Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  And then the horse stopped.

  George looked up.

  “That it?” he said, and spat a thin twist of blood into the snow at his side.

  The tip of the lance had fused into the stone of his hand.

  He looked along the long length of the great spear, into the black eyes smoking out of the Knight’s helmet.

  “Now. You want me to tell you about your fear? Because I can.”

  The Knight tried to jerk his lance free, but George closed his open fingers into a fist that gripped it like a vise.

  “I can feel your fear. You need a shape. You have no form to exist in within our world, so you need a shape, because without it you would be nothing. And you know what?”

  He spat sideways without breaking eye contact, so he missed the second red star that bloomed in the snow as his spittle hit it.

  “I’ve been frightened of a lot of things, too many things, in fact. But even I can’t figure out why I should be afraid of nothing.”

  I am nothing. I am everything, screamed the darkness leaking out of the horse’s torn headpiece.

  “No,” said George, thinking of the Stone Corpse. “You’re not everything. You’re just fear and pain and evil. And that isn’t everything. I mean, it may be where you come from, but not here. In this world everything balances: like for like, ill for ill, good for evil, and for every dragon . . . ? Guess who?”

  And with that he bent the tip of the lance into a right angle and jerked the Knight, who was trying to backpedal the horse, forward and right out of his saddle.

  “HA!”

  The bell tolled, and the Cnihtengild moved as one, engulfing the Dark Knight. And as the bell continued to toll, in the accompanying flashes George saw them hacking and ripping at the fallen Knight. He heard the darkness shrieking in rage and then something like terror, and he felt the lance gripped in his stone fist begin to shake more and more as less and less of the darkness was left with a place to be.

  The Cnihtengild were ripping great panels off the black shape and throwing them aside. As they did so the darkness lost its form and twisted and flowed into the remaining sections of the statue, desperately seeking a way to stop dissipating.

  It flowed into the arm holding the lance, then on into the hand. The metal bulged and buckled as too much darkness tried to find a shape within too little space. Then the darkness swelled into the thin lance, twisting as it rammed itself farther inside, so that the metal writhed and fattened like a snake. The Cnihtengild tore the metal plates of the arm apart and wrenched open the hand, so that for an instant the darkness flared and leaked out of the end of the lance like some exotic bloom. Then George felt the pain in his hand explode, as the darkness forced itself from the lance tip into his arm.

  In the instant of shock, he stared at the darkness entering the white limestone fist, trying to find fissures and veins in which it could hide and take form, and he knew exactly why the last vein had been made of this stone and no other. It was exactly the same white gritty limestone as that of the London Stone, the Stone where he had refused to make a sacrifice, the Stone where he had chosen the Hard Way. He choked out a savage bullet of laughter through the pain coursing up his arm, along with the darkness.

  “Come on, then!” he gasped.

  The darkness couldn’t flow fast enough through the narrow tip embedded in his hand. In a flash of light as the bell tolled, George saw one of the Cnihtengild swing the savagely nicked blade of a great battle-ax down on the lance, severing it in the middle.

  Darkness poured out and writhed in the air, like a many-headed hydra, each blind tentacle swirling about, trying to find somewhere to be, to take shape in.

  “Come on!” sobbed George as a new and sharp pain tore across his chest and arm, and the stone kicked and buckled beneath his clothes with a horrid life all of its own. And then there was a tremendous ripping noise as the shoulder ripped out of his shirt and the two coats he was wearing, and the stone that had spread across his chest began to unfurl and peel back like an answering bloom to the dark flower at the other end of the arm and lance that connected them.

  The pain was like an enormous plaster that had been stuck to his skin being slowly pulled off. It was too acute for him to even cry out in protest as he watched the stone flare off his shoulder into matching tendrils that reached out to the darkness beyond.

  He just stared openmouthed, his whole body trembling in shock as the stone and the darkness met and whirled around each other, like two strange sea creatures, a black and a white squid twisting and squirming around each other in a titanic struggle for supremacy.

  There was a final ripping noise and a jerk of excruciating agony, and then the darkness and the stone were wrestling horribly on the ground as George backed away, shaking with the knowledge that the stone arm had been ripped off.

  He knew he couldn’t survive that.

  And then he felt the last thing he expected. A small warm hand slipped into his and squeezed. It squeezed the right hand, the one he was sure had been ripped off. He looked down and saw his own hand, red and raw from where the stone had unpeeled itself, but flesh and blood. In it a golden hand.

  “Good, boy,” whispered a voice in his ear; and as he tried to look at the source of the warm breath making all the hairs on his neck suddenly and inexplicably stand to attention, she was gone in a flash of gold, soaring into the sky above the struggling stone and darkness.

  The stone jerked and snapped and then inexorably tightened around the darkness, squeezing it within itself. It was, in the end, an uneven fight because the darkness needed a shape more than it needed to win; because if it had destroyed the stone, it would have been left without a way or a place to be. There was a final wrench, and the last thin tendrils died back into the evolving shape of the stone, and all there was left to see was the white limestone twisting and flexing into the shape it had adopted before flaying itself free of George’s body. Then all was still on the snow-covered bridge, and George stood panting, looking down at a stone arm lying at his feet, surrounded by the discarded plates of armor that had once been the Last Knight of Cnihtengild, and the dead body of the Duke’s horse. All the darkness had left the statues, and the jumbled fragments of the Knight’s glass-inlaid surcoat once more blazed clear blue every which way out into the air around them, so that George appeared to be standing in a thicket of lights as he bent down and picked up the arm.

  The bell had ceased to toll, but in the glow from the Last Knight’s armor George could see the ghost band of the Cnihtengild panting with their exertion, resting on their saddlebows, looking at him.

  “Take the horse back to its plinth, and then take the Knight and his horse home,” he said, pointing at the shattered fragments of the statues. “The darkness that took them over wasn’t their fault.”

  Ariel dropped out of the sky and looked quizzically at him.

  “He deserves to live to fight another day,” said George.

  “HA!” roared the Cnihtengild. George thought he saw them raise their weapons in salute, and then he definitely saw them dismounting and picking up the fragments of armor.

  “Good,” he said. The weight of the stone arm in his hand felt almost too great to carry even the short way back to the chariot.

  “It was fated,” said Ariel.

  “Maybe,” said George, climbing back over the wall onto the Embankment, “but this isn’t over, is it? There’s the Ice Devil, and he looks like a bigger problem altogether.”

  “I am a mere minister of fate. That’s not my job. . . .” Ariel shrugged.

  “Yeah,” he said, climbing into the chariot and feeling the cold biting at his one bare arm, making him feel strangely lopsided. It was a good feeling, he reckoned, given that it meant he still had two flesh-and-blood arms.

  “No,” he said, placing the stone arm at his feet and picking up the reins. “It’s mine.”

  And with a crack of the reins, he was off, galloping along the walkway, heading for Trafalgar Square and wh
at he knew in his bones was going to be, however it turned out, the last battle.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Walker on the Beach

  Edie was frozen in horror, jammed against the beach hut wall, locked into the darkest room of her nightmare. The only light was the one burning from her mother’s earring. And in that light Edie saw a tall figure standing with his back to the door, tendrils of greasy hair escaping from a hoodie worn under a long green coat.

  It was the Walker.

  Her fists clenched and she stepped in front of her mother.

  “Stop him,” she said, eyes flicking to the Gunner.

  “If I could,” he said, pain in his eyes, “I’d stop his clock once and for all. But I can’t. We can’t.”

  “What a charming earring.” The Walker smiled.

  Edie’s mother was very still, like an animal that knows danger has arrived and it will have only one chance to make its escape. She suddenly looked very sober.

  “Thanks,” she said, swallowing. “I’ve got to go. . . .”

  “No, really,” the Walker said, stepping forward and starting to circle her. “Just a simple piece of sea-glass, and yet it has such . . . life in it.”

  Edie knew what happened next. She’d seen it in harsh, terrifying flashes when she’d glinted it what seemed a lifetime ago, before she’d been chased by the stepfather and dealt with him and run away to London. She’d seen the Walker circling her mother, wheedling, teasing, and then bullying and threatening. She’d seen him mocking her for not even knowing what she was. She’d seen the stepfather sitting and watching and giggling at it all. And then she’d seen him leap to keep the door locked when her mother made her last desperate break for freedom and sanity.

  The struggle she’d seen as he tripped her and she fought to escape them both was fierce and brutal and— as measured in real time—quite short. To Edie it had seemed to go on forever. She didn’t watch it again, not the way she had when she’d glinted it.

  This time she was in it.

  As her mother ran for the door, Edie dived between her and the Walker, trying to block him. He slid past without noticing her. When she regained her balance she sprung for him, her fists glancing off his face, her throttling hands sliding around his neck without being able to crush it. Edie fought with every ounce of her strength. She fought hard and she fought silent, the way a born street brawler fights, wasting no energy on noise, using every last fragment in the struggle. She kicked, she bit, she scratched, she gouged, and she punched the unbreakable force field so many times that her fists just got numb, way on the other side of pain.

  But all she managed to do was exhaust herself.

  The scream, when it came, was her mother’s, as the Walker ripped the earring clear and held it high in his exultant fist. Edie sobbed and once again threw herself between the Walker and her mother.

  There was no need. Now that he had the stone, he stepped calmly back.

  “Marvelous,” he panted, eyes bright, oblivious to the three scratches her mother had raked diagonally across his face, from forehead to ear, as he gazed hungrily at the fire in the glass. “Such a tiny fragment, yet such vigor within.”

  Edie’s mother scrambled to the locked door and tried to tear it open.

  “Oh, you can’t go,” he said, as eerily polite as a host at a tea party. “Please. Dear lady. You mustn’t go yet. I haven’t told you what you are. I haven’t told you what you’ve lost. It’s quite the best part. . . .”

  The door bounced behind her as she staggered out onto the promenade and ran for her life.

  The Walker didn’t chase her. He shrugged, shook his head, and returned to his contemplation of the stone.

  “No hurry. I have all the time in the world.”

  Edie ran out the door, onto the promenade. Her mother was sprinting away already fifty yards ahead. As she started to follow, the Gunner caught up and gripped her shoulders.

  “Let go!” shouted Edie.

  He lifted her in the air, her legs bicycling as she tried to run after her mother.

  “You can’t follow her, love. You can’t help her; you can’t change what happens. Look at you, look at how you’ve hurt yourself trying.”

  Edie stopped struggling. She knew he was right.

  The Gunner put her down. She was shaking with the shock and backwash of adrenaline from the one-sided fight. Her knuckles were split, her hair hung wild, and there was a graze weeping on her cheekbone where she’d bounced off the rough brickwork of the beach hut.

  “I just . . .” she began.

  “Don’t speak. Be still for a while,” said the soldier. “Just be.”

  She looked out to sea. He followed her eyes.

  “It’s a great calm, all that water,” he said. “I’ve never seen the sea ’til now. It’s calmer than the river.”

  She stumbled over the edge of the promenade and dropped onto the loose pebbles with a jolt. She crunched over to the wooden wall, pulled her fur coat tightly around her, and sat against it, eyes fixed on the gentle heave of the sea swell in the middle distance.

  She heard a louder crunch and footsteps approaching, and she felt the thud against the wall as the bronze man sat down next to her. After a while there was a flutter next to her ear and then a weight on her shoulder as the Raven dropped in to perch on her; but she didn’t react to that either.

  And for a long time they sat like that, all staring out to sea while Edie’s heartbeat returned to normal and she stopped shaking.

  Something gray and big-winged flapped slowly along the line of the shore, too far away to identify.

  She knew she couldn’t sit there forever.

  “He took her heart stone,” said the Gunner.

  She nodded, eyes still fixed on the sea.

  “He took her heart stone,” she agreed with a sniff. “After that must have been when she went loony. Went for my stepdad with the potato peeler.”

  A flicker of satisfaction snuck onto her face at the memory, and then was gone.

  “They took her away. She didn’t come back.”

  She scooped up a handful of small pebbles and let them drop to the beach one by one. The Gunner watched with her as the stones bounced and skittered across the jumble of rocks beside them.

  When her hand was empty she looked at him. Her eyes were now dry, and her chin had regained its stubborn jut.

  “She died?” said the Gunner softly.

  Edie nodded. “She killed herself.”

  She shoveled her hand into the pebbles at her side, but this time she kept her hand closed around the wet stones she dug out. The Gunner watched her knuckles whiten on them, though her voice remained calm.

  “I’m not meant to know that bit. But he told me. My stepdad. One night. Drunk. He ‘thought I should know.’”

  The Gunner leaned over, and very gently, his large bronze hands unwrapped her fingers. She didn’t resist as he turned her hand over and let the clenched handful of stones drop away.

  “So why can’t you forgive her?” he asked gently.

  Edie took a big breath and held it while her body burned all the oxygen in it. Then she exhaled.

  “Because she was meant to look after me. But she left me. With him. She took the easy way out. And left me the hard way . . . Ow!”

  The Raven pecked her hard on the ear.

  “Why’d he . . . OW!”

  The Raven did it again.

  “He doesn’t agree with you.” The soldier smiled and stood up. He offered her a hand and hauled her to her feet.

  “Well, he doesn’t know everything, does he?” Edie said, eyeing the bird with dislike as she rubbed her ear.

  “No,” agreed the Gunner. “Just everything that happened. And I think he knows something else, which he wants to show you, and all.”

  Edie turned and looked at the beach hut. The door was now closed again, the memory locked away behind a rusting padlock. It looked as innocent and shabby as the other doors on either side of it.

  “Wha
t else can there be?” she said. “Nothing can be worse than that.”

  The Raven clacked its beak and looked at the Gunner behind Edie’s back.

  The Gunner shook his head.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Hare Bell

  The ice murk made it almost impossible to move forward in any coherent direction, but the Queen of America and Shack were making progress by only moving in the direction of the noise the Queen had heard. They stayed in contact by each holding on to the shaggy coat of the buffalo at their side. In the gray fog the white stone of the Queen and her beast glowed a little, so that she was just able to track the dragon’s trail in front of her.

  As they trudged through the ever deeper snow, Shack could hear the noise more and more clearly, his muffled ears catching up with the more finely tuned hearing of the warrior Queen.

  It was people crying and shouting, a general lamentation that held more sorrow than fear. It was a sound of resignation, not of desperation, and there were more female voices mixed through it than there were men’s.

  They blinked in surprise as they walked unexpectedly out of the murk and into one of the great avenues of open air that cut through the miasma in deep straight gullies, like firebreaks in a dense forest.

  They looked right and left, and saw with relief that the dragon’s tracks led along the break, keeping out of the murk.

  “What is this?” said Shack, pointing along the clear cut of clean air.

  “Lines of power,” said the Queen.

  “Of course,” said Shack. “The ley lines.”

  People who think London is a great shambolic mishmash of twisting streets that have grown up piecemeal over time, are right, but only partially so. There are lines that underpin the apparent random shape of the city, and always have done. If you took a map of the city and drew lines connecting the major churches, you would begin to see how many lie in a straight line. A straight line between three churches could be a coincidence. A straight line between four or five or six is something else entirely. When you add in the even older holy wells and sacred springs and find them on the same lines, it’s possible that there is a more ancient grid of power running under the city streets. And if you look beyond the city along those lines, you might find they cut through even more ancient stone circles and strangely hallowed hilltop sites in the island beyond.