Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  Neither barber nor customer could see Edie, or the great black bird that flew in ahead of her and perched on the back of the free chair. Edie sat in the chair, unnoticed. She looked into the mirror and saw that it was doubled to infinity in a matching mirror on the wall behind her, the blue disinfectant and the red transistor gently arcing away in ever decreasing versions of themselves like a cheery two-tone rainbow.

  The Raven flew over her head and into the mirror, and Edie stood up on the footrest of the barber’s chair, reaching out after it. As she followed the bird, the last thing she noticed was a smooth-voiced man singing out of the red radio about how much he loved the sound of breaking glass . . . especially when he was lonely.

  Edie felt lonely as she fell into the mirror.

  Lonely.

  Sad.

  And suddenly and inexplicably doomed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Mile Zero

  George and Spout flew fast and low as they made their way back to the Embankment. In the main they flew below roof level, only popping above when the street they were flying along went too far in the wrong direction and they needed to take a shortcut.

  George was flying like this because he didn’t want to draw the attention of any new spits to their whereabouts, and Spout seemed happy to let him steer. George could see he was tired by his two fights.

  “You’re doing well,” he said, gently slapping his neck.

  “Gack,” said Spout, tipping sharply as he swooped out of the bottom of Leicester Square, heading for Charing Cross and the Embankment beyond. George caught sight of something moving fast across the snow, heading north past the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. He craned around to look backward, and was relieved to see it was no taint, but one of the Queen’s daughters. He was just starting to wonder what she was doing when Spout flared his wings and seemed to stop dead in midair, almost standing on his tail.

  “Genny gits, Eigengang!”

  George snapped his head around and saw the horde now pouring into the center of Trafalgar Square.

  “Wow,” he breathed. “Yeah. That’s many spits, all right.”

  The Queen and the Officer were easy to see, even in the crowd, because firstly they were directing people here and there, and secondly, there were several horses but only one chariot. But no Edie that he could see.

  “Down, Spout,” he said.

  The cat-gargoyle headed for the chariot without any need for George to steer him. As he dropped smoothly and flew along the lower level of the square, between the snow-filled fountains, George scissored one leg over his neck and jumped off in a running dismount. He lurched sideways, pulled off balance by an unnatural weight on his right side. The twinge of pain in his shoulder reminded him that his arm was now stone. He looked down at his hand and shuddered at the sight. Only the two fingers next to his thumb were still him. The limestone had spread over the rest. He jammed his hand in his pocket and decided to think about it later.

  “Did you stop her?” said the Officer as he ran up.

  “No,” said George. “Where’s Edie?”

  And while the square filled up around them, as spits of all shapes and sizes took up defensive positions, using the balustrades and raised pools and walls as cover, the Queen told George what the Sphinx had said about the black mirror, about how it was in a bed not a bed, someplace where he had felt it to be, and then how they had failed to keep an eye on Edie. The news of her disappearance rocked him, and to hide how shaken he was, he bought time by telling them how he was unable to stop the Queen of Time from flying to her doom. But even as he spoke, at the back of his mind an insistent and increasingly loud little voice kept telling him that Edie having disappeared was very, very bad news indeed.

  As they talked, Spout became tired of being jostled and given funny looks by the spits bustling around him, and flapped up onto a tall, empty plinth on the northwest end of the square. From this raised viewpoint he watched the spits taking up positions all around him.

  “Oi, puss,” said a voice from below. Spout looked down and saw the four soldiers of the Euston Mob looking up at him. The one called East was grinning up at him.

  “You got a nice view up there on that empty plinth, have you? Good field of fire and all.”

  Spout said, “Gack,” uncertainly.

  “Jolly good.” East grinned, and held up a hand. “Give us a hand up, eh?”

  As Spout reached his wing talons down and helped each of the four soldiers in turn, there was the sound of a throat being cleared behind George.

  He turned to see the armored king on his horse, looking a little apologetic.

  “Not now, Lionheart!” hissed the Queen.

  “This isn’t a great beginning, is it?” said George, staring pointedly at her. “You lose Edie, and the Queen of Time is missing.”

  “The girl lost herself. . . .” began the Queen.

  “That’s just not good enough!” snapped George, finally giving in to the worried voice wheedling away in the back of his head. “And you’re the last person I’d expect to be making excuses. It was you who took me aside and who told me that she was especially vulnerable now. It was you who told me to keep a special eye on her. And the moment my back’s turned, it was YOU who lost her! Now we need to stop messing up like this and move fast. . . .”

  The Queen’s eyes flashed in anger at being spoken to so bluntly. “How dare you—” she began.

  George shut her up by ripping open his jacket and showing the stone arm and the almost stone hand. She swallowed her anger and threw a worried look at the Officer.

  “Like this,” George said flatly, looking between the Queen and the Officer. “I don’t know how long until the taints attack this lot, but I’m running out of time. I need to find this Knight of the Wood.”

  “Ahem,” came the Lionheart’s voice from behind him once more. George shrugged his coat back on, quickly hiding his shoulder.

  “Not now!” barked the Queen, waving the Lionheart away and turning back to George. “Does the clue about the mirror mean anything to you?”

  “No. The mirror may ‘sleep on a bed neither here nor there,’ but I’ve got no clue where that may be,” he admitted, looking across the square. “Spout!”

  They looked at him as Spout dropped off the empty plinth and glided toward them.

  “What?” said the Queen.

  “Spout can cover more ground from the sky, looking for Edie,” said George.

  And as the gargoyle landed next to one of the great lions at the foot of the column, George ran over and told him what he wanted him to do.

  “Gint,” said Spout. “Gind gint?”

  “Yes,” said George. “Find glint. Find Edie.”

  “Gogay,” said Spout, and launched into the air with a racketing bustle of stone wings, punching at the air and sweeping it past him as he headed for the rooftops.

  “Look,” said a voice from behind George.

  He turned to see the Lionheart leaning down off his horse.

  “Before that harridan gets going and tries to shut me up again. I keep an eye on all the gentlemen in armor, and there’s a wooden knight in Southwark Cathedral.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so, you great booby?” snapped the Queen.

  The Lionheart rolled his eyes at George.

  The Queen whistled for her horses. As the chariot rolled up behind them, she turned to the Officer. “You seem to have this lot in some kind of control.”

  He nodded as she jumped on the back of her chariot and held out her hand.

  “Come, boy. To Southwark.”

  George jumped up behind her, and with a crack of the reins, they were racing downhill, through the snow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Gunner to Black Friar

  The Gunner could see several tracks as he jogged east along the Embankment. It wasn’t clear which direction most of them were going, and he supposed they had been made by spits heading toward the Sphinxes. He kept on going with his eyes on the
snow because he hoped one of them would turn out to be Edie’s feet going in the opposite direction. As he approached the traffic island at the end of Blackfriars Bridge, he was so deeply focused on trying to decipher the footprints and disentangle who they might belong to that he didn’t look up and notice the blank wall of the ice murk looming vertiginously above him.

  He started noticing one set of footprints that had a shorter distance between them than the others, and a sort of feathered drag mark going along with them. He was hoping it was Edie’s long black fur coat brushing the snow as she ran. And when he stopped and peered deep into the snow hole of one footprint he was elated to see it was definitely a small boot print at the bottom, and that it was heading away from the Sphinxes. He grinned and picked up speed.

  It was only when he looked up that the smile died and he hit the brakes. He was six feet away from the uncannily flat front edge of the ice murk, a sullen escarpment that soared three hundred sheer feet above his head. He tipped his helmet back and stared up at it.

  “Bloody hell.”

  He took a couple of paces back and looked down. Edie’s footprints—for he was sure now they were hers— led straight into the murk.

  He scratched his head. “Edie, girl. You’re in trouble now.”

  Then something caught his eye. Something was moving, about fifteen feet up the wall of icy cloud. Something round. Something whirling, like a propeller. As he looked closer he saw three golden numbers below it, just covered by the thinnest layer of murk.

  “One seven four,” he said. He realized what the whirling propeller was, and he knew what he was looking at. He looked along the wall of murk and saw where Edie’s footprints angled into it, and knew his hunch had been right. He squared his shoulders and stepped into the murk. If he was right, the door he was looking for couldn’t be so far away that he would get lost looking for it. Despite that, the moment the murk swallowed him, he was disoriented enough to stumble and have to reach out to stop himself from falling. He ended up on his knees, feeling blindly in front of himself.

  “Come on,” he said, and then he found a wall and crawled along it until his hands found a door. He pulled himself to his feet and twisted the doorknob, flinging the door open and stepping into the Black Friar’s pub.

  “Edie?” he said.

  “Close the door, you damn fool,” roared the Friar, kneeling in front of the mirrors, his hands trying to shield the candles that were sitting on the floor in front of him like an impromptu shrine.

  “Black. What are you up to?” said the Gunner, closing the door behind him. “The hands on that clock of yours outside, the one that never works, always five to seven, they’re whirling around like a bloody propeller. Got to be the only clock working in the city. . . .”

  “What do you want?” said the Friar, relighting a candle that had been blown out, and then scrubbing at the mirror with his hand.

  “I’m looking for the girl. Edie. The glint.”

  “She’s not ’ere!” said Little Tragedy, his face popping into view upside down from the top of one of the arches.

  “I saw her footprints,” growled the Gunner.

  “She’s in there,” said the Friar, pointing at the mirrors.

  “What do you mean, she’s in there?” said the Gunner dangerously.

  “The Raven took her to see her mother,” replied the Friar. The mirrors he was scrubbing at were becoming frosted with the intense cold brought on by the ice murk enveloping the building. Only at the bottom were they clear, where the heat from the candles was stopping the frost from riming them completely opaque.

  “Her mother’s dead,” replied the Gunner.

  “You saw the clock whirling,” said the Friar. “You know this is a Machine of Times and Places. She is not only there, the there where she is is not now, but then.”

  “That ruddy bird has taken her back in time?” said the Gunner incredulously.

  “He’s discharging an obligation.” The Friar shrugged.

  “I’ll discharge my bleeding pistol up his jacksie if that girl comes to any more harm on his account,” swore the Gunner.

  The Friar lit another candle.

  “What are you up to?” said the Gunner suspiciously.

  “If the mirrors frost up because of this freezing murk that is enshrouding the building, they will not find their way back here,” explained the Friar, moving the candles closer to the mirrors.

  “Well, can’t you get them back?” asked the Gunner, pointing to the concentric rings of the mosaic on the ceiling. “Can’t you control this thing?”

  “I would go in after them,” said the Friar, “but I cannot quite trust this imp to tend the candles. . . .”

  “Oooh!” squealed Tragedy. “That’s so unfair. I said sorry, and I never meant—”

  “SILENCE!” roared the Friar. He looked up at the Gunner. “Perhaps you could watch the candles while . . .”

  “No,” said the Gunner, hitching up his belt and pulling his pistol. “You watch. I’ll go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Club Death

  Edie and the Raven fell into a dark cavern, lit by a thousand points of light, which cascaded across the ceiling and walls from a giant glitter ball turning slowly on the ceiling. A heaving crowd of dancers bobbed and weaved on the dance floor as the rhythm of the music throbbed at more than a hundred and twenty beats per minute.

  Edie was about to follow the Raven when something clumped to the ground behind her with an impact like an anvil dropping out of the sky.

  She turned to see the Gunner looking around, disoriented and scowling.

  “Hey!” she called.

  He saw her and smiled in relief.

  She felt two contradictory emotions at once. Pleasure . . . and rebellion.

  “I’m not coming back!” she shouted.

  He waved his hands around his ears.

  “This is worse than a bloody artillery barrage!” he yelled back.

  “It’s a club,” shouted Edie.

  “I’m sure it is,” he roared back. “It’s certainly giving my ears a right old pounding. Come here. . . .”

  And before she could twist away, he caught her arm and pulled her close enough to talk into her ear.

  “Calm down,” he said as she tried to escape. “Let me explain. You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want. Only, things have changed back there in the pub. . . .”

  She relaxed a fraction as he spoke, telling her what had changed and how things were now more dangerous. She turned her head and shouted into his ear, telling him what she had seen. And why she had to keep following the Raven.

  When she finished, he gently gripped her by both shoulders and held her at arm’s length. All around them the world was in motion, bouncing and writhing and flailing its arms to the music, but in this one place, in the matrix bracketed by his two strong arms, there was stillness in which an understanding was born as she looked back into his eyes.

  “Please,” she mouthed. “She’s my mum.”

  He took a deep breath. Looked at the pounding mayhem around them. And then nodded.

  “But not on your own,” he shouted, pointing at himself. She nodded. Almost smiling.

  They had no more time to talk, because the Raven flapped across the dance floor, so low that his wing tips seemed to brush the raised hands of the dancers.

  Then the DJ hit the strobe machine, and for a moment Edie thought she was glinting, as the world suddenly stopped flowing seamlessly and all the rhythmic movement around her was chopped into frozen flash frames. Then she realized she was touching no stone or metal and had her hands bunched deep into the pockets of her coat.

  She followed the Gunner through the strobe-lit dancers, who appeared to move miraculously out of his way just enough for the girl and the spit to move forward, then close in behind them as soon as they passed— all without seeing the pair.

  The Gunner, she noticed, had his fingers in his ears. She could only see the back of his helmet reflecting
the wheeling pin spots above him, but she knew his face would be wrung into a tight scowl.

  They passed through a thicket of jumping girls waving luminous glow sticks in the air, and then found themselves trailing the Raven as he dipped lower and led them along a green-painted passageway to one side of the dance floor. Above him a blocky air-conditioning duct twisted and jinked along the roof like the body of some great man-made snake.

  The noise was less oppressive here, the top notes getting lost in the distance, and only the deeper thump of the bass following them down the passage. The Gunner took his fingers out of his ears and grimaced back at Edie.

  “People pay money to come in here and have that row fired at them? Could stick your head in a bucket and whack it with a hammer for free . . . Hello . . .” he said.

  The Raven had banked and turned into what was undoubtedly the ladies toilet.

  “I think I’ll stay”—he pointed at the wall opposite— “here.”

  Edie walked past him and into the room.

  Apart from the Raven, the only person in the bathroom was a girl in a neon pink miniskirt and a cropped white T-shirt, across whose back was a green Day-Glo smiley face that looked a bit sick. The girl had her hair braided on both sides of her head and tied up with neon green and pink scrunchies. Her hair was dark, almost black, and it was only when Edie moved forward and saw the girl’s face stretched wide in horror that she realized it was her mother, ten years or so older than when she’d last seen her. Now she was recognizable as the mother Edie had known ten years farther on down the line.

  She was leaning against the brickwork, hand spread wide against it for support, staring into one of the cubicles. Edie steeled herself to see what it was that had so terrified her.

  She looked in and saw nothing, just a lavatory bowl and a paper dispenser.

  “Oh God,” whispered her mother. “Make it stop . . .”

  Edie looked at her. She looked at the hand spread on the wall.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s not really there. You’re seeing the past. . . .”