Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  “You have to do it for all the people who have disappeared. They may NOT be ready for Judgment Day, not like you. We should at least give them a chance, you know, to live their lives.” As he spoke the stone in his shoulder smarted badly, and he flinched involuntarily.

  “But why should I help you, boy?” repeated the Corpse.

  “Because the Sphinx said so,” said George, out of other arguments and beginning to feel the panic rising inside him again.

  “What did the Sphinx say?” asked the Corpse, bending closer.

  “Something about taking the way of the dragon, which I did—Green Dragon Court, which leads here— and then by the Knight of Wood finding kin I can call my own; and if I do that, then the dead stone’s tongue—that’s you, I suppose—will be in my power.”

  “Have you found kin?” asked the Corpse.

  George looked around. There were statues looking at him, but none that he recognized.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Names,” said a bald trim figure in Elizabethan dress. He stroked a small beard and waved a quill at George. “I always find it best to start with names when I am stuck for a beginning. Yours, for example.”

  “I’m George.”

  “Well, we have only one George here, but a first name implies no kinship, and I very much fear that unless he was less saintly than we imagine, he fathered no kin for you to have sprung from,” said the quill bearer. “Still, a start is a start. Mayhap he can help you . . . He is at your back, behind the altar.”

  George turned and stepped back. And there it was, on the wall. Surrounded by a gilded frame of laurels and ribbons, picked out in gold and red and white and a deeply satisfying lizardy green was a George and a dragon—Saint George and the Dragon, that is.

  “There’s a dragon!” he said, in surprise.

  “Of course,” said the Stone Corpse. “If you will permit an observation from the other side of the veil: life balances things out. Like for like, ill for ill, good for evil, and for every George, a dragon.”

  “But it’s not my kin,” said George, deflating. “He’s a saint, not a Chapman. And you’re right, I’m not a saint. All the bad stuff that’s happening is my fault! Look. Can’t you just answer my question without—”

  And here he stopped abruptly, because Saint George pulled his lance out of the dragon’s mouth, and while the dragon coughed and choked like a cat just having dislodged a hair ball, Saint George leaned out of his gilded niche and tapped the long list of names carved into the World War I memorial below him.

  George knelt down and traced his fingers over the sharply incised words. And then he gasped.

  His finger ran down the column with the C’s in it, skating over CASEY and CHADWICK and CHALLIS and slowing down abruptly as it hit CHAPMAN. And not just one Chapman, but three of them.

  “I didn’t know,” he said, staring openmouthed at his name in triplicate. Maybe it was because two of the Chapmans had the same first initial as his father, or maybe it was because he knew this was a World War I memorial, but he was, for an instant, so powerfully back in the artillery bombardment that he felt the ground shudder beneath his feet. The smell of cordite and a horse’s fear pressed to his nose, and he saw the soldier with his father’s face gripping an arm over the horse’s neck. And then the moment was gone.

  “We oft know little of who we were, only something of who we are, and nothing of who we may be,” the man with the quill said quietly.

  “The old blood of this city runs deep in you, boy,” said the Stone Corpse, “for there have been Chapmans here from its very foundation. I am yours to command.”

  “Then please tell us how we can beat the Ice Devil?” said George. “I know where the black mirrors are that we must banish him through, but I don’t know how we can beat him first.”

  The Stone Corpse’s head rocked back on its neck, and it looked at the ceiling, and then it began to turn slowly. George had the distinct impression that it was not quite standing on the same ground as the rest of them. It intoned the answer, when it came, just like the Sphinxes.

  “As the dragon marked your hand, so a dragon shall be your tool, and flames taint and ice have fanned only spit and fire shall cool.”

  George watched the Corpse twirling in the air for a moment, while he tried to make sense of what it had just said.

  “I don’t understand,” he exploded in frustration. He had been so near, and now seemed as far away from a clue as he had ever been. And what’s more, his shoulder had stopped hurting, but only because the pain had moved across to his chest. He felt under his shirt. His chest was, as he had feared, marked by a distinct gritty ridge, where the stone met the skin.

  “This is just like the Sphinx! What does spit and fire mean?”

  “To see the flames of darkness fade will require all the light glint and maker made,” chanted the Corpse, as if it hadn’t heard him at all.

  George shot out a hand and gripped the stone shroud. It felt thin and slippery, almost so wispy that it wasn’t there, like a greasy cobweb.

  “What does spit and fire mean?” he repeated.

  The Stone Corpse stopped turning and bent its head to look down at him. As George returned the look, it pulled the shroud back and revealed the full horror of the death’s head beneath.

  “You carry the answer with you, George Chapman. You always have.”

  Just as George was about to ask what was meant about the dragon and the tool part of the answer, the church was rocked by the sound of a bell.

  It was a deep unavoidable tolling, one that George had heard before. He knew in his heart and in his guts and in the sharp pain where the stone arm met his flesh that it was tolling for him.

  As if the Stone Corpse could read his mind, it reached down its one bony hand and gently removed his hand from its shroud. He saw the last pink tip of his fingertip gripped between the dead stone fingers, and then he saw the pink disappear as the white limestone engulfed the last bit of his arm.

  The bell tolled again. George’s stone hand flexed in answering pain.

  “If thy hand causes you to offend, cut it off,” said the Corpse.

  “What?” said George, in horror.

  “Gospel of Mark: ‘It is better for thee to enter into life maimed than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that shall never be quenched,’” intoned the Stone Corpse. “Peace be with you.”

  George watched it turn and drift back to its alcove.

  The summoning bell tolled again.

  The Knight of Wood hurried down the aisle. “Boy? There is a chariot at the door. And a golden girl who says you must go with her.”

  George stumbled to his feet and made them walk toward the door. Everything had almost made sense, but now he was going to face the final battle without knowing how to win.

  The man with the quill walked beside him, looking at his face.

  “The Stone Corpse is of his nature a dark and doomy fellow, but there is often illumination in his words, as a sullen thundercloud may carry the brightest lightning.”

  “Er . . . okay,” said George, distracted.

  He could hear the horses snorting beyond the door, and could see Ariel’s golden reflection on the inside of the arch. He looked down at his open shirt and saw the stone crossing over the center of his chest.

  “Chapman,” said the man, a hand on his shoulder. “That Bible that the Corpse loves to quote has cheerier verses, and I have scarce ever seen a boy more in need of cheer, so I give you Ezekiel as a blither fare-thee-well: ‘I will give them one heart . . . and I will take the heart of stone out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.’”

  “Thank you,” said George. “But what does it mean?”

  “Whatever you make of it, boy.” The man smiled. “For are you not as I was, a maker?”

  “Yes,” said George, looking down at his stone arm. “I am.”

  “Then nothing is yet lost, just as nothing is yet won, and the great
globe itself lies beyond those doors, waiting to be made anew,” said the man, clapping him amicably on the shoulder and sending him on his way.

  George walked out of the dark, into the light, and as he did so, he smiled.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Dead right.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  On the Bench

  Edie tripped out of the mirror and found herself in a clothes shop. She was getting used to people not being able to see her, and walked straight past the shop assistant, who was straightening already perfectly aligned stacks of sweaters on a shelf by the door, chatting to someone on her phone as she did so.

  The Gunner squeezed past, and they followed the Raven into the street. The bird waited, hanging unnaturally in the air until he caught up and, casting a backward glance at Edie, dropped onto the Gunner’s shoulder and clacked its beak animatedly next to his ear.

  Edie watched the traffic pour past. They were definitely in modern London again. A red bus and a line of taxis confirmed that, and as the Gunner led the way across the street toward a mean triangle of thin grass and patchy shade spread beneath a sick-looking plane tree, Edie wondered what would happen if she stepped in front of a car.

  She wasn’t feeling suicidal or anything like that; it was just that if nobody could see her, did that mean she would just slide off a car unhurt? Or would she get run over?

  “What happens . . . ?” she began, catching up with the Gunner as he snaked between two cars going in opposite directions without breaking pace.

  The Gunner stopped on the edge of the pavement and held up a finger. At first she thought the Raven had flown ahead of him, because there it was, hopping along the back of a park bench, sidling up to a drunk man sprawled across one end of it, his feet surrounded by a small collection of empty beer cans. His head flopped back bonelessly over the back of the bench, so all Edie and the Gunner could see was the underside of his stubble-mottled chin and a very prominent Adam’s apple vibrating as he snored.

  Then she noticed that the Raven was still on the Gunner’s shoulder.

  The Raven on the bench was either a different Raven, or . . .

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” she said.

  The Raven back-paddled off the Gunner’s mountainous shoulder and neatly lofted down onto hers. Out of the corner of her eye she saw it nod its head.

  “Why are we watching you . . . ?” she asked. And then the Raven on the bench clacked its beak imperiously, and the drunk woke and sat up, his head hinging back to a normal position with an audible grunt of pain.

  “Oh,” said Edie. “Oh.”

  It was him. Her stepfather. He leaned forward and spat, his phlegm smacking down in a glutinous green ground-burst amid the beer cans at his feet.

  “He used to come up to London. Be gone for a week, sometimes weeks at a time. I loved it; left me alone at home at the seaside with my mum, without him ruining everything. She drank less when he was away as well. I hate him. . . .”

  The Raven clacked on. The man cocked his head and listened, rubbing his face as he did so.

  “Yes,” he slurred. “Yes, we have seen what you ask about. We have seen such a stone.”

  “‘We?’” said Edie, tugging at the Gunner’s sleeve. “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Them what choose booze and oblivion instead of real life, leaving their untended minds prey to a creature like the Walker. He’s always got a use for their eyes, and he knows the spell to conjure them,” rumbled the Gunner.

  “You mean he . . .” started Edie, and stopped as the stepfather’s eyes opened, and she saw them for the first time. The eyes, normally pinched and bloodshot, were pure black from lid to lid, shiny as gobbets of oil. They were eyes she had seen before in another face, at Puddle Dock.

  “He’s a Tallyman,” breathed Edie in horror. “And he’s talking about my mother’s stone!”

  “We have seen it,” mumbled the stepfather. “We can show it.”

  Edie whirled on the Gunner, so fast that the Raven on her shoulder was left in midair.

  “We’re going back to warn her!” she snapped.

  “You can’t change the past, Edie girl,” said the Gunner sadly, reaching out a hand to comfort her. She turned away, back in the direction she had come from. Her hand snapped out and clamped around the Raven’s leg.

  There was an undignified squawk.

  Edie fumbled in her pocket and pulled out the red thread.

  “Tell him we’re going back. Tell him we can do it the easy way or the other way, the one where I put that red thread back on him and choke him with it.”

  Ravens don’t have much practice at appearing long-suffering. Mostly they just endure and look ominous. So the look the Raven sent the Gunner was unusual. It clacked its beak slowly, with an air of strained patience. It glared down at its trapped leg pointedly.

  The Gunner sighed. “He says he’ll do what you ask. Says he was going to do it anyway. But he says you should always be careful what you ask for.”

  “Fine,” said Edie, and walked straight across the street. She didn’t look where she was going, the traffic didn’t slow, and nothing hit her.

  Given the jut in her jaw and the fire in her eyes, it probably didn’t dare.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The Impossible Bridge

  Ariel was waiting for George outside the cathedral, holding the horses’ reins in her fist.

  “Here,” she said without ceremony, and passed them to him as the bell tolled again and the horses whinnied and shivered.

  “They can tell, boy; they hear the bell and they can tell . . .” she began.

  “I know,” he said, stepping into the chariot. “It tolls for me and all that. Let’s get it over with.”

  He sounded braver than he felt, but the pain in his stone shoulder had swept across his chest, and he was clear enough to know that in the absence of anything else, facing his fear was the best chance he had.

  “Follow me, then.” She shrugged, unimpressed by his appearance of stoicism.

  She flew ahead of him, as he twisted the horses out of the narrow gate to the churchyard and into what seemed like a series of less and less passable alleys that suddenly opened up into the riverwalk along the south side of the river.

  “Hurry, boy!” she shouted over her shoulder. He snapped the reins experimentally over the back of the horses, and they accelerated.

  He held on tight as the chariot sped along the side of the river, kicking up an ice storm in the wake of its whirring scimitar-bladed wheels. The cold wind in his eyes made him look sideways, and he couldn’t help but look over the wind-scalloped surface of the river to the blank wall of the ice murk, which rose in a solid impenetrable slab on the other side.

  They shot under a bridge and back out into the light, and then a railway bridge approached, and as George followed Ariel, the ringing definitely got louder and the pain radiating up his arm and into his chest stabbed sharper with each toll. He ground his teeth together and tried not to cry out.

  Ariel flashed golden, then was gone into the dark arch beneath the railway bridge. The horses cut through the strip of untouched snow, hot on her tail, so fast that when they came back out into the light on the other side, George almost missed her.

  She had stopped and hovered in the middle of the stretch of embankment between Blackfriars railway bridge and Blackfriars Bridge itself. George pulled back on the reins, and the horses sat back on their haunches, bringing the chariot to a skidding halt in a cloud of snow.

  “What?” he said between tolls of the bell, looking up at the golden girl suspended above him.

  “Your third and final duel,” she said, and pointed across the river.

  “Where?” he asked, staring over the water. The wall of ice murk on the other side was sheer and unbroken. He could see no one and nothing between him and it.

  The river was flowing past a series of columns that stuck out of the water, marooned between and dwarfed by the two bridges. You could see that they had once been
the supports of an iron bridge that was either unfinished or long gone.

  “I can’t see anything,” he said.

  The bell tolled. There was an accompanying muted flash low down in the face of the murk opposite, like lightning muffled within a thundercloud. And then, to his horror, he saw the uncannily flat surface of roiling grayness darken and bulge and swirl outward as the emerging bumps resolved into a coherent whole, a knight on a horse coming out of the fog.

  It had the shape of the last Knight of the Cnihtengild, but the darkness that had flowed into it like a parasite had dimmed the metallic armor, so that it was as matte black as the inside of a soot-blackened chimney. The rider and the horse both had eyes that leaked wisps of black fire and smoke. Only the disks of glass on the horse’s surcoat still lanced out their beams of light, no longer a clear blue but a colorless white that was somehow gray at its core, like black-and-white static on a television screen.

  “That’s not the Cnihtengild,” said George, staring. “Not anymore . . .”

  The other thing he noticed was that it had started to snow.

  I am the darkness invincible thundered the Dark Knight, his words as clear from across the intervening gulf of black water as if he were standing next to them.

  “This new Dark Knight is still enough the Cnihtengild for you to have an undischarged obligation to fight him,” said Ariel. “Look at your arm if you doubt me.”

  George didn’t have to. The stone was binding around his chest now, and the constriction and pain were making it hard to breathe.

  The bell tolled once more.

  Boy. Light bearer. Will you stand?

  Despite the pain crushing his arm and chest, George still had enough reflexes left to shudder at the awful tone in the voice and the horror of the challenge it was offering.

  “Where are we meant to fight?” he said to Ariel. “I mean, I fought underground, at least I think it counts as underground—in that bombed-out cellar with the horses, that was belowground. And I fought the bloody Walker on the water, because we were on the ice at the Frost Fair. . . .”