of the blood-filled pond, he reached in the bag and pulled out some kind of dark disc with a handle. He angled it flat to the ground and craned his head to look back up at it as he inched it out over the surface of the blood, ensuring it was parallel.

  Then he held it there and nothing happened. And nothing kept on happening until his arm began to shake and he screamed and there was a colossal silent impact, as if something had just sucked half the air out of the night in one giant indrawn breath, and then Amos saw what wasn’t there any more.

  The fatally compliant cattle whose carcases had clogged the three-foot-deep dewpond with ungainly bellies and horns and strangely delicate upturned hooves and hocks had gone. In place of all their slaughtered, bumpy irregularity, there was a perfectly flat mirror surface again, the same as when it had been water but–and this was of course impossible–blacker. And, when he looked closer, also flatter–impossibly flat and unmoving with no hint of a ripple despite the freshening night breeze stirring around them.

  And then he realised it was not just the cows that had been sucked into the theoretically non-existent depths of the shallow pond. The reflection of the moon had gone. He had not changed position, but the mirror-like surface was not reflecting it.

  And as he began to see the black circle as not a mirror but a hole, Badger Skull and the Bull Sluagh slapped the pony into motion. It leapt forward, snapping the rope tight, as it dragged the flag box into the centre of the pond, where it sat, as if on a sheet of black ice. For a moment nothing happened. And then the blackness reared up and grabbed it and yanked it into itself. The rope whiplashed tight again and before anyone could stop it the pony was brutally somersaulted off its feet and dragged broken-backed and shrieking to the edge of the pond to be grabbed by the dark and snatched down into it as well.

  Badger Skull bellowed something at the Raven Sluagh, who threw himself backwards, taking the mirror with him. As soon as the connection between the two black surfaces was broken there was a massive subsonic concussion as if the missing half of the night’s oxygen had been blown back into it.

  No one moved. Then Badger Skull walked to the edge, and took a handful of liquid. He let it fall, clear and bloodless. Water again.

  “It is done,” he said.

&nb
sp; His eyes found Amos’s.

  “Still here, Bloody Boy?”

  Yes.

  He wished he wasn’t. He wished he could rub out what he’d seen from his memory, scrub his eyes with lye to bleach out the stain of the night.

  “Wash yourself here,” said Badger Skull as if he had read his thoughts. “The water is good again. Just a mist pond once more.”

  He exhaled in relief, showing nerves he had clearly kept in check throughout the previous operation. He caught Amos looking at him.

  “It’s important to break the connection as soon as you can. Our fathers told us the black mirrors weren’t always black. Once they were bright. Then the Wildfire was taken from whatever lies beyond, plunging it into everlasting dark. And so that darkness hungers for the fire, and if the way between our worlds stays open too long, who knows what will come through seeking the lost fire? And who can say what harm that hunger and hatred would mean for all of us?”

  He shrugged and shook himself, a little like a dog drying off.

  “Throw me your knife.”

  My knife?

  “Your damned iron-bladed knife.”

  Amos found it in his pocket and did so.

  The Sluagh caught it. Every eye on him. He didn’t flinch. He carefully unfolded the blade. And laid it flat on the soft skin of his wrist. He laughed softly. He stuck his tongue out and laid the blade on that. He grinned.

  The other Sluagh roared in excited approval.

  He snapped the blade shut and looked across at Amos.

  “Iron no longer has power over us. And so we rise again.”

  He held up the knife.

  “I think I will keep your blade,” he said. “I will need to get used to this dull grey metal that holds such a fine edge.”

  Amos shrugged.