Silvertongue (19 page)

“Er . . . okay,” said George, distracted.

He could hear the horses snorting beyond the door, and could see Ariel’s golden reflection on the inside of the arch. He looked down at his open shirt and saw the stone crossing over the center of his chest.

“Chapman,” said the man, a hand on his shoulder. “That Bible that the Corpse loves to quote has cheerier verses, and I have scarce ever seen a boy more in need of cheer, so I give you Ezekiel as a blither fare-thee-well: ‘I will give them one heart . . . and I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.’”

“Thank you,” said George. “But what does it mean?”

“Whatever you make of it, boy.” The man smiled. “For are you not as I was, a maker?”

“Yes,” said George, looking down at his stone arm. “I am.”

“Then nothing is yet lost, just as nothing is yet won, and the great globe itself lies beyond those doors, waiting to be made anew,” said the man, clapping him amicably on the shoulder and sending him on his way.

George walked out of the dark, into the light, and as he did so, he smiled.

“You’re right,” he said. “Dead right.”

E
die tripped out of the mirror and found herself in a clothes shop. She was getting used to people not being able to see her, and walked straight past the shop assistant, who was straightening already perfectly aligned stacks of sweaters on a shelf by the door, chatting to someone on her phone as she did so.

The Gunner squeezed past, and they followed the Raven into the street. The bird waited, hanging unnaturally in the air until he caught up and, casting a backward glance at Edie, dropped onto the Gunner’s shoulder and clacked its beak animatedly next to his ear.

Edie watched the traffic pour past. They were definitely in modern London again. A red bus and a line of taxis confirmed that, and as the Gunner led the way across the street toward a mean triangle of thin grass and patchy shade spread beneath a sick-looking plane tree, Edie wondered what would happen if she stepped in front of a car.

She wasn’t feeling suicidal or anything like that; it was just that if nobody could see her, did that mean she would just slide off a car unhurt? Or would she get run over?

“What happens . . . ?” she began, catching up with the Gunner as he snaked between two cars going in opposite directions without breaking pace.

The Gunner stopped on the edge of the pavement and held up a finger. At first she thought the Raven had flown ahead of him, because there it was, hopping along the back of a park bench, sidling up to a drunk man sprawled across one end of it, his feet surrounded by a small collection of empty beer cans. His head flopped back bonelessly over the back of the bench, so all Edie and the Gunner could see was the underside of his stubble-mottled chin and a very prominent Adam’s apple vibrating as he snored.

Then she noticed that the Raven was still on the Gunner’s shoulder.

The Raven on the bench was either a different Raven, or . . .

“It’s you, isn’t it?” she said.

The Raven back-paddled off the Gunner’s mountainous shoulder and neatly lofted down onto hers. Out of the corner of her eye she saw it nod its head.

“Why are we watching you . . . ?” she asked. And then the Raven on the bench clacked its beak imperiously, and the drunk woke and sat up, his head hinging back to a normal position with an audible grunt of pain.

“Oh,” said Edie. “Oh.”

It was him. Her stepfather. He leaned forward and spat, his phlegm smacking down in a glutinous green ground-burst amid the beer cans at his feet.

“He used to come up to London. Be gone for a week, sometimes weeks at a time. I loved it; left me alone at home at the seaside with my mum, without him ruining everything. She drank less when he was away as well. I hate him. . . .”

The Raven clacked on. The man cocked his head and listened, rubbing his face as he did so.

“Yes,” he slurred. “Yes, we have seen what you ask about. We have seen such a stone.”

“‘We?’” said Edie, tugging at the Gunner’s sleeve. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Them what choose booze and oblivion instead of real life, leaving their untended minds prey to a creature like the Walker. He’s always got a use for their eyes, and he knows the spell to conjure them,” rumbled the Gunner.

“You mean he . . .” started Edie, and stopped as the stepfather’s eyes opened, and she saw them for the first time. The eyes, normally pinched and bloodshot, were pure black from lid to lid, shiny as gobbets of oil. They were eyes she had seen before in another face, at Puddle Dock.

“He’s a Tallyman,” breathed Edie in horror. “And he’s talking about my mother’s stone!”

“We have seen it,” mumbled the stepfather. “We can show it.”

Edie whirled on the Gunner, so fast that the Raven on her shoulder was left in midair.

“We’re going back to warn her!” she snapped.

“You can’t change the past, Edie girl,” said the Gunner sadly, reaching out a hand to comfort her. She turned away, back in the direction she had come from. Her hand snapped out and clamped around the Raven’s leg.

There was an undignified squawk.

Edie fumbled in her pocket and pulled out the red thread.

“Tell him we’re going back. Tell him we can do it the easy way or the other way, the one where I put that red thread back on him and choke him with it.”

Ravens don’t have much practice at appearing long-suffering. Mostly they just endure and look ominous. So the look the Raven sent the Gunner was unusual. It clacked its beak slowly, with an air of strained patience. It glared down at its trapped leg pointedly.

The Gunner sighed. “He says he’ll do what you ask. Says he was going to do it anyway. But he says you should always be careful what you ask for.”

“Fine,” said Edie, and walked straight across the street. She didn’t look where she was going, the traffic didn’t slow, and nothing hit her.

Given the jut in her jaw and the fire in her eyes, it probably didn’t dare.

A
riel was waiting for George outside the cathedral, holding the horses’ reins in her fist.

“Here,” she said without ceremony, and passed them to him as the bell tolled again and the horses whinnied and shivered.

“They can tell, boy; they hear the bell and they can tell . . .” she began.

“I know,” he said, stepping into the chariot. “It tolls for me and all that. Let’s get it over with.”

He sounded braver than he felt, but the pain in his stone shoulder had swept across his chest, and he was clear enough to know that in the absence of anything else, facing his fear was the best chance he had.

“Follow me, then.” She shrugged, unimpressed by his appearance of stoicism.

She flew ahead of him, as he twisted the horses out of the narrow gate to the churchyard and into what seemed like a series of less and less passable alleys that suddenly opened up into the riverwalk along the south side of the river.

“Hurry, boy!” she shouted over her shoulder. He snapped the reins experimentally over the back of the horses, and they accelerated.

He held on tight as the chariot sped along the side of the river, kicking up an ice storm in the wake of its whirring scimitar-bladed wheels. The cold wind in his eyes made him look sideways, and he couldn’t help but look over the wind-scalloped surface of the river to the blank wall of the ice murk, which rose in a solid impenetrable slab on the other side.

They shot under a bridge and back out into the light, and then a railway bridge approached, and as George followed Ariel, the ringing definitely got louder and the pain radiating up his arm and into his chest stabbed sharper with each toll. He ground his teeth together and tried not to cry out.

Ariel flashed golden, then was gone into the dark arch beneath the railway bridge. The horses cut through the strip of untouched snow, hot on her tail, so fast that when they came back out into the light on the other side, George almost missed her.

She had stopped and hovered in the middle of the stretch of embankment between Blackfriars railway bridge and Blackfriars Bridge itself. George pulled back on the reins, and the horses sat back on their haunches, bringing the chariot to a skidding halt in a cloud of snow.

“What?” he said between tolls of the bell, looking up at the golden girl suspended above him.

“Your third and final duel,” she said, and pointed across the river.

“Where?” he asked, staring over the water. The wall of ice murk on the other side was sheer and unbroken. He could see no one and nothing between him and it.

The river was flowing past a series of columns that stuck out of the water, marooned between and dwarfed by the two bridges. You could see that they had once been the supports of an iron bridge that was either unfinished or long gone.

“I can’t see anything,” he said.

The bell tolled. There was an accompanying muted flash low down in the face of the murk opposite, like lightning muffled within a thundercloud. And then, to his horror, he saw the uncannily flat surface of roiling grayness darken and bulge and swirl outward as the emerging bumps resolved into a coherent whole, a knight on a horse coming out of the fog.

It had the shape of the last Knight of the Cnihtengild, but the darkness that had flowed into it like a parasite had dimmed the metallic armor, so that it was as matte black as the inside of a soot-blackened chimney. The rider and the horse both had eyes that leaked wisps of black fire and smoke. Only the disks of glass on the horse’s surcoat still lanced out their beams of light, no longer a clear blue but a colorless white that was somehow gray at its core, like black-and-white static on a television screen.

“That’s not the Cnihtengild,” said George, staring. “Not anymore . . .”

The other thing he noticed was that it had started to snow.

I am the darkness invincible
thundered the Dark Knight, his words as clear from across the intervening gulf of black water as if he were standing next to them.

“This new Dark Knight is still enough the Cnihtengild for you to have an undischarged obligation to fight him,” said Ariel. “Look at your arm if you doubt me.”

George didn’t have to. The stone was binding around his chest now, and the constriction and pain were making it hard to breathe.

The bell tolled once more.

Boy. Light bearer. Will you stand
?

Despite the pain crushing his arm and chest, George still had enough reflexes left to shudder at the awful tone in the voice and the horror of the challenge it was offering.

“Where are we meant to fight?” he said to Ariel. “I mean, I fought underground, at least I think it counts as underground—in that bombed-out cellar with the horses, that was belowground. And I fought the bloody Walker on the water, because we were on the ice at the Frost Fair. . . .”

“So you must fight the third battle on the ground,” she said, pointing to the middle of the river. “There.”

“That’s a river,” said George after a beat during which the bell tolled again and his chest squeezed painfully in response, jerking the stone arm.

“It’s a bridge. A bridge is solid enough ground for a duel,” she said. “Don’t be so picky, boy. It can’t matter a jot where you face your death.”

Her cheerful callousness needled him.

“It’s not a bloody bridge,” he said, pointing at the columns sticking out of the water. “It’s just some old bridge supports. They’re not joined up, are they?”

“Of course they are,” she flounced back. “Don’t be a baby.”

“You’re impossible,” he said, with a snort of frustration.

“No I’m not,” she said, almost hurt at the suggestion. “But the bridge is.”

“I know . . .” he said.

“No you don’t. It’s the Impossible Bridge. Look . . .”

He stared more closely but still could see nothing but sturdy, unconnected, red-painted stanchions stretching across the river toward the Dark Knight. He thought of the Impossible Door behind which he and Edie had taken sanctuary, only two, or was it three long nights back? Either way it seemed like a whole other lifetime ago. That had worked, but this didn’t look like it could work, and even if it did, the outcome was going to be the very opposite of sanctuary. It was going to be a fight to the death. And the twinging in his arm and chest were sending very strong hints as to who was likely to die.

As he looked, the Knight kneed his horse forward. The horse stepped up onto the wall of the embankment, and then—to George’s amazement—out into thin air. It didn’t fall. It just walked forward on the line where a bridge—if there were a bridge—would lie on top of the columns. “How . . . ?” began George, then squinted and looked even harder at what was happening. As the horse walked slowly forward, the snow that was falling started to land. And where it landed, the space took on the distinct contours of a wide road: pavement and two sidewalls just ahead of the Knight’s progress, as if there had been an invisible bridge there all along.

“It’s the Impossible Bridge,” repeated Ariel, again with that insufferable tone as if that explained everything. “All it requires is a leap of faith.”

Suddenly George thought of Dictionary’s last words to him.

He smiled grimly.

“‘The natural flight of the human mind,’” he said.

“What?” said the golden girl, hovering closer to him.

“‘From hope to hope,’” he explained.

He swallowed. This is it, he thought, looking at the approaching Dark Knight, who was clearly making the bridge as he came.

This is the moment.

The moment when I find out who I am.

The last possible moment when I can run.

He looked at the empty strip of walkway ribboning away to his left. He tensed. There was nothing and no one in the way to stop him from trying to escape this.

Instead, or maybe because of this, he stepped up onto the wall and faced the darkness slowly riding toward him on the other side.

“I’ve done enough running,” he said very quietly to himself.

And stepped out into thin air.

T
hey fell out of the black strobing passage through the mirrors into gray evening light, the cold tang of sea air and the sharp sting of wind-blown drizzle in their faces.

If Edie had looked back she’d have seen they had fallen out of the side mirror on the side of a parked lorry in a residential cul-de-sac. Edie didn’t look back, or sideways. One glance had told her where she was, and she knew with a violent twist in her gut exactly where she had to go and how to get there. She’d been this way a hundred times before.

She ran down a narrow alley between two houses, brushing past dripping blue hydrangeas and breeze-blown tamarisk overhanging garden fences, and came to the sudden light and larger sky at the top of the small bluff overlooking the beach. She hurtled down the cracked concrete steps three at a time, followed by the Raven and the Gunner.

“Take it easy,” the Gunner puffed.

“I know where I’m going!” she shouted as she hit the wet promenade and swerved left, nearly falling as she changed direction

She sprinted past the railings on her right. High tide heaved greasily between the wooden walls, only a narrow shelf of wet pebbles between her and the beckoning blankness of the sea.

She remembered her dream, but there was no hare and no owl to help her here. She was the helper.

The doors of the beach huts set into the base of the cliff jolted blurrily closer as she hammered down the wet cement walkway. They were all closed and padlocked, as they always were—all except the one that was open, as she knew it would be.

Seeing the blackness within stopped her.

This was her bad place.

This is where the nightmares came from.

This is where she had glinted the worst thing.

If she was so very, very tired, if she was at the end of her tether because it felt like she’d been trying to escape from something since forever began, this was where she had started running. And this was what she had been running from. This was the other end of that tether, and here she was.

She hadn’t escaped it at all.

She had been pulled right back.

She turned away from the open door and jumped down onto the beach in front of it.

“Edie,” said the Gunner, sliding to a stop behind the metal balustrade and looking down at her. “You all right?”

“No,” she said flatly. “No, I’m not all right. . . .” She wiped wetness from her face and realized it was not just the drizzle, because drizzle doesn’t taste of salt. “I’m here.”

She didn’t have time to be embarrassed.

She leaned down and picked up the biggest stone she could grasp in one hand and climbed back up on the promenade, heading straight for the black doorway with a face hard as the flint she was carrying.

The Gunner reached out a hand to slow her, but she shrugged out of it and kept on going.

It was all as she’d seen it before. The white-painted brick walls. The dripping ceiling. The Thermoses, the beach ball, the broken deck chair, and the two plastic seats with the table between them. The beer cans. The bottles. The sour reek of old cigarette smoke.

Her mother.

Her mother sat in the gloom on one of the white plastic chairs, looking out at the gray seascape beyond. A cigarette had burned down to a fragile arc of ash in her unmoving hand, ash as gray and burned-out as her eyes.

Edie had always hated it when drink made her mother’s eyes lose focus and go flat like that. It was as if she had partly gone, partly left, partly died. It was only when she was drunk that her mother let her sadness take over, only then when she became unreachable.

The stepfather emerged from the shadows, unscrewing the top of another bottle of wine. And of course it was always he who poured the wine in the first place, always he who prodded her mum into another glass.

“Come on,” he said, blurring the edges of his words as he sat down with the exaggerated care of the truly inebriated and poured a shaky stream of red into the clouded plastic tumbler at her mother’s elbow. “Misery loves company.”

He cracked open another can of beer, with a cackle, and sucked the foam from the top.

Her mother shook her head as if waking up from a long, wide-eyed sleep. The ash fell onto the floor, unnoticed.

“Edie,” she said.

Edie’s heart stopped dead. Her mouth made silent shapes, and only the Raven saw her eyes become a drowning pool in which both despair and hope fought to survive.

“Mum?” she whispered.

Her mother looked right through her.

“Got to get Edie,” she mumbled, trying to focus on her watch. “Get her tea on. . . .”

“She’s got a key,” said the stepfather, belching. “S’nice here.”

“It’s cold.” Her mother shivered.

“Come on.” He giggled. “I’ll give you a little cuddle. . . .”

Edie knew this. The drunker he got, the nastier he got. And the nastier he got, the more babyish his language became. The flint felt smooth and hard in her hand.

Her mother pushed his hand away.

“Can’t go anyway.” He shrugged. “Got to meet my mate. You’ll like him.”

“No,” said her mother. And she got to her feet. “I don’t know why you like it here. It’s creepy. Feels like I’m being watched.”

“You are!” cried Edie. “I’m here, Mum!”

Edie lurched forward. She couldn’t help herself. She threw her arms around her mum, trying to bury her face in the coat and sweater she knew so well. The force field that protected the past from the future just neatly slid her off to one side as her mother stepped past, a finger twisting her earring.

Edie recognized the gesture. It was a tic her mother had; and only now, now that she knew what being a glint was and what a heart stone meant to one, did Edie understand. She longed to be able to explain it to her mother. She knew it would help; she knew that once she had a chance to explain it, the great burden of thinking she was mad would disappear and she wouldn’t have to try and lighten it by looking for forgetfulness in a bottle.

“Mum!” she shouted.

The Gunner’s hand clasped her shoulder. “She just can’t hear you, girl,” he said softly.

“MUM!” she yelled, so loud that it felt like her vocal chords were tearing.

“I don’t want to meet him,” said her mother, leaning down to pick up her shoulder bag. “I don’t know him, why would I want to?”

“He’s a laugh; you’ll like him,” said the stepfather, putting his foot on the bag. “Come on, don’t be a spoilsport. He’s heard all about you, he wants to meet you, he’ll be in a right old huff if you go. . . .”

“Who is he anyway?” said her mother. She kept hold of the bag handles with one hand, but reached for her glass with the other.

“John, Johnny something. Like the whisky,” he slurred, his S’s skidding all over the place. “Johnny Walker.”

Edie’d known this was coming, but still the word caught her by surprise. She saw her mother let go of the bag and reach again for her ear, in the way she did when she got agitated, and in that moment Edie saw the sea-glass fragment blaze light.

“NO!” she shouted. “GET OUT!!! RUN!!!”

“’E’s a mate from London,” said the stepfather, swigging more beer. “You’ll like him. He’s a right cutup. . . .”

Edie flashed the memory of the Walker coming after her on the ice, the light from a distant brazier flashing redness on the long dagger he held as he came after her, and she was in motion before the Gunner could pull her back.

“NO!” she roared, and hit the stepfather with every ounce of power in her body, slamming the sea-smoothed flint into his temple like a sledgehammer.

The rounded edges of the stone spun out of her tight grip with the force of the impact, but his head didn’t move an inch. He just kept on smiling his nasty smile as the stone flew into the darkness at the back of the hut. Only when the stone hit the back wall with a clatter did he react, turning toward the sound.

“What was that?” sad Edie’s mother, head coming up in fright.

“Something fell off the roof,” he said, peering backward.

Edie grabbed her mother’s arm and tried to yank her to the door. She, of course, didn’t move at all.

“I hate this place,” she said. “I’m going to go get Edie her tea. She shouldn’t be alone. It’s getting dark. And I want to go see her, see how she’s doing.”

She turned to the door, pausing to scoop up her bag.

The door slammed shut.

And a slightly bored voice said: “Ah, but it’s so much more fun in the dark, don’t you find?”