The Officer pushed a way through the crowd for them. The noise of chatter was still very loud and sustained, and every now and then voices rose in anger and turned into bad-tempered shouting.
A king wearing chain mail blocked their way as he stood in the stirrups of his charger and started jabbing his sword in emphasis at a lavishly wigged nobleman on a smaller horse.
“Oi!” said Edie, stepping back sharply to avoid being trampled by the charger. She stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled shrilly to get the rider’s attention. “Coming through, mind your back. . . .”
“That’s Richard the Lionheart,” said George, recognizing the statue from the edge of Parliament Square.
The king spun on his horse and glared down at them with such an intensity that the first thing you noticed was angry and only then king.
“I know very well who I am, boy, but who, pardieu, are you, girl, to be whistling at a king as if he were some hound to be called to kennel at your whim?” he bellowed, raising his sword.
Two loud gunshots cracked through the clamor and reduced it to instant silence as all the statues tensed and looked around for where they had come from.
They saw the Gunner standing at the shoulder of the Sphinx, who snarled and shook her head as if disturbed by the explosions from the smoking pistol the Gunner was pointing into the sky.
She slowly got to her feet and towered over the crowd, stretching like the giant cat that she partly was. And then she looked straight at George and Edie.
“They are the right people,” she purred in a slow dreamy voice.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Riddle of the Sphinxes
At the words of the Sphinx, perhaps underlined by the warning glare from the Gunner at its side, the Lionheart backed his horse up with an ill-natured dig of his stirrups, and the crowd parted for George and Edie. They felt every eye in that immense, strange crowd turn and strain for a look at them as they moved forward onto the plinth next to the Sphinx. Edie glanced at the side of the great lion’s body before she looked into the finely modeled human face beneath the elaborate Egyptian headdress. She saw there were no shrapnel holes punched into the animal’s flanks.
“It’s the nice one,” she breathed to George.
“I hope so,” he answered. “Because I wouldn’t like to meet one angrier-looking than this.”
The Sphinx’s normally impassive face was twisted into a very dark and unpromising scowl.
“I am not angry at you, child. I am out of sorts.”
“Where’s your sister?” asked Edie.
The Gunner cleared his throat. “Er, you remember what the Bow Boy said about the call, and how he heard it but didn’t go, and now we know which side of the line he’s on. . . ?”
“Yes, and I remember you saying the Sphinxes were somewhere between spits and taints, half animal, half human.” said George. “So I suppose . . .”
“We both heard the call. Only one of us answered it. I have always seen the human side of things, but my sister had become too taintish of late,” said the Sphinx, her tail lashing behind her in a slow flick of irritation. “I did not think we should go. I did not like the call. I do not like being told what to do. I do not like that whatever is doing the calling thinks it can call us to heel, as if we were common house pets. We are not dogs, after all.”
The Sphinx arched her back in a decidedly feline stretch and lay back down in her usual position. Her eyes remained on George and Edie.
“What is calling?” said George.
“A voice from the outer dark. From the darkness before time. Something unknowably powerful and dangerous. Someone let it through.”
The Sphinx was not looking at George as she said this, but sometimes one can not look at something just as pointedly as one can look at it. And he knew she was talking about him as surely as he knew that the great icy blast that had shot past them as they returned to this layer of London from the Frost Fair was the source of that dark voice. A voice he had let into this world.
“How do you know?” said Edie, staring at the Sphinx with a gaze as unblinking as the Raven’s on her shoulder. “If it’s unknowable, how do you know? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Ah, little rainsplash, there you are,” sighed the Sphinx. “And still asking such interesting questions.”
George could tell how much Edie disliked being called a rainsplash by how fiercely she jutted her jaw at the giant cat with the human face.
“And you’re still giving such unhelpful answers,” she retorted. “How can you know all this if it’s unknowable?”
“Because it has happened before: the old darkness imprisoned in the London Stone came from the same place long, long ago. It is only the strength and exact nature of the power of this new darkness that is unknowable—not the fact of its existence,” replied the Sphinx. “This kinship explains why the two darknesses are working together and combining their strengths.”
“How—” began Edie, but George stepped in front of her. He knew she irritated and perturbed the Sphinx in a way he didn’t, and while she seemed to be answering questions without needing a riddle answered first, he didn’t want her provoked.
“What has happened?” he said quickly. “Exactly?”
“The new power comes from the outer darkness, a dimension beyond and without time. Coming here, it has sent a shock through all the layers, which has cut this layer of London off from the present, and the future.”
“That’s stupid,” said Edie. “We’re in the present, aren’t we? I mean this is all happening . . .”
“It’s not the real present. It’s just now,” explained the Sphinx. “The real present is a living thing through which time flows from the past into the future, like blood through a vein, keeping the body of the universe alive. This ‘now’ we are trapped in is disconnected from that present and cannot flow forward into the future. And like a vein through which the blood cannot pass, it will eventually die.”
There was a great rumble of shock at this news, and so many of the spits started shouting questions at once that it was impossible to distinguish any one voice.
Another shot cracked flatly into the air, and silence returned abruptly, this time everyone turning to see the Officer pushing through the crowd with the Queen. Once more their way took them past the Lionheart, and once more he bridled as one of the Queen’s daughters pushed at his horse in the tightly packed crowd to make a space for her mother to pass through.
“Unhand my horse!” snarled the Lionheart as he jerked his reins and made as if to cuff the daughter, only pulling the blow as he realized it was, in fact, a girl he was about to hit.
In an instant the Queen had her spear point parked dangerously under his chin.
“She whom you would strike is of as royal a blood as you, boy; and I, her mother, was Queen and conqueror centuries before you were whelped! Bar our way one moment longer and I shall take your sword and thrash you with it until you bawl like the great baby you show yourself to be!”
Regal eye met regal eye, and in very short measure the male eye blinked first. The Queen removed her spear tip from its uncomfortable proximity to the Lionheart’s Adam’s apple and leaped up onto the dais next to the Sphinx.
A faint growing rumble of discontent began to well up again, and she quelled it with a look as she started to speak. “Of everyone here, I am the only one ever to have destroyed this city; and having washed my anger in blood once, I shall not see it happen again. To the victors may go the spoils, but only a destroyer knows the true cost of the destruction they have wrought, and only then too late.”
In the crowd a few of the generals nodded.
“She’s right,” said a spit in a World War II RAF uniform, a statue that George remembered Edie commenting on a lifetime ago as they had begun their quest, by St. Clement Danes. She had said he had a lot of death about him.
“What has happened before shall not happen again!” continued the Queen, turning to the Sphinx with a great flourish
of her cape. “What can we do?”
There was a small groan from the crowd. The Sphinx shook her head from side to side.
“That is the wrong question.”
“We already asked her that,” said a voice from the crowd.
The Queen looked unexpectedly deflated to see her grand gesture go flat so quickly.
“Been like that all morning,” said the RAF officer to the Gunner. “Too many kings and generals, not enough bloody common sense.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say, Bomber. . . .” retorted a periwigged figure, waggling an enraged scepter at him. And with that, the crowd of spits started arguing and bickering among themselves louder than before.
George found Edie looking at him, something between despair and disgust spreading across her face. The Raven was gone, he noticed.
“I know,” he answered.
And in a sick lurch of his stomach he realized of course that he did. He knew exactly what to do. He knew exactly what the question was, and he knew that there was only one person who could ask it. So amid the argumentative din rising around them like an angry sea, he turned and put his hand out to steady himself against the Sphinx’s great forepaw.
He looked up into her eyes, to find they were waiting for him. He couldn’t say whether the smile in them was friendly or hostile, but that, he supposed, was one of the things that just went with being a fabled enigma. He cleared his throat and spoke quietly but steadily.
“What can I do?”
The Sphinx jerked to her feet. The sudden movement was enough to get the attention of the crowd, and George sensed once again that all eyes were on his back.
“That,” said the Sphinx with a purr like honey, “is exactly the right question.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Queen of Time
Oxford Street was, if anything, blocked more solidly by snow than the roads the Clocker and Dictionary had taken to get there. The Clocker led the way, his long legs high-stepping through the drifts, while Dictionary seemed to barge rather than walk through them. Yet he puffed and grumbled his way forward with such doggedness that he kept pace with his taller friend.
The Clocker turned to check on his progress. “Snow a particular hindrance. Perhaps a rest before continuing?”
“Nonsense. It may be a particularly discommodious and unobliging oberration, but I’ll warrant the unfortunate Highland denizens of the far north endure worse without complaint. And what a Scotsman may do with composure, I shall not be balked by . . .”
And with that he plowed ahead with such determination that the Clocker had to stretch his legs to keep level with him.
“Ah,” he said. “Oberration?”
Dictionary allowed a momentary smile to betray his satisfaction at the Clocker’s question.
“Oberration, sir, is a much underused word meaning ‘perambulation’ or, in more common speech, ‘walking about.’ It is both an activity and a word I am very fond of, though I will admit this unnatural snowfall does make the current exercise of the activity less than normally joyful to me.”
“Many thanks,” panted the Clocker as he forged slightly ahead through a deepening drift of snow that had blown across the street and stacked up next to a long bus. “Your acquaintance both a pleasure and an education. Most obliged.”
“Pleasure all mine, sir,” puffed Dictionary, looking up at the facade of the great department store they were approaching on the north side of the street. “And almost as great a pleasure to note we have arrived.”
The Clocker looked directly up at the canopy jutting over the main entrance to the block-long shop.
“My lady,” he said simply, and as far as the snow permitted, executed a graceful bow.
“Clocker,” replied a gentle, golden voice with a barely audible undertone that sounded like a myriad of tiny bells chiming through it. “I wondered when you would come. I wondered when you would notice . . .”
“When clocks struck thirteen, lady.”
The Queen of Time stepped out from beneath the great golden globe above her head, a globe that was also a clock with both its hands pointing motionlessly straight up toward the due north of midnight.
She was a golden angel, her beautiful face framed with thick hair topped with a diadem inlaid with blue enamel. Her outspread wings steadied her as she lifted the hem of her gown so that she could kneel on the edge of the canopy and look down at the Clocker more closely. The gown itself, and the girdle that snugged it to her waist, were also inlaid with a startlingly deep blue enamel, and the gold from which she was made of seemed to intensify and shine from her eyes like sunlight.
“Time stopped when the clocks struck thirteen, and yet only now do you come to me,” she murmured. “But is it not your curse to keep an eye on the time, as it is my joy to see it wing its way from day to day?”
“It is, my lady. Or rather, was.” The Clocker nodded. He lifted the black lens over his clock eye and revealed the clock face, and the fact that it no longer pulsed.
Dictionary noted that the blue of the Clocker’s eye was exactly the same blue as the embellishments on the gold clothes and wings of the Queen of Time.
“Believe curse was to keep eye on time until time stopped.” He pointed at the clock above her head. “Believe time now stopped.”
The Queen of Time looked hard at his eye and then smiled. The smile seemed to light up the gray-and-white street as she took a small step off the canopy and descended to the Clocker’s side in a delicate swirl of her wings.
“I believe it has, my old friend. And I am very happy that the one good thing that seems to have come of it is that you no longer toil under your curse. You have not failed in your duty.”
He smiled and bobbed his head in embarrassment.
“I, on the other hand, seem to have failed in mine,” she went on, face darkening as her head bowed in something like shame.
Dictionary found the sight suddenly unbearable, and pushed off his lamppost.
“No, dear lady, no indeed . . . We are in the grip of unparalleled and unanticipated circumstance, and one cannot be blamed for that.”
“Yet I am the Queen of Time, and time is out of joint,” she sighed. “And if I am queen of a broken thing, then it is my job to mend it. Otherwise I am a fair-weather queen, am I not? A mere ornament. My duty is to mind the Clock of the World here above me.”
She looked up at the golden globe set above her gilded plinth.
“I sense a great disruption in the east, but have been loath to leave the clock unattended in case time should restart in my absence, and for fear that some of the taints I have observed flying toward the City should return and interfere with it.”
“That would not be good,” concurred the Clocker.
“Indeed not,” she said. “You have always understood time as I do. As I have watched it, you have monitored its unbroken passage through the ticking watch mills of the city’s clockwork. Though I must admit there is a part of me that fears what I may find in the east, and I wonder if I make too much of my guardianship of the clock in order to excuse a reluctance to go and confront it out of cowardice.”
“Nonsense!” erupted Dictionary. “I’ve never seen anything or anyone less possessed of the cowardly vices. Why the very—”
Clocker interrupted him. “Not coward. Prudent. We also have seen taints flying east. Fault mine. Should have gone east myself, reported back to you. Delay intolerable, cowardice mine. Apologies. Will go immediately.”
“But you are no longer cursed to watch time. . . .” began the Queen.
“Am aware time out of joint is fatal to all of us here in end. Shall report back.” He turned and started to head off toward Oxford Circus.
“No,” said the Queen, in a harder voice. “You shall stay and watch the Clock of the World, for if time starts and the clock does not run fast to catch it up again, it will be a disruption as great as the present one afflicting us.”
“But . . .” he said.
“No.
No buts, my friend. My wings will get me there faster, and if there is anything to be done, it’s better it’s done without delay. You can aid me by watching the clock.”
The Clocker looked at Dictionary and then nodded, accepting the rightness of her words.
“If I may,” said the Queen. She put her arms around the Clocker and launched into the air with a mighty downbeat of her wings. She flew up to the canopy and placed him on it next to two reclining maidens, who smiled at him.
“They do not talk.” She smiled. “They are the silent witnesses to time’s passage. But they have sharp eyes.”
And with that she lofted into the sky and flapped east. Somewhere ahead of her, there was a low rumble like distant thunder. She didn’t falter, but flew toward the noise in a straight line, disappearing quickly from view over the snow-topped roofs of the buildings on the far side of the street.
“Clocker,” said a gruff voice from below. “I have a grave foreboding about this. I like it not a jot or a tittle that the lady goes into harm’s way unescorted.”
“Agree. But in press of circumstance, sometimes all ways forward perilous,” said the Clocker. “Lady knows time like no other.”
“Mayhap you’re correct,” snorted Dictionary. “But she knows nothing of a martial or self-defensive nature, and unless I misguess our situation, some power with dark intent has cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war.”
Another far-off rumble of thunder broke over the buildings toward the City.
“Thunder in the snow, Clocker. A never-heard-of thing. It bodes ill.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Wrong Question
The rumbling squabble of the crowd dropped away as all eyes turned to look at George and the Sphinx.
“What was the right question?” shouted a voice from the back of the crowd.
“Couldn’t hear,” answered another. “But the boy asked it.”
“What did you ask, boy?” bellowed the first voice.
“He asked what HE could do about it,” rumbled a new yet familiar voice from behind them, a voice with a deep purring undertone.
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