The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Last crossroads before running water and the iron railway on the edge of the city?” said The Smith. “One of you would always be here.”

  “What’s in the bag?” said Fore-and-Aft.

  “A question,” said The Smith. “Open it.”

  The Sluagh took the bag, shook it and opened the drawstring. He reached a hand in and took out a small scrabble of something Lucy couldn’t make out.

  “Bones?” said Fore-and-Aft.

  “A bone pet. Sent to my cells. To kill one of your own,” said The Smith.

  “Ah,” said the Sluagh. “That bone pet.”

  He drew himself to full height and tossed the bag back to The Smith.

  “No interest to me. Its job is done, and it would have been tied to the man who made it.”

  “Who was working for a man called Mountfellon,” said The Smith. “Why?”

  “I know nothing that might help you,” said the Sluagh.

  “Why did you work on the minds of a girl and the man Ketch to insert her into our midst?” said The Smith. “Why are you allied with this Mountfellon?”

  “We ally with no one,” said the Sluagh, turning away.

  “By Law and Lore I command you to answer!” snapped The Smith.

  The Sluagh rounded on him, entirely uncowed by his tone. His lip curled in a sneer.

  “Law and Lore? You, the great traitor, dare invoke Law and Lore? Law and Lore exist to stop two worlds from colliding. I know the words you use. It is not just you who study us. You look into the shadows but we look back at you,” he spat. “You say there is a natural world and another one alongside it, a world you call supranatural. Well, we call it the old world, the Pure World. We call the other new and unnatural one the Hungry World.”

  “The Hungry World?” said The Smith. “What does that nonsense mean?”

  Fore-and-Aft grunted in contempt as he began to stride back and forth in front of The Smith, becoming increasingly agitated as the words began to pour out of him in a dam-burst of pent-up anger.

  “And is your new world not a hungry one, Smith? Does it not take our forests to build ships so that that can go beyond the great salt waters and bring back more things to sate that endless hunger? Are our trees not taken to make pit props for the holes you dig, grubbing out the coal you need for your smoke-belching machine-farms? Do you not take our very darkness with your gas lamps, the deep darkness we need as much as you need sunlight? And what of our great silences? The places where the only sound was the wind passing over the land and the cry of the birds? You have put your clanking steam machines with their whistles and their damned iron rails through our wastelands. You breed like rabbits in a landscape without foxes. Every month there are more of you. Every year’s end there is less room for us than there was at the beginning. The new world is insatiable and you, the mighty Oversight, are partial and blinkered and hostile to us, to the old world. You turn a blind eye to the harm done to us by the new world, by the Hungry World. You were charged to patrol the borders between both. You do not. You look one way, you push one way, your hand is not even, your ‘justice’ is not fair. You have all lived so long within the Hungry World you have forgotten you have our blood as well as theirs! And when we defend ourselves, because you do not, we are punished and hounded and hurt. We are an affront to you, not because we are monsters, but because your own betrayal of Law and Lore is the true monstrosity, and we are but the living remnants who remind you of your failure and your perfidy, the mirror in which you see yourselves as you really are: lackeys and lickspittles of the Hungry World.”

  The Smith had stood his ground in front of the tirade, like an oak tree facing down a gale, but now he took a step forward.

  “Be very careful who you call lickspittle, Nightganger, for my hammer might remember the taste of Sluagh blood and get hungry again.”

  They stared each other down. Then The Smith relaxed, dismissing his moment of threat in a chuckle.

  “Forgive me. I came for information. Not a lecture on your grievances.”

  “These are not grievances, Smith. These are atrocities,” said Fore-and-Aft. “There is an old way that our people have travelled for twice a thousand years or more, between Wenlock Edge and Grimsby. And the hungry men have pinned iron rails across it, rails that go from London to Manchester and have no break in them. And now the old way cannot be used by us, or such as us, who cannot cross cold iron. Did The Oversight stop the rails? Did you enforce Law and Lore and stop them destroying our ancient landscape? No. You looked the other way. This web of iron is a cage. To pass over the land in our troops is a part of who we have always been, but now we wake up each morning to find another swathe of countryside is barred to us, or only accessible if we take a crazed meandering route that switches back and forth like a madman trying to escape a maze. You are mongrels. You have Pure blood mixed with that of the Hungry World, but I think you hate the Pure in you. I think that is why you betray us at every turn, ignoring our interests and letting the Hungry World eat at us like a wasting disease. You want us to die. You want us to leave, because the Hungry World is too greedy to share. It is a void that must fill itself at anyone’s cost but its own.”

  “What do you want?” said The Smith.

  “Law and Lore. Fairly applied. No more. No less.”

  “And what does that have to do with Mountfellon?” said The Smith sharply. “Is this avalanche of resentment what is behind your new loyalty to him?”

  Fore-and-Aft shook his head, almost sadly.

  “Who are you to speak of loyalty to us? You of all the people who walk beneath the sky? How can you hope to change your destiny, turncoat,” he sneered. “The mighty Smith who will always betray all you love, as you always have, when the darkness comes back in you.”

  The Smith’s hands flexed, as if he wished he had his hammer to hand.

  “Once I believed that,” he said, voice rough and low.

  “Once?” said the Sluagh.

  “Once, yes,” said The Smith. “But then I remembered I was a maker. I can turn a horseshoe into a knife or a sword into a ploughshare and back again. I can make or remake anything. Including my fate.”

  The Sluagh shook his head.

  “My father’s fathers were right. You have run mad with arrogance.”

  “Your father’s fathers feared the darkness so they made themselves its pets. I went into the darkness. I looked it in the eye. And then I came back. Your father’s fathers knew nothing…” said The Smith.

  The Sluagh smiled nastily and leant in and whispered so that Lucy could only just make out what he said:

  “The others, The Oversight, do they ever know–ever guess–what you were? What your true allegiance is? Do you even know?”

  “They know who I am. They know I am true. And not even you can guess at my allegiance,” said The Smith.

  “None come back from beyond the dark mirror unless the powers that rule there allow it,” said Fore-and-Aft.

  “How would you know?”

  The Sluagh waved a hand at the darkness of the night above.

  “I am sworn to the night. I know its mysteries.”

  The Smith laughed, a deep-throated rumble of true mirth.

  “The night? The night is nothing compared to the void beyond the mirrors. If dark was light then the darkness beyond is strong as a thousand suns, and the night you say you understand is no more than the sputtering flame on a ha’penny dip.”

  He picked up the bag of bones and emptied them onto the road. Then he trod on them, ground them to splinters and kicked the debris towards the Sluagh.

  “Tell your chieftains. If you continue to work against me, this will be your fate. Ground to flinders and dust and lost in the night breeze. And if I hear of any of you working for Mountfellon or that damned lawyer Templebane we will come against you all with the full force of Lore and Law.”

  He turned on his heel and strode south.

  “Smith,” called the Sluagh. “One thing: the Black Knife.”
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br />   The Smith stopped despite himself, and turned.

  “Do you still have it?”

  The Smith did not answer. The Sluagh laughed mirthlessly and nodded his head.

  “Then I think we all know where your allegiance lies.”

  And he stepped back into the shadows and was gone. The Smith stared after him for a long time, so long that Lucy got cramp in her leg from not moving as she watched. And then he turned his back on the outer darkness and headed back for the scattered lights of the city beyond the marsh.

  Lucy bit down on her lip to ride the cramp and keep herself still as she tried to both understand what she’d just heard, and work out what had not been quite right about it. Because it had not cleared up her mistrust of The Smith at all. In fact, it had posed more questions than she had set out in the night to answer.

  As she waited for him to get far enough away before she risked moving to rub and stretch out the cramp, she wished she was going to return to the Safe House and not The Folley on the lonely Isle of Dogs. With Charlie and Cook and even–maybe especially–Cait she felt more secure. With The Smith and his solitary house, she felt too vulnerable and strange.

  The Safe House was like a hidden castle within the city, a stronghold that could never fall.

  CHAPTER 23

  A DENIABLE RUSE

  Issachar Templebane was unwell. Not only were his spirits understandably diminished by the death of his twin, the arm that the hellion Sara Falk had smashed was excruciatingly painful. She had not merely broken it, but done so by shattering his elbow. It was an injury that had clearly confounded the bone-setter because it was getting more, rather than less, agonising. He could not sleep properly because every time he moved it felt as if the joint were being dashed to splinters once again. He had returned to the bone-setter and terrified the man into a second attempt at putting him back together, but it had been so painful that he had passed out, and even now he had little confidence he would ever have the use of the joint again. In anticipation of this, he had insisted the arm be strapped to his chest in a sling that allowed him to reach his mouth with the hand by simple action of the wrist. There was, he felt dispassionately, no sense with being left with a functionless arm mended at an angle that didn’t even allow him to feed himself with it.

  This was about the last dispassionate thought he had, since the homemade variation of Sydenham’s Tincture of Laudanum that he favoured for the pain (raw opium, saffron, cinnamon and cloves, bruised and then macerated in a little sherry wine and white honey according to an old family recipe) was having distinct effects on both his thinking and his bowels: where Pountney Templebane was clearly evacuating himself painfully into oblivion in the outhouse in the corner of the courtyard, Issachar was now severely constipated. He was also afflicted by a persistent itching all over his torso, which demented and frustrated him in equal measure, and which also made him suspect his un-emptied bowels were poisoning him from within which led him to send for increasingly strong emetics from the apothecary. His mouth was permanently dry, his eyes seemed to be weakening and his breathing felt shallower and reedier than he could ever remember. He spent a lot of time assembling and reassessing his symptoms and becoming unaccustomedly worried as he did so, which was a result of the overarching effect of his opiated state: unlike some who encounter the poppy and become euphoric, Issachar’s constitution took the other path. He was increasingly dysphoric, prey to a deep unease and constantly nagging anxiety. He was, in short, not the Issachar Templebane he had been.

  And to make things all the worse, the pain was not much helped by the regular dosing. One effect of this malaise was that Issachar was very keen that the forthcoming move against The Oversight should be entirely deniable, something that might best be seen as accidental. His desire for retribution was entirely personal. He had no desire to advertise, nor would it sweeten his vengeance if The Oversight knew he was the hand that moved against them. He simply wished them removed from the scene. And he was also concerned, increasingly so as the tincture sweated through him in ever larger doses, that if this plan went awry they would come after him and extract a vengeance he might be powerless to resist. There is something elementally unmanning to the psyche in having one of your arms put out of action, and this added to his desire for caution.

  Coram’s plan had the triple virtues of simplicity, guaranteed devastation and the appearance of a complete and tragic accident.

  “Tell me again,” he said, wincing as he adjusted his position in the high-backed Chesterfield in which he spent most of his days and nights.

  “The sugar manufactory is directly up the slope from The Oversight’s headquarters,” said Coram. “There are two huge boiling vats, each as tall as a house, resting on hardened firebrick kilns, which provide the heat that melts the sugar. All that is needed is to ensure the kilns explode, making the vats topple, and then a river of flaming molten sugar descends the street and burns them to the ground. I should say that anyone in the house would be unable to escape the flow if not the flames. And if we were ‘accidentally’ to ensure that a wagon containing barrels of turpentine happened to be drawn up outside the house in the way of the fiery flow, why, I think the ensuing holocaust could be considerably exacerbated.”

  “Considerably,” agreed Templebane, wincing as he reached for the tincture. Coram intercepted him, uncapped the bottle and held it out.

  “Thank you, boy,” he said, taking a swig. He closed his eyes and waited for the effect to dull the sharpness in his elbow. “And how will you ensure the kilns explode?”

  “Grenadoes,” Coram said. “I have already arranged to purchase some through the back door, as it were, of the Woolwich Arsenal. It’ll be easy as bowling to roll them into the kilns, since the openings are large enough to admit big balks of wood and we don’t even need to go to the danger of lighting the fuses. The fire’ll do it for us. Just roll ’em in and bunk off sharpish.”

  Templebane opened his eyes which were, Coram noted, irissed down to pinpricks. Despite that, they swept approvingly over him.

  “Fire has always served the Templebanes well, boy. Yes, fire, the cleansing fire is just what we need. Acquire the grenadoes.”

  THIRD PART

  THE DEATH OF EARTH

  CHAPTER 24

  CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGE

  “The Alp has gone,” snarled The Citizen.

  “Gone where?” said Mountfellon.

  “Gone to whatever hell fate has prepared for him,” said The Citizen. “He is dead.”

  “You have seen the body?”

  “I have seen the signs and I know he is dead. Dead and I need…”

  His eyes smouldered with rage as he choked apoplectically. The bout passed and he wiped the spittle off the corners of his mouth with a cuff.

  “This is The cursed Oversight,” he said.

  “There are other explanations,” said Mountfellon.

  The Citizen stood up and hurled the chair away from him. It cracked against the wall and knocked a picture frame to the floor, where it broke into shards of gilt and plaster.

  “No, Milord. No! They are not only thwarting us and obstructing our experimentation–they are now threatening MY LIFE!”

  He was shaking with affronted rage.

  “And what have you done?” said Mountfellon, eyeing the damage to his furnishings.

  “I have sent a message to bring another Alp to me,” said The Citizen. “In the fastest way possible. What do you think I did?”

  “In the fastest way possible, or the fastest way acceptable?” said Mountfellon.

  “The fastest way possible is the only way acceptable in this case,” spat The Citizen.

  “You used the mirrors,” said Mountfellon. “Despite our agreement not to take that chance again.”

  “Yes,” said The Citizen simply, staring him down. “My life could depend on it.”

  “Well. You will not do so again,” said Mountfellon.

  “Or?”

  “Or you will answer to
me, sir,” said Mountfellon coolly.

  “And what is the exact question I shall be answering, Milord?” replied The Citizen, his voice suddenly keen and steely as a box of knives.

  “I cannot say exactly, but it will doubtless touch on where else you would be more comfortable pursuing your endeavours, Citizen,” said Mountfellon. “I take it very ill that you broke your word on the use of the mirrors, but I will countenance one infelicity between us for two reasons: firstly because we share a higher goal; and secondly because you felt your survival was imperilled.”

  “You are very… gracious.”

  “I am very practical. And as a practical man I should point out that with the advent of the cross-channel steam-packet and the bewildering extension of the locomotive railway network both here and on the continent, a letter may travel to your destination with a despatch that would satisfy both your needs and my strictures in future, and thus save a great deal of wear and tear on our friendship and my paintings.”

  “Milord. I apologise for my assault on your… Romney was it?”

  “It is a Ramsay. And a damn fine picture for a Scot. But no harm. A frame can be replaced easily.”

  “I am relieved.”

  “As I will be when you re-confirm your undertaking that while we work together in this house, you will not prosecute any assault on The Oversight before we have found a way for me to avail myself of the contents of their library.”

  The Citizen worked his mouth violently, as if trying to swallow one forced pleasantry too many, and then bowed his head.

  “You have my word again, Milord. I am sorry you had to ask a second time.”

  The dangerous sparkle in his eye as Mountfellon turned away from him hinted that the true sorrow was at Mountfellon asking, not at himself having provoked the question in the first place.

  CHAPTER 25

  SEA-CHANGE

  So Amos and the Ghost had found their way to the English Channel. They descended the green oceanic swell of the ancient, sheep-cropped downland and skirted the white cliffs until they discovered a runnel that dipped down to a shingle beach.