Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  “No,” said Edie. “Sorry. I believe in me. And what I can see, and what I can touch.”

  She cinched the belt tighter around her fur coat, as if that finished the discussion.

  “Fine,” said the Queen, standing. “You see that Raven on your shoulder?”

  “Er, yuh . . .” grunted Edie, as if it were the stupidest question in the world.

  “There was another god, a one-eyed god, a hanged god. He was called Odin, and he came to this island with the Vikings. He had two birds. One was Thought, one was Memory.”

  “And?”

  “They were ravens.”

  “So?” said Edie, suddenly not liking where this was going.

  “So I suppose you don’t believe in that god either?” said the Queen.

  “No.”

  “Interesting.” The Queen smiled. “But complicated. Because you’ve got his raven on your shoulder.”

  “It’s the Walker’s bird,” said George, looking at the Gunner, who shrugged.

  “It is Memory, the raven whose name is also Munin. The Walker was a mage before he was cursed by the Stone. He enslaved the bird with a spell, the spell that appears to have been broken when your friend broke the red thread and made the bird her own,” explained the Queen.

  “It’s not my bird, it’s free to go,” declared Edie. “Seriously . . .”

  She shrugged her shoulder as if to dislodge the bird. The Raven rode the rise and fall without turning a feather or going anywhere.

  “It has seen everything and forgotten nothing. It certainly has seen enough to know that a favor left unthanked and not repaid will always come back to haunt you. It knows how the world balances accounts. I think Munin is with you until you are done with it, child, like it or not,” said the Queen.

  “I don’t mind it. I just don’t like animals and birds tied up or caged. Or people,” muttered Edie, thinking of the woman with the sewn eyelids in the House of the Lost.

  The wind buffeted again, whirling the powder off the top of the surrounding snow and dancing it past them. George looked across at Edie as the gust whipped her long dark hair into a rippling flag behind her. Silhouetted against the snow and lit by the wind-kindled blaze, wearing the black fur coat with the Raven perched on her shoulder, she didn’t look modern at all. She looked just for an instant like something out of time.

  Edie, George thought, may not have believed in the old myths, but she suddenly looked like she’d just stepped straight out of one.

  The Queen was also looking at her appraisingly. The sternness and outrage in her face was so strong that George wasn’t sure whether she was going to shout or hit her.

  She took a deep breath and did neither.

  She went down on one knee so that she was eye to eye with Edie, and gripped her chin firmly. Edie tried to escape the implacable bronze grip, but couldn’t.

  The Queen spoke very calmly. It was clearly a great effort not to lose her temper.

  “The goddess that you don’t believe in, and the magic you are so sure doesn’t exist, had power on this island so long ago that the island itself went by another name. It was Albion, the white land, the white of the moon. The goddess had the power of the moon, and she took the shape of an owl, the moon bird; owls and certain other creatures, like the hare, were sacred to her and the—”

  As soon as the Queen mentioned the hare, Edie knew she had to stop the conversation.

  “Look,” she interrupted. “It’s all rubbish to me. Sorry. Means a lot to you, I can see that, but that’s not my world, is it?”

  In her mind’s eye she was unable to stop the replay of the dream, the bit where the hare watched her from the ridgeline on top of the pebble slope.

  “I just want to find my mum. It’s not about gods or old England or Albion, see? It’s about me thinking she was dead, and now having a chance to find her.”

  The Queen opened her mouth to speak. Edie went on quickly, because she was only telling half the truth.

  “You’d do the same if you were me. And if they were me, so would your daughters. They’d rip the world apart looking for you. Wouldn’t they?”

  The Queen was, as Edie had hoped, temporarily unable to speak or deny the truth of what she was saying.

  The Officer filled the silence. “We need to get south to the Sphinxes. Time may have stopped, but night will still fall soon enough.”

  “And I go north. To see Queen of Time. See what we can do,” interjected the Clocker. “Best of luck to all.”

  He turned and strode off into the snow, his long thin legs crowstepping through the drifts. There was something brave and sad about the sight of him setting off into the whiteness on his own, thought George. Dictionary must have thought so too, because he harrumphed and called out after him.

  “Clocker. Dear fellow. I would be inordinately gratified if you would do me the great unmerited honor of allowing me to accompany you. I should admire to make acquaintance of the lady sovereign of things temporal.”

  Dictionary turned to the others and lowered his voice.

  “Look at him. No meat to his bones; the icy blast must blow right through him. I must admit that I have taken a liking to the poor jingling spindle-shanks. I should feel a great indolent booby were I to let him venture off alone into this icy vastness. So I wish joy and success of the day to you, my friends. “He bowed jerkily then beckoned the cat. “Come, Hodge. . . .”

  And with that the broad figure bulled his way through the snow toward his lanky companion, the cat leaping through the drifts at his side.

  “Jack Spratt and his wife,” said the Gunner, looking at the mismatched pair walking away from them. “Come on. I’ve already seen other spits heading south through St. James’s Park over there. We ain’t the only ones’ll have thought about consulting the Sphinxes. Don’t want to miss the party.”

  They turned their backs on the homey fire, and walked across to the park, led by the Gunner. The Queen’s daughters led the horses and chariot, which was too low to the ground to be able to surmount the snow where it had drifted deeper.

  George walked beside Edie, but every time he turned to say something, all he got was the side of her face, jaw jutting forward, and an appraising look from the deep black eyes of the bird riding her shoulder.

  He felt a hand on his arm and turned to find the Queen walking beside him. She pulled him back a couple of paces, out of earshot, and spoke low.

  “The glint may not wish to hear it from me, boy, but the truth of things is this: there is something in you, one or both of you, something that has scraped through to the forgotten layers of old England, before it was England even, when it was Albion. Whatever is happening, whatever has followed you here in your quest, is connected with that wilder world, the world of the ancient magic. It goes deeper than I can fathom, but in the depths are black things that are calling to that girl. And if she listens to them and forgets the light, she is lost. And I would have no more girls lost because I failed to speak out and warn them.”

  George looked over at Edie. Now even the Raven was avoiding his eyes. Not a good sign.

  “We are in a place I have never been, boy. And though I know nothing of it, I do know it will be darker before it gets better.”

  “If it gets better,” said Edie, without turning. It was then they heard the screaming.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Love Lies Bleeding

  “Someone’s hurt!” shouted George.

  “Sounds like a boy,” said Edie, pushing past him and staring eastward.

  They all stood frozen, listening to the distant screams, trying to figure out exactly where they were coming from.

  “Somewhere on Piccadilly,” barked the Officer, starting off in that direction.

  “No,” snapped the Gunner. “South of there. In the park. Look . . .”

  Just for an instant George saw it, above the snow-laden treetops of Green Park. At a distance it looked like three birds fighting, but only for a moment. George’s eyes adjusted to th
e scale of the winged creatures, and he realized he was seeing two bat-winged gargoyles swooping and tearing at the third winged human figure, like crows mobbing an owl.

  The human figure was flying lopsidedly. He was swatting at the gargoyles with a bow in his left hand as they lunged at him. His right arm dangled loosely, somehow bent the wrong way.

  Then one of the gargoyles folded its wings and dropped like a stone, using all its weight to hammer the boy out of the sky. They dropped below the top of the trees and were lost from sight. But not from hearing: the sound of the impact reached them, followed by a cry of agony and terror, and the sound of something like a terrier snarling and tearing at its prey.

  No one gave an order.

  Everyone ran at once.

  “It’s the Bow Boy. From Piccadilly Circus,” shouted the Queen.

  The statues outran the two children, but even with their added strength and size, running through the thick snow was like running in a dream, the kind of bad dream where, however hard you try, you’re never quite running fast enough.

  George knew those dreams.

  He also knew how they ended.

  He knew they were going to be too late.

  He turned and looked back at the arch. Spout sat on the cornice of snow, quivering like a dog. George saw there was just one chance to save whoever was screaming in the unreachable distance.

  “Spout!” he yelled. “Go! Help the boy!”

  “Taints won’t just do what you tell them; they ain’t . . .” began the Gunner.

  There was an eruption of snow as Spout leaped into the air, his wings unfolding with a sharp decisive whip crack. He powered through the air, accelerating as he went, great wing beats kicking up the snow around them as he passed over and disappeared into the trees.

  “Blimey,” said the Gunner. “Never seen that before.”

  “He’s not going to get there in time.” panted Edie, chopping her way through the snow a couple of paces behind George.

  “He’ll still get there before us,” gasped George. Although he seemed to have been hurtling through London ever since he’d broken the carving at the Natural History Museum, this new sensation of running in snow made him tired in entirely new and more painful ways.

  The screaming stopped dead.

  The sudden silence was shocking in itself, so much so that the Queen and the Officer came to simultaneous halts, and stood straining to hear any more noises.

  George heard the Officer curse under his breath as he ran past him.

  “Damn and blast.”

  George kept plunging ahead in the wake of the Gunner, who hadn’t slowed one bit as he ran in under the trees, unholstering his pistol as he went.

  “Look out!” shrieked Edie as something large came crashing through the branches in their direction—an angular jagged shape getting bigger with startling rapidity as it spun straight at them. The Gunner ducked and George swerved, and then the thing hit the snow and cartwheeled between him and Edie in a savage series of impacts before embedding itself in the trunk of a tree.

  They stared at it.

  “Your gargoyle,” said Edie, deflating.

  It was a stone wing, torn off at the root. George looked at it for an instant longer, then threw himself forward into a lurching snow-hobbled sprint.

  “Spout!” he yelled.

  “I’m sorry . . .” shouted Edie, trying to keep up.

  George said nothing more. He needed all his breath to keep running. The extra surge of energy was not despair, because Edie was wrong.

  The wing wasn’t Spout’s.

  He heard the crack of the Gunner’s pistol ahead of him, and then he burst out of the trees, crashed through a hedge, and stopped dead.

  Spout was fighting two gargoyles at once. Or rather, he was fighting one intact gargoyle with the other one, whose wing he had obviously just torn off, swinging the damaged one by its undamaged wing, using its truncated body like a hammer.

  The intact gargoyle yammered in fury and pain as Spout stood astride the broken-winged figure of the boy, cutting huge swaths of air with his gargoyle-hammer, trying to keep it at a distance and prevent it from darting in to rip at the unmoving figure on the ground.

  As Spout’s improvised bludgeon whirred past its snarling face, it pounced in and latched on to the boy’s outflung leg with its teeth, shaking it with the growling terrier noises George had heard from a distance.

  Up close there was something truly horrible about the inhuman fury and malice in the taint’s onslaught. It seemed to want to hurt the boy even if it meant putting itself in greater danger, a danger that manifested itself almost immediately as Spout gave it a bone-crunching blow with its partner. The intact gargoyle was knocked head over heels. There was another sharp crack as the gargoyle-hammer broke, leaving Spout with a second dismembered wing in his talon.

  He tossed it over his shoulder and leaped for the undamaged gargoyle, who took to the sky just too slowly to avoid Spout catching it by its foot. Spout stayed on the ground, one talon hooked around a park bench, anchoring his desperately flapping adversary and stopping it from escaping.

  Spout was panting with exhaustion. George could now see how much the uneven fight had taken out of him. He had a great gouge across his chest, and one of his brows was lopsided, having been sheared off by a blow from his attackers.

  “Eigengang! Gow, Eigengang!!” he howled hoarsely at George.

  “Shoot it!” George yelled at the Gunner.

  BLAM. The Gunner’s first shot knocked the gargoyle out of Spout’s grip. It stuttered in midair, nearly fell, but then flapped away. Spout launched himself after it.

  “Again!” roared Edie, who had caught up with them.

  “Your bloody pet’s in the way!” snarled the Gunner in frustration, running after the disappearing gargoyles, leaving George alone with the injured boy.

  “Spout! Leave it!” George shouted. “SPOUT! GET DOWN.”

  Spout swooped lower, exposing the gargoyle. The Gunner stepped sideways and rested his gun hand against a tree, steadying his aim.

  BLAM.

  The gargoyle flew on.

  “Too far for a pistol . . .” the Gunner growled, squinting along the gun’s sights.

  BLAM.

  He shook his head in frustration.

  “What I need is a bloody—”

  CRACK. CRACK.

  The sound of two distant shots smacked flatly across the snow. The gargoyle suddenly tipped in midair and cartwheeled into the very solid sidewall of the Ritz hotel in an impact they felt as much as heard, even at this great distance.

  For an instant it stayed there, as if embedded in the masonry, then it plummeted straight down out of sight, unmistakeably dead.

  “. . . rifle,” finished the Gunner wonderingly. And he raised his head from his point of aim and squinted across the snow toward the sound of the other gunshots.

  “Who the hell was that, then?”

  As if in answer to his question, the Old and the Young Soldiers broke out of the distant trees, waving and running toward them.

  George relaxed a fraction, which was a mistake, because just as he did so, something hopped toward the still figure of the Bow Boy and leaped on him, sinking its teeth into his ribs and starting to shake him from side to side. It was the now wingless gargoyle.

  George didn’t think, he just leaped, throwing his arms around the barrel-chested creature and wrenching it off the boy. The gargoyle kicked at George with its feet, winding him enough so that he loosened his grip. The thing twisted and reared its head back to strike: George had a sickening impression of stone fangs and angry eyes blurring at him, and just managed to jerk his head sideways so that the rough granite skin of the creature painfully grazed his cheekbone as it struck, instead of pulverizing his skull.

  He latched on to the taint with an even tighter grip, to prevent it being able to head butt him again, keeping his own head buried in its shoulder, like a boxer riding out a flurry of blows while he figures out what
to do next.

  “Shoot it!” yelled Edie.

  The Gunner spun to see what was happening behind him.

  “Might hit George!” he spat in frustration. He dropped his gun on its lanyard and ran back toward George and the snarling gargoyle. He was too far away. The gargoyle was forcing its head back, ready for another blow, and George’s grip was weakening.

  “GIRL!” shouted the Queen. She was running toward them, also too far away to be able to help in time.

  And then she stopped.

  Edie stared in shock.

  The Queen cocked her arm and threw her spear. It flew through the air and landed a yard in front of her.

  “GIRL!” roared the Queen. “You . . . !”

  Edie understood and was moving before the Queen got to the next word. She ripped the spear from the ground and reversed her grip as she spun on her heels. As the gargoyle broke George’s grasp and snarled in victory before slamming his head to pulp and oblivion . . .

  Edie struck.

  The bronze spear entered under the monster’s jaw and came out the back of its head, effectively stapling its mouth shut as Edie continued her forward momentum, vaulting over the creature, snapping its neck backward, and ripping it off George. It lashed out a savage back kick with a sickle-sharp talon, but Edie twisted out of the way without letting go of the spear. She gritted her teeth and used all her strength to jerk it even farther backward.

  The taint’s head snapped off with a sharp cracking noise, and its body twitched and was still.

  Edie looked down into George’s eyes, still wide with surprise.

  “That,” she said with a dark and somehow terrible smile, “felt good.”

  Inside herself, the ache of hoping against hope was suddenly a little less painful.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Anteros

  The Old Soldier and the Young Soldier wasted no time in telling the other spits what had happened to them and all about the ice murk within the City. There was a shocked silence at the fate of the Duke. Then the silence was shattered by a spasm of coughing, which made them all look down to where Edie and George were crouched on either side of the Bow Boy, who lay in the snow, unmistakably broken.