The taints howled off and joined another attack that was boiling around the empty plinth, where the Euston Mob were fighting back-to-back.
George had seen the king’s body tumbling into the fountain and had felt sick at the impact it had made, but an instant later another attack had blurred past, and he was backed into the lion’s side by the Officer and the Gunner, who had obviously decided they could protect him best by shielding him with their bodies. For several minutes all George could see of the fight were fragments snatched in the gaps between their two broad backs. And then, although the sounds of gunfire and shrieking and yelling all around were deafening, the Admiral’s voice cut through to them from above.
“To the sky! Look to the sky!”
George jerked his head upward, and saw for the first time how the battle was being fought in the air above his head. The Temple Bar Dragon had been firing gouts of wildfire at the airborne taints. These multicolored air-bursts hung in the air and faded into skeins of smoke that overhung the battle below. Through the smoke looking east, George saw immediately what the Admiral was shouting about.
Four struggling figures were being carried off by teams of larger taints, their greatcoats flapping as they twisted and fought to free themselves.
“It’s the Euston Mob,” breathed the Gunner.
George stared in horror as one of the soldiers dropped his rifle. A taint unhooked from his arm and dived straight down, catching the gun before it fell to the ground.
“What the hell did it do that for?” said the Gunner. “Why’d it catch the gun?”
The taints carried their struggling victims out of sight, over the top of St. Martin’s church. And almost as if this were a signal, the taints that remained disengaged and poured out of the square in their wake. In less than one minute the whole echoing piazza was silent except for the moans and cries of the hurt. George looked up to see the Lionheart looking down at them, showing his teeth in a wide battle-drunk smile. “I did not know London held so many taints.” He laughed. “But we saw them off, by God!”
“It doesn’t, and we didn’t,” said the Gunner, looking at the Officer. “I killed two that weren’t stone to my knowledge, maybe others.”
“What do you mean?” said the Lionheart.
“Something is making taints out of ice,” said the Officer. “Copying them.”
“Nonsense.” The Lionheart laughed.
“He’s right,” said George.
“All the more for me to kill, if they dare to come back,” snorted the Lionheart, riding off.
“They’ll come back,” said the Gunner.
“Why would they take the Euston Mob?” said George, remembering with a sharp pang how the four soldiers had saved him only the night before; how he had sat with them and enjoyed their easy company.
“I don’t know,” replied the Officer. “But I don’t like the way they took care to keep that gun. It was only our guns that saved us this time.”
George looked around at the shattered bodies strewn across the piazza. If this wasn’t the finish, then he worried about what that would look like. Surely it could not be worse. “I shouldn’t have brought the arm here,” he said, feeling desperately sad and guilty. “None of this . . .”
“Nonsense, boy. There’s no other place in the world you should have brought it if not here, for where else could you defend it from those who would free it?” rumbled the bearlike man in the overcoat.
George looked at him.
“George. This is Bulldog. Bulldog—George,” said the Gunner. “He knows a thing or two about keeping on scrapping when all looks lost.”
“Pleasure.” Bulldog nodded, looking a little bit like a gangster as he smiled around the cigar in his mouth. “Though, if you’re feeling guilty, try working out how we can use these mirrors of yours against that thing on top of the tower.”
“If Edie manages to find them, that is,” added the Officer. “And think fast, because I don’t know if we can survive another attack.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
The Old Growler
There was no time for ceremony when the Queen got Edie to the riverbank by Blackfriars. She’d had to drop back over Waterloo Bridge and take her to the south side of the river, and this had taken extra time as well as distance. They could hear from the shouting and crackle of gunfire that drifted across the river that the battle was continuing; and though neither of them said it, they both understood that their failure to get the mirrors and return them to the square in time might make all the fighting pointless.
“Where are your daughters?” Edie had asked in her one attempt at conversation.
“They went to look for you,” answered the Queen shortly.
She didn’t need to say anything more. Edie looked at the side of her face as she whipped the horses forward, and saw all the worry that the Queen wasn’t voicing.
When they arrived just upstream of the bridge, the Bosun and Jack Tar were again on the deck of the barge, throwing the anchor out and dragging it in again, and the Boy and the Dolphin were hard at work in the water beside them. Of the gryphons, there was no sign, and the sailors shouted across the water that they had left once the Queen and George had gone.
The Pilot was still lifelessly bent backward over the river wall on the other side of the water, and when Edie asked about it, the Queen gave her an abrupt and unadorned answer. For the second time Edie wondered if the Queen was angry with her, worried for her daughters, or trying not to show that she was worried about the outcome of the struggle with the Ice Devil.
She decided it was all three, got out of the chariot, and stripped off her fur coat. Then she sat on the edge of the chariot and yanked off her boots. The Raven eyed her quizzically, and then jerked its head with the follow-me gesture she was beginning to recognize. She walked through the snow to the riverbank, not worrying about how soaked her socks were getting, in the horribly certain knowledge that she was about to get them a lot wetter and colder any moment now.
The Raven curved down over the river’s surface, and then stopped in midair.
Edie looked from the Raven to the bridge and back again.
“Yes,” said the Queen. “That’s about right.”
Edie felt the Queen’s hand on her shoulder.
“The Raven remembers everything. It is there that the Walker disappeared, there that he left the mirrors on the ice, there that they will have sunk into the water once the ice melted,” said the Queen.
“So I’ll search along that line, from there downstream, I suppose, in case they got swept along,” said Edie, trying to sound nonchalant about a horror she had no idea how to face.
“Yes,” agreed the Queen. “Though, I feel that objects of such dark power do not drift. Rather they pin the world beneath their awful weight.”
Somehow this talk of awful weights was not helping Edie get into a particularly optimistic frame of mind about the upcoming ordeal. She knew if she started to think about what she was going to do, she might not do it, so she just peeled off the two sweaters she was wearing and turned to the Queen. “Right,” she said. “I can hold my breath for about a minute. Maybe a bit longer. So. How are we going to do this?”
There followed a fast consultation between the shore and the barge. While this went on, Spout looped overhead, watching the surrounding skies, on gryphon watch. After a few minutes, Jack Tar whistled him down and explained to him what the plan was.
“Gack,” said Spout, nodding.
“Gack indeed, me old china,” said Jack Tar. “Take a hold of the glint and ferry her over, would you?”
The plan was as simple as it was terrifying.
There was no time for finesse.
Edie was to be tied to the Dolphin.
They decided the best thing to do was to rope her underneath it, so she could reach down to the riverbed and retrieve the mirrors, and would be able to direct the Dolphin left or right by reaching back and pulling on the relevant fin.
“Like steering
a bicycle. With your hands behind your back,” explained Jack Tar, not particularly helpfully.
Tapping the creature three times in a row would mean she was running out of air.
The Bosun and the Boy worked with the Dolphin as it came out of the water and lay on the back of the small boat so that they could work a rig of ropes around it, while Spout came and gently lifted Edie across to join them.
Edie didn’t know what to say to the Queen, but she felt a knot of emotion as she looked back at her while Spout carried her over the water.
“I’m sure your daughters will be fine,” shouted Edie.
The Queen smiled briefly and nodded. “As I am sure that you will come through this ordeal. Andraste guards you, and you have too much fire in you to be quenched even by as great and timeless a river as this old growler before us,” she shouted back.
The old growler flowing beneath Edie’s feet looked cold and deadly as gunmetal. The current seemed to twist past with a silent growl, pitched too low for human hearing, but there, all the same, right on the edge of her consciousness.
Then the little boat was below her, and she was dropped into the waiting hands of the sailors, who lifted her onto the harness. She could feel the soft surface of the Dolphin at her back, and when she reached for the flippers experimentally, it twitched each one in turn, and clicked and whistled in greeting.
“Hi,” said Edie.
“He would never harm you,” said a laughter-filled voice at her ear, and she turned her head to see the tousled head of the Dolphin’s Boy smiling encouragingly at her, upside down. “And besides, I shall swim with you both. We play in this river every night, so it holds no fears for us.”
Maybe it was because he looked so like another little boy, one who had betrayed her to the Walker, or maybe it was because that betrayal had led to a drowning, which meant this river did hold fears for her, but Edie, instead of feeling calmed by this, felt instant panic to the point where she was about to forget to breathe. She felt that the ropes the sailors were tying around her chest and middle and arms were going to kill her.
There was only one way out.
“Okay,” she said shortly, “let’s do this now.”
She started purposefully taking deep breaths, hyperventilating to cram her lungs with all the oxygen she knew she was going to need the moment she hit the water.
The cold nearly made her breathe out all of the carefully hoarded air in a single shocked outbreath. She kept her mouth closed and just screamed on the inside, behind her tightly clenched teeth.
There were bubbles all around her, and then darkness as the Dolphin swam straight to the bottom of the river, beneath the hovering Raven. Edie knew she had to reach out, clear her brain, and stop worrying about things like the excruciating pressure in her ears, or drowning in the knifing cold. She needed to feel the dark pulse of the obsidian mirrors; but the moment she tried not to think about drowning, she thought of nothing else.
She felt the powerful flex of the Dolphin’s belly behind her, and heard a high-pitched keeking and clacking. She didn’t need to speak Dolphin to know it was asking her where to go.
She had no idea.
This was not going to work.
This was going to get her killed.
She reached her hands blindly forward, but felt nothing as the Dolphin slowly skated along the unseen floor of the river. And then her lungs began to burn with oxygen starvation, and she tapped the fin three times.
Edie burst into the air with a rasping breath, unaware in her desperation that the Dolphin had controlled its ascent and was now standing on its tail so that she could breathe.
“Did you get it?” shouted the Bosun.
Edie just shook her head.
Not only did she not get it, but there was no way anyone in the world could make her go down there again.
No one.
Ever.
Only now that she was back in the air did the wall between her and her memories of drowning come tumbling down. The cold desperate horror came flooding over them and engulfed her, obliterating everything else as it came.
“One more time . . .” she gasped, sucking in air.
No one could make her go into the water again.
No one except herself.
She trapped a giant lungful in her chest, tapped the Dolphin’s fin, and plunged into the deadly cold one more time.
CHAPER FIFTY-FOUR
Ground Assault
The second wave didn’t come from the air. Not at first.
The first assault came boiling out of the side streets and approach roads. All the wingless taints, the strange and the fantastical sculptures of London charged in at ground level. They came ripping and tearing and screaming, and they all launched their attack at the same moment. They had obviously worked their way around the square while the spits had been distracted by the earlier aerial engagement. The attack came on every side, hopping and running and slithering into the shocked ranks of the spits with bewildering speed.
Because the onslaught roared in through the snow, the fight was even harder to keep track of as the assailants kicked up their own ice cloud as they came, but George had more time to try to make sense of it because he was in the center of the square at the foot of the column, so not immediately involved in the fighting.
Despite this, it was still just a great, terrifyingly brutal mess.
Wingless gargoyles and snakes and lizards fought side by side with unformed or grotesquely exaggerated human figures. George saw two tall male humanoids with smoothed-off features and blank heads, one rustier than the other, flailing into the middle of a group of spits on the outer edge of the west fountain.
“They’re almost human,” he said.
“Yeah,” replied the Gunner at his shoulder. He shot the rusty one in the chest. “It’s the ‘almost’ that makes ’em so angry.”
The duplicate of the downed taint raised its eyeless head and looked across the intervening space, zeroing in on its twin’s killer.
The Gunner flipped open his revolver and reloaded. The Lionheart tumbled past, hacking at a stone lizard that had knocked him out of his saddle. The impact made the Gunner drop the bullets he was loading. He knelt to pick them out of the snow, scowling at the humanoid that was sprinting toward him, furiously knocking aside any spit or taint that got in its way. George could hear a muffled scream inside it, like a bell resonating around its hollow interior as it found that its maker had made it without a mouth to let the rage out.
“Bugger,” said the Gunner, his hands scrabbling in the snow as the gap between them closed with alarming rapidity.
“Don’t worry,” said the Officer, stepping in front of the Gunner and raising his pistol. “I’ve got him.”
And then there was the sound of a shot, and the Officer twisted and looked at them in shock, the back of his head blown open.
George and the Gunner had a second of complete horror in which they watched the Officer drop in his tracks. Then George looked up and saw the faceless man-taint leaping at the Gunner. And in that moment, George felt something under his hand and realized it was the edge of the Gunner’s helmet, and with a massive despairing twist of his muscles, he jerked it off the ground and spun it at the attacker like a giant flying disk.
It hissed through the air and took the taint’s head off at the neck.
The body stumbled forward and dropped to the ground. George saw the hollow core through the neck hole.
“George . . . ?” said the Gunner.
“I don’t know,” he replied quickly, knowing what the Gunner was going to ask him and looking down at his hands, which felt unusually hot again. “I don’t know how I did that.”
“No,” said the Gunner, slamming him back into the side of the lion as something cracked flatly past his ear. “I meant, get down.”
He jerked his thumb over his head at the rooftops hidden beyond the steep protecting bulk of the lion’s torso. “I meant they’ve got bloody guns.”
T
hey stared at each other, then at the lifeless corpse of the Officer. They inched their heads up the smooth flank of the motionless lion and peered carefully over the top.
“How the hell do taints know how to use guns, let alone bloody get hold of them . . . ?” began the Gunner.
They saw the snipers on the roof at the same time.
“Oh no,” breathed the Gunner. “That’s not right. You can’t do that. . . .”
The Euston Mob were ranged along the parapet of the building, greatcoats snapping in the wind, which had just kicked up in answer to the storm raging through the square below.
They were firing into the spits, picking them off one by one.
But the eyes that squinted along the gun sights were not the eyes of the soldiers. Those eyes stared sightlessly from the heads that had been torn partially off the bodies and now hung off their necks. Gargoyle heads were stuck on in their place: snarling stone heads welded to the ripped-open neck stumps with thick collars of ice.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
The Death of Water
Nobody says second time lucky.
That was the thought that plunged with Edie to the bottom of the river.
It’s never the second time.
Third time is always the charm.
Silvertongue Page 27
