Ironhand (7 page)

“Tragedy! Stay there.”

She followed him into the gloomy nook.

“The rest of the slices were identical to each other, just getting smaller; but there was this one slice with a bowl and a knife lying on the ground. Only, that’s what I thought they were. Until I saw them again, later.”

Little Tragedy’s Adam’s apple bobbled up and down twice. His eyes slid around the room, looking for an exit. Or help.

“You saw them later? This bowl and knife whatsit?”

His Adam’s apple came up for the third time, as if it were drowning.

Edie nodded grimly. She knew from the unmissable awkwardness of his body language that she was on the threshold of something new, something powerful.

“I saw them again just after this evil bloke called the Walker pulled two little round mirrors out of his pocket and stepped into one of them. I saw them just after he disappeared into the mirror, taking our friend with him. Only, it wasn’t a bowl and a knife. It was the Walker’s dagger and the Gunner’s tin helmet. And they lay there on the ground, and these two little mirrors hung there in the air on either side of them for a moment, like a magic trick, with no one holding them. Then there was a little pop, and the mirrors and the hat and the dagger just sort of disappeared. So what I want to know, what I need to know is: are these the kind of mirrors you can step into? And if they are, how come I saw the hat and dagger lying there before it happened?”

“Er,” said Little Tragedy. “Well. Ah.” His eyes were sliding all over the room. “You should ask himself. He’s got the words. I only see stuff, really. Ask Old Black.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Ask him.”

“He’s not here.”

Tragedy looked at the newspaper crumpled in his hand. Then he placed it delicately on a tabletop. Edie flashed the memory of him catching the paper as it lifted off the pile in the gust of wind from the door, and only then remembered that the door was shut. Had been shut. Locked. Tight enough to keep drafts out.

Little Tragedy grimaced again, as if knowing what she was belatedly realizing.

“Er.”

The hairs on the back of her neck went up. Her hand reached instinctively for the warning glass in her pocket. The deep booming voice behind her froze her hand.

“The little imp is trying to say, ‘Yes he is.’”

She turned, knowing what she was going to see. She was nose to belly with the Friar himself, towering over her like a dark cliff face. And as her eyes traveled upward, she couldn’t help but notice that the previously jolly face was as cheery and welcoming as a black thundercloud in a cold dark sky.

G
eorge plummeted toward the ground, held in the tight embrace of the golden girl. He knew he was dead. In one short second his head would pile-drive into the pavement. And the Gunner would be dead, and Edie would never know he hadn’t deserted her by choice, and his mother, his mother would never know how much he—

He threw his hands out reflexively, and two things happened at once: the girl batted them down with the arm that wasn’t wrapped around his chest and clamped them tightly to his side.

And she swooped.

There was no other word for it. At the very last moment she defied all the laws of aerodynamics and flattened out her dive, acrobatically swooping left in a ninety-degree barrel roll, so that instead of splatting into the stone sidewalk, she flew along it at an altitude of about one foot.

“Keep your arms in or you’ll hurt yourself,” she said calmly. George just stared at the paving stones whipping past his nose and got used to being alive again. He nodded and then made the mistake of looking ahead.

Not only were they running out of pavement, the intersection ahead was busy and in motion. Buses and lorries sped through in opposite directions, and the girl seemed to be leaving the sidewalk too late, suddenly much, much too late if she hoped to gain altitude and fly over the vehicles powering across their path at right angles.

A big high-sided lorry hurtled in from the left on a certain collision course, much too close to miss or avoid; and once more he knew he was dead, and once more he refused to close his eyes—and then he wished he had, because instead of hitting the lorry, she dinked even lower and underflew it, between the moving wheels.

He heard her laughter gurgle in his ear, and she banked left and up; and where George had been terrified, he realized that his mouth wasn’t shrieking but smiling.

The reason was this: she flew.

Just as she had said she did.

And when she flew, she
really
flew.

Spout, by comparison, had not really flown. Spout, by comparison, had dragged himself painfully through the sky by grabbing great untidy chunks of air and forcing them under his wings as he desperately snatched for the next one. Spout had propelled himself through the sky in a constant battle against the air and pull of gravity. The girl didn’t fight the air. She flew in it, as if she were a part of it.

He realized that this was why she laughed. She loved the simple freedom and exhilaration of flying.

As if she had read his thoughts, she slalomed between three lampposts and then down into a tunnel under a modern building, which quickly opened up into a small square in front of an ancient stone church. She cut a wide arc around the right-hand side of the building at gargoyle height, close enough for George to see with relief that the only gargoyles on this church were grotesque medieval heads pulling ugly faces.

She tightened the radius of the arc and circled down to the pavement at the foot of a bulging gherkin-shaped skyscraper that was as modern as the church at its base was old.

She daintily released George and stepped back, running her fingers through her hair to restore some order to the windblown golden locks. She and George were both panting and took a moment to get their breath back. As they did, George could see her eyes were bright with exhilaration.

“I guarantee we lost him,” she said.

He looked upward and was pleased to see no sign of Spout. He nodded. “Thank you.”

“It was nothing more than a pleasure, boy.” She smiled.

“My name’s George,” he said. And he held his hand out because he didn’t know what to do, and shaking hands always seemed to be part of a good introduction. She looked at him oddly, and then took his hand. But instead of shaking it, she turned it over and examined it. He saw she was looking at the scar, the dragon’s wound, his maker’s mark.

“Oh,” he said, “that’s a—”

“I know what it is, boy.” She laughed. “Being one of the ‘made,’ how would I not?” She gave him his hand back.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I am Ariel.”

George kept a wary eye on the sky, in case any spouts suddenly appeared out of it.

“I’ll hear him coming,” she said. “He punches great holes in the sky as he drags his ungainly bulk through it. I will catch the vibrations. I am, after all, a spirit of the air.”

And George remembered who Ariel was, because his class had been to see a play in the park two summers ago.

“Er, no offense, but I thought Ariel was a boy.”

Her head came up and she looked at him with an expression that was half-hurt, half-outraged pride.

He swallowed and hurried on, before the insult could take root. “No, I mean, when we saw it in school. The play. That’s when I thought Ariel was a boy. In the play, right?”

He was burbling. He knew he was burbling. He definitely wasn’t making it better.

“Do I look like a boy to you, boy?”

It was a disconcerting question, and she had a disconcerting way of asking it. It wasn’t just her voice, which, for all its disapproval, was rather low and quite velvety. It wasn’t the sense that she was always on the point of laughing at him either, although that was quite irritating. It was that there was something unnerving about her clothes. It wasn’t that they were golden or filmy, or even that they were covering—barely—a body that the sculptor had made disconcertingly lithe and curvy. It was that they were, he realized, not really clothes at all. They were floaty bits of material that seemed to be held on by nothing more than a light breeze.

“No. You look very . . . not like a boy.”

She held his look for a long and predictably disconcerting moment. A smile twitched at the edge of her mouth. Somehow, somewhere—actually in the pit of his stomach—he found that hint of a smile the most disconcerting thing of all.

“I am very
not
like a boy, boy. No boy could do this.”

She reached out and took his hand again and leaped into the air. His stomach flipped and his arm was half wrenched out of his socket. She hoisted him higher and put an arm under his armpit and held him, his back tightly clenched to her as she soared up, spiraling around the curved skyscraper.

He saw the office floors, layer after layer as they rose and circled toward the swelling middle of the building. He saw empty desks and winking computer screens. He saw a conference room with men and women sitting around a long table. He saw a man in a suit standing on his head against a wall as a couple of business-suited women laughed and applauded. And he saw entire empty floors with a lone cleaner pushing her cart through the anonymous maze of booths and dividers. And then the building ceased to belly outward and started to taper, and Ariel twisted in midflight, laughing as she gave them a widening panorama of the whole city below.

He saw the sparkle of the river and the closer high-rises, and then the distant skyscrapers at Canary Wharf to the east, and he began feeling as giddy as her laughing sounded, as the circuits around the building got narrower and narrower as they neared the apex.

The whirling panorama really did start to blur with the velocity at which she was circling, and then they reached the rounded point at the top of the building, and the circling became a pirouette that got faster and faster until George felt like one of those ice-skaters spinning on one skate, so fast that he ceased to be a recognizable person and just became a high-velocity whirling smear.

“Please,” he choked, half laughing, half panicking. “Please. Ariel. I’m going to hurl. . . .”

Her spinning slowed and eased, then ceased. Once she had stopped, it took a while for his brain to settle back on its gimbals and stop its own sympathetic whirligig.

Ariel stepped gently down to the rim of the building’s cap and lowered him onto it. He grabbed a bar set into a recessed hole and clung on tight.

“No, don’t—” he began, but she did.

She let go of him, and there he was, sitting on top of the world, a shiny glass-and-metal world that arced away from him on all sides, curving so radically that there was nothing to see but drop-off whichever way he looked.

Ariel stepped in front of him, spun on one toe, and curtsied, as if she had just completed a virtuoso performance. She looked expectantly at him, a prima ballerina waiting for applause.

“There’s no way I’m letting go of this bar in order to clap. It’s just not going to happen,” he explained, deciding that given his precarious position, anything other than complete frankness would be suicidal. “But you’re right. No boy could fly like that. That was amazing.”

“Amazing?”

A single golden eyebrow curved higher than its mate.

Obviously, amazing wasn’t doing it.

“Brilliant. Crazy. Superb.”

Her eyebrows regained their symmetry.

“Yes,” she said. “It was superb.”

“Yes.” He nodded, really hoping that she would take the compliment and put him back on the ground. He had a sudden horror-struck premonition of being left there, perched on the sharp end of this fantastically elongated egg shape as the night drew in and darkness covered the city. He knew if that happened, he would eventually fall asleep and slide off the curving edge and into death.

He saw with huge relief that she was smiling triumphantly. She looked off into the west and pointed.

“There is a boy who lives over there, a babyish boy in a babyish park who thinks he too can fly. Should you ever see him, I would be eternally in your debt if you could repeat what you have just so kindly said. Especially the ‘superb’ bit. He is an odious crowing coxcomb of a boy. And he flies with all the grace of a thrown turnip.”

“Thrown turnip. Gotcha,” he said, clenching on his handhold like a very determined limpet. “Could we please go down now?”

“You want to go down so soon?” She stretched languidly, her hands back to back, fingers intertwining, reaching for the sky, her toes straining on point. “But you can see everything from here.”

“I know,” he said. “Except, I can’t see Edie, and I can’t see the Gunner, and frankly”—all the frustration of being snatched up and put down and snatched up again and flown all over the city boiled over and choked him— “frankly, I’m fed up with this all. I’ve got friends in trouble, and they need help and I need help to help them, because they’re my responsibility, yeah? And all that happens is I seem to be being carried farther and farther away from any place I might find them. So please. Ariel. I have to do what has to be done, or I don’t know, burst trying or something, but I have to do it. So the flying is tip-top, okay, but what I really need to know is: can you help me or not?”

He ran out of words and stared at her. She watched her fingers make a butterfly as they descended to her sides, and then she smiled at him.

“Of course,” she said. “To help do what has to be done. That’s why I came for you.”

He didn’t know what she meant.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m not. I told you what I was.” She flashed a grin.

“A spirit of the air?” he guessed.

“A minister of fate,” she said with a gasp of exasperation. She tugged his ankle, and he lost his grip, and the whole falling thing happened again, only this time he was ready for her to catch him, which thankfully she did.

“There’s an easier way to do this,” he choked as they angled groundward in a shallow dive.

“Ah, but you don’t get the easy way, do you, boy?” She laughed as they flew down and cut north up the street known as St. Mary Axe.

“You get the Hard Way.”

The way she said it, the way she knew it suddenly, made his stomach drop faster than any of the flying had done, and then he heard a sound that made everything much worse.

Ahead of them, somewhere in the darkness ahead, he heard a single bell tolling as if for a funeral, deep and low and solemn. And he knew with absolute certainty that it was a warning bell, and that the warning was for him.