The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Well,” said Lucy. “You never said your dad was called Barnaby.”

  “Not something he likes getting about,” said Charlie, looking back at his parents, now just silhouettes framed by the arch of the bridge against the moonlit water behind them. “He’s funny that way.”

  CHAPTER 65

  THE WALKER BETWEEN THE WORLDS

  Mr Sharp walked between the mirrors. Although it did not involve looking down, the first impression he got was a sickening kind of vertigo as he stared ahead and then behind himself to see the infinite disappearing line of matched reflections stretching away into the heart of forever.

  Or that is what he called it in his head.

  “I am walking into forever,” he said, talking to the ivory balls he held ahead of himself like a lantern. They were the closest he had for company.

  He had heard one click as he entered the mirrors, which he took to be the “home” ball at the centre of the nest registering his start point.

  “That’s good,” he had told it. “You make sure you can get me home.”

  After that he had stopped talking to the balls because he heard the fear he was suppressing in his voice, and also because though there was nobody else to hear it and think him mad, he thought it of himself.

  The first mirror he had looked out of was the one he felt Lucy would have walked into, from the limited understanding of how the mirrors worked as told him by The Smith. It was disappointingly black.

  Unknown to him this was because the mirror she had been pulled out of had of course also broken, and the shards had been tossed into a midden and buried under succeeding dumps of night soil and other less noxious rubbish. So he resigned himself to taking the long way round, and carefully stepped from reflection to reflection, looking right and left and out of the mirrors on each side, in case there was something that would give him a clue.

  One effect of walking in the mirrors was that time went very odd. He walked and walked but did not get tired. And because there was no night or day, he lost all track of the hours. The only other effect he began to notice was that he seemed to be getting thinner as he walked, not in the sense of his waist diminishing, but in the way he seemed to become less substantial, almost less dense, to the point where he held his hand up in front of himself and was sure that for a moment he could almost see through it.

  “Perhaps I am becoming a ghost,” he said. He walked on until he thought that maybe the further you got from your starting point, the more see-through you became.

  Since he was not getting any sense of where to start looking, he took this as a cue to make his first turn. He heard the next ball in the ivory click as he turned right, and stepped into a new passage.

  It looked just like the one he had come from, and he saw how without the Ivories you would be lost for ever in a wilderness of reflections. He tried looking at his feet.

  And that’s where the vertigo really did kick in because the floor and the ceiling were also mirrors, reflecting him up and down to incalculable vanishing points.

  He sat for a long time and closed his eyes. Cook had been right: it was a fool’s errand. He should swallow his pride and go back. He should have gone back the moment he saw the mirror Lucy must have exited through was black and uncrossable. He was indeed a fool.

  And then when he opened his eyes and stood he saw that something had changed. The light was different. The infinite passage was not static. It bounced a little.

  And then he realised it wasn’t bouncing, but that a light was approaching and the light was being carried, and the bouncing effect was made by the gait of the light bearer.

  He spun and found he’d pulled the longest knife from his belt without conscious thought.

  “Won’t need that, friend,” said a man’s voice from behind the light. “Here. I’ll put mine down.”

  And the indistinct figure bent and laid a small sword on the floor. When he stood, Mr Sharp saw a tall man with a jutting beard which sprouted horizontally off his chin like a goat’s, deep-set intelligent eyes and a long dark robe. His hair was kept back with a long skull-cap with earflaps, and there was a chain round his neck with a jewel and a piece of nondescript rock attached to it.

  “Who are you?” said Mr Sharp.

  “Like you, I am a walker behind the worlds,” said the man.

  “What is your name?”

  “What is yours?” The older man smiled a courtly smile and raised an eyebrow.

  “Sharp.”

  “Like your blade.”

  “If you will.”

  “I will. And I shall similarly introduce myself as… Walker.”

  Mr Sharp was still on his guard. Smiles cost nothing and hid more than they revealed in his experience.

  “Not your real name. Whereas mine is really Sharp. The blade is a mere coincidence.”

  The man bowed again and broadened his smile, eyes sparking with great good humour.

  “My name is Dee.”

  He pointed at the ring on Mr Sharp’s finger, and then showed him that what he had first taken to be a jewel on the chain round his neck was another ring, similarly but more crudely fashioned from gold and a carved bloodstone.

  “But you may call me Brother John, brother.”

  Despite himself Mr Sharp lowered his knife a little and leant in to look at the lion and the unicorn insignia cut into the stone.

  “Dee is dead,” he breathed incredulously. John Dee had not only been Queen Elizabeth’s mathematician and astronomer and much else besides; he had been a member of The Oversight from her reign until the Stuart king came south to succeed to her throne.

  “Only in the past,” grinned the other, and sat down on the mirrored floor as if exhausted.

  Mr Sharp saw that the light he carried was a fine mesh bag in which were a lot of pieces of frosted glass like Sara’s sea-glass, but of all different colours and shining brightly. As he looked at it, he saw Dee was staring at his Ivory.

  Dee saw him see that and laughed.

  “What are you doing in the mirrors, brother?” he said. “And what is that preposterous rattle you are carrying?”

  “I am looking for someone,” said Mr Sharp stiffly.

  “Not me, I hope,” said Dee, looking pointedly at the blade in Mr Sharp’s other hand.

  “No,” said Mr Sharp. “No. A girl. What are you doing?”

  “Trying to find a way into a new layer,” said Dee, and sat suddenly, looking tired and older. “It’s been a long time.”

  He drew his knees up to his chin and leant back on his hands.

  “Layer?” said Mr Sharp.

  “Sit down,” said Dee, patting the mirrored ground beside him. “You don’t know how this works, do you? Place to place is crude. Time to time is better. World to world is best, for there may be an infinity of worlds nested within each other, and in an infinity of worlds even a dead man may live for ever if he can step from one to the other fast enough.”

  And he threw the bag of stones to Mr Sharp who caught them without dropping the knife.

  “You want to examine them, go ahead. They help with the light and with the past,” said Dee, rummaging in the inner recesses of his gown. “You can have a couple if you like. Do you like dried pear?”

  Mr Sharp sat down opposite him and looked at the glasses in the fine metal net. They were just like Sara and Lucy’s heart-stones, he thought—

  —and then he didn’t think anything else for a while because Dee lashed out with his boots, smashing them into his head, knocking him senseless.

  When he awoke he was alone.

  The Ivory get-you-home was gone.

  As were all of his knives except the small one in his sleeve, the one The Smith had given him, which Dee must have missed. His boots were also missing. His head throbbed and his finger hurt and was chafed, from which he deduced Dee had tried to remove his ring too.

  He stood and looked around him.

  Everywhere looked like everywhere, all the way to forever and back.
/>   “Stupid,” he said. “Stupid.”

  Cook’s prophecy and Sara’s fears had come true.

  He was well and truly lost in the mirrors.

  CHAPTER 66

  WATERBORNE

  The bargee’s name was Harry Stonex and his wife was Ruby, and apart from introducing themselves they didn’t say much, other than that Lucy and Charlie were welcome aboard but should be so kind as to keep out of sight during the day. Ruby brought them food and hot tea whenever they made it for themselves, and Harry sat and had it with them in the space they found among the baulks of timber he was bringing to London.

  “Hearts of oak,” he said, patting the stacked wood. “Safe as old England you’ll be in here. And you’ll have noticed the iron.”

  Lucy had not noticed, but Charlie had. He pointed out an iron rubbing strake running around the entire boat like a belt.

  “That’s not just to protect the gunwale from scraping on the banks and lock-sides,” he said. “That keeps the Shadowgangers away too.”

  Lucy didn’t know what a gunwale was, and said so. Charlie’s explanation was less exciting than she expected, being just the side of the boat. She didn’t need to ask what Shadowgangers were. She had seen them appear out of the darkness and felt a cold chill of dread run through her guts at the memory. She feared them even though she knew they were dead and all trace of them had been tipped into the water and was gone.

  Except all trace of the Sluagh had not gone. The Sluagh’s cocked hat had been knocked off in the short fight and fallen under the Pyefinches’ wagon, where it lay unnoticed. Back at the fair, the enthusiasm for chasing after the thief who had snatched the Manus Gloriae had eventually worn off, and the crowd had evaporated into other booths and diversions. Because of the disruption, the great Battle of the Wizards was declared–unilaterally by Huffam–to be a draw, on the strict and financially advantageous understanding that battle would be rejoined next year at the same time and place. Huffam was a showman to his bones and knew that the stories about the night’s marvels would only swell the crowd next time, so much so that he was already thinking of how to expand the capacity of his tent. Both Anderson and Na-Barno were privately relieved and did not contest this, so unnerved had each been by the other’s performance, and were happy to split the take for the first showing.

  Georgiana was not relieved, nor was she happy. She realised Na-Barno only planned his life from bottle to bottle. With money in his pocket, he was able to forget the uncomfortable fact that Anderson had destroyed their act, and that without the Manus Gloriae they had nothing to survive on in the long term.

  “Something will turn up,” said Na-Barno, waving her off as he hurried to the cider tent.

  She wanted to slap him again, but instead decided to watch the Pyefinches’ wagon in case the thief showed up in the night. So she sat in the shadows and watched Rose and Pyefinch return and close up, waiting for Charlie to appear. As the night drew on, the cold realisation that he had gone with the Sara girl dawned on her. She kept herself awake by will-power alone, and by the time the early morning light began to reappear she had crystalised her anger into something much closer to murderous hatred.

  It was because of the light that she saw the cocked hat, and what drew her attention was the fact that it was moving. She slipped across to the Pyefinches’ wagon and stared at it.

  The bony cockade of bird’s skulls were working together like the legs of a spider, crabbing the hat towards the deeper darkness below the wagon.

  She was fascinated and horrified, but a girl who has handled a Manus Gloriae is already hardened to the uncanny. So she reached in and snatched it up, sprinting away through the dew towards her father’s distant wagon, her heart suddenly lighter.

  “I don’t know what you are,” she said to the hat with the writhing bird-skull cockade. “But if we can’t build a turn around you, we deserve to starve.”

  Na-Barno had been right, against all experience: something had turned up.

  What she could not know was that the cocked hat would lead her on a terrible journey–a journey that would one day help her revenge herself on her childhood friend and the girl she thought was called Sara Falk.

  For the first night and day there was an awkwardness between Charlie and Lucy that had not been there when they had been together among the hurly-burly of the fair. This new uneasiness was partly because they were now alone together, but mainly it stemmed from what he had hidden from her.

  “Why?” asked Lucy eventually, as they were lying on the front of the boat enjoying the last of the autumn sun on the second afternoon. “Why didn’t you tell me what you all are?”

  “It’s not complicated,” said Charlie. “Mainly cos why would we? Same as you keeping it to yourself. Don’t do much good strangers knowing our business, and it’s not like Ma and Pa set much store by their powers, such as they have.”

  “But you do,” said Lucy. “You can go fast and yet slow, you can sneak and not be seen. You’re a… well, I don’t know what you are but you remind me of a man called Mr Sharp who I saw in London…”

  “Well, I’d like to see this Mr Sharp character too,” said Charlie. “Cos I don’t know what I am any more than you do. I’m just fast when I need to be, or maybe I just make everything else slow, I dunno. And as for sneaking around–look who’s talking!”

  And he grinned and held out his hand.

  “None of us done you any harm, Lucy-if-that’s-your-name-now.”

  “It’s always been my name,” she said. And shook his hand firmly. “Now tell me about the Shadowgangers.”

  In the daylight it was easier to talk about them. And since they were interested in her, she thought it only prudent to know as much as she could about them. So Charlie went aft and asked Mrs Stonex for a loan of her chart. It was a much-rolled thing, and he was careful not to add to the wear and tear as he laid it out on the deck. It was a crudely printed map of the lower half of the country, and had been clearly added to over time by Stonex drawing additional things on it in blue pencil, like spurs to existing canals, entirely new waterways and–criss-crossing the country, in black pencil–railway lines.

  “That’s England,” he said. “Some of it anyway. Now how would you get from London to Birmingham?”

  She studied the map for an instant and then traced the railway line.

  “Right,” he said. “Easy isn’t it?”

  “I thought you were going to tell me about the Shadowgangers,” she said. “I want to know about the Sluagh.”

  “I’m showing you,” he said. “At least I’m explaining what my dad says is why they are so riled up and angry nowadays.”

  And he pointed at the map again.

  “Now try and get across the same bit of country without crossing water or an iron track.”

  Lucy snorted and said.

  “Easy…”

  But when she put her finger on the map and tried to trace a path avoiding the black and the blue lines, she found it was anything but. It was as if the whole landscape had been turned into an unwinnable child’s game, a maze with no sane solution.

  “They can’t cross running water,” said Charlie. “No more than they can abide cold iron. Before the canals they wove paths through the country, meandering in and out of the watercourses, which you can do easy enough if you have the stamina for making your night trails wind along the tops and the high ground, on the peak of the watershed, so to speak.”

  “What’s a watershed?” said Lucy.

  “It’s like where the hills meet to form a ridge, like the roof of a shed and the rain drains off in one direction or the other depending which side it falls on. Water don’t flow uphill, see? Walk the ridge, above where all the streams begin, and you don’t ever cross flowing water.”

  She nodded.

  “But then navvies been cutting canals across the old ways,” he continued. “And that was like putting straight fences across open land to them, and then other men staked rails for the steam-trains criss
-crossing it, and their old ways of moving across the land is ten times, no, a hundred times more complicated. It’s like slipping through a net. And they have trooped the night freely for centuries. Can see why they’re stirred up and turning nasty. Not that they’ve ever needed an excuse for that, from what I heard.”

  And then he went on to explain what he knew about them and their various other names, how abjuring the sun and embracing the night was their way, how everything they did and believed seemed like a world turned topsy-turvy. And he explained that they hated The Oversight.

  “Why?” she said.

  “Because running water has always been a bane to them, but cold iron, and what it does to them? That’s down to something The Oversight did to them a long, long time ago. Like a punishment for something really horrible that they got caught doing.”

  “What?” said Lucy.

  “Dunno,” he said. “It was before the Tower of London got built, and that’s the oldest thing I seen. Except Stonehenge…”

  And that led to him explaining what Stonehenge was and drawing a picture of it and the talk meandered off into companionable silence, sitting and watching the world go past. Then he jumped off the barge and took Mr Stonex’s place leading the horse, with a promise to wake him once it began to get dark.

  “Ol’ Barnaby’d skin me if he knew I let you be off the boat come dusk,” he said. “Sun drops below the horizon, you jump on board and raise me sharpish, see?”

  The Sluagh found them that evening.

  Charlie was back on the boat and Mr Stonex, who carried a horseshoe in his belt out of superstition and self-protection, led the horse for another hour or two of darkness before they tied up for the night. “Led” was not quite the word, for the horse knew how to pull away along the clearly marked towpath quite as well as he did, and in fact he climbed up on its back and allowed himself to doze as it ambled along into the mirk.