Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Gackly,” he choked, as the first chunk of laughter burst out of his nose in a convulsive snort. The great white dome of St. Paul’s loomed straight ahead.

  “I’m guggered. . . .”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Killing Bull

  The Walker emerged with a pop from the small glass mirrors in his hands and looked up at the classical front portico of Tate Britain and then turned around. There was no one around except for people waiting for a bus on the other side of the road.

  He approached the gray steps and hurried up the left-hand side of the wide stairway. He kept his hood pulled over the right side of his face in a gesture that seemed to have an unaccustomed air of furtiveness for a being who was, by the very nature of his curse, so good at not being seen.

  The truth is that he had come to visit one new statue, but was very keen to not see or be seen by another one.

  The statue he sought was around the left-hand side of the entrance, on a little adjunct balcony space beside the double-columned edge of the portico. The one he particularly didn’t want to see was on the other side.

  As soon as he was around the corner, he relaxed and resumed his normal arrogant strut.

  He looked at the group of statues he had come to see. It was a hybrid, because not all statues are either spits or taints. This was both, or rather, the human statues were spits, two muscular men like Greek wrestlers struggling with a taint, a huge and murderous bull on whose back had been tied a naked woman.

  It was not a happy group. It was a monument to the fact that the ancient Greeks had had much too much fun thinking up ways to execute people.

  The Walker cleared his throat. “I want to talk to the Bull.”

  No one moved. The frozen moment of struggle remained paralyzed in midair.

  The Walker sighed. “It’s the Minotaur.”

  The Bull’s eye swiveled and looked at him.

  “He has been killed,” the Walker flatly informed the Bull.

  The Bull convulsed and threw the two men into the corner of the balcony. The woman tied to its back screamed.

  “Yes,” said the Walker, unmoved. “Yes. It’s distressing.”

  The Bull stood there, snorting angrily through its nostrils as the woman struggled to free herself.

  “I wondered if you’d like to help me punish the ones responsible.”

  The woman screamed louder as the bull tossed its head and horns back and then drowned her noise in the primal bellowing it blasted up into the night sky.

  The Walker looked up and smiled, as a darker shape dropped out of the night and landed gently on his shoulder.

  “Ah. There you are.”

  The Raven clacked its beak in his ear.

  The Walker nodded.

  “Good. If they are to be found, the Tallyman will do it quicker than anyone else. Now come. We must go east.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Tallyman

  Edie was stuck at the curb, waiting for the crossing light to change from red to green. She was on the edge of a knot of pedestrians, all of them impatient for the traffic to stop so they could continue their way on toward Blackfriars station. Everyone was in their own worlds, listening to music on their earphones, talking into mobiles, or just staring vacantly ahead, lost in their own London. No one paid her any attention.

  “One glint. Topper Puddleduck.”

  Her ear caught the words right on the edge of her hearing. The voice was a man’s, lumpy with phlegm, flat and uninflected as a machine talking. She turned, half sure that she’d misheard, half certain that she was getting jumpy and starting to imagine things. Nobody was looking at her. She must have imagined it. The words didn’t make sense anyway. “Topper Puddleduck” was just gibberish. She’d obviously just caught a snatch of conversation that she couldn’t really hear properly, and her mind had filled in gaps in the sentence with sounds that made semicoherent nonsense out of them.

  “Puddleduck” was a word from her childhood, not this London. She had a flash of memory, real memory, not a glint’s vision, of pale little drawings of a white duck in a pink shawl and a blue bonnet, the exact blue of the frosted glass earrings her mother had always worn, and her mother’s fingers tracing the words around the picture and conjuring a story out of them. The memory was a happy one, and therefore treacherous and not to be kept in the mind too long, in case it started to hurt too much.

  The light changed, the obstruction cleared, and the tight little bolus of humanity that had been blocked at the curb started moving again, thinning out as people walked on at different speeds.

  Edie angled down toward the river, and as she did so she caught sight of the street name bolted to the building on the corner, clearly outlined in black and white. She was walking down Puddle Dock. And just as she was turning Puddle Dock into Puddleduck and back again, she heard the phlegmy voice once more, very clearly.

  “One glint. Top of Puddle Dock. Walking down to the river.”

  This time when she turned, she saw him, and for a stomach-jolting instant she knew it was the Walker, and then an equally strong wash of relief hit her as she realized it wasn’t. It was just a tramp wearing a long coat that gave him a silhouette like the Walker’s, and instead of the Walker’s hood, he had a cowl of matted hair framing his head in dreadlocks. He was squinting, eyes slitted, jaw hanging slack as he mouth-breathed at her in lumpy gurgles through gappy black-and-orange teeth. He stared back as if waiting for her to do something. Then a tiny shudder twitched through him, and he shrugged.

  “One glint. Top of Puddle Dock. Standing still in the middle of the road . . .”

  His voice was still uninvolved, almost disembodied. He had the look of a man who had zombified himself beneath relentless waves of alcohol. She decided he was deeply drunk.

  The other pedestrians had moved on. The two of them faced each other in the middle of the road.

  Edie should have run, she later decided, but he was a street-crazy, and street-crazies and drunks were things that didn’t frighten her. First, because she felt somewhere deep inside that she was a street-crazy herself, and secondly, she knew all about drunks and the different levels of zombification into which they fell. It wasn’t just because she was not frightened by the tramp—she was intrigued by what he seemed to be saying. So, keeping out of the reach of any sudden lunge that he might make, she took a couple of steps toward him.

  “What did you say?”

  “One glint. Top of Puddle Dock. Standing still in the middle of the road . . .” His voice repeated itself, a flat and exact replica of the previous sentence he’d uttered.

  “Why d’you call me a glint?” she asked, mouth drying as she tried to anticipate the answer.

  “Because you are a glint,” he said, without taking his squinting eyes from her. The lack of interest in his voice was somehow more disturbing than the fact that he seemed to see what she was. She jutted her chin forward, determined not to betray the unease and the intimidation beginning to rise around her.

  “Who are you?”

  His tongue roiled wetly in the stump-scattered ruin of his mouth.

  “We are the Tallyman.”

  “You’re the what?”

  “We are the Tallyman.”

  Again the inflection was identical to the first time he’d said it: flat, uninterested, lifeless. Like a recording. Like a computer speaking.

  “We?” she said, looking around. She was relieved to see he was alone. The drivers in the cars now passing them on both sides weren’t relieved. They were irritated, and a couple of them used their horns to communicate the fact.

  “You’re a‘we,’ are you? Royal, like the Queen, are you?”

  “We are the Tallyman,” he said, echoing himself, uninterested, immovable eyes locked on her.

  This flat repetition was annoying as well as unnerving.

  “What are you doing?” she asked as a truck rumbled past her right shoulder.

  “Counting you.”

  “Counting me?”r />
  “Counting you. One glint. Top of Puddle Dock. Standing still in the middle of the road . . .”

  “Why?” she asked, confused. “Why are you counting me?”

  As a high-sided lorry paused in the traffic behind Edie, it threw the Tallyman into shadow, and he stopped squinting.

  “We are the Tallyman.”

  Again his flat answer came back as if he were explaining the obvious. It wasn’t his tone that made her feet suddenly feel as if they were being glued to the tarmac. It was his eyes, no longer squinting. Because they weren’t a man’s eyes, not the bloodshot whites she would have imagined; they were entirely black eyes, eyes with no whites at all—they were dark and beady and inhuman, like the Raven’s eyes. Edie was filled with the sudden and horrible conviction that more than just a tramp was staring at her out of them. She wrenched her feet into motion and darted between a car and a shrieking taxi driver and sprinted toward the river.

  The Tallyman didn’t run after her. He just spoke calmly as he waited for a hole in the traffic.

  “One glint. Running down Puddle Dock. Toward the river.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gunner in the Dark

  “‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where there is an hind. . . .’” The Walker’s words seemed to hang in the dank air long after he had left the Gunner alone in the darkness, reminding him that the Walker had left to hunt Edie. The Gunner was sick with the certainty that the Walker would get her. There were just too many heart stones belonging to other glints arranged on the four walls of the underground water tank, like grisly trophies, to leave any room for doubt. The Walker clearly knew what he was doing. Each of those worn pieces of sea-glass had been the precious possession of a woman or girl, the kind of possession none of them would have given up without a fierce fight. The Gunner wondered how many of the heart stones had been pried from cold, dead fingers. He felt weak at the thought. “Right,” he said to himself. “Smoke break.”

  He felt for the wall behind him and slid down to a sitting position, hunched against the damp stone at his back. He reached under the tarpaulin cape he wore around his shoulders and fumbled something out of a pocket. There was a scrape and then a match flared into light, and the red end of a cigarette was ignited.

  He held the match out at the end of his arm, not wanting to waste a moment of its illumination as he sucked hungrily at the cigarette between his lips. He used the fleeting light to orient himself in the space: he saw the castle-shaped outlines of the sea-glass fragments, and he noted the disk hanging in the center of the room, reflecting the tiny flame in his hand. Then it guttered out and he was in the dark again.

  The only sound was his breathing, interspersed with his inhaling and exhaling the tobacco smoke. Each time he inhaled, the red dot at the end of the cigarette glowed brighter, like a tiny heart pulsing.

  He took an inventory of how he felt, and what his options were. He felt wrong inside, still twisted and hanging by a thread, which he realized was the result of having broken his oath in order to try to save Edie. He imagined this wrongness was going to get worse. It certainly made him weak, and it seemed to be making it hard for him to think as straight as he normally did. The thing he was most worried about, after what was going to happen to Edie and then George without him there to help them, was what was going to happen at midnight.

  Midnight, or turn o’day, was the time when the statues based on real people, the spits, had to be on their plinths. It wasn’t optional, it was part of what they were and how they were. An empty plinth at turn o’day meant the death of a spit. When it returned or was returned to its plinth after turn o’day, it never walked again, and became no more than a human-shaped lump of metal or stone. Since he was now paying the penalty for breaking an oath sworn by the Stone and the hand that made him, he imagined that midnight might mean, if not the end of him, the start of an eternity of wandering, like the Walker, in thrall to the dark powers pent in the Stone.

  He didn’t seem to have much chance of leaving this subterranean cell before midnight unless the Walker got him out the way they’d come in; and there just didn’t seem much likelihood of that. Even if he’d had his normal strength, he didn’t know how deep underground he was, and he certainly didn’t think he could claw his way to the surface, given the fact that the last time he had tried to lift his arms to do so, he had failed so badly. The Walker’s power over him seemed to be working. He wondered if the Walker would be back before turn o’day, before midnight came and brought his death.

  He wasn’t looking forward to the Walker’s return, if only because his sneering boastfulness was hard to bear, on top of all the bad things that were happening to the Gunner. And then he thought of a way to stop having to see the Walker’s face at least, and that gave him a plan.

  “Come on, you dozy beggar,” he said to himself as he grunted and heaved himself back onto his feet.

  If the glint’s glasses blazed into life because of their power to warn when a taint or a Stone Servant like the Walker came near, and that was the perverse way the Walker provided light for himself in his subterranean lair, there was something the Gunner could do. The fact that it involved disassembling the Walker’s carefully made castle shapes only increased his desire to do it.

  He unhooked his tarpaulin cape and felt for the mural on the wall behind him.

  By sucking hard on his cigarette, he caught a pale reflection in some pieces of glass on the wall. He carefully laid his cape on the gravel beneath the castle outline, and reached high and wide, using both hands to brush a glass piece off the wall and onto the tarpaulin.

  “Abracadabra to you too, mate,” he muttered in grim satisfaction.

  Once he’d convinced himself that he’d cleared that wall of heart stones, he bundled up the tarpaulin and turned one hundred eighty degrees to the wall and walked in a straight line off the gravel spit and into the water. As he passed the center point of the space, he stopped and cast around with his hands in the air until they clattered into the spinning disk on the chain. He tugged hard, and there was a percussive spang noise as the chain parted and the disk came free. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his matches. He lit one and stood there, hip deep in the water, looking at the disk in the light of the small flame.

  It was an old pewter plate: on it, someone had scratched a series of concentric circles with turreted castles around the edge, as if marking the points of the compass. Roads led from the arches in the base of each castle. They made a cross where they met in the center of the plate, joined by another series of circles like the central boss of a shield. There was writing all over the design, but all the Gunner had time to read was “The King and his princes . . .” and “Occidens” before the match guttered out. He carefully stowed the plate inside his jacket and headed for the glass castle on the wall.

  “King, my eye,” he snorted. “You won’t need all this malarkey, because when you pop back in here with the lights out, I’ll bloody crown you for nothing.”

  And though there was no one to see it, he grinned as he reached for the first piece of sea-glass on the wall ahead of him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Paternoster

  At the same time Edie was running south toward the river, George had just recrossed it heading north. Spout held him firmly around the chest as he flapped toward the great dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a jerky passage through the air as the gargoyle grunted and flexed his muscles on each downbeat, swaying so precariously from stroke to stroke that flying was more a matter of will than aerodynamics for the bulky stone creature. There was a strong sense that he might plummet to the ground at any moment. One improvement on things was that he wasn’t carrying George upside down anymore, so his head no longer pounded with blood.

  The flash of a camera caught his eyes as they overflew a gaggle of tourists taking pictures in front of the cathedral. He shouted, “Help!” more for the form of it than from any real hope, trying to throw a verbal grappling hook back into a safer real
ity that he barely remembered.

  Just as he’d expected, not one single tourist looked up. They couldn’t see him in his layer of London. The unconscious, instinctive part of their brains stepped in and erased him, protecting their consciousness from the shock of seeing the impossible: a boy being flown through the city beneath a gargoyle, like a mouse being taken by an owl. The last day had been so full of terror and running and people not seeing or helping him that he’d gotten used to it.

  Because he had given up expecting anyone to notice him, he missed the wiry old broken-toothed man in the mismatched grimy suit sitting on the ground in a doorway. He didn’t see him put down the cider bottle and squint into the sky at George. He didn’t see the unwashed hair or the broken veins crimsoning the man’s face in a drinker’s blush. And he neither saw the jet-black eyes nor heard the lifeless voice saying:

  “One boy inna sky. Carried by a gargoyle. Flying around St. Paul’s, heading nor’ nor’east.”

  Spout suddenly stood on one wing and turned an ungainly right angle in the sky, diving low around the side of the dome across the radiating white sunburst design inlaid on the surface of Paternoster Square.

  Now that it was clear that the gargoyle wasn’t going to kill him immediately, there was room on top of the fear for anger, too: George desperately needed to rescue the Gunner, but he could do nothing about it because he’d been grabbed and was being taken wherever the gargoyle felt like going. He thought of the Gunner and how relieved he’d been when he’d reappeared as if back from the dead at the Monument. In the pit of his stomach, George nursed the conviction that you really only got to come back from the dead once, if you were lucky. And the Gunner had done something fatal to his luck by sacrificing himself for Edie. George knew that if they didn’t get the Gunner free and back on his pedestal by midnight, he’d have no need of luck at all, because he’d just be finished.