CHAPTER 66

WATERBORNE

The bargee’s name was Harry Stonex and his wife was Ruby, and apart from introducing themselves they didn’t say much, other than that Lucy and Charlie were welcome aboard but should be so kind as to keep out of sight during the day. Ruby brought them food and hot tea whenever they made it for themselves, and Harry sat and had it with them in the space they found among the baulks of timber he was bringing to London.

“Hearts of oak,” he said, patting the stacked wood. “Safe as old England you’ll be in here. And you’ll have noticed the iron.”

Lucy had not noticed, but Charlie had. He pointed out an iron rubbing strake running around the entire boat like a belt.

“That’s not just to protect the gunwale from scraping on the banks and lock-sides,” he said. “That keeps the Shadowgangers away too.”

Lucy didn’t know what a gunwale was, and said so. Charlie’s explanation was less exciting than she expected, being just the side of the boat. She didn’t need to ask what Shadowgangers were. She had seen them appear out of the darkness and felt a cold chill of dread run through her guts at the memory. She feared them even though she knew they were dead and all trace of them had been tipped into the water and was gone.

Except all trace of the Sluagh had not gone. The Sluagh’s cocked hat had been knocked off in the short fight and fallen under the Pyefinches’ wagon, where it lay unnoticed. Back at the fair, the enthusiasm for chasing after the thief who had snatched the Manus Gloriae had eventually worn off, and the crowd had evaporated into other booths and diversions. Because of the disruption, the great Battle of the Wizards was declared–unilaterally by Huffam–to be a draw, on the strict and financially advantageous understanding that battle would be rejoined next year at the same time and place. Huffam was a showman to his bones and knew that the stories about the night’s marvels would only swell the crowd next time, so much so that he was already thinking of how to expand the capacity of his tent. Both Anderson and Na-Barno were privately relieved and did not contest this, so unnerved had each been by the other’s performance, and were happy to split the take for the first showing.

Georgiana was not relieved, nor was she happy. She realised Na-Barno only planned his life from bottle to bottle. With money in his pocket, he was able to forget the uncomfortable fact that Anderson had destroyed their act, and that without the Manus Gloriae they had nothing to survive on in the long term.

“Something will turn up,” said Na-Barno, waving her off as he hurried to the cider tent.

She wanted to slap him again, but instead decided to watch the Pyefinches’ wagon in case the thief showed up in the night. So she sat in the shadows and watched Rose and Pyefinch return and close up, waiting for Charlie to appear. As the night drew on, the cold realisation that he had gone with the Sara girl dawned on her. She kept herself awake by will-power alone, and by the time the early morning light began to reappear she had crystalised her anger into something much closer to murderous hatred.

It was because of the light that she saw the cocked hat, and what drew her attention was the fact that it was moving. She slipped across to the Pyefinches’ wagon and stared at it.

The bony cockade of bird’s skulls were working together like the legs of a spider, crabbing the hat towards the deeper darkness below the wagon.

She was fascinated and horrified, but a girl who has handled a Manus Gloriae is already hardened to the uncanny. So she reached in and snatched it up, sprinting away through the dew towards her father’s distant wagon, her heart suddenly lighter.

“I don’t know what you are,” she said to the hat with the writhing bird-skull cockade. “But if we can’t build a turn around you, we deserve to starve.”

Na-Barno had been right, against all experience: something had turned up.

What she could not know was that the cocked hat would lead her on a terrible journey–a journey that would one day help her revenge herself on her childhood friend and the girl she thought was called Sara Falk.

For the first night and day there was an awkwardness between Charlie and Lucy that had not been there when they had been together among the hurly-burly of the fair. This new uneasiness was partly because they were now alone together, but mainly it stemmed from what he had hidden from her.

“Why?” asked Lucy eventually, as they were lying on the front of the boat enjoying the last of the autumn sun on the second afternoon. “Why didn’t you tell me what you all are?”

“It’s not complicated,” said Charlie. “Mainly cos why would we? Same as you keeping it to yourself. Don’t do much good strangers knowing our business, and it’s not like Ma and Pa set much store by their powers, such as they have.”

“But you do,” said Lucy. “You can go fast and yet slow, you can sneak and not be seen. You’re a… well, I don’t know what you are but you remind me of a man called Mr Sharp who I saw in London…”

“Well, I’d like to see this Mr Sharp character too,” said Charlie. “Cos I don’t know what I am any more than you do. I’m just fast when I need to be, or maybe I just make everything else slow, I dunno. And as for sneaking around–look who’s talking!”

And he grinned and held out his hand.

“None of us done you any harm, Lucy-if-that’s-your-name-now.”

“It’s always been my name,” she said. And shook his hand firmly. “Now tell me about the Shadowgangers.”

In the daylight it was easier to talk about them. And since they were interested in her, she thought it only prudent to know as much as she could about them. So Charlie went aft and asked Mrs Stonex for a loan of her chart. It was a much-rolled thing, and he was careful not to add to the wear and tear as he laid it out on the deck. It was a crudely printed map of the lower half of the country, and had been clearly added to over time by Stonex drawing additional things on it in blue pencil, like spurs to existing canals, entirely new waterways and–criss-crossing the country, in black pencil–railway lines.

“That’s England,” he said. “Some of it anyway. Now how would you get from London to Birmingham?”

She studied the map for an instant and then traced the railway line.

“Right,” he said. “Easy isn’t it?”

“I thought you were going to tell me about the Shadowgangers,” she said. “I want to know about the Sluagh.”

“I’m showing you,” he said. “At least I’m explaining what my dad says is why they are so riled up and angry nowadays.”

And he pointed at the map again.

“Now try and get across the same bit of country without crossing water or an iron track.”

Lucy snorted and said.

“Easy…”

But when she put her finger on the map and tried to trace a path avoiding the black and the blue lines, she found it was anything but. It was as if the whole landscape had been turned into an unwinnable child’s game, a maze with no sane solution.

“They can’t cross running water,” said Charlie. “No more than they can abide cold iron. Before the canals they wove paths through the country, meandering in and out of the watercourses, which you can do easy enough if you have the stamina for making your night trails wind along the tops and the high ground, on the peak of the watershed, so to speak.”

“What’s a watershed?” said Lucy.

“It’s like where the hills meet to form a ridge, like the roof of a shed and the rain drains off in one direction or the other depending which side it falls on. Water don’t flow uphill, see? Walk the ridge, above where all the streams begin, and you don’t ever cross flowing water.”

She nodded.

“But then navvies been cutting canals across the old ways,” he continued. “And that was like putting straight fences across open land to them, and then other men staked rails for the steam-trains criss-crossing it, and their old ways of moving across the land is ten times, no, a hundred times more complicated. It’s like slipping through a net. And they have trooped the night freely for centuries. Can see why they’re stirred up and turning nasty. Not that they’ve ever needed an excuse for that, from what I heard.”

And then he went on to explain what he knew about them and their various other names, how abjuring the sun and embracing the night was their way, how everything they did and believed seemed like a world turned topsy-turvy. And he explained that they hated The Oversight.

“Why?” she said.

“Because running water has always been a bane to them, but cold iron, and what it does to them? That’s down to something The Oversight did to them a long, long time ago. Like a punishment for something really horrible that they got caught doing.”

“What?” said Lucy.

“Dunno,” he said. “It was before the Tower of London got built, and that’s the oldest thing I seen. Except Stonehenge…”

And that led to him explaining what Stonehenge was and drawing a picture of it and the talk meandered off into companionable silence, sitting and watching the world go past. Then he jumped off the barge and took Mr Stonex’s place leading the horse, with a promise to wake him once it began to get dark.

“Ol’ Barnaby’d skin me if he knew I let you be off the boat come dusk,” he said. “Sun drops below the horizon, you jump on board and raise me sharpish, see?”

The Sluagh found them that evening.

Charlie was back on the boat and Mr Stonex, who carried a horseshoe in his belt out of superstition and self-protection, led the horse for another hour or two of darkness before they tied up for the night. “Led” was not quite the word, for the horse knew how to pull away along the clearly marked towpath quite as well as he did, and in fact he climbed up on its back and allowed himself to doze as it ambled along into the mirk.

Lucy was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, cradling the hand in its wrapping close to her, and not thinking about much in particular as her eyes watched the darkness drift by.

The Sluagh appeared on the bank so quietly that it took a moment or two for Lucy to realise that some of the darkness had detached from itself and was now keeping pace with her at a disturbingly leisurely pace, as if it were just out for a gentle stroll along the towpath only three perilous feet away.

She looked up to see a man with a face garlanded with ancient tattoos, wearing an animal-skin top-coat and a hat crowned with a coronet of woodcock skulls with all the beaks pointing to the sky.

“What is it you want, little girl?” he said calmly, his eyes open and guileless.

“Don’t look at him,” said Charlie. “Not in the eyes.”

She kept her eyes on the Sluagh’s hands instead.

“I have a proposition for you,” he said calmly.

There was a solid click of metal ratcheting back against metal right by her ear as Charlie cocked the blunderbuss.

“And I have half a pound of cold iron nails in here for you if you try and warp her will,” said Charlie. “Rusty ones.”

“Rusty ones?” said the Sluagh, and there was a disconcertingly mocking tone to his voice. “Oh well then. That makes all the difference.”

A second Sluagh appeared beside him, shorter, hunchbacked.

“You sound so confident–yet smell so very scared,” the newcomer giggled.

Charlie jabbed the gun at them.

Lucy saw the first Sluagh’s hands open and make a placating gesture.

“Just listen,” he hissed softly. “Just words: I have a proposal. You are going to London?”

“We don’t know where we’re going,” said Charlie.

“Will you let us have the girl?” said the hunchback.

“Why would I do that?” said Charlie.

“Gold,” came the wheedling reply. “Gold which could change your life… make you rich, gold which would make you free…”

“Gold which would turn to acorns and beech-mast in my pocket as soon as your filthy glamour washed out of my eyes?” said Charlie. “No thanks.”

“Real gold?” said the Sluagh wearing the woodcock crown.

“No,” said Charlie.

“No?”

“No.”

Lucy saw the Sluagh’s hands fold round themselves and squeeze tight. He walked on with them clasped like that for several paces and when he spoke his voice was clenched as tight as the hands.

“There are men in London who would pay us well for her. Who have sent the word out. Powerful men.”

“When did the Sluagh get interested in money?” said Charlie.

“It is not money they would pay us with. It is something much more precious. To us,” said the first Sluagh.

“The answer’s still no,” said Charlie.

“I heard the answer. You haven’t heard my counter-offer,” said the Sluagh, a dangerous smoothness taking the edge off his voice in such a way that Lucy nearly involuntarily looked up into his eyes.

“You don’t shut up and stop doing that thing with your voice, you’ll bloody well hear mine: I’ll sound like ‘boom–splatter’,” said Charlie sharply, poking the stubby gun in their direction. “This is the boom; your head’ll be the splatter…”

The hunchback Sluagh growled in the back of his throat and spat words back at Charlie in a snarl of barely controlled rage.

“Do you ever wonder what your skin looks like on the inside, boy? Step over the iron and say that. Then we could have a nice time showing you.”

“What is your offer?” said Lucy. She was uncomfortable with several rather significant things about this conversation, first of which was who they were having it with, but the fact that she was being talked about as if she were just baggage with no will-power of her own was running it a close second.

“I offer you an uninterrupted passage if you will take a message to The Oversight,” said the Sluagh in the woodcock crown.

“Who?” said Charlie.

“Don’t play games, boy,” said the Sluagh, irritated again. “We have been in her mind before, and we know where we sent her.”

Lucy’s stomach lurched.

“You couldn’t interrupt our passage if you tried,” said Charlie. “The boat’s iron-bound, on flowing water you can’t cross.”

The Sluagh said nothing, but just walked on, its hands working against each other.

“If you are running to The Oversight, tell them we know they have betrayed us. We know they have given our most precious possession to a mere man. They have given him the thing they took from us when they laid the Iron Law across our shoulders. They have not only betrayed us, they have betrayed Law and Lore.”

Lucy had the strong impression that the left hand was gripping the right hand to stop it flying across the narrow gap between them and grabbing her by the face, running water and cold iron be damned. She pushed back against the timber baulks behind her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“But they will know,” said the Sluagh with the woodcock crown. “And now they will know we know. And until they return what they took from us, and lift the Iron Law, we will work relentlessly to destroy them, even if it means working with men.”

And he spat and stopped walking.

The barge passed under a bridge which neither Lucy nor Charlie had seen approaching, so concentrated had they been on the Sluagh.

“Phew,” said Charlie. “Railway bridge. Cold iron for miles on either side. We’re safe.”

She felt strangely divided, a mix of relief and frustration. She knew she would sleep badly because the malice of the hunchback Sluagh would taint her dreams, but something else in her wished she’d had more time to talk to the other Sluagh. She might have had a chance at filling in some of the blanks in her memory.

“Safe as houses,” said Charlie, as much to himself as her. “And old Harry says we should touch London tomorrow, and all your troubles will be over.”

“For now,” said Lucy, looking back at the darkness and wondering about the answers it held.