The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  Garlickhythe smiled

  and then slammed backwards, his head smacking into Issachar’s side with enough force to wind him, and then, horribly, to stick there.

  “Wh—?” said Issachar, looking down in shock.

  Garlickhythe stared back at him with one lifeless eye, the other one having been replaced by the feathered end of a crossbow bolt. He shoved the body away and yelped as the arrowhead, which had pinned it to his side, wrenched out of his flesh. It was not a mortal injury, just a flesh wound, but Templebane had a lot of flesh and it bled copiously as he stood gaping down at it in disbelief.

  Sara was gasping in the water, having been dragged out by the current, weakened by the bullet in her leg. Something hit her hard in the ribs, and she scrabbled hold of it. It was the last remnant of the ruined jetty, a tilted piling that canted crazily off its original vertical, now pointing downstream about a foot below the waterline. It held her steady against the relentless pressure of water.

  Hodge was crouched on the steps, protected by the corner in the wall, hurriedly trying to clear Jed’s eyes, the dog quivering with tension but allowing his friend to dab at him with his handkerchief soaked in water from the puddle he was sitting in.

  He shook his head and barked. One eye was clear, the other foggy but clearing. Hodge saw the devastation in front of him for the first time, through the dog’s eyes.

  “No!” he breathed. “It’s a bloody massacre.”

  He pushed himself to his feet and pulled the knives from his belt.

  “Come on boy. Stay close. Let’s go among ’em.”

  He kept close to the wall and began to edge around the corner.

  In the shadows by the Irongate, Badger Skull pointed at the fallen members of The Oversight splayed on the gravel.

  “We must help them.”

  “Are you run mad? Why would we?” snarled Woodcock Crown, grabbing Badger Skull’s arm. “Just because they saved one of ours? Their debt is far from paid. No, brother, we should finish them while they’re down.”

  Badger Skull snarled back at him.

  “If we start keeping close tally on our debts, we are no better than the Hungry World. And if we are no better than the Hungry World, who are we?”

  He spat on the ground between them.

  “If you wish to fight, fight me—or get out of my way. The Shee was right. Change does not mean surrender.”

  Charlie pushed himself to his feet once more, his face now streaked with blood, which he wiped from his eyes as he reached for Sharp and tried to drag him to some kind of safety behind one of the thick wooden buttresses.

  Sara’s heart leapt. If Charlie was risking his life again to pull the deadweight of Sharp’s unresponsive body, it must mean he could see he was still alive.

  A wave thrown by the churning progress of the paddle-tug swamped her from behind, and she lost sight of the shore, and then as she coughed and spat back into the air and shook the water from her eyes she saw Charlie still on his feet, but now he was twisting away from the river to face something new, something which killed that treacherous leap of hope in her heart stone dead.

  A compact swarm of unmistakably tattooed men came boiling out of the deeper shadows, fierce-faced men with bronze blades like broken-backed sickles in their hands. In an instant, the Sluagh engulfed Charlie and Sharp like an angry wave, and then more bow wash from the tug dunked her beneath the water and when she fought clear again the cut was now empty and Charlie was gone and Sharp was gone, and she knew with absolute certainty that any opportunity to unsay the things she had said was gone too, and gone for ever, as was the chance to say new, kinder, truer things to make up for the past words, because even if she survived this, she would never see him again, not alive.

  She would, if spared, make herself see whatever butcher’s shambles the Sluagh had hacked him into, but only to fire her resolve to now burn them out of the world once and for all.

  And hanging on half-drowned in the Thames, she realised the true horror of her love, that in this moment she would burn a world to avenge him, two worlds if it would bring him back even for an hour. But of course it wouldn’t. Natural or supranatural, one thing was constant and irrevocable: death was death, and though everyone’s last door was different and passed through alone, all those doors opened only once and slammed shut for ever as soon as that final threshold had been crossed.

  No one came back.

  And worse than that was the thought that this moment would pass.

  This was the split curse of the clear mind Sara Falk bore, a mind always in the moment but always watching herself in the moment too: even as she hung in the water, clinging to the mooring ring, seeing everything she loved die, she was outside herself, knowing worse truths than the ones unfolding in front of her eyes.

  This moment would pass.

  Time would move on.

  She would burn no worlds, for no good would come of it.

  She would mourn this instant of clear elemental fury too, as she would grieve the death of Sharp and the others. She would feel perpetual sorrow for the loss of everything she cared for, and she would be left alone to lament the one thing that lasted, the cold obdurate unloved thing which would now fill the shockingly painful gulf in her heart: duty.

  Duty was the last remnant of what she had once had, the thing that would banish any treacherous warmth and softness in her for ever. She would deplore the fact that this thankless duty was all that was left her in place of solace.

  But she would do it, precisely because it was all that remained.

  And because, of course, that was what he would have done in her place.

  She wrenched her eyes from the killing ground of the cut and turned towards the steam tug.

  Mountfellon was dragging the river.

  Mountfellon was trying to steal the Wildfire.

  There was no more last Hand. There was only her.

  She was The Oversight.

  Her duty was to protect the city.

  There was only one way to make sure of that.

  The thought came into her head in a different voice, like a scream from a distant shore.

  Mountfellon must die.

  CHAPTER 51

  A FACE AT THE WINDOW

  The Ghost was gone, the house was empty and Lucy, still sprawled on the chaise-longue, knew if she matched its stillness, she would die. She needed to save herself, because no one was coming to do it for her. She had wadded one of her gloves into a pad she held tightly against the wound in her side to try and staunch the blood flow, but every time she moved it felt as though she was being stabbed again, though this time the sensation was not the dull, winding impact she had mistaken for a mere punch, but an increasingly sharp and disabling pain.

  But pain or no pain, she had to move. If she just stayed on the chaise, she would eventually bleed the rest of her life out onto the already sodden silk upholstery. If she moved, she would probably bleed faster, but it was only in movement that there was any chance of success. Somewhere in the shocked core of herself she was proud she was able to think clearly, and that spark of pride got her off the seat and gave her enough power to stagger on disconcertingly heavy legs across the parquet floor to the windows. The opaque milk-glass hid the street from her and prevented any bystander from seeing her waving for help. So the glass would have to go. She looked around for something with which to break it: there was a candlestick on the table by the bloodied chaise, but she did not have the energy to stumble back and pick it up. Instead she reached for the heavy damask curtains, wrapped them around her fist and punched the nearest pane of glass.

  The fragments fell on top of the portico, and did not land on the street below where they might have caught the attention of any of the several pedestrians nearby. As it was, the noise of the breaking glass was lost in the sound of the city beyond, and no one looked up at the pale face in the broken astragal.

  She tried to shout, but her voice had been taken by the blow. She only heard a thin rasping
wheeze, more like a whisper.

  “Help …”

  She pushed her head and her arm out of the window and waved weakly.

  “Help, please …”

  No one looked up and saw her face, or the bloody hand waving at them. The city drowned her weakening voice.

  But someone looked down and saw her.

  She heard a rapping noise, and raised her head to see a whey-faced child banging at the glass of a closed window in the house opposite. The child was shouting something excitedly and pointing at her. Another face, and adult, swung into view over the child’s shoulder, looked at Lucy in horror, and then dragged the child away from the window.

  Lucy waved one last time and then laid her head on the cool stone of the windowsill. She would just close her eyes for a moment. She would regain her strength with a little rest. Then she would try and shout louder. Surely someone would hear. When she wasn’t so tired.

  Her eyes closed and the city went away.

  CHAPTER 52

  THE BLOODIEST BOY

  It was on one of the moments when Mountfellon was checking the thus far exemplary station-keeping of the steersman that he saw figures running out into the cut at Irongate, and then heard what seemed, over the clank of the steam engine and the sound of the paddle wheels, to be a series of light cracks and popping noises, at which some of the figures appeared unaccountably to topple over …

  The nasty jolt of recognition he felt at the sight of Sara Falk’s unmistakable white plait was too brief for him to parse the oddity of the apparent situation, because at the very moment he saw it, the chain men at his side whooped and cheered and began winding in one of the grapples.

  “We got something, my lord!” the closest one shouted into his ear. The elation in their voices and the alacrity of their actions was a direct consequence of the lavish bonus payment Mountfellon had offered if they found the desired lead caskets.

  Immediately, he lost interest in the strange tableau being enacted in the cut, parking it for later analysis, and focused on what evidently heavy item the chain men were pulling in from the bed of the river.

  This was what his life had been moving towards ever since that fateful moment when he had seen the girl walk through the mirror and reveal the true hidden clockwork behind the world. This was the moment when he would grasp the key to that great and secret mechanism. And with that in his grasp, he would have power, more power than one man had perhaps ever had over his fellow man, the power to move where he would, see what he wished, overhear what he needed, and the ability to take, to influence, to steer, to suborn and manipulate any and everything that came within his ambit. He had never had any doubt of his greatness, either of intellect or station, and the power he was about to acquire seemed, in this moment, to be no more than his due, his birthright. The anticipation he felt was violent and sexual: he was to embark on a destiny whose ends and greatness even he, with his fine mind, could not yet envision. He had a heady sensation, as if he had miraculously grown two feet taller in this moment, and his whole body felt vibrant and engorged with anticipation of the now inevitable.

  Beneath the water, not one but two grapples had hooked on two things.

  The first was caught on the massive ancient chain that stretched from the shore, the one Sharp had tried to use to alert Emmet about the imminent danger churning overhead.

  The second caught Emmet himself, and the casket he had so doggedly attached himself to. The hook trapped his arm against the side of the chest and yanked him off the riverbed with it. It was on this grapple that the excited men on the boat were pulling.

  The first grapple, as the tug continued to power downstream, lifted the submerged chain off the bottom, pulling it tight, bringing it ever closer to the surface, until it went tight as a bar and held suddenly, slewing the paddle boat to one side.

  Closer to the water’s edge, it swung across Sara, knocking her from her handhold on the submerged piling. She had just enough time to see it coming but not enough to realise what it was, though she did manage to grab it with one hand before her grasp on the mooring bolt was torn free and she was dragged out further into the river.

  Mountfellon went sprawling, steadying himself on the iron track that crossed the deck carrying the heavy counterweight chain-box Watkins had been so proud to demonstrate: he nearly lost a hand as the wheels on the carriage jerked forward, just managing to snatch it out of the way on reflex.

  The men hauling on the grapple also lost their footing for an instant, and in that moment the line from the grapple which had trapped Emmet’s arm loosened and he broke free in the water. A second or so later and the steersman and the engineer had stopped the wheels and corrected the rudder and the tug hung in the river, no longer tilting crazily, but moored by the grapple on the old chain which acted like an impromptu anchor.

  “Hold steady!” shouted the men on the grapples, and by the time Mountfellon had pulled himself to his feet they were using a boathook to help drag a dripping wet grey metal casket inboard, a heavy coffinsized object which smashed to the deck boards as it came over the bow rail.

  Mountfellon grabbed a sledgehammer and a chisel and fell upon it in a frenzy of excitement, his heart leaping as he bludgeoned first the lock shackle and then hammered away at the lead solder rendering the thing waterproof. He was oblivious to the difficulty the steersman was having coordinating movements with the engineer as they tried to free the tug from its impromptu anchoring spot. It was only when they tried to take the sledgehammer in order to knock out the pin that held the trawling rig in place that he took any notice, and that was just to tell them to hang off and wait, because the rig was not to be abandoned until they were sure all the caskets were off the damned river bed.

  Then he went back to jimmying the casket open. The first thin crack he made in the seal made him chuckle in satisfaction: a stripe of light was clearly visible from within. He put his hand on the lid. It was warm.

  He laughed exultantly, louder this time. He had it. And in a few more blows he would get the lid open enough to get his hand inside and grasp the Wildfire for himself.

  Issachar had steadied himself, lit the grenadoe and hurled it into the cut below. The fizzing iron ball fell out of the sky and thumped on the mud next to Hodge. Jed ran towards it. Hodge ran for the dog and grabbed blindly at it, his hands flailing so that his mind tried to compensate for the fact he was seeing himself through the dog’s eyes.

  “No, Jed, get away from it!” he yelled hoarsely.

  The terrier stopped. The pause gave Hodge enough time to grab the dog by the scruff of its neck and fling it clear.

  The fuse stopped fizzing. Hodge threw himself away from it too, starting to sprint after his dog, but he ran blindly, straight into the angled beam of one of the buttresses and fell senseless to the ground, tumbling into the gravel on the other side of the selfsame wooden spar that Sharp and Emmet had sat on to watch the Thames.

  The grenade exploded with a short, brutal concussion. Mud flew everywhere, flung savagely away from the epicentre of the blast. Had it not been buried in the ooze before it detonated, no doubt the damage would have been more immediate, but as it was, the detonation blew a ragged hole in the pilings holding back the side of the cut. For a moment, as the mud spray hung in the air in a fine brown mist, nothing happened—and then with an initially slow, and then gut-wrenchingly sudden movement, the gravel slumped out as the bank collapsed on top of Hodge, burying him completely.

  Issachar stood with his back to the wall beside the window, terrified that another bolt would follow its predecessor through the opening if he was to show himself.

  “Go down and finish them off!” he screamed. “Fifty gold guineas for whoever brings me the damned crossbow!”

  Fifty gold guineas was a fortune none of the sons of Issachar had dreamed of possessing, and their blood was up, fired by the rush of adrenalin and the strong sense of mortal power the bucking of the guns in their hands had transmitted, a sense as palpable as the smell of blac
k powder hanging in the air around them. As one they rose from their shooting positions and ran towards the steps leading down into the cut, jostling each other, cursing, fumbling and stumbling as they tried to run and reload at the same time.

  The Sluagh had been far enough away from the blast to avoid lethal wounds, backed up as they were against the iron gate at the narrow blade-end of the cut, but they had been knocked off their feet and bloodied by pieces of gravel and wood shards. They had also been deafened by the bang.

  Badger Skull levered himself to his feet and looked at the splinter of ancient wood sticking out of his calf like a rough-hewn tent peg. He bent and jerked it out with a tight grunt of irritation.

  He caught Charlie’s eye.

  “Stay still,” he said, pointing. “Keep pressure on the bullet hole or you will bleed out.”

  Charlie could not hear what he was saying as his ears were still ringing, but he understood the gruff gesture. He understood it more than he understood what had happened to him and Sharp. He understood it more than the death of Cook, a death he had seen but which was so impossible, so wrong, that he didn’t yet believe it. Sharp was behind him, closer to the gate, so he would have been protected from the worst of the blast by the phalanx of Sluagh between him and it, the band of men getting to their feet and cursing the bloody marks left on them by the grenadoe.

  Charlie had known that he and Sharp were dead the moment the snarling crew had burst from the shadows and surrounded them. He had thought there might have been a chance for him to drag Sharp and himself back into cover, and perhaps to staunch their wounds long enough for some help to arrive, but help had not arrived and the Sluagh had come in their place.

  He had grabbed for his knife and had it immediately cuffed from his hand as other hands had reached for him. Not blades, but hands, hands that grabbed and lifted and dragged both him and Sharp to safety. And when he looked up, the grotesque, terrifying whorl of tattoos looking back down at him had smiled and he recognised Woodcock Crown and Badger Skull, who had leant in and growled: