Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  “A blockhead.”

  “A thicko,” explained Edie helpfully.

  The Gunner prodded George in the back again. George cleared his throat.

  “The Sphinx sort of gave us a half-answer, and told me to go to the ‘dark shaveling.’Only, I don’t know what a shaveling is.”

  Dictionary’s fingers flew through the pages of his book, slowing down as he got nearer the word he was looking for. He stabbed it in satisfaction.

  “ ‘Shaveling: a monk.’ ”

  “So I’m looking for a dark monk?”

  “A monk or an abbot, a friar—”

  “A dark friar.”

  The air went a bit still. The children gazed up at the two statues, who were looking at each other with that look people exchange when they’re busy not saying something.

  “A dark friar who knows all about London.”

  Dictionary straightened and looked east, up Fleet Street.

  “A black friar, then.”

  The Gunner nodded slowly with a grimace.

  “The Black Friar. Should have known.”

  “What’s wrong with this Black Friar?” asked George, trying to watch the two statues at once.

  “Nothing,” they both replied rather quickly, looking away from each other.

  “Still,” harrumphed Dictionary, “not a man to disturb lightly. Perhaps I can help. It is mere vanity, but I pride myself on a tireless knowledge of the metropolis.”

  “The boy’s got the taints stirred up. He don’t know why, but they’re after him. That’s why we went to the Sphinxes, seeing as how they’re halfway between us spits and the taints.”

  “And what crepuscular illumination were they able to shed on this dilemma?”

  “What does crepuscular mean?” interrupted Edie.

  “Dim,” said Dictionary, with a sour twitch of his shoulders. George could see he didn’t like being disturbed while he was talking.

  “Well, why not say dim? All these long words are like talking in code.”

  Before Dictionary could reply, George broke in. He wanted answers, and he didn’t want Edie starting another argument.

  “The Sphinxes said I needed to find the Stone Heart. I think they said the Black Monk—”

  “Friar,” said the Gunner.

  “The Black Friar could tell me what it was.”

  “’Course, it’d save a lot of time and—you know, if you happened to know what the Stone Heart was, Dictionary,” said the Gunner hopefully. “Then we wouldn’t have to bother the Friar at all. And that would be …”

  He seemed to run out of words.

  “More convenient?” suggested the other statue. There you go.

  “So we need to fathom the meaning of the Stone Heart,” said Dictionary, suddenly swiveling and lowering himself so that his stockinged legs hung off the edge of the plinth. He riffled through the book in his hand, but came up with nothing. He clutched it to his chest and rocked back and forth, eyes closed in thought.

  “Stoneheart? Stone heart? A heart-shaped stone, perhaps. Or the heart of a stone—but that could be any stone, and looking for any stone in this great city would be like trying to find a grain of wheat in a wheat field. No. Stone Hart perhaps—'hart,’as in a statue of a deer, a male deer, carved of stone?”

  He opened one eye and looked at them. No one nodded, so he closed it again, rocked some more.

  “Or Stone Heart, perhaps being a disease of the affective organ, in need of physick, as in gallstone, kidney stone?”

  George nudged the Gunner and spoke quietly.

  “I don’t understand what he’s saying.”

  The Gunner put his finger to his lips and looked at the rocking figure above.

  Edie’s voice cracked the silence.

  “Neither does he. He doesn’t know what it is.”

  The rocking stopped. Dictionary opened the other eye and focused on her.

  “Why, in faith, what I took for a helpmeet and a paranymph is no more than a mannerless"—his fingers fanned the pages of the book at speed. He found the word he was searching for and speared it with his finger—"a mannerless sprunt.”

  “Sprunt? He called me a sprunt!” bristled Edie.

  “I know,” said the Gunner wearily. “He found it under the S’s. If he was looking under P’s he’d probably call you a pest. Or a pain in the—”

  Edie jutted her chin suspiciously at the figure above her and tugged on his buckled shoe.

  “Is a sprunt like a glint?”

  Dictionary shuddered and pulled his foot up out of her reach.

  “A glint? Not at all. ‘Glint’ does not appear in my dictionary, being an ungodly word, a mere superstition beyond even the wildest Frenchified imaginings of the Romanists. A sprunt is a common word, widely used, as any child even of the female inclination knows, meaning anything short that will not bend.”

  George looked at her. His lip, despite itself, twitched.

  “What?” she asked dangerously.

  “You might be a bit of a sprunt.”

  “You might be getting a puffy one if you start calling me names, too.”

  Edie pushed George hard. He had to grab her jacket to stop falling backward. There was a ripping noise and the clink of glass hitting stone. She swung at him, punching his shoulder hard enough to make him let go. Dictionary looked scandalized.

  “Now, children, there shall be no occasion for snick-or-snee here in the very shadow of God’s house!”

  “Snick-or-snee?” said George, floundering again.

  “A barney. A bust-up. A fight,” said the Gunner wearily.

  “With knives, mark you, with knives,” harrumphed Dictionary.

  “It wasn’t a fight. She pushed me. Look, I’m sorry but—”

  He stopped talking. Edie was crouched over the thing that had fallen out of her ripped pocket and clinked on the pavement. It was the weathered disk of glass. Her eyes were transfixed by it.

  “They’re here.”

  The warning glass was blazing blue-green light, brighter than she’d ever seen it.

  “There’s taints. Here. Now.”

  They all looked up into the evening sky—still stained orange by the fluorescent city lights—except Edie, who swept the glass into her other pocket and zipped it shut.

  For one terrible moment George felt his gut turning to water as a winged shape dropped out of the sky and flapped over them. He relaxed when he saw it was just a large black bird, not some gargoyle.

  “It’s just a bird,” he said with relief.

  It flapped around them above their heads, flying as if in slow motion. Dictionary waved his book at it, trying to shoo it away.

  “A strick,” he said wonderingly, almost to himself. “A strick if ever I saw one.”

  “Strick?” asked the Gunner, not taking his eyes off the eerily slow bird.

  Dictionary waved his book at the Gunner, as if trying to shake the meaning out of it and onto him.

  “Strick. A bird of ill omen.”

  He twitched and jerked, and George found himself shivering as if the movement were contagious.

  “What do we do now?” His arm was gripped in a small vise. Edie yanked at him. “Run.”

  She dragged him stumbling into the traffic. After two stutter-steps he was running faster than she was.

  The Gunner looked around from where he had been watching the wheeling bird. Horror flashed across his face. He kicked into a sprint and shouted in one movement “No! Not that way!”

  George and Edie had to stop short as a red double-decker bus turned in front of them, blocking the way down Fleet Street. George heard the Gunner shout, and spun around. He got a glimpse of the big man running toward him, pointing, yelling something—then another bus turned behind George, and for a moment, he and Edie were sandwiched in a narrow red canyon as the two buses passed each other.

  It was like being in the eye of a hurricane—a beat of quiet as the two red walls ground past them in opposite directions.

  Th
en, with a whoosh of sound and diesel fumes, the bus ahead of them swept away, and Edie tugged him onward—a good three fast steps until she saw what they were running into. The thing the Gunner was shouting about behind them as he ran around the other double-decker bus. The thing with the fiery eyes and the scales and the wings that cracked like thunder. The thing that saw them from the top of its tall stone perch planted in the middle of the street.

  Then she braked, and George stopped, still looking back to see what the Gunner was trying to say, not realizing what they had just run into.

  “What is it?”

  “I think it’s a dragon.”

  And he turned, slowly.

  And it was, exactly, a dragon.

  And then there was nowhere to run.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Dragon at the Bar

  Dragons come in all shapes and sizes, from vast nightmares whose wings unfold with a thunderclap and block out the sky, to tiny furry mascots that dangle in a harmless but irritating way from people’s rearview mirrors. The first thing George and Edie noticed was that the dragon that guards Fleet Street is not one of the fuzzy cuddleable ones. Its wiry body looked like that of a lion crossed with a muscular greyhound, and then covered in scales like chain mail.

  The thin spiny tail cracked like a whip and the wings snapped wide as it reared back on its hind legs. The front claws—and these were proper cut-you-to-shreds claws with talons like curved daggers on them—picked up the large shield it rested on and clashed it twice on its chest scales, making a warning sound George could feel vibrating the ground he stood on.

  But its head was the nastiest thing about it. It sat on top of a long reptile neck that grew out of the lion’s body, with a crest of spikes bristling along its top side. The head had ears pricked like a horse’s and a snarling mouth that showed a lot of hooked fangs as it looked right at George and Edie. And the eyes that it was doing the looking with glowered out from under angry brows with a heat and an intensity that seemed to weld George to the spot. The eyes were like looking into the heart of a banked-up fire. They were the deep red of burning coal, and as George watched the intensity of the red fade into a hotter, white heat, black tendrils of smoke whisped out of the eye sockets and rolled up and over the jutting brows into the night sky.

  Edie tugged at him.

  “I can’t move,” George said.

  “Neither can I.”

  The dragon’s head snaked back, turning its whole body into a coiled S shape. The narrow chest expanded and the scales on the neck stuck out in angry spikes. George had once seen film of a frilled lizard expanding its neck in anger. This looked like the grown-up end-of-the-world version of that.

  And then the Gunner was skidding to a halt in front of them, between them and the dragon.

  “Don’t look into its eyes! It’s got you stuck! Don’t look into the—”

  Whoomf.

  The dragon’s head struck forward, the mouth opened, the barbed tongue jabbed out like a sword, and then the flame jetted out, and there was no question, no way in the world that George and Edie or anyone who could see it wouldn’t watch it.

  The flame hit the street in a twisting spiral of wildfire, ropes of red and orange and purple and yellow blaze twining together before slapping into the ground with the massive controlled force of water from a fire hose. The flames spread wide across the street and rushed toward them like a building wave.

  Still rooted to the spot, George and Edie could do nothing but shield their heads from the wall of heat racing ahead of the flaring crest.

  The Gunner spun and knelt in front of them, pulling his rain-cape wide, trying to protect them from the rolling incineration slamming toward them. There wasn’t enough cape to block out the sight, and George couldn’t tear his eyes away from the inevitable conflagration anyway.

  “Get down!” shouted the Gunner.

  George couldn’t move. Couldn’t even shut his eyes. He knew he was a heartbeat away from ignition and conflagration, but he didn’t blink. He felt the heat hit his eyeballs and dry them out in an instant. Then he blinked reflexively to wet them, and when his eyes opened, he saw the flames stop dead, as if they had hit an invisible wall ten yards in front of them.

  The Gunner looked at George’s face, at his reaction, then turned to look behind him. Flames lapped up against the invisible barrier like water hitting a glass wall.

  “Bloody hell!”

  The fire built up behind the wall, rising higher and higher, taking shape as if filling a mold. And as they watched, they saw that in the midst of all this, London carried on. Cars drove through the wall of flame without noticing. A cyclist wove around a taxi, his whistle shrieking angrily, unaware that he’d missed the cab by inches but ridden straight through a studded gate of fire.

  Whatever was happening was happening to George and Edie and the Gunner but not to the rest of London, not to normal everyday London. Normal everyday London just got on with getting home and going out and not making eye contact with anyone else, in case something odd happened.

  Something odder than everyday odd was happening, of course. The flames were building a gate spread from side to side of Fleet Street. Or rather, they were swirling into a sharp-edged flame sculpture of a gatehouse with three openings underneath it. There was a wide central gate, with two narrow man-size arches on either side. Above the main gate rose a flattened classical arch with blocks of stone sharply outlined by different colored streaks of flame. On top of this arch was a gatehouse room, with an elegant window flanked by two alcoves, and on top of that a shallow arched roof. Even though he was terrified and obviously going mad again, George couldn’t help noticing that it was beautiful.

  An ugly single-decker bus with a jointed middle drove through the side of the flame gatehouse, the driver blankly chewing gum with a sour expression on his face, unseeing eyes fixed on the back of the car in front.

  “What is it?” Edie asked, eyes transfixed by the barrier.

  “Temple Bar,” whispered the Gunner.

  “What’s Temple Bar?”

  “One of the old gates to the city. They took it down, hundred, more’n a hundred years ago. Put up that dragon instead. Same purpose though, I reckon—”

  There was a crash from behind the gatehouse. The flames blurred and jumped, then sharpened their edges again. You could even see the studded panels in the sturdy gates.

  “What purpose?” George croaked out of a dry throat.

  “Guard the ways into the city. Keep out the unwanted.”

  The wide gates beneath the central arch shook. Something reached over the spiked top and pulled angrily.

  It was the dragon’s claw.

  “Move!” shouted the Gunner, hand scrabbling for his holster.

  And then all the magic and the beauty of the fire-building was gone, and terror returned as the gates wrenched open and the dragon stepped through the arch.

  The building heat inside the beast had turned it from a dull metal monster to a shining white-hot dragon.

  Its head swung hypnotically as it searched for someone, and then it stopped, finding George. The neck was swollen as the fire-crop beneath bulged the scales into an angry frill framing the burning, unavoidable eyes.

  Everything in George’s body tried to run, but everything in his mind stopped sending the right signals. The Gunner grabbed him and pulled—and nothing happened. George seemed to have become as immovable as a rock, even to the Gunner’s great brass-bound muscles.

  “Bloody hell!” said the Gunner again, this time with more disbelief in his voice.

  The dragon’s head cocked back. Its mouth opened. The fangs sparkled like blue diamonds.

  “No, you don’t,” growled the Gunner.

  His gun hand snapped out, cocking the heavy revolver in one determined movement.

  The dragon didn’t even look at him.

  Blam!

  The revolver bucked in his fist.

  Splat.

  The bullet hit the white-h
ot dragon where its heart might be, and melted on impact, splashing a darker color over the creature’s skin.

  “Ah,” said the Gunner.

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  Splat. Splat. Splat.

  Three more bullets splashed across the dragon’s front, with as much effect as paintballs on a tank. The dragon looked down on the molten lead hissing across its chest, noticed the Gunner as if for the first time, and spat flame.

  The Gunner spun and tried to grab George and Edie before the lance of fire hit. His sweeping fingertips grazed George but scooped up Edie just as the flame-burst punched into his shoulder and sent him spinning and rolling across the street, curled around her in a protective ball.

  George couldn’t imagine the power behind a fire jet that could send a bronze man skittering across the ground like a crumpled paper cup being hosed into the gutter.

  And he didn’t want to imagine what that felt like, because the dragon flamed again, and this time the fire was a different color—a kind of shimmering violet—and he had time to decide on the exact color because the flame didn’t go away but stood like a fiery wall, bisecting the road between him and Edie and the Gunner.

  A lorry overtook a cyclist and drove right down the center of the wall of fire, which closed in behind it as it passed. The driver’s head turned and grinned toward George.

  “Oi oi!” he shouted, and stuck out his tongue, making a rude licking motion.

  “Arsehole!” replied a girl’s voice on the other side of George, and he dragged his eyes away from the dragon for a flicker, long enough to see a pretty blond girl smoothing a wind-caught dress back down over her legs as she struggled to control her cycle in the evening traffic that, horribly and inexplicably to George, seemed to be going about its own business and ignoring the dragon in their midst.

  The dragon wasn’t ignoring George. It was watching him intensely. George still couldn’t move his legs. He had to shade his eyes to see the dragon, but when he did he was sure it looked different. Still angry, because that’s the way dragons are made, but something else. The heat shimmer coming off the creature made it hard to be sure, but it seemed to be raising an eyebrow. He didn’t know what that meant. It was probably trying to make its mind up on how to roast him, George decided bitterly—and then there it was again. The unwanted bit of himself, the black, biley-treacle taste in his mouth, the prickling behind his eyes, the dark cable that seemed to twist through him, the thing he didn’t think about, the thing he usually forgot was inside him, the thing he didn’t understand. The thing that made him angry.