Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  A tousled head of bronze hair poked into view at the top of one of the arches, hanging upside down; then a face dropped into view, the impish face of a street cherub carrying a mask, which a sculptor had carved into the distinctive features of Tragedy. His face was grinning and mischievous.

  “I do now,” Edie said drily.

  “You’re in a pickle.”

  “Am I?”

  “Biggest pickle in the barrel is wot I heard.”

  “Heard from who?”

  “Dunno.” He dropped to the ground and looked at her. He looked at the mask he held in his hand. He put it in front of his face and then took it away, grimace giving way to smile.

  “You get all sorts in a pub. Keep your ears open, you pick up a lot of stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  He hid behind the mask again, and then half took it off, winking with the one visible eye. “‘Careless talk costs lives.’”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean?”

  “‘Careless talk costs lives.’ You know.”

  “No. I wouldn’t ask if I knew.”

  “It’s what they say. What they used to say.”

  “Who?”

  “I dunno, do I? Them. Everyone. There was posters. We had one over there.”

  “When?”

  “In the war. You know. When they was dropping bombs and all that. In the wossname. The Blitz. You remember.”

  She realized he was talking about the Second World War.

  “The Blitz?”

  He looked pleased. His little chest swelled in front of her, and he nodded enthusiastically. “There you go. You remember. We had the poster over there. You liked it.”

  “I wasn’t alive during the war. Not that war.”

  His eyes flicked left and right and then centered on her beneath a newly wrinkled brow. “Wasn’t you?”

  She shook her head. “My mum wasn’t alive in that war.”

  “I thought you . . .”

  “I’m twelve.”

  “Well, that don’t mean nothing. That’s older than me. I think. I mean, I think I’m not twelve. Not yet.”

  He began to look confused.

  “You look about ten. But then you’ll always be ten, won’t you?”

  “Will I?”

  “You will. Statues don’t get old. You’ll have been ten in the war like you’re ten now. But I wasn’t born, my mum wasn’t born. I don’t even think her mum was born. . . .”

  The furrows on his brow curved and deepened. “But you liked the poster. I’m sure I remember.”

  She shook her head. “I never saw any poster.”

  He held her gaze for a couple of beats longer. “I thought you did. I—”

  “I didn’t.” She cut him off hard. She didn’t have time to waste.

  He looked offended and suddenly deflated. He twirled the mask in his hands and examined his feet. “Okay.”

  His toe traced a pattern in the carpet. “It’s just that I seen so many things for so long that I get it all in a ball, you know? Like knots. It all gets tangled. Like, I think I remember stuff I ain’t supposed to have seen, and I seen things I ain’t supposed to remember. And that’s not even counting the stuff I definitely ain’t seen, don’t remember, and can’t forget. You know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “I got so much stuff in my head, I can’t keep it all apart. It gets jumbled. It’s one of the things makes me feel like I’m made wrong, you know?”

  There was a small gust of wind from behind her. It rustled a newspaper on a stool beside him. He reached out and caught the top sheet as it lifted off the pile. He held it as if surprised to find it there. Then he scowled intently at it and crumpled it into a ball. He kept it bunched tight in his hand and smiled hopefully at her.

  The last time Edie had met Little Tragedy, he had been keen that she use her power, her ability to glint, to suck the past from rock and metal to touch him and see if she could sense if there was something wrong with him. She hadn’t touched him, but she could see there was something not right. She didn’t know if he had been made wrong, or made to be wrong, but his eagerness to be glinted, when every other statue shied away from the pain and distress caused when she touched them, had been one of the things that she and George had mistrusted about the whole setup of the pub and its threateningly cheery landlord. She thought Little Tragedy was a spit. The suspicion was creeping up on her that he might have a dual nature like the half-human, half-fantastical Sphinxes. Maybe he was taintish when he had the mask on, spit-like when he didn’t. So she didn’t answer his question directly. Instead she changed the subject, back to the reason she’d come back to the pub.

  “Look. I haven’t got time to talk. I need to find the Gunner. And I need to find George. I don’t even know where to start, except with this one thing: what’s in the mirrors?”

  He looked perplexed again. “What mirrors?”

  She pointed to the two mirrors on either side of the arch he was standing in. They faced each other on the inside pilasters of the arch, and standing between them and looking sideways gave the impression that the reflections in the mirrors not only framed each other, but repeated themselves into infinity.

  “Those mirrors. I need to know about the mirrors.”

  Little Tragedy scratched the back of his head with the hand that still held the balled-up newspaper and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, avoiding her eyes. “Nothing. They’re just mirrors, yeah?”

  Edie stepped toward him. He raised his eyes and smiled brightly, as if seeing her for the first time. Whatever look she had parked on her face clearly wasn’t returning fire on the smile, because his faded fast, dimming to a grin before curdling into a grimace and an awkward rise and fall of his shoulders.

  “Just mirrors. Straight up, no messing. That’s all they are . . .”

  Edie cleared her throat. The question she was about to ask was going to be so outlandish that she didn’t want to give it the chance of catching on something before it even got out of her mouth.

  “Are they the kind of mirrors you can step into?”

  “Do what?”

  His head suddenly tilted and bobbed from one side to the other as he squinted up at her like a raccoon eyeing up a particularly complex trash can.

  “There are mirrors you can step into, aren’t there? You said there were other places, other ‘heres.’ You said you could show me how to get to them.”

  “Oooh, I never, what a whopper!”

  Edie turned on him, hand clenched into a fierce and knobby fist. “The only whopper you’re going to get is when I lay one on you if you don’t straighten up and start telling me the truth. I want to know about the mirrors, because I think it’s to do with them, isn’t it? When we left here, I looked in, and it was all like this, hundreds of reflections of the same thing snaking off into the distance, all copies of each other, except for one thing.”

  Her finger stabbed at the mirror. Little Tragedy flinched as her hand passed his shoulder, but his eyes followed the direction she was indicating.

  “It’s not there now. I hoped it might be, but it isn’t. But it was. There was one slice that was different from all the others, and you know why?” asked Edie.

  “No. I don’t want to know an’ all . . .”

  He was backing into the shadows again. She could hear him nervously crumpling the newspaper ball in his fist. Her voice cracked like a whip, and he stopped dead.

  “Tragedy! Stay there.”

  She followed him into the gloomy nook.

  “The rest of the slices were identical to each other, just getting smaller; but there was this one slice with a bowl and a knife lying on the ground. Only, that’s what I thought they were. Until I saw them again, later.”

  Little Tragedy’s Adam’s apple bobbled up and down twice. His eyes slid around the room, looking for an exit. Or help.

  “You saw them later? This bowl and knife whatsit?”

  Hi
s Adam’s apple came up for the third time, as if it were drowning.

  Edie nodded grimly. She knew from the unmissable awkwardness of his body language that she was on the threshold of something new, something powerful.

  “I saw them again just after this evil bloke called the Walker pulled two little round mirrors out of his pocket and stepped into one of them. I saw them just after he disappeared into the mirror, taking our friend with him. Only, it wasn’t a bowl and a knife. It was the Walker’s dagger and the Gunner’s tin helmet. And they lay there on the ground, and these two little mirrors hung there in the air on either side of them for a moment, like a magic trick, with no one holding them. Then there was a little pop, and the mirrors and the hat and the dagger just sort of disappeared. So what I want to know, what I need to know is: are these the kind of mirrors you can step into? And if they are, how come I saw the hat and dagger lying there before it happened?”

  “Er,” said Little Tragedy. “Well. Ah.” His eyes were sliding all over the room. “You should ask himself. He’s got the words. I only see stuff, really. Ask Old Black.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Ask him.”

  “He’s not here.”

  Tragedy looked at the newspaper crumpled in his hand. Then he placed it delicately on a tabletop. Edie flashed the memory of him catching the paper as it lifted off the pile in the gust of wind from the door, and only then remembered that the door was shut. Had been shut. Locked. Tight enough to keep drafts out.

  Little Tragedy grimaced again, as if knowing what she was belatedly realizing.

  “Er.”

  The hairs on the back of her neck went up. Her hand reached instinctively for the warning glass in her pocket. The deep booming voice behind her froze her hand.

  “The little imp is trying to say, ‘Yes he is.’”

  She turned, knowing what she was going to see. She was nose to belly with the Friar himself, towering over her like a dark cliff face. And as her eyes traveled upward, she couldn’t help but notice that the previously jolly face was as cheery and welcoming as a black thundercloud in a cold dark sky.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Ariel Rising

  George plummeted toward the ground, held in the tight embrace of the golden girl. He knew he was dead. In one short second his head would pile-drive into the pavement. And the Gunner would be dead, and Edie would never know he hadn’t deserted her by choice, and his mother, his mother would never know how much he—

  He threw his hands out reflexively, and two things happened at once: the girl batted them down with the arm that wasn’t wrapped around his chest and clamped them tightly to his side.

  And she swooped.

  There was no other word for it. At the very last moment she defied all the laws of aerodynamics and flattened out her dive, acrobatically swooping left in a ninety-degree barrel roll, so that instead of splatting into the stone sidewalk, she flew along it at an altitude of about one foot.

  “Keep your arms in or you’ll hurt yourself,” she said calmly. George just stared at the paving stones whipping past his nose and got used to being alive again. He nodded and then made the mistake of looking ahead.

  Not only were they running out of pavement, the intersection ahead was busy and in motion. Buses and lorries sped through in opposite directions, and the girl seemed to be leaving the sidewalk too late, suddenly much, much too late if she hoped to gain altitude and fly over the vehicles powering across their path at right angles.

  A big high-sided lorry hurtled in from the left on a certain collision course, much too close to miss or avoid; and once more he knew he was dead, and once more he refused to close his eyes—and then he wished he had, because instead of hitting the lorry, she dinked even lower and underflew it, between the moving wheels.

  He heard her laughter gurgle in his ear, and she banked left and up; and where George had been terrified, he realized that his mouth wasn’t shrieking but smiling.

  The reason was this: she flew.

  Just as she had said she did.

  And when she flew, she really flew.

  Spout, by comparison, had not really flown. Spout, by comparison, had dragged himself painfully through the sky by grabbing great untidy chunks of air and forcing them under his wings as he desperately snatched for the next one. Spout had propelled himself through the sky in a constant battle against the air and pull of gravity. The girl didn’t fight the air. She flew in it, as if she were a part of it.

  He realized that this was why she laughed. She loved the simple freedom and exhilaration of flying.

  As if she had read his thoughts, she slalomed between three lampposts and then down into a tunnel under a modern building, which quickly opened up into a small square in front of an ancient stone church. She cut a wide arc around the right-hand side of the building at gargoyle height, close enough for George to see with relief that the only gargoyles on this church were grotesque medieval heads pulling ugly faces.

  She tightened the radius of the arc and circled down to the pavement at the foot of a bulging gherkin-shaped skyscraper that was as modern as the church at its base was old.

  She daintily released George and stepped back, running her fingers through her hair to restore some order to the windblown golden locks. She and George were both panting and took a moment to get their breath back. As they did, George could see her eyes were bright with exhilaration.

  “I guarantee we lost him,” she said.

  He looked upward and was pleased to see no sign of Spout. He nodded. “Thank you.”

  “It was nothing more than a pleasure, boy.” She smiled.

  “My name’s George,” he said. And he held his hand out because he didn’t know what to do, and shaking hands always seemed to be part of a good introduction. She looked at him oddly, and then took his hand. But instead of shaking it, she turned it over and examined it. He saw she was looking at the scar, the dragon’s wound, his maker’s mark.

  “Oh,” he said, “that’s a—”

  “I know what it is, boy.” She laughed. “Being one of the ‘made,’ how would I not?” She gave him his hand back.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I am Ariel.”

  George kept a wary eye on the sky, in case any spouts suddenly appeared out of it.

  “I’ll hear him coming,” she said. “He punches great holes in the sky as he drags his ungainly bulk through it. I will catch the vibrations. I am, after all, a spirit of the air.”

  And George remembered who Ariel was, because his class had been to see a play in the park two summers ago.

  “Er, no offense, but I thought Ariel was a boy.”

  Her head came up and she looked at him with an expression that was half-hurt, half-outraged pride.

  He swallowed and hurried on, before the insult could take root. “No, I mean, when we saw it in school. The play. That’s when I thought Ariel was a boy. In the play, right?”

  He was burbling. He knew he was burbling. He definitely wasn’t making it better.

  “Do I look like a boy to you, boy?”

  It was a disconcerting question, and she had a disconcerting way of asking it. It wasn’t just her voice, which, for all its disapproval, was rather low and quite velvety. It wasn’t the sense that she was always on the point of laughing at him either, although that was quite irritating. It was that there was something unnerving about her clothes. It wasn’t that they were golden or filmy, or even that they were covering—barely—a body that the sculptor had made disconcertingly lithe and curvy. It was that they were, he realized, not really clothes at all. They were floaty bits of material that seemed to be held on by nothing more than a light breeze.

  “No. You look very . . . not like a boy.”

  She held his look for a long and predictably disconcerting moment. A smile twitched at the edge of her mouth. Somehow, somewhere—actually in the pit of his stomach—he found that hint of a smile the most disconcerting thing of all.

&nbs
p; “I am very not like a boy, boy. No boy could do this.”

  She reached out and took his hand again and leaped into the air. His stomach flipped and his arm was half wrenched out of his socket. She hoisted him higher and put an arm under his armpit and held him, his back tightly clenched to her as she soared up, spiraling around the curved skyscraper.

  He saw the office floors, layer after layer as they rose and circled toward the swelling middle of the building. He saw empty desks and winking computer screens. He saw a conference room with men and women sitting around a long table. He saw a man in a suit standing on his head against a wall as a couple of business-suited women laughed and applauded. And he saw entire empty floors with a lone cleaner pushing her cart through the anonymous maze of booths and dividers. And then the building ceased to belly outward and started to taper, and Ariel twisted in midflight, laughing as she gave them a widening panorama of the whole city below.

  He saw the sparkle of the river and the closer high-rises, and then the distant skyscrapers at Canary Wharf to the east, and he began feeling as giddy as her laughing sounded, as the circuits around the building got narrower and narrower as they neared the apex.

  The whirling panorama really did start to blur with the velocity at which she was circling, and then they reached the rounded point at the top of the building, and the circling became a pirouette that got faster and faster until George felt like one of those ice-skaters spinning on one skate, so fast that he ceased to be a recognizable person and just became a high-velocity whirling smear.

  “Please,” he choked, half laughing, half panicking. “Please. Ariel. I’m going to hurl. . . .”

  Her spinning slowed and eased, then ceased. Once she had stopped, it took a while for his brain to settle back on its gimbals and stop its own sympathetic whirligig.

  Ariel stepped gently down to the rim of the building’s cap and lowered him onto it. He grabbed a bar set into a recessed hole and clung on tight.

  “No, don’t—” he began, but she did.

  She let go of him, and there he was, sitting on top of the world, a shiny glass-and-metal world that arced away from him on all sides, curving so radically that there was nothing to see but drop-off whichever way he looked.