Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  He realized that the narrow duct he was in must be a side tributary to a bigger underground stream, and in this he was right. The underground water tank was an ancient spur of the Tyburn, diverted for the very purpose of providing an underground reservoir. The water he was feeling against his fingertips was the flow of the main channel of the stream itself.

  He shoved the bundle of sea-glass ahead of him and wrenched himself around onto his side. He couldn’t quite get his body around the angle, but because he was gaining strength, and because when you get a second chance at life you grab it with both hands, he wrenched away the crumbling cornerstone and pulled himself into the wider stream.

  He felt the pull of the water tugging gently at him. He could easily have gone with it and seen where it took him. But something pulled him the other way. He scrabbled for the bundle, took a firm grip on it, and pushed his way against the mild current. It was a contrary thing to do, but if anyone had been able to see his smile in the black tunnel, they would have seen it was not only contrary but obstinate and fierce and somehow exulting.

  If he wasn’t going to die, he was certainly going to live, and live his way—and he was not going to do that by taking it easy and going with any damn flow.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Unquiet Death at Ghastly Grim

  Edie fell one floor and was saved by a combination of thick snow and a henhouse.

  At least she imagined it was a henhouse, because it squawked alarmingly when she hit it and rolled off into the alleyway.

  It was still clucking in outrage as Edie ignored the fact that she was winded and her shoulder felt dislocated, as she ran off into the snow. Somewhere in the distance a barrel organ was playing and a church bell was cheerily tolling the hour as Edie thudded through the snow, the arms of her straitjacket flapping wildly behind her as she tried to put as much distance as she could between her and the House of Pain.

  The street was dimly lit by occasional oil lamps, and Edie ran from pool of light to pool of light, checking behind her as she did so. The houses hunched over the street with drooping eaves and second and third floors that overhung a narrow thoroughfare, as if ready to pounce.

  She was very conscious that her footsteps were the only ones in the virgin snow. She wasn’t going to be hard to find. She ran out into a wider street, where the surface had been churned up by the passage of carts and cabs, hoping her footprints would be hidden in the general confusion.

  She didn’t, however, want to run in the middle of any street for long, because she was too visible. She also had a strong sense that she was being watched; but when she whirled to look behind her, she saw no one in the road, and only blackness stippled with falling snow above her. The sense of being seen became an unbearable itch that needed to be scratched, so when she saw a chance, she leaped across the strip of virgin snow and into a narrow alley, leaving, she hoped, no clues as to where she’d left the general melee in the middle of the street.

  She looked back and noted with satisfaction that she’d left no trace at all. She ran along the side of the alley, keeping in the shadows, then turned a sharp corner, only to come to an even sharper halt.

  Straight across the street was a church, and beside it a small churchyard. The high wall surrounding it was topped with ornate multibarbed spikes that poked through the soft topping of snow like a thornbush. There was an arched stone gateway, also topped with spikes, above a black iron gate that stood ajar.

  Edie normally stayed well clear of churchyards, but there were two reasons that she started across the street, heading for the gate. First, there was a mash of footprints and wheel tracks leading into it, so her footprints would be lost among them. And secondly, she heard the chilling noise of dogs baying, coming closer. Her plan was to get through those metal gates, close them, and wait behind their safety for her pursuers to pass. She knew without a doubt that the barking came from the mastiffs from the House of Pain.

  As she approached the gate she looked up and saw that it was decorated with stone skulls. There were two on each side, buried to their eye sockets in snow, impaled on savage barbs. There were three in the center of the arch, resting on bones. The central skull wore a laurel wreath like an ancient Roman, which made it look even more ominous, like the Emperor of Death.

  It was too late for her to stop now, because the baying was closing in, and there was nowhere else to hide. She ducked through the gate and pushed it shut. The latch clunked, but there was, she noted, no way to lock it. She griped the obsidian blade and listened, ready to fight.

  The dogs were suddenly silent. Edie hoped this was because they had taken a wrong turn and run on. She crouched in the shadows of the wall and looked at the graveyard behind her. It was a cramped space, hemmed in by the blind-eyed backs of houses on two sides, and by the square tower and side of the church on the other. It was a mad jumble of snowcapped gravestones, as if the bodies beneath were stacked four or five deep. The spaces between the stones were far too small to leave room for the full length of a coffin between them.

  There were no lights in the houses, but there was a dim flicker from within the church. She saw a narrow door in the base of the tower. Without thinking, she slipped through the closely stacked ranks of gravestones.

  She heard a voice and froze.

  “What a busy night.”

  “A busy night indeed, Majesty.”

  The voices had a hollow, doomy quality to them. They sounded dry and were accompanied by a bony clacking.

  “One goes out, one goes in.”

  “No rest for the wicked, Majesty.”

  “No rest for the good either. Not with the resurrection men abroad in the night.”

  Edie realized with a chilling certainty that she was hearing skulls talking to each other on the other side of the arch. The three central ones on the outside face of the stonework were, of course, invisible to her, but the two skulls on top of the wall were outlined against the night sky. And she knew what resurrection men were. She’d always listened in school, even when making it look as if she weren’t. Resurrection men dug up dead bodies and sold them to surgeons to cut up.

  She looked down and realized that the muddy footsteps and wheel tracks in the snow were just the kind to have been made by people digging and wheeling something away in a barrow. That explained why there was such a churn of markings leading into a graveyard at night.

  One of the end skulls swiveled on its impaling barb and looked at Edie.

  “She’s listening, Majesty.”

  “Impossible. Unless . . .”

  “Exactly.”

  “Ask her.”

  “Are you a glint, girl?” said the skull that Edie could see.

  She nodded.

  “She says yes, Majesty.”

  “I didn’t hear her.”

  “She nodded. She’s hiding.”

  “Tell her there is much hidden in the boneyard of Ghastly Grim, but that none of it is alive. Tell her to go.”

  “You must go,” said the skull.

  “Please stop talking!” Edie said urgently, ears straining for the sound of hounds or footsteps beyond the prattling chatter of the skulls.

  “What does she say?”

  “She’s arguing, Majesty.”

  “She can’t argue with me.”

  “You can’t argue with the Majesty.”

  “I’m not arguing. I’m asking.”

  This was the noisiest deserted churchyard Edie had ever been in. She backed up to the narrow door and tried it. It was locked.

  “She’s trying to get in the church.”

  “Will you please be quiet,” Edie hissed again, stepping around a newly opened grave. She hunkered down behind a gravestone. She noted the name carved across it. It read: Aemilia Bowles. “Please stop talking.”

  “No. We always have the last word.”

  She was really regretting her decision to seek refuge in this “quiet” graveyard.

  “Okay,” she said urgently. “Have it. Just be q
uiet.”

  “She says have it, Majesty.”

  “Tell her we don’t need her permission to have it. We have it by right, for we are Death!”

  Edie boiled over. “You’re not Death,” she said. “You’re a bunch of chattering stone skulls that can’t keep their mouths shut.”

  “She says . . .”

  “SHUT UP. You are not Death—”

  There was silence. Then another voice said quietly.

  “No. But I am.”

  It was the Walker. Edie could see the two dogs silently pawing the other side of the gate.

  Only now did she remember to look down at her hand holding the heart stone. She had been gripping it so tightly that she hadn’t seen the warning light blazing from it.

  Something large leaped to the top of the wall and crouched there, and where the dogs were panting, this thing was breathing in short, choppy shrieks of hunger. In excitement, it clapped its stubby wings together over the hunched mass of its torturously enclosed body.

  It was the Icarus.

  All the energy seemed to drain from Edie as she slid down behind a grave marker, realizing that now the Walker had her and would have George, and the Gunner was probably dead, and it was all over. And even though she knew she was done for, she used the last piece of her energy to scrabble away the snow and mud at the foot of the gravestone she was hiding behind and stuff her heart stone deep into the earth.

  And then she stood up and kicked the earth in on top of it and stamped it down, hoping her legs were hidden as she did so.

  And she saw the Walker come through the gate, knife in one hand, the other covering one of his eyes.

  And she dropped her head and closed hers.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  How to Fall Out of a River

  As the Gunner crawled his way against the flow, he felt life returning to his body in more ways than just the renewed strength. His hands felt like his hands again, not clumsy obstacles at the end of his arms. He could think straighter, too, as if layers of thick cloth had been lifted from his brain.

  He wondered if this miraculous increase in wellbeing extended to a lifting of the Walker’s power over his ability to dig his way to the upper air. He flexed his muscles and reached for the roof of the pipe. Somehow the instructions were blocked between his head and his arms, which just stayed where they were and didn’t attack the roof as he had told them to do.

  He ignored his disappointment and pushed on.

  The dark water-filled pipe seemed to go on forever, and the absence of any visual clues made it even harder to bear. At times he hallucinated that he had become weightless and was crawling on the ceiling of the pipe; other times it seemed that the pipe was moving past him and he was keeping still.

  He realized he could fight these disorienting feelings if he concentrated on what his hands were touching on the wall of the tunnel as he went forward, because the texture beneath his fingertips was the one thing that did change. Some of the time it was bricks, some of the time it was long curves of stone or concrete piping. At one stage it appeared to be just clay, and he felt his fingertips leaving a groove as he squirmed forward. He imagined the cloudy trail his hand must be leaving in the clear water, invisible in the darkness.

  He had been feeling a brick side to the tunnel for quite a long time, and had just wondered if he could work out how far he was going by counting them as his fingers moved from gap to gap. Then he felt a new texture. It was unbroken by any mortar cracks, so his first thought was that it was more concrete piping; but he quickly realized that it was different. It was metal.

  He rapped his knuckles against it, and the answering vibration confirmed his first impression. He moved on for a few paces, and then the implication of that answering vibration hit him: a metal pipe, bedded in the clay of London, would be deadened and sound damped by the surrounding earth. There would be no answering vibration.

  The implication was that he was in a metal pipe, and that there was air, not clay on the other side of it. His first instinct was to hit the roof of the pipe, but his hands wouldn’t obey his commands. He kicked the floor of the pipe in frustration.

  His boots set off a bigger vibration. He did it again, harder. And then he smiled.

  “Didn’t say anything about digging down, did he?”

  He turned on his back and hacked the metal-shod heels of his ammo boots onto the floor of the pipe. He sledgehammered them down again and again, and every time, he felt the answering vibration in the wall through his braced fingertips. Every kick of his boots got the same result, and then suddenly the vibration wasn’t there, but a sharp single shock shuddered through the pipe. He had no idea what it meant, but he stomped down one last time with all the power in his body. Instead of the jarring impact of his boots, there was a slight resistance, and then his feet continued downward, through the bottom of the pipe, and he was suddenly falling—

  The Tyburn is one of London’s lost, hidden rivers. But it does show itself in one place, and that’s where the Gunner was: it crosses over the Regent’s Canal in an aqueduct disguised as a footbridge, close to the London Zoo, and it was out of the bottom of that aqueduct that the Gunner tumbled, in his own personal waterfall.

  He had a moment of elation as he felt the air, and then a jolt of surprise as he depth-charged into the water of the canal. The surprise was, under these circumstances, understandable. Not many people fall out of a river, and even fewer fall out of one river into another.

  He pushed off the muddy bottom of the canal and breathed in the night air. He looked back at the bridge out of which he had just fallen, and the liberated Tyburn pouring out of it into the water below. He realized what must have happened, and grinned. Then he lofted the bundle of heart stones onto a footpath and pulled himself out after it. He paused only to put his helmet on, and then he picked up the bundle, vaulted a fence into Regent’s Park, and started running southeast.

  He knew it was after turn o’day and that he should be dead. If he wasn’t, it meant someone had stood his watch, and he wasn’t going to waste a minute getting back to Hyde Park Corner to see who it was.

  He smiled as he ran.

  Because of course his gut told him exactly who it must have been; and where George was would also be his best chance of finding Edie before the Walker got to her.

  The glasses chinking in the bundle as he ran were all the evidence he needed to know that once a glint was in the Walker’s grasp, there was no escape.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  In the Walker’s Grasp

  The Icarus stood in the middle of the dusty library, his cropped wings brushing the roof as he loomed over Edie, panting short angry screams.

  Edie turned her face away.

  “If you find him worrying, you shouldn’t have broken the window,” said the Walker. “He would never have been able to get in here without an opening that size.”

  Edie looked at the Walker’s face. There was no blood where she had slashed him, but an impossibly healed white scar cut across his face, just below one eye, taking a nick out of the bridge of his nose and ending in the other eye. That eye was now dead, clouded a pinky white, with no iris or pupil to be seen.

  “And if you didn’t want him angry with you, you should never have killed his brother.”

  “I didn’t kill his brother,” said Edie quietly.

  “The Minotaur was his brother. Not an actual brother, but a brother in that they were the creations of the same maker, the same sculptor. They had much in common as a result.”

  Edie didn’t need to look to confirm the truth of that. The Icarus had the same powerful legs and body, the same sense of dark energy bunched up and ready to erupt.

  The Walker stood up and looked down at her. One of her arms was again tied to the chair.

  Far off in another part of the house, Edie could hear the despairing sobs of the Blind Woman. The Walker noticed her listening. He smiled and snapped his fingers. The Raven flew in the window and settled on his shoulde
r.

  “You’re wondering why she is crying so heartbreakingly.”

  Edie didn’t say anything. The Walker’s hand traced the scar across his face.

  “You’re wondering what I am going to do to you. For what you have done to me.”

  He was right, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of letting him know. She was unnerved by how calm he had been ever since finding her at the churchyard. He had almost been polite as the Icarus had trapped her and they had led her away.

  He smiled without a shred of humor, and started writing on a sheet of paper. His voice was quiet, conversational, almost warm.

  “I am doomed to walk the city until the Stone releases me. And so I cannot die. I heal, as you can see, prodigiously well. But in four hundred years, no one has done what you have done. . . .”

  And here he looked up from the writing and pointed to the blind, pinky-white eyeball next to it.

  “Now, because of you, I must walk the world one-eyed. Be sure that that is a wound and an affront that requires a magnificently well-thought-out punishment. I shall not deny myself the pleasure of planning the gradual stages of your end by rashly killing you now in anger. For despite what foolish men say, revenge is not a dish best served cold: to my taste, it is a dish best served after exquisitely detailed preparation and execution, and enjoyed at blood temperature.”