Silvertongue (6 page)

I
t wasn’t daylight everywhere in London. Inside the ice murk, the gray freezing miasma that slowly billowed out from the Ice Devil’s tower, it was still dark. Anyone flying above the city would have seen that at the center of the whiteness covering everything, the ice murk was a starkly contrasting cloud of near-black fog. It bloomed slowly and inexorably, now a massive black growth six hundred feet high and nearly a mile across that swallowed buildings and exuded into the intervening streets, filling them with its impenetrable gloom.

Somewhere in the middle of this, the Old Soldier was trying to light his pipe. The Young Soldier stood behind him, barely able to see his companion at arm’s distance. The fog was so thick that even the flare of the match as the Old Soldier struck it only showed as a brief frosted globe of hazy light against the side of his face, before sputtering out.

“It’s a ruddy pea-souper and that’s a fact,” mumbled the Young Soldier.

“Pea-soupers weren’t this cold. And they weren’t this thick,” replied the Old Soldier. He held out his arm. He could barely make out the pipe stem in his hand.

“You don’t know where we are, do you?” said the Young Soldier.

“Nah. We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,
baa baa baa
. . .” said the Old Soldier. “Little black sheep who’ve gone astray.”

He unlooped his belt and fumbled for the Young Soldier’s hand.

“Hold this end, don’t let go, at least that way we’ll both stay lost in the same place and won’t get split up.” And he walked forward slowly, feeling along the side of the building like a blind man. The Young Soldier followed, clinging on to his tether. It was painfully slow going.

“He was all right, Hooky was,” he said after a bit.

The unseen figure on the end of the belt ahead of him just grunted.

“I never seen nothing like that,” continued the Young Soldier. “It done my nut in, I don’t mind telling you.”

“You was made with your nut done in, youngster,” growled the other. “Now keep your trap—hello.”

The youngster stopped. The belt went tight between them.

“What?” he said nervously. “Oh blimey . . .” He dropped the belt and quickly unshouldered his gun.

“Why’d you do that?” said the Old Soldier’s voice. “You dropped the belt. I said hold on, didn’t I?”

“I thought there was trouble,” admitted the Young Soldier. “I’m sorry.”

He reached ahead with his hand, swiping it back and forth, trying to find the Old Soldier in the murk. Now the panic started to rise.

“Oh bloody hell,” he whined. “I’ve gone and done it this time, haven’t I?”

The Old Soldier stood watching the Young Soldier’s hand with a grin of enjoyment as he lit his pipe. He was not in the murk. He was two paces ahead of the Young Soldier and standing knee-deep in the snow under a bright blue sky, a wide swath of clear air that cut through the ice murk like a firebreak in a forestry plantation. The murk rose up on either side, so that the Old Soldier was in a canyon between two sheer walls of dark fog, walls that were so flat and smooth that it seemed as if the roiling gloom within was being held back by giant sheets of glass.

It was out of one of these flat walls that the Young Soldier’s hand was waving.

“Just stay where you are,” said the Old Soldier. He calmly stuck his pipe in his mouth and took the time to strike a match and get it going properly this time. He took several deep happy puffs.

“You still there?” he said to the shaking hand sticking out of the fog wall in front of him.

“Yes,” came the quavering reply.

“Right,” said the Old Soldier, grabbing the cuff of the Young Soldier’s jacket.

“Oh, thank God,” said the relieved voice from inside the murk.

And then the Old Soldier yanked him forward, and the Young Soldier’s face and then his whole body stepped out of the wall of murk and into the clean air.

He stared around him, blinking. “Hang on. You been standing in the clear all that time? While I was in there?” he asked querulously.

“Had to get my pipe going,” explained the Old Soldier, smiling innocently. “Now come on. Looks like St. Paul’s down there. . . .”

“Right,” said his companion. They walked toward the south elevation of the great cathedral, partially emerging from the fog wall in which it was embedded.

“Blimey,” said the Old Soldier. “We ain’t near where I thought we was. That fog come down and we got turned around good.”

“Well, I’m glad we’re out of it,” said the young one. “As long as we don’t meet that blooming horse.”

The soldier in front froze and raised a hand. They both stopped and crouched, weapons ready.

“What?” whispered the young one.

“Cover me,” said the Old Soldier without looking around. He loped forward through the snow and stopped in front of the cathedral, or at least the corner of it that hadn’t been eaten by the murk. He looked down at something lying in a jumble at his feet. He shook his head, turned to the Young Soldier, put a finger to his lips, and beckoned him forward.

As the Young Soldier hurried through the snow toward him, he kept alert, gun shouldered, panning around for dangers that might be approaching from any direction.

He was at a point where the clear avenue in the middle of the murk intersected with four other streets. He was at the center of a star that radiated in ten separate different directions. He checked each one in turn.

The Young Soldier gagged when he saw what he was standing guard over.

“I know,” said the Old Soldier. “They went hard.”

Fragments of bronze bodies lay around them. Something had ripped apart the Blitz memorial that stood in front of the cathedral. Heads in tin helmets lay apart from torsos that were missing arms and legs. The other limbs were spread about in the snow.

“They was just firemen,” said the Young Soldier. “They wasn’t soldiers.”

“They was spits. Reckon that’s all that matters now,” said the Old Soldier, gathering up body parts.

“What you doing?” said his companion.

“Put ’em back on their plinth. For turn o’day,” said the Old Soldier. “You ain’t got the sense you was made with.”

“Right,” said the other, reaching for a sightless head. And then he went very still, his eyes widening at something over the Old Soldier’s shoulder.

The Old Soldier caught the look and froze. “What?” he mouthed.

The Young Soldier just pointed with his chin. The Old Soldier turned in time to see a huge bronze lion’s body, about the size of a large elephant, as it followed its head into the sheer wall of the murk. Neither spoke until the tip of the lazily twitching tail had been swallowed up.

“What was that?” breathed the Young Soldier.

“Dunno,” said the Old Soldier. “But if it’s as happy to walk in the murk as in the light, it’s up to no good.”

E
die looked down at the red thread between her fingers. It didn’t seem very magic. It was just thread.

The Raven jerked and flapped to its feet and then just stood in front of her, pecking and preening its ruffled feathers back into some kind of order, keeping its eyes on Hodge, who was very still, watching from the edge of the drift into which Edie had flung him.

“Why did you do that, child?” asked the Queen.

Edie didn’t know why she’d done it, not in a way she could explain. Her mind was still half jumbled with sleep, a tangle of too much exhaustion and too many “maybe”s again: maybe she’d done it because she had to, maybe because it felt like the thing to do. Maybe she knew what it was like to be imprisoned—although maybe she wasn’t kind, maybe she was just clever. Or maybe she’d done it because she knew the moment she felt it that the Walker had placed the thread there, and she instinctively wanted to undo everything he’d ever done. Then again, maybe she just liked birds.

“A bird saved me,” she said.

“What bird?” said George.

“In my dream,” she said, beginning to get irritated. “Look, I don’t know, an owl saved me in my dream, and I didn’t think about it much; it just seemed like the thing to do.”

“An owl?” said the Queen. “In your dream? An owl watched over you?”

Edie looked at her in surprise. “Yeah. A gray owl. . . .”

“Andraste,” said one of her daughters, coming closer.

“Or Arianhrod,” said the other.

“Who?”

“Different names for the same White Lady. The moon goddess,” explained the Queen. “You see, you are wrong. You’re not on your own. No one ever is.”

“Goddess?” snorted Edie. “There’s no such thing as goddesses. It was an owl. In a dream. That’s all.”

“A goddess comes to you in a dream and you think it’s nothing?” hissed the Queen in disbelief.

“I don’t believe in goddesses. Or dreams. Or magic,” Edie said flatly. “I believe in me and what I can see and what I can do.”

“What about your power? What about your glinting?”

“Not magic, is it? It’s just what I do. I can feel the past in stones like dogs can hear high-pitched noises humans can’t. It’s not magic. It’s just a thing.”

Edie balled the red thread and stuffed it into her pocket.

“You don’t make sense, Edie,” said George. “After all that’s happened to us, you can’t—”

“Yes I can,” she said. “I can do what—”

And at that point Hodge leaped for the Raven, and the Raven lofted into the air and came to rest on Edie’s shoulder, so neatly that the cat got nothing but a face full of snow and embarrassment.

Cats hate looking stupid more than anything else in the world, so Hodge twisted in a fury and prepared to spring up at the Raven again.

“No!” shouted Edie.

Hodge stopped dead. He looked at the girl. He looked at the Raven. And then he slowly walked away, as if suddenly bored by the whole affair.

“Takes one catamount to know another,” said Dictionary, stooping to pick the cat up and stroke some dignity back into the affronted animal.

The wind, which had been entirely absent until now, picked up a light swirl of snow and blew it across the empty space between the arch and the war memorials.

“You don’t believe in goddesses?” repeated the Queen in a voice no warmer than the ice crystals dancing across the top of the snow.

“No.”

“Or gods?” asked one of the daughters.

“No,” said Edie. “Sorry. I believe in me. And what I can see, and what I can touch.”

She cinched the belt tighter around her fur coat, as if that finished the discussion.

“Fine,” said the Queen, standing. “You see that Raven on your shoulder?”

“Er, yuh . . .” grunted Edie, as if it were the stupidest question in the world.

“There was another god, a one-eyed god, a hanged god. He was called Odin, and he came to this island with the Vikings. He had two birds. One was Thought, one was Memory.”

“And?”

“They were ravens.”

“So?” said Edie, suddenly not liking where this was going.

“So I suppose you don’t believe in that god either?” said the Queen.

“No.”

“Interesting.” The Queen smiled. “But complicated. Because you’ve got his raven on your shoulder.”

“It’s the Walker’s bird,” said George, looking at the Gunner, who shrugged.

“It is Memory, the raven whose name is also Munin. The Walker was a mage before he was cursed by the Stone. He enslaved the bird with a spell, the spell that appears to have been broken when your friend broke the red thread and made the bird her own,” explained the Queen.

“It’s not my bird, it’s free to go,” declared Edie. “Seriously . . .”

She shrugged her shoulder as if to dislodge the bird. The Raven rode the rise and fall without turning a feather or going anywhere.

“It has seen everything and forgotten nothing. It certainly has seen enough to know that a favor left unthanked and not repaid will always come back to haunt you. It knows how the world balances accounts. I think Munin is with you until you are done with it, child, like it or not,” said the Queen.

“I don’t mind it. I just don’t like animals and birds tied up or caged. Or people,” muttered Edie, thinking of the woman with the sewn eyelids in the House of the Lost.

The wind buffeted again, whirling the powder off the top of the surrounding snow and dancing it past them. George looked across at Edie as the gust whipped her long dark hair into a rippling flag behind her. Silhouetted against the snow and lit by the wind-kindled blaze, wearing the black fur coat with the Raven perched on her shoulder, she didn’t look modern at all. She looked just for an instant like something out of time.

Edie, George thought, may not have believed in the old myths, but she suddenly looked like she’d just stepped straight out of one.

The Queen was also looking at her appraisingly. The sternness and outrage in her face was so strong that George wasn’t sure whether she was going to shout or hit her.

She took a deep breath and did neither.

She went down on one knee so that she was eye to eye with Edie, and gripped her chin firmly. Edie tried to escape the implacable bronze grip, but couldn’t.

The Queen spoke very calmly. It was clearly a great effort not to lose her temper.

“The goddess that you don’t believe in, and the magic you are so sure doesn’t exist, had power on this island so long ago that the island itself went by another name. It was Albion, the white land, the white of the moon. The goddess had the power of the moon, and she took the shape of an owl, the moon bird; owls and certain other creatures, like the hare, were sacred to her and the—”

As soon as the Queen mentioned the hare, Edie knew she had to stop the conversation.

“Look,” she interrupted. “It’s all rubbish to me. Sorry. Means a lot to you, I can see that, but that’s not my world, is it?”

In her mind’s eye she was unable to stop the replay of the dream, the bit where the hare watched her from the ridgeline on top of the pebble slope.

“I just want to find my mum. It’s not about gods or old England or Albion, see? It’s about me thinking she was dead, and now having a chance to find her.”

The Queen opened her mouth to speak. Edie went on quickly, because she was only telling half the truth.

“You’d do the same if you were me. And if they were me, so would your daughters. They’d rip the world apart looking for you. Wouldn’t they?”

The Queen was, as Edie had hoped, temporarily unable to speak or deny the truth of what she was saying.

The Officer filled the silence. “We need to get south to the Sphinxes. Time may have stopped, but night will still fall soon enough.”

“And I go north. To see Queen of Time. See what we can do,” interjected the Clocker. “Best of luck to all.”

He turned and strode off into the snow, his long thin legs crowstepping through the drifts. There was something brave and sad about the sight of him setting off into the whiteness on his own, thought George. Dictionary must have thought so too, because he harrumphed and called out after him.

“Clocker. Dear fellow. I would be inordinately gratified if you would do me the great unmerited honor of allowing me to accompany you. I should admire to make acquaintance of the lady sovereign of things temporal.”

Dictionary turned to the others and lowered his voice.

“Look at him. No meat to his bones; the icy blast must blow right through him. I must admit that I have taken a liking to the poor jingling spindle-shanks. I should feel a great indolent booby were I to let him venture off alone into this icy vastness. So I wish joy and success of the day to you, my friends. “He bowed jerkily then beckoned the cat. “Come, Hodge. . . .”

And with that the broad figure bulled his way through the snow toward his lanky companion, the cat leaping through the drifts at his side.

“Jack Spratt and his wife,” said the Gunner, looking at the mismatched pair walking away from them. “Come on. I’ve already seen other spits heading south through St. James’s Park over there. We ain’t the only ones’ll have thought about consulting the Sphinxes. Don’t want to miss the party.”

They turned their backs on the homey fire, and walked across to the park, led by the Gunner. The Queen’s daughters led the horses and chariot, which was too low to the ground to be able to surmount the snow where it had drifted deeper.

George walked beside Edie, but every time he turned to say something, all he got was the side of her face, jaw jutting forward, and an appraising look from the deep black eyes of the bird riding her shoulder.

He felt a hand on his arm and turned to find the Queen walking beside him. She pulled him back a couple of paces, out of earshot, and spoke low.

“The glint may not wish to hear it from me, boy, but the truth of things is this: there is something in you, one or both of you, something that has scraped through to the forgotten layers of old England, before it was England even, when it was Albion. Whatever is happening, whatever has followed you here in your quest, is connected with that wilder world, the world of the ancient magic. It goes deeper than I can fathom, but in the depths are black things that are calling to that girl. And if she listens to them and forgets the light, she is lost. And I would have no more girls lost because I failed to speak out and warn them.”

George looked over at Edie. Now even the Raven was avoiding his eyes. Not a good sign.

“We are in a place I have never been, boy. And though I know nothing of it, I do know it will be darker before it gets better.”

“If it gets better,” said Edie, without turning. It was then they heard the screaming.