Silvertongue (22 page)

T
wo things struck George as he swung the chariot up and onto Blackfriars Bridge. The first was that he was going to have to find another way to cross back to the north side of the river, because the sheer mass of the ice murk had already spread west past the other end of the bridge. If he kept on he’d just barrel right into the middle of it and be irretrievably lost.

The second thing he noticed was the activity on the bridge. The Red Queen, Boadicea, was leaning over the edge, shouting and pointing with the unmistakeable air of someone ordering a group of people about. There was a metal sack at her feet, and as George approached, first one then another figure flew up from the river below and clung on to the other side of the bridge wall, talking to her and nodding and shaking their heads.

One of the airborne spits was a winged pilot, in World War II gear, wearing a flying helmet and life jacket. His arms were attached to his wings, making him look more like a crucifix than an angel, as he hung in the air talking animatedly with the Queen and the other figure. The other spit was recognizable as a Perseus; semiclad with a feathered helmet and winged sandals, he was gesticulating with an aggressively curved sword at something below. The one thing they had in common, apart from the fact they could both, in their different ways, fly, was that they were both dripping wet.

The Queen turned as George approached.

“Boy,” she said without ceremony or a hint of surprise—or pleasure—at the fact he had come back at all from his ordeal. “We cannot find it.”

“But chin up, old man, we’re still looking!” The Pilot smiled and dropped off the edge of the bridge.

“Yes,” said the Perseus, his teeth chattering despite a wide grin, “but I was not made for these cold northern waters.”

And with that he flipped backward in a perfect dive. George jumped off the chariot and ran to the edge, just in time to see the two spits hit the river below and disappear.

There was a big barge moored in the middle of the river, and on it, one of the sailor statues—the Bosun— was standing amid a ramshackle collection of stones and objects that were wet and caked in silt. As George watched, a great bronze dolphin leaped out of the water, trailing a laughing bronze boy who held on to its fin as the creature arched high over the Bosun. He dropped another stone onto the deck next to him, and then Boy and Dolphin disappeared in another splash on the far side of the barge.

Jack Tar was standing in a small boat, which the sailors had obviously commandeered from one of the large boats permanently moored on the embankment, hauling at a rope as he dragged the riverbed below with the anchor, which, as George stared, broke clear of the water with half a rusted bicycle attached to it.

“We’re doing everything we can,” said the Queen, as first the Perseus and then the Pilot burst out of the river, each gasping for breath and carrying assorted pieces of junk in their hands. They flew to the barge and dropped the items next to the Bosun, who quickly sifted through them and shook his head.

“They can’t find the mirror down there. They’re pulling stuff out at random and hoping,” she said. “We don’t know what else to do. But we’re not giving up.”

George knew he couldn’t really feel more than a vague dark presence out there. He knew that to find the mirror required someone who was an expert at feeling the power hidden within stones.

“We need Edie,” he said. “Edie can feel its presence.”

He remembered what she had told him about why the Walker had kidnapped her, to sift through his collection of black stones and look for the one he could make into a black mirror. George knew without needing to think how or why that this was a job for her and no other.

“Where the hell is she?” he said, scanning the cityscape stretched all around him. “If we can’t find Edie, everything is lost.”

It was at that instant, as his gaze swept across the river on the other side of the bridge, toward the east, that he saw them. Flying fast and low, hugging the wavelets on the river’s surface, a solid phalanx of ten ice-covered taints, hurtling inbound like silvery missiles.

T
he smell hit Edie as soon as she stepped out of the mirror: the sharp piney-chemical spike of disinfectant cut with the sour reek of stale cigarettes was as unappealingly institutional as the queasy green corridor walls stretching away on either side of them.

The Gunner held out a steadying hand, and for a moment as Edie acclimatized, they stood there watching the Raven flap slowly away from them down the long corridor, his black wings doubled in the reflection on the shiny floor below, like a shadow that flew just a beat behind him.

“Are you all right?” said the Gunner.

“Let’s go,” she said tightly, setting off after the bird, who as always seemed to know exactly where they should be going.

As she followed, other details began to filter into her consciousness. All the windows were barred with wire mesh, thickly painted the same color as the walls. All the barred windows Edie had seen before were barred on the outside, to stop people from getting in. These were different. On these, the mesh was on the inside of the windows, protecting the glass. Stopping people from getting out.

A stocky nurse pushed a squeaky trolley loaded with medication past them, the brightly colored pills rattling cheerily in their neatly ranked plastic cups as she went.

The Raven hovered above the nurse unseen while she punched a code into a keypad on the door at the end of the corridor. As soon as the door was opened, the Raven flew in ahead of her, and Edie and the Gunner slipped after it as the nurse turned to negotiate the trolley through behind her.

It was a big hospital dayroom. Patients were scattered around in the plastic chairs, most of which were arranged in a jumbled half-circle in front of a ceiling-mounted television. The television was showing nothing but a bright rectangle of static, the tiny white-and-black flecks fizzing into a gray electric blur as an electrician in coveralls and tool belt stood on a chair, checking the connections at the back.

Most of the patients—in pajamas and dressing gowns—were sitting and watching the television anyway.

A man sat at a table playing chess. With himself. And only a black rook on the board. Beyond him, a woman stood in the corner, face jammed into the angle of the wall, slowly stepping from one foot to the other, one thin white hand twining blindly behind her back, doggedly going nowhere.

“It’s an asylum,” said the Gunner, telling Edie what she already knew.

The electrician sucked his teeth in a disappointed snap of his tongue, got down off the chair, and walked past them to a door in the wall. He pulled out a key and unlocked it.

The nurse with the trolley rolled her eyes at him as she passed.

“Have you not got it fixed yet?”

“I’m going on the roof. Must be the aerial. Those winds . . .” he said, opening the door.

Edie saw the stairs leading upward beyond it.

“Well, mind you, lock the door behind you,” said the nurse, stopping by a lone patient in a pale lemon dressing gown sitting on a chair and looking away from the TV, her face hidden by a long sweep of aubergine dark hair.

“You don’t want to turn around and find any of this lot have decided to follow you onto the roof. He doesn’t need any little helpers, right, Sue?”

It was Edie’s mother. She turned her attention to the woman handing her a little disposable cup. Then she looked at the door and the stairs, face blank with lack of interest.

“Right,” she agreed, taking her cupful of bright pills and swallowing them while the nurse waited and then ticked her name off a list.

“Lovely jubbly.” The nurse smiled brightly.

Edie’s mother’s face froze, and she pushed back in her chair so hard that the foam padding whooshed air in protest.

“What are you doing here?” she gasped at someone behind the nurse.

The nurse turned and saw nothing but a blank wall.

“Who are you talking to?” she asked, turning back to her.

Edie’s mother stretched out a long accusing finger, shaking with emotion. “Him.”

The nurse looked again and saw nothing. “There’s no one there, Sue.”

Except there was.

It was the Walker. He had just stepped out of one of his handheld mirrors and was carefully snapping them back together and pocketing them.

“She can’t see me. Not unless I let her,” he drawled, stepping forward and waving his hand in front of the nurse’s face. She didn’t react at all, just looked at Edie’s mother and wrote something on her chart.

“You just stay there, Sue. Doctor might come and have a little chat in a while, yeah?” said the nurse. “Best just stay there for now. There’s nothing to worry about, love.”

And off she jangled with her trolley. Edie’s mother was still crammed back in her seat, her hands white-knuckling on the armrests.

The Walker stroked his beard and looked at her.

“What do you want?” she croaked.

“What do I want?” He smiled and rolled his eyes theatrically, as if bored by everything and everyone. “I would like things to be easier. In the early days it was easier. There were fewer people, spread across a much simpler world. It was not hard to find you.”

“To find me?” She gulped, eyes switching left and right, looking for somewhere to run, or someone to help her.

Edie couldn’t take it. She launched herself at the Walker. Once more she just slid off him, tumbling around his body and landing painfully on the floor. The Gunner stepped across the room and restrained her as she tried to launch herself back into the attack.

“No,” he said firmly, gripping her arm. “No more of that. You’ll just hurt yourself again.”

The Walker shook his head at her mother. “Not to find you. To find such as you. Glints. They knew who they were, and others knew they were different, even if they were unaware of the exact nature of that difference. The hostile called them witches and burned them; the needy called them wise women and asked for their help. Everyone knew who they were, even if only the glints themselves knew
what
they were. And they’d pass on that knowledge to younger women who had the gift, daughters and the like. . . .”

And Edie watched as the Walker explained to her mother exactly what a glint was. And it was painful to witness the realization spreading across her mother’s face as she understood that, however crazy the message was or how frightening the messenger, it was all true.

Edie remembered how, when it was explained to her, she too had instantly felt the truth and rightness of it. And now she was seeing the same thing dawn on her mother.

“So I’ve had this ability, this ‘gift’ all the time?” said her mum, twisting the tie of her pale yellow dressing gown tightly around her fingers and pulling so tight that they whitened with lack of blood.

“Yes.”

She took a moment to watch all the carefully arranged dominoes of her life tip over one at a time in a long chain that snaked, Edie knew, all the way back to the seven-year-old version of herself glinting the plague pit.

“And I wasn’t mad,” she said, staring at her feet but seeing something different entirely. “Not ever. I was seeing things. Real things. Not imagining them.”

“Yes.” The Walker shrugged.

She bit her lip and looked up at him, shaking her head in disbelief at her predicament. She spoke very slowly as the last domino fell with a click, like a door locking.

“And now that I know that I wasn’t mad, that I’ve never been mad—I’m in here.”

“Ironic, is it not? Though not for long, I feel, if that is any solace. . . .” He grinned easily. “You have the gift, but you no longer have the stone. Without a heart stone you will, really, go mad. You feel it, don’t you? That sense of things coming unstitched, of the fragile mooring that held you on the earth slowly working loose?”

Edie’s mother stared at him, her leg starting to jig up and down with the tension building in her.

“What do you want?” she whispered.

He reached into his pocket and held up the earring. Her eyes devoured it and the fire blazing inside.

“Such a small stone,” he tutted. “Scarcely worth my trouble.”

“So give it back,” she said, swallowing.

“You have a daughter.”

Edie’s mother went very still, just as she had in the beach hut, like an animal sensing danger. She said nothing.

“Does she . . . have a stone?” he asked casually.

She shook her head emphatically. “She’s not like me.”

The Walker’s hand shot out and gripped her chin. “She’s just like you.”

Edie gasped and stepped forward. The Gunner’s hand fell on her shoulder and squeezed it in comfort. Tears of frustration welled behind Edie’s eyes at her inability to talk to her mother, to help her, to just touch her, even for an instant.

“In the old days mothers handed the knowledge of the gift to their daughters, just as they had been handed it by their own mothers,” the Walker continued, again sounding slightly bored by what he was saying. “A clear line of communication and tradition reaching back to the dawn of time itself. Somehow, perhaps even because of my activities, these lines have been cut.”

Edie thought of the bagful of heart stones that the Gunner had brought from the Walker’s underground cell. The stones that had warmed and brought her back to life. She thought of how many there had been, and how many lives that meant the Walker had destroyed to collect them, a life for each one. She shuddered.

“And it’s been so very much harder for me, laboring as I do in these latter days, to find glints now that they no longer know who they are. . . .”

“Poor you,” said Edie’s mother.

Edie smiled at the contempt her mother put into the two words. She knew how scared she was. She’d been that close—too close to the Walker. And yet her mother was finding a way to fight back even though she had no way of winning.

“I’m not insensitive,” the Walker replied, squatting in front of her, eyeball to eyeball. “I can see it must be painful for you now, knowing what you do, that you cannot pass the knowledge on to your daughter in the old way. You must be sorely vexed that she will go through a wasted life like your own, not knowing what she is, not understanding she’s a glint, thinking she’s mad.”

“I’ll tell her,” she said.

“No. I don’t think you’ll tell her in time. Unless . . .”

“Unless?”

The terrible spark of hope that the one word brought to her mother’s eyes was painful to see. Edie knew the Walker never let anything get away. She knew his “unless” was a viciously barbed trap waiting for her mother to step in it.

He stood up and stretched. His manner was all the more menacing because of the careless way he issued his threats, always appearing to be on the edge of yawning.

“She has a stone.”

He spoke to the ceiling with a studied lack of interest.

Edie’s mother said nothing. There was a sudden jolt of sound from across the room as the television kicked back to life, the white noise being replaced by the early evening news. The other patients mumbled in approval and sat back to stare at the colorful images jerking across the screen above them. Edie’s mother’s eyes flicked to the screen and then to the locked door across the hall. She swallowed and looked at the Walker again.

In the window behind him, beyond the safety mesh and the glass, the sun was beginning to set, smearing red across the evening sky, so that the Walker appeared to be framed in blood.

“She has a much larger stone than this pea of yours. He has seen it. Your ‘friend.’ He has told me of it.”

“I’ll kill him,” she said very calmly and with absolute conviction.

“What you do to him is no concern of mine; though I do not imagine you will have the opportunity before your mind goes. Your daughter has a stone. We have looked for it. But we cannot find it.”

Edie had a memory flash: she and her mother and an old biscuit tin. They were burying it in the scrap of woods just behind the house, in a hollow beneath an overhanging laurel bush. It was a place Edie liked when she was smaller, a sort of den in the woods. Some days her mother would come and sit with her, with a Thermos of tomato soup, and tell stories.

On the good days.

And on one good day they’d seen something on TV about digging up history and decided they would bury the battered biscuit tin full of things that were precious, for the future.

“My time capsule,” Edie breathed. “I put it in my time capsule. . . .”

“What?” said the Gunner.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Edie.

But it did. In her mind’s eye she saw the clods of earth spattering down on the biscuit tin lid as they buried it; and though it was only a biscuit tin, it felt for a moment as if she were remembering a coffin being put in the ground. Her mother’s coffin. The one she’d never seen. The one she’d never been allowed to see.

“I didn’t tell her,” she whispered. “She doesn’t know where it is. We put in stuff and then we put in a secret envelope each . . . He’s going to kill her because I didn’t tell her where I hid it!”

“Not a bit of this is your fault,” rumbled the Gunner. “Not a crumb.”

The Walker suddenly switched positions and sat on the chair next to her mother. He patted her hand companionably. She pulled it away as if she’d been stung. His smile didn’t falter, but he slowly pulled the dagger from the sheath at his side and laid it across his knees.

“I’ll make you a deal. You tell me where the girl hid it, and I’ll let you live.”

“Or?” whispered her mother, eyes fixed on the dagger.

“Or I ask her myself,” he hissed, looking at the sunset reflecting off the flat planes of the blade.

Edie’s mother licked her lips. There was a squeal as the door the workman had disappeared through opened. Her eyes twitched sideways toward it and back to the Walker.

“So. That’s the deal. You let me live if I give you my daughter’s stone?”

“I am not an unreasonable man.”

Without warning, Edie’s mother jerked out of her chair and ran. She ran, but not in panic. The moment she exploded from the chair, it was clear to Edie what she was doing. She’d seen the TV go back on. She knew the electrician would be coming back off the roof. And she timed her run perfectly. She was also clearheaded enough to keep hold of the chair arm as she burst out of it, dragging it in front of the Walker, buying her a fraction of a second’s advantage as he became entangled in it.