Silvertongue (23 page)

As he crashed to the ground, Edie felt a swoop of hope, and just for a moment dared to think the inexplicable and the impossible both at once: this is it, this is where she cheats death.

Her mother barged past the shocked electrician, sending him flying across the floor. Edie sprinted after her, the Gunner on her heels, as her mother raced up the narrow staircase toward the roof and freedom.

T
he Perseus and the Pilot never saw what hit them. The ice-sheathed taints howled in at zero feet, straight through the arches beneath the bridge, and slammed into them at the very moment they burst back into the air from the bottom of the river. They had scarcely begun to gasp for breath before it was knocked out of them by the impact.

The Bosun and Jack Tar did have a couple of seconds to react, because George’s first action on seeing the phalanx of taints flickering across the river toward them had been to shout a warning. The Perseus and the Pilot had been under water, and had not known what danger awaited them as they surfaced.

The Perseus was hit so hard that his sword went flying. The Pilot was knocked head over heels by a gargoyle that smacked straight into his face and hooked on with ferocious tenacity, snarling and biting at him.

Though they had been taken by surprise, they immediately fought back. The Perseus punched and kicked at his two assailants as they tried to bite him out of the air. All the taints had the same gryphon shape, with an eagle’s wings, head, and front talons; and a lion’s body and hindquarters. Their bodies were stunted, but this just seemed to make them more maneuverable and powerful in the air. They fought in pairs, which made the fight that followed uneven and consequently short and viciously final.

The Pilot managed to tear one assailant off his face, only to have its partner gouge its talons into his wings and latch its screaming beak on to his head. The whirling threesome slammed into the sheer wall of the Embankment, knocking the Pilot senseless just long enough for the second gryphon to rip off one of his wings and start tearing at his chest. With only one wing and two attackers, it wasn’t long before the Pilot just stopped moving and hung there, draped over the river wall as the gryphons pecked at his lifeless body.

Jack Tar—having had the advantage of hearing George’s warning shout—had managed to duck the first of his attackers and swing the anchor at the end of a short length of rope with enough hurried accuracy that, although the anchor missed the jinking taint, the thin anchor chain snarled in its wings. As the taint stuttered in midair and tried to twist free, the anchor swung around its neck and hit it in the face, dropping it into the water.

Having escaped immediate annihilation, Jack Tar didn’t hang around in his exposed boat for a moment longer. Instead he jumped from the boat to the barge, hitting the hollow metal hull with a clang like Big Ben, and scrambled up to join the Bosun. He got there in time to rip a gryphon from his shipmate’s back and stomp it to trash with his heavy sea boots, and then he and the Bosun fought back-to-back as two taints whirled and snarled about them.

The Perseus had managed to pull one of his attackers off, and kicked the other one into it as it fell. While the two taints disentangled, he took advantage of the brief respite to run through the air toward the bridge. The feathers on his sandals whirred as he sprinted toward George and the Queen. He slammed into the edge of the bridge and reached a desperate hand over the scarred stone lintel.

“My bag!” he shouted.

“Look out!” shouted the Queen and George as one, seeing the icy gryphon shrieking in behind him.

“My bag!” he yelled again, his hand stretching to the limit of his reach.

The gryphon slammed into his kidneys so hard that all the air was punched out of him and his eyes rolled back in his head.

“Out of the way, boy!” shouted the Red Queen, hefting her spear.

George didn’t get out of the way. He was already lunging toward the gryphon’s wildly flapping wings. He caught one wingtip, then the other, and without a second’s conscious thought, slammed them together. The gryphon squealed in outrage, but George closed his eyes and felt the heat in his hands, and the momentary awareness of the granular structure of the stone wings they were pinioning together.

And he simply fused stone wingtip to stone wingtip and wrenched the gryphon off the Perseus.

The gryphon struggled to free its locked wingtips and flap, but it couldn’t do anything except plunge straight down, shrieking, into the black current below.

George reached a hand out, but there was a horribly abrupt jerking impact as two taints flew back around the bridge arches and hit the Perseus’s dangling feet, tearing him off the bridge and into the air. As he dangled upside down above the barge, each one gripped a foot and flew in a different direction.

George looked away, but he heard the Queen gasp in horror, and then the noise of the spit’s body clanging down onto the barge.

The Bosun and Jack Tar were trying to fight their way to a metal hatch in the deck. The gryphons circled them, slashing and biting, two of them actually standing on the hatch, blocking their way to safety.

When all seemed lost, all of a sudden the waters burst beside the barge and the Boy rode the Dolphin high out of the water, battering one of the gryphons off the hatch and throwing something to the ground at the sailor’s feet.

George saw in a flash that it was the Perseus’s sword.

The Bosun grabbed it and slashed right and left in a fury, cutting his way to the hatch.

“Come on, Jack!” he roared. “Let’s live to fight another day!”

He cut the gryphon standing guard clean in half, and kicked his way onto the hatch. He stood over it as Jack Tar dived down and ripped it open. The Bosun tumbled in, and Jack Tar leaped after him, fast, but not fast enough to stop one gryphon diving in with them. The hatch clanged shut, and there was a muffled eagle shriek from inside.

The Boy and the Dolphin surfaced and looked up at the Queen and George.

“Save yourselves!” shouted George, and without a second to spare they plunged deep into the river and disappeared as the Dolphin sounded deep and powered away from the scene of the massacre.

The Queen grabbed George’s arm and hurled him into the chariot.

“We must go, boy, now!”

She threw the Perseus’s bag in after him and leaped aboard, cracking the reins over the backs of horses that needed no second telling. They lurched into a gallop, and the chariot careened off the bridge in a whirlwind of snow.

“It is no longer safe to be out here alone! From now on there is only safety in numbers,” yelled the Queen into the slipstream. “And we may already be too late to reach that safety.”

George stared backward, waiting for the pursuing gryphons, and thought two things.

Yes, they were maybe too late.

And whether or not that was so, Edie was out there alone.

It wasn’t just that he was desperately worried for her safety. He was worried for everyone’s survival.

Because without her ability to sense the black mirror, all was lost.

E
die and the Gunner were right behind Edie’s mother as she scrambled up the stairs and burst through a door onto a flat, gravel-covered roof. They just got there before she grabbed the outer edge of the flapping door and slammed it shut. There was a bolt on the outside of the door, which she rammed home.

Then she ran to the edge of the roof. There was a sheer drop down to the parking lot in front of the hospital.

They watched as she dashed around the rectangular perimeter, looking for a safe way down. They saw the realization grow on her that she was trapped up here.

They heard the increasingly urgent banging on the locked roof door, the distant sound of an emergency bell ringing, and the muffled shouts of the nurse calling her name.

They saw her turn and see the eye-twisting horror of the Walker stepping out of a small, round hand mirror right behind her. She stumbled back in shock, falling onto the sharp gravel.

The Walker looked down at her as he pocketed the mirror again and calmly drew his dagger.

“What are you going to do?” He wagged the blade at her. “I promise you, if you do not tell me where your daughter’s heart stone is, I will split you open like a bag of peas, and you will die right here on this roof.”

She closed her hand on a fistful of gravel and staggered back to her feet.

“No. You will not go near my daughter.” Her voice was raw but steady. She stood in a crouch, ready to run in either direction if he came for her.

“I will do what I wish; this is your last opportunity. There is no more chance of you thwarting me in this than there is of these stones not hitting the ground below.” The Walker turned slightly and scuffed some roof gravel over the edge behind him. “I am as unavoidable as gravity itself. So tell me, where does the brat hide her stone?”

“Her name is Edie,” she said, her voice catching with pride as she stood taller, squaring her shoulders and looking him right in the eye. “And I won’t tell you one damn thing that would harm her.”

He yawned, studiously unimpressed. “So you will not get off this roof alive.”

“Then neither of us will,” she said, throwing the handful of gravel at his eyes with a sharp jerk of her hand.

In the moment when he raised his hand to shield his eyes, she exploded into motion, sprinting straight at him.

Time slowed for Edie as she realized in horror what her mother was going to do, and the price she was going to pay. She heard herself shouting “Mum!” in a shriek that seemed to go on forever, but her mother couldn’t hear her.

All the wear and tear that the years and drink—and the worrying that she was mad—had put on her fell away, and with her long hair flying behind her and fire in her eyes, her face was, in this one last moment, as fierce and focused as a lioness defending its cub.

She looked again like the mother Edie now remembered only in her dreams.

The Walker slashed at her with the dagger, but she ducked her head and threw herself into a horizontal dive.

Edie saw the blade cut an arc in the air, reflecting the rosy light from the setting sun. It scythed over her mother’s head, just missing her. The Walker staggered with the impetus of the mistimed blow, and so was off balance as Edie’s mother hit him in a solid flying tackle, just below his waist. His body bent in the middle and his feet flew up off the roof. His hands bicycled sideways, grabbing for a handhold in the empty air beyond the roof’s edge.

The only sound was a strangled “NO!” which jerked out of his mouth as he twisted and looked at the gulf of air below them.

And then they were gone.

Edie and the Gunner were left staring at the sun, now a red hole in the sky where her mother had sacrificed herself in taking the Walker off the roof.

“She didn’t know that he can’t die,” said the Gunner with great sadness.

Edie ran for the edge, but before she could get close enough to look over and see anything of her mother’s body, the Gunner’s hand snapped out and yanked her back so abruptly that her feet left the ground.

He held her to his chest while she struggled to free herself, and spoke softly into her ear.

“You may be born to pull the past from stones and see terrible stuff someone your age shouldn’t have to see, but there are some images you
don’t
need to carry in your head.”

The Raven perched on the parapet and looked over at what Edie could not see.

Her mother was spread-eagle on the tarmac below, one leg bent under the other, arms wide, almost as if she had been crucified. Her eyes stared sightlessly at the sky above, her face framed in the outflung fan of her hair. As people hurried toward her, one figure walked in the opposite direction, not looking back.

It was the Walker.

“I want to see how it ended!” hissed Edie, struggling against the bronze arm holding her in place.

“You saw how it ended,” said the Gunner softly, his voice rumbling so low in his chest that she could feel the vibrations in her back, where she was crushed against him. “You saw all that matters.”

He continued to speak very calmly into her ear.

“It ended with your mother flying. She flew through the air, into the sunset. She was fighting for you. Just like she fought to bring you safe into this world and gave you your first breath, so she fought for you with her last. She fought to save you from him. She died with nothing in her but that fierce love of you.” The Gunner’s voice was low and raw. He cleared his throat. “And death is a terrible and final thing, Edie girl, but there’s many worse ways to die than with love in your heart. And that’s all you need to know. There is nothing you can see down there that is a truer or a finer end than that, and that’s the God’s honest truth of it.”

“It’s my right to see her!” she protested, voice shaking. “It’s my right!”

“It is,” he said simply, and let her go. She stood alone on the gravel roof as he stepped back. “Just like it is your right
not
to see her. Just as it is your right to choose whether the last image you carry of her is as a living creature or a dead shell, her body broken, but not her spirit.”

“It’s my right,” Edie repeated.

The Gunner said no more.

Neither he nor the Raven looked at Edie as she stood there, the evening wind blowing her hair across her face and flapping the black fur coat around her ankles. She was poised between stepping forward and retreating, and the breeze seemed to rock her as her whole body remained balanced on the balls of her feet.

And then she just sat down and pulled her knees to her chest. She muttered something.

“What?” said the Gunner.

She raised her head, eyes bright with tears. “The Sphinx lied! All this time I thought this was about finding her alive! I mean, I knew she was dead, then I found her stone, and it stayed lit, and then the Sphinxes, the Sphinxes lied!”

“Sphinxes don’t lie,” he said sadly.

“But I thought she lived! I thought she was alive!” Edie hacked her heel into the gravel, sending it skittering across the roof. “I thought . . . I thought I would get to hold her again. I thought she would hold me. Even just one more time, just once. . . .”

She shuddered and dropped her head back into the hollow between her knees and chest, her long hair tented over her face.

The Gunner put a hand on her shoulder and left it there. He said nothing, just let the solid weight of his hand ballast Edie as the gusts of emotion billowed through her.

When the sun had dropped halfway below the horizon, and Edie’s shoulder had almost completely stopped shuddering, the Raven hopped over and looked up at her. Then it pecked her shoe, but not hard. Almost companionably.

She sniffed and pushed aside the dark curtain of her hair.

“I thought she was alive. And I knew it was impossible, but I still had this crazy stupid hope that I would just hold her.”

The Raven clacked its beak.

“She is,” said the Gunner. “And you do. Those we love never truly leave us. We carry them in us forever. Her love will ride in your heart throughout your life and beyond.”

“How can it live beyond?” said Edie flatly. “That’s all magic rubbish.”

“It’s not magic, girl. Or if it is, it’s just the ordinary magic of being human. You’ll carry her love and add it to your own, and one day you will pass it on to your children, who will send it forward in time to theirs, long after you’re gone. That’s the glory and pain of being human, the curse and the blessing of life,” he said, stroking her hair with the care of someone comforting a wild animal that may bolt at any moment. “Though I reckon it’s more blessing than curse.”

Edie stared at the sunset now reddening the horizon and took a deep breath. She felt cleansed by it, so she took another one.

“She didn’t commit suicide,” she said, exhaling.

“No,” agreed the Gunner.

“And she wasn’t mad.”

“No.”

“And she went down fighting.”

“To the last,” he said.

“And that’s what she gave me,” she said to the final sliver of sun blinking out of sight below the scarlet edge of the world. “That rides with me too.”

Silence followed as the reds bled from the sky and the night started to roll in. She took another deep, deep breath and set her jaw before turning. The Raven flapped onto her shoulder and clacked in her ear. And she realized with a strange lack of surprise that she could understand it.

“Exactly,” she said. “There’s a fight going in London . . .”

She looked at the Gunner. Eyes dry.

“. . . so what the hell am I doing here?”

The Gunner pulled the two disks of glass from his pocket and grinned at her.

“That’s my girl.”