The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  Lucy looked at them, then at Sara Falk who was sitting on the other side of the table with a bowl of hot water, some flannels, a towel and a box full of old gloves.

  “Now, my lovely, these are Eccles cakes,” said Cook. Her voice was rough but kind. “We shall bake them for twenty minutes or so, and while we wait for them to come out of the Dreadnought, I will try my best to free your mouth without any distress. I expect the smell of them baking will encourage you to bear any small pain we may accidentally inflict, knowing once we’re done you can enjoy eating them, all of them if you wish, perhaps with a nice slice of Lancashire cheese. I assure you they will be worth it: I have used the estimable Mr Henderson’s receipt.”

  She offered Sara a small knife.

  “No,” said Sara. “Lucy may do it, for the luck of the thing.”

  Cook expertly spun the blade between her fingers so the handle faced towards Lucy.

  “Three slashes across the top of each one, no more, no less,” said Sara Falk, giving Lucy an encouraging and mysterious wink. “Threes are powerful things, Lucy, almost as powerful as fives: some say the triple cut is for Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, some say it’s for the Trinity. Others say it’s for the Maid, the Mother and the Crone. Wise King Solomon said—”

  Cook made a short explosive snort like a boiler blowing a safety valve.

  “If Wise King Solomon knew anything about baking, he’d have known it’s to let the steam out and stop them exploding sticky mincemeat all over the inside of my nice clean oven.”

  She jabbed the knife handle at Lucy.

  “Come on, girl, let’s get this done. My tummy’s rumbling.”

  “Your tummy’s always rumbling,” said Sara Falk with a smile. “It’s like living with a permanent thunderstorm.”

  “Why—” said Cook, and then cut off abruptly as Lucy snatched the knife from her fingers.

  “No!” said Sara, reaching across the table, too late to stop the girl.

  Lucy stretched her jaw as far away from her nose as she could manage, like a silent scream, then sliced the tip of the knife into the hessian plaster, the sharp edge of the blade facing away from her, and ripped outwards, wincing as she did so.

  “Aie!” She said, her voice escaping through the ragged hole she had cut. She stabbed the knife into the wood tabletop where it quivered with the force of her blow as she reached inside her mouth. Her finger came out with a smear of blood on the tip. “Merde. Je me suis coupée. Ce salaud—”

  Cook blew her cheeks out in shock.

  “Hell’s teeth!” she exploded. “She’s a bloody Frenchy!”

  Lucy worked her mouth, trying to spit something out through the hole in the gag.

  “Lucy,” said Sara, reaching across the table with the flannel while Cook surreptitiously reclaimed her knife and examined the tip for signs of damage. “Do you speak English? Parlez vous—?”

  The girl managed to spit the thing out of her mouth. It bounced on the scrubbed deal table and came to a halt between them. It was a gold ring and even though it landed face down, they could see from the back that the stone it was set with was broken and half was missing.

  Lucy tugged at the hole in her pitch-plaster gag, wincing again and grimacing as she made it bigger. She took several deep breaths and looked at them as if what she had done and the thing she had produced as if by magic from her mouth was perfectly normal.

  “C’est l’anneau de ma mère,” she said with a shrug. “Ils ont lui cherché partout, ces salauds avec leurs visages bleus—”

  She reached for the ring and wiped her spit from it on the flannel.

  “—je pensais que j’allais avaler le truc foutu!”

  “What did she say?” said Cook. “She speaks so fast—”

  “She said it was her mother’s ring. And they searched everywhere for it, those blue-faced, um, bastards. And she thought she was going to swallow the, er, damned thing.” Sara raised an eyebrow at Cook. “I must say she swears quite a lot.”

  “Spirited and clever though, hiding it in her mouth,” said Cook with a gleam of approval in her eye.

  “And reckless,” said Sara Falk. “She could have choked.”

  “Well, she is a Glint,” said Cook. “Just like you. And you were reckless at her age…”

  “But if she can only speak French…” said Sara Falk, ignoring the raised eyebrow that accompanied Cook’s observation, “why is she called Lucy Harker?”

  Lucy stretched across the table, indicating she wanted Sara Falk’s right hand. She let the girl take her glove and turn it to look at the ring she wore outside the glove.

  “Lucy,” said Sara Falk, “what—?”

  Lucy turned her mother’s ring over and held it next to the other one. The former’s gold setting was an older and thinner style, but the stone, of which half remained in the setting, was also a bloodstone.

  And more than that, it was a lion.

  Exactly the same lion as the one on Sara Falk’s ring. The only thing it lacked was the half of the stone that had cracked and fallen out.

  All that was missing was the unicorn.

  “Sara,” said Cook very slowly, stretching her hand forward and showing another matching bloodstone ring on her flour-covered finger. “Her mother was one of us.”

  They stared at the girl. She looked at them, then at the rings, then back at Sara.

  “Mais…” Lucy said, hope and distrust fighting for control over the smooth planes of her face. “Qui êtes-vous?”

  CHAPTER 7

  BRIGHT KNIVES IN A DARK ALLEY

  Mr Sharp did not see Ketch count his gold under the gaslight and find that it was copper. He didn’t see him shrug and forget why this should disappoint him, nor did he see the man walk on and disappear into the gloom. He did not see any of that.

  He was still in the alley by the pub, but was standing with his back to the fog-muffled lights of the square. His nostrils were flared, like a hunting dog testing the wind, and he was staring into the pitch-black dead end waiting for something to move. His right hand was cocked beneath his coat, fingers ready over the handle of his blade.

  Seconds passed, then minutes, but he did not move a muscle.

  After five minutes had passed, he decided he had imagined whatever he thought he had sensed and was about to turn when the side door of the King’s Arms slammed open. It was a high door and above it a horseshoe had been nailed, just as on the windows and door at the front of the tavern. A shard of candlelight jagged across the dark alley, far enough for Mr Sharp to see something on the cobbles, and then a red-faced man in a barman’s apron peered out and his shadow blotted out whatever it was again as he shouted.

  “Bessie? Bessie? Where are you, girl?”

  He cocked an ear for a moment but there was no reply. He disappeared back inside, slamming the alley back into darkness.

  Mr Sharp moved quickly across the cobbles and picked up the thing he had seen in the brief slash of light.

  It was a woman’s shoe.

  He looked at it for a moment and then carefully placed it on the barrelhead of one of the empty casks stacked up against the side of the building. He stepped back to the middle of the alley and drew his blade.

  “Let her go,” he said quietly.

  Time seemed to go very still in the dark slot between the pub and the blank-faced house next door.

  Nothing happened.

  Nobody answered.

  And Mr Sharp did not move.

  And still nobody answered.

  And still Mr Sharp did not move.

  And nobody went on answering and nothing moved until the shadows shifted and an ugly laugh tumbled out of the darkness, followed by a harsh voice that was angular and somehow northern.

  “I wondered if you could see me.”

  Mr Sharp nodded.

  “So did I.”

  A whimper followed the ugly voice into the light, a whimper that came from a young woman’s mouth and was immediately stifled with a hand. The unseen speaker laughe
d again.

  Mr Sharp reached inside his coat and pulled out a candle. He held it upright and snapped his wrist. The candle ignited by itself, and when he tossed it into the darkness it remained alight, even as it bounced and rolled on the ground and came to rest at a pair of slender top-boots.

  The boots were made of some close-cropped fur, like sealskin, and they emerged from a long moleskin coat. Thanks to the candle, Mr Sharp could see that it wasn’t the kind of tough velvety moleskin material woven in one of the cotton mills sprouting up all over the newly industrialised Midlands. It was the other kind, the old kind, and old in two ways: not only was it worn and greasy with age, it was made from the skins of hundreds of dead moles, stitched together. The flattened heads had been left on and hung downwards, which gave the tight-fitting coat a scaly look like a kind of soft chain-mail. In place of buttons it was fastened across the chest with the bones and skulls of small animals, bleached and yellow with long use.

  The coat wasn’t the strangest thing, nor the fact that its owner was holding a young serving girl gently by the hand, her clothes unbuttoned and dishevelled, her flushed face slack and happily drooling with an expression very much like the one on Bill Ketch’s face when he had been with Mr Sharp: what was strangest was the man in the moleskin coat’s own face.

  He had a forked beard which jutted untidily forward of his chin like a goat, and his hair was swept back off a high forehead and tied in two braids strung with more bird skulls and tiny animal bones. From the hairline to the tip of his nose his skin was covered in writhing blue tattoos so dense that his eyes peered brightly out of them as if he were wearing a mask.

  He cocked his head at Mr Sharp.

  “What are you?” he asked, his voice hissing softly in a way that reminded Mr Sharp of the sound that winter waves made after they had broken and were draining back off a cold shingle beach.

  There was something majestic about the man, but there was also something grotesque and corrupt; he was somehow smaller than he appeared to be at first sight. His smile was regal and arrogant until he spoke, when his teeth showed through the tangle of his beard, brown and mossy like neglected tombstones jumbled at the back of an overgrown churchyard.

  “I am the person asking you to let the girl go inside to her father who is looking for her,” said Mr Sharp. His voice remained even and reasonable.

  “Go away, boy,” spat the man, waving a hand dismissively.

  “I cannot. Not now I have seen you.”

  The bones rattled as the man shook his head in irritation.

  “You carry a familiar blade, and yet you are not what the marks on it say you should be. You can make light, but you need a candle to hold it. And you held the Ketch man’s mind and bent it to yours, but only to punish him for some trifle.”

  “It wasn’t a trifle,” said Mr Sharp. “Now please let the girl go, mind and body.”

  “Well, it wasn’t much of a punishment either, truth to tell,” continued the man with a short bark of laughter, quickly strangled. “Now if I was punishing a man I’d slit him up the back and skin him slowly, then make him put his pelt back on inside out and dance a jig in it until his feet wore out or he ceased to amuse me: that’s a punishment.”

  “No. That’s an abomination.”

  “Abomination?” he snorted with derision. “You exaggerate. I’m just talking about a man. At best it’s a diversion…”

  “Abomination or diversion, I can’t allow that, or anything like it.”

  “Who are you to allow or disallow anything to a Pure One?” rasped the tattooed man. “I do not even know what you are, aping us and yet talking like one of them, like some cross-bred mongrel everybody kicks—”

  “I am Sharp,” he replied calmly. “And I know you are going to put the girl down and step away from her.”

  “Or?”

  “Or you will have a chance to kick this mongrel and find out exactly how hard it bites.”

  “You think you can better me, a half-breed runtlet like you?” he spat. “Slink away now or I’ll hurt you so bad you’ll skin yourself to make me stop…”

  Mr Sharp didn’t blink.

  “I cannot leave. I am sworn to this. And if you try to harm the girl it will be my pleasure to enable you to read the marks on this blade much, much closer than you will find comfortable.”

  The tattooed man’s hand snuck inside his coat and emerged with a blade of his own, flashing gold in the candlelight, a thick strangely recurved thing like a broken-backed sickle made of bronze. He hooked it round the girl’s neck. She just smiled dreamily and giggled as if the razor-sharp edge were tickling her like a feather.

  “Ah now, boy, I had only thought to sport with this girl and be gone, but if we’re to play at blades, I think I shall wet mine first, and this pretty will be on your dainty conscience. So perhaps you should just put up your knife and walk on. I have no mind to do anything with the girl which she has likely enough not done already, and if she has not, well, she will do it often enough in the future. There will be no permanent harm to her, unless you persist.”

  Mr Sharp looked at the girl.

  “Bess?” he said. “Bess, are you all right?”

  Her eyes wandered and then found his and for a moment seemed to focus, but then went dreamy again.

  “Her mind’s not her own for now is all,” said the strange man. “Now, you don’t want to cross blades with me, mongrel boy. My sword was singing long, long before the bitch that bore you was whelped, and will sing on long after your grave’s grown over and the headstone gone to dust in the wind.”

  “Ah. You’re trying to provoke me,” said Mr Sharp. “You’re trying to get inside my head.”

  The tattooed man snarled angrily.

  “I’ll be inside your guts in a min—”

  And then, before he could finish, the dreamy girl moved so fast that he had no time to defend himself as she twisted and ducked and rolled, spinning her neck clear of the hooked blade.

  Her left hand clamped round his wrist, yanking his arm straight while her right smacked up into the elbow, sending it the wrong way with an ugly crack.

  The blade dropped from his convulsing fingertips, his mouth opening to emit a shriek of pain as her remaining shoe kicked his knee sideways.

  He dropped lopsided to the cobbles while her right hand calmly snatched the tumbling dagger from the air and held it to his neck.

  Stilling him wide-eyed on the ground.

  Killing the yell in his throat.

  “If he so much as blinks, cut his damn head off,” snapped Mr Sharp, already in motion. He ran and jumped, boosting off the barrelhead and seeming to run sideways along the wall of the pub as he snatched the horseshoe off the lintel above the door and then leapt across the width of the alley to land at Bess’s side, slamming the open ends of the horseshoe on either side of the tattooed man’s neck, pinning him to the ground.

  “No!” squealed the man. “No, please–it burns!”

  “Cold iron,” said Mr Sharp. “I lied. I know exactly what cruel stock you come from. Now be still a moment.”

  He held his hand out to the girl. Her eyes brightened for a flicker and then dulled to a sleepy happiness again. She handed him the bronze blade.

  “Thank you, Bess,” he said as she gazed into the autumnal tumble of his eyes. “Now forget all this. You went for a walk because your head was hurting but it’s better now and you heard me calling for assistance, and now you’re going to go in and tell your father that Mr Sharp sends his compliments and has a customer for the cells in the Sly House for the night.”

  She shook her head as if coming out of a sleep and then sneezed three times. She wiped her eyes and smiled at him clear-eyed.

  “Why, Mr Sharp,” she said as if seeing him for the first time. “You’ve apprehended yourself another miscreant. Shall I get my father to open the cells?”

  “That would be a considerable kindness, my dear,” he said with great seriousness, and watched her run inside.

&nbs
p; “You got inside her head while I was trying to get into yours,” hissed the tattooed man. “You made her do all that fighting. You could never have beaten me in a fair contest.”

  He was looking smaller and older by the minute, as if the iron in the horseshoe was leeching the power from him. The dark blue tattoos on his face were beginning to fade, bleaching out to a pale blue as his power waned, revealing the tired and washed-out eyes of a very old man.

  “Ah well,” said Mr Sharp, keeping him in place with the horseshoe round his neck like a giant staple. “Mongrels don’t fight fair, especially not with the foul.”

  “You call me foul because you have tricked me into a disadvantage,” he wheezed. “But you do not know what enemy you have just made, you mannerless puppy. Our blood is Pure, our blood is One and I am Many!”

  His eyes flashed for a moment, then faded again. Mr Sharp smiled down at him.

  “I know who you are. I recognised the smell and the tattoos. You are one of the Night Host, a Shadowganger. You are one of the Sluagh,” he said, pronouncing the word “sloo-er”, his lip curling with an evident distaste as he did so. “But your place is in the north. Your place is the wild lands. That is the Law and the Lore.”

  The Sluagh shook his head and winced as his neck touched the iron on either side. His voice was weakening and fading as fast as his tattoos were washing out but there was still a flicker of defiance within him.

  “That is your Lore, not ours. We live wherever we will and always outside the Lore. What is this Lore anyway?”

  “The heart of the Lore is simple,” said Mr Sharp in a measured voice, the kind a teacher might use to a slow but excitable child. “It says you cannot come among defenceless men, women and children and prey on them. If you do, we will stop you.”

  The Sluagh tried to snarl but only had the energy to curl his lip.

  “What almighty ‘we’ is this?”

  “You know who those of us who carry this badge are. We are the Free Company. We are Law and Lore…”

  Mr Sharp made a fist and held the ring in front of the Sluagh’s eyes.