Silvertongue (21 page)

“No,” he said, placing the stone arm at his feet and picking up the reins. “It’s mine.”

And with a crack of the reins, he was off, galloping along the walkway, heading for Trafalgar Square and what he knew in his bones was going to be, however it turned out, the last battle.

E
die was frozen in horror, jammed against the beach hut wall, locked into the darkest room of her nightmare. The only light was the one burning from her mother’s earring. And in that light Edie saw a tall figure standing with his back to the door, tendrils of greasy hair escaping from a hoodie worn under a long green coat.

It was the Walker.

Her fists clenched and she stepped in front of her mother.

“Stop him,” she said, eyes flicking to the Gunner.

“If I could,” he said, pain in his eyes, “I’d stop his clock once and for all. But I can’t. We can’t.”

“What a charming earring.” The Walker smiled.

Edie’s mother was very still, like an animal that knows danger has arrived and it will have only one chance to make its escape. She suddenly looked very sober.

“Thanks,” she said, swallowing. “I’ve got to go. . . .”

“No, really,” the Walker said, stepping forward and starting to circle her. “Just a simple piece of sea-glass, and yet it has such . . . life in it.”

Edie knew what happened next. She’d seen it in harsh, terrifying flashes when she’d glinted it what seemed a lifetime ago, before she’d been chased by the stepfather and dealt with him and run away to London. She’d seen the Walker circling her mother, wheedling, teasing, and then bullying and threatening. She’d seen him mocking her for not even knowing what she was. She’d seen the stepfather sitting and watching and giggling at it all. And then she’d seen him leap to keep the door locked when her mother made her last desperate break for freedom and sanity.

The struggle she’d seen as he tripped her and she fought to escape them both was fierce and brutal and— as measured in real time—quite short. To Edie it had seemed to go on forever. She didn’t watch it again, not the way she had when she’d glinted it.

This time she was in it.

As her mother ran for the door, Edie dived between her and the Walker, trying to block him. He slid past without noticing her. When she regained her balance she sprung for him, her fists glancing off his face, her throttling hands sliding around his neck without being able to crush it. Edie fought with every ounce of her strength. She fought hard and she fought silent, the way a born street brawler fights, wasting no energy on noise, using every last fragment in the struggle. She kicked, she bit, she scratched, she gouged, and she punched the unbreakable force field so many times that her fists just got numb, way on the other side of pain.

But all she managed to do was exhaust herself.

The scream, when it came, was her mother’s, as the Walker ripped the earring clear and held it high in his exultant fist. Edie sobbed and once again threw herself between the Walker and her mother.

There was no need. Now that he had the stone, he stepped calmly back.

“Marvelous,” he panted, eyes bright, oblivious to the three scratches her mother had raked diagonally across his face, from forehead to ear, as he gazed hungrily at the fire in the glass. “Such a tiny fragment, yet such vigor within.”

Edie’s mother scrambled to the locked door and tried to tear it open.

“Oh, you can’t go,” he said, as eerily polite as a host at a tea party. “Please. Dear lady. You mustn’t go yet. I haven’t told you what you are. I haven’t told you what you’ve lost. It’s quite the best part. . . .”

The door bounced behind her as she staggered out onto the promenade and ran for her life.

The Walker didn’t chase her. He shrugged, shook his head, and returned to his contemplation of the stone.

“No hurry. I have all the time in the world.”

Edie ran out the door, onto the promenade. Her mother was sprinting away already fifty yards ahead. As she started to follow, the Gunner caught up and gripped her shoulders.

“Let go!” shouted Edie.

He lifted her in the air, her legs bicycling as she tried to run after her mother.

“You can’t follow her, love. You can’t help her; you can’t change what happens. Look at you, look at how you’ve hurt yourself trying.”

Edie stopped struggling. She knew he was right.

The Gunner put her down. She was shaking with the shock and backwash of adrenaline from the one-sided fight. Her knuckles were split, her hair hung wild, and there was a graze weeping on her cheekbone where she’d bounced off the rough brickwork of the beach hut.

“I just . . .” she began.

“Don’t speak. Be still for a while,” said the soldier. “Just be.”

She looked out to sea. He followed her eyes.

“It’s a great calm, all that water,” he said. “I’ve never seen the sea ’til now. It’s calmer than the river.”

She stumbled over the edge of the promenade and dropped onto the loose pebbles with a jolt. She crunched over to the wooden wall, pulled her fur coat tightly around her, and sat against it, eyes fixed on the gentle heave of the sea swell in the middle distance.

She heard a louder crunch and footsteps approaching, and she felt the thud against the wall as the bronze man sat down next to her. After a while there was a flutter next to her ear and then a weight on her shoulder as the Raven dropped in to perch on her; but she didn’t react to that either.

And for a long time they sat like that, all staring out to sea while Edie’s heartbeat returned to normal and she stopped shaking.

Something gray and big-winged flapped slowly along the line of the shore, too far away to identify.

She knew she couldn’t sit there forever.

“He took her heart stone,” said the Gunner.

She nodded, eyes still fixed on the sea.

“He took her heart stone,” she agreed with a sniff. “After that must have been when she went loony. Went for my stepdad with the potato peeler.”

A flicker of satisfaction snuck onto her face at the memory, and then was gone.

“They took her away. She didn’t come back.”

She scooped up a handful of small pebbles and let them drop to the beach one by one. The Gunner watched with her as the stones bounced and skittered across the jumble of rocks beside them.

When her hand was empty she looked at him. Her eyes were now dry, and her chin had regained its stubborn jut.

“She died?” said the Gunner softly.

Edie nodded. “She killed herself.”

She shoveled her hand into the pebbles at her side, but this time she kept her hand closed around the wet stones she dug out. The Gunner watched her knuckles whiten on them, though her voice remained calm.

“I’m not meant to know that bit. But he told me. My stepdad. One night. Drunk. He ‘thought I should know.’”

The Gunner leaned over, and very gently, his large bronze hands unwrapped her fingers. She didn’t resist as he turned her hand over and let the clenched handful of stones drop away.

“So why can’t you forgive her?” he asked gently.

Edie took a big breath and held it while her body burned all the oxygen in it. Then she exhaled.

“Because she was meant to look after me. But she left me. With him. She took the easy way out. And left me the hard way . . . Ow!”

The Raven pecked her hard on the ear.

“Why’d he . . . OW!”

The Raven did it again.

“He doesn’t agree with you.” The soldier smiled and stood up. He offered her a hand and hauled her to her feet.

“Well, he doesn’t know everything, does he?” Edie said, eyeing the bird with dislike as she rubbed her ear.

“No,” agreed the Gunner. “Just everything that happened. And I think he knows something else, which he wants to show you, and all.”

Edie turned and looked at the beach hut. The door was now closed again, the memory locked away behind a rusting padlock. It looked as innocent and shabby as the other doors on either side of it.

“What else can there be?” she said. “Nothing can be worse than that.”

The Raven clacked its beak and looked at the Gunner behind Edie’s back.

The Gunner shook his head.

T
he ice murk made it almost impossible to move forward in any coherent direction, but the Queen of America and Shack were making progress by only moving in the direction of the noise the Queen had heard. They stayed in contact by each holding on to the shaggy coat of the buffalo at their side. In the gray fog the white stone of the Queen and her beast glowed a little, so that she was just able to track the dragon’s trail in front of her.

As they trudged through the ever deeper snow, Shack could hear the noise more and more clearly, his muffled ears catching up with the more finely tuned hearing of the warrior Queen.

It was people crying and shouting, a general lamentation that held more sorrow than fear. It was a sound of resignation, not of desperation, and there were more female voices mixed through it than there were men’s.

They blinked in surprise as they walked unexpectedly out of the murk and into one of the great avenues of open air that cut through the miasma in deep straight gullies, like firebreaks in a dense forest.

They looked right and left, and saw with relief that the dragon’s tracks led along the break, keeping out of the murk.

“What is this?” said Shack, pointing along the clear cut of clean air.

“Lines of power,” said the Queen.

“Of course,” said Shack. “The ley lines.”

People who think London is a great shambolic mishmash of twisting streets that have grown up piecemeal over time, are right, but only partially so. There are lines that underpin the apparent random shape of the city, and always have done. If you took a map of the city and drew lines connecting the major churches, you would begin to see how many lie in a straight line. A straight line between three churches could be a coincidence. A straight line between four or five or six is something else entirely. When you add in the even older holy wells and sacred springs and find them on the same lines, it’s possible that there is a more ancient grid of power running under the city streets. And if you look beyond the city along those lines, you might find they cut through even more ancient stone circles and strangely hallowed hilltop sites in the island beyond.

These are the old lines of power, forgotten by everyone who crosses them every day, just as the London Stone is. Lines that are still so powerful that the ice murk made no impression on them.

The voices were much clearer now, as if the clean-cut sides of the murk canyon were channeling them, like the long nave of a dark cathedral.

“Come on,” said Shack, jogging forward. “There’s something moving over there.”

The lines of power don’t, of course, run neatly along the road plan of the city, and what was ahead of them was a harsh and complicated facade of a medium-rise office complex. The tracks led up some steps, and Shack and the Queen had to dip into the murk and follow the wall of the building by touch until they turned a corner and broke back out into the clean air beyond. And when they did, they saw they were in the inner square of the Broadgate Centre, a blocky modern piazza whose normal starkness was softened by the snow.

The snow on the ground was not a virgin blanket of white. It was churned up in great chunks that bore witness to the great fight that must have taken place on it.

The Queen of Time was lying broken-winged at the edge of the piazza—a golden splash of color in the middle of a ring of dark statues, which ranged around her in a protective perimeter. They were a group of spits, made to look like tired office workers. Clean scrapes of bronze were exposed through their normally matte surface, showing where they had fallen on the dragons and tried to rescue the Queen from their ripping talons.

It was they who were doing the keening and lamenting.

“She’s still breathing,” said an almost faceless male figure as Shack ran past him, and the Queen of America slid to one knee beside the Queen of Time.

“Not for long,” the warrior Queen grunted. “Put her on buffalo. We ride for the maker boy. Maker boy maybe can heal. It’s only chance. Can be no turn o’day if she dies.”

There was an urgency in her voice that made the big polar explorer immediately reach down and slide his hands around the golden body of the fallen Queen and lift her gently, her shattered wings hanging loose, her hair tumbled in disarray over the gouges torn through her clothes into the body beneath.

“Got her,” he said, carrying her carefully through the office workers toward the waiting buffalo. “How will you get to the boy through this murk?”

The Queen of America ran past him to the other side of the square, where there was a statue of a sinewy hare leaping past a giant bell that was tipped on its side.

“Brother jackrabbit,” she shouted. “Brother jackrabbit knows the secret ways through the city.”

She swung her tomahawk and clanged the bell, and as she did so, the hare sprang into life and raced in a circuit of the square, like something getting up speed.

In the silence that followed as the bell’s noise died away, the only sounds left were the horses feet circling them in the deadening snow pack and a distant sound of more voices crying. Shack cocked an ear as the Queen of America jumped up on the buffalo on which he had gently placed the golden Queen.

“Ice man,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“I think,” he said carefully, “I think I should go and see what those girls are crying about.”

The Queen looked in the direction of the noise, which had been cloaked by the lamentations of the office workers.

“Sound of grief comes from the holy well,” she said, pointing. “Cannot be a good thing if the holy well is open.”

“Maybe so,” said Shack. “But someone should go and see anyway.” And with that he raised his hand in farewell and turned away, trudging off into the unknown on his own.

The Queen of America looked after him for a short beat, and then put a restraining hand on the gold body in front of her.

“We go,” she said. “Follow jackrabbit . . .”

The hare stopped its increasingly desperate circuits of the square and ran straight into the side of the ice murk, and the buffalo plunged into a gallop, following the bobbing tail of the hare, which blazed white in the gloom beyond.

And in a moment, the murk had swallowed them too.