The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  He was the thing from whom Amos would even now, were it possible, run back into the blood-soaked horror of his recent dream to avoid.

  He was worse than nightmare, because he walked the shadows and the darknesses of the real world, the same tattooed darkness that writhed across his face.

  He was not a man.

  He was Sluagh.

  And Amos would have shucked his pack and run, run faster than he had ever run in his life, faster than anyone had ever run in all the long and fear-drenched history of the world, had he not sensed the Sluagh was ready for this and would casually hamstring him the moment he moved, flicking the ugly recurved blade at the straining tendons at the back of his knees in a crippling cut that would come swifter than thought.

  The tattoos squirmed as Badger Skull exposed broken teeth in a smile.

  “You can hear what I am thinking,” he said, voice scratchy and hoarse. “Can’t you?”

  “He is mute,” said the Ghost.

  The other Sluagh rose and moved in to encircle Amos completely, looking and poking at him as if he were a sheep at a market. He was surrounded by tattooed faces and rank-smelling animal skins, worn with age and fastened by bones instead of buttons.

  “Who is he?”

  “He is the Bloody Boy,” she replied. And there was something in the sharp look she threw sideways at him that made him keep silent and not say his true name.

  And then someone grabbed him from behind and a sack was thrown over his head and cinched tight round his throat, and a boot kicked into the back of his knee, hinging it forward and chopping him helplessly into a kneeling position, and as he threw his hands forward to stop himself falling further, they were expertly looped into a noose that trapped them and bound them together.

  He was helpless, blind and trussed up like a chicken for the slaughter in less time than it takes to sneeze.

  CHAPTER 28

  EX TENEBRIS LUX

  It took Sharp some days to find his knife. It had bounced off the side of the cell when he had thrown it to sever the string with which the nun had tried to retrieve the mirror, and had landed somewhere in the dark, lost in the vast bone pile which covered the floor.

  He had found someone else’s knife within the hour, however.

  Once the nun had disappeared from the high chink of light, and taken the candle with her, he had stood in the fetid blackness and tried to think what to do. He had no idea what kind of cavern he was penned in, other than the scant glimpse he had snatched before the candle went out, and given the unfathomable relationship between the topography of the mirrors and the actual geography of the world beyond, even less idea of where on earth it might be. Blind and without much hope as he was, it would have been easy to succumb to gloom or claustrophobia. Instead he thought of Sara Falk. He found himself wondering what she would do if she found herself in such an impossible pass. He decided she would not give up but would begin to organise herself. He set out on a shaky and treacherous journey across the tangle of bones to find the wall. A wall would be a good start. With a wall he would have something solid to lean on, something to sit against and rest.

  He found the wall by slipping over and banging his head on it. For a moment the darkness was lit with stars, and the silence broken by a muffled curse.

  Then, having found the wall, he decided to try and clear a small space to sit. Sightless and so by touch alone, he began to move bones out of the way. The floor was hard to find. For a long time, he moved ribs and vertebrae and femurs and skulls and who knows what else without finding anything beneath except more of the same. In the darkness, it felt like bones all the way down. Except every now and then the osseous remains were tangled in shreds of what had once been clothes–shirts and jackets and dresses and boots. Again, it was the kind of work that could easily have unhinged him had he let his mind wander on the matter of exactly whose skeletons he was handling because, if his surmise was correct, he would certainly have known and liked some of the dead when he was still a child. Indeed, he was shifting the bones of hands that might have held him with kindness, and knee bones on which a happier and much smaller version of himself might have sat. Because of this, he steeled himself not to succumb to the sadness all around him by speculating on the “who” of the bones, but instead on the more general “what”: he used touch to identify the general types, and by concentrating on the individual components–a femur, a scapula, a jaw–he was able to avoid focusing on whose once familiar flesh they might have underpinned.

  The boots were the first good thing that happened to him in the dark. There was a moment of qualm when he found the first pair, which he dispelled immediately, knowing the owners were long gone and would undoubtedly wish him well in his present extremity. But that pair did not fit him; the second pair must have been a woman’s and were even smaller, but the third boot he tried on fit well enough, once he had removed the bony foot and shinbones, but finding its mate was impossible.

  Still, one boot was better than no boots, and he dug on, using his protectively shod foot to shove the bone tangle aside as he went.

  He had got used enough to grubbing among the fragmented skeletons and handling the bones not to feel queasy about it any more, and then his hand found skin.

  The feeling of taut leathery hide beneath his hand made him retch, that and the thought that this might be the remains of someone he had known. He stopped working for a while and leant against the rough stone wall until he was able to steel himself to his task again. He bent and gripped what he now took to be a torso with both hands–and then his hand found a pocket. Not skin, he realised with relief. A leather jerkin.

  He coughed out a short laugh, and then stopped, suddenly breathless with hope as he felt something else: in the pocket were three regularly shaped tubes, too uniform to be bones. He pulled one out and felt it. It had a flat bottom, a smooth cylindrical body about two hand breadths long, which tapered to a blunt dome at the end, out of which poked a tuft of something. String perhaps. Or…

  “A wick.”

  He heard the wonder in his voice echo off the walls in the darkness. Then he flicked his wrist and the darkness was gone, banished and pushed to the very edges of his prison by the light blazing from the candle held in his hand.

  “Ex tenebris lux,” he said, and smiled, both at the banishment of the dark and the unbidden memory of Cook, sitting at a scrubbed deal table lit by a very similar candle, teaching a much younger version of himself Latin. In his mind’s eye he could also see his fellow pupil, a young girl with raven-black tresses, sticking her tongue out at him, unseen by their unlikely Classical tutor. He had forgotten how Sara’s face looked framed in dark hair, in the time before shock had turned it white. “Out of darkness, light.”

  He looked around the ceiling above him. He looked up first because he wanted to leave looking at the bone pile until last.

  It was hard to see all the way, and he snapped a flame onto the two other candles and held all three over his head. The first thing he realised was that he was definitely not in a room. He was in a cave. The walls encircled him in a continuous overhanging curve, unclimbable and dwindling in circumference as they rose upwards, penning him at the base of a rock-bound void the shape of an irregular cone, wider at the bottom and narrowing to a flattened dome at the apex. It was a strangely smooth and organic shape, as if it had been formed by a bubble in the once molten rock, or perhaps by some unseen and aeons-long process of subterranean water erosion: certainly he saw irregularly spaced dark rings around the walls which marked the differing tidemarks of age-old water levels. Just below the apex of the roof, at the small end of the cone, was a paler ring, and offset to one side of it was a small hole, clearly the chink through which the nun had observed him.

  He turned slowly, hoping to see another fissure which might hold a second way out of the natural bottle-dungeon at the bottom of which he stood, but the walls were dishearteningly regular.

  He braced himself and looked around the floor to each side. I
t was a boneyard, as he had felt it to be. The skeletons were strewn haphazardly across each other, limbs splayed every which way in a great sprawling jumble of death. The bones were mostly dull and tallow-coloured, not bleached, and where they were not they were darker brown and shiny like old horn. Some were on their backs, some were face down, some were bent awkwardly in positions that made no sense to him, contorted in death and jammed in topsy-turvy wherever they fitted. Mostly the flesh was long gone, but there were some leathery remnants: hands like gloved talons, withered legs and one cocked skull pulled quizzically askance by an unrotted rawhide of tendons and skin still tethering one side of its neck to its shoulder. The clothes had mostly gone the way of the flesh and disintegrated to rags and dust, but there were tatterdemalion remnants here and there, mainly hats, boots and belts which survived, often more or less intact. And where there were belts, there were, he was pleased to see, blades.

  He reached across and pulled a cutlass from a scabbard. The scabbard cracked and fell off what had once been a sword but was now a pitted shank of rust. He discarded it and looked for another.

  They were all shaling arcs of corrosion, each as bad or worse than the last. By the time he found one that might, with weeks of grinding against the stone walls, be capable of retaining an edge, he had formed a nasty suspicion as to how all the people around him had died.

  He sat back on his haunches and surveyed the charnel house floor.

  “You drowned…” he said. “You all drowned. I’m sorry…”

  He looked up again, his eyes rising above the aged, high watermarks until it found the paler ring close to the top.

  “Brighter,” he whispered.

  The candles in his fist flared and started to burn stronger and faster. Melting wax began to ribbon down and spill over his fingers but he didn’t flinch. Instead he stared at the pale ring. With more light he saw it for what it was–a circumference of desperate scratches and panicked gouges hacked there by the men and women, trapped by rising water which jammed them in against the unforgiving roof of the cavern, made in a last desperate attempt to break through the adamantine stone dome that had ultimately drowned them.

  “Out,” he said.

  The candle flames extinguished themselves. He remained staring sightlessly at the roof, unable to clear his mind of the imagined end of The Oversight, the men and women kicking to stay afloat in the darkness as the water rose, becoming jammed in closer and closer to each other as the cavern roof narrowed to its blunt point, then chopping and slashing at the rock in final desperation as the air pocket got smaller and shallower. He did not want to know what that had looked like. They had had candles and his own ability to make them stay alight. They would have seen the end coming. The space above would not have been wide enough at the end for all that had been trapped in here to stay above the water, so at what point had they started drowning each other, submerging their comrades by mistake as each tried to boost his or her head above water? Had there been discipline? Honour? Sacrifice?

  “It was a dog’s death,” he said to the void. “Someone drowned them. Like puppies in a bag.”

  He imagined the thrashing and the screams. He really did not want to know what that had sounded like, what had been shouted, who had said what to whom…

  … but he imagined it anyway. He was used to life or death struggles, but rarely at odds of more than one or two to one. This was a different order of killing. And it had not been a fight, fair or foul. It had just been a trap, a fatal mechanism. It had been death wholesale, murder in bulk, an eradication, not a battle.

  He stood there a long time. And because it was dark nothing saw him wipe his eyes, and nothing saw him set his jaw.

  “Right,” he said.

  He put two candles in his pocket and flicked the remaining one into life. He looked around. There would be more candles, and other things that might be useful hidden in the tangled boneyard around him. If Fortune chose to smile, he might even find a mirror, though he was painfully aware Fortune had recently only favoured him with her absence. Though he could not make this right, he could still put things in order. And in doing so, who knew what he might find that might be useful? Even now he saw the remains of a barrel, and remembered that the ones who had bravely gone through the mirrors to destroy the great evil threatening the nation had taken gunpowder with them. From the parlous state of the barrel, it was clear that the powder had long been washed away, but there might be unbroken barrels beneath the bone pile. He would have to start digging.

  But before he began, he saw himself in the mirror that he had saved. He remembered the nun’s warning about other things following him in here, and shuddered. He didn’t even like the idea of anything watching him from the other side. Now that he had walked in the world behind the mirrors, he knew he would never quite trust a looking-glass not to be observing him right back. Maybe that’s why they were called looking-glasses, because they did the looking too. He turned it to the wall.

  “Very well,” he said, stretching. “I believe it is time to tidy up.”

  CHAPTER 29

  THE WHITE TATTOO

  Amos lay face down on the grass, his head in a rough hessian bag, powerless to extricate himself from the rope cuffing his hands, powerless to do anything other than listen to the words and thoughts passing back and forth in the night air above him. He had missed a passage of time, but did not know how. He assumed from the throb in his temples that he had fallen forward and stunned himself, or that he had been purposefully knocked out with a blow to the head.

  The damp sack smelled terrible, as if dead things had been carried in it. Breathing was hard, and when he tried to move he realised at least one person and possibly two were actually sitting on him. He stopped struggling and concentrated on breathing and slowing his racing heart. As he did so, he was able to clear his mind enough to listen to the conversation going on beyond the limited world of his sack-wrapped head.

  “He is a tool,” said the Ghost. “A weapon.”

  “We have no need of more weapons,” said a voice he took to be the one he had christened Badger Skull, who seemed to be the leader of the band of Sluagh.

  “I know of what you have need,” she said. “And better than that, I know how to get it, if you can be patient.”

  “You know nothing of our needs,” he said.

  “I know Mountfellon,” she said. “And I know he must die.”

  Badger Skull paused. Amos heard the silence and somehow felt the freight it carried, but he did not see his captor turn and look pointedly at the other Sluagh before turning to peer even more closely at the Ghost, sniffing deeply as he did so, as if learning her scent.

  “What do you know of us, you who calls us through blood and chalk and uses a name that is hateful to all the Pure who walk the clean darkness of night?” he said.

  “I know you want the flag that was once yours,” she said. One of the Sluagh sitting on Amos’s back shifted and the sharp-set buttock bones dug painfully into the unprotected area over his kidneys.

  “The flag is still ours,” hissed another Sluagh, perhaps the one sitting on his legs. “It was stolen and iron-bound and stolen again, passed between our enemies and ill-wishers, its true power over us forgotten by them, but it is still ours!”

  “I know it is,” said the Ghost calmly. “I know it is a map of your world and a guarantor of free passage through it. I know it holds the oath-lock that binds all Sluagh and gives cold iron its power over you–a warrandice put on your own banner by your conquerors millennia past.”

  The Sluagh were suddenly quiet. Amos could almost see the looks being exchanged between his captors.

  “How do you know this?” said Badger Skull. “Who are you?”

  “I am no one,” she said. “Once I was someone, once I knew things. Now I am vengeance. Now I am a weapon and a tool like the Bloody Boy there.”

  You betrayed me, thought Amos. I helped you and you betrayed me.

  Yes, she replied. What of it? It had t
o be done.

  And before he could reply she was talking again, almost as if she wanted to shut him up.

  “I know where it is,” she said.

  “Gallstaine Hall,” sneered Badger Skull. “The whereabouts is not unknown to us.”

  “But you do not know how to penetrate the defences that ward the building,” she said. “Ironstone built and ringed and wrapped with iron, it is forbidden to you.”

  “We will find a way,” he replied after a brief silence. “We have waited centuries. Everything fails in the end, even the plans and devices of cunning men.”

  “Especially the devices of men, cunning or no,” she agreed. “But I can help you now. If I tell you how to use the Bloody Boy, you will have the flag within the next cycle of the moon. I have seen it.”