Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  The momentum swung him up and around as the Officer anchored himself on the chariot rail, and the Gunner was on board.

  The Bull had no time to slow his headlong pursuit, and the spinning blades opened him up like a giant can opener, splashing twisting curls of bright bronze in its wake. The Bull pitched forward, its horns digging into the ice and throwing it into a slamming somersault, where it lay still, upended and wreathed in its bronze entrails.

  The Queen looked back. “He won’t be killing any more women.”

  The Gunner dropped Edie to the bucking floor of the chariot and started to pump water out of her. It was like trying to work on the pitching deck of a ship.

  “Help me,” he said.

  The Officer grabbed him and held him steady.

  The Queen was turning the chariot. “Hold on,” she shouted.

  The Officer looked up and saw she was racing toward her two daughters, who were holding the mirrors up.

  “George,” shouted the Gunner as he futilely pumped water from the dead girl.

  “You hold on,” shouted the Officer. As the Queen hit the mirrors the first time with the tip of her spear, the Officer let go of the Gunner and leaped off the back of the chariot. There was a pop, and the chariot disappeared. The Officer scrambled to his feet.

  “Stay there,” he said to the girls, and ran away from the lights of the Frost Fair, toward the dark end of the ice.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Heart Stone

  “She’s dead,” said the Gunner as the Queen reined her horses in and brought the chariot to a sliding halt in front of the Artillery Memorial. The Queen dropped to her knees next to where the Gunner was pumping at Edie’s chest with the heel of his hand.

  “Then why are you still doing that?” she asked as she moved around to Edie’s head.

  “Because I don’t know what else to bloody do,” he said.

  The Queen looked up and saw big tears rolling out of his eyes.

  She bent over Edie’s open mouth, tilted her head back, and pinched her nose. She took a breath and blew it into the waterlogged lungs. She did it again. She listened. And when there was no answering breath, she did it again. For a while, the two of them tried to revive the small dead body, refusing to accept the truth that she had gone.

  Eventually the Gunner looked at the Queen. His eyes had emptied and were now deserts of dry despair.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  She wiped her eyes, and the Gunner saw an echo of the dead girl in the way her jaw came stubbornly forward.

  “Because I don’t know what else to do either. Except keep fighting.”

  “Fair enough.” He pumped Edie’s chest. “Neither did Edie.”

  He thumped his fist into Edie’s breastbone in frustration and grief, just as the Queen had blown in, and suddenly Edie threw up a great lungful of river water and then convulsed in a terrible coughing spasm.

  Her eyes flickered open, then closed again as she passed out. The Gunner felt her heart. It was beating faintly. He stared at her in disbelief. He looked at the Queen. He’d never seen her smile before, but now her face shone back at him.

  “Neither had she, I think you mean,” the Queen said.

  He beamed back at her. “If you weren’t a bloody queen I’d kiss you.”

  “If I weren’t a bloody queen I might well let you.”

  Then her face snapped back its normal businesslike demeanor.

  “She’s not out of the woods yet. She could still die of cold. We need a fire.”

  “We haven’t got a fire.”

  The Queen was unfastening her cloak. “Well, get a coat or something. We need to warm her up.”

  The Gunner held Edie’s wrist. “Her pulse is hardly there at all.”

  “Get a move on, then,” she snapped, and started stripping the cloak from Edie’s body.

  The Gunner ran over to the monument, where he saw the Officer’s coat and hat sitting next to the wet bundle of heart stones he had brought from the underground tank. As he picked up the Officer’s coat, he noticed that the bundle was steaming.

  “Hurry up,” shouted the Queen. “We’ve got to get her into something warm. She’s slipping away again.”

  “Hold up,” he said as he threw the coat over his shoulder and untied the bundle. Light blazed at him. He quickly looked around to see if there was a taint or the Walker creeping up on them. But then he noticed something about the light. The glass stones had been of all different colors, but now they were glowing with the same warm hue, like the orange at the heart of a well-banked-up fire.

  “Gunner!” shouted the Queen. “We’re losing her.”

  The Gunner dumped the heart stones next to her.

  “Heart stones. The bloody Walker kept them as trophies of all the glints he’d culled.”

  Like him, the Queen looked around searching for danger.

  “No,” he said, as he started placing the stones around Edie. “They’re not warning us. I think they feel her. I think it’s the spark of all them troubled girls kindling one last time. I think it’s them having a last laugh at the Walker.”

  The Queen watched him carefully place a stone over Edie’s heart, and then she dug her hands into the blazing stone pile and helped him surround Edie with the warmth, and wrapped her with her own cloak and the Officer’s coat.

  And in the end, it wasn’t just the fact that the Gunner and the Queen wouldn’t let her die that saved Edie. It was as the Gunner thought: it was all the lost girls and the lonely girls, all the odd women who thought they might be a bit mad because they didn’t quite fit in— because they didn’t understand that their glinting could be a gift and not a curse—it was all of them who surrounded this last lost lonely girl and gave her the final warm sparks that their lives had stored in their stones, so that she could go on and live for them.

  Because the Queen knew this was so, she wept as she watched the color return to Edie’s face and her eyes flicker open again.

  Edie’s small hand twitched where it lay in the Gunner’s big bronze palm. He closed his hand gently on it. Her eyes focused, and as she recognized him, she gripped his hand fiercely, and he again saw the rare small miracle of her smile break across her face like sunshine.

  “It’s all right,” he said gruffly. “I’ve got you. You were too tough for the Walker to kill. And you were too bloody tough for the river to kill. You’re safe.”

  Edie nodded and coughed harshly.

  “Where’s George?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Ice Devil

  The Officer didn’t find George at the ice edge. He found his hammer, caught in a branch. When he pulled at it he found George’s hand still attached to it through the thong. He pulled on the hand, and that’s when he found George, and pulled him spluttering and shivering out of the river and onto the ice.

  “W—where’s Edie?” was the first thing he said. As he had flown over the river with the Icarus, he’d seen the Gunner dragging something out of the river, and he hoped, with an intensity that hurt worse than the cold, that it had been her.

  “I’m afraid she’s dead, old man,” said the Officer. “They took her through the mirrors already. Can you run?”

  George looked terrible as he stood there trembling, teeth chattering, fist clenched on the hammer.

  “Yeah,” he said, staring across the ice.

  In fact, he looked like murder. Because he was staring at the hunched figure of the Walker, who was bent over something in the snow, scratching marks all around himself.

  “Good,” said the Officer, taking his shoulder. “Because the real trick’s going to be to get to those girls over there, the ones with the mirrors, without him seeing us.”

  George shook the Officer’s hand off his shoulder.

  “No,” he said, hefting the hammer, “that’s not the bloody trick at all.” He began to walk determinedly toward the Walker.

  The Walker was oblivious. He was so excited he could barely breathe, and the rea
son for that was in two pieces in the snow in front of him.

  When George had hit him in the chest, the blow hadn’t stopped his heart. He had been protected by the two wax disks surrounding the mirror. The disks had been there to protect him from unintended contact with the mirror, but they had failed to protect the mirror itself.

  George had broken the black mirror in two.

  The one solution to not having two mirrors, which had never occurred to the Walker, came to him now: take the one mirror and split it.

  The marks he was scratching in the snow were a pentacle of protection.

  George had just broken into a trot, the Officer on his heels, when there was a pop from behind him, and the chariot appeared.

  “Boy!” yelled the Queen. “Get over here!”

  George kept going.

  “I’m going to finish him,” he shouted.

  “No, George,” she shouted. “The girl is alive!”

  George stopped dead in his tracks.

  “What?”

  She reined in next to him. “Jump on. She’s badly shaken and very miserable, but she’s going to be fine, and she’s asking for you. Come quickly, we should hurry and get out of here.”

  The Officer grabbed George and dumped him into the chariot and jumped in after him. “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.” He grinned.

  George and the Queen were both looking at the Walker and the intensity of his activity in the snow. They looked at each other.

  “What?” said the Officer.

  “On the other hand, why not?” said the Queen. George grinned through his shivering teeth as the Queen clicked her tongue and urged the horses forward into a gallop.

  “Oh hell,” said the Officer, unbuttoning his holster. “But he doesn’t stay dead long, you know. . . .”

  “Every little helps,” said the Queen, snapping the reins and smiling fiercely, her hair flying out behind her in the wind. “Every little helps.”

  The Walker was so intent on lining up the two broken halves of the stone mirror to face each other in the snow that he didn’t look up until the first shot kicked ice into his face.

  What he saw were horses careering toward him at full gallop, with the Queen hefting her spear, the Officer firing at him, and George—leaning out the side of the chariot with a hammer held ready, above whirling scimitars attached to the wheels.

  “Fools!” he screamed.

  They were going to run him down. There was nowhere for him to run. So instead of standing up, he crouched down with his nose to the snow, making sure that the two stone mirror surfaces were facing each other exactly.

  He knew he had it set up right, because there was a burst of heat and steam as snow began to melt under each mirror edge.

  Without a microsecond to spare, he muttered something under his breath and reached into the stone mirrors.

  As the whirring blades tore through the space where he had just been, the mirrors pulled him in and out of the way.

  As they rushed toward the Walker, the Queen leaned over the back of the chariot and stabbed her spear through the ice in the very spot where he should have been. George looked down and saw that the Walker had disappeared and that they were riding through the pentagram of protection, obliterating the boundaries the Walker had scratched in the snow. As the Queen wheeled the chariot in a fast U-turn, they saw something else.

  The stone mirror halves melted their way straight down through the ice and disappeared, but not before something almost invisible, like a living ripple in the air, came out of the mirror through the door the Walker had opened.

  And because that something was made of nothing, it needed substance to survive in this world, and the first things it encountered in the empty air were the ice devils kicked up by the spinning blades of the chariot. The Queen’s chariot raced over the pentagram, and she leaned out and retrieved her spear, and then they were hurtling back to her daughters and the safety beckoning in the mirrors they were holding.

  As George looked back, he saw the invisible ripple take the ice crystals in the air and whirl them into a body shape that suddenly grew and rushed after them.

  “Faster,” he shouted. “Go faster!”

  The ice devil grew bigger. It gained on them impossibly fast. The Queen twitched the reins, and the lead horse hit the mirror. There was a pop, and for a beat they all fell through layers of black. As they did so, they had the sense of something flying past them, something very cold and alien indeed, like a blast of otherworldly frost. . . .

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Crackstone

  The London Stone sat behind a protective grille, in its usual niche on Cannon Street.

  Nobody noticed it, nobody stopped as they passed. Nobody detected the dark hum of power that throbbed through the city, connecting its streets and buildings and the stone creatures that peopled the landscape.

  But something noticed. Something noticed the stone the moment it arrived, and went to it faster than thought.

  There was no movement in the stone, but suddenly it was covered with an intense white frost that was so cold it cracked.

  It was only a small fissure.

  But it was enough.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Last Stop Is Nowhere

  The chariot bumped onto the grass, and the Queen pulled the horses to a halt. She turned in time to make sure her daughters had reappeared behind them. They nodded at her, and all three shared the same fierce grin.

  “Did you feel it?” said the Officer.

  “Feel what?” said the Gunner, looking up from where he sat next to Edie, a red-faced, warm-looking Edie swaddled in the Queen’s cloak and the Officer’s coat.

  “Something followed us back,” said George, jumping out of the chariot and racing toward Edie. She grinned at him but threw up a warning hand—

  “Mind the stones!”

  The warning stones were spread out on the ground around them, and all were now dull. Except for a small blue one clasped in Edie’s hands, a blue the exact same color of the bonnet a duck had worn in a story that had been read to her as a child. A small blue warning stone that had been made into an earring.

  George stepped carefully over to her, and not knowing what to do, punched her on the shoulder. She smiled up at him and punched him on the leg. And that seemed to be okay for both of them.

  In the distance, George heard the strangely comforting sound of Big Ben sounding the hour.

  “Get the boy that blanket,” said the Queen, pointing to the Unknown Soldier’s draped body.

  “But . . .” said the Gunner.

  “No buts,” said the Queen. “Boy’s catching his death; he’s already half dead.”

  George put down his hammer and started to unbutton his soaking coat with fingers like frozen sausages.

  “Nice hammer,” said Edie, a small hint of mockery at the back of her voice.

  “Nice earring,” he replied, equally unimpressed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “It’s my mum’s.”

  “What was it doing in there with the rest of—Oh,” said the Gunner.

  “She went mad,” said Edie. “That’s what they said. That’s why she got taken away.”

  She looked at the earring.

  “No question about why she thought she was mad, and I guess—”

  “She was a glint too,” said George.

  “Yup,” Edie replied. “Only, nobody told her.”

  “The question,” said the Queen, “is why all the other stones have faded, but it keeps blazing.”

  The Gunner cleared his throat. “Those stones belonged to glints the Walker killed or sent off to die, mad in loony bins. . . .” He looked at the Queen. She nodded. He went on. “Maybe it’s still alight because she is too.”

  “Alight?” said George.

  “Alive,” said the Queen.

  Edie looked down at the ground. She couldn’t speak. George looked at his arm. The second flaw that he had felt jagging up his arm when he’d accepted the Wal
ker’s challenge had gone, as he knew it would.

  He caught the Officer looking at it too. The Officer smiled. Held up three fingers, then folded two down.

  In the background, George could see a police motorcycle flashing its blue lights as it roared down Piccadilly and leaned into the curve that would take it around Hyde Park Corner.

  “One to go, boy. Good man.”

  George wrapped himself in the blanket the Officer handed him. He decided he’d worry about the final duel with the Last Knight later.

  “My mum could be anywhere,” Edie said in a very small, flat voice.

  “Budge up,” said George, and sat down next to her. “The Gunner could have been anywhere too. And so could you. But we got ourselves back together, didn’t we?”

  She nodded.

  “There may be a bigger problem,” said the Officer.

  They all looked at him.

  “Can’t you hear it?”

  They listened; there was only silence. And silence in London doesn’t happen, even at night.

  “The city’s gone very still, and the clock just struck thirteen.”

  They all stood up slowly and looked around.

  The city was still. Unnaturally still. The city was so still that nothing moved.

  There was no breeze.

  No noise.

  No people.

  The few cars on the street had stopped dead.

  George walked to the edge of the road.

  The police motorcycle was frozen leaning into the curve. There was no rider.

  George looked up at the familiar red mass of a night bus. There were no passengers, and no driver.

  The others slowly walked out into the street, seeing what George was seeing.

  Edie peered into an empty taxi and looked at George. “Where have all the people gone?”