Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  “It’s my right to see her!” she protested, voice shaking. “It’s my right!”

  “It is,” he said simply, and let her go. She stood alone on the gravel roof as he stepped back. “Just like it is your right not to see her. Just as it is your right to choose whether the last image you carry of her is as a living creature or a dead shell, her body broken, but not her spirit.”

  “It’s my right,” Edie repeated.

  The Gunner said no more.

  Neither he nor the Raven looked at Edie as she stood there, the evening wind blowing her hair across her face and flapping the black fur coat around her ankles. She was poised between stepping forward and retreating, and the breeze seemed to rock her as her whole body remained balanced on the balls of her feet.

  And then she just sat down and pulled her knees to her chest. She muttered something.

  “What?” said the Gunner.

  She raised her head, eyes bright with tears. “The Sphinx lied! All this time I thought this was about finding her alive! I mean, I knew she was dead, then I found her stone, and it stayed lit, and then the Sphinxes, the Sphinxes lied!”

  “Sphinxes don’t lie,” he said sadly.

  “But I thought she lived! I thought she was alive!” Edie hacked her heel into the gravel, sending it skittering across the roof. “I thought . . . I thought I would get to hold her again. I thought she would hold me. Even just one more time, just once. . . .”

  She shuddered and dropped her head back into the hollow between her knees and chest, her long hair tented over her face.

  The Gunner put a hand on her shoulder and left it there. He said nothing, just let the solid weight of his hand ballast Edie as the gusts of emotion billowed through her.

  When the sun had dropped halfway below the horizon, and Edie’s shoulder had almost completely stopped shuddering, the Raven hopped over and looked up at her. Then it pecked her shoe, but not hard. Almost companionably.

  She sniffed and pushed aside the dark curtain of her hair.

  “I thought she was alive. And I knew it was impossible, but I still had this crazy stupid hope that I would just hold her.”

  The Raven clacked its beak.

  “She is,” said the Gunner. “And you do. Those we love never truly leave us. We carry them in us forever. Her love will ride in your heart throughout your life and beyond.”

  “How can it live beyond?” said Edie flatly. “That’s all magic rubbish.”

  “It’s not magic, girl. Or if it is, it’s just the ordinary magic of being human. You’ll carry her love and add it to your own, and one day you will pass it on to your children, who will send it forward in time to theirs, long after you’re gone. That’s the glory and pain of being human, the curse and the blessing of life,” he said, stroking her hair with the care of someone comforting a wild animal that may bolt at any moment. “Though I reckon it’s more blessing than curse.”

  Edie stared at the sunset now reddening the horizon and took a deep breath. She felt cleansed by it, so she took another one.

  “She didn’t commit suicide,” she said, exhaling.

  “No,” agreed the Gunner.

  “And she wasn’t mad.”

  “No.”

  “And she went down fighting.”

  “To the last,” he said.

  “And that’s what she gave me,” she said to the final sliver of sun blinking out of sight below the scarlet edge of the world. “That rides with me too.”

  Silence followed as the reds bled from the sky and the night started to roll in. She took another deep, deep breath and set her jaw before turning. The Raven flapped onto her shoulder and clacked in her ear. And she realized with a strange lack of surprise that she could understand it.

  “Exactly,” she said. “There’s a fight going in London . . .”

  She looked at the Gunner. Eyes dry.

  “. . . so what the hell am I doing here?”

  The Gunner pulled the two disks of glass from his pocket and grinned at her.

  “That’s my girl.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  An Unexpected Ally

  The gryphons didn’t seem to be following George and the Queen as the chariot raced along the river toward the looming sweep of Waterloo Bridge and the concrete bunker buildings that squatted theatrically beside it. George kept expecting the taints to suddenly accelerate into view behind them, so he stayed facing backward holding the Queen’s spear at the ready for just such an eventuality.

  Something rolled against his leg, and he twisted around on reflex, but it was only the Perseus’s bag, which the Queen had thrown in the chariot next to the stone arm. He reached down and steadied it.

  “Don’t open that,” snapped the Queen.

  “I’m just stopping it from falling out!” he shouted back.

  She reached back with her foot and pushed the bag forward against the inner wall of the chariot in front of her, treading on it to keep it in place. “Just don’t open it,” she said.

  George scanned the sky behind him. The hairs on his neck were suddenly prickling upright, but the sky was empty, though he could have sworn that he heard something like wing flaps in the sky. He took a deep breath and told himself that he was getting jumpy.

  “Why not?” he said, as the Queen pulled on the reins, sending the horses hard right up the slope of the approach road to the bridge proper.

  She never got to answer, because at that point the four gryphons that had obviously been stalking them, low down and out of sight on the other side of the river wall, bounced up and over the parapet and yammered into the attack, eagle beaks snapping and shrieking as they came.

  “Go!” yelled George, and heard the Queen crack the reins. The chariot picked up speed, but nowhere near enough to outrun the ice-sheathed taints, who slipped through the sky toward them with a bulletlike velocity.

  Once more they fought in pairs, and as George stabbed the lance at the first one that came at his face, its partner dipped in and pecked at something behind him. George missed with the lance as the attacker flipped its wing and sheered off at the last moment. He saw the other as a blur on the edge of his vision, and expected to see it ripping at the Queen’s exposed back.

  Instead he saw its talons closing on the stone arm at her feet.

  “No!” he shouted, and without time to reverse the spear in his hands, slammed the blunt end of the haft into the back of its neck with all the strength he could muster. It squawked in outrage and turned to snap at him. He pulled back the spear haft and punched it into the gaping beak, right down the throat of the creature. Then he swiveled violently, pitchforking the gagging taint off the back of the chariot. It hit its partner just as it swooped in to the rescue, and the two gryphons were, for a moment, a whirling, snapping ball of ice and stone as they tried to disentangle from each other, before depth-charging into the snow in a great cloud of powder.

  He staggered to keep his footing on the bucking chariot, which lurched badly sideways as the Queen crested the approach road to the bridge.

  “George!” she shouted. He turned to see the third gryphon had flown in from the side and was taloning the stone arm away. George stomped his boot into the side of the gryphon’s head, buying himself just enough time to get his balance and retrieve the arm, which he did by grabbing its hand in his. As the gryphon darted in again, he swung the stone arm like a club, knocking the taint into the snow just ahead of the chariot.

  The gryphon made the fatal mistake of raising its head to shriek at him in protest before launching itself into the counterattack an instant too late to avoid the whirling scimitar blade on the chariot wheel, which smithereened it into a savage hail of ice shards and stone fragments.

  George rammed the stone arm into the space between the front wall of the chariot and the bag. “They’re trying to get the stone arm!” he shouted. “They’re trying to free the darkness.”

  The Queen nodded and put her foot on it to keep it from rolling out.

  “Behi
nd you . . .”

  He looked up to see that the three remaining gryphons were jinking into the attack. He stabbed at the leading one with the lance, and missed. The second one darted in, and he jabbed at it, only to have the third one attack as he was at the limit of his thrust.

  It didn’t attack him, but grabbed the shaft of the spear instead, yanking it hard. It slipped out of his hand, but he managed to regain a grip only a foot from the end, which was almost worse than useless, because he had no way of controlling the spear at all, and it pulled once more, almost hoisting him off the back of the chariot altogether. The second gryphon rejoined the attack, and the two taints working together managed to easily twist and wrench the smooth pole out of his hands.

  “They got the lance!” he shouted as the third one screeched and threw itself at his face once more.

  He felt a sharp pain in his ear as the creature’s talons scraped past his cheekbone. Without thinking, he punched his open palm into the chest of the creature. Despite the jarring impact, he gripped on, and as he felt the heat flare in his hand, he had a deep and instantaneous impression of the flawed and grainy stone that the taint had been carved from. Again, without conscious thought, he sent the heat in his hand into the flaws and between the grainy matrices of the rock. As he twisted his grip he saw the taint wheel upside down in his grasp, and then disintegrate into three separate parts, which spun into the snow behind them.

  The moment the stone fragments came to bits in his hand, he felt a wave of tiredness, like a physical blow. He looked down at his hand.

  “Okay,” he said, breathing hard. “Okay.”

  “Not okay,” said the Queen shortly. “Not okay at all.”

  George looked back and saw what she had seen. The chariot was going too fast to get a good count, but nine or ten gryphons had bounced up and over the side of the bridge and were sweeping in at an angle to join the two remaining ones behind them.

  “GO!” he shouted.

  “They’re not the problem,” she shouted back. “Look ahead!”

  He tore his eyes off the phalanx of shrieking gryphons accelerating toward them and looked ahead, over the plunging heads of the horses.

  The end of the bridge was seventy long yards away, but not only was there no way they would make the other side of the river before the incoming gryphons tore into them, there was no safety there in any case.

  There was worse than no safety.

  There were two figures blocking their way.

  The floor of the chariot was still lurching up and down, so his vision was blurred. One of the figures was indistinct, but the other one was unmistakeable.

  It was a taint, and not just any taint.

  A dragon.

  Here I am again, thought George.

  Between a rock and a hard place.

  “Only one thing to do!” he shouted. “Keep going straight ahead.”

  “I know,” said the Queen, smiling fiercely and snapping the reins hard. “Keep them off my back as long as you can.”

  The horses must have sensed this was the end of the chase, or maybe it was because a light wind had blown some of the snow off the top surface of the bridge so that it was less deep, but whatever the reason, they picked up speed as they hit the down slope, so that the taints didn’t catch them quite as fast as George feared, but closed up in a solid menacing formation right behind them.

  George heard a muffled WHOOMF from the dragon ahead of them, but he didn’t dare look around, for fear one of the gryphons would put on a sudden burst of speed and grab him. His shoulders tensed and he ducked down, hoping the front prow of the chariot would give some protection from the fireball he knew must be rushing toward them.

  “Boy!” called the Queen, her hand reaching back and feeling for his shoulder.

  “Ram it!” shouted George, out of ideas. “Just ram it.”

  The Queen laughed, a wild and raw sound, so unexpected that George had a quick look behind him. “No need,” she whooped. “They’re opening the gate.”

  George’s quick look turned into a long one. He was unable to move his eyes from the sight now blocking the end of the bridge.

  It was a wall of fire; not just any fire, but a bright multicolored fire he had seen before. It was the wildfire of the true dragon, the Temple Bar Dragon. And the wall was no ordinary wall. It was the fiery re-creation of the old Temple Bar gate to the City that the Dragon had blown across George’s path a lifetime ago, or so it seemed. It rose in twisting spirals in front of his eyes, an elegant gatehouse on top of a broad double gate, which opened as they galloped toward it, just wide enough to let them through. And on the other side, George saw the Railwayman beckoning them urgently.

  “I don’t . . .” began George.

  “Nor do I.” The Queen laughed and cracked the reins one last time.

  George spun and looked at the intent, furious line of gryphon faces straining to catch up with them—four, now three, now two yards behind.

  And then there was a flash of light as the Queen stampeded her horses through the gate and the whole gatehouse flashed past on either side of them. George saw the double doors slam shut like the gates of hell, cutting off any view of their pursuers.

  The gates bucked and jumped with the impact of the chasing taints slamming into the other side. As the Queen reined in, something bright and white snarled over George’s head and landed in front of the gates, tearing them open.

  It was the Temple Bar Dragon, stoked up to a white heat of fury.

  It jerked the gates open and looked at the twitching, stunned bodies of the gryphons lying in the snow beyond, where they had knocked themselves senseless. One unlucky gryphon shook its head, trying to clear it, and saw the Dragon looking down. The gryphon opened its beak to shriek defiance, but the Dragon just incinerated it with a blast of fire that jetted from its mouth like a hose. It swept the flames across all the figures until they were no more than featureless half-melted blobs of rock, scarcely recognizable as what they had once been.

  And then it turned and looked at George.

  George knew it was looking at him and no one else, because it coughed something that might have been a small and spark-enhanced laugh, and then very delicately traced a sign in the air, a mark that hung between them in thin slashes of fire for a full five seconds before blinking out.

  George looked down at his hand, where the same mark had been slashed by the same talon. He held it up and showed it to the Dragon.

  “Thanks,” he said. And because his brain was still catching up after their headlong flight, he added, “But I thought you were a taint. . . .”

  The Dragon just bowed its head, very slightly.

  “Dragon. Save. City. Must,” it said, the words sharp and disparate. “Maker. Save. City. Can.”

  “Well . . .” began George.

  “So. Dragon. Maker. Save,” it finished.

  “It was old Dictionary talked it around,” said the Railwayman as the Queen reached down a hand and pulled him up on to the chariot. “Said he and the Dragon had always had the love of London in common. He said that they’d spent so many years looking at one another in the long hours of the night and talking about it that they were, in their own way, if not mates, sort of neighbors, like. Dictionary understood this chap’s been made to defend the city. And as you can see, he’s already been in a barney with some of the other dragons what didn’t have as strong a sense of their purpose as him. So he didn’t take much talking around at all, if you follow.”

  George saw the Dragon cooling in front of him, the white heat flushing down to red and then pink and then back to a deep burnished gray in front of his eyes. And now that the bright glare of the heat was off him, he saw the rent in the Dragon’s wing and the half-torn-off ear.

  “We must get going . . .” began the Queen, but George jumped off the back of the chariot, and without thinking why he was doing it, or how, he crossed to the Dragon and reached up a hand. The Dragon bowed its head, and he felt the torn ear. It was no w
armer than a dog’s ear now, and unexpectedly soft to the touch. He gently pushed it back into place, closing the tear, and then he closed his eyes too and felt the metal beneath his touch. Where stone was granular, the metal was more like a fluid, as if he could feel the molten state that had flown into the mold.

  “What’s he doing?” asked the Railwayman.

  “Man’s work,” said the Queen. She nodded at the wall of ice murk visible over the rooftops. “And we must be on our way, for there shall be more need of healing before this is over. Come, George.”

  George opened his eyes and saw he had mended the Dragon’s ear. It shook its head like a dog does, just to make sure everything was attached, and then it smiled, as much as a dragon can. It looked at the Queen as George went to work mending its wings.

  “We. Both. Come.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  The High Admiral

  Edie and the Gunner had followed the Raven into the mirror held in the Gunner’s hand. They staggered out of the sunset light on the hospital roof and back into the dimly lit interior of the Black Friar’s pub, to find the Friar kneeling in front of one mirror with a candle held right against the glass, while Little Tragedy did the same on the other side of the arch. Edie’s breath plumed and her teeth started chattering as soon as her feet hit the carpet. The interior of the pub was now well below freezing, enveloped deep within the ice murk. As soon as Edie breathed in, the piercingly cold air burned her lungs and she instantly felt the hairs in her nostrils freeze up.

  “Thank God!” breathed the monk. “You must go now! You cannot live long in here; we are mired in the murk, and the fire itself can scarce find purchase on this all-consuming cold.”

  “Trafalgar Square,” said the Gunner, throwing an arm around Edie, who was already beginning to shake, despite her fur coat.

  It wasn’t hard to see how close they were to having been stuck in the mirrors, as the glass was clouded by ice rime everywhere except where it was right next to the candle’s heat.

  The Friar reached above his head and twisted the great rings of mosaic in the ceiling.