Sixty-One Nails

by Mike Shevdon

  Blackbird glanced at the mirror and raised an eyebrow at me. There was a sense of challenge here.

  I calmed myself for a moment and then reached out to the mirror, not with my hand, but with my will. I pulled at the surface of the mirror, reaching for what I knew was there. The mirror, though, felt like a dead thing with nothing that would give me any purchase. Blackbird had said the other wraithkin had used the mirror, and I had drawn lines in the mirror's surface only last night. I knew it could be done. Last night had been different, though. It had been like drawing in a thick viscous liquid. Maybe I was mistaken to call to the reflective surface of the mirror. Maybe what I needed was within.

  I focused again, clearing my mind, and reached out with my will, pulling at the silvery depth of it. I reached within and formed a connection. This time I could feel the tension there, the inertia of it. Power pulsed within me and the ambient light in the room dimmed as the mirror went milky white.

  "Gently, Rabbit, gently," Blackbird encouraged.

  I relaxed my hold on it a little and the light in the room returned, the mirror clearing, but I could feel the connection with the undercurrent in the mirror. A sound grew gently in the room. It had the ambience of a large busy space. The sound of people milling around gently entered the quiet room. Then an announcement reverberated through, confirming that the British Airways flight to Hamburg was now boarding at gate 14. The sound included little shuffles and scrapes, layered over the ambience and I knew that this was where Alex was. My unconscious mind, worried about her, had somehow located her though the mirror and brought me the sounds from where she was. In a way, it was comforting though it felt a little like eaves-dropping on someone else's conversation. Hadn't the announcement said Hamburg? Is that where they were going? Suddenly conscious of my audience, I released the mirror before the sounds gave away who it was we were listening to. There was a slight ripple as I let go, radiating out slowly across its surface like a stone dropped into a pool of slow silvery syrup.

  Blackbird was smiling at me. "Is that sufficient?" she asked Claire.

  Claire hesitated for a moment, taking a deep breath, and asked the question that was bothering her. "How do I know you're not from the wrong court? "

  "That's simple. They are only interested in wrecking the ceremony and making sure it doesn't happen. If we were from that court then you would be dead by now." Blackbird smiled, and it was not a comfortable smile. "Your turn," she prompted.

  "What do you mean? I certainly can't do anything like that."

  "No, but you said all parties must be identified. How do we know you are who you are supposed to be? "

  "I'm the clerk to the Queen's Remembrancer."

  "Suppose you tell us a little more, some background, just to reassure us."

  "Very well. I already said that I am the clerk to the Queen's Remembrancer and you know I am the caretaker of both the current journal and of the knives. Perhaps I should say that I am the latest in a long line of clerks to this office, since the time of King James I, when certain very particular duties of the role were passed to the clerk when the king decreed that he would have no truck with witchcraft and neither would any of his officers.

  "Actually, things became easier when the duties were passed to the clerks. Each clerk chooses their successor and so is able to instruct them in the duties to be performed, rather than being appointed by the monarch, which is the case with the Remembrancer. Being able to choose who will be clerk after us gives us a continuity that perhaps would otherwise have been lost. Of course, there's always the chance of accidents, so each clerk makes a bequest in their will of a journal, a little like this one, containing instructions on how to conduct the ceremony. It has references to certain texts, now mostly in the private archives of the Public Record Office, showing the line of succession from each clerk to the next, together with the original royal decree instructing the ceremony to be conducted for as long as there is a throne in England."

  "Does the current Queen know you do this?" I asked. "I've never met the monarch, as it was the Remembrancer that was presented to her, so I have no way of knowing, but on balance I think not. After James I, the kings and queens took a deliberate disinterest in these matters, making it easier for them to deny all knowledge. I know from my predecessors that the Church was very determined to stamp out anything heretical or pagan. The ceremony survived, though. It was a matter of law, not faith, and therefore outside the Church's jurisdiction. I am the latest in a long line of clerks going back to the time of King James. I serve the Remembrancer and it is part of my duties to see that the ceremony is carried out annually and that the Remembrancer plays his part."

  "And you know about the Feyre?" Blackbird gently steered her.

  "There are notes in the journals. They make fascinating reading if you can decipher them. They're much less straightforward than the official journal you have there, though. There are entries concerning certain meetings; it isn't until fifteen hundred and something that the word 'Feyre' is actually mentioned. Before that they are referred to as 'The Others' or 'The Visitors'. "

  "Go on."

  "Remember, a clerk can go through their entire term and not meet anyone from the other courts. It's quite a privilege, in a way, though there have been incidents. "

  "What sort of incidents. "

  "I'm not sure I should say."

  "Claire, I promise no harm shall come to you by our hands this day. You have nothing to fear from either of us."

  She deliberated for a moment. She must have known something about the Feyre and their inability to lie convincingly because she continued, "When I said we were warned against direct contact? That was after my predecessors demanded proof from one of your kind. From what she told me later, she was quite direct, shall we say."

  "They took it the wrong way?" Blackbird suggested. "I was called to a hospital out in the country in the Thames Valley, an asylum I suppose you might call it. She was screaming my name, crying that she needed me. When the doctors phoned me, I explained that I barely knew her. I had been interviewed by her on a civil service panel while at university and then she invited me to spend a week at the Royal Courts of Justice as work experience. I liked her, but you couldn't say we were friends. She was insistent that she needed to see me, though, and the doctors thought it might calm her. "When I arrived, she was screaming about spiders crawling all over her, in her hair, her ears, her eyes. She was scratching herself with her nails and they had to sedate her. I sat with her and held her hand for a while, hoping it would be enough to calm her down. Quite suddenly she was lucid and recognised me. She told me I had been chosen for an extremely important job, a secret vocation. I thought she was raving, of course, but then she told me about the safe containing the knives and her journal. She told me to go to the Queen's Remembrancer for the key – that's Jerry. She said he would be expecting me and that it was more important than I could possibly realise. I was still half convinced it was some sort of delusion, but she was different, focused.

  "I left her that afternoon only half convinced as to whether to follow it up. I was waiting on some interesting job offers and I wasn't sure I wanted to work in the Royal Courts. I waited a week before curiosity got the better of me and I rang the office and asked to speak to the Remembrancer. He invited me down to read the journal, and afterwards we talked. I've been with him ever since. "

  "Did your colleague ever recover?"

  "I used to visit her regularly. Once, on one of her better days, she was able to explain some of what had happened. But she never really recovered, no. "

  "I'm sorry, Claire. Some of our kind can be touchy. "

  "She was warned, as was I. The journals are quite clear on some things."

  Listening to Claire, I realised the Seventh Court had made a mistake. It looked like they had eliminated the Queen's Remembrancer, hoping to further undermine the ceremony. They had it wrong, though. It was the clerk that was important, not the Remembrancer. "Tell us about the knife," Blackb
ird suggested.

  "The Quick Knife? It was one of the two knives used for the Quit Rents Ceremony. The other is the Dead Knife, which is the other knife in the box. In 1933 the Quick Knife was dropped and it snapped in two. I can show you the entry in the journal. Everyone was very surprised when it broke and at the time it was taken as a bad omen. It was due to be used for the ceremony the next day and there was no time to make another. Luckily my predecessor had a friend with connections in the Tower of London and they arranged for another set of blades to be sent over. They're on permanent loan from the Royal Armouries and of a rather different style, but the ceremony carried on as before and the bad luck was averted. "

  "Can we see them?" Blackbird asked.

  "I don't see why not. Just a moment and I'll fetch them. They're in the safe." She rose again and stepped out, leaving the door ajar.

  "Is it wise to get more knives? What if they're like that one?" I nodded towards the dark-wood box. Blackbird glanced at the knife box and shook her head. "Wait and see."

  Claire returned with another bundle wrapped in black cloth. There was no sense of anything about it when she placed it on the table and unfolded it. Wrapped inside the cloth were two blades, or rather tools. One was a small neat hatchet and the other a kind of bill-hook with a broad flat blade. The blades were polished as if they were made of silver, or perhaps they were plated. They were clearly ceremonial. She looked at us. "May I?" I indicated the bill-hook. "Of course."

  I picked the bill-hook up from the cloth, finding the oddly shaped blade lighter than it looked. I tested the edge with my thumb and it was sharp. The broad, flat blade reflected distorted scenes from the room. If it came from the Tower armouries, then it probably had a distinguished and honourable history.

  "It's unusual enough, but it's totally different to the original Quick Knife. It's just a blade."

  "We brought an expert from the armouries in to see if the Quick Knife could be mended, but apparently it is the wrong sort of metal."

  "Or the right sort," Blackbird added. "It's very likely to be made of some sort of iron. If it were pure then that would make it brittle. That's why steel replaced iron as the metal of choice, it's much more resilient. What's the other knife in the case made of?"

  "Some sort of alloy, definitely not iron. Would you like to see it?"

  "Maybe later." Neither of us wanted her to open the box with the Quick Knife in it. "The broken knife is the key. Once the Quick Knife was broken, the ritual was weakened. Each time the ceremony is performed with the wrong knives, it weakens a little more." She glanced at me. "A worm at the heart of the ceremony, do you see?"

  "There's nothing in the records saying that the ceremony must be conducted with a particular set of knives," Claire commented. "It just says that two knives must be presented, one blunt and one sharp, and must be tested for their qualities."

  "I'm sure you've carried out the ceremony according to the instructions you were given," said Blackbird, "but that in itself is not enough for the ritual to have power. I'm sure now that the knife is the reason the barrier is weakening and also the reason why your Remembrancer is missing. You know he's not coming back, don't you? "

  "He's not dead," said Claire.

  "That may not be the worst of it," said Blackbird. "It is in all our best interests to make sure the ceremony goes ahead with a new knife, and soon."

  "You want me to change the ritual, just because you say so?"

  "No, I'm not telling you to change it. I'm saying you have to put it back to the way it was, the way it was meant to be. If we don't then the consequences may go far beyond the fate of one Remembrancer and his clerk."

  "I don't know…"

  "Claire, we stand on the edge of something terrible. The breaking of the Quick Knife has changed things, weakened them. If things break down completely then the incidents you refer to could be the very least of it. We need to get the knife repaired or remade."

  "It can't be welded or fixed in that way. We tried. The only way is to get a new one made."

  "Can you do that?"

  "I can't, but perhaps you may be able to."

  "Us? Neither of us want to get anywhere near it."

  "It mentions in the journals, when the nails became too rusty to use. Two of your kind came and took them away and got them re-forged."

  "That's very unlikely, Claire."

  "Oh, I don't mean they did it themselves. I mean they took them to a smith and he did it for them. "

  "Where would the Feyre get a smith from?"

  "From the same place as always, the Highsmiths. "

  "The high smiths?"

  "The Highsmith family, the people who rent the Moors in Shropshire. They are the smiths to the Six Courts. Surely you know this?"

  It was our turn to admit we didn't know all of it. "I guess you are not the only ones to lose things," Blackbird conceded.

  Claire acknowledged this with a nod. It relieved some of her tension that she was not the only one fumbling in the dark.

  "The Highsmiths were the family that produced the new set of nails. All except for the sixty-first one. "

  "Why wasn't the sixty-first nail remade?"

  "It didn't need to be. It's made of a different metal to the rest and it hadn't rusted. It's like the Dead Knife, rather than the dark metal of the others."

  "I wondered about that when I read it in the leaflet," said Blackbird. "Ten nails for each horse-shoe and then another. I thought it must be a spare."

  "No, the sixty-first nail is different from the rest, though I've no idea why. Shall I get it? It's in the safe with the others, ready for the ceremony next week. "

  "We'd like to see it, thanks."

  Blackbird and I waited, both wrapped in our own thoughts, while Claire retrieved the nails. They were in a velvet case, a little like that used for jewellery, which she unrolled across the table. Each bundle of nails had a pocket and it was immediately clear to Blackbird and I that the nails were iron, though thankfully they didn't have the noxious aura of the Quick Knife.

  The last nail in the roll had a pocket of its own, though. Claire extracted it and held it up so I could see it, unsure of my reaction. It was the same size and shape as the other nails, a square section about two or three inches long, narrowing sharply along its length to a fine point. "Any ideas?" I asked Blackbird.

  "No, I don't see why that one should be different from the others. It's not iron, or anything like it, is it? Is there nothing in the journals about it, Claire?" she asked. "Nothing obvious, no. The nails were taken back to the Highsmiths about a hundred and fifty years ago, but the sixty-first was returned with the rest, unchanged. "

  "Well, the problem is with the knife, not the nails. Do you have an address for these Highsmiths? "

  "I can get it for you."

  She replaced the nail and rewrapped the bundle, taking them out again while Blackbird and I considered what we had learnt. For my part, the revelation that there had been regular, if infrequent, meetings between humanity and the Feyre was an eye-opener. It had never occurred to me that such things might be going on, but why would it? People didn't generally notice things they weren't looking for.

  "Somebody knew this was going on," said Blackbird, her thoughts following the same lines as my own. "Claire obviously does, and presumably the Remembrancer, if he's alive?"

  "No, I mean the Feyre. I'm beginning to see another hand in this."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Do you remember I said yesterday that I wasn't following you, but it wasn't random chance that put me there either?"

  "Yes, you said it was fortune."

  "I chose my words carefully. I really wasn't following you, but I was waiting for you."

  "For me?"

  "Not for you specifically, but for someone or something. Kareesh sent me a message, which she does from time to time when she an errand to run or maybe a message to be delivered. She said: 'Be at the southern end of the Leicester Square tube station platform at the morni
ng peak on Thursday and make yourself useful.' She didn't tell me what to do or why, but that's pretty standard for her. I waited there to see what would happen.

  "And then I collapsed down the stairs onto the platform."

  "I was waiting on the other platform, but it didn't take me long to realise what was going on. "

  "So did she mean for you to save me?"

  "It's hard to tell with her. You, of all people, know what the visions are like. Did she know what would happen or did she just know I should be there? "

  "As you say, it's hard to tell."

  "But what if she did know? What if she knows what's going on better than we do?"

  "Then why doesn't she just say?"

  "I think they're ashamed, all of them."

  "Ashamed of what?"

  "Of doing dirty back-door deals with humanity. Of needing humans to make a barrier strong enough to hold back the Seventh Court. That's why there's no record, no stories. To keep the Seventh Court from stealing their babies and possessing their dead, they stooped low enough to strike a deal with humanity, and now they won't admit it."

  "Why not? What's so terrible about wanting to protect your children?"

  "The courts rule absolutely, Rabbit, but they rule by consent, not force. The Feyre agree to be bound to the courts for protection and survival. They agree to abide by court law for the good of all. But if someone like Marshdock was able to implicate the rulers of the courts in conspiring with humanity then it would show them up as weak, ineffectual and incapable of protecting anyone. The whole structure would be undermined. Knowledge like that could earn you a lifetime of favours, Rabbit. A Feyre lifetime, not a human one. If you were to share this with Marshdock, for instance, he could become very influential, able to grant favours to those he owed for his position and power. That makes such knowledge dangerous. Those in power would do almost anything to keep the information out of the hands of Marshdock and those like him. Eliminating a couple of half-breed Fey who were poking into things that were none of their business would be the least of it. When the stakes are that high there isn't much they wouldn't do."