The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  On the right side of the road they could see a full moon reflected on a fretful sea, the offshore wind deckling the disordered remains of the long Atlantic rollers as they surged ever landward, broken into choppy fragments of their former oceanic grandeur by the protective jumble of barrier islands visible further out in Massachusetts Bay.

  Initially the moonlit seascape was visible through the palisade of masts, spars and cranes which lined the working shore of the bay, but after a while the wharfs and boatyards and warehouses thinned out and the view was unobstructed.

  Lucy felt a lurch in her stomach at the thought that all she knew of the world was hidden far beyond that distant horizon. She turned and looked out of the other window. On that side there was no water, no sea, just a few lit windows in the houses dotted along the rising slope of land. The heavier darkness hunched and waiting beyond those lights made her stomach lurch again. And she was surprised to find it was not a wholly unpleasant feeling: it was excitement, excitement mixed with trepidation certainly, but mainly what she was feeling was the thrill rather than the fear of the unknown.

  “I like your dog,” said Cait, leaning back in her seat, as if this was all a fine lark.

  “She doesn’t like you,” said Mrs. Tittensor. “One wrong move and she’ll take your face off.”

  “That’s what I like about her,” said Cait with a smile. “What I like about any dog: loyalty.”

  “She’ll have your throat out,” said Mrs. Tittensor. “You stay where you are now.”

  “You’ve a very gory turn of phrase, Mrs. Tittensor, sure you have,” said Cait. She shifted to smile at the man with the gun. “Is she normally like this, Mr. Proctor?”

  “I’m just a Proctor. My given name doesn’t signify,” he said.

  “Well I’m Caitlin Sean ná Gaolaire, and this is my apprentice, Lucy Harker,” said Cait. “And you’ll no doubt be interested to know why we’ve come all this long way over the bounding main, seeing as how you like things nice and ‘regulated’ in this brave new world of yours?”

  She smiled at Mrs. Tittensor. Lucy realised she was trying to unsettle the woman. “She’ll be less interested, but maybe a little more concerned, because she knows fine well. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Tittensor? Do you think the gentleman with the revolving pistol here’d be quite so solicitous of you if he knew the truth of it?”

  Mrs. Tittensor gave her a look that would have curdled milk.

  “Save it for the Guardian,” said the Proctor. “This ain’t the time.”

  “She stole a babby …” began Cait.

  “Took it from a changeling bitch on the dockside in port o’ London is what I heard,” said the Proctor matter-of-factly. “Paid cash money too.”

  Cait sat back. She kept her face still, but Lucy knew she was surprised that the captain’s wife’s secret was known and openly spoken of.

  “Like I said,” scowled the Proctor. “Keep it for the Guardian.”

  “Where is the child?” said Cait.

  Mrs. Tittensor didn’t answer. Cait shrugged and closed her eyes as if the silence meant nothing and she had just decided to go to sleep. Lucy looked out at the moonlit sea. The sky was not so clear now as clouds had begun to roll in overhead. She stared at the view until a squall blew a sharp spatter of raindrops against the carriage windows, and then she watched the water runnelling down the glass until she too slept.

  CHAPTER 10

  FOR WANT OF A TWELVE-INCH BASTARD

  Despite the Ghost’s thwarted vengeance dictating the need to make all speed with their journey to London, they were sorely delayed on the road. Will-power alone, however manic, was no match for the crippling ague with which she was assailed on the day after the conversation beneath the hornbeam.

  It had been a bright morning, and the early sunshine had been a welcome addition of warmth to limbs stiff with cold from a night spent beneath a ruinous old barn that had been abandoned to the rats, rats whose bold scuttlings to and fro had made the night one of broken sleep and worse dreams than usual when that sleep did come.

  She had spent the morning talking, telling him about the tension between the worlds of the natural and the supranatural. He knew she had decided to turn tutor, as it were, as a means of binding him to her. He listened attentively despite her motives, for the plan of things that she sketched was in parts surprising and in other parts conformed to what he had picked up and assembled for himself both from his personal experiences and from eavesdropping on the edges of conversations held by his “brothers” and the two fathers. He had always hidden his ability to hear others’ thoughts from them all out of a well-honed instinct for self-preservation: it had enabled him to overhear not only what was said quietly or on the other side of unguarded keyholes, but also what remained unsaid and merely thought. Initially he had been worried the Templebanes would punish him for what was, to them, a freakish ability. Later, once he had learned of how they connived with strangely abled confederates like the Sluagh, he wondered if he might gain preferment within the purposely competitive pecking order of the sons by letting the fathers avail themselves of his facility, since it would make him the perfect spy and tattle-tale. He dismissed the impulse after a couple of hours’ consideration: the reasons were several but the main one was that he simply didn’t trust them. He was scared of them, certainly, but his obedience was a practical thing, not a matter of loyalty. He had watched his brothers fight and betray each other to inch up the greasy pole of preferment. He had stood apart in his silence and known, he now realised, that this was not for him, because one day he would walk away.

  The Ghost had begun to tell him about The Oversight, which piqued his interest, but she had spoken in a meandering and disjointed way, weaving their history in with stories of other esoteric pursuers of different truths: she spoke of London’s past, of alchemists and natural philosophers, of Kabbalists and Rosicrucians and fine upstanding members of the Royal Society, whatever that was, clever but foolish men who had turned occult scientists to attempt to understand the supranatural so they might control it. At some point in the early afternoon, she had begun to ramble in her speech and seemed to be weaving her own family history into the lesson, for it became clear she had had a father who was one of these “clever fools” who travelled as a kind of itinerant tutor to other great men, passing on supposed truths about a world he knew less of than they thought, at a price far above any practical worth.

  “He was a charlatan,” she said. “A very intelligent one, and a charlatan by default rather than by commission. I loved him, but once I realised what I was, what I could do and that he could not do it, I saw him for what he was. The tragedy was that he believed he was a wise man; he believed he had knowledge. So, an honest charlatan, my father, peering into the shadows and seeing less than he imagined he saw, and saying he saw more than he did. And yet he appeared to know enough to earn his living at it, and I was young and foolish enough to think myself the gentleman’s daughter he raised me to be. Spend enough time in a pigsty, you become hoggish, they say. Spend enough time in the households of great men, a similar varnish adheres to you. I thought I was safe, clever and loved even … and then—”

  And then she coughed, stumbled and pitched forward into the road, as if poleaxed by an invisible assailant.

  They had been far from any buildings, and Amos had carried her to the side of the road and wrapped her in the one blanket they shared, a thin thing filched from a washing line two counties ago. Her face had gone alarmingly white and the blueness of her lips made him convinced she was finally dying. He had smelled woodsmoke and heard voices on the other side of the wood, but when he had found them he’d been dismayed to find no human habitation beyond the temporary lean-tos of a gang of charcoal burners.

  The charcoal burners were borderline outcasts, as charcoal burners always have been, haunting the woodland like soot-stained wraiths, reeking of smoke and tar as they tended their carefully constructed conical kilns, but as is the case with most groups living a l
iminal existence, they were accepting of others clearly wracked by misfortune. They made space for the Ghost by the fire, and they quickly used their billhooks and axes to make a temporary shelter for her to lie in and sleep. Amos indicated by sign language that he would help them work, but they shook their heads, went about their arcane trade as if only someone trained to it could understand how to stack the logs in concentric circles, or pile the wet earth and boughs around it to make the distinctive flattened beehive shape of the kilns. Half of them were involved in construction, and the rest chopped trees.

  The oldest men, clearly the masters, moved least but endlessly monitored the colour of the woodsmoke emerging from the top of the kilns to ensure the heat was constant, day and night, poking holes in the clay walls when they felt more air was needed to aid the combustion, slapping patches of wet mud over the same openings when they wished to smoor the fires.

  Amos and the Ghost stayed with the charcoal burners for several days as she seemed to flutter like a moth along the thin line dividing life from death. Amos was finally allowed to work for their keep, helping to tend the camp-fire and carry the finished charcoal out of the woods to a prearranged point on the road, where a carter awaited to take the product of their toils away to market.

  Although Amos was keen to get to London, he couldn’t abandon the Ghost, not because he felt deep loyalty to the woman who had betrayed him, but because he thought she was dying. The thought came to him that it would be a very cold and terrible thing to die alone, and so he remained, not as a friend, but simply as one who knew her. He also understood that the thought was a strange one, and probably came from a weakness within him: there really was no particular benefit to him for acting in a kind way, and he was sure she would have even now betrayed him again in an instant if by doing so she might have ensured that Mountfellon would die as a result.

  He was musing on this late one night, sitting on a recently cut stump a little way from the camp, leaning against the long handle of a felling axe whose head was buried in the circle of wood, which made an impromptu backrest. He had removed himself from the immediate vicinity of the others because he wanted some quiet in which to ponder what to do if the Ghost didn’t die. He was far enough from the camp not to hear the low hubbub of everybody’s thoughts, but close enough to see the golden light dancing among the remaining tree trunks, and the contrasting white light of the moon broken into pieces by the dark tracery of branches overhead. Someone was playing a mournful fiddle tune on the other side of the camp, and the wind was getting up enough to make him think of going back to the meagre warmth of the fire and the comforting smell of the woodsmoke which now permeated all of his clothes.

  Something gently touched his neck.

  “What is this?” said a quiet, ruined voice.

  He looked down. One of the distinctive broken-backed bronze blades carried by the Sluagh had been hooked around his neck from behind. He swallowed and turned slowly. He was unsurprised to find a face full of interwoven tattoos looking at him with interest. This Sluagh looked older than any of the others Amos had seen. His head was shaven in a tonsure like a monk’s. The bald dome of his head was decorated with a tattoo of a hawk, and the hair that ringed it was interwoven with a circlet of falcons’ skulls which made a strange bony wreath that clattered as he moved. The cruelly curved beaks were dyed black and were surprisingly small in comparison with the bulge of the birds’ skulls with their giant eye-sockets that stared blankly back at him.

  The hawk-skull Sluagh ran his fingertip around Amos’s neck, tracing the thin and barely visible line where he himself had once been marked.

  “White Tattoo,” said Hawk Skull. He laughed quietly. “You’re the boy Badger Skull used.”

  Amos nodded.

  “And yet you are scared of me. I don’t think you like me. I don’t think you are truly our friend.”

  Amos shrugged.

  What do you want?

  “Ah,” said the Sluagh. “You can talk like that can you?”

  What do you want?

  “I’ve been wanting to see you again,” said the Sluagh, and he stepped closer, his smile widening and emitting a foul-smelling gout of breath as he chuckled nastily into Amos’s face. “For old time’s sake, you know …”

  I’ve never seen you before.

  “I have seen you before, boy. And that’s what interests me. When you came to see Mountfellon. Not recently, but earlier. The first time. See, when Badger Skull told of how he had used a boy who could not speak to break into Mountfellon’s house and take the flag for us, I thought it was you. Do you know we hunted you the night you came to Gallstaine in the rain, myself and two brothers? We were going to take you from Mountfellon’s coach after he changed horses at the inn before Hertingfordbury, but you must have heard us and ran away. We nearly had you too, but you jumped into the canal, and running water saved you. Do you remember that? Thwarting us, balking me, nearly drowning?”

  Amos remembered the night, and he remembered seeing shadows in a field beyond the inn suddenly move and resolve into three Sluagh on horseback. At the time, it had been one of the most frightening things he had seen in his life, though since then he had seen and done much worse. Still, the memory of that fear ran through him like a cold shudder. He remembered hearing them make their plans, and he remembered sneaking into the stable and picking up a twelve-inch bastard file for protection and then running for his life, pelting blindly into the dark, leg muscles burning with the effort as he tried to sprint away across ploughed fields with clay-clogged boots which dragged like cannonballs.

  He shook his head.

  Wasn’t me.

  There was something in the way Hawk Skull had spoken, something gleeful and knowing that made him lie. And more than that, made him wish he had the protective security of that heavy iron file in his hand.

  “It was you,” said the Sluagh, stepping even closer, the curve of his sickle blade holding Amos close to him. “And I told Badger Skull and he said he didn’t believe me, but I told him you was in league with Mountfellon afore he found you, because you carried a name we know, because you was a Templebane, and Templebanes is nigh as bad as Mountfellon is. And so, if you were in league with Mountfellon from before, why then, you might be useful to us in working against him or the two brothers in London, eh?”

  He shook his head as if trying to dislodge a bad memory.

  “Anyway, Badger Skull has a liking for you so he said he didn’t believe it because if you had such bad blood in you he’d have felt it. But he’s young, is Badger Skull, and so he’s soft. So I come to find you and bring you back. Because even if you can’t help, you can be punished,”

  For what?

  “Mountfellon’s crimes. He skinned some of us for his collection. We’ll have the skinning of him for that, by and by, but till then maybe we could start with you.”

  Amos wished he had that file, any file, any weapon in fact. He felt the blade prick the side of his neck and steeled himself not to look towards the axe in the stump.

  It wasn’t me.

  “Oh, it was you, boy,” said Hawk Skull, tugging Amos towards him so they were almost nose to nose, so close that Amos could feel the hotness of his breath against his face.

  “It was most certainly you, certain as moon follows sun it was you,” he repeated, his free hand pointing to his circlet of falcon skulls. “Eyes like a hawk I have, boy, and memory like a brock.”

  He sniffed.

  “And you smelled just like that.”

  Like what?

  “Like you’re going to piss yourself with fear.”

  You’re wrong.

  Amos shivered and looked downwards.

  I have pissed myself. And you too … I’m sorry—

  The Sluagh’s eyes looked down, and he stepped back instinctively.

  Amos slapped the curved blade to one side with his left hand and at the same time grabbed a handful of the falcon-skull tonsure. He felt the sting as two of the sharp little beaks pierced
the palm of his hand, but he gripped even harder as he yanked the Sluagh’s head down into the up-swinging pile-driver of his knee. Things jarred and went crunch and the Sluagh gagged and choked, as if winded. He fell backwards into the undergrowth on the other side of the stump.

  Amos looked at the axe handle he had been leaning against, sticking out of the wood like a sundial.

  The old Sluagh had not got to be so old by being slow or weak or lacking in resilience. He shook his head angrily, sending blood from his ruined nose to the right and to the left. And then looked up at Amos on the other side of the stump with a look of coldest, murderous fury.

  He gripped his blade and leapt at him, teeth bared in a snarl.

  Something broke inside Amos.

  It was a sharp feeling, like a strap snapping in two.

  He didn’t run away.

  He’d decided to stop running a while ago.

  He leapt right back towards the Sluagh, jerked the axe out of the stump and swung straight down.

  As he did so, he had enough time to notice that he seemed to be moving fast while everything, including the approaching Sluagh, was moving oddly slowly.

  The blade chopped through the Sluagh’s head with such force that it chunked into the open face of the stump between them, pinning him to it like a bug. Amos stumbled back and watched in a kind of horror-struck relief as the circle of newly cut wood, white in the moonlight an instant before, went dark with the lifeblood of the Sluagh.

  It had happened quickly and without loud noises, and so no alarm was raised in the camp below. Amos’s eyes swung away from the fires and scanned the shadows in the depths of the surrounding wood. He jerked the axe free and held it ready, sure that at any moment those same shadows would move and reveal a horde of other avenging Sluagh. He was so focused on watching that the gush of blood that spattered him from the split head went completely unnoticed.

  As he watched, he felt the thumping of his heart and heard his breath returning to normal. But most of all, he felt the looseness within his chest. That thing that had felt like a strap breaking had done something to him. And he was not sure that it was a bad thing. Indeed, he felt it had been the thing breaking that had somehow enabled him to move so fast that the Sluagh had appeared to slow himself down in a kind of pantomime physical joke that would have been funny had the punchline not been an axe through a falcon tattoo and a tree stump stained red with gore.