The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  The hunter’s face was grim but kind. The girl had left the boy and was with Frau Wachman on the floor in the doorway. She pulled a letter from the unconscious woman’s dirndl and crossed back to the fire where she unfolded it and looked at the writing in the red glow. She sucked her teeth and looked at the hunter, who was now using a short knife to ease his bolt from the wall.

  “Not good,” she said.

  “Who are you?” the boy said quietly.

  “Frau Wachman knew who we are,” she said, looking at the prone figure at her feet. “She knew all about monsters in the dark.”

  “You’re not monsters,” he said.

  “No,” she replied. “She and her husband, they’re the monsters. And we hunt them.”

  “So who are you?” he repeated, realising even as he asked that he knew, because the old stories were not just about dark things, but also about heroes.

  The girl folded the letter and stowed it inside her jacket, then came over and sat by him. She smoothed his cheek with a surprisingly cool and soft hand. Her eyes were, in contrast, warm.

  “We are Die Wachte, little Peter.”

  The man grimaced as he pulled the crossbow bolt from the wall.

  “We are the Shadowhunters.”

  “The monster-killers,” said Peter, in awe.

  The girl shrugged and passed her hand gently over his eyes. He experienced the merest feather of alarm at the back of his mind, perhaps remembering the thing becoming hot as it breathed in his last breath, but the soft voice calmed him and made him feel pleasantly tired.

  “If you will. But by the time we have taken you back to your family, you will forget all this and only remember that you walked in your sleep and woke to find yourself alone and wandering in the dark, lost on the Berchtesgaden road, where my friend and I found you crying in a ditch.”

  She lifted her hand from his eyes. He was asleep.

  Otto looked at her.

  “You could have waited until he walked off the mountain.”

  She shook her head.

  “He was too tired to walk.”

  “And now I have to carry him!” he said.

  She shook her head, reached down and lifted the child onto her own shoulders.

  “No,” she said, pointing at the unconscious figure on the threshold. “You have to carry Frau Wachman.”

  “I thought—” he began.

  “No, you didn’t,” she said. “Law and Lore. We only kill to save life.”

  “They stole the child,” he began.

  “They stole the child, but she didn’t do it to kill him. She wanted to take him back to Berchtesgaden and raise him as her own. She lost a child, and was replacing what was lost. Even Alps go mad with grief.”

  “And how do you know this?” he said, beginning to drag the dead Alp from the hut.

  “How do I know what she was thinking?” said Ida, raising an eyebrow. “You’re really wasting breath asking me that question.”

  “But he was killing the child,” he said, grunting with the effort of moving the deadweight of the Alp’s corpse.

  “He had less control of his needs than she. He was older, he hungered for the vigour, the life the child would bring him. He was a man. He was weaker. What do you want me to say? They must have both been strong at one time to live as normal people without drawing attention to themselves. They were chicken farmers. I’d guess they were feeding on the death breaths of their hens and not touching people at all, until this.”

  “This…” he said. “And what is that note?”

  She held up the letter.

  “This is something to do with London. Someone there wanted the services of another one of their sons, the previous one having… disappeared. And he wasn’t there to kill chickens.”

  “And that’s why I have to carry that fat woman down the mountain?” he said.

  She was silently reading the rest of the letter. She came to the signature and swore under her breath.

  “Ida?” he said. “What?”

  She showed him the letter, pointing at the signature.

  “Maximilien de what?” he squinted. “I can’t make it out.”

  She told him.

  “No,” he said. “No, Ida. He is dead. Long dead. They killed him for perverting the Paladin as much as for prosecuting the Terror. He is dead.”

  “A regular access to Alps can prolong life a lot,” she said, looking at Frau Wachman.

  “But—” he said.

  “We’ll take her back to Lichtenberg,” she said. “We can show the others the letter and ask her questions. But I think I need to go to London without delay and warn our brothers and sisters in The Oversight that something very wicked is in their midst.”

  “You, Ida?” he said. “Why should it not be one of the older members?”

  “Because none of the others had a Scottish mother,” she said. “And I speak English.”

  “Right. If you leave in the morning you could be there in three days,” said Fleischl grudgingly.

  “I will be back within the week,” she said. “And there is little urgency in our hunting for now. We have found our Alps.”

  The Schattenjäger nodded.

  “And Herr Wachman?” he said, looking at the body on the mattress.

  “There’s a perfectly good–and very deep–ravine behind the hut,” she said. “And if I leave tonight I can be in London in two and a half days.”

  CHAPTER 42

  THE NAME OF THE ENEMY

  The candle had burnt down to less than half a thumb’s length when they paused at the entrance to the catacomb, looking up at the warning carved into the lintel.

  “What?” said Sara.

  “L’Empire de la Mort,” said Sharp. He was aware that he was futilely trying both to postpone and lighten the coming moment. “Very French, no?”

  “Histrionic?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “I mean yes, possibly that too, but I meant making death feminine.”

  “Well,” she said, “we all come into the world through a woman: birth’s feminine. Only right that a woman should hold the door on the way out.”

  “And where does that leave room for us murderous men?” he said.

  “Holding the candle,” she replied, passing him the dwindling nubbin of wax and working quickly at the buttons on her glove. She peeled it back, revealing the pale elegance of her hand. The look she gave him stilled any more conversation.

  “I need to get this over with,” she said quickly. And before he could prevent her, she squared her shoulders and plunged into the room beyond, striding straight up to the barrel-shaped pillar of bones and splaying her naked hand right on the shiny nut-brown forehead of the nearest skull.

  “Sara!” he said, the word escaping despite himself.

  Her back arched, the long white braid of her hair snapped like a whip and she was no longer in the present with him.

  She was deep in the past, screaming silently as it cut viciously into her and burnt its images on eyes that she no longer had the power to close, leaving her helpless to shut out the incoming horror.

  The chamber–lit by a circle of tall church candles arranged around the pillar.

  Men make a second circle outside the candles.

  The clothes of the last century. Of the French Revolution. The fashions of the Terror: britches. Tight, high-collared jackets. Some in the red Phrygian caps and tricolour cockades of the sans-culottes.

  All staring at the pillar.

  A prisoner is brought in.

  Thrown to the stone floor.

  Writhing in pain. As if the iron shackles on his ankles, wrists and neck are burning him.

  As if the iron chains twisted around his nakedness are scorching him.

  But the marks on his body are not burn marks.

  They are tattoos. Twisting and coiling around him like creepers.

  He is Sluagh.

  Three men enter behind him. Two pick him up and spread-eagle him on the pillar, face first. Arm
s spread. Like a profane crucifixion.

  The third man is older. Face dinted with pox. Eyes merciless.

  Carries a black stone knife.

  Says something to the Sluagh.

  The Sluagh writhes and tries to rip himself off the pillar, head twisting to look out at the ring of men behind him.

  One of the two men holding him nods at the pockmarked man.

  “Citizen?”

  The Sluagh wrenches the manacles.

  The Citizen seems frozen in a moment of anticipatory ecstasy, eyes closed and face smiling. As if he can smell the blood to come.

  “Citizen Robespierre?”

  The eyes open. He moves.

  The Sluagh’s cheeks bulge. Teeth clenched. He’s trying to keep the pain inside. Trying not to scream.

  The Citizen hooks a short brutal punch into his unprotected belly.

  He exhales in a panicked whoof of air.

  Mouth gapes wide.

  The Citizen moves, reaches in to the mouth, grabs the tongue.

  The other hand has the knife in motion.

  Time slices.

  Sara gasped.

  The Sluagh hangs slack on the pillar.

  Black blood ribbons from his mouth, filling a bucket held there by one of the two men.

  The Citizen is jamming something meaty and dripping into the gaping teeth of one of the skulls on the pillar.

  Time slices.

  The Citizen dashes the pail-full of blood onto the pillar and shouts something high-pitched and unintelligible.

  Time slices.

  The pillar rotates. The different strata of bones crushing round in opposite directions.

  Like grindstones in a mill.

  But they are not producing flour or oatmeal.

  They’re milling darkness.

  It’s trickling from the gaps between the bones.

  Now it’s pouring from the eye sockets and the mouths of the skulls.

  Streaming down the pillar, cloaking its irregularities with a thick layer of black, like tar.

  The darkness pools out across the floor.

  Climbs each candle.

  Coating it black.

  Reaches the flames.

  Turns the light red.

  The watchers step back. Screaming.

  The red light pulses black.

  The watchers fall to the ground and are still.

  Only the three men remain on their feet.

  The Citizen strips off his shirt.

  Nods.

  They plunge their hands into the blackness and then smear it below his jaw-line, daubing it in a thick band around his neck. He roars with pain but holds himself steady through will alone.

  His eyes are staring wide. And quite, quite mad.

  Time slices.

  The two helpers are on the floor. One broken against the pillar, which is still.

  The other halfway to the doorway, face down.

  The Citizen is hunched over him, jerking the obsidian knife from his back.

  He stands and looks around at the stuttering candles. The dead audience. The broken Sluagh.

  He smiles.

  He is ringed in black from shoulders to jaw.

  He puts his shirt back on.

  Calm as if at home.

  Time slices.

  He has tied his stock around his neck. He shrugs into his coat.

  He tosses the blade over his shoulder as he leaves.

  It skitters its way across the floor. Into the black puddle.

  It stops but does not slow down, spinning on its axis.

  Sending out a cyclone of sprayed darkness that spatters the prostrate corpses.

  Sara screams.

  The knife starts to rise off the ground, sucking the blackness with it, like an invisible hand lifting a cloth from the centre.

  The bodies are dragged inward. The candles tumble and are melted into the rising cone of dark.

  The flames remain, rippling round the rising shape like a diaphanous shroud.

  The shape is becoming a figure that seems to suck in everything dark to build itself.

  The whirling knife sits atop what is now almost a veiled head, like a spinning crown.

  There are shoulders now, arms, a waist.

  The outline of powerful legs beneath the dark mantle of liquid black.

  The arms rise, hands and fingers poking their shapes into view, reaching for the spinning knife—

  The only thing left on the floor is a body.

  Naked.

  The Sluagh.

  It shudders.

  The dark tattoos peel off its corpse like black lace and hang in the air for an instant, before being sucked into the growing figure, leaving the Sluagh lying on the ground, pale and lifeless.

  The figure carefully raises its fingers to the spinning knife–tentative–perhaps trying to stop it.

  The knife sends black finger joints flying. Like carrot tips.

  And the whole dark figure splashes to the floor and is sucked straight back into the pillar

  Dropping in an instant.

  So fast she nearly missed it.

  Would have missed it in a blink.

  If she’d been able to blink.

  The chamber empty but for the bleached Sluagh’s body.

  No movement other than the blackness seeping back into the pillar through every available chink and hole.

  And a black knife that spun in the air and moved inexorably towards Sara’s neck. Spinning with intent. As if it could see her.

  As if the knife

  In the past

  Could see Sara

  In the future

  And had been waiting for her.

  She wanted to duck. Couldn’t. Tried to hang on to the fragment of normal that told her she was just glinting.

  That this was just a vision.

  That the blade couldn’t possibly hurt her.

  The last ribbon of black was sucking into the eye socket of a skull when the skull jerked and exploded and the blade bit into her neck

  and then whatever had burst out of the blackness hit the blade in an eruption of oily black feathers

  And the glinting stopped dead.

  And she fell to the floor.

  Sharp leapt across the space between them and caught her before her head dashed itself on the stone.

  Her eyes rolled back and then forward and then they focused and found his.

  “Sara,” he said.

  “I know,” she choked. “I’m all right. It was just a vision…”

  “I know,” he said. “But where did that blasted Raven come from?”

  The Raven fluttered to his shoulder and pecked his ear.

  She stared in disbelief.

  “And what’s that cut on your neck?”

  CHAPTER 43

  COMINGS AND GOINGS

  The house on Chandos Place was not normally a busy one. The solitary habits of Mountfellon and his guest dictated that, and the household matters went attended to by only three taciturn and mildly threatening manservants. It was one of these who slid back the bolts and opened the door to the messenger from the north. The messenger was Biles, the footman, and he seemed to have brought a large acreage of Rutlandshire with him, since his greatcoat and horse were heavily spattered with mud.

  “Is he in?” he said. His face was gaunt and hollow-eyed from exhaustion.

  The manservant looked him up and down.

  “You ain’t bringing that mud in here, Mr Biles, for I’m the one as will have to clean it—”

  Biles pushed past him, leaving a muddy smear on his livery as he went. He thumbed over his shoulder.

  “Look after the horse, pretty boy. He’s blown and needs a good rubdown and feed.”

  Mountfellon could not initially believe what the bemired messenger was telling him. And then he spat his mouthful of breakfast kedgeree the length of the table as it hit him.

  “Stolen?!” he shouted, staggering back from the table and upending his chair. “The flag?”
<
br />   “Dunno how but it’s gone, sir,” said Biles. “And all your display cabinets smashed, and the cattle from Home Farm vanished like the devil spirited ’em away. Tracks all lead to the dewpond behind the gibbet, and then they just stop. Like it swallowed ’em.”

  “What the blazes do I care for damned cattle?” roared Mountfellon. “Do I look like a farmer?”

  Biles shook his head.

  “They got into my room,” said Mountfellon. “And none of you addlepated incompetents noticed?”

  Biles shook his head again.

  “No, sir. It’s a proper enigma and no mistake.”

  Mountfellon reached for him, then controlled himself and withdrew his hand.

  “If you are hiding anything, Biles, I shall gut you, do you understand? Gut you and likely flay what remains.”

  He staggered from the room.

  “Get my carriage ready to leave immediately. I must go and see what else is awry.”

  He had never felt so assaulted. All the care he had taken in building an unassailable sanctum swept away in an instant, and all the surety he felt about his work gone too. The room was locked, ironbound and guarded.

  Someone would hang for this.

  Ten minutes later, the viscount’s carriage had left at speed.

  Fifteen minutes after that, Coram Templebane appeared at the side-door and asked for Mountfellon. He had walked across town to do this, and on the way had been thinking of the plan he was about to betray. Part of him, the wiser part, hoped Mountfellon would confront Templebane, because then his side-plan of implicating the unfortunate Abchurch would come into play and Coram’s life and fortunes would brighten as a result. And the other part of him was becoming increasingly interested in seeing the full destructive force of his plan in motion: explosions, fire, rivers of molten sugar and more conflagration would be a heady spectacle and something to remember.

  He was perturbed when the servant told him that Mountfellon was out of town. He had been about to leave disappointed when a thin but commanding voice from down the passage told the servant to let him in if his name was truly Templebane.

  A minute later he found himself in the most extraordinary interview. He was in a dark room with a light reflected off a brass disc aimed at him so he could not make out the face of his interlocutor. The man spoke with a foreign accent, but made it clear that he could speak to him as if he were the viscount himself, and that in turn whatever he said was to be taken as the noble lord’s wishes.