Silvertongue (28 page)

T
his time the fighting was more intense, but the spits did better because they were tightly bunched in a square around the base of the column. This enabled them to concentrate their firepower, and made it harder to pick them off one by one.

George missed the first wave of the attack because he was bent over the Queen of Time, trying to mend her as fast as he could. It was exhausting work, and he began to realize that every time he healed a gash or smoothed out a hole, it took something from him. He was putting himself into his work, literally, bit by bit.

By the time the attack retreated, he felt washed out.

He looked up to find Edie glaring at him with an angry scowl.

“What?” he said.

“Well, I reckon the first answer is about using the Temple Bar Dragon to make something. I mean, that’s all I can think of, yeah? I mean, since he turns out to be the only dragon we have on our side.”

“Sure,” he said, looking up at the creature that had dropped into the square and had been flaming taints as they attacked, acting like a kind of living artillery piece. “Sure, that’s what I thought.”

“But that answer you got from this Stone Corpse thingy,” she continued, voice tight with frustration. “That answer is
just
like the Sphinx! What does ‘spit and fire’ mean?”

“Sorry?” said Bulldog, removing his well-chewed cigar as he turned to look at them, his plundered rifle held casually over one shoulder.

“Just a riddle,” said George. “Like a crossword.”

“Ah,” he said, replacing the cigar, “I thought you said Spitfire. Would be a lovely thing to have right now. . . .” He turned away to watch the sky.

Realization hit George like a bucket of cold water.

“No,” he said. “Yes. Of course. That’s what it means. . . .”

He flashed the memory of the Stone Corpse whirling slowly in front of him and saying: “You carry the answer with you . . . You always have.”

He jerked his hand into his pocket, hoping against hope that in the turmoil of the last few days he still had the thing, the thing he always carried with him. He knew he’d had it to get back into his flat, before the Walker came for him, and he’d had to make a sudden exit out the back . . . and then he felt the reassuring jagged edge of the house keys and the smooth, curving elegance of the miniature brass key ring they were attached to.

George looked at Edie. Edie looked at George. They both looked up at the Dragon, who was watching the sky above.

“Excuse me,” said George, pulling out the key ring and holding it in front of the Dragon’s nose. “Do you think if you made one of these, it would fly?”

“What. It. Is?” asked the Dragon, turning to have a closer look.

“A plane,” said George, turning to Edie with a smile.

Her face was white.

She was staring at the key ring and the little brass Spitfire twirling in the air at the end of his fingers.

“What?” said George. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I have,” she said, her mouth dry. “Where did you get that key ring?”

“This?” he said. “My dad made it for me. He had one just like it. . . .”

“Your dad?” she gasped.

And then, because her brain seemed to have suddenly gone into overdrive and shut down all nonessential functions, like remembering to stay standing up, she abruptly sat down.

“Edie, girl . . .” began the Gunner.

“No,” she said.

“The bloke on the bridge. With your mum. The one she . . . That was his key ring. . . .”

“I know.” She swallowed hard.

The Gunner reached out a hand and grasped her arm gently but very firmly.

“If we were wrong. If he was what you first thought. If he
was
your . . .”

She shook her head. The implications were too big for her to process.

“Not now,” she pleaded. “I can’t.”

“You have to,” said the Gunner. “And yeah. You can. You’re made of special stuff. That’s always been obvious. But how special?”

Her eyes were welling up as she looked at him, wordlessly shaking her head. It was just too complicated and too full of hope for someone used to traveling roads that ended in disappointment.

“If you were made by a glint and a maker? I don’t know if that’s ever happened, right? I don’t know. But I reckon you’d be something more than special, wouldn’t you?”

Edie’s eyes darted at George and then back to the Gunner.

“Please,” she said. “We don’t know.”

The Gunner’s hand went to the scar on his chest, the almost invisible streak of fresh and untarnished bronze where Edie’s hands had smoothed the wound and healed him. He leaned in and whispered in her ear.

“It ain’t just the boy who’s got maker’s hands, is it?”

Edie the oddball. Edie the loony. Edie the killer. Edie the always alone turned and looked at George, and wondered if the size of the new possibilities she was taking on board meant her head would explode before her heart burst.

“What?” asked George. “What are you whispering about? What did glint and maker make?”

“Edie,” said the Gunner, “tell him. Maybe that’s why this all happened. Maybe that’s why you saw him and ran after him. Maybe that’s why he broke the dragon’s head, to find you. Maybe it’s why we all found each other.”

Once again Edie felt herself drowning in “maybes.”

“Maybe none of this was ever an accident. Like the Queen said, the world balances accounts,” the Gunner finished.

“Edie,” said George, with an increasingly dangerous look in his eyes. “What did glint and maker make?”

Edie’s hand went where it always did when she had to face a danger she couldn’t quite see. It found the smoothed edges of her heart stone, and as her thumb coasted over the familiar sea-tumbled lines, she felt the heat and pulled it out of her pocket. It was blazing light, brighter and more powerful than she had ever seen. And she had never seen so many kinds of light. For the first time, instead of its normal warning blaze, it had a full rainbow of colors blasting out of it in a constantly changing glare that was as bright and twisting as the Dragon’s wildfire.

Edie laughed in surprise and wonder. “This. They made this! My mum, the glint, and your dad, the maker, we saw them. Before I was born. Before you were born. And they made something. They took this bottle and filled it with hope and love and good stuff, and if you laugh I will knock your bloody head sideways. . . .” she said, bridling at the smile that had kindled on the side of his mouth. “And they threw it into the river, and it washed up on a beach, and later, much later, I found this broken bit of it, and it became my heart stone. And . . .” Her heart really was much too full to go on.

“And what?” asked George.

“And if that bloody Ice Devil is another creature of darkness, then that light is the very weapon we need,” said Bulldog. “And if he remains on his high citadel and won’t come down to fight, then you will have to go to him. Up there. So.”

“So?” said Edie and George as one.

“So. We. Spitfire. Make,” said a very dragony voice behind them. They turned to see the Temple Bar Dragon standing over them, his talons kneading a ball of pure wildfire like a lump of clay.

“Okay,” said George carefully, and he held up the key ring. “They look like this.”

“Ha,” said the Dragon.

“Ha?” said Edie.

“I believe he knows what a Spitfire looks like, my dear,” said Bulldog. “As any of us do who lived through the Blitz and the Battle of Britain.”

The Dragon turned to the center of the square. “Make. Room.”

T
he Temple Bar Dragon closed its eyes, as if remembering something. As it stood there, its greyhound chest swelled, and the heat from its fire crop built up so fast that by the time it was ready to make the Spitfire, its scales had paled from charcoal dark to ash gray to radiant white, matching the white heat stored inside.

As it ramped up the intensity of the banked wildfire, the spits had not been idle. The Gunner and the bald man in the coat had organized them into a bigger square to accommodate the space the Dragon was to use.

“Bad news,” said the Gunner. “No one’s got many rounds left.”

“You’re running out of bullets?” said George in amazement. “I thought you just . . .”

“We got what we carry. Once they’re gone, we’re done,” answered the Gunner tightly. He climbed onto the back leg of one of the unmoving lions.

“Right,” he shouted. “Listen up. We’re outnumbered. We haven’t got much more ammo. And unless these two kids and Snakey over here can pull it out of the hat, we probably can’t win. . . .”

“Which has never been a reason to stop fighting,” growled Bulldog at his side.

“Which has never been a reason to stop fighting,” repeated the Gunner. “So it’s going to be close work, lads—cold steel, bare hands, and devil take the ’indmost!”

There was no great cheer to greet his words, just an approving grumble and the businesslike sound of metal on metal as bayonets were fixed and swords were drawn. George looked down the line of the square and saw weapons bristling along its length like an angry porcupine. He was shocked by how reduced the number of spits was from the great crowd that had ringed Cleopatra’s Needle earlier.

“So few,” he said under his breath, and then he felt the bald man’s hand on his shoulder. He looked up. “Do you think we can win?”

The great bulldog face crinkled into a fleeting smile as he pointed his cigar toward the east.

“I don’t know where that hellish thing up there was spawned, but I do know where every damn person in this square comes from,” he growled, stabbing his cigar down at the snow-covered ground he stood on. “Right here. And there’s an old saying: Whatever the world dishes out . . . London can take it.”

The Dragon spat fire into the hollow rectangle behind the men’s backs. And while it blew and made, it was hard for anyone to keep watch on the skies as the twisting ropes of many-colored wildfire hit the snow and spiraled and fizzed into shape, as if filling up an invisible mold in the shape of an elegant fighter plane of a bygone era.

First two chubby wheels hissed out of the snow, and then the fire spread up the undercarriage legs and billowed out, pancaking along the sweeping shark’s curves of the underbelly, slowly spreading fore and aft and side to side in a rough cross-shape, as first the fuselage and the two wings became distinct. The wildfire licked up and over on itself, tracing the graceful leading edges of the wings and curving around the perfect shallow sweep of the rear profile, outlining the flaps and meeting other flames rolling down the steep sides of the long fuselage. Flames spiraled up and around the sharp nose cone and spun into the four whirling blades of the propeller. A long wave of flame blew off the distinctly visible cowlings in the backdraft and curved up and over the cockpit and then raced toward the tail, which they traced up and down and left and right, before dropping back into the snow with a light pop as they finished the entire plane by bulging out the surprisingly small tail wheel.

“Wow,” said George.

There it stood. A perfect Spitfire, made from wildfire that smeared and coalesced across the surface in a constantly moving approximation of World War II camouflage, done in infinitely brighter and more surprising colors.

“Wow.” And then because he didn’t want to look stupid by saying “Wow” again, George said: “My dad would have loved this.”

“Yeah,” said Edie. “Mine too.” And then, before the Gunner caught her eye . . . “How does it fly?”

“I. Fly,” creaked the Dragon, and simply walked into the flame shape and spread its wings within the Spitfire’s.

“What next?” said Edie, rather unnerved by the way the plane’s flame canopy had just slid back.

“I reckon I should break that mirror,” said George. He reached for it, put his hands on either side, and tried to feel the flaws and break it along one of them.

Two bad things happened.

First, he couldn’t find any flaws or break the mirror, no matter how hard he tried.

And second, the taints howled into the attack.

A
s the world became noisy and violent and complicated around them, George bent over the black mirror and tried to snap it.

“Come on,” shouted the Gunner. “You need to be gone!” He turned and shot a flying gryphon that was trying to snatch the bundled stone arm out from under his heavy boot.

“Come on, George,” said Edie. “We can’t hold out forever.”

“I can’t break it,” he said, straining so hard he thought his wrists would snap before the mirror did. “I can normally feel the granules inside, the flaws in the stone, and I can break it along them. . . .”

“Look, maybe if we both try,” she said, gripping the mirror with him.

“Edie, I don’t think—” he began, and then stopped, aware that the heat in his hands had just doubled.

A stone pterodactyl hit the ground next to them, spraying them with beak fragments. Edie was concentrating so hard she didn’t even notice the chip that flew past her cheek, leaving a thin ribbon of blood in its wake.

“Yeah,” she said. “Of course you can’t find any flaws. I mean, feel it. It’s not really stone, is it? It’s more sort of . . . flowy. It’s glass.”

“Edie,” George said, realizing what was happening. “You can feel that too . . . ?”

The mirror snapped in half.

“There we go,” she said in satisfaction. “Yeah. I guess I can.”

“Time to go,” said the Gunner, throwing George the stone arm and reaching up and tearing a screaming gargoyle right out of the air and stomping it to shards. “GO!”

And then adrenaline did the strange thing, for both George and Edie, of making time go both fast and simultaneously slow. There was a lot happening in a confined space, but they seemed to run in a dream, so that they avoided the flailing limbs and shattered weapons slashing around them, and leaped up onto the shining wing and into the cockpit. The Dragon roared and the propeller sped up in answer. The way ahead was blurred by a slight shimmer, and they saw a line of backs, which was the outer edge of the square.

“Oh no . . .” said Edie.

There was a large creature standing foursquare in their way. A massive and angry taint, bigger than the Spitfire. A Sphinx.

“Roadblock.”

“I am the Sphinx, the great and mighty enigma of Egypt,” growled the giant head on the lion’s body.

There was a crash and a shudder as something landed right in front of them. There was a moment of invisibility as the propeller whirled the snow, and then George and Edie saw that it was the High Admiral.

“Then this bids fair to be a most unhappy engagement for you,” said the Admiral, bowing coldly. “For I am the Victor of the Nile, and this square of land is my damned quarterdeck.”

The Sphinx roared so loudly that the Admiral’s hat was blown clean off his head. The Admiral roared right back and charged into a headlong attack, hurdling the swipe of the Sphinx’s foreleg and swinging his heavy sword with all the power in his one remaining arm so that it split the Sphinx’s headdress. The two sides fell away as the wounded creature pounced on him.

The Admiral jabbed the sword into the paw that was trying to rip him open, but it was torn away as the second—good—Sphinx burst out of a side street and hit her sister broadside on, knocking her over and clearing the way ahead.

“GO!” shouted George, seeing the opening. The plane leaped forward and the square broke apart just long enough for the plane to roll toward Admiralty Arch, taints diving out of the way of its brutally spinning propeller. Edie and George felt their stomachs being left behind in the square as the Spitfire roared under the arch, along the Mall, and lifted into the air with a sudden and vigorous jerk. The plane banked into a tight right turn over St. James’s and then went upside down as the Dragon barrel-rolled once, accelerating toward the ice murk and the high citadel beyond.

George was filled with a deep thrill of elation at the speed and power all around him. He looked at Edie.

“Okay,” she said. “Wow.”

A phalanx of gargoyles broke off the tower and headed for them, as straight and merciless as missiles.

“George?”

“Straight at ’em,” he replied, hoping the dragon below would hear, and then it was too late to worry, as a second unseen group of gargoyles dropped on them out of the sun, and the Spitfire spun and rolled and jinked as, one after the other, the taints tried to tear and bite chunks out of it to get at George and Edie.

As the taints flew relentlessly after the Spitfire, it looped all the way around and came up behind them, and the Dragon’s wildfire cannoned out from within the plane, and the attackers dropped from the sky.

The Ice Devil howled in fury as they passed over him, and slashed a misshapen hand at them as he roared:
KILL IT AND BRING THE OTHER DARKNESS TO ME.

The flared lip of the citadel it had built for itself exploded outward in all directions as the remaining gargoyles unhooked and took to the sky in a shower of snow and icicles. From the silvery sheen on them, George could see that the Ice Devil had been making his own copies of the existing ones, which explained why the cloud of attackers was so thick.

“We can’t . . .” he began, and then the Spitfire tipped on one wing and flew a tight circle around the top of the tower, howling through the air as it went. There were bumps as it hit taints left and right, but it kept on circling in what seemed like ever tightening rings. The bumping and the buffeting got less and less as they chased their own tail around the tower, and the sky got lighter. This wasn’t because they were clearing it of taints, but because the Spitfire was trailing wildfire as it went, building a flaming cone that rose around the citadel.

George, looking across the inner void of the cone, saw the opposing curve of fire and remembered how the Dragon had trapped him inside a fiery tornado when it had marked his hand, and how he had been unable to escape it. His hand twinged and he looked down and saw the scar. And then he knew what they had to do.

He reached into his pocket, then tapped Edie on the shoulder. She was staring openmouthed at the whirling fire cone they were screaming around.

“You take one half. I take the other half. Get on either side and point them at each other. That’ll open the portal,” he shouted.

He would grab the Ice Devil and plunge it through the mirror. If that meant losing his hand, perhaps that was what was meant by the Stone Corpse’s prophecy. He had been hoping that trapping the other darkness in his stone arm would have covered that, but in the absence of a better plan, this was all he could think of. It seemed like a suitably savage end to his ordeal.

“How do we get down there?” she yelled back. “Oh.”

The plane was slowing, and as it slowed she noticed it was thinning out and the wildfire it was made of stretched itself into a sloping tornado.

As they slid down the side of the fiery vortex, the canopy slid open, and the Spitfire tipped and bucked and decanted them onto the top of the tower, facing the Ice Devil.

“Save. City,” roared the dragon. As they looked around, George realized the dragon was on the outside of the cone, keeping the cone spinning, in the same way it had done the last time he had seen it conjure the wild whirlfire.

They were on their own.

With the Ice Devil.

“Tell you what,” said George carefully, getting to his feet, clutching the stone arm in one hand and the fragment of black mirror in the other, “you don’t have to be a glint to feel the darkness in that thing.”

“In him,” said Edie, edging left. “Definitely a him.”

The Ice Devil could sense the other power trapped in the stone arm. It was so heady that it made it laugh.

GIVE
.

The Ice Devil held out its hand.

“Sort of looks like the Walker,” said Edie, still curving around the edge of the roof in the opposite direction to George. “If you’d put him through a wringer.”

“Well, there’s a nice thought,” said George. He was uncomfortably aware that the stone arm was flexing and reaching its fingers toward its brother darkness.

GIVE FAST OR DIE SLOWLY!

George swallowed and stopped moving.

“Edie?”

“Gotcha,” she said, stopping and slipping the mirror out of the end of her sleeve.

George threw the stone arm on the ground in front of him. “There,” he said. “There it is.”

The Ice Devil strode forward with eye-blurring speed and reached for the arm.

“Now!” yelled George.

He and Edie angled the front faces of their fragments of black mirror at each other as the Ice Devil stepped between them.

There was a snapping noise, and the mirrors jumped in their hands as they found each other and the reflections locked them together. And in between them, as if trapped in a force field, the Ice Devil was spun and frozen, one hand reaching forward, the other reaching back, each hand being pulled into a different mirror.

“Got him,” shouted Edie exultantly. “Easy!”

The Ice Devil shrieked so loud their ears rang with pain, and then it pulled its hands closer together.

Edie and George kept a tight grip on their mirrors, but each saw with horror that the Ice Devil was pulling them toward him by the rope of invisible forces connected to whatever lay on the other side of the mirrors.

“Or he’s got us,” gritted George, staring in shock at the furrow his feet were making in the snow as he tried to resist the inexorable pull.

“Edie,” he yelled. “Your sea-glass!”

“What?” she said, all her energy focused on not letting the mirror rip clear of her fingers.

“If it’s what glint and maker made, we need to see if it does something, because I’m out of ideas.”

She clamped down on the mirror with one hand, freeing the other to scrabble the sea-glass out of her pocket.

It was so hot that she almost dropped it. But she knew she mustn’t, so she rode the pain and tried to ignore the smell of burning.

She turned it toward the Ice Devil, and the glass flared so suddenly that the pain caused her involuntary reflexes to take over, and she dropped it.

The world once more went fast/slow as Edie saw the last hope tumble toward the ground, and heard the Ice Devil roar. There was a flash from behind her as something splashed through the wall of fire and flapped past her. A white bird, an owl, gently plucked the tumbling fragment of light from the air and carried it straight toward the Ice Devil. The Ice Devil opened his mouth to roar it to smithereens, but the bird flew slowly straight through the middle of his chest, in one side and out the other, as if he were made of nothing.

Which, of course, he was.

Nothing but ice crystals and the outer darkness and the inhuman terror that has no form in this world other than what we give it.

“Andraste,” breathed Edie.

The owl flew relentlessly on, disappearing out the other side of the cone of whirlfire.

But what it left behind in the rapidly dissolving body of the Ice Devil was the scorching, all-melting heat of Edie’s heart stone.

The ice melted, and the Ice Devil had no form. As it searched blindly for a way to be, shrieking in terror, it found a darkness it recognized and reached for it. The darkness on the other side of the black mirror in George’s hand.

There was an enormous explosion, as loud as worlds colliding, which in a way they were.

The heart stone flashed white as an atomic ground zero, and the mirrors leaped in their hands as the Ice Devil was sucked back into the unknowable dark. And because the world balances accounts, and matches every exit with an entrance, just as the Ice Devil popped out of this world, a small package popped back in the other direction and went whirling disorientedly over the edge of the tower, so fast and so unexpectedly that George and Edie, blinded by the light, missed it.

And then they were violently jerked across the tower, toward each other, as the mirrors slammed together like super-magnets.

They untangled themselves and found that the mirrors had again become unstuck.

George looked down at the fragment in his hand. It was no longer the blackest thing he had ever seen. He showed it to Edie.

She lifted hers. They were identical. They were white.

“Snap,” she said, numb with the shock and relief of success.

All around them the cone of fire was dropping away, revealing a clear sky and a very happy-looking dragon.

“Good. You. Are. Both,” it said simply. “Saved. All. All. Debted.”

It dropped away and headed back to Temple Bar.

George stared at Edie.

“What’s that?” he said, getting up and pointing at her other hand.

“The stone burned me,” she said, reaching up and letting George pull her to her feet. She showed him the jagged scar on her hand.

He turned his own palm upward to look at the same maker’s mark on his palm.

“Double snap,” he said. “Edie . . .”

“Yeah,” she said. “So. There’s something I think we need to talk about. . . .”

She didn’t know how to begin, largely because she still wasn’t admitting to herself what she thought about the situation. So she tried to buy a bit more time.

“How are we going to get down?”

“
Gack
,” said a voice from behind her.