The Paradox

by Charlie Fletcher

  And with that he walked past her, putting a firm hand on her shoulder as he did so, and then disappeared upstairs.

  She sat there looking out at the workshop lit by her candle, which stood on the anvil.

  Her eyes glittered with unwanted moisture. She wiped them. Her instinctive mistrust of The Smith had been correct. He had got in deep behind her defences. And it hurt.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE ROCK AND THE WHIRLPOOL

  Raised a Templebane, but sworn to secret loyalty by a Mountfellon, and a terrifyingly vengeful Mountfellon at that, Coram was caught between Scylla and Charybdis, and like many sharp customers in a similar predicament had decided the best thing to do was rely on his wits, play both ends against the middle and hope that he could arrange things so that either the whirlpool swallowed the rock, or the rock plugged the maelstrom.

  He was walking back to the counting house with three grenadoes, cast-iron balls filled with gunpowder in the bag looped over his shoulder. The balls were packed in straw wadding to stop them knocking against each other. With a crimped, brush-like fuse poking out of the top, they looked like unexpectedly lethal pomegranates. He had just paid a bibulous and habitually impecunious warrant officer stationed at the Woolwich Arsenal a sovereign apiece for them, and was looking forward to showing them to Issachar. He would not tell him how much he had handed over, because he had led his surviving father to believe the price was four sovereigns. Coram had pocketed the surplus coin as an investment in his future.

  Issachar had begun to look a little better than previously, an improvement in his health he had been heard to opine was due to Coram’s unexpected enterprise in pursuing the interests of the House of Templebane during his indisposition. Coram was gratified with this, especially as it made Abchurch look very green around the gills, but he privately suspected Issachar’s better temper was connected with the doses of Sydenham’s tincture, of which he was taking noticeably less. So much for adamantine Scylla.

  The whirlpool that was Charybdis required more thought, but in the end Coram had decided there was no way Mountfellon would ever know it was he who had formulated Templebane’s destructive assault on the Safe House, and thus that there was little reason not to warn the noble lord of the plan before it happened. If he then decided to “discover” the plot and intervene with Templebane, Coram had no particular objection. And indeed he had insurance against being suspected as the spy within Templebane’s family, since he determined it would be in both his and Mountfellon’s ongoing interest that he should remain undiscovered in case he could be of use in the future. So he had prepared a scapegoat, and was to suggest to Mountfellon that he should accidentally identify “a squinny-eyed boy with no chin” who had come and sold him the information for a sovereign.

  He felt the weight of the swinging bombs at his back, and smiled.

  He found he was a little thrilled at the prospect of blowing up the sugar manufactory and seeing the consequent conflagration destroying the house of The Oversight. He hoped all remaining members would be within. He had not forgiven them for unmanning him on the river in front of Mountfellon.

  One way or another, he was going to be fine.

  For unknown to the strabismatic unfortunate in question, Coram had secreted the extra sovereign that he had extracted for the grenadoes from Issachar right beneath Abchurch’s mattress, where it might easily be discovered if further proof were needed.

  It was, he thought, a good investment in his future.

  CHAPTER 34

  THE BUNG

  Time passed in the dark cavern, and the nun did not return. Sharp found early on that he was hungry in a way that he had never been in the mirrors. Lack of hunger or thirst, or any need for food or water seemed to be a feature of the looking-glass dimension, but now that he was back in the “normal” world (or at least under it) he was finding himself prey to those bodily needs once more.

  He had slipped hard ship’s biscuits into his pockets, and two small slabs of pemmican that the thief Dee had either not found or not troubled himself to steal. He ate as sparingly as he could from these as he worked, but the real problem was water.

  He worked by candlelight, sifting through the bone pile, initially clearing a space around the mirror that he had propped face to the cavern wall. The skeletons and other detritus were four or five deep, but he found the stone floor beneath, and began to create order out of chaos. Initially he had intended to lay the bodies out separately, but it quickly became clear that the skeletons were in such an advanced stage of decay that working out which tibia went with whose ribs or skull and so forth was not going to be possible. So he found himself following the ancient custom of those who tend to the disposal of the long dead in ossuaries the world over, which is that he stacked the bones by type and shape, rather than by individual ownership. A pile of skulls grew next to leg bones stacked like cordwood, while all the diminishing sizes of bones were arranged in graded heaps around the edge of the cavern as he cleared space for them. Among the bones, he found the remains of more powder kegs, broken into their constituent barrel staves, which he duly stacked alongside the newly neat bone piles. After a while, he ceased to find the handling of remains unpleasant or charged with any kind of grim association and in the absence of anything else to busy himself with, he found himself taking pride in the painstaking action of clearing and sorting.

  When he got to the centre of the floor, or the bottom of the cone, as he thought of it, he discovered both the answer to something that had been worrying him, and also the solution to his growing problem with dehydration: he had been wondering how, if the void had filled with enough water to leave tidemarks in the past, it was now dry. He moved a pair of skeletons twisted together in the folds of an oilskin cape that had resisted rotting, and found a narrow gash in the stone floor. It was about four feet long and maybe eight inches wide at the most, tapered at both ends in a slightly kinked peapod shape. And when he reached down into it, his hand found water, moving gently past from left to right. It was an underground stream, and the water, when he cupped it greedily to his parched mouth was cold and clean, with a flat mineral taste that was not unpleasant at all. This then was the drain that had emptied the void in the past, and now it was a welcome source of drinking water for his future. The channel was about arm-deep as far as he could tell, since he could touch the bottom if he stretched. When he did so, he found a shoe that had fallen in and wedged itself in a narrow groove, and he retrieved it and added it to the relevant pile.

  Of course he found much else in the charnel heap. There were many more candles, which were very welcome. There were boots, shoes and belts which he mounded against the wall. There were fragments of unrotted cloth, and some garments that remained more or less intact. These he laid out on the ground and used as a mattress for the times when he extinguished the candles and went to sleep. There were horse-pistols and swords rusted to uselessness, and there was a surprisingly large number of coins which had fallen through the bone pile to the floor as the pockets they had once been in had rotted away to nothing.

  And of course there were rings. Of all the things he sorted into piles, it was the rings that touched him most, rings that were all variants of the one he wore, gold rings set with mottled bloodstones on which were incised lions and unicorns, rampant. There were also wedding rings, and he took care to keep them all safely, tied into a handkerchief. He maintained a close tally on the number of them, adding to it every time he found another. He knew that precisely eighty-five souls had gone into the mirrors on the occasion of the Disaster, since the ominous number had often been mentioned by The Smith and Cook when discussing the tragedy which had brought The Oversight to its current desperate state. And yet, by the time he had cleared the bone jumble and stacked every bone, he had only gathered eighty-four rings. He re-counted them several times, and then went back to the piles of small bones and checked them again to make sure there was not an overlooked finger bone encircled by the missing signet. When that failed,
he went through the piles of bigger bones. And when that too failed he gave up and extinguished the candle and tried to go to sleep.

  He tried to think of other things. He stared into the darkness and thought of Sara Falk, of where she might be, of whether there was any possibility that the nun might find her. Thinking of the nun made him think of the man whose name she had told him, the man he must kill for her if she did miraculously make good on her part of the bargain and reunite him with Sara Falk. Thinking of the man, and her claim that he had been responsible for all the dead men and women in this cavern led him back to the number of them, and the number drew him relentlessly to the fact he was one ring shy of eighty-five, and then sleep was impossible and he relit the candle and walked to the pile of skulls.

  He felt foolish doing it, but he methodically took each skull and shook it, like a child rattling a piggy bank, just in case the missing ring had tumbled into someone’s brain-pan in the muddle of broken skeletons, and was hidden there. He heard no tell-tale clatter of metal on bone however, and restacked the skulls. As he did so he found he was automatically counting them, and that was when he found out there was one skull missing too.

  He picked up the candle, flared it to maximum brightness and slowly prowled round his newly ordered circumference to see if he had put it on the wrong pile.

  He had not. There was no doubt. He was missing a skull too. And there was nowhere it could be hiding. Just ordered piles of human components, accessories and the barrel staves. He squatted and looked around thoughtfully.

  Five minutes later found him counting tibias. He totalled them, divided by two, and confirmed that there were the right number of bodies but the wrong number of heads.

  He sat on the floor to consider this dilemma, chewing a small portion of his dwindling pemmican as he did so. The dried beef made him thirsty, and so he went to the runnel in the centre of the floor.

  He did not drink from it when he got there. Instead he stood and stared down at it. It was, he realised, the only place the skull might be hiding.

  He retrieved the candle and lay on the floor. Then he stuck the candle under water and peered into the flowing water.

  The candle did not go out. Instead it flickered in the current as a normal flame might waver in a draught of air.

  “Brighter,” he said.

  The flame grew in intensity and lit the walls of the subterranean channel. He checked one end as far as he could see, his face mashed to the stone as he strained to look back along the course of the rivulet. Then, seeing nothing, he switched round and peered carefully down the other way. He did not see the skull, but instead saw the ends of two bones, a radius and an ulna, still wrapped in a fragment of sleeve. He reached in and grasped them, and tugged. They were wedged in a wrinkle in the stone channel and did not come easy.

  He pulled harder and then harder again, until he realised something was locking them in place. He pushed the candle back underwater and managed to squint down the channel and see that what was wedging them was the missing skull. He tried to reach it, but his arm was not long enough, his fingertips brushing the curve of bone but unable to get any purchase. He gripped the arm bones and pulled with more strength, twisting and levering them as much as he could until something cracked and the skull came loose from the cranny it was wedged in and was swept permanently out of reach by the flow, as the bones broke free and came out of the water so suddenly that he fell backwards. He stared at his catch, a whole skeletal forearm and the bones of the attached hand, balled up in the twisted remnants of the sleeve end. And among them was the unmistakeable gold band of the last missing ring.

  He was so surprised and strangely pleased by this small victory that he laughed in delight, his merriment ringing round the dome above him.

  Below him, unseen under the cavern floor, the skull he had dislodged bounced and bobbled in its own merry way, tumbling blindly along the imperceptibly narrowing curves of the channel, like a ball carried by the current. And then it stopped, wedged again, now wholly unreachable and this time corked like a bung, blocking the subterranean stream at a tapering choke point. The pressure of the current held it in place.

  And dammed behind the sudden obstruction, the stream backed up, bubbling and gurgling up out of the slit in the floor, stopping Sharp’s laughter in an instant.

  He stared at the thin puddle emerging from the hole and spreading in a dark stain across the floor.

  Once he had worked out the implications of what he was seeing, he did not waste a moment. He looked up at the distant roof, the tide marks and the piles he had spent so much time organising.

  The cavern was going to fill with water. It had done so before. Sometimes it clearly did not fill all the way to the top. So this was not necessarily fatal. But it was deadly serious, because although he could swim, he could not do so indefinitely. He needed something to hold on to, something that floated.

  All he had were the barrel staves and the wooden frame of the mirror. He worked fast. Using the belts he’d reclaimed, and twisting rags into ropes, he lashed together the curved wooden slats, using the mirror as a base to tie them too. He ended up with an ungainly rectangular pallet, not big enough to call a raft, maybe four foot by three foot and eighteen inches in depth. It wasn’t something to sit on, but it would do, he hoped, to cling to if the water kept rising.

  He had taken the precaution of collecting his pile of candles and jamming them about his person, wedged into boot-tops, pockets and waistcoat. By the time he’d done this and built his diminutive liferaft, the water was as high as his calves. He thought perhaps it was slowing, but as he sat on the long end of the propped up raft, he realised it had only slowed because the walls of the pear-shaped cone were widening and the increased volume was having a consequent effect on the apparent rate of rise in the water level.

  And worse than that, he realised, the water was very cold. He was quite as likely to succumb to exposure as drown.

  He wished he hadn’t laughed so merrily all those long minutes ago. Somehow the dark water rising around him felt like a punishment for that immoderate moment of optimism.

  If Sharp had believed in gods (which he didn’t, gods being much more mundane and imaginary things than the arcane realities he dealt with on a regular basis) he might have thought they were punishing him for his one unguarded flash of hubris.

  He extinguished the candle and composed himself to wait and see if the water would stop.

  There was a quiet and deceptively gentle burbling as the now unseen water kept welling out of the cut in the floor. The only other sound in the perfect darkness was a single word.

  “Sara.”

  Which was either an apology or perhaps as close to a prayer as a man without a god could get.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE DEWPOND

  Amos did not recognise the approach to Gallstaine Hall until the ominous scaffolding that gave the junction known as Bowland’s Gibbet its name swung into view across the fields. The old gallows silhouetted against another bright moonlit night sky seemed to him a stark and ominous harbinger of the dark deed he was now expected to perform. He had not of course forgotten why he was being shepherded across the countryside night after night as a weapon for another’s revenge, but he had pushed it to the side of his mind and tried not to look at it too closely, since there was little he could do about the fatal tattoo closing round his neck other than comply. Instead he had concentrated on the experience of being with so strange a troop as the Sluagh, noting everything about them: what made them so other, so different from the people he had grown up with in the great city and, perhaps most surprisingly, what they had in common with normal folk. The Sluagh were so proud and disdainful of those who were not “Pure” that they would have vociferously refuted any shared characteristics with the mundane populace, but the truth, Amos saw, was that they were human and not “creatures”: each had his own character, be it phlegmatic, complaining, inquisitive, garrulous or foul-mouthed and so on, just as ordinary people d
id. Within the group there were tensions and friendships, old rivalries that would flare up into well-worn arguments as they travelled, and jokes shared that would have the whole company smiling and laughing, as much from familiarity as any real humour. They did have a sense of humour, albeit a cruel one, which was the thing that disconcerted Amos the most in some ways, since he often found himself grinning in concert with the wild-faced night-riders, a thing he would never have expected. They were tough, harsh and prone to brag, especially about their ruthlessness and cruelty, and particularly when talking of themselves to Amos or the Ghost, but he noted that while they talked a vicious and cruel game, they did not terrorise anyone as they passed, and in fact seemed to move cautiously through the nightscape as if more worried about being seen than anything else. The braggadocious stories of merciless inhumanity seemed as much an ornamentation to create an impression of ferocity as the facial tattoos and the festoons of animal bones with which they adorned their clothes and hair.

  And then, just when he was beginning to wonder if they were quite as bad as they were painted, not least by themselves, they came to the dewpond, and he realised that familiarity had not bred contempt, but something much more dangerous to him: vulnerability.

  The dewpond was a perfectly circular depression brimful of water on the top of the small hill just behind Bowland’s Gibbet. He had thought they would proceed straight to the gate of Mountfellon’s Gallstaine Hall beyond, but the troop had turned aside and climbed the slope, the quiet chatter of the road dying on their lips, so that by the time he crested the rise, the procession had become unmistakeably serious. The Sluagh ringed the pool, none dismounting. Not one of the horses tried to drink from the flat water, which surprised Amos.