Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  There were several things the Raven found unsatisfactory about the Walker. Not ever standing still made him a less than perfect perch, for example. And making snide jokes about his ability to rebirth himself. People didn’t make jokes about phoenixes, thought the Raven. He filed it away for future brooding and resentment, and shook his feathers out. They didn’t feel new. They already felt older than dirt.

  “Right,” said the Walker, having the bad manners to sound hurried and impatient while talking to a bird that daydreamed in eons. “We need something to find him. Something with a taste for children.”

  It was starting to rain heavily. He turned up the collar of his coat, unconsciously rubbed the stone on the choker around his neck, and pulled the torn scrap of T-shirt from his pocket and held it out to the Raven.

  “It’s time for the Minotaur.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  A Day to Repair

  George woke with a jolt. Edie was standing in front of him. She looked better. He could tell that because she was poking him with gusto.

  “Hey, you were snoring!”

  He looked around the room. He got to his feet and checked all the corners.

  “He’s gone,” he said with disappointment.

  “Who’s gone?” she said, looking at him suspiciously.

  And so he told her all about the Clocker, and what he’d said. He didn’t tell her all of what he’d said to the Clocker, because it didn’t seem any of her business, and besides, he’d said it to someone, and somehow that was what mattered.

  “What was he like, this Clocker?” she asked.

  George described him, starting with the way he looked and his clock-face eye, ending with his warning about the Servants of the Stone.

  A Day to Repair “And they’re not taints. Or spits?”

  “No,” he replied.

  “So what are they?”

  “Weirded.”

  “They sound like it.”

  “It means doomed. They’re cursed to walk the earth until they’ve undone whatever it was that got them in trouble in the first case. And the Servants of the Stone are—

  “In trouble with the Stone.”

  “Yup,” he said, feeling the water deepening under his feet.

  “And are you in trouble with the Stone?” she asked carefully, unconsciously rubbing her sea-glass between her fingers. She was remembering the warning from the drowning girl shouting, “He’s not what he seems.” She had a chilling jolt of doubt. She had thought the warning applied to the Black Friar. But what if the girl had been warning her about George?

  “Yeah. But not their kind of trouble, though,” he said, feet paddling a little desperately in the deep water of his ignorance.

  “Not ‘their kind’of trouble,” she parroted. “Oh. How does that work, exactly?”

  “The Clocker said they were beings who had made a pact with the Stone. I haven’t made any pact. I’ve, um, wronged it.”

  “And wronging it is different?”

  “Apparently.”

  Edie felt the room getting smaller. She wanted to be out in the fresh air, away from the dust and the dark, and away from the slightly uncomfortable feeling of being stuck in a locked room with George.

  “How do we get out of here? I mean, it’s going to be a bit harder climbing out of here in broad daylight. . . .”

  George was suddenly aware of the time and the noises of the city outside the door. The grumble of traffic was full force, and with a shock he realized he must have slept again, and slept longer than before.

  “We can go out from inside the church,” he said hurriedly, crossing to the door the Clocker had shown him. “See?”

  He gently undid the lock. Edie followed him cautiously. From the bottom of the narrow staircase came the sound of chanting in a language that wasn’t English.

  “What’s that?” she whispered.

  “Russians,” he explained. “It’s used by Russian Orthodoxes now, according to the Clocker.”

  “What are ‘orthodoxes’?” asked Edie, following him down the stair.

  “I don’t know,” said George, slipping out of a doorway behind a pillar in the nave of the church. “Unhappy, from the sound they make.”

  The front quarter of the church was mainly full of old people, with a sprinkling of younger people all facing away from them toward the altar. They were all standing, and the song they were singing wasn’t really a song but more of a chanted moan of pain and apology led by a bearded priest in long black robes. His eyes were the only ones to see George and Edie slip out from behind the pillar and head for the door to the street. By the time he had registered interest, the door was closing behind them.

  They paused on the steps and looked at the bustling city splashing past in front of them. The relative emptiness of the night streets had been replaced by throngs of pedestrians, and where empty night-buses had raced minicabs on uncrowded streets, unavailable taxis now inched forward in a rain-lashed gridlock.

  “Brilliant!” said Edie in disgust, looking up at the sheets of water dropping out of the lead-heavy sky. She pulled her coat tight around her neck. “Just brilliant.”

  “No,” said George. “Edie. It is brilliant. Remember what the Gunner said? Gargoyles don’t fly in the wet! It means we don’t have to worry about them spotting us from the sky. The rain is brilliant. Come on.”

  “Come on where?” she asked, staying in the dry patch by the door. “I’m hungry.”

  “The Monument,” he explained excitedly.

  “Yeah, but we don’t know what monument you need,” she said, thinking that even if he did know, it wasn’t a monument she needed, and wondered how or when she’d be able to work out if her new fear about George not being what he seemed would resolve itself.

  “The Monument,” he explained. “The Clocker helped me work it out.” And he told her how the clues had been hidden in what the Black Friar had said.

  “I didn’t know whether we should trust the friar,” she said.

  “Me either,” he admitted. “But the Clocker said it seemed to make sense. And he couldn’t honestly see why the Friar wouldn’t help us.”

  “And why do you trust the Clocker?”

  Because he had kind eyes, thought George. Because he understood when I told him about my dad.

  “Because he told me not to,” he said. “He told me not to trust anyone, even him, not unless they were a spit without a hint of taint about them.”

  She shook her head as if this were the stupidest thing she’d heard all day.

  “Could have been a double bluff though, couldn’t it?”

  “No,” he said emphatically, sure he was right. “Here.” He fished the square of chocolate from his pocket and held it out to her. “He left this for you. He said you’d be hungry when you woke up. He was that kind of person.”

  “The kind that gives sweets to unsuspecting little girls,” she said, taking the chocolate anyway.

  “I don’t think you’re that unsuspecting,” he said.

  “Too right,” she said around the lump of chocolate already disappearing into her mouth. “Haven’t been unsuspecting for a long, long time.”

  “Come on then, if you’re coming,” he said, looking up at the clock above them. It was getting late. The Herculeses stared out at the street, eyes fixed and stony as if they’d never moved an inch since the sculptor had chiseled them out of the living rock.

  “You got any more?” she said in a chocolate-muffled voice.

  “No,” he said, jogging into a narrow alleyway.

  “Oh,” she said disappointedly.

  He didn’t turn to see if she was following him. After a few yards he heard her voice behind his right ear.

  “Why are we going this way?” she asked. “It’s wetter than the streets.”

  “No one puts taints on the back of buildings or in alleys,” he explained.

  “Good thinking,” she said grudgingly. “That one of your friend the Clocker’s ideas?”

&n
bsp; “No,” he said. “I worked that one out all by myself.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Absent Friends

  Dictionary watched the early-morning lawyers walking into the Law Courts. He felt the pigeons landing on his wig, and enjoyed the warbling they made as they jostled for position.

  “Your pardon, Mr. Johnson. A question. Amiable, assure you.”

  He looked down. The Clocker looked back at him.

  “Introduce myself, perhaps.”

  “No need. You’ll be the Clocker. I don’t miss much up here, sir. We may never have had cause to converse, but I see you coming and going, checking the clocks and tallying away on your beads.”

  “Ah. Your fame precedes. Magnificent achievement. Man of many words, etcetera. Self man of few. But desire knowledge.”

  “Pursuit of knowledge is one of the things that elevates us beyond the ruminant bovine, sir. That and the 340

  Absent Friends ability to enjoy a pipe and a good dish of tea. If you mean no malice I have no objection to making your acquaintance and illuminating you, as far as my dim lamp of learning may cast its light into the tenebrous miasma that encircles us.”

  The Clocker bobbed a series of short bows.

  “Eternally grateful. In your debt. Matter of boy.”

  “Boy? What’s the matter with a boy? What boy?”

  “Unusual boy. Travels with girl. Girl glint.”

  Dictionary shivered and shuddered.

  “Oh. That boy. What of him?”

  “Met him. Last night. Decent chap. In trouble. Seeking Stone Heart.”

  “And a bushel of trouble he caused too, in the pursuit of it. Perhaps you know of a spit that was known as the Gunner?”

  The Clocker bobbed up and down in friendly excitement.

  “Indeed. Absolutely. Well, no. But wish to. Wish to contact him. Tell him of boy and girl’s movements. Need help, I feel.”

  “The Gunner may well be beyond help, giving or receiving. He left here in no state to get to his plinth before turn o’day, I fear.”

  The Clocker stopped bobbing, and slumped like a puppet with its strings cut.

  “But. Oh. I see. Tragedy. Would like to . . . Unfortunate. Wish was something to do for ‘em.”

  There was a pause. A harrumph. And the sound of a man grudgingly ripping a strip of paper from a very old dictionary.

  The Clocker looked up. Dictionary cleared his throat in an explosive blast.

  “The Gunner had friends, of course. Count myself one. But friends of a more martial aspect are probably more to the point at this particular juncture. The word could be put out, so to speak. Do you have a pen or pencil, sir?”

  The Clocker held up a tiny curl of paper.

  “Perhaps we may combine in essaying a pigeon?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  As the Crow Flies

  The Raven lofted up and over a sheer glass massif, heading northwest through the rain. Below him was a jumble of buildings thrown together with little rhyme or reason beyond the accident of history and the ravages of time, fire, and aerial bombing. Pitched roofs and piercing spires pointed to heights that had been unimaginable at the time they were built, but were themselves now looked down on by soaring office towers and mammoth blocks of flats alongside them.

  The Raven caught an updraft from a building’s heating system venting into the rain, and spiraled higher. As he did so he looked back on the cityscape behind him, where there were fewer towers and more blocks, all bisected by the sinuous river curving between them, tamed by the embankments built on both sides.

  The Raven remembered the living river, remembered how its curves had sharpened and shallowed over the time it had known it, a snake moving over the land at a pace too slow for men to notice. And now it was banked in stone and concrete, tamed into a runnel, not a living river at all. He remembered when it had driven mill wheels. Now the only wheel was a massive upended bicycle wheel on the South Bank, where people paid to see what the Raven saw and had seen for generations.

  The Raven flapped back on course, the scrap of George’s T-shirt fluttering in its beak. Ahead of it, in the distance, it saw the densest cluster of modern high-rises, lit up from within against the gunmetal rain clouds behind them. He centered himself on the bulbous outline of the one that looked like a giant’s cucumber thrust rudely end-first into the ground, and started to descend.

  In a direct line between him and the cucumber, about half a mile in front of it, was the eastern edge of a massive complex of concrete and glass, like a fortress assembled from ziggurats and thin spiky towers. Inside the boundaries of this futuristic urban citadel there were fountains and walkways on different levels, and there was more concrete. The Raven knew that below the surface of the southern end of this sprawl had once run the ancient city wall. And he could remember when the dwarfed white church marooned within a startling patch of green in the cement bastion had once been the tallest building in the area.

  It swerved around one of the spiky tower blocks and dropped suddenly into a forgotten corner of the complex. There were some raised flower beds being lashed by the rain. They were not full of flowers as such, but had been planted with hardy city-proof vegetation that almost matched the cement walkways for lack of color and decoration. The only piece of exuberance was a small grove of horse tail reeds.

  The Raven dropped to the earth in front of the reeds and looked up at the feathery tips being buffeted by the wind and the rain squall breaking overhead.

  Above it crouched a powerful figure, black and shiny in the rain, the wetness coursing over its hunched and massive body reflecting the surrounding streetlights. It was an unmistakeably male figure; below the waist, a man with strong overmuscled legs bent ready to spring out of the rushes at any unwary passer-by. But his principal feature was in the predominance of muscle and bulk curving up from the waist; not the muscle of a man, but the raw brutal power and bulk of a full-grown bull. The shoulders hunched massively below a bull’s head topped by aggressively pointing horns; and so well had the sculptor shaped it, that the sound of enraged snorting seemed to lurk about it, even though it never—to the normal eye—moved or breathed at all.

  The Raven hopped up on its shoulder. It dropped the piece of T-shirt into the flower bed in front of it as it sidled up to a pricked bovine ear and clacked its beak.

  Above them, the spike of apartment block failed to keep the rain cloud pinned in place, and the rain moved on to drench other parts of the city. As the rain eased, and a small patch of fugitive blue appeared in the cloud-scape, the Raven could again be seen flapping south.

  In the flower bed, beneath the rushes, for those whose eyes saw what was there and what really was not there, there was no Minotaur. Just a patch of newly turned earth, where a hoof had plashed the ground in anger and set off.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  After Pudding

  George and Edie were working their way through a new part of the city. It was a part where modern buildings rose high on each side of them, but from streets whose names, narrowness, and random angles betrayed them as part of the very old plan of London. They turned down a thin sloping section of road called Pudding Lane.

  “Don’t know why you’d call a lane after a pudding,” grumbled Edie, her collar held tight around her neck.

  “It’s where the bakers worked,” explained George, happy to have found himself in a part of London that he knew about, if only from history lessons. “It’s where the fire started.”

  “What fire?”

  “The Great Fire. 1666. It began in a baker’s oven around here.”

  “You know dates and things? Must be a brainbox as well as rich.”

  “I’m not rich, Edie. And it’s an easy date to remember. It’s a cigarette and three pipes.”

  “It’s what?” said Edie, completely lost.

  “Everyone gets taught that. The one looks like a cigarette and the sixes look like pipes. You know—like old men smoke?”

  “I don’t know any
old men. And I didn’t get taught about any fire.”

  “Well, if you don’t believe me—"said George, turning left out of the bottom of Pudding Lane, “—look at that.”

  A tall stone pillar soared over their heads, dominating the small square that stood at the crest of a gentle rise. George thought it looked like a more homely Nelson’s Column. It may have been the fact that buildings crowded in on it from all sides, giving you no place to stand back and appreciate its size; or it may have been that the square pediment it sat on had a door in the middle of it, with a yellow light burning inside. It somehow seemed more like a lighthouse than a triumphal column. And of course, there was no triumphal figure atop the fluted gray stone pillar. Instead there was a square cage running around it, painted gray and white. And rising from this unexpected cage was a gilded urn sprouting frozen gold flames. Even on a gray day like this, the aerial gilt sparkled against the city dullness around it.

  Edie pulled him back into Pudding Lane.

  “What?”

  “Have you gone dragon-blind all of a sudden?”

  After Pudding “Dragons?” he said, floundering.

  “On the top of the plinth!”

  He stuck his head around the corner. Sure enough, he had completely missed the four roughly carved dragons clinging on to the corners of the plinth. They had a desperate teeth-gritted look to them, as if their legs were getting tired of gripping on to the corners, and they might plummet bottom-first to the ground below at any moment.

  “I have to go up there,” he said, looking up at the drizzle. “It’s still raining.”

  “They’re not waterspouts, George. I think the ‘not flying in the rain’ thing only applies to the gargoyles who are meant to be waterspouts. These look more—nasty.”

  She pulled out her sea-glass. It was lifeless and opaque, and told her that, despite their proximity and unpleasant grimaces, these dragons were—for now—no threat.

  “They might be dead statues,” he said “The Clocker said a lot of statues don’t move anymore because they’re dead. They died in the wars between the spits and the taints.” He saw the trap his mouth was opening up for him to fall into, so he stopped.