These are the old lines of power, forgotten by everyone who crosses them every day, just as the London Stone is. Lines that are still so powerful that the ice murk made no impression on them.
The voices were much clearer now, as if the clean-cut sides of the murk canyon were channeling them, like the long nave of a dark cathedral.
“Come on,” said Shack, jogging forward. “There’s something moving over there.”
The lines of power don’t, of course, run neatly along the road plan of the city, and what was ahead of them was a harsh and complicated facade of a medium-rise office complex. The tracks led up some steps, and Shack and the Queen had to dip into the murk and follow the wall of the building by touch until they turned a corner and broke back out into the clean air beyond. And when they did, they saw they were in the inner square of the Broadgate Centre, a blocky modern piazza whose normal starkness was softened by the snow.
The snow on the ground was not a virgin blanket of white. It was churned up in great chunks that bore witness to the great fight that must have taken place on it.
The Queen of Time was lying broken-winged at the edge of the piazza—a golden splash of color in the middle of a ring of dark statues, which ranged around her in a protective perimeter. They were a group of spits, made to look like tired office workers. Clean scrapes of bronze were exposed through their normally matte surface, showing where they had fallen on the dragons and tried to rescue the Queen from their ripping talons.
It was they who were doing the keening and lamenting.
“She’s still breathing,” said an almost faceless male figure as Shack ran past him, and the Queen of America slid to one knee beside the Queen of Time.
“Not for long,” the warrior Queen grunted. “Put her on buffalo. We ride for the maker boy. Maker boy maybe can heal. It’s only chance. Can be no turn o’day if she dies.”
There was an urgency in her voice that made the big polar explorer immediately reach down and slide his hands around the golden body of the fallen Queen and lift her gently, her shattered wings hanging loose, her hair tumbled in disarray over the gouges torn through her clothes into the body beneath.
“Got her,” he said, carrying her carefully through the office workers toward the waiting buffalo. “How will you get to the boy through this murk?”
The Queen of America ran past him to the other side of the square, where there was a statue of a sinewy hare leaping past a giant bell that was tipped on its side.
“Brother jackrabbit,” she shouted. “Brother jackrabbit knows the secret ways through the city.”
She swung her tomahawk and clanged the bell, and as she did so, the hare sprang into life and raced in a circuit of the square, like something getting up speed.
In the silence that followed as the bell’s noise died away, the only sounds left were the horses feet circling them in the deadening snow pack and a distant sound of more voices crying. Shack cocked an ear as the Queen of America jumped up on the buffalo on which he had gently placed the golden Queen.
“Ice man,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“I think,” he said carefully, “I think I should go and see what those girls are crying about.”
The Queen looked in the direction of the noise, which had been cloaked by the lamentations of the office workers.
“Sound of grief comes from the holy well,” she said, pointing. “Cannot be a good thing if the holy well is open.”
“Maybe so,” said Shack. “But someone should go and see anyway.” And with that he raised his hand in farewell and turned away, trudging off into the unknown on his own.
The Queen of America looked after him for a short beat, and then put a restraining hand on the gold body in front of her.
“We go,” she said. “Follow jackrabbit . . .”
The hare stopped its increasingly desperate circuits of the square and ran straight into the side of the ice murk, and the buffalo plunged into a gallop, following the bobbing tail of the hare, which blazed white in the gloom beyond.
And in a moment, the murk had swallowed them too.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Divers
Two things struck George as he swung the chariot up and onto Blackfriars Bridge. The first was that he was going to have to find another way to cross back to the north side of the river, because the sheer mass of the ice murk had already spread west past the other end of the bridge. If he kept on he’d just barrel right into the middle of it and be irretrievably lost.
The second thing he noticed was the activity on the bridge. The Red Queen, Boadicea, was leaning over the edge, shouting and pointing with the unmistakeable air of someone ordering a group of people about. There was a metal sack at her feet, and as George approached, first one then another figure flew up from the river below and clung on to the other side of the bridge wall, talking to her and nodding and shaking their heads.
One of the airborne spits was a winged pilot, in World War II gear, wearing a flying helmet and life jacket. His arms were attached to his wings, making him look more like a crucifix than an angel, as he hung in the air talking animatedly with the Queen and the other figure. The other spit was recognizable as a Perseus; semiclad with a feathered helmet and winged sandals, he was gesticulating with an aggressively curved sword at something below. The one thing they had in common, apart from the fact they could both, in their different ways, fly, was that they were both dripping wet.
The Queen turned as George approached.
“Boy,” she said without ceremony or a hint of surprise—or pleasure—at the fact he had come back at all from his ordeal. “We cannot find it.”
“But chin up, old man, we’re still looking!” The Pilot smiled and dropped off the edge of the bridge.
“Yes,” said the Perseus, his teeth chattering despite a wide grin, “but I was not made for these cold northern waters.”
And with that he flipped backward in a perfect dive. George jumped off the chariot and ran to the edge, just in time to see the two spits hit the river below and disappear.
There was a big barge moored in the middle of the river, and on it, one of the sailor statues—the Bosun— was standing amid a ramshackle collection of stones and objects that were wet and caked in silt. As George watched, a great bronze dolphin leaped out of the water, trailing a laughing bronze boy who held on to its fin as the creature arched high over the Bosun. He dropped another stone onto the deck next to him, and then Boy and Dolphin disappeared in another splash on the far side of the barge.
Jack Tar was standing in a small boat, which the sailors had obviously commandeered from one of the large boats permanently moored on the embankment, hauling at a rope as he dragged the riverbed below with the anchor, which, as George stared, broke clear of the water with half a rusted bicycle attached to it.
“We’re doing everything we can,” said the Queen, as first the Perseus and then the Pilot burst out of the river, each gasping for breath and carrying assorted pieces of junk in their hands. They flew to the barge and dropped the items next to the Bosun, who quickly sifted through them and shook his head.
“They can’t find the mirror down there. They’re pulling stuff out at random and hoping,” she said. “We don’t know what else to do. But we’re not giving up.”
George knew he couldn’t really feel more than a vague dark presence out there. He knew that to find the mirror required someone who was an expert at feeling the power hidden within stones.
“We need Edie,” he said. “Edie can feel its presence.”
He remembered what she had told him about why the Walker had kidnapped her, to sift through his collection of black stones and look for the one he could make into a black mirror. George knew without needing to think how or why that this was a job for her and no other.
“Where the hell is she?” he said, scanning the cityscape stretched all around him. “If we can’t find Edie, everything is lost.”
It was at that instant, as his gaze swept a
cross the river on the other side of the bridge, toward the east, that he saw them. Flying fast and low, hugging the wavelets on the river’s surface, a solid phalanx of ten ice-covered taints, hurtling inbound like silvery missiles.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Asylum
The smell hit Edie as soon as she stepped out of the mirror: the sharp piney-chemical spike of disinfectant cut with the sour reek of stale cigarettes was as unappealingly institutional as the queasy green corridor walls stretching away on either side of them.
The Gunner held out a steadying hand, and for a moment as Edie acclimatized, they stood there watching the Raven flap slowly away from them down the long corridor, his black wings doubled in the reflection on the shiny floor below, like a shadow that flew just a beat behind him.
“Are you all right?” said the Gunner.
“Let’s go,” she said tightly, setting off after the bird, who as always seemed to know exactly where they should be going.
As she followed, other details began to filter into her consciousness. All the windows were barred with wire mesh, thickly painted the same color as the walls. All the barred windows Edie had seen before were barred on the outside, to stop people from getting in. These were different. On these, the mesh was on the inside of the windows, protecting the glass. Stopping people from getting out.
A stocky nurse pushed a squeaky trolley loaded with medication past them, the brightly colored pills rattling cheerily in their neatly ranked plastic cups as she went.
The Raven hovered above the nurse unseen while she punched a code into a keypad on the door at the end of the corridor. As soon as the door was opened, the Raven flew in ahead of her, and Edie and the Gunner slipped after it as the nurse turned to negotiate the trolley through behind her.
It was a big hospital dayroom. Patients were scattered around in the plastic chairs, most of which were arranged in a jumbled half-circle in front of a ceiling-mounted television. The television was showing nothing but a bright rectangle of static, the tiny white-and-black flecks fizzing into a gray electric blur as an electrician in coveralls and tool belt stood on a chair, checking the connections at the back.
Most of the patients—in pajamas and dressing gowns—were sitting and watching the television anyway.
A man sat at a table playing chess. With himself. And only a black rook on the board. Beyond him, a woman stood in the corner, face jammed into the angle of the wall, slowly stepping from one foot to the other, one thin white hand twining blindly behind her back, doggedly going nowhere.
“It’s an asylum,” said the Gunner, telling Edie what she already knew.
The electrician sucked his teeth in a disappointed snap of his tongue, got down off the chair, and walked past them to a door in the wall. He pulled out a key and unlocked it.
The nurse with the trolley rolled her eyes at him as she passed.
“Have you not got it fixed yet?”
“I’m going on the roof. Must be the aerial. Those winds . . .” he said, opening the door.
Edie saw the stairs leading upward beyond it.
“Well, mind you, lock the door behind you,” said the nurse, stopping by a lone patient in a pale lemon dressing gown sitting on a chair and looking away from the TV, her face hidden by a long sweep of aubergine dark hair.
“You don’t want to turn around and find any of this lot have decided to follow you onto the roof. He doesn’t need any little helpers, right, Sue?”
It was Edie’s mother. She turned her attention to the woman handing her a little disposable cup. Then she looked at the door and the stairs, face blank with lack of interest.
“Right,” she agreed, taking her cupful of bright pills and swallowing them while the nurse waited and then ticked her name off a list.
“Lovely jubbly.” The nurse smiled brightly.
Edie’s mother’s face froze, and she pushed back in her chair so hard that the foam padding whooshed air in protest.
“What are you doing here?” she gasped at someone behind the nurse.
The nurse turned and saw nothing but a blank wall.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked, turning back to her.
Edie’s mother stretched out a long accusing finger, shaking with emotion. “Him.”
The nurse looked again and saw nothing. “There’s no one there, Sue.”
Except there was.
It was the Walker. He had just stepped out of one of his handheld mirrors and was carefully snapping them back together and pocketing them.
“She can’t see me. Not unless I let her,” he drawled, stepping forward and waving his hand in front of the nurse’s face. She didn’t react at all, just looked at Edie’s mother and wrote something on her chart.
“You just stay there, Sue. Doctor might come and have a little chat in a while, yeah?” said the nurse. “Best just stay there for now. There’s nothing to worry about, love.”
And off she jangled with her trolley. Edie’s mother was still crammed back in her seat, her hands white-knuckling on the armrests.
The Walker stroked his beard and looked at her.
“What do you want?” she croaked.
“What do I want?” He smiled and rolled his eyes theatrically, as if bored by everything and everyone. “I would like things to be easier. In the early days it was easier. There were fewer people, spread across a much simpler world. It was not hard to find you.”
“To find me?” She gulped, eyes switching left and right, looking for somewhere to run, or someone to help her.
Edie couldn’t take it. She launched herself at the Walker. Once more she just slid off him, tumbling around his body and landing painfully on the floor. The Gunner stepped across the room and restrained her as she tried to launch herself back into the attack.
“No,” he said firmly, gripping her arm. “No more of that. You’ll just hurt yourself again.”
The Walker shook his head at her mother. “Not to find you. To find such as you. Glints. They knew who they were, and others knew they were different, even if they were unaware of the exact nature of that difference. The hostile called them witches and burned them; the needy called them wise women and asked for their help. Everyone knew who they were, even if only the glints themselves knew what they were. And they’d pass on that knowledge to younger women who had the gift, daughters and the like. . . .”
And Edie watched as the Walker explained to her mother exactly what a glint was. And it was painful to witness the realization spreading across her mother’s face as she understood that, however crazy the message was or how frightening the messenger, it was all true.
Edie remembered how, when it was explained to her, she too had instantly felt the truth and rightness of it. And now she was seeing the same thing dawn on her mother.
“So I’ve had this ability, this ‘gift’ all the time?” said her mum, twisting the tie of her pale yellow dressing gown tightly around her fingers and pulling so tight that they whitened with lack of blood.
“Yes.”
She took a moment to watch all the carefully arranged dominoes of her life tip over one at a time in a long chain that snaked, Edie knew, all the way back to the seven-year-old version of herself glinting the plague pit.
“And I wasn’t mad,” she said, staring at her feet but seeing something different entirely. “Not ever. I was seeing things. Real things. Not imagining them.”
“Yes.” The Walker shrugged.
She bit her lip and looked up at him, shaking her head in disbelief at her predicament. She spoke very slowly as the last domino fell with a click, like a door locking.
“And now that I know that I wasn’t mad, that I’ve never been mad—I’m in here.”
“Ironic, is it not? Though not for long, I feel, if that is any solace. . . .” He grinned easily. “You have the gift, but you no longer have the stone. Without a heart stone you will, really, go mad. You feel it, don’t you? That sense of things coming unstitched, of the fragile mooring that hel
d you on the earth slowly working loose?”
Edie’s mother stared at him, her leg starting to jig up and down with the tension building in her.
“What do you want?” she whispered.
He reached into his pocket and held up the earring. Her eyes devoured it and the fire blazing inside.
“Such a small stone,” he tutted. “Scarcely worth my trouble.”
“So give it back,” she said, swallowing.
“You have a daughter.”
Edie’s mother went very still, just as she had in the beach hut, like an animal sensing danger. She said nothing.
“Does she . . . have a stone?” he asked casually.
She shook her head emphatically. “She’s not like me.”
The Walker’s hand shot out and gripped her chin. “She’s just like you.”
Edie gasped and stepped forward. The Gunner’s hand fell on her shoulder and squeezed it in comfort. Tears of frustration welled behind Edie’s eyes at her inability to talk to her mother, to help her, to just touch her, even for an instant.
“In the old days mothers handed the knowledge of the gift to their daughters, just as they had been handed it by their own mothers,” the Walker continued, again sounding slightly bored by what he was saying. “A clear line of communication and tradition reaching back to the dawn of time itself. Somehow, perhaps even because of my activities, these lines have been cut.”
Edie thought of the bagful of heart stones that the Gunner had brought from the Walker’s underground cell. The stones that had warmed and brought her back to life. She thought of how many there had been, and how many lives that meant the Walker had destroyed to collect them, a life for each one. She shuddered.
Silvertongue Page 23