The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  The only benefit of the recent disasters and outrages that had been visited on them both by the band of Sluagh they had been forced to abet and then been abandoned by was that she, the erstwhile Ghost of the Itch Ward, had been so thwarted and betrayed in her own carefully laid plans that he had been able to slowly increase the privacy of his own mind. Her increased distraction allowed him the space to put in defensive foundations which she, if more alert, might well have been able to grub up before they bedded in enough to be built on. As it was, he had without instruction found a way to veil his inner thoughts from her: it was as if he had built a small redoubt into which he might retreat and find some privacy from the unwanted trespasser in his mind that she had become.

  I know what you’re doing. Her words came into his head unbidden as they sat under the twisted branches of a hornbeam that was still clinging to a few of its double-toothed leaves, now turned brown and lifeless.

  Good for you.

  You’re keeping me out.

  Am I?

  “I don’t care,” she wheezed out loud, voice dry and scratchy as the noise of the dying leaves rattling in the mild evening breeze above them. “I don’t care about anything except the one thing. I will do the one thing and then nothing matters.”

  I will walk with you to London. But I will not help with that one thing any more. Our ways will part.

  “If you help me, I will give you a present,” she said. “The loveliest of presents, really.”

  You have nothing I want.

  “I have everything you want.”

  I want nothing.

  “I can explain you to yourself,” she said.

  I know who I am.

  “You do not know what you are. You do not know why you are different. You do not know there are others who are different, like you, like me.”

  In fact, Amos did know there were others like himself, or at least he had gleaned the fact of their existence from keeping his ears open in the service of the house of Templebane, his adopted family. He knew the Free Company for The Oversight of London was comprised of men and women who seemed to have unusual powers, powers that made their existence somehow insupportable to the interests of his fathers and to the actions of the Sluagh. The Sluagh had worked in concert with his fathers, and later had taken him prisoner and then used him: they were the main source of the blood-soaked dreams. They had opened his eyes to an alien darkness so inimical to human life that he felt just witnessing it had permanently befouled him. And the secret, the thing he was hiding from the Ghost behind the new barricades in his mind was that he was determined to contact The Oversight as soon as they got to London. Perhaps finding those who could fight the Sluagh could end the nightmares that were beginning to unravel his own hold on reality.

  “I can teach you things,” she said. “Stay with me until the end, and I will teach you the song of your own life. I will show you how to use the powers you have and those you do not yet know how to use.”

  He knew she was lying. When she lied, she spoke out loud, as if speaking in thought was too direct a means of communication to cloak falsehood.

  I want nothing, he repeated. From you or anyone.

  “Everybody wants something. Wanting and getting. That’s the way the world runs, Bloody Boy. Wanting and getting and rutting and strutting, the world like a foul church with the powerful and the strong bestriding the brightly lit nave and the weak and the weary sent to the wall where there are benches over which the shadows may be drawn like a shroud so that none of the great men need see them as they wither and perish. But we all go to the wall in the end, Bloody Boy. The wall waits. The wall knows. And do you know what the wall says to me?”

  Amos knew. It was the song and chorus of her obsession. It was the one thing.

  Walls do not speak, he answered, trying to forestall the repetition of words that had become exhaustingly irritating to his ears.

  “Oh, indeed they do,” she said, a laugh coughing out of her mouth like a poor dying thing. “Oh, indeed they do, and if you were born a thing called a Glint instead of a Bloody Boy, you might hear them clear as that pheasant in the hedge across the road. Glints and things like that are what I can teach you about, show you the world you belong to—if you stay with me and help me do the one thing. My gift to you.”

  Behind the buttress he had thrown up in his mind, he did think that learning from her would pass the time on the road, and maybe give him useful knowledge, if he could separate the real from the imaginary raving. But he would not help her with her “one thing.” But then again, he would not hinder her.

  He stood up quietly. There was indeed a pheasant in the tangled hedgerow opposite, and he was hungry. If he moved slow and sharp, they would at least eat well before a cold sleep.

  “You do know what the wall says, don’t you?” she insisted, the unexpected gleam of her smile rather horrible in the failing light.

  Quiet now. You will scare our supper.

  Kill it, Bloody Boy. Kill it dead. Kill it like you-know-who.

  He knew who.

  Kill it like Mountfellon.

  Her smile widened and got much worse.

  For Mountfellon must die!

  CHAPTER 7

  THE PROCTOR

  Once a room for a single night at the harbourside inn had been negotiated at a reasonable rate, and their bags left securely locked within, Lucy found herself back out in the streets of Boston, yet again trying to keep up with Cait’s long-legged strides.

  “Where are we—?” she began.

  “You’ll find that out when we get there,” said Cait. “Now keep up and if it’s conversation you’re after, answer me this: what did you make of Mrs. Tittensor?”

  “So that was her,” said Lucy.

  “Of course it was. Did you not see her earlier, with the dog?” said Cait.

  “What dog?” said Lucy.

  Cait shook her head in what Lucy was now conditioned to recognise as barely suppressed disbelief at her apprentice’s lack of acuity.

  “There was a dog,” said Cait. “A big shaggy bitch that could take down a deer if it had a mind to.”

  “I didn’t see it,” said Lucy.

  “Well, what did you see?” said Cait.

  “She had lots of hair. She was well dressed. Um …” said Lucy.

  “Lots of hair? Well dressed? Um?” said Cait, snorting in disgust. “That was your first impression?”

  “I wasn’t even sure that she was the captain’s wife,” said Lucy. Dry land had not returned Cait’s joviality.

  “You should have marked her before you did,” said Cait. “I’ve told you, if you’re to survive alone in the world then you never stop looking around, ever. And when you’re arriving somewhere new, you sure as guns look twice as hard.”

  “When did you see her then?” said Lucy, aware she sounded truculent but not caring enough to hide it. She was proud of the fact that she had, until recently, survived well enough in the world without needing anyone’s help, though it was true she had not prospered at much more than mere existence.

  “When she saw us,” said Cait. “She was by the warehouse on the right, with the pillars. And then she spied us and paused. Then she stepped back into the shadows.”

  “In that great bustle of people heaving to and fro, and at that distance you’re telling me you saw all that?” said Lucy.

  “Crowds aren’t a problem, Lucy Harker, not once you know the way of them. They have rhythms and movement, like the tide. You want to hide, no better place to do so than in a crowd, but you have to go with the flow to do so, else you stand out like a salmon fighting its way upstream. See now, she was moving towards us, then she saw us and checked herself and stepped back to conceal herself and take a hidden keek at us. That’s the odd movement I noticed.”

  “She hid herself?” said Lucy. “Why’d she do that?”

  “Because she saw us,” said Cait as if this was the most obvious thing in the world. “Or rather, she saw me. And wasn’t I just sayin
g a friendly goodbye to the captain as she did so?”

  Lucy spooled her memory back to the top of the gangplank where they had given their fare-thee-wells and thank-yous to the captain, and he in turn had chuckled and handed Cait a slip of paper, holding her hand for what was in strict terms a beat or two too long as he joked about this being an “au revoir” rather than a “goodbye” as he made her promise not to forget to come and see him and his wife about a possible nursery-maid’s position.

  “Nothing untoward passed between you,” she said.

  Cait held up the piece of paper in question and waved it over her shoulder without breaking stride.

  “But she saw something pass between us and, though I take no credit for it since it’s just my mother’s good colouring passed down to me by an accident of blood, to a wife no doubt used to wondering what her husband gets up to in foreign ports I look like trouble.”

  “So she was jealous?” said Lucy.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. She was something, that’s for sure. And she sailed past us when we disembarked taking quite as much care to not look at us as we were taking not to look at her.”

  “Maybe she just didn’t see us,” said Lucy.

  “People see me, Lucy,” said Cait. “Men do. Women do. Wives especially do. At least people see me when I want them to. And unless you’ve been even denser than you like pretending to be, you’ll have noticed they see you too. Faith, you’re a handsome, strong-faced thing, like a little black thundercloud in a dress most of the time it’s true, but men do still turn and look at you even if it’s just to wonder what it’d take to make you smile.”

  Lucy didn’t want to continue down this line of conversation, though she was secretly gratified to hear that Cait thought her handsome, so she just walked on, scanning the unfamiliar street and taking in as much of this new country as she could.

  “You’re not blushing now, are you?” said Cait without turning.

  “No,” said Lucy, immediately doing so.

  “Controlling how you look is part of how to survive,” said Cait. “It’s how to stalk your prey too. You have to thin yourself down.”

  “Thin myself down?” said Lucy.

  Cait sighed again, stopped and pulled her to the side of the house they were passing. They stood, protected from the flow of pedestrians and carts by the jutting steps of the house.

  “Look at my face,” said Cait. “Did you never play with paints as a child?”

  “No,” said Lucy, whose childhood memories were ragged and full of holes. “I mean, yes, paints, maybe …”

  “Well, thinning yourself down is like adding water to your paints,” said Cait. “You wash the colour down until that’s all it is really: a thin wash. Like this. Look at me now and learn something.”

  Lucy was uncomfortable looking directly and openly into Cait’s face, mainly because looking at it was something she actually did a great deal of, although she had spent a lot of time and effort perfecting the art of not being caught doing so.

  She made herself look into the green eyes, the pale skin dusted with the lightest scrabble of freckles which had been positioned entirely perfectly in order to limn the contours of her cheekbones, features whose curves Lucy knew well from every angle as they swept up and away into the ordered disorderliness of Cait’s thick red hair. And then her breath caught, not with the usual treacherous, empty pang behind her breastbone, but in surprise: Cait hadn’t moved, nor had she appreciably changed her expression any major way, yet she had somehow … left. Which is to say Cait was still there as a physical presence, but she had somehow rendered herself drab and unexceptional, not merely by dousing the animating light in her eyes and slackening the muscles in her face but by some less obvious device, becoming dull where she had been radiant, and vague and watery where she had been remarkable and definite. She not only seemed altogether smaller and untenanted, but Lucy felt her eyes somehow wanting to slide off the lacklustre features and seek something more interesting to look at.

  “How d’you do that?” she said.

  Cait grinned, and it was like the lights coming back on in a deserted house.

  “Practice,” she said.

  “Will you teach me?” said Lucy.

  “Sure, and why would I not?” said Cait. “That was the deal, no? You just have to slacken your hold on the bits that control the outside of you and step a pace back inside yourself.”

  “Just?” said Lucy.

  “I said it took practice,” said Cait, stepping back out into the street. “Now keep up, and keep sharp.”

  Over the next few hours, Lucy became footsore and even more confused. Cait’s progress through the tangle of streets seemed random at best, but by the time they ended up almost back where they had begun, they had acquired, variously, a half-pound of pork sausages from an Irish butcher on the back side of Beacon Hill and two small bottles, one labelled McMunn’s Elixir of Opium, the other Mother’s Gentle Laudanum Soporific. Cait had not explained either of these purchases, but had kept on admonishing Lucy to keep an eye out. Lucy didn’t ask what for. She just looked for anything that looked wrong. She saw none of that, and instead rather liked what she saw of Boston, its bustle and energy—in fact everything about it—until they turned a corner and found themselves looking at a spreading shanty town which seemed to have been hurled carelessly across the lower slopes of Beacon Hill on the unpromising land penned between the sea and the saltmarsh beyond.

  A group of drunken men came suddenly into view, having scrambled up the slope from the boggy ground below, and as they saw Cait they said something in a language that Lucy could not place let alone understand. The gist of what they said was, however, clear from the ribald laughter and the leers that they gave her.

  Cait turned to look at them. Her gaze alone was steely enough to make some of them step back, but the drunker of the group just continued to comment about her, digging each other in the ribs and laughing, clearly feeling safe behind the impenetrability of their language. One of them stepped towards Cait and attempted to endear himself by reaching down, squeezing the front of his trousers and winking at her while grunting something that was—to Lucy—linguistically unfathomable but universally comprehensible.

  Cait did not recoil. Instead she stepped towards the demonstrative suitor and let fly with a stream of invective in the self-same language that her admirer had used. He staggered backwards gurgling in shock and outrage, as if her words were a straight-arm to the throat, and then stumbled and fell ignominiously in the dust before any of his companions could catch him. They in turn all seemed to wilt and look shamefaced and suddenly uncomfortably sober as Cait turned the fusillade on them. By the time she finished her words had brought a dash of high colour to her own cheekbones.

  “See, Lucy? It’s what I said. One place is much like another. Here’s a fine flowering of Irish manhood, except they wouldn’t behave like that if they were still stood on their home sod in earshot of their mammies, who’d clip them around the earhole and send them to bed till they got over themselves. But hop them over the water and out of sight and they’re strutting around, hooting like mad baboons with their winkles out.”

  They watched the men slink away back toward the shanties.

  “And they say travel broadens the mind,” said Cait. “Bad cess to them. Now, we’ll have the meeting with the captain and spy out the land. I want to take the measure of this woman that spotted us. Something about her rattles my chains. And then once we know what the situation with the baby is, we’ll be back after they sleep, give the dog a nice sausage with some of this soporific and then be away with the child and on the boat back to civilisation before anyone’s any the wiser.”

  She seemed refreshed by having let fly at the Irishmen, and Lucy had to stretch her legs to keep up as she stepped out back towards the shore.

  Two hours later, they had found the captain’s house, and after waiting in the shadows between a pair of wind-bent jack pines until the appointed hour, they crossed to the
house, which was a substantial three-storey clapboard building painted a buttery yellow and picked out in white trim. It had a steep pitched roof with a widow’s walk and below it a covered porch that extended across the whole width of the building.

  “Well,” said Cait. “There’s money in shipping, and there’s no surprise.”

  She strode confidently up the steps and tugged the brass knob next to the door. There was the sound of wire scraping, and then a distant bell jangled deep in the house, triggering an explosion of barking much closer to the door. Lucy stepped back involuntarily.

  “See,” said Cait. “Told you there was a dog.”

  There was heavy footfall on the boards approaching the door, and then it opened to reveal a blaze of light from within.

  The dog bounced forward and stood on the threshold, fur brindled at its neck, teeth bared.

  Cait bent towards it.

  “Arragh, stop that now. We mean no harm, do we, captain?”

  She looked up at the black figure silhouetted by the gaslights. The man was taller and thinner than the captain.

  “The captain’s asleep,” he said, and stepped forward so the porch light caught his features. His face was gaunt and pitted, and at some stage in his life his nose had clearly met something powerful going left while the rest of his head was going right, since it had been mashed sideways and mended thus, giving his face the look of something that had been badly folded before being put away.