His bare torso was heaving for every breath, each of which looked more painful than the previous one. A headdress like a wreath made of feathers lay at his side. The Gunner bent and picked it up. “You know who he is?” he said.
“Cupid,” said Edie.
“Eros,” said George.
“Same thing,” said Edie. “Fancier name.”
“You’re both wrong,” said the Queen. “Mind you, so is everybody. He is not Eros. He is Anteros, his brother. The opposite of Cupid. Cupid is god of the loved. Anteros is god of people whose love is not returned. He is the god of the unloved.”
“He doesn’t look good,” said George.
The Bow Boy opened his eyes. His normally handsome face was stretched tight with pain and fright. His words came out ragged and thin with desperation.
“Nothing good . . . nothing good going to be safe, not safe or good ever now . . .”
“What’s he saying?” said the Officer.
“Darkness walks again,” coughed the boy. “Darkness is calling.”
He coughed some more and caught his breath, his eyes rolling upward to look at Edie. She smoothed his hair. He closed his eyes.
“Darkness is calling,” she said to George. “That doesn’t sound great.”
“Not unless you’re a goth,” he said, trying to find a smile.
“Goths,” she snorted quietly. “They don’t know the first thing.”
The boy’s eyes opened.
“I’m broken,” he whispered.
“Get you back on your plinth; by turn o’day you’ll be right as rain,” said the Gunner cheerily.
Edie felt a tremor go through the boy. “What happened?” she said softly.
When the boy spoke, he stared straight up into the sky, as if the blank clouds above were somehow carrying a projection of the past that only he could see. His voice was so thin and ragged that every now and then it just wasn’t there, as if a hole had been worn in it.
“It was a normal midnight. The lights were on, the people were out. The cars and taxis were all going past like usual . . . Then it struck thirteen and . . .”
“And everything stopped. And the people disappeared,” filled in Edie.
He nodded and licked his lips as if he was parched. George scooped snow into a ball and held it to his mouth. He swallowed some and smiled thanks.
“Nothing happened. Anywhere. I’ve never seen anything like that before. So I just watched, and I waited . . . and it was all quiet and still, and the snow started to fall. It was . . .” He smiled again. “It was . . .”
“Nice?” guessed Edie.
He shook his head. “It was peaceful. It’s never peaceful in the circus. There’s always noise and people and something happening, hurrying or shouting or . . .” He coughed. George offered him more snow, but he shook his head.
“It was quiet. And the neon lights looked so . . . They never look pretty, not to me, just bright and flashing, but in the snow, in the silence with no people . . . just for a moment it was lovely.”
He smiled at the image only he could see.
Then his face dropped.
“Until it started.”
“What started?” asked George.
“The calling. The darkness calling. Not like a noise, not exactly, more than a noise. A pull.”
“What kind of pull?” asked Edie.
“Just like a word you can’t hear that gets inside your head and stops all your other thoughts and words. Just a word . . . just ‘COME.’”
“Come?” said George. “Come where?”
“Just ‘COME.’ I knew if I started flying I’d know where to go. It was like a magnet, pulling me to the east. To the darkness in the east. And then they started flying overhead. . . .”
“The gargoyles?” said Edie.
“Taints. All the winged taints. They must have heard it too. I saw them flying past.” He looked at the other statues. “You felt it too, yes, the pull?”
The statues looked embarrassed. George and Edie both noticed.
“No,” said the Gunner. “No. We didn’t feel it.”
“Ah,” whispered the boy. “I see. I always wondered . . .”
He was shaken by another spasm of coughing. The Gunner leaned in and put the boy’s winged wreath gently back on his head.
“Well, you know now, don’t you?”
The boy nodded. A tear rolled out of his eye.
“What does he—” started George.
The Gunner cut him off. “Later. He ain’t got much more in him, and this is important.” He turned to look down at the boy.
“Two taints came back. This morning. Those two . . .”
The memory seemed to trigger a panic attack. The boy started hyperventilating. The Gunner put a big hand on his chest and rubbed it like a man calming a horse.
“S’all right. Why did they come back?”
The boy’s eyes closed. “To punish me,” he breathed. “The darkness punishes everything.”
“They attacked you because you wouldn’t answer the darkness’s call?” said George.
The boy nodded, eyes bright. “I did hear the call. But I stayed. I just knew it was not for me. Not for who I really am . . . I’m not one of them, you see?”
“No,” said the Gunner quietly, keeping his wide hand on the heaving chest of the boy. “No, son. You’re one of us.”
The boy began to smile, and then his chest stopped moving and his eyes rolled back in his head as his leg kicked a couple of times.
And then he was gone.
“Right,” snapped the Gunner, rising to his feet in one decisive move. He pointed at the two soldiers. “You two, bearer party, put him back on his plinth, keep your eyes peeled, meet us at the Sphinxes, double-time. Move now.”
“Why do we—” began the Young Soldier.
“It’s not a debate, it’s an order. Stow it and catch hold of his legs,” snapped the Old Soldier, stashing his pipe in his breast pocket and slinging his rifle across his back. He bent and took hold of the Bow Boy’s shoulders and lifted. His companion took the legs, and they moved away.
“Let’s crack on,” said the Gunner, and led the rest of them off at a trot.
Spout lofted off a distant tree from where he had been keeping an eye on the sky, and flapped after them.
“What was that all about?” said George, trying to keep up.
“The darkness is calling the taints to itself,” said the Queen.
“Not that,” said Edie. “We get that the darkness is a bad thing. He meant the other thing. . . .”
“The ‘now you know’ thing you said to him. To the Bow Boy. About not being able to hear the call or being able . . .” agreed George. “What was that about?”
“He’s human shaped, but he’s not a real person,” said the Gunner. “There’s spits and taints, and then there’s the ones in between. We’re spits because we’re made to be real people, right? Taints is made to be frightening imaginary creatures, yeah? And in between . . .”
“In between there are the ones we’re not sure of,” finished the Queen.
“You’re not sure because they’re not sure,” said Edie, suddenly having a memory flash of Little Tragedy, betraying her with sadness in his eyes.
“Yeah,” said the Gunner, turning to look at her with a keen eye. “The Bow Boy didn’t know. But he heard the call. And he refused it. And so now I guess we all know which side of the line he is on. And what it cost him to find out.”
“I think we’re all going to be asked to pay that price, sooner or later,” said the Queen. “I think this darkness would claim us all.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Gathering
As the strange party worked its way through the snow-choked streets toward the Embankment, they discussed what the Old Soldier had told them of what he had seen within the City, and the murk in the night. The Queen and the Gunner were particularly horrified at the death of the Duke. The Officer stayed silent and trudged ahead of the group,
stamping a path that the children could follow in the hip-high snow.
“I knew there was darkness in the London Stone,” said Edie. “I felt its pull worse than any stone I’ve glinted, even though I never even touched it.”
The silence that followed was broken only by the clump and squeak of their feet compacting the freshly fallen snow as they walked on.
“Wonder what would have happened if—” began George.
Edie turned and interrupted him with a snort. “If I HAD touched it? If I had touched it, I’d have . . . I probably would have, you know . . .”
“Lost your mind,” finished the Queen. “The darkness pent in the Stone would have burned out your sanity and cored your mind like an empty husk. You’d have been left a haunted, dribbling idiot.”
George and Edie watched the Queen’s cloak swirl around her shoulders as she turned back to plow ahead of them in the Officer’s wake.
“Nice,” said Edie.
“Especially the dribbling bit,” agreed George, hoping for a smile. But Edie’s face was as wintry as the snow-blanketed buildings on either side of them.
“Anyway,” he went on, “that wasn’t what I was going to say. What I was going to say was, I wonder what would have happened if I had put that broken dragon’s head on the Stone.”
“You mean if you hadn’t stayed because of me?” Edie said. “You’d have gone back to your layer of London and wouldn’t have remembered anything or known about any of this, would you?”
“No. It’s not about you. Not always, anyway,” he replied, suddenly irritated. He had woken with an itch on his upper arm, and that itch had now become a sort of dull pain, the kind you get from being punched hard on a muscle. He didn’t need to look to know that the third and last twining vein of stone was again moving slowly toward his shoulder, marking the duel he had yet to fight before he was done with the Cnihtengild’s challenge. He’d forgotten about it as he slept in the night, and all the unfamiliar events occurring around them had pushed it to the back of his mind. Whatever Edie’s problems were, they didn’t involve the fear of the Knight on his eerily hollow horse being out there somewhere, slowly riding toward a fight that George had no confidence in surviving. He looked over at Edie and saw that she was looking down at her hand, which held the earring heart stone that had been her mother’s. The moment she noticed him looking at her, she reflexively closed her hand and pocketed the stone, and there was something in the unguarded protectiveness she showed in doing it that touched him and made him remember the roller coaster of hope and disappointment she was on.
He caught the Queen watching them both, and remembered what she had said about Edie’s extra vulnerability, having been taken over the line into death and back. He felt suddenly ashamed of the irritability he’d let escape. He was tired and worried. And as annoying as Edie could be, with her defensive spikiness and her willingness to fight and argue with any- and everyone, their predicament and the icy blight that was being visited on this layer of London was not her fault.
“I didn’t mean . . .” he continued, trying to make eye contact through the long sweep of dark hair she’d let fall forward, obscuring the side view of her face. “I meant that I was wondering if this is all getting worse because of me.”
She didn’t turn her head. The only response George got was from the Raven, who was riding Edie’s far shoulder and had him fixed with its unblinking, shiny, black-bead eyes over the top of her head. The fact that she had acquired this supernatural companion somehow made him feel both worried and a little jealous. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but the way she had instantly and easily accepted the fact that this bird chose her—as if it were nothing, as if having a raven ride your shoulder was the most natural thing in the world—perturbed him. He didn’t trust the bird. That was what it was.
“Look—” he began.
“What?” she cut in, way too fast for politeness.
“Put a sock in it, you pair of moaning Minnies,” growled the Gunner, coming up behind them and putting a great hand on their shoulders. “It ain’t the time for a competition about whose fault any of this is; but if it was, I’d say if I hadn’t broke my oath and let the Walker take me, we wouldn’t be in this trouble now. So stow it, or you’ll start making me feel all guilty and wobbly, and then I’ll be needing one of these ‘shrinks’ of yours, and then where will we be?”
He stopped abruptly as they turned a corner on to the Embankment.
“Bleeding Nora . . .”
George and Edie stopped too. The dark obelisk of Cleopatra’s Needle had been guarded by two Sphinxes the last time they had been there. Now it was girdled by a great jumbled throng: statues of all ages and types, bound by one common thing, which was that they were all human. It was a great gathering of the spits, and even as Edie and the others approached from a distance, two things were apparent: firstly, there was a debate in progress, and secondly, a ring of soldier statues at the edge of the crowd faced outward, their backs to the debate, rifles and muskets with bayonets fixed, swords drawn, eyes watching the sky and the approaches to the Needle.
“I’ve never seen a gathering like this,” murmured the Queen.
“I’ve never heard of one. I think this is the first time so many of us have been in one place,” agreed the Officer.
“Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound,” said the Gunner, with an attempt at cheeriness as he led them onward.
George turned to Spout. “Better stay back here,” he said. “In case they don’t know you’re one of the good guys.”
“Goog gai,” agreed Spout, and jumped up to perch on a tree in the shadows.
The rest of them walked slowly toward the jumbled mass of spits bunched at the river’s edge ahead of them.
“I can’t see the Black Friar,” muttered Edie.
“Yeah, but you can see everyone else,” said George in a voice tinged with wonder.
And the closer they got, the more intense the strangeness around the obelisk became. Once the eye adjusted to the fact that this seething knot of humanity was made from stone or bronze, the smaller details began to stand out: their clothes displayed an extraordinary mishmash of epoques and professions—men in armor argued with men in suits and ties, and elaborately bewigged heads bobbed next to crowns and steel helmets and bearskins and tricornes, while at the center of one of the most vehement knots of debate, a bearlike man with a great bald head atop a large shambling frame swathed in a long overcoat swapped terse words with a tight-britched figure who buzzed around him like a wasp, cutting great swaths in the air with his hands as he tried to make his point. This was the second detail that became immediately apparent: a lot of men—and a few women—from all ages of Britain’s history were gathered in this crowd, and they all appeared to be talking at once. The reason the noise level was so high was that they didn’t seem to be complementing the talking by doing much listening, which only encouraged the people they were talking at to speak even louder.
It did seem that every spit in London was here: in the water beyond the Embankment wall George could even see a statue of a boy on a dolphin—which he recognized from farther down the riverbank in Chelsea—now jumping and diving into the river.
The outer ring of bayonets and blades relaxed and parted a little as they reached it. Two gray stone seamen, each armed with nothing more than sailors’ knives, made a gap for them.
The taller one grinned thinly. “Gunner.”
“Jack.” The Gunner smiled in greeting and nodded at the other sailor, who wore an oilskin coat tied around his middle with a piece of string. “Bosun. Strange days.”
“Aye, and worse weather to come, I’d say,” said the one the Gunner had called Jack.
“Strange days and strange shipmates,” said the Bosun, nodding at George and Edie.
“Boy’s a maker, the girl’s a glint,” explained the Gunner, making the introductions. “George, Edie, these sailors is mates of mine from the east end of town. Jack Tar and the Bosun. Their normal bi
llet is Trinity Square. They’re—”
George interrupted with a grin. “Merchant seamen. From the memorial. My dad took me to see them once, when we went to the Tower next door. He was a sculptor. . . .” he explained. “He liked you. I mean, he liked what you were. Are. As statues.”
Memory flashed and he saw his dad on a bright spring afternoon. He had his sketchbook out and was doing a quick pencil drawing of the two statues. They had a similar square-jawed heroic quality in their making, as the Gunner did, but like him they were somehow more than just idealized caricatures of heroes. They looked windswept and used to the weather in all its guises, and instead of uniforms, they wore the kind of working sea gear that real sailors assemble through years of experience. He remembered his dad commenting on the Bosun’s choice of belt, for example. George pointed.
“He liked the string around your middle.”
“So do I,” grunted the Bosun. “Keeps my trousers up.”
The Queen pushed in close behind George and Edie and peered into the hubbub surrounding the Needle.
“What’s happening?”
“Jaw bloody jaw,” said Jack Tar. “Too many kings and dukes and generals, and not enough sense, if you ask me. They’re all used to getting their own way, see, and nobody’s got a firm hand on the tiller.”
“We’ll see about that,” said the Queen, nodding at the Gunner. “What have the Sphinxes said?”
The Gunner dived into the inner throng, pushing great men to left and right as he made his way to the Needle itself. The Queen looked at Jack Tar, waiting for an answer.
“There’s a problem with the Sphinxes,” he said. “First off, she says we’re asking the wrong questions, and she’ll answer the right people when they ask it. And secondly . . .”
“There’s only one Sphinx,” said Edie, looking around for the second one. George saw that she was right. They were one Sphinx short.
“Yeah,” he said, suddenly wanting to be close to the Gunner as more and more eyes nearby began to notice them and stop talking. “Come on.”
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