CHAPTER 9

THE TRIPLE-WOOD CELL

It wasn’t just the horseshoes nailed up over every opening which made the King’s Arms especially outlandish in a city full of unusual taverns and alehouses: what made it unique was the fact that it was not merely a busy pub but also a working jail.

There had long been a small courthouse in the building next door and it had become customary to lodge prisoners in the adjoining cellars, known as the Sly House, which meant that the landlord drew both beer and a jailer’s salary. Most of the people sent through the door between the court and the King’s Arms were petty debtors who remained incarcerated until their debts were paid off, and their accommodation was unremarkable for anything other than Spartan discomfort and the damp that rose from the ground at night, as if the twenty acres of water penned in the New London Dock just two streets to the south was trying to soak its way back up into the city proper.

These were the public cells.

Behind them was the ale cellar where the beer barrels were stored, and beyond that was a secret door that led to a low brick-lined tunnel known as the Close Passage.

The Close Passage led to the Privy Cells.

The Privy Cells did not belong to the courthouse; indeed the officers of the court knew nothing of them, nor did they know that the Close Passage actually continued past the cells and through a pair of locked doors to a junction, where it split. The left fork led south, taking a short journey down to the Thames at Hermitage Dock while the right fork burrowed west across the corner of the square, under a secret entrance to Sara Falk’s house and onwards through increasingly thick sets of subterranean doors, all the way to an anonymous and little-opened culvert gate within the Inner Ward of the Tower of London itself.

William George Bunyon, father of the recently dishevelled but thankfully largely unmolested Bessie Bunyon, was the present landlord-jailer of the King’s Arms, and he had never gone–or thought to go–beyond the double doors at the limit of his property. He was a cheerful and outgoing man, naturally hospitable yet firm, in short both an exemplary landlord and a benevolent jailer. Above ground, behind the bar or beside the crackling fire in the snug, he displayed a talent for talking and joking, a gift that not only put everyone at their ease but had the not unprofitable side-effect of usefully encouraging customers to stay longer and buy more beer. Underground, in the Privy Cells, he talked much less and only rarely asked anything other than the one question.

He asked it now, as Mr Sharp pushed the Sluagh into the cell ahead of him.

“Bad ’un is he, Mr Sharp?”

“Yes, Mr Bunyon. A right bad ’un,” confirmed Mr Sharp as he in turn always did.

Bunyon nodded as if he understood everything now, which he neither did nor minded about.

He wore, in addition to the high apron of his profession, a pair of darklensed spectacles like the ones Sara Falk wore. He had been trained by Mr Sharp never to enter the passage without them because some of the guests in the cells had the disturbing ability to turn men’s minds if they could only look them straight in the eye. This was an undoubtedly queer thing but William Bunyon never thought it so, precisely because Mr Sharp himself had looked him in the eye a long time ago and diverted his normally wide-ranging inquisitiveness so that it flowed quite around the narrow matter of the Close Passage, the Privy Cells and their occasional strange residents without touching on it at all. If asked who Mr Sharp and his colleagues actually were (which he never was) the jovial landlord would have put a knowing finger to the side of his generous red nose, dropped an eyelid and muttered something about “officers of the law”, which was not a million miles from the truth, especially if you spelled things a bit differently.

The cell was lined in wood, floor and ceiling, like a rougher version of the anteroom in the basement of Sara Falk’s house. Mr Sharp was controlling the Sluagh by the horseshoe held round his neck. The Sluagh now seemed impossibly old and frail, his once-dark tattoos reduced to a thin scrabble of blue lines that could have been mistaken for broken veins beneath his paper-thin skin.

Mr Sharp hooked a wooden stool out from under the cot with his boot-tip and dragged it into the middle of the room.

“Sit,” he said, forcing the Sluagh down on it, facing away from the doorway. “The tray, Mr Bunyon, if you please.”

William Bunyon slid a wooden tray onto the floor just inside the door and withdrew his hand quickly.

“There is ale and water and bread,” said Mr Sharp.

“And cheese,” said Mr Bunyon, who had stepped safely back out of sight.

“And cheese,” said Mr Sharp.

“And a nice apple,” Mr Bunyon’s voice insisted.

“And an apple,” sighed Mr Sharp. “Indeed, Mr Bunyon spoils you. Now, I shall take the iron from your neck and you will not move until you hear the door lock. Understood?”

“Yaass,” hissed the Sluagh, and the voice that slithered weakly out of his mouth sounded every bit as ancient and corrupt as he now looked.

Mr Sharp yanked the horseshoe free and flickered out of the door in no time at all. The lock snicked shut before the Sluagh could even raise his head.

“Well,” he said, gazing round. “Well. You think this box can hold me?”

“Yes,” said Mr Sharp from the other side of the door. “Look at the woods that surround you.”

The Sluagh stumbled to his feet and staggered to the wall. His good hand stroked across the panels and recoiled slowly.

“Oak… ash… and thorn,” he breathed. “You are cruel.”

“We are not cruel. We are modern and humane. Hence the bread and ale and water and Mr Bunyon’s very fine and somewhat superfluous apple,” smiled Mr Sharp. “But we are also cautious.”

The Sluagh spat weakly at the wall and watched the phlegmy gobbet dribble down the planking.

“Woods of protection, woods of binding,” he wheezed. “And something else too, something I cannot see that is making me as slow and rudderless as the men you protect, something like the cold iron you burned me with—”

“The back of each plank is carved with words against such as you, for extra protection,” said Mr Sharp. “Your abilities will not, I’m afraid, work at all in there. I only mention it to save you later disappointments.”

The Sluagh turned and looked into Mr Sharp’s eyes through the narrow viewing slit in the door.

“You are very dainty for a mongrel. What are you going to do with me?”

“I am going to check across the metropolis to see if you have been up to any other mischief or viciousness. If you have, you will answer to The Smith’s Court and be punished. If not—”

The Sluagh threw back his head with a rattle of small bones, and chopped out a short bitter laugh.

“The Smith? What of him? The Sluagh do not answer to anyone or anything, neither mongrels like you nor a turncoat cripple-foot like him. We are Pure. Besides,” he wheezed, “The Smith’s Court may still exist in name, but The Smith himself is no longer seen, we hear. He is gone and lost in the wind like the rest of your company.”

Mr Sharp’s nostrils flared a little, but apart from that there was no sign that the barb flung by the Sluagh had found its mark.

“If The Smith is not seen by you and yours, it is because he chooses not to be seen,” he said.

The Sluagh laughed.

“And the mighty Oversight? You talk as if you are still something. But you are almost extinguished. Your great days are gone.”

“If the Sluagh think our misfortunes have weakened us to the point where you can come into the cities and prey on normal people, then they and you are much mistaken,” said Mr Sharp.

The Sluagh smiled nastily.

“Why else would we come into a city? A city is an abomination to us, a place of iron and steel, just as a brick-built farmyard with its fenced-in chicken run is a blight to the open countryside a fox loves. But like the fox and the chicken run, we have learned that a city has the single virtue of concentrating and controlling the quarry in one place…”

“And because you cannot control yourselves, just as the fox once inside a chicken coop cannot stop his blood frenzy, Law and Lore forbid you from entering and limits you to the Wild Lands,” said Sharp.

“But our wild land is not protected from your cities!” snarled the Sluagh. “And year by year the stink of iron and machinery begins to spread into our domain, with forges and manufactories, and rails of steel hammered into the ground like great metal snakes that run for hundreds of miles, caging the wild beneath it, breaking the flows of the older lines. And your precious Law and Lore do not protect us from that!” He spat again. “You are pets; we are Pure—”

“You are many things, I’m sure,” cut in Mr Sharp. “But what you are now is in here for the night. I suggest you get some sleep.”

“We do not sleep.”

“My mistake. Of course you don’t.” Mr Sharp bobbed his head in apology. “Sit quietly then and wait until morning. I will come back then.”

The Sluagh looked round his cell and waved a dismissive hand at the viewing slit.

“Don’t trouble yourself. There is no window here. By morning I shall have stifled.”

“You exaggerate,” said Mr Sharp. He was in a hurry to get back above ground because he wished to see what was happening with the strange girl whom Ketch had deposited with Sara Falk, and he had one more thing to do before he could return home, which was to patrol the area in case the Sluagh had had any accomplices lurking in the fog. Mr Sharp did not like leaving any unpleasant possibility unexamined.

He turned on his heel and nodded at the landlord.

“Lock him up, Bunyon. I will be back in the morning if not before.” He headed away down the corridor. Bunyon bent and slammed home the first of the three heavy bolts that added security to the lock on the door. When he had shot them all he peered in one last time, his hand rising to close the slit on the judas hole. As he did so he caught the Sluagh’s eyes which were staring right back at him, and paused.

“I am a creature of the air.” The Sluagh’s voice wheezed in complaint. “Not some shadow-fed dirt-burrower. And you say you are not cruel.”

Bunyon watched him through the viewing slit for a long beat. The Sluagh stared palely back, his shoulders heaving as he tried to get air into his lungs. With each breath Bunyon could hear them crackling and popping like a small twig fire. It was a sad and pathetic noise, and Bunyon was a kind-hearted jailer.

“Very well,” he said. “I will leave this slit open. That will allow more air in. Goodnight to you, sir. You may as well rest. Nothing has ever escaped these cells. Your mischief is over for the night.”

The Sluagh watched the lantern light bobbing away through the slit, listening as the footsteps diminished until they were cut off by the sound of the door to the ale cellar opening and then slamming him into darkness.

He listened some more, heard nothing and knew he was alone.

Then–and only then–did he reply with a nasty smile containing such a distillation of malice in it that for a moment he regained the malign vigour of a much younger version of himself.

“Oh no, my fine fellow: the mischief has just begun.”