The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Whatever you do,” she said, “get out of the mirrors. They are killing you.”

  She disappeared the cup back inside whatever pocket was hidden within her robe and turned to walk away.

  He watched the myriad identical reflections of her begin to diminish as the distance between them increased, and then with a twitching movement, like a bird ruffling its feathers, she stopped and turned at a right angle, about to walk out of view.

  He felt a strange tug in his breastbone.

  “Wait,” he called in English, and then corrected himself. “Attendez, s’il vous plaît.”

  He drew his knife again and began to walk towards her. It had been a very small cup, he thought. And it wasn’t like he had a better plan. It wasn’t as if he had any plan at all. So what harm could it do?

  CHAPTER 17

  THE NIGHT VISITOR

  A knocking on the door after midnight is never good news. The Safe House was slumbering: Cook asleep in her feather bed, Charlie on his horsehair mattress under the eaves and Emmet still as a statue in the wood-lined room by the side-door to the half basement.

  The sound of the knocker banging imperiously woke them all. By the time Charlie had hurtled down the stairs and Cook had strode purposefully from her room trying to tie the sash of her dressing-gown without dropping the precautionary boarding axe she’d picked up on her way out, Emmet was at the front door.

  He did not open it until Cook arrived and tapped his shoulder.

  “Go on then,” she said.

  Charlie looked at her axe.

  “What?” she said as Emmet began unlatching locks and sliding bolts.

  “Nothing,” said Charlie.

  She followed his eyes to the weapon in her hand.

  “We get some strange night callers in our way of business,” she said, hefting the hatchet then dropping it so that it hung less obviously against the billowing folds of her dressing-gown.

  “And don’t you be giving me the old fish-eye,” she said. “You’ll have a blade somewhere you can get to it in a hurry, I’ll be bound,” she said.

  He grinned at her.

  Emmet opened the door.

  “I’ll be looking for Jack Sharp or the woman of the house,” said a dry Irish voice. “And it’s sorry I am for the lateness of the hour.”

  Charlie peered over Emmet’s mountainous shoulder.

  Caitlin stood confidently on the top step while next to her, one step lower, a young woman scarcely more than a girl stood with her hands cuffed in front of her, fingers curled round the handle of a heavy-looking bag which hung to her knees. The girl looked sick.

  “I’m the woman of the house,” said Cook, sniffing the air.

  “Sara Falk you are not,” said Caitlin with a laugh in her voice. “That or Sharp Jack is a liar…”

  “Sara Falk is away,” said Cook coolly.

  They looked each other up and down, and as they did so Charlie understood that though they could not be more different in almost every fashion, in one crucial respect they were evenly matched, and that was in the easy way each projected a sense of coiled threat behind perfectly polite exteriors.

  “So you’d be the Cook,” said Caitlin. “And a pleasure to make your acquaintance, so it is.”

  “Just Cook,” said the older woman.“And likewise, I’m sure.”

  They nodded at each other.

  “I like your axe,” said Caitlin.

  “And I don’t like the smell of your friend,” said Cook. “Who are you and why have you brought her here?”

  “I’m Caitlin Sean ná Gaolaire. Her name doesn’t matter a field of beans, and truth is I clear forgot to ask it. What’s to the point though is that, as your nose probably tells you, she’s a changeling. As is the one in the bag. She switched it with a real baby earlier, and I’ve just returned the rightful child to its own cot, and now I’m tired and after the loan of one of your cells in the Sly House.”

  Cook just stared at her. Charlie knew when she went that still it meant she was getting angry.

  “You know about the Sly House?” she said. “But you are not one of us.”

  “Sure and doesn’t that fine feller Jack Sharp owe me a favour,” said Cait. “No mystery there. Old friends is me and Jack.”

  “You are not old friends,” said Cook emphatically. “I have known the boy all his life and he was never friends with any young lady, indeed he’s never been so.”

  “He’s been to Bristol, Cook dear,” smiled Cait. “Chasing a bad couple off a Baltic trader who’d done a little mischief in the Port o’ London before slipping their moorings and looking to repeat the nastiness in the next port visited, a Neck and a Klabautermann it was, a couple of years back, you’ll remember?”

  Cook twirled the axe and then stopped it dead when she caught herself doing it.

  “You’re the one.”

  “We had a shared quarry,” said Cait.

  “You’re the venatrix,” said Cook.

  “That I am,” said Cait.

  “He said you as good as saved his life,” said Cook. ‘He didn’t say you were so… young.”

  “Well, he’s a modest one,” grinned Cait. “Was as much the other way round, truth to tell. I was in a tight spot and pleased for the help.”

  Cook put the axe down carefully, leaning it against the wall.

  “You’d better come in and warm yourself,” she said. “It’s a cold night.”

  “Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I’d as soon get these two under a safe lock first,” said Cait.

  “Emmet and Charlie can do it,” said Cook. “If you’re happy to trust them.”

  “What’s a venatrix?” said Charlie.

  Cait looked at him as if only just noticing he was there. The slow smile she greeted him with lurched somewhere low in his stomach. She turned to Cook.

  “He looks trustworthy enough,” she said. “But I’d like the golem to keep a tight grip on her. She’s fast and fly, this one. And the one in the bag’s a pure streak of venomous swelter.”

  She looked up at Emmet.

  “Never seen a golem before. A fine-looking thing it is, to be sure.”

  “He’s not a thing,” said Charlie. “He’s Emmet.”

  Cait nodded and smiled at the clay face looming above her.

  “Fair do’s to you, big man, I meant no offence.”

  And she stuck out her hand. After a moment of pause, Emmet reached out and shook it. Cook raised an eyebrow at Charlie.

  “Well, that’s a first,” she said. “Now you go across and lock ’em away in the same cell.”

  She turned to Caitlin.

  “How old’s the one in the bag?”

  “Baby,” she said.

  “Teeth yet?” said Cook.

  “Maybe four,” said Caitlin. “And he’d use them.”

  “So mind when you open the bag,” said Cook, “or let Emmet do it.”

  Caitlin let Emmet take the changeling by the shoulder and steer her out into the square, heading for the tavern and the hidden cells beneath. Charlie stepped aside to let Caitlin enter.

  “Is there really a baby in that bag?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “And it would bite your eyes out too, soon as spit,” she said. “So watch your fingers.”

  By the time Bunyon had been woken and the warded Sly House cells had been opened and closed again on the changelings, Cook had tea and warmed-over pie in front of Caitlin, who lost no time in helping herself. Charlie came back into the Safe House and found them in the kitchen, facing each other across the table. Cook was sliding what was at least a second wedge of pie onto Cait’s plate.

  She tucked into it as if it was the first food after a long famine.

  “Jack Sharp said you were the most dangerous thing in the Safe House,” she said around a full mouth. “And if I was living here I think I’d die of pie. This is glorious stuff here, faith–even the pastry itself’s magic.”

  Cook’s nose pinked with pride.

/>   “I’ve made better,” she said.

  “Well, don’t show it to me,” said Caitlin, “or I’ll never leave. Ambrosia this is.”

  Cook slid Charlie a slice on a clean plate. It was larger than the others, perhaps to make up for the earlier missed sausages.

  “You never said what a venatrix is,” he said.

  “You’re looking at one,” said Caitlin.

  “She’s a hunter. She’s like us, but she’s not part of any group,” said Cook.

  “Like a thief-taker?” said Charlie.

  “Yes and no,” said Caitlin. “I travel after mischief. And far as I can, I serve Law and Lore. But I’m a free agent.”

  “And why these changelings, here and now?” said Cook.

  “Well, and here’s me thinking you’d be as pleased as hook-nosed Punch himself to have two such things that were on your patch without you noticing it brought in and made safe,” said Cait, raising an eyebrow. “And me thinking too that after a favour like that you’d maybe not be so interested in my affairs.”

  “Everything that happens in London is our affair,” said Cook. “We are The Oversight.”

  “Arrah now, but you overlooked that nasty pair, didn’t you?” said Cait, washing down the last of her pie with a deep swig of tea. She pushed back from the table and stretched comfortably. “And I’d wonder why, except it might be a rude question. Prying into your affairs…”

  “What brings you to London all the way from… wherever it is you came from?” said Cook.

  “Skibbereen,” said Caitlin. “A lovely place it is too. And for another slice of that pie, sure I’ll tell you a piece of my business.”

  Cook glanced at Charlie as she cut another pastry-covered wedge and slid it onto Caitlin’s waiting plate.

  “One thing a venatrix is,” she said, “is mercenary. You seldom get something for nothing from them. What we do to uphold the balance, they do to profit.”

  Caitlin snorted.

  “Rank prejudice, no offence to you. Do I look like a rich woman? I take a fee for my services but that makes me professional, not grasping.”

  She enjoyed a couple of mouthfuls.

  “The Factor at Skibbereen had a lovely little daughter–he and his wife who’s a kind, charitable woman though blighted by an unfortunate wall eye, though that’s by the by. Pride and joy of the family, first child: a tiny morsel of sunshine and all that’s good in the world, she was. And then she was stolen, and the babby she was swapped with looked just like her, but wasn’t. And in any other family, they would just have noticed the character of the poor thing changing and taken on a slow sadness about it that they probably wouldn’t have ever spoken of one to the other. But the Factor has the Sight, and he saw something was wrong, not with the child’s spirits but with the child itself. So he came to me and told me his child had been changed and that his wife would die of a broken heart if she ever found out, and he gave me good coin, real sovereigns of gold, to put this right. And I gave him my word. And I have tracked this family of changelings for two years. And I will return his true daughter to him, for another thing that a venatrix is, Charlie, is honourable. Because if you do not have a group to support you, as you in the mighty Oversight do, then all you have is yourself. And if your own word’s no good in this world–well, you have nothing at all.”

  Charlie nodded at her and grinned. Cook lent over and poked him with the end of a wooden spoon.

  “If you’re so interested in her business, then there’s a passage in the book upstairs you might like to read that’ll tell you all you need to know about changelings,” she said. “Takes a lot to make my flesh creep, but you know what, Charlie Pyefinch, changelings do the job nicely.”

  “Which book?” he said, hoping she wasn’t implying he’d been displaying too much interest in the new arrival. Or indeed, if he had, that the new arrival herself hadn’t noticed.

  “The Great and Hidden History of the World,” she said. “Written by Sara’s grandfather, it was. Was a man who never used one word where four or five would do, but if you cut your way through the fat there’s good meat for learning on in there. I’ll show you.”

  CHAPTER 18

  THE HARM

  Sharp squatted in front of the little nun. Her black eyes were fixed on him as she pulled the small tin cup from the bleached folds of her habit.

  He held out his hand. She put the cup in it.

  “Wait,” she said. Her hand disappeared back inside the garment and re-emerged with a small box, about three inches long and one inch wide and the thickness of a finger in depth. It was made of ivory or perhaps bone, its colour matching that of her habit. Initials were picked out on the lid in tiny holes. Sharp read them upside down.

  “‘M de R,’” he said.

  “Marianne de Rohan,” she said. “The name means nothing. Just someone who once owned this box.”

  She opened the lid. Inside was a dirty-looking twist of some kind of diaphanous material. He looked at her.

  She said a word in French that he did not understand. She repeated it. He shrugged.

  “I do not know that word.”

  “From a spider? The net of a spider? For to catch flies?” she said.

  “Spider-web,” he said in English.

  It was her turn to shrug.

  “I do not speak your language,” she said. “But this is from a spider and it will help stop the bleeding.”

  He put the cup on the ground and prepared to nick the edge of his palm with his blade. She reached out to stop him.

  “Not there,” she said. “It does not heal so well, and it stings every time you flex your hand.”

  Her finger pushed back his cuff. She pointed to a vein a couple of inches below the wrist.

  “Here,” she said. “Just a shallow nick here, where there are fewer nerves. It will smart less and it will close up easily afterwards if you keep pressure on it for a while.”

  His eyes met hers.

  “I have been in these mirrors a long time,” she said. “I made three vows in my life. And the last was to outlive my persecutors, whatever I became in the process.”

  “And?” he said.

  “And my persecutors do not die like normal men,” she said. “I did not know that when I vowed. Maybe if I’d known this I would not have sworn as I did. Maybe there are better forms of revenge, but at the time I thought this would do. I was very young. But a vow is a vow.”

  The glance she gave him caught him unguarded, and he looked away on reflex, but not before he had seen a flicker of something momentarily young and proud in the age-scored face.

  “One cup,” he said.

  “What you can spare,” she replied.

  He cut himself and held the small wound over the cup, transferring the knife to his teeth and using his free hand to squeeze the blood into it. He was not squeamish about gore, but he did feel light-headed as he watched the inky blood collect, first a thimbleful, then another, then the cup was half full and what had seemed like a small container suddenly appeared much larger now that it was his vital fluid that was slowly moving up the inside wall.

  Something–honour or perhaps stubbornness–made him fill the cup to the brim.

  “Enough,” she said sharply as the level top developed a slight bulging meniscus. “Don’t bleed onto the mirrors.”

  She reached over and dobbed a wad of spider-web on the nick in his arm and pressed down on it.

  “Just wait,” she said. “Just a moment while the wound closes. Do you have a handkerchief?”

  He nodded, conscious of the pressure on his arm and the unwanted intimacy of the moment.

  “What were the other two vows?” he said.

  “One was to this habit,” she said. “The other was personal.”

  The way she said “personal” made him decide not to press her on the matter.

  “Now you keep the pressure on and bind the cut with your kerchief,” she said, moving back from him.

  He did as she suggested, and almo
st missed seeing her take the cup and drink the blood. He didn’t see it directly; rather he saw it in a reflection, unobserved by her. She dipped her tongue into the surface and took a first taste, savouring it, her face relaxing into a smile, and then she held the cup to her lips and took a long, slow pull on it, draining it in one draught.

  She closed her eyes and allowed whatever the benefit of the blood was to course through her. Her smile widened and she shuddered in a manner so profound that he looked instinctively away, feeling that he was observing something too intimate and private for his own comfort and sense of propriety. Once he’d bound the cut on his forearm tight and pulled his cuffs back down over it, he risked looking at her again. This time his reaction was a more palpable shudder of distaste: she was running her finger around the inside of the metal canister and sucking the redness from it, like a greedy child licking the remnants of a mixing bowl.

  He stood and looked away until she was finished and the cup had returned to its place within her habit.

  “Good,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “And now you will take me to where you saw the woman with this ring,” he said.

  “As we agreed,” she said.

  They walked a long way before she took a turn to the right and carried on walking. Once more, the repetitive monotony of the mirrored world began to dull Sharp’s senses, and with increasing frequency he found himself stumbling along in a kind of walking sleep.

  Again awareness of time passing totally eluded him, and he felt his thoughts slowing and beginning to fray at the edges. He again had the odd feeling of slow vertigo, as if he was walking through time instead of space.

  Whenever he asked the little nun how much further they had to go, she would just wave her hand onwards and say they were getting closer but had distance to cover. He grew to hate the sight of her heels flashing back and forth beneath the hem of her habit, but kept his eyes locked on them, walking close behind, ever watchful in case she tricked him by suddenly darting into a mirror and disappearing if and when he nodded off. The prospect of falling asleep was a very real one since he was so footsore and exhausted that he now was stumbling along on the very cusp of unconsciousness.