“And it’s been so very much harder for me, laboring as I do in these latter days, to find glints now that they no longer know who they are. . . .”
“Poor you,” said Edie’s mother.
Edie smiled at the contempt her mother put into the two words. She knew how scared she was. She’d been that close—too close to the Walker. And yet her mother was finding a way to fight back even though she had no way of winning.
“I’m not insensitive,” the Walker replied, squatting in front of her, eyeball to eyeball. “I can see it must be painful for you now, knowing what you do, that you cannot pass the knowledge on to your daughter in the old way. You must be sorely vexed that she will go through a wasted life like your own, not knowing what she is, not understanding she’s a glint, thinking she’s mad.”
“I’ll tell her,” she said.
“No. I don’t think you’ll tell her in time. Unless . . .”
“Unless?”
The terrible spark of hope that the one word brought to her mother’s eyes was painful to see. Edie knew the Walker never let anything get away. She knew his “unless” was a viciously barbed trap waiting for her mother to step in it.
He stood up and stretched. His manner was all the more menacing because of the careless way he issued his threats, always appearing to be on the edge of yawning.
“She has a stone.”
He spoke to the ceiling with a studied lack of interest.
Edie’s mother said nothing. There was a sudden jolt of sound from across the room as the television kicked back to life, the white noise being replaced by the early evening news. The other patients mumbled in approval and sat back to stare at the colorful images jerking across the screen above them. Edie’s mother’s eyes flicked to the screen and then to the locked door across the hall. She swallowed and looked at the Walker again.
In the window behind him, beyond the safety mesh and the glass, the sun was beginning to set, smearing red across the evening sky, so that the Walker appeared to be framed in blood.
“She has a much larger stone than this pea of yours. He has seen it. Your ‘friend.’ He has told me of it.”
“I’ll kill him,” she said very calmly and with absolute conviction.
“What you do to him is no concern of mine; though I do not imagine you will have the opportunity before your mind goes. Your daughter has a stone. We have looked for it. But we cannot find it.”
Edie had a memory flash: she and her mother and an old biscuit tin. They were burying it in the scrap of woods just behind the house, in a hollow beneath an overhanging laurel bush. It was a place Edie liked when she was smaller, a sort of den in the woods. Some days her mother would come and sit with her, with a Thermos of tomato soup, and tell stories.
On the good days.
And on one good day they’d seen something on TV about digging up history and decided they would bury the battered biscuit tin full of things that were precious, for the future.
“My time capsule,” Edie breathed. “I put it in my time capsule. . . .”
“What?” said the Gunner.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Edie.
But it did. In her mind’s eye she saw the clods of earth spattering down on the biscuit tin lid as they buried it; and though it was only a biscuit tin, it felt for a moment as if she were remembering a coffin being put in the ground. Her mother’s coffin. The one she’d never seen. The one she’d never been allowed to see.
“I didn’t tell her,” she whispered. “She doesn’t know where it is. We put in stuff and then we put in a secret envelope each . . . He’s going to kill her because I didn’t tell her where I hid it!”
“Not a bit of this is your fault,” rumbled the Gunner. “Not a crumb.”
The Walker suddenly switched positions and sat on the chair next to her mother. He patted her hand companionably. She pulled it away as if she’d been stung. His smile didn’t falter, but he slowly pulled the dagger from the sheath at his side and laid it across his knees.
“I’ll make you a deal. You tell me where the girl hid it, and I’ll let you live.”
“Or?” whispered her mother, eyes fixed on the dagger.
“Or I ask her myself,” he hissed, looking at the sunset reflecting off the flat planes of the blade.
Edie’s mother licked her lips. There was a squeal as the door the workman had disappeared through opened. Her eyes twitched sideways toward it and back to the Walker.
“So. That’s the deal. You let me live if I give you my daughter’s stone?”
“I am not an unreasonable man.”
Without warning, Edie’s mother jerked out of her chair and ran. She ran, but not in panic. The moment she exploded from the chair, it was clear to Edie what she was doing. She’d seen the TV go back on. She knew the electrician would be coming back off the roof. And she timed her run perfectly. She was also clearheaded enough to keep hold of the chair arm as she burst out of it, dragging it in front of the Walker, buying her a fraction of a second’s advantage as he became entangled in it.
As he crashed to the ground, Edie felt a swoop of hope, and just for a moment dared to think the inexplicable and the impossible both at once: this is it, this is where she cheats death.
Her mother barged past the shocked electrician, sending him flying across the floor. Edie sprinted after her, the Gunner on her heels, as her mother raced up the narrow staircase toward the roof and freedom.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Ambush
The Perseus and the Pilot never saw what hit them. The ice-sheathed taints howled in at zero feet, straight through the arches beneath the bridge, and slammed into them at the very moment they burst back into the air from the bottom of the river. They had scarcely begun to gasp for breath before it was knocked out of them by the impact.
The Bosun and Jack Tar did have a couple of seconds to react, because George’s first action on seeing the phalanx of taints flickering across the river toward them had been to shout a warning. The Perseus and the Pilot had been under water, and had not known what danger awaited them as they surfaced.
The Perseus was hit so hard that his sword went flying. The Pilot was knocked head over heels by a gargoyle that smacked straight into his face and hooked on with ferocious tenacity, snarling and biting at him.
Though they had been taken by surprise, they immediately fought back. The Perseus punched and kicked at his two assailants as they tried to bite him out of the air. All the taints had the same gryphon shape, with an eagle’s wings, head, and front talons; and a lion’s body and hindquarters. Their bodies were stunted, but this just seemed to make them more maneuverable and powerful in the air. They fought in pairs, which made the fight that followed uneven and consequently short and viciously final.
The Pilot managed to tear one assailant off his face, only to have its partner gouge its talons into his wings and latch its screaming beak on to his head. The whirling threesome slammed into the sheer wall of the Embankment, knocking the Pilot senseless just long enough for the second gryphon to rip off one of his wings and start tearing at his chest. With only one wing and two attackers, it wasn’t long before the Pilot just stopped moving and hung there, draped over the river wall as the gryphons pecked at his lifeless body.
Jack Tar—having had the advantage of hearing George’s warning shout—had managed to duck the first of his attackers and swing the anchor at the end of a short length of rope with enough hurried accuracy that, although the anchor missed the jinking taint, the thin anchor chain snarled in its wings. As the taint stuttered in midair and tried to twist free, the anchor swung around its neck and hit it in the face, dropping it into the water.
Having escaped immediate annihilation, Jack Tar didn’t hang around in his exposed boat for a moment longer. Instead he jumped from the boat to the barge, hitting the hollow metal hull with a clang like Big Ben, and scrambled up to join the Bosun. He got there in time to rip a gryphon from his shipmate’s back and stomp it to trash with
his heavy sea boots, and then he and the Bosun fought back-to-back as two taints whirled and snarled about them.
The Perseus had managed to pull one of his attackers off, and kicked the other one into it as it fell. While the two taints disentangled, he took advantage of the brief respite to run through the air toward the bridge. The feathers on his sandals whirred as he sprinted toward George and the Queen. He slammed into the edge of the bridge and reached a desperate hand over the scarred stone lintel.
“My bag!” he shouted.
“Look out!” shouted the Queen and George as one, seeing the icy gryphon shrieking in behind him.
“My bag!” he yelled again, his hand stretching to the limit of his reach.
The gryphon slammed into his kidneys so hard that all the air was punched out of him and his eyes rolled back in his head.
“Out of the way, boy!” shouted the Red Queen, hefting her spear.
George didn’t get out of the way. He was already lunging toward the gryphon’s wildly flapping wings. He caught one wingtip, then the other, and without a second’s conscious thought, slammed them together. The gryphon squealed in outrage, but George closed his eyes and felt the heat in his hands, and the momentary awareness of the granular structure of the stone wings they were pinioning together.
And he simply fused stone wingtip to stone wingtip and wrenched the gryphon off the Perseus.
The gryphon struggled to free its locked wingtips and flap, but it couldn’t do anything except plunge straight down, shrieking, into the black current below.
George reached a hand out, but there was a horribly abrupt jerking impact as two taints flew back around the bridge arches and hit the Perseus’s dangling feet, tearing him off the bridge and into the air. As he dangled upside down above the barge, each one gripped a foot and flew in a different direction.
George looked away, but he heard the Queen gasp in horror, and then the noise of the spit’s body clanging down onto the barge.
The Bosun and Jack Tar were trying to fight their way to a metal hatch in the deck. The gryphons circled them, slashing and biting, two of them actually standing on the hatch, blocking their way to safety.
When all seemed lost, all of a sudden the waters burst beside the barge and the Boy rode the Dolphin high out of the water, battering one of the gryphons off the hatch and throwing something to the ground at the sailor’s feet.
George saw in a flash that it was the Perseus’s sword.
The Bosun grabbed it and slashed right and left in a fury, cutting his way to the hatch.
“Come on, Jack!” he roared. “Let’s live to fight another day!”
He cut the gryphon standing guard clean in half, and kicked his way onto the hatch. He stood over it as Jack Tar dived down and ripped it open. The Bosun tumbled in, and Jack Tar leaped after him, fast, but not fast enough to stop one gryphon diving in with them. The hatch clanged shut, and there was a muffled eagle shriek from inside.
The Boy and the Dolphin surfaced and looked up at the Queen and George.
“Save yourselves!” shouted George, and without a second to spare they plunged deep into the river and disappeared as the Dolphin sounded deep and powered away from the scene of the massacre.
The Queen grabbed George’s arm and hurled him into the chariot.
“We must go, boy, now!”
She threw the Perseus’s bag in after him and leaped aboard, cracking the reins over the backs of horses that needed no second telling. They lurched into a gallop, and the chariot careened off the bridge in a whirlwind of snow.
“It is no longer safe to be out here alone! From now on there is only safety in numbers,” yelled the Queen into the slipstream. “And we may already be too late to reach that safety.”
George stared backward, waiting for the pursuing gryphons, and thought two things.
Yes, they were maybe too late.
And whether or not that was so, Edie was out there alone.
It wasn’t just that he was desperately worried for her safety. He was worried for everyone’s survival.
Because without her ability to sense the black mirror, all was lost.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
A Matter of Death and Life
Edie and the Gunner were right behind Edie’s mother as she scrambled up the stairs and burst through a door onto a flat, gravel-covered roof. They just got there before she grabbed the outer edge of the flapping door and slammed it shut. There was a bolt on the outside of the door, which she rammed home.
Then she ran to the edge of the roof. There was a sheer drop down to the parking lot in front of the hospital.
They watched as she dashed around the rectangular perimeter, looking for a safe way down. They saw the realization grow on her that she was trapped up here.
They heard the increasingly urgent banging on the locked roof door, the distant sound of an emergency bell ringing, and the muffled shouts of the nurse calling her name.
They saw her turn and see the eye-twisting horror of the Walker stepping out of a small, round hand mirror right behind her. She stumbled back in shock, falling onto the sharp gravel.
The Walker looked down at her as he pocketed the mirror again and calmly drew his dagger.
“What are you going to do?” He wagged the blade at her. “I promise you, if you do not tell me where your daughter’s heart stone is, I will split you open like a bag of peas, and you will die right here on this roof.”
She closed her hand on a fistful of gravel and staggered back to her feet.
“No. You will not go near my daughter.” Her voice was raw but steady. She stood in a crouch, ready to run in either direction if he came for her.
“I will do what I wish; this is your last opportunity. There is no more chance of you thwarting me in this than there is of these stones not hitting the ground below.” The Walker turned slightly and scuffed some roof gravel over the edge behind him. “I am as unavoidable as gravity itself. So tell me, where does the brat hide her stone?”
“Her name is Edie,” she said, her voice catching with pride as she stood taller, squaring her shoulders and looking him right in the eye. “And I won’t tell you one damn thing that would harm her.”
He yawned, studiously unimpressed. “So you will not get off this roof alive.”
“Then neither of us will,” she said, throwing the handful of gravel at his eyes with a sharp jerk of her hand.
In the moment when he raised his hand to shield his eyes, she exploded into motion, sprinting straight at him.
Time slowed for Edie as she realized in horror what her mother was going to do, and the price she was going to pay. She heard herself shouting “Mum!” in a shriek that seemed to go on forever, but her mother couldn’t hear her.
All the wear and tear that the years and drink—and the worrying that she was mad—had put on her fell away, and with her long hair flying behind her and fire in her eyes, her face was, in this one last moment, as fierce and focused as a lioness defending its cub.
She looked again like the mother Edie now remembered only in her dreams.
The Walker slashed at her with the dagger, but she ducked her head and threw herself into a horizontal dive.
Edie saw the blade cut an arc in the air, reflecting the rosy light from the setting sun. It scythed over her mother’s head, just missing her. The Walker staggered with the impetus of the mistimed blow, and so was off balance as Edie’s mother hit him in a solid flying tackle, just below his waist. His body bent in the middle and his feet flew up off the roof. His hands bicycled sideways, grabbing for a handhold in the empty air beyond the roof’s edge.
The only sound was a strangled “NO!” which jerked out of his mouth as he twisted and looked at the gulf of air below them.
And then they were gone.
Edie and the Gunner were left staring at the sun, now a red hole in the sky where her mother had sacrificed herself in taking the Walker off the roof.
“She didn’t know that he can’t die
,” said the Gunner with great sadness.
Edie ran for the edge, but before she could get close enough to look over and see anything of her mother’s body, the Gunner’s hand snapped out and yanked her back so abruptly that her feet left the ground.
He held her to his chest while she struggled to free herself, and spoke softly into her ear.
“You may be born to pull the past from stones and see terrible stuff someone your age shouldn’t have to see, but there are some images you don’t need to carry in your head.”
The Raven perched on the parapet and looked over at what Edie could not see.
Her mother was spread-eagle on the tarmac below, one leg bent under the other, arms wide, almost as if she had been crucified. Her eyes stared sightlessly at the sky above, her face framed in the outflung fan of her hair. As people hurried toward her, one figure walked in the opposite direction, not looking back.
It was the Walker.
“I want to see how it ended!” hissed Edie, struggling against the bronze arm holding her in place.
“You saw how it ended,” said the Gunner softly, his voice rumbling so low in his chest that she could feel the vibrations in her back, where she was crushed against him. “You saw all that matters.”
He continued to speak very calmly into her ear.
“It ended with your mother flying. She flew through the air, into the sunset. She was fighting for you. Just like she fought to bring you safe into this world and gave you your first breath, so she fought for you with her last. She fought to save you from him. She died with nothing in her but that fierce love of you.” The Gunner’s voice was low and raw. He cleared his throat. “And death is a terrible and final thing, Edie girl, but there’s many worse ways to die than with love in your heart. And that’s all you need to know. There is nothing you can see down there that is a truer or a finer end than that, and that’s the God’s honest truth of it.”
Silvertongue Page 24
