Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  The other Sphinx walked across the street, her tail swaying lazily as she clove a path straight through the crowd of spits. A thin covering of hoarfrost had turned her normally dark bronze body silvery gray, one effect of which was that the shrapnel holes in its side stood out more obviously than before.

  George felt Edie step closer to him. “That’s the nasty one,” she breathed quietly.

  The silvery Sphinx looked at her sharply, as if she could hear everything she said.

  The bronze Sphinx stood and took a step forward. “And where have you been, sister?”

  “I have been where I have been and seen what I have seen,” murmured the other.

  “You answered the call.”

  “I heard the call as you did. I did not answer it. I went to see what made it. I went to see how the balance has shifted. I went to see the thing that has come.”

  “And why was that?” said the Gunner. George noticed that his hand rested very casually on the holster he kept under his cape. And when he saw that, he noted several of the other soldier spits were responding to slight movements of the Officer’s head and casually moving around the silvery Sphinx with their weapons ready.

  “Because a cat may look at a king.” The Sphinx smiled. And for the first time, George noticed that the Sphinxes’ human heads were only human on the outside: inside their mouths the sharp incisors and fangs were much more in keeping with their lion bodies. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed it before because the Sphinxes hadn’t done much grinning, only enigmatic smiling with their mouths closed.

  “What’s it got to smile about?” whispered Edie, as if she could read his thoughts.

  “Perhaps you like this new ‘king’ that you have seen,” said the bronze Sphinx at their side. “Perhaps this new power appeals to your . . . anger.”

  The other Sphinx shook its head slowly. “My anger is at men and what they have done to me, the holes they have blown in my perfect body, the contempt with which they walk past us day in and day out without realizing our ancient place in their history and their lives. And as you see, there are no men here, none anywhere in the city. Just these children. Not men at all.”

  Edie started to say something, then appeared to bite her tongue as she thought better of it.

  The Sphinx raised an eyebrow at her and smoothly continued. “I went into the City because I was curious.”

  “Yeah well, curiosity and cats ain’t a great combination, are they?” said the Gunner.

  The creature’s face turned on him, the smile thinning out into a narrow line of icy malice.

  “It is hardly time for clever word games, Gunner. I would have thought you would all have wanted to know what the night held and what manner of things have happened in the City.”

  She shrugged past him, stepping back onto her plinth. She stretched and lay down, as if unconcerned by the crowd staring at her.

  “What did you see then, sister?”

  She opened one eye, yawned, and closed it again. She spoke sleepily, as if what she was describing was obvious, as if having to remember and then explain it was slightly annoying and beneath her dignity.

  “I saw all the taints flocking to a great high tower in the east. I saw a new darkness atop that tower, a power that has taken an icy shape and brought this snow to fill the city, and I heard its call, as you did. I saw the great citadel in the sky it has made for itself, ringed by flying taints at the top, guarded at its foot by a horde of walking taints that could swallow this gathering in a heartbeat. I saw the London Stone cracked open, and I saw the old darkness walking again. I have seen statues shattered and destroyed in the City, spits that shall not walk again unless this war is won by turn o’day.”

  “What war?” said George.

  The Sphinx yawned again. “The war that we have always avoided. The war we have always feared. The war between the spits and the taints.”

  Her eyes snapped open, and George found himself caught in their very awake, very unsleepy gaze, like a deer in the headlights.

  “The war YOU started,” she said with icy satisfaction.

  George actually stepped half a pace back and gasped as the words hit him like a gut punch.

  “He didn’t start this,” exploded Edie, from George’s side. “Spits and taints have always been fighting. We’ve seen that, you know that. . . .”

  “Spits and taints have always been hostile to each other, but it has been a balanced hostility. The boy has thrown the balance off.”

  “Rubbish,” said the Gunner. “You just said it’s this new darkness that’s come here and got things stirred up!”

  “Would the dark power have come here had the boy not used his making hand to mar, to break, the carving at the museum? Make no mistake, it is his fault.”

  George felt a kind of growing vertigo as all the spits looked at him, their eyes filling with the realization of the truth that had been slowly metabolizing inside him all morning.

  Of course he was to blame.

  “That’s a load of tosh,” said the Gunner decisively. “It ain’t his fault. He didn’t know he was a maker; he still don’t really know what it means, and he can’t be guilty if he didn’t know what he was doing.”

  “And he’s done more than any of you to try and make it right!” exclaimed Edie. “So don’t look at him like that, or I’ll come down there and glint every last one of you!”

  “The trouble is,” said the silvery Sphinx, with a calm smile, “that everything he has done to make it right led to the moment the door between the outer darkness and this world was opened, and the new power got in.”

  “No,” said Edie.

  “Yes,” said George, stepping up to the silvery Sphinx. “You’re right. So what do I do about it?”

  “Is that your question?” she purred in a familiar way that made all the hairs on George’s body feel like they’d just been stroked in the wrong direction.

  “Careful,” said the Gunner.

  George thought if there was a better question, he didn’t have it in his head.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s my question.”

  “Then this,” murmured the Sphinx, hiding her cat’s teeth behind a tight-lipped half-smile, “is my riddle.”

  “Sister,” said the other Sphinx flatly.

  “It is our way. For the important questions, an answer for a riddle.”

  “Right, and a riddle for an answer often as not,” said the Gunner.

  “It’s not time for games, is it?” interrupted George, looking up into the Sphinx’s eyes. “You said it. I’ll answer your riddle, but only if you give me a straight answer.”

  “Straight as a die. Straight as an arrow. Straight as the road from cradle to grave,” it replied. “The riddle is—”

  The other Sphinx cut in before she could begin.

  “I am not amused when confused with a stony stare,

  With a lifeless head but lively hair.

  Wise men twist their faces from me,

  Or stand frozen in their track.

  My nemesis outfaced me by the turning

  of his back.”

  “Too easy,” hissed the icy Sphinx. “Too, too easy.”

  “It doesn’t have to be hard,” said her sister. “It just has to be a riddle.”

  They stared angrily at each other. The crowd of spits began to rumble and discuss the riddle among themselves. George looked at Edie, who returned the look expectantly.

  “You did it last time,” she said encouragingly.

  He tried to slow his mind. He had done it last time, but somehow the stakes hadn’t been as high. Or maybe they had, but he just hadn’t known enough to be as panicked as he felt inside.

  “Calm down,” said the Gunner, leaning in. “And breathe slower.”

  Only then did he realize he had started to hyperventilate. He closed his eyes. Last time he had thought of his dad and the crosswords he had loved to waste time poring over with a stub of pencil. He thought of how he had explained the way things worked in cr
yptic clues.

  This riddle was a cryptic clue, full of hooks and mine-fields, he was sure: words that didn’t mean what you thought they meant, hidden in clues that had other clues in them. Or words that meant two things at once. And no wasted words, not in the clues. All there for a reason. He thought about what the Sphinx had said. Not amused, he thought, and blurted the first thought that came to his head.

  “Victoria. Queen Victoria.”

  She had not been amused. She was famous for it. He looked at the Sphinxes.

  “Is that your answer?” said the icy one.

  “No,” said George. He didn’t know why, but he knew he’d spoken too fast and hadn’t checked it with the rest of the clue. He closed his eyes and let the words wash through his mind again, seeing which ones flashed extra bits of meaning, like someone panning for gold. Not amused . . . confused . . . stony stare. Why was everything about stones? Well, he supposed it had to be. Lifeless . . . lively hair? What was that about? Why talk about lively hair? It was an odd thing to say.

  “He answered Victoria,” hissed the icy Sphinx. “He got it wrong.”

  “Shhh,” hissed back her sister. “He said that wasn’t the answer.”

  Maybe it was the hissing, but something unlocked in George’s head and he saw the answer.

  “Snakes,” he said.

  “What?” said Edie.

  He opened his eyes. Even though he hadn’t said the answer, he could see the icy Sphinx’s eyes cloud with disappointment, and he knew she knew that he had it now.

  “Lively hair . . . snakes, who had snakes for hair?”

  “I don’t know,” said Edie. “Oh. Stony stare, wossname . . .”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Not amused but confused.”

  George felt a kind of savage elation. Often things in riddles didn’t mean what they said, but sometimes they meant exactly what they said and just looked like they meant something else. And in this case “lifeless head” meant exactly what it said.

  “Have you got it or haven’t you?” asked the Gunner. “Because you might as well be talking Greek, far as I’m concerned.”

  “Bang on the money,” said George triumphantly, silently thanking his dad for reading him the Greek myths when he was a little kid. “Greek it is. Confuse ‘amused,’ meaning jumble up the letters in ‘amused,’ and you get what?”

  “A headache?” said the Gunner.

  “Medusa,” said Edie.

  “Medusa: hair made of living snakes, turn you to stone with her stare. Had her head cut clean off by the Greek hero Perseus, and carried away in a bag,” finished George, grinning at the Sphinxes. One turned away in disgust, but the kind one nodded calmly.

  “You are right. It’s a good answer.” And here the Sphinx did something strange. She leaned low and spoke quietly. “And you’d do well not to forget it.”

  “Okay,” said George, baffled again. The Sphinx meant something, but he had no idea what.

  “Your question was what you can do,” continued the Sphinx. “Am I right?”

  George nodded. The Sphinx’s eyes rolled back a little, and she answered in a kind of singsong monotone that George remembered from the first time she had answered his question, what seemed a lifetime ago.

  “There are two things to do, and by you they must be done, and in this order. First, the old darkness must be defeated and penned back into the Stone from which it came. Only you can do this, for only a maker can mend the rent in the Stone through which it escaped. Only once the old darkness is vanquished can you have a chance of fighting the Ice Devil back into the black mirrors and putting time back in joint.”

  “How can we fight an Ice Devil?” said George, hopelessness suddenly rising around him like a cold dark tide.

  “Take the way of the dragon, and by the Knight of Wood, who lies all alone, you may find kin you can call your own. Find your kin, and within the hour the dead stone’s tongue will be in your power,” intoned the Sphinx.

  “That’s it? I don’t understand. What then?” asked George.

  “You ask the dead stone.” The Sphinx shrugged as if it were obvious.

  “What stone?” exploded George, tipped over the edge by the catlike disinterest. “What dead stone? There’s always a stone!”

  “As there is always a George, and there is always a dragon,” purred the Sphinx. “That is how the world and all that is stays in balance. The dead stone is a Stone Corpse. And now I think I have given more than enough answers.”

  “Wait, what’s the black mirror?” he gabbled desperately, beginning to lose the thread in all this talk of Ice Devils and darknesses and dead stones and black mirrors.

  “I know about the black mirror,” said Edie. “I just don’t know where it is.”

  “Great . . .” said George. And then a bigger thought hit him and put the next question he was going to ask about the mirror clean out of his mind.

  “What if we put time back in joint first?” he blurted, the image of the Clocker and Dictionary pegging off through the hip-high snow to find the Queen of Time flashing into his mind’s eye. “What if the Queen of Time succeeds in restarting time?”

  “To attack the Ice Devil while its brother darkness joins forces with it is suicide. You must halve their power, and finishing your business with the old darkness must happen first.”

  “What do you mean ‘finish’?” started Edie. “He hasn’t . . .”

  “He chose the Hard Way,” said a light airy voice that came tinkling out of the sky above them.

  George looked up and saw a golden girl holding on to the sheer sides of Cleopatra’s Needle.

  “Ariel,” he said.

  “Hello, boy.” She smiled and dropped so delicately to the ground between him and Edie that she didn’t seem to disturb the snow as she landed.

  “Who’s she?” asked Edie, looking at him over a golden shoulder draped with a very filmy piece of equally gold cloth, seemingly held on to the golden girl’s body with nothing more than an invisible wind.

  “I am a minister of fate as surely as you are a glint,” said Ariel. “And the boy has unfinished business. He has a third and final duel to fight.”

  “Yeah,” said George, “but that’s with the Cnihtengild, not the old darkness that was in the London Stone. . . .”

  Ariel laughed. “They are now one and the same: the hollow knight is hollow no more. The darkness has taken him. He rides the Night Mare, and the duel that must be fought—the duel neither on land nor water—must be resolved first. Darkness has a prior claim on you, a claim underwritten and guaranteed by fate. And even you, boy, even a maker cannot mis-make the fabric that fate has woven around you.”

  George was painfully aware that every spit around the Needle was looking at him.

  “Okay.” He swallowed and looked back at the icy Sphinx. “But you’re saying that if the Queen of Time tries to restart time without the old darkness being dealt with . . .”

  “She will fail. She will die.”

  Edie looked at George. At the Gunner. At the Queen.

  “But they’ve already gone to try. . . .” she said.

  “Then it’s a suicide mission,” interjected the bronze Sphinx. “You must stop them.”

  “But we can’t get to them in time,” said the Gunner. “Not pushing through this bloody snow.”

  George looked at Spout, who was perched on the railing across the street, being looked at with great suspicion by the soldiers guarding the outer ring.

  “I can,” George said.

  “But you have a duel to fight, boy,” exclaimed Ariel, as if he’d suggested something shockingly improper.

  “If the people who can start time again are killed because they try before I’ve fought that duel, then it’s pointless anyway, isn’t it?” he snapped. Anger got him through the wave of fear that was threatening to rise up and engulf him.

  “I’ll stop them jumping the gun, then I’ll get to the bloody duel.”

  “But how can you get there in time?” ask
ed Edie.

  George looked at Ariel, remembering his experience in the London sky with her. His stomach rebelled at the memory, but it was the memory that gave him the idea he was now committed to.

  “I can fly there,” he said.

  “I will not help you, boy. I cannot help you avoid or delay your fate,” said Ariel.

  “I know,” he said grimly. He turned to Edie and the Gunner and the Queen. “You’ve got one more riddle and one more question with the other Sphinx. See if you can find out how to put the Ice Devil back in his box. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He stuck two fingers in his mouth and blew hard, a piercing whistle that he had almost forgotten he knew how to do. His dad had taught him, one long summer’s evening, sitting in a field watching pigeons flock as they headed to their roosts.

  Spout lofted off the bridge above them. Soldiers raised their weapons.

  “He’s with me!” shouted George. “He’s going to fly me to warn the others.”

  Spout swooped low over the heads of the assembled spits. He neatly grabbed George’s outstretched hand and swung him up onto his back as he punched air beneath his wide stone wings, climbing into the lowering sky above.

  “He’s got guts, the boy,” said the Gunner.

  “Yes,” said the Queen, watching George disappearing over the rooftops. “The kind that get you killed.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Dogfight

  The last time George had flown with Spout, he had been gripped in the gargoyle’s talons, both the right and the wrong way up. Even being held the right way up had been uncomfortable, so this time George found their new way of flying infinitely more comfortable and even exhilarating. The only discomfort came from the ridges along Spout’s spine, but as long as he sat between them and didn’t slip, he was fine. Being perched between the two stolidly flapping wings, with an unobstructed forward view over the creature’s head, gave him a feeling of the power and majesty of flight itself.

  Spout still flew as if every next beat of his wings might suddenly fail to defeat the insistent tug of gravity, jerking himself through the sky by main force rather than natural aerodynamics, but George had enough time and confidence to feel the pleasure both of being airborne and of the unusual view of the city that it gave him: white shrouded everything as far as the eye could see, and the rounded cornices of snow on all the roof edges softened the hard lines of the buildings, making everything less regular and ordered than it normally was. London was starting to look more and more like a fairy tale. The white roads were largely trackless and bumped by the snow-laden shapes of cars that were now well buried up to the door handles. Here and there were footprints in the snow, made, he guessed, by statues walking toward the Sphinxes, but mostly the narrow alleys and broad streets unfolding below him were like unblemished pages in a new book.