Ironhand (16 page)

G
eorge hurried west on Euston Road, leaving the British Library behind him. He had just heard an urgent, earsplitting whistle, and though he hadn’t seen the whistler, he had a nasty feeling that whatever it was, he’d do no harm by quickly getting as far from it as he could.

Now that he wasn’t actually fighting for his life, he was able to focus on his urgent worry about Edie and the Gunner. As far as Edie was concerned, George was pretty sure that she would continue on to the Black Friar as they’d planned. One of the things about her was that she didn’t go to pieces when things got hard. The Black Friar would surely be able to help her. He hoped she would find the broken dragon’s head in his coat pocket and use it to bargain with the Friar if necessary. He couldn’t believe how much time had been wasted since they’d sat together in the shelter of the Dumpster, working out the first step in their probably futile plan to save the Gunner. Now that George was safe, the whole business of being picked up and flown all over London seemed like a desperate inconvenience. He still had no idea how to find or save the Gunner. The frustration of it hit him with the intensity of a blow, and he stopped, trying to think straight now that the adrenaline was flushing out of his system.

He realized he was walking with no sense of where he should be going. He should be heading for the Black Friar’s pub. Of course, going to the Black Friar’s pub meant crossing back into the City, and that meant finding a way past the dragons that stood watch on each thoroughfare leading across the old boundary; but he’d have to deal with that problem when he came to it.

He was level with the entrance to Euston station. If his sense of direction was working, then he needed to turn south and east. His London geography was a bit sketchy, but he thought if he turned south he would eventually hit the river, and then all he reckoned he’d have to do was to head east.

So he turned, and the scrape of his oversize plasterer’s boots on the gritty paving stone was echoed by another stony scrape in front of him, and then a hiss. And as he looked up, he saw two massive stone bat wings blocking his way as the gargoyle he had hit with the red paint can dropped softly in front of him. The red was splashed across it like blood, and its head was cocked.

One paint-spattered eye was screwed shut, while the other seemed to bore into George, despite its stony blankness.

He looked around for somewhere to hide. To his left was a big blocky gatehouse, one of a pair leading into the station. Unfortunately it would be too far for him to reach before the gargoyle got to him, and even if it wasn’t, there was no door that he could see in the facade, which was carved with the names of battles fought long ago in faraway places.

With nowhere to run, George knew that his battle was about to be here and now.

He knew it from the look on the gargoyle’s face as it scraped one talon forward on the paving stone and dragged the other one after it. He knew it from the painful twinge in his hand, from the dragon’s scar, and the three flaws entwining his forearm.

He gripped the hammer, ready to go down fighting.

The pain in his hand gave him an idea. The scar had bought him a moment with the Knight. If it bought him a moment with the gargoyle, maybe he could think of something that would stop the gargoyle from tearing him to shreds.

“Hey,” he said, holding his hand out. “Back off.”

The big taint cocked its head and then, amazingly, stopped.

George saw his wrist extending out from the work-jacket sleeve, and caught a glint of metal reflecting the streetlights on a part of him where he should just have seen his skin. He realized with a sickening jolt that the stone and brass grooves braiding around his arm had definitely moved farther toward his elbow. He decided he didn’t have the time to worry about that now. He had to keep his advantage over the gargoyle.

“Yes,” he said, submerging the shake in his voice. “A maker’s mark. An Ironhand. You back off, or I’ll—”

He couldn’t think of what to say. So he took one step forward, brandishing his hand in front of him as if it were a magical talisman.

“Back off, or I’ll . . . I’ll . . .”

“Most likely bleed all over him, like.”

The voice from behind George was not one he’d heard before. It was a Geordie voice with the flat, hard matter-of-fact vowels of northeast England.

“I was you, bonny lad, I’d lower the hammer and step backward,”

George wanted to look behind him, but he didn’t want to take his eyes off the gargoyle.

“Big Red there’s not fussed about your ’and, Sonny Jim. He’s fussed about four Lee-Enfields pointing right at his ugly mug,” rasped another voice, which sounded as if it came from South London and had smoked way too many cigarettes along the way.

George realized that the gargoyle wasn’t looking at him at all. It had stopped because of something that was behind him.

“Now, why don’t ’e step back to us, lad. Be safer, all things considered,” said a third voice, humming with a west-country twang in which all the S’s sounded like Z’s.

George turned.

Four bronze World War I soldiers were behind him, tall men in long flapping army greatcoats. Three stood and one knelt, resting his elbow on one knee. They wore soft peaked hats instead of tin helmets, and they all had rifles leveled unwaveringly at the gargoyle. One of the standing riflemen’s jaws was in constant motion, as if chewing tobacco.

The kneeling soldier took his trigger hand off the weapon and beckoned George toward him, nodding slowly as if to say it was going to be all right.

George backed up fast. The standing soldiers made space for George, without taking their guns off the taint, as he walked between them and turned to see what happened next. The rifleman who was chewing stepped forward into the space that George had just vacated and spat a large gob of something dark onto the paving stone at the gargoyle’s feet, splashing its talons as he did so. The chewer gestured to the sky with his gun.

“Haddaway, ya greet sackless cuddy!”

When the gargoyle didn’t move, the soldier took another step forward and prodded it in the chest with his gun. The gargoyle flinched, hissed, and threw itself backward into the air. Its great wings beat downward, causing the soldier’s greatcoat to billow behind him like a cloak. It pulled itself higher and higher into the sky, until it disappeared behind the rooftops. There was a general easing of tension and uncocking of guns, and the soldier next to George turned and nodded at the chewer.

“It’s all right; we never know what he’s saying either.”

George looked at the soldiers as they all crowded around him, looking down with interest.

“You’ll be the boy we heard about, most like,” said the one called Westie. “Us got a pigeon tellin’ us to keep a sharp eye out. Friend of the Gunner’s, it said?”

George nodded. The chewer looked around.

“Said tha was wi’ a lass too, kiddar?”

“Edie,” said George. “We got split up.”

The soldiers tutted and sucked their teeth.

“Who are you?” said George.

The soldier nearest him paused in the action of lighting a cigarette.

“Rifleman South,” he said, his accent turning “South” into “Sarf.” He thumbed introductions over his shoulder without looking. “These are my oppos. Corporal North’s a Geordie bastard, as you can tell, so we don’t understand hardly nothing what he says; Westie here’s a bit of a wurzel, but once you get used to him he’s all right. And Private East there don’t say much anyway, but he’s a nugget, lets his fighting do the talking, so don’t you worry about him. They’re all good men in a scrap, none better. They call us the Euston Mob.”

He jerked his thumb at an obelisk with four empty plinths at its base.

“That’s where we stay. We was railwaymen, see, before the war, so they put us in front of the station. That’s our billet. Plinths on points of the compass, as you see; hence the names. Come on, out of the street.”

He led George back toward the obelisk.

George looked into the night sky, where the red gargoyle had disappeared.

“You think he’s really gone?”

South hunkered down against the stone, rifle across his knees, enjoying his smoke.

“He won’t hang about. Westie here may seem slow, but he can shoot the eye out of a running squirrel without breaking a sweat; leastways that’s what he’s always telling us, eh, Westie?”

The other soldiers joined them sitting against the monument’s base, except for East, who seemed edgier than the others and stood apart, keeping watch on the sky toward St. Pancras.

“’E won’t be back, not if ’e knows what’s good for ’im,” agreed Westie, taking a light from the end of South’s cigarette.

“The Gunner’s in trouble,” said George. “I need help.”

“Everyone needs help, Sonny Jim. Why don’t you start by telling us what’s going on, then,” said South.

In as few words as he could manage, George sketched everything that had happened to him since his nightmare began. The soldiers didn’t interrupt him, but he was aware of their looking at each other at certain points in the story. And when he told the bit about how the Gunner had broken his word and had been taken by the Walker, even East turned away from his scouring of the night sky and looked at George intently. George finished, and was conscious of nothing so much as that he just seemed to have wasted more time.

“So anyway,” he concluded, “I started out to help the Gunner, and now I’ve got these three duels, or contests, to fight as well!”

“Oh yeah, you gotta fight them. You can’t duck ’em. Duck ’em and you’re done,” said South. “Them stripes on your arm, they’re the marks of your task. Each stripe is different, see, like the contests are. And they’re on the move, right?”

George stared at the flaws corkscrewing toward his elbow. Two were slowly moving up his arm, but the metal one had just started to circle in a tight coil. As if it couldn’t go farther. He nodded.

“Ay, well, it’d be worse than the black dam if you let one o’ they buggers get to your heart.”

“What do you mean?” George asked, knowing he was going to hate the answer.

“Why, you’ll likely croak or worse, lad,” South said flatly, looking at him through a skein of cigarette smoke.

“What’s worse than croaking?” asked George in horror.

There was a pause.

“You met the Walker, yeah?” puffed South, and widened his eyes as if no further explanation were necessary.

“’E just must face up to the three contests, and one by one they’ll clear,” Westie explained. “That’s why you must stand. If you don’t, you’ll lose anyway, because you won’t stop the line reaching your heart, see.”

Now George was panicking, despite all his intention to keep a clear head.

“Wait, but with the Knight, I didn’t finish the fight. I mean, am I already doomed?” He stared at the soldiers’ faces. “Am I going to croak?”

North reached over and took George’s arm. He pushed the sleeve back and examined the scars. He looked at South.

“Well,” exhaled South, “that’s a matter of opinion. It seems to me you didn’t duck a fight as such. Seems to me you were on the point—a very sharp point—of losing one. And then this gargoyle, the one you called Spout, he flies in and snatches you, yeah.”

North and West nodded.

“Reet. Wasn’t tha’ running away, like. Was a
deus ex
wotsit . . .”

North snapped his fingers, trying to conjure the word that was on the tip of his tongue.

“Machina.”
South cleared his throat and pulled a watch out of his pocket. “You didn’t run, is what I’m saying. Worst you could say is rain stopped play.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Maybe you don’t follow, chum, but I reckon the Last Knight will. I think he’ll follow you until the fight’s all done. It’s your fate, mate. Your first duel ain’t over, it just got cut short. Postponed, as it were. I’d say you’re half a scrap down and two more to go. Look at how that metal vein must have started to move, but then stopped. If you’d chosen to run away, it would have continued on and split your heart, and we wouldn’t be wasting valuable time talking. It’s just coiling around and around, like it’s marking time until you meet the Knight again and finish the duel you started. But that ain’t the problem right now.”

He tapped his watch. “This is.”

George stared at the timepiece. If he’d felt sick before, he felt sicker now.

“You’re saying I’m out of time. The Gunner’s out of time. It’s nearly turn o’day.”

“Exactly,” said North.

“Ar, and if ’e isn’t there, if his plinth is empty by midnight—”

“The Gunner’s a goner. . . .” finished South.

George felt the night closing in on him, as the rising claustrophobia of hopelessness began to take over.

“But I’m out of time. I’ll never—”

“You want to talk less and listen more, chum,” said an unfamiliar voice. It was East. He pointed at Westie. “What did he say?”

George reran the conversation in his head. He heard the soft west-country burr saying
If
’
e isn’t there, if his plinth is empty by midnight . . .
But it didn’t make sense, and they were all looking at him . . . and then he got it.

“If he’s plinth is empty—you mean?”

North nodded. “Canny lad.”

George was on his feet. Urgency took the place of rising hopelessness and squashed it back down into place.

“. . . You mean, if someone takes his place on the plinth, he won’t die?”

Four bronze faces nodded solemnly at him.

“Well, why didn’t . . . That’s easy . . . I’ll do it!”

South shook his head. “Standing to ain’t easy, Sonny Jim. It’s not just standing there—”

“Fine, but I’ll do it!” George was almost giddy with relief.

“Nobody ’ere doubts that. That ain’t the question.”

“What is the question?”

Rifleman South held out the watch. George looked at it and started doing a horrible calculation in his head.

“Question is, how fast can you run?”

George didn’t waste any time answering, because he had no time. He just nodded and sprinted westward. He did remember to stop when he got to the edge of the traffic—and he took advantage of the enforced second’s pause to turn and hurl a hurried “Thank you” over his shoulder as he did. A hole opened in the cars, and he dashed across the road, vaulted the central divider, and jinked west, running at full tilt.