Ironhand

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Third time’s the charm,” she said, reining the horses into another tight turn.

  “There’s no time for this!” said George, and he leaped clear of the chariot. He heard the Gunner shout after him, but he ignored him and ran toward the Queen’s daughters.

  They looked at him in shock.

  “How does it work?” he said, hand grasping the hammer tightly.

  “Just step in,” said the daughter to his left. “Either mirror. The Walker has set them to bring you right to him.”

  It didn’t seem likely to George that this was going to work either, but he remembered how he’d seen the Walker step into the mirrors and pull the Gunner with him; and he thought of Edie, and the urgency of that thought made him reach into the mirror and step impossibly into it.

  He felt the surface tension give, and then he was falling through layers of blackness that strobed at him, making him feel suddenly nauseated with plunging vertigo—and then the fall ended abruptly and he was facedown on the ice with a mouthful of snow.

  He looked up and saw the lowering black wall of a barge in front of him, a boat that had been frozen in the ice. He turned around and saw, a hundred feet away, the lantern-lit carnival of the Frost Fair, and a parade with a white elephant wending through the tented street.

  He had dropped the hammer as he’d landed, and he scrabbled in the snow for it. He had just found it when there was a popping noise from behind him, and the Gunner tumbled out of nowhere. He looked at George with a short grin.

  “She’s going to take forever getting through.”

  “We don’t have forever,” said George, getting to his feet and pointing. “The elephant’s already here.”

  He started to move forward. The Gunner’s hand stopped him.

  “George. Thought just hit me. I broke my oath. The Walker’s got some power over me. He used it. Couldn’t control my arms.”

  “What?” said George, eyes raking the distant crowd for signs of Edie.

  “I’m thinking if he saw me, he could make me do something bad.”

  The Gunner looked shamefaced. “Shoulda let the Officer come instead.”

  “No,” said George decisively. “Someone had to stay behind and watch for us coming back in case the Walker’s on our tails when we do. Someone’s got to be ready to shoot him down.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No buts,” said George, kicking into a sprint.

  He’d seen Edie.

  “Just don’t let him see you first.”

  He tore across the expanse of snow toward Edie, who was running away from the crowd at an angle. He yelled as he ran, trying to cut her off.

  “Edie! Over here!”

  She didn’t seem to hear him. Maybe because she was fumbling with her bonnet.

  The Gunner started running too. He saw the Walker break out of the crowd at a fast hobble. The Gunner saw him turn and shout at something in the darkness on the other side of the river. Heard the words:

  “Get the girl! Icarus! Where’s the Bull? Get the bloody girl!”

  The Gunner saw what was going to happen before George did. He stopped going for Edie and ran toward the side of the river, where the Thames boatmen had cut a wide channel between the shore and the ice so that they could charge people for crossing over on planks they had erected. He saw a portly father quibbling about the fee, while his beribboned daughter jumped excitedly up and down at his side and pointed to the ice beyond. Her voice was sharp enough to cut straight through the sound of bagpipes and drums and into the Gunner’s ears.

  “Oh, Daddy. No, Daddy, please, pay the little man! It’s there and we’re missing it! The elephant—”

  George heard the voice and remembered Edie saying she’d missed seeing something because of the elephant, and he raised his hands like a megaphone and yelled at Edie, who hadn’t seen him yet.

  “Edie—don’t look at the elephant!”

  And then he hit an ice hummock and tripped.

  But not before Edie saw him. As she was about to shout back, the Walker hit her from behind, and they fell to the ice. Edie kicked and hit and bit like a wildcat, without thought, as furiously brutal as any animal fighting for its life. She smashed the Blind Woman’s blazing heart stone into the Walker’s good eye. He managed to close his eyes and duck his head away just in time, but the searing light temporarily blinded him.

  “Now you die, girl!” he screamed.

  She booted him in the chin and tumbled backward onto her feet and ran, while he swiped at her through his stone-dazzled vision.

  He pulled the long burnished dagger from inside his coat and ran after her.

  Edie was struggling with the bonnet that had been mashed forward over her face in the struggle.

  Her heart was pumping so hard from the adrenaline of the fight, she forgot to look out in front of her.

  Her foot hit water instead of hard ice, and she plunged forward, straight into the hole. The shock of the cold and the water in her mouth hit her simultaneously, and she scrambled up through the icy Thames. Her fingers clawed onto the edge of the ice, and she tried to pull herself out of the hole. As her face broke into the air, covered in hair like a thick flap of seaweed, she remembered that she must be watching this happening as she glinted this past death in a future and faraway London. She screamed a warning to herself as she tried to scramble out of the water’s icy grasp:

  “Edie. The Friar’s okay! Don’t trust Little Tragedy! He’s not what he seems! Tell George! Walker’s trying to open evil—”

  And then a rescuing hand reached over and grabbed her hair; only it wasn’t rescuing at all. It was pushing her back under, and there were bubbles and splashing and black water, and then she broke free for an instant and fishmouthed for air and used her last words to try to complete her warning:

  “—gates in the mirrors—”

  The Walker’s hand grabbed the bonnet and plunged her spluttering face under the water for the last time. She carried on shouting as her lungs filled with water, and the last thing she saw as she sank into the inky blackness was the Walker’s face, lit red by the distant lanterns, grinning down at her through the floating tangle of her own hair.

  In that terrible last moment, Edie wanted everything. As she started to fade, the years of her life peeled away, and she became younger and younger. All the layers of toughness she’d had to put on to survive dropped off and left her feeling helpless and young and tiny. As she hurtled toward the full stop of her life, she felt outrage that this should be so, and she just wanted to start everything again. She wanted her mother before she had changed, before she’d gone strange, before she’d become mad, before she’d just gone away and never come back. . . .

  —And more than anything, she wanted that child’s first and best sanctuary, the heart’s last ditch—the warm embrace of her mother telling her it would be all right, that today’s pain would fade and tomorrow the sun would shine.

  But her final thought was the desperate despair of knowing it wouldn’t be all right, as her eyes dimmed and the freezing blackness took her, alone and in the dark.

  And then Edie died.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Ironhand

  George hit the Walker at full speed, every ounce of power and rage in his body powering him into the larger man like a runaway train.

  He knew he was too late. He knew Edie was dead. He knew it was his fault.

  The impact cartwheeled the two of them into a cloud of snow.

  George swung the heavy hammer in his fist right at the Walker’s body, as if he could stop the black heart in one massive blow.

  The hammer slammed into something the Walker was wearing under his sweatshirt, something thick that gave way and cracked at the same time.

  The Walker gasped as the air was pile-driven out of him, but his left hand clawed out and gripped George by the hair and ear. The two of them staggered to their feet, eye to eye. The Walker got a breath and snarled at George, his good eye blazing.

  “Are
you going to try and fight me, boy?”

  “No,” gritted George. “I’m going to kill you.”

  As he accepted the challenge, George felt a searing pain in his arm jagging toward his armpit, and he knew without being able or needing to look that the twisting channel of bronze in his arm had ripped forward, heading for his heart.

  He knew this was the second contest; this brutal tussle in the snow was his next duel, the moment he would live or die by.

  And he didn’t care.

  Because there was no way on earth that he wasn’t going to make good on his word.

  The Walker was a dead man.

  “It’s a waste, boy. But I have all the time in the world.”

  Time slowed. George saw the flash of the knife as the Walker pulled it back and slashed it up toward his belly in a cruel, gutting blow.

  George’s hand was moving before conscious thought kicked in, and this time it didn’t flinch. It closed around the sharp blade and held it tight, stopping it an inch from his belly.

  The Walker’s eye widened in shock at the strength of the boy. And what the Walker saw made him step back a half pace. The boy’s eyes were as hard and unforgiving as stone.

  “I don’t think so,” said George.

  He jerked his hand sharply and snapped the blade clean.

  Then he pulled his hand back behind his shoulder, and when the Walker let go of his hair and tried to get away, George gripped the Walker’s hand and held him as he stabbed the blade down into the Walker’s heart.

  The blade hit something hard and skittered sideways; but with all the cold rage George had put into the blow, it still buried itself in the Walker’s shoulder, so deep that George couldn’t pull it out.

  He let go and took a microsecond to notice that his hand wasn’t cut at all, despite the fact that he had gripped the double-edged blade like a vise.

  The Walker stared at the broken blade in his shoulder and howled in fury.

  George had time to look down at the black hole in the ice. Edie was long gone. He quickly stooped and picked up the blazing piece of sea-glass she’d dropped in her struggle. He could see it wasn’t hers; it was the wrong shape and color, but he knew it for what it was, and without thinking, he dropped it into the water. If she was alone and dead in the inky blackness, somehow, the least he could do was leave the light on.

  He turned back to the howling Walker, stepped across the gap between them, and punched him in the face. The Walker went silent in shock at the force of the blow.

  In the distance, there was the approaching sound of something screaming in short, excited bursts. But George ignored it and kept on coming. He hit the Walker with a straight punch that knocked him flat on his back. Only then did George step back, in order to pick up his hammer and stand over him.

  There was a thunder of hooves, and the Walker’s eyes flicked left. He sneered up at George through a bloody mouth.

  “Now you die, boy.”

  George turned his head and saw the Bull thundering across the ice.

  “Maybe,” said George, “but you die first.” He raised the hammer. “I’ll deal with your bull after that.”

  “It’s not the bull.” The Walker smiled, his eyes flicking upward.

  The Icarus hit him like an airborne sledgehammer.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Under the Ice

  The Gunner hit the narrow channel of water between the ice and the riverbank like a depth charge.

  He’d seen Edie go under, and that neither he nor George would get there in time to save her. So he made the only choice that remained, which was to go under the ice.

  Tons of bronze don’t swim too well, so he hit the bed of the Thames and did the best he could to plow through the blackness toward the spot where he estimated the hole in the ice was. The human part of him went through the searing drowning pain of oxygen starvation, but he was so driven that he didn’t bother trying to hold his breath—he just sucked in water and got on with it.

  He couldn’t see a thing, and surged forward by instinct alone. The snow-covered ice made a perfect roof over the river, blocking out all light. And as he moved ahead, he realized he wasn’t going to be able to see Edie’s ice hole either, since looking straight up was only going to bring a dark view of the night sky, which would be indistinguishable from the impenetrable murk surrounding him.

  He flailed around with his arms as he went, hoping that if he couldn’t see Edie’s body, he might at least touch it by chance. But as he stared blindly, he realized it was a forlorn hope.

  The girl was gone.

  Then an orange light dropped out of the ice roof overhead, and he looked up and caught a brief glimpse of the world above, with George staring sightlessly downward, his face momentarily lit up by the falling heart stone before he jerked away from the hole.

  The Gunner reached out his hand and caught the stone on its chain and held it high, like a lantern in a storm. The orange light shone so brightly that the turbid river water became somehow less opaque—and that’s when the Gunner saw the body, its foot caught in a broken cart wheel half buried in the ooze, its hair lifelessly going with the flow, pointing toward the sea.

  He freed Edie’s foot and grabbed her, surging toward the riverbank. As he powered forward, he looked down at her pale dead face and looped the heart stone around her neck so he could get a better grip. He hugged her tightly to his body, as if he could force some of his life into her.

  And of course you can’t cry under water, so the stinging in his eyes must just have been the Thames resisting his attempt to run through it.

  He scrambled up the slope toward the torch-lit strip of light, and pulled himself out of the water. He felt Edie’s body flop against him as he coughed his way to his feet. He was about to start pumping water out of her, when he heard the ice scrabble and the angry snorting that heralded the approaching bull. He scooped her up and ran.

  Out of the corner of his eye, George saw the Gunner emerge from the ice. The Icarus flew George away from the Walker, who was lying on his back and tugging at his clothes, trying urgently to get something out of his sweatshirt.

  The Icarus screamed at George, and he looked into the blind curve of the creature’s breastplate. Somewhere inside the intricate structure, a mouth was shrieking angrily at him.

  The Icarus was a worse flier than Spout. George was only about twenty feet off the ice, but he was heading away from the Gunner and what he had pulled from the water. He was unable to see what the Walker was doing. The only good thing was that he saw something pop into existence and gallop across the ice, heading for the Gunner, the whirling blades on its chariot wheels twisting ice devils out of the snow as it thundered beneath him.

  George still had the hammer in his hand.

  “One chance,” he said to whatever was behind the jutting hull masking the face in front of him. “Put me down.”

  The Icarus howled and shook him angrily. When George looked down, he realized that the thing was gripping him with its human feet, which crushed him with toes like sinewy talons.

  “Fine,” he said.

  He smashed the hammer into the hull. He hit it again and again, and as he did so, the Icarus shrieked and lurched in the sky. There was a crack, and the breastwork gave way, and George was staring into the mad eyes of the Icarus.

  The Icarus was a man cramped and jammed into the narrow confining space of a basketwork hull. His arms and hands were folded in on themselves, and his mouth and lower face were bound with some kind of webbing— but not so obscured that George couldn’t see the hostile insanity snarling out of the face.

  “Last chance. Put me down,” said George.

  The feet tore at him angrily and the eyes burned brighter. The head shook violently back and forth in an unmistakable “No.”

  “Then I’m sorry,” he said, and whacked the hammer dead center on the straining forehead. The mad eyes rolled back, and the Icarus plummeted, unconscious and, for the first time, silent.

  G
eorge had time to see that they were going to land in open water, just beyond the point where the ice began. He booted himself free of the Icarus’s limp feet in the instant before they hit the water.

  The Icarus hit the river and kept going down. George kicked for the surface and gasped for air, then turned in time to see the edge of the ice approaching as the river pulled him toward it. The edge was a confusion of trapped driftwood and branches, and he had a horror-struck premonition that he was about to be sucked beneath the ice. He grabbed at the edge as he reached it, but the ice bobbled away beneath his fingers, and he was pulled under.

  On the surface of the ice, the Gunner had seen the Bull just in time. He grabbed Edie’s body and leaped clear as the sharp horns thundered in. The Bull tried to hook him, but its momentum made it overshoot, and it crashed into the snow piled on the riverbank.

  The Gunner heard his name being called, and whirled to see the Queen approaching across the flat ice field, her horses straining against their harness, their feet kicking up great divots of impacted snow as they raced to the rescue. There was another figure on the chariot, and because the man was hatless, it took the Gunner an instant to realize it was the Officer.

  He sped toward the incoming chariot, cradling the dead body as he ran. He heard a snort and the drumming of hooves behind him and knew that the Bull had turned and was now running after him.

  As the chariot approached without slowing, the gap behind him closed almost as fast.

  He saw the Officer point urgently straight down and shout something.

  “Mind the wheels!”

  The Officer snapped his arm out, leaning so wide over the spinning blades that the Queen had to lean far in the opposite side to stop the chariot from tipping. Then time went very quickly as they closed in on the Gunner at breathtaking speed. He felt the Bull’s breath on his back and a light tug as it tried to hook him again, but he had no time to think about how close the creature must be, because he had to concentrate on the spinning blades whirling in toward his knees. He stuck his arm out as if he were signaling a turn and hurdled the blades as they swept in under him. This open hand slapped onto the Officer’s reaching forearm and gripped it at the same time the Officer grabbed his arm.