www.hodderchildrens.co.uk
The story so far …
In the British Museum, Bast, an ancient Egyptian goddess, has been accidentally freed from thousands of years of frozen captivity. In revenge, she has cast a spell, freezing all the normal people in London.
Only a brother and sister, Will and Jo, have escaped her magic.
The statues of London are alive and moving, divided into human ones (Spits), and non-human ones like animals, gargoyles and especially dragons (Taints). Some Spits have helped Jo and Will, and have just paid the price by being frozen like the people of London.
Bast has sent the dragons after Will and Jo …
1
Running scared
Two children were running away from the British Museum as fast as possible, which was not as fast as either would have liked, because of Jo’s old injury. She hobble-ran as fast as she could, but her brother Will could see that her leg hurt badly. He kept his eye out for a bicycle or a shopping trolley they could use as a wheelchair, but though the dark streets were full of unmoving people, all he had found so far were a rack of city-bikes for hire, solidly locked in place, and useless to them.
He was trying not to think how horrible it was to be the only mobile things in the eerie, magical freeze-frame that the city had become. The empty sensation in the pit of his stomach made him feel like if he let go he might just fall into himself and disappear. This shaky connection with reality wasn’t helped by the fact that they were running in company with Little Tragedy – a small bronze boy – and a large marble dog, Filax.
Jo stumbled to a stop and hung onto a railing outside a house in the middle of a long terrace of Georgian buildings running down one side of the street. She had a stitch, and her leg was hurting badly.
‘Just give me a minute,’ she said.
They looked up and down the road. Brick and stucco houses stretched away on one side. On the other, a white stone Art Deco building loomed over them. LONDON SCHOOL OF HYGIENE AND TROPICAL MEDICINE was carved above the door. Although the streetlamps were not lit, there was a light on in a building opposite, and the strange golden ornaments on the black ironwork outside the windows caught it and glinted down at them: snakes, rats, massive mosquitoes and huge bugs that looked like giant ticks and were the size of hubcaps.
‘That’s creepy,’ panted Jo. Biology was one of her favourite subjects at school. She wanted to be a vet. ‘A giant bedbug.’
‘No dragons though,’ said Will. ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah,’ she lied. ‘I don’t mind running … but do we know where we’re running to?’
Will shrugged. He didn’t. And that was the problem. He knew they had to do something, that they needed a plan. He just didn’t know what it was.
‘Will,’ said Jo. ‘We’re just thrashing, aren’t we?’
He knew what she meant. ‘Thrashing’ was what you did when you were losing in a video game as the level got too hard, and you just began flailing around wildly. Thrashing was almost always what happened just before you got killed. But this wasn’t a video game. There was no automatic ‘saved game’ to reboot to. This was real.
He reached over and squeezed her hand. At first she looked surprised. Then she squeezed it back.
‘Leg’s bad, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Like someone’s hitting it with a hammer,’ she admitted.
She almost never talked about her pain. So when she did, Will knew it was serious. He needed to get her somewhere to rest. But the moment of contact with her skin, which was warm, reminded him of the frozen people. They were not only frozen in the sense of not moving, they were beginning to get cold.
Initially, when they had tried to move their mother, she had been immobile but warm. Now the people around them were chilled. And knowing his mother was out there, unmoving and cold as stone, froze something inside him too. This wasn’t the time to thrash. This was the time to get their heads straight.
He was about to say this when Filax braced himself and growled a warning, the shaggy fur on his shoulders bristling into a ruff as he did so.
2
Bast the Mighty
Bast the Mighty, Bast the Huntress, Bast the so-nearly-Omnipotent that she had frozen almost an entire city, making its citizens look like mere statues, had a nasty feeling that she was, at this precise moment, also dangerously close to being Bast the Ridiculous.
She shouldn’t feel like this. She had taken swift revenge on the city’s soldier-statues when they had tried to assault her stronghold in the British Museum in an attempt to break her spell. The military statues had helped Will, the only unfrozen boy in London, to rescue Jo, who had been – until Bast stopped her moving – the only unfrozen girl. They’d been shielded from Bast’s magic because they wore matching friendship bracelets with beads carved like scarab beetles on them – which just happened to be ancient protective amulets. Bast’s curse had detonated a blast-wave of pure blue light, radiating out from the museum and paralysing and punishing every uniformed statue in the city, so they were now as unmoving as the people. The force of her magic was terrifyingly strong.
And yet there she was; Bast – mightiest Bast, Lion Goddess, Protector of Pharaohs, Defender of the Sun God, The Lady of Flame and Eye of Ra – shivering on top of a forty-foot pole, skinny and weak, looking just like any old house cat stuck up a tree in someone’s back garden.
Except it wasn’t a tree, it was a totem pole. And it wasn’t in a back garden, it was in the Central Courtyard of the British Museum. Yet it was a humiliating position for any self-respecting feline, let alone an ancient goddess wakened after millennia of imprisonment inside the bronze form of an ear- and nose-ringed cat.
She was not shivering with fear. She had won the battle. But doing so cost her. The setting of a curse drained what strength she had and made her groggy. Magic uses muscles too, hidden and secret muscles of the mind. It was like going for a run after a long time of taking no exercise at all. She ached. Her head hurt. She coughed as if she was trying to clear an immovable furball. She had the heart of a lioness, the most feared of all the hunters in Africa, deadlier by far than the male. And yet all she wanted to do was put aside her anger, curl up and sleep.
And that made Bast the Mighty mighty angry.
HURRY UP AND GET ME DOWN FROM HERE, she growled.
Two black basalt statues of lion-women were climbing up the totem pole, gingerly using the noses, beaks and grimacing mouths of the carved faces as fingerholds as they pulled themselves towards her.
It was humiliating. One of her claws was stuck fast in the dense old wood, driven deep in like a nail. The lion-women would have to pull it out and free her. She would have revenge for this.
No one embarrasses a god.
Not without suffering the most horrible revenge.
Not without suffering it for a very long time. And not without it being the kind of revenge that is spoken of in terror for generations after it is over.
Bast the Humiliated watched her servants haul their human bodies up the redwood pole and noted how they kept their lion heads tilted away from her, unwilling to look at her current state, in case they should themselves be punished simply for having witnessed it.
Their fear gave her a small flicker of strength and satisfaction.
HURRY UP, she said. I MUST REGATHER MY STRENGTH. I HAVE A NEW WORLD TO CONQUER. AND TO REMOVE AL OBSTACLES TO MY SUCCESS, THERE IS A BOY AND A GIRL WHO MUST FIRST BE ERASED FROM IT!
3
To the rescue
Jo, Will and Little Tragedy peered nervously down the street at whatever had got Filax’s attention. It was empty of cars, though there was a bus stuck halfway round a turn, angling into a side junction and blocking their view of whatever was beyond it.
Will was about to wonder out loud what the dog was growling at, when Filax barked, two deep warning sounds that rumbled out of his deep chest and seemed to shake the ground beneath their feet. Then they heard a wailing noise like a broken siren and saw fragments of movement through the side windows of the bus: something – or things – were coming up the street behind it at speed, but before they could move or even think of hiding they saw it was three dark men running towards them, and right behind was something altogether bigger and more thunderous.
The men were wearing steel helmets, and for a happy fragment of a second Will thought that the soldier-statues must have been freed from the cat’s curse and were moving again, but as the black metal figures came close he recognised them as firemen from the memorial at St Paul’s, the ones who had used their hoses to make the Ghost Church out of nothing but water and light and the memory of the absent building that had been bombed to nothingness in the Great Blitz. But before he could process that disappointment his attention was taken by the great thundering contraption that appeared to be chasing them.
Four galloping bronze horses careered round the back of the bus, pulling a huge high-sided chariot. One of the two wheels came off the ground as it made the corner, and then smacked back onto the tarmac with a mighty crash.
As it hurtled towards them it became clear that the wailing noise was not some kind of faulty warning siren but the yells of a bare-chested bronze boy who was holding the reins and thus – in theory – driving the thing. From the fact that he seemed to be shouting a frenzied, non-stop ‘Whoa!’ without any visible slowing of the charging horses, it was clear that events had run away with him; the horses were in charge and he was just in the chariot as a kind of noisy hood-ornament.
However, when the firemen skidded to a stop in front of them, the horses did follow suit, so that the whole running bunch suddenly stacked up nose-to-nose with Filax, who – Will noticed – didn’t budge an inch.
‘That dog there safe?’ asked the lead fireman.
‘Safe as pie,’ said Tragedy with a relieved grin, though he didn’t say why pie should be particularly safe. ‘Wotcher, Quad!’
He waved at the boy with the reins, who was dragging himself back into the chariot, having been thrown nearly clean out of his precarious cockpit by the sudden halt of his horses. He grinned and waved back, a smile much like Tragedy’s cracking his face.
‘Hello, Tradge!’ he said. ‘Strange days, ain’t they?’
‘They is indeed,’ said Tragedy. ‘This here is Will and this is Jo, and they’re my new mates.’
He pointed at the grinning charioteer. ‘And this is Quad,’ he said. ‘One of my old mates.’
‘Quad?’ said Jo.
‘Short for Quadriga Boy,’ said Tragedy. ‘The Quadriga is the name of his infernal chariot—’
‘And it is an infernal chariot,’ agreed the boy. ‘On account of the horses being so wilful and ungovernable, like.’
‘What’s going on?’ said Tragedy.
‘The soldiers have all been frozen,’ said the fireman. Will noticed that while he spoke, the other firemen stayed vigilant, their eyes scanning the night sky as if expecting something dangerous to drop out of it at any moment. Their air of alertness was a bit unnerving.
‘We know that,’ said Will. ‘That’s why we’re running away.’
The fireman grunted. It wasn’t a grunt that contained much approval either.
‘You can run all you like. Lucky you. But they can’t run. They can’t move a bleeding inch, can they? And if they’re not back on their plinths by midnight they will never move again,’ he said, looking at Tragedy. ‘You know how it works.’
‘Cor!’ said Tragedy. ‘Cor, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.’
‘Well, come on then!’ said the fireman. ‘All hands to the pump. We’ve got to drag them back to their plinths ourselves. Because if we don’t, they’re going to be dead forever!’
‘He’s right,’ said Tragedy, looking at Jo and Will. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. I was too scared. I’d better be off to lend a hand.’
‘You’re not big enough to carry a statue,’ said Will. He didn’t want to lose their one guide in this strange city they had got trapped in.
‘No. I’ve got to do this,’ said Tragedy. ‘I mean, I bet I could carry one of them little St Georges if I had to …’
The memory of the cheerful and brave Georges who had ridden to their rescue stung Will. He had not only been grateful to them, he had liked them. They had been funny and irreverent and had stuck up for him when the snootier soldier-statues had not taken him seriously. He wanted to help too.
He looked at Jo. She nodded.
‘You stay,’ said Tragedy. He pointed at the dog. ‘Filax here’ll be a good guard dog for you.’
‘No,’ insisted Will. ‘We’re coming with you.’
He watched Jo limp across to the chariot.
‘The soldiers got frozen because they came to help us,’ he said. ‘We can rest when we’ve repaid the favour.’
He helped her up and into the chariot.
‘This is better than thrashing,’ he said.
‘And much easier on my knee than all that running,’ Jo replied. ‘I can ride on this and we can keep an eye on the sky and watch out for dragons.’
She looked a question at the firemen.
The shape of their tin hats reminded Will of the Fusilier who had saved him. In the kind of clear moment you sometimes get when you’re very tired, he realised he had liked him because he reminded him of their father, who was also a soldier. He felt a pang of guilt, and then a sudden boost of energy as he realised what they should do next. It was the tiniest first seed of a plan, and though small, it was the end of thrashing around in panic.
‘That is what you’re watching the sky for, isn’t it?’ said Jo to the nearest fireman.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dragons and worse.’
Will joined Tragedy and his sister, stowing the dragon shield on the floor, keeping it in place with his foot and holding onto the insides of the chariot as the firemen climbed onto the outside and hung on there. It lurched into motion as Quad snapped the reins and the four horses snorted and leapt forwards.
He looked at Jo. She smiled grimly at him.
‘Dragons and worse?’ she said. He looked back at her. She was scanning the strip of sky above them. ‘What could be worse than dragons?’
Not for the first time Will thought she was much braver than he was.
‘Don’t know,’ he said, trying to sound normal. And older. And more intrepid. And cool. ‘Wish we didn’t have to find out. But I expect we will …’
As they raced away, they left the street behind them to the eerie and unmoving silence that had bewitched everything – or almost everything. And because they were scanning the sky and the way ahead they didn’t spare a look backwards. So they missed the two golden rats on the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who shifted slightly, their noses wrinkling and tails lashing as they smelled the air. Nor did they see one of the giant, bird-sized mosquitoes detaching from the ironwork and hanging in the air beneath its humming wings, like a drone.
Jo looked at Will.
‘Why are you smiling?’ she said.
‘Because we needed a plan,’ he said. ‘And if the statues are healed at midnight, then maybe they’ll be healed from being frozen too. And then we can talk to the Fusilier.’
‘Who?’ she said.
‘You didn’t meet him. He saved me after you got taken by the dragons. But he’s the one I trust,’ he said. ‘You’ll like him. He feels … safe, you know? He’s a bit like Dad. He got melted saving me. I reckon he’s the one that’ll have the best plan.’
‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Maybe he can tell us how to help Mum too.’
‘Fusilier’s a good egg,’ said Tragedy, who’d been listening. ‘Talking to him’s a good plan.’
‘Maybe he can help us to help everyone,’ said Will.
Behind them, unseen,
the mosquito tipped in the air and drifted slowly after them.
4
Four dragons
A dead dragon should at the very least be majestic. The merest glimpse of its corpse should chill the bones of any viewer and inspire a bowel-loosening sense of dread at the horrific fact that even the most magnificent and fabulous of creatures can perish. It should be awe-inspiring.
The very sight of slain dragon should change the world.
The lifeless thing impaled on the railings round Coram’s Fields was not majestic. Not any more. He was sad. He wasn’t fabulous either, or awe-inspiring. He was awkward and – frankly – ridiculous. He had expired in a particularly ungainly and self-destructive fashion when Will had used his own shield to ricochet the twisting spirals of his fire-jet back onto him. This had heated the dragon to the point where he first became welded to the iron railings and then collapsed in an undignified slump, the spikes on top of the railing sliding through him like hot skewers through a pat of butter.
As he had cooled, so he had become part of the railings themselves, a twisted, half-melted flail of wings and talons. His legs, claws, tail and horribly skewed neck all pointed in different directions, turning him into a grotesque, silvered bomb-burst, frozen into a permanent 3D splat and pinned in place by the line of black spikes that passed straight through him.
And, worse than not being majestic, he was clearly a problem.
Two identical dragons, unmelted, mobile and entirely normal (as much as a fire-breathing flying lizard the size of a skip can be normal) stood in front of him with cocked heads and deeply furrowed brows. They’d laid their shields on the pavement beside them, and had the distinct air of workmen about to execute a necessary but rather unwelcome task.
One of them stepped up to the dead dragon and tugged him by the wingtip.
He didn’t move. The other shouldered past with a huff of frustration and took a businesslike two-taloned grip of the impaled dragon’s torso. His muscular thighs flexed and bunched as he tried to slide the body off the railings.
The London Pride Page 1