CHAPTER 26
BUNYON’S BLESSING
Mr Sharp could see that Emmet was finishing nailing the last horseshoe into place on the Sluagh’s horse as he entered the small stable adjoining the Safe House. The horse was still slick with sweat and quivering as if all its nerves were on the surface, but the giant clay man held it still with the foreleg clamped between his knees as he worked with his customary blend of speed and tirelessness.
A golem is a rare thing. Mr Sharp knew for a fact that this was the only one that had ever been made on this island, and he knew that Sara’s grandfather had made him. Mr Sharp was never quite comfortable with Emmet, perhaps because the power that made him had bound him to protect and serve Sara just as Mr Sharp had been charged–in his case of his own free will–with the same task. There was a love of freedom buttoned tight behind Mr Sharp’s leather waistcoat and somehow he could never quite get himself comfortable with the idea that Emmet was bound to his particular task as a slave. A long time ago, The Smith had tried to explain this to Mr Sharp, that Emmet was not alive in any meaningful way: “a mere automaton without visible internal workings” was how he described him, as if Emmet was some species of marionette or puppet, just a piece of showman’s trickery such as to be found in the sideshows of any large county fair. Mr Sharp did not have that sense of Emmet. Rather he sensed that whatever the animating power was that moved the clay man, it was a power bound rather than a power given. And in that difference lay his unease.
Emmet could move and obey orders. He could understand, but he could not speak. Nor could he write, which Mr Sharp knew because he had once provided him with pen and paper and ordered him to do so, something he had not managed. Yet despite all this he believed there was more to Emmet than anyone had realised, or perhaps divulged. Mr Sharp had an affection for him which he could not imagine feeling for a mere thing, the kind of vital affection one can only have for a fellow being. As a man who needed less sleep than most normal people, Mr Sharp had spent long watches of the night sitting companionably with the golem and never felt alone while so doing. In fact he found the golem’s presence relaxing and strangely comforting to his nerves whenever they were frayed or stretched by too much activity or worry. Because of this he never gave Emmet an order, certainly not in the abrupt and harsh tones in which Samuel Falk had addressed his creation. Instead he asked him to do things in the same tone as one might use to address an equal. It was this tone he adopted now as he walked into the stable.
“Emmet, would you be so good, once you have put the horse in a stall, to watch the house with extra care tonight. And if The Smith should come before I return, give him this note?”
He held out a piece of paper that had been first folded into a narrow strip and then been bent through a series of right angles to produce a sort of flat knot.
Emmet nodded, pocketing the note. And turned back to the horse, taking a blanket off the stall side and beginning to rub it dry.
Mr Sharp tried to remember if he had told Emmet to dry the horse before putting it away. It was undoubtedly the correct and humane thing to do. Then, secure in the knowledge that whatever happened in his absence, the golem would guard the house, he turned his feet towards the Privy Cells, but not before picking a new iron horseshoe off the small farrier’s table close by the door.
He entered the public house by the side door and slipped down to the cellar without troubling William Bunyon, who was entertaining a small smoke-wreathed knot of regulars with a humorous tale about his earlier career in the late king’s navy. One of Mr Sharp’s many abilities was that of not being noticeable when he wished it by blending in with the shadows as if he were one himself.
He passed through the main cellar and into the dark passage beyond without even the slightest clink from the keys he used to open the door. He twirled the horseshoe in his hand as he walked, and then rapped it on the wooden wall as he approached the cell.
“I have some questions for you. I hope you weren’t sleeping,” he said cheerily. “Oh, of course. I forgot. You don’t sleep, do you?”
Something crunched under his foot and he stopped dead.
“Hello?” he said, his hand slowly drifting inside his coat as his nostrils wrinkled at something wafting towards him from the floor. His hand emerged clutching a candle.
“Light!” he said.
The candle snapped into flame, filling the narrow passage with a bright flickering light.
There was a thunk as the horseshoe dropped from his fingers and a snick as the hand that had held it darted inside the other side of his coat and came back with a blade in it.
“I’ve been a fool,” he hissed.
The fragments of the bone pet were spread across the floor like a scrabble of white islands in the sea of black that was the Sluagh’s blood.
He raised the candle and saw the arm of the Sluagh sticking out of the judas hole into the passage, pinned in place by the wooden spike between a now visible radius and ulna, blackened flesh rotted back to the very skeleton within. The Sluagh’s hand was frozen in a gesture that might have been a blessing or a curse, pointing at the blank wall opposite.
“Damn you!” said Mr Sharp, stepping through the pool of blood and quickly unbolting the door. He jerked it open to see the body suspended on the other side like a sagging animal hide hung on a hook. The shells and bones in the rotting dreadlocks rattled against each other with the sudden motion. Mr Sharp yanked the head back and looked into the already rotted face of the Sluagh, into eyes that were already just empty holes in a skull.
He shook his head as he put the knife away and let his finger touch the judas hole thoughtfully.
“William Bunyon,” he said sadly. “Your kindness is blessing for some, but for this poor creature it was a curse. Though why he would kill himself, or indeed why anyone else might want to stop him talking I do not know.”
A thought hit him with the suddenness of an arrow from the dark.
And he turned and ran for the door with such speed that the blood on the floor was still splashing from his passage through it by the time he hit the street above.