Stoneheart

by Charlie Fletcher

  “Minotaur?”

  “Half-bull, half-man. And all bad. Man half of him hates the bull part, and the bull part thinks the man part’s what makes it unhappy. Primitive, ugly bastard—pardon my French. Dangerous too, dangerous for her.”

  “Why?” asked George, his mind racing back to Greek legends he barely remembered his dad having read him one long-ago holiday on an island in the Mediterranean.

  “Because Minotaurs think they can make themselves less bull and more man by eating the thing they want to be.”

  “He’s going to eat her?”

  “Not as such. He’s gonna be pulled that way, but he’s under the Walker’s orders, see. The Walker’s a Servant of the Stone. Cursed, like—”

  “Weirded.”

  The Gunner looked at him, impressed for an instant.

  “You been getting an education while I been getting my strength back, I can see that.”

  “I met the Clocker.”

  The Gunner looked closely at him.

  “Did you now?” he said slowly.

  “Is he good or bad?” asked George, all of a sudden needing to know very urgently why the Gunner had used that tone.

  “Plenty of time to talk about that after we get the glint.”

  “Edie,” said George firmly. She’s called Edie. “And how are we going to stop a Minotaur? I mean, that man, that thing, he took all your bullets.”

  The Gunner looked ashamed for an instant.

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d you let him?”

  “Because he’s a tricky bleeder. It was give him the bullets, or he gave Edie to the Bull. You heard that, right?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t understand. About the oath either.”

  “The oath’s the thing a spit can’t break. Swear by a Maker’s hand, and you’re done if you break the oath.”

  “Done? Like a statue that isn’t on its plinth at turn o’day? Like the Grid Man?”

  The Gunner’s head jerked around at the sound of a distant roar that added itself to the rumble of traffic.

  “Worse. You Wander. Now shut it and let’s go. We don’t have time,” he said fiercely, closing George’s mouth with a look as he ran off.

  “Where’s he taken her?” asked George, running alongside him.

  “Ain’t you had an education? Where do Minotaurs always take their victims? Where do they live—in the stories?” he said, leading off at a fast clip.

  George racked his brains. He remembered the Greek hero and Ariadne, the king’s daughter, who helped him with a spool of string so he could find his way out of a—

  “Maze! He lives in a maze?” he shouted.

  “In the Labyrinth. That’s right.”

  Then questions were out of the question for a while, as George needed all his breath for keeping up with the Gunner as they crossed roads and sprinted along pavements, always heading gently uphill, mostly north, always away from the river.

  The Gunner stutter-stepped on the curb edge as a bus punched past, then grabbed George and carried him in a fast jinking run across a busy, crowded street. George saw unseeing drivers racing at them, and lurched in the Gunner’s arms from side to side as the Gunner dodged them, so much that he felt nauseous when the Gunner deposited him on the opposing pavement.

  “But there isn’t a labyrinth in London,” said George unsteadily.

  The Gunner snorted in derision and set off northward again.

  “Some say the whole boiling lot’s a labyrinth. But don’t worry . . .”

  He pointed to a tall dark swerve of brick buttress ahead of them. Signs for the Museum of London flashed past, and a sign reading: LONDON WALL.

  “We’re nearly there.”

  George was struggling to keep up. It seemed like he’d been running forever. His life was divided into the past, when he hadn’t really run after anything except footballs, and now, when he ran all the time.

  “I never heard of the London Labyrinth,” he gasped.

  The Gunner pointed at a wall of concrete, pierced with walkways, topped with narrow spiky high-rises.

  “Lucky you. Because this is it. As dark and labyrinthine a maze as any Minotaur could want.”

  He pulled George into a stairwell and pounded up the steps. George read a sign and an arrow as they passed.

  It read: BARBICAN.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  The Hands of the Minotaur

  Screaming had done no good. Edie had never put much faith in screaming anyway, but screaming into the Minotaur’s roar had been like throwing a snowball into an avalanche and hoping to stop it.

  She’d heard it stop when it was all roared out. She’d felt it shake itself in the rain, like a dog. And she’d seen the look in its unexpectedly small eye as it looked at her before it ran on.

  It was a look that hated what it was, and hated what it wanted.

  She bunched her fist and thought about swinging at it, but the void in her sapped all energy now, and the hand just twitched.

  The void was growing, and there was less Edie and more nothing because, in a horrible way, the mad bull’s-eye of the Minotaur was scooping out what was left of her. It was a hungry eye, a hot eye, a horrible eye.

  The Hands of the Minotaur The Minotaur ran into a spiral staircase and, as its hooves stomped up the concrete steps, Edie tried to think of something to do. She felt she was dissolving from the inside out.

  They emerged into the rain on a raised walkway. An old man with a cane was ahead of them, shuffling along in the wet. Edie reached a hand out and shouted.

  “Help!”

  He didn’t react. Of course he couldn’t see her. His mind wouldn’t let him see something as unbelievable as a wet girl being cradled by a striding, bestial statue.

  The Minotaur stopped. Looked at her. At the old man. And its bull’s mouth twitched in a sneer and it roared again.

  Now she was feeling so empty, the sound seemed to echo around her hollowness and shake every bit of her. She felt the rising blackness at the edge of her vision, and knew she wouldn’t be able to fight it this time.

  The Minotaur suddenly pulled her close to its muzzle, and its nostrils sucked in long and hard. It shivered as if the smell of her was some exquisite stimulant, and then, most disgusting of all, she felt the thick swollen weight of its tongue curl out of its mouth and lick her, from her neck to her ear, then over her eye and into the hair over her forehead.

  And the last thing she felt before the dark closed in were the hands of the Minotaur squeezing her body, her legs, her arms, the soft bits around her kidney, like a butcher testing his meat.

  And then he swept her up and ran on, as her world went, mercifully, black.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  London Labyrinth

  The Gunner led George out of the stairwell, leaving the faint smell of urine-soaked concrete behind them as they skidded out onto a raised walkway.

  George slipped. The ground beneath his feet was slick with rain, a thickening downpour that was just beginning. Running in under the storm clouds felt like running toward something it was infinitely more normal to run away from. As fast as you could.

  The Gunner caught him and pulled him to his feet. He stopped and looked hard at George’s hand. At the scar left by the dragon. He grunted.

  “What?” asked George.

  “Makers mark. The glint—Edie—told me, just before the Raven got hold of you. That mark means you got a choice, and I’d say you’ve made it.”

  “What kind of choice? I haven’t chosen anything about this!” George protested.

  “Yeah, you have. You’ve chosen a lot, son. You’re here. You could be at the Stone, putting your world to rights. But you’re here.”

  He nodded as if he approved of something George didn’t understand.

  “Standing taller, you are; taller and straighter than when I first saw you. You ain’t apologizing for yourself. You’re fighting.”

  “I’m just trying to stay alive.”

  “No. If you was
doing that, you’d be at the Stone, making your amends, not thinking about anyone else. Not with me, trying to help her.”

  He looked George up and down.

  “You come a long way, mate, and not just miles. And you know why you’re fighting and not just sniveling?”

  “Not because of this mark,” said George.

  “You’re fighting because you got something to fight for. The mark is what got you in trouble, but it’s also what might help you out of it. The mark says you might be a maker.”

  “I’m not a maker! I don’t make anything.”

  But his hand was, he noticed, back in his pocket, kneading away at the plasticene blob.

  “You may not know what you are, but I’ll tell you what, the taints know it, and after I seen you with that dragon at Temple Bar, I think I know it. It’s in your blood and it’s in your bone. You done well, son. You looked to be made of pretty dodgy stuff when I first seen you. Just goes to show. It’s like Jagger used to say in his studio—it’s not just the clay, it’s what you make of it.”

  George thought of his dad, quietly sucking at the cigarette parked in the side of his face, hands working at the clay in between them. Before he could think further, the Gunner ran on.

  “We can talk later. We got our work cut out.”

  George ran after him. He realized they were in a new self-contained complex within the City. The raised walkways that they were sprinting along gave it a futuristic feel, especially if your vision of the future involved grime and blank windows staring at you as you passed.

  The Gunner pulled ahead, and George followed him along a path that ran parallel with the busy street below. He could see speeding cars and taxis racing past through the glass wall on his right. George had to swerve to avoid an old man with a cane, and bounced off a dustbin that looked like it was made of rubber but felt like it was made of rocks.

  He ignored the pain and kept going.

  Ahead of them, the four lane street disappeared under a vast arch in a big brick and stone building, as if it were being swallowed by a whale. The top of the arch was glassed in, and he saw people blankly staring out from their tables in a restaurant, chewing under the blue neon “Pizza” sign.

  They ran into a covered atrium alongside the arch, and suddenly there were shiny floor surfaces and noise and color and bright artificial light. Diagonal steel pipes pierced the glass wall on his left, buttressing the polished pink granite to his right. A sign reading “Bastion Highwalk” slid past. They ran around a statue of two frozen tango dancers out in the open air. George wished he felt as light-footed as they looked. He felt like he was dragging lead in his shoes.

  He was tired, and as he and the Gunner turned and twisted, he began to feel deeply out of control, with no idea where they were going. He was getting lost in the maze.

  He had an impression of open spaces to their left, a flash of green, an unlikely white church by some water, and then they were out of the fresh air again and running in a low-ceilinged space. The walkway seemed to hug the roof as it right-angled through a forest of thick concrete columns.

  In this long vaultlike space he felt underground again, although his sense told him they were still high above the ground-level of the city. He found it harder and harder to breathe.

  “Come on, son. Dig in,” said the Gunner.

  They ran toward the square of light at the end of the dim passageway.

  When they clattered out into the rain, they were on the edge of a huge rectangular space, entirely closed in by balconied flats raked back like pictures of Aztec pyramids that he had seen at school. The lost-city feel was added to by the vegetation sprouting from every balcony, startlingly green against the gray concrete and the reddy-brown bricks. On the floor of this elongated piazza was an impressive stretch of water, where fountains were fighting a losing battle with the wild downpour that was eclipsing their more ordered sprinkling.

  They splashed through a sheet of water on the brick beneath their feet, then along another covered walkway.

  George gave up trying to keep his bearings. He just concentrated on not losing the Gunner. He stopped noticing the things and places he was running past as anything other than a blur. Except, at one point, he looked right, and found himself glimpsing something like a giants greenhouse, with tall lush tropical vegetation and groups of schoolchildren standing beneath it, looking out at the rain.

  He couldn’t believe he’d been as uninvolved and bored as they looked on his own school trip only a day ago.

  He felt the rain on his hot face and thought about how he’d stood out on the steps of the Natural History Museum and been so angry and so sure that being a loner was the safest way to protect himself.

  Right now he’d have given anything to be part of that mindless group behind the fuggy windows—not happy, maybe, but also not scared; not exhausted, not where he was now. He couldn’t believe that all he’d been through had been going on for nearly twenty-four hours.

  And then he remembered that the clock was ticking down, and that unless he got to the London Stone soon, he was going to be living—perhaps not for very long—something that the Black Friar had called the Hard Way.

  Ahead of the Gunner a tall new office block swept into the sky, its bottom floors flaring out like a ski jump. Lit from within, against the dark clouds and driving rain, it somehow lifted the spirits. Maybe because it was glass and light, and not wet concrete.

  George felt a bit better.

  The Gunner turned a corner.

  And then the Minotaur hit him.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The Bull and the Bullet

  The Minotaur hit the Gunner as he rounded the corner, coming out of nowhere, hard and low, powerful as a speeding car, horns hooking evilly up and sideways.

  There was a concussive thump of impact, and the noise of the air being knocked out of the Gunner mixed with the fierce grunt the Minotaur made as it bunched its massive neck muscles and tossed him up and over its back.

  The horns caught in the bridle chains on the Gunner’s belt, and sent them jingling across the wet pavement.

  The Gunner hit the ground and rolled and skidded to a halt against a concrete tub in a great spray of rainwater.

  The Minotaur turned.

  And it was only when it turned that George saw that its arms were crossed over its chest, in a grotesque parody of cradling a baby—except the thing it was cradling was no baby, but Edie.

  It was no Edie that George had ever seen. She was so pale she seemed a pearl-colored ghost of herself clutched against the blackened bronze of the Bull’s chest like a rag doll. Her eyes were shut, and George had a horrid thought that she was dead—until he saw the working of her lips as they repeatedly tried to say something, like a sleep talker.

  “EDIE!” he shouted.

  Wherever she’d gone inside her head was a place from which she couldn’t hear him. The Minotaur stamped the ground with one of his hooves, and George felt the whole walkway shake like worlds colliding.

  The Minotaur held one hand out and made a very human beckoning gesture at him.

  “Stay put,” growled the Gunner, hoisting himself to his feet and stumbling in between the beast and the boy.

  “What are we going to do?” said George, voice catching in a suddenly dry throat.

  “I’m gonna drill the beggar.”

  He pulled his revolver and pointed it at the Minotaur.

  “Oi. Bully-beef. Over here.”

  The Minotaur tensed when he saw the gun.

  “But you haven’t got a—” began George.

  “Yeah, I have,” said the Gunner without breaking eye contact with the Bull over the notch sight on the revolver.

  “But you swore—”

  The Bull and the Bullet “Too clever by half, the Walker. You want to fool a bloke who thinks he’s made of brains, try something simple. Kept my thumb over one chamber when I shook the rest of ‘em out. We got one shot here.”

  “But you broke your oath!�
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  The Gunner’s face tightened, all the planes flattening into a defensive mask of indifference.

  “My choice. The girl didn’t sign up for this. Can’t let it happen.”

  “But you’ll—”

  “Don’t want to hear it,” snapped the Gunner. He raised his chin at the Minotaur. “Put her down, Oxo. Nice and gentle.”

  The Minotaur didn’t put Edie down. He shook her out of his arms, hanging limp and ragged as a tea towel, and held her by the shoulders in front of his torso like a shield.

  “Nasty blighter, aren’t you?” said the Gunner.

  The Minotaur snorted.

  Blam!

  The revolver rocked in the Gunner’s hand. The Minotaur didn’t move. The detonation woke Edie, and her eyes struggled to make sense of where she was.

  “Wha—?” was all she managed to say.

  The Minotaur threw back its head and roared in a blast of rage and, George realized, triumph. The sound of the roaring echoed off the concrete buildings around them. Then it lowered its head and growled dangerously.

  George couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “What happened?”

  The Gunner swallowed.

  “I missed.”

  George felt like the walls of the world were falling in on him. His chest felt tight, and breathing started to be a problem.

  “What do you mean, you missed?” he asked jerkily.

  “I didn’t hit it.” He looked at his gun in disbelief. “My luck must have started to turn already.”

  “You’re the Gunner. You don’t miss!” George hissed. “You said so!”

  “I also said don’t believe everything people tell you.”

  There was a pause as George’s brain wobbled alarmingly on its gimbals.

  “No, you didn’t! You didn’t say that!”

  “Oh.” The Gunner looked faintly embarrassed. “Well, I should have.” He cleared his throat and spat into a puddle. “I’m saying it now.”

  The Minotaur was pawing the ground. Actually, he was pawing concrete and raising nasty ridges with his hoof as easily as if the concrete had been butter.

  “Shoot it again,” said George urgently. He wasn’t thinking straight. He was in full pre-panic mode. “Shoot it before it charges.”