The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  He hooked open the door just at the moment Magill and Armbruster stepped out of the mirror, followed by Cait. They knocked Lucy forward towards Dee whose arm lashed out and pinned her inside the cabinet, with her back against the mirror facing the one she had just come out of.

  Before anyone could react, he switched hands, and had his knife at her neck.

  Cait and the men had no time to respond before The Citizen had scrambled towards the cabinet with his new pistol pointed at them. He moved so fast that his chair crashed backwards and made a rattling thump on the floor. They instinctively backed up against the mirror facing Lucy, all trapped in the glazed cell of the cabinet, facing each other in a way that would have been ridiculous had it not been so fraught with impending peril.

  “Be very still,” hissed Dee.

  “I have five bullets,” said The Citizen. “More than enough for all of you.”

  “Mr. Sharp,” said Armbruster. “What is th—”

  There was a banging on the door which stopped them in their tracks as a hesitant man’s voice came through it, evidently alerted by the noise of the falling chair.

  “Monsieur! Monsieur! Est-ce qu’il y a un problème?”

  “Non! Allez vous en, et n’espionnez pas vos supérieurs!” barked The Citizen.

  “Nous sommes à Paris?” said Lucy, further jolted by the familiar sound of the language of her childhood in these unfamiliar surroundings. “You said we were staying in North America … Are we … in France?”

  “No,” said Magill uneasily. “Montreal. Canada. Mr. Sharp, why—?”

  “You think that’s Sharp?” said Cait. “That’s not Jack Sharp.”

  “She’s right. He isn’t—” said Lucy, who then stopped as Dee jabbed the knife, pricking her skin and drawing a bead of blood.

  “Silence,” The Citizen hissed.

  “Lucy Harker,” snarled Dee. “Another word and your head parts company with your neck.”

  The fact this man she had never consciously met knew her name froze Lucy.

  “Lucy Harker?” said The Citizen. “Well, well, and so it is. You see, Dee, nothing is wasted. For this is indeed Lucy Harker, though what she is doing here, so far from London, is a great mystery …”

  He moved with unrelenting deliberation towards Cait and Armbruster and Magill, the gun unwavering enough to stop Cait’s hand in its almost imperceptible attempt to shuck the razor from her sleeve.

  “Good,” he said. “If you’d carried on doing that, your gentlemen friends would have been wearing the inside of your head.”

  “No harm meant,” said Cait.

  “And none done,” he said, as he came close enough to rest the muzzle of the gun on her chest. “But you are uninvited, whoever you are, and if there are more of you about to step through the mirror, you will be the first to die.”

  “There’s just us, friend,” said Armbruster. “Mr. Sharp there knows us fine.”

  “He may know you, but he’s not Sharp,” said Cait.

  “What do you want to do?” said Dee, looking at The Citizen.

  The Citizen smiled and stepped into the cabinet, between Lucy and Dee on one side, and the others facing them. He reached up and into the cabinet, where he touched the design, which Lucy saw was an inlaid mosaic or marquetry of some type, like a compass rose made from different shades of brown and white marble that glistered like mutton fat in the light of the candles. Something clicked and he leant forward. Pushing Armbruster with the barrel of his gun so he in turn reversed into Cait, backing her against the mirror.

  “Steady now, mister,” she said. “Just tell us what you want.”

  Lucy, behind him, could not see his face, but she heard the chilly smile in his voice.

  “I just wish you to leave the way you came.”

  Magill’s eyes were still locked on the ceiling of the cabinet.

  “What did you do?”

  “Just asked you. Politely. To leave,” said The Citizen, shifting the gun to Cait, prodding her. Armbruster grabbed her arm, steadying her so she wouldn’t fall into the mirror.

  “Hold on. You did something to the cabinet,” he said.

  The Citizen swung the gun off Cait and pointed it at Armbruster.

  “Just shoot them,” said Dee. “I don’t know why you—”

  Lucy found the one thing that she could do. Now the gun was off Cait, she opened her hand and let go of Digger’s leash.

  The dog sprang forward.

  Armbruster moved with shocking speed. His hand batted the gun out of his face and up towards the roof of the cabinet.

  The Citizen pulled the trigger.

  The gun detonated with the sound of a cannon in the confines of the room.

  The bullet powdered the thin ceiling of glass and marble above him, but before gravity had a chance to shower him with the dropping fragments, the dog had hit him in the small of the back, powering him forward into Cait with enough velocity that they tangled and took the others with them as they fell away out of the room, through the mirror, leaving Dee and Lucy staring at themselves in the now unobstructed glass.

  Lucy saw the horror-struck disbelief in Dee’s eyes, felt the knife waver.

  “What have you done?” he gasped.

  The unaccustomed quiver in his voice was matched by a slackening of the knife pressure on her neck. She threw herself backwards as fast as she could, away from the wavering blade at her throat, right into the other mirror.

  Dee might have been stupefied, but he was still almost fast enough to stop her.

  She fell into an endless mirrored passage and was nearly on her feet before he tumbled out of the glass she had fallen through and grabbed her by the hair, yanking her head backwards and putting the blade to her neck.

  “You stupid little bitch,” he snarled. “I should open your neck right now.”

  She stayed very still. Everything she wanted to say was stuck in her throat.

  “You have killed him,” said Dee, his voice shaking with disbelief. “Do you know that? You killed him.”

  He stood staring at her, matching her stillness, stunned into gaping immobility by the enormity of what had just happened. And then he spasmed into action as though remembering himself, one hand keeping the blade crooked around her throat, the other sliding over her body like a questing eel as he searched her for her hidden weapons, all of which he found and pocketed.

  He stood back and was silent for another unnervingly long period, calming his breathing, not so blank this time, the cogs of his mind now visibly turning as he adjusted to the new reality.

  “Right,” he said. “Right.”

  He found a length of silk rope in his coat and looped it around her neck. Only then did he step back and look at her. His voice was not so much angry as tired.

  “You killed him,” he repeated, as if trying to convince his mind of what his eyes had just seen. “The Citizen. A stupid little girl killed a great man like that, almost by accident, as if it was nothing.”

  “I just sent him after the others,” she said, regaining a little spirit. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “It was a trap,” said Dee, looking as exhausted as he sounded. “One he’d used before. Designed to deal with meddlers like you. You killed your friends too, by the way. There would be irony in it if it were not such a bleak, bloody tragedy.”

  Cait and the Americans were dead.

  Lucy felt the truth of it like a sudden aching hollow had opened up behind her sternum. She gulped but it didn’t go away. She felt her eyes go treacherously hot. She took a deep breath. Then another.

  “Pretty stupid to get caught in his own snare then,” she said, deciding not to cry in front of this terrifying goat-like man.

  “He was more intelligent than any man you will ever meet,” hissed Dee. “Do you know who he was, what he did, how he cheated death …?”

  “Ah,” said Lucy.

  “Ah what?” said Dee.

  “A cheat was he?” said Lucy. “Cheats never prosper.”


  He yanked the rope hard, cinching the slipknot, making her stumble and choke.

  “I should pull this tighter,” he snarled. “Watch you strangle and die. Because that’s what he’s doing right now. That’s what your friends and that damn dog are doing. Dying, drowning, most likely, without oxygen at the bottom of a very deep lake in the middle of nowhere.”

  She clawed the loop loose enough to breathe again.

  “What?” she said.

  “The trap. That’s where they went. A pair of mirrors dropped by accident from a canoe while one of the damn coureurs de bois was crossing a lake in the wilderness. Nearly killed me when I looked through and found it, and that was summer. He liked the idea of it as a trap. His insurance, he called it.”

  He shook his head.

  “Our plan was the finest stratagem in the world. And you—a nothing, a witless little girl, not even a man—you broke it.”

  He pulled the Coburg Ivory from within his long coat and held it in front of him, rotating it in his hand and slowly sweeping it in a wide arc until he heard the first tell-tale click. He stopped still and faced the direction it was pointing.

  “I break things a lot,” said Lucy, hearing the dull pain in her own voice. “It’s my special skill.”

  “Well,” he said, waving her forward. “Now you walk. You walk home to London with me.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill me?” she said. “You wanted to. I saw it in your eyes.”

  “Because you’re a hostage. And sometimes hostages have value.”

  “There’s no one in London would pay for me,” she said. “You could just let me go.”

  “There’s no one in London that you know would pay for you,” he said, pointing the ivory balls at her. “But what you do not know could fill an ocean. Walk on and keep silent. I don’t want to miss a click from the get-you-home.”

  So Lucy walked ahead of him down the sterile uniformity of the mirrored passage, fighting the sense of vertigo triggered by the unchanging vista opening up in front of her, and thinking that wherever he was taking her it wasn’t home for her. Because she had no home, not now, not ever.

  Cait was dead. And she’d killed her.

  CHAPTER 45

  EXCHANGE OF GIFTS

  Sara found the neatly folded blanket and the bracelets on a stool just inside the door of The Folley when she went to open the door. It was being pummelled by a very thin and energetic message boy who had clearly run all the way from the Bedlam Hospital, whence he had brought a badly penned message from Ketch, written just this morning and referring to the previous day’s visitors to Coram.

  She had given him a small coin and a tin cup of water, and Cook had given him a day-old iced bun to see him on his way, and then Sara had read the note.

  “What?” said Cook.

  “It appears Coram Templebane has spoken. Ketch thinks he wants to speak again. To us.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Cook. “I’m making coffee.”

  “Maybe,” said Sara, looking at the note.

  “What are those?” said Sharp, coming in behind her. She looked at the triple-wood bracelets.

  “The Green Man is gone. He left these …”

  “What are they?” said Charlie who entered from the other door with Ida close behind him, both looking flushed with running.

  “Oak, ash, thorn,” said Sharp, taking the proffered note from Sara’s hand, brow rucking as he read it.

  “Put them on,” said Sara, holding them out, then sliding one onto her own wrist.

  “For luck?” said Ida, taking one.

  “For protection. We looked after him; he’s returning the favour the only way he can,” said Hodge, who’d been sitting by the fire with Jed at his feet, so still no one had noticed him. “Pass me one of them.”

  Charlie handed one to him.

  “What are you two looking so hot and bothered about?” said Sharp, giving the note back to Sara.

  “The Sluagh are back at The Gut,” said Ida.

  “Right,” said Cook. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the room where the injured Sluagh lay. “Well, he’s definitely dying in there. What do we do?”

  Sara and Sharp followed her back and looked into the room. The Sluagh lay on the bed, so still they had to watch for a moment to see if he was still breathing.

  “Look,” said Sharp, pointing at the twist of twigs circling the Sluagh’s thin wrist. “The Green Man looked in here too before he left.”

  “Yes,” said Sara, looking down at the fresh bracelet circling her own wrist. “And I think he told us what to do.”

  She squared her shoulders and looked up.

  “We’ll get it done and then see what this is that Coram Templebane wants to tell us.”

  “He’s mad,” said Hodge. “Like as not, we’ll schlep over there and find he’s clammed up again.”

  “We’ll deal with that if it happens,” said Sharp. “Let’s go and see our tattooed friends.”

  The Sluagh stayed in the deep shadow of the warehouse, watching Sharp walk across the bridge towards them.

  “Is The Smith returned?” said the taller Sluagh with a nasty smile. He wore a Woodcock Crown.

  “No,” said Sharp. “I am.”

  “Oh well,” said the Sluagh. “I’m sure he’ll be along directly. But if you want to match blades, I’d be happy to show you your insides to pass the time.”

  “I haven’t come to fight,” said Sharp. “And unless I see you harming anyone, I will keep my blades sheathed.”

  “Scared are you?” grunted the other Sluagh, stepping forward from behind Woodcock Crown. It was Badger Skull.

  “Of many things,” said Sharp. “For I am not a fool or a braggart like you.”

  Woodcock Crown hissed and began to draw his blade.

  Sharp didn’t look at him; he kept his gaze locked on the eyes of the other one.

  “But we are not on the list of things you are scared of,” said Badger Skull, putting his hand on the arm of his companion, stilling him. He looked behind Sharp.

  “The one with the arrow gun is watching, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Sharp.

  “But that is not why you are not frightened of us,” said Badger Skull. “Why is that, then?”

  “Because I know my capabilities,” said Sharp. “And I also know why I have come to talk to you.”

  “Why would we talk to you, mongrel blood?” said Woodcock Crown. “Why would the Pure consort with crossbred cur like you?”

  “Because I come to ask your help,” said Sharp.

  There was a shocked silence. The two Sluagh looked at one another.

  “Our help?” said Woodcock Crown. “What kind of trick are you hoping to play—?”

  “No trick,” said Sharp. “I need your help.”

  “Well, you can whistle for it like the spavined whelp you—”

  “Enough,” said Badger Skull, putting a hand out again and planting it on the chest of his companion, pushing him back a pace.

  “What would make The Oversight ask for our help, we who are sworn enemies?” he said.

  “Only sworn on your side,” said Sara, stepping out of the gloom behind them. The Sluagh spun, blades instantly drawn, clearly thinking they had been encircled and were about to be ambushed. Sara didn’t flinch, but just kept walking towards them, arms raised to waist level, palms forward, open and empty.

  “I’m not armed,” she said, “but I would give you my hand.”

  “Why would I take it?” said Woodcock Crown, bristling with fury, straining against his elder’s firm grip.

  “Because if I invite you and lead you by the hand, you are able to cross running water, are you not?” said Sara.

  Both Sluagh gaped at her.

  “And why would you do that?” said Badger Skull.

  “If not to trap us?” said the other.

  “Because we rescued one of you from a laboratory where a man was experimenting on him. Taking his blood. And he is very close
to death, and we do not have the knowledge of how to help him recover,” said Sara.

  Again the Sluagh gaped at her.

  “Please come quickly,” she said.

  “Why would you do this?” said the older Sluagh. She held up her fist and showed him her bloodstone ring.

  “Because Law and Lore command us,” she said, and then she turned her fist and opened it into a beckoning hand. “Bring three men to carry him, because he cannot walk.”

  Badger Skull paused, then reached out and took her hand and let her lead him across the narrow bridge.

  Cook had warned Amos that Sluagh were coming. He had blanched and looked panicked, but she told him why, and though he tried to tell her the Sluagh were not to be trusted, in the end he allowed himself to be shooed upstairs until they were gone. Even so, he felt the vibration of them as they entered, and did everything he could do not to listen to their thoughts and conversation by retreating behind the carefully erected buttress in his mind.

  When Badger Skull and Woodcock Crown were shown the injured Sluagh, there was a moment when their shock could have turned to violent fury. Amos, despite himself, heard their thoughts begin to come to a bloody boil. But they hadn’t spilled over into ugly recrimination, mainly because Cook bustled in with a blanket and showed how four of them could take a corner each and carry him more comfortably. And then, after a close examination, Badger Skull had tersely instructed the Sluagh who had accompanied them to pick up the wounded one and get him, with all speed, out of London and up to the Scowle as fast as they could.

  They had followed his orders, and Woodcock Crown, who seemed to be a kind of second in command, led them at a fast pace back to the bridge, escorted by Sara and Sharp and Cook and Charlie.

  “We will send him to the Shee,” said Badger Skull as they re-crossed the bridge.

  “Will he survive the journey?” said Cook.

  “If he does not, he will die among his own,” said Woodcock Crown.

  “And if he survives,” said Badger Skull, “the Shee can heal better than we.”

  “We wish him well,” said Sara.

  Woodcock Crown halted the carrying detail and turned back.