Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

  As the Raven came to perch on her shoulder and clacked in her ear, Edie understood he was switching the mirrors’ destinations from When to Where.

  “Go now, and Godspeed,” bellowed the Friar. “Come and find us when this is over.”

  “What?” squeaked Little Tragedy. “Come find us? Why? We shall be all right, shan’t we? Old Black? We shall be right as rain, yeah?”

  “We shall find out.” The Friar shrugged. “This has never happened before. We shall stay put. As guardian I cannot leave.”

  The Gunner nodded at him. “Be lucky, chum.” He smiled and pulled Edie into the mirror.

  “Th-th-thanks,” stuttered Edie as she looked back. It was so cold she was getting a brain-freeze just breathing, and she thought her teeth might just shatter like fine porcelain as they clattered together uncontrollably in her shivering jaw.

  They fell into the blackness.

  The Friar bent to pick up the candle that he’d left propped against the mirror, and then looked up as something brushed quickly past him. Whatever it was moved so fast that its slipstream guttered the candle in passing, and it blinked out, unable to fight off the surrounding cold. The Friar tutted and reached backward.

  “The matches . . .” he said, and turned to find no reply, and no Little Tragedy either, just a lone candle and a box of matches on the floor in front of the other mirror, too far away to keep the frost from glazing over the last teardrop-shaped patch of clear mirror. He realized only then what had brushed past him and followed the others into the mirrors.

  “You imp,” said the Friar sadly, and sat cross-legged between the two mirrors, scraping slowly at the matchbox with fingers that were now starting to shake badly.

  The first thing Edie saw when they tumbled out of the mirrors was that they were in another pub. The second thing she saw was that it was thankfully light outside. And then the Gunner opened the doors, and the third thing she saw was the square beyond.

  Trafalgar Square was, of course, covered in snow, but what was most striking was how crowded it was.

  Spits were spread right across the great piazza, from the top, where they lined the balustrades along the terrace outside the classical portico of the National Gallery, right down to the traffic island facing Admiralty Arch and the long sweep of open avenue leading to the palace beyond.

  “Wow,” she said.

  The Gunner blew out his cheeks and exhaled in wonder. “That,” he said, “is quite something. I never knew there was so many of us.”

  “Gack,” said something that bounded toward them from the side. They turned to see Spout bobbing and smiling at them. He flapped to the top of a gray pillar and waved his wing at the center of the crowd at the lower end of the piazza, next to the foot of the tall column.

  “Eigengang!” he screeched. “Eigengang. Goung gint! Gear. Gook gear!”

  He jabbed his wing emphatically downward at Edie and the Gunner as they walked out of the shadow of the pub door.

  “Eigeng—” Spout began, bouncing up and down in barely controlled excitement, only to stop abruptly as something white trickled down his forehead. His eyes rolled up to find the Raven perched nonchalantly between his ears, adjusting its feathers, before squinnying a second splatter onto the cat-gargoyle’s head.

  “I think he thinks you should calm down,” said the Gunner, looking up. Spout hissed and shook himself. The Raven floated off into the air and coasted behind Edie as she hurried toward the boy running up the square in her direction.

  Although she knew who he was the moment she laid eyes on him, there was something about him that had changed. She couldn’t figure out exactly what it was, but he not only looked older but he seemed to carry himself completely differently—taller, like he wasn’t trying to hide or somehow excuse his height or the breadth of his shoulders anymore.

  What it was, she realized, was that he was no longer turned in on himself, hunched around an apology for what he was. Even his face looked different, with his hair now pushed back out of his eyes, so different that she could scarcely remember the worried and regretful boy she had taken such a firm dislike to so long ago on the parking ramp to the garage under the park. It was also the look in his eyes. He still looked worried, but it was a capable worry. It was the worry of someone who was dealing with something bigger than himself.

  “Edie!” shouted George, raising a hand. “We need you. We’ve got a dragon, but we need you!”

  And as she walked toward him, oblivious to the interested glances of the forest of spits of all shapes and sizes she was passing, George in turn was struck by the change in Edie. The Raven on her shoulder was one thing, but he’d seen that before. He’d seen the confident stride and the jutting jaw too. What he hadn’t really seen was this smile. It was easy and unforced and matched by a level look in her eyes that was both straight and just tinged with enough of a sparkle of humor at the back of it to make his stomach flip.

  Thank God you’re okay, he thought. But what he said was: “What took you so long?”

  She pointed at his bare arm. “What happened to your sleeve?”

  They stood there and, with interruptions from the Gunner and the Queen and occasionally Spout, quickly brought each other up-to-date with their adventures. George told her that the High Admiral had been watching the City ever since dawn had broken, and that he was sure the taints had all congregated on Tower 42, the black skyscraper in the distance, turning it into a citadel in the sky. He had used his telescope and seen a figure pacing the icy battlements, who he did not recognize. They both agreed this must be the Ice Devil. George omitted to tell her that the Admiral had remarked how from certain angles, the figure, though larger, had reminded him of the Walker.

  As George explained about the ambush at the river and how they had been unable to find the mirror, Edie saw the Queen looking at her. Something passed between them that was beyond words. The light in Edie’s eyes dimmed a bit as George rolled on, but by the time he had explained about the Temple Bar Dragon, and pointed out where it was now perched next to the High Admiral on the top of the column, she had taken a deep breath and combed her fingers back through her hair and was doing something to it behind her head.

  George looked down from the Dragon to see her face unguarded by the normal shifting curtains of hair, and just as she had seen the rightness of his face now that she could see all of it, so he smiled despite himself as he saw her face clearly.

  “What?” she growled.

  “Nothing,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?” she said. “Braiding this mess. If I’ve got to get wet and look for this mirror, I’m not going to need my hair in my eyes, am I?”

  He flashed the memory of her drowning face in the ice hole, a long flag of dark hair slashed across her white face like a strip of seaweed, and he understood the courage it took for her to make light of what she was going to have to do.

  “No,” he said. “You’re not. You know what else you don’t need?”

  “What?” she said, bridling.

  “Guts,” he said, clapping her on the arm. “I reckon you’ve got them to spare.”

  “Enemy ahead!” came a ringing seaman’s bellow from above. “Prepare to repel boarders!”

  The High Admiral, a tall stone figure in a cocked hat worn broadside on, was pointing his sword to the east.

  “The sky’s black with the devils!”

  The Queen gripped Edie’s arm. “We must go now!”

  Suddenly there was no time for good-byes as Edie ran and jumped up into the chariot next to her.

  “Spout!” shouted George. “Go with them. Look after them. Keep an eye on the sky.”

  “Gack,” croaked the cat-gargoyle, and spread its wings.

  “Edie,” shouted George as the Queen urged her horses into motion. “Good luck.”

  “I’ll find it,” she called back. “You just try to stay alive long enough to work out how we’re going to get up there to use it!”

 
“Okay,” he yelled to the disappearing chariot and the girl’s hand raised in farewell.

  “Or just stay alive,” she said quietly, and turned to steady herself on the front wall of the chariot as the Queen recklessly flung her horses straight down the steps, heading for the river.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  First Wave

  As George had told Edie, the High Admiral had been watching the City since first light. He had seen the blank gray escarpment of the ice murk spreading inexorably across the horizon to the east. It had widened and seemed to grow taller as it approached, as remorselessly as bad weather rolling in across the sea.

  The Admiral had noted that the one building that remained visible in the City was not only the tallest, but seemed to be at the dead center of the blooming cloud. He had spent the day scanning it with his telescope, and as the rest of the spits had poured into the square below, had shouted down and kept them updated with what he could see from his lookout position atop the column. He commanded a great view from his lofty aerie, which was just one of the reasons why this sailor with one empty sleeve pinned to his much-bemedaled frock coat was known as the High Admiral.

  The one good eye he had left had seen many strange things, but what he seemed to be seeing on top of the distant dark tower was something new. Though most of them had arrived under cover of darkness, he saw the last few winged spits coasting in at dawn and joining the rookery of gargoyles and other grotesque flying creatures that had blossomed around the building’s rim, changing its sleek silhouette into something lumpy and unwholesomely organized-looking, like a blighting fungus. He’d seen the slow cascade of icy air falling off the top of the building down into the ice murk below, and as a sailor he’d known enough about how weather works to see that this confirmed his suspicion: the dark tower was the center of the cold blight afflicting the City and spreading toward the rest of London.

  He’d seen the strange elongated figure of the Ice Devil striding back and forth along the icy battlements of his citadel, and he’d watched the occasional patrols of gargoyles that had detached from the battlements and gone off on who knows what business throughout the day. He’d also seen enough of the Ice Devil to be reminded, at certain angles, of the Walker. But the most disturbing thing he had seen was the Ice Devil when it stopped pacing and just stood still.

  In those moments the High Admiral, a man whose visible wounds attested to how little he cared for his personal safety in battle, felt the unfamiliar twinge of fear. The reason he felt this unaccustomed sensation was this: he was pretty sure that just as he was looking at the Ice Devil, so the Ice Devil was looking straight back at him. And the Ice Devil’s gaze was almost palpable in its malign intensity.

  All that had been the most disturbing thing, until now.

  Now the flying taints were peeling off the side of the black tower and spiraling into a winged maelstrom that circled the Ice Devil. Next, the Ice Devil gesticulated with his arms, and the spiral flattened into a disk whose thin edge became a storm front, which thickened and grew as it headed straight toward him.

  It was at this point that he had hailed the spits below and warned them to prepare to repel boarders.

  The Admiral turned to the Temple Bar Dragon, who was perched awkwardly next to him, looking in the same direction.

  “You’d better get below. There’ll be hard pounding before this is over.”

  The dragon just looked at him, raised an eyebrow, then turned back to look at the approaching cloud of taints.

  “Pound. Them. Shall. I,” it spat. And as it spoke, the Admiral could feel the heat building up in the scaly body next to him.

  “My. City. Ice. Cloud. Swallow. Not. Forever,” it continued harshly, tendrils of smoke starting to curl out of its reddening eyes. “My. City. Free. Made. Free. Born. Free. Stay. Free.”

  “Can’t say fairer than that,” admitted the Admiral, putting his telescope away and drawing his sword. “But if you get in the way or set anything on fire up here, you’ll have to find somewhere else to fight.”

  All across the square below, the spits were ready, spread behind every balustrade or fountain edge they could find, waiting for the attack.

  The Gunner joined George behind one of the four massive bronze lions at the foot of the column.

  “You just keep your head down,” he said.

  “Why haven’t these lions come alive?” asked George, nodding at the great bulk next to them.

  “No one knows exactly,” said the Gunner. “But they never have. Some say they’re made wrong, others that they have one purpose, and they won’t come alive until it’s their time to fulfill it. That’s why they’re known as the Last Lions.”

  “What purpose?” asked George.

  “Don’t know. Some say there’s something under this column that they’re defending, others that they only come alive when the land’s at its deepest peril, or some mumbo jumbo like that. Me?”—he rapped the butt of his pistol on the side of the lion with a clang—“me, I think they’re just lazy, like all cats is.”

  Before George could ask another question, the sky did indeed seem to go black as a cloud of airborne taints poured over the rooftops in a howling avalanche of fangs and claws and talons.

  Battles don’t have much sense or shape, not when you’re stuck in the middle of them. If you’re high above them, there are patterns that can be discerned as the struggling masses attack and retreat. You can see power flowing and whirling back and forth as the forces feint and dodge and stand fast in their turn. You can even, if asked afterward, draw neat diagrams that appear to make a clean and clinical sense of the bewildering chaos and carnage that it actually is for the person stuck in the middle of it.

  When you’re in the middle of a battle, with your boots on the ground, you’re lucky if you notice anything beyond your immediate vicinity. In fact, most of the time you’re lucky if your boots are on the ground. In George’s case it was his knees and then his chest as the Gunner kept pushing him out of the way of a succession of diving and snapping taints. He crouched against the lion, wanting to fight but knowing he had to keep guard of the darkness trapped in the stone arm, which he was clutching tightly. The Gunner shot a gargoyle out of the sky in front of George’s face and shook his head in frustration.

  “It’s that damn stone arm of yours!” he shouted. “It’s like wasps and a bloody jam pot. Here . . . !”

  He unclipped the groundsheet he normally wore as an improvised cape around his shoulders and threw it down to George.

  “Wrap it up. If they don’t keep seeing it, we’ll have it easier,” he yelled, and was then hit by two small taints at once.

  The taints each fastened on to one of his arms and ripped them sideways, exposing his chest to a third one that slammed into him. Before George could leap to his aid, the Gunner had head-butted the taint as it tried to bite his face—ramming the sharp edge of his steel helmet into its beak and shattering it. The force of the blow snapped his chinstrap, and as the helmet tumbled off the back of his head and the taint fell off his chest, he roared in anger and clapped his two outflung hands together, clattering the two smaller spits into each other in a shattering impact.

  They fell to the ground, and he put a bullet in the one he had head-butted, and then turned to finish off the other two. Nothing remained of them except ice fragments.

  “That’s a bit queer,” he said. “Where’s the bloody stone?”

  Another taint whirled to the ground and pancaked across the flagstones in a smoking mass between them, taking the Gunner’s mind off the strangeness of the ice taints, who had no stone body. He nodded at George, who had been narrowly missed by the crashed taint.

  “Keep your head down, son.” He grinned. “It’s gonna get hotter before this is over.”

  The Gunner looked strangely younger without his helmet. His hair stuck up in an unruly tuft above the shorter sides. He scraped his fingers through it and scanned the piazza for the next threat.

  The Officer came tumb
ling over the top of the lion and landed with a crash next to George, trying to throttle a stone pterodactyl that in its turn was straining to rip his throat out with its fanged beak. The Officer’s pistol swung wildly around on the end of its lanyard.

  “George, my gun, if you’d be so kind . . .” he gasped.

  George leaped forward and grabbed for the swinging weapon. The pterodactyl snapped at his hands, but he got them around the oversize pistol and jammed the barrel into the creature’s chest, pulling the trigger. The hammer clicked noisily, but there was no accompanying explosion or bullet.

  “Ah,” said the Officer.

  George just dropped the gun and grabbed the pterodactyl’s beak without thinking much. He felt the heat in his hands and the loose particulate molecules deep in the stone. He swiveled his hands around the two halves of the beak, and as he did so he felt a granular smearing as he wiped one set of molecules into another, joining the top part to the lower, gagging the surprised taint so that its saucer eyes widened and bulged even larger.

  It dropped to the ground and hopped around, furiously but ineffectually tearing at its beak with the talons on the end of its wings, trying to open what was now one piece of stone. It was almost comical in its rage.

  The Officer looked at George with a new respect. “That is some trick you’ve got there.”

  George nodded. The Officer looked at the hopping pterodactyl.

  “Seems almost a shame to—”

  BLAM. The Gunner blew its head off.

  “Not to me it don’t,” he grunted. “Behind you . . .”

  Two taints were swooping in, their eyes fixed on the bundle that George was wrapping in the cape. The Officer leaped on one and clubbed at it with the pistol he had hurriedly reversed in his hand. The Gunner shot the other one three times before it died, so close to George that its body knocked him flying.

  The battle was a series of small fights just like this, all rolled into one giant maelstrom of violence. What George couldn’t see was that the taints were beginning to isolate and pick off groups of spits at the edges of the square, and having surrounded them, attack from all sides and destroy them before looking for the next vulnerable pocket of men. The king who had smacked the Lionheart on the helmet was in one of these pockets, slashing and hacking with a thin ornamental sword while the six spits around him were torn to pieces. Then the taints swarmed him, the force of their attack ripping him up and out of the saddle. There was a series of terrible breaking noises, and then they dropped him into one of the two fountains, where his broken body hit with a tremendous splash and explosion of broken ice, and then lay still, his curly wig splayed alongside his cropped head suddenly looking less like an elaborate hairpiece than an exhausted yet faithful spaniel.