The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  “You are new blood, Luce,” said Charlie.

  “I am not enough,” she said. “And you should all scatter. If not for your own safety, for the safety of The Oversight…”

  “If you go, you go,” said The Smith. “It is not your job to then tell us what to do. But if the Last Hand is no more, then the steps that are to be taken will be taken methodically, not in panic. Seeing what I have seen, a Sluagh on iron, I would have done that anyway. Hodge will want to ensure the Tower remains safe and will stay there. Cook and I will plan itineraries and divide up the country, then go and look for any who might join us and refresh our numbers. Charlie, if he would be kind enough, might go to his parents and ask them if they would reconsider.”

  “I don’t know,” said Charlie. “I think they’re going to find it hard enough that I’ve joined. But I’ll give it a go, course I will.”

  They all sat with their own thoughts. Lucy felt the long silence was as bad as anything they might have said to her.

  Cook turned a spoon in the crimson paste.

  “Ruddy Glue. Looks lovely but can’t stick a damn thing together.”

  It should have been a jolly last meal.

  CHAPTER 48

  NO GOODBYES

  Cait was striding towards the docks, her carpet-bag in her hand and a bright face on to greet the day. She was whistling for the joy and luck of it, the tune she chose being the sea shanty known as “Fare thee well, my own true love”. It seemed the right tune for a day when she was setting off on a voyage across the ocean to America.

  Her passage drew smiles from those she passed, for she looked blithe and bonny, and the whistling also made it easy for her stalker to keep track of her in the morning crowd.

  As she neared the dock gates, Cait ceased whistling and when she walked under the arch she stopped in its shadow and spoke to no one in particular.

  “You should have said farewell.”

  The crowd milled past.

  “Did you hear me?” she said.

  And part of the crowd broke away and walked up to her. It was Lucy, and she had a bag over her shoulder.

  “I did. Last night. You were there,” she said. “How long have you known I was following?”

  “Since we left the house,” said Cait. “You should have said farewell.”

  “I did,” she repeated.

  “To Charlie Pyefinch,” said Cait, walking into the dockyard. “He’s been a good friend to you, girl.”

  “I left him a note,” said Lucy, jogging to keep up. “He was gone ratting with Hodge by the time I woke.”

  “Hmm,” said Cait, not breaking her long stride. “Goodbye in a note is no kind of a goodbye at all: it’s at least half of a cowardly thing. I expect more of you.”

  Lucy walked behind her as they wove through the stevedores and dockers. Then Cait turned and looked directly at her with an exasperated sigh.

  “Lucy Harker.”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t like girls.”

  Lucy’s face flushed.

  “What?”

  “Not in that way.”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “Sure you do,” said Cait. “And there’s nothing wrong with it, see. There’s enough pain and loneliness in the wide world that you’d have to be a rank fool, and an unkind one at that to say any kind of love was bad.”

  Lucy knew her face must look very hot. A memory flashed into her head of Georgiana Eagle, very close to her face, looking at her in growing horror. It made her wince.

  “Look, I still don’t know—”

  Cait rolled her eyes.

  “All right then, try it the other way: sure you don’t. Or maybe you do. Or maybe, just maybe it’s what you might call a “mash”. I had a terrible fierce mash on an older girl when I was a slip of a thing. I think I confused wanting her with wanting to be her. But I had a mash on, all right, and it felt realer than real, to be sure. But I do like men, acushla. Not many, not often, because finding a good one’s a rare thing. I fierce liked that Mr Sharp, but he didn’t like me, and truth is he didn’t make me laugh, when I thought about it. See, a good strong feller who can make me laugh, that’s my poison, and find me one of them and I’m as big a fool for the love as anyone. D’you see now?”

  Lucy nodded, miserable.

  “And I work alone. Venatrixes work alone.”

  Lucy’s chin came up.

  “But you had a teacher. You told me. A mentor, you said.”

  Cait stared at her, face giving nothing away as a stevadore who seemed to be carrying a small house on his back staggered past between them.

  “If you’re right,” said Lucy, once the obstacle had lurched away towards the warehouse. “If you’re right and what I’m feeling is wanting to be you and not… not the other thing… then show me how.”

  Cait looked away, up at the sky. The world kept walking past them, and all Lucy could see was the curve of Cait’s neck and the line of her jaw.

  “Cait,” she said.

  Cait shivered.

  “There’s cold weather coming in.”

  “Cait,” said Lucy. “Please!”

  “I’ll give you one year, same as I had. Then you’re on your own,” said Cait briskly.

  Her eyes dropped and found Lucy’s.

  “A deal?”

  “A deal.”

  “Take your glove off then,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because lesson one is do what I say,” said Cait.

  Lucy peeled off her right glove and began to remove the other.

  “That’ll do,” said Cait.

  She spat in her own right hand and looked at Lucy.

  “Go on then.”

  Lucy spat in her own hand and they slapped skin to skin, gripped firmly and shook.

  “One year,” said Cait.

  “Thank you,” said Lucy.

  “Lesson two,” said Cait, pointing at her carpet-bag on the pavement. “You carry the luggage.”

  CHAPTER 49

  THE RAT KING

  Whether or not the Last Hand was done, some things would continue, and the most important, according to Hodge, was his routine. So while the rest of London stirred itself from its various beds and began to think about breakfast, Charlie was deep beneath the north end of the White Tower listening to Jed yipping in unprecedented excitement. Hodge was not with them, having decided Charlie would learn more by ratting on his own, while he boiled the tea and fried the bacon in his quarters, claiming the very blurry shapes he was just beginning to be able to make out through his less ruined eye made this not only possible but “good practice”.

  Charlie and Jed had patrolled the usual corners and crannies, and found nothing but a dead pigeon that had somehow got stuck in the cellar stairwell. And then, just as Charlie had decided it was time to go and see if Hodge had remembered to save him any bacon, Jed went mad.

  The normal excited barks had quickly changed to something Charlie hadn’t heard before–a fiercely rising crescendo of sharp, high-pitched yips–and then, as he bent and peered forward beneath the low roof, pushing the bull’s-eye lantern ahead of him to try and see the dog, the noise stopped.

  “Jed!” he shouted. “Jed!”

  The sudden silence was the nastiest thing he had yet encountered while underground in the dark. It made his heart race.

  “Jed!” he shouted.

  More silence answered him. Silence from the darkness beyond the light of his lantern.

  Charlie didn’t hesitate. He liked the dog, and more than that, they were a team. He didn’t really need to think at all. He was on his hands and knees, crawling forward as fast as he could and somehow he had managed to draw his knife and hold it between his teeth, ready for whatever had silenced the terrier. The floor rose towards the roof as he went, pressing down on him and turning his crawl to a squirm, and then just as he thought he could go no further, a growling, screaming ball of something hurled out of the darkness ahead. It hit him and scratched an
d bit its way around his body, knocking the lantern from his hand and extinguishing it, and in the moment before his world went black he saw a nightmare fragment of rats–giant rats, wrong rats–and teeth and tails and fangs and fur fly past.

  He stayed there stunned, scrabbling for the lantern. He felt wetness and glass. The lens was shattered, the fuel was spilled. Trying to relight it would start a small fire that would burn or asphyxiate him.

  He heard a terrible noise of howls and snarls and screams interspersed with a brutal sound of metal bashing against stone from the void behind him. Again he froze, trying to make sense of what he was hearing.

  And then something grabbed his ankle.

  He lashed out with his boot.

  “Hoi!” said a familiar voice. “Less of that!”

  It was Hodge. He dragged Charlie free of the cramped squeeze-point and they both scrambled back into the cellar. Hodge had left his lamp on the floor and in its light Charlie saw three things.

  A blood-stained shovel. A nearly as gory Jed, lying panting on the stone flags, covered in bites and scrapes, but wagging his tail proudly. And in front of him, in a spattered puddle of blood, the rats, seemingly laid out in a circle.

  And now they were dead Charlie could see what was wrong with them. As they had gone past him, he had snatched a glimpse of some running forwards and some seeming to run backwards. That’s what hadn’t made sense. Now he could see why: they were more than twenty in number and their tails were snarled together, twisted and plaited and glued in place by their own droppings and dried blood and filth. It was a wheel of rats.

  “What is it?” said Charlie.

  “It’s a fucking harbinger is what it is,” spat Hodge.

  Charlie had never heard him swear before. It was the second most shocking thing he had experienced today. It was almost as bad as that horrible silence in the dark.

  “Pardon my French,” said Hodge. “But that’s a Rat King, and Rat Kings mean bad trouble’s coming sure as a gunshot means a bullet’s on the way. Sluaghs walking the iron rails, the Last Hand threatened and now a f—a bloody Rat King for breakfast. Batten down the hatches, Charlie, cos there’s an anvil dropping out of the sky and it’s got our name on it.”

  He spat at the Rat King.

  “Let’s get Jed patched up and then we’ll go and tell everyone the lovely news and see how they take it.”

  Because they had been underground, muffled by rock, earth and masonry, they did not hear the explosion. The first they knew of the new disaster was when they saw the dark smoke pluming into the sky to the east.

  Jed spotted it first and barked.

  And then they ran.

  CHAPTER 50

  DOWNFALL

  If Ida Laemmel had not been a trained hunter, she would have walked right up to the door of the Safe House and announced herself. As it was, she had taken passage on a fast ship from Zeebrugge which had brought her right up the Thames and deposited her a short walk from Wellclose Square. She had picked up her woollen pack and a violin case, and gone straight there. She had taken up position in the centre of the square against the wall of the Danish Church and was now observing it to find the lie of the land: as a hunter she wanted to acclimatise herself to the local terrain and ensure all was as it seemed before she made herself known, not least because for all she knew The Citizen may have made his move already and those in the Safe House were dead, imposters or–as he had done with the Paladin–turned into his puppets.

  The Paladin had been as ancient a Free Company as The Oversight or Die Wachte, and he had perverted them in a handful of years. They had been numerous too, and his cunning had almost destroyed The Oversight, from what she had heard. If they were as reduced in number as rumour had it, then they would be hanging on by their fingertips, and he would find them much easier to pluck than their French counterparts had been.

  So she wrapped herself in her long loden cape and went shadow-still, and just watched the square from beneath the deep overhang of her hood.

  She had seen a young man leave and head towards the Tower of London. He had worn a ring.

  Forty minutes later she had seen a striking redhead leave, swinging a carpet-bag and whistling cheerily as she went. A moment or two later, a girl had slipped out of the house with a small bag over her shoulder and followed the redhead in a furtive, swift way that Ida the hunter recognised only too well. The first girl had not worn a ring. The stalker had worn a ring and gloves. A Glint perhaps. Her behaviour was odd, and so Ida stayed in the shadows and watched both everything and nothing in the way she had learned, staying open to both patterns and breaks in patterns.

  She spotted the other watchers by the sugar factory. They looked like loafers but they had a focus she could feel: though they tried to be subtle about it, they loafed with intent, and all that intent was focused down the slope at the Safe House. They did not wear rings, and one scarcely had a chin.

  A subtle change in sensibility that she knew well came over her as she went from watching for anything to watching something: the loafers broke the pattern because they were doing nothing, but looking agitated and stressed about it.

  Then she saw them relax. A wagon pulled up outside the Safe House. It was piled with barrels. The driver put the brake on, and then did not go to the door and knock but walked away up the hill. As he passed the chinless loafer without pausing or seeming to see him, the loafer winked at him, and the wagoner gave a thumbs up with his hand held low at his side.

  The wagoner stopped beside a hansom cab parked on the corner. Ida saw a flash of the interior, a waiting man with a face that had the pallor of a toad’s belly, his arm held in a sling across his chest. She got a better look at his face as the door closed and he reappeared at the window, peering hungrily at the Safe House. Then he looked quickly at the loafers and made a sign with his hand.

  The loafer with a chin reached into a bag and handed the chinless one what looked like a large black pomegranate.

  And now Ida knew she had been right to wait. Something bad was about to happen. She loosened the knife in her belt and then reached down and quietly pushed back the hooks on the lid of her violin case.

  She heard a metallic bouncing noise, and her head whipped back to look at the sugar factory in time to see the chinless loafer roll the second grenado.

  “Scheisse!” hissed Ida, throwing off the cloak and pulling the crossbow from the violin case in the same movement. She was still wearing her hunting clothes, dark suede Trachtenjacke and the shocking, men’s lederhosen. As she ran, she ratcheted the bow and slapped a bolt in place.

  She was torn between two options–catch the loafers or warn The Oversight.

  She saw a tall, caped coachman in an old-fashioned tricorne hat walk out of the Safe House to look at the wagon parked outside.

  The first grenado exploded, a deep shattering concussion that nearly knocked her over as the doors blew off the sugar manufactory. She saw a house-high vat split and slowly tilt forward and then she stopped thinking and started acting.

  She turned and yelled at the coachman as she pointed at the ruined factory and the slowly toppling vat.

  “FIRE! FIRE IS COMING!”

  Then without waiting to see if he understood, she whirled and looked for the bomb throwers.

  The chinless one was climbing up next to the driver on the hansom cab; the other one had opened the door and was about to get in.

  Ida shot him, almost without aiming.

  The crossbow bolt blew out Coram’s knee and knocked him shrieking into the gutter.

  Her hands worked fast so that by the time the second grenado blew she was loaded and firing. The bolt chunked through the back of the cab.

  Then she was running. A thin river of flaming sugar was starting to roll down the street towards the Safe House and the wagonload of barrels.

  She fired a last bolt, then turned to outrun the fire stream.

  Issachar Temblebane stared in shock at the two arrowheads stuck through the wall of the c
ab facing him.

  “Arrows?” he said. “ARROWS?” And then he slammed his hand on the roof.

  “GO!” he screamed. “GO!”

  As the cab lurched into motion, he caught a glimpse of Coram writhing in the gutter, clutching his leg. His face opened in a yell, eyes staring at Issachar’s as he passed.

  “Father!”

  And then he was gone. Issachar slumped back as the cab sped away, staring in controlled horror at the bolts which protruded through the seat back in front of him.

  “Who the hell uses arrows?”

  Ida was pleased the coachman had run back in the house.

  “Get out!” she shouted as she ran in the door he had left open in his haste.

  “Everybody out! Fire is coming!” she yelled as she followed him in at speed.

  She was just thinking that she’d done a stupid thing running into a house that was about to get hit by a river of fire without knowing where the back door was when she skidded to a halt at what was obviously the kitchen door.

  A large, red-faced woman with a scar running down her face was swearing like a trooper and fighting to free herself from the undignified position she found herself in, which was over the coachman’s shoulder.

  “Emmet, you effing lump of mud, what the bloody hell are you doing manhandling me like this?”

  “He’s trying to save you!” said Ida.

  Cook registered her in shock.

  “Who the buggery are you?”

  “Friend,” said Ida. “No time. The factory’s blown up, there’s a river of burning sugar headed this way and—”

  Outside, the sugar-lava hit the wagon and ignited the barrels of turpentine. The wagon, the barrels and bits of unfortunate horse blew in the windows at the front of the house.

  Pots and pans and kitchen paraphernalia rained from the hooks and rails on the ceiling, jolted adrift by the concussion.

  “Right, got it–put me down,” said Cook.

  Fire began to glow angry red in the passage behind Ida as the burning sugar began to find its way into the basement.