The Remnant

by Charlie Fletcher

  “You? The Oversight? Wish him well?”

  He spat on the ground.

  “Why else would we have brought you to him?” said Sara.

  Badger Skull waved Woodcock Crown on ahead. He watched the Sluagh jog off into the shadows, carrying the limp form between them, then turned to look at Sara.

  “He does not like to think we now owe you something,” he said.

  “You don’t.”

  He shrugged.

  “That is true. Your past treachery outweighs this small gesture like a mountain outweighs a mouse.”

  “How very gracious of you,” said Cook. “Don’t let us keep you.”

  He smiled.

  “I will give you something to balance what you have done. Something you do not have.”

  “You could just say thank you and jog after your friends,” said Cook. “That’d be fine by us.”

  “Cook,” said Sara.

  “My gift is my thanks,” he said. “But I fear you may not like it.”

  “I’d say that’s a certainty,” said Cook.

  “He’s not coming back,” said Badger Skull.

  Cook and Sara and Sharp went very still.

  “This is ‘intelligence,’ I think you call it,” said Badger Skull, a thin smile breaking the mask of his tattoos. “At least that’s what the cunning man Templebane calls it. He places high value on ‘intelligence.’ So. There it is. My gift. You did not know. You lived in false hope. Now you know.”

  “What do we know?” said Charlie.

  “He’s talking about The Smith,” snapped Sharp. “Though how he knows …”

  “The Shee,” said Badger Skull. “They know what the ravens see. And they have seen that Wayland Smith is gone, gone under the hill, and that’s the truth of it.”

  And with that he bowed slightly, turned and left.

  Badger Skull caught up with Woodcock Crown as he waved off the four Sluagh charged with carrying the injured one all the way to the Scowle. As they watched them disappear, Woodcock Crown turned back and glowered at the older Sluagh.

  “We could have killed them,” he said. “We were on their cursed island.”

  “And they could have let him die,” said Badger Skull.

  “He will die.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But if not, the credit is theirs.”

  “And if he dies?” spat Woodcock Crown.

  “Then the credit is still theirs.”

  “So we owe them a life?”

  Badger Skull took out his blade. Looked at it for a long time, as if remembering how it had got every ancient scratch and nick on the savagely recurved blade. Woodcock Crown and the others in the war band watched him.

  “I don’t say we owe them anything,” he said. “I’m just pointing out that they have done something they have not done for a very long time.”

  “Made a mistake?” said Woodcock Crown.

  “No,” snorted Badger Skull. “No, this Oversight, this Last Hand, they have made plenty of mistakes.”

  He stifled a laugh and re-sheathed his blade.

  “So what is this thing they did that they have not done for a very long time?” said Woodcock Crown.

  Badger Skull looked up into his eyes.

  “They did their duty. To us. To the Sluagh. Not just to the light-grubbing people of the Hungry World.”

  “What does that mean?” said another Sluagh in the group behind Woodcock Crown.

  “I don’t know,” said Badger Skull. “Maybe it means nothing. Or maybe it means the Shee are right.”

  “No,” hissed Woodcock Crown. “We do not have to change.”

  “Maybe not. But we do have to think,” said Badger Skull, looking up at the sun with a grimace of distaste. “All this light is making me sick. Time enough to talk on this after we venge ourselves on Mountfellon. The lowest tide is coming. Let us get to Irongate Steps. If Templebane’s word is true, there is blood to be spilled before the moon rises.”

  CHAPTER 46

  THE INBOUND CHILL

  Once the hated Sluagh had left, Amos had come down into the forge to find the others sitting around the table too stunned to be talking. Even Cook was looking into her empty teacup with no thought of refilling it or anyone else’s.

  “Smith’s not coming back,” said Hodge flatly. “Someone’s got to say it. We’re done. We’re on our own.”

  “No,” said Sara. “We still have a Hand.”

  Hodge dragged himself to his feet again and stood, supporting himself on his fists on the tabletop.

  “No, Sara Falk. This is the time for you to disperse until more members can be found to make The Oversight anew. I stay and guard the ravens in the Tower. As happened before. As The Smith told us has happened at least three times earlier in our history.”

  Cook cleared her throat.

  “Ah. Well, as to that, he never quite told us exactly how that happened though, did he?”

  “What d’you mean?” said Hodge, looking a little betrayed by her interjection.

  “I mean, maybe him striding off and not coming back without warning isn’t a part of it,” she said.

  “He would never have left us on purpose without explaining,” said Sharp. “We don’t know how we communicate when we disperse to the four winds, how we search, how we persuade those we do find to join us without him, without—”

  “When my parents died, I was alone, as we are alone,” said Sara. She stood away from Sharp’s hand and looked around at them all.

  “I didn’t give up just because they hadn’t told me what to do exactly: I grew up.”

  “But you still had The Smith,” said Sharp.

  “And we have each other,” said Sara, turning slowly as she counted them off. “Cook. Hodge. Charlie Pyefinch … Ida?”

  Ida nodded.

  “Of course,” she said. “It is not the moment to go home, is it?”

  “Thank you,” said Sara. “Five. That’s a Hand.”

  And you have my help too, if it will serve.

  They all turned to look at Amos who was standing in the doorway, looking hesitant.

  “Thank you,” said Sara. “Maybe so. We have a Hand. And maybe the way we renew ourselves at the lowest point in our fortunes is by growing up and helping each other. And maybe if the eighty-five had not been killed in the Disaster, we would have been taught this is the way The Oversight rises like a phoenix from the ashes, again and again. Who knows? Maybe if they’d lived there would have been time for more lessons about our history, but there wasn’t. They died. The Citizen killed them. And since then there has only been time to try and keep afloat, a single Hand to save a city, five to guard the Wildfire.

  “Six,” said Sharp. “There were always six. Emmet is one of us. You know I have always felt that. Maybe even the steadiest of us.”

  “So we grow up,” said Sara. “We stand alone. We try and grow our strength again. We reduce our enemies and we guard—above all, we guard the Wildfire until The Smith returns.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” said Cook.

  “Then maybe, once present danger is past—if it passes—we go and find him.”

  She looked around at them all.

  “But not until then.”

  “Don’t know what the world’s coming to when someone you’ve dandled on your knee as a baby tells you to grow up,” said Cook, sniffing.

  “Its senses?” said Sara. She turned to Amos.

  “I don’t know if we can trust you. And I don’t know how to test you. So I’m going to take a leap of faith …”

  “No, Sara—” said Sharp.

  “Enough,” she snapped, hating the edge in her voice even as she heard it. “You will stop worrying about me; you will stop caring for me; you will above all stop telling me I am wrong. Someone must make the decisions even if they are the wrong ones, because the only thing that is certain is that if we spend our time debating what to do but do nothing, we will certainly fail, and The Citizen will win.”

  Sharp opened his mouth t
o protest, but bit it shut upon catching Cook’s warning look.

  “Good,” said Sara. “All that matters is the job in hand. You will take Amos Templebane and see if he is the knife that can unshuck the oyster of his brother’s silence. We must know how far the cancer of this conspiracy has spread if we are to burn it out.”

  “Yes, Miss Falk,” said Sharp, bowing very stiffly. “As you wish.”

  She watched him beckon Amos and leave without a backward glance. She was grateful for that. If he had looked back, she might have been tempted to unbend and apologise for upbraiding him in public for his loyalty to her. And the time for sentiment was gone.

  She could feel the inbound chill of it on the wind. She hoped it was The Citizen who would be doing the departing, but one thing was certain.

  There was dying to be done.

  CHAPTER 47

  UNDER THE KILLING FLOOR

  Cait had fallen backwards out of the mirror, and several things had happened at once, none of them good.

  She fell out of light into pitch dark.

  She fell out of warm air into icy water.

  She fell into water so cold it burned her eyes.

  Her eardrums stabbed with sharp pain, as though they were bursting.

  The shock of it clenched her so tight she didn’t breathe a lungful of water, but she did exhale half the air inside her before choking the reflex off.

  Armbruster and Magill got tangled up with her as they tumbled after her, which made her lose track of where up and down were.

  She took a thrashing elbow in the eye, and a knee in the ribs, and then something desperate and furry scrabbled past her, claws raking her cheek as it headed in panic for the surface, and she realised it was the dog Digger.

  She kicked after the dog, too desperate to notice that her boot connected with what might have been Magill or Armbruster’s head.

  As she rose, she felt the screaming pressure on her ears ease, and though she felt the ache in her lungs beginning to bite she ignored it and clamped her teeth together so she would not take a fatal breath of water before breaking the surface.

  She clawed upwards through the darkness, aware that the surface above was becoming clearer, a rosy glow, treacherously warm-looking.

  She saw the dog’s silhouette just ahead of her, a dark rangy shape scrabbling against the ruddy backlight.

  She kicked harder, furiously determined to use all her energy before the bone-crack pain of the freezing lake-water sapped the vitality from her limbs and fuddled her mind.

  She kicked for her life, and hit the surface.

  Hard.

  Hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to knock stars into her eyes.

  She steadied herself with a splayed hand against an immoveable ceiling.

  The surface wasn’t air.

  It was thick ice.

  She felt Armbruster and Magill arrive on either side of her, but her vision was too blurry to make out their faces with any clarity. They hit and punched at the ice roof, and it didn’t buckle or flex one bit.

  Cait fought panic and scrabbled inside her coat and fumbled one of The Oversight’s candles from her inner pocket. Her fingers were not her own. They were numb rubber sausages that seemed to work on a delay. The candle slipped from her grip, and she snatched clumsily at it to catch it before it tumbled out of reach.

  She caught it, but the movement of her hand broke it against her leg, so that she had only a stub left in her hand. She gripped hard, and snapped her wrist.

  The candle ignited and showed her a strobing vision of hell.

  The harsh flickering light of the Wildfire turned Magill and Armbruster into macabre, dancing marionettes, each of them treading water, faces desperate, eyes popped wide, cheeks bulging and mouths clamped shut as they hacked at the thick and unyielding ice using their knives like picks.

  Their assault had no effect.

  The desperate urgency in her lungs went from an ache to a shrieking pain.

  Armbruster wrestled his gun free from its holster but then dropped it.

  It somersaulted away into the darkness below.

  The dog Digger died in front of her eyes.

  It stopped scrabbling and opened its jaws as reflex made it breathe the lake, and immediately lost buoyancy, dropping past her.

  No, she thought.

  No.

  She caught the dog’s tail with her left hand as she punched the fist holding the candle and the Wildfire flame into the unyielding ice-floor above her. She felt the fire blaze and burn, heating the water around her hand as she kept churning her legs, trying to power upwards against the unmoveable roof.

  Magill swam over to her and began chunking his bowie into the ice closer to the light.

  It was futile. It was doomed. It was over.

  All she had was the energy for one last furious blow as she bunched her fist and slammed it into the ice in a final act of defiance, not just punching the adamantine barrier between her and the air, and not punching with any hope now, but just punching everything, everything that had brought her to this sudden, grotesque and irreversible end, punching the whole damned world with all the power and anger left in her dying body. She punched without caring whether she broke her bones because in a short mouthful of water from now all pain would be gone …

  And above her was no stone to mark her grave, just a flat plane of ice, a lonely frozen lake surrounded by steep mountain slopes covered with ancient pine trees heavy with snow; and above all that, an immensity of mountains whose jagged peaks soared heroically into a bloody sunset that painted everything with its ruddy light, even the incoming face of the dark storm-clouds rolling in from the north.

  All this, and nothing moving in the crisp, cold moment before the sun drops behind the peaks and leaves the world to darkness and the next fall of snow.

  Nothing moving except the small fist that punched out of the killing floor, the fist carrying the fire, the fist followed by the tall red-haired woman who drags herself and the dog out and onto the ice and just lies there as the two mountain men follow her, Magill using his bowie like an ice axe to get enough of a purchase on the slick surface to help Armbruster choke and splutter out of the hole.

  Cait rolled over and reached for the dog.

  “Got it,” hacked Magill, dropping the bowie and staggering to his feet, grabbing the dog by its back legs and holding it upside down, swinging it lightly.

  The dog choked and made a raw gagging noise as lake-water left its lungs, and then it convulsed and he half put it down, half dropped it as he too fell back and lay on the ice, getting his breath as the dog coughed and gacked and shook itself back to life.

  “Goddamn,” said Armbruster. “Hell was that …?”

  Magill shook his head. Lost for words.

  “Damned if I know,” he said. “But we’re alive.”

  “Get me out of here or that will change,” said The Citizen’s voice, punctuated by the unmistakable click of a revolver hammer being cocked.

  Cait rolled over and saw the back of the old man’s head sticking out of the hole, his arm pointing the long-barrelled pistol at Armbruster.

  “Your gun is wet,” said Magill.

  “But my cartridges are sealed,” said The Citizen. “If you want me to demonstrate, I will blow his head off to show you. Get m-me out of here.”

  His white face was going blue at the lips but his eyes were alive with an unquenchable fury of will-power.

  Armbruster looked at Magill.

  “Chances are it won’t fire,” he said. “And he’s shaking like a—”

  Cait didn’t have to do much. She didn’t even have to get off the ground. She just reached out and gripped the handle of Magill’s discarded bowie-knife and scythed it across the ice in a fast powerful arc, letting the weight of the heavy blade power the razor-sharp cutting edge cleanly through The Citizen’s neck, scarcely snagging at all as it clove the vertebrae and passed on and out the other side.

  The force of the blow and the jetting
pulse of The Citizen’s heart bobbled the severed head around so she saw the shocked eyes seem to widen as he saw her, and then it tumbled sideways on the ice as the body it had been separated from sent a final dark fountain into the sky before it dropped back into the water and sunk.

  Cait staggered to her feet and looked down at the head and then at Magill and Armbruster, whose faces were stuck somewhere between shock and something a little closer to awe.

  “What?” she said, beginning to shake, either from the extreme cold or the hot flush of adrenalin.

  “Nothing,” said Magill.

  “Good,” she said. “There was too much talking going on, and I’ve no mind to die of cold after all that.”

  She looked down at The Citizen’s head, and then flipped it with her boot, sending it back into the hole in the ice, where it bobbed, bubbled and sank without trace.

  She handed the bowie-knife to Magill.

  “Fine blade,” she said.

  Magill took it automatically, his hands trembling with the cold, his eyes still locked on the hole in the ice.

  “Who the hell was that guy?” said Magill.

  “That ain’t the question, Jon,” said Armbruster, looking around at the icy peaks and the wilderness of pines. “Question is: where the hell are we?”

  “Well, that’s easy,” said Cait, teeth chattering as she slipped and stumbled past them, heading across the ice towards the tree-lined shore. “We’re where we’re going to die if we don’t get warm and dry before it starts snowing again.”

  She began to jog towards the snow-laden pines.

  “Why are you heading that way?” said Magill.

  “I’m just following the dog,” said Cait. “He’s heading for the trees.”

  She reached a shaking hand into her jacket and held the last candle up over her shoulder without looking around.

  “And trees burn.”

  Magill and Armbruster shared a look, and then began to trot unsteadily after her.

  “It upset you that she’s now probably saved us twice?” said Armbruster.

  “Not a bit,” said Magill. “Think we make a good team.”

  “We’re not a team,” gritted Cait, teeth now chattering like castanets. “We’re just three d-d-damned idiots following a half-drowned dog.”