The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  He felt the blood now cold and wet on his clothes in the light breeze.

  He was, once again, the Bloody Boy.

  But the shadows remained still. And after a long while, he forced himself to take hold of the Sluagh and drag him through the wood until he found a scrape where the charcoal burners had dug out some clay, and then he tumbled the body into the shallow pool of water which had gathered in the bottom and threw some mud and branches over it, and then he allowed himself to step quietly back towards the camp, still clutching the axe.

  It was time to move, Ghost or no Ghost.

  She was, to his great shock, standing by the fire. She looked at him with no corresponding surprise in her own eyes.

  “There was a Sluagh,” she said.

  How did you know?

  She shrugged as if it was nothing.

  “Something in the wind. Or I dreamt it. Or I saw it.”

  There was. It’s gone.

  She looked at his blood-soaked clothes.

  “You’ll need to steal another shirt,” she said. “We can do that on the road to London.”

  She had obviously decided not to die quite yet.

  SECOND PART

  THE RETURNED

  This visible world is a trace of the invisible one,

  and the former follows the latter like a shadow.

  Algazelus

  ON THE UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS

  Ravens are wholly unlike other birds, which is why the old Book of St. Albans calls a group of them “Ane vnkyndennys of rauynnys,” in that they are unkind, as in not the same, rather than unkind meaning malevolent … and it is not possible to think of any bird that has a closer sympathy with the human, and the history of The Oversight has always been closely entwined with the ravens they both protect and share duty with. Further, it is said that The Oversight itself is overwatched by one particular Raven among ravens, an uncannily long-lived bird that remembers everything it has ever seen, and has the unsettling knack of being in two or even all places at any time. Moreover, the Raven has always had strong supranatural associations as a proven mediator between life and death … from this stems the potency of the Raven as war token or shield-bird … Ragnar Loðbrók sacked Paris beneath a banner known as “Reafan,” emblazoned with the fell bird … the flag was so powerful that if it blew in the wind, victory would follow, but if it hung flat and unmoving then he would be defeated … the last great Viking, Harald Hardrada, killed by the doomed English king Harold at Stamford Bridge, died beneath his own raven banner “Landeyðan,” which fell with him and now is lost, though some say it is buried beneath the White Tower … Friedrich Barbarossa sleeps beneath the Kyffhäuser in Thuringia along with his knights, guarded by ravens who circle the mountain continuously, waiting for the day when they cease their avian vigil and he will rise and save Germany again … just as King Arthur is said, in some medieval materials that make up the Matter of Britain, to lie sleeping beneath a raven shield, hidden in a chamber under a hill, also guarded by ravens where he waits until Britain’s need is direst …

  From The Great and Hidden History of the World by the Rabbi Dr. Hayyim Samuel Falk (also known as the Ba’al Shem of London)

  CHAPTER 11

  EVERY HOMECOMING A BETRAYAL

  A dusting of unseasonably early snow had arrived in London just ahead of Sara Falk and Mr. Sharp’s return from Paris, where they had endured both a long ordeal in the mirror’d world and then an escape from the catacombs beneath the city which had involved nearly drowning in a bottle dungeon and witnessing a catalogue of horrors that had exhausted them both.

  The destruction of the Safe House, its reduction to the rubble-strewn wasteland at the bottom of Wellclose Square was almost the last blow, and if Charlie Pyefinch and a cohort named Ida, previously unknown to them, had not found them at the peak of their distress, Sara felt she might have easily lost her mind for a moment. As it was, the two new younger members of The Oversight had reassured them that at least the others survived, and brought Hodge’s familiar dog cart to convey them with all speed to the temporary new headquarters at The Smith’s Folley out on the Isle of Dogs.

  The scrape of snow was already melting beneath the wheels of the cart as they bumped out of the square, leaving the desolate scene behind them.

  Sara looked at Sharp, who was white-faced with exhaustion and what she knew was rigidly suppressed worry and guilt. The protection of the Safe House was his especial concern, a duty he had taken upon himself a long time ago, that and the responsibility for her specific protection. She knew the catastrophic destruction of their home was hitting him hard. She put her hand on his knee.

  “Bedrock and bone,” she said. “That’s enough for us to build on, no matter how desperate the news is.”

  He nodded. Sara turned and tapped Charlie on the shoulder.

  “Right,” she said. “Tell me what happened—everything. There is not a moment to waste.”

  Charlie grimaced and shot a glance at Ida as if asking for help; she just shrugged.

  “I don’t how to tell it,” he said. “I mean, I don’t know how to tell you everything. All at once. In the right order, like …”

  “I expect we can wait until we get to The Smith’s,” said Sharp, looking at Sara with concern. To him, her face looked as tight as a drum, and her jaw muscles were clearly visible, clenching and unclenching beneath the taut skin. “Let The Smith tell it.”

  “Well. Er …” said Charlie.

  “Er?” said Sara.

  “There’s no Smith. Not there. He’s gone north.”

  “Why?”

  Charlie looked at Ida for support.

  “So much to tell,” she said. “Maybe Charlie is right: can you wait till Cook and Hodge can do it? They will say it better, I think.”

  “Yes,” said Charlie. “There’s just so much been going on …”

  “Start with what happened to the house,” snapped Sara. “Sorry. Start with what happened to my home.”

  “Ida can tell you best,” said Charlie, ignoring the look of betrayal the girl shot him. “No, seriously, Ide. You saw it all. Me’n Hodge didn’t see the beginning. Not like you did.”

  He turned to Sharp and Sara.

  “If Ida here hadn’t been on her way to see us, if she hadn’t been sitting in the square, well, you wouldn’t have just lost the Safe House: we’d have lost Cook too, no question. It was Ida who saw it all happening and got into the house to warn her so they could get out in time.”

  “I was just in the right place,” said Ida, looking embarrassed.

  “If you saved Cook, then you are my friend for life, Miss Laemmel,” said Sara.

  “Trousers,” grinned Ida. “Cook calls me Trousers.”

  “Because she wears them,” said Charlie.

  “But you can call me Ida,” said the girl.

  “Ida. Please tell me how my house was destroyed,” said Sara. “It will help me to start somewhere, to get a grip on a lifeline, for I fear that I feel my world is in danger of unravelling …”

  Ida nodded.

  “So. I was, like Charlie says, sitting in the square. It was early and I had just come from the docks. I had news for you, as I said, from my colleagues in Die Wachte, news about a breath-stealer and a letter we had found about their activities in London, but I can tell you about that later. So. Again: I was waiting for it to be a reasonable time to knock on your door, and I was also just looking around, getting my bearings, so to speak. I saw the sugar factory at the top of the square, and I saw this man, a young man whose eyes were wrong, and before I could make up my mind why they were wrong he rolled these little round metal balls with fuses—what is the word, Charlie?”

  “Grenadoes,” said Charlie.

  “He rolled these grenadoes like a man playing skittleballs, and they went in through the big open door of the factory and—Oh wait, sorry, there was another man just before, a big man who had stopped his horse cart at the bottom of the square right outside your house, and then he lef
t it and walked away until he got to the corner and then he ran, and that’s when I saw the cart was loaded with Lampenöl. Do you say, er, lamp oil, ja? Anyway barrels of it, and that’s when I looked back at the factory and saw the grenado-bombs being rolled in and then they exploded and I saw the giant vats of boiling sugar tip and crack and then there was rivers of burning treacle running downhill towards the house and, um—”

  “And that’s when she chased down the bomber and shot him,” said Charlie, taking an evident vicarious pride in his friend’s prowess.

  “Shot?” said Sharp. “With a gun?”

  “Crossbow,” said Ida. “I am a hunter. The bomber was getting into a waiting carriage around the corner. I shot him and broke his knee. He fell in the street and then the carriage whipped away and left him.”

  “She had a crack at the carriage too,” said Charlie. “Two bolts in the back of it, then she legged it for the Safe House and got in just before the fire did, and warned Emmet and Cook and they got out through the tunnels to the Sly House after the burning sugar exploded the lamp oil and the front of the house went in. Least Cook and Ida did. Emmet brought the roof of the tunnel down on top of himself and stopped the fire getting them.”

  “And Emmet …?” said Sharp, and stopped, either surprised to find he had gripped Sara’s arm without meaning to, or because the question had got stuck in his throat, which he now cleared with a gruff cough. “What happened to Emmet?”

  Sara placed her hand on top of his without looking at him. She was both aware of how close the bond between Sharp and the mute clay man had been, and how he would not wish to be observed reacting to what sounded like it was going to be very bad news.

  “He’s all right,” said Charlie with an unexpected smile. Sharp felt Sara give his hand the merest hint of pressure before letting go. “No, Smith had us dig him out from the blocked tunnel once the ruins had cooled off above. Took five days. Me, Hodge, The Smith, even Cook and Ida pitched in. All his clothes burned off him, but he’s right as a trivet. Takes more than hellfire and a house landing on him to kill a golem is what Cook said. And that’s what the burning sugar looked like, right enough, like hell had opened and the rivers of flame come flooding out …”

  “And what of the Wildfire?” said Sara.

  “Cook saved it and got it away,” said Charlie. “Smith said if Ida had funked going into the house barely one step ahead of the flames, and if Emmet hadn’t done a Samson and brought the house down around his own ears—why, half of London would have gone up most likely.”

  “Smith was exaggerating,” said Ida, looking away, the tops of her ears pinking with embarrassment.

  Charlie turned and grinned at Sharp and Sara.

  “Ida don’t funk much,” he said. “She’s a terror.”

  Sharp and Sara looked at the dark-haired girl.

  “It seems the list of things we owe you is getting longer by the minute,” said Sara.

  “Nobody owes me anything,” said Ida. “Any of you would have done what I did.”

  “Not me,” said Charlie. “Not without second thoughts, and by the time I’d have had them, it would have been too late. It was that close …”

  “Who was in the carriage?” said Sara. “The one you shot at?”

  “Issachar Templebane,” said Charlie. “Ida got back out on the street and tried to follow it.”

  “Templebane,” said Sara. “I should have shot him when I could …”

  “That’s not what you are, Sara,” said Sharp. “That’s not what we are sworn to.”

  “This is my failure,” said Sara, pulling her hand away from his. “I should have dealt with him before I … before I went into the mirrors.”

  “Well, since through them you found me without a minute to spare, I cannot be entirely unconflicted in my view on that,” said Sharp. “And if blame is to be put, I think my claim takes precedence, since it was I who went into the mirrors in the first place.”

  “You were trying to save me,” said Sara, her voice strangely bleak.

  Charlie thought he had never seen such a terrible expression on anyone’s face as the one he saw on hers as she looked away at the buildings passing on either side. It was like she was being torn in half. It was unbearable to see. So was the look on Sharp’s face as he watched the back of Sara’s head, now turned away from him, gazing sightlessly out of the window. Charlie felt as though he was in the wrong place, as if Ida and he were witnessing something too intimate and private. He nudged Ida.

  “Go on,” he said. “Tell them what happened when you went after the carriage.”

  Words, any words were better than the uncomfortable silence hanging between Sharp and Sara.

  “It was long gone,” said Ida. “So was the fellow I wounded, but he was hit hard and left a good blood trail and so I followed.”

  “She found him in the sewer,” said Charlie. “The new one they’ve been digging up west.”

  “He shouldn’t have gone in there,” said Ida. “Not underground in the excrement. He lost too much blood and he got human filth and who knows what all over himself. So. The wound went bad and the hospital had to cut his leg off above the knee.”

  “I’d have cut it off at the neck,” said Sharp.

  “Well, he lost his head the other way,” said Charlie. “Fever and infection and the surgery sent him clear round the bend. He don’t make much sense, but what sense he did make made him a Templebane, Coram by name, one of the sons of Issachar.”

  “And we have him?” said Sara.

  “We did. We don’t now, but we know fine where he is. Smith had him in the cells in the Sly House and then he put him in Bedlam. He ain’t coming out any time soon is Coram Templebane. He’s got his own special keeper too: a bloke called Ketch that Cook says you put a judgement on, Mr. Sharp.”

  “Bill Ketch,” said Sharp. “I enjoined him to muteness until the May flowers bloomed, and then swore him to service at the Bedlam since he had sealed Lucy Harker’s mouth with pitch and hessian and brought her to us in a sack. He had been worked on by the Sluagh …”

  There was more silence. Sara appeared not to have been listening. The carriage bucked and clattered as it went over the narrow wooden bridge which crossed the thin but deep cut of water known as the Gut that divided the rest of London from the Isle of Dogs.

  “Well, there may be a symmetry in that,” said Sharp. “Templebane was mixed up in it somehow too. Ketch was a sot, with a wet brain easily worked on. There was no especial malice in him. He’s as decent a jailer as we could provide, if this Coram is to be suffered to live. Better than he deser—What?”

  Sara had suddenly lunged across him in order to look out of the window on his side, her normally lithe body now stiff and taut.

  She stared open-mouthed as she looked backwards at something they had just passed, something unbelievable beyond the two wheel-tracks they had left in the thin dusting of snow that remained on the narrow bridge, protected from the melting sun by the shadow of the tall warehouse close by.

  “Sara?” he said, his hand touching her back. The contact broke whatever spell was keeping her still and quivering and like a hunting dog on point. She slammed back into her seat and rapped the ceiling.

  “Stop!” she said. “STOP!”

  Before the carriage had fully halted, she had opened the door and jumped to the ground, landing with a great splash in a deep puddle-filled rut and not paying the least attention to it as she stared back at three figures standing in the deep shadows of the warehouse on the other side of the bridge. Sharp leapt after her, and Ida and Charlie were right on his heels.

  “Charlie Pyefinch,” said Sara, turning to him in a gesture so fast he would have sworn that the long braid of her prematurely white hair cracked like a whip as she did so. “How many knives are you carrying?”

  “Ah,” said Ida.

  “They’re not doing any harm,” said Charlie.

  “They’re Sluagh!” said Sara. “In my city. I’ve never seen them so bold.�
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  “Or in such numbers,” said Sharp. “Charlie, give her what knives you have.”

  “No,” said Ida.

  “No?” said Sharp. “Miss Laemmel, these are Sluagh!”

  “They just want to talk,” said Charlie.

  “They’re leaning on the railing,” said Sara. “Jack, look at them.”

  Her voice had a stutter in it.

  “They’re just waiting for The Smith,” said Charlie. “They’ve been there every night for a week, and in the day they do that: lurk in the shadows.”

  Sharp had stepped closer to the bridge and was peering at the unmoving figures, two of whom were leaning on a section of railing, the other sitting casually on it, leg dangling idly like any wharfside loafer.

  “They’re sitting on the railing,” he said, looking back at Sara. “You’re right. The iron railing.”

  Sara and he looked at Charlie and Ida.

  “They’re not …” began Charlie. “That’s to say … well, it’s one of the things I reckoned the others could explain better …”

  “They are no longer scared or bound by iron,” said Ida.

  “The Iron Prohibition …?” said Sara.

  “Broken,” said Charlie.

  “But they still won’t cross running water,” said Ida. “So we have that.”

  Sara’s face now matched her hair. Charlie thought she looked as tintless as a calotype, her black oiled-silk riding habit making her seem like a monochrome figure erroneously added to a coloured picture.

  “How did this happen?” she breathed.

  “Dunno,” said Charlie, painfully aware that this was not a suitable answer to such a momentous question. He looked at Ida for support.