Ironhand (19 page)

G
eorge ran behind a giant statue of Achilles, heading south. He was aware of the naked giant with a sword in one hand and a round shield held to the sky in the other, as if warding off an attack from above. George looked up in case something was howling in from the night sky, but his luck seemed to be holding. He ran across the level crossing on South Carriage Drive, ran through the left hand of the triple arch alongside Apsley House, and finally took a breath as he had to wait for the lights to change and allow him across the final road width and onto the central island of Hyde Park Corner.

He could afford to allow himself this luxury because right in front of him he could see the huge stone cannon pointing to the sky, and two of the four bronze soldiers that stand, or in one case lie, on each side of the base. He couldn’t see the Gunner’s side, but he could see the soldier lying on a stretcher and the one facing into the center of the grassy space, with two huge shell holsters hanging pendulously on the side of each leg.

The light changed. And he ran. He felt the gravel spitting under his feet as he powered toward the huge memorial plinth. Then he was up on the surrounding dais, around to the Gunner’s side, sure he was going to see Edie.

But no one was there.

Where the Gunner usually stood was only a slab of bronze plinth and a blank wall of smooth-cut, weather-stained slabs, broken by the words RUSSIA—PALESTINE— CENTRAL ASIA.

George stopped dead and bent over as if the disappointment had hit him physically. He braced himself with his hands on his knees. The truth was, now that he had arrived and his run was over, he was finally letting his exhaustion catch up with him. He was disappointed too, no doubt, but he told himself it didn’t matter. He’d find Edie later. Right now he had to stand on the Gunner’s plinth. By the last clock he had passed on Park Lane, he had a good five minutes to spare.

He looked down and saw a bronze helmet on the chest of the figure at his feet. The sculptor had made a body lying on its back, a covering thrown over his face. His booted legs stuck out from the covering, and a coat was thrown over him so casually that you could see a portion of the side of the soldier’s face and a hint of hair, but not enough to get a good look. The boots were missing some of the hobnails, and showing signs of hard wear. George noticed that the laces in one boot had snapped at the bottom of the lacing and had been quickly tied together in a rough-and-ready knot. Somehow this personal detail made the anonymity of the unknown soldier more poignant.

Having gotten enough oxygen back into his lungs, George looked at the soldier with the shell canisters on his legs.

“Excuse me,” he said, not knowing how to begin a conversation with a statue that might not know George could see him.

“Excuse me,” he repeated. “I can see you. I know about spits and taints and everything. I’m a friend of the Gunner.”

The soldier didn’t move an inch. George decided not to waste time. After all, he knew what he had to do.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m going to go on the other side and stand to for the Gunner. On his plinth. The Euston Mob told me all about it.”

There was still no reaction, so he shrugged and hurried around to the Gunner’s empty place. As he walked toward it he realized he was passing relief scenes of trench warfare carved into the white limestone of the memorial—men in shaggy sheepskin jerkins and tin hats wrestling weapons and shells and wounded bodies against a background of shattered trees and broken trenches. He saw a gunner struggling with a terrified team of horses, and then he was up on the Gunner’s stand, and felt the cold wall at his back.

On the other side of the street, a homeless man was pushing his belongings past in a tattered red-tartan shopping cart. His eyes weren’t on the pavement in front of him. They were staring blankly across the traffic. They were black eyes with no hint of white.

The traffic was too loud for George to have heard him speak even if he had noticed him, which he didn’t.

“One boy maker. Hyde Park Corner. On the war memorial.”

George, oblivious to the eyes of the Tallyman, wasn’t sure what do, but since it was nearly midnight, he leaned back and spread his arms in the way he remembered first having seen the Gunner do. Something moved at his feet as he trod on it. He bent down and picked it up. It was a horsewhip. The Gunner had obviously left it here when he’d taken George under his wing and begun the first stage of the gauntlet George now suspected he had been running forever.

He put down the hammer, picked up the whip, and felt the solid heft of the thing in his hand. He noticed that once he took hold of it, the rigid bronze lash, casually wrapped around the haft, became flexible. It was as if the sculpted item were becoming real in his hand. He kept his feet on the plinth and shook out the lash. Somehow, having something of the Gunner’s in his hand made him feel more secure. He was going to be able to do this. How hard could it be? All he had to do was stand here until midnight was over, and then he’d have bought the Gunner another day.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The voice was tired and cultivated and mildly irritated, and it came from the left. George looked that way and saw a statue of an officer from the other end of the monument standing there, looking at him as though his very presence were some kind of unforgivable insult. He wore a tin helmet and a pair of binoculars in a case high on his chest. He held his hands together with a heavy greatcoat loosely folded over them.

“Er . . . I’m standing here . . .” he hesitantly replied.

There was a slight snapping noise as the Officer sucked his teeth in irritation. He had a small mustache neatly trimmed above his top lip, and it twitched as he looked at George.

“You’re a boy,” he observed.

“I’m George.”

“Yes,” sighed the Officer, opening the lid on a wristwatch and then snapping it shut again. “Yes, I’m afraid you are. You’re the one got the Gunner gallivanting off his station in the first place. You know where I found him last night? Half melted by the Temple Bar dragon, facedown in a pond over there in Green Park. Had half a mind to leave him there, but you know.” He sucked and snapped his lips again.

“That’s why I’m here!” said George. “Exactly. He’s down. He got taken by the Walker. He’s not going to be here by turn o’day. So I’m going to take his place. Then we’ll have another day to rescue him!”

“Poppycock!” the Officer exploded.

“It’s not poppycock,” George said levelly. “I’m going to do it.”

The Officer tipped the front of his tin helmet down and scratched the back of his neck in amazement.

“You’re going to stand to, in his place?”

“Yes,” said George.

As he said it, he felt something shift on his arm. It was a ripping burning sensation, as if his skin were splitting, and he doubled up, cradling the painful arm with his good one. The whip clattered to his feet.

The Officer lost his veneer of coldness as he dropped his coat and darted over to George.

“What’s wrong, boy?”

“My arm,” George gasped.

The Officer checked his watch, sucked his teeth in worry, and knelt by him. “Quickly, boy, show me.”

George held out his arm. The Officer took it with surprising gentleness and turned it over. Another tutting noise escaped his lips as he saw the scar of the maker’s mark and the three lines spiraling down from it to where they disappeared into his cuff.

“Right. Jacket off, look sharp.”

He helped George get his arm out of the two jackets he was wearing, then pulled his shirt open and revealed the arm from shoulder to wrist.

“Not much of you under these layers,” he said quietly, turning George’s arm outward in order to look at it better. A loud tut greeted the sight. “Still, you’re a plucky one, no doubt about that. You carry the mark of the Hard Way.”

George looked in horror at his arm. One of the flaws, the marble one, had suddenly lanced its way beyond his elbow and braided itself around his bicep so that the sharp questing point of the fissure was now dangerously close to his armpit. The other two flaws were still twining below his elbow.

“That happened, the long one, just now?” asked the Officer.

George nodded, biting his lip, not trusting himself to speak steadily.

The Officer tapped the in-grooved vein. The sound of bronze tapping marble made George queasy. It was as if someone were reaching inside him and tapping his bones. The Officer pulled George’s shirt back up, hiding the arm. When he spoke he was all business, the veneer of mild irritation gone.

“Right. Cover up, jacket on, fast as you like. You’re right, no question, you
definitely
have to stand now.”

George shrugged into the coats and fumbled with the buttons, happy not to be able to see his arm and the twining stone and metal veins that disfigured it.

“What?” he asked.

“What what?” replied the Officer, eyes scanning the street in front of them.

“What changed your mind?” said George urgently.

The Officer looked into his eyes. Then he bent and picked up the whip and put it in George’s hand. “Because if you don’t, that crack is going to continue up your arm and into your body, and when it gets to your heart . . . I’m very sorry to say you’ll be dead.”

The Officer smiled encouragingly. “
Nil desperandum.
It’s not all gloomy. You take the Gunner’s place, like you said you would, stand to until stand down, and you should be right as rain.”

George saw what he was saying and suddenly discovered that his mouth had gone dry. “You mean this is one of the contests, one of the duels? But how does just standing here at midnight . . .”

Then he felt a sudden wash of relief.

“No, that’s brilliant. I mean, that’s great. Just stand here? That’s easy, right?”

“Not as such. There’s a little more to it that that, old son.”

He clapped George encouragingly on the shoulder and pushed him gently into place on the Gunner’s plinth. George didn’t like the smile on the Officer’s face. It was the smile parents show you as you are pushed inside the dentist’s room to have something painful done to your teeth, only worse.

“What more?” George asked. “Please, what exactly happens when you stand to?”

The Officer gestured to the tortured relief carvings ringing the monument.

“All that, I’m afraid. Carnage, slaughter, screaming fear, bloody waste of good men and horses. We stand to and relive it every night. It’s who we are, and it reminds us why we’re here. It’s the maker’s purpose.”

He cleared his throat as if there were a great deal more he would like to have said about the maker and his purpose, but good manners prevented him from doing so.

George found himself grasping at straws. “But it can’t be that bad. I mean, you know you’re going to survive, right? I mean, you do it every night, so . . .”

“Doesn’t quite work like that, young ’un.” The Officer shook his head. “Not like that at all. We don’t relive it as statues. We relive it as the men we were made to represent. And while we’re reliving it, it’s real. We don’t know that it happens every night. None of us do. Not even him, poor devil . . .” He nodded at the dead soldier with his covered face at the end of the monument.

“Who is he?” said George.

“Depends who’s asking,” he said, checking his watch. “He’s whoever people want him to be. He’s the Unknown Soldier. That’s why his face is covered, so the bereaved can come and imagine he is their lost loved one. Good idea, if you ask me. Jagger, the man who made us, knew a thing or two about loss. Mind you, he was a soldier, too. Now you’re about to be one, if you’re really going to do this . . . ?”

The way he made it a question offered George a way out.

“I’m doing it.”

He was doing it for a lot of reasons, but in the end they all boiled down to a simple one: he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he didn’t.

The Officer nodded. “Good man. Be strong. Stiffen the sinews and all that good stuff.”

He gave George one final firm clap on the shoulder. “Do it for yourself. Do it for the Gunner. Do it for whoever you like, but just do it. Don’t step off the blasted plinth. You’ll be tempted. And if you still believe in anything, pray to it.”

“Pray?” said George shakily, clenching the horsewhip. “Why?”

The Officer checked his watch and moved back toward his own plinth, scooping up his coat as he went. He smoothed it over his arm and looked at George before disappearing around the right angle in the stone.

“Because for the next hour, old son, you’re going to be eye-deep in hell.”

“T
here are no happy endings,” said the Walker. “But then I expect you already know that.”

Edie watched him place a scarf-wrapped bundle on the desk in the middle of the room and turn to smile humorlessly at her. All her muscles were tensed, ready to run or fight, but the fact that the door was locked and the dogs were waiting outside severely limited the likelihood of success, whichever of the two options she chose.

“Is that right?” she said, suppressing the tremor in her voice.

“It’s a, in fact
the
, fact of life. . . .” he replied. “Now, please don’t do anything sudden or stupid.”

He thunked the point of his dagger into the desktop and walked over to her. She stared at the jeweled handle and the long blade as it reflected the candle flame. She remembered how he had been carrying it when she had glinted the scene on the frozen Thames, when she had seen him chasing the girl he had finally drowned in an ice hole. The girl with her face. That had certainly not been a happy ending.

“That’s good, then,” she spat. “That means no happy ending for you either.”

She could feel his breath on her face as he leaned in and laughed quietly, strapping her right hand to the chair arm.

“Oh, there’s an exception to every rule, and in my case, being cursed to walk forever has the one advantage of also meaning I have no foreseeable end. So I’m sorry, but I can’t oblige you by fulfilling your kind wish.”

He took her left wrist and jerked her hand out of her pocket. She let go of the heart stone just in time, as he quickly tied her arm to the chair with the efficiency of someone who’d done it many times.

All Edie had left was her feet.

“At this point,” he murmured, “some of you decide that kicking me would be a heroic final gesture.”

He reached back without looking and pulled the dagger out of the desktop. The blade flashed, and he stabbed it into the arm of the chair.

“It’s never particularly heroic, and I can always let the dogs back in. They’re not nearly as understanding as I am.”

Edie relaxed her foot. Everything he said was a kind of threat. Even the gloating was a threat. The smile. It was all designed to make her scared. And suddenly she thought she knew why.

It was designed to stop her thinking. Fear can do that, make you freeze like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming car; it can dazzle you and take out your first line of defense, which is using your brain. So instead of coming up with a reply, she shut up and thought.

And as she thought, she took an inventory of the room in the candlelight: the shelves, the stones on them, the desk, the leaded, unopenable windows, the piles of paper on the floor around the desk. And as she did so, she forcibly shoved the fear to the back of her mind, in the same place she had earlier put the feeling that she was going mad when she had found that George had just astonishingly vanished. She could always unpack the fear and madness later. Right now she had to keep all her energy focused on there actually being a “later” in the first place.

Only one thing mattered now: she was going to do everything she could to not die in this dusty room.

The Walker was busying himself at his desk with the bundle he’d brought from the British Museum.

“You want me to touch some of these stones,” she said, pointing with her chin toward the shelves.

“You’re a bright spark,” he said sarcastically, turning the wheeled chair so that it faced the desk.

“I’m a glint,” she replied. “It’s what we do, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is.” He smiled. He walked around to the opposite side of the desk and made room amid the papers to unwrap his bundle. Edie watched as he carefully laid out its contents. As he took the thick wax disks out, they looked so like cheeses, Edie thought for an unsettling instant that he was unpacking a picnic. Then she saw the arcane magical symbols that were scratched all over them, and realized they were something else entirely.

“You’ll forgive my good humor,” he said, without looking up, “but these are old friends, and I have waited a long time to retrieve them. It is thanks to you and the boy that I have reason to be so happily reacquainted with them.”

He carefully placed a thin gold disk on top of a smaller circular wax tablet, taking great pains to align its design with the marks scratched on the surface. Then he placed a little crystal ball at the center of it. Edie thought it would roll off, but there was an almost inaudible “snik” as he let go, as if a magnet had been engaged. It not only stayed in the dead center of the arrangement, but rotated slowly as it did so.

The Walker exhaled in satisfaction and turned his attention to the black mirror sandwiched between the two larger wax disks. He retrieved gloves from his pockets and put them on. He lifted the top disk and placed it on the edge of the desk, close to Edie. He picked the mirror off the second disk, holding it gingerly by the handle and placing it on top of the disk that was inches from her bare hands.

She felt the black surface suck at her hand, so strongly that her hand began to move toward it without her thinking. When she did think, and tried to pull her hand back, it was with an effort that had her gritting her teeth at its intensity.

The Walker saw this and nodded.

“It’s strong. Touch it.”

She shook her head, horrified at the way the shiny blackness was pulling at her hand.

The Walker came around the table and pushed her closer to the edge of the desk. The blackness dragged her hand across the rough wood toward it. She dug her fingernails in, but it did no good.

She had no idea what was in the stone, but its pull was far stronger than any other she’d ever glinted. She couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of terror or pain she would experience when her hand completed its inexorable journey toward the mirrored surface, but she knew it would be worse than anything she had ever experienced.

With a final effort, she threw her whole body weight backward, and her feet lashed out, sending a dusty pile of papers skittering over the floor. But it was no use. The black mirror suddenly seemed to exert a stronger pull in reaction, and her hand flipped across the arm of the chair and slapped open-palmed across the center of the mirror, splayed like a white starfish on a plate of ink.

The jolt of contact detonated through her body and out into the room, sending a silent shock wave through the layers of dust, blowing them into the air all around her. It blew out the candle, too, and for an instant all was as black as the mirror. Then there was the scrape of a match, and the Walker relit the candle and coughed at the airborne dust. Edie did too.

And as she did so, she noticed an extraordinary thing.

She wasn’t glinting.

Not as she had previously experienced glinting.

The past was not slicing into her in jagged shards of recorded pain.

Normally, glinting tore at her and left no room for thought until it was over. This was different, and it didn’t immediately hurt. She could notice things—like it not hurting, for example.

The treacherous instant of surprise and relief lasted about as long as the match in the Walker’s hand. Then she realized this was worse.

She wasn’t feeling the past in the stone.

She was feeling nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

The stone was not a recorder of past pain. Whatever it had been used for, whatever it had witnessed had gone into it and out into the void beyond. And touching that void was purely terrifying. It was as if Edie were touching the exact opposite of everything in the world around her, because everything around her was
something
: whereas everything at the end of her hand, sucking at her splayed fingers, was
nothing
.

It was such an alien feeling that, given the choice between it and the foulest, most terrifying person that had ever lived, without a second’s thought she’d have taken the side of the human monster and not what was touchable through the mirror. The void stripped everything down to a very simple equation—human or inhuman.

What was at the end of her hand was the possibility of something so vastly, cosmically bad that she couldn’t begin to get her head around it, and didn’t want to.

“You feel it,” said the Walker.

“It’s evil,” she whispered.

“It’s just different.” He smiled. “The world is full of people who are too stupid to understand, and use words like ‘evil’ and ‘unholy.’ It’s a third thing, a way to power that only the cleverest and bravest can take. And it will set me free and let me rule. . . .”

Edie gasped as something else edged into her consciousness.

“Can you feel them?” he asked.

Horribly, she realized she could. The thing about an absence or a void is that it should, by its very nature, be empty. Edie was slowly becoming aware that all around the edges of this black hole at the end of her arm were things like shadows in the dark, shifting and peering at her over the rim of nothingness. She tried to see what they were, but every time she did so her mind and vision just slid off them as they ducked out of sight.

“Do you see the Presences?” he asked eagerly.

“No,” she gasped. “But they’re there. . . .”

“Precisely,” he said exultantly. “Don’t worry. Not yet.

They can’t come here unless a gate is opened, and for that to happen we would need another mirror to set up the reflections out of which they could step. I had the two mirrors once, but a meddling fool stole one before I had understood how to use them safely, or work out how to contain the Presences within bounds on this side, once they emerged from the emptiness. He thought I was going to unleash the end of days or some such nonsense. . . .”

He scowled at the memory and pulled his dagger from the chair arm, looking at it before slipping it back in its scabbard on the back of his belt.

“I caught up with him and gutted him in a field outside the city, but I have never found the twin mirror again, and I have searched this metropolis from top to bottom ever since.”

He smiled suddenly. In many ways it was much worse than his scowl.

“And now I have a glint and an Ironhand at one and the same time . . . so I shall cut through the obstacle that I have been blocked by for three centuries and open the gates in the mirrors in one bold slash. . . .”

With that, he jerked the gold disk out from under the crystal ball so quickly that the crystal was left spinning furiously on the spot just above the wax surface of the protective tablet. In the same movement, he sliced it under Edie’s hand, between it and the black mirror, and as it severed the connection between Edie and the void, she felt a savage, blunt pain as if a limb had just been brutally chopped off. Then her hand was free, and she jerked it off the gold disk with a sob.

She curled over the pain as her hand twitched like the jerking nerves of a dying fish.

“There,” he said. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

It had been so bad that touching the loathsome otherness in the mirror left her feeling shocked to the core of her being. She had just touched something behind the scenes, something that humans were not designed to be conscious of, let alone contact. It hadn’t been pain, but if her hand had been free, she would have taken the dagger and killed the Walker simply for making her touch it.

“It was worse,” she panted. “It wasn’t like glinting. It wasn’t like touching a stone normally is.”

“Of course. And part of that is because the mirror is not really stone. Scientists, these new magicians of your age, they say that it’s not a stone at all. It’s obsidian, which looks like a stone but is a kind of glass, a volcanic glass.”

“It’s a glass. Like—?”

“Like your precious heart stone, yes. Don’t worry.” He smiled thinly. “Keep it for the moment. You will need all your strength.”

He waved an arm at all the wrapped bundles of stone on the shelves.

“I will have you touch all of these pieces of black stone. I have spent a lot of time collecting them, as you can see, in the hope that one day I would be lucky enough to find a master maker and a glint who could tell me which one of these rough items most closely matches the feel of the dark mirror.”

It all came clear to Edie in one flash of understanding. “You think George can make you a new mirror?”

“I know he can.”

“He’s not a stone mason, or anything. He’s just a boy.”

“It’s not a learned skill. He will feel the shape of what is to be made in the obsidian you choose, and he will know how to bring it forth. It’s not a skill. It’s in his bloodline.”

She shook her head. “No. He won’t do it for you, even if he does have this ability you think he has. He just won’t do it for you.”

“He will do it for you,” the Walker said simply. “He will do it to save you.”

And with a plummeting feeling inside her, she knew he was right.

He roughly freed her right arm and pointed to the shelves. “I will unwrap these rocks. You will feel them. You will tell me which one feels most like the obsidian mirror. You will glint for me. . . .”

Edie forced the fear back and tried to think straight. “Okay,” she said. It would buy her time. And now she had one hand free, even if the other was tightly tied to the heavy chair.

“I have freed your hand so you can reach all three levels of shelf. Do anything other than as I tell you, and I will have the Blind Woman set the dogs on you. Understood?”

She heard the hungry snuffling of the two mastiffs under the door and nodded. The Walker started along the shelf, unwrapping package after package, revealing black stones of every shape and size.

“Some of these are obsidian, some are flint. I did not know the difference when I began my collection. Don’t worry about the flints. Just touch the black glass,” he said as he moved away.

It was the word “flint” that made Edie know what she was going to have to do. She pulled against the strap pinning her to the chopping-board arms of the seat. The strap was only half an inch wide, but there was no question of breaking it. She would have to bide her time until it was the moment to act. All would depend on the Walker’s being in the right place.