Silvertongue

by Charlie Fletcher

The thought, she knew, was killing her. It was bouncing around in her brain, obscuring everything else she might be doing, telling her she was going to fail. It was drowning her like a block of lead chained around her neck. She wasn’t just fighting the water, she was fighting herself, and she knew she was a tough and ungiving opponent.

  She just couldn’t clear her mind and think about anything except the cold and the pressure and the fact she was running out of air.

  The pulse of dark power came at her at exactly the same moment that the light came on. For the first instant she didn’t know what it was, and then she knew exactly.

  The pulse was the mirrors.

  The light was her sea-glass heart stone blazing a warning through the material of her jeans pocket, through the thick silty water of the river bottom, through the darkness itself.

  The light said second time lucky.

  Second time the charm.

  The light also said danger.

  She reached her hand toward the pulse of darkness ahead of her.

  The danger coiled out of the clay bed of the river and wrapped a thin tentacle around her wrist.

  She felt it before she saw it, because she was looking ahead into the wall of water on the edge of the light-bloom from her warning stone. She looked down and saw the feeler made of clay coiling tightly around her arm. And next to it she saw the edge of darkness, and knew it was the side of one of the mirrors.

  Without thinking, she grabbed the mirror with her free hand, knowing if she didn’t, she might pass it a thousand times and never see its narrow profile again. And because the mirror that had broken in two had had the original shape of a hand mirror, Edie found she had gripped it by the half handle that remained. Again, almost without thought, she scythed the black mirror through the clay tentacle, so that it had severed and dissolved into the water before her conscious mind had begun to process the horror it was.

  And then the Dolphin pulled her off the riverbed, and she burst upward out of the river into the sharp air. The mirror was half clamped in her fist as the Dolphin rolled on its back and the Boy loosened the knots that tied her to the Dolphin’s belly. Rough stone hands reached gently down and lifted her onto the boat by the barge, and Edie managed to control the shaking and override the bone-shattering cold that had frozen her to the core, and chatter out one despairing cry.

  “No! I only got one!”

  The sailors looked down at her.

  “I have to go back,” she sobbed.

  The tentacle of clay burst out of the water like a small waterspout.

  The end waved right and left, as if looking for something, but there was no eye in the blunt tip of the thing. Instead it grew a crown of nubby fingers that twisted and writhed into longer and thinner tentacles before her shocked eyes.

  In the instant before the tentacle sensed her, Edie saw the glistening surface of the main arm twisting with river stones and other bits of waterborne garbage that were forming themselves into thick veins and corded sinews.

  The many-fingered hand at the top of the arm bent toward her, and Edie saw the grinding maw that had opened in its palm, a great mouth lined with broken bottles and torn and shredded cans, which chomped against each other hungrily.

  And then life happened very quickly as death struck.

  The tentacle reared back like a snake and lunged.

  The grinding mouth slammed at Edie, and there was nowhere to hide, no time to even get to her feet or roll out of the way. A gray blur of stone hit her, and she couldn’t breathe and was lifted above the river, ready to be plunged down to her icy doom. She heard the tentacle gripping her say: “Gack.”

  She looked down and realized it was not the tentacle that had grabbed her, but Spout, who had seen the danger and snatched her to freedom.

  Before she exhaled in relief, Edie looked down at the arm pinioned to her side. Her fist still white-knuckled on the black mirror.

  Edie breathed.

  Spout flew across and circled above the Queen. The Raven lofted off the wall and rose to meet them.

  “What the hell is that?” Edie said to herself, staring at the tentacled mud still sinuously coiling and searching for her above the river’s surface.

  The Raven clacked its beak.

  “Unmade Things?” said Edie, teeth chattering. “What do Unmade Things want with me?”

  It was George who had aroused the hunger of Unmade Things, George who had been attacked by a similar loamy tentacle in the underpass two, or was it three, long nights ago?

  She was losing count.

  She was losing her grip.

  Losing everything except the mirror half clutched in her fist, and the sense that things were wrong and getting more wrong by the second.

  George had aroused the hunger of Unmade Things, because he was a maker.

  Edie wasn’t.

  Her stomach lurched as Spout dropped out of the sky and grabbed a bundle that the Queen was holding up to him. It was Edie’s fur coat and clothes.

  “Go!” shouted the Queen. “Just go!”

  “Eigengang,” agreed the gargoyle. “Go Eigengang!”

  And before Edie could speak, the Raven and Spout had wheeled in the air and were flying full tilt back across the river.

  Toward the sound of the guns.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Divide and Conquer

  “You can’t just turn a spit into a taint!” exploded the Gunner.

  “What about Spout?” shouted George. “I did it the other way around, didn’t I?”

  A bullet spanged off the spine of the lion behind them and ricocheted across the square, over the heads of the fighting statues.

  George’s eye followed the whirring noise and came to stop on a giant taint wading through the spits, slashing left and right with a huge weapon like a double-ended spear. It was, in fact, a pair of enormous geometrical dividers. But it wasn’t the weapon that got George’s attention: it was the taint itself, and the jerky disjointed way it moved. It reminded him of the Gridman. Its naked figure was constructed of connected lumps, as if someone had taken a band saw to a muscular and well-proportioned body and cut it into awkward chunks before sticking them together again, leaving wide gaps between the reassembled parts. The parts almost moved together, but were just out of sync enough to make your eyes hurt. His eyes blinked a half second apart, and when he shouted, the two sides of his mouth seemed to fight each other.

  “Maker!” he bellowed, twirling the dividers above his head. “I have come to measure your span and weigh the darkness you have stolen!”

  “It’s the Newton,” said the Gunner. “I thought he was one of us. Been spending too much time up St. Pancras Way, next to that rookery of taints, I expect.”

  He dealt with his disappointment by emptying his pistol into the advancing giant. Each bullet hit a different section of the body, and each section spun on its axis, like a bewildering 3-D fruit machine, but the figure kept on striding toward them through the carnage.

  “Right,” the Gunner said, reloading fast. “Don’t let him get that bloody arm, eh?”

  There was no one between them and the Newton now. The Gunner flashed George a smile.

  “Been a pleasure, son,” he said.

  “No!” shouted George.

  “It’s what I do,” said the Gunner. “There’s a bullet with everyone’s name on it somewhere. I’ve told you before, thing is not to worry about it and live while you can, because sure as guns, no one’s got a guarantee on tomorrow. Be lucky.”

  And with that he snapped his pistol back together, clapped George on the shoulder, and ran straight at the Newton, firing as he went.

  “Save the boy!” he roared. “Everyone around the boy!”

  This time, each one of the bullets he fired hit the same spot—the Newton’s right eye. The section of head containing it was blown loose, but before the Gunner got to fire the sixth and final shot, there was no more time, and the snarling taint had stabbed the end of his sharpened dividers in a savage
blow, which sparked like a grinding wheel as it caught the Gunner halfway between belt buckle and heart.

  George heard the impact, and the “oof” of surprise it punched out of the Gunner. He saw the Gunner stop dead as the Newton jarred to a halt and shook itself before turning its one remaining eye on the Gunner and then George.

  “I am the unstoppable force!” it roared in a high croaking voice, twisting the point in the Gunner’s wound.

  The screeching noise was the one made by metal on metal, but to George it sounded like the Gunner’s dying scream. He rushed forward, only to be grabbed from behind and held tight.

  “No, boy,” growled Bulldog, holding him low to the ground as he struggled to run the twenty feet to his dying friend.

  The Lionheart leaped his horse over their heads and swung his great doublehanded battle sword with one arm, cleanly severing the dividers.

  The Gunner staggered back, still impaled on the freed end. The Newton whirled the dividers so the remaining point speared the Lionheart through the shoulder, yanking him off his horse and lifting him high above his head.

  “Have at you, fiend!” shouted the Lionheart, his battle frenzy undimmed as he swung the sword at the arm lifting him.

  The Newton simply ripped the sword out of his hand and took his head off in one angry backhanded swipe.

  The head was immediately buried in the snow, but the crown bounced off a balustrade and landed at George’s feet.

  “That’s how a king goes,” said Bulldog. “Worse luck.”

  The Newton shook the Lionheart’s body off his spear point and took one step toward George. Bulldog shoved himself in front of George.

  “When he gets me, you run like blazes,” he said.

  But the Newton stopped dead.

  It couldn’t walk forward.

  Its other foot was impaled to the ground.

  There was a distant sound of approaching thunder and the noise of a high-pitched whooping, but George barely registered it because he didn’t have time to worry about whatever fresh wave of taints was soon going to engulf them.

  He was transfixed by the fragment of life and death in front of him.

  The Newton roared in pain and frustration as it turned its remaining eye to see what had happened on its blind side.

  The Gunner had pulled the broken dividers out of the wound in his torso and used the last moment of his strength to shank it through the Newton’s foot, down into the stone beneath the snow, pinning it to the spot.

  The Gunner fell back and sat there, splay-legged and scrabbling for the pistol on the end of its lanyard.

  “Unstoppable force?” he spat, breathing hard. “Immoveable object, more like.”

  And he fired his sixth and last bullet into the Newton’s enraged eye, blinding him.

  “Behind you,” he coughed. His back crumpled and he pitched forward limply into the snow.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  No Retreat, No Surrender

  The Newton didn’t look backward as the Gunner fell. His attention was taken by something bounding past him, something that he struck at on instinct. It was the hare, and it shrieked as it wriggled off the end of his spear and ran on.

  Because of this, he never saw the source of the thundering noise approaching from behind him as the Queen of America stampeded off the top layer of snow in a huge eruption. Which was a shame, because a buffalo does not leap very often, and there are few people who have seen one fly through the air with such intense velocity. It landed without stumbling, and George saw the flash of gold from something across its shoulders, in front of the warrior Queen riding it.

  “They got her!” he yelled exultantly; but before anyone could ask who had got whom, the buffalo charged into the back of the Newton’s knees, knocking his feet from under him.

  The Queen of America bent low as the Newton tumbled back over her head, and then the buffalo slid to a halt in front of George, and the limp body of the Queen of Time slithered off its hump and landed at his feet.

  “You mend!” The Queen of America barked, then the buffalo spun around and she charged the Newton once more just as it was trying to raise itself off the ground. She speared it in one ear and out the other and then leaped off the buffalo. She ran up to the giant taint, ripped her lance free, and stabbed it again and again. It twitched and jerked and then lay still.

  She jumped onto the Newton’s chest and speared it one more time, right where its heart would be. “Stay dead, windigo,” she hissed, spitting contemptuously into the blank unmoving bullet hole in its eye.

  As she turned to answer George’s smile, a bullet from the rooftop knocked her leg out from under her, and she tumbled off the giant taint and landed across the Gunner’s legs.

  The very last thing the Gunner did was grab her and fold her in his arms, twisting to shield her with his body so that three bullets caught him in the back and didn’t hit her.

  It all happened so quickly and matter-of-factly that it was over and the Gunner had sacrificed himself before George could even shout “No!” The word died in his mouth, unsaid, and he staggered toward his fallen friend in a daze, as if the horror and the loss was just too much for his brain to process. He couldn’t believe what his eyes had just told him. He couldn’t believe the Gunner was dying, was going to be as dead and as gone as his father, as everyone who—

  Bulldog grabbed George and ran him across the few feet to the base of the column. He shoved him behind it, away from the snipers on the roof, and then he turned and shouted across the square in a voice as deep and ominous as a thunderclap.

  “To me! To me!! Everyone to me and form a square! Form a square!”

  “Why?” said George, looking around for a weapon to pick up off the ground.

  Across the square the isolated groups of spits, although drastically reduced in number, started to fight their way through the taints, toward the base of the column.

  “Why form a square?” repeated George, who had found a discarded sword and was looking hungrily about for a taint to bury it in, to avenge the Gunner.

  “Because it’s who we are, boy. We fight better when our back’s to a wall, and when there is not even a wall, we fight the best of all because there is no better buttress than the back of the man behind you, the man who is fighting for you in his turn.” The big man laughed and reloaded his rifle with practiced movements, which made him look like a much younger version of himself.

  It had got suddenly quieter. The taints had retreated.

  As the spits fought their way to the center of the square to make their stand, the taints had not followed. Instead they had disengaged and moved in the opposite direction, melting away to the edges of the piazza, and then dissolving into the shadows of the surrounding streets.

  George’s immediate fear was that they were leaving because one of them had somehow crept through and snatched the stone arm and the darkness within, but when he looked down he saw the bundle was still there, wrapped in the Gunner’s cape.

  Involuntarily his eyes swept up and across the square, and found the one body that really mattered. The Queen of America had rolled out from under the Gunner and was dragging him toward the base of the column, hobbling as she did so.

  “This should be good, the taints all going, shouldn’t it?” said George, itching to break cover and help, but held firmly in place by Bulldog, who was chewing on a cigar he had retrieved from his pocket.

  “Yes,” he said, though George noticed it sounded like “Yesh.”

  “But it isn’t, is it?” said George.

  “No,” he replied.

  “Taints ho!” bellowed the Admiral from above.

  Something swept in behind the last remaining taints, the grotesquely altered former spits of the Euston Mob. For an instant all the guns on that side of the square pointed at the incoming shape. And then George, who had peered around the corner despite the attempts of his protector to stop him, shouted.

  “Don’t fire! It’s Edie!”

  The Eust
on Mob turned as one, the upside-down heads of the former soldiers bobbling on the end of the bronze flaps where they had been decapitated, and the replacement gargoyle heads snarled and spat in anger as they tried to aim their guns. But they were too slow and Spout was gliding in too fast. His wide-stretched wings hit them all and swept them off the rooftop to crash down the front of the tall building, where they slammed into the railings below and moved no more.

  There was a ragged cheer from the dense square of spits grouped around the base of the column as Spout followed them down at a slower pace, flaring his wings and dropping a wet and shivering Edie at George’s side, tossing her bundle of coat and clothes to the ground and pointing excitedly at the rooftops.

  “Gaints, Eigengang, genny gaints!”

  Edie ripped off her wet top and folded herself into her coat in one fast move, hugging it around herself. “We saw a lot of taints flying this way. They’ll be here any minute!” she stuttered through her chattering teeth.

  The Queen of America laid the Gunner’s body against the column. Edie gasped and stumbled over to him, arriving at the same time as George.

  “No!” she said, her hand clapping over the wound in his chest as if she could stop the life from flowing out of it. George was on the other side, looking at the three bullet holes across the back.

  The Gunner’s eyes half opened. “S’all right. It’s just dying. Be fine.” And his eyes flickered shut again.

  “It will be all right,” Edie said urgently, not caring about the tears running down her face. “George! It’ll be all right, won’t it? I mean, we’ll just put him on his plinth and he’ll get better at turn o’day, like spits do, right?”

  “If time is out of joint, we don’t know if there’ll be a proper turn o’day,” said Bulldog. “I think unless time flows normally, dead means dead.”

  “George!” shouted Edie. “He can’t die. We can’t lose him. He’s . . .”

  The importance of what the Gunner had become to her choked her into silence.

  “I know,” said George. “He feels like family to me too.”