Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  Text copyright © 2007 by Charlie Fletcher

  First published in the U.K. by Hodder Children’s Books

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion Books for Children, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion Books for Children, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First U.S. Edition, 2008

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file.

  ISBN 978-1-4231-0177-2

  Reinforced binding

  Visit www.hyperionbooksforchildren.com

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Darkness Falls

  Sticks And Stones

  Black Bird

  Smiler With A Knife

  Death Of Glints

  The Flawed Hand

  The Icarus

  Airborne

  Red Queen

  Edie Alone

  Hung At The Tate

  The Killing Bull

  The Tallyman

  Gunner In The Dark

  Paternoster

  Careless Talk Costs Lives

  Ariel Rising

  The Icarus Alone

  Digging In

  Friar's Deal

  The Last Knight

  Black News

  A Wilderness Of Mirrors

  The Stroke Dolorous

  Tyburn's Last Victim

  Black Mirror

  Hunter's Moon

  Eigengang

  Queen Takes Knight

  Deathslide

  Three Challenges And A Betrayal

  Siege In The Sky

  Escape To Silence

  The Euston Mob

  The House Of The Lost

  Road Runner

  The Makers And The Stone

  Substitute

  Happy Ending

  Chimes At Midnight

  The Gunner's Last Laugh

  The Broken Lace

  Gunner's End

  Unquiet Death At Ghastly Grim

  How To Fall Out Of A River

  In The Walker's Grasp

  The Challenge

  Frost Fair

  Last Ditch

  Ironhand

  Under The Ice

  Heart Stone

  Ice Devil

  Crackstone

  Last Stop Is Nowhere

  Acknowledgments

  With all my love and thanks to Domenica, without whom none of this would be possible or nearly as much fun

  Wounds are for the desperate, blows are for the strong.

  Balm and oil for weary hearts all cut and bruised with wrong.

  I forgive thy treason—I redeem thy fall—

  For Iron—Cold Iron—must be master of men all!

  “Cold Iron”

  —Rudyard Kipling

  THE STORY SO FAR . . .

  On a school trip, George breaks a fragment from a carving of a dragon on the front of the Natural History Museum. This wakes an ancient force imprisoned in the Stone—a rough block hidden deep in the City of London. As an immediate result, a vengeful carving of a pterodactyl peels off the side of the building and begins chasing him. Just when all seems lost, the Gunner, a statue of a World War I soldier, steps off a war memorial and saves him.

  So begins George’s ordeal, trapped in a layer of London, an unLondon in which the mutually hostile tribes of statues in the city, the human-based spits and the inhuman taints, walk and talk and live in an uneasy truce, a truce that George’s action has thrown into jeopardy.

  The thing that makes his ordeal all the harder to endure is that no one else in London can see what is happening to him. Except Edie Laemmel. Edie’s a glint. Glints are women or girls who have a gift that enables them to touch stone and metal and experience past events that have imprinted themselves in them. But nobody’s ever explained Edie’s gift to her, so she just sees it as a curse and thinks she’s crazy. She’s also on the run.

  George, Edie, and the Gunner set off on a journey to make amends; but unknown to them, the Stone has alerted the Walker, one of its servants, who stalks them through the streets with the help of his minion, the Raven.

  On this journey, George discovers that he has special powers, which make him a target for the enraged taints. One of the dragon statues that guards the City of London slashes a scar onto George’s hand. Another statue, the smiling but sinister Black Friar, tells him it is a maker’s mark, which identifies George as a maker, someone with a special gift for sculpting things from stone or metal. The Friar also tells them to find the Stone Heart and put the broken dragon carving back, to make amends for the damage George has done. Helped by benign spits and threatened by violent taints, George, Edie, and the Gunner eventually find themselves at the Stone Heart of London, the London Stone.

  But once there, the Gunner sacrifices himself to try to save Edie, and ultimately falls into the clutches of the Walker. It is left to George to use his newfound gifts as a maker to rescue him.

  And now the story continues. . . .

  CHAPTER ONE

  Darkness Falls

  The Walker and the Gunner fell into the dark, pitched into a deep abyssal blackness beyond the memory of light. But though there was no possibility of seeing anything, the Gunner sensed they were plummeting through a succession of layers, as black flashed black in an unpleasant negative strobing, which he felt rather than saw.

  And then the horrible movement through the void stopped abruptly as they hit something solid.

  The Gunner’s knees crunched down into wet gravel, and his free hand instinctively palmed out to halt his fall, sending a jarring shock up his arm as it smacked into an unseen stone wall in front of him. He hung there, head low, angled between the wall and the ground, panting for breath. He felt wrong, more wrong than he’d ever felt, more wrong than he’d known it was possible to feel. He felt it in ways he couldn’t begin to list or explain; it was as if an invisible hand had reached into his core and wrenched everything off-true and left it hanging there, twisted and broken.

  He heard the birl of gravel beside him as the Walker moved his feet. Using the last of his strength, he swiped a hand into the darkness, but his fingers only caught air and blackness.

  He opened his mouth in an “oof” of pain at the effort, instantly clenching it shut and cutting off the giveaway sound. Whatever was happening to him, he was damned if he was going to give the Walker the pleasure of knowing how much it hurt.

  And then the lights came on.

  The first thing he saw was the upturned bowl of his tin helmet lying on the stones in front of his thick hobnailed army boots. Then he saw the protective legging cinched on to his right calf with three buckled straps like the residue of an ancient piece of armor. On a real soldier the legging would have been leather; but in this case, since he was, of course, a statue, it was made from bronze, like the rest of him. His left calf was unarmored, tightly wound with bandagelike puttees instead. Above that he saw his hands, strong blunt fingers splayed on the knees of his army britches, as he took a breath.

  He scooped up the helmet, smoothed the front of his uniform tunic, and adjusted the cape around his shoulders. It wasn’t a real cape. It was a canvas groundsheet from a one-man tent, to keep the weather off, tied in place with a piece of string through two grommet holes. He put on the helmet and stood up straight, every inch the battle-worn World War I veteran that he’d been sculpted to be.

  And then his mouth, despite his best intentions, fell open again as his jaw dr
opped in shock.

  They were in a large and ancient underground water tank. His feet stood on a small shelf of pea gravel that sloped against one wall. This tiny beach took a bite out of a rough square of black water, about ten yards on each side. The irregular blocks of stone lining the walls of the tank were greasily mottled with age and tumored with sickly blooms of damp fungus, which hung around them at what looked like a high-water mark. Drips from the stone roof of the chamber plopped concentric circles into the dark surface below.

  But it wasn’t the claustrophobic dimensions of this doorless chamber, with its dark water floor and half-moon gravel beach that made the Gunner gasp in surprise.

  It was the lights.

  Each wall had an outline of light blazing from it, a shape about the height of a man and perhaps a third as wide. The shapes were made from irregularly placed pieces of broken glass, and all had the same distinctive outline of a squat turret, the kind of thing a child might draw when trying to represent a castle. The light blasting forth from each of the four tower shapes intersected at the center of the water tank, where a silvered disk about the size of a plate spun lazily on the end of a piece of chain, reflecting the light randomly around the room.

  “What is this?”

  The question croaked from the Gunner’s throat before he could stop it. He heard a sniff of contempt and focused on the gaunt figure, up to its knees in the water at the edge of the gravel bar. The Walker wore a long green tweed overcoat with a hooded sweatshirt underneath. He swept the hood back and ran his fingers through long rat-tailed hair brindled with gray. He had a skullcap on the back of his head, and a jutting goatee framing a mouth twisted into a permanent half-open sneer. His hands held two small circular mirrors, which he clipped together and stowed in his coat pocket. He bent and lifted a long dagger from the edge of the beach. He unpeeled a thin sour smile as he gestured around the water tank with the gleaming blade.

  “This is a dream of four castles,” he replied, indicating the turret shapes on the walls around them. “It is a vision that came to me in a dream, long ago, when I was a free man. It is a vision that I have made real. It is nothing that you could begin to understand.”

  He shifted the blade in his hand and sliced angled reflections of light around the room, revealing more edges of the subterranean tank.

  “It was a void, and darkness was all it contained until I came across it. Now it is a place of power. My power.”

  The Gunner felt squeezed by the great pressure of earth above him. He felt as lost as if he had been spirited into the bowels of the earth and pinned beneath a mountain. But he was damned if he was going to let the Walker enjoy his discomfort.

  “Where are we? Where is this?”

  The Walker spun slowly in a full circle, sending the reflected beams of light around the dank edges of the chamber.

  “We are under London. A city you will only ever see again in your memories.”

  The Gunner would have swung a fist at the Walker, but the wrongness inside him seemed to have sapped his normal strength and had left him needing all his energy just to stay on his feet. And besides, he had to know what was going on. He was nowhere he’d ever been, feeling like nothing he’d ever felt, and he could always try to flatten the Walker later, when he came within easier reach. Although, he had a suspicion that escaping or even surviving whatever was happening to him was going to require more than swinging fists.

  “Talk plainer.”

  “This is where you stay. Forever, perhaps. Enjoy the light. When I leave, it goes too.”

  The Walker looked at the Gunner with something like pleasure. “You feel it, don’t you; inside, the emptiness, the rising horror, the loss of strength, the sense that you’re not master of yourself?”

  The Gunner made himself stand straighter. “Don’t you worry about me, chum. I’m right as a trivet.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid you’re not. You broke an oath sworn to me by the maker. You have to do what I say.”

  “Not happening,” the Gunner snorted tersely.

  “Oh, but it is. You’re a proud man. I won’t offend you by treating you like a lackey. After all, all I require of you is that you die. And all I have to do to effect that happy outcome is to forbid you to dig your way up out of here. And I do. I order you not to try to dig up toward the light and the clean air. Simple, isn’t it? One instruction and you’re doomed. Midnight will come, your plinth will be empty, whatever animates you will die, and you will be just so much scrap for the smelter.”

  The Walker’s eyes burned bright with banked-up malice.

  “Do you still feel master of yourself?”

  The Gunner tried to lift his hands, determined to wrench one of the ceiling slabs down into the water to show the Walker he was wrong. But his arms wouldn’t move. He shook his head in frustration. “I think I’m gonna grab you and shove your mirrors where the monkey put his nuts, that’s what I think.”

  He lurched toward the Walker, but he was much too slow, and the Walker danced out of his reach. The Gunner stumbled against the wall, horrified by how weak he’d become. As he reached back to stop himself from falling, he dislodged one of the bright pieces of glass.

  It fell at his feet. He stared at it, at the opaque surface, the rounded, sea-tumbled edges. And as he stared, his memory fired on reflex, and he saw a similar piece of tumbled glass in Edie’s hand. Then it fired again, and he remembered the first time he’d seen her smile, like sunlight breaking cleanly across her face. He relived the surprise he’d felt when he’d realized that all it had taken to kindle that blaze was to smile at her and call her by her real name; and he remembered strongly how that realization had made him feel suddenly protective of this strange and outwardly flinty girl. It was that surge of paternal protectiveness that collided with the dreadful realization spreading slowly across his mind like a dark stain that made something shift uncomfortably inside him.

  He bent and picked the sea-glass up between thumb and forefinger.

  “These are heart stones.”

  He heard a dry humorless chuckle and looked up into the sour slash of the Walker’s smile.

  Then he heard the horror in his own voice as the question gritted out of his mouth, unbidden.

  “What have you done, Walker?”

  The gaunt figure above him just kept smiling, like a wolf airing its teeth.

  “The glints, Walker. What the hell have you been doing to them?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sticks and Stones

  Edie and George hurried away from Cannon Street, happy to leave the London Stone behind them. They were both shocked and footsore, and because both kept their eyes on the hard road in front of them, neither noticed the leaden cloudscape darkening the sky above, or indeed anything that was happening overhead.

  Which was a shame. Because what was above was definitely noticing them.

  The stone gargoyle on the roof didn’t have to look up to see the storm clouds. It felt the rain even before it started to fall as a kind of itchy premonition right in the middle of its back, high between the spiked shoulder blades, in a place it couldn’t have scratched even if it had had normal arms instead of the talon and wing arrangement its sculptor had given it. Feeling rain coming was part of what it was. When rain came, it normally had a job to do, spouting water on the roof of St. Pancras Station, a mile or so to the north. This was not that roof. On this roof it was hiding and watching.

  It was hiding because it was in the grip of a new and dangerous sensation: it was feeling curiosity. It bared its savagely curved fangs and stretched its head over the gutter to scan the street beneath. For the first time in its existence, it knew that it had something more important to do than respond to the raindrops now inbound at twenty miles per hour from the clouds above.

  The gargoyle was far more interested in the boy and girl walking along on the pavement below. And as they moved west along the street, it stalked the parapet, keeping down, batlike wings folded behind it, stony tendons quiverin
g in anticipation—ready to pounce.

  At first glance, George and Edie looked like any tired kids after a day at school, heading back to secure, reasonably normal homes where hot teas waited and a long day would come to a happy ending.

  But at a second, closer look, it was clear that these children belonged to quite a different story.

  Look deeper and you could see the marks of that story all over them.

  George seemed about thirteen, shoulders starting to fill out, bones beginning to lengthen into early maturity, muscles stretching to keep up with the growth spurt. His hair was unkempt and just long enough for him to have to keep sweeping it untidily behind his ears. His school blazer was torn at the shoulder and all scuffed up, as if he’d been rolling on a very dirty floor. His knee flashed white through a tear in his dark trousers as he walked, and a smudge of dirt smeared along the upper curve of his left cheekbone. The disheveled look was, however, at odds with the steady and determined set to his eyes.

  The look in Edie’s eyes was different. She was walking with her head bent down, a long swath of dark hair keeping them in shadow. But in the glimpses of them that George was occasionally getting, he could see that they were troubled, and he could also see that whatever her eyes were seeing wasn’t only what was actually in front of her. Her normally pale skin was even whiter, as if all the blood had drained from it, stretched taut with exhaustion. She tripped on a curb, and only his hand whipping out to catch her stopped her from hitting the ground.

  “Edie!” he said, “Watch where you’re going!”

  He saw himself swimming into focus in her eyes as she returned from wherever she had been.

  “You ever think you’re cursed, George?” she asked abruptly.

  George took a second to absorb what she was saying, and why. “You think you’re cursed?”

  She shook her head in irritation, as if he weren’t keeping up. “Not like by a witch or something, not like turned into a frog, but you know, like you done something bad once, so bad that bad stuff happens to you because of it?”