He was enjoying the view when the revealed vista of a road stretching east took his eye. When he saw what was at the end of it, all that pleasure and enjoyment died at once.
It was the ice murk. The great dark wall of mist rose sheer from the ground to hundreds of feet above the rooftops. It was a shock to see its looming presence overhanging the clean snow like a stain. At its very edge a white stone steeple stood out in stark contrast to the turbid gloom roiling slowly behind it. And then it was swallowed. The murk was moving slowly.
He’d seen old slow-motion footage at school of the mushroom clouds of atomic explosions, and this reminded him of that, not just because the snow and the murk had the monotone look of those ancient black-and-white films, but because those explosions had carried with them a deep and indefinable air of threat and menace, made all the worse by the slowness with which they unfolded their deadly bloom. The ice murk had the same air of threat to it.
“Gack!” screeched Spout. “Gainger, Eigengang, gag gainger.”
“Yes,” said George. “I see it. Bad danger, and lots of it.”
He wondered whether the murk would get to Cleopatra’s Needle before he could get back and alert the spits, and was trying to work out the geography of London over in that direction, when they were attacked.
Something leaped up at them from below and behind, erupting from the snow covering a roof beneath. It hit Spout like a snarling missile, and for the first couple of seconds it was all George could do not to fall off.
He had a fast fuzzy impression of a savage dog-faced gargoyle trying to rip out Spout’s throat in a series of snapping bites, and then Spout dipped in the air, unable to carry the weight of George and the dog-gargoyle at the same time. Spout kicked at the attacker with his foot-talon, and the dog yelped in pain and fell off, snarling with renewed anger as it twisted and turned around on itself in midair, trying to get its wings in the right shape to curb and control its downward plummet.
Spout pulled them higher in the sky, panting as he did so. George was able to let go with one hand and get a grip on the hammer that had hung uselessly from his wrist throughout the short aerial tussle. He looked behind them and saw that the dog-gargoyle was on their tail, flying much faster, gaining on them.
“Left!” shouted George as the creature snarled in for another attack, snapping at Spout’s trailing leg.
“Gack?” squawked Spout, to whom left and right were clearly new concepts.
“This way!” yelled George, reaching out and yanking the gargoyle’s ear to the left.
Spout angled in the air and broke left, just in time to avoid the dog, who flew under them, fangs clashing on nothing but cold air.
“Good,” shouted George. “That was left.”
He tugged the ear the other way.
“This is right! Go right!”
Spout followed his lead, and the dog rocketed past them again, missing his target but just clipping Spout’s wing. It had a dangerously fast turn of speed, and was much nimbler in the air than the cat-gargoyle. George wondered if the intense ferocity of its attacks had something to do with the dog’s natural hatred of cats, but before the thought had time to really take root, the dog had found another lurching hairpin bend in the clear sky and was dropping on them. This time George saw that the dog had slowed its attack, making it less likely to be fooled by a sudden jink from side to side.
In fact this attack was disconcertingly leisurely, as the dog calmly matched its speed to Spout’s and simply edged closer, easily following the bobbing and weaving of its more heavily laden adversary.
As it closed the gap in the air between them with a horrible inevitability, George could see its sides heaving for breath, and the tongue lolling out of the great fanged mouth. It was covered in a rime of frost, so that the rough stone it was made of had a white sheen on top of it. He could also see the intensity in its eyes and, worse than that, he was pretty sure that it was now not looking at Spout, but at him.
As if to confirm his fears, the dog chose that moment to lunge for him. George just had time to duck as the gnashing teeth passed overhead, and then the world tipped and lurched as the dog hit Spout’s wing instead, in a crunching collision of stone on stone. The impact spun Spout on his axis, so his wingtips were pointing straight up at the sky and down at the ground as the skyline pitched from horizontal to vertical in a gut-wrenching roll that threatened to capsize them.
George threw his weight against the direction of the roll, desperately trying to stop them from tipping over completely, and Spout grunted explosively as he clawed with one wing only, grabbing air on the other side and forcing them the right way up. It would have worked if the dog-gargoyle had not been able to turn so sharply at the end of each of his attacks. It stood on one wingtip, pirouetted gracefully, then hurtled back in, this time ignoring George and aiming for the much bigger target of Spout’s flailing wing. It didn’t snarl or try to bite; it just hit the wing and put all its inbound weight into canceling Spout’s attempts to right himself.
It hit him so hard that Spout spun like a propeller, once, twice, nearly three times around. The world and the sky above it cartwheeled past George’s eyes; all he could do was hold on.
As Spout nearly went over for the third time, George got his grip sorted out well enough that he was able to try to counter the spin by once more throwing himself in the opposite direction. It wouldn’t have worked anyway, because his weight was so much lighter than the spinning mass of stone, but what it did was worse than failure.
By leaning out from the body of the cat-gargoyle, he exposed himself.
The dog barked victoriously, then swooped in and neatly picked him off Spout’s back with a savage snap of its jaws.
George had time to feel the impact on his upper arm, a deep crushing sensation just below his armpit, and then he could see Spout dropping away below him as the dog soared higher into the sky, growling in victory.
The pressure where the dog had him in its jaws was immense. It got worse as it started shaking him like a terrier attacking a rat. He stared in horror at his arm, knowing that it could not withstand the stone fangs, and was about to be torn off at the armpit. He scrabbled for the hammer on the strap around his other wrist, trying with a last and desperate reach of his flailing fingertips to get a grip on the one weapon that might save him; but before his hand could find the wooden handle, he heard the sickening crunch on his arm and knew that the dog had bitten through the bone.
The dog stopped shaking him, and he had a glimpse of his arm in its mouth, and then the dog yelped and grabbed him with a talon as it shook its head and spat something out. For a moment George couldn’t work out what it was, and then he saw the gap in the dog’s teeth and realized that the tiny gray nub of stone falling to the ground far below was one of the dog’s front fangs.
The crunch he had heard had been the tooth breaking, not his arm being shorn off.
He stared at his bicep, and through the shredded sleeve saw grazed skin and the thing that had broken the tooth: the dog had bitten down on the vein of stone twining up from his wrist, and the stone vein had saved his arm, and probably his life.
Relief seemed to add another two inches to his fingertips, because in the moment that he realized he was not going to die yet, he found the hammer hanging off his wrist, clenched his fist around it, and brought it up in a flailing roundhouse blow that ended in a bone-shaking thwack on the dog’s chest bone. It woofed out a lungful of air, winded by the impact. As it lowered its head, trying to hunch itself over and get a next breath that wouldn’t come, George struck again. Right at the limit of his swing he managed to reach high enough to land the heavy steel hammerhead just off center in the middle of the gargoyle’s forehead.
Stone split and a large chunk of the monstrous head sheared clean off and tumbled away, ear-over-eye toward the deserted white streets below. George looked at the dog-gargoyle’s head and found he was looking at a flat plane of newly exposed stone, dark in contrast to the ice ski
n that covered the rest of the creature. Then the head turned, and he saw he had shattered the head at an angle, leaving one eye and one ear—and all the jaw— looking at him in shock.
George cocked his arm for another blow. As if the pain and injury had hit it in a shocked delay, the dog suddenly yelped and cowered away from him. It flung him off, out into the clean empty gulf of air, tucked a spiked tail between its legs, and flew away as fast as it could, leaving nothing but a high keening whine of enraged pain trailing behind it.
But George saw none of this, and if he had, he wouldn’t have had the time for any kind of satisfaction. He was too busy falling earthward with a velocity that left his stomach far behind.
He didn’t even have time to wonder what sort of mark he was going to leave in the clean white expanse of snow rushing up to meet him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Edie’s Question
All the spits seemed to be looking at the rooftop over which George and Spout had just disappeared. Edie was the first to look away. The truth is she was scanning the sky for the Raven. She didn’t find it. Instead she found the steady gaze of the icy Sphinx.
The spits around her erupted into more talking and questions, and the sound of old arguments being rekindled left Edie in a strange cone of silence, alone with the great creature.
“You have a question so big that keeping it within makes you feel like you will split and burst, is it not so, child?”
Edie stopped herself from reacting reflexively to the indignity of being called “child,” and nodded.
“But it’s not mine to ask,” she said. The Sphinx was right. The question growing and growing inside her was so big that she had to keep a grip just so that she didn’t scream it out all the time.
“Why not ask?” said the Sphinx, so low that none of the organized spits could hear it. “It would be easy to ask. It would be easy to answer. . . .”
“Yeah” said Edie. “But you know what?” She lowered her voice and stood her ground, so low that the icy Sphinx had to bend close to hear her. “I don’t trust you, not any more than I did last time. In fact, a lot less. There’s an Ice Devil out there, calling taints to it, and you’ve been gone all night. And now you’re back, covered in ice. . . .”
“Ice is just ice. It’s very cold,” purred the Sphinx, dangerously quiet.
“Right,” said Edie. “But your sister isn’t covered in ice, and I think you want me to ask my question so that the other question, the question about how to defeat the Ice Devil gets unanswered. At least until tomorrow, when it’ll be too late.”
The icy Sphinx hissed quietly at her, a strangely threatening sound at the back of its gullet. Edie stood her ground.
“I remember your rules, see?” she said. “One question each a day. And you’re trying to make me waste the one we’ve got left.”
“Why would I do that?” breathed the Sphinx.
“Dunno. Maybe you answered the call. Maybe the cat looked at the king and found something it liked. Maybe the darkness sent you back as a spy, to give bad advice or to lie or something. . . .”
The snarl that greeted this was loud enough to stop the talking all around them.
“I cannot lie,” seethed the Sphinx. “And I call no man king!”
Edie felt a firm hand grip her shoulder. Without looking she knew it was the Queen.
“What’s happening, child?” she said. Edie took strength from the statue at her back and jutted her chin at the Sphinx.
“Trick answers,” she said, “seeing as how this Ice Devil isn’t a man.”
In the microscopic pause that followed, Edie saw the Sphinx’s eye twitch, and she knew she had just stopped herself from blinking, and she knew she had touched a raw nerve and the creature was trying not to show it. She could feel the tension building inside the elephant-size bronze body standing over her.
“Sister?” rumbled the other Sphinx over Edie’s shoulder.
The four things that happened next happened so fast that for Edie they appeared to be simultaneous.
The icy Sphinx smiled.
And then lashed out a giant paw at Edie with unimaginable speed.
The Queen’s hand ripped her out of the way, so nearly too late that the Sphinx’s claw caught in the welt of Edie’s boot and tore it clean off her foot.
And the other Sphinx pounced.
The good Sphinx hit the bad one with an impact that all the spits felt through the soles of their boots. It was like two lorries colliding head on, except the moment after the impact the difference immediately became apparent, since colliding lorries don’t then bite and tear at one another like two great cats locked into a life-or-death fight.
The Sphinxes were of course perfectly matched, and each gave as good as she got as they tumbled and rolled off the plinth and across the road in a yowling ball of bronze fury that sent spits leaping out of the way. They seemed to have latched on to each other’s throats as one tried to disembowel the other with great tearing movements of the hind paws. It was an ugly and brutal fight as they rolled under the wide railway bridge, kicking up clouds of snow.
They hit one of the solid bridge supports with such an impact that they broke apart for an instant. Snow avalanched off the bridge above them, creating a curtain of whiteness that almost immediately exploded outward as the icy Sphinx leaped through and knocked the other onto her back. She pressed forward her advantage by jumping onto the prone body and pinning its neck to the ground with one paw, raising the other in preparation for a wicked slash across the exposed throat.
At that moment the raised paw sprouted a lance straight through its middle as the Queen threw hard and straight from the edge of the watching crowd.
The Sphinx screeched in pain and turned on her new assailant, which gave her sister just enough time to roll out from under her grip.
There was a sudden clatter of metal on metal as rifles and pistols were cocked and aimed at the icy Sphinx, but before the first shot could be fired, the good Sphinx had thrown herself in front of her.
“NO,” she roared, so loud that the top layer of snow seemed to be blown off the ground toward her would-be rescuers. “This is between me and her, and no others!”
Behind her the icy Sphinx gripped the lance with her teeth and pulled it out of her paw, spitting it contemptuously back at the Queen. She looked at her sister.
“Come with me,” she panted. “The darknesses will win.”
“Maybe,” said the other hoarsely. “But that is not enough reason not to fight them.”
“Spoken like a human,” hissed her sister. “You always were too much with people and their paltry hopes and fears.”
“I find there is much to be said for hope,” replied the other simply.
“There is only one thing to be said about it.” The icy Sphinx raised her head and looked over the other’s shoulder directly at Edie. “Are you listening, glint? Are you thinking of your question? Because yes, what you hope for is true . . . but hope seduces with a silver tongue, double-edged like a dagger that cuts both ways.”
And with that the great cat body suddenly flexed and sprang right over her sister’s head and neatly clawed its way up and over onto the railway bridge, and before anyone could do anything about it, it was gone.
“What question were you going to ask?” said the Queen quietly.
“Come on,” said Edie, holding out her mother’s heart stone. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? I want to know if my mum’s alive and where I can find her. Only now’s not the time, not if we’ve just got one more question and a whole world to save, not to mention putting time back in joint or whatever.”
She knew that what she was saying was the right thing to say, but she ached to ask the question anyway. It was almost worth the world to her.
The Sphinx walked stiffly over to her and looked down. “You do not need to ask the question, child, or answer any riddle: the answer is within you.”
“Is it?” said Edie bitterly. “Jolly good. That’s the
sort of answer you get in crappy kung fu films. I’ll just sit down and wait for enlightenment, shall I? Or maybe do some chanting. . . .”
The Sphinx opened her mouth to reply, then shrugged and walked on, her eyes becoming blank and unreachable as she curled back up on her plinth and looked at them and the spits beyond.
“Do what you will, my answer stands. What is the question you would ask?” she said wearily, examining a long jagged gash in her side, scraped there by her sister.
Edie looked at the Gunner. The Gunner spoke. “Where do we find this black mirror to banish the Ice Devil through?”
The Sphinx took a deep breath and looked away from them, over their heads.
“The mirror sleeps on a bed neither here nor there,
Not beneath the ground, nor under the air,
It cannot be seen, not by you or by me,
But can be found where the boy felt it to be.”
There was a silence as everyone absorbed what had been said.
“Is that the riddle or the answer?” said Edie, exhausted and wishing George were there to put his mind to the conundrum.
“It is both,” said the Sphinx, and closed her eyes. “Now, I am tired and must rest before I go hunt my sister.”
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