The Admiral jabbed the sword into the paw that was trying to rip him open, but it was torn away as the second—good—Sphinx burst out of a side street and hit her sister broadside on, knocking her over and clearing the way ahead.
“GO!” shouted George, seeing the opening. The plane leaped forward and the square broke apart just long enough for the plane to roll toward Admiralty Arch, taints diving out of the way of its brutally spinning propeller. Edie and George felt their stomachs being left behind in the square as the Spitfire roared under the arch, along the Mall, and lifted into the air with a sudden and vigorous jerk. The plane banked into a tight right turn over St. James’s and then went upside down as the Dragon barrel-rolled once, accelerating toward the ice murk and the high citadel beyond.
George was filled with a deep thrill of elation at the speed and power all around him. He looked at Edie.
“Okay,” she said. “Wow.”
A phalanx of gargoyles broke off the tower and headed for them, as straight and merciless as missiles.
“George?”
“Straight at ’em,” he replied, hoping the dragon below would hear, and then it was too late to worry, as a second unseen group of gargoyles dropped on them out of the sun, and the Spitfire spun and rolled and jinked as, one after the other, the taints tried to tear and bite chunks out of it to get at George and Edie.
As the taints flew relentlessly after the Spitfire, it looped all the way around and came up behind them, and the Dragon’s wildfire cannoned out from within the plane, and the attackers dropped from the sky.
The Ice Devil howled in fury as they passed over him, and slashed a misshapen hand at them as he roared: KILL IT AND BRING THE OTHER DARKNESS TO ME.
The flared lip of the citadel it had built for itself exploded outward in all directions as the remaining gargoyles unhooked and took to the sky in a shower of snow and icicles. From the silvery sheen on them, George could see that the Ice Devil had been making his own copies of the existing ones, which explained why the cloud of attackers was so thick.
“We can’t . . .” he began, and then the Spitfire tipped on one wing and flew a tight circle around the top of the tower, howling through the air as it went. There were bumps as it hit taints left and right, but it kept on circling in what seemed like ever tightening rings. The bumping and the buffeting got less and less as they chased their own tail around the tower, and the sky got lighter. This wasn’t because they were clearing it of taints, but because the Spitfire was trailing wildfire as it went, building a flaming cone that rose around the citadel.
George, looking across the inner void of the cone, saw the opposing curve of fire and remembered how the Dragon had trapped him inside a fiery tornado when it had marked his hand, and how he had been unable to escape it. His hand twinged and he looked down and saw the scar. And then he knew what they had to do.
He reached into his pocket, then tapped Edie on the shoulder. She was staring openmouthed at the whirling fire cone they were screaming around.
“You take one half. I take the other half. Get on either side and point them at each other. That’ll open the portal,” he shouted.
He would grab the Ice Devil and plunge it through the mirror. If that meant losing his hand, perhaps that was what was meant by the Stone Corpse’s prophecy. He had been hoping that trapping the other darkness in his stone arm would have covered that, but in the absence of a better plan, this was all he could think of. It seemed like a suitably savage end to his ordeal.
“How do we get down there?” she yelled back. “Oh.”
The plane was slowing, and as it slowed she noticed it was thinning out and the wildfire it was made of stretched itself into a sloping tornado.
As they slid down the side of the fiery vortex, the canopy slid open, and the Spitfire tipped and bucked and decanted them onto the top of the tower, facing the Ice Devil.
“Save. City,” roared the dragon. As they looked around, George realized the dragon was on the outside of the cone, keeping the cone spinning, in the same way it had done the last time he had seen it conjure the wild whirlfire.
They were on their own.
With the Ice Devil.
“Tell you what,” said George carefully, getting to his feet, clutching the stone arm in one hand and the fragment of black mirror in the other, “you don’t have to be a glint to feel the darkness in that thing.”
“In him,” said Edie, edging left. “Definitely a him.”
The Ice Devil could sense the other power trapped in the stone arm. It was so heady that it made it laugh.
GIVE.
The Ice Devil held out its hand.
“Sort of looks like the Walker,” said Edie, still curving around the edge of the roof in the opposite direction to George. “If you’d put him through a wringer.”
“Well, there’s a nice thought,” said George. He was uncomfortably aware that the stone arm was flexing and reaching its fingers toward its brother darkness.
GIVE FAST OR DIE SLOWLY!
George swallowed and stopped moving.
“Edie?”
“Gotcha,” she said, stopping and slipping the mirror out of the end of her sleeve.
George threw the stone arm on the ground in front of him. “There,” he said. “There it is.”
The Ice Devil strode forward with eye-blurring speed and reached for the arm.
“Now!” yelled George.
He and Edie angled the front faces of their fragments of black mirror at each other as the Ice Devil stepped between them.
There was a snapping noise, and the mirrors jumped in their hands as they found each other and the reflections locked them together. And in between them, as if trapped in a force field, the Ice Devil was spun and frozen, one hand reaching forward, the other reaching back, each hand being pulled into a different mirror.
“Got him,” shouted Edie exultantly. “Easy!”
The Ice Devil shrieked so loud their ears rang with pain, and then it pulled its hands closer together.
Edie and George kept a tight grip on their mirrors, but each saw with horror that the Ice Devil was pulling them toward him by the rope of invisible forces connected to whatever lay on the other side of the mirrors.
“Or he’s got us,” gritted George, staring in shock at the furrow his feet were making in the snow as he tried to resist the inexorable pull.
“Edie,” he yelled. “Your sea-glass!”
“What?” she said, all her energy focused on not letting the mirror rip clear of her fingers.
“If it’s what glint and maker made, we need to see if it does something, because I’m out of ideas.”
She clamped down on the mirror with one hand, freeing the other to scrabble the sea-glass out of her pocket.
It was so hot that she almost dropped it. But she knew she mustn’t, so she rode the pain and tried to ignore the smell of burning.
She turned it toward the Ice Devil, and the glass flared so suddenly that the pain caused her involuntary reflexes to take over, and she dropped it.
The world once more went fast/slow as Edie saw the last hope tumble toward the ground, and heard the Ice Devil roar. There was a flash from behind her as something splashed through the wall of fire and flapped past her. A white bird, an owl, gently plucked the tumbling fragment of light from the air and carried it straight toward the Ice Devil. The Ice Devil opened his mouth to roar it to smithereens, but the bird flew slowly straight through the middle of his chest, in one side and out the other, as if he were made of nothing.
Which, of course, he was.
Nothing but ice crystals and the outer darkness and the inhuman terror that has no form in this world other than what we give it.
“Andraste,” breathed Edie.
The owl flew relentlessly on, disappearing out the other side of the cone of whirlfire.
But what it left behind in the rapidly dissolving body of the Ice Devil was the scorching, all-melting heat of Edie’s heart stone.
; The ice melted, and the Ice Devil had no form. As it searched blindly for a way to be, shrieking in terror, it found a darkness it recognized and reached for it. The darkness on the other side of the black mirror in George’s hand.
There was an enormous explosion, as loud as worlds colliding, which in a way they were.
The heart stone flashed white as an atomic ground zero, and the mirrors leaped in their hands as the Ice Devil was sucked back into the unknowable dark. And because the world balances accounts, and matches every exit with an entrance, just as the Ice Devil popped out of this world, a small package popped back in the other direction and went whirling disorientedly over the edge of the tower, so fast and so unexpectedly that George and Edie, blinded by the light, missed it.
And then they were violently jerked across the tower, toward each other, as the mirrors slammed together like super-magnets.
They untangled themselves and found that the mirrors had again become unstuck.
George looked down at the fragment in his hand. It was no longer the blackest thing he had ever seen. He showed it to Edie.
She lifted hers. They were identical. They were white.
“Snap,” she said, numb with the shock and relief of success.
All around them the cone of fire was dropping away, revealing a clear sky and a very happy-looking dragon.
“Good. You. Are. Both,” it said simply. “Saved. All. All. Debted.”
It dropped away and headed back to Temple Bar.
George stared at Edie.
“What’s that?” he said, getting up and pointing at her other hand.
“The stone burned me,” she said, reaching up and letting George pull her to her feet. She showed him the jagged scar on her hand.
He turned his own palm upward to look at the same maker’s mark on his palm.
“Double snap,” he said. “Edie . . .”
“Yeah,” she said. “So. There’s something I think we need to talk about. . . .”
She didn’t know how to begin, largely because she still wasn’t admitting to herself what she thought about the situation. So she tried to buy a bit more time.
“How are we going to get down?”
“Gack,” said a voice from behind her.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Twist in the Tail
They stood on the edge of the tower and looked out over the city. The murk was as gone as the Ice Devil that had spawned it. George carried the stone arm, and Edie had retrieved her heart stone from the center of the roof. Spout stood beside them.
“George,” said Edie. “It’s quiet.”
He nodded.
“I can’t hear the guns.”
“Yeah,” he said, ears straining for any distant sound the wind might bring them. “I think the battle’s over.”
“Gack,” confirmed Spout.
Here and there, George could see what he first took for birds returning to the empty skies, and then he saw that they were taints, flying back to their perches.
“It’s all over,” said Edie.
“Not quite,” he said, hefting the stone arm. “I’ve got a couple of things to do. First we need to put this back in the London Stone, where it can’t do any more harm. Then I’ve got to go and mend the little dragon I broke. Then . . .”
“Then it’s all over.”
“No.” He grinned. “Then it begins.”
Edie looked questioningly at him.
“You think all this was impossible, try and figure out how we explain you to my mum.”
She looked away, her eyes skating over the strangely peaceful city below.
“We don’t have to,” she said.
“Yeah we do,” said George. “And we will. She’s not entirely normal herself.”
“What do you mean?” she said, bridling.
“Nothing,” he replied. “You’ll see. Don’t be so touchy.”
“I’m not,” she sniffed. “And I’m not some lost puppy that needs a home.”
“No,” he agreed. “But you’ve got one anyway.”
They didn’t say much else. Not right then. And because Spout could only carry one of them at a time, they didn’t fly straight to the London Stone. Instead they just let him ferry them to the foot of the tower, and walked through the empty city while he flew back to Trafalgar Square with news of what had happened.
“They’re not going to understand him,” said Edie. “It’s not like he talks very well.”
“He’ll do fine,” said George, nodding at the black Raven that had looped overhead and had joined Spout on his journey west.
As they headed off toward Cannon Street through the snow-clogged wilderness of the City, they really didn’t talk much at all. Partly it was because they didn’t want to disturb the silence around them, partly it was because they both had so much to say that they didn’t know how to start, but mainly it was because they were both as tired as they had ever been, and now that the adrenaline and fear had gone, they felt all of it at once.
“What was that?” said George.
Edie had stopped dead and was peering down a side street, suddenly tense again, like an animal poised to run for its life.
“I saw something,” she said. “At least I think I did. . . .”
George looked down the empty street and saw nothing.
“Saw what?”
He walked into the side street and looked down its length.
“There’s nothing here, Edie. Not even footprints.”
He was so sure, and his certainty was reassuring enough that she let herself relax. She hadn’t seen anything properly, just a brief dark blur caught the corner of her eye as she passed, something random that her mind had cobbled into a false impression—that looked like Little Tragedy ducking out of sight.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry. I’m just still jumpy. . . .”
“Me too,” he said. “And tired. More than tired, really . . .”
“Chinstrapped,” she said, straightening up. “Come on. And we should walk on the pavements. In case time starts suddenly.” She pointed at the frozen traffic all around them. “Getting run over would be a pretty stupid way to end this.”
George didn’t say anything, but he did switch carrying the stone arm from one shoulder to the other as he stepped off the road and onto the pavement. He was so exhausted that the arm just seemed to get heavier with every step.
And then they heard wheels and horses and saw the Red Queen turning her chariot onto the street ahead of them. The Gunner rode beside her, still helmetless. They were both smiling.
“Well,” said the Queen.
“Yeah,” said the Gunner, hoisting first Edie and then George onto the chariot and slapping them both on the back. “That was something.”
“Why hasn’t time started again?” asked Edie.
“The Queen of Time has to get back to her plinth, see to the Clock of the World,” replied the Gunner. “The Clocker and her’ll see to it. Don’t you worry.”
“We’re not,” said George. “It’s peaceful like this.”
“Besides,” continued the Gunner, “them what are left in the square’ve got a lot of dead spits to get back on their plinths before turn o’day. There’s no hurry.”
“Have your daughters come back?” asked Edie quietly.
The Queen shook her head.
“The Queen of America has gone to look for them. She usually finds anything she tracks. And they are big girls. They can look after themselves. I am not worried.”
Edie looked at the Queen, but all she got was the side of her face and a tight smile. She decided not to pursue the question for now, but she noticed that the Queen was a great leader, and a surprisingly bad liar.
And again, because there was so much to say, they all remained silent as the Queen drove them to London Stone.
There were two figures already there when they arrived.
The Old Soldier and the Young Soldier were standing looking at the sword and the hand and the frozen gout of metal th
at had once been the Duke, trying to work out how to remove it from the Stone.
“We don’t know what to do,” said the young one.
“I do,” said George, jumping off the chariot and walking over to have a look, followed by the Queen and the Gunner. He knelt in front of the Stone and reached out. His fingers felt the thin crack in the limestone block that the Duke had kept open.
“I can get the stone arm and we can widen this crack and put the old darkness back in and seal it up. . . .”
“Where have you two dozy beggars been?” asked the Gunner.
“We got lost in the murk,” said the old one.
“We thought we’d try to get old Hooky, what’s left of him, back on ’is plinth.”
“So that, come turn o’day, he gets better. . . .” explained the Young Soldier.
“Nothing gets better,” said a dry voice from behind them, a voice shot through with malice and satisfaction. “Not ever. Not really. Certainly not for any of you.”
George was the first to turn.
It was the Walker.
He held Edie tightly around the neck, the thin straight blade of his dagger pressed to her jugular, so nearly cutting it that George could see every vein pulse against the sharp metal edge.
Edie stood still as a statue. She didn’t look scared. She looked angry; angry with herself for letting her guard down; angry for believing that she, of all people, might actually deserve a happy ending to her ordeal; angriest of all for letting the Walker creep up behind her and trap her again.
“You shouldn’t have come,” said a thin urchin’s voice from the right. “You really shouldn’t have come. Not here. Not now . . .”
Little Tragedy stepped out from a doorway, shaking his head. It was probably just melting snow, but there was water running down his cheeks.
“I did see you,” said Edie. “Stupid. Of course . . .”
She should have trusted her first instinct. She hadn’t been jumpy and imagining things. She’d been right. And now it was all wrong. She looked at George.
George didn’t waste time trying to figure out how the Walker had returned; though it was, in the end, simply because the world likes balance: in the same way that the Ice Devil had entered this world by filling the space displaced by the Walker, so when the Ice Devil returned to the outer darkness, it was the Walker’s body that had been spat back out of the mirrors and had fallen off the roof, unseen by George and Edie.
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