The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  Badger Skull and the other Sluagh stood looking at him in the moonlight. The night was hushed and scarcely a leaf moved in the still air. There was something in Templebane’s demeanour that prevented Badger Skull from asking him for help, though that was what he had come for. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust him—which he didn’t—it was that every transaction with a Templebane left him feeling toyed with. Maybe, he thought, he should just kill him and be done. Maybe the Herne’s plan was a bad one. He remembered the Shee, however, and rather than leaping at the fat man with his blade, he stopped to think. The only sound was the light babble of the rill and something small shrieking in the woods at the bottom of the drive. Issachar waited and did not blanch beneath the weight of their scrutiny.

  “You are scared,” said Badger Skull after a while. “You would not be justifying yourself if you were not trying to persuade me of your friendship.”

  “Of course I’m afraid, but I am not unmanned by it, and nor am I your friend,” said Issachar, voice blunt as a hammer. “I am something much more useful and reliable to you: I am your go-between.”

  “Go-between?”

  “Go-between, jobber, broker, middle-man—call it what you will. I get what you cannot get for yourself,” said Issachar. “Sometimes even things you don’t yet know you need.”

  “And what do you sell that we could possibly now need?” said Badger Skull.

  “Intelligence,” said Issachar. “Knowledge. Offered, as I have said, by an honest broker.”

  “A ‘broker,’ you say,” rasped Badger Skull, and he spat contemptuously on the moon-silvered grass. “I broke the Iron Prohibition. I do not need you.”

  “Then break this twig,” said Issachar, holding it out. “If you broke the Iron Prohibition and think that means you don’t need me and what I can do for you all, just break this twig.”

  The Sluagh snorted.

  “I’m not here to play games.”

  “Then break the twig and prove it,” said Issachar.

  “Why don’t I break it and then stab both jaggy ends in your ears?” said Badger Skull. “I could do that, you know. Just for being a friend to Mountfellon.”

  “I am no friend of his. Our relationship was purely professional. But if you think you can, be my guest: here is the twig and here are my ears at your disposal.”

  Badger Skull stepped forward, hand outstretched, and then stopped with a jerk. He tried to walk forward, but his body rebelled. He exhaled in a tight grunt of frustration.

  He looked down at the thin rill which ran between them.

  “Iron no longer confounds you, but you cannot cross running water,” said Issachar.

  “You are not telling me anything yet that I do not know,” growled Badger Skull.

  “And yet you thought you could break this twig,” said Issachar.

  “You think it is clever or wise to make sport of us?” said Badger Skull, and held up his hand.

  Shadows moved and rippled and resolved into a host of Sluagh standing in a rough perimeter of the portion of the orchard on his side of the rill.

  Issachar quelled the cold fear that ran up his spine at the sight of so many nightwalkers so close to him. He knew that he was only safe on his side of the rill for a while, and that the Sluagh had their convoluted ancient paths through the countryside, one of which would inevitably lead them to his side sooner or later. In fact, for all he knew, other Sluagh were in the darkness behind him. It was not beyond the Sluagh to have already planned a pincer movement and sent others along that tangled path ahead of this meeting. And with that in mind, and acutely conscious that the fortunes of the house of Templebane were at a perilously low ebb, he did what a normally cautious broker never does, except when it is absolutely necessary and unavoidable. He did it knowing that if he did not adjust to the realignment of powers consequent on both his failed attempt on The Oversight and the eradication of the Iron Prohibition he was lost anyway.

  He stepped back across the rill and put the twig in Badger Skull’s hand.

  “Why?” said Badger Skull. “Why do you think I will not do what I said I would do?”

  “Because you are no fool,” said Issachar. “You just forgot to notice something for a moment. We all make those small mistakes; the secret is to adjust and correct ourselves when we do.”

  “I could be no fool and still kill you,” said Badger Skull, looking at the twig.

  “You are not going to kill me,” said Issachar. “You are going to let me give you a present. And then we are going to make a deal. Just like old times.”

  “I need no present,” said Badger Skull.

  “It is just a piece of information,” said Issachar. “My stock in trade, as it were. It is the present whereabouts of Francis Blackdyke, Viscount Mountfellon.”

  “He is at Gallstaine Hall, protected by running water which we cannot cross,” rasped Badger Skull, throwing the twig and grabbing Issachar by the throat. “Tell me something I do not know, and you may live.”

  “You do not need get to him at Gallstaine,” said Issachar, his voice beginning to strangle. “Your b – broker has the means by which he can be lured into the open, away from his place of safety and put at your mercy.”

  There was a pause as his eyes bugged with the pressure around his throat and Badger Skull stared into them, his grip unshakeable.

  “You can do this?” he hissed, releasing his grip on Templebane’s throat.

  Templebane gasped for air, and then straightened and held out a hand, rubbing his neck with the other.

  “The old deal. Like for like, aid for aid, and my word is, as ever, my bond,” he said.

  “And yet you betray Mountfellon,” said Badger Skull.

  “No,” said Issachar. “He betrayed me. I am merely retaliating, as I said, like for like—”

  “Mountfellon wants power,” interrupted the Sluagh. “What do you want?”

  “I want protection from The Oversight,” said Issachar. “They think I tried to destroy them. I do not think they know where I am, nor that they can, in their reduced state, operate far outside London. But they will be coming for me.”

  “And did you try to destroy them?” said Badger Skull.

  “Of course,” said Issachar. “They were becoming an obstacle to my honest trade.”

  Badger Skull grinned.

  “Well. I cannot fault you for that. But what else do you want, broker-man? What do you want to survive for?”

  “I want to let the great men and fools scrabble for what they think is power, while I make a profit by going between them,” said Templebane. “For if my family’s history proves anything, it is that the great and the deluded come and go, as their power and wealth waxes and wanes, but the brokers remain. And people always want information.”

  The Sluagh reached out and gripped his hand.

  “The old alliance,” he said. “Like for like, aid for aid, if you bring us to Mountfellon.”

  “We get to Mountfellon by giving him what he thinks he wants,” said Issachar, shaking the cold hand of the Sluagh. “And it may be that in doing that we deliver a fatal blow to The Oversight into the bargain.”

  CHAPTER 38

  THE VIOLATION

  Sara had walked through the house, her hand trailing the stone and the plasterwork, pausing as she sifted through the fragments of the past recorded in the walls. It was a draining process, trying to keep calm enough to trace a single path through a three-dimensional maze full of nasty surprises that could jump out and bite you just when you least expected it.

  It had taken her no time to ascertain that The Citizen had been a guest here for a considerable while, news which had led to Sharp reacting to the news with an oath, the only time she had ever heard him swear. She had been similarly appalled that their greatest enemy, the man who had been responsible for the death of her parents and eighty-three of their companions, had been quietly ensconced in their city without them even having a hint of it, but the business of controlled glinting required a
smooth mind to succeed so she put this thought away to unpack and examine later, and continued.

  On the first floor there was a small salon leading off the main room: it was a well-proportioned space, with high ceilings, a bookcase on one side, tall windows glazed with the opaque milk-glass with which Mountfellon secured his privacy, a hard parquet floor on which stood an elegant chaise-longue upholstered in faded rose silk and, on the wall at right angles to it, a large painting or mirror hung with a sombre dust-cloth like a shroud.

  “Well, this is a more pleasant room,” said Sharp.

  “No,” said Sara, teeth gritting as she trailed her hand along the plasterwork. “No. It isn’t.”

  Time jagged and bit into her as she found the most pungent strand of the room’s history hiding in the warp and weft of the varied pasts recorded in the walls.

  Sara went rigid as she glinted an earlier night lit by candles.

  A young woman sat on the chaise-longue—which was disconcertingly in quite another part of the salon, beneath a large giltwood pier-glass which reflected the flames of the many candles lining the room.

  Her blonde hair was neatly put up in a style more than two decades out of fashion, and she wore a pale blue dress which looked well on the faded rose of the chaise-longue.

  She was reading.

  And then time jumped and a man was in the room, tall, young, dark-haired, smiling and sliding onto the seat next to her, carefully taking the book from her hand and replacing it with a glass of champagne.

  Sara gasped as she saw the profile and recognised it.

  It was the young Mountfellon.

  And then the two of them were sitting comfortably together, and the candles were lower, and he was opening a second bottle of champagne.

  They both laughed as the cork popped, bouncing off the plasterwork and hitting the door with a loud smacking noise.

  “The servants!” she said, laughing.

  “I have locked the door,” he smiled. “No one will surprise us.”

  He filled her glass and then his own.

  “Do you love me?” he whispered.

  Sara felt unclean, watching the intimacy, this private moment of love, for that was what she saw glowing in the young woman’s eyes, that and a kind of mischievous sparkle.

  “Why, Lord Mountfellon!” she said. “You know I hold you in the highest affection, to be sure.”

  “Don’t joke,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Francis,” she said, and the warmth was still in her eyes.

  “Do you?” he said, more urgent now. And Sara sees his eyes have their own warmth, but a very different one, one that surrounds them and makes them seem hot and uncomfortable.

  He turns and fills her glass.

  Unseen by her, he pours a powder into it.

  Then time jolts.

  And the young woman has moved away. Not far, just a hand’s breadth, and she is laughing and leaning back on the arm of the chaise-longue and he is not laughing but he is leaning forward.

  Time slices again

  and he is touching her.

  And she is not laughing.

  She is blinking too much and not quite right. Her face is flushed.

  She is pressed against the arm of the divan. But she is talking, and trying to make light.

  “No,” she says. “Francis. It is the wine. I feel a little—”

  His smile is no longer young or happy or kind.

  “It is these new friends,” he says. “This group, this sect you have joined, whose damned ring you wear.”

  “You know nothing of them,” she laughs, trying to cajole him back to a sunnier place. “And you a Man of Science, judging without observation, surely that is poor practice—”

  “Do not mock me,” he says, his lip curling. “I do not apologise for being an open, rational man who seeks to understand the physical world. If the Royal Society was good enough for Newton, it is good enough for me. It is not some damned secret sect of charlatans.”

  He lifts her hand. Twists it cruelly to show her the ring.

  “Francis,” she says, trying to laugh. “You hurt. It is not a sect. It is a Free Company.”

  “How can it be free when you are not at liberty to tell me about—?”

  “I cannot,” she laughs, but now the sound is forced and something close to fear has taken the place of warmth.

  “I want you,” he says, reaching for her.

  A small explosion of crystal at her feet.

  Her champagne glass, dropped to the parquet.

  “No, Francis!” she says.

  She looks down at her smashed glass and then her hand, as if surprised it should have let the thing slip.

  “What have you done?”

  His smile is a travesty.

  “It is not only you who can have secrets.”

  She shakes her head fast three times, as if trying to loosen the grip of whatever has her fumbling at things.

  Time slices. Sara gasps.

  The woman says,

  “NO, Francis.”

  Material rips.

  “No … don’t … please! this is not right …!”

  “It is right,” he snarls. “It is MY right!”

  Buttons ping across the parquet floor.

  And she fights.

  Kicks at him.

  Squirms an arm free of his grip.

  Throws a punch. Hard.

  He jerks his head back.

  Sara sees the fist hit the giltwood on the frame of the chaise—hears the crack as the stone in the ring breaks.

  Sees the gouge in the wood.

  Mountfellon laughs now.

  Then gasps as her second punch smashes into his cheek.

  A glancing blow.

  Leaves a red furrow.

  Broken ring scoring a blood trail into the side of his nose.

  He snarls.

  Time slices again.

  Weight and strength have prevailed.

  Sara cannot shut her eyes, however hard she tries. Caught in the inexorable grip of the glinted moment.

  And of all the bad things she has been forced to witness through her gift, this is one of the worst.

  Not the physical violation alone.

  The girl’s eyes.

  The initial disbelief, the innocence destroyed, the love dying as he—

  And then time slices

  Mercifully, for once

  And now the candles have guttered and only a few cast a much dimmer light over the aftermath.

  He sits on a chair at a distance. Wiping blood from himself.

  Coldly watching her make herself outwardly whole again. Fumbled fingers trying to match torn buttonholes with absent buttons.

  She is in pain.

  She is scared.

  But she is something else too, and whatever this new hard thing is, she is becoming it in front of Sara’s eyes.

  “Please open the door,” she says calmly.

  “I think you have all but broken my nose,” he says, equally calmly.

  She looks down at her ring. It is broken. Half the bloodstone is missing.

  “And you have broken my ring,” she said.

  She does not care.

  “What did you put in my drink to muffle me so?”

  “It does not matter,” he said.

  “No. I suppose it does not. Please open the door, Milord.”

  He reaches for her hand. In the circumstances, the smile on his face is grotesque.

  “Not until you call me Francis again. Come. It was not so bad …”

  She steps away.

  “I will call you Francis,” she says, rationally, calmly, “but only when I return and stop your heart as you have killed mine.”

  She walks straight towards the chaise-longue and then, without pausing, steps up on it and takes a further step

  into the mirror

  and passes right through it.

  Mountfellon spasms off his chair, which falls back with a crash as he stands there frozen in disbelievi
ng shock.

  “How?” he chokes as he stumbles across the floor and puts his hand to the surface of the mirror, which stops it dead.

  “But … how?”

  Sara can see every detail of his face, clearly reflected in the mirror.

  It is a rare thing to see the moment of transmutation, the moment a life steps from one state to another and she has seen two in these painful shards of the past.

  She has seen an innocence violated and lost, and its replacement by a blunt resolve towards vengeance.

  And now she is seeing the violator’s eyes as the steely and self-proclaimed Man of Science is presented with irrefutable evidence that there is another set of rules which disproves the very system by which he had held the world works.

  His eyes stutter as he comes to understand that the rational mechanism which he thought underpinned things was no more than a first layer hiding a second and more arcane clockwork by which the universe is really governed.

  Sara is witnessing a mind convulsing and deciding not to judge itself mad. She is seeing the birth of obsession.

  The shock has changed the young Mountfellon.

  He no longer looks stunned and disbelieving. He looks hungry, and fiercely so.

  He looks made anew and now wholly consumed by the need to control the supranatural world and all of its hidden clockwork.

  And then glinting ended and the past stopped jolting into her and Sara felt Sharp catch her shoulders and she leant there for a moment, allowing herself the luxury of being held up.

  And then she nodded and turned to look into his worried face.

  “What?” he said.

  She needed time to absorb what she’d seen, and the implications of it. She walked to the chaise-longue, now—disorientatingly—at right angles to where it had just been in her mind. She bent and looked at its giltwood back, running her gloved hand along it, finding the dint where the woman had broken her ring.

  She pointed at the shrouded frame on the wall.

  “Do you know what that is?” she said.

  “A painting?”

  “It’s a pier-glass,” she said.

  He crossed and twitched the material hanging over it, revealing the reflective surface. He let the material fall back.

  “Just as well to leave i—” he began.

  “Jack,” she said. “I think I know who Lucy Harker is.”