The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  Lucy pulled against the shackle on her wrist but it was no use: she couldn’t run. And now she was going to see the Pyefinches slaughtered. She didn’t know why they had captured her, because it didn’t quite feel right that they had done so to hand her over to these strange night men, though she could think of no other reason. She was confused and scared. She nudged Rose, who appeared not to feel it; her face was blank as if asleep on her feet.

  “That is tidy,” said Cocked Hat as he reached back into his tattered cloak and retrieved his own broken-backed blade. “Take the girl and leave the blame on her.”

  “Wait…” said the first.

  His voice was sudden and puzzled.

  “Wait?”

  “There were four of them…”

  Lucy looked round. Charlie had disappeared.

  For the first time, the two Sluagh looked less than commanding as they peered about them, searching the shadows just as the Pyefinches had done a moment before they had walked out of the dark.

  Rose looked up at them, the stupid look sliding off her face to be replaced by something chilling and tough.

  “I expect you’ll be feeling a little disappointed,” she said.

  “What?” said the first Sluagh, turning to his companion. “I thought you had bent her will.”

  “My will doesn’t bend,” said Rose. “I’m not built like that.”

  She turned to Lucy.

  “Don’t look,” she said with great seriousness, and though Lucy normally made a point of not doing what people told her without first questioning it, this time she just closed her eyes.

  Hearing it was almost worse, though it happened very quickly. There was a gasp and a rustle of clothing as someone turned very fast, and then a sound like a cabbage being chopped into with a knife, then a grunt of surprise and then she heard a Sluagh gasp—

  “Bu…”

  —and then a heavy meaty thump and another sound like something slicing through the air very quickly that ended in a snick and sudden wet gargle, and then there seemed to be a beat of absolute silence as no one moved, and then two bodies hit the grass, one slightly before the other.

  “It’s done,” said Charlie. “But I shouldn’t look too closely if you’ve got a weak stomach.”

  Lucy opened her eyes. Rose was bent over the body of one of the Sluagh, wiping her blade clean on his moleskin waistcoat. Lucy saw dark blood in the deep gash across his throat. Charlie was tugging a blade from the chest of the other Sluagh, whose heels were still drumming on the grass.

  “Look away, girl,” said Pyefinch, wiping something off the butt of his blunderbuss. “No need for your eyes to dwell on the butcher’s bill.”

  The Pyefinches looked at each other.

  “This is bad work,” said Rose.

  “Only bad if other Sluagh ever find out we did it,” said Mr Pyefinch, slinging his blunderbuss over his shoulder by its strap, and then reaching down to grip one of the bodies by the collar of its jacket. “Come on. We’ll put them in the canal while we wait.”

  Rose gripped the other Sluagh by the foot and the two adults dragged them off into the dark. Charlie looked at Lucy.

  “Dunno what they had in mind for you or who these Templebanes is, but now you see why we had it in mind to bundle you.”

  “I thought you were going to hand me over,” said Lucy, head reeling. “I thought you were going to take their gold.”

  “Their gold ain’t ever gold,” said Charlie. “They’d have handed over a bunch of pebbles or acorns or some such, and some poor flat would have thought they was gold coins for a while until the black glamour wore off their eyes again.”

  “They tried to fool your parents. I saw them pretending to…”

  “We don’t fool so easy. No time for a chat,” said Charlie. “Eagles’ll search their way here eventually and frightening as them Sluagh was, won’t be nothing to what Georgie-girl will be if she catches hold of you. Now you can choose. I’m going to unshackle that hand. You can run, or you can come with me. Dad’s got a plan for keeping you safe, see?”

  And with no more than that he freed her wrist and stood back.

  “If you’re going to run, head that way and avoid the woods,” he said. “Open fields until daylight, and watch the hedges. There’ll be more Sluagh out there, I’m thinking, and they don’t like open ground as much as something that can cast a nice shadow, like a copse or a spinney.”

  Lucy looked at him. He was smiling like the old Charlie she’d come to like so much, not like the new one with the knife.

  “Fine,” he said. “Reckon you can move as fast and quiet as me, so stay close.”

  She almost ran at that point because he was acting as if she’d made a decision to trust him, which she hadn’t. But then he sped into the dark and she was following him, going fast-and-slow alongside him, and it was strange and unsettling for her for the first time in her life to be moving across the ground, jumping ditches and jinking through hedgerows with someone else who was going at her speed while the world around them appeared to have gone sluggish. It was also exhilarating.

  They arrived at a low bridge spanning the canal just in time to see Rose tip the last Sluagh into the water. As the body slipped beneath the water there was a harsh sizzling sound and black steam came off the surface, and then the water flowed past and flattened out, reflecting the nearly full moon above them. For a short moment Lucy saw the steam make a shape against the silver of the moonlit bridge, as if the tattoos had been set free from the bodies in the canal, making a swirling, filigreed three-dimensional cage in the exact shape of a man, and then they lost their form and were gone in the wind.

  “Night take them,” said Rose quietly, and then turned to see Lucy and Charlie.

  “Under the bridge,” said Mr Pyefinch. “And we’ll have us a little chat.”

  They ducked under the arch and found a log rolled up against the stone-work. They sat on it in a line, and Mr Pyefinch stared up the river against the current, as if expecting something. The little chat began with a question that Lucy had been dreading.

  “Who are you?” said Rose.

  “Who are you?” countered Lucy.

  “You’re not Sara Falk,” said Rose. “Never were, either, not in any of our minds. Not the real Sara. Though a name’s like a coat, and if you’ve a need of stealing either, it’s as well to take a good one, I’ll grant you.”

  And though she too was scanning the darkness up the canal like her husband, she reached back and gripped Lucy’s arm in a friendly way as if to say everything was all right. Lucy felt the grip on her arm, and the disembodied hand clutched to her chest. It was limp and lifeless now, though in the stillness she could feel it was alive, like the ghost of a pulse.

  “I’m Lucy Harker,” she said. And the whole story of her adventures since being taken to Wellclose Square poured out of her. She left it all in, even the fact she had big holes in her memory, even the fact that she had tried to steal from Sara Falk’s library, and that somehow Sara’s hand had been cut off trying to save her from being tugged into the mirrors. She told how she had mistaken it for a black crab on the floor of the circus tent in the pandemonium of her arrival. She told it all because once she started talking it was hard to stop the gush of words, and when she stopped she felt as if a great pressure had been relieved within the walls of her skull. And then when she finished they all sat there in silence as Mr Pyefinch busied himself with his pipe.

  “May I see the hand?” said Rose.

  Lucy let her take it, and watched as she stepped out from the cover of the bridge to examine it in the moonlight. She saw her look at the two rings for a long time, and then she ducked back beneath the brickwork and returned the hand.

  “Lion and unicorn,” she said to her husband. “And Sara Falk never goes ungloved.”

  “That’s it then,” he said, reaching into his waistcoat pocket for his matchbox. As he lit his pipe, he looked at his wife, and in the flare of the match Lucy saw his eyebrow raised in a q
uestion.

  “It’s not over, is it?” she said. “We’ve been right to stay clear of The Oversight all these years. In the old days, this girl would never have got within a mile of the Red Library, let alone steal from it. The Free Company’s a danger to such as us, and not any kind of protection. Never has been, not since the Disaster.”

  “Nothing’s been good since the Disaster and they brought that on themselves,” said Pyefinch, sucking the smoke into his lungs and then blowing it out in a long sad sigh.

  “What disaster?” said Lucy. “What was the Disaster?”

  Pyefinch looked at his wife. Rose shrugged and carried on watching the darkness.

  “No harm her knowing,” she said. “Maybe she’s got a right to, even though she’s a thief. Maybe her story’s wrapped up in it.”

  “Maybe it’s why she’s a thief,” said Charlie. “Thieving’s different if you’re doing it to survive than if you’re just greedy. I don’t think she’s greedy. She works ’ard enough.”

  “Well,” said Pyefinch. “The short of it is this: about thirty years ago, when I was a nipper and the French were doing their best to kill me and my mates on the battlefields of Europe, things looked pretty bad. See, no one could understand how that Napoleon Boney-part come from almost nowhere to be such a blessed powerful leader of men and a fighter of wars. Because he was an ill-figured blighter and wasn’t born to power or riches, see. And until he was twenty-three, he seemed a very ordinary man indeed, so they say. And then something changed, too fast for it to be quite normal. And it come to be noticed by those of them back here in London as watched events over the water, that he was perhaps not entirely natural in his powers. Indeed, it were clear to them as could read the signs that if he himself didn’t have some powers, he was most certainly being helped by those that did. And using supranatural powers to prey on the natural world is forbidden, has been forbidden for centuries—”

  “You haven’t got time for a performance,” said Rose. “Barge’ll be along any moment. Give them the short version.”

  Pyefinch grunted ruefully, then tapped out his pipe on his boot.

  “The cutty version of the tale is this: Frenchies done so well because their version of The Oversight, what they called the Paladin, was destroyed by the Revolution…”

  He paused and spat on the ground, his face curdled in distaste, though whether at the pipe which wasn’t drawing to his satisfaction or at the memory was unclear.

  “Mind, there’s some as say it caused the Revolution itself, though I shouldn’t like to think it had become so corrupt as to cut all those poor people’s heads off in the Terror. Anyway, what was left of the Paladin was corrupt enough to back Napoleon. Maybe they thought that breaking the Law Paramount, the rule about preying on the natural, just for a bit until they got their feet back under themselves again, was acceptable. So the French army and the French navy had people in it using supranatural skills to make them do so well. Which was bad. But what was worse was a plot to destroy London in one big stroke.”

  He sucked more flame into the tobacco, pulling at it until it was lit to his liking.

  “The Oversight never ever got involved in Britain’s wars. Was a point of honour, and a point of greater safety. Cos once you step over that line, you end up with something nasty like the Terror and them guillotines and old Boney hisself. The plan was exposed somehow, and it was clear that unless something was done to stop it, Britain was done for, and all our freedom gone for a ball of Dover chalk. So they held a vote. And they decided this was, just this once, the time for The Oversight to get involved in a war. Them as thought it was a good idea must have had some notion that because they would be fighting others with supranatural abilities, it was sort of fair, like. They must have sung themselves some such kind of song to do something so very wrong as break the Law Paramount themselves, because war’s a messy thing and once you’re in a fight it’s hard enough staying alive, forget about working out who and how you can and can’t kill.”

  “There was a spy,” said Rose, watching the canal where a dark shape was beginning to come into view, floating towards them with one bull’seye lantern on its stubby prow. “Our spy. He knew how to get The Oversight into the French ship.”

  “There was a ship, crewed by the Paladin and their type, heading across the channel. The plan was to appear suddenly by means of mirrors in the belly of the French and attack them from the last place they expected to be.”

  “Seventeen Hands went through the mirrors into that ship,” said Rose. “That’s eighty-five poor creatures that was never seen again.”

  “No one knew if they even got to the ship,” said Pyefinch, right eye crinkled against the pall of pipe smoke he was creating around himself. “Because it was a trap.”

  “Were near as dammit the end of The Oversight,” said Rose. “Five stayed because without a Last Hand there’s no Oversight, and without an Oversight, there are certain things that get out of control a little too quickly.”

  “There were others, friends of The Oversight, if not actually members of hands, that spoke against it,” said Pyefinch, “and when the Disaster became apparent, we decided to keep ourselves separate because the trust was gone and good women and men had been butchered.”

  “We?” said Lucy.

  “My old dad had powers,” said Pyefinch. “Me? Not so much. Just two things: I got a strong eye and can’t be foozled by the likes of them Sluagh a-trying to put the black glamour on me, and I got a knack for making folk listen to my stories like they’d be missing something really important if they didn’t.”

  “But the French never won,” said Charlie. “And you never say why.”

  “Because I don’t know,” said Pyefinch. “No one knows. The seventeen Hands went, never come back, the French ship never snuck up the Thames into the centre of London and in the end there were those who thought it had never existed and that the spy was a double agent who trapped the eighty-five into going somewhere else entirely, into a killing ground like the bottom of a volcano, or in the deeps of the sea or something. And then I ended up a couple of years later getting shot through the ankle at the Battle of Waterloo, the battle that finally saw that bastard Boney off. No one knows the truth of any of it, but the lesson was clear: The Oversight overstepped itself and lost its way.”

  “And since then we have been staying away from them, and with good reason,” said Rose. “They’re unchancy and broken, even if they mean well. And there’s those as think maybe they’re corrupt and a crew of blackguards, though I don’t.”

  Before Lucy could ask about Rose’s powers, Charlie nudged her and pointed at what she was carrying.

  “What were you going to do with the hand?”

  “Take it back to Sara Falk,” she said without thinking, and in that moment realised that was indeed what she was going to do.

  Rose grasped her chin gently and turned her face to the moonlight, looking deeply into her eyes. As she did so Lucy saw two dimmer, yellower lights slowly approaching down the canal. It was the bow lantern on a barge, and a smaller bull’s-eye lamp carried by a man leading the horse pulling it down the towpath.

  Pyefinch stood and stretched out the stiffness in his legs.

  “She’s telling the truth,” said Rose.

  “Good,” said Pyefinch. “She’s trouble, but I took a liking to her first time I saw her.”

  He stepped out into the moonlight and waved at the barge. Lucy saw answering waves from a woman silhouetted at the back of the craft and the man leading the horse.

  Rose turned back to her.

  “This barge will not stop because there may be eyes watching the waterways as well as the road, and those lanterns are easily seen from a distance. You’ll have to jump as it passes, but the bargee is a friend and will get you to where you need to go.”

  “But—” said Lucy, for whom things were going a little fast.

  “Charlie will go with you,” said Rose, pulling her to her feet. “You mean well, I think, but
your head is muddied. Too muddied to be safe.”

  “Charlie has a gift too—” began Lucy.

  “Oh yes,” said Rose. “You’ll have plenty of time to discuss it but we have none now. The countryside is death to you. The only things which can stop the Sluagh are cold iron and running water. Stay on the barge until you’re within the city. They won’t follow you inside the city–too many hidden waterways and underground rivers, and too much iron for them. Least I think so. I never heard of them in the big cities.”

  “We’ll keep our guard up till we get to the Safe House,” grinned Charlie. “Always wanted to see inside. All them stories.”

  The Barge was fewer than twenty-five yards away now.

  “Well, son,” said Pyefinch, handing over his blunderbuss. “You’re going to be part of ’em now. Both of you. You’re going to make a whole new story all on your own.”

  And without any more ceremony, he took Lucy’s free hand and pulled her to the edge of the canal. As the man leading the horse passed, he just nodded and said, “Harry. Much obliged.”

  And then he helped her step from towpath to barge and then dropped back.

  Harry did not break step but looked back and grinned at the Pyefinches.

  “Rose, Barnaby. We’ll look after ’em, worry not,” he said, and then half raised a hand in farewell and led the horse onwards.

  Charlie took a bundle from his mother and then leaped on beside Lucy.

  And for the two of them, as simple as that, it was like the barge stopped moving and the moonlit landscape began to slide past them instead.

  Rose walked beside them for a moment, keeping pace.

  “Tell Sara Falk Rose Pyefinch bears her no grudge, as she can see from what you bring her. And mind you send word when you get there safe,” she said, and blew Charlie a kiss.

  “And if we don’t see you before, we’ll look for you at the King Harry down the Mile End Road come Michaelmas…” said his father, waving thanks to the silent woman bargee at the rear of the boat.

  And with no more ceremony, they were sliding away into the unknown night, leaving the bridge, the Pyefinches and the distant lights of the fair far behind them.