The Paradox

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  For Domenica, for ever the loveliest of paradoxes

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  THE OVERSIGHT

  Cook–once a pirate

  The Smith–smith, ringmaker and counsellor

  Hodge the Terrier Man–ratcatcher at the Tower of London, blinded

  Charlie Pyefinch–apprentice ratcatcher

  Lucy Harker–a Glint and a lost girl

  Emmet–a golem

  Jed–an Old English Terrier

  IN LONDON

  Caitlin Sean ná Gaolaire–a venatrix, from Skibbereen

  An amorous doctor–unfaithful to his wife

  Young woman–child thief and changeling

  A newborn baby–her father, also a changeling

  Francis Blackdyke, Viscount Mountfellon–man of science turned supranaturalist

  The Citizen–a sea-green incorruptible, thought dead

  Issachar Templebane Esq.–lawyer and broker

  Sherehog, Vintry, Jewry, Westcheap, Aldersgate, Backchurch, Pountney, Poultry, Outwich, Bothaw, Abchurch and Coram Templebane–adopted sons (unimpaired)

  William George Bunyon–innkeeper and gaoler of the Sly House

  Nell Bunyon–his daughter

  Obadiah Tittensor–owner and Master of Lady of Nantasket, out of Boston, Mass.

  RUTLANDSHIRE

  Whitlowe–a running boy

  A footman

  Old Biles–servant and nightwatchman

  AT THE ANDOVER WORKHOUSE

  M’Gregor–superintendent

  Mrs M’Gregor–his wife

  IN THE COUNTRYSIDE

  The Ghost of the Itch Ward–formerly of the Andover Workhouse, real name unknown

  Amos Templebane–adopted son of Issachar (mute but intelligent)

  BETWEEN THE WORLDS

  Sara Falk–keeper of the Safe House in Wellclose Square

  Mr Sharp–protector and sentinel

  The Raven–a wise old bird

  John Dee–known as The Walker between the Worlds

  A cavalier–a Mirror Wight

  A bowman–a Mirror Wight

  The nun–onetime Marianne de Rohan, now a Mirror Wight

  BEYOND LAW AND LORE

  Badger Skull, Bull Tattoo, Raven Totem, Fore-and-Aft and others–Sluagh

  ON THE STEINERNES MEER

  Frau Wachman–a grief-stricken mother

  Herr Wachman–her husband

  Peter–a boy

  Otto von Fleischl–Schattenjäger, a hunter

  Ida Laemmel–Schattenjägersmesser, his “knife”

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  Prudence Tittensor–wife of Obadiah, holder of secrets

  “WILDFIRE RULES ALL”

  Heraclitus, Fragment 64

  “Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of earth, earth that of water”… so says Heraclitus, the ancient philosopher of flux and flame so beloved of the Alchemists. He believed this eternal fire was the key to the cyclical process of transmutation, both the creative spark and the destructive conflagration, changing the elements into one another so that, as Diogenes Laertius attests, “the world is alternately born from fire and again resolved into fire in fixed cycles to all eternity, and this is determined by destiny”. Finding themselves guardians of a fragment of the original Wildfire, the Free Company for The Oversight of London have not been satisfied with leaving so potentially destructive a force to the vagaries of that destiny, but have devoted great effort and cunning to keeping it safe and contained. Indeed, of all the arcane duties involved in The Oversight’s responsibility for keeping the balance between the natural and the supranatural worlds, this has been the keystone or, as it were, the fulcrum on which the balance depends… there are those who believe the Wildfire did not come from this world at all, but from another sphere whence it escaped, and to which it is inexorably drawn back (whence its volatility)… a sphere now rendered dark and hungry by its absence, but this is, so far as I know, conjecture and little evidence has come to my attention…

  from The Great and Hidden History of the World by the Rabbi Dr Hayyim Samuel Falk (also known as the Ba’al Shem of London)

  PROLOGUE

  A DOUBLE JEOPARDY: FIRST PART

  Issachar Templebane examined his own dead face with more disappointment than sorrow. He noted how surprised it looked at the sudden interruption of all the clever plans that had once boiled so vigorously through the lifeless brain already beginning to rot behind that high forehead. The rictus of shock frozen on the waxy skin gave the lie to those who claimed that death by drowning was a peaceful and a painless departure, though it did occur to him that the expression might merely be one of distress at the taste of the noxious mix of Thames water and sewer effluent that had been his final fatal inhalation.

  “Well,” he said, reaching his good hand down and thumbing open an eye which gave a slight sticky pop as the lid detached unwillingly from an eyeball now devoid of life or lubrication. “Well, brother, you are a fool to have fallen in so untimely a manner, and I shall have to carry on without you.”

  The eye stared gummily back at a spot on the ceiling over Issachar’s shoulder. He in turn hung over the face that was–his dead brother being also his identical twin–notionally but not actually his own. The movement was awkward and made him wince as the broken arm that was hanging in a sling twisted uncomfortably.

  “I was thinking that I might unman myself by looking at your dead face, but now that I do so I must admit my first reaction is one of determination, for sad and distressing though it is to see you thus, it chiefly makes me resolved never to be seen by my own survivors with such a surprised and disappointed expression. I have to say that for such a preternaturally bright and accomplished man, brother, you look shamefully taken aback.”

  He let the eyelid go and sucked his teeth.

  “It won’t do though, it won’t do at all. I am diminished by your death. I feel like a…”

  And here, unusually for Issachar, words quite left him. He waited for them to return, eyes turned to the ceiling, blinking more rapidly than normal. He took a deep breath, then released a long, calming exhalation, massaging his broken arm with his good hand as he did so.

  “I feel something has been stolen from me,” he said. And the snarl with which he said it made it clear that the flush beginning to pink the ridges of his cheekbones was not grief but anger. “Well, brother, the dissolution of the partnership does not signal the end of the enterprise. I will continue alone, and I will destroy them. The precious Oversight may be adept at fighting the insubstantial and the arcane; we shall see how they are guarded against an assault in the real world. They think they have stopped us, but they have not. They have simply confirmed my opinion that our future prosperity is only guaranteed by their eradication, root and branch. I shall grub up their vines, burn their storehouses and sow their fields with salt. Once gone they will stay gone for ever. Their last thought will be an agonised regret that they attempted to thwart the House of Templebane.”

  FIRST PART

  TH
E BLOODY BOY

  CHAPTER 1

  THE FIRST STEP

  Sara Falk had passed through the mirror in one decisive step. Behind her, she left the basement of the familiar Safe House and the support of people who had known her all her life, the tight-knit band of guardians and friends who would have died to protect her, just as much as she would have risked everything for them.

  It was thus a hard first step to take away from them, but she took it boldly and decisively, and she did not go precisely alone, nor without means of self-preservation: she was armed to the teeth, carrying a bright candle in one hand and the Raven on her shoulder. She looked herself up and down in the reflection, taking a brief inventory: slender but stout top-boots visible beneath an oiled silk overskirt that emerged from a black riding jacket buttoned tight around her lean body, her hands bunched inside equally black gloves on top of which gleamed two gold rings. The difference she noticed about her appearance, apart from the unaccustomed weaponry, was that she had taken to wearing her rings on the left hand, her recent travails having involved losing the other one and the rings with it–leading her to nearly expire–until it had been miraculously returned and even more miraculously re-attached. Above all that was her face, taut with exhaustion but still, as ever, decades too young for the prematurely white hair pulled tight into a thick white plait which curled round her neck and hung over her right collarbone. The eyes that looked back at her from the mirror were the grey-green of a midwinter sea and, she was pleased to note, steady and determined, despite the tug of exhaustion and the drumming of her heart beneath the tight coat buttons.

  “Right,” she said so quietly that only the Raven heard. “Let us go.”

  And she took a firm pace forward into the mirror. She passed through the surface of the glass with less resistance than popping a soap bubble, and then she stopped dead.

  She lifted the candle. It seemed to flare brighter as she did so. She stared ahead into the uniform corridor created by the endless reflections of the mirror stretching away to a vanishing point lost in the darkness beyond the throw of the candlelight. When she turned round she did not see the back of the mirror she had just walked through, but an identical tunnel of mirrors now stretching away in the opposite direction until it too became lost in the gloom beyond the light. When she looked down, she saw the mirrored ceiling reflected all the way up into eventual darkness, and when she looked to one side, the same endless multiplication of reflections stretched to right and left.

  “So,” she said, “a maze it is.”

  The Raven clacked its beak in her ear.

  “I know,” she replied. “We shall have to mark the starting point if we are to have any hope of returning. I shall—”

  The Raven hopped to the ground and shuddered briefly. Then it lofted back on to her shoulder. Where it had stood was an impressive splatter of bird’s mess.

  “… I’m sure that will do nicely,” said Sara. “Or if not quite nicely, adequately.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BLOODY BOY

  Amos Templebane (mute by birth and Templebane by adoption) had blood on his hands. Figurative blood, since the man he had killed was weeks in the past, and possibly even justifiable blood since the tinker in question had been about to cut Amos’s throat the instant before Amos had backhanded him with the man’s own frying pan, knocking him into the turbid canal in which he had drowned. Amos had walked and thought himself across many leagues of English countryside since that desperate night and in the course of that journey had both come to terms with the slaying, and made a vow that he would never, ever take another life. But arguably unimpeachable though his actions may have been, and admirable though his subsequent resolution was, the fact is that Amos had certainly killed a man.

  The cold, detailed murderousness radiating from the mind of the grey-haired woman he had freed from the Eel House as she strode ahead of him across the water meadow was a different order of thing: it was as disconcerting as the discovery that she could read his thoughts just as well as he himself could hear what went on in other people’s heads. Until she had spoken to him in his mind as he passed the little brick building in the dark and persuaded him to unlock it and release her, he had until now thought his ability was unique.

  Where are you going? he thought.

  She answered him in a voice hoarse and reedy from long disuse.

  “To the poorhouse. To the Warden’s bedroom.”

  The poorhouse. The words reminded him of his own early years in a similar institution in London. The memories were far from happy ones.

  What will you do?

  “Take what is mine,” she said.

  He had no memory of possessions in his own poorhouse. His memories were of being smaller than everyone else, and having nothing except fear and discomfort.

  What is that?

  “Revenge,” she said. “For a start, revenge.”

  Why must you do violence?

  She stopped and looked at him, her face implacable in the silvered moonlight.

  “Because I must, Bloody Boy, because I must.”

  Why do you call me that? I am not bloody, and I am a man.

  “You cannot yet be more than eighteen years old, and you already reek of blood. It was the first thing I noticed about you: even before my eyes saw you, my nose found you.”

  Her smile was fragile and terrible.

  “Death walks with you, before and behind,” she said. “Life taken and life to be taken. It’s on you like a stench.”

  I will not take life.

  She snorted and turned away.

  “Your will does not enter into it, Bloody Boy,” she said. “Not when fate has other plans.”

  He wished he had not given her a knife.

  As he followed her towards the squat barrack of the poorhouse, he could see her head was full of blood as she planned her actions: she would stop by a water butt and reach down into the inky depths to retrieve a piece of oval glass, a mirror that she had previously hidden there. And then she would enter the back door of the Warden’s dwelling and slip through the kitchen and ascend the backstairs, keeping to the left-hand side of the treads close to the wall so that they would not creak and give her approach away. She would ease open the bedroom door and cross the floor in two or three fast steps to stand beside the large double bed and its hopefully still snoring occupants, M’Gregor the Warden and his wife. And then—

  Why kill him?

  “Stop looking at my thoughts,” she said without slowing.

  What has she done?

  “She is worse than him,” she said. “You will help me.”

  There was something in her manner, in her single-mindedness, that was not quite human. It was feral, focused and unthinking. It was as if she had been imagining this revenge for so long that it was now more instinct than plan.

  Wait, he thought.

  “I have been waiting for long enough,” she said. “I have been waiting for longer than you have been alive.”

  She slipped through the hedge and into the small yard at the back of the poorhouse.

  What is this place?

  “I told you. A vale of tears. It is the Andover Workhouse. It is my prison.”

  Just as he had seen her imagine it, she retrieved the looking-glass from the bottom of the water butt, leaning right down into it so that her arm was wet to the shoulder and her hair stuck to her face in wet snakes. She shook the water off and slid it into the pocket of her shift.

  Why do you need a mirror?

  He was beginning to realise she was mad.

  “Wait and see,” she said, and turned to the back door.

  She worried the lock with the thin blade of the knife in an intent, nimble-fingered way that told him she had done this before. There was a snicking noise and she eased the door open, revealing the shadowy passage within.

  Wait.

  She turned to look at him.

  You don’t have to do this. You could just leave. By dawn you can be miles from
here.

  “You have no idea what I have to do,” she said. “You must help me.”

  He took her arm.

  She looked at the knife in her other hand. She looked pointedly back at his fingers gripping her arm.

  “It would be foolish and dangerous to stop me,” she whispered, “and quite against your own interests.”

  My interests don’t need the slaughter of innocents in their bed.

  The thought jumped from him before he could cloak it. And before he could stop her she had the knife at his throat. She stared into his eyes. He felt assaulted by the intensity of her scrutiny as much as by the prick of the blade. She appeared to be devouring everything about him, scanning his face, smelling him, feral again, sensing his warmth, his strength, his vulnerabilities…

  She pulled the knife back, her eyes still sharp. She pointed up the stairs with a jerk of her head.

  “He rapes the boys in the foundling ward. Mostly the boys, the smaller the better. Sometimes it’s the girls. She knows and says nothing. She keeps the books and steals the money the parish puts aside for food and medicine. People die of hunger here, while that milk-fat bitch sleeps on a chest full of money. More than that, she steals from the inmates if they’re unlucky enough to arrive with anything of value: kerchiefs, boots, whatever–she takes them and sells them. She took my things.”

  She had not blinked as she listed the crimes of the M’Gregors. He did his best not to break eye contact and stared right back at her.

  “He does what he does because he has disgusting urges he has not the strength or character to resist. She looks the other way just because she likes money. She is worse. She knows and she is a woman, and a woman should be a mother; even if she has no blood-kin, she should be a mother to poor children without their own parents…”