Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  It had already recognized the presence of the old darkness, a force with powers akin to its own as it overflew the London Stone, and it had felt that power staring back. It had acknowledged the kinship and had been acknowledged in turn, because of course the old darkness had itself once escaped into this world from the same outer darkness.

  In the exchange between the two darknesses was also communicated the idea of the taints: the fact that the taints were useful hands and wings and claws with which to move upon this world. And it was for this reason that the Ice Devil had called them to him.

  It had sent out the command “Come,” and they had. Throughout the night, flight after flight of gargoyles and phoenixes and pterodactyls and all manner of winged stone creatures had arrived and perched wherever they could find claw- or foothold at the top of the skyscraper.

  Wingless taints had also heard the call and had run, trotted, or shambled through the snow to the foot of the tower. Those who were equipped to climb had begun the long ascent on the outside of the building, and those who couldn’t waited in a tormented rabble of misshapen creatures below.

  The clean straight lines of the tower’s top had gone as the arriving taints had bloomed all around it like a parasitical fungus. The new and increasingly crowded aerie of monstrous creatures were also affected by the proximity of the Ice Devil, and froze up, catching the falling snow in their various hooks, folds, and hollows. Giant icicles began to form on the more pronounced extremities of this outer flange, and every now and then a shifting gargoyle would send ice and snow tumbling slowly through the night air to explode on the ground at the tower’s foot, to the consternation of the earthbound taints congregated below.

  The intense icy temperature at the apex of the tower caused cold air to fall down the sides of the building in what looked like an unendingly slow cascade of fog from dry ice.

  The Ice Devil had cordoned itself behind a living wall of taints encircling its fortress in the sky, and it walked the unlikely parapet of this aerial stronghold, mapping the other lines of power that it could sense crisscrossing the jumbled urban landscape beneath. There were lines of power it understood, and others that it sensed but did not know the nature of, and there was nothing as strong as the brother power it had felt in the Stone. But when it returned to the facade of the building, the darkness in the Stone was gone, almost completely.

  The Ice Devil loped around the high perimeter of the tower, trying to sense where this power had gone, and then its attention was taken by a disturbance in the crowd of terrestrial taints beneath. They had parted in order to let something through, and the moment the Ice Devil saw it, it knew it for what it was. The dark horse shape of the Night Mare stood looking up, and this time there was more than a nod.

  There was a connection.

  The darkness smoldering out of the horse’s eyes slowly circled its way up into the night sky and met the falling ice smoke. Where the darkness met the ice, a third thing was formed, a kind of thick and unwholesome gray miasma that billowed outward from the tower in all directions as it filled the roads and alleys, enveloping the surrounding buildings in a light-leeching cloud of freezing ice murk.

  In the moment of connection, the Ice Devil and the darkness realized they both came from the same place outside this world, and that they could conquer the world by joining forces. The Ice Devil also learned that the obstacle to this was the moving points of power and light it had sensed, called spits. And it agreed with the darkness that the first order of the day was to destroy them, them and the two other powers that moved with them.

  The Ice Devil watched the Dark Horse turn and walk into the ice murk, toward the edge of the City.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In Shtuck

  “She said thank you,” said George. He sat wrapped in a blanket, looking over at Edie in the firelight. She was fast asleep. “The goddess Andraste looks after her in her dreams.”

  “She is safe for now,” murmured the Queen.

  “For now?” said George, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and wishing the Gunner hadn’t just shaken him awake, especially by gripping his shoulder. The pain of the stone vein twining up his arm had been rekindled and immediately reminded him of the clock ticking down to the moment when he would have to face the final duel with the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild, a duel that he felt was more death sentence than fair fight. He shivered despite himself. “It doesn’t feel like any of us are particularly safe right now. Doesn’t feel like any of us even know what’s happening. Which is pretty harsh.”

  “We’re all in shtuck, right enough,” growled the Gunner. “But Her Majesty here reckons Edie’s in deeper, because of having been dead and all.”

  “But she—” began George.

  “The girl drowned. She was dead. We all saw it. And yet she came back. The heart stones of the dead glints, the ones the Walker killed, they brought her back. But she was—make no mistake, boy—dead!” said the Queen emphatically.

  “I’m not saying she wasn’t. And my name is George, not ‘boy,’” he said. “What does ‘having been dead’ mean?”

  “It means the barrier between life and death is weaker for her now that she has crossed it twice. It means death will come farther into life looking for her than it will for you, for example. She is a fearless girl, but too little fear can be as dangerous as too much.”

  “So we’ll keep an eye out for her then.” George shrugged.

  “It’s more than that,” said the Queen sharply. “It means she’ll be changed. It means she’ll favor the darker side of herself. She may harm herself by the choices she makes.”

  “Okay,” said George slowly. “No offense, but that just sounds like stuff the school shrink says when he doesn’t know what else to say. Edie’s a fighter, not suicidal.”

  “School shrink?” said the Gunner with a questioning tilt of the head. “What’s that mean?”

  George scrabbled quickly for a way to explain this, trying not to think about how bizarre it was having to translate the modern world to a bronze statue in the middle of a snowstorm.

  “When my dad died I didn’t cope with it that well. Not well at all, in fact. I thought it was my fault. My mum had me see the school shrink. Psychologist.”

  George was surprised at how he was able to talk so matter-of-factly about the great unspoken pain in his life. He remembered the soldier with his father’s face and the firm grip he had taken on his arm across the horse’s neck. He remembered his smile and what he had said. And then he almost gasped as he realized that a locked door in his heart had opened somewhere back there, only he hadn’t had time to notice it. And now where there had been a black treacly darkness, he felt clean air and light flowing through.

  He knew he’d never stop being sad about his dad. But he now knew that he wouldn’t ever have to be chained or made less than himself by that sadness.

  He grinned.

  “What?” said the Gunner.

  “Nothing,” said George. “It’s all right.”

  “No it isn’t,” said the Officer, tensing and aiming his pistol out into the night. “Gunner. We’ve got company.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dark Knight

  As George feared, the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild was slowly crisscrossing the City, looking for him. The Knight was in no hurry since a minister of fate, such as he was, knows things will come to their inevitable end at some point. So he doggedly traversed the wandering maze of streets in the Square Mile, seeking out George.

  He didn’t really notice the clocks striking thirteen, nor the way all the people faded out of the City as that last chime dwindled to nothingness.

  He was aware of the snow, but thought little of it.

  In his mind he rode with his great ghostly company of fellow knights on either side of him, their hacked and battle-worn armor creaking and jangling as they searched the streets with him.

  He thought little of the snow, because, in truth, he didn’t think much about anything. He didn’t
have much of an internal life, indeed he didn’t have much internal anything. He was precisely what he had been made to be: a hollow man.

  He was constructed, as was his horse, from curving sheets of metal, welded together at certain points, showing the gaps in his construction in a way his maker had intended. He was an armored man on an armored horse. The horse’s surcoat was made from interlinked wavelets of metal set with circles of blue glass, which jangled as he rode forward, seeming louder and louder as the clop of its hooves became increasingly deadened by the falling snow.

  The Knight’s one thought was to find the boy and end the duel they had begun. He had no hatred for the boy. He had no rancor about this. He had a job to do and was going to do it.

  It was just the way things were fated to be.

  He had no fear of losing the coming fight, not because he felt himself invincible, but because the duel itself was the point, not the victory. It was a fight that had to be had, and would be had, and he would throw himself into it without holding back one ounce of his strength or his battle skill.

  That’s what it took, being a minister of fate. Unswerving commitment to the “how,” the “when,” and the “who” of things, and very, very little reflection on the “why.” That’s what it took—that and being unstoppable.

  He was riding across Holborn Viaduct when his horse whinnied and snorted at something in the roadway ahead. The Knight had been looking to his side and vaguely wondering where the statues of the ladies who normally adorned the bridge balusters had gone, so he didn’t initially see what had unsettled his horse.

  He turned his helmet, and the two glowing eyes behind the slit burned a little brighter as he peered ahead through the thickly falling snow. All he could make out was the slow white blur of the falling flakes graying out the deeper darkness beyond. And then something detached from the wider dark and walked toward him.

  It was a horse.

  The Knight stopped.

  “Who goes there?” he bellowed.

  The Dark Horse did not speak, but the Knight heard the answer in his head.

  The dark of the sun and the fear that walks at night.

  His horse whinnied and tried to walk backward. The Knight tugged the reins and dug his heels in. “Halt!” he thundered, dropping his lance point and aiming it at the approaching animal. Now it was closer, he could see that it had a shadow figure on its back, an indistinct shape made from the same darkness, a hazy rider whose edges and shapes were cloaked in a shifting cowl of black smoke.

  What manner of thing are you?

  The question echoed in his head, though again he couldn’t exactly hear it.

  “I am fate’s champion and the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild, and no man or thing may stop me on my quest, so stand aside!”

  He shook his lance to show he meant business. The Dark Horse kept right on coming through the endlessly tumbling veil of snow.

  What is your quest?

  “I seek the boy maker, the bearer of the light.”

  The Dark Horse still walked toward him.

  Why do you seek him?

  “He has chosen the Hard Way. I must fight him. I must kill him, if I can. So must I kill any who come between me and my purpose. Stand aside!”

  The Dark Horse didn’t falter a fraction as it bore down on him.

  I do not want to stop you. . . .

  “Then stand aside!” roared the Knight, jabbing his lance forward.

  I want to be you.

  And with that the Dark Horse walked straight on to the sharp point of the lance, and as it did so the Knight’s horse shuddered and bucked and turned to flee, despite his attempts to stop it. The Knight was twisted around in his saddle as he kept his tenacious, unstoppable grip on the haft of his weapon, and so he saw exactly what happened as it happened, and what he saw was this:

  The lance pierced the Dark Horse and turned black as the darkness leached into it. The Knight could not tug the weapon free, and his horse became frozen as a tendril of darkness dropped off the lance and poured inside the horse through one of the curving gaps in its metal plates. Very quickly, other tendrils enveloped the horse and the Knight like black creepers, and twined their way inside the gaps, filling the hollow within with the darkness.

  When the Knight spoke, it was not just with his own voice anymore.

  I too seek the boy. And now I am you.

  It was the voice of darkness and the Knight.

  We are the Dark Knight.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Cold Light of Morning

  Spout sat on top of the arch on Hyde Park Corner, watching things. Not that there was much to watch. Nothing moved anywhere. Throughout the night he’d seen occasional taints flying past, but he’d kept very still and not joined them. Now in the cold light of morning, the skies were empty. Even the snow had stopped abruptly as the dawn rose. The city remained unpopulated, and no birds sang. In fact the birds seemed to have gone as well, except for one large black bird slowly picking its way along the spiked top of the palace garden wall far below. Maybe all the other birds were still roosting. Maybe it was the cold.

  Edie felt a hand gently shaking her shoulder, and woke instantly. She looked up to see the giant wings of the owl spread wide above her, and then she really woke and saw that the wings were not wings at all, but the smooth sweep of the massive stone arch over her head.

  George was squatting beside her with a ham sandwich in his hand and a big smile on his face.

  “Edie. It’s morning.” He held out the sandwich. “Room service.”

  She sat up and pulled the duvet around her shoulders. She noted sadly that her hand no longer held her own sea-glass heart stone as in the dream, but only her mother’s small earring. Still, it was better than nothing. And the little flicker inside was not just flame, but hope—the hope that said, “She’s alive.”

  She took the sandwich and munched down on it. It was just bread and butter and ham, but because she had not really eaten in a long while, it tasted like the best thing she’d ever had.

  She surveyed the scene. London was covered in snow. In fact it was more than covered. It was buried. The fire was still blazing beneath the center of the arch, but out beyond the red and orange of its flames, and below a crisp blue sky, the city had gone monochrome.

  It was no longer snowing, but given the size of drifts all around them, this was maybe because all the snow had run out.

  Beyond the arch all was white punctuated by gray buildings and black tree trunks. It would have been magical if it hadn’t been so still. The absence of people or movement made it a sad sight, somehow. The snow deadened everything. It hung in great cornices from the tops of the buildings, and lay so thick on the ground that cars were buried up to their windows and wore thick snow-caps on their roofs. The cold made her breath plume.

  The Queen crouched in front of the fire, holding a hotel teapot directly over the flames. She looked over at Edie and smiled. Edie heard a loud sneeze and a “Gah” from the other side of her.

  She stopped chewing and turned to look at the source of the explosion.

  “Dictionary!”

  The big man twitched and ducked his head in a half-bow that would have been more effective had it not dislodged his wig and slid it dangerously askew. He stood and straightened it with a surprisingly shy smile.

  “Ah. I give you joy of this fine, fresh, and unworldly morning, my dear. And I am told that you, whom I wrongly called a mannerless sprunt, have turned out to be a doughty nonpareil after all!”

  “Doughty what?” said Edie, looking at George, who just shrugged, equally baffled.

  A thin figure with complicated glasses, one eye obscured by a dark lens, appeared from behind the great man’s shoulder.

  “Brave heroine. Or somesuch. Dictionary wordy man but means well. Introduce self. Am.”

  “Clocker,” said Edie, realizing who he must be. “George told me about you. You gave him chocolate for me. It was good.”

  “Obliged,” s
aid the Clocker, beaming at her. “You asleep last time we met. Or didn’t. But inordinately happy to see good self safe. And well. Indeed am,” he said with a nervous bob that made all the instruments hanging off his coat jingle at once. Combined with his rusty green coat and the snow, they gave him the look of an amiable—if spindly—Christmas tree.

  “They come out of the dark last night, and me and him nearly blew holes in them,” said the Gunner, thumbing in the direction of the Officer, who was still looking alertly out at the wintry scene. There was still nothing moving in the snow-clogged landscape. Even the solitary bird perched on the spikes topping the wall around Buckingham Palace Garden seemed frozen into stillness.

  The Queen pushed past Dictionary and the Clocker and knelt in front of Edie with the smoke-blackened metal teapot and a china mug.

  “Warm milk. Drink it,” she ordered, pouring from the pot.

  “So what’s happening?” Edie asked George.

  “We don’t know,” he said. “Clocker and Dictionary passed loads of taints heading east on their way here last night.”

  “Into the City,” interrupted Dictionary. “No doubt in my mind that something is afoot, something inimical to us brewing within the Square Mile. ’Tis plain as a pikestaff that dark days attend us. All people erased from the city at a stroke, this unseasonable and unnatural snow, all portend evil. Not a word I use lightly, but I am muchwhat confirmed in my apprehension that a new devil walks the earth, and this snow is his footprint.”

  A beat of silence followed as everyone absorbed his gloomy words.

  “Still, we’ve been talking about what to do,” said George, rallying. “We’ve got a plan.”

  In the distance Edie saw movement, but it was just the bird gliding off the wall and landing nearby.

  “I just want to find my mum,” said Edie. As she said it, a horrible thought came to her, cloaked in the memory of a dream and the sandy hands pulling at her feet, and she scrabbled in her pocket. She pulled out her mother’s heart stone earring, and was relieved to see it still shone from within.