Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  Ariel stepped in front of him, spun on one toe, and curtsied, as if she had just completed a virtuoso performance. She looked expectantly at him, a prima ballerina waiting for applause.

  “There’s no way I’m letting go of this bar in order to clap. It’s just not going to happen,” he explained, deciding that given his precarious position, anything other than complete frankness would be suicidal. “But you’re right. No boy could fly like that. That was amazing.”

  “Amazing?”

  A single golden eyebrow curved higher than its mate.

  Obviously, amazing wasn’t doing it.

  “Brilliant. Crazy. Superb.”

  Her eyebrows regained their symmetry.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was superb.”

  “Yes.” He nodded, really hoping that she would take the compliment and put him back on the ground. He had a sudden horror-struck premonition of being left there, perched on the sharp end of this fantastically elongated egg shape as the night drew in and darkness covered the city. He knew if that happened, he would eventually fall asleep and slide off the curving edge and into death.

  He saw with huge relief that she was smiling triumphantly. She looked off into the west and pointed.

  “There is a boy who lives over there, a babyish boy in a babyish park who thinks he too can fly. Should you ever see him, I would be eternally in your debt if you could repeat what you have just so kindly said. Especially the ‘superb’ bit. He is an odious crowing coxcomb of a boy. And he flies with all the grace of a thrown turnip.”

  “Thrown turnip. Gotcha,” he said, clenching on his handhold like a very determined limpet. “Could we please go down now?”

  “You want to go down so soon?” She stretched languidly, her hands back to back, fingers intertwining, reaching for the sky, her toes straining on point. “But you can see everything from here.”

  “I know,” he said. “Except, I can’t see Edie, and I can’t see the Gunner, and frankly”—all the frustration of being snatched up and put down and snatched up again and flown all over the city boiled over and choked him— “frankly, I’m fed up with this all. I’ve got friends in trouble, and they need help and I need help to help them, because they’re my responsibility, yeah? And all that happens is I seem to be being carried farther and farther away from any place I might find them. So please. Ariel. I have to do what has to be done, or I don’t know, burst trying or something, but I have to do it. So the flying is tip-top, okay, but what I really need to know is: can you help me or not?”

  He ran out of words and stared at her. She watched her fingers make a butterfly as they descended to her sides, and then she smiled at him.

  “Of course,” she said. “To help do what has to be done. That’s why I came for you.”

  He didn’t know what she meant.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m not. I told you what I was.” She flashed a grin.

  “A spirit of the air?” he guessed.

  “A minister of fate,” she said with a gasp of exasperation. She tugged his ankle, and he lost his grip, and the whole falling thing happened again, only this time he was ready for her to catch him, which thankfully she did.

  “There’s an easier way to do this,” he choked as they angled groundward in a shallow dive.

  “Ah, but you don’t get the easy way, do you, boy?” She laughed as they flew down and cut north up the street known as St. Mary Axe.

  “You get the Hard Way.”

  The way she said it, the way she knew it suddenly, made his stomach drop faster than any of the flying had done, and then he heard a sound that made everything much worse.

  Ahead of them, somewhere in the darkness ahead, he heard a single bell tolling as if for a funeral, deep and low and solemn. And he knew with absolute certainty that it was a warning bell, and that the warning was for him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Icarus Alone

  The Icarus flapped its rigid wings and gave a series of short muted shrieks of agony as it flew over the office buildings that made up the Broadgate development.

  It was screaming because it hated people, and the more of them it saw in one place, the worse it felt. It preferred the safety of its plinth, where it could stay hunched inside the contraption that attached it to its wings, and close its ears to the noise the people made as they walked past.

  The reason it was shrieking was partly because it had accustomed itself to the habit and partly because the flying harness was so ungainly and heavy that being attached to it was like being permanently jammed in its own personalized torture chamber.

  It found it hard to fly effectively because the wings it had been given were more like ragged and sawn-off windmill sails than anything designed for graceful passage through the air. This meant it could fly only short distances without exhaustion, and never got higher than about twenty feet off the ground. Whenever it had to overfly anything taller than that, it had to do it in a series of hops, using sinewy man’s feet that had become accustomed to a new life as talons.

  It was shrieking particularly intensely because the space it had tried to fly over was too ambitious, and it was going to have to land in the middle of the crowd of people leaving the office buildings; and its hatred of people was so intense that it had convinced itself, somewhere in the back of its mad mind, that the closer they came to him, the more it hurt.

  It landed in front of the only group of unmoving office workers amid the flow—six black figures, frozen in time, tired and work-weary men and women who would never make it home, because they were cast from bronze.

  The taint stood in front of them, protected by their tight immobile grouping from the other, real, office workers flowing past.

  Six unmoving pairs of bronze eyes watched the taint panting and sobbing as it flinched from any contact with the people passing by.

  The real reason the Icarus was mad was because it didn’t know who or what it was—man, machine, animal, or bird. That’s why it couldn’t fly very well. That’s why it walked like a bull on its hind legs. That’s why it lived its life in a scream.

  The only other creature who had ever been able to understand or soothe it was the Minotaur, because the Minotaur had been made by the same maker, and had the same mad split at its core.

  The boy and the glint had killed the Minotaur. The Icarus would hunt them down, no matter how much the hunting hurt.

  It took a great ragged breath and launched itself into the sky.

  It would find them.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Digging In

  The Gunner’s wrongness seemed to be getting worse. He felt tired beyond normal exhaustion, and his hands and limbs were beginning to not do what he wanted them to, as if the instructions coming down from his brain were subject to a game of Chinese Whispers and losing a lot of the detail in translation.

  His hands had begun to feel as if their normally strong, agile fingers were wrapped in stiff new boxing gloves. His back ached, and he was fighting the overwhelming desire to find a piece of ground and just sit down for a bit. He knew this was a fatal impulse, because once he sat, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to get up again. So he wiped his now-clumsy hands across the rough stone of the wall and confirmed to his satisfaction that there were no more heart stones left on it.

  He grinned and hefted the oilskin bag that his groundsheet cape had become. It clinked satisfactorily.

  He had two choices, he thought: he could drop the bag underwater, which would leave the Walker floundering around in the dark, trying to find the heart stones. The only trouble was that the tank floor was barely two meters below water at its deepest points, and a lot shallower over most of its area. Floundering around would eventually lead the Walker to trip over the package, and then when he opened it, he would have all the light he could want.

  “Bury it,” he grunted. “Smart arse didn’t say I couldn’t dig downward, did he?”

  He stumbled up onto the gravel, moving by touch alo
ne. He found the back wall and dropped to his knees. He put the bag of heart stones on the ground next to him and allowed himself the luxury of a cigarette.

  The match scraped, and he ignited the end and sucked in the smoke. He pulled the pewter plate out of his jacket and looked at it in the light of the match as it burned down to his fingers.

  “Dream of four castles, my Aunt Fanny—know what you are, my beauty?” he asked it as the match died and darkness swept back in from the edges of the tank.

  “You are a bloody short-handled shovel.”

  He rolled the cigarette to one side of his mouth and chunked the plate into the pea gravel at his knees. He hoisted a plateful of stone to one side and dug in again, pleased to see that the injunction forbidding him to dig up was not preventing him digging in the opposite direction.

  And as is often the way of it, once he was working he felt less tired. It was as if the physical labor took some of the worry out of him, and the rhythmic shoveling left less space for him to worry about the wrongness of things at his core.

  He knew he had plenty to worry about, not least of which was the fact that he was running out of time. Turn o’day must be approaching up on the surface. And if his plinth was empty at midnight, he knew he was a goner. He didn’t know how being a goner would work with the fact that he seemed to be under a curse. Perhaps it meant he’d be a walking dead statue, a sort of pair of dead hands, the same way taints were, only ever moving from the plinth to do the Walker or the Stone’s bidding. The thought of becoming a taint in spit’s clothing turned his gut, and he took it out on the gravel by digging faster and harder. Whatever happened, even if he kicked the bucket at midnight, he was going to bury the Walker’s profane booty as deep as he could. He dug so hard that the pewter plate buckled in his hand. He put it aside and started digging with his hands alone.

  And for the longest time in the darkness, the only sounds were the chunk and hiss of gravel being scooped out of a hole and tossed aside onto more gravel, and the quiet pop of a man working with both hands, a cigarette parked in the side of his face.

  He wondered what George was doing right now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Friar’s Deal

  “Where’s the boy?”

  The Black Friar glowered down at Edie.

  “Gone.”

  “Gone? Gone how? Gone where?”

  Something in the accusing way he asked gave the strong impression that whatever had happened was going to turn out to be Edie’s fault.

  “Just gone. Don’t know how, don’t know where.” Her chin jutted forward as she refused to look away from his eyes.

  “You don’t know how, you don’t know where. And now . . . you’re here.”

  “Yep.”

  He exhaled, a long and noisy out breath whistled out of his nose like a safety valve taking the pressure off a steaming boiler.

  “Well. That’s fine and dandy, no doubt. Capital, even. And I suppose you—”

  “I thought you might know why.”

  He didn’t look like someone who was used to people interrupting him so bluntly. He cleared his throat.

  “You thought I might know why you’re here?”

  “Why George has gone.”

  The safety valve blew as the Friar detonated in a spluttering explosion.

  “Why he’s gone? You think I know why the boy has gone? Sunder me from my bones, girl! I assure you it’s nothing to do with me! Why the very thought of—”

  “I thought you might know if it’s to do with the Hard Way.”

  The explosion stopped. The Friar ran his hand over his bald head and down to his chin. It was as if he were wiping off the look of shocked indignation and replacing it with one of genuine puzzlement.

  “The Hard Way?”

  “You said if he didn’t put the dragon’s head on the Stone, he’d be guaranteed the Hard Way. I wanted to know if suddenly disappearing was part of that.”

  The Friar stepped back. Looked less ominous. Scratched his head.

  “You’re saying he didn’t put the head on the stone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because he ran out of time? You surprise me, indeed you do. I saw the mark he bore, I sensed the power within, I felt he would succeed.” The monk looked genuinely puzzled. “Well, devil me kidneys . . . I’d have wagered on him finding the Stone Heart, indeed I would. I thought more of the boy.”

  Edie had a sudden flashback to George, his face set and determined as he held the pistol steady, aimed right into the Minotaur’s eye. She remembered how he hadn’t flinched, not even at the thunderous detonation when he’d pulled the trigger.

  “He didn’t run out of time. He found the Stone Heart. It was the London Stone. He worked it out. He followed the map of words you gave him. He did other stuff, too. He was a bit amazing. He just chose not to put the dragon’s head on the Stone. He chose the Hard Way. And I want to know if that’s why he disappeared.”

  “He chose the Hard Way? You’re telling me he actually chose the Hard Way? Trophies and trumpetings, why would he do that? Unless . . .”

  The Friar looked at Little Tragedy. Then at Edie. And then slowly took three steps back to the bar. He reached back over it and grabbed a Coke bottle. He popped the metal cap thoughtfully between his teeth and held the bottle out to her.

  “Have a drink, in as much as this hellish soda water can be called a drink, then tell me everything, leave nothing out. We’ll see what we can see and mayhap do what can be done.”

  Edie took the bottle and sat down on a stool and, suddenly very conscious that the broken dragon’s head was in the pocket of George’s coat, only an inch from the Friar’s elbow, started to talk.

  She told him of everything that had happened since they’d left this room the night before, and ended on the Gunner being spirited into the mirrors by the Walker.

  “And that’s why I want to know about the mirrors. And that’s why I want to know about the Hard Way. I have to find George, and we have to help the Gunner.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do,” she answered, without thinking. And when she heard herself say it, she realized that that was exactly why, for her, it had to be done. Take a life, save a life.

  Only then did she drink from the untouched bottle of Coke. The bubbles rose inside her; she burped thunderously and looked defiantly at the mountainous spit.

  “And you have told me everything that happened?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, crossing fingers in her mind. “I’ve told you everything I saw.”

  Which was strictly true. They had left last time pretending that they had to go to fetch the broken dragon’s head, not telling the Friar that it was with them, in George’s coat pocket. And that brought her eye back to the same coat and the same heavy pocket lying on the bar top by the Friar’s elbow. She looked away and hoped he hadn’t noticed the weight inside it as he’d pushed it aside to reach over for her Coke.

  “I didn’t ask you if that was all you saw. I asked you if that was all that happened.”

  For a being made of bronze, his eye was disconcertingly steely.

  “That was what happened.”

  “Still not quite what I was asking, but close enough for a glint, perhaps.”

  She heard Little Tragedy try to stifle a small snort of derision. He didn’t do a very good job, and the sound irritated her more than she would have expected. Her head came up, eyes bright and defiant.

  “I’ve got nothing to hide.”

  The Friar peered at her for a moment, and then his shoulders started to twitch, and the twitch turned into a quake, and the quake rumbled into a laugh, and soon the whole room was reverberating to the deep rolling mirth of the mountainous figure at the bar. He reached for a beer towel and dabbed at the tears streaming out of his eyes as he chuckled and chortled and generally did a very poor job of trying to control himself.

  Being laughed at unexpectedly is never a very pleasant experience. Be
ing laughed at by a ton and a half of bronze alloy in a cassock is even more annoying.

  “Hoi,” she said, trying to stem the tide. “What’s so funny?”

  “Sorry,” gasped the Friar. “Intolerable rudeness, eternal shame, gross lapse of hospi . . . hospitality. But a glint. Having nothing to hide? Why the thought of it. A glint is nothing but a veritable warehouse stuffed to the gunwales with hidden things. The hidden and the hiding are two sides of the same coin, as you know in the core of your young being, whether you acknowledge it or no. A glint absorbs the hidden in the world and must hide to survive in that world. Why if it were not so nearly a symmetry, it might be a paradox.”

  And he erupted into a fresh spasm of laughter, shoulders heaving and chins wobbling at the sheer hilarity of it all.

  She had no idea what the avalanche of words meant. It felt as if he were using his booming voice to bludgeon her. She did understand what a paradox was, and it was a paradox that this smiling figure, who seemed all hospitality and good cheer, was in fact particularly frightening. It was as if he’d found a way to use all that bonhomie as a weapon. He was a million miles away from the smiler with the knife who’d pursued her on a distant beach in what seemed a different life, but there was something about all the mirth that seemed to suggest, if not a hidden knife, then a hidden agenda that might be just as fatal to her as a blade.

  All the laughter and the good cheer had the effect of making it hard to think, and thinking was how Edie stayed ahead of things.

  “Hey,” she said. He kept on laughing.

  Without thinking why she was doing it, she picked the bottle cap off the table in front of her, held it between thumb and forefinger, and flicked it at the Friar. Metal hit metal as the cap hit him square on the forehead with a distinct tink that chopped off the laughter like an ax. The bottle cap bounced up and off the sloping head, glinting in the headlights of a car passing outside the window, and the Friar’s left hand snapped out and opened and closed in one astonishingly fast reaction from a man who was so mountainous and fat. He caught the cap and crushed it in one movement. Then the hand opened and gently dropped the mangled disk on the table in front of her.