The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  “So your rules are fine, but theirs should be bent?” said Lucy. “They’re going to keep you here and do whatever this regulating is for a year, and then how much chance do you think you have of finding your needle in a haystack?”

  “In a thousand haystacks,” said the man called Magill. “And the timing’s all wrong: three weeks to St. Louis and that’s just the jumping-off point. If they’ve gone all the way to the Willamette Valley like they planned, you could be six months or a lifetime getting there. By which I mean there’s plenty ways you could die out there on the trail. And you got no reason to think they might not have changed their plans and headed south to California—hell, maybe they took the Salt Lake cut-off and turned Mormon!”

  “People do change their plans on the trail,” said Armbruster. “It’s a long slog under big skies, and it saps the soul if things don’t go right, which of course they don’t.”

  “I’ll be going,” said Cait. “I’m bound to it. Lucy Harker, you’re not coming.”

  “I am,” said Lucy.

  “Listen,” said Cait. “I know you want to come and we both know why and this isn’t the place to say it, but we’ve talked about this, so let it lay, eh?”

  She underlined her words with a very direct look. Lucy suddenly wanted to hit her. Cait shook her head.

  “No, girl, I’ve no use for a pupil who won’t do what she’s told, and there’s an end to it. And as a free agent, you have no cause to—”

  “I have every cause,” said Lucy, and what surprised her more than the vehemence with which she found herself speaking was that she meant it. “Do you know what it’s like to be stolen as a child? Do you know what it’s like to have big holes in your memory where you can’t remember your true parents? Do you know what it’s like to never quite belong anywhere and not know why that is, other than suspecting it’s because someone took you away from where you were meant to be?”

  “No,” said Cait. “But …”

  “No buts,” said Lucy. “I do. And I think we should stop arguing and find that baby so it doesn’t, right?”

  Cait stared at her, and there was something in her eyes that Lucy had never seen before: Cait looked surprised.

  “Well,” said Cait after a beat. “Fair dos.”

  “But how will you know them?” said the Guardian. “You have no way of recognising them …”

  Cait nodded at Prudence Tittensor.

  “She knows them. She can tell me.”

  The captain’s wife lurched to her feet, one hand clutching her belly, the other steadying herself on the back of her chair.

  “You’re mad!”

  Cait nodded.

  “Sure but there’s every chance of that.”

  Armbruster held out his hand and eased Mrs. Tittensor back down into her chair. She winced and held her belly as she sat.

  “This woman’s in no shape for the road,” he said, “let alone a journey beyond where there’s two thousand miles or more where there never was a road at all …”

  Magill nodded.

  “I don’t need her,” said Cait. “Not the whole shebang anyway. I just need her eyes.”

  “You’ll not be taking anyone’s eyes, you hellion!” spat Mrs. Lonnegan, leaning over stabbing a long bony finger right in her face. Cait didn’t blink or flinch.

  “It’ll stand to you to take your finger out of my face, missus,” she said calmly. “Or I’m just as like to snap it off and use it to plug your hole.”

  “Sister Lonnegan,” said the Guardian.

  The angry woman sat back and withdrew her fingers.

  “That’s the shot,” said Cait, turning to look at the Guardian. “I’m talking about the dog.”

  “What?” said Mrs. Tittensor, making to rise from her seat again. Armbruster gently caught her arm and restrained her.

  “Your one here’s a sharer, is she not?” said Cait, jerking a thumb at the pregnant woman. “Holds herself in an animal’s brain? That big shaggy dog of hers, Shay, she rides alongside as it were, sees through its eyes, talks to its thoughts even? Amn’t I right?”

  Mrs. Tittensor was staring in outrage at the Guardian.

  “I’ve had Shay since she was a pup,” she quivered.

  “Sure, and I’d bring her back,” said Cait.

  “You might not come back yourself,” said Magill. He reddened slightly as if aware that all the attention in the room had suddenly refocused on him. “Which is, on the long trail, nothing’s certain.”

  Cait looked at Mrs. Tittensor.

  “You want to come instead of your dog?”

  “No,” she said. And then she sat back and nodded slowly. “No, I think it wouldn’t suit me even if I wasn’t carrying a child. I get itchy if I can’t see the sea. I can’t see an inland voyage suiting me one bit.”

  “So—” began Cait.

  “But I have a better idea,” said Mrs. Tittensor, smiling for the first time. “Your plan’s not a bad one, but I won’t send Shay with you either.”

  Before Cait could object again, she went on.

  “We can make a deal. I will let you have one of her pups; you saw them earlier. Take one of them. It can be my eyes as well as Shay, and either of them has more stamina, being younger.”

  Cait looked at Lucy.

  “Well, seems we’re going west, Lucy Harker. Looks like you’re going to get your sightseeing after all. And a puppy, can you believe it? You should be smiling.”

  Lucy looked back at her.

  “And you should say thank you.”

  CHAPTER 17

  THE COMING STORM

  Amos and the Ghost finally entered London like almost everybody else, which is to say they arrived unnoticed and unremarked and were immediately stirred into the great stew of people milling through the city, all of whom were much too concerned with themselves to remark on two new ingredients as they quietly added themselves to the pot.

  They would certainly have been remarked on had they arrived in the ragged and filthy state in which they had left the charcoal burners’ camp, but whatever had snapped within Amos and allowed him to move in the new way he instinctively called fast-but-slow had a very useful side-effect, which was that he could now hunt with extraordinary success, catching rabbits by hand even, so that they ate better than they had before, and, less admirably, he became a better thief as a result of his enhanced abilities. Something made him leave things in exchange when he could, and he didn’t steal from those who clearly had very little. But he entered London wearing a decent enough overcoat which he had lifted from a coat-hook on which he had left a brace of pheasants and a hare, and the Ghost wore a patched but clean cambric dress whose faded print contained tumbles of rosebuds several shades brighter than her cheeks, and a warm shawl he had taken from a clothes-line which he left garlanded with five freshly killed rabbits in exchange. The boots he now wore were the best he had ever owned and he had left nothing for them because he had stood in the shadows of a barn and watched their previous owner, a stupendously drunk farmer, thrashing his horse and then his wife when she came to remonstrate with him. She had escaped and the farmer had pitched forward into the hay, vomited and instantly fallen asleep, snoring so stertorously that he didn’t notice when Amos had relieved him of his footwear and left him face down in his own mess.

  So while they did not enter the metropolis in any very great style, they did look clean enough to escape comment and were, within an instant, merely part of the background. The only significant aspect their arrival was that it was attended by the noise of thunder and distant flashes of lightning as a storm rolled in from the east, as if to meet them.

  They entered together but still in two minds: Amos was determined to find The Oversight; the Ghost was determined to find Mountfellon.

  A bare hour and a half earlier they had stood in the open countryside at the top of Stamford Hill, at the rural junction between Hangar Lane and Seven Sisters Road, looking across the hedgerows and fields at the distant brooding mass of the city bel
ow. There was still a remnant of yesterday’s light snowfall on the fields around them, but the day was not as cold and it held the promise of rain rather than snow in the air. The incoming storm was at this point just a dark smudge on the horizon to their left. The New Reservoir reflected the dull morning light just beneath them and the winding course of the New River traced a looping path from it into the great sprawl of the metropolis beneath. It made a silvered thread, linking the last of the clean green fields with the endless scrabble of wet slate roofs and smoking chimneypots spreading back up into the open landscape like brick-built fungi blooming along the course of the old high roads.

  To one who had spent so many months walking away from it across the forgiving wind-cleansed bounty of the shires, the ruinous sprawl of the city skulking beneath the pall of smoke looked terrible, like a great surly beast growling beneath its own fug.

  And it felt like home.

  “Mountfellon must die,” said the Ghost.

  The repetition is superfluous.

  “He is somewhere down there in that tangle of streets. I know where, if he has not shifted his lair in the long years since I knew him. I know where, and you will help me get in. Perhaps you will kill him for me, though I would much rather do it myself. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but cold dishes may have hot sauces to them and I would like to feel the warmth of his blood at the end,” she said.

  I have brought you here but I will have no part in what comes next.

  “That is not our deal,” she said.

  We have no deal.

  “The Oversight will not give you what you want,” she said. “Everything I have told you of them should have alerted you to that fact.”

  You do not know what I want.

  “Revenge. Justice. Power. You’re a man. Take your pick. That’s what you all feed on.”

  Again. You do not know what I want. And you do not know what The Oversight will be able to do for me. Nor do I, it is true. But I think they can help me. I think at least they can protect me from the Sluagh, if anyone can.

  “The Oversight is an illusion. It cannot even help its own. It was a fine idea but a busted flush.”

  My fathers feared it.

  “Your fathers resented it because it was an obstacle to their commerce. Templebanes have been traders in fear and rumour and what they call ‘dark intelligence’ since they came out of the stinking fens that bore them and turned from witchfinders to brokers and lawyers. They have no powers to speak of, only that of arcane knowledge and the means of parleying with those who walk in the shadows, those who might be bribed or placated enough to help the Templebanes and those whose interest they represent.”

  He stared at her in shock. He had until this moment not had any hint that she knew about the house of Templebane.

  You know of the Templebanes?

  “As I know about The Oversight. You should believe me, Bloody Boy. This game has been going on for many lifetimes.”

  Just because you know of the Templebanes does not mean you are right about The Oversight.

  “But I am right and I do know. I know they are done. They cannot protect their own; they could not protect them even when I was young. It is because of their weakness as much as Mountfellon’s perfidy that I lost what I had. Their day is done.”

  It is not, his thoughts sounded desperate even to his own inner ear.

  “Done as yesterday’s breakfast kipper,” she cackled. “My, I would like to eat a kipper again …”

  How do you know? About The Oversight?

  She turned.

  “Because I was one of them, Bloody Boy, and you—if I had still the ring I once bore—would do as I say because I could make Lore and Law command it!”

  For a moment she did look commanding and strangely, defiantly magnificent, holding her fist towards him as if it bore the imagined ring of authority. And then, without moving, almost by a trick of the light, she seemed to collapse and look old and tired and broken again.

  “But my rings are stolen, and I would not wear the bloodstone even if I had it. I broke it when I foreswore the damned Oversight and went away. Law and Lore did me no good, giving me neither justice nor vengeance on the one who wronged me, and those days when I was foolish enough to believe in them are winnowed and as gone with the wind as my own dear lost children.”

  The lost child or children (she was always perplexingly inconsistent in how she told this part of her history) was the thing that had ultimately driven her mad, he knew. He had heard enough fragments of her past as they had walked the long miles together to be able to make a more or less coherent patchwork of her history by joining up the pieces that recurred with the most consistency. She had been wronged by an admirer whom she had loved and trusted; she had not been able to satisfy her need for revenge, and had fled far away from London, somewhere she had thought herself safe with her child (or children), and then one day agents of the great man who had been searching for her took her away from them. Sometimes she said she had been experimented on like an animal; sometimes she said she had been repatriated and immured in the Andover poorhouse in the expectation that she would die shortly after. The children (or child) were lost for ever, as were her wits. The only thing that had not died was her desire for vengeance, the only thing that had kept her alive.

  “Gone and gone with the wind,” she repeated with a sigh. “Like my doomed and departed darlings.”

  A minute later, with nothing resolved between them, they were also gone, walking out of the countryside into the first layers of the metropolis.

  As they walked, Amos thought about her latest revelations behind the buttress he had built in his mind: was she lying? She was, he was certain, a liar. Why had she saved this revelation about The Oversight until now, this last moment? She never said anything that was not in some way manipulative. And even the things she did not say were artful, it seemed, else why would she have hidden her more detailed knowledge of the Templebanes? Could she really be what she now claimed: a lapsed member of The Oversight? A fallen initiate?

  He trudged on beside her, his head full of this, determined that the only safe thing was to stick to his plan of going to The Oversight and laying all that had happened and all he knew at their feet and then seeking their protection. And yet, and yet … he kept looping back to the new question of the Ghost and her latest revelations. It itched in his brain, because he could not work out if she was manipulating him by feeding him carefully edited titbits, find if that were the case, what she was trying to achieve by doing so. Avenging herself on Mountfellon was her one aim, but he could not see how she imagined the information she was rationing him with would change his mind about being an accessory to the planned vengeance.

  And then, as they entered the warren of streets of the old city proper, the heavens opened and rain as heavy as he had ever seen began to pound the cobblestones around them and introspection stopped and the search for shelter took over completely.

  The rain seemed not to fall as much as to be being hurled with a spiteful ferocity from the dark clouds overhead. It hit the cobbles so hard it bounced, sending six inches of spray back up into the air, soaking their lower legs even as they hunched their heads into improvised hoods made by coat and shawl respectively. Within less than a minute, the roofs overhead had filled the guttering with too great a volume of rain for the downpipes to drain, and sheets of water began to fall into the street around them, rendering passage along the slick pavements as perilous as walking under a cataract. The drains clogged, the sewers revolted, and five minutes into the inundation the city seemed to be drowning.

  Shopkeepers rushed out and pulled their goods inside their premises, while those with awnings wound them away, depriving the passing pedestrians of their shelter, not out of malice but in order that the canopies did not founder under the weight of the biblical torrent pounding in from above.

  Amos and the Ghost took refuge with a crowd of similarly soaked refugees beneath the one remaining protective covering of
a greengrocer whose winding gear had conveniently—for them but not him—jammed. They stood and miserably watched as the proprietor and his wife attempted to save the bellying canvas from splitting under the volume of water it contained by poking at it with broomsticks to channel the water off the side before the weight of it split the material. It was unfortunate they were standing beneath the seam running down the centre of the awning, because it was there that the rip happened as weatherworn stitching gave up the struggle and drenched them quite as comprehensively as if they had decided to take a shower beneath one of the aforementioned waterfalls.

  The force of the falling water actually knocked the Ghost off her feet and she went sprawling into a barrel of apples. Amos caught her arm and was alarmed to see a streak of blood on her temple.

  “I’m fine,” she said, shaking off his hand. He watched the red blood thin and pink in the falling rain. He looked around. The street was all too familiar. He was one junction away from the house of Templebane, the scene of all his past miseries. But he knew that just beyond it was a closed alley with a gate which he had the knack of opening by jiggling it in a certain way. It was the empty premises of a cartwright who had gone bankrupt. Amos had used it as a private means of getting in and out of the Templebane establishment when he wished not to be seen by his brothers or the fathers. It was sure shelter from this deluge, and he knew it would be, as ever, empty, because in truth the Templebane fathers—who already owned the untenanted building on the other side of their house, and for the very same reason—had bought the deeds from the bankrupt man “in order that no damned neighbours should know our business by doing no more than leaning on a party wall with a bloody tumbler at their ears.” Thus the two empty premises on either side of the house of Templebane were a perpetual no man’s land, a secret cordon sanitaire, and in this case, a place of refuge. He pulled his coat up over his head like a hood and steered the Ghost into the street.

  I know where we can shelter, but you must not draw attention to us, for it is an empty dwelling but right close by my father’s house.