Stoneheart (10 page)
She saw he had only one hand that worked properly. Without thinking, she clambered up on his knee and reached under the folds of his cape, surprised at the way what looked like metal moved and felt like material. She tugged at the chains.
“What are you—?”
“Don’t talk. You talk too much. Listen.”
She was about to fire back an answer, when she saw his face. It was hurt, but he wasn’t looking at her angrily. For a moment he even looked kind.
“He’s got to get to the Black Friar. He’s in a pub at the end of Blackfriars Bridge.”
She kept looking at the cone of flame across the street.
“You’ll take him—” Edie said.
“No. I won’t. I don’t even know if this’ll work, but if it does I won’t be able to and you will. Your problem is the dragons.”
“There’s more than one?”
“There’s one guarding every street that leads into the City. And the problem—
one
of the problems—with the Black Friar, is that he’s
in
the City. So you can’t take the streets—”
“We can take the Underground—”
He clasped her arm.
“No. I dunno what or who George is, but if he’s who or what I think he might be, the only place more dangerous for him than aboveground is under it. Never, ever go underground, you got it? I done it once in the parking garage and we got away with it by blind luck and ruddy ignorance, but don’t do it again!”
Edie nodded.
“So if we can’t go by streets …”
He took the chains from her and looped them around his good fist, eyes on the fire and the dragon as he spoke.
“There was a road here before there was streets. It’s a wet road, but you take it. There ain’t much can save you once a taint’s got your number, but what’s uncanny and evil’s always hated two things: cold iron and running water. So your way ain’t by land. And one more thing—”
Edie pointed. Across the street, the dragon had lowered its arms. It flicked out a claw and gently sliced an opening in the cone of fire. They saw a brief image of George standing in the middle of the fire, and then the dragon stepped inside the burning wall, and the opening slapped shut behind it.
George felt a blast of cold air suck inside the cone and opened his eyes. And of course once he did, he wished he hadn’t, because the dragon was towering over him—and he would have screamed, but he was all screamed out; so he shut his mouth and clenched his teeth and all the screaming stopped at once, and he was alone in the spiral of flame with the dragon.
As he looked up, he saw its white head outlined against the disk of night sky at the top of the cone. And behind the head he saw the flashing light of a jet flying across London, and somehow the fact that there were still jets full of people being told to fasten their safety belts and eating airline food off those tiny trays made him shake his head in wonder.
The dragon mirrored his movement with its own head.
George shook his head again to see if that was what was happening. The dragon copied him. George found he was laughing, at least part laughing, part crying. And as he choked and snuffled, the dragon did the same, soundlessly pantomiming his motions.
George looked at the friendly blinking airplane light just about to leave the circle of normality above him, and tried very hard to wake up. He didn’t, and he got angry again.
“You’re not real!” he spat at the dragon, who was watching him very closely. He pointed at the sky.
“That’s real, that’s a
plane
and it’s
real
and
science
is real and jet engines and crappy food and pepper and salt in little packets and seat belts and bad movies with the cool bits taken out and boiled hard candy when you land and ears popping anyway and everything about that is real and NOT YOU!”
The dragon’s eyes changed and it roared something that might have been a wordless screech, but sounded a little like a hot metal throat trying to shout.
“RRREAL—”
The noise bounced around George and made him flinch. He looked into the creature’s mouth and saw a flame at the back of the throat, behind the tongue with its flat spear-tip end, like a pilot light waiting to ignite the stream of wildfire brewing inside the dragon’s fire-crop.
“NOT REAL!” shouted George, and spat—spitting being all that he could do in defiance of the inevitable. The spit sizzled and instantly evaporated off the chest of the dragon. He held his hand up to ward off the heat.
And the dragon suddenly snaked out a claw like a switchblade and jagged it over George’s outstretched hand so fast he couldn’t avoid it.
George had never felt pain like it. But he had imagined pain like it. It was as if all the bone-snapping, hand-shattering pain that he had expected, but miraculously
not
felt when he’d hit the head off the tiny dragon at the Natural History Museum was suddenly happening, only a thousand times more intensely. He felt his body spasm, totally out of his control, as he curled over his injured hand.
His mouth rictussed wide and wider, and his neck tendons snapped tight as whipcords, but no sound came out. It was pain past screaming. It was pain so bad that it became suddenly dull and distant, as if happening to someone else; and as darkness crept in on the edges of his sight, he welcomed it like a friend, though he knew he shouldn’t. And where he had felt fear and anger, he felt more sadness than he knew there had ever been in his life, and his heart slowed and shriveled under the world-crushing weight of it.
He sensed the dragon stepping over him, and then the last thing he saw—as his brain decided to focus on self-preservation and close down his eyesight—was a darkness that burst through the wall of fire in the shrinking center of his vision. And the final bit of George that was George, and not just the pain and the sadness, thought he recognized the shape of the darkness and wished he could remember why it wore a tin hat.
The Gunner leaped through the wall of flame and found himself on the dragon’s back. Before it could turn and throw him off, he scrambled as high as he could using the ladder of spines, his hobnailed boots kicking sparks off them as he pushed higher up the dragon, which was nearly twice his height.
It jerked around and roared.
George had tumbled to the ground in a motionless heap. The Gunner swung his good hand, and the chains of the bridle lashed down and around the muzzle of the dragon just as it puffed its neck out to blast him off it with a torrent of flame.
“No, you don’t!”
Grimacing with pain, he cinched the chain and pulled hard, muzzling the dragon. As it realized what was happening, the dragon tried to get a claw under its chin to rip the chain off, but the Gunner yanked harder, trapping the claw under the dragon’s jaw and jamming its mouth shut as the chain tightened.
The dragon flailed lopsidedly at the man on its back, and now it was its turn to buck and struggle. Its wings beat at the Gunner, but he rode it like a man in a rodeo trying to break a horse.
He gripped its shoulders with his knees, pressing down hard, pulling back on the bridle chains. The sharp scales beneath his legs began to spang upright as the pressure from the fire-crop built, like a boiler about to burst. The whole body of the dragon began to bristle like a porcupine as its scales all stood up. It shook more and more savagely. The Gunner arched back, hands grinding on the chains, pulling the dragon, like a man bending a bow.
Which was a mistake. He leaned so far back that the dragon’s tail was able to whip around the Gunner’s neck from behind him, and pull at him in turn, whipping him in different directions, trying to pull him apart.
He saw a small figure dart between the dragon’s legs and crouch over George.
Then the dragon staggered backward, and the Gunner couldn’t see George and Edie anymore. The dragon’s strategy of pulling the Gunner backward was a bad one in the end, because of course in trying to strangle the Gunner, he was adding his own strength to the Gunner’s pull on the muzzle, and the dragon desperately needed to open its mouth and relieve the pressure of its swollen fire-crop.
They crashed to the ground and scrabbled at each other. The Gunner’s grip slipped a little. Sparks shot out from between the dragon’s clenched teeth. One of the chain links melted on one side—the O of the link becoming a C, whose gap got wider as the dragon struggled to open its jaws and point its head toward the children.
The Gunner saw a round metal manhole cover in the road beside them. He jabbed his two fingers into the holes on it, and ripped it out of the tarmac.
“No you bloody don’t, snakey”
He wrenched the dragon’s head away from the children and forced it down into the manhole. Metal shrieked on metal as the two of them writhed against each other, and then there was a distinct
ping
as the
C-
link gave way and became an
I
, and the pent-up flame burst out of the dragon in an uncontrolled magma jet of pure wildfire, straight down into the sewer beneath the street.
The Gunner felt the back blast slam out of the manhole, searing at his face.
The jet of flame filled the sewer and raced along the main drain, spilling sideways, up and down into the pipes and drains that fed it. It traveled like the pressure wave in front of an explosion, swelling and finding new ways to burst out and spaces to expand into.
On the surface, still wrestling to keep the struggling dragon’s head underground, the Gunner had a street-level view of the fire’s progress. Flame gouted from drains all the way down each side of the street, and a hundred yards down the road, another manhole cover popped into the sky on top of a geyser of wildfire.
A truck’s front wheels bounced into the hole and out again, making the driver spill the packet of chips he was eating all over himself. Then there was a clang as the manhole cover landed in the back of his truck.
The Gunner turned back to look at George and Edie.
They were gone.
G
eorge was already walking when he truly became conscious. Edie was dragging him, her shoulder under his armpit, her arm around his waist, staggering down a sloping alley that led away from the light. He was aware she was talking to him, but the echo of the screaming still filled his ears, accompanied by a heavy pounding bass backbeat that he recognized as his heart pumping. He felt his injured hand throbbing in time to the blood, pulsing with a pain that was bone-deep and too intense to be sharp anymore, just a pounding blunt pain that was both too hot and too cold all at once. He tried to look back at his hand on the end of the arm Edie had jammed over her shoulder.
She shook her head and said something he couldn’t hear. Panic hooked out of nowhere and hit him in the gut.
Maybe his hand was too badly shredded to mend.
Maybe?
Certainly.
The dragon had slashed it with a white-hot dagger-claw.
His hand
had
to be maimed, that’s what she was trying to stop him seeing.
He yanked his arm, tugged his head around, tried to see, tried to stop—but she carried on, and they became tangled and fell in a painful scrabble of knees and elbows on the wet concrete. As the impact pain shot up his leg, the echo of the screaming stopped dead, and the roar of the city came back, and he could hear.
“… said you were an idiot—OUCH!” yelped Edie, as she hit the wet concrete. “Why?”
George felt the slime on the ground beneath him and realized that it must be—had to be—his blood. You don’t get your hand shredded without a lot of blood, he thought. He’d played enough computer games to know that.
Nausea rose in his stomach as he looked at his good hand.
It wasn’t blood. It was just city slime, gray and brown street dirt slicked with rain. He disentangled his hurt arm from behind Edie, and even as he did so, he knew it was a false hope—this absence of gore, because, of course the dragon’s claw had been white-hot, so it would have sliced up his hand and sealed the wound at the same time.
He scrabbled back against the wall and made himself look at the throbbing pain at the end of his arm.
The shock hit him and he started to shake. He clenched his fists to try and stop the tremors. Fists, because he had fists—as in, two good ones.
His hand was still there.
He opened and closed it again, in disbelief.
The more he moved it, the more it hurt. But he couldn’t help moving it, because he could; because, against all the odds, it was still there on the end of his arm, and there was no blood and no gore; and for a brief glorious moment he didn’t care about what the future held, because whatever it was, he, George, would also be able to hold it with two hands. He couldn’t stop himself laughing, and that began to hurt, too.
“What’s so funny? We’ve got to move.”
Edie got to her feet on the other side of the alley and tried to brush the slime off her knees.
He held up his hands, like they were the punch line of the funniest joke in the world.
And then he stopped laughing.
Edie stared at his hand and moved across the alley as if drawn against her will by what she was seeing. And he looked closer too, and saw what he’d missed. He had been so happy to have both hands work that he’d just been clenching them and staring into his palms, and hadn’t looked closely at the back of the one that the dragon had slashed.
There was a red and purple mark, a pulsing scar-branded into his skin, cut and seared closed in the same zigzag fiery slashes, and it looked like this:
Edie shook her head.
“That’s not good.”
He put his hand away in his pocket. Hiding it seemed the right thing to do. It found the wodge of plasticene and kneaded it between finger and thumb.
“The dragon slashed me.”
Her face showed no emotion. It was as blank as if people told her that dragons slashed them every day of the week. As soon as he’d said the words, George started laughing again. He repeated his words, just to see how deranged they sounded.
“The dragon slashed me!”
She watched him get up, wipe the tears from his eyes, and stumble off down the alley toward the river.
“Where are you going?”
He stopped at the pavement edge, looking at a red and blue Underground sign that shone out against the dark glitter of the Thames beyond the traffic on the Embankment.
“Home.”
She stood in front of him.
“You can’t.”
“Watch me.”
“We can’t go home. Not from all this.” I can.
He looked for a break in the traffic.
“We can’t just pretend this isn’t happening, you have to get to the Black Friar—”
“You go to the Black Friar. I’m going home.”
Edie actually stamped her feet in frustration. He hadn’t thought people really did that, but she did. She did it again. She looked as if she were going to explode.
“Listen, you idiot, we—”
“Hey, you’re the one who said there’s no ‘we’! I’m agreeing, you’re right, okay? I’m just not doing this anymore… .”
He waved at a taxi that was pulling away from the Temple tube station across the street. The driver saw him, waved, indicated for a U-turn and waited for a gap in the traffic. Something flapped between George and the streetlight, and he flinched, but when he looked up he saw it was just a big black bird, not a dragon or anything made of stone or metal, so he relaxed.
Edie looked desperate. He felt guilty, but he didn’t know why, or if he did, he didn’t want to know. He felt his brain was about to melt anyway, and the pain in his hand was rising again.
“I’m just stopping this. I’m just going home. And I’m just going to crash out, and then I’m just going to wake up tomorrow and this will—this will just be … over.”
“What about me?”
“I don’t know. You should go home, too. Everyone should go home and this should stop.” It won’t.
“You don’t know that.”
Edie jutted her jaw. The streetlight glistened in her eyes. At her feet the black bird swooped in and tugged the guts out of a discarded burger in a bright wrapper. She took a deep breath.
“I do. It never stops.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t know that. You’re just—just a kid.”
The taxi found its gap and U-turned to park next to them. She put a hand on his shoulder.
“So are you. You can’t go home, George. I’m sorry, but you really can’t. The Gunner said—”
The bird hopped with them as George pushed past her to the driver’s window. It left the burger uneaten. George shook off her hand and leaned into the taxi.
“Thirty-seven St. George’s Square, please.”
“All right, son, hop in.”
Edie reached for him, but the black bird chose this moment to launch itself into the air between them in a flurry of black feathers, and Edie stepped back for an instant, and in that instant George slipped into the taxi. She reached an imploring hand across the gulf of air between them.
“Look. Don’t do this—it’s dangerous—” I m sorry.
He closed the door. The window was open. So was Edie’s mouth. She couldn’t believe this was happening. He tried to find something to say that would make what he was doing feel better.
“Good luck.”
“Good luck?”
She stood there as if she’d been hit. George looked at her and tried to say something better, but the taxi moved off, and he didn’t have the words, so he just shrugged and held up his hand in half a wave, and their eyes stayed locked on each other until the taxi turned onto the Embankment and George couldn’t see her anymore.
He took a deep breath. Then another. Then he curled himself around the pain in his hand, the hand still thrust deep in his coat pocket, and sank down in the corner of the seat with his eyes closed.
Of course, if he’d looked back he’d have seen the bird flapping lazily along behind the taxi until the big dark mass of Waterloo Bridge swept up and over them, and the bird wheeled north, up and over the brightly lit classical pillars of the long building on the side of the bridge, in the general direction of St. Pancras station.
Edie wiped her eyes. She felt in her pocket. The glass was still there. It just reflected the lights of the city. It had no inner warning flame now. She reached beyond the glass, to the scrabble of coins that jingled like shrapnel at the bottom of her pocket. She counted the heavier coins into one hand, dropped the others into her pocket, and took off her shoe. There was a banknote inside. She slid it out carefully. Her hand closed around the paper and the coins as she wriggled her foot back into the shoe and set off toward Temple station.