Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  He finished off his note. Edie found that the more he tried to frighten her, the angrier she got. And the angrier she got, the stronger she felt. Unfortunately, it was also true that the more he tried to frighten her, the more frightened she became.

  She tried to suppress the mind-killing fear and watch what he was doing as he folded the note and produced the two interlocked circular mirrors from his pocket. She watched as he unsnapped them, and then unsnapped them again, revealing a second set of mirrors clipped inside. He took one set of mirrors and carefully adjusted a tiny bezel running around the edge.

  “That will bring them straight back to where I shall be,” he said to himself, then noticed her listening.

  “We shall meet in an open space. That way, if George brings help, I shall see them and you will suffer the consequences.”

  He reached over to the table. Edie saw that he had sandwiched the black mirror between the two wax disks and tied them in place. He had also knotted a leather thong through the hole in the mirror’s handle. He put the thong around his neck so that the heavy package hung on his front like a giant medallion. Then he pushed it inside his sweatshirt and buttoned his coat.

  He pulled his dagger out from behind him and turned back to her. As he moved, he revealed a woman’s cloak and a bonnet on the desk. She had seen them before. She had seen the bonnet tangled around her own face as the Walker drowned her. In the open spaces of the ice-covered Thames. At the Frost Fair.

  Despite herself, she shrank back in the chair. He waved the knife, imagining that it was causing her to flinch.

  “Now. Do scream if you like. The Icarus will enjoy it. I need just one thing from you before we go.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  The Challenge

  “Here he comes,” said the Officer’s voice.

  George swam slowly upward, out of a dark pool of sad dreams, as if he were made of lead. It was hard for him to leave unconsciousness; it was a huge effort just to open his eyes.

  When he did, there were two pair of bronze boots in front of his nose. He was lying beneath a heavy greatcoat that was somehow as warm and supple as wool, even though it was made of the same bronze as the boots.

  One pair of riding boots was the Officer’s. The other pair was heavier and more workmanlike: laced boots topped off by mismatched leggings, one set of puttees, the other armored with a calf protector.

  George knew those boots.

  He scrambled to a sitting position and looked up.

  The Gunner smiled down at him.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” said George.

  “You okay?”

  George thought about it for a moment.

  “Not really.”

  “Good enough,” grunted the Gunner, and he squatted down in front of George, eye to eye. “There’d be something really wrong with you if you done what you done and felt all tickety-boo about it.”

  George suddenly had to get the great thing rising in his throat out before it choked him.

  “I saw my dad.”

  “Yeah.” The Gunner nodded. “You would.”

  After a beat the Gunner pointed over his shoulder at the body lying at the north end of the monument. “It’s him, isn’t it? The Unknown Soldier. That’s why his face was made covered, so he could be everyone’s lost one. So, you just made him your dad. . . .”

  George nodded and put on a tight smile. He didn’t want anyone to know that somewhere inside, there was a well of sadness that he had been drowning in. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

  “Must have been rough,” said the Gunner.

  He put his hand on George’s shoulder and looked away.

  George took a series of long deep breaths, getting himself back together.

  “You want to let it out, son, no one here’s gonna think any the worse of you.”

  “Absolutely not,” said the Officer, busy looking with great interest anywhere but at George. “Couldn’t think more highly of you, as it happens.”

  He coughed in embarrassment and lowered his voice a little. “And for what it’s worth, I blubbed like a baby all the way through my first bombardment. . . .”

  Maybe because they gave him permission, maybe because they understood, but George didn’t need to let it out. He swallowed and found that it went back inside and didn’t seem so terrible.

  “I’m okay.”

  The Gunner turned back and looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

  “. . . in a not entirely okay way,” finished George.

  “Look at your arm,” said the Officer.

  George had forgotten about the marble groove jagging its way toward his armpit and the heart beyond. He tore at his shirt and looked.

  The entire flaw had disappeared, leaving only a faint red mark like a scar, well on the way to healing.

  “It’s gone!” he said.

  “A duel is a duel, I’d say.” The Officer smiled. “Whether it’s fought with dueling pistols, rapiers, or great big hulking artillery pieces like that one. . . .” He nodded up at the huge stone gun topping the monument. “And you certainly stood your ground. I’d say that’s one down, two to go.”

  George smiled and felt the other two grooves still twining below his forearm, the gritty stone one and the smooth brass one.

  “I’d say.” The Gunner grinned and gripped his shoulder. “And by the by: thank you.”

  He held his big hand out. George took it. The Gunner gripped it firmly.

  “Saved my bacon, no mistake. And if you don’t mind me saying, I reckon your dad would have been proud of you.”

  “Yes,” said George.

  The truth of it was suddenly there inside him. It was as if it had always been there, but he hadn’t noticed because he’d always been looking the wrong way, staring at the pool of sadness. Maybe the soldier who had worn his dad’s face had said it best: maybe it was like being on a stage that you thought you were the center of and then realizing you were on the edge of something much bigger behind you. Whatever it was, George realized that a very big pain in his heart had gone, simply because he had stopped concentrating on it and noticed that its cure had been right there all the time, waiting to be noticed.

  “Yes. I reckon he would have been. I reckon he was.”

  It was as if by not crying on the outside, all the tears had fallen inside and left him feeling washed and clean. And clearheaded.

  He got to his feet in one lithe move.

  “Edie,” he said decisively. “We need to find her.”

  “No question,” said the Gunner. “The Walker’s after her, and he’s after you.”

  The Gunner repeated to George what the Walker had told him about the black mirror. George told the Gunner about everything that had happened to him; and just as he got to the bit about the Euston Mob, the Officer tapped the Gunner on the shoulder and pointed to a dark shape gliding in from the east.

  The two soldiers unholstered their guns and aimed at the Raven as it coasted in toward them. George picked up his hammer.

  “It’s got something in its beak,” said the Officer.

  The Raven landed calmly on the white stone in front of them and gently laid the two mirrors on the ground. Then it stepped back. It wasn’t going to make any fast moves with two revolvers trained on it, but it also had too much self-respect to look interested in what might or might not happen.

  “There’s a note tied on it,” said the Officer.

  “Last pair of mirrors I saw like that was in the Walker’s hands,” said the Gunner.

  George darted forward and slid the note out. It was a simple message:

  Come to me. Beneath the main banner at the Frost Fair. Step into the mirrors and they will bring you. come now, or the girl dies.

  The Gunner and the Officer read it over his shoulder.

  “He could be bluffing,” said the Gunner.

  “He lies like the rest of us breathe,” said the Officer.

  “No,” said George. “He’s not lying.”r />
  He gently lifted the “string” that had been used to attach the note to the mirrors. It was not quite black. It was a dark, almost eggplant color.

  “It’s her hair.”

  The Gunner swore under his breath. Then he aimed his gun at the Raven.

  The Raven wasn’t surprised. It knew what was going to happen next. In his experience, people always shot the messengers when they brought bad news.

  What did surprise him was that it wasn’t a bullet in the chest bone that sent him to Hell again. It was a spear, thrown with great force and accuracy from the opposite direction.

  George, the Gunner, and the Officer looked at the sudden explosion of shocked black feathers, and then across the grass to where the spear had come from.

  There was a parked chariot, and a very businesslike queen was striding over the grass toward them, to retrieve her weapon.

  “What are you men all staring at?” she said. “It sounds like we have a girl to rescue.”

  “I think we can manage, thank you, ma’am,” the Officer said stiffly.

  “No we can’t,” said George sharply. “We’ll take all the help we can get.”

  He picked the spear out of the pile of feathers that was already being winnowed into the night air and handed it to the Queen.

  “Thank you, boy. Now, what I suggest is—”

  “You don’t suggest anything. If you want to help, you listen, because Edie told me about this. She glinted it, and it ended badly. . . .” The unmistakable crack of authority in George’s voice made the spits look at him in surprise.

  The Queen swelled in indignation. “Why, I will not—”

  “Yeah, you will,” the Gunner interrupted. “If you want to help the girl, listen in. The boy knows what he’s talking about.”

  The Queen bit her lip and kept quiet as George quickly told them about how Edie had glinted the Frost Fair and seen herself chased by the Walker and drowned in an ice hole. He told them every detail he could remember.

  “I don’t know if it really was herself that she saw being drowned; and if it was, I don’t know if you can change the past. All I know is she saw it, and I’m going into those mirrors and do everything I can to stop it from happening.”

  There was a beat of silence.

  “I could do with a hand, but either way I’m going.”

  He turned and retrieved the hammer from where it was leaning. The weight felt right as he hefted it in his hand.

  The spits looked at each other.

  The Queen turned and snapped her fingers at her daughters. “Girls,” she said, “come and hold the mirrors. It’s going to take very careful riding to get the chariot through in one piece.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Frost Fair

  You can’t change the past. Even if it hasn’t happened yet.

  This was the thought going around and around in Edie’s head as the Walker led her from the House of Pain toward the frozen Thames. She scarcely noticed anything except the snow in front of her and the strap binding her wrists together. Her vision was restricted by the bonnet the Walker had tied around her head. It jutted forward on either side like blinders. Her bound hands were hidden in a muff: a roll of padded rabbit fur that hung from the front of what she assumed was the Blind Woman’s cloak.

  She knew what the Frost Fair would look like when they escaped the narrow warren of snow-deadened streets leading down to the river’s edge. She’d seen it all before when she’d glinted her own death.

  You can’t change the past. Even if it hasn’t happened yet.

  The thought kept whirring ’round and ’round. If she was going to be able to escape, then she wouldn’t have seen herself in the ice hole. If she wasn’t going to be able to stop this from happening, why try to escape? But if she didn’t try to escape, how could she stop this from happening?

  Edie was a fighter. She knew one of the reasons she was beginning to spin loose in her mind was that she didn’t have her heart stone anymore. But neither did the Walker. That was something. It probably wasn’t enough to keep her alive by itself, but it was enough of a spark to keep her trying to figure out how to.

  “Cheer up, girl. This is a sight rarely seen.”

  If she hadn’t already glinted it, the sight that met her eyes as the Walker led her on a plank over a narrow open channel of icy water onto the frozen surface of the river would certainly have amazed her. Having previously seen it as a background for her own murder took the edge off, somehow. But it was an extraordinary sight.

  Below the looming span of Blackfriars Bridge, the entire width of the Thames was iced over and covered in snow. The night was banished with the light of hundreds of lanterns and flaming torches that illuminated the ramshackle street of makeshift tents and shelters, which had been set up on the center of the river. There was music and laughter and the sounds of a holiday crowd enjoying itself, mingling with the smell of roasting meat and wood smoke. London’s tavern owners and cooks had taken to the ice, selling their wares and hospitality out of hurriedly built temporary premises decorated with garish signs and billboards. And it wasn’t only food and drink that were for sale.

  There were souvenir shops and portrait painters, there were jugglers and acrobats, there were fairground games and a huge swinging boat full of shrieking men and women of all ages. There was even a printing press being cranked by hand next to a man with a monkey and a barrel organ. A huge painted banner straddled the street, reading FROST FAIR—COME ONE, COME ALL!, and from the numbers thronging the icy street, it would seem all of London had responded to the invitation.

  Again, if Edie hadn’t already seen all this before, she would have been captivated by the magic of the sight. As it was, seeing it all, especially the monkey and the barrel organ, just terrified her. She remembered all of this, but the monkey and the organ were a very specific part of what she had glinted. She had seen and heard them and then noticed how their music had been drowned out by an approaching sound of bagpipes as a parade moved down the street, led by a white elephant, which had stolen everybody’s attention.

  On cue, Edie heard the warning rattle of snare drums as a bagpipe band skirled into life in the distance.

  The Walker was pushing her ahead of him, one hand firmly on her shoulder.

  She needed to stop her mind from unraveling. She knew she needed to think fast and move before everything closed in on her and her diminishing series of options disappeared altogether, leaving her with nothing. She needed to choose something, and she needed to do it now. Even if it didn’t work, she would go down fighting.

  The flash of the knife blade caught her attention and gave her the something to focus on. A cook was serving slices of beef from a joint turning on a spit in the entrance of a booth just ahead. He had stabbed his blade into a wooden carving block as he took a customer’s money.

  The sharp steel blade was her way out. In the absence of any other options, this was the one she was going to choose.

  She pushed the muff awkwardly up one arm, shoving it against her stomach, disguising the wriggle with a cough. The Walker just shoved her forward, not noticing that she had exposed her wrists to the cold night air and the cruel blade beckoning just a few short steps away.

  She held her breath, and then, once the blade was in reach, she threw herself forward. Her hands chopped through the air on either side of the blade, slamming onto the red juices covering the carving surface. The blade was not as sharp as the obsidian razor she had used to slash the Walker, but it was sharp enough to give her the escape she wanted.

  It cut through the strap that was binding her wrists together, and as soon as she felt the constraint part, she pulled her hands back up and grabbed the handle of the knife, yanking it out of the wooden block.

  And as the Walker grabbed for her, she ducked and spun. His arm swung over her head, just missing, knocking the bonnet awry. She kept spinning and slashed the carving knife into his leg, catching him behind the knee.

  She heard a yell of
pain and fury, and left the knife in his leg. As he buckled forward clutching at his knee, Edie saw the bright blaze of the Blind Woman’s heart stone in the chest pocket of his coat. Without thinking, she plunged her hand in, grabbed it, and just ran, cannoning off people, heading for the open ice.

  As she ran, she remembered that when she had glinted this scene before, she had seen the bonnet fall in front of her face as she’d tried to escape. That had been the thing that had done her in, because she had run blindly into an ice hole, where the Walker had caught up with her. So as she ran, her first thought was to get rid of the stupid bonnet before it killed her.

  Her fingers fumbled at the ribbons, which was a good idea but a bad mistake: because fumbling at full tilt, trying to get the bonnet off, turned out to be the very thing that made it fall in front of her face and blind her in the first place.

  You can’t change the past.

  Even if it hasn’t happened yet.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Last Ditch

  “How’s this going to work?” asked George.

  Its working didn’t seem likely from where he was standing. Mind you, he was standing in a pretty unlikely place, in a chariot being driven by a queen of the ancient Britons, next to a World War I gunner, cantering toward two small mirrors being held parallel to each other by the Queen’s daughters.

  “I touch the mirrors as we pass, and we will go through,” said the Queen, lowering her spear.

  The mirrors seemed impossibly tiny, and then they were right on them, and the Queen jabbed with her spear point and missed.

  “Okay,” said George, looking across at the Gunner. “We don’t have time for target practice.”

  The Queen circled the chariot so tightly that it turned on one wheel, and for a moment George and the Gunner could do nothing except hold on to avoid being spun out onto the grass. Then the wheel landed with a thump, and the Queen raced back at the mirrors.

  “Just getting her eye in,” said the Gunner.

  The mirrors approached again, and the daughters didn’t flinch as the whirring blades on the wheels whipped past, inches from their knees. The Queen jabbed her spear—and missed again.