The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  For an instant nothing happened, and then each side of the newly cut wound darkened to a sudden and startling green-black that blossomed with dull grey eruptions of rot in slow explosions through which white maggot heads began to writhe and poke like hundreds of tiny fingers reaching out of the corrupted flesh.

  The smell was as swift and if possible even more shocking. Lucy Harker slipped off her chair and ran to the far end of the room gagging, her hands clamped over her nose, staring at the rotting ham as if it were a personal insult.

  “Jésus chiant!” she cried, one finger clamped on her nose while the other pointed in outrage. “Cela sent comme le cul d’un mendiant mort. Faites quelque chose!”

  “We’re really going to have to do something about her language,” said Sara Falk. “But she’s right. Can you do something about that, Cook?”

  Cook picked up the ham which had shrivelled halfway back to the bone already, and dropped it decisively, board and all, into the fire. The fire crackled and roared and then kicked up unnatural red and green flames which shot three feet above the grate and curved savagely backwards into the catch-all hood and up the open flue, racing one another in their fiery eagerness to get to the open sky beyond the chimney-pot three storeys above.

  “Well,” said Sara Falk, taking her eyes off the bundle and finding Mr Sharp.

  “I told you I smelled something,” he said. “I thought it was Ketch or the girl—”

  “But it was something else?”

  He nodded.

  “One of the Sluagh.”

  Cook exhaled sharply in an explosion of disbelief.

  “The Sluagh? This far south?”

  “Yes.”

  “In a city?” she spluttered.

  “He was in it,” said Mr Sharp. “Now he’s under it. I have him in the Privy Cells. I found his horse.”

  As if on cue there was the sound of a hammer clinking against metal out in the alley.

  “Emmet is shoeing it,” he said.

  “Shoeing it?” said Sara. “Surely it would have been kinder to just put it out of its misery?”

  He shook his head.

  “It had been Sluagh-rid for a long time, but it was still just enough itself behind the madness to be worth the saving. Besides…”–he looked at the floor for an instant–“You know I don’t like to kill.”

  Cook snorted again.

  “There’s a long line of dead men would be spinning in their graves if they could hear that!”

  “None the less,” he said. “You know it is so.”

  He pointed at the red handkerchief.

  “I cut the beaks and skulls off its mane. One of them was faster than I was…”

  He held up his finger and showed the wound with a rueful smile.

  “We must talk,” he said, widening his eyes and tipping his head very slightly to indicate Lucy.

  “You can talk freely. She speaks only French,” said Sara.

  “How do you know?” said Cook. “All we know is that she hasn’t spoken English yet.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Mr Sharp. “What matters is that it is not safe to have her in the house.”

  “I have just given her my word that she will be safe here,” said Sara.

  He shook his head.

  “There is something in the manner of her arrival I do not like—”

  “Is there a connection between her and the Sluagh?”

  “I do not yet know of one—”

  “I gave her my word.”

  “As I gave my word to protect you and this house,” he countered with the faint exhaustion of one for whom this was an overfamiliar exchange. “Have Emmet take her to The Folley. Have her guarded by The Smith if he has returned. If not Emmet can keep her there. She can do—”

  “One night here will do no harm, Sharp,” Sara cut in. “Look at her. It is not even a full night for it will be light soon enough and she is dropping in her tracks.”

  Lucy’s eyes were drooping, it was true. Mr Sharp took a deep breath.

  “My nose tells me something is wrong—”

  “Something is always wrong,” said Sara. “We would not be necessary if it wasn’t.”

  “That argument does not improve with your incessant repeating of it,” he bristled. “She cannot stay here. It is not safe.”

  “It is the Safe House. If not here, then where?”

  “I mean it is not safe for the house to have her here,” he said.

  There was a pause as he looked at Cook, who in turn looked at Sara.

  “It is not safe for us,” he finished.

  Sara shook her head slowly, tired at having to rejoin an old battle.

  “Why was the house made safe in the first place?” she asked.

  “To guard the library,” said Cook.

  “To guard the key,” corrected Mr Sharp.

  “And why must the key be guarded?” continued Sara wearily.

  Mr Sharp looked at Cook again. She didn’t meet his eyes. He smiled with icy politeness.

  “Sara Falk. With respect, I am not a child to be pulled through his lessons by you.”

  “I am not schooling you. It is a serious question which applies to the girl.”

  His smile tightened up a notch. Then he exhaled.

  “The key’s power must be kept out of the hands of those who would misuse it.”

  “Why?” she persisted.

  He shook his head and looked at Lucy. She was head down on the table, eyes closed, fast asleep.

  “I will not play this game with you, not now and not in front of her—”

  “It is no game and the child is asleep.”

  He leant in and looked closely at Lucy.

  “I put something in her milk,” said Cook.

  He straightened and looked into Sara’s face whose chin was tipped up in a defiant manner.

  “Very well,” he said. “I will play but you will not like my answer: the real key is the Discriminator. It discriminates. It shows who is normal and who is not. It reveals those who have supranatural characteristics to those who don’t. It even reveals those who have abilities which are latent or unsuspected—”

  Sara opened her mouth but he raised a finger to stop her and rode implacably over her attempt to interrupt.

  “We are here to protect the unaware from the unseen, but also to protect the unseen from the attentions of the unaware. We know what the unaware can do when in the grip of one of their occasional fits of religion or other zealotry. Burned girls, men tortured and foolish old women put to the rack or drowned in the village pond.”

  “My father—” she began.

  “Your father said the last witch craze under Cromwell killed scores of innocents, most of whom had no real powers anyway. The persecutors lit their fires without a means of truly distinguishing who was actually who. Just imagine the immense harm they could do with a Discriminator like the key—”

  “If I might—” began Cook. He shook his head.

  “I have not finished. The last witch craze would seem like a mild diversion when they set to work in earnest with a tool like that. The next fit of enthusiasm could be on a horrible scale–it would be like comparing the meagre output of the humble weaver working his handloom in the back of his cottage to the torrent of fabric emerging from the new steam-driven mills. It would be death wholesale and persecution by the yard—”

  “Mr Sharp,” said Sara, eyes hot.

  “No, Sara Falk,” he said, stabbing at her with his finger. “It would not be a mere temporary tipping of the very balance we are sworn to maintain; it would be the scales themselves knocked over and smashed in the rush to blood and vengeance. Man is too fearful to embrace difference. One day this may change, once poverty and ignorance are banished, but as long as the passage of most men’s lives remains a struggle against hunger and insecurity, difference itself is a threat because those who are alien to you, those whom you do not know, might come and steal your food and do worse to your family. The key is not merely the Dis
criminator: in the wrong hands it is a tool for finding difference and thus identifying an enemy. Cromwell’s men kept dissent at bay in the shires by scourging the ‘different’ and blaming them for the ills his war brought to the peasantry. Prejudice is a strong fire, Sara Falk, and the Discriminator is too easy a means of finding it fuel.”

  He smacked his hand on the table and looked up into the attendant silence, almost immediately ashamed at his uncharacteristic vehemence.

  “And now who is giving lessons?” said Sara quietly.

  He coloured slightly.

  “I am reminding you why it is my duty to go against your wishes and insist the girl is taken from here tonight.”

  “She stays,” she said.

  “This is the Safe House. It is my charge to keep it–and you–so. I cannot understand why it pleases you so much to check me on that, unless it is a wilful obstinacy that—”

  “Don’t continue this old dance,” said Cook. “Sometimes I think you bring out the worst in each other: Sara never reckless except in reaction to Sharp; Sharp never so cautious except in relation to her. It is quite exhausting as a spectacle, especially this late at night. I swear sometimes the pair of you make me feel like an old gooseberry forced to watch two mooncalves stumbling through a flirtation—”

  Sara’s pale face tightened and flushed pink at these words, and her voice rose.

  “I frightened the girl!” she said. “I have an obligation. I overstepped myself. She panicked and threw hot food in my face, and because it hurt I got angry, which was an unpardonable lack of self-control, and I gripped her hand and made her touch the wall and so made her glint against her will!”

  She looked down at the floor, as if too ashamed to meet anyone’s eyes.

  “I hurt her instead of being patient and explaining things in a slow and measured way. It was unforgiveable.”

  “Nonsense,” said Cook, nudging Mr Sharp.

  He didn’t say anything. So she nudged him again, harder, the kind of nudge that leaves a bruise. He looked at her in surprise. She raised an eyebrow and drew her arm back a third time.

  “It was… understandable,” he said.

  “Nevertheless,” she went on, raising her head and pointing at Lucy. “She was hurt and drained because of me. She can stay one night.”

  He opened his mouth. She carried on with a placatory wave of her hand.

  “If you have a Sluagh in the Privy Cells, then The Smith will want to see it. I suggest we send Hodge to fetch him. He will be here at first light, and then can take the girl back to The Folley afterwards. One short night will do no harm.”

  He held her gaze, seeming on the point of retorting, then winced as Cook trod on his foot. He dropped his eyes into a shrug of acceptance.

  “Very well.” He looked at his hands and wrinkled his nose in distaste. “I will go and wash my hands at the pump.”

  The door bumped loudly behind him as he walked out, making Lucy raise her head and look sleepily round the room before sinking back into sleep.

  “What?” said Sara without looking at Cook. “He agreed with me in the end. It’s fine.”

  “Nothing,” said the older woman.

  “That’s a rather pregnant nothing,” said Sara after a long beat. “Spit it out or go to bed.”

  “I was just observing that you are, as ever, the one blade he cannot defend himself against,” she replied with an unconvincing innocence.

  “And what does that mean, you old pirate?” said Sara, a dangerous edge to her voice.

  “It means, young lady, that one day you and he are going to have to have a conversation.”

  Sara’s eyes bored holes into Cook’s ample back as she watched the older woman examining the Sluagh blade.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  “Yes, you do. Even if you don’t know you do, you do. But that’s for another day,” said Cook with a shudder. “I don’t want this filthy cleaver in my kitchen for a minute longer. It has a charnel-house reek to it.”

  “Yes, I think it and these need to be placed out of harm’s way,” said Sara Falk, relieved that the conversation had tacked back into safer waters. She reached over and picked up the bag.

  “I think they shall have to be put in the Red Library.”

  CHAPTER 20

  QUIETUS

  The lock to the cell door wouldn’t budge. No matter how insistently the Sluagh worried at it with the bronze pin he had secreted in his sealskin boots, the mechanism just wouldn’t move at all. It was iron, and cold iron was stubborn, alien stuff for the Night Host at the best of times, and this was far from a good time for the Sluagh. He knew it was pointless, but his pride kept him at it until the pin bent and re-bent and then finally snapped.

  Only then did he stop, tossing the pieces away and slumping to the cell floor, his back against the door. He could feel the discomfort of the power in the alternating oak, ash and blackthorn planks fizzing against him like a very mild static electricity, but he was much too tired to move. Instead he sat in the dark and remembered his life. Not the short life before First Death, but the much longer life he’d led after that. He remembered the wild rides and the companionship of the Night Host and the sense of excitement in the mastery of the dark they shared.

  Before First Death, in his day-lit life, he had been as cautious about the dark and what it might hide as any other man or woman living in a solitary spot at the edge of the world would sensibly be: he smiled at the memory, dim and distant though it now was. The dark was his element now, as essential and unnoticed as water to a fish. It was hard to be afraid of what the darkness might hold when you know you are almost always the most dangerous thing abroad after the sun goes down.

  He shook himself to erase the memory of his Day Life, funny though he found the idea of the dark ever having held terrors bigger than those he was now blood-kith and bone-kin to: other Sluagh never mentioned their Day Lives. For them it was as if escaping the tyranny of light had rubbed out all memories of their earlier selves, their friends, their families. He wondered, as he often did, if he had perhaps done something incorrectly on that cold midnight so very many Beltanes ago as he stumbled bloodily through the twin fires which marked his First Death. He knew the Sluagh chieftains, who saw everything even in the darkest corners of a man’s soul, noticed this in him, and though nothing a Sluagh did was condemned by another Sluagh as a point of honour, he sensed they saw his taste for day-drenched girls as a weakness. He viewed it differently, this coupling with girls fat with sunlight a demonstration of his power, but he never spoke of it. He enjoyed playing with the girl’s minds as much as he perversely thrilled to the unwholesome warmth of their flesh against the vital chill of his own. And in the end he also knew the thin thread of connection he had with the daywalkers was a tool the Sluagh were happy to use when it suited their purposes. Most of them were so removed from the light-locked that they scarcely noticed them as they rode past their lit windows or darkened doorways, paying them no more heed than a man does who rides past a wood and fails to see the birds in the trees or the rabbits and field mice hidden beneath the hedges and brambles. He always noticed, and his noticing of the daywalkers was a bridge between them.

  That is why he had been sent into London to do what he had done. That is how he came to play the part he had in the game that was now running. He’d felt the power and the life in the girl in the sack, and an old fire had kindled in him even as Ketch had shouldered her and set off for the Jew’s house with his story, and he had sought out the soft-minded girl in the tavern as a vessel within which to quench that heat.

  He should have kept apart and waited and watched, but he had done what he had done and nothing was to be regretted. Nothing except that he had not had time to do more because the man in the midnight blue coat had seen him where others couldn’t.

  His lip curled at the memory. The first thing he would do when he was released by his bone-kin was to find the man and skin him.

  He knew he would be r
eleased. Before he had ridden into the city he had asked what would happen if he fell foul of the Lore, and his chieftain had sworn a blood oath that he would be released. He might be in a cell of oak, ash and thorn, but the Sluagh had their own woods, their own metals, and any moment now he expected to hear the sound of bronze blades on rowan handles hacking their way through to save him.

  He didn’t hear that. What he heard was a smaller though no less welcome sound. He heard the scrabble and skitter of bony feet on the corridor floor outside, and then the slow careful scratch of tiny claws pulling a skeleton up the outside of the door-frame.

  He smiled and unfolded from the floor. It was not a smooth movement as he gasped to his feet and leant against the door.

  “Hello, my dear,” he croaked. “Brought them to rescue me, have you?”

  And he laughed, the dry wheezes tumbling from his lips like dead insects.

  “Come in then,” he croaked, and slid his hand out of the judas hole, palm up, ready. “Come in, pretty one, for by the bone you have run far tonight and you deserve rest.”

  His good hand trembled in the dark as he waited for the familiar weight to drop into it. It was true, he thought, he had never felt so old. The cold iron and the mongrel puppy with the fast blade had done this to him: he knew his strength and the vigour of his youth would return to him as soon as his kin had freed him from the woods lining the room and whatever words had been hidden on the back of them. He would celebrate his returned strength by dancing in the mongrel’s blood. It would happen so soon that he could almost feel it was happening already, and his voice was stronger as he spoke to the bone pet outside.

  “Come, my dear, for we shall soon be free.”

  Unseen by the Sluagh, the bone pet turned its head, still gripping the sharp rowan twig in its bronze beak as it gauged the distance and then leapt from its perch on the door-frame and landed on the waiting hand.

  “Good,” laughed the Sluagh. “Good…”

  He began to draw his forearm back inside the cell.