Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Old Friends, New Betrayals

  When the vision glinting into George through the sea-glass stopped, and the opaque disk was just a bottle end again, he dropped it and knelt there on his hands and knees, just trying to remember how to breathe normally.

  The relief he felt was huge. It was so huge that he didn’t notice the first tentative tugs as the Raven managed to get its beak through the railings and grip the end of his shoelace. It was a tough bird, and what it lacked in size, it made up for in strength. On the third tug, he noticed it and turned awkwardly. The Raven already had his foot at the bars, and was determinedly flapping backward.

  “Hey!” shouted George, kicking at the bird with his free leg.

  The Raven jerked his foot out between the bars with unexpected force and continued to fly backward.

  “Hey! Stop that!” George shouted, so appalled at the small bird’s strength and persistence that he was almost laughing as well as riding a new wave of rising panic. Hysteria, he thought as he kicked at the bird again. All that happened was that he connected with the unforgiving metal bars and felt a real and wholly unimaginary pain lance up his foot and ankle.

  Alarmingly, the bird took no notice and jerked George’s leg out over the two-hundred-and-two-foot drop, and things suddenly didn’t seem so absurd or funny anymore. It also didn’t seem like he was in real danger of falling because of the metal bars, but now his upper leg was jammed through them and his hands were on the cage. He yanked his dangling leg back, and the bird stayed put.

  Something gave.

  It was his shoe.

  His foot slid out of it, and the Raven hovered for an instant with the shoe dangling from its beak, looking like a bird that had tugged up a worm only to find it was wearing a full-size Doc Marten. The Raven spat the lace out and lunged for the disappearing trouser leg.

  By the time the shoe had clomped and bounced off the paving stones below, the Raven had caught the end of George’s trousers and was yanking his leg back out over the drop. He grasped the cage and pulled in the other direction, but the bird just seemed to hunch in the air and double its efforts.

  “You won’t get me through the cage! So let go!” George yelled. His thigh was beginning to hurt as the bird yanked it through the gap.

  And then the pain eased—because the bars started to pull apart.

  Something flew in and attached itself to them and began to yank them wider and wider in a hideous scree of resisting metal. It pulled them by the ugly hooks on the end of its uglier batlike wings, and as it pulled, it whistled with the effort through the length of corroding piping stuck in the middle of its wildcatlike face.

  It was the cat-gargoyle from St. Pancras, the one that he had last seen on the balcony of his mothers flat.

  And like the Raven, it seemed to have a strength way out of proportion to its size. It grunted and hooted through its water pipe as it tugged and strained, and George realized that it was probably strong enough to rip the bars apart, and that if it did, he was in for a long drop and a short sharp splat.

  It prised the bars enough apart to get its head in and snarl at him. Instinctively he reached out to protect himself. His hand closed around the waterspout jutting at him like a verdigris-encrusted gun barrel, and he pushed at it, trying to push the gargoyle off.

  “Go away!” he shouted. “I’m not scared of you!”

  The gargoyle shook its head like a terrier with a rat, and George held on and kept pushing it back outside the cage.

  “I’m not!” he shouted, trying to convince himself. “You’re just a waterspout! An ugly bloody waterspout, made to look frightening, but you don’t!”

  Lying as he was, on his back, he cocked his raven-free leg for a stamping kick into the gargoyle’s face.

  “Get away, spout! Just get away.” And he booted his heel into the thing’s chest with all the strength he could muster.

  There was a graunching noise as the gargoyle flew back out of the cage. One of its hooks came loose from the bars, and it swung drunkenly over the gulf of air for a moment. George tried to pull the leg being tugged at by the Raven, but the Raven seemed to be anchored in its block of air.

  Then the gargoyle swung back in toward George with horrible speed and ferocity. He had just enough time to realize that its mouth was wide open and shrieking because something had changed; and then he felt the reason in his hand. A length of corroding metal pipe. He had pulled it out of the gargoyle’s mouth when he kicked it, which had freed it to open its fanged mouth wide and come at him with renewed ferocity.

  Blam!

  The gargoyle was kicked to one side by a shot slamming into it from below.

  Blam!

  A second shot knocked its remaining grip off the bars. It seemed to George that it hung there in the air, like a cartoon coyote that’s run out of desert and found itself bicycling on the spot over a thousand-foot canyon drop.

  The gargoyle even looked comically surprised. Its newly freed mouth opened in a recognizable “Huh?” expression.

  “See you, spout,” said George.

  Blam!

  Spout fragmented into shards and dust, dust that whirled in the eddy of wind around the Monument, and then winnowed north-westward, toward the great train sheds on the other side of the Euston Road.

  The Raven paused in its tugging, and without giving more than an inch, looked down in the direction the shots had come from. George didn’t know how the Fusilier had found them, but he knew that’s who it had to be.

  The Raven looked back at George. It looked very disappointed. It looked very much as though it shrugged. Then it wrenched at George’s leg with a fury it had only hinted at before. George’s fingernails scrabbled for purchase on the gridded metal floor plates.

  Blam!

  The Raven was hit and spun like a black tufted propeller on the end of his leg. George felt a sudden release as the bird opened its beak to comment.

  “Caw!” it said. And then:

  Blam!

  It was suddenly a puffball of oily black feathers, and George was not only free, but running.

  He descended the spiral staircase with giddying velocity. He crashed through the turnstile at the bottom and bounced out the doors, knowing he was going to see the Fusilier and Edie, and he was so elated and adrenal-ized that he didn’t see his shoe lying on its side, where it had fallen. So he tripped on it and cartwheeled to a painful halt on the curb before he looked up at the dark figure calmly reloading its revolver.

  It wasn’t the Fusilier.

  “You should look where you’re going, young ‘un,” said a gravelly voice George had thought he’d never hear again. “You don’t know what kind of trouble you’ll run into like that.”

  It was the Gunner.

  Edie stuck her head around his side and just grinned at George. It was the first really wide smile he’d ever seen on her face.

  It opened her up like sunshine.

  Her dark eyes actually sparkled with excitement and relief. He knew he felt relieved to see the Gunner, too. He felt more than relieved. He felt like . . .

  “Steady,” said the Gunner as George rolled to his feet and lunged at him. The Gunner put a shovel of a hand in between them, and George, who had been an inch away from embarrassing himself by hugging the big man in the full flush of his relief, gripped it and clenched it and pumped it up and down in gratitude and excitement.

  Old Friends, New Betrayals “You’re okay!” he exploded. “I mean, you’re . . . OKAY!”

  “You’re not too bad yourself,” grunted the Gunner, reclaiming his hand and scratching the back of his neck in something like embarrassment. “You was fighting those two like a good ‘un. You’ve found yourself some pluck, I’d say.”

  “They’d have had me,” admitted George. “I was just struggling, really.”

  “Sometimes all you can do is struggle. But long as you’re struggling, you ain’t giving up, and that’s the half of it.”

  Edie was
still beaming.

  “He came out of nowhere. And I thought he was a taint, and then I saw it was him and then the bird came, and he was about to shoot it and then that taint did come, and you were fighting and he couldn’t get a clear shot and then—blam blam blam!” She mimicked the Gunner shooting. “It was awesome!”

  George looked up at the distant cage at the top of the Monument. He grinned at the Gunner.

  “That was brilliant shooting!”

  “It was okay.”

  “No, I mean, you could have missed.”

  “I’m not paid to miss,” said the soldier, holstering his revolver. “I’m the Gunner.”

  George’s face was aching, he was smiling so widely.

  “And you’re not dead.”

  “Not last time I looked, no.”

  “Last time I looked, you were badly hurt,” said Edie. “You talked as if you were going to die. Then the Fusilier said your message said—”

  “I thought I was. I nearly did. Snakey don’t take prisoners. And he fired me up bad. I made it as far as St. James’s Park and pegged out in the mud. Half drowned in one of those ponds. Thought that was my ticket punched, and that’s the truth of it.”

  “But you got back on your plinth. Before midnight—”

  “No.” He rubbed his chin. “One of my lot come and found me. Carried me home. The Officer. Saved my bacon.”

  “And you saved mine,” said George, lacing his shoe back on.

  “Did you do it?” asked Edie. “Did you catch a fire?”

  “I did.” He grinned up at them and pointed. “It’s over there. Opposite a black tower block that’s sort of caged in a crisscross silver lattice. …”

  “Cannon Street,” said the Gunner. “Right. Follow me. And, Edie—try not to get lost, eh?”

  He led off. They jogged after him. Edie grinned despite herself. George caught the unfamiliar expression pass across her face.

  “What?” he said.

  “Edie. He called me Edie.” She tried to stop grinning and went red instead.

  “Well, it’s your name, isn’t it?”

  Old Friends, New Betrayals “He usually calls me ‘that glint’or ‘her.'”

  “Well, you grow on people,” George grinned at her embarrassment.

  “Yeah?” She almost looked pleased.

  “Mind you,” said George, “so do warts. . . .”

  She threw a friendly punch at him as they jinked across the road in the Gunner’s wake.

  “I’m glad he’s back. I’m glad he’s here,” she said, eyes locked on the Gunner’s back.

  “Yeah,” said George. “I’m glad you’re here, too.”

  “Shut up.”

  “No, I mean it. I owe you,” he said decisively.

  “No, you don’t.”

  They paused for a beat as a taxi U-turned in front of them.

  “Sure I do. I mean, seriously, why are you still with me?

  “Because you came back for me. Without thinking. With that taint that had me by the head. That’s why I gave you the sea-glass.”

  George felt uneasy. He stopped smiling. He kicked the ground.

  “Edie. I didn’t come back for you without thinking. I mean, I did in the end, but I did think about just running away first. . . .”

  She looked at him, absorbing the truth of what he was saying.

  “I’m sorry. I wish I’d been braver. Without thinking about running away. More like him,” he said, pointing with his chin to where the Gunner was waiting impatiently for them on the other side of the narrow street. The taxi finished its slow squealing maneuver and drove off. She tugged his arm and they ran over.

  “Maybe it’s braver to think about running away but then stay anyway. And it’s not just because of that,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I lost my temper when the Sphinxes gave me another question. If I’d asked about the Stone Heart you’d have got there quicker.”

  “We’ll get there quicker if you two stop gassing and keep up,” said the Gunner, snapping his fingers at them.

  “It’s not just terror and fear that stop you thinking,” Edie went on in a low voice. “Anger can do that, too. So all the stuff, some of the stuff we’ve been through, it’s my fault. If I hadn’t asked about glinting, you’d have got there in a lot straighter line.”

  “Or I might not have got there at all.”

  “No. You’d have got here. You were meant to. The mark on your hand, being able to make stuff. It’s meant, George. I mean, I haven’t a scooby what ‘it’is, but it’s gotta be meant. I mean, your dad—he was a maker, right? Haven’t you got that far?”

  He didn’t want to talk about his dad. So he ignored it.

  “Edie. Seriously. How could you not have asked what glinting was? I mean, being something, something so—I don’t know—weird and frightening, and not knowingwhat it was? That’d do anyone’s head in. There’s no way you couldn’t have asked!”

  “Stop jabbering and watch the skies,” said the Gunner, pausing to let them catch up. “I may have only winged that bugger.”

  “Yeah,” said Edie, running alongside. “I don’t think winging him quite does it—if it’s the same bird we saw blown to pieces last night.”

  “It would be,” said the Gunner. “You can’t kill him. Any more than you can kill Memory, which is what he is.”

  “What?” asked Edie, stumbling on a badly laid paving stone. The Gunner caught her and put her steady on her feet without looking down. The instinctive gentleness of the gesture surprised her enough to stop her asking about the bird. She didn’t know whether to say thank you or not. She was unexpectedly confused. She didn’t know why.

  “What do you mean?” said George.

  “Memory always finds a way to survive. Even if there’s no one left to do the remembering, it locks itself away in stones and waits for one of her sort to pole up and unlock it.”

  Edie tapped George on the arm as they ran on.

  “Can I have it back?” she asked.

  “What?” he said, just as the realization of what she was talking about hit him.

  “My sea-glass.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  She stopped dead. He stopped a couple of paces later and turned, trying to think of a way to explain.

  “You left it!” She choked in disbelief, saving him the trouble. “You’re joking, right?”

  “It was very confusing. I was being attacked. I didn’t think. …”

  Edie looked at him. The pit of her stomach dropped like an elevator with the cable cut, creating a deepening void as it plummeted. The betrayal was so sudden it made her feel giddy and nauseous.

  “We’ll go back for it later. I mean, soon. But after we’ve been to the Stone,” said George, aware that the Gunner was walking back to them.

  All the warmth and happiness and relief she’d felt since the Gunner came back drained away as if it had never been there at all. In its place was chill and loneliness and, at her center, the old familiar hole—the lack. She couldn’t think of anything to say to him. She knew what betrayal felt like, and this was worse.

  She just spun on her heel and ran back the way they’d come. In four paces she was around the corner.

  The Gunner looked at George, face set and unreadable, and all the worse for that. George suddenly felt outraged. He was so close. This was nearly over.

  “What?”

  The big square jaw swung slowly from side to side as the Gunner shook his head in what looked suspiciously like disappointment. George’s sense of outrage ramped up and spread redly across his cheeks and neck.

  “What? I didn’t do it on purpose! Things were happening! Remember?”

  “You don’t understand, son—”

  “Well add it to the pile, then,” spat George. “Add it to the pile of things I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this, I don’t want any of this, I didn’t ask for any of this, I—”

  “You left her heart stone behind.”

  “Her what?”
r />   “The sea-glass—her heart stone. A glint’s heart stone is essential to them. It’s vital to what they are.”

  “But we’re nearly there! I mean, look! We’re here!”

  George pointed up the alley at the Black Tower and the faceless building beyond.

  The big chin swayed in a more definite negative shake. “You’re here.” His thumb pointed back over his shoulder. “She’s there”

  “But—”

  “She’s there. And she’s without her heart stone. And she’s alone.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Don’t Blink

  Edie ran into the little square at the foot of the Monument. The door into the pillar was closed. She couldn’t believe it. They’d just been here. It had been open then. She banged hard on the painted wood, before she noticed the scrap of cardboard wedged in the glass window.

  BACK IN FIVE MIN’S it apostrophized in a blotchy scrawl of red marker pen.

  She stepped back and looked up at the cage in the sky. Her heart was pounding and her knees felt weak. The sea-glass would make her feel better. All she needed was to get it back close to her. As soon as she got it in her hand, she knew she wouldn’t feel this hole in the core of her.

  She tried to control her breathing. She kept her head tilted to the sky and closed her eyes. Five minutes was three hundred seconds, which was three hundred elephants. She counted elephants in her head, trying not to speed up, trying to make each elephant last a whole second. . . .

  As Edie counts, take a snapshot of the city.

  Take a frame of the scene: a girl faces a door at the foot of a tall column, her eyes closed, rocking nervily from foot to foot, long sweep of dark hair swaying in counterpoint, counting elephants in her head to keep calm.

  Keep her company. Count a couple of elephants yourself.

  Take another frame.

  Something’s missing.

  The column is there.

  The door is there.

  The girl is gone.

  Look back at the first frame, the one with the girl. There’s something else, something black and blurred on the left of the frame. Something black and blurred and bull-like. Something charging at the girl.