The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  “… we are The Oversight.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE SHADOW GUARD

  “Qui êtes-vous?” said Lucy again.

  “Are you going to tell her?” said Cook. Lucy was trying to keep still as she fussed about her with cloths and a bowl of warm olive oil, softening the plaster and carefully pulling it off her face in small increments. Sara stood behind, gently keeping her from squirming with a firm grip on each of her shoulders.

  “Why not?” said Sara. “I’ve already tried to explain that she’s a Glint. And if the ring is hers, she has a right to know.”

  “She’s listening,” said Cook without looking at Lucy. “I think she understands us.”

  “Do you speak English?” said Sara, gripping the shoulder-blades a little harder and turning to peer closely at her. Lucy kept her face blank.

  “Lucy. Parles-tu anglais?”

  “Non. Je veux seulement savoir qui vous êtes!”

  “She just wants to know who we are—” said Sara.

  “I can speak French quite as well as you can, thank you,” said Cook sharply. “Especially when she speaks slowly. I just don’t think now is the time to tell her.”

  “She’s a Glint,” repeated Sara. “And now she knows what she is, sooner or later she will have to know who we are.”

  “Later will be better,” said Cook. “Once we know more about her.”

  “Once The Oversight welcomed and protected those who were as unaware of their powers as she is until they could master them and put them to good use.”

  Cook shook her head.

  “Once The Oversight was many Hands strong. Once we had so many members in so many Hands that I could not have fed them in six shifts seated round the great table upstairs!” she said, jabbing her finger at the ceiling. “Now we can fit round this small table with room to spare. These are not the old days, Sara. Now there is just you and I and Sharp and Hodge and The Smith, and no others. We are the Last Hand and we cannot behave as we did before the Disaster. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Sara saw not just the flint but also the flicker of worry in the older woman’s eyes.

  “Sara,” repeated Cook, “do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” said Sara. “You are saying there is room for one more at the table.”

  Cook exhaled like a porpoise clearing its blowhole.

  “You are ungovernable and incorrigible…”

  “Thank you,” said Sara with a smile.

  Sara began to speak in French. Lucy swivelled and craned her neck round to watch her, lips closed to avoid getting a mouthful of oil as Cook dabbed away at it.

  “We were founded long ago,” Sara said, “when the world was less crowded and people liked to fill up the space with four or five long words where one simple one would do: we are the Free Company for the Regulation and Oversight of Recondite Exigency and Supranatural Lore.”

  “What?” said Lucy, feeling like she’d just been hit by a landslide of words that buried any meaning deep beyond her reach. Sara Falk smiled.

  “Amongst ourselves we’re known as The Oversight. For short.”

  “Or The Lore,” said Cook. “For shorter.”

  “What does it mean?” said Lucy, hackles of suspicion rising. “The words are too confusing…”

  “It’s simple: ‘recondite exigency’ just means strange, hidden things that happen without a normal explanation. ‘Supranatural lore’ is knowledge and customs that apply to those things. ‘Regulation and oversight’ means we watch the shadows and police what goes on there. And a ‘Free Company’ means we band together and do this of our own free will, and are subject to no king or government.”

  “Or queen,” said Cook.

  “Or queen,” agreed Sara Falk.

  “God save her,” said Cook stoutly.

  “Indeed,” said Sara Falk.

  No question, thought Lucy. Both of them were mad.

  “This does not make sense to me,” she said. “And I still don’t understand who you are…”

  Sara took a deep breath.

  “Long ago, before the idea of history had even been born, there were many different kinds of people: some were very fast, some were very strong, some came out at night and slept in the day, some could silently ‘think’ to each other the way we talk out loud. They weren’t unnatural because they were part of nature. But if you take nature as what is normal, and normal as what most people can do, well, they were perhaps ‘supra’-natural—”

  Lucy nodded, although she wasn’t listening as closely as she appeared to be. She was thinking that there were two doors between her and the outside door through which she had been brought into this odd house. She was retracing the steps which had brought her here, thinking that she could probably outrun Sara if she got a head start.

  “ ‘Supra’ means above and beyond. Or extra. It’s Latin,” said Cook helpfully. “Powerful stuff, Latin.”

  Her nose twitched, smelling some subtle change in the baking smell emanating from the Dreadnought Range. There was an alarming creak of stressed wood as she swivelled in her chair, grabbing a potholder as she turned.

  Lucy watched as the Eccles cakes were pulled from the oven and slid onto the table in front of her. They now looked like small golden cannonballs. The sugary baking smell and the odour of nutmeg and clove swirled slowly around her like a warm blanket.

  Her stomach gurgled despite herself as Sara continued:

  “They had extra abilities which most ‘normal’ men have forgotten about, abilities which people might make up stories about and call ‘diabolical’ or ‘elvish’ or ‘dwarfish’ or things like that, you see?”

  Lucy shrugged a “yes”, thinking she could probably turn chairs over as she ran to the first door, and that these obstacles would buy her the time she needed to escape.

  She had frighteningly large blanks in her memory, especially about the recent past, and was feeling woolly-headed as if she had been drugged, but the body remembers things the mind doesn’t and she knew she had the ability to move unusually quietly and speedily. She knew she had staved off hunger in the past by catching rabbits in the fields, being quiet enough to get very close to them and fast enough to catch them when they ran. That fragment of memory made her stomach rumble again. She had not eaten in a very long time.

  Then she noticed they were both watching her as if expecting another question.

  “Oh. So, er… where did they go?” she said quickly. “These people with ‘supra’ abilities?”

  “They didn’t go anywhere,” said Cook in English.

  Lucy caught her piercing look and again had the thought that this deceptively fat lady might move unexpectedly fast. There was steel in her eye, and that fat was more muscle than it seemed. Lucy remembered to appear baffled, as if she hadn’t understood. Cook repeated her answer in French, and Lucy let her face uncloud and nodded. She would definitely need to throw chairs down behind her, and not just to trip Sara Falk. She would also grab a cleaver from the knife rack as she passed in case she needed to make them both keep their distance. Lucy knew about running and she knew about fighting. Sometimes it felt as if she’d been doing both all her life.

  This talk of supranatural powers had confirmed her resolve to get away from these two women who were, despite being outwardly friendly, clearly mad, even madder than she knew herself to be.

  And the homely, seductive smell of the baking was far too nice to be real.

  Sara Falk rolled down her glove and pulled back the cuff of her dress, exposing an elegant wrist which she flexed and held, palm up, towards Lucy.

  The room was very still. Perhaps because Lucy had now worked out how she was going to run for it, both halves of her mind came together and focused on what was being told her. It seemed to her that the only thing moving was the pulse bumping the blue artery beneath the tautness of Sara Falk’s skin.

  “They went there,” Cook said. “Into the blood.”

  “They went into your
blood?” Lucy began.

  “They went into everyone’s blood,” said Sara. “They mixed. And married. And bred. And the supranatural blended with the natural, and just became part of us all. Most supranatural abilities just got diluted down the generations and are barely noticeable if indeed noticed at all. But some strains stay strong in the blood and are passed mother to daughter or father to son, like you and I and glinting, and others, well, just as two normal white sheep sometimes throw a black lamb, sometimes old blood comes back strong and you get a throwback.”

  Cook slid an Eccles cake towards Lucy. The smell wrapped round her and threatened to loosen her resolve to escape, so she told herself to ignore it, that it was a lie, that these people were liars, that everyone lies.

  “Don’t touch it until it’s cooled a bit,” Cook said. “Mincemeat will still be hot enough to scald you.”

  “But not all the supranatural peoples mixed,” said Sara Falk. “Some kept themselves apart. They call themselves things like the Pure, the Clean or the Saved. Depends where in the world they are hidden.”

  “But how can they be in the world and we don’t see them?” said Lucy. “How can they not be known about? This is stupid.”

  “As there are always more shadows than light, and more layers in the shadows than you can imagine, they choose to live in the layered darknesses of our world,” said Sara Falk. “And if they come out of the shadows and harm normal men, we put them back.”

  Cook pushed a knife and fork across the table and lurched to her feet.

  “Cut it open; it’ll cool faster. But don’t eat a mouthful until I get you some cheese. Can’t eat an Eccles cake without a slice of nice crumbly cheese.”

  Lucy no longer had to think about any of this: chance had again put a knife in her hand and Cook was disappearing into a larder at the far end of the kitchen. It was as if fate had suddenly arranged all of this to allow her escape. All she had to do was distract Sara, and her hand was moving before she’d fully thought about how to do it. She was a natural survivor and sometimes her body seemed to think for itself while her conscious mind caught up later on, when she’d got to a place of greater safety.

  She grabbed the piping hot ball of sugar-hardened pastry and threw it into Sara’s face.

  She heard the gasp of surprise, but by the time she heard it she had toppled a chair and was sprinting for the door. She scrabbled at the handle and felt a flash of relief as it opened. Her fear that it had been locked behind her evaporated and she saw the key was in the outside—

  —because of that she allowed herself a fast look over her shoulder to see if she had time to slam it shut and lock them in so she could make her escape more safely.

  Cook was fast.

  She was out of the larder and already halfway across the kitchen. But she stopped next to Sara, who was wiping the smashed Eccles cake off her face, trying not to wince at the heat of the mincemeat in her eye.

  Neither of them was chasing her.

  “Sara—” said Cook.

  “I’m fine,” said Sara tightly.

  “You’re burnt,” said Cook. “Stupid. I told you it was too soon.”

  The calmness with which they looked at her but did not follow was somehow more chilling than if they’d rushed pell-mell after her.

  She would have to lock them in before they got over the shock. Without taking her eyes off them she sprang backwards through the door.

  And bounced straight back into the room.

  She stumbled, lost her footing and sprawled on the floor.

  It was her turn to gasp in surprise.

  The door was blocked by the massive clay-faced coachman, immoveable as a brick wall.

  She was trying to think how the statue had been moved into place when it–impossibly–raised a finger and shook it slowly side to side, as if to say “no”. And then scowled and bunched it into a fist as it took a half step forward—

  “No, Emmet!”

  Sara’s voice cracked across the table, angry.

  “Emmet! No. She didn’t understand. She didn’t mean to harm me.”

  The clay giant seemed to emit some kind of subsonic growl which Lucy felt rumbling through the scrubbed floorboards as much as heard, and then stepped back and closed the door.

  “What’s wrong, girl?” said Cook with a grim smile. “Never seen a golem before?”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE TRIPLE-WOOD CELL

  It wasn’t just the horseshoes nailed up over every opening which made the King’s Arms especially outlandish in a city full of unusual taverns and alehouses: what made it unique was the fact that it was not merely a busy pub but also a working jail.

  There had long been a small courthouse in the building next door and it had become customary to lodge prisoners in the adjoining cellars, known as the Sly House, which meant that the landlord drew both beer and a jailer’s salary. Most of the people sent through the door between the court and the King’s Arms were petty debtors who remained incarcerated until their debts were paid off, and their accommodation was unremarkable for anything other than Spartan discomfort and the damp that rose from the ground at night, as if the twenty acres of water penned in the New London Dock just two streets to the south was trying to soak its way back up into the city proper.

  These were the public cells.

  Behind them was the ale cellar where the beer barrels were stored, and beyond that was a secret door that led to a low brick-lined tunnel known as the Close Passage.

  The Close Passage led to the Privy Cells.

  The Privy Cells did not belong to the courthouse; indeed the officers of the court knew nothing of them, nor did they know that the Close Passage actually continued past the cells and through a pair of locked doors to a junction, where it split. The left fork led south, taking a short journey down to the Thames at Hermitage Dock while the right fork burrowed west across the corner of the square, under a secret entrance to Sara Falk’s house and onwards through increasingly thick sets of subterranean doors, all the way to an anonymous and little-opened culvert gate within the Inner Ward of the Tower of London itself.

  William George Bunyon, father of the recently dishevelled but thankfully largely unmolested Bessie Bunyon, was the present landlord-jailer of the King’s Arms, and he had never gone–or thought to go–beyond the double doors at the limit of his property. He was a cheerful and outgoing man, naturally hospitable yet firm, in short both an exemplary landlord and a benevolent jailer. Above ground, behind the bar or beside the crackling fire in the snug, he displayed a talent for talking and joking, a gift that not only put everyone at their ease but had the not unprofitable side-effect of usefully encouraging customers to stay longer and buy more beer. Underground, in the Privy Cells, he talked much less and only rarely asked anything other than the one question.

  He asked it now, as Mr Sharp pushed the Sluagh into the cell ahead of him.

  “Bad ’un is he, Mr Sharp?”

  “Yes, Mr Bunyon. A right bad ’un,” confirmed Mr Sharp as he in turn always did.

  Bunyon nodded as if he understood everything now, which he neither did nor minded about.

  He wore, in addition to the high apron of his profession, a pair of darklensed spectacles like the ones Sara Falk wore. He had been trained by Mr Sharp never to enter the passage without them because some of the guests in the cells had the disturbing ability to turn men’s minds if they could only look them straight in the eye. This was an undoubtedly queer thing but William Bunyon never thought it so, precisely because Mr Sharp himself had looked him in the eye a long time ago and diverted his normally wide-ranging inquisitiveness so that it flowed quite around the narrow matter of the Close Passage, the Privy Cells and their occasional strange residents without touching on it at all. If asked who Mr Sharp and his colleagues actually were (which he never was) the jovial landlord would have put a knowing finger to the side of his generous red nose, dropped an eyelid and muttered something about “officers of the law”, which was not a million mil
es from the truth, especially if you spelled things a bit differently.

  The cell was lined in wood, floor and ceiling, like a rougher version of the anteroom in the basement of Sara Falk’s house. Mr Sharp was controlling the Sluagh by the horseshoe held round his neck. The Sluagh now seemed impossibly old and frail, his once-dark tattoos reduced to a thin scrabble of blue lines that could have been mistaken for broken veins beneath his paper-thin skin.

  Mr Sharp hooked a wooden stool out from under the cot with his boot-tip and dragged it into the middle of the room.

  “Sit,” he said, forcing the Sluagh down on it, facing away from the doorway. “The tray, Mr Bunyon, if you please.”

  William Bunyon slid a wooden tray onto the floor just inside the door and withdrew his hand quickly.

  “There is ale and water and bread,” said Mr Sharp.

  “And cheese,” said Mr Bunyon, who had stepped safely back out of sight.

  “And cheese,” said Mr Sharp.

  “And a nice apple,” Mr Bunyon’s voice insisted.

  “And an apple,” sighed Mr Sharp. “Indeed, Mr Bunyon spoils you. Now, I shall take the iron from your neck and you will not move until you hear the door lock. Understood?”

  “Yaass,” hissed the Sluagh, and the voice that slithered weakly out of his mouth sounded every bit as ancient and corrupt as he now looked.

  Mr Sharp yanked the horseshoe free and flickered out of the door in no time at all. The lock snicked shut before the Sluagh could even raise his head.

  “Well,” he said, gazing round. “Well. You think this box can hold me?”

  “Yes,” said Mr Sharp from the other side of the door. “Look at the woods that surround you.”

  The Sluagh stumbled to his feet and staggered to the wall. His good hand stroked across the panels and recoiled slowly.

  “Oak… ash… and thorn,” he breathed. “You are cruel.”

  “We are not cruel. We are modern and humane. Hence the bread and ale and water and Mr Bunyon’s very fine and somewhat superfluous apple,” smiled Mr Sharp. “But we are also cautious.”