Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  The first gargoyle he came to reared up and snatched at him, but he ducked under its wings and powered forward. Coming out from under the wing, he found another gargoyle in front of him, and before it could move, he jumped at it. His front foot hit it in the chest and it went over backward. George went with it, using the gargoyle like a springboard as he jumped over it and raced for the skylight on the roof ahead. A small monster leaped at his face, but he managed to club it back with the fragment of stone.

  And then there was nothing between him and the rectangular skylight, except four paces of clear roof. A big gargoyle had launched into the air on the other side of the glass, but it wasn’t going to intercept George in time to stop his desperate para-jump through the glass.

  George hit the edge of the skylight and leaped high. He registered, almost without time for relief, that on the other side of the glass was a drop the height of one room, onto a pile of old boxes.

  He brought his feet together in midair and slammed his heels down on the glass in one mighty smash.

  One thing about London is that the people in charge of how things are built have very strict ideas and rules about the materials that have to be used. One of the rules about skylights is that they have to be made from safety glass. And if the skylight is to be in a roof just below a tall tower that has stone decorations that may shatter in frost, or fall off in high winds, then that safety glass has to be as safe as safety glass can get. It has to be tough— the kind of tough that doesn’t just go to pieces at the first sign of danger.

  George’s heels smashed down on the glass and didn’t break anything except his fall.

  The water on the rain-slick surface did, however, combine with his considerable forward momentum and turned the rectangle from a skylight into a skating rink.

  George’s feet flew out from under him, and he hit the slippery glass with his tailbone, only managing to get his chin down just in time to stop from dashing his brains as he fell backward. But that was where his good luck ended and the very bad luck began.

  True, he did slide beneath the airborne gargoyle that had been leaping at him from the other side of the skylight, but only because he was now tobogganing at high speed toward the edge of a very steep roof and a long drop onto the engine shed roof below. He scrabbled and shimmied, desperately trying to get some friction going, some kind of stick that would slow him down or help him stop.

  Hope flickered alive as a new gargoyle appeared over the fast-approaching roof edge. He stuck his feet out to brake himself against the roof, but the gargoyle was heartbreakingly quick-witted for a lump of stone. As he was about to impact, it simply flattened its ears and ducked.

  And so George flew onward, over its head, off the roof, and into the void.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Three Challenges and a Betrayal

  Edie had got her legs back under control, but she was still sitting on the pub floor, absorbing what had happened to her. Finding herself in the midst of World War II at the height of the Blitz had been quite different from the sharp pain of merely seeing slices of the past when she glinted.

  Being in the past rather than just seeing it wasn’t painful as such. It just left an overwhelming feeling of nausea and a kind of empty horror inside her. Maybe it was being there and coming back so suddenly that did it, she thought, concentrating on this idea rather than the twisted overcoat and hand she’d seen sticking out from under the tipped omnibus. Perhaps this was like jet lag only worse—time lag, in fact.

  The Friar watched her from the bar, which he was leaning against, still getting his breath back. He pushed George’s coat to one side and heaved his great bulk up on the bar, bare legs and sandals dangling out of the bottom of his cassock, somehow startling in their powerful nakedness. He looked as if he were sitting on the side of a river, about to paddle. He lacked only a fishing rod to complete the illusion. Instead he looked at Edie and flicked a question over her head like a fly.

  “And the second question.” The Friar spoke in a voice so honeyed and solicitous that, despite the shock flushing through her body, Edie felt her hackles begin to rise.

  “Second question?”

  “Apart from the mirrors and how they work. You said you had a second question.”

  Though it had been only minutes ago, it felt as if she’d asked that question in a different life. She shook her head to clear it.

  “Yeah. Right. The Hard Way. You said if George didn’t make his sacrifice by putting the broken head on the Stone, then he would have to do things the Hard Way.”

  “Indeed,” he purred, and sat there with the kind of smugness that, in Edie’s book, would have been asking— in fact begging—for a slap. Somehow in her present state, she didn’t have anything approaching a proper slap in her—real or verbal. She took a deep breath.

  “What exactly is the Hard Way? Is it why he just vanished off the face of the earth?”

  The Friar twirled George’s coat around on the bar top. Then hung it neatly on one of the beer handles.

  “Maybe.”

  Somehow, having been dragged back from what very possibly was, and certainly had felt like, the end of the world hadn’t put Edie in a mood for maybe’s.

  “I need you to tell me a little bit more. Please.”

  The please stuck in her throat, but she got it out with a good attempt at a smile as sugarcoating. And to her surprise he told her. He told her that George must stand and fight the three duels, and that they all had to be fought above or below ground, in the air or in or on water. He explained that this was so because the challenge of three contests was one of London’s forgotten rituals, but that just because it had been forgotten didn’t mean that it didn’t underpin the city in an important way.

  “After all, my dear, who remembers the keystone that was laid beneath the cathedral or the church? But they are there, and though forgotten, it should be remembered that the whole edifice would tumble without them.”

  “You mean it’s like tradition,” she said.

  “It’s nothing like tradition. Tradition is like giving votes to the most obscure class of people, namely your ancestors. My word, no. Tradition is the democracy of the dead. No, this is part of the living warp and weft of the city itself. Nothing dead about it at all. He has to fight three duels to earn his place in the fabric.”

  “What if he doesn’t fight?”

  The Friar’s eyebrows rose and fell, one after another in a small ripple of outrage at the very thought.

  “He has to. To refuse a contest is a failure. To fail is to become a Stone Servant and walk in thrall to the power of the Stone for eternity.”

  Edie absorbed this carefully.

  “So that’s bad.”

  “So that, as you so perspicaciously put it, is bad.”

  “But if he doesn’t know this, if he doesn’t know the Hard Way is the way of three duels, he might refuse a challenge. He might. I would. I’d run away unless I couldn’t avoid it!”

  “Then you’d better find him and tell him, had you not?”

  “But how can I find him?”

  “Look.”

  Edie spluttered with frustration at the enormity of the task he was outlining for her. “In this city. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack!”

  “Then don’t waste time”—he hooked his thumb and jerked it toward the door—“be on your way. The first step in finding a needle in a haystack is to start.”

  She sat tight. “Will you help me?”

  “I thought I just did.”

  “Help me find George,” she added.

  “Why would I help?”

  “Because you’re a spit.”

  His expression didn’t change by a flicker.

  “Okay, then,” she amended, “because you’re not a taint.”

  Maybe something ticked under his eye, but even if it had, Edie was pretty sure it had been irritation. He sighed shortly.

  “Absence of hostility does not mean presence of benevolence, my child.
It can also mean indifference, and I, uncharitable and uncharacteristic as it may be to admit, find that I am sublimely and ineffably indifferent.”

  “But why?”

  He looked over her shoulder. “‘Why,’ she says. Why?”

  There was a little needling “Tchah” of disbelief from behind her as Little Tragedy tried to express how extraordinarily dense she must be not to know why the Friar was suddenly, inexplicably changing tack.

  “I mean it,” she said, hating the plaintive note that had crept unbidden into her voice. “I don’t know why you’ve gone all like this, why you won’t help.”

  The Friar deliberately scooped George’s coat off the beer pump handles and let it fall to the countertop with a distinct and giveaway thunk.

  Little Tragedy scuttled out of the shadows and nimble-fingered his way into the pockets. In an instant, he pulled out the broken dragon’s head like a conjuror producing a rabbit, eyes wide as soup plates.

  “Ooooh,” he said. “Look at that. It’s little George’s little dragon. Blimey.”

  “Blind you, indeed I should, You Imp, if you don’t stay where you ought,” barked the Friar, snatching the carving from his hands. “Blind you, indeed I should, were my heart not so damnably soft and sentimental.”

  Sentimental and soft were the last two words Edie would have used to describe the look on the statue’s face as his eyes locked on hers across the dragon’s head.

  “Why? Because it appears that the boy did not trust me, and neither do you. And trust, milady, is a two-way street. That street is now closed. I cannot abide a liar.”

  He glared at her with an intensity she found hard not to blink at. She wanted him to turn back into the Friar who had shielded her from certain death and then run her to safety through the Blitz. But that Friar was gone. Too late, she realized, she hadn’t thanked him for following her into the mirror and saving her life.

  “Look, I’m sorry, and I should have thanked you—”

  A tap at the window stopped all conversation. Edie followed the Friar’s gaze. Three figures were outlined against the night beyond. Two of them had noses pressed to the frosted glass, so close that it was clear their eyes were black raven eyes. The figure behind them was less distinct, but he was tall and seemed to be wearing a hood.

  “Tallyman!” piped Little Tragedy. The Friar cut him off with a look and slid off the bar, landing on the floor with an ominous thud. He paused to put the dragon’s head back in the pocket of George’s coat and then walked to the door.

  “Keep her out of sight until I tell you,” he hissed over his shoulder.

  Edie felt Tragedy tugging at her urgently. “Come on, Glinty. Time to be somewhere else.”

  She let him pull her into the shadows behind the arch. They could see the bulk of the Friar blocking the door as he opened it, and then he stood like a roadblock, whispering earnestly to whoever was on the outside.

  Edie’s blood ran cold, in a way she’d heard talked about but never felt. If the figure on the outside was who she thought it was—the Walker, the man who’d sent the Minotaur after her, the man who’d calmly threatened to slit her belly and spill her guts on the floor like a bag of peas—if it was he who she’d glinted and seen drowning the girl at the Frost Fair, then her blood had every reason to turn cold.

  Because if it was he, then Death had come to call.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Siege in the Sky

  When George had slid pell-mell across the wet skylight and been launched into the void above the glass-roofed engine shed far below, there had been an instant of actual and momentary weightlessness that battled a sickening sense of disbelief, as his world went quiet . . .

  —And then gravity took over and “off the roof” turned into “down toward the ground.”

  George had heard that people who fall off high buildings lose consciousness before they hit the pavement. It was one of those playground facts that kids tell each other, like the one about drowning, how gentle it is in the end. George had always wondered how anyone knew this stuff. It wasn’t as if you could ask dead people how it had felt. He had fallen through the air like a flailing starfish, watching the humped-glass roof of the train shed come up to meet him with appalling finality.

  He didn’t lose consciousness. In the few seconds of free fall, his mind remained as sharp as the glass panels he was about to hit. His life didn’t flash before his eyes. He didn’t experience a moment of relief, of oneness with the universe. He just felt alone. Brutally, sadly, and irrevocably alone. And he just had time to think what a terrible waste this was, how terrible it was to have wasted such a precious and extraordinary miracle as life. He felt ashamed at how little he had made of what he had been given, more ashamed of anything he’d ever done or not done in his life.

  He wondered if this terrible pain had gone through his father’s mind the instant of the car crash that had killed him. As George accelerated toward impact, his last thoughts tumbled after one another, and they were these: he knew his father had definitely felt all of this, and he knew that his last thought had absolutely been of George, and he knew that the pain of that last thought had been unspeakable, and he knew this just as surely as he knew he had gone to sleep every night since wishing for just one last word with his dad. He thought of his mother and remembered the good times and laughter and realized, just as he ran out of air and hit something solid, that she would now spend her life unable to say those last words to him. And the sudden pain of that realization was worse than the impact.

  The impact wasn’t too bad.

  What took the edge off was the ton or so of flying sandstone that swooped in at a shallow angle and caught him, flattening off his downbound trajectory and slowing his velocity into a survivable deceleration. George had the air knocked out of him as the gargoyle almost fumbled the catch, and things went black for a microsecond, but then he saw the wing that was flapping above him, and he saw the mended seam. He twisted his head to see the gargoyle’s face, which spared him a quick look and said:

  “Gack!”

  “Hello, Spout,” said George, fighting a ridiculously inappropriate bubble of hysterical laughter that was rising in his throat. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this. . . .”

  Spout swerved suddenly. A large gargoyle swiped a talon at them, and then a second one flew in from above. Spout only managed to avoid a collision by flying into the side of the building and bracing himself against the scaffolding. On reflex, George grabbed on to the plastic safety webbing that shrouded the cold tubing. Spout punched away another assailant with a snarl and then turned and slashed at George. For a moment, George thought the creature had perversely snatched him from death only to have the satisfaction of decapitating him. And then the talon whistled past him and slashed a hole in the webbing. Before George could quite realize what was happening, Spout had grabbed him and pushed him into the relative safety of the decking within. George sprawled on the splintery boards, then turned in time to see Spout reaching a talon inside the slash.

  “Ging,” he hissed urgently. George held out the fragment of wing, and the talon closed around it.

  The great stone mouth opened and produced the first clear word George had heard from it, probably because it actually did begin with a G.

  “Go.”

  George was shocked by the clarity.

  “You’re saying ‘go’?”

  Spout nodded fiercely, one eye scanning the sky above him.

  “Go, Eigengang, go!”

  George got it.

  “Eigengang? You’re calling me Ironhand?”

  Spout exhaled heavily and rolled his eyes as if George were actually denser than the rock Spout had been carved from—and then Spout was savagely yanked back into the blackness as a gargoyle dropped and tackled him around the neck.

  George didn’t waste any time wondering why Spout had started to talk. He just decided anywhere would be better than where he was right now. As he saw gargoyles buffeting the protective mesh arou
nd the scaffolding, he decided to try for anywhere with solid brick walls around it. He ran along the clanking aerial walkway, trying each window as he passed. Four windows along, he got lucky. The window was in the process of being replaced, so there was just a dark hole in the brickwork.

  He vaulted in and rushed blindly through a room full of timber and workbenches. He saw a door on the far end, which he ran for.

  As he burst through the doorway, something grabbed him in an all-enveloping tackle. For a jolting moment, he knew it was some fresh hellish monster, and then he got himself disentangled and realized he’d just run into sheets of plastic that had been hung to keep the workman’s dust in one room. He pushed through into a long, dark corridor and stumbled abruptly, his foot—the one without a shoe on it—finding a void where the floor should be, and he crunched on a rough surface below. He looked down, and in the murk, realized he’d gone through the floor and onto the lath and plaster of the ceiling below, because half the floorboards had been removed and were stacked on the side wall of the corridor.

  He got up and made his way forward, picking a path as quickly as he could, past the long holes in the floor— hoping he was going to find a staircase soon. He thought he could hear stone wings and talons keeping pace with him on the scaffolding that ran parallel with the corridor, one short room away. He was sure he heard great stone knuckles rapping on the windows behind him, testing them. He bumped against a bench, and something heavy thudded onto the floor.

  It was a club hammer, the big heavy kind used for hitting cold chisels.

  He picked it up. Having three pounds of drop-forged steel on the end of a stout hickory handle was just the confidence-booster George needed. There was a piece of rope looped through a hole in the bottom of the handle, and he put it around his wrist.

  He remembered a comic book his dad had had in his workroom, a memory of his own childhood—The Mighty Thor. He’d been a superhero with a hammer like this. George didn’t feel much like a superhero right now, as he teetered his way carefully along the skeletonized floor joists. The sound of gargoyles tracking him seemed to come closer and closer.