Ironhand (23 page)

A
s the Gunner crawled his way against the flow, he felt life returning to his body in more ways than just the renewed strength. His hands felt like his hands again, not clumsy obstacles at the end of his arms. He could think straighter, too, as if layers of thick cloth had been lifted from his brain.

He wondered if this miraculous increase in wellbeing extended to a lifting of the Walker’s power over his ability to dig his way to the upper air. He flexed his muscles and reached for the roof of the pipe. Somehow the instructions were blocked between his head and his arms, which just stayed where they were and didn’t attack the roof as he had told them to do.

He ignored his disappointment and pushed on.

The dark water-filled pipe seemed to go on forever, and the absence of any visual clues made it even harder to bear. At times he hallucinated that he had become weightless and was crawling on the ceiling of the pipe; other times it seemed that the pipe was moving past him and he was keeping still.

He realized he could fight these disorienting feelings if he concentrated on what his hands were touching on the wall of the tunnel as he went forward, because the texture beneath his fingertips was the one thing that did change. Some of the time it was bricks, some of the time it was long curves of stone or concrete piping. At one stage it appeared to be just clay, and he felt his fingertips leaving a groove as he squirmed forward. He imagined the cloudy trail his hand must be leaving in the clear water, invisible in the darkness.

He had been feeling a brick side to the tunnel for quite a long time, and had just wondered if he could work out how far he was going by counting them as his fingers moved from gap to gap. Then he felt a new texture. It was unbroken by any mortar cracks, so his first thought was that it was more concrete piping; but he quickly realized that it was different. It was metal.

He rapped his knuckles against it, and the answering vibration confirmed his first impression. He moved on for a few paces, and then the implication of that answering vibration hit him: a metal pipe, bedded in the clay of London, would be deadened and sound damped by the surrounding earth. There would be no answering vibration.

The implication was that he was in a metal pipe, and that there was air, not clay on the other side of it. His first instinct was to hit the roof of the pipe, but his hands wouldn’t obey his commands. He kicked the floor of the pipe in frustration.

His boots set off a bigger vibration. He did it again, harder. And then he smiled.

“Didn’t say anything about digging
down
, did he?”

He turned on his back and hacked the metal-shod heels of his ammo boots onto the floor of the pipe. He sledgehammered them down again and again, and every time, he felt the answering vibration in the wall through his braced fingertips. Every kick of his boots got the same result, and then suddenly the vibration wasn’t there, but a sharp single shock shuddered through the pipe. He had no idea what it meant, but he stomped down one last time with all the power in his body. Instead of the jarring impact of his boots, there was a slight resistance, and then his feet continued downward, through the bottom of the pipe, and he was suddenly falling—

The Tyburn is one of London’s lost, hidden rivers. But it does show itself in one place, and that’s where the Gunner was: it crosses over the Regent’s Canal in an aqueduct disguised as a footbridge, close to the London Zoo, and it was out of the bottom of that aqueduct that the Gunner tumbled, in his own personal waterfall.

He had a moment of elation as he felt the air, and then a jolt of surprise as he depth-charged into the water of the canal. The surprise was, under these circumstances, understandable. Not many people fall out of a river, and even fewer fall out of one river into another.

He pushed off the muddy bottom of the canal and breathed in the night air. He looked back at the bridge out of which he had just fallen, and the liberated Tyburn pouring out of it into the water below. He realized what must have happened, and grinned. Then he lofted the bundle of heart stones onto a footpath and pulled himself out after it. He paused only to put his helmet on, and then he picked up the bundle, vaulted a fence into Regent’s Park, and started running southeast.

He knew it was after turn o’day and that he should be dead. If he wasn’t, it meant someone had stood his watch, and he wasn’t going to waste a minute getting back to Hyde Park Corner to see who it was.

He smiled as he ran.

Because of course his gut told him exactly who it must have been; and where George was would also be his best chance of finding Edie before the Walker got to her.

The glasses chinking in the bundle as he ran were all the evidence he needed to know that once a glint was in the Walker’s grasp, there was no escape.

T
he Icarus stood in the middle of the dusty library, his cropped wings brushing the roof as he loomed over Edie, panting short angry screams.

Edie turned her face away.

“If you find him worrying, you shouldn’t have broken the window,” said the Walker. “He would never have been able to get in here without an opening that size.”

Edie looked at the Walker’s face. There was no blood where she had slashed him, but an impossibly healed white scar cut across his face, just below one eye, taking a nick out of the bridge of his nose and ending in the other eye. That eye was now dead, clouded a pinky white, with no iris or pupil to be seen.

“And if you didn’t want him angry with you, you should never have killed his brother.”

“I didn’t kill his brother,” said Edie quietly.

“The Minotaur was his brother. Not an actual brother, but a brother in that they were the creations of the same maker, the same sculptor. They had much in common as a result.”

Edie didn’t need to look to confirm the truth of that. The Icarus had the same powerful legs and body, the same sense of dark energy bunched up and ready to erupt.

The Walker stood up and looked down at her. One of her arms was again tied to the chair.

Far off in another part of the house, Edie could hear the despairing sobs of the Blind Woman. The Walker noticed her listening. He smiled and snapped his fingers. The Raven flew in the window and settled on his shoulder.

“You’re wondering why she is crying so heartbreakingly.”

Edie didn’t say anything. The Walker’s hand traced the scar across his face.

“You’re wondering what I am going to do to you. For what you have done to me.”

He was right, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of letting him know. She was unnerved by how calm he had been ever since finding her at the churchyard. He had almost been polite as the Icarus had trapped her and they had led her away.

He smiled without a shred of humor, and started writing on a sheet of paper. His voice was quiet, conversational, almost warm.

“I am doomed to walk the city until the Stone releases me. And so I cannot die. I heal, as you can see, prodigiously well. But in four hundred years, no one has done what you have done. . . .”

And here he looked up from the writing and pointed to the blind, pinky-white eyeball next to it.

“Now, because of you, I must walk the world one-eyed. Be sure that that is a wound and an affront that requires a magnificently well-thought-out punishment. I shall not deny myself the pleasure of planning the gradual stages of your end by rashly killing you now in anger. For despite what foolish men say, revenge is not a dish best served cold: to my taste, it is a dish best served after exquisitely detailed preparation and execution, and enjoyed at blood temperature.”

He finished off his note. Edie found that the more he tried to frighten her, the angrier she got. And the angrier she got, the stronger she felt. Unfortunately, it was also true that the more he tried to frighten her, the more frightened she became.

She tried to suppress the mind-killing fear and watch what he was doing as he folded the note and produced the two interlocked circular mirrors from his pocket. She watched as he unsnapped them, and then unsnapped them again, revealing a second set of mirrors clipped inside. He took one set of mirrors and carefully adjusted a tiny bezel running around the edge.

“That will bring them straight back to where I shall be,” he said to himself, then noticed her listening.

“We shall meet in an open space. That way, if George brings help, I shall see them and you will suffer the consequences.”

He reached over to the table. Edie saw that he had sandwiched the black mirror between the two wax disks and tied them in place. He had also knotted a leather thong through the hole in the mirror’s handle. He put the thong around his neck so that the heavy package hung on his front like a giant medallion. Then he pushed it inside his sweatshirt and buttoned his coat.

He pulled his dagger out from behind him and turned back to her. As he moved, he revealed a woman’s cloak and a bonnet on the desk. She had seen them before. She had seen the bonnet tangled around her own face as the Walker drowned her. In the open spaces of the ice-covered Thames. At the Frost Fair.

Despite herself, she shrank back in the chair. He waved the knife, imagining that it was causing her to flinch.

“Now. Do scream if you like. The Icarus will enjoy it. I need just one thing from you before we go.”

“H
ere he comes,” said the Officer’s voice.

George swam slowly upward, out of a dark pool of sad dreams, as if he were made of lead. It was hard for him to leave unconsciousness; it was a huge effort just to open his eyes.

When he did, there were two pair of bronze boots in front of his nose. He was lying beneath a heavy greatcoat that was somehow as warm and supple as wool, even though it was made of the same bronze as the boots.

One pair of riding boots was the Officer’s. The other pair was heavier and more workmanlike: laced boots topped off by mismatched leggings, one set of puttees, the other armored with a calf protector.

George knew those boots.

He scrambled to a sitting position and looked up.

The Gunner smiled down at him.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” said George.

“You okay?”

George thought about it for a moment.

“Not really.”

“Good enough,” grunted the Gunner, and he squatted down in front of George, eye to eye. “There’d be something really wrong with you if you done what you done and felt all tickety-boo about it.”

George suddenly had to get the great thing rising in his throat out before it choked him.

“I saw my dad.”

“Yeah.” The Gunner nodded. “You would.”

After a beat the Gunner pointed over his shoulder at the body lying at the north end of the monument. “It’s him, isn’t it? The Unknown Soldier. That’s why his face was made covered, so he could be everyone’s lost one. So, you just made him your dad. . . .”

George nodded and put on a tight smile. He didn’t want anyone to know that somewhere inside, there was a well of sadness that he had been drowning in. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

“Must have been rough,” said the Gunner.

He put his hand on George’s shoulder and looked away.

George took a series of long deep breaths, getting himself back together.

“You want to let it out, son, no one here’s gonna think any the worse of you.”

“Absolutely not,” said the Officer, busy looking with great interest anywhere but at George. “Couldn’t think more highly of you, as it happens.”

He coughed in embarrassment and lowered his voice a little. “And for what it’s worth, I blubbed like a baby all the way through my first bombardment. . . .”

Maybe because they gave him permission, maybe because they understood, but George didn’t need to let it out. He swallowed and found that it went back inside and didn’t seem so terrible.

“I’m okay.”

The Gunner turned back and looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

“. . . in a not entirely okay way,” finished George.

“Look at your arm,” said the Officer.

George had forgotten about the marble groove jagging its way toward his armpit and the heart beyond. He tore at his shirt and looked.

The entire flaw had disappeared, leaving only a faint red mark like a scar, well on the way to healing.

“It’s gone!” he said.

“A duel is a duel, I’d say.” The Officer smiled. “Whether it’s fought with dueling pistols, rapiers, or great big hulking artillery pieces like that one. . . .” He nodded up at the huge stone gun topping the monument. “And you certainly stood your ground. I’d say that’s one down, two to go.”

George smiled and felt the other two grooves still twining below his forearm, the gritty stone one and the smooth brass one.

“I’d say.” The Gunner grinned and gripped his shoulder. “And by the by: thank you.”

He held his big hand out. George took it. The Gunner gripped it firmly.

“Saved my bacon, no mistake. And if you don’t mind me saying, I reckon your dad would have been proud of you.”

“Yes,” said George.

The truth of it was suddenly there inside him. It was as if it had always been there, but he hadn’t noticed because he’d always been looking the wrong way, staring at the pool of sadness. Maybe the soldier who had worn his dad’s face had said it best: maybe it was like being on a stage that you thought you were the center of and then realizing you were on the edge of something much bigger behind you. Whatever it was, George realized that a very big pain in his heart had gone, simply because he had stopped concentrating on it and noticed that its cure had been right there all the time, waiting to be noticed.

“Yes. I reckon he would have been. I reckon he was.”

It was as if by not crying on the outside, all the tears had fallen inside and left him feeling washed and clean. And clearheaded.

He got to his feet in one lithe move.

“Edie,” he said decisively. “We need to find her.”

“No question,” said the Gunner. “The Walker’s after her, and he’s after you.”

The Gunner repeated to George what the Walker had told him about the black mirror. George told the Gunner about everything that had happened to him; and just as he got to the bit about the Euston Mob, the Officer tapped the Gunner on the shoulder and pointed to a dark shape gliding in from the east.

The two soldiers unholstered their guns and aimed at the Raven as it coasted in toward them. George picked up his hammer.

“It’s got something in its beak,” said the Officer.

The Raven landed calmly on the white stone in front of them and gently laid the two mirrors on the ground. Then it stepped back. It wasn’t going to make any fast moves with two revolvers trained on it, but it also had too much self-respect to look interested in what might or might not happen.

“There’s a note tied on it,” said the Officer.

“Last pair of mirrors I saw like that was in the Walker’s hands,” said the Gunner.

George darted forward and slid the note out. It was a simple message:

Come to me. Beneath the main banner at the Frost Fair. Step into the mirrors and they will bring you. come now, or the girl dies.

The Gunner and the Officer read it over his shoulder.

“He could be bluffing,” said the Gunner.

“He lies like the rest of us breathe,” said the Officer.

“No,” said George. “He’s not lying.”

He gently lifted the “string” that had been used to attach the note to the mirrors. It was not quite black. It was a dark, almost eggplant color.

“It’s her hair.”

The Gunner swore under his breath. Then he aimed his gun at the Raven.

The Raven wasn’t surprised. It knew what was going to happen next. In his experience, people always shot the messengers when they brought bad news.

What did surprise him was that it wasn’t a bullet in the chest bone that sent him to Hell again. It was a spear, thrown with great force and accuracy from the opposite direction.

George, the Gunner, and the Officer looked at the sudden explosion of shocked black feathers, and then across the grass to where the spear had come from.

There was a parked chariot, and a very businesslike queen was striding over the grass toward them, to retrieve her weapon.

“What are you men all staring at?” she said. “It sounds like we have a girl to rescue.”

“I think we can manage, thank you, ma’am,” the Officer said stiffly.

“No we can’t,” said George sharply. “We’ll take all the help we can get.”

He picked the spear out of the pile of feathers that was already being winnowed into the night air and handed it to the Queen.

“Thank you, boy. Now, what I suggest is—”

“You don’t suggest anything. If you want to help, you listen, because Edie told me about this. She glinted it, and it ended badly. . . .” The unmistakable crack of authority in George’s voice made the spits look at him in surprise.

The Queen swelled in indignation. “Why, I will not—”

“Yeah, you will,” the Gunner interrupted. “If you want to help the girl, listen in. The boy knows what he’s talking about.”

The Queen bit her lip and kept quiet as George quickly told them about how Edie had glinted the Frost Fair and seen herself chased by the Walker and drowned in an ice hole. He told them every detail he could remember.

“I don’t know if it really was herself that she saw being drowned; and if it was, I don’t know if you can change the past. All I know is she saw it, and I’m going into those mirrors and do everything I can to stop it from happening.”

There was a beat of silence.

“I could do with a hand, but either way I’m going.”

He turned and retrieved the hammer from where it was leaning. The weight felt right as he hefted it in his hand.

The spits looked at each other.

The Queen turned and snapped her fingers at her daughters. “Girls,” she said, “come and hold the mirrors. It’s going to take very careful riding to get the chariot through in one piece.”