The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  Cook snatched a hatchet and a cutlass from the debris, stuck the cutlass through her apron strings and snatched the candle and the five-wood wreath from the centre of the pine table. She looked wistfully at the kitchen and then found Ida’s eyes. She pointed at a box covered in Chinese writing.

  “Right,” she said. “You, Trousers, grab that box and follow me. Time to abandon ship. Emmet, grab the table, block the door, stop the fire as long as you can, so’s we can get this damned Wildfire to safety.”

  Emmet lifted the table and looked at Ida. She realised she was in the way. She ran after Cook. He smacked his arm down and chopped the huge table in half, then ran at the door and slammed the table over the opening just as the first wave of burning sugar splashed into it. He leant against it, wedging back the tide as flames licked hungry fingers round the edge, leaking into the doomed kitchen.

  Ida followed Cook as she ran down the passage to the back of the house. Cook stopped herself with one hand, catching on one of two pillars halfway down.

  “Emmet,” she shouted. “Come now, and drop the roof as you go.”

  “Anyone else in the house?” said Ida.

  “No. But there’s a lot of irreplaceable—Bugger, yes. Maybe. A girl,” said Cook.

  “Redhead?” coughed Ida. Smoke was beginning to curl in from the kitchen end, twining towards them across the roof.

  “Glint,” said Cook. “I mean she is a—”

  “She left,” hacked Ida. “And we need to too.”

  “I’m with you,” said Cook, eyeing the smoke. She opened a door to another passage. “This way. Takes us uphill, towards the Tower. Away from the flow.”

  “I need to get back on the street fast,” said Ida. “I shot one of them. Hobbled him. I can find out who he is. Or follow his blood trail to his lair.”

  “Trousers,” said Cook, “don’t know who the bloody hell you are, but I like your style.”

  “I’m Ida Laemmel.”

  “Maybe,” grinned Cook, a dangerous spark in her eye, “but you’ll always be Trousers to me.”

  She seemed to be getting an unaccountable burst of energy from the mayhem, almost as if it were her element. “We’ll take the side tunnel to the Sly House.”

  There was a crash and a whomp of flame as a fireball curled out of the kitchen, eating its way along the ceiling as it bellied towards them like a hungry snake.

  Cook grabbed her shoulder and yanked her through the door, slamming it shut.

  “But Emmet—” said Ida.

  “He’s a golem. Hard to kill,” said Cook.

  Behind the door, a burning figure walked determinedly through the flames, knee-deep in molten sugar that was now coursing ahead of him as it searched for the quickest way down to the river.

  He reached the pillars, his clothes burnt off him and hanging in fiery tatters as he stretched across the width of the passage and pulled them. They didn’t move. And still he pulled, the fire river lapping his thighs, every ounce of strength fighting the downward force of the building above. His mouth was open and screaming silently, and then with a jolt and a thud the pillars buckled inwards and, as he staggered forward, it was as if the whole of the Safe House came crashing down behind him, sealing the passage and pitching him face down into the fire.

  CHAPTER 51

  DEVASTATION

  Sharp and Sara arrived in London after an astonishingly speedy night crossing from Boulogne by the new South Eastern & Continental Steam-Packet Company that had eaten up the Channel and ejected them onto the quayside at Folkestone in time for the first train to London.

  It had been an uncomfortable and uneventful passage, except for one moment mid-Channel when Sharp had woken to find Sara looking at him.

  “What?” he said.

  “I never thanked you for coming into the mirrors for me,” she said.

  “Nor I you, come to think of it,” he said.

  The boat churned on through the night.

  “When I was restored to my hand and found you had gone, two things were immediately apparent,” she said, as if describing the results of an experiment. “The first was that although my hand and heart-stone were an integral, necessary part of me, I was still not whole.”

  She looked out at the moon.

  “The second thing,” he prompted.

  “You know the second thing, Jack,” she said, pulling her collar tight round her neck and closing her eyes. “Don’t be obtuse. It’s the same reason you went into that damned glass maze.”

  And he watched her fall asleep. And he might have been wrong, but before she did he would have sworn he saw the very edge of her mouth tic up in a quickly suppressed smile.

  He watched her until they docked, and then they followed the mail to the railway station and arrived in the city before nine-thirty, having travelled through a dawn that revealed in its crisp first light a landscape almost magical with snow. On arrival the Raven flew ahead, and they engaged a sleepy hansom cab driver to take them to the Safe House. The cab squelched through slush and ice that was distinctly unmagical, but made good time despite that.

  They heard the clocks strike ten as the cab paused at the bottom of St George Street, just below Wellclose Square. When it didn’t make the expected turn, Sharp stuck his head out the window.

  “Sorry, guv,” said the driver, pointing with his whip. “Some bugger’s lost a wheel.”

  A cart carrying what looked like carboys of turpentine had got stuck on the turning, and three very angry carters were trying to replace a wheel that had broken on the high kerb without tipping the cart into the street.

  “We can walk,” said Sara.

  They paid the driver and made their way up the short street to Wellclose Square.

  “Home, Sharp! We’re home. And I feel not a minute too soon!” she said, squeezing his arm. “Come on. I can’t wait to see Cook’s face when we walk in!”

  And she dragged him into what developed quickly into a laughing race up the slope through the snow.

  He let her lead, and so when she stopped at the top of the street he saw the stutter-step and then the stillness hit her as the laughter died on her lips.

  “Sara,” he said. “What—?”

  And then he saw it too.

  The Safe House was gone.

  It had disappeared as if plucked from the face of the earth.

  Where he should have been looking at the familiar back wall, he was seeing straight through to the Danish Church beyond the house in the centre of the square, and beyond it another absence where the sugar factory had been.

  “But…” said Sara. “But…”

  His arm went round her shoulders, keeping her on her feet as their eyes tried to make sense of what they were seeing.

  One side-wall of the Safe House remained, a smoke-blackened cliff with the outlines of the once hidden rooms clearly visible on it. Of the rest of the house there was nothing recognisable. A huge pile of charred rafters and cross-beams had been made in one corner of the now vacant lot, and facing it there was a brick pile where the debris had been sorted and moved out of the way. Whatever had happened had happened a long time ago.

  “But this can’t…” she said. “This isn’t…”

  “Sara,” he said. He felt like he was being repeatedly hit in the stomach. “Time. Time in the mirrors is unreliable. The nun, Dee, someone warned me: it flows differently.”

  “Oh, Jack,” she said. “Oh, Jack. What happened here?”

  He looked around the street. There were no familiar faces. Just a girl and a boy running across the square, preceded by a dog that he for a brief, excited, moment thought was Jed but now saw was not, being a puppy instead.

  “I’ll find out,” he said. “I’ll go to Bunyon’s, the Sly House…”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  He felt her stiffen and straighten her back and walk towards the looming wall, peeling off her glove as she went.

  “No, Sara,” he said, running after her as he realised what she w
as about to do. He grabbed her arm. “Please. If they are dead we shall find out soon enough, but you do not have to witness it.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “Yes, I damn well do. Let me go.”

  He didn’t.

  “Mr Sharp,” she said, voice and eyes suddenly icy as a midwinter wave. “Unhand me, please.”

  He didn’t. Nor did he know what to do next.

  The running girl paused in front of them.

  “Mr Sharp?” she said, eyes bright and face pinked from the exertion of her run.

  “Do I know you?” he said.

  “Not a bit,” she said. There was a clipped, foreign intonation to her accent. His head was spinning and sick with dread, but there was something familiar about her. “I am Ida Laemmel. Thanks be that you are both alive.”

  “Miss Falk!” said the boy, skidding to a halt. Sharp had never seen him before, but there was something familiar about him too.

  Sara’s eyes left Sharp’s face and found his. And the midwinter wave crashed and the ice melted and her knees buckled for an instant and then she straightened.

  “Pyefinch?” she said. “Charlie Pyefinch?”

  He brushed his hair out of his eyes and grinned in embarrassment. And Sharp saw the familiar thing. He wore a bloodstone ring. As did the girl Laemmel.

  “The Raven found us at the Tower,” said Charlie. “I was teaching Ida and Archie to rat…”

  He pointed at the terrier puppy happily worrying the cuff of his trousers. He beamed at Sara.

  “You’re bloody alive!” he said. “Sorry. Swearing. But this is the first good news… well, it’s the first good news, apart from Ida here poling up, since this—”

  He suddenly looked stricken as he pointed at the devastation behind him.

  “Since this happened.”

  “What happened?” said Sara. “Exactly what?”

  Sharp saw her tensing as if making ready to receive a blow. He stepped up close behind her and put an arm round an unyielding shoulder.

  “Long answer’s a bit complicated,” he said, stumbling a little.

  “The short answer is Templebanes,” said the girl.

  “Charlie Pyefinch,” said Mr Sharp, voice raw, “I know your parents and like them greatly, but if you don’t tell us what has happened to Cook and Hodge and The Smith and Emmet, I am going to have to strangle you.”

  “And the girl Lucy Harker?” said Sara.

  A look flew between Ida and Charlie.

  “I think we better let the others tell you,” he said. “Those that remain. They’re at The Smith’s on the Isle of Dogs…”

  “You won’t like it when they do,” said Ida.

  Sara stared at the ruin of her only home.

  “I already don’t,” she said.

  Only now did she let herself bend and sag against Sharp for an instant.

  “I’m here,” he said quietly into her ear. “Bone and bedrock.”

  “Good,” she breathed back, her eyes looking to the east to where the low winter sun was still rising. Then he felt her straighten again.

  “Because we have some building to do and vengeance to take…”

  EPILOGUE

  BACK BAY, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Prudence Tittensor does not normally curse, either in or out of polite company, in both of which situations she is equally comfortable and equally likely to be found. She is a sea-captain’s wife and a prosperous trader in her own right, given to travelling with her spouse on his voyages to Europe and beyond. She has only done one bad thing in an otherwise blameless life, the fruits of which should have been grizzling in the empty and silent Crandall’s Patent Baby Carriage at her side in the room overlooking the dock beyond.

  She had told herself no one would know, and persuaded herself that if she had not made the agreement the vendor would likely have disposed of the child by dropping it in a sewer or leaving it to die in the streets. And she had known that the warning sense she was suppressing all the time was that the girl selling her the baby, as her own, for adoption, was no girl at all, but older than she was, and was a changeling. Smell alone should have alerted her. But she had been in extremis herself, her faculties dulled, her scruples suppressed, and the prospect of the child had made her husband so very happy. And she loved him.

  And then later she felt the quickening of her own belly, and could no longer hide from herself what she had done. And so she had sent her husband away in order that she could engineer a discreet solution to her problem. She had allowed a childless couple from Marblehead to adopt the child. They were kind, young and determined to build a new life in the West, away from families that both found too cloistering for comfort. And they had headed to the new territories with their optimism buoyed by the prospect of a future happiness promised by the happy two-year-old that Providence, and Prudence, had provided for them.

  She could never tell her husband the real reason she had done it, for to do so would be to disabuse him of certain illusions both about how the world was constituted in general, and what Prudence’s abilities were in particular. So she had determined just to tell him God had told her to share their fortune by giving Emelia to a deserving couple of fine upstanding moral character in order that he and she could concentrate their love and attention on the coming child who would be blood of their blood and flesh of their flesh. Using God–who he deeply believed in–as an excuse for her less explainable rashnesses always worked, and was quite consequence-free for Prudence who no more believed in a god than her husband believed in changelings or Wendigos or any of the lesser manitou. Or even Skinwalkers like his wife.

  The reason she swore like the basest wharfie was that she had come down to the dock to meet the Lady of Nantasket and greet her beloved. She was steeled to finesse the bad news about Emelia and glaze it with a thick sugar-coating of good news about the progress of her own pregnancy.

  What she was not steeled for was the tall redhead stepping off the gangplank ahead of her husband whom she immediately registered, as of a fierce vibration in the air, as fiagaí, nor was she in any doubt of why the girl following her was wearing gloves on such a mild winter’s day.

  She wondered if they were here to contact the Remnant, perhaps to search for Emelia. Stranger things had happened.

  One thing was certain: they were two things.

  Abled, as she was.

  And trouble.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A word on the Rat King’s appearance in the preceding pages: it didn’t just come unbidden out of the deep darkness beneath the White Tower to surprise Charlie and Jed. It crawled from The Stewpot, out of the Gumbo. A while ago, when I was thinking about stepping outside my screenwriting comfort zone to venture a first novel, I conspired to interview Terry Pratchett for a Sunday supplement over a long and very–on his part, towards me–indulgent dinner in Edinburgh. I was of course hoping to pick up some tips from the master. (The best way to learn about something is, in my experience, to interview an expert in the field.)

  Somebody had recently come up to him at a signing having seen an illustration of Ponder Stibbons (in The Last Hero) and snarkily pointed out that he’d obviously been, er… “inspired” by the then young Harry Potter, and that by association perhaps Unseen University itself was “stolen” from Hogwarts. Terry just very calmly mentioned that the first Harry Potter book was published a year after The Last Hero and left it at that. This led us into to a general discussion about inspiration and where ideas come from, and Terry outlined his theory of the Gumbo, or The Stewpot: everything that’s ever been written and everything you write gets thrown into a big pot, and everyone one can pick different bits and pieces out of the stew and use/remix them as ingredients in their own recipe. The only crimes against The Stewpot are to either pretend it doesn’t exist, or that you own it. It’s a rational, robust and generous rule, and in that is like my experience of Terry himself. He was a great inspiration, hard-edged about the process of creativity, truly funny and righteously angry about all
the embuggering™ pretence, venality and self-delusion in the world. I hate the fact we will have no more books from him, and I’m profoundly grateful for the ones we have, the ones I’ve enjoyed and stolen from: the Rat King is a fragment I speared out of The Stewpot which originally creeped me out in his The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.

  The other thing I particularly remember from the dinner had nothing to do with being a writer and everything to do with being a dad: we talked about video games and, in the course of enthusiastically recommending Thief as a profitable and enjoyable aid to Writer’s Procrastination, he spoke of his daughter. Just for a moment the public Terry dropped his guard and revealed a flash of deep and gruff pride. I didn’t put that in the article then, but I’d like to mark it now, perhaps because I never found a way to thank him properly for his indulgence and inspiration. He created strong, courageous and independent-minded women in a range that went from young Tiffany Aching to Granny Weatherwax, and though I’m pretty sure he was confident enough in his own art to be proud of them, I’m equally certain that the one he was most proud of was not a fictional character at all, and that her name begins with R.

  Many thanks to Orbit/Little Brown, especially to Jenni Hill and Will Hinton, my excellent editors at Orbit on either side of the pond, to Joanna Kramer for her exemplary copy-edit which makes me seem much smarter and less repetitive that I really am. Thanks also to Lauren Panepinto for contriving another lovely cover. I’m very grateful to and for Karolina Sutton, my agent at Curtis Brown, and to Michael McCoy at Independent whose work on the other side of my writing street gives me confidence and time to spend on these books. None better.

  Thanks to Hugh and Anne Buchanan for the Austrian hospitality that led to my fictional forebears emerging out of the dark, high on the Steinernes Meer.

  Ave atque vale to our neighbour and friend who was one of the two main inspirations for Cook, who sadly died between The Oversight and this book: I said it at her funeral, and I’ll say it again: you have to admire a woman whose collection of swordsticks outnumbers her handbags.