Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  He nodded slowly and then shook his head. She was right but she was wrong, too. She had to be wrong, otherwise they really didn’t have a place to start.

  “I think he might be dodgy, but I don’t think he’s evil. Not like the Walker. I think he’s just out for himself a bit more than the Gunner or Dictionary, you know? I think he’d be open for a deal.”

  “A deal? What have we got to deal?”

  He pulled out the broken dragon’s head and looked at it. He realized that though he’d been sure it was a dragon’s head, when he looked closer it was beakier. More like a gryphon kind of dragon—

  “This. I didn’t give it to him because I wanted to make amends by putting it on the Stone; but I decided not to, didn’t I? So maybe we can give it to him in exchange for help. Yeah?”

  In the absence of a plan, and in the presence of fear and danger, sometimes all one needs to feel better is forward movement. Edie couldn’t argue with George’s thinking. So she nodded.

  “The Black Friar it is.”

  He saw she was still shivering. He took off his jacket and handed it to her. “Go on. I’m warm enough.”

  “I’m okay.” She tried to push it back toward him.

  “Edie. You’re shaking. Put the coat on and let’s get moving. We’re not going to save the Gunner just sitting here shivering.”

  After a long beat, she gave in and draped the coat over her shoulders.

  And then she stopped and pointed.

  “George. Your hand.”

  “It’s fine.”

  His eyes followed her look. He suddenly felt sick.

  “Okay,” he swallowed. “It’s not.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Death of Glints

  Something was very, very wrong. The Gunner could feel it like a kind of cold heat filling the whole underground space.

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

  His voice echoed around the watery chamber. In the beat of silence that followed, the only sound was gravel crunching under the Walker’s feet as he paced the half circumference of the small beach. His tufted beard split lopsidedly to reveal a cruel smirk.

  “Oh, I have done much; more than you could begin to understand. And when I have the boy in my power, I shall do more still.”

  “I’m not talking about the boy,” grunted the Gunner, putting the thought of George away for later. Right now the blazing pieces of glass on the walls were what had his attention.

  “The glints. The wise women, the sharp girls. You’ve been hunting them. All these centuries. The reason we all thought they were dying out as a breed; it wasn’t dying out, it was you. Picking them off. It was you. . . .”

  The enormity of it robbed him of words for a moment. It was as if a great puzzle had been revealed to be the simplest of things, as if a fool should have seen it. The horror of it made his voice raw.

  “Wasn’t it? How else could you get these heart stones?”

  The Gunner held up the glass in his hand like an accusation. The threadbare shoulders of the Walker’s coat rose and fell in an irritable shrug.

  “Heart stones? Pah! Baubles. When a man is doomed to walk the world beyond the natural span of his days, he needs a . . . hobby. Mine has been to collect a few dainties and eye-brighteners that give me pleasure.”

  It was the pause as the Walker chose the word to describe his actions that confirmed the Gunner’s fears and triggered an explosion of outrage.

  “You been killing them and stealing their warning stones for a bloody hobby!”

  The Walker waved a bored hand at him. “You exaggerate. I don’t kill them. Killing them is superfluous. I may kill some, but it’s far from a habit and entirely not the point. After all, without their heart stones they’re lost and spinning in the wind. Their minds unspool and they’re fit for little but chattering and mowing like senseless apes, squatting in their own filth and dribbling into a cup.”

  The Gunner shook his head. “Why, Walker? Why’ve you been doing this? Why would the Stone want it?”

  The Walker almost spat his reply. “The Stone? The Stone wants none of it. This is my doing. The Stone has me cursed and in thrall to it, so I must do all its bidding; but not all I do is at its beck and call. I was a great man, centuries before you were anything—when you were just ore at the bottom of a mine that hadn’t even yet been dug—and I will be a man of power again!”

  Spittle flecked his beard as his voice rose, and the light blazing out from the sea-glass mosaics reflected wildly from his eyes.

  The Gunner overrode the rising wave of despair in his gut and twisted his face into a dismissive grin.

  “Man of power, my Aunt Fanny. I seen blokes with gibbering shell shock make more sense than you. . . . Only reason you’re still around is you got on the wrong side of the Stone, and now you’re one of its servants.”

  The Walker’s eyes blazed angrily at him. “And what are you, I pray? A lump of bronze in man shape who has broken his word and is himself now doomed to die alone and in the dark? These warning glasses light up when I’m here because that’s what they do when a Stone Servant or a taint is near. When I’m gone”—he waved his hand like a magician—“abracadabra, out go the lights.”

  “Wait,” said the Gunner, appalled at the desperation he heard cracking through his words. “Those kids . . . don’t . . .”

  “Oh, the children? The boy who thwarted me? Don’t worry about the boy. I shall turn him to my will.”

  “I doubt it. You saw how he chose the Hard Way. He’s got grit, more grit than I gave him credit for.”

  The Walker snorted in irritation. “He’s willful, Gunner, that’s all. He’s shot through with the stupid impetuosity of youth.”

  “It’s grit,” insisted the Gunner. “He may not have known exactly what ’e was signing up for, but ’e knew it’d be rough. And he did it for the girl. He wouldn’t leave her in the lurch, and good on him I say.”

  Dark humor danced in the Walker’s eyes. “Yes, good on him, as you say. Good on him for protecting the girl, good on him for caring, good on him most of all for showing me what he cares about, because if you find out what a man cares about, then you can take it and threaten it, and then you have a lever. And with a lever and the right place to put it, you can move the world. And I shall move the world. I shall change everything.”

  “Leave the kids be, Walker. Don’t mess with them.”

  “Sorry. Can’t oblige. I have a job for the boy if he is the maker he seems. Once, many years ago, I had two black stone mirrors, darker than the blackness you will be left to die in when I leave.”

  He reached into his pocket, unsnapped two small circular silver mirrors from each other, and held one in each hand.

  “Compared to the stone mirrors, these little pieces of glass in my hand are like a baby’s toy. A thief and a cheat took one of my black mirrors from me, afraid of the power they would give when used together. One stone mirror made of the right stone is a thing of some power, but two together . . . ?” His eyes blazed with an intensity that matched the heart stones on the walls. “. . . Two together can open portals, portals into worlds where there are vast powers that make even the might of the Stone pale into insignificance. And it is that power I shall harness and then free myself. The boy will make it for me, the girl will choose the stone he should shape—”

  “No, Walker, the boy and the glint are j—”

  The Walker cut across him with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The boy, the unmade maker and the plucky little glint? The poor dears. Poor, poor dears . . . Strange word ‘dear.’ Say it one way it’s something you love, spell it another way and it conjures up stags and antlers and the thrill of the chase. I love the chase, but you know what, Gunner? You know what part of it I really enjoy?” His smile widened, red and wet.

  “The killing,” said the Gunner hollowly.

  “Not just the kill.” The Walker grinned. “It’s the moment just before, when you know you can either kill
or choose not to, and the prey knows it too. That’s the best part. When life or death are in your gift. That’s where the real power is. . . .”

  He lifted his foot, and with an eye-twisting pop, gently and impossibly stepped into one of the mirrors he was holding, and then he was gone. The lights on the walls faded, and in their afterglow, before the blackness descended, the two mirrors hung in the air, facing each other; and the last sound the Gunner heard was the Walker’s voice, diminishing and very far off. It sounded like he was saying: “‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where there is an hind. . . .’”

  Because the Gunner knew that hind was another word for a female deer, he knew exactly who the Walker was talking about, and he was filled with another surge of unbearably helpless fear for her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Flawed Hand

  Edie stared at George’s hand, eyes wide in shock at what was happening to it. She tore her eyes away and saw that George had gone very pale as he examined the changes. He was staring so intently that he had completely stopped blinking.

  “What’s happening?” she asked quietly.

  He had no idea, but it was something. From the scar that the dragon had slashed on it, three distinct lines had begun to emerge, dark lines coloring the pale skin of his hand as they spiraled down and around to his wrist like tendrils on a briar.

  “Is it blood poisoning?” Edie asked tentatively.

  He examined the three lines closely, although everything inside him made him want to pull his eyes away.

  “No,” he said, mouth drying up. “It’s something worse.”

  Each twisting vein was a different color and texture from the others. All three were slightly indented into his skin, like flaws in a rock.

  “George. We should get you to a hospital or something.”

  He shook his head, fighting the waves of nausea rising inside him. “I don’t think this is something a hospital’s going to help with.”

  She bent in to examine the triple skein of veins more closely. “They’re all different.”

  “Yeah . . . and they’re not me. I mean, they’re not made of me.” He couldn’t keep the revulsion out of his voice.

  “Can I?” She reached a hand hesitantly forward.

  He turned his head away, not wanting to see.

  “This one’s smooth. Like metal.”

  He decided he couldn’t duck this. He swallowed hard and turned back. “It is metal. I think it’s bronze or brass.”

  He moved her hand out of the way and made himself trace the mottled bluey-green channel twisting next to it. It was cool to the touch. “This one’s not so smooth. It’s like marble.”

  That left the last pale corded flaw twining down to his wrist. He rubbed it, feeling the rough shaley texture of limestone. As his thumb skated along the channel, tracing its course, he could feel a piece of grit detach from the surface and stick to it.

  “Okay,” he said, clenching his teeth before managing to cloak them in a grin, “this is scaryish.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  He flexed his arm. The veins of bronze and stone seemed to flex with it. He shook his head. “No. But you know when they say something makes your flesh crawl?”

  Edie nodded.

  George pointed to his arm.

  “It’s crawling. It’s like I’ve got something inside my arm that isn’t me. I mean, if I think about it, it’s definitely going to creep me out.”

  “So what are we going to do?” She stared into his tight smile.

  Seeing the concern in her eyes somehow triggered the opposite reaction in George; he found himself once more determined to erase that look by making sure she was okay. It wasn’t necessarily a rational impulse, but it was one thing in their almost entirely ungraspable predicament that he could hold on to and work with.

  “Not think about it,” he decided.

  He stood up. The rain was easing. He reached down and pulled her to her feet. He didn’t really know what to say, so he dragged up things he’d heard other people say on TV and in films.

  “Edie. We’re going to be okay. We’re going to do this together. I’ll be right there with you. Anything, anyone trying to get you, they’re going to have to get past me first.”

  As he said it, he was pretty sure he wasn’t as convincing as the actors he was trying to copy had been. Maybe you had to be an adult to sound macho.

  Edie swept the hair out of her eyes and gave him a long, appraising look. “What? All ninety-eight pounds of you?”

  He grinned back at her. At least she hadn’t laughed. Not outright. He curled his lip and mugged at her, making a caricature of a tough guy.

  “Yeah. All ninety-eight pounds of me. Until we get out of this, I’ve got your back. Look around anytime, I’m there.”

  He waited for her to join in the joke. Instead she nodded slowly.

  “That’s”—she struggled for the word, then leveled her eyes right into his—“that’s good.”

  And because the earnestness of her belief in him was so unexpected and so sharp, George immediately felt as if he wanted to escape the moment.

  “Come on, then. Let’s go see the Friar.”

  And because she felt buoyed by his confidence, and strangely comfortable that he had her back, she straightened, walked ahead of him into the dwindling rain shower, and pointed down the road. “Blackfriars is down this way.”

  Because she was ahead of him, she didn’t see the stone gargoyle take a headfirst leap off the gutter along the top edge of the alley, falling like the half ton of rock that it was, before its batlike wings snapped open. It swooped upward, one foot-talon neatly hitting George between his shoulder blades while the other closed around his ankle like a gin trap.

  And because a half ton of wet sandstone packs quite a punch, Edie didn’t hear George yell. He couldn’t yell. All the air had been knocked out of him as the gargoyle carried him, looping up and away into the darkening sky.

  Instead Edie turned around to see what was taking George so long, and saw nothing. No George where an instant before there had been, and no friendly face in the stream of wet pedestrians hurrying along the pavement. No one watching her back. It was as if someone had thrown a switch and George had simply been turned off.

  Edie was alone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Icarus

  There was a pop, and unseen by anyone hurrying through the rain-spattered fastness of Old Change Court, the Walker stepped out of his portable mirror and looked around. There were only a few young office workers chattering and laughing their way to the pub near the bus stop. He slotted in behind and followed them across the square.

  Their talk withered as he trailed them, becoming less cheery and more gloomy—and then dying off into an uncomfortable silence. He stopped and let them carry on into the street, plans for a convivial beer before going home having become significantly less appealing, but for no reason that any of them could have put a finger on.

  He stopped by a pinch-waisted bronze plinth, on the top of which stood a grotesquely distorted winged figure. From the back he was naked, attached to chopped-off wings by a torturous harness that looked more like an instrument of punishment than a means of flight. His head was jammed uncomfortably backward, and his torso was bound inside an openwork breastplate device that curved around the front, hiding his face and trapping his arms within.

  It was a monument to agony, not flight.

  It whimpered as the Walker came around to the front, where the only human pieces visible were the legs, buckling under the weight of the painful apparatus.

  “Icarus, I thought you might like to know. Your brother is dead.”

  The Icarus flinched and started to twitch. After a moment, low stifled moans began to emerge from the brutal constriction of the cage hiding the face and torso.

  “Yes. Your brother, the Minotaur. The Minotaur that was sculpted by the same maker as yours. Your brother is dead.”

  The Icarus screamed, a deep man’s scream, horrifyi
ng and raw, though muffled, as though the mouth hidden inside the apparatus was sewn shut.

  “Yes. He died badly. I could do nothing to stop it.”

  The scream changed tempo and was punctuated by rhythmic panting sobs as the man, or the creature within, absorbed the news.

  “I thought you might like to help me find the people who did it. Two children. I have a use for them, but if you bring them to me, I will give them to you when I am done. You have my word.”

  The Icarus screamed more deeply, as if some of the stitches in his lips had been ripped out with the force of his previous cries. He hopped grotesquely, awkwardly, off the plinth and landed in a kind of hunched squat, his chopped-off wing tips clapping together above his head in furious eagerness.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Airborne

  Everybody wants to fly. At some stage in their lives, everyone looks up in the sky and sees the seeming effortlessness of a bird in the gulf of air overhead and thinks: I wish, just one time, that could be me.

  Nobody wants to fly like George was flying. He was upside down, back arched, staring at the ground below, winded by the sledgehammer blow between his shoulder blades, gagging soundlessly for a breath that just wouldn’t come.

  All he could do was reach a despairing hand back toward the rapidly diminishing figure of Edie as she spun the wrong way on the crowded pavement, trying to see where he’d gone. She was turning like a leaf caught in the whirlpool of a fast-moving stream, looking everywhere but the right way, which was up.

  And then, just as his vision started to spot and dim through lack of oxygen, he found a breath and took a deep whooping lungful of air, then another, and yelled— at the very moment the gargoyle crested a building, and Edie was lost to his sight.

  “Edie!”

  He shouted his throat raw in one ragged word that tore out of him like the death of hope, but his yell was lost in the greater noise of the city below.

  Above him he heard the gargoyle hiss in disapproval, and felt its grip on his leg tighten. In a couple of thunderous wing flaps, they had cleared the next block of buildings and were flying across the Thames.