Ironhand (11 page)

I
n the darkness, in the cold, in the absence of hope, the Gunner dug on.

The scoop and scatter noise had been joined by a new sound, which was a hollow splash as he dug in. The Gunner had dug down into the gravel, below the level of the surrounding water in the tank. He was so deep that he had one leg inside the hole and was bending and stretching as he dug, waist-deep in a gravel-ringed pool of his own excavating.

The tiredness that he was now feeling was a real tiredness, the tiredness of hard work, not the wrong feeling that had been churning inside him in the absence of any distractions. It occurred to him that if he’d put all this effort into trying to dig upward, he might have reached a surface by now. Then again, he might not have. The roof was stone, and shifting a stone to start digging might have ended everything before he’d even begun.

“Could have brought the house down,” he said aloud. The sudden sound of his own voice in the echoing chamber made him pause. He became even stiller as he felt something move around his ankles. It was the water in the pond.

There was the ghost of a current, barely there, but definitely there.

The Gunner didn’t know it, but the current he was feeling was the pull of the Tyburn, one of the lost rivers of London, the one that gave its name to the place where London’s criminals used to be hanged. And now it was exerting its dark pull at the Gunner’s ankles. He didn’t know that, any more than he knew that he was standing in a lost medieval water tank below Marylebone. All he knew was that moving water meant a stream, a stream meant a channel for it to flow down, and a channel might, just might, mean a way out of this rat hole.

If he’d been of a reflective bent, he would have said, like most soldiers, that the ideal way to die was at home in bed, surrounded by great-grandchildren. But since that wasn’t an option, he thought he might as well die trying not to.

He doubled his efforts, and as he bent and shoveled, the urgency of his movements tipped his tin hat into the water in a great splash. It took him a moment to realize what had happened and to retrieve the helmet. And when he did, the obvious hit him.

“Must be getting stupid,” he muttered, and started digging with the hat. Now he really was making progress.

The hole deepened, and he was even able to feel the top of a low arch in the wall beginning to appear. As he dug, he wondered why the hole had been blocked up. It’s the nature of an underground stream, if blocked, to silt up with the debris it washes down, and this was how the bank of gravel in the tank had been created.

But something had blocked the exit pipe from the tank, and as the Gunner’s hat suddenly skidded sideways instead of digging in, he found the reason. He put his hat aside and reached down. His first thought was that it was a tree root. Then it came away in his hand, and he felt it. He had a sudden horrible feeling he knew what it was. He reached into the water and found more pieces. And then his hand tangled in hair.

He carefully disentangled it and shook his hands dry before lighting one of his precious matches.

Although the flame reflected off the surface of the pool, he could see enough to be sure: staring back at him were the two wide-eyed sockets in the skull of a woman. He could tell it was a woman because there was a long hank of dark hair hanging off one side of the skull, and there was a gold ring glinting on a finger bone next to a small bundle. He reached in and moved the bundle and then he realized it wasn’t a woman’s skeleton at all, because another face smiled back at him. It was a crude face, carved out of some kind of stone, but it was unmistakably a doll’s face.

The dead woman was no woman, but a little girl.

He knew without needing to be told that the girl was a glint, and that she was one of the Walker’s victims, possibly even his first.

The little bone hand clasped around the smiling doll’s face did something to the Gunner. It filled him with a murderous blackness, as dark as the chamber as the match guttered out.

“Right, you bastard. Fate or no fate, I ain’t bloody dying tonight. I’m coming after you.”

He lit another match and looked into the small skeleton’s eyes. He didn’t see anything gruesome in the bones and fragments of flesh and clothing that remained. He saw a little girl who had died clutching her doll for a comfort that never came. He imagined the sobs that had filled this stone chamber before she went quiet. His jaw clenched tight.

A statue can’t cry, of course. Everyone knows that. It must have just been water from the splashing as he dug that rolled off the upper curve of his cheek and plopped into the Tyburn below. He reached gently into the water and began to move the bones, laying them softly on the gravel bank in as close to the right order as he could. Despite the growing clumsiness in his hands, he managed most of the time to be as delicate as a father putting his child to bed.

“Sorry, love. I got to move you. But it’s only so as I can have him. And I WILL have him, straight up. I’ll swing for him wherever he is.”

T
he King’s Library sits off to the west side of the great circular courtyard of the British Museum. It’s a long, elegant room, and the mixed collection of curios on display come from all ages and regions of the world.

There are delicate fossils and brutal Maori war clubs, exquisite alabaster vases as high as a man, and slender Native American spears tipped with meteorite blades. There are Greek sculptures and busts of the great men who had assembled the collections. There are ancient manuscripts and gold jewelry, savage flint axes, rude Roman wind chimes, and all manner of obscure religious relics and paraphernalia.

To most people, this looks like a charming hodgepodge of collectable objects from the Age of Enlightenment; only a very few people know that there are things in this compendium of seemingly mismatched objects that are there because they keep each other in check: things of power, dark things and light things canceling each other out by the careful way they are arranged around one another.

The lights were off and the museum was silent.

Then there was a very distinct popping noise, and the Walker stepped out of one of his small mirrors. He reassembled them, snapping them together, face-to-face, and slipped the disk into the pocket of his coat. He stood in front of a tall, free-standing display case and feasted his eyes on its contents. He pushed back the hood of the green sweatshirt he wore beneath his flapping overcoat, releasing the Raven that had been traveling with him. He leaned forward, both hands on the glass of the cabinet as he stared at the contents.

The Raven stretched its wings and flapped across the width of the room, finding a perch on the railing of the walkway that ran around the bookcases at first-floor level. It fixed its unreadable black eye on the Walker and the glass case he was engrossed in.

The contents were as follows: three big wax disks of different sizes—two small, one big, all thick as cheeses, decorated with magical symbols like pentacles and forgotten names of great significance. There was a “shew stone,” or small crystal ball, not much bigger than a golf ball. There was a thin gold disk engraved with the same concentric circles and simple turrets that had been scratched into the surface of the pewter plate in the underground water tank; and perhaps strangest of all, there was a black stone mirror. The other objects looked just like the kind of occult paraphernalia anyone would expect to see in a magician’s lair. The stone mirror was a different thing altogether. Its lines were so simple and unadorned that it looked timeless, simultaneously modern and irretrievably ancient. Carved and polished from flawless black obsidian, the label described it as being of Aztec origin.

“Aztec,” the Walker snorted and spat derisively. Spittle dribbled down the sheer wall of glass between him and the offending label. “Collectors with the brains of pygmy shrews.”

He knew this black mirror had been old long before the Aztecs in Central America had developed their strong taste for human sacrifice. It was into the highly polished face of the stone, which looked like a hand mirror with a handle and a hole for a long-perished thong, that the Walker stared so intently.

“Birds and butterflies. Imagine that . . .”

He looked up at the bird as he pushed up the right-hand sleeve of his coat.

“The Aztecs sacrificed them in the hundreds of thousands to their god Quetzalcoatl. Hummingbirds rather than ravens, mainly, so you, my friend, would have been fine. But I should liked to have seen that. It takes a particularly exquisite sensibility to think of sacrificing a butterfly. . . .”

The Raven, for whom the insect world was essentially an all-day buffet, didn’t think killing butterflies was especially unusual, but it kept its beak shut. The truth is, the Walker liked to talk, and the Raven was doomed to listen.

The Walker reached out and splayed his hands against the glass, opposite the circular crystal ball. He closed his eyes, spread his hand as if measuring it, and committed the size to his memory. Then he peered into the dark glassy surface again.

“The mirror is no use alone. Without its twin, it’s little more than polished rock.”

He smiled darkly up at the Raven. “An ordinary pair of glass mirrors will open a portal to wherever in this world you wish to go, anywhere in space or time, if you have the knack. But compared to what a stone mirror can do, that is a mere parlor trick for mewling infants. A pair of stone mirrors can open a portal into another world entirely. And from that dark world, a cunning man may bring and harness powers the likes of which this world has never seen.”

If the Raven was impressed, it chose a strange way to show it, as it squittered a prodigious bird’s mess onto the bald marble head of the eighteenth-century worthy below him. The Walker didn’t notice.

“They thought they could clip my wings by separating my mirrors and hiding the other stone mirror where I couldn’t find it. Yet it never occurred to them that with eternity spread ahead of me, I would have time to find a glint and a master maker to choose a stone and carve me a new one. Fools . . .”

The crystal ball was beginning to spin inside the case, answering a hidden force emanating from the Walker’s spread fingers, and the faster it spun, the more it seemed to wobble on its axis.

A bead of sweat trickled down the Walker’s nose and splashed to the parquet floor as he struggled to contain the powerful answering judder in his hand. With a gasp, his open hand snapped closed, and he lashed it back and forth, flailing it across the air in front of the cabinet. As he did so, the ball whipped and ricocheted around the interior of the glass cube, matching the movements of the fist, bouncing off the sides faster and faster, until the noise of the sharp percussive impacts sounded like the rip of a machine gun. Then all the glass in the cabinet shattered at the same time and fell to the floor like a dropped crystal curtain.

An alarm bell began to ring prosaically in the distance, and the dim lights came on. Ignoring all that, the Walker stepped over the shards of glass and deftly snatched the ball from its now-stationary position in midair in the center of the case and pocketed it.

His hands reemerged, carrying two crumpled and mismatched gloves. He speedily put them on, and then equally quickly, he spread a scarf out and placed two of the protective wax disks on it. He picked up the obsidian mirror and put it on top of the disks, letting go of it as soon as he could, as if not wanting to touch it any longer than he had to, even though he was wearing gloves. Then he sandwiched it with another protective wax disk and tied the corners of the scarf tightly together, making a bundle. He pocketed the gold circle with the dream of four castles on it and stepped back.

“Come,” he said.

The Raven flew onto his shoulder. The Walker held the ends of the scarf, wrapping the bundle containing the stone mirror. He exchanged his gloves for the mirrors in his pocket; and then, just as the first museum guard was running through the door, he stepped into one of his small glass mirrors and disappeared.

E
die fell into the mirror behind her. She felt the surface bend and pop as delicately as a soap bubble, and then she was falling into a fire. As she fell, someone grabbed at her ankle but wasn’t able to hold it, and she hit the ground with a thunderous crash, like the gates of Hell blowing open.

She fell on her back and rolled, so that the first things she saw were her legs in the air above her, and beyond them, the dark sky and the bright disk of a full moon staring down at her, the pale night sun of a hunter’s moon, framed for an instant between two familiar scuffed boots.

She felt the sharp dig of a broken brick in her back, and lost contact with anything familiar as she flinched and squirmed to her feet, just in time to see long, white fingers of light sweep across the sky, cutting it into jagged segments. And then she was conscious of the hungry crack and pop of a fire very close to her.

She realized that the crash she had heard was not her landing on the ground; it was the sudden continual hell storm of noise that shook the world around her, the world she had fallen into: it was the sound of a world blowing itself apart. There were deep explosions and crashes and screams. And behind the screams was the low moaning sound of a siren rising and falling; behind that, there was a rhythmic throbbing engine rumble from the sky itself. There was the sharper counterpoint of antiaircraft fire from a hidden battery nearby, and others farther off. Mixed in all of this were urgent shouts and jangling ambulance bells and more screams and huge earthshaking thuds that she could feel through the soles of her boots.

Unwilling to look around at the source of all this horrifying sound until she had to, Edie looked at her feet and saw they were on the step of a shop. There were fragments of brick and glass all around her. She looked to her side and saw a mirror on the doorpost. She saw her face staring back at her, a white smear of shock side lit by flames. Before she could see if there was a matching mirror on the other side of the door, there was a huge thump that knocked her to her knees as the ground kicked and buckled beneath her. When she looked up, stunned by the violence of the invisible blow, halfway back onto her feet, she saw something that stopped her from moving at all. She remained there, one knee on the ground, eyes wide, mouth open, staring at the infernal vision towering over the other end of the street.

It was a firestorm. Out of the very center of the flames rose the familiar dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, wreathed in conflagration and black smoke—but untouched. It was a vision of the end of the world. But from the heat on her face and the twinging pain in her shoulder where she’d rolled onto the half brick, Edie knew this was no vision. She wasn’t glinting this.

This was real.

When she glinted, the past came in jagged slices, and she had no choice about what she could see. She never ended up with brick dust in her mouth. This wasn’t glinting; this was being.

“Hey you, girly, get off the bloody street, get down the shelter!”

A voice shrieked at her from the other side of the road. She turned to see a middle-aged man in a suit, with a canvas bag over one shoulder and a tin hat like the Gunner’s, except the Gunner’s didn’t have a white W painted on the front. He was waving at her angrily, thin mustache bristling like a furious hairy caterpillar.

“It’s that way, down the end, you trying to get yourself killed or—”

The side of the ancient brick building behind him jerked as if it had been kicked by an unseen giant. The man never got to what came after the “or,” because the front of the building just dropped on him in a brutally short avalanche of brick and stone.

Edie instinctively put her hand over her mouth as the dust cloud rolled out. It thinned, and she saw the white W of the hat slowly rolling toward her. It hit the curb at her feet and turned over. She got a glimpse of something wet inside, and looked away.

In the inferno surrounding the unscathed dome of the cathedral were plumes of water arcing futilely into the roiling mountains of fire. At their base were the dark outlines of small groups of men wrestling fire hoses. In the sky above, the fingers of the searchlights quested back and forth, and the intermittent lines of tracer fire squirted into the dark heavens like fiery echoes of the water jets playing on the devastation below.

Edie realized she had her hands jammed over her ears, trying to keep the jarring assault out of her head.

And then something grabbed her arm.

She spun to see the Friar. His normally jolly face was tight and worried.

“Come,” he shouted over the sound of another building crashing to the ground on the next street. “Back into the mirrors. You don’t want to die here.”

For once in her life she didn’t even think of arguing. She let him drag her back toward the shop entrance, where she saw, with relief, two mirrors facing each other on either side of a bookshop window. That was their way out of this nightmare.

The Friar stopped dead.

“What?” Edie began.

And then she heard it, an instant before it hit: a whistling sound from out of the chaotic sky overhead, shockingly, intimately close.

There was another sharp jerk on her arm, and the Friar pulled her to him and turned away from the bookshop and the safety beckoning in its mirrors just a pavement’swidth away. He curved around, enveloping her.

The bomb hit, and Edie’s feet were blown out from under her. Only the unbreakable grasp with which the Friar held her to his chest stopped her from falling. The very air seemed to punch them viciously, and there was a sudden jagged horizontal silver hailstorm as the windows of the shop blew out. If she hadn’t been completely shielded by the arched metal back of the Friar, she’d have been just a red mist and so much ground meat blown across the cobbled street. The shop window was followed by the shop’s contents. Whole books spilled across the pavement, and a snowstorm of pages from volumes shredded by the explosion swirled around them.

After a second the Friar straightened, and they turned to see that they were in the middle of a slow-moving blizzard of paper, some pages on fire, some not, but all whirling up into the night sky on updrafts created by the heat around them.

The Friar crossed the pavement in four fast paces, batting the airborne page storm out of his way as he went. Edie stumbled after him—and she stopped when he stopped.

The mirrors were gone, shattered by the same blast that had destroyed the shop window. Even through the maelstrom of the Blitz around them, Edie could hear the single sharp tutting noise the Friar made. It was more ominous than a building falling.

“Those were the mirrors,” she said.

He tutted again.

“Those were our way out,” she went on, voice rising.

He peered up at the sky. She tugged at his robe. Glass shards fell out of the folds and tinkled to the ground around his feet.

“What do we do now?”

The Friar looked up and down the street. Seeing him unsure made Edie more frightened than she already was. Finally he looked at her.

“Can you run?”

She glanced up at his great bellied bulk standing over her. “Can you?”

The ghost of a smile flickered across the flame-lit face above her.

“Lady, when my survival depends on it, I can practically fly. . . .”

He hiked up his cassock above the knee with one hand and grasped her hand with the other—and ran. And even though she would never have admitted it later, the fact that he held her hand did pull her out of her stunned state, and she ran alongside him, matching his every long pace with two of her own.

The details of that headlong dash through the firestorm and the falling bombs blurred together so that later she could not remember exactly what had happened. But single moments remained, disconnected with each other, one minute there, next minute gone. An old-fashioned taxi with spoked wheels was blown across the road in front of them, burying itself upside down in a second-floor bay window. They ran on. At some stage, a stream of fire suddenly flashed out of an alleyway, blocking their way. The Friar just grabbed Edie and hurdled through it. There was one point where she remembered running past a London bus, on its side, and she registered the curling staircase that ran up the back to a top floor that had no roof. She turned away before her brain could make sense of the twisted coat and hand sticking out from under the side of the bus.

They ducked down narrow lanes between vertiginously high walls, and at one point dodged through an old graveyard that appeared out of nowhere in the warren of streets. She remembered the whump of a bomb hitting the graveyard behind them as they left it, and turning and seeing a long box toppling back down out of the sky and dashing itself to pieces on a church wall, and turning away before she had to see what was in the coffin. She remembered the Friar saying:

“They’ll be burying those poor souls again in the morning.”

They were running on and on, through strangely empty and quiet streets one minute, then through flaming ruins the next. And it was only when she saw a street sign hanging off the corner of a building reading “Puddle Dock” that she realized where they were running to.

Though tired, she redoubled her effort, and they skidded around the final corner to see the Black Friar standing on the prow of his building above them. He didn’t look down to see himself running past, or if he did, Edie was sprinting too quickly to notice.

The Friar pushed open the door, and they tumbled in. She had time to notice that the windows were crisscrossed with tape, before he yanked her forward in between the two mirrored arches.

“Right,” he panted. “Home, I think.”

“James who?” inquired a familiar voice from the alcove within.

Edie peered in but couldn’t see him. What she could see was a poster, a finely drawn cartoon of two men leaning on a bar, talking—and the bottles, and even the beer-pump handles behind them, all had the familiar face of a man with an angular sweep of hair and a—in fact the— Hitler mustache, listening carefully. Below it, the message, “Careless Talk Costs Lives.” It was a colorful and funny-looking poster.

“You’re right,” she said into the darkness, aiming her voice toward where she knew Little Tragedy would be listening. “I do like the poster.”

The Friar snorted and pulled her arm, and they were falling back into the mirror; she staggered and found she had different carpet under her feet and the world outside wasn’t blowing itself to hell, only grinding itself quietly down with the traffic beyond the windows—windows no longer crisscrossed with antiblast tape.

“I think,” said the Friar, “that that explains the mirrors.”

“Yep,” said Edie, trying to stop her legs and voice from trembling. “Got the mirror thing. Definitely not for saddoes. Definitely real.”

She sat down suddenly, right there on the floor, because something had to give, and her shaking legs just did so first.