Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  He didn’t think twice, just clenched his fists, ducked his head, and ran his heart out, tearing past the sporadically visible walls of knights. He had to get there before one of them positioned himself at the end of the line and cut off what he was pretty sure was his last chance of escape.

  He ran so fast that his heart bounced alarmingly hard against the inside of his rib cage; but he saw that he’d made it.

  None of the Guild was going to be able to block his exit. He didn’t let up on his speed. He wasn’t going to slow down until he’d put a lot of ground between the Knight and him. Or until he threw up or had a heart attack or something. He felt the jag of elation as he closed in on the open gate. Two paces out, he allowed himself to look back.

  This meant he was facing the wrong way when the gate slammed shut.

  He hit it in a pile-driving shoulder charge. He hit it so fast and so unexpectedly that the impact was somehow dulled with shock. He saw stars, bright tiny stars that whirled around in front of his eyes. It didn’t really hurt so much as take all the breath and hope out of him in one bone-crunching impact. Except no bones crunched. The only thing that broke was his spirit.

  He opened his mouth to say, “What?” but didn’t have the breath to voice the word. He turned and saw a flash of gold beyond the tightly arranged black bars of the gate.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  “Ariel?”

  Her slender arm serpentined through the bars, and her hand found his upper arm. She squeezed it gently.

  “You cannot run. You cannot refuse the duel.”

  He shook his head in disbelief, trying to shake some of the stars out of it.

  “You closed the gate? You?”

  She squeezed his arm again. Given the fact that he saw in the next flash of flame that the Knight was now aimed at him from the other end of the two long ranks of the Guild, it didn’t give him the comfort he imagined she’d intended it to impart.

  “Open the gate!”

  She shook her beautiful golden head sadly. He was sure he heard real regret in the catch of her voice. Which made what happened next almost worse.

  “I cannot, boy.”

  The Knight lowered his lance for the third time and kicked the horse forward. Its hooves danced through the puddles, sending up great sheets of spray as it bore down on George.

  “Okay fine,” he said desperately. “Let go of my arm and I’ll climb over.”

  “I cannot do that, either.” Her hand clenched around his upper arm like a manacle and pinned him to the gate.

  “But why?” he shouted, heart freezing at the sight of the inbound knight.

  “Because I am a minister of fate.” The new note in her voice was as hard as a diamond and cold as ice. “And no one, absolutely no one, cheats fate, boy.”

  She spat that last “boy” as if she were getting something really disgusting out of her mouth. And no matter how hard he struggled, he couldn’t break her iron-hard grip as it pinned him to the metal gate like an unmissable target.

  Clang! The bell tolled its final note, and in the flash, George saw the Guild rise in their stirrups and shake their weapons at the sky, in celebration of his death, and the fatal lance tip sped in toward his heart—three meters, two meters, one meter—Game Over.

  He reflexively jerked his head away. He actually sensed the wings of Death flying in to gather him as he closed his eyes and felt a tremendous impact. Something felt horribly wrong, and he heard his scream of pain as if it were already coming from outside him. He felt himself leave the earth in one brutal savage jerk, and his head seemed to explode. Then his spirit soared into the sky, and he opened his eyes, knowing he would see himself being drawn into the light. . . .

  Instead he saw Spout looking down at him with his implacable stone eyes as he flapped into the night sky.

  “Gack?” the gargoyle inquired drily and tightened its grip on George’s chest. It swayed into another lopsided wing beat, circling north.

  George looked down, still half expecting this to be an out-of-body experience, still imagining he was going to look down on his impaled body.

  What he saw instead was the Knight and the horse and the lance thrust through the gate, up to the hilt. He also saw that the figure writhing on the end of the weapon was the source of the screaming—not him. Her golden shape was the last thing George saw before his eyes fluttered shut and unconsciousness swept in and anaesthetized him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Tyburn’s Last Victim

  In the darkness, in the cold, in the absence of hope, the Gunner dug on.

  The scoop and scatter noise had been joined by a new sound, which was a hollow splash as he dug in. The Gunner had dug down into the gravel, below the level of the surrounding water in the tank. He was so deep that he had one leg inside the hole and was bending and stretching as he dug, waist-deep in a gravel-ringed pool of his own excavating.

  The tiredness that he was now feeling was a real tiredness, the tiredness of hard work, not the wrong feeling that had been churning inside him in the absence of any distractions. It occurred to him that if he’d put all this effort into trying to dig upward, he might have reached a surface by now. Then again, he might not have. The roof was stone, and shifting a stone to start digging might have ended everything before he’d even begun.

  “Could have brought the house down,” he said aloud. The sudden sound of his own voice in the echoing chamber made him pause. He became even stiller as he felt something move around his ankles. It was the water in the pond.

  There was the ghost of a current, barely there, but definitely there.

  The Gunner didn’t know it, but the current he was feeling was the pull of the Tyburn, one of the lost rivers of London, the one that gave its name to the place where London’s criminals used to be hanged. And now it was exerting its dark pull at the Gunner’s ankles. He didn’t know that, any more than he knew that he was standing in a lost medieval water tank below Marylebone. All he knew was that moving water meant a stream, a stream meant a channel for it to flow down, and a channel might, just might, mean a way out of this rat hole.

  If he’d been of a reflective bent, he would have said, like most soldiers, that the ideal way to die was at home in bed, surrounded by great-grandchildren. But since that wasn’t an option, he thought he might as well die trying not to.

  He doubled his efforts, and as he bent and shoveled, the urgency of his movements tipped his tin hat into the water in a great splash. It took him a moment to realize what had happened and to retrieve the helmet. And when he did, the obvious hit him.

  “Must be getting stupid,” he muttered, and started digging with the hat. Now he really was making progress.

  The hole deepened, and he was even able to feel the top of a low arch in the wall beginning to appear. As he dug, he wondered why the hole had been blocked up. It’s the nature of an underground stream, if blocked, to silt up with the debris it washes down, and this was how the bank of gravel in the tank had been created.

  But something had blocked the exit pipe from the tank, and as the Gunner’s hat suddenly skidded sideways instead of digging in, he found the reason. He put his hat aside and reached down. His first thought was that it was a tree root. Then it came away in his hand, and he felt it. He had a sudden horrible feeling he knew what it was. He reached into the water and found more pieces. And then his hand tangled in hair.

  He carefully disentangled it and shook his hands dry before lighting one of his precious matches.

  Although the flame reflected off the surface of the pool, he could see enough to be sure: staring back at him were the two wide-eyed sockets in the skull of a woman. He could tell it was a woman because there was a long hank of dark hair hanging off one side of the skull, and there was a gold ring glinting on a finger bone next to a small bundle. He reached in and moved the bundle and then he realized it wasn’t a woman’s skeleton at all, because another face smiled back at him. It was a crude face, carved out of some kind of s
tone, but it was unmistakably a doll’s face.

  The dead woman was no woman, but a little girl.

  He knew without needing to be told that the girl was a glint, and that she was one of the Walker’s victims, possibly even his first.

  The little bone hand clasped around the smiling doll’s face did something to the Gunner. It filled him with a murderous blackness, as dark as the chamber as the match guttered out.

  “Right, you bastard. Fate or no fate, I ain’t bloody dying tonight. I’m coming after you.”

  He lit another match and looked into the small skeleton’s eyes. He didn’t see anything gruesome in the bones and fragments of flesh and clothing that remained. He saw a little girl who had died clutching her doll for a comfort that never came. He imagined the sobs that had filled this stone chamber before she went quiet. His jaw clenched tight.

  A statue can’t cry, of course. Everyone knows that. It must have just been water from the splashing as he dug that rolled off the upper curve of his cheek and plopped into the Tyburn below. He reached gently into the water and began to move the bones, laying them softly on the gravel bank in as close to the right order as he could. Despite the growing clumsiness in his hands, he managed most of the time to be as delicate as a father putting his child to bed.

  “Sorry, love. I got to move you. But it’s only so as I can have him. And I WILL have him, straight up. I’ll swing for him wherever he is.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Black Mirror

  The King’s Library sits off to the west side of the great circular courtyard of the British Museum. It’s a long, elegant room, and the mixed collection of curios on display come from all ages and regions of the world.

  There are delicate fossils and brutal Maori war clubs, exquisite alabaster vases as high as a man, and slender Native American spears tipped with meteorite blades. There are Greek sculptures and busts of the great men who had assembled the collections. There are ancient manuscripts and gold jewelry, savage flint axes, rude Roman wind chimes, and all manner of obscure religious relics and paraphernalia.

  To most people, this looks like a charming hodgepodge of collectable objects from the Age of Enlightenment; only a very few people know that there are things in this compendium of seemingly mismatched objects that are there because they keep each other in check: things of power, dark things and light things canceling each other out by the careful way they are arranged around one another.

  The lights were off and the museum was silent.

  Then there was a very distinct popping noise, and the Walker stepped out of one of his small mirrors. He reassembled them, snapping them together, face-to-face, and slipped the disk into the pocket of his coat. He stood in front of a tall, free-standing display case and feasted his eyes on its contents. He pushed back the hood of the green sweatshirt he wore beneath his flapping overcoat, releasing the Raven that had been traveling with him. He leaned forward, both hands on the glass of the cabinet as he stared at the contents.

  The Raven stretched its wings and flapped across the width of the room, finding a perch on the railing of the walkway that ran around the bookcases at first-floor level. It fixed its unreadable black eye on the Walker and the glass case he was engrossed in.

  The contents were as follows: three big wax disks of different sizes—two small, one big, all thick as cheeses, decorated with magical symbols like pentacles and forgotten names of great significance. There was a “shew stone,” or small crystal ball, not much bigger than a golf ball. There was a thin gold disk engraved with the same concentric circles and simple turrets that had been scratched into the surface of the pewter plate in the underground water tank; and perhaps strangest of all, there was a black stone mirror. The other objects looked just like the kind of occult paraphernalia anyone would expect to see in a magician’s lair. The stone mirror was a different thing altogether. Its lines were so simple and unadorned that it looked timeless, simultaneously modern and irretrievably ancient. Carved and polished from flawless black obsidian, the label described it as being of Aztec origin.

  “Aztec,” the Walker snorted and spat derisively. Spittle dribbled down the sheer wall of glass between him and the offending label. “Collectors with the brains of pygmy shrews.”

  He knew this black mirror had been old long before the Aztecs in Central America had developed their strong taste for human sacrifice. It was into the highly polished face of the stone, which looked like a hand mirror with a handle and a hole for a long-perished thong, that the Walker stared so intently.

  “Birds and butterflies. Imagine that . . .”

  He looked up at the bird as he pushed up the right-hand sleeve of his coat.

  “The Aztecs sacrificed them in the hundreds of thousands to their god Quetzalcoatl. Hummingbirds rather than ravens, mainly, so you, my friend, would have been fine. But I should liked to have seen that. It takes a particularly exquisite sensibility to think of sacrificing a butterfly. . . .”

  The Raven, for whom the insect world was essentially an all-day buffet, didn’t think killing butterflies was especially unusual, but it kept its beak shut. The truth is, the Walker liked to talk, and the Raven was doomed to listen.

  The Walker reached out and splayed his hands against the glass, opposite the circular crystal ball. He closed his eyes, spread his hand as if measuring it, and committed the size to his memory. Then he peered into the dark glassy surface again.

  “The mirror is no use alone. Without its twin, it’s little more than polished rock.”

  He smiled darkly up at the Raven. “An ordinary pair of glass mirrors will open a portal to wherever in this world you wish to go, anywhere in space or time, if you have the knack. But compared to what a stone mirror can do, that is a mere parlor trick for mewling infants. A pair of stone mirrors can open a portal into another world entirely. And from that dark world, a cunning man may bring and harness powers the likes of which this world has never seen.”

  If the Raven was impressed, it chose a strange way to show it, as it squittered a prodigious bird’s mess onto the bald marble head of the eighteenth-century worthy below him. The Walker didn’t notice.

  “They thought they could clip my wings by separating my mirrors and hiding the other stone mirror where I couldn’t find it. Yet it never occurred to them that with eternity spread ahead of me, I would have time to find a glint and a master maker to choose a stone and carve me a new one. Fools . . .”

  The crystal ball was beginning to spin inside the case, answering a hidden force emanating from the Walker’s spread fingers, and the faster it spun, the more it seemed to wobble on its axis.

  A bead of sweat trickled down the Walker’s nose and splashed to the parquet floor as he struggled to contain the powerful answering judder in his hand. With a gasp, his open hand snapped closed, and he lashed it back and forth, flailing it across the air in front of the cabinet. As he did so, the ball whipped and ricocheted around the interior of the glass cube, matching the movements of the fist, bouncing off the sides faster and faster, until the noise of the sharp percussive impacts sounded like the rip of a machine gun. Then all the glass in the cabinet shattered at the same time and fell to the floor like a dropped crystal curtain.

  An alarm bell began to ring prosaically in the distance, and the dim lights came on. Ignoring all that, the Walker stepped over the shards of glass and deftly snatched the ball from its now-stationary position in midair in the center of the case and pocketed it.

  His hands reemerged, carrying two crumpled and mismatched gloves. He speedily put them on, and then equally quickly, he spread a scarf out and placed two of the protective wax disks on it. He picked up the obsidian mirror and put it on top of the disks, letting go of it as soon as he could, as if not wanting to touch it any longer than he had to, even though he was wearing gloves. Then he sandwiched it with another protective wax disk and tied the corners of the scarf tightly together, making a bundle. He pocketed the gold circle with the dream of four castles on
it and stepped back.

  “Come,” he said.

  The Raven flew onto his shoulder. The Walker held the ends of the scarf, wrapping the bundle containing the stone mirror. He exchanged his gloves for the mirrors in his pocket; and then, just as the first museum guard was running through the door, he stepped into one of his small glass mirrors and disappeared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Hunter’s Moon

  Edie fell into the mirror behind her. She felt the surface bend and pop as delicately as a soap bubble, and then she was falling into a fire. As she fell, someone grabbed at her ankle but wasn’t able to hold it, and she hit the ground with a thunderous crash, like the gates of Hell blowing open.

  She fell on her back and rolled, so that the first things she saw were her legs in the air above her, and beyond them, the dark sky and the bright disk of a full moon staring down at her, the pale night sun of a hunter’s moon, framed for an instant between two familiar scuffed boots.

  She felt the sharp dig of a broken brick in her back, and lost contact with anything familiar as she flinched and squirmed to her feet, just in time to see long, white fingers of light sweep across the sky, cutting it into jagged segments. And then she was conscious of the hungry crack and pop of a fire very close to her.

  She realized that the crash she had heard was not her landing on the ground; it was the sudden continual hell storm of noise that shook the world around her, the world she had fallen into: it was the sound of a world blowing itself apart. There were deep explosions and crashes and screams. And behind the screams was the low moaning sound of a siren rising and falling; behind that, there was a rhythmic throbbing engine rumble from the sky itself. There was the sharper counterpoint of antiaircraft fire from a hidden battery nearby, and others farther off. Mixed in all of this were urgent shouts and jangling ambulance bells and more screams and huge earthshaking thuds that she could feel through the soles of her boots.