by Mike Shevdon
Claire Radisson’s mansion flat was rear-facing, but I figured that welcome guests didn’t sneak around the back, they knocked at the front door like civilised people. I laid my hand on the street door and felt the lock tumble and click open. Inside, the smell of disinfectant floor-cleaner was overpowering, but at least the hall was warm. I took the stairway up to the flat, listening to the sound of early evening behind closed doors. At Claire’s door all was silent, but I couldn’t really imagine her watching TV, other than serious current affairs, maybe. I rang the bell, standing back from the door so that she would be able to see me through the security peep. I didn’t imagine she had that many visitors. Her role as Chief Clerk to the Queen’s Remembrancer and the secrecy about the more esoteric aspects of her role did not invite confidences. I knew that she and Sam Veldon had once been together, but my understanding was that was all in the past. I stood in the hallway while the door remained resolutely unanswered. Perhaps she was out buying groceries, or had gone to dinner with a friend. I re-opened the letter from my pocket, scanning her words. I hope to God this reaches you.
I placed my hand on the door, and immediately retracted it. Something was amiss. It felt like unexpectedly touching a snake. I could feel the wrongness in the door. I tried again, feeling for the sense of the door so that I could click the lock open, but as soon as my hand touched the door I was forced to snatch it away.
I tried the bell again and rapped sharply on the door, avoiding touching it for any length of time. “Claire? Are you there? It’s Niall.” There was no sound from within. I glanced down the corridor. If I made much more noise, I might start attracting attention. The last thing I wanted was someone calling the police.
Blackbird had stayed with Claire for a short while when she was pregnant and on the run from the Seventh Court. She’d mentioned that Claire had a rear fire escape. If I was not a welcome guest, then maybe I needed another entrance. I walked back to the stairs and descended to the ground floor and the street. Walking along the row, I took the side alley, the wind whipping around the corner and pulling at my jacket, making me wish I’d brought a coat, but I’d only been dropping off my daughter – I had only been going out for an hour or so.
The alley led to a service road that ran behind the rows of houses, populated by dumpsters and networked by fire escapes that climbed the rear of the building. Light spilled from occupied flats, creating more shadow than illumination. I worked my way along the row until I was behind Claire’s flat. I could see the fire escape, but her windows were dark. Maybe she was away. That wouldn’t be a bad idea if she was feeling nervous. Maybe in the absence of a reply from me she had decided to take a break somewhere warm and leave it all behind, except she didn’t strike me as the sort of person to leave when things were in crisis. Intensifying the misdirection around me, I rolled one of the dumpsters under the fire escape. Climbing on top, I leapt upwards to catch the rail of the fire escape, expecting it to lower itself on counterweights so that I could use the steps. Instead, I hung there, swinging from the underside of the rail from the cold steel bars. Shifting my weight between my hands, I felt above me, finding nothing to hold so that I could pull myself upwards.
While I didn’t have anything like the reaction to steel that I had to iron, it wasn’t the easiest thing to hang from, not helped by the dull throb from my recent encounter with a van. The metal felt intensely cold, and I could feel a spreading ache seeping into my muscles. I dropped back to the dumpster with a booming thud. Perhaps the mechanism had been designed specifically to prevent it being used as an aid to burglary. Perhaps I needed another approach. I jumped down from the dumpster and hauled it out of the way.
Scanning up and down the alley, I listened for signs that I was being observed. I stepped across the alley, putting my back against the wall opposite so that I could see where I wanted to be. I deepened the glamour of concealment, and then opened the well of power within me. The air around me chilled even further and the wind whipped down the alley tumbling empty cardboard coffee cups and discarded carrier bags along. I drew power into me, watching the lights in the surrounding flats dim and flicker. I felt the emptiness within me dilate as more power poured into the well at my core.
Gradually the world took on a papery thinness, as if it were made only of images painted on insubstantial shadows. Walls became translucent, so that I could see the shifting shadows of people moving within. I stared up at Claire’s balcony, focusing on that point, and stepped forwards. The world flashed white and then was quiet. I turned and could look down to where I’d been in the service alley. On the walkway above me, a door opened and someone walked along the metal walkway. There was a sharp tapping. A door opened.
“It’s only me,” said a female voice. “Is your electric all right? Mine is going on and off.”
A male voice answered. “No, mine too. It’s back on now, though.”
“I thought it was gonna go off for good,” said the first voice.
“Seems to be OK now,” said the man.
“I’ve got some candles if you need them. They’re scented ones, but if you need some I’ve got plenty.”
“I’m fine thanks.”
“Am I interrupting something?” said the female voice.
“I was just sitting down to supper,” said the male voice. I could hear the blatant lie in that. From the tone, I was surprised she couldn’t.
“OK then. I’d best be getting back.”
“See you, then.”
I heard the footsteps padding back to the door above me, and then the door closing. The man’s door closed too, but I thought for a moment I could hear the faint sound of giggling coming from the man’s flat, though not in a male voice.
I set that aside and peered through the window into Claire’s flat. The windows were shut, and there were no lights inside. There was a fire exit off the kitchen and I pressed my hand to the door, wary of booby traps. Claire knew to protect herself from intruders – especially ones with my abilities.
The door clicked and I eased it open slowly, opening my senses to the dim interior. What hit me first was the smell – a stuffy, foetid aroma that jarred with my memory of the flat. It had been spotless when I’d been here last, and I couldn’t imagine her leaving it otherwise.
I stepped inside, leaving the door ajar for the fresh air more than anything else. The interior was dim, but I could see marks on the walls that hadn’t been there before. I weighed the risk for a moment, and then clicked on the light. I didn’t fancy exploring the flat in the dark.
The glow from the energy-saving bulb gradually increased. Now that I could see, my heart sank. There was a long streak down the wall, as if someone had fallen backwards, trailing their hand down the wall while it was covered in brown paint. Except I already knew it wasn’t paint.
Now that I knew what to look for I could see the trail along the carpet. I followed it into the living room where I had once spent the night on the sofa. I clicked on another light.
This room had been Claire’s sanctuary. It was filled with keepsakes and dark-wood furniture. Some of that furniture had been hacked to pieces. Other pieces were smashed. The sofa I had slept on was slashed so that the stuffing bulged out in white tufts.
Someone had swept blood in spatter-lines up the walls and across the carpet. There were trails of blood everywhere.
Blood spatters onto the glass wall as Raffmir’s sword slices the head from the nurse who brought us the key to the cells. Her head bounces down the corridor. Lines of black blood run down the glass leaving a dark smear in their trail. The smell of fear and death is in my nostrils…
I shook myself, trying to push the memory from beneath Porton Down Research Centre back down. It was too much. I turned and ran for the fire escape, bursting through the door onto the balcony and throwing up over the railing into the alley below. There was little enough in my stomach, but that didn’t stop the dry heaving.
I already knew I was going to have to go back into the flat.
I stood in the small galley kitchen and tried to piece together what had happened. Part of the smell was the slowly rotting red peppers on the chopping board and the chopped tomato in the pan on the stove. She had been in the middle of preparing a meal and then… what? Just left it? Heard a noise? There was a knife rack on the worktop. One of the knives was missing. It wasn’t on the worktop or in the sink where grease had congealed around the edge of the murky water.
I turned back past the fire exit and looked at the streak down the wall. It was blood – you didn’t need to be a forensic scientist to see that. Had she fallen? It looked like she’d pressed her hand to the blood and then collapsed, smearing it down the wall. There was blood soaked into the carpet. That didn’t make sense. Surely you fell first and then bled all over the carpet, so how did the blood get on the wall? The living room didn’t answer the question. It looked like someone had gone berserk, strewing mayhem around the room. But why attack the sofa? What had it done to deserve being hacked to pieces?
The front door was as I suspected. An iron horseshoe was hanging on a hook on the back of the door. I didn’t get too close. It would prevent anyone with fey abilities opening the door, though, which meant that whoever had gained access had come through the back.
I went back through the living room, heading for the bedroom, readying myself for what I might find. An image from my past of a woman lying on a bed with her throat ripped out was at the forefront of my mind. I pushed the door open gingerly. The bedroom looked curiously untouched. The bed was made, the covers pulled over. I checked the far side of the bed, half expecting to find a body. There was only a patterned rug.
That left the bathroom.
I pushed the door open with my foot. There was a shower curtain drawn across the bath, but that wasn’t what caught my attention. The sink was stained with blood. The mirror was streaked with it. The tiles had droplets that had run until they dried. There was a facecloth dyed brown with it. I stepped inside, being careful to avoid treading in the bloodspots on the floor and drew the shower curtain back in one fluid motion.
The bath was empty. Not only that, it was clean. I drew the curtain across again and noted the blood spots on it. They had come into the bathroom and sprayed blood across the sink, the floor and across the outside of the shower curtain, and then left. This made no sense at all. Claire wasn’t fey, and if she’d died her body should still be here. No one was going to carry her body away. So where was she? My mind drifted back the dumpster in the alley. I had stood on top of it to try and reach the fire escape. Had I been closer than I thought?
I stepped carefully out of the bathroom, retracing my steps and went back to the kitchen passage, polishing the light switch to leave no incriminating fingerprints as I switched it off. The welcoming dark hid the stains and the chaos. I retreated to the fire escape and closed the fire-door behind me, finding the chill, clean air welcome after the cloying smell of the flat. Taking the fire escape downwards, I was able to drop from where I had grabbed on to the rail to the alley below.
Hoisting the lid off the dumpster, I expected to see a set of dead eyes. Instead there were plastic rubbish bags. I pulled them apart looking for something that looked less like a bag and more like a body. In the darkness, a flash of bright metal caught my eye. Amidst the bags there was a kitchen knife.
Angling the knife so it caught the light, I could see brown stains smeared across the blade. She had been cutting peppers and tomato, and this definitely wasn’t tomato juice. My assumption was that whoever had found Claire had killed her, but without a body that theory was getting harder to substantiate. This was her knife and it had bloodstains on it.
Maybe she wasn’t dead after all?
When I reached the courts, all was quiet. Amber was watching the Ways. As far as she knew, I’d taken my daughter to visit my ex-wife. I’d returned covered in blood, livid bruises across my face, a gash on my forehead, and carrying a blood-stained knife. She took in my appearance and shook her head once, making no further comment. It made me wonder what would be considered worthy of comment in Amber’s world.
When I reached our rooms I got more of the reception I’d been expecting.
“Niall! What on earth happened to you? And where did you get that?” Blackbird was referring to the knife. She was no longer dressed up for court and looked more like the Blackbird I knew.
“I found it in a dumpster.” It was the truth, but her expression told me it was not sufficient.
“I can’t let you out of my sight for two minutes,” she said. “Angela, bring me a wet towel – with cold water. For goodness sake, Niall. Where did these bruises come from? I thought you were visiting Katherine.” At least she hadn’t concluded that I’d murdered them all. She made me sit while she inspected the gash across my forehead.
“I was visiting an old friend.” Angela appeared with the towel, handing it to Blackbird, who dabbed it at my forehead. “Ow! That stings.”
“Don’t be such a baby. You don’t want it to get infected, do you?”
“I can’t get infections. I’m fey,” I pointed out.
“You can still scar, and if I don’t close this wound properly you’ll have a white gash across your forehead for a long time to come.”
“I thought it would make me more handsome… ouch! Do you have to do that so hard?”
She pressed the cloth to the wound on my forehead. “Maybe you’ll think twice next time. So what happened?”
Pulling Claire’s letter from my pocket, I passed it to Blackbird who passed it to Angela. I explained about what happened at the Royal Courts of Justice. I even admitted to pinning the woman against the wall.
“I didn’t have time for twenty questions,” I explained, but still earned a frown of disapproval from Blackbird. “And then Raffmir ran me over with the van, or at least he crashed the gates into me. I’m not completely sure what happened after that. I think I staggered down into the crypt of St Clement’s Dane. I woke up in a cellar down the Way.”
Mentioning the strange dream seemed a bad idea. I didn’t want to start sounding crazy after an obvious head injury. Instead I explained why I’d gone to find Claire.
“Why didn’t you come back here? We could have got some help, or sent someone else; one of the other Warders.”
“If I’d waited and come back here they would have been gone before we got there. I only just caught them as it was.”
“For all the good it did you.” Blackbird shook her head. “One of these days…” she said, dabbing at the cut.
I told them about the flat and finding the blood stains. I neglected to mention throwing up over the balcony, but I did tell them about the state of the rooms and the absence of a body.
“So you think Raffmir took the body?” asked Blackbird.
“I’m fairly sure it was him in the van. He must have hired someone to steal the safe. By recruiting human help, they were able to remove the safe with all the items inside. They can’t do anything with it because they can’t open the safe, but now neither can we. They only have to keep it from us.”
“We can just make another set of knives, though, can’t we? Isn’t that what you did before?” asked Angela.
“Perhaps,” said Blackbird. “What about the horseshoes?”
“They were only there to protect the knives.” I said. “Fat lot of good they did in the end.”
“I still don’t understand,” said Blackbird. “Why take the knives now? We have almost ten months until they’re needed again. The ceremony isn’t until next October. They’ve given the game away much too early.”
“I don’t think Raffmir was expecting to see anyone at the Royal Courts of Justice,” I said
. “And with Claire Radisson out of the way, who is there to raise the alarm about the missing safe? The woman outside Claire’s office clearly thought it was all routine. We wouldn’t find out until it was too late.”
“But why now?”
“Because no one was expecting it now. We’re close to the winter solstice, the time of balance, but they’re usually quiet at this time of the year. They can cross between the worlds and lay the foundations for whatever they have planned for next year. We already know they had long-term plans to eliminate the mongrel-fey using biological weapons. Who knows what else they’re doing,” I pointed out.
“I need to tell the High Court about this,” said Blackbird. “They can spread the word that the Raffmir is here. Maybe we can find out what the Seventh Court is up to before it gets any worse.”
“I thought we’d finished for today,” said Krane, taking his seat. “If I’d realised the Eighth Court would take this much time I’d have never agreed to it in the first place.”
“You didn’t agree to it,” said Teoth.
“No, I didn’t. So why are we back here? Is your plan to talk us into submission, Blackbird? An endless debate until you get what you want?”
He had a point. They had already debated for hours, firstly on whether there was precedent for another court, then on whether it could be formed without the agreement of all the other courts, including the Seventh. It seemed like Krane and Teoth would fight her every inch of the way. They had even argued over where she should sit. Krane said that she could not have a seat until they reached a decision on whether there would be an Eighth Court, but then changed his mind when Blackbird went to sit in Altair’s vacant seat. Then they had tried to seat her at the end of the row, but as she pointed out, that would place her directly next to Altair, should he return. On the other hand, she didn’t want to be in the middle of them all and have to divide her attention between those to the left and right of her. In the end, Kimlesh made a space between her and Yonna. At least there she felt she had some support.
