Silvertongue (13 page)

The dragon exhausted its breath, and the flame stopped as it filled its lungs for a second blast.

“You must get free, boy,” murmured a strange raw voice. “I fear I cannot hold him forever. . . .”

It was only when Dictionary turned to look blindly at him, and George saw the terrible erasure that the fire had wrought across his eyes and forehead, that he realized the voice was the spit’s.

“Dictionary,” George cried involuntarily.

The dragon roared, cocked its head confidently for the coup de grâce, and then jerked it violently sideways once, twice, three times.

It coughed and looked at George, a question in its eyes, as if it didn’t know why it had done that, and then . . .

BLAM
.

A fourth shot rang out and knocked the head limply back on the scaly neck, and George realized he had heard three earlier shots but had been too busy preparing to die to work out what they were.

The dragon pitched backward, its twitching tail sweeping Dictionary off his feet as it went down.

“What happened, boy?” he said hoarsely.

There was a strange noise building to their right—a low rolling thunder of hooves with a high-pitched yipping in counterpoint, like someone shouting “Hi, hi, hi!” over and over. George’s eyes followed the sound waves back to their source. “I don’t know,” he breathed. “But whatever it is, it’s still happening.”

L
ittle Tragedy scampered ahead of Edie along the Embankment, heading east.

Toward the ice murk lowering over the City.

Edie didn’t notice the cloud. All she saw was her mother’s stone bobbing along in Little Tragedy’s hand. She sprinted after him and grabbed his shoulder.

“Hey,” she said, spinning him around and bunching her fist.

“Don’t—”

She punched him. The pain in her hand was instantaneous and numbing. He stumbled backward.

“Hit me,” he finished, getting his balance.

“Give me that stone,” she growled, holding her throbbing fist and deciding not to look at it, no matter how broken it felt.

“I’m made of metal,” he said, backing up as she advanced on him. “It’s stupid to hit me. . . .”

She kicked and hooked his legs out from under him. He smacked down on his back with a satisfying thud.

“Ow!” he yelped.

“Give me the stone!” she repeated, bunching her fist again. She tried not to show how much just bunching it now hurt.

“All right, all right, keep your hair on,” he grumbled, and held up the stone. “I was just trying to help.”

As she reached for it, the Raven swooped in and picked the stone from his hand, so close that Edie’s fingers brushed the feathers on its back as it passed between them.

“You’re pulling my leg. . . .” she said.

The Raven hung in the air and beckoned her.

“Don’t start that again,” she sighed. “I’m really not in the mood.”

“He’s trying to ’elp an’ all,” said Tragedy. “Can I get up, or do you want to hurt your hand some more?”

“You betrayed me. You took me to that house, that prison with the woman with the sewn-up eyes!”

She couldn’t begin to explain the scope of his treachery or the depth of her disgust and hatred for him. It rose in her throat like a black column of bile.

“You lied, you stole. You stole the broken carving, the one George broke. And you handed me to the Walker. He hurt me. You hurt me. You worse than hurt me: you got me killed!”

“If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t,” he whined.

“Yeah, well, if I had a gun, I’d shoot you,” she spat. “In fact, I’m going to get a gun right now. . . .”

She turned away and started to call out to the Gunner.

“Wouldn’t do that if I was you, girlie. Not if you want to see your mother again.”

Edie’s heart gave that treacherous lurch skyward. “What?” she gasped.

“Your old mum. You want to see her, right?”

The best of all possibilities was being laid before her by the worst of messengers. She took a deep breath, then another. Tried to think straight. Gave up.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well then, that’s why Old Black sent me,” he said, as if she should have known this.

“The Black Friar sent you?” she said, trying to catch up.

“’Course he did. This ’ere bird flapped in, all of a twitter, an’ clacked away in Ol’ Black’s lug ’ole, and Ol’ Black, ’cos he understands the bird, sends me to get you. The bird wants to show you something.”

“Where?” said Edie.

“In the pub, where else?” sighed Tragedy. “Blimey. You sure you didn’t bang your ’ead as well as your knuckles?”

Edie was well aware her heart was still fluttering somewhere above her head, ready to be dashed to the ground and crushed by the familiar iron heel of disappointment. As far as she had experienced life, which was more than most people three times her age, when things were too good to be true, they usually weren’t either good or true.

It had to be a trap, at the very least.

What changed her mind was what happened next.

The Raven swooped really close to her, eyeballed her, and then dropped the stone into her hand. Then it nodded and flew off toward the distant lights of the Black Friar’s pub.

“Ol’ Black said the Raven owes you one. Said you freed it from the Walker,” said Tragedy.

Tragedy had betrayed her. He had maybe betrayed other glints before her. She had no reason to trust him. He had got her killed.

The Friar, on the other hand, had initially seemed suspicious to both her and George. But then he had saved her life, shielding her from a bomb blast and rescuing her from the Blitz.

Caught between a traitor and a savior, Edie decided it was a trap worth walking into, and set off after the bird. She walked fast and then broke into a jog. Once she made up her mind to do something, she never wasted time getting it done, for good or bad.

Little Tragedy hobbled along after her, wincing.

“You hurt my leg,” he sniveled. “Look. I can’t walk proper. I landed funny.”

“Good,” she said, without turning. “Does the Friar know you betrayed me to the Walker?”

“No,” he moaned. “You think I’m soft or something? ’E ’ates the Walker.”

After a few more steps he obviously decided she wasn’t going to turn around and look at him, because he shrugged and straightened up and walked perfectly normally, all hint of a hobble gone.

The whine had also miraculously been cured when he next spoke, just as they were jogging up and across the intersection at the end of Blackfriars Bridge.

“You ain’t going to tell ’im?” he said.

“Why not?” she said, looking up and noticing the murk for the first time. It hung above and behind the white pub like a slow-moving thundercloud.

“Because you don’t know why I done what I did?” he said, and the air of hopefulness in his voice made her gorge rise, and she spun and grabbed a handful of his collar in her fist, so angry that she ignored the pain in her split bruised knuckles as she did so.

“Oi . . .” he said.

He was still protesting when Edie booted open the door of the pub and threw him in ahead of her. He pancaked on the floor in an ungainly spread eagle, coming to rest against the legs of the Black Friar.

The burly monk looked down at him, and then up at Edie, his normally cheerful smile lost in an expression as thunderously ominous as the cloud outside.

“Please,” said Tragedy, turning to Edie, “you don’t have to tell him. . . .”

“Indeed she doesn’t,” boomed the Friar, bending down and hauling Tragedy to his feet in one powerful move.

The Raven flapped in and took a perch on one of the pump handles on the bar. The door slammed shut behind it.

The Friar looked straight into Edie’s eyes.

“I know exactly what you did.”

G
eorge was torn between his horror at what had happened to Dictionary and wonder at the apparitions who had saved them both.

Three figures were approaching at a run, spread across the width of the street. The bronze one on the left had the unmistakable helmet of a World War I soldier, like the Gunner, but even at this distance George knew it wasn’t the Gunner, because he carried a rifle, and a scarf fluttered around his neck as he ran.

The bronze one on the right seemed to shamble speedily instead of actually running, but this was because he was swathed in an extraordinary collection of clothes: a thick woolen balaclava, a long garment that seemed at this distance to be half anorak and half smock, and huge woolen mittens that appeared to hang from some kind of strappy chest harness.

But as extraordinary as he looked, he was nothing like as strange as the third one charging up the middle of the road at a faster clip than either of the two bronze statues. It was, in fact, two figures carved out of marble as white as the cloud of snow they were kicking up behind them. The larger one was an immense white buffalo, hooves pounding into a full gallop. The smaller figure was riding on its back, just behind the muscled shoulders, the fingers of her left hand gripping the wooly hump instead of a bridle. She wore only a thin cloak, which rippled in the wind behind her like a battle flag, and she held a lance in her right hand, ready to throw. On her head a warbonnet of eagle feathers was blown flat by the speed of the charging buffalo, and lest there be any doubt that she was a warrior, bent on warrior’s business, she carried a tomahawk clenched between her teeth.

The high-pitched yipping “Hi’s” were coming around the handle of the war ax, and the woman’s eyes were fixed in steely concentration on the dragon ahead of her.

The dragon ripped Hodge off its head and hurled the mewling cat into a snowdrift, turning its one remaining good eye on the source of the yipping—at the very moment the warrior raised herself onto the buffalo’s back and threw the spear.

It flew through the air and hit the dragon in the shoulder, so hard that the tip came a foot out of its back.

The dragon roared in outrage, so loud that cornices of snow fell off the surrounding buildings; but the buffalo just lowered its head as the rider snatched the tomahawk from her mouth with her newly empty hand—and then they hit the dragon smack on dead center, the buffalo’s horns going on each side of the taint’s breast as it knocked it backward in a mighty collision. The buffalo trampled right over the dragon and pivoted around for a second charge.

The dragon pushed itself up, using a wing as a temporary crutch; but the impact had stunned it so badly it couldn’t avoid the woman as she leaned far out from the side of the passing buffalo and smashed the tomahawk into the side of its head in a blow that spun the head almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees.

Again the buffalo lumbered in a curve and came back for a third run. This time the warrior threw her tomahawk, which whirred end over end, thocking home in the center of the taint’s chest, just below the point where its neck rose up. Thick fire bled out of the wound like lava, because she had hit it right in the fire crop, and the dragon dabbed at itself in horror as its own fire began to eat into its scales.

As the buffalo passed on the other side, the dragon took a last despairing swipe at the warrior woman, but missed. She leaned out and gripped the spear sticking out of the dragon’s back and neatly pulled the whole length through the taint’s body.

As the dragon roared in pain and frustration, the woman scissored nimbly off the side of the buffalo in a galloping dismount, not even stumbling a fraction as her bare feet hit the ground. She ran back in close behind the turning dragon and killed it stone dead with one decisive thrust through the center of its back. She jerked her spear free as the dragon fell on its side, and rolled the taint over with her foot, yanking her tomahawk out while neatly avoiding the thick fire pooling around it.

“Doe-nada-go-huh-ee, do-way-gah!”
she said, spitting on the twitching corpse. She looked up at George and grinned.

“Ah-see-you,”
she said, eyes still wide in elation at her kill.

“Right,” he said. “Er . . . I see you too.”

“No,” said a deep voice from behind him. The man in the balaclava was striding up.
“Ah-see-you
is ‘hello’ in her language.”

“Yes. Hello,” she barked as she ran past and dropped to one knee next to Dictionary, who was trying to get up. She put a gentle hand on his shoulder and made him lie down as she leaned over and examined the damage.

George went to join her, but the man in the balaclava gripped his shoulder and stopped him.

“Let her see to him, sonny. She knows as much about healing as she does about harming,” he said in a voice that was English, with a lilting hint of something else in the background. The slightly clipped ends to some of the words made George wonder if he was a bit Irish, perhaps. He knew he’d seen him before, on the side of a red-brick building by the park.

“You’re Shackleton,” he said.

“Friends call me Shack,” said the spit, with a smile, sticking out his hand to shake George’s. “You’ll be George, the boy maker. We heard about you. This is the Railwayman. . . .”

He nodded toward the soldier reloading his rifle as he jogged across the street to join them.

“And who’s that?” breathed George, looking back at the warrior woman leaning over Dictionary, while her buffalo nosed the snow as if hoping to find a few buried blades of grass on the pavement beneath.

“Well,” said Shack, a hint of amusement glimmering in his eyes, “the buffalo’s called Bill, for obvious reasons. . . .”

“No,” said George. “Her. Who’s she?”

“Oh, her?” said the soldier. “Sitting on a buffalo, head full of eagle feathers? ’Oo do you think she is? S’obvious . . .”

He snorted and rolled his eyes at Shack.

“She’s the Queen of America.”

“I
t is my fault, indeed it is,” repeated the Friar, scowling at Little Tragedy.

“You knew what he did?” said Edie incredulously.

“That he tricked you, that he spirited you through the mirrors to a place of detention in London past, no—I did not know that until it was too late. Indeed, until the Raven here came to me, I knew nothing of it, or of the fate you and the boy arranged for the Walker. You are to be congratulated, my child, my word, yes you are,” he said, his stern face relaxing for a moment as his more usual smile made a brief appearance, his eyes all but disappearing in creases of mirth. Then he turned back to Tragedy. “But that this imp was partial to another, that the Walker had him in his thrall, using him as a common kitchen spy and tattletale? That I did know. My failing was to believe, while he may have been capable of mischief and tale-bearing, he was not capable of evil.”

Tragedy carefully got to his feet and looked at the Friar. He couldn’t hold his gaze for longer than a second and looked away.

“I ain’t evil. I was just . . . I been made wrong, ain’t I? Like there’s something in me what ain’t quite right. It’s not my fault.”

He glanced pleadingly at Edie.

“I thought the Walker ’elped glints, see? He was always looking for ’em. And ’e said one day when ’e was free of the Stone and its curse, ’e’d make me better inside.”

“Bumblepuppy! One liar should see another’s lies for what they are,” roared the Friar.

“Yeah, but you talked to ’im,” shot back the small boy, in a sudden cringing counterattack. He pointed a thin finger. “You talked whenever he was past here. . . .”

“You talked to the Walker?” Edie said, horror-struck.

“Frequently,” the Friar replied instantly.

Edie tried to get her bearings in a tilting world that seemed to lurch from one side to another every time she thought she had it straight.

“But he was bad. I mean worse than bad, he was a murderer and a . . . and you just TALKED to him! Why?”

The Friar spread his arms wide, his voice bouncing off the marble and mirrors and rattling the glasses on their shelves.

“Why? WHY? Why would I talk to any man, any woman, any waif or stray who found their way to my door? Because it is my lot to bring cheer and succor to any that seek it!”

Edie tried to protest, but the Frier silenced her with an imperious sweep of his hand.

“Close your mouth, child, and hear me out. An open mouth is a great obstacle to an open mind, indeed it is. I talk to the Walker because I am a priest, and a priest must talk to all men who wish to talk. And who but the darkest souls have the most need of the light a listening heart can bring? I am also a landlord and a host, my house a free house, open to men of every stripe and color. . . .”

“The Walker wasn’t a man. He was a
monster
!” she protested, unable to control her outrage.

The Friar hoicked up his cassock and knelt on one knee, coming eye to eye with her. His voice lowered and he spoke as if he were talking to her alone.

“He is a man. You know it to be so, because you know, as I do, that, slice the world how you will, it is men and men alone who make the very worst monsters.”

There was a long beat. Edie nodded, despite herself.

“And then there’s the other reason . . .” he said, reaching out a hand to one side. The Raven flapped off the beer pump and came to roost on his outstretched finger. “It is good to keep your friends close, but better to keep your enemies even closer.”

And with that he winked and bounced to his feet, suddenly invigorated.

“I am a man who needs to watch his enemies, child, and what better way to do so than to appear to be all things to all men; and if that is a crime then every landlord who was ever worth his salt should swing for it!” he said, clapping his hands in sudden mirth. “And why need I watch my enemies? Because I am three in one and one in three, priest, landlord . . . and guardian.”

“Guardian?” said Edie. “Guardian of who?”

His hand swept around the extravagantly decorated room, taking in the reliefs on the walls, the mirrored pillars leading into the barrel-vaulted snug with its mosaic roof, smoky mutton-fat marble, and exotic alabaster light fittings.

“Guardian of
what
, child, not who. Guardian of this. Guardian of the Thresholds, Guardian of the Ways between here and there, between then and now, between what may be and what might be.”

He snapped his fingers theatrically, and in an instant the light dimmed to a redder and more ancient glow, as if the electric bulbs had become flickering oil lamps. And as his finger-snap still echoed around the room, the alabaster figures that hung beneath the lamps launched off the walls and flew to him.

The beaming black-robed Friar was framed by four white-winged imps with goat legs and satyr horns.

“This spot, this house, this Machine of Times and Places has always been an uneasy point, balanced between the best and the worst, between monks and devils. It is my duty to maintain the equilibrium. I make no apologies for the way I do it.”

Edie remembered the large figure reaching up to the compass-rose mosaic in the ceiling of the snug, and shifting the checkered rings before showing her the past in the mirrors.

“This is a time machine,” she said, feeling stupid. “This whole building is a time machine!”

“Yes . . . and no, child,” he said, walking back into the shadowy arch between the rooms, standing between the two narrow mirrors facing each other on either side of the pilasters.

“It is a place where the lines of power cross. And where lines of great powers cross, you can travel between both now and then, and here and there . . . if you have the knack of it.”

“So I can go to the past? I can change the past!” she said, excitement rising in her throat.

“No,” he said. “Good lord, no. Changing the past? What a thought. No, child, if people could change the past, where on earth would we be? Certainly not where we are today.”

“But I went back into the past,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense. In the Blitz. To the House of Lost Hope. To the Frost Fair!”

Edie was getting so very excited about the idea of changing the past because she thought she could go back and alter what had happened to her mother. She was sure that this was what the rising elation and frustration she had been feeling, ever since she’d been revived and found her mother’s heart stone, was all about.

It all made sense.

She was going to see her mother because she was going to go back and warn her. She was going to tell her about the—

“No!” he repeated, this time with a voice like a church door slamming. “You cannot change the past if you were not in it in the first place. If you were meant to be there, you are. Otherwise you just see it. Or rather you are in it but not of it. You can see but not be seen. Like your glinting.”

“I don’t understand. . . .” she protested. But she didn’t go on, because she sort of did. She realized that nothing that she had foreseen about her death at the Frost Fair had happened any differently when she had actually been there, being the one being killed. All the air went out of her as her heart dropped.

“Yeah. No. Actually I do,” she said grimly, looking at the carpet and the dust sheets on the floor. “It’s all crap, as usual.”

The Black Friar watched her until she lifted her head and swept the fall of hair from her face.

“You thought you would change things for the better,” he said with an unexpected gentleness that ambushed her and made her eyes prickle with tears.

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The Friar blew his cheeks out and scratched the back of his head. “We have little time, child. Time itself is out of joint. The old darkness rides again, and the taints have flocked to a new darkness, whose frozen evil is blighting the City. Even now an icy murk is billowing over the roof of this building. And yet all is not lost, and kindness that was done can be repaid. And while this Machine of Times and Places may not change the past, what is learned by it may yet change the future.”

“What do you mean?” said Edie.

“You freed the Raven. And he would repay your kindness with a gift of his own. Maintaining the balance, you see. And he has much to give, since he has seen much and remembered all.”

The Raven bobbed off his hand and flew onto her shoulder. It looked into her eyes. It was too close for her to focus on it, but she could see it was nodding enthusiastically.

“What gift?” she said carefully.

The Raven clacked in her ear.

The Friar tapped the mirrors on either side of him.

“If you will allow him to guide you back into the mirrors . . .”

“What then?” she said, suddenly aware that her skin was goose-bumping.

“He would take you to see your mother.”