Ironhand (6 page)

A
t the same time Edie was running south toward the river, George had just recrossed it heading north. Spout held him firmly around the chest as he flapped toward the great dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was a jerky passage through the air as the gargoyle grunted and flexed his muscles on each downbeat, swaying so precariously from stroke to stroke that flying was more a matter of will than aerodynamics for the bulky stone creature. There was a strong sense that he might plummet to the ground at any moment. One improvement on things was that he wasn’t carrying George upside down anymore, so his head no longer pounded with blood.

The flash of a camera caught his eyes as they overflew a gaggle of tourists taking pictures in front of the cathedral. He shouted, “Help!” more for the form of it than from any real hope, trying to throw a verbal grappling hook back into a safer reality that he barely remembered.

Just as he’d expected, not one single tourist looked up. They couldn’t see him in his layer of London. The unconscious, instinctive part of their brains stepped in and erased him, protecting their consciousness from the shock of seeing the impossible: a boy being flown through the city beneath a gargoyle, like a mouse being taken by an owl. The last day had been so full of terror and running and people not seeing or helping him that he’d gotten used to it.

Because he had given up expecting anyone to notice him, he missed the wiry old broken-toothed man in the mismatched grimy suit sitting on the ground in a doorway. He didn’t see him put down the cider bottle and squint into the sky at George. He didn’t see the unwashed hair or the broken veins crimsoning the man’s face in a drinker’s blush. And he neither saw the jet-black eyes nor heard the lifeless voice saying:

“One boy inna sky. Carried by a gargoyle. Flying around St. Paul’s, heading nor’ nor’east.”

Spout suddenly stood on one wing and turned an ungainly right angle in the sky, diving low around the side of the dome across the radiating white sunburst design inlaid on the surface of Paternoster Square.

Now that it was clear that the gargoyle wasn’t going to kill him immediately, there was room on top of the fear for anger, too: George desperately needed to rescue the Gunner, but he could do nothing about it because he’d been grabbed and was being taken wherever the gargoyle felt like going. He thought of the Gunner and how relieved he’d been when he’d reappeared as if back from the dead at the Monument. In the pit of his stomach, George nursed the conviction that you really only got to come back from the dead once, if you were lucky. And the Gunner had done something fatal to his luck by sacrificing himself for Edie. George knew that if they didn’t get the Gunner free and back on his pedestal by midnight, he’d have no need of luck at all, because he’d just be finished.

He caught a smeared vision of a strangely familiar arched gatehouse, its Georgian elegance at odds with the modern piazza beyond, and then unaccountably he heard a noise so out of place that he looked wildly around for the source of it: it was the sound of sheep, bleating plaintively in the middle of this windblown stone piazza.

It was a peaceful sound, of grass and hills and summertime, and for all its alienness, it flowed into his overheated brain like cool water after a long dry spell. For some unaccountable reason, the sound of innocent animals in the midst of all this turmoil just made him lighten inside.

Then, as if he really had become less heavy, he and Spout suddenly lifted higher and climbed up and over an office building, too quickly to be certain, but just slowly enough for George to be almost convinced that he heard a voice amid the sheep shout after him:

“Hold on, my son!”

He twisted and wriggled in Spout’s clasp, desperately trying to see the sheep or the man whose voice he was sure—heartbreakingly sure—he recognized. But the gargoyle flew on, over the rooftops, and the square was lost to his view.

It had only been a snatch of sound, but it had gone through George like a burst of adrenaline. He felt invigorated, as if he’d just had a night’s sleep. He didn’t feel any less scared or confused by what was happening to him— he just suddenly felt a lot more able to cope with it. The zigzag scar on his hand twinged sharply, but it wasn’t an unbearable pain, and it didn’t stop the unaccountable surge of well-being he felt coursing through him. He snatched a look at the three lines twining down to his wrist. Unless he was mistaken, they’d traveled farther, one of them actually crossing his wrist and starting a curving fissure onto his forearm. Somehow, looking at these flaws that seemed to be spiraling through his flesh made him feel more nauseous than all the swerving through the sky.

“Gaven,”
Spout croaked suddenly. There was another swooping heave, and the world tilted alarmingly.

If you can trip in the sky, three hundred feet above any possible obstruction, that’s what it felt like. George concentrated on keeping whatever was in his stomach on the inside; and then once he’d gulped it back into place, he looked upward to see what was troubling the gargoyle, and saw that Spout’s neck was craned backward.

The world bucked and roller-coastered once more, and George’s stomach popped up to say hello to his tonsils again, and he realized that Spout was taking evasive action, diving down between two skyscrapers to get below roof level—as if trying to put them between him and something else in the night sky. George craned around and followed the direction of the gargoyle’s eyes, but saw nothing but the city as the lights came on and the colors drained from the day. The sky was empty, apart from a large crow, or some such bird, flapping slowly north in the distance. There was nothing obviously threatening. George couldn’t see why Spout was acting so frightened.

“Gaven!”
panted the gargoyle, this time more intently.

The early night sky disappeared, and they swooped over the rooftop of a large older building that seemed to take up an entire city block. George caught a glimpse of the pillared frontage of the Royal Exchange building to the right, and realized they must be flying directly over the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street.

He looked down and saw the dark hollow made by the central courtyard of the building, and then he heard someone singing.

It was only a snatch of song, but it cut through the rumbling snarl of the city and came to his ears as cleanly as the sound of the sheep had in Paternoster Square. It was a girl’s clear voice, and it had a lightness and clarity that spoke of sunshine and light spring breezes. It was the happy sound of someone singing purely for her own enjoyment, drawing out the trilling rhyme at the end of each line with a joyfulness that had something unmistakably pure and elemental to it.

“‘Where the bee sucks there suck I:

In a cowslips bell I li-i-i-ie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fl-y-y-y . . .’”

The singing was coming from the top of a small domed cupola at a sharp angle of the building to the north. The singer was a bright splash of gold against the gray of the building and the darker shadows of the narrow street beyond. She was balanced like a ballet dancer on the toes of one slender foot, while her other leg stuck out behind in the beginnings of a dainty arabesque. Golden drapery shimmered around her legs and torso, as if blown by an invisible breeze that ruffled her gilded hair as she sang, her throat arched back in joyful abandon, singing to the sky and the moon that had just started to rise.

For an instant she was a vision of poise and grace and happiness—and then, just as George saw her, she saw him; and though her mouth stayed open, she stopped singing and stared at him in unfeigned surprise as Spout flapped past.

It seemed to George that her face shone, more than just because it was gold. It shone because her eyes were bright and full of hope and something that made him uncomfortable—though not in a necessarily bad way.

“A boy?” she said in a voice running clean as a mountain stream. “Hello, boy.”

As Spout flew away from her, her smile changed to a small sad pout, and she traced a half-wave with her hand. “Good-bye, boy.”

“Help?” he shouted awkwardly.

Spout hissed in disapproval. George twisted to see her getting smaller in their wake.

“No, really!” he shouted with more conviction. “HELP!”

And then she was lost to sight behind the angle of the next building they flew over. Spout was looking back, too, and something he saw didn’t please him at all, because he suddenly hissed even louder, dropped a shoulder, and curved in and down behind a tall office building with the sudden jerking swoosh of a skier abruptly swerving to a halt.

His talon reached out and grabbed a parapet, and he neatly pinwheeled himself to a stop and flattened against a sloping roof of greasy greenish-gray tiles. His wings were spread out like a partial umbrella, and George was stuck between them and the angle of the roof.

For a long minute they stayed there, unmoving. The only sound was Spout panting and George’s heart hammering. He looked down and saw that his feet were braced on a slippery gutter above a lethal drop to the street below. He noticed that he had only one shoe on, because his sock immediately became soaked. Then Spout did something terrifying.

He let go of George.

George scrabbled with his hands and then realized the only way not to fall was to flatten himself on the sheer angle of the roof and hope the gutter didn’t give way.

He stopped scrabbling and pressed forward. Spout kept his eyes on him and nodded slowly. He pointed one claw warningly at George. And then he reached above himself and slowly began to crawl to the edge of the roof above. His ears were flattened back on his head, like some great hunting cat. George could see the spines that ran up his backbone quivering, like the hair on a dog’s back when it’s alarmed. He wondered what it was that was frightening the gargoyle. It gave him a treacherous spark of hope: perhaps there was someone out there looking for him. Perhaps the Gunner had got free and was coming to his rescue, perhaps having enlisted some flying . . .

And here the hope dwindled a bit as he realized the only statues he could think of that could fly were taints instead of spits. He saw Spout cat-crawl to the roof ridge and slowly slide halfway over. Spout paused in that position, only one leg and the edge of a wing still visible to George, ready to duck back into hiding if his search of the sky revealed anything alarming.

George concentrated on keeping a grip on the distressingly sheer slope of the roof. He thought he’d be okay if he didn’t make any sudden movements. He was pretty sure he could be still, especially since the consequences of not being still were going to be moving very quickly downward and then being still forever. He concentrated on sticking to the roof. He could do this.

He felt his hands splayed against the slates. He saw the greenish flecks on the gray surface in front of his nose. He felt the stone under his fingertips. Maybe because he was concentrating so hard on staying stuck to it, he somehow felt that he could feel the structure of the stone itself, the tight grain, the compressed layers running parallel with the face, the layers that made it possible to split it into the thin roof tiles. He even felt a magneting tingling, as if those green flecks were not stone but little flecks of iron embedded in the slate.

He was so taken by the immediacy and intensity of what he was feeling beneath his hand that he forgot to be scared.

Then something tapped him on the ankle.

He jerked away on reflex and nearly tumbled onto the street. He flattened against the tiles, trying to become part of the roof, hoping that every extra bit of him that he could press against the surface would help him stick there. Even his face was squidged against the cold slate.

“Are you perchance trying to hold on with your nose?” said a tiny whisper behind him. He looked down and saw the golden girl looking back up at him, both elbows perched on the gutter, chin cupped in her hands, as nonchalant as if leaning on a bar—despite the fact that there was nothing but a lethal gulf of air beneath her feet.

His eyes automatically flicked upward, to see if Spout had heard her. All he could see was the one talon on the ridge and the bit of wing. Spout was still on lookout.

The girl pushed herself off from the gutter and held on with her hands, arms at full stretch, still looking up at him.

“Come,” she said simply, and held out one hand.

“Who are you?” George whispered, trying to put off the moment when he might have to reach away from the comfort of the wet tiles and find out if her ability to hang in the air included being able to carry him, too.

“I am minister of your fate,” she said with a heartbreaking smile. He returned the smile. It seemed the polite thing to do, even though he hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.

And then she tugged his ankle off the gutter.

He didn’t even have time to yell or grab a handhold. He just fell, snatching handfuls of air . . .

—And then she caught him.

“Wha—?”

“Shhh,” she whispered, mouth pressed close to his ear, breath warm on the back of his neck. One finger pointed at Spout’s back on the ridgeline above them. He shushed and nodded.

“Hold on, boy,” she breathed. His hands locked on to her arm, which wasn’t hard and metallic, but as warm and soft as her breath.

“What do we do now?” he asked very quietly, eyes locked on Spout’s back view.

He could hear the smile in her voice as she answered, “I fly.”

She let go of the building edge and fell slowly backward with the clean grace of an Olympic high diver, pivoting on her toes as her head described a perfect one hundred eighty–degree arc, and George went along with her as upright changed to upside down, and they were suddenly diving face-first for the paving stones beneath.

He opened his mouth to shout, but her free hand clapped over it and stifled the yell, and all he could see racing toward his bulging eyes was granite oblivion.

E
die hit the pavement at the end of the pedestrian crossing and trotted downhill, turning right and heading under the dark railway overpass at the bottom of the slope. She saw the white triangular shape of the Black Friar pub beyond, jutting toward the Thames like the prow of a landlocked ship.

She stopped as a taxi slowed and turned past her, heading up the hill. When it had passed, she didn’t continue crossing the road. She just stood there, staring at the pub facade; not at what was on it, but rather at what wasn’t. The clock below was stuck at five to seven, but above it, where the statue of the Black Friar normally stood like a figurehead, was a blank plinth.

The Friar was gone, and the empty space stared back at Edie like a threat.

She’d been running all the questions she wanted to ask him through her head, trying so hard to imagine what he’d say, how he might help, how she might have to cajole him into doing so, so that the one scenario she hadn’t catered for was that he might not be there to ask in the first place. She also hadn’t thought how she might get into the pub if he wasn’t there to let her in, with his jovial laugh and jangling keys. Another car turned in front of her and splashed the curbside puddle across her ankles, jolting her out of her frozen state.

“Right,” she said, smacking her palm with heel of George’s shoe. “Right.”

She jogged across the road and under a railway bridge as a train rumbled ominously overhead. She rounded the point of the building and slowed, suddenly wary.

The door to the pub stood open, but the lights were off. As she approached it she saw two builders carry out a stack of planks and load them into the back of a white van double-parked near the curb. Edie flattened herself against the side of the building and went very still, concentrating on not being seen. Not being seen was a skill she’d realized she had very early on in her life. Sometimes she’d thought people were just ignoring her, but she’d later decided that they just found it hard to see her a lot of the time, and this was because she could, when she concentrated, be very still and unnoticeable. Once she’d noticed this was something she could do, she did it more and more, really putting a lot of mental effort into making herself invisible. She knew she wasn’t actually invisible, but she also knew that she had something that made people’s eyes slide off her as if she were covered in nonstick coating.

She waited for the men to go back inside the pub, then slid quickly up to the open door and pressed her back against the outside wall. She slipped the frosted circle of sea-glass out of her pocket and checked it. It was dull and unthreatening, no inner fire kindling within to warn of the closeness of danger. Edie slipped it back into her coat, and as she did so, she felt the heavy lump of the dragon’s head in the pocket of George’s coat bump against her thigh. She knew whatever had happened to make him disappear was bad, because he’d said that he would stay with her, and his word was good—and even if it wasn’t, he’d never have run off and left her wearing a coat that contained such a precious object.

Before she could think more about this, the builders came back out, knees buckling under the weight of a second, bigger stack of planks. They walked it right past her as she stood there, not breathing. As soon as the second man had passed her, she pivoted neatly and slipped inside the door, into the gloom.

The interior was much the same as it had been the last time she’d been there, still shrouded with drop cloths and littered with builder’s jumble. She heard the rear door of the van slam and feet heading back toward her. She lifted the edge of a drop cloth and bent double beneath a low pub table, flicking the cloth back into place to hide her. She held her breath again and listened as one man walked into the room. He picked up something that clanked like a toolbox, switched off the lights, and walked out again. She heard the door shut with the finality of a church door slamming, and keys turning in the lock. As she relaxed a fraction and breathed in quiet shallow breaths, she heard the hollow thump of the van’s side door closing and the noise as it drove off into the traffic on the main road beyond.

She still didn’t move for about five minutes, just crouched there in the darkening room behind the grubby canvas of the drop cloth, listening for noises made by anyone or anything locked in with her. When the complete absence of sound or movement from anywhere had told its incontrovertible story of emptiness and abandonment, she rolled out from under the table and walked purposefully toward the bar. The room smelled rank and overheated. It smelled of workmen and wet plaster.

She shrugged out of George’s jacket and put it on the countertop. She boosted herself up onto it, swiveled her legs over, and dropped onto the barman’s side in one decisive movement. She bent down and examined the cardboard boxes stacked neatly along the foot of the bar. She plunged her hand into the torn hole in the side of the one with pink writing on it and fished out a pair of prawn-cocktail crisp packets.

She was so hungry that she’d torn the first one open and was munching a mouthful of tangy potato shards into starchy shrapnel by the time she stood up again.

She closed her eyes and allowed herself the momentary pleasure of enjoying the taste and feel of eating. Then she got down to business.

“Okay,” she lisped through a full mouth, “come down here. We need to talk. . . .”

Nothing but silence answered her.

She opened her eyes and tipped the other half of the packet straight into her mouth. She chomped happily for a moment, clearing a passageway for her next words.

“Seriously. Don’t make me come in there after you. . . .”

Silence. She reached under the bar and came out with a bottle of ginger beer. She stuck it in the opener screwed to the inner wall of the counter and popped the cap without looking. She chugged a couple of mouthfuls and swilled the impacted potato wodge from the spaces between her teeth. Then she burped and smacked the heavy glass bottle onto the bar top.

“Oi. Tragedy. I need some straight answers.”

She made a point of not looking into the dark alcove beyond the three low arches to her right. To the trained ear it was entirely clear that this was where all the silence was coming from.

“I know you’re there.”

Silence. And then, just as she was opening her mouth to speak, another voice dodged quietly out from under the arches.

“No I ain’t.”

It was a cockney voice. Edie hid a smile by popping the second bag of crisps and pouring some of them into her mouth.

“Where’s the Friar?” she asked.

Now that it had leaked a voice, the silence seemed much more eloquent. It spoke of someone trying to find a way to avoid a straight answer, she thought.

A small throat cleared itself. “’E’s not here an’ all.”

“You’re both not here?”

“No. Yes. Er. Yes . . . only ’e’s more not ’ere than what I am. See?”

A tousled head of bronze hair poked into view at the top of one of the arches, hanging upside down; then a face dropped into view, the impish face of a street cherub carrying a mask, which a sculptor had carved into the distinctive features of Tragedy. His face was grinning and mischievous.

“I do now,” Edie said drily.

“You’re in a pickle.”

“Am I?”

“Biggest pickle in the barrel is wot I heard.”

“Heard from who?”

“Dunno.” He dropped to the ground and looked at her. He looked at the mask he held in his hand. He put it in front of his face and then took it away, grimace giving way to smile.

“You get all sorts in a pub. Keep your ears open, you pick up a lot of stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

He hid behind the mask again, and then half took it off, winking with the one visible eye. “‘Careless talk costs lives.’”

She had no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean?”

“‘Careless talk costs lives.’ You know.”

“No. I wouldn’t ask if I knew.”

“It’s what they say. What they used to say.”

“Who?”

“I dunno, do I? Them. Everyone. There was posters. We had one over there.”

“When?”

“In the war. You know. When they was dropping bombs and all that. In the wossname. The Blitz. You remember.”

She realized he was talking about the Second World War.

“The Blitz?”

He looked pleased. His little chest swelled in front of her, and he nodded enthusiastically. “There you go. You remember. We had the poster over there. You liked it.”

“I wasn’t alive during the war. Not that war.”

His eyes flicked left and right and then centered on her beneath a newly wrinkled brow. “Wasn’t you?”

She shook her head. “My mum wasn’t alive in that war.”

“I thought you . . .”

“I’m twelve.”

“Well, that don’t mean nothing. That’s older than me. I think. I mean, I think I’m not twelve. Not yet.”

He began to look confused.

“You look about ten. But then you’ll always be ten, won’t you?”

“Will I?”

“You will. Statues don’t get old. You’ll have been ten in the war like you’re ten now. But I wasn’t born, my mum wasn’t born. I don’t even think her mum was born. . . .”

The furrows on his brow curved and deepened. “But you liked the poster. I’m sure I remember.”

She shook her head. “I never saw any poster.”

He held her gaze for a couple of beats longer. “I thought you did. I—”

“I didn’t.” She cut him off hard. She didn’t have time to waste.

He looked offended and suddenly deflated. He twirled the mask in his hands and examined his feet. “Okay.”

His toe traced a pattern in the carpet. “It’s just that I seen so many things for so long that I get it all in a ball, you know? Like knots. It all gets tangled. Like, I think I remember stuff I ain’t supposed to have seen, and I seen things I ain’t supposed to remember. And that’s not even counting the stuff I definitely ain’t seen, don’t remember, and can’t forget. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“I got so much stuff in my head, I can’t keep it all apart. It gets jumbled. It’s one of the things makes me feel like I’m made wrong, you know?”

There was a small gust of wind from behind her. It rustled a newspaper on a stool beside him. He reached out and caught the top sheet as it lifted off the pile. He held it as if surprised to find it there. Then he scowled intently at it and crumpled it into a ball. He kept it bunched tight in his hand and smiled hopefully at her.

The last time Edie had met Little Tragedy, he had been keen that she use her power, her ability to glint, to suck the past from rock and metal to touch him and see if she could sense if there was something wrong with him. She hadn’t touched him, but she could see there was something not right. She didn’t know if he had been made wrong, or made to be wrong, but his eagerness to be glinted, when every other statue shied away from the pain and distress caused when she touched them, had been one of the things that she and George had mistrusted about the whole setup of the pub and its threateningly cheery landlord. She thought Little Tragedy was a spit. The suspicion was creeping up on her that he might have a dual nature like the half-human, half-fantastical Sphinxes. Maybe he was taintish when he had the mask on, spit-like when he didn’t. So she didn’t answer his question directly. Instead she changed the subject, back to the reason she’d come back to the pub.

“Look. I haven’t got time to talk. I need to find the Gunner. And I need to find George. I don’t even know where to start, except with this one thing: what’s in the mirrors?”

He looked perplexed again. “What mirrors?”

She pointed to the two mirrors on either side of the arch he was standing in. They faced each other on the inside pilasters of the arch, and standing between them and looking sideways gave the impression that the reflections in the mirrors not only framed each other, but repeated themselves into infinity.

“Those mirrors. I need to know about the mirrors.”

Little Tragedy scratched the back of his head with the hand that still held the balled-up newspaper and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, avoiding her eyes. “Nothing. They’re just mirrors, yeah?”

Edie stepped toward him. He raised his eyes and smiled brightly, as if seeing her for the first time. Whatever look she had parked on her face clearly wasn’t returning fire on the smile, because his faded fast, dimming to a grin before curdling into a grimace and an awkward rise and fall of his shoulders.

“Just mirrors. Straight up, no messing. That’s all they are . . .”

Edie cleared her throat. The question she was about to ask was going to be so outlandish that she didn’t want to give it the chance of catching on something before it even got out of her mouth.

“Are they the kind of mirrors you can step into?”

“Do what?”

His head suddenly tilted and bobbed from one side to the other as he squinted up at her like a raccoon eyeing up a particularly complex trash can.

“There are mirrors you can step into, aren’t there? You said there were other places, other ‘heres.’ You said you could show me how to get to them.”

“Oooh, I never, what a whopper!”

Edie turned on him, hand clenched into a fierce and knobby fist. “The only whopper you’re going to get is when I lay one on you if you don’t straighten up and start telling me the truth. I want to know about the mirrors, because I think it’s to do with them, isn’t it? When we left here, I looked in, and it was all like this, hundreds of reflections of the same thing snaking off into the distance, all copies of each other, except for one thing.”

Her finger stabbed at the mirror. Little Tragedy flinched as her hand passed his shoulder, but his eyes followed the direction she was indicating.

“It’s not there now. I hoped it might be, but it isn’t. But it was. There was one slice that was different from all the others, and you know why?” asked Edie.

“No. I don’t want to know an’ all . . .”

He was backing into the shadows again. She could hear him nervously crumpling the newspaper ball in his fist. Her voice cracked like a whip, and he stopped dead.