'When I arrived, she was screaming about spiders crawling all over her, in her hair, her ears, her eyes. She was scratching herself with her nails and they had to sedate her. I sat with her and held her hand for a while, hoping it would be enough to calm her down. Quite suddenly she was lucid and recognised me. She told me I had been chosen for an extremely important job, a secret vocation. I thought she was raving, of course, but then she told me about the safe containing the knives and her journal. She told me to go to the Queen's Remembrancer for the key — that's Jerry. She said he would be expecting me and that it was more important than I could possibly realise. I was still half convinced it was some sort of delusion, but she was different, focused.
'I left her that afternoon only half convinced as to whether to follow it up. I was waiting on some interesting job offers and I wasn't sure I wanted to work in the Royal Courts. I waited a week before curiosity got the better of me and I rang the office and asked to speak to the Remembrancer. He invited me down to read the journal, and afterwards we talked. I've been with him ever since.'
'Did your colleague ever recover?'
'I used to visit her regularly. Once, on one of her better days, she was able to explain some of what had happened. But she never really recovered, no.'
'I'm sorry, Claire. Some of our kind can be touchy.'
'She was warned, as was I. The journals are quite clear on some things.'
Listening to Claire, I realised the Seventh Court had made a mistake. It looked like they had eliminated the Queen's Remembrancer, hoping to further undermine the ceremony. They had it wrong, though. It was the clerk that was important, not the Remembrancer.
'Tell us about the knife,' Blackbird suggested.
'The Quick Knife? It was one of the two knives used for the Quit Rents Ceremony. The other is the Dead Knife, which is the other knife in the box. In 1933 the Quick Knife was dropped and it snapped in two. I can show you the entry in the journal. Everyone was very surprised when it broke and at the time it was taken as a bad omen. It was due to be used for the ceremony the next day and there was no time to make another. Luckily my predecessor had a friend with connections in the Tower of London and they arranged for another set of blades to be sent over. They're on permanent loan from the Royal Armouries and of a rather different style, but the ceremony carried on as before and the bad luck was averted.'
'Can we see them?' Blackbird asked.
'I don't see why not. Just a moment and I'll fetch them. They're in the safe.' She rose again and stepped out, leaving the door ajar.
'Is it wise to get more knives? What if they're like that one?' I nodded towards the dark-wood box.
Blackbird glanced at the knife box and shook her head. 'Wait and see.'
Claire returned with another bundle wrapped in black cloth. There was no sense of anything about it when she placed it on the table and unfolded it. Wrapped inside the cloth were two blades, or rather tools. One was a small neat hatchet and the other a kind of bill-hook with a broad flat blade. The blades were polished as if they were made of silver, or perhaps they were plated. They were clearly ceremonial.
She looked at us.
'May I?' I indicated the bill-hook.
'Of course.'
I picked the bill-hook up from the cloth, finding the oddly shaped blade lighter than it looked. I tested the edge with my thumb and it was sharp. The broad, flat blade reflected distorted scenes from the room. If it came from the Tower armouries, then it probably had a distinguished and honourable history.
'It's unusual enough, but it's totally different to the original Quick Knife. It's just a blade.'
'We brought an expert from the armouries in to see if the Quick Knife could be mended, but apparently it is the wrong sort of metal.'
'Or the right sort,' Blackbird added. 'It's very likely to be made of some sort of iron. If it were pure then that would make it brittle. That's why steel replaced iron as the metal of choice, it's much more resilient. What's the other knife in the case made of?'
'Some sort of alloy, definitely not iron. Would you like to see it?'
'Maybe later.' Neither of us wanted her to open the box with the Quick Knife in it. 'The broken knife is the key. Once the Quick Knife was broken, the ritual was weakened. Each time the ceremony is performed with the wrong knives, it weakens a little more.' She glanced at me. 'A worm at the heart of the ceremony, do you see?'
'There's nothing in the records saying that the ceremony must be conducted with a particular set of knives,' Claire commented. 'It just says that two knives must be presented, one blunt and one sharp, and must be tested for their qualities.'
'I'm sure you've carried out the ceremony according to the instructions you were given,' said Blackbird, 'but that in itself is not enough for the ritual to have power. I'm sure now that the knife is the reason the barrier is weakening and also the reason why your Remembrancer is missing. You know he's not coming back, don't you?'
'He's not dead,' said Claire.
'That may not be the worst of it,' said Blackbird. 'It is in all our best interests to make sure the ceremony goes ahead with a new knife, and soon.'
'You want me to change the ritual, just because you say so?'
'No, I'm not telling you to change it. I'm saying you have to put it back to the way it was, the way it was meant to be. If we don't then the consequences may go far beyond the fate of one Remembrancer and his clerk.'
'I don't know…'
'Claire, we stand on the edge of something terrible. The breaking of the Quick Knife has changed things, weakened them. If things break down completely then the incidents you refer to could be the very least of it. We need to get the knife repaired or remade.'
'It can't be welded or fixed in that way. We tried. The only way is to get a new one made.'
'Can you do that?'
'I can't, but perhaps you may be able to.'
'Us? Neither of us want to get anywhere near it.'
'It mentions in the journals, when the nails became too rusty to use. Two of your kind came and took them away and got them re-forged.'
'That's very unlikely, Claire.'
'Oh, I don't mean they did it themselves. I mean they took them to a smith and he did it for them.'
'Where would the Feyre get a smith from?'
'From the same place as always, the Highsmiths.'
'The high smiths?'
'The Highsmith family, the people who rent the Moors in Shropshire. They are the smiths to the Six Courts. Surely you know this?'
It was our turn to admit we didn't know all of it. 'I guess you are not the only ones to lose things,' Blackbird conceded.
Claire acknowledged this with a nod. It relieved some of her tension that she was not the only one fumbling in the dark.
'The Highsmiths were the family that produced the new set of nails. All except for the sixty-first one.'
'Why wasn't the sixty-first nail remade?'
'It didn't need to be. It's made of a different metal to the rest and it hadn't rusted. It's like the Dead Knife, rather than the dark metal of the others.'
'I wondered about that when I read it in the leaflet,' said Blackbird. 'Ten nails for each horse-shoe and then another. I thought it must be a spare.'
'No, the sixty-first nail is different from the rest, though I've no idea why. Shall I get it? It's in the safe with the others, ready for the ceremony next week.'
'We'd like to see it, thanks.'
Blackbird and I waited, both wrapped in our own thoughts, while Claire retrieved the nails. They were in a velvet case, a little like that used for jewellery, which she unrolled across the table. Each bundle of nails had a
