The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Dee,” he said.

  “Citizen,” said John Dee, his head dipping infinitesimally.

  “You have found my breath-stealers?” said The Citizen.

  “I have, and more than that I have mapped a safe and swift passage through the mirrors to them, which is something we did not previously possess,” said Dee. “Thanks to this get-you-home.”

  He pulled an object from within his long coat. It was a complicated thing, like an extraordinarily large and elaborate baby’s rattle, being a series of cunningly turned and pierced concentric ivory balls mounted on a handle of the same material.

  “A Coburg Ivory,” breathed The Citizen, almost as pleased with the device in Dee’s hand as the confirmation that he would now have access to one of the creatures who were so instrumental in him extending the natural span of his years. He still smarted from the memory of the way The Oversight had killed his last one. It was in a forlornly desperate attempt to avail himself of some similar kind of supranatural energy that he had accelerated his experiments on the caged beings in the curtained laboratory annex to his study.

  He had intubated both the ailing Green Man and the Sluagh and had been experimenting with their blood. He had given himself a series of transfusions according to the enlightened principals laid out by Blundell and Leacock who, he was forced to grudgingly admit, had achieved an infinitely more effective modus operandi than his countryman Jean-Baptiste Denis had ever managed. However, he had not noted any increase in his own vitality or resilience as a result of the efficient harvest and intake of new blood. The only measurable effect seemed to be in the donors, who grew weaker and paler, and in the case of the Sluagh, whose mind was already unbalanced due to the proximity of so much iron and his transport having taken him forcibly over so much flowing water, it had led to an almost complete descent into terminal lassitude and idiocy. The Green Man bore the physical effects better, but was permanently distressed at the confined nature of his incarceration, weeping and pleading so much that The Citizen had dosed him with laudanum and taken the opportunity afforded by his consequent insensibility to stitch his mouth together and insert a feeding tube via his nostril. It had been the only way to quiet the snarling creature, and The Citizen’s work was after all too important to be disturbed by mere insensate noise.

  But the truth remained that the transfusions were an act of desperation, and he was mightily relieved to know that he would soon have access to an Alp to revive him. He was vigorous enough at the moment, but he knew he would benefit from congress with one within the next two months, and begin to decline if it was not possible.

  “I have better news than that,” said Dee. “If I might prevail on you to step into the mirrors.”

  “I am not ready to leave quite yet,” said The Citizen, stepping away from the proffered hand. “I have papers to pack, and baggage to assemble—”

  Dee smiled and waved his hands.

  “No, sir, I do not mean you should leave immediately; rather I mean that if you would step in and join me for a mere minute or two, I believe you will be both illuminated and deeply gratified by what I can now show and demonstrate.”

  The Citizen craned his head to look within the cabinet, as if able to see around the corner of the mirror.

  “And can you guarantee my safety?” he said. “From Mirror Wights?”

  “There are none close,” said Dee. “For it is another pleasing attribute of these Ivories that there is a tell-tale flame that seems to illuminate within the smallest of the inner globes when they are close, and it will warn us in plenty of time should any be remotely in the vicinity.”

  The Citizen hesitated and looked around his chamber.

  “If it is good news, could you not just tell it?” he said, licking his lips.

  “Show is sometimes better than tell,” said Dee. “I promise you will be safe, and I swear you will be gratified.”

  He handed The Citizen the Coburg Ivory.

  “See. It will warn you if danger approaches, and we can just step back into this room and close the cabinet.”

  The Citizen twirled the Ivory slowly in his hands, and then nodded.

  “Very well, but you will have to give me your arm, for I am not as sure-footed as I once was.”

  A minute later they had both stepped through one of the parallel mirrors in the cabinet and were standing inside a long and seemingly infinite corridor whose walls, roof and floor were uniformly mirrored, with the unsettling result that reflections of themselves were stretching away, seemingly for ever. The Citizen staggered a little, and Dee held his arm.

  “I find the mirror’d world as disorientating as ever,” The Citizen scowled. “What have you to show me?”

  Dee took his arm and turned him around. Behind him the unbroken succession of reflections was not quite perfect. One of the mirrors was black.

  “A Black Mirror,” said The Citizen. “There is nothing new there—”

  Dee smiled and shook his head with the air of a conjuror about to reveal the culmination of a very cleverly worked trick.

  “The mirror’d world is broken,” said Dee. “This we both know from painful experience. The reason I have not succeeded in mapping its many passages is not merely because the size changes constantly, perhaps as a consequence of mirrors in the outer world being newly made, or moved or broken. That was my mistake, thinking that this was the reason, but I now believe the mutability of the mirror’d realm is not the thing that stops us using it as we would.”

  “What is?” said The Citizen.

  “These,” said Dee, pointing. “The Black Mirrors. They have corroded a once perfect engine.”

  The Citizen shrugged his arm out of Dee’s grip and stood in front of the obsidian face of the mirror in question. It reflected nothing at all back into the passage.

  “But we believed the power of the mirror’d world came from the darkness beyond,” he said. “Brahe and Fludd were quite assured on this point.”

  “Fludd was a fool and the only reason we give their writings credence is that they wrote them a long time ago. Antiquity does not guarantee authenticity.”

  “No,” said The Citizen. “No, you are right, and perhaps we should be even more suspicious of the ancients when we are embarked on a quest to forge a new, modern means of control and power. Go on.”

  “The Black Mirrors are not a natural part of the mirror’d world,” said Dee. “The ancients may or may not be right in saying the darkness beyond them has something to do with the power underlying the mechanism by which it works, but I think the Black Mirrors are like windows smashed by vandals. They do happen to show what lies behind, but they are an aberration and a sign of neglect. I have seen, as I have told you in the past, that they are caused by the spilling of blood. The blood is spilled almost exclusively by Mirror Wights who are, I know we both agree, parasites who have moved into the deserted realm to escape the grip of time. I have seen whole sections of passage blanked by the Black Mirrors, and the sense, the fluid vibration in the normal passages, is different on either side of them.”

  He turned and looked at The Citizen to make sure he was being understood.

  “You do remember we found the passage in the surviving fragment of Sacrobosco’s De speculatam cuniculis, the one that described the mirror’d world as a great engine running by a species of occulted clockwork?” he said.

  The Citizen shuddered as if in irritation at being taken for a dunce.

  “Yes, yes. We disagreed on the translation of ‘occulted,’ but yes, broadly—what of it?”

  “If we take his analogy, then the Black Mirrors are like broken teeth on the cogwheels—they cause the whole device to skip and run wrong. And certainly from my own explorations, in some places the entire system seems to have baulked and seized up, as if the great engine is jammed,” said Dee. “That is why our attempts to find and then exploit a consistent series of shortcuts around the world have always failed: if the system functioned smoothly, if all the cogs were present and enga
ged, then travel would be as simple as stepping into a Murano Cabinet in Cheapside and stepping out again in Constantinople or Far Cathay a single pace later.”

  “Say you are right …”

  “I am right,” said Dee. “The device is broken …”

  “I have not done what I have done, I have not survived the guillotine and wildly extended the natural span of years in order to give up,” spat The Citizen.

  “Nor I,” said Dee. “Nor I. And nor need we—for I believe I have the cure-all. Which is to say, I know how what is broken can be mended. I know how to repair the Black Mirrors.”

  “How?” said The Citizen.

  Dee drew a stub of candle from his pocket.

  He snapped his wrist and it lit itself. “Observe. This is a candle I took from a man called Sharp who I found lost in the mirrors.”

  “A Wight?”

  Dee snorted back a laugh.

  “A member of The Oversight.” He pointed to the Coburg Ivory still clutched in The Citizen’s hand.

  “At first I thought all I had to thank him for was this, the get-you-home, and in truth it has been a wondrous tool which has vastly extended my ability to explore. Indeed, it is because it helped me range wider and further that I have seen so many of these regions of the mirror’d world that are blighted and broken by the Black Mirrors. It is a thing of great precision and extraordinarily cunning artifice, and I would give an arm to have the understanding that those who made it must have had about the working of the mirrors. But in the end, it was a simple candle that gave me the clue we have been missing …”

  He held the candle at arm’s length.

  “Watch the flame.”

  As he approached the Black Mirror, the flame began to flare brighter, but that was not the most striking thing, which was this: although the wilderness of mirrors in which they stood was a sterile place without the merest hint of a draught, the flame bent, as if being blown towards the Black Mirror.

  “The darkness attracts the flame,” breathed The Citizen. “Yes. I see. But we should have seen this phenomenon before!”

  “No,” said Dee. “The fault is not ours. A normal flame has no effect. The Oversight’s candles are not normal. They are, as it were, self-kindling, each primed by its owner to carry a tiny spark of the thing they have always guarded most carefully. The Wildfire.”

  “I thought their great secret was the Discriminator,” said The Citizen. “It was that which Mountfellon was sure was the Great Key.”

  “It is like The Smith to hide a secret inside another secret and then leave it more or less in plain sight,” said Dee. “I am a fool for not having thought of it years ago. But watch close now, for this is the last of the three candles I had off the fool Sharp.”

  He held his hand even closer to the Black Mirror: the candle was vertical, but now the flame bent at a right angle and began to roar, as if being sucked towards the blackness. As it roared, the wax began to melt at an astonishing rate and then the flame leapt from his hand and splashed and lapped against the surface of the glass, filling it top to bottom, side to side. His fingers dripped with wax and the candle was soon gone. And then so too was the flame.

  “Merde,” breathed The Citizen, staring at himself in what had an instant before been a non-reflective Black Mirror but was now a looking-glass again. A terrible grin stretched across his face. “The flame mended the mirror …”

  Dee nodded and matched his smile.

  “And now we can mend all the mirrors, and our long-held hopes can be realised.”

  “But,” said The Citizen, gripping his arm with a hand like a talon, “you say there are whole swathes of Black Mirrors breaking the flow. One mirror took your candle. From what you have told me there are not enough candles in London to do what you suggest. Are we not in the even more intolerable position of knowing the theoretical cure but not having enough medicine to effect it?”

  “Oh, I am not going to go mirror to mirror, spending the rest of my days mending them candle by candle like some jobbing bricklayer repointing a wall,” said Dee. “The candles are created by the Wildfire. The clue is in its name. It is the most destructive, voracious thing in the world. The Oversight and its predecessors have guarded it for millennia. When fragments have escaped, disaster has followed, such as the Great Fire of London, and only the wildest luck and the foolhardiest bravery contained that to London alone. There is a reason that the Wildfire is kept in the biggest city on the most powerful island in the world.”

  “The clue is in the word island, I perceive,” said The Citizen with an awful twinkle in his eye.

  “Precisely,” said Dee. “If we were to release the Wildfire within the mirrors, it would roar through every nook and cranny of the great, broken machine, consuming everything in its way, restoring every Black Mirror to the newly silvered state of the one in front of you.”

  “Would we not be turning the mirror’d world into a maze of perpetual flame?” said The Citizen, his smile suddenly dropping off his face.

  “I believe not,” said Dee. “I believe the Black Mirrors would absorb it, but if I am wrong, there is a way to tame it again, as they did in the Great Fire, for had there not been, London would still be burning, and the rest of Britain besides.”

  “And you know that way,” said The Citizen.

  “And I know that way,” said Dee. “For I was there.”

  The Citizen’s awful smile returned.

  “Well. It would have the added bonus of incinerating the Mirror Wights. And since you say it is their propensity to shed blood that has led to the breaking of the machine, I cannot see that as any great loss.”

  “Indeed,” said Dee. “It would be no more than pouring lamp oil down a rathole and setting it afire to cure an infestation.”

  “Well,” said The Citizen. “Then all we have to do is destroy The Oversight, and take their Wildfire.”

  “And they have never been at such a low ebb,” said Dee. “It is as if a benign providence positively wishes us to succeed as they fail so desperately.”

  “But where have they hidden the Wildfire?” said The Citizen. “Their house is destroyed, and it cannot be there.”

  “It will be in the river” said Dee, as if this was the most obvious and inevitable thing in the world. “Sealing it in a lead coffer and putting it beneath running water has always been their failsafe.”

  “And you are sure of this?”

  “Did Mountfellon’s first stratagem not fail when he tried to ambush them on the river as they were sinking caskets beneath the water?” said Dee. “They are not imaginative, and their options in dealing with the Wildfire are severely limited by its volatility. They will have had to move fast, and emergency measures do not allow for great sophistication. All we need to do is find someone to drag the river effectively for us.”

  “It is a very long river,” began The Citizen. Dee snorted.

  “With their numbers so severely reduced, they will not have had the resources to have taken it far, of that I am sure. And besides, the Templebanes have eyes and ears all over the city: I am assured their intelligence network will enable us to narrow the search area down considerably.”

  “You are so very sure of everything …” said The Citizen, still nursing a flicker of scepticism. Dee’s answering smile was distinctly vulpine.

  “You forget, dear Citizen. I know the ways of The Oversight. For was I not, in my sadly misspent youth, one of them?”

  CHAPTER 6

  UNDER THE HORNBEAM

  Amos Templebane, in the service of his two fathers, had once worn a badge on a strap around his neck: it had proclaimed to the world, or at least that portion that was interested in the perplexingly silent state of the dark-skinned young bearer, that he was “mute but intelligent.” Sometimes when wearing it, he had felt belittled like a dog wearing its owner’s collar, but it had also given him a kind of status, or at least a sense of belonging, in that it parsed him for the strangers among whom he was bidden to go: it told that he
was no mere simpleton; it explained that he could not speak; and it was evidence that he was connected to someone of substance, since the brass plaque was finely made and incised with handsome lettering. It did undoubtedly also evidence a kind of ownership as if he was, like the aforementioned dog, a domesticated pet bound to respond to commands in exchange for regular meals and a dry place to sleep.

  The plaque and the explanatory rubric were long gone but even now, months later, he did not feel liberated. He had rebelled, walked free and ranged across the countryside, swearing to be his own man and live at liberty on his own wit and merit alone. He had almost immediately been assailed by a murderous tinker and had unfortunately killed him in self-defence. The fatality had not been intentional and his spirit had balked at the deed even though his rational mind had excused himself the manslaughter. So he had sworn a solemn vow that the homicidal tinker’s blood would be the last he would ever shed or be responsible for shedding. It was the expression of an inner revulsion against all violence and a fervent, almost visceral desire to avoid it in future. It wasn’t cowardice that prompted Amos to this, for he was resilient and brave; rather it was a general moral instinct mixed with a specific impulse to curb something largely unacknowledged within himself, for Amos knew he carried an inner power that needed to be ridden and limited, lest it itself become the rider and put the spurs to him. So Amos had committed himself to live a peaceful life of independent freedom.

  But as Issachar Templebane had once said to a deputation of his “sons” when they had been pushed by the extreme cold to hesitantly express the wish for more sea-coal for the stove to keep the counting-house warm enough to work in, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride.

  And now despite his best wishes and intentions, Amos was both literally and figuratively afoot on the muddy road to London, still somehow travelling with a woman whose passive tyranny over him was almost as insupportable as the nickname she had given him: the Bloody Boy. The name was all the more unbearable because it was demonstrably apposite: since so naïvely attempting to shun violence, he had been responsible for more death and self-slaughter than he could possibly have achieved had he taken the contrary course and embraced a career of violent mayhem. The memory of all that blood soaked his dreams, and the dark behind his eyelids was no refuge but a nest of shadows in which the gory scenes he had witnessed lurked, ready to disrupt his sleep and infect his nightmares. Even when awake, his head was no sanctuary into which he might retreat behind the protective veil of silence, since the disappointed and deranged companion he was somehow bound to shared his ability to converse without words.