Ironhand (10 page)

They looked like a nasty, hard-nosed bunch of medieval muggers.

“Anyone going to lend me a shield or something?” George asked.

In another flash he saw no one moving. It just made him angrier.

“Good. Nice chivalry. To hell with you all anyway.”

He felt the scar on his hand twinge badly, and he knew without looking that what Ariel had described had started. The metal flaw had jagged up his arm and was heading for his heart. He looked at this hand and held the maker’s mark out for the Guild to see. Then he showed it to the Knight.

“I don’t know what this means, but I am a maker. You might not want me to get my hands on you.”

He was of course bluffing, but bluff was all he had going for him.

The Knight stopped and cocked his helmet. “Show me the hand.”

George’s spirits rose. Maybe the bluff was going to work; though he had no idea why it would. He held his hand up. “A dragon did this . . .” he began, hoping the extra detail might impress someone.

“You carry the mark,” boomed the Knight.

“Yes I do,” said George quickly. “I do carry it.”

“The mark of the Ironhand,” continued the Knight.

The bell tolled in the next flash of light, and in it George saw the Cnihtengild craning forward in their saddles for a closer look. He felt he was getting somewhere.

“Yes,” he said, trying to sound as if he had a clue what he was saying. “Yes. That’s right. Um . . . I am the Ironhand.”

Here was a pause. Nothing moved but the rain.

“No,” said the Knight. “
An
Ironhand. There have been many. You have the mark that says you may be one. Only time, your ordeals, and how you face them will tell.”

“But an Ironhand’s a good thing, right?” said George, trying to catch up.

“It is.”

“So . . .” George said hesitantly, realizing he should negotiate the next bit very carefully, because he might be at a very important junction where the right reply would send him down a road where he wouldn’t need to fight the big statue with the even bigger pointy lance; whereas the other road would end with his being neatly—or probably not so neatly—kebabed.

“So,” he continued, “so you’re good. And I’m good. So me being an Ironhand, sorry—a maybe Ironhand— means what? That we don’t have to fight, yes? I mean, it makes a difference, right?”

He injected an eager note into the last question, as if he were stating the obvious.

And then his heart suddenly bucked and soared as he saw the Knight slowly nod his great helmet. He made a doubly imposing figure sitting on a horse at the center of a moon-burst of blue lights radiating out from the horse’s chain-mailed caparison. George forgot to breathe, waiting for the Knight to add words to his silent affirmation.

“Yes. It makes a difference.”

“Great!” George exploded in noisy relief. “That’s great. Just great. Brilliant—”

The Knight lowered his lance and aimed it right at George’s chest. “It means you are a worthy adversary. Now.”

George froze in horror. That “now” definitively pricked the bubble of his newly inflated hope.

“Now?”

“Now—à outrance!—Have at you!”

The Knight jagged his spurs into the horse’s side, and the horse bunched its muscles and leaped forward. There was another shout and clash of arms, and a flame freeze-framed the Cnihtengild hemming George in, and all he could see was nowhere to run and the sharpened lance point barreling in toward him like an express train through the rain.

T
he Walker paced back and forth on the corner of Bury Street and St. James’s Court. His hands were clasped behind his back, and as he walked, his head was cricked to one side, watching himself.

He was looking at his reflection in the highly polished black granite stone adorning the corner of the building.

The edge of the building had been sculpted so that a stylized steamship appeared to be plowing its way out of the corner and into the street. The Walker let his hand trail over the frozen bow wave the boat was making—a V of tight stone curls peeling off the facade like black wood shavings.

The Raven sat patiently, watching him from its perch on the bowsprit of the boat, the only thing blacker than the granite around it, apart from its eyes. The eyes flickered, and then the Raven hopped on to the Walker’s shoulders.

“The eyes of Tallyman have seen something?” hissed the Walker.

The bird clacked its beak in the Walker’s ear.

The Walker listened and then nodded. “Puddle Dock, they say?”

He turned on his heel and walked back in the other direction.

“A glint walking down Puddle Dock, seeking succor or knowledge would likely be on her way to see a friar. A Black Friar.”

The Walker ran his hands over the black mirrored surface, as if testing it. Then he turned away with a snap.

“Black is a lucky color. Tell the Tallyman where she is bound. Now that she is found, it would pain me to have her lost again.”

E
die thought for a moment about the fact that she might just have betrayed George. It was a short thought, but a sharp one.

Then the Friar was talking and she was listening, and what he told her quickly pushed the uncomfortable thought to the back of her mind, into a place from which she could unpack it later.

“The mirrors are gateways. Not all mirrors, just mirrors that are set up parallel with each other. They work in two ways: firstly, by stepping into a mirror, a being may move himself from where he is to another place within the city, so long as there are parallel mirrors set up in them.”

“That’s wild,” said Edie, despite herself.

“Oh, it’s much more than wild, I assure you. It’s much more than a mere ‘transporter.’ It’s very powerful, and it’s very, very dangerous. . . .”

“Why?”

The Friar stood up, the swiftness of his movements making Edie flinch. But he was only gesturing for her to take a position in the archway.

“Stand there. Between the mirrors. Do not touch them, because now that you know what they can do, they may be open to you. But look.”

She saw the images of herself and the dimly lit bar multiplying away into the distance.

“You think you are seeing reflections of yourself, again and again. But you are not. You are seeing moments in time. Even a single reflection in a mirror is never yourself in the present, because it takes a thin slice of a microsecond for the light carrying the image to bounce off the mirror and back to your eye. A face in the mirror is always a face in the past, by that tiny fraction. And because of that, we never see ourselves as we are, only as we were—”

He smiled at her.

“Look at the images of your face, repeating off to infinity. Each separate image looks the same, but that’s only because the images you can see clearly are the ones where the differences are so minimal as to be beyond detection. Travel farther through the layers and you travel deeper into the past.”

Edie looked into the mirrors, trying to see where the differences began. She couldn’t. But she felt uncomfortable, as if the mirrors were gazing back at her, somehow.

“How does it work?” she said, looking away.

“The ‘how’ of it doesn’t matter. It’s just something that
is
, the same way the sky or a sparrow just is. It’s like that, and it’s always been like that. London is a place of power, and it was a place of power before people built the first shelter here. It was a place of power before people built stockades or roundhouses or temples or huts on it; why, it was a place of power before the thought of temples had even occurred to man. It was a place of power when the wide arch of the sky was temple enough for all. Look along the river; look at the Tower of London. Ancient? It’s a Johnny-come-lately. It was a Christian church, and before that a Roman temple, and before that a shrine to a Celtic crow god, and before that a god with horns on his head, and before that only the Raven himself remembers. All pasts are all still there, layered under the skin.”

His eyes were shining. He ducked through the arch next to her.

She turned, uncomfortable in the thought that he might be trying to get behind her in the dark. “So the mirrors not only transport you through space. They can also move you through time, into past Londons.”

“You’re quick, little girl.”

“I’m not a little girl. I’m a glint. I know all about the past.”

“And of course it holds no terrors for you.”

Edie rolled her eyes and blew her cheeks out at him in impatience. “It holds plenty of terrors for me. Don’t be stupid. The past’s not a nice place, is it? I’m just saying I understand about being able to go to the past because it’s sort of what I do. I can get my head ’round that.”

The Friar’s face broke into an anticipatory grin, eyes flashing theatrically at Edie. “You don’t seem impressed, child.”

She shrugged. “Not really. I got enough trouble coping with this particular present. I don’t need more.”

“You don’t
need
more?”

The more outrage he showed at her lack of response, the less she wanted to appear impressed by the vista of possibilities he was opening up.

“Nah. Sorry. I just can’t really do the past layers of London thing. I mean, I hear what you’re saying, but it’s all a bit . . . crap.”

She hadn’t meant to say crap. She’d meant to say weird. Or maybe scary. But her mouth had taken control before her brain could hit the anchors, and she’d said it. The Friar looked shocked.

“A bit . . .
crap
?”

“Yes,” she replied. She supposed she meant it, having said it, and all.

“You think different realities, layered pasts are a bit . . .
crap
?”

“Yeah.” She just wasn’t going to be bullied. “Yeah. No offense, but it’s the sort of thing saddoes talk about when they’ve bonged a bit much or got all boozed up and out of it, you know what I mean? All that magic mushroom mumbo jumbo they think makes sense of what’s going on in their messed-up heads, stuff like all the molecules in their fingernails being galaxies with little worlds spinning ’round them and all . . .”

As someone who had spent most of her life trying
not
to see strange and frightening things every time she accidentally touched something, Edie had strong views on people who voluntarily monkeyed with their heads in order to
think
they saw strange things. As someone who’d slept rough in the city and been in and out of more hostels than a young girl should have, she also had come across people who went to extreme lengths to get out of their heads, usually for the entirely understandable reason that they couldn’t get off the streets and out of the cold.

The Friar rose to a height that seemed at least half a foot higher than normal. “Saddoes? You think this is something for
saddoes
?”

He spat the word, hissing the S’s on each end in disgust.

Once again, she decided not to show she was intimidated by him. “Well. It all sounds a bit . . . crap, doesn’t it?”

“What it sounds like to your young ears is something I have no control over, glint. What it is—” And here he raised his hands over his head and did something to the checkered circular mosaic in the ceiling. It looked as though he had moved two of the rings in different directions. “—What it is, I can show you.”

There was a crump and crunch, and somehow, the world jerked a bit and felt suddenly a lot darker and more serious. And the Friar looked less like a monk and more like a demon, as shadows danced across his face, lit from below. The main reason he looked like a demon was because the light that was casting these sinister shadows across his face was red and dancing like flames, and there had—a moment ago—been no flames in the room. Edie turned to see where the fire was coming from and only got halfway to looking behind her, because she felt a great heat blast sear the side of her face. Her eyes stopped as they swung past the mirror to her right, the mirror that had contained the endlessly repeating reflections of herself, and now contained a blast furnace vision of hell and falling walls and screaming people.

The shock of it made her leap back—and for an instant she felt the cool glass of the other mirror behind her. And she heard the Friar yell, “NO! STAY AWAY FROM THE MIRROR!”

The cool hard glass at her back gave way as gently as a soap bubble popping. The world lurched as Edie started to fall through into a howling firestorm, and a blast lashed her face. Something grabbed her foot, and that’s when things really started to go wrong.

T
he Last Knight barreled through the rain, his lance aimed unwaveringly at George’s heart. George backed up until he felt a wall behind him, and then he ducked and rolled sideways.

He knew the invisible knights had him hemmed in; he had the throbbing nose to prove how hard it would be to try to barge through their cordon. It was a thick impenetrable wall of horse’s bodies and shields and men with weapons. But he also noticed when the knights became visible at the next flash and toll of the bell that lower down, under the horse’s bellies, there was plenty of space to escape at ground level.

So that’s what he aimed for as he ducked and rolled for safety, hoping he wouldn’t find a hoof in the way. As it happened, a hoof found him and gave him a glancing blow on his shoulder, but apart from that, his plan worked pretty well. As he rolled, the bell tolled in another flash, and he saw the belly of the horse above him. He hauled up onto his feet and sprinted across the courtyard to the relative shelter of the low brick colonnade.

He heard a roar of disapproval from the Cnihtengild, heard someone clearly shout “CRAVEN!” and turned in time to see the Knight hurriedly raise his lance to the sky and try to apply the brakes by leaning back and hauling on the reins. The charger’s head came back, and its hooves locked into a slide. He could see why the Knight had raised the lance; because if he hadn’t, he would have definitely speared himself a nice big office building.

George ducked sideways and flattened himself against the inside of a pillar and held his breath. In front of him was the plate-glass wall of a coffee shop. The shop was closed, but a girl was stacking chairs and wiping tabletops. She looked up, and George was sure she saw him, so sure that he was about to shout for help, when he heard a horse’s hoof slowly clopping closer. He saw in the reflection in the plate-glass window the lights on the war horse’s surcoat as it stepped slowly into the arch behind him.

He saw the Knight try to bend his head low enough to get into the colonnade, but there wasn’t enough headroom. He looked down and saw the lance jabbing in beside him, tapping his leg.

And that’s when he remembered that if he could see the Knight in the reflection of the coffee shop window, then the Knight could see him right back.

“You must fight,” said the Knight. “You must come out and fight, or you must forfeit as a craven varlet.” His voice echoed ominously in the low-roofed space.

“I am fighting,” said George. “I just don’t have a weapon!”

A twinge of pain in the scar made him look down at his hand. He remembered how it had cut through the tentacled arm of the earth creature that had grabbed him in the underpass the day before. He remembered how the Temple Bar dragon had looked at his hand in a kind of wonder. He remembered making the bullet that had killed the Minotaur. He remembered the Gunner’s look of awe as he had told him he was a maker.

And then he looked down at the lance that was tapping him on the leg. Somehow the tapping was too ignominious to bear. The Knight was cajoling him to fight as if he were a toddler having to be coaxed out of a hiding place in a playhouse.

He thought of the power in his hands. He thought of how he had just been called Ironhand.

And then he moved. His hand flashed down and grabbed the lance, about one foot six inches from the tip. He knew what he would do, and he tried to focus his mind in order to do it. He was going to snap the lance and then he would have a pointed weapon of his own, and the lance would be blunted. This would be a good thing on many levels, not the least because he was pretty sure the sculptor who had made the Knight had decided not to equip him with a sword.

It was an act of desperation, but somehow George knew from the pulsing pain in his scar that it would work.

His hand closed around the shaft of the lance and he tried to put every ounce of strength and will into it. At the very least he would bend the thing and render it useless.

It was a good plan, and he
did
put everything into it. He put so much willpower into squeezing and tugging at the lance that when it neither snapped nor bent, he remained clenched on to it for too long, and when the Knight kicked his horse so that it sprang backward, George was dragged out into the open, like a terrier refusing to loosen its grip on a particularly enjoyable stick.

As he was dragged out, he suddenly had a horrible vision of what his hand would look like if he slid down the lance and the blade sliced it open.

Without thinking, he flinched.

He flinched because he let the fear in.

And as he flinched, the Knight flicked his arm and the lance sideways and sent him skimming across the rain-slick courtyard floor as effortlessly as a man twitching a fishing rod.

George spun to his feet and looked for the next place to run.

The bell tolled, and he saw the Guild advancing behind him in a solid and ominous wall of armor and general-purpose grimness.

“You must stand. You cannot run. You must fight. Refuse to fight and you forfeit,” bellowed the Knight.

“I am fighting,” shouted George. “You’ve got a bloody horse and a weapon. All I’ve
got
is running!”

However, he was in a dead end. So he stood his ground, because when there’s nowhere to run, and all the talking hasn’t worked, that’s almost all you can do.

And when the Knight pricked his horse forward and lowered his lance, George did the one other thing he hoped the Knight wasn’t expecting: he ran toward him.

He didn’t plan it, but it came to him as he was already kicking into a sprint. His dad in the park, a rugby ball, cold winter afternoons. And the words: “The trick is to zig when they expect you to zag.”

The stutter step. The key to wrong-footing the tackler on the other team. His dad had spent hours trying to help him get the hang of it. Do it right, and a hefty opponent closing in on you at speed wouldn’t have enough room or mobility to change his direction in time to catch you. It was the perfect tactic.

The only problem, he remembered five steps into the run, was that he’d never really been that good at rugby and was particularly crap at selling the stutter step. Often he just tripped up and tackled himself.

He erased the thought and focused on the tiny circle at the end of the lance as it sped toward him. When it was two paces away, he jinked left but went right, and the lance tip tried to follow him, and whiffled past his ear as he ducked and dug in, his left shoulder grazing along the side of the horse’s chain mail as they passed.

He reached the safety of another colonnade and looked back to see the big horse outlined by the office building beyond, trying to one-eighty at speed; sparks flew from its hooves as its skid sent up a huge backlit wall of spray.

George didn’t wait to see them get their balance again. The bell tolled, and he saw in the accompanying flash that the Guild were arranging themselves in another long line, cutting off his most obvious route of escape. But he also saw, at the end of their gauntlet, not a blank wall but the sentry-box-style gatehouses he’d flown in over with the golden girl. And beyond the gatehouses, the traffic and lights of the city beckoned.

He didn’t think twice, just clenched his fists, ducked his head, and ran his heart out, tearing past the sporadically visible walls of knights. He had to get there before one of them positioned himself at the end of the line and cut off what he was pretty sure was his last chance of escape.

He ran so fast that his heart bounced alarmingly hard against the inside of his rib cage; but he saw that he’d made it.

None of the Guild was going to be able to block his exit. He didn’t let up on his speed. He wasn’t going to slow down until he’d put a lot of ground between the Knight and him. Or until he threw up or had a heart attack or something. He felt the jag of elation as he closed in on the open gate. Two paces out, he allowed himself to look back.

This meant he was facing the wrong way when the gate slammed shut.

He hit it in a pile-driving shoulder charge. He hit it so fast and so unexpectedly that the impact was somehow dulled with shock. He saw stars, bright tiny stars that whirled around in front of his eyes. It didn’t really hurt so much as take all the breath and hope out of him in one bone-crunching impact. Except no bones crunched. The only thing that broke was his spirit.

He opened his mouth to say, “What?” but didn’t have the breath to voice the word. He turned and saw a flash of gold beyond the tightly arranged black bars of the gate.

He couldn’t believe it.

“Ariel?”

Her slender arm serpentined through the bars, and her hand found his upper arm. She squeezed it gently.

“You cannot run. You cannot refuse the duel.”

He shook his head in disbelief, trying to shake some of the stars out of it.

“You closed the gate?
You
?”

She squeezed his arm again. Given the fact that he saw in the next flash of flame that the Knight was now aimed at him from the other end of the two long ranks of the Guild, it didn’t give him the comfort he imagined she’d intended it to impart.

“Open the gate!”

She shook her beautiful golden head sadly. He was sure he heard real regret in the catch of her voice. Which made what happened next almost worse.

“I cannot, boy.”

The Knight lowered his lance for the third time and kicked the horse forward. Its hooves danced through the puddles, sending up great sheets of spray as it bore down on George.

“Okay fine,” he said desperately. “Let go of my arm and I’ll climb over.”

“I cannot do that, either.” Her hand clenched around his upper arm like a manacle and pinned him to the gate.

“But why?” he shouted, heart freezing at the sight of the inbound knight.

“Because I am a minister of fate.” The new note in her voice was as hard as a diamond and cold as ice. “And no one, absolutely no one, cheats fate, boy.”

She spat that last “boy” as if she were getting something really disgusting out of her mouth. And no matter how hard he struggled, he couldn’t break her iron-hard grip as it pinned him to the metal gate like an unmissable target.

Clang!
The bell tolled its final note, and in the flash, George saw the Guild rise in their stirrups and shake their weapons at the sky, in celebration of his death, and the fatal lance tip sped in toward his heart—three meters, two meters, one meter—Game Over.

He reflexively jerked his head away. He actually sensed the wings of Death flying in to gather him as he closed his eyes and felt a tremendous impact. Something felt horribly wrong, and he heard his scream of pain as if it were already coming from outside him. He felt himself leave the earth in one brutal savage jerk, and his head seemed to explode. Then his spirit soared into the sky, and he opened his eyes, knowing he would see himself being drawn into the light. . . .

Instead he saw Spout looking down at him with his implacable stone eyes as he flapped into the night sky.

“Gack?”
the gargoyle inquired drily and tightened its grip on George’s chest. It swayed into another lopsided wing beat, circling north.

George looked down, still half expecting this to be an out-of-body experience, still imagining he was going to look down on his impaled body.

What he saw instead was the Knight and the horse and the lance thrust through the gate, up to the hilt. He also saw that the figure writhing on the end of the weapon was the source of the screaming—not him. Her golden shape was the last thing George saw before his eyes fluttered shut and unconsciousness swept in and anaesthetized him.