Silvertongue (5 page)

N
ature abhors a vacuum, so when the Walker used the black mirror to escape into the outer darkness, something from the outer darkness escaped into our world to take his place. In the same way that the old darkness in the London Stone had needed to take substance and shape in order to move in the world, and so had taken over the Duke’s horse to become the Night Mare, so the new darkness had taken the first substance it had met as its own: that substance was the ice crystals thrown up in the wake of the Queen’s chariot. This is why it became the Ice Devil.

The shape it took was that of the being who it had swapped dimensions with, which meant that the Ice Devil pacing back and forth on the top of Tower 42 was a Walker-shaped figure whose slightly stretched and twisted body was made from permanently whirling ice crystals.

It had already recognized the presence of the old darkness, a force with powers akin to its own as it overflew the London Stone, and it had felt that power staring back. It had acknowledged the kinship and had been acknowledged in turn, because of course the old darkness had itself once escaped into this world from the same outer darkness.

In the exchange between the two darknesses was also communicated the idea of the taints: the fact that the taints were useful hands and wings and claws with which to move upon this world. And it was for this reason that the Ice Devil had called them to him.

It had sent out the command “Come,” and they had. Throughout the night, flight after flight of gargoyles and phoenixes and pterodactyls and all manner of winged stone creatures had arrived and perched wherever they could find claw- or foothold at the top of the skyscraper.

Wingless taints had also heard the call and had run, trotted, or shambled through the snow to the foot of the tower. Those who were equipped to climb had begun the long ascent on the outside of the building, and those who couldn’t waited in a tormented rabble of misshapen creatures below.

The clean straight lines of the tower’s top had gone as the arriving taints had bloomed all around it like a parasitical fungus. The new and increasingly crowded aerie of monstrous creatures were also affected by the proximity of the Ice Devil, and froze up, catching the falling snow in their various hooks, folds, and hollows. Giant icicles began to form on the more pronounced extremities of this outer flange, and every now and then a shifting gargoyle would send ice and snow tumbling slowly through the night air to explode on the ground at the tower’s foot, to the consternation of the earthbound taints congregated below.

The intense icy temperature at the apex of the tower caused cold air to fall down the sides of the building in what looked like an unendingly slow cascade of fog from dry ice.

The Ice Devil had cordoned itself behind a living wall of taints encircling its fortress in the sky, and it walked the unlikely parapet of this aerial stronghold, mapping the other lines of power that it could sense crisscrossing the jumbled urban landscape beneath. There were lines of power it understood, and others that it sensed but did not know the nature of, and there was nothing as strong as the brother power it had felt in the Stone. But when it returned to the facade of the building, the darkness in the Stone was gone, almost completely.

The Ice Devil loped around the high perimeter of the tower, trying to sense where this power had gone, and then its attention was taken by a disturbance in the crowd of terrestrial taints beneath. They had parted in order to let something through, and the moment the Ice Devil saw it, it knew it for what it was. The dark horse shape of the Night Mare stood looking up, and this time there was more than a nod.

There was a connection.

The darkness smoldering out of the horse’s eyes slowly circled its way up into the night sky and met the falling ice smoke. Where the darkness met the ice, a third thing was formed, a kind of thick and unwholesome gray miasma that billowed outward from the tower in all directions as it filled the roads and alleys, enveloping the surrounding buildings in a light-leeching cloud of freezing ice murk.

In the moment of connection, the Ice Devil and the darkness realized they both came from the same place outside this world, and that they could conquer the world by joining forces. The Ice Devil also learned that the obstacle to this was the moving points of power and light it had sensed, called spits. And it agreed with the darkness that the first order of the day was to destroy them, them and the two other powers that moved with them.

The Ice Devil watched the Dark Horse turn and walk into the ice murk, toward the edge of the City.

“S
he said thank you,” said George. He sat wrapped in a blanket, looking over at Edie in the firelight. She was fast asleep. “The goddess Andraste looks after her in her dreams.”

“She is safe for now,” murmured the Queen.

“For now?” said George, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and wishing the Gunner hadn’t just shaken him awake, especially by gripping his shoulder. The pain of the stone vein twining up his arm had been rekindled and immediately reminded him of the clock ticking down to the moment when he would have to face the final duel with the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild, a duel that he felt was more death sentence than fair fight. He shivered despite himself. “It doesn’t feel like any of us are particularly safe right now. Doesn’t feel like any of us even know what’s happening. Which is pretty harsh.”

“We’re all in shtuck, right enough,” growled the Gunner. “But Her Majesty here reckons Edie’s in deeper, because of having been dead and all.”

“But she—” began George.

“The girl drowned. She was dead. We all saw it. And yet she came back. The heart stones of the dead glints, the ones the Walker killed, they brought her back. But she was—make no mistake, boy—dead!” said the Queen emphatically.

“I’m not saying she wasn’t. And my name is George, not ‘boy,’” he said. “What does ‘having been dead’ mean?”

“It means the barrier between life and death is weaker for her now that she has crossed it twice. It means death will come farther into life looking for her than it will for you, for example. She is a fearless girl, but too little fear can be as dangerous as too much.”

“So we’ll keep an eye out for her then.” George shrugged.

“It’s more than that,” said the Queen sharply. “It means she’ll be changed. It means she’ll favor the darker side of herself. She may harm herself by the choices she makes.”

“Okay,” said George slowly. “No offense, but that just sounds like stuff the school shrink says when he doesn’t know what else to say. Edie’s a fighter, not suicidal.”

“School shrink?” said the Gunner with a questioning tilt of the head. “What’s that mean?”

George scrabbled quickly for a way to explain this, trying not to think about how bizarre it was having to translate the modern world to a bronze statue in the middle of a snowstorm.

“When my dad died I didn’t cope with it that well. Not well at all, in fact. I thought it was my fault. My mum had me see the school shrink. Psychologist.”

George was surprised at how he was able to talk so matter-of-factly about the great unspoken pain in his life. He remembered the soldier with his father’s face and the firm grip he had taken on his arm across the horse’s neck. He remembered his smile and what he had said. And then he almost gasped as he realized that a locked door in his heart had opened somewhere back there, only he hadn’t had time to notice it. And now where there had been a black treacly darkness, he felt clean air and light flowing through.

He knew he’d never stop being sad about his dad. But he now knew that he wouldn’t ever have to be chained or made less than himself by that sadness.

He grinned.

“What?” said the Gunner.

“Nothing,” said George. “It’s all right.”

“No it isn’t,” said the Officer, tensing and aiming his pistol out into the night. “Gunner. We’ve got company.”

A
s George feared, the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild was slowly crisscrossing the City, looking for him. The Knight was in no hurry since a minister of fate, such as he was, knows things will come to their inevitable end at some point. So he doggedly traversed the wandering maze of streets in the Square Mile, seeking out George.

He didn’t really notice the clocks striking thirteen, nor the way all the people faded out of the City as that last chime dwindled to nothingness.

He was aware of the snow, but thought little of it.

In his mind he rode with his great ghostly company of fellow knights on either side of him, their hacked and battle-worn armor creaking and jangling as they searched the streets with him.

He thought little of the snow, because, in truth, he didn’t think much about anything. He didn’t have much of an internal life, indeed he didn’t have much internal anything. He was precisely what he had been made to be: a hollow man.

He was constructed, as was his horse, from curving sheets of metal, welded together at certain points, showing the gaps in his construction in a way his maker had intended. He was an armored man on an armored horse. The horse’s surcoat was made from interlinked wavelets of metal set with circles of blue glass, which jangled as he rode forward, seeming louder and louder as the clop of its hooves became increasingly deadened by the falling snow.

The Knight’s one thought was to find the boy and end the duel they had begun. He had no hatred for the boy. He had no rancor about this. He had a job to do and was going to do it.

It was just the way things were fated to be.

He had no fear of losing the coming fight, not because he felt himself invincible, but because the duel itself was the point, not the victory. It was a fight that had to be had, and would be had, and he would throw himself into it without holding back one ounce of his strength or his battle skill.

That’s what it took, being a minister of fate. Unswerving commitment to the “how,” the “when,” and the “who” of things, and very, very little reflection on the “why.” That’s what it took—that and being unstoppable.

He was riding across Holborn Viaduct when his horse whinnied and snorted at something in the roadway ahead. The Knight had been looking to his side and vaguely wondering where the statues of the ladies who normally adorned the bridge balusters had gone, so he didn’t initially see what had unsettled his horse.

He turned his helmet, and the two glowing eyes behind the slit burned a little brighter as he peered ahead through the thickly falling snow. All he could make out was the slow white blur of the falling flakes graying out the deeper darkness beyond. And then something detached from the wider dark and walked toward him.

It was a horse.

The Knight stopped.

“Who goes there?” he bellowed.

The Dark Horse did not speak, but the Knight heard the answer in his head.

The dark of the sun and the fear that walks at night
.

His horse whinnied and tried to walk backward. The Knight tugged the reins and dug his heels in. “Halt!” he thundered, dropping his lance point and aiming it at the approaching animal. Now it was closer, he could see that it had a shadow figure on its back, an indistinct shape made from the same darkness, a hazy rider whose edges and shapes were cloaked in a shifting cowl of black smoke.

What manner of thing are you?

The question echoed in his head, though again he couldn’t exactly hear it.

“I am fate’s champion and the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild, and no man or thing may stop me on my quest, so stand aside!”

He shook his lance to show he meant business. The Dark Horse kept right on coming through the endlessly tumbling veil of snow.

What is your quest?

“I seek the boy maker, the bearer of the light.”

The Dark Horse still walked toward him.

Why do you seek him?

“He has chosen the Hard Way. I must fight him. I must kill him, if I can. So must I kill any who come between me and my purpose. Stand aside!”

The Dark Horse didn’t falter a fraction as it bore down on him.

I do not want to stop you. . . .

“Then stand aside!” roared the Knight, jabbing his lance forward.

I want to be you
.

And with that the Dark Horse walked straight on to the sharp point of the lance, and as it did so the Knight’s horse shuddered and bucked and turned to flee, despite his attempts to stop it. The Knight was twisted around in his saddle as he kept his tenacious, unstoppable grip on the haft of his weapon, and so he saw exactly what happened as it happened, and what he saw was this:

The lance pierced the Dark Horse and turned black as the darkness leached into it. The Knight could not tug the weapon free, and his horse became frozen as a tendril of darkness dropped off the lance and poured inside the horse through one of the curving gaps in its metal plates. Very quickly, other tendrils enveloped the horse and the Knight like black creepers, and twined their way inside the gaps, filling the hollow within with the darkness.

When the Knight spoke, it was not just with his own voice anymore.

I too seek the boy. And now I am you
.

It was the voice of darkness and the Knight.

We are the Dark Knight
.

S
pout sat on top of the arch on Hyde Park Corner, watching things. Not that there was much to watch. Nothing moved anywhere. Throughout the night he’d seen occasional taints flying past, but he’d kept very still and not joined them. Now in the cold light of morning, the skies were empty. Even the snow had stopped abruptly as the dawn rose. The city remained unpopulated, and no birds sang. In fact the birds seemed to have gone as well, except for one large black bird slowly picking its way along the spiked top of the palace garden wall far below. Maybe all the other birds were still roosting. Maybe it was the cold.

Edie felt a hand gently shaking her shoulder, and woke instantly. She looked up to see the giant wings of the owl spread wide above her, and then she really woke and saw that the wings were not wings at all, but the smooth sweep of the massive stone arch over her head.

George was squatting beside her with a ham sandwich in his hand and a big smile on his face.

“Edie. It’s morning.” He held out the sandwich. “Room service.”

She sat up and pulled the duvet around her shoulders. She noted sadly that her hand no longer held her own sea-glass heart stone as in the dream, but only her mother’s small earring. Still, it was better than nothing. And the little flicker inside was not just flame, but hope—the hope that said, “She’s alive.”

She took the sandwich and munched down on it. It was just bread and butter and ham, but because she had not really eaten in a long while, it tasted like the best thing she’d ever had.

She surveyed the scene. London was covered in snow. In fact it was more than covered. It was buried. The fire was still blazing beneath the center of the arch, but out beyond the red and orange of its flames, and below a crisp blue sky, the city had gone monochrome.

It was no longer snowing, but given the size of drifts all around them, this was maybe because all the snow had run out.

Beyond the arch all was white punctuated by gray buildings and black tree trunks. It would have been magical if it hadn’t been so still. The absence of people or movement made it a sad sight, somehow. The snow deadened everything. It hung in great cornices from the tops of the buildings, and lay so thick on the ground that cars were buried up to their windows and wore thick snow-caps on their roofs. The cold made her breath plume.

The Queen crouched in front of the fire, holding a hotel teapot directly over the flames. She looked over at Edie and smiled. Edie heard a loud sneeze and a “Gah” from the other side of her.

She stopped chewing and turned to look at the source of the explosion.

“Dictionary!”

The big man twitched and ducked his head in a half-bow that would have been more effective had it not dislodged his wig and slid it dangerously askew. He stood and straightened it with a surprisingly shy smile.

“Ah. I give you joy of this fine, fresh, and unworldly morning, my dear. And I am told that you, whom I wrongly called a mannerless sprunt, have turned out to be a doughty nonpareil after all!”

“Doughty what?” said Edie, looking at George, who just shrugged, equally baffled.

A thin figure with complicated glasses, one eye obscured by a dark lens, appeared from behind the great man’s shoulder.

“Brave heroine. Or somesuch. Dictionary wordy man but means well. Introduce self. Am.”

“Clocker,” said Edie, realizing who he must be. “George told me about you. You gave him chocolate for me. It was good.”

“Obliged,” said the Clocker, beaming at her. “You asleep last time we met. Or didn’t. But inordinately happy to see good self safe. And well. Indeed am,” he said with a nervous bob that made all the instruments hanging off his coat jingle at once. Combined with his rusty green coat and the snow, they gave him the look of an amiable—if spindly—Christmas tree.

“They come out of the dark last night, and me and him nearly blew holes in them,” said the Gunner, thumbing in the direction of the Officer, who was still looking alertly out at the wintry scene. There was still nothing moving in the snow-clogged landscape. Even the solitary bird perched on the spikes topping the wall around Buckingham Palace Garden seemed frozen into stillness.

The Queen pushed past Dictionary and the Clocker and knelt in front of Edie with the smoke-blackened metal teapot and a china mug.

“Warm milk. Drink it,” she ordered, pouring from the pot.

“So what’s happening?” Edie asked George.

“We don’t know,” he said. “Clocker and Dictionary passed loads of taints heading east on their way here last night.”

“Into the City,” interrupted Dictionary. “No doubt in my mind that something is afoot, something inimical to us brewing within the Square Mile. ’Tis plain as a pikestaff that dark days attend us. All people erased from the city at a stroke, this unseasonable and unnatural snow, all portend evil. Not a word I use lightly, but I am muchwhat confirmed in my apprehension that a new devil walks the earth, and this snow is his footprint.”

A beat of silence followed as everyone absorbed his gloomy words.

“Still, we’ve been talking about what to do,” said George, rallying. “We’ve got a plan.”

In the distance Edie saw movement, but it was just the bird gliding off the wall and landing nearby.

“I just want to find my mum,” said Edie. As she said it, a horrible thought came to her, cloaked in the memory of a dream and the sandy hands pulling at her feet, and she scrabbled in her pocket. She pulled out her mother’s heart stone earring, and was relieved to see it still shone from within.

She held it up.

“She’s still alive, see? I thought she wasn’t, but she is,” she explained to Dictionary and the Clocker.

“Edie,” said George quietly. “This might be a bit bigger than that. If we can’t stop what’s happening, it won’t matter where your mother is or why you thought she was dead. . . . There won’t be any
when
for her to exist in.”

“What do you mean
when
?” snapped Edie, drinking off the last of her milk and standing in one motion. She stamped her feet to get the circulation going and reached down for the fur coat. She glared at George as she pulled it on. “Saying ‘there won’t be any
when
’ doesn’t make sense!”

“Actually,” coughed the Clocker, “makes complete sense. Precise definition of predicament. Time out of joint. Stopped dead. No when. No then. Just now. Imperative put time back in joint or all stuck here frozen in time forever.”

He grimaced apologetically.

“And how do you put time
in
joint?” she said, lip curling. “Sounds like a big job. What do you do? Find time and then just kick it and bang it on the side? Or is there a button you push? Reboot, reset, off we go again?”

“No,” said the Clocker. “Have to go to Queen of Time. She will know.”

“Fine. You go to the Queen of Time. I’m going to find my mum.”

“How?” said the Gunner, looking her straight in the eye.

Edie had no idea, and that made her all the angrier at the question. Her jaw jutted forward dangerously.

“By trying, for a start,” she snapped. “I can’t just not try, can I?”

“Edie,” said George with a glance at the Queen. “Why are you getting so angry? We’re all in this together. Last night you were . . . happy. Now you . . .”

The Officer stepped between them, decisively ending the exchange.

“If the girl got out of bed on the wrong side, so be it. Expect she’ll get over it once the food’s kicked in and the day progresses. We don’t have time for nannying. Sorry, but there it is.”

“Nannying?” said Edie incredulously. “You think I need
nannying
?”

“It’s not about what you need. It’s about what we talked about. What we all need to do. We’re burning daylight as it is.”

“It stopped snowing as it got light. Pretty uncanny. We think it’ll start again when it gets dark,” explained George.

“Another snowfall like this and we won’t be able to move at all,” continued the Gunner.

“Here’s the plan,” said George. Over his shoulder, Edie noticed the big black bird hop closer to them, right into the shadow of the arch. It cocked its head.

“The Clocker is going to find the Queen of Time. He says if there’s anything to be done, she’ll know what it is. You, me, and the Queen here, Boadicea, are going to go with the Officer and the Gunner to see the Sphinxes. . . .”

“
Sphinxes
?” Edie choked in disbelief. “Why’ve I got to go back to the Sphinxes? They don’t exactly like me, do they?”

“That’s why we need you,” the Queen said calmly. “Glints are the only things we know of that the Sphinxes are wary of. And when things are awry, or need clarifying between the spits and the taints, it’s the Sphinxes who are most likely to come up with an answer.”

“Not that their answers are the acme of clarity,” grunted Dictionary. “So having someone like you who disconcerts and possibly affrights them may enable us to put their feet to the fire in case of obscurity or obfuscation.”

“It’s not just them that aren’t clear,” said Edie darkly. She snaked the belt out of the loops in her jeans and used it to cinch the fur coat tight around her.

“If there is anything to be done, it is the Sphinxes who will know. It is likely that many other spits will come to ask them. It is a good place to marshal our forces, anyway. There is safety in numbers, and we should look to defend ourselves in case this massing of taints is aimed at attacking us,” said the Queen.

“Well—” began the Officer, but what he was about to say next never got said, because there was an explosion of activity behind them. Everyone spun, and those who had weapons drew them and aimed at a furious whirlwind of snow and feathers and a yowling bronze feline at the foot of the arch.

The black bird—who on closer inspection, of course, revealed itself to be the Raven—was a big bird and a feisty scrapper, but the cat Hodge was just as fierce and much, much heavier. After a few flaps and a lot of aggrieved squawks, the Raven found itself pinned to the snow with a metal forepaw across its neck. The cat hissed in victory, showing its teeth—in no hurry to kill the bird while there was still fun to be had from it. The Raven went limp, hoping the cat would lean lower and try to bite it, so that it could then give it a good hard peck in the eye. The Raven had died and gone to hell so many times before that death itself had no fears for it. What it never enjoyed was the journey back. It always reappeared in the world with its feathers in a shocking state of disarray. Pecking the cat wouldn’t do a bit of good to anything except the Raven’s self-respect.

“It’s the Walker’s bloody bird,” said the Gunner. “Either the cat kills it or I do. . . .”

He cocked the pistol in his hand.

“NO!”

The vehemence of the voice surprised everyone. Including Edie, whose voice it was.

“No. Don’t kill it.”

The cat hissed again and raised its free paw to swat the bird in the head. Cats don’t like being told what to do.

They also aren’t particularly in favor of ferocious girls diving across the snow, grabbing their tails, and flinging them into a snowdrift.

Which is exactly what Edie did.

The cat rolled and turned back with its claws out, ready for bloody revenge.

“Hodge!” bellowed Dictionary. “No!”

Hodge stopped and looked at the girl and the Raven.

The Raven lay on its back and looked at the girl. Part of its natural instinct was to flip over and fly away to safety. But the Raven had seen everything, and forgotten none of it. And one of the things about remembering the past is that it can all get a bit stale. What it was particularly interested in was the opposite of the past, the bits it didn’t yet know about or remember.

Its job was the past.

But its hobby was the future.

What it enjoyed was the simple pleasure of seeing what happens next.

So it ignored the instinct to fly, and waited to see what the glint would do.

What she did was reach forward and move the feathers at its neck.

And now the Raven was so interested it didn’t move a pinfeather.

“It’s still alive,” said Edie, “but there’s blood.”

She suddenly pulled her hand back in surprise.

“It’s not blood. It’s a thread. . . .” She leaned back in and moved the oil-black feathers apart. The Raven didn’t dare blink.

“It’s a red thread.”

“Don’t touch it!” said the Queen and both of her daughters at the same time.

“It’s part of the old magic: ‘Red thread to bind; red thread to catch dreams; red thread to make the wearer not what she seems.’ It must be part of the binding spell the Walker put on the bird,” the Queen continued. “Meddling with the old magic if you don’t know what you’re doing is a very, very . . .”

Edie leaned down and neatly bit through the red thread.

“. . . very bad idea,” finished the Queen.