Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  She turned and walked to the door.

  “Why does he need this power?” asked Edie, dry-mouthed, measuring the distance to the door to see if she could get past and put the woman between herself and the dogs.

  The Blind Woman turned and looked at her, pausing in the doorway for an instant. It was hard to see if her smile was pitying or just sad as she replied:

  “Ask him. He’s coming. . . .”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Road Runner

  For the first time in a long time, George felt he was running toward something. It made a difference. Fear was pretty good at getting him moving, but that was running fueled by the flight part of the fight-or-flight reflex. This running was taking its fuel from the fight part. Maybe that was why he was able to dredge up the reserves of strength he needed.

  He stopped worrying about taints swooping down on him; not because he wasn’t scared of them, but because worrying about things he couldn’t possibly stop was an obvious waste of energy, and he had none to spare. Every ounce was going into keeping his legs and arms pistoning forward. He would just have to deal with any attacker, if it happened, as it happened. He had one shot at getting to the Gunner’s plinth, and he wasn’t going to let anything distract him from it.

  He ran in a kind of fugue state. Somewhere he knew all this was hurting and that he had run through several stitches in his side, and that his breath was tearing out in great ragged gasps that would have sounded like sobs if anyone had noticed, but he didn’t care. He just ran, clutching the hammer.

  And as he ran, he realized that his mind was clearing all the things he didn’t understand, and leaving only the things that mattered, only the things he could deal with. First he was going to be able to buy more time for the Gunner, if he could just make it to the plinth. Then he would find Edie, and she would tell him what the Black Friar had said, and they would find a way to get the Gunner back. There was no doubt in his mind, because there was no room for anything that would slow him down.

  Unfortunately, he turned into a narrow alley and suddenly found there was no room in it for him and the low sports car that was heading straight toward him.

  It honked its horn and flashed its lights, but George kept on running. Luckily, the alley was so narrow, the driver was going slowly in order to not scrape his expensive side mirrors. So when George didn’t stop, the driver had enough time to slam on the brakes without skidding or running him down. The car came to a stop, entirely blocking the alley.

  George didn’t miss a step. He jumped up on the hood of the low-slung muscle car, over the roof, onto the trunk, and off into the empty alley beyond, before the driver knew what was happening.

  Of course, the moment the driver realized that the boy had run over his car, he went berserk. George could hear a torrent of shouting from behind him, then a series of angry blasts on the horn, and finally the sound of someone trying to slam an expensive gearbox into reverse, managing to engage the gear at the third shrieking try, and then the boom of exhaust as the driver tried to back up and catch George.

  George took the time to glance backward for an instant. He saw reversing lights approaching at speed as the driver wobbled to keep straight in the narrow alley. He had just enough time to see one side mirror explode into expensive shards against a drainpipe, and then he turned away and ran on, pausing only to pull a rubbish bin into the alley to discourage further pursuit from the driver, now leaning out of his window and screaming.

  He ran out of the alley and adjusted his bearings as he crossed the road and carried on. He could see trees in a park beckoning at the end of the road.

  Seeing the park reminded George of Edie, of the first time they’d met in an underground garage. She’d been sparky and aggressive and had hit him when he’d tried to be nice to her. But she’d turned out to be a brave and resourceful ally in all the adversity they’d had to face together. He wondered suddenly if she might already be there at the Gunner’s plinth. Of course, the Friar had probably told her the same thing George had been told by the Euston Mob. The thought of seeing her again put more energy in his legs, and he hit Park Lane with a renewed burst of energy. He chicaned through the late-night traffic and slipped into the park.

  Running on grass, beneath the fluorescent-lit tracery of the trees, was a lot easier.

  He saw a clock face on the side of a building on Park Lane, and as he ran under the tall modern tower hotel, his heart was pumping like a trip hammer, but now it was because he knew he was going to make it to the plinth before midnight.

  Hang on, Edie, he thought. I’m almost there!

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Makers and the Stone

  The Blind Woman led Edie down two flights of stairs as calmly and precisely as if she could see.

  The house had no carpets, no pictures, and no furniture: no decorations of any kind. Dust had grayed it all into nothing more than a background. There was no sense of a life lived within its walls.

  The woman stopped in front of a door and reached for a large key ring hanging from her belt. She took off her glove and felt the various keys, searching by touch alone for the one she needed. She found it, and Edie noted that she put the glove back on before she inserted the key in the door and turned the lock.

  “There is a chair,” the woman said softly. “You will walk forward and sit on it. You will wait. If you move? The dogs will bite.”

  Edie saw that the Blind Woman stood to one side as if afraid to enter the room. Edie heard a low growl behind her, and walked through the door.

  There was a chair in the middle of the room. It was solidly built and rested on small iron wheels attached to each leg.

  The room was lit by a single candlestick on a desk in the center of the floor. The room had been designed to be used as a library, but it was now a library without books. There was no furniture except for a high desk and shelves covering every inch of wall. They weren’t, however, empty. Instead of the regular ranks of leather-bound volumes that might once have peopled its shelves, there were irregular lumps and bundles filling the space from the bare wood of the floor to the dangerously sagging lath and plaster of the ceiling.

  Edie walked to the chair and sat in it with a shiver.

  She noted that the windows were a lattice of diamond-shaped glass pieces joined with lead. Edie saw no obvious way to open them, so there was no question of throwing herself out one in a desperate bid for freedom. The dogs padded in after her and lay at her feet, eyes locked on her.

  The Blind Woman stepped back from the door, into the hall, and sat on a high-backed chair against the wall facing the doorway.

  For a long time, the only sound was the dogs’ breathing and Edie’s heart beating. She shifted in the hard chair, and the tiny creak immediately made both dogs growl sharply to their feet and raise their hackles at her.

  Edie looked through the door at the stiff-backed figure staring sightlessly at her.

  “What were you?” she asked.

  “What was I when?” replied the Blind Woman, in a voice scarcely above a whisper.

  “Before this happened,” said Edie. “What were you?”

  More silence answered her. And then, just when Edie had decided the woman wasn’t going to respond, she did.

  “I was a teacher.”

  “That figures.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never liked teachers much,” said Edie. “Never seemed to tell you the stuff you really need to know.”

  “And what do you need to know, child?” murmured the Blind Woman. “What could someone so young and unaware possibly want to know, when any knowledge will blight and not enlighten.”

  “That’s rubbish!” snorted Edie. “Knowing stuff, the right kind of stuff, is good. In fact, it’s all good, isn’t it, even the bad stuff, because, how can you make a plan or keep yourself safe without all the info?”

  “You can’t keep yourself safe with it either, child.”

  “Yeah, well, excuse me f
or living, but I haven’t given up yet.”

  The Blind Woman allowed the pale moth of a smile to flutter across her face, and then it was gone.

  “You will. Everybody does.”

  There was something pulsing at Edie from the shelves, exerting a stronger force than the background pull from the walls. She looked at the strange assortment of indeterminate shapes lumped together around the room.

  “What’s on these shelves?”

  “Stones.”

  “Why?”

  She wanted the Blind Woman to keep talking. The silence left her mind too empty—a blank canvas for the malign hum of the house and its contents to bleed their promise of terror onto.

  “Because he collects them. Like he collects our heart stones. Looking for the power hidden in a very different kind of stone. A much stronger and darker stone.”

  “What—” began Edie. Then she stopped and reformed her question. “Why is everything about stones?”

  “Because it is,” said the Blind Woman shortly. And then said no more.

  Edie waited, and when it became clear that that was all the woman was going to say, she grunted in disgust.

  “Typical teacher.”

  The Blind Woman’s head came up, bridling at Edie’s tone. “What?”

  “It’s like I said. Never tell you anything useful. Ask them a difficult question and you get ‘You don’t need to know that,’ or ‘That won’t be in the exam,’ or ‘Just because.’ You must have been a really rotten teacher.”

  The Blind Woman sat so stiffly upright that you could almost hear her spine crack.

  “I was a good teacher,” she whispered, soft as dust. “I was a very good teacher.”

  Edie stared at her. Unless she was mistaken, there was a single tear cutting a pink trail through the dusty skin at the edge of the Blind Woman’s sewn lid.

  “Then tell me why this is all about the stones,” said Edie, just as quietly.

  “It can’t help you,” the woman replied.

  “Maybe it can help you,” said Edie carefully.

  “Nothing can help me, child.” She laughed almost inaudibly. “I am lost, so mired in darkness that I cannot turn back.”

  “Then don’t turn back,” said Edie. “Stay where you are. But why don’t you be a good teacher again? Tell me why everything is about the stones.”

  In the silence, one of the dogs turned and looked at the Blind Woman. She worked her mouth as she thought.

  Her hand rose and smoothed nonexistent stray hairs back into her tight bun, and then she just started to talk.

  “Long ago, before history began, before things had names, a darkness walked the earth. It fed on fear, and wherever it walked, it spread terror and hatred and ignorance.”

  She paused and listened, head tilted toward something she might have heard near the front of the house. After a moment she relaxed and carried on.

  “There was a light that also walked the earth, encouraging life. It couldn’t bear to see its children live where terror and hatred spread pain and violence, like a sort of dark canker. So it fought the darkness, and after a great struggle, it won, and bound the darkness deep into the rocky heart of the world, imprisoning its evil in the stone below, so that it could never walk the earth again.

  “Time passed, and humankind, who are the sons and daughters of life, spread across the earth, and they built and lived and loved and laughed. . . .”

  The Blind Woman paused, caught by her own words as if she had only just remembered there were things like love and laughter outside the House of the Lost. Edie waited while she took a thin breath and then resumed.

  “And as well as building, humankind made things. At first the makers—the artists and sculptors—worked with wood and clay, but their children began to dream of making things that wouldn’t rot or perish with time. They began to create out of stone and tried to work metal in the fire. But making sculptures out of stone and metal was much harder than working with wood and clay. And because they knew that nothing hard can happen without tears and sacrifice, they began to believe that a sacrifice must be made to the stone they wished to use, to make it easier to work with.”

  She looked blindly at Edie as if uncertain whether to go on.

  “Although many ages had passed since life had imprisoned the evil in the rock, there were still people who had a memory that there was some ancient power in the stone. These women—for they were women, the memory handed from mother to daughter—these women had the sense of the power and memories that lived in the rock—”

  “Women like us,” said Edie.

  “Women like us.”

  “Glints.”

  “Glints.”

  Edie wanted to scream at the woman. She wanted to ask how she could be so calm, so very quiet, so evilly doing the Walker’s bidding in this terrible house when she and Edie were, or had been, the same thing. She clenched her jaw and kept the scream inside. She wanted to know how the story ended.

  The Blind Woman cleared her throat and continued. “But time had made them forget that the power in the stone was dark. And when the makers came to the glints, the women told them of the power, confirming that it was a living thing, and the makers were happy, because they knew how to appease living things; they made a blood sacrifice.

  “They drew lots, and the chief maker’s son lost. He was taken to a stone that the glints had chosen, and a stone knife was used. Now, because these were children of life, the blood sacrifice was to be just that: not a death, just a little finger merely nicked with a flint knife, the tiniest of wounds, and then the makers would swear an oath to the stone. The child might cry for a moment, but then he would be surrounded with flowers and laughter and a celebration where he would be given the first of the food and the sweetest of the honey to make up for his short second of pain. . . .”

  The woman’s hands fluttered up and passed over the stitches in her eyes. Edie knew that she was feeling the pain of her own sacrifice.

  “And did it work?” Edie said.

  “You know it did. The oath between maker and stone was that the stone would not resist the makers, and the makers would use the power to work stone—to make, not mar. But the flint dagger had betrayed them— perhaps because it was a blade of stone and so had some of the evil hidden in it—and it turned in the father’s hand, and the nick in the finger became a gash in the wrist, and before they could seal the wound, the child was dead. Although it was an accident, his life’s blood had run to the stone, and the bond between maker and stone was sealed.”

  “The man killed his own son?” interrupted Edie.

  The Blind Woman nodded. “He killed his own son. By mistake, tricked by the stone. Sadness and wailing came to the maker’s house. But time passed. The makers made, and the stone didn’t resist, and what they made had power. They made idols and gods and devils and gargoyles for their temples and churches, and these, though the makers didn’t know it, were the first Servants of the Stone. They were made to frighten and to awe. And they were known as ‘taints,’ because wherever their shadow fell, the children of light were tainted with fear.”

  “But they made the spits, too,” prompted Edie.

  “They did—likenesses of living things, of animals and people. They made things with a new intent: to represent people loved and admired, or even just to feel the sheer joy in recording that which they found beautiful and pleasing.”

  “And that’s why spits aren’t Servants of the Stone?”

  “Yes, child. They were called spits because they were made as a spirit and image of real men, and so had a sort of spirit inside them that stood free of the darkness and fear in the stone.”

  “And that’s why the taints, the Servants of the Stone, hate them? Because they’re free?”

  “It’s more than that. It’s because the spits are the maker’s revenge on the stone for taking the life of the innocent child. They found a way to banish a fragment of the darkness and put a spark of life back into the world with every spit
they made. And—”

  She stopped. The dogs’ ears pricked up. Edie heard the floorboards creak in the hall and a voice she had hoped never to hear again—a thin supercilious man’s voice ended the story.

  “—And in this way the battle between light and darkness, between fear and joy continues. The darkness in the stone always waits for the makers to tire, so it can return to the earth and rule again.”

  The Walker appeared in the doorway, smiling humorlessly at Edie.

  “And you know what? Fear always trumps joy, and darkness is so much more reliable than light. . . .”

  He tapped the long shiny blade of his jeweled dagger on the door frame.

  There was a whimpering noise. Edie’s first fear was that it was coming from her. But it wasn’t. It was the Blind Woman. She was bent straight forward over her knees, sobbing quietly. The Walker turned and looked down at her. Her hand reached out beseechingly, although she didn’t look up. She had taken off a glove. Edie heard a single word sift through the sobs.

  “Please . . .”

  The Walker reached inside his coat and pulled out a bright piece of sea-glass, blazing a bright orange light, sending grotesque shadows around the room. It was on a chain. He dangled it into her hand.

  The hand closed on it greedily, and the Blind Woman shuddered and sighed with relief.

  Edie had survived by herself on the streets. She knew that shudder. She’d heard the junkie’s sigh before. She knew how the Walker kept the Blind Woman just alive and hungry enough to do his bidding. He was using her heart stone like a drug to control her.

  Edie’s hand closed over her own stone hidden in her pocket.

  The Walker looked at her as if he could read her thoughts. He bared his teeth in a sneer. “You’re thinking you’ll never be like her.”