• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

... instead, she came face-to-face with a boy. No, a man.

No, something between the two. He was covered in dirt, and his clothes were all but shredded, yet his eyes were bright and there were traces of a smile on his face.

‘Where are you going?’ the boy asked.

Duquesne shook her head. ‘I do not know. Please. Leave me. I must not be seen.’ But as she said it, she wondered why she was even bothering to hide. I might be able to avoid the first assassin they send to me, she thought, or the second, or the third... but the Shadow Directory has all the hired killers of Napoleon’s kingdom at its disposal. And I am alone. And one person cannot fight an empire.

‘Depends. Depends whether the one person knows what she’s doing.’

Duquesne coughed, the way ladies were supposed to cough when they were embarrassed. The way her parents had taught her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I must have been thinking out loud, I...’

Then she saw the thing in the boy’s hands, and she recognized it, without knowing how or why. And there was something spreading through her nervous system, filling up the space where the Sight had been, almost as if it were flooding out from the boy, through the sphere in his hands, into her spine. The sensations were the same ones she’d been feeling since her adolescence, but somehow less painful, more controlled, more... rational?

‘I understand,’ she said. ‘ Dieu. I understand.’

But the boy just kept smiling ‘What can I do?’ she asked him ‘What should I do?’

‘We’ll think of something.’ The boy’s attention was caught by something over her shoulder, and he stepped out onto Paris Street. ‘Roz’s idea,’ he said, pointing at the fir tree. ‘She said it’s how they mark Christmas, where she comes from. The Doctor had it in his TARDIS. And all the decorations. They put it up first thing this morning.’

‘Doctor...?’ queried Duquesne.

The boy reached out for one of the few branches that wasn’t already dripping with stars and angels. He balanced the golden sphere amongst the fir needles, and it stayed there, quite happy to remain on the branch in spite of the laws of gravity. Seen from a distance, it just looked like any other bauble.

‘You’re leaving it there?’ asked Duquesne, stepping out of the shadows and joining him by the tree. The boy nodded.

‘Won’t be needing it any more. World’s ready to make its own rules. You’re from France?’

‘Ahh. Yes, yes I am...’

‘You going back there? You’ve got a ship?’

Duquesne hesitated. ‘I don’t... there are problems. It may not be safe...

‘Like I said. We’ll think of something.’ The boy set off along Paris Street, and Marielle Duquesne found herself walking with him ‘I want to see France,’ he said. ‘There’s supposed to be some people there that I’ve got a lot in common with...’

And, together, they headed for the docks.

February, 1800.

Cardinal Pontormo finished reading the reports of the so–

called Woodwicke incident’, and realized that he was no wiser than when he’d started. He rubbed his eyes, slipped the records back into their bindings, and returned them to the shelf, where – amongst other things – they joined the Secret Travelogues of the Khan-Balik Caravan and the only surviving copy of Preslin’s thesis On Coincidence as a Disease.

Of course, he reminded himself, the French wouldn’t have told him anything about the incident at all, if they hadn’t wanted the Crow Gallery to look after their ‘live specimen’. It was said that although the skies of America had been thick with demons on Christmas Eve, only two of the abominations had survived the dawn. One was the oft-sighted ‘forest monster’ that now haunted the woodlands outside the town, a source of much amusement in the New York press. The Shadow Directory – and the Special Congress as well, no doubt – had tried to capture the animal, so far without success.

But the other creature... Cardinal Pontormo remembered the first time he’d seen the thing, when it had been brought to South Africa in the belly of a French cargo ship.