The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  The attic floor was empty, and she flowed down the stairs like a shadow made flesh. The next floor was easier to check, the rooms being grander and thus bigger and fewer, and then the floor below was even quicker, being made up of the public rooms, a ballroom and dining room respectively. The ground floor was empty and she debated whether to check the basement was similarly safe, and decided it would be sensible to open the front door and proceed to the lower, darker levels with reinforcements.

  There was something nagging at the back of her mind now, a rising tingle which had grown as she descended the stairs.

  She unlocked the front door and stood back as Sharp, Sara and Charlie flitted out of the shadows across the street and wraithed inside the house to stand with her in the tall marbled hallway. Archie immediately ran to the top of the stairs down to the basement and stopped, fur bristling.

  Charlie closed the door behind them. He looked at Ida. She nodded.

  “What do you think?” said Sharp.

  “There’s no one here,” said Ida. She looked at the ruff of fur standing up on Archie’s back. “But there’s something.”

  “What?” said Sara.

  “I don’t know,” said Ida. “It got worse as I came downstairs. I haven’t checked down there yet. If there’s something, it’s down there.”

  “That’s what Archie thinks,” said Charlie. “He doesn’t know what it is either, but he doesn’t like it.”

  Sharp took out a candle from his waistcoat.

  “No,” said Ida. “No lights until I say.”

  Sharp and Sara exchanged a look. Charlie could see they were adjusting to the fact this girl of his age considered herself to be in charge.

  “I can see in the dark well enough,” she explained. “Make a light, all you do is let whatever’s down there see us.”

  Sharp nodded and slid the candle back in his coat.

  “Lead on,” he said. “But take care.”

  She nodded and soft-footed slowly down the half-spiral of stone stairs which led below. Unlike the restrained but still palatial decoration of the rooms above, the stair was suddenly austerely and characteristically spartan in the true Georgian style, just unadorned sandstone steps and an iron railing, as if leading to a completely different world from the one above. The ceiling of the long corridor that led from the bottom of the steps was low and seemed to press down on them as they followed Ida going from door to door, checking.

  She came to a door that wouldn’t open and stopped, raising a warning hand.

  Charlie was feeling both what he could sense and what Archie’s impressions were. The young dog was quivering at his side, eyes locked on Ida and the door beyond.

  Ida pressed her ear against the door and listened. She grimaced and beckoned Sharp closer to stand ready as she carefully tried the door. It was definitely locked. She eased up on the handle, returning it to its original position slowly so as not to let it give a tell-tale click.

  Sharp stepped back. Looked at Sara.

  “We’ll need Hodge and his lock-picks …”

  “I can do it,” said Charlie quietly.

  He reached into his waistcoat and slid the wallet of picks from the inner pocket as he knelt at the keyhole. Ida bent and spoke into his ear, so close he felt the warmth of her breath raising the hairs on his neck.

  “If something comes through the door in a hurry, don’t stand up,” she murmured, and then stepped back and shouldered her crossbow, aiming it at a point at chest height just above where he was crouched.

  He listened, trying to make sense of the quiet animal noises which were just barely audible on the other side of the door. Then he eased the thinnest probe into the lock. And found it already occupied. Locks can all be picked, unless the key is still in them. He moved the tip of the pick gently, getting a feel for whether the offending key was aligned up and down, or at an angle that would need jiggling for his plan to have a chance of working. The bit was slightly offset, by less than ten degrees. He reached in another pick and held his breath as he eased it into what he thought of as the six o’clock position. Then he reached down and felt the gap at the bottom of the door. And then he held up a hand to warn Ida he was going to stand, and stepped back towards the others.

  “The key’s still in the other side,” he said.

  “So?” said Ida.

  “So if there was no one in there, I could slide a paper under the door, poke the key out so it landed on the paper and pull it back under,” he said. “But the room isn’t empty, and the noise will alert whatever’s in there. So it might be all we can do to try it … and it might work if we can move fast …”

  Ida dropped to the floor and put an eye to the crack. She held up three fingers.

  “You’re pretty fast,” said Sara, nudging Sharp and starting to unbutton her jacket.

  “What are you doing?” he said, a little shocked.

  She stripped the oiled silk jacket off and handed it to Ida.

  “Use this instead of paper.”

  Ida nodded and fed the semi-stiff material under the door, directly beneath the keyhole. Sharp looked at Charlie.

  “On three then,” he said, “and no butterfingers please, Miss Laemmel.”

  He transferred the knife to his teeth and flexed his fingers like a concert pianist preparing for a performance.

  “What is butterfingers?” whispered Ida.

  “Don’t drop it,” said Charlie.

  “Told you: my grip is good,” she said.

  Sharp nodded. Charlie took a breath, looked at Ida and mouthed “1, 2, 3” and then slid the lock pick deeper into the keyhole, finding the blunt end of the pin and pushing smoothly against it to force the key out.

  Ida whipped Sara’s coat back out so quickly that it fooled Charlie’s senses into thinking she’d done it too soon, before the key had landed, but then he saw her snatch it from the folds of the jacket and hold it up.

  Sharp seemed to blur, and there was click and a squeal and then Charlie was knocked aside as Sharp and Sara sprang past him into the dimly lit room.

  Something pale moved very fast, snarling in from the right, but even as Sharp’s blade was slicing air towards it, something else punched over Charlie’s head, catching the assailant in the throat and knocking it clear of the slash. Ida’s crossbow bolt pinned it to the wall where it hung with spasming fingers reaching in surprise for the feathered end sticking out below its chin.

  It was a man from whom all colour seemed to have been leeched, the blood ribboning a dark strip from the arrow in his neck to the floor, except for the clenched teeth which were as black and shiny as jet. His uniformly dirty white clothes were ragged, though once homespun, and his long hair and spade-like beard were bleached with something other than age to the same hue as his clothes. His eyes rolled back in his head and his hand opened, dropping the heavy axe he had been gripping onto the bare floorboards against which his heels kicked convulsively and then were still.

  “I had it,” said Sharp tightly, without looking around.

  “Yeah,” said Charlie, staring at the pale thing dying on the wall. “But what is it?”

  “Mirror Wights,” said Sara facing the archway beyond, in the shadows of which stood three more monochrome figures, frozen in shock around something which looked like an animal cage …

  Charlie couldn’t see what was in the cage and, as he stepped sideways to get a clearer look, one of the Wights shifted to block his view.

  “Be still,” snapped Ida, stepping into the room with her crossbow reloaded and aimed at them.

  The one closest to Sara shook his head. He was a bent, bow-legged figure, perhaps once a seagoing man from the look of his flat-brimmed oilskin hat, long pigtail and short jacket. He tipped the hat back on his forehead and sighed.

  “Ach, there was no need for that now,” he said, showing a mouth full of black teeth in his floury white face. “He was just surprised …”

  “He was about to surprise my damned head off,” said Sara, poking the axe
with her foot.

  “Well, you should have knocked, dolly,” said the sailor.

  “Don’t call her dolly,” growled Sharp. “And put your hands in the air where I can see them, all of you …”

  Their hands stayed down. The two other Mirror Wights appeared to be twins, or at least to have entered the mirrors at the same point in history, from the look of it somewhere around the time of the Civil War, for though what they wore was bleached out and colourless it was clearly the uniform of Cromwell’s New Model Army. Both wore metal breastplates over leather jerkins and high boots, and each had a sword belt hung sash-like over one shoulder. The one closest to them had a metal helmet with a faceguard, and the other was bareheaded and broken-nosed.

  “Now don’t be like that,” smiled the sailor, tipping the hat even further back on his head. “I’m just trying to calm this—”

  And then he flung the hat at Sara, hard and flat, diving to the left as Ida fired on reflex, the bolt catching him in the chest …

  Sharp’s hand snaked out and caught the spinning hat before it hit Sara.

  “Damn,” he said, wincing. He dropped it and looked at his fingers, badly gashed and pumping blood. “Razors in the brim.”

  “We want no trouble,” said the helmeted one, who was standing by the cage.

  “Then put your damned hands in the air,” said Sara.

  “They’re just animals,” said the other, raising his hands. “It’s just like you’d milk a cow.”

  “It’s true,” said the first, his hands hovering at shoulder height, as if they couldn’t decide to go all the way up. “They don’t mind it so much, and we never take too much neither.”

  Sharp had made a tight fist to try and close the wound in his hand. He held it out, showing his ring, holding it steady as blood dripped to the floor below.

  “Step aside, or by Law and Lore we will end you now,” he gritted.

  “Ah well, we don’t end so easy,” said the Wight by the cage. “Just let us return to the mirrors and no harm done. They’re just animals really, like I said.”

  Charlie didn’t know what they were talking about, but the way they spoke of it was tainted, their half-smiles curdled and wheedling and somehow ashamed. There was palpable sense that something very bad had been done in this room, was still being done in fact, right at the moment they had burst in. Ida stepped up to his shoulder with a new quarrel loaded in her crossbow. She grunted without taking her eye off the Wights and, though there were no words, he could tell she was saying she too felt the taint of something very wrong here.

  “Just milking ’em,” said the other. “You let us go now. We’ll be nice as nuns’ hens, and everyone happy, eh? Them two you killed were soft boys, pusser’s mate and a woodcutter, no great loss and no special friends of ours. You make us fight, you’ll find we’re tougher’n ’em, and trained to it too.”

  “Step away from that cage,” said Sara, voice cracking like a whip. “Do it now.”

  “Your wish, milady,” said the helmeted one and stepped sideways.

  As soon as he did so, it became apparent that the cage door was unlocked and he had been keeping it shut with his leg, for it immediately sprang open and smashed back against the bars with a loud clang of iron on iron, and a green-faced thing charged out, keening horribly as it jumped at Sara.

  There was a thunk as Ida fired. The bolt would have hit the attacker had not the roundhead’s arm been chopping down in front of it as he went for his sword. His forearm was protected by an armoured bracer and the bolt spanged off it, ricocheting into the floor.

  Charlie was already in motion, working on reflex, fist already bunched and inbound before his mind caught up with his body as he jumped forward, and he stopped the attacker dead in its tracks with a solid hook to the face. The impact jarred him to his boot-heels, but the punch poleaxed the assailant and dropped it unconscious to the floor. He had time to register it was a normal-looking man in a breechclout, normal, except for the fact his hair and skin were green. There was something wrong with his mouth and blood was dripping from a thin pipe sticking out of his forearm.

  He saw all this in a fraction of a second, just enough time to also begin to wonder if he’d broken something in his fist—and then there was no time to wonder at anything because the roundheads attacked, trying to cut their way to the mirrored box on the wall with disciplined slashes of their heavy dragoon’s swords.

  He saw a thick blade cutting towards his midriff and then someone grabbed his collar and pulled him sharply out of the way of the blow, and as he tumbled backwards he saw a streak of midnight blue go past him which must have been Sharp, and then he was falling and saw mostly ceiling and Sara hurdling his body as she sprang into the attack, and then he banged his head and saw ceiling and stars and then blackness as unconsciousness took him.

  Sharp parried the blow that had nearly cut Charlie in two, sending the blade high and holding it there for a short second as Sara, as if she knew without a word what his intention was, darted beneath his outstretched arm and sunk her blade into the now vulnerably exposed armpit of the dragoon, just above the curve of the armoured breastplate.

  She stabbed twice, fierce and fast, and then spun out of the way as Sharp stepped back and kicked the dying body into the path of its twin, who was snarling and swinging at him. The surviving Wight was a quick thinker and an even faster mover because he leapt sideways, avoiding getting tangled in the corpse, and turned his blow into a sudden backhanded slash at Sara who was already moving to get behind him.

  She parried the blow, but the force of it knocked her spinning backwards. She checked herself from falling by reaching behind her and bracing on the downthrust blade of her other knife. The Wight immediately turned fast, hacking a brutal upwards slash at Sharp, who caught the gutting blow in the fork made by his two crossed knives, keeping the sword just below waist level, inches from splitting him in half.

  Sara had not stopped spinning, but used the momentum to pivot on the knifepoint, which cut a small spiral curl of wood-shaving from the floorboard as she slashed around with the other blade, held at full length, cutting across the exposed back of the snarling Wight’s knees, hamstringing him.

  He grunted in surprise as his legs began to collapse, and in the instant of realisation, Sharp pushed his blade aside with one knife while with the other he stabbed a single devastatingly surgical lunge through the helmet’s face guard, jabbing in and out of the Wight’s eye so fast that Ida, who saw it, almost missed it.

  And as the Wight crumpled and fell backwards, Sara used the last of her gyratory momentum to unfold upwards through his collapse so she seemed to shrug his boot-heels over her shoulder as she stood.

  And then it was suddenly over as his heavy, helmeted head hit the floor behind her with a final thump.

  “You are unhurt?” said Sharp.

  “Never better,” she said. And Ida again was unsure whether she saw a smile go between them, so fast was its passing.

  Charlie lurched out of unconsciousness, his eyes opening to see that the white ceiling now had a spray of dark liquid slashed across it, liquid that was dripping back onto the ground. Some of it splashed into his face and he wiped at it groggily and looked at the blood smeared on his hand. And then Ida swung into view overhead, reaching a hand down.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not yours.”

  She pulled him to his feet and he saw the Mirror Wights—one was awkwardly sprawled on the floor of the cage, his eye welling blood out of a brutal wound which made Charlie want to be sick, so he looked away and saw the other sitting against the wall by the mirror-box, his legs splayed wide with his hand clamped impotently over the blood spilling out of the ruined armpit above his armoured breastplate.

  Sharp and Sara were crouched in front of him, talking urgently.

  “What?” grunted Charlie.

  Ida shook her head.

  “I’ve never seen anyone move as fast as he did: he just sort of flowed around them, under the
blades, moved like water; she got behind them before they knew she was there; he lunged and blocked and she attacked in the gaps he made. It was very, very swift,” she whispered. “I mean, I work in a team, and we are also very good, but … they are something else, those two.”

  “Wish I’d seen it,” said Charlie, rubbing the knot on the back of his head and wincing.

  “Wish I could do it,” snorted Ida. “Perhaps he can teach me.”

  Sara and Sharp were knelt close together, simultaneously questioning the Wight while binding the gash in Sharp’s hand.

  “Mountfellon,” said Sara. “Did he bring you here?”

  “Mount-who?” said the Wight.

  “He owns this house,” said Sara.

  “What was the deal? What did you do for him?” said Sharp.

  “Dunno whose house this is,” choked the Wight, blood welling over his lower teeth. “Just a place we lucked on. Place to take a Blood Toll, somewhere we …”

  He coughed the shiny blood onto the dull white breastplate.

  “Thought all our Christmases come at once, we did.”

  “Who invited you?” said Sara. “Was it Mountfellon or The Citizen? Was it a man called Robespierre?”

  “Don’t … know these names,” said the Wight.

  “What did he want from you in return?” said Sharp.

  “Don’t know who … No one invited us,” said the Wight. “By the blood I swear; we only found it because we saw ’em coming out. We saw them passing, two old men, one looked like death himself …”

  He spat more blood and looked into a distance further away than the walls of the room.

  “Well. Well. Well. Think I’m taking the short road home now …”

  “The men,” said Sharp, shaking him gently.

  The eyes returned to the room for a moment.

  “The men? Oh … we tracked back to see where they come from … we just looked through the mirror … found these things just left and caged … we just milked … we just milked … we just milk—” and he stopped with a shudder.

  And then he just left himself.

  He didn’t slump; his eyes didn’t roll back: he just wheezed and halted, mouth half open, waterfall of blood stilled at his teeth, chin and breastplate streaked with its outflow, eyes now vacant and lifeless.