The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  He didn’t, not fully, but he nodded, not wanting to break the flow of her explanation.

  “Ha,” she said out loud, as if reading his thoughts. “Well, when I was separated from my children and my things and the other objects that kept me moored in place, then all those waymarkers were swept from me. It was as if I lost the map of the world, and could no longer travel in my mind, beyond myself. So that was added to the total of all that I had lost. And then one day, one cold winter’s day when the M’Gregors had grudgingly allowed that a fire might be lit in the women’s dayroom in order that we might not freeze to death and thus bring the workhouse into disrepute, I fell off my stool as the under-wardens brushed past with a begrudged basket of sea-coal. And I cut my head. And the knock and the blood wakened something within me, and I found I had one shard of a waymarker left inside my brain, buried like a long-forgotten splinter. And that waymarker gave me two things, Bloody Boy. It gave me a way to walk beyond my body again, and in time, it gave me you.”

  He looked at her. Their eyes met. And she nodded with a kind of savage glee.

  You didn’t know that, did you? That I called you?

  He shook his head. Not only did he not know that, he didn’t believe her. This was another of her imaginings. Like walking behind the world in the mirrors.

  You know my waymarker? The one that stayed with me?

  No.

  You don’t believe me, do you?

  I believe you believe it.

  Her eyes remained locked on his.

  A bloody thing happened to me once. A bad thing. It happened in sunlight, in a field. The blood was part of the waymarker, part of what imprinted it in my mind. That and the persecutor and the place. And that’s where I found you.

  His throat was unaccountably dry. He took a swig from the tin flask he had shared with her. The water tasted sour, or maybe he was him tasting his own mouth, his own rising fear at what she was clearly so eager to have him believe.

  You are scared.

  I am not.

  You feel you are standing on the edge of a great abyss, a chasm that is hidden from you by a curtain. You think as long as you do not see the abyss you will be free from the impulse it exerts, the horrible tug that will unmoor you and make you liable to cast yourself into it.

  I don’t feel anything like that, he lied.

  Then ask where the place is.

  He couldn’t. He did not want to think that his passage across the country, the seemingly random journey that had ended at the Eel House and the carnage in the M’Gregor’s closet had been destined. Most of all, he had the horrible certainty that the place was the canalside where he had bloodied the murderous tinker’s head with his own frying pan as he killed him. He did not want to talk of it, or have her rootle around in whatever memories of the manslaughter he was suppressing. Perhaps the tinker was the persecutor who had wronged her in the sunshine. He tried to remember how old the tinker had been, to work out if the ages coincided or made this conjecture an impossibility. He realised the tinker had been one of those weather-beaten men of indeterminate age who might have been anywhere between forty and sixty. It was all too possible, and all too terrible that she might know of this, that she might in some measure have been responsible for it…

  I believe you. You don’t need to prove it.

  He didn’t want to touch on the tinker’s death. She smiled at him. He realised with an inexorable dread that she was going to tell him anyway.

  Bowland’s Gibbet.

  His mind blanked. He knew the name, but could not, for an instant, remember where it was. It was not the canalside. It was—

  She reached for his hand. It was so unexpectedly personal and gentle a gesture that he found he had put his in hers before thinking not to. She traced a small scar, the one that Mountfellon had given him.

  “Bowland’s Gibbet,” she said. “At the gates to Gallstaine Hall. You were cut by him in a thunderstorm, in his coach. He is easy and liberal with others’ pain. That was the blood. That was the place. That was the persecutor. I saw you at my waymarker and I saw you bled, and I stayed with you. I showed you the Shadowgangers waiting to take you from the back of the coach, and I pointed your feet towards the running water that they could not follow you over as you ran. And then I found you at the canalside and called you to me across all the lost and lonely miles. I brought you to the Eel House. I brought you here.”

  He retrieved his hand and looked at the scar.

  Why?

  She stood and stretched and began walking downhill, towards the distant shore below.

  Because you can help.

  He stumbled to his feet, shouldered his pack and clattered after her. His thoughts were unexpectedly panicked and almost incoherent. He shaped a question for her.

  Why?

  She didn’t stop or turn, but seemed to pick up speed with every step. Her answer came through like an exultant shout.

  Because Mountfellon must die!

  CHAPTER 13

  PLAYING WITH FIRE

  Charlie and Lucy’s education swiftly fell into a routine. Charlie would go out with Hodge and patrol the deepest and darkest extremities of the Tower, prosecuting the unending war on rats. Lucy would spend that morning time with The Smith; it was not initially clear to her what she was supposed to be learning, but he gave her small tasks about the workshop, not domestic things like cleaning or sweeping which he took care of himself, but other practical things like stacking wood, or sorting through jumbled drawers and boxes, or just holding things for him as he worked on them. And as they worked alongside each other she realised he was actually telling her important things about The Oversight and the realities of the strange world being opened up to her, but without lecturing. It was almost as if by doing something manual together, he was allowing the top layer of her consciousness to calm down and ingest facts without noticing, in a way it might not have done had she been tensely receiving a more formal lesson. When she mentioned this to Charlie, he admitted that Hodge had been following the same process of education-by-misdirection with him as they ratted, but that he had not been sharp enough to notice it.

  “Haven’t got your brains, see, Lucy Harker,” he grinned.

  She was also bright enough to know this wasn’t true. What it was was that Charlie had grown up with a different kind of brains, within a family and an exotic but regular world that required certain ways of thinking. She’d been looking after herself for much longer, without the buttressing of a family to watch over her too. She envied him of course, but she also valued her own independent cast of mind. It might make her seem overly suspicious of others, but she couldn’t see that as a bad thing. And because her mind was shaped to respond in such a way, she began to also suspect that The Smith was drawing parts of her story from her in the most subtle and seemingly accidental of interrogations. And that just put her on her guard again.

  The Smith remained an unsettling enigma to her: he was gruff and kind enough, and he could even on occasion surprise her into laughter, but he also had a darkness in him that made her never quite comfortable. It was like the tension she remembered from the great bull on Sylvie and Antoine’s farm all those years ago–a feeling that the normally docile nature of the huge beast could snap at any minute and then the fury and power of its brute strength would turn it into an unstoppable destructive force. The sense she got from him was like that of a thunderhead which might look its most beautiful in a sunlit sky just before it blotted out that same sun and unleashed the titanic storm within.

  She would discuss this with Charlie, whom she trusted as much as she trusted anyone, in the afternoons when they were together being taught by Hodge and Cook. Again these afternoons didn’t seem quite like any lessons she expected, but would take the form of “Go to Goodbehere’s shop and get such-and such, then go to Eschalaz’s in Wapping and fetch some Smyrna Figs–oh, and on the way, see if you see anything unusual that might be of interest to us”. Or again “Go to Josiah Blam’s pie shop and fetc
h a tuppenny belly-buster–but don’t touch ground except in Cable Street, and try not to be seen as you go. Or fall off anything too high”. Or again “Go to the West India Docks and give dock master Mashiter my respects and ask him when the next ship on the China trade is due to up anchor–and see how many times you see Hodge on the way”. In this way, the city was made both a playground and a schoolroom for them, and they began to know their way around its streets and its rooftops too.

  Another danger occurred to Lucy as Emmet was driving her back to the Isle of Dogs one late evening after a full day and a bracingly good pie supper which Cook had made for them all. (Cook never allowed them to eat the belly-busters they were sent for, declaring them inferior things filled with questionable meat, and gave them to Jed instead, who had no such qualms.) This other danger was simply that she was enjoying herself. She was liking people. Especially Charlie and Cook. Liking people, in the way Lucy’s mind worked, was undoubtedly weakness, not because you lowered your guard with them, but because it opened up a softness that time or ill-wishers would inevitably exploit.

  So between her naturally suspicious bent, her mistrust of liking people and her reflexive aversion towards being told what to do or not to do, it was not surprising that when The Smith told her not to touch something in the workshop, her fingers immediately itched with the desire to do so.

  She had been looking at the tools spread around the bewilderingly crowded room as she waited for the battered black kettle to boil on the forge fire, and had reached for what was, he had told her, the oldest tool in the place. It sat on a shelf just above the modern brass-rosetted complexity of the Holtzapffel Rose Engine, and it was such an unrelieved black that it seemed to suck light into itself.

  She lifted it carefully, surprised at its weight which was more like lead than stone. And even though she was wearing her thin leather gloves, she sensed a tiny shudder in the black stone, as if there was a power in it longing to escape.

  “Ah,” said The Smith from behind her. He didn’t tell her to put it down, or forbid her to examine it or anything like that. He just said, “Ah.”

  She looked up at him.

  “It’s very heavy,” she said.

  “You have no idea,” he said. He was smiling but his eyes were elsewhere for a moment. “Sometimes I think it’s the heaviest thing in the world.”

  And then his eyes returned from a long way off and his smile tightened a little.

  “I think it would be really good if you were to remember not to touch that particular tool without your gloves on,” he said. “By which I mean that not only is that a stone you might not enjoy glinting, but the force of the past stacked up in the obsidian might be permanently damaging to any Glint who unwittingly channelled it.”

  And then his smile came back to full strength.

  “Touch it with gloves, examine it all you will. And if you ever see a similar weapon? Leave the place you see it and come and tell me immediately, without delay, even if it means leaving something you think is more important undone.”

  She looked at the knife and the way the black stone seemed to hungrily suck light into itself, and then she put it carefully back where she had found it.

  “Mind your fingers,” said The Smith.

  She withdrew them sharply as the knife swivelled like a compass needle answering to a magnetic pull.

  The Smith pointed to the glowing coals at the centre of the forge.

  “And the other thing about it is that it always points towards Wildfire if close enough,” he said.

  “I thought that was in the Safe House,” she said. They’d been shown the inextinguishable candle at the centre of the scrubbed pine table in Cook’s kitchen.

  “That’s the original flame,” he said. “But there’s some in everything it kindles. Cook’s range has some in its coals, this forge has some in it–and then again, so do I.”

  He picked up a candle from the workbench and tossed it to her. He snapped his fingers as it was in mid-flight and it ignited, landing in her hand with a full flame engulfing the wick.

  “See you started without us,” said Hodge from the doorway. Jed was at his feet, wagging his tail, eyes bright. Charlie appeared at his shoulder.

  “What?” said Lucy.

  “They’re going to teach us how to make light,” said Charlie with a grin. “Since I seem to spend half the day in the dark, it seemed like a good idea.”

  “Controlling the Wildfire is always a good idea,” said The Smith. “Come and put these on.”

  He produced a pair of bracelets made from five twigs plaited together, like miniature versions of the wreath surrounding the candle in the Safe House. The Smith took the candle from her grasp and slid one over her wrist.

  “Good,” he said. “Now take off your glove.”

  Charlie, with no glove to slow him up, went first. Lucy watched as The Smith held the candle out to him.

  “Close your hand slowly around the flame,” he said. “Don’t flinch. Whatever you do, don’t flinch at all, and keep it steady. You’re going to crush the flame.”

  Lucy watched him do so.

  “Ouch,” he said, looking accusingly at Hodge. “I thought the bracelets were protection.”

  “You’re not on fire, are you?” said Hodge.

  “No,” said Charlie. “But my hand hurts. A lot.”

  “That’s the fire gone into you. Wouldn’t do so if you didn’t have the blood,” said The Smith. “All members of The Oversight have to do this. It’s useful.”

  “And it’s a way of making sure you’re made of the right stuff,” added Hodge.

  “Light the candle,” said The Smith. “Then it’s Miss Harker’s turn.”

  Lucy had peeled her glove back but, having seen the sweat break out on Charlie’s face, was in no hurry to follow his example.

  Charlie took a step towards the forge. The Smith’s hand stopped him.

  “By yourself,” he said. “Wildfire’s in you. Just let it out.”

  “How?” said Charlie.

  “Feel it, think it, kindle it,” said Hodge.

  “Just make it so,” said The Smith. “There’s no trick to it really, though some like to snap their fingers, or snap their wrists to trigger it. Some find it makes them sneeze a bit to start with.”

  As it turned out, Charlie was a good sneezer but not, despite his initial enthusiasm, a natural kindler. Lucy, on the other hand, was immediately able to light a candle every second or third try. Greatly to Charlie’s chagrin, she had lit the candle a score of times before he produced a single sputtering ignition.

  “Try it like this,” said The Smith after a lot more failed attempts. “Think of the fire being there all the time. In you. It’s about you–it’s your fire now: it’s nothing to do with the candle–candle’s just a convenience to hold your fire.”

  In the end what solved it for Charlie was a game. He and Lucy were set up in a corner of the workshop with a half dozen candles each. The first to light all their candles won, and the one who won the most games by the time the sausages which Hodge and Charlie had brought with them were cooked would get supper, and the other would get the leftover bread from breakfast.

  Lucy kept winning, but Charlie began to catch up as the forge filled with the sizzle and smell of frying saveloy, and by the time the food was ready he was almost as fast as her.

  “Almost,” said The Smith, “but not quite.”

  Charlie watched in rising horror as the sausages were divided into three plates, and he was passed the fourth, containing no more than a heel of stale bread.

  “We’re The Oversight,” said Hodge. “We don’t get prizes for coming second.”

  “But—” said Charlie.

  “But nothing,” said Lucy, biting into her first sausage. “We just learned how to make fire, Charlie! And you’re whining about a few sausages?”

  He stared at her. She grinned at him. She knew she’d share her sausages in a minute, but was enjoying having won something for a change. A li
ttle teasing wouldn’t do him any harm.

  She lifted the sausage to her mouth. It caught fire, singing her nose. She dropped it on the floor with a gasp. Charlie’s face split in a wide grin of its own as Jed pounced on the windfall and ate it in two bites.

  “I see it’s not just candles we can light,” he said. “I reckon we could have some fun with that…”

  “Charlie Pyefinch!” said The Smith, sounding harsh but inexpertly hiding a smile. “Control yourself! There’s enough chance of harm out there in the dark without us injuring each other!”

  CHAPTER 14

  ABCHURCH’S APPLE

  Coram Templebane was determined to repair his fortunes and achieve the previously unimagined promotion to become his extant father’s deputy. He had a shrewd and realistic view of the competition, and though his “brothers” were all in their own way resourceful and ruthless, he was only really worried about Pountney and Abchurch providing any serious competition. Both were naturally clever with wide, retentive memories; each was cunning and neither would have any scruples about doing the other or Coram down at the very first opportunity.

  The other brothers were dangerous in certain circumstances–physically stronger, more vicious and so on–but Coram was not especially worried about anyone he could outthink. He moved quickly and decisively following the funeral breakfast, and after Coram had made an unobserved visit to a pill-grinder in an apothecary shop just off Bleeding Hart Lane, Pountney was taken gravely ill with an indelicate, persistent and debilitating complaint that the local physician called a Galloping Black Flux, and which the other brothers called Shitting Himself to Death. Pountney’s illness followed so closely on the heels of the unprecedented gorging that had attended Zebulon’s testimonial meal that it was ascribed to overindulgence in previously unencountered rich foods. Coram, knowing that Issachar was probably just as clear in his assessment of which three sons were the frontrunners in the race to be his deputy, did not dose Abchurch since the removal of his two competitors by identical means could only implicate him as the fons et origo of their discomfiture. And he was unsure as to how Issachar would react to having a poisoner in his house: poison was a very particular kind of threat, and one that people–even ruthless people–had qualms about. Issachar himself might feel unduly threatened if he had to suspect every mouthful he ate.