A Little Knowledge by Emma Newman

Author:Emma Newman [Newman, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781682302903
Publisher: Diversion Publishing
Published: 2015-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

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By the end of the day, most of the cob wall had been wheelbarrowed out of the house and dumped in a huge pile outside the back. The waifs and strays, as Cathy called them, came and chatted at points, entertained by the industry unfolding in front of them, but Sam shooed them away as soon as he saw that there was something on the iron slab that wasn’t just a roughened surface. From that point, only he and Jim were allowed in the small hallway, and he got the estate manager to put locks on the doors that gave access to it. He was happy to keep the victims of the Fae and their minions safe, but there was always the possibility that some of them might go back to that world, and the less they saw of anything important, the better.

He had a couple of portable floodlights brought in and elected to finish the demolition once Jim’s working day was over. Even though he’d only paused for lunch and comfort breaks, he seemed to have a boundless amount of energy that was constantly replenished every time a few more inches were exposed.

It was about two metres high above floor level, one and a half metres wide, and a metre thick. It was an absurdity in the centre of a house, serving no discernible purpose; it wasn’t holding up any of the floor above it nor supporting any other structure. He went down into the cellar and found that it probably went down as far as the foundations of the entire house, as the wall of the cellar ended about a metre from the slab he’d uncovered on the floor above. It felt as if it had always been there, with the house built around it. For all he knew about the first Lord Iron, that might well have been true.

Once he’d brushed it all off, clearing ancient cobwebs and newly created dust from the surface, he sat on one of the stools that had been brought in and stared at the iron.

At first the bumps and grooves didn’t make much sense at all. There was no writing or any symbols per se, just seven large bumps and a series of lines that weren’t joined to each other, seeming random in the way they curved and wobbled across the iron.

Then he noticed a curve that looked like the Thames, recalled from a time when Leanne had gone through a phase of watching Eastenders that he’d endured for the sake of getting half an hour of cuddling on the sofa. Of course, he’d got quite hooked on the stories too, but he’d never admitted it. In the credits, it panned across a map of London and the particular bow in the river around the Isle of Dogs.

He fetched an atlas from Amir’s library and soon discovered that most of the lines related to rivers. There were discrepancies, but he knew that the slab was so old, some of the rivers were bound to have been altered by people at some point or other.

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