Ironhand (13 page)

Spout’s head came up fast, his eyes wide, his ears back, all the hackled spines on his neck raised.

Something was coming.

A
fter dark, the narrow streets in the City of London quiet down. City workers have all gone home, and the twisting canyons hemmed in by high-rises are not on the way to anywhere. Traffic passing through the city blasts past on wider thoroughfares, and the narrow streets that are so busy by day become a ghost town.

The Red Queen drove her horses slowly along the road, the ancient design of the war chariot beneath her feet strikingly at odds with the shiny modern buildings towering over her on either side.

Her daughters flanked her, scouring each side street and alley as they passed, looking for Edie—or anything that might give a clue as to where she was.

Both daughters had the intense look of their mother. They were fierce, mostly silent, girls. But when they needed to move, they did so firmly and decisively. They had her fearlessness running in their veins, but whereas their mother allowed her fire to blaze freely, the girls chose to keep that fire banked up quietly.

The one on the left heard it before the others.

She touched her mother’s arm, and the Queen instantly reined in the horses.

Then they all heard it.

The sound of hooves, coming closer.

The Queen gripped her spear. The source of the noise came slowly around a corner. The three women stood stock still.

It was the Last Knight. He rode at a slow, funereal pace, his lance lowered in mourning, his head bent forward in sadness. Across the saddle in front of him was draped the limp golden body of Ariel.

The Queen and her daughters watched the Knight move toward them, as still as if frozen in a pocket in time. When it became apparent that he was going to pass without acknowledging them, the Queen spoke tightly.

“Sir Knight. A word, if you please.”

He just carried on past.

The Queen nodded at her daughters. Without the need for words, they leaped nimbly from the chariot and ran toward the Knight, soundless on their bare feet. The Queen threw her spear to one of them, who caught it almost without looking and ran ahead of the Knight. As the Queen snapped the reins on her chariot and turned, the daughter with the spear stood foursquare in front of the warhorse and armored man towering above her, and jabbed the spear warningly at his throat. He stopped the horse. The other daughter grabbed the bridle reins and held them as the Queen trotted up.

She looked at the golden girl lying across the horse’s neck. Then up at the Knight.

“What is this?”

There was a pause as the Knight slowly looked around at her.

“An accident.”

“And what are you doing with her?”

He nodded ahead. “I had thought to scale the building and put her on her plinth before turn o’day. I would not have her die on my account.”

The Queen looked at her girls. “Was it on your account that the accident happened?”

“It was,” replied the Knight.

The Queen nodded at her daughters. The one holding the reins pulled Ariel off the horse and onto her shoulders.

“It is my obligation . . .” began the Knight in protest.

“You have done enough,” said the Queen, seeing the large hole in Ariel’s side. “If you had done but a fraction more, I could have ridden my chariot through the wound you have put in this poor girl.”

“It was not meant,” he protested.

“It never is,” she snorted.

“Go back to your guild, Knight. And play your sword games with each other. That is all you are good for. We will take care of her from here and make sure she is on her plinth by turn o’day.”

The Knight looked at her, then bowed his head and backed his horse into a turn and rode slowly away.

The Queen watched him as her daughter carefully laid Ariel on the back of their chariot.

“See, girls. It’s as I always tell you. It never does to send a man to do a woman’s job.”

H
igh on the roof of St. Pancras, George could hear them coming. He looked over the edge of his precarious perch and saw that a great many stone things were crawling over the green tiles and chimneys below.

In the middle of everything, George had forgotten what the Gunner had told him about gargoyles: that they might be taints and bent on his destruction, but they always had to answer their first purpose, which was to be highly decorative waterspouts.

This meant that when it rained, they had to go back to their places on whatever roof they came from and funnel water. It raised the question of why Spout alone had suddenly been able to fly freely through the rainstorm. George had a strong feeling that it had something to do with the fact he’d somehow changed the gargoyle by giving him a name and modifying him by ripping out the metal spout that had been gagging him when they’d had their first confrontation. It was, however, not a question that George was going to have time to concern himself with right now.

The question crawling, slithering, and hopping toward him at that moment was what he was going to do now that the rain had stopped and most of the gargoyles in the rookery of St. Pancras had come alive and were converging on Spout’s aerie from all sides. That was the sound he’d heard—stone limbs and talons scraping relentlessly toward him over wet roof tiles and dripping smokestacks.

They moved slowly, but there was something much worse about that than if they had come in a rush. If they’d come in a rush, he wouldn’t have had time to see them in all their brutal detail. They came in different shapes and sizes, but all had jaws stretched wide in gaping snarls panting through their mouths as if they somehow smelled with the backs of their throats. Some were worn and weather-beaten to a point where their features had begun to erode into almost abstract masks of hostility and threat. Some clearly had been carved more crudely than others, and several of them obviously had been recently restored, because they looked newer and their lines were more finely incised.

The larger ones dragged their wings after them like great capes, while the smaller ones hopped from perch to perch, leapfrogging one another from gable end to dormer window to chimney stack as they came.

George wondered if this was what Spout had intended, if this was his end, to be torn apart by this pack of blank-eyed taints high above the uncaring city.

Spout turned to him and held out a talon.
“Gung,”
he said urgently.

He was shaking like a dog when its blood is up and it smells trouble. George didn’t understand why the arrival of his friends was upsetting the creature so much.

“Gung ear!”
hissed Spout, motioning with his talon while keeping an eye on the approaching gargoyles. George had just enough time to wonder if he was trying to say “Come here” with a catlike mouth that wasn’t designed for normal conversation; then something tumbled out of the sky above them and buried its teeth into Spout’s shoulder. The momentum knocked him off his perch. George’s eye met his for one appalled moment, and then Spout and the smaller gargoyle, who had dived on him from the spire above, fell over the edge and out of sight.

George scrambled to the lip and looked over, just in time to see Spout and his attacker crash down onto the flat roof below, landing on another gargoyle, who instantly joined the fight. The other gargoyles on the roof stepped back, and for a few moments, the three creatures ripped and tore at one another in a snarling hissing ball that rolled back and forth across the narrow space. At one point it looked as if they were about to plunge into the forecourt below, but Spout hooked a great talon on a protruding gutter and heaved himself and the two monsters back into the middle of the roof.

He slammed himself back into a chimney stack, stunning the small gargoyle on his shoulders. It fell to the ground, and Spout savagely back-heeled it over the edge. The other gargoyle, locked on to his front, tried to get its fangs into Spout’s throat, but Spout struck faster and closed his fangs on the gargoyle’s head.

The surrounding creatures hissed in fury as Spout shook the smaller gargoyle back and forth in his jaws. The circle of gargoyles closed in on Spout, and he spat the lifeless creature onto the tiles and grabbed the first new attacker that rushed in on him, stepping nimbly aside, using its momentum to throw it straight past into the solid brick chimney behind him. Then he grabbed the stunned assailant by a wingtip and whirled him around like a club, cutting a swath in the surrounding horde as they backed off to avoid being hit by the flailing gargoyle. George realized Spout was fighting his way back to the foot of his tower.

The wing of the creature Spout was swinging snapped off with a crack like a rifle shot, and the body spun away into the night.

The other gargoyles froze. Spout looked at the wing fragment in his hand and sort of shrugged. He hefted the improvised club in his hands as if to say, “Who’s next?”

Three gargoyles, two his size and one bigger, rushed him from different points of the compass. He kicked the first one out of his way, but the other two tackled him, and their impact knocked the wing fragment from his grasp and took them all out into the darker air over the engine shed, and they were gone.

Half of the gargoyles below rushed to the edge, but the other half turned to look at something more interesting.

George.

He was staring down at them, wondering what to do, when a gargoyle blindsided him by crawling around the roof and grabbing him.

He found himself airborne again, but only for a short flight, as the gargoyle was one of the medium-size ones with quite stubby, not particularly aerodynamic, wings. It clearly didn’t have the lift necessary to keep itself and its human prey in the air at the same time.

They crash-landed on the narrow ridge below. It happened slowly enough not to hurt too much, and awkwardly enough for George to end up lying on the creature’s arm.

He had nearly dashed his brains out on the broken wing fragment that Spout had used as a club, but he jerked his head out of the way just in time.

The gargoyle tugged its arm, trying to get out from under George. Before George thought too much about what he was going to do, he grabbed the broken wing and scythed it into the gargoyle’s face in a crunching haymaker. He could tell it was crunching because crunch is what he heard. The gargoyle looked at him, groggy and puzzled, then shook its head and snarled.

George just hit it again, a carbon-copy blow, and then once more, even harder. The gargoyle’s head was smashed sideways in a ninety-degree arc with the first blow, but it came back around, snarling in fury—just in time for the second blow to send it one hundred eighty degrees the wrong way on its neck. The crunch this time was followed by a
thunk
as the head dropped off, onto the ground.

It wasn’t just George who was shocked at the result of his despairing blow. The gargoyles on the roof were suddenly very still. He took advantage of this to roll to his feet and get the solid brick of a smokestack at his back. He figured he’d do better if they could only come from in front. He’d seen how far trying to fight a three hundred sixty–degree battle had got Spout.

The gargoyles began to hiss, starting quietly and becoming louder.

“Right,” he lied. “I can do this all night. Who’s next?”

His bravado didn’t slow them one bit as they began to close in.

George didn’t have a plan. He was outnumbered and out of options. The only chink of hope he might have, he realized, was the ray of light beaming straight up from the roof, about fifty feet away. It was a skylight, and though jumping through a window is not usually the most sensible thing to do, in this situation he thought it might be the safest option. Out here he was surrounded. If he could get inside the building, there would be corridors and rooms and places to hide. If he could sprint through the advancing tide of stone killers and hit the glass with both feet, and then roll like a parachutist when he landed, he might have a chance. Of course, the chance depended on A) not getting too sliced up by the falling glass, and B) the skylight dropping him into a room on the floor below and not somewhere else, such as, for example, an unending well that ran down the whole height of the building.

“I can do this,” he said, trying to ignore the voice in the back of his head that told him he was still lying.

If he was going to do it, if he was to have any chance of getting off this roof, he would have to do it now, before the gargoyle horde closed any further in and became too dense for him to run through. So he gripped the fragment of wing and ran.

As he exploded into motion, the thought flashed that this was the second time he’d tried to get out of a tight spot by running forward instead of running away. The thought gave him strength as he remembered how well it had worked on the Knight.

The first gargoyle he came to reared up and snatched at him, but he ducked under its wings and powered forward. Coming out from under the wing, he found another gargoyle in front of him, and before it could move, he jumped at it. His front foot hit it in the chest and it went over backward. George went with it, using the gargoyle like a springboard as he jumped over it and raced for the skylight on the roof ahead. A small monster leaped at his face, but he managed to club it back with the fragment of stone.

And then there was nothing between him and the rectangular skylight, except four paces of clear roof. A big gargoyle had launched into the air on the other side of the glass, but it wasn’t going to intercept George in time to stop his desperate para-jump through the glass.

George hit the edge of the skylight and leaped high. He registered, almost without time for relief, that on the other side of the glass was a drop the height of one room, onto a pile of old boxes.

He brought his feet together in midair and slammed his heels down on the glass in one mighty smash.

One thing about London is that the people in charge of how things are built have very strict ideas and rules about the materials that have to be used. One of the rules about skylights is that they have to be made from safety glass. And if the skylight is to be in a roof just below a tall tower that has stone decorations that may shatter in frost, or fall off in high winds, then that safety glass has to be as safe as safety glass can get. It has to be tough— the kind of tough that doesn’t just go to pieces at the first sign of danger.

George’s heels smashed down on the glass and didn’t break anything except his fall.

The water on the rain-slick surface did, however, combine with his considerable forward momentum and turned the rectangle from a skylight into a skating rink.

George’s feet flew out from under him, and he hit the slippery glass with his tailbone, only managing to get his chin down just in time to stop from dashing his brains as he fell backward. But that was where his good luck ended and the very bad luck began.

True, he did slide beneath the airborne gargoyle that had been leaping at him from the other side of the skylight, but only because he was now tobogganing at high speed toward the edge of a very steep roof and a long drop onto the engine shed roof below. He scrabbled and shimmied, desperately trying to get some friction going, some kind of stick that would slow him down or help him stop.

Hope flickered alive as a new gargoyle appeared over the fast-approaching roof edge. He stuck his feet out to brake himself against the roof, but the gargoyle was heartbreakingly quick-witted for a lump of stone. As he was about to impact, it simply flattened its ears and ducked.

And so George flew onward, over its head, off the roof, and into the void.