The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  His eyes swept the darkness beyond the ring of light. His eyes were very good in the dark once they adjusted. He could see the distant copse of elms in the centre of the field more than a hundred yards away. He could see the shape of the trees where the cattle had neatly cropped off the bottom branches to a uniform height so that the dark leafy mass seemed to hover in mid-air. There was, he concluded, definitely no one there. The hearing had been a trick of the night, and he should get back to the coach before it thundered southwards without him. He had been warned he had two minutes and no more.

  And yet there was something that kept him where he was, staring across the thorny hedge and the dinted grass towards the elms. He just couldn’t see what it was, and then the air between the trunks rippled and the leaves, or what he had taken to be leaves, moved across the grass. Three horsemen seemed to materialise out of nothing and trot towards him, and as they came he heard not the sound of their hooves, which in truth made no sound, but the conversation running between them.

  A voice said, “We cannot take Mountfellon. The coach is bound in cursed iron…”

  A second scratchy voice replied, “But we may take the boy who rides beyond the safety of iron in the boot beneath the leather curtain.”

  Amos’s heart stuttered and a cold abyss seemed to open inside him as he realised they were talking about him. He also suspected they were Sluagh, for though he had never seen one in person he had heard much about them. He might not speak in Templebane’s counting house, but he listened to everything, and nothing he had heard of them filled him with pleasure at their current closeness to him. He remained motionless in the shadows.

  “Why will we take the boy?” said the third in a voice that was less a whisper than the frozen ghost of one.

  “Because he brought a message from the Templebanes,” spat the first. “He is the broker’s boy.”

  “We can use him,” agreed the second voice.

  “We can hurt him…” whispered the third, a flicker of restrained glee kindling in its voice.

  “We can do both,” agreed the first decisively. “We will take him as they slow going up the long sharp hill two leagues hence, as they pass through the dark of the wood. They will see nothing and hear nothing and not know he has gone until they get to London.”

  They grunted in agreement and there was a rattle of bone as the leader pulled hard on the reins of his pony, yanking its head round, and then he kicked his heels into its ribs so hard that Amos heard the hollow thump of it as the three Sluagh wheeled round and cantered off towards the ambush point.

  At that moment he heard the coachman call his name with a sharp crack of the whip, and he knew he must make a decision, and fast.

  He knew that the safest thing to do would be to run back into the courtyard and tell Mountfellon what he had seen, and do it now. It was clear that if he rode on the boot he would be taken and hurt by these riders. But what if Mountfellon wouldn’t let him ride within the coach?

  As he thought this he felt a twinge in his thumb, and he thought of the smile on the gaunt viscount’s face after he had jabbed the blade into it and watched him flinch and bleed. He heard the coachman say something, and heard Mountfellon’s reply.

  “If he’s not here, he can shift for himself. I’ve better things to do than hunt for a blackamoor in the dark.”

  And so Amos did a very unusual thing.

  He took Mountfellon at his word. He stayed in the shadows and did not return to the coach in time and, true to that word, the coachman cracked the whip and without bothering to call him a second time, drove the coach back out of the courtyard and into the night, leaving Amos alone in the dark. He didn’t move until he heard the ostler put the used horses into the stable, and then stomp off back into the welcoming warmth of the inn.

  And then Amos moved very fast and decisively.

  He knew that he needed cold iron in his hand to protect himself in case the Sluagh came looking for him, and then he needed to put running water between him and them. Even though he had never been this far away from London, he knew the things that would help ward against the attentions of the uncanny.

  He slipped back into the stables and pulled a twelve-inch bastard file from its place by the anvil. He felt the rough edges and the weight of the thing, and stuck it in the waistband of his trousers. Next he stuffed both pockets of his coat with oats, and finally he stole a horse-blanket which he wrapped around himself as he slipped out into the road and headed in the direction he had come from.

  Not wanting to stand out as the only traveller on the empty road, he slipped through the hedge at the first opening and jogged doggedly along the field edge keeping parallel to the road but protected from view by the hedge itself.

  It was wet plough beneath his feet, and it soon felt like he was taking most of Hertfordshire with him as his boots clagged into heavy balls of clay, but he kept going.

  He knew what Templebane said the Sluagh were capable of doing to those who fell foul of them. Indeed Issachar had used the very thought of the Sluagh as a threat to keep his boys on what he called “the straight and sensible road”: it was this childhood fear of the Shadowgangers who would skin small boys for their sport which propelled him away from London with his heart thumping wildly in his chest.

  He had almost been bounced out of the coach’s boot half a mile back as the coachman had taken a humpback bridge at breakneck speed, and he had had a glimpse of a canal, its moonlit surface ribboning off into the darkness on either side. If he could cross the canal, it would be an added safety. He did not know how the Sluagh hunted, but he was certain that the night was entirely their element and not his at all, at least not in the rural version that he was hurrying through.

  There were no lights to be seen now since the inn had dropped out of sight behind the curve of the field, and the moon, which had revealed the canal as he had hurtled over it on the coach, was itself also hidden behind a thickening bank of sky.

  He was beginning to feel he could slow down when he heard something move behind him. Without looking back he started to sprint for his life, heavy-footed through the clay, running blind from the things breathing hard behind him.

  He missed the canal entirely, although it did not miss him. He stumbled off the plough through a thin band of long grass, and then just as the thing behind him snatched wildly at his neck, catching the strap of the brass plate, his feet clomped into thin air, and he was pitching forward, his momentum snapping the leather as he plunged face first into the water.

  The cold wet hit him like a knife and he gasped and filled his mouth with the flat silty taste of the canal. He coughed and spluttered it out before he filled his lungs, but as he flailed for a handhold he instead wound the heavy horse-blanket round him like a shroud. His arm was pinned by the wet material and, worse than that, the weight of his clay-balled feet pulled him inexorably below the water.

  If he had continued to flail, Amos may well have drowned.

  But one thing he was was a survivor, and the way he survived was by thinking fast. He realised that he was fighting himself, and so he just went still and didn’t move. He let his feet sink until there was a good six feet of water over his head. Even though his lungs were burning with oxygen starvation he kept calm, squatting as he was carried slowly along by the flow of the canal. His feet dragged along the bottom as he went. As soon as he had enough bend in his legs he straightened them explosively, powering himself up towards the air. His head burst the surface of the canal and he sucked a lungful of the night air, shaking the water out of his eyes to try and get a bearing before sinking again.

  And then he went under.

  CHAPTER 30

  SINGLE-HANDED

  “It is my fault,” said Mr Sharp, looking down at Sara Falk who was stretched on her bed with her eyes still shut, lying just as motionless as she had been ever since he had carried her up the stairs and into her bedroom.

  “That’s not how she’ll see it,” said Cook.

  “It wa
s a trap,” he said, bitterness spiking his words. “The girl was a trap.”

  “Well,” Cook agreed, “she was a something, that’s for sure.”

  “I should have insisted she didn’t stay in the house,” he said.

  “You did,” said Cook, looking down at Sara. “Unfortunately as you well know, she has never been particularly… insistable.”

  Sara lay there between them, so drained that her face was as colourless as the starched linen of her bed. The sheets were pulled up to her shoulders and her arms hidden beneath the covers.

  The room itself was perhaps the plainest in the house: the walls once painted a pale violet were aging back to a bleached-out white, and what furniture there was–a cupboard, a bedside table and a desk and chair in front of the window–were simple light-coloured things made of limed oak. No pictures intruded onto the blank walls, and there was no mirror. The room was plain because this was the room into which Sara retreated to sleep and be calm. The only splash of colour came from the intricate Kashgai rug; a meadow of once bright yellow, blue and green flowers on a pinkish ground, all now faded with time and wear. Mr Sharp mashed his foot into one of the green blooms and scowled.

  “I should have known. I did know. The Sluagh wasn’t a coincidence—”

  “Are you going to whine or do something?” said Cook, her words brutal as a slap. His head came up and he looked at her, his face as close to surprise as he ever allowed it to get.

  “I mean, you can whine if you like, but I do not expect that will help Sara much,” she said. “Her ring was on that hand. And a Glint without a heart-stone, an adult Glint, will sicken and go mad.”

  Mr Sharp opened his mouth to say something, and then bit down and clenched it off. The muscles round his jaw worked for a long beat, and then he spoke with a controlled, glacial voice through which tension shivered like a crack in the ice about to unleash an avalanche.

  “If I could give her my hand for hers, I would cut it off instantly,” he said. “Without thought. Willingly. But I cannot…”

  “And a good thing too,” said Cook. “You are becoming positively histrionic.”

  “What happened?”

  Sara’s voice rose from the bed like a wisp of smoke, thin as cobwebs. Her eyes were open and for an unguarded moment they darted between Cook and Mr Sharp, bright with shock.

  “How much do you remember?” said Cook.

  Sara’s eyes locked onto Mr Sharp’s as if trying to pull an answer from him. He said nothing, but his eyes slid off hers and down to the end of her right arm, hidden beneath the sheets.

  Her eyes seemed to go away for a long moment, and then she shuddered and they came back older and less bright.

  “All of it,” she said.

  “So you know about your hand?” said Cook.

  Sara nodded and slowly pulled her arms out from under the covers. The sight of the truncated wrist silenced them all. Mr Sharp’s throat worked but no sound emerged and they waited as she looked at the clean-sheared stump, turning her forearm this way and that, and then finally reaching across to touch the mirrored oval where the arm stopped. She winced as her fingers skated across the glass.

  “I will go and wake the pharmacist on Ratcliffe Highway,” said Mr Sharp. “I will bring laudanum for the pain.”

  “There is no pain,” she said flatly. “And I do not require poppies to dull my faculties at this time of all times.”

  “Child,” said Cook, coming forward now the silence was broken. “Your…”

  Whatever she had been about to say remained unsaid, because something large and unswallowable rose in her throat and made it impossible to speak. She rested her hand on Sara’s cheek instead. Sara looked up at the big woman.

  “I have not been a child for a long time,” she said.

  “No,” snuffled Cook, pulling a red and white spotted handkerchief from the inner recesses of her pinafore and blowing her nose with a thunderous series of detonations like a rolling broadside.

  Sara patted her hand and sat up.

  “Besides, there is no pain,” she repeated.

  “Good,” said Mr Sharp.

  “But there is something else,” she said, the catch in her voice betraying the strangeness of what she was feeling. “I have a great sense of… loss. And I can feel the hand.”

  “As if it’s still there?” said Mr Sharp, looking at Cook.

  “In a manner, yes,” she said. “Yes. I see it has quite gone, though I revolt against the thought of it, and yet… and yet… I feel…”

  Her voice trailed off as she closed her eyes and concentrated on exactly what it was she seemed to be feeling.

  “You feel it?” said Mr Sharp.

  “Yes,” she said, eyes still shut, moving her arm a little from side to side. “Yes, that, and yet more than that I feel… I mean, it is as if I can also feel with it. As if it is still connected to me…”

  She opened her eyes.

  “It is not a painful sensation, but it is also not quite a pleasant one. In the circumstances.”

  Cook blew another cannonade into her handkerchief.

  “Had a shipmate once,” she said. “French chain-shot took his leg off just below the Tortugas, carried it clean over the side in an instant. As gone as any limb could hope to be, buried fathoms deep and lost to man. And yet, ever after, when it was cold he said his toes was freezing off, except it was the toes on the foot that were already long gone under the waves that he felt. It’s a trick the body plays on the thinking part of you. It’s just your mind not quite caught up yet.”

  “It’s not that,” said Sara, her voice gaining strength. “It doesn’t feel like it’s here.”

  She raised the stump again and looked at it wonderingly.

  “It feels like it’s somewhere else.”

  “In the mirror?” guessed Mr Sharp.

  Sara shrugged and shuddered again. “Wherever it is, it’s distracting. Not painful. Just distracting. It feels like it’s in a… box.”

  She moved the stump but looked at the void above it, as if she was moving an invisible hand.

  “It’s your mind, girl,” said Cook. “Like I said: it’s the shock.”

  Sara fixed her with eyes that had now regained their usual sharpness.

  “You know it isn’t.”

  Cook wiped something out of her eye.

  “Don’t,” said Sara softly.

  “I’m not,” said Cook, blowing her nose with a final thunderous series of detonations.

  “The girl…” began Mr Sharp.

  “Lucy. Lucy Harker. I told her she was safe,” said Sara.

  “She’s a thief. The key from the black cage is gone,” he replied.

  “The key in the cage was false bait, you know that. So no harm done,” she replied. “It has served its purpose. The Discriminator is secure still, and since the stratagem was yours in the beginning, you are to be commended for your cunning and foresight in installing the decoy all those years ago.”

  The long speech clearly drained energy from her that she could ill afford. He opened his mouth to say something but she shook her head and carried on.

  “We must still find her and get her back to safety.”

  “Sara Falk,” he snorted. “You gave your word to a thief.”

  “It doesn’t matter what she is,” she snapped back. “My word is my word. Besides. She may not have known what she was doing…”

  “She knew exactly what she was doing, and so did those who sent her to us.”

  “We must find her,” she said.

  “I have sent for The Smith. He and Hodge will be here at dawn. You may decide with them what is to be done. I have one thing to do, and one only…”

  He was already stepping to the door.

  “Mr Sharp—” she said.

  “Miss Falk,” he said, cutting her off. “I will find your hand or—”

  “Find the girl,” she insisted.

  “No,” he said. “I must find the hand. If the girl is still wherever t
he hand is, then I will drag her back too, but the hand is the thing.”

  “You are… ungovernably obstinate,” she said, rising off the pillows. “Do as I say. It is my hand!”

  “It is not just the hand,” he snapped. “It is my duty to protect not just this house, but you above all.”

  She shook her head in irritation.

  “This is not about some quaint chivalry, Mr Sharp, this is…”

  “No,” he said. “It is not: it is about life or death.”

  “I can live with one hand if need be,” she snorted. “I can li—”

  “But you cannot live without your heart-stone.”

  She stopped as if slapped.

  “It is not just the hand that is gone, Sara Falk,” he said. “Your rings were on it too.”

  She remained frozen, propped on her good arm halfway between pillow and upright.

  “I will find the girl. I will return your heart-stone, or…” He stopped himself, unable to say what the alternative might be, nodded a curt farewell, and closed the door behind him.

  “… or die trying,” finished Cook quietly.

  “I had not thought of the heart-stone,” said Sara, wonderingly. “It was stupid of me. But the loss of my hand makes me, made me…”

  She looked at Cook, her eyes suddenly wild with a new fear.

  “The mirrors: he cannot—!”

  “He is distressed,” said Cook, easing her back onto the pillows. “He blames himself. But don’t worry. He cannot get lost in the mirrors like—Well, he cannot get into the mirror anyway, not in through the Discriminator since one of the inner mirrors is in shards, so the direct road to the girl and the hand are gone for ever.”

  CHAPTER 31

  SNICKERSNEE

  Amos did not drown. He plunged into the canal just as something snatched at his neck. He felt the leather strap that held the “Mute but Intelligent” brass around his neck yank his head back and then snap, and then he was underwater and breathing in river until everything went black…