The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Now this is what’s going to happen—” she began.

  “Sit down,” snapped Lucy, thinking fast and standing as she did so.

  Cait turned on her as if slapped, heat flushing her cheeks.

  “Lucy Harker—”

  “Sit!” said Lucy.

  Their eyes were locked on each other’s, but even so Lucy could feel the multiplied force of every other eye in the room boring into her.

  Cait sat down. Lucy turned on the Guardian.

  “Tell us now. Where is the child?”

  The Proctor reached for her arm and tried to pull her back into her seat with a derisory snort.

  “Girl, we aren’t going to help the fiagaí; we’re certainly not going to help her novice—”

  Lucy let him pull her halfway back into the seat as others around him joined in his chuckles.

  And then she went fast-but-slow, squirming and twisting—

  —and then there was a gasp and a kicking over of chairs as half the room seemed also to leap at her, also fast-but-slow—

  —and then they stopped dead.

  Because she had twisted the revolver from his grip and now had the barrel pressed to the side of his head.

  There was a man lying on the floor with a burst nose, and Cait was grimacing and blowing on her knuckles, and Lucy realised that the man clutching his nose was—extraordinarily—laughing, and had clearly been fast enough to have been about to stop Lucy had not Cait, in her turn, stopped him.

  And then Cait herself froze as something went click behind her ear, and her eyes swivelled sideways to find the shorter man with the kind eyes had a pistol of his own, whose muzzle was lost in the unruly disorder of her hair.

  Lucy swallowed.

  The Proctor scowled up at her along the length of the gun barrel.

  “Easy on the trigger, if you please. It’s a light one, and I do like my head attached to my neck,” he said. “You’re faster than I credited.”

  “Everyone stay still and listen to me,” said Lucy.

  “And why should we do that?”

  “Because Law and Lore command it,” snapped Lucy.

  “Who are you to talk of Law and Lore?

  Lucy held her bared hand out in an unwavering fist. The ring on her finger caught the light from the fire and reflected the blaze back at the watchers.

  “We are The Oversight,” said Lucy, repeating the formula she had learned at The Smith’s side. And as she said them, words she had never thought to say in earnest, she felt buoyed up, part of something bigger than herself. Just for an instant, she felt as if The Smith stood at her side, and not just The Smith, but Cook and Hodge and her friend Charlie Pyefinch. It was a fleeting sensation, but she stood taller because of it. “We are The Oversight. And by your own words, you are bound to assist us.”

  “May I?” said the man with the bloodied nose. “On my word, no foolery and no piking, but I’d just like a close look at that ring of yours.”

  Lucy looked into his face. It was weather-beaten, a traveller’s face, much like the faces of the sailors she had been surrounded by on the voyage across the Atlantic, but on closer inspection it was much younger than the prematurely grey hair that surrounded it. The eyes were clear and direct, but it was not this that led her to nod and allow him to step closer. It was that there was something in his demeanour that felt reassuringly familiar.

  He stepped closer and looked at the ring on her finger. Then, to her surprise he reached into the depths of his coat and produced a folding magnifying glass which he opened and used to peer even more closely at it.

  “Yep,” he said, and it appeared to Lucy that he was only speaking to the man holding the gun to Cait’s head. “It’s good, Jon.”

  The kind-eyed man nodded, uncocked the gun and stepped back.

  “My apologies,” he said to Cait. “I was just trying to calm things down.”

  “What do you mean it’s good?” said the Proctor, still held at bay by his own gun and clearly liking it less and less with each passing moment.

  “It’s a Smith’s ring,” said the grey-haired man, only now seeming to notice his bleeding nose as he disappeared the magnifying glass and produced a large red bandana handkerchief in its place, which he used to staunch the flow.

  “The devil it is,” said Sister Lonnegan.

  “If Armbruster says it’s something, that’s what it is,” said the man called Jon. “Anything he don’t know about metals or smithing just isn’t worth the knowing of.”

  “Then I think we should all take a breath and sit down,” said the Guardian. And she bowed slightly in the general direction of Cait and Lucy. “For it appears things are not what they seemed to be, and it may be we do owe you assistance rather than … regulation.”

  There was a grumble of dissent from some of the figures in the room, but the Guardian swept the crowd with a stern look, and everyone returned to their seats.

  “Lucy—” said Cait.

  “I know,” said Lucy. “But you weren’t getting anywhere.”

  She took a step away from the Proctor and aimed the gun at the floor. Now things were calm, she spared a moment of thought as to the horrible tug she had felt while she held it to his head. A gun was different to a blade. A blade did not urge you to use it in the way this pistol had: it was as if it had one purpose, a potentiality just like the chemical explosion pent up and waiting to happen in the close confines of the chambered round. Knives never felt like they wanted to bite. They were just metal, sharp metal no doubt, but neutral, as useful for eating or slicing or whittling as anything else. Perhaps they were neutral because they could be used for so many different things. The gun was not neutral. In her hands, it had felt like it wanted to fire: the potential stored in that explosive charge was a dark pull, very much like the thrilling urge to take that one extra step when standing on the edge of a high cliff. Just that one step. Just that extra pressure on the trigger. Just one small pace. Just one tiny click. And then the whole equation of life would change—

  “Would you take this?” she said, holding it out to the Proctor.

  He stared at her.

  “Now you’re … just giving it back?” he said.

  “I only needed to get everyone’s attention,” she said.

  “Still. Put a gun to a man’s head, then just hand it back? That’s a dangerous play, young lady. A man might bear a grudge …”

  “You haven’t killed anyone with it,” said Lucy.

  “Have I not?” he said.

  “I’m a Glint, remember? I’d have felt it,” she said. “So if you’ve been able to resist it so far, I think you won’t start now.”

  He gingerly took it from her unresisting fingers. She felt a thrill of relief mixed with a surprisingly strong tang of regret. The power banked up in the thing was palpable to her. But only now that she no longer held it did she realise what a dangerous thing she had done in grabbing it from his hands: if the weapon had been used to take life, she might well have glinted, and if she had been caught in the grip of the moment as the past slammed into her and disabled her senses and motion as it always did, then she would have been totally at the mercy of the circle, and she and Cait might well have been in a worse state than the one in which they now found themselves.

  The Guardian was observing her across the width of the room, pale grey eyes seeming to bore into her head and see her thoughts.

  “Firearms and glinting don’t sit well together,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Next time you do it, you’ll want to keep the gloves on.”

  Lucy shivered and avoided Cait’s glare as she carefully sat back down in her chair.

  “There won’t be a next time,” she said. “I don’t like guns.”

  Even to her own ears it sounded like a lie.

  CHAPTER 15

  HOME AND NOT HOME

  The reunion at The Folley was a double-edged thing all round: Cook and Hodge were dumbfounded, delighted and distressed in equal measure by the sudden appearanc
e of Sharp and Sara: they were overjoyed to see them yet worried by the spectacle of physical depletion that they presented; pale, drawn, enervated and almost translucent with fatigue. Cook, who was never knowingly lost for words, was rendered quite speechless with joy and made up for it by hugging them both repeatedly and then disappearing into the storeroom where a thunderous cacophony of nose-blowing and handkerchief work took place. Hodge took his turn in embracing them both, while Jed darted between their legs, tail threshing and barking happily.

  “You need rest and physic,” he said to Sharp, holding him at arm’s length as if his ruined eyes could see.

  Sharp’s hands reached towards the well-healed wounds on his old friend’s face, and then paused.

  “Your eyes,” he said.

  “Ah now, old Jed don’t mind me sharing his,” said Hodge. “Besides, I’m getting some blurry vision out of this one, like looking through a piece of dirty ice. Other one’s a goner, though.”

  “I’m so sorry. I should have been with you all,” said Sharp.

  Sharp was not a demonstrative man, and the audible catch in his throat was a sign of precisely how reduced his normal vitality had become after his ordeal.

  “Well, we saw ’em off well enough,” said Hodge gruffly. “And Cook got to play pirate again, so not a complete waste of time, eh?”

  Cook had salvaged a very few things from the wreck of her domain and set up a new kitchen in The Smith’s workshop itself—the tiny kitchen he normally satisfied himself with having been condemned as being no bigger than a water closet with no room to swing a cat, nor even contain a table that would accommodate the five members of the Last Hand. So somehow the already jumbled order-within-disorder of the workshop had been rearranged to incorporate a working kitchen, the actual kitchen having been relegated to the status of storeroom (in which Cook was now wiping tears from her eyes with a tablecloth-sized red and white spotted handkerchief).

  Seeing the huge, well-remembered kettle from the Safe House on the red coals of the forge, sporting new dents and dings but evidently carefully repaired and burnished to a fine coppery sheen as it bubbled away like a baby hippopotamus, was enough to bring the prick of rigorously suppressed tears to Sara’s eyes. And here lay the paradoxical poignancy of the reunion for the returnees: the Safe House was gone, but here was home; here was hearth; here was warmth and safety and the society of friends and the closest they had to blood kin. And yet it was not so, since the juxtaposition of well-known things in such a strange setting only emphasised the abrupt change in their world, and made it seem all the more irreversible. The joy of return was undercut with the strange pain of well-loved, familiar things in an unfamiliar setting.

  Cook emerged, red-eyed and smiling, brandishing a basket of eggs and a leg of York ham encased in golden breadcrumbs, which she plumped on the table and from which she immediately began to carve thick, pale pink slices of meat.

  “Now,” she said. “Sit down close to the fire, and we shall get some victuals in you both. Trousers? Make the tea.”

  Making the tea was one of the things that Cook prized above all duties, being of the firm conviction that no one could do it as well as she, except possibly Hodge. That Ida was being trusted with such an honoured responsibility spoke volumes about how high the Austrian girl had risen in her estimation.

  “Right,” said Sara, allowing Sharp to help her into the chair closest to the fire. “And now please tell us everything, from the beginning.”

  “Food and drink first,” said Cook. “For it’s not news to be taken on an empty stomach and you both look so wretchedly sharp-set and pale you might as well be made of parchment.”

  “No. Everything, now,” said Sara. “Before …”

  “Before what?” said Hodge. “Before it’s too late?”

  He spat into the fire.

  “It’s already too late.” He waved his arm around the forge. “This is what too late looks like, Sara. Doesn’t mean we’re out. Just means we’re down. And if we’re to get back on our feet, Cook’s right. You need food and drink and rest. A lot of rest. You both look like the very life’s been sucked out of you.”

  “It’s just the mirrors,” said Sara, thinking of the pale, bleached-out Mirror Wights. “They leech the colour from you.”

  “And the vitality,” said Sharp, nodding at Cook. “Food and talk at the same time then, if you please …”

  “You were away so long I had—we had thought you were both lost,” sniffed Cook, turning to the fire and pulling a frying pan closer in over the flames.

  “Time is different in the mirrors,” said Sharp. “It’s elastic. But not consistent. A day can seem like a minute, and then suddenly a minute seems to have lasted a week.”

  “Wouldn’t catch me going into the mirrors,” said Hodge.

  “Where is Emmet?” said Sharp, looking around the forge.

  “Smith set him to guard the Wildfire,” said Hodge.

  “Where is the Wildfire?” said Sara.

  Cook harrumphed and riddled the coals beneath the frying pan, making the slices of ham sizzle and emit the most delicious of smells.

  “Smith sealed it back inside the lead casket and sunk it in the river again,” she said. “Seemed like the safest course in the circumstances.”

  “Safe under flowing water,” said Hodge. “No mischief will come to it unless the Thames dries up, and that ain’t going to happen, not with the wet weather we been having.”

  “And Emmet?” repeated Sharp. Alone perhaps amongst the rest of The Oversight, he had an especial affinity for the golem. Where others saw the giant clay man as some sort of automaton, Sharp had always felt calmer in his presence, and had enjoyed the long periods of silent companionship he felt they shared. There was little in his life that was tranquil and he was, by at least half of his nature, pulled towards a violence of action with which the remaining part was uncomfortable. Emmet had been, by his very stoic stillness, a means by which Sharp could balance himself and find repose. More than that, he claimed that if you slowed yourself to the golem’s pace, you were able to notice things about Emmet which hinted at thought rather than mere obedience within the empty shell of his being. None of the others had time or inclination to test this, but it was a belief Sharp held firmly to.

  “He’s with it,” said Hodge, head down over his terrier who was allowing him to run his hands through his broken fur, looking for the ticks the dog picked up as he ran rabbiting through the high grass around The Folley.

  “With it?” said Sharp.

  “Underwater, sat on it. Don’t look at me like that,” said Cook. “Emmet doesn’t need air.”

  “How long?” said Sharp.

  “Couple of months,” said Hodge.

  Sharp shook his head angrily.

  “He’s not a machine.”

  Hodge shrugged and continued checking Jed for ticks with even more apparent concentration. Even though he was blind, he was clearly uncomfortable with having to meet Sharp’s gaze on this point.

  “Smith says he’s as good as, nigh enough for make-do,” he said.

  “Smith’s wrong,” said Sharp.

  “Well, you’d best tell him when you see him.”

  “I will,” said Sharp. “There must be another way. It’s inhumane for you all to have—”

  Cook spun from the fire, face reddened with more than the heat of the flames.

  “You weren’t here. Sara wasn’t here. With Lucy Harker taking off with the Irish girl and going gallivanting all the way to America, we didn’t have a Hand, or we wouldn’t have if Trousers over there hadn’t turned up in the nick of time. Without that bit of luck EVERYTHING would have gone for a ball of chalk anyway—”

  “I’m just saying—” said Sharp.

  “Just sit down and stop saying and eat this,” thundered Cook. “We are all but ended here, Jack Sharp!”

  She smacked a plate of eggs and ham in front of him, and then slid the other more gently in front of Sara. She leaned back against the anvi
l by the fire and took a deep calming breath. It didn’t work.

  “You two need to realise something and realise it now: we are clinging on by the very tips of our fingernails to the edge of an abyss that is crumbling away right beneath our grip. And I don’t like the idea of that poor creature sitting alone and blind under that bloody beast of a river, but if The Smith says it’s the safest thing, we have to do it. We had to make things safe.” She took a second deep breath, then blew her nose again. “And you weren’t here.”

  “And we weren’t here,” said Sara, putting a weary arm out and pulling Sharp back down into his chair. “We weren’t here, but we are now. So. I want to know everything else that has happened, for we have clearly been away longer than we thought we had been, and then we will tell you what we in turn have found out.”

  “What have you found out?” said Hodge.

  “About the Disaster,” said Sharp.

  “It’s not going to make you feel any better than you are going to make us feel with your news,” said Sara. “But we have found out what happened and who was responsible. We’ll tell you, we’ll eat and then I need to sleep and so does Jack, and then when we wake we will all roll up our sleeves and start putting things to rights.”

  She looked at her mug of tea.

  “No fine china here, Sara,” said Cook. “That’s all smashed to buggery under the old house. It’s Smith’s crockery we’re doing with, and a tin cup holds tea just as well as anything else.”

  “It’s not the cup,” said Sara, “it’s the tea.”