The Oversight Read online

  The bone pet turned its head sideways so that the sharp end of the rowan pointed downwards, and then ratcheted its neck backwards before striking towards the floor in one sharp decisive movement.

  The small stick went through the Sluagh’s arm just below the wrist, right through the gap between the radius and the ulna bones and out the other side, so that there was more than four inches of wood sticking out above and below the arm preventing the hand being withdrawn back into the cell through the narrow slit.

  The Sluagh grunted in surprise as much as pain. He squinted out into the dark and saw the stick and the bone pet beyond.

  “What…?” he choked, his eyes trying to make sense of the familiar skeleton and the unfamiliar skull with its bronze raptor’s beak crouching on his trapped hand. “Why…?”

  The beak opened and the Sluagh chieftain’s voice answered him.

  “As I swore, by the blood and by the bone, you are released.”

  “No!” shouted the Sluagh, and tried to crush the skeleton in his palm, but his fingers were too old, too tired, too human to beat the inhuman speed of the bone pet as it leapt out of his grip and landed athwart his wrist, the beak open, the sharpened edges slashing right and left and then right again. And where it cut, the blood came, but not the bright blood, the red blood of life, but the inky blood of Last Death, blood turned as black as the wound itself as the bronze blade brought the outer darkness into the body of the Sluagh, and in its own way, did release him.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE RED LIBRARY

  The Red Library was on the first floor of the house, at the top of an elegant staircase which swept up round the panelled walls of the entrance hall onto an upper landing covered in murky green and brown murals depicting a marshy coastline dotted with strange buildings and ships in distress on a dark, rising sea. The double doors to the library were, in contrast, covered in rich scarlet silk. Each door had a large animal outlined upon it in shiny brass upholsterer’s tacks: on the left a rearing unicorn, on the right a matching lion.

  Lucy, having been roused from her doze in the kitchen, was feeling unnaturally sleepy despite wanting to remain alert. She looked at the seven-foot high animals and then at her ring.

  “Yes,” said Sara Falk in French. “The same unicorn.”

  “I do not understand,” said Lucy, looking around at all of their hands and the rings on them.

  “Well,” said Sara. “It’s late…”

  Lucy opened her mouth to protest, but Sara continued firmly.

  “… it’s late and you must go with Cook and, if you wish, have a hot bath, but you must then sleep. Your eyes say you are exhausted, whatever your mouth might claim. Sleep, and then you will be in a better condition to understand things. But until then I will tell you this: the lion and the unicorn represent the one truth behind the great and hidden history of the world, and that is that there is more than just one way to see. View the world in one way, it’s a day-to-day place where wonderful things like lions are possible, but if you can see it the other way you notice it contains other realities, layers if you will, in which there are ‘impossible’ things, things like—”

  “Unicorns,” said Mr Sharp, jogging up the stairs behind them.

  “Exactly.”

  “But unicorns don’t exist,” said Lucy, yawning despite herself.

  “You’re right,” said Sara, exchanging a look with Mr Sharp. “At least as far as I know. But they certainly do exist as symbols.”

  Mr Sharp pointed to her hand.

  “You have one on your ring,” he said.

  “Yes. But it is broken—” she began, her chin rising in defiance. He pointed to the animals outlined on the door.

  “But when it is whole, like this, and faced with a lion, like that, it says the different realities do exist and are, like this lion and this unicorn, in balance,” said Sara, showing her ring. “And those who wear this seal are sworn to keep that balance.”

  Lucy nodded, not because she fully understood, but because she was running out of energy and was filing all this away to be unpacked later. She had one final question.

  “Why are the doors so red?”

  “For safety,” said Cook firmly. “Now: bath and bed.”

  “I thought red was for danger,” said Lucy.

  “Danger. Safety. Two sides, same coin,” said Sara with a smile. “Balance, you see.”

  Lucy yawned. She really was very tired. She wanted to ask more questions but Cook’s large hand was steering her towards the next flight of stairs, so she just nodded sleepily instead.

  “Sweet dreams, Miss Harker,” said Mr Sharp. “You are safe and among friends.”

  Lucy turned, remembering the rest of the question.

  “But why silk? On the door?”

  “My grandfather found a passage in the Talmud which told of the power of a red thread to ward off the evil eye,” said Sara Falk. “Thinking that if one single thread had such power, many must have much more, he decided to line this whole room–floor, walls and ceiling–in silk, which is of course woven from uncountable numbers of threads, so making it infinitely secure.”

  “To ward off the evil eye?” said Lucy.

  “Yes,” said Sara Falk as Cook steered her out of sight round the next curve in the stair. “Sleep well.”

  Mr Sharp unlocked the door and pushed the lion part open.

  “Of course she wouldn’t sleep any better if we were to tell her it’s as much to stop the evil getting out as getting in, would she?” he said quietly.

  “She’ll sleep fine,” she said, pushing past him. “Cook’s hot milk has its virtues.”

  He followed her in and locked the door behind him as she turned up the gas globes on the wall.

  “Well and good,” he replied. “If she can stay asleep until The Smith gets here, so much the better.”

  “She means us no harm,” Sara said as the light flooded the room, revealing walls covered in ceiling-high glass bookcases crammed with ancient leather-bound volumes of every shape, size and colour. The shelves were also lined in red silk, as was every visible surface not covered by a book, an artefact or a cascade of manuscripts. The ceiling was red, and the thick Chinese silk carpet beneath their feet was of the same hue. The shutters were closed on the tall windows and were also, of course, lined in silk like the doors.

  There were tables down the centre of the room covered in books, papers and maps, and there were glass cabinets filled with an extraordinary mixture of objects: bones, weapons, jewellery, cups, idols, fragments of pottery and much more, all assembled with no visible rhyme or reason, but all, when you looked closer, carrying a handwritten label, tied on with red silk string.

  In the middle of the floor, between two long tables, there was a blocky pedestal made of glassy obsidian so black that it was like a square hole sucking the light into itself from the four corners of the library. On top of it was a three-foot square wickerwork cage made from flexible strips of raw steel. An ornate key with a handle made to look like the flared hood of a cobra hung from the roof of the cage at its dead centre. As Sara walked past it, something hidden hissed at her, and she paused for a moment with her gloved hand stretched wide against the woven metal wall.

  The floor of the cage was covered in black volcanic sand, and in one corner an obsidian urn had been half buried on its side, next to a shallow pool of water the size of a saucer. It was from the dark mouth of the urn that the hissing emerged, but it died down quickly, as if Sara’s hand was calming it.

  “There is not much in the natural world that makes me shudder,” said Mr Sharp, pausing behind her and nodding at the cage. “But I will confess the thing guarding that key never fails to do so.”

  “Put the bones over there by the Murano Cabinet,” Sara said, pointing at an empty shelf in a far corner next to an ornately panelled cupboard. The panels were covered in delicate paintings of Venetian canals, and each panel was outlined in twirled rods of hand-blown glass which caught the lamplight as they moved
towards it. “And give me that damned blade.”

  “I shall keep the bones for now, and try them with Jed’s nose,” he said, handing it over.

  “I told her about The Oversight,” said Sara, looking at the cruel bronze edge in her hand. “I didn’t tell her how few we are, or how fragile the balance.”

  “Or what power we must protect?” he said quietly. “I wager you told her nothing of that.”

  “No,” she said, looking at the Murano Cabinet. “She has no need to know about the real key.”

  “And who is she?” he said.

  “The Smith will know,” she said. “And then I want to know who has been in The Three Cripples saying the Jew wants screaming girls.”

  “There was a time—” he began, turning.

  “That was before our time,” she said, cutting him off.

  He watched her put the Sluagh’s blade on a red shelf in a glazed cabinet set on the wall between the bookcases.

  “None the less,” he said calmly. “Old stories get repeated, and so the past comes back with a different face: it’s how the city builds its legends, out of misremembered realities and old wives’ tales.”

  “My grandfather used to say that men always deceive themselves when they remember their own pasts,” she replied, “so why should a city be different?”

  “Why indeed?” he agreed, pausing by the cage and looking at the small key hanging at its centre. “And what after all is wrong with a little deception?”

  “In the right place, at the right time? Nothing,” she said. “But I would prefer a little clarification and truth about the night’s proceedings, and so we need to alert the others.”

  He stepped to the door and unlocked it. He paused to look back at her.

  “You’re sure The Smith will know who she is?”

  She had her back to him, hands on her hips, scanning the high shelves above her.

  “Wayland makes all the rings. He’ll know if anyone does. He’ll at least know who he made it for. And that’s a start.”

  He watched her flex her back and roll her head from side to side, unconsciously stretching away the pain and fatigue he knew she always carried with her, but never spoke of.

  “It’s on the next shelf,” he said.

  “What?” she asked.

  “ ‘S’,” he said, smiling mirthlessly. “For ‘Sluagh’. But now you need to go to bed. I will find Hodge, who is as ever on the trail of an interesting bitch, and send him for The Smith, and then, since you will have your way about the girl, I think I will go and ask the Sluagh some more questions, questions I should perhaps have already asked…”

  “You have nothing to worry about,” Sara said, her voice soft. “I know I may betimes seem wilful and hard to govern, but I am no more a fool than you, old friend.”

  He looked at her and shook his head, still not quite ready to smile.

  “Since I am at present still cursing myself for a weak-minded idiot for letting you keep her here until dawn, that does not recommend you much, I am afraid.”

  Silence hung between them, and then he shook himself like a man waking up from a doze.

  “No matter. Hodge will not come in to make his report until breakfast, and then The Smith will be here and we can move forward.” He inclined his head to her in the ghost of a bow. “Sleep well and sleep safely, Sara Falk.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THE TERRIER MAN

  Mr Sharp had been right. There was an interesting bitch under the Thames, and that was where he found Hodge the Terrier Man. The bitch was a young Irish terrier with bright eyes, good strong teeth and a beautiful redcoloured coat of rough broken hair. That was the good news. The bad news was that the bitch’s owner was an out and out rogue who worked as a pimp and who, perversely, was as unwilling to sell the services of his terrier as he was keen to profit from the bodily attentions of the not so convincingly youthful stable of ladies he cared for. Unfortunately for him, Hodge was not, nor had ever been interested in ladies, negotiable or not, and he was presently and with characteristic single-mindedness much more interested in contracting an exclusively canine conjunction.

  He had been on a rooftop earlier in the day, investigating a mysterious outbreak of mortality in a crowded series of pigeon houses, when he’d seen the man and his dog on the outside staircase of the building opposite. His eye had been so captured by the man’s dog that his mind had been quite taken off the ramshackle coops full of pigeons which appeared to have been methodically crushed to death. He had curtailed his investigation and made enquiries about the man and the clutch of women he was shepherding around instead, and had determined he was a trader in ladies’ favours.

  He was now under the Thames because it was there, after dark, in the new tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe that the pimp’s charges patrolled the already dank and dingy arcade of retail booths with which the speculative developers had lined the tiled underpass. These emporia had been advertised to potential investors as a subterranean replacement for the legendary cavalcade of shops that had once lined the great mediaeval London Bridge which had been demolished ninety years before: the promoters had puffed the prospect of jewellers and cabinet-makers and fine craftsmen of all disciplines moving into the passage in order to cater to “the Quality”, who would flock in high-class droves to the novel subriverine thoroughfare. The truth was that by day the tunnel was full of gaudy booths full of every kind of gimcrack operator working to take money from the passers-by, from conjurers dressed up as “Egyptian necromancers” to several lesser species of cardsharps, hucksters and pitchmen, as well as sweetshops, toy-sellers and dancing monkeys. At a certain late hour, the stores shuttered up, the gas globes seemed to dim, and–to the inattentive eye–the shop-girls appeared to stop selling souvenirs and start selling themselves, though in truth the actual shop-girls left as the ladies of the night arrived.

  Hodge wanted a wife for his dog Jed, and he was arguing his suit with a tenacity that matched the stubborn, never-say-die quality he so admired in the dog himself. He was a distinctive and muscular man, built low to the ground, with bright blue eyes and a shock of wiry copperish hair brushed back from a weatherbeaten face which–in conjunction with a rolling gait caused by his slightly bowed legs–gave him the air of permanently walking into an invisible wind.

  Jed sat obediently at his feet as Hodge tried to make the match, studiously ignoring the charms of the comely Irish bitch with a lordly unconcern, as if the whole thing meant nothing to him. He himself was an Old English Terrier, black and tan with an equally broken coat and a lively and alert eye.

  He saw Mr Sharp before Hodge did, but when Hodge noticed his friend he made his apologies, engaged to come back later to continue the negotiation and joined him as they walked out of earshot towards the galleried entrance shaft. They both moved fast and with purpose, Jed never straying more than a foot from Hodge’s heels.

  The shaft was an impressive cylindrical space, well lit and floored in a checkerboard mosaic of blue and white, more than fifty feet in diameter. It rose from the tunnel mouth to a marbled rotunda high above. Marble stairs zigzagged up the curved walls, and there were two landings on which tired pedestrians might rest on their way up or down. Neither Hodge nor Mr Sharp paused as they jogged up the steps. Hodge’s head inclined towards the other’s as he listened to what he was telling him.

  “A Glint?” he said at one point, and as they neared the brass turnstile at the top he stopped and looked at Mr Sharp in amazement. “Sluagh? In the city?” but apart from that he was all attention, as was the dog, who followed him but seemed to watch Mr Sharp’s every move.

  They emerged into the fog and only then paused.

  “So,” said Hodge. “Something’s afoot.”

  Mr Sharp nodded. Hodge pulled a stubby cut-off clay pipe from his jacket and lit it with a phosphor match, staring at his friend over the flame as he did so. The hand that held the pipe showed a bloodstone ring with the lion and unicorn incised in it.

  “And you
are unhappy,” he said.

  “I smelled something in the air, but I let the man Ketch in,” grimaced Mr Sharp. “That may have been a mistake.”

  “And he never makes mistakes,” said Hodge to the dog sitting expectantly on the ground between them. The dog barked once.

  “I make them,” said Sharp. “I just don’t like them. I don’t like this. I need you to go and fetch The Smith. Ask him to join us for breakfast. Then see what you can find out about Ketch’s movements tonight.”

  “This Ketch may not have been what he seemed?” said Hodge.

  “He may have been acted upon. If I’d known there were Sluagh abroad, I would have considered that. I would have asked more questions about the man at The Three Cripples who told him the Jew wanted screaming girls.”

  “I’ll get The Smith and then go to The Three Cripples,” said Hodge. “They don’t close. What did this Ketch look like?”

  Mr Sharp looked at him. Hodge held his gaze for a beat, then nodded although no audible words passed between them.

  “Not the face of an angel, is it?”

  Mr Sharp shook his head. “Walked a hard road and shows every mile, I’d say.”

  “I’ll find him,” said Hodge. “And the Sluagh?”

  “Here,” said Mr Sharp. “Start outside Bunyon’s tavern, the side entrance. He was there for a long while.”

  He unwrapped the bones he had taken and crouched on the ground. Jed stiffened and began to quiver with a low whine of excitement as he filled his nostrils with the smell of the Sluagh’s trophies. The sharp-beaked puffin skull that had bitten Sharp began to vibrate and turned towards the dog, chittering menacingly, but Jed just curled his lip on one side, showing his fangs, and rumbled a low warning growl. The puffin skull stopped chittering immediately, turned away and was very still.

  Hodge scratched the dog’s head affectionately.

  “Good man,” he said. “See you back at the Tower.”

  Jed yipped once and then bolted into the night.

  “You could put the Raven up,” said Mr Sharp, retying the bundle.