“I know. My luck turned—”
“Because you broke your—”
“Enough talking. We need to move. And you need me, son, because the Walker’s gonna be guarding the Stone, and I ain’t done all this to have you walk into his hands at the last minute, right?”
He led off, straightening with every step, visibly pushing the pain out of his consciousness as he went.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Black Tower
Opposite the neglected facade of the office building, in whose unprepossessing facade the London Stone is embedded, is a railway station.
Outside the station, like most stations in London, there is a stand for a man selling newspapers.
People have been filling the streets of the city with the noise of them crying their wares ever since the idea of trade arrived. The man advertising the name of his paper had ruined his voice through a combination of all-weather shouting and three packs of high-tar cigarettes a day. The sound he made was a raw shorthand rather than a clear description of his product.
“Stannid! Gitcha Stannid!” he shouted every twenty seconds.
He spent the remaining time hawking and spitting and wiping a runny nose. The noise was beginning to annoy the Walker, who was pacing the meter of pavement behind him, in the shadow of the Black Tower.
He avoided a splat of phlegm that the news vendor hoiked behind him, and decided enough was enough. If the Raven were here he could be more relaxed, as the Raven’s eyes missed less than it forgot, and of course, it forgot almost nothing. As it was, he had to stand sentry on the Stone across the street, and this yelping coughing man was distracting him.
He put his hand out and touched him. The man turned, shocked to find someone had been so close to him all this time. Before the man could say anything, the Walker smiled and spoke quietly.
“Go home. You’re sick. You’re probably very, very ill. You may die.”
The news vendor started shaking. He forgot he’d just seen the Walker. He didn’t realize he’d been spoken to. He just felt terrible—ill and full of fear. It was the bloody smokes.
He snapped the lid on his metal stand closed and locked it. He felt panic building in his chest. He wondered if he’d get home before his heart attacked him.
The Walker smiled in satisfaction, unconsciously rotating the stone fragment on the chain around his neck with one hand as he watched the man shuffle off in an explosion of coughing.
He backed around a pillar and reached into his pocket. He was sure he could make the boy not see him if he came close to the Stone, but he knew that the Gunner, if he was still with them, would see him. So he pulled a silver disk from his pocket. It was the same size and shape as a woman’s powder compact. He twisted the disk. There was a click, and it revealed itself to be two mirrors that clipped together for carrying. He pocketed one, and held the other around the edge of the pillar. He angled it so that he could get a good view across the street, and paced imperceptibly on the spot, eyes fixed on the Stone. As he watched, he licked his dry lips, one hand loosening the ancient dagger in the scabbard at his belt.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Tempered Steel
The Gunner stopped them on the corner of the road leading onto Cannon Street, where the Black Tower rose into the sky in its cage of angled silver tubes.
“You don’t move until I whistle. When I whistle, you know I’ve got him, or the coast is clear.”
George checked his watch. It read 3:31.
“I’ve got eleven minutes.” His voice was calm.
“You’ve got time. Don’t show yourselves. I’m gonna go around the back. See where the evil bugger is.”
Edie put her hand out to stop the Gunner. As she touched him, a wave of impressions flowed into her. It wasn’t like glinting. It wasn’t fear. It didn’t have the slicing inalterable pain of the past. It was fluid, but it had a dark underthrob to it, like a tooth about to go bad.
“Wait,” she said. “Something not good’s going to happen.”
He gave her a long look. Then a short smile.
“Glints see the past. Not the future. And bad stuff happens all the time. That’s why we keep doing what we do.”
“It’s not that—”
He headed off at a trot.
“Later, eh?”
“What did he break?” said Edie, her eyes glued to his disappearing back. George leaned against the closed box of a newspaper stand as he answered.
“He swore an oath that he wouldn’t bring a bullet against the Minotaur.”
“What does that mean?”
“He put himself in harm’s way, like taking on a curse or something. To save us.”
“You mean me,” she said dully. Then some of the old fire returned, and her chin jutted tightly. “I didn’t ask him to.”
She kicked angrily at the newspaper stand. It clanged satisfactorily, but it didn’t make her feel any better.
“Sorry. It’s my bloody temper. It’s always my temper. If I’d kept it. . .” She looked away.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
George’s hand reached for her shoulder. She shrugged it off. He didn’t, however, let go.
“Edie. What?”
“If I’d known how to control my temper, I don’t think I’d be where I am now. I wouldn’t be alone. I’d have a family.” She fired out a short laugh that sounded half a sob. “I’d have a dad, anyway—of sorts. If I’d controlled myself.”
They stood there for a long time, his hand on her shoulder, his eyes on her back. Her eyes somewhere else entirely, somewhere with the sea on the horizon and pebbles underfoot, and a train rattling past full of unseeing eyes and a driver waving happily, misreading everything he was seeing and turning away before he saw what she had had to do to the man behind her.
“It just comes. It blows through me. Like a wind. I can’t close the doors and keep it out. It blows in like this black wind and I go with it, and then it’s . . . and then I. . .”
“It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
“No, it’s not,” said a voice corroded by ill humor. “Not for you. Nothing is ever going to be okay again.”
The Walker had materialized behind George, holding the dagger’s long blade at his throat.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
London Stone
The Walker’s free hand patted George’s coat pockets. George couldn’t move. The razor-sharp blade brushed his Adam’s apple so closely that he didn’t dare swallow.
“Please,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “I just want this all to be over. I just want to go home.”
The Walker’s teeth appeared in a humorless snarl.
“No one goes home. No one ever goes home.”
Edie’s leg began to shake. She stamped it to stop the tremor. It didn’t work.
It wasn’t just the knife, or the man in the big green coat, or the venom in his voice. All that was bad; all that was very, very bad. But it was as nothing compared to the thing that really terrified her.
What terrified her, what dropped the floor out of her world, was the fact that she’d seen the long burnished knife and the Walker before.
And she knew he was capable of slitting George’s throat without losing his smile, because the last time she’d seen him he had been drowning a little girl in a hole in the ice, at the Frost Fair.
But even that was not the worst thing. The worst thing was too awful to think about, so she stamped down on it by screaming at him.
“Leave him alone!”
The Walker ignored her completely as his hands scrabbled more and more desperately in Georges pockets.
“Where is the thing you broke, boy? Just tell me. All I want is the thing you broke. All I want to do is put it on the Stone. …”
He felt the dragon’s head in the side pocket of the coat. George could smell his breath, sweet with decay and hunger as he talked into his ear.
“Here we are. Take it out, boy, and hand it over. I sh
all make amends. The Stone will smile on me.”
Edie felt a tug between her and the Walker. He was so busy watching George pull the broken carving out of his pocket that he had stopped looking at her. She had felt the tug before, but it was usually when something especially nasty was trying to make her touch it. Things with deep sadness exerted this kind of pull. She never went into churchyards, for example, because some headstones yanked at her like magnets. But no human had ever exerted such a tug. And then she saw what it must be.
The stone with the hole in it.
The one on the choker around the Walker’s neck.
“Leave him alone!” she shouted.
The Walker raised his violet eyes and stared at her. Took the blade off George’s throat and waved it at her in fast steely zigzag.
“Shut up, milady, or I’ll open you up like a sack of peas. You’ll spill all over the pavement, and you know what? Nobody will care.”
“Yeah, they will,” said George. And while the blade was still waving at Edie, and not brushing his throat, he gripped the stone dragon’s head and smashed it back over his shoulder into the Walker’s face with all the strength that he could put into it.
The Walker staggered back, one hand going to his eye, the other slashing the wicked blade at the space where George was. Only, George wasn’t quite there. He was rolling sideways, out of the Walker’s grip, trying to get free. He nearly managed it.
The blade lightly scraped his ribs, cutting a foot-long slash in his shirt, and jabbed through the tough wool of his jacket. The dagger held fast, and the Walker used it to yank George back toward him. George desperately tried to get his arms out and escape the jacket, but there wasn’t enough time.
“Now you die, boy! You didn’t have to, but now you do—by the Stone I swear it!” screamed the Walker. “And if you have blinded my eye, by the Stone I will make you SUFFER on the way to your quietus!”
“NO!” yelled Edie. And she leaped at the Walker like a wildcat, giving in to the tug of his stone, suddenly, intuitively knowing what she was going to do.
The Walker saw the girl spring at him, dark hair swinging, eyes blazing, and though he tried to wrench the dagger around to impale her, he felt not rage or anger, but something he had almost forgotten about, something he had not felt for centuries.
He felt fear.
George smashed the dragon’s head down across the Walker’s knuckles, sending the dagger skittering across the pavement.
Edie’s right hand went for his throat. It closed around the stone on his neck. Her left hand grabbed on to the Walker’s ear and clamped tight. She felt the metal of his earring press painfully into her hand, but she kept holding on like a terrier.
And the past slammed into her in the old familiar juddering slices of pain and nausea.
Her hair blew out in a radius as the shock hit her. The Walker’s head snapped back. His coattails also flew out in a fan, as what she was glinting hit him, too.
George managed to rip out of the sleeve of his jacket just as the first time-sliver sheared into Edie’s brain.
And this is what she saw.
A room in a palace.
Courtiers in doublets and hose, swords at their sides. White ruffs around their necks.
Leaded-glass windows reflecting candles.
A woman in a dress as wide as a galleon sweeping across the floor, hair red as flame, a ruff around her neck. Face above it whiter than the ruff. She said something to a bowing man.
“. . . not fail us, John Dee,” was all Edie heard, as the woman handed him a purse and swept on. The man raised his head and watched her go.
It was the Walker.
Time sliced. Edie rode a wave of nausea. Tried to close her eyes. They jerked open again.
Now she was in a dark workshop.
The only light came from a candle and a brazier.
A skullcapped figure poured liquid fire from a metal pot into a mold.
As the liquid fire cooled, the light dimmed, and in the reddening glow she saw the man turn and shout something angry.
Again it was the Walker.
Time jerked her nightward.
Now she saw a street.
Old London by moonlight.
Half-timbered buildings overhanging the cobbles.
A church.
Beside the church, in the road, a square pillar.
By the pillar, the Walker.
Beneath the pillar a carved sign reading LONDONE STOUNE.
A flash of metal.
London Stone The clink of a hammer.
The Walker chiseling a lump off the stone.
And the wind rose and winnowed the leaves across the cobbles. And there was a rushing noise, like many wings suddenly appearing.
And the Walker froze guiltily.
And then the perspective lurched and tore in toward the back of the Walker’s head, as if about to attack it, and he turned, and his eyes widened in sheer horror and he screamed, “NO!”
The past finished, and Edie was back in the present, and the Walker was still screaming, wide-eyed in the here and now.
She released the stone and backed away.
A dark figure slammed in past her shoulder and grabbed the Walker from behind in an immense disabling bear hug. Then turned and looked at them.
It was the Gunner.
“I thought I told you two to keep out of sight!”
And even though she was still feeling sick, Edie joined him and George in a grin.
“Now, what’s the time?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Sacrifice
The Gunner held the Walker tight in his massive bronze embrace, his arms pinioned to his side. The Walker’s head was slumped forward, his black and gray hair tumbled over his face in greasy straggles. Whatever it was Edie had glinted had sucked the will and energy out of him, it seemed.
George looked at his watch.
Four minutes.
“I better go.”
“Yeah,” said the Gunner. “And good luck.”
There was something in the way he said it that made George stop and turn.
“What happens? When I put the head on the Stone?”
“You get what you want. It’s over.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Hurry up,” said Edie.
“Tell him,” said a vicious voice. The Walker’s head raised a little, and a violet eye peered at George. “Tell him to say good-bye.”
George felt there was a long list of questions that he should know the answers to, but that he now didn’t have enough time to ask.
“What happens?”
The Walker shrugged.
“It ends. You make your amends. You return to your vision of safe happy London, sans spits, sans taints, sans anything strange and unexplainable to disturb your soft happy life. And good riddance to you.”
“But I’ll remember all this, right?”
“Edie,” said the Gunner, “get George to the Stone.”
“If I put this on the Stone Heart, are you saying that I—what? I forget you all?”
The Walker spat.
“Stone Heart? That isn’t the Stone Heart. It’s the London Stone. And yes. Make your trifling amends and return to your even more irrelevant existence,” said the Walker.
“Edie!” snapped the Gunner.
She took his arm and pulled him toward the shabby building with the stone embedded in its facade. His mind was racing.
Behind them, the Walker struggled, worming his hands into his coat.
“No, you don’t,” said the Gunner, squeezing him tight.
Edie pulled George up to the low grating in the building side. Behind it the Stone sat there, innocent as any other lump of masonry. Except, Edie could feel a dark, massy pull reaching out from it. She stepped back.
“Go on, then.”
He checked his watch. One and a half minutes. Ninety seconds to say something that made sense. Except he didn’t think anything made sense. Especially what h
e was really thinking.
He looked at Edie. Her jaw was set in its habitual jut, but there was a smile, and above it were shining eyes nearly as dark as the hair that framed them.
“I’m a bit scared,” he said.
“Everyone’s scared,” she said.
“If I do this, I think I won’t … I mean, you’ll be . . . or I’ll be in a London, where none of this makes sense. So I won’t believe you.” He cleared his throat. “I won’t know you. I mean, you’ll still be in this—this un-London. This scary place. And you’ll be alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, hearing that she was saying his words back at him. “Hurry.”
She widened the smile, and her eyes seemed to shine that bit brighter. He looked at her.
“You’re not scared of anything.”
“I know. So I’ll be fine. Go on.”
He looked at her. Wanting to remember it all. Her face, the jaw set, the chin jutting at him below a tightening little smile.
“Edie, what if the Sphinxes gave me an answer that has two meanings? I mean, that would be perfectly like them, right?”
“George, get a bend on, will you? You know what the Sphinxes said: ‘To end this, you must find the Stone Heart, and then make sacrifice for that which was broken by placing on the Stone at the Heart of London that which is necessary for its repair!’Do it! Time’s running out. Remember what the Friar said about that!”
And the mention of the Friar jolted George, and it jolted him because he remembered what the Friar had said about Sphinxes spinning riddles even when they were answering. At the same time, out of the corner of his eye he saw the Walker trying to squirm out of the Gunner’s grasp, and he thought of the derision with which he’d said the London Stone was not the Stone Heart—
—and then he thought of the Friar again, and it was with such a sharp immediacy that he almost believed he could hear the rolling, cheery voice as it chuckled, —What could be better for them than an answer with two meanings? Except one with three! What is the Stone Heart? Who can say?
He turned on Edie, the new thought bursting out of him in a geyser of words.
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