Ironhand (9 page)

G
eorge heard the bell tolling ahead of them, deep, regular, and doom-laden. They flew straight, as if locked on to the source of the noise like a homing beacon, shooting like a missile through the sheets of rain that were now gusting down with a vengeance.

Ahead of them, black metal railings and a spiked gate loomed between two worn stone gatehouses, barely larger than sentry boxes. Ariel flew over them and between two old colonnaded brick buildings that led into an inner courtyard complex beyond. The back end of the courtyards were modern glass-fronted office buildings, and as they flew in, George saw groups of umbrellas hurrying through the rain as workers headed through the downpour. There was so much water on the ground that George could see the rain-pocked reflection of Ariel, gold and bright against the lowering night sky beyond.

She swerved and landed so delicately that it wasn’t clear where flying ended and walking resumed, but it was clear that they’d arrived. The tolling of the bell was very loud against the white noise of rain. She pointed up to the side of one of the renovated warehouse buildings.

There was something red and boxy high on the wall above them, but because the rain was falling directly into his upturned eyes, it took George a couple of seconds to realize that it was the bell and its mounting. It must have been a fire bell at one time. Now it rang its relentless funeral note and sat there in the rain, red and slick as new blood.

He knew he wasn’t going to like the answer to his next question, but he asked it anyway.

“What’s that about? Why are we here?”

Ariel smiled brightly at him, spun on a toe in a single pirouette, and came back around without a hint of the smile or laughter in her eyes. “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, boy, it tolls for thee.”

“Okay,” he said, very deliberately. He wasn’t surprised, because he’d known the bell was for him from the first clang he’d heard, but he wasn’t any clearer, either. “Why is it for me?”

She stretched a long arm out with a theatrical flourish and pointed over his shoulder. “It is a summoning bell. It is summoning you to meet the Last Knight.”

He turned slowly. Forty feet away, on a raised patch of grass surrounded by a low box hedge was a full-size knight in armor sitting on a fierce-looking mount, carrying a long lance at the ready. The knight’s helmet covered his face, except for a narrow slit in his visor. The horse wore a surcoat made of interlinked plates of metal set with round disks of blue glass in a Celtic wave pattern. They made a majestic pair, though there was something almost skeletal about the horse’s head. George could see through the nostril. He could see through several bits of the horse, in fact, because it wasn’t solid at all. It was hollow. And then George looked more closely and saw that the sculptor had made both the man and the horse out of plates of armor. The Knight was a hollow man. Which raised the question—a pointed question, given the sharpness of the lance in the Knight’s right hand—of whether he was a spit or a taint.

“Ariel,” said George quietly, “why is the bell summoning me, exactly?”

A fine shower fanned out in a flattened halo around her as she shook the water out of her hair before speaking. George noticed that there was something theatrical about everything she did.

“I told you, boy. You chose your own fate. You picked the Hard Way. That starts here.”

George was pretty sure the Hard Way had begun when he was knocked into the sky by Spout, if not even earlier, when the Gunner had been taken from them. He didn’t like the idea that that had just been a warm-up for something much worse.

“And who is the Last Knight?”

“He is the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild.”
She pronounced the strange word
Ke-nik-ten-gild
.
“The what?”
“They are a guild of knights. Spelled the old-fashioned way. That writing explains it,” she said, pointing behind him. There was a plaque on the shallow wall beneath the hedge that surrounded the Knight.

George walked slowly forward, keeping an eye on the Knight and his charger as he went down on one knee in a rain-splashed puddle in front of the plaque and read:

King Edgar (943–975) granted this derelict land to thirteen knights, on condition that they each perform three duels, one on land, one below land, and one on water. These feats having been achieved, the king gave the knights, or Cnihtengild, certain rights . . .


He got no farther because the horse blew an irritated harrumph and stamped its hooves. George looked up to see that the Knight was leaning forward, the dark shadows of his eye slits pointed at him. And as George stared back at the Knight, the shadows lightened and he could see a pair of dim blue lights beginning to kindle where the eyes would have been. Before George could decide whether to straighten up and run away, or stay where he was, the Last Knight spoke. His voice was deep and sonorous, and shared the brassy harmonics of the bell tolling in the background, as if his voice were the bell put into words.

“Will you stand?”

It was a simple question. George could see no harm in it. He straightened up and wiped the rain from his face. “Yes. Hello.”

“And will you stand?” repeated the Knight.

George looked down at himself then back at the blue eye-lights staring out from within the blank helmet. The horse pulled against its reins and pawed the ground with a great metal hoof.

“Here I am. Standing,” he answered, a little puzzled. The Knight pulled at the horse’s bridle, which made it snort and stop pawing.

“And then will you stand?”

The repetition was getting strange. Or maybe just annoying. Or perhaps the Knight couldn’t see very well out of the narrow slits in his armor.

“Yes. I’ll stand. I am standing. I do stand. As you see.” He spoke slowly, with exaggerated politeness, so as not to cause offense. “You’ve asked me that three times already.”

The horseman’s neck straightened, and his mount snickered through its curling nose holes.

“And you have accepted three times, good knight.”

George decided the statue was a bit mad. As far as he knew, there was no reason why statues shouldn’t be as mad as anyone else. He hadn’t accepted anything once, let alone three times. He decided it was time to try much harder to get back to Edie.

“Yes. Well. Good night to you, too,” he said, and turned away.

Clang!
The toll of the bell was augmented by a simultaneous roar and clash of arms.

The sound hit him like a physical blow. It was so loud he saw rainwater bounce up out of the puddles around him. It was a shout of approval, and it came from many more throats than just the Last Knight. It was the sound of a great host shouting and hitting their shields with swords or lances. And in a flash of something like lightning or a sheet of flame, George saw the Guild gathered around him in a living frame, like ghostly projections on the rain. But these were no brightly colored fairy-tale knights from a child’s book. These were grim combat-worn figures clinging to their saddle horns with the last of their strength. Their armor and chain mail wasn’t shiny but hacked up and skeined with blood. Their sword edges were nicked and dinged, and their shields bore so many gouges that it was hard to make out the heraldic designs that had once been painted on them. Those that carried their helmets had faces grizzled with stubble, and dark, shadowed eyes stained with battle weariness. Several of the faces were bruised and bloodied, and many of them sat awkwardly on their mounts, shoulders dropped or curled over the pain of wounds George couldn’t see. To complete the sense that they had all just paused in a battle, breath panted out of their mouths and the nostrils of their horses, pluming in the cold. They held drawn weapons in their hands.

George saw all of this in a flash, and when it was gone, the modern buildings reasserted themselves and he was staring at Ariel, still with his back to the Knight. One thing that had changed, however, was that there seemed to be hundreds of bright blue lights radiating out from behind him, making a starburst on the surrounding walls of the courtyard, like an intense disco ball.

“He meant ‘good knight’ with a K,” said Ariel.

There was another flash, timed with the tolling of the bell, and he saw the other knights, the Guild, moving slowly in.

“Okeydokey,” George said slowly, really not wanting to turn around and see where all those blue lights were coming from. “And what does that mean, exactly?”

“It means he’s honoring you as a fellow knight, for accepting the challenges. It’s chivalry.”

“Er, no. It’s rubbish,” he hissed desperately. “I didn’t accept any bloody challenges, let alone three!”

“Yes, you did, boy. You agreed to stand. You agreed three times.”

“But I didn’t know what he was saying! I thought he couldn’t hear me or something. I thought that was why he was repeating himself”—he lowered his voice—“I thought he might be a bit deaf. Or mad . . .”

Clang!
The bell tolled and there was another intense flash and the sound of a host shouting, and George saw the Guild again. They were moving in, making two long lines on either side of him.

“Good luck, boy,” Ariel said, and walked backward away from him.

“What am I meant to do?” he hissed.

“Stand and fight. Three duels, three trials of strength, none to be fought on the same ground as any other. You must fight on the earth, under the earth, and on the water. You read the plaque. That is the way of the Guild.”

“But why must I fight?”

“Because in choosing the Hard Way, you chose to remain. Now you must prove you are worthy.”

“And if I don’t?”

Another toll of the bell, and this time a flash with no shout, just the vision of the knights. This carried on every time the bell rang. It was like seeing the knights in a very slow strobe, a tempo dialed down to the funeral toll of the bell.

“Then you will not remain. Here or in any unLondon. This world will have seen the last of you.”

She pushed up his sleeve and tapped the metal flaw twining out from the maker’s mark.

“Each of these flaws will start to move toward your heart when you begin a duel. They do this to make you finish each contest; for if you run away, the flaw will continue up your arm and pierce your heart. So do not run from any of the duels. You must stand and prove yourself. Only in that way will you show what you are made of.”

Desperation was making George’s breath come faster. He clenched his fists and clasped at a last straw as he heard the horse behind him nicker and shake its bridle chain.

“But I can’t fight. I don’t have a weapon!”

Ariel smiled a sad smile of farewell and pointed behind him. “Then pray that your wits are sharper than his lance, boy, because here it comes.”

He turned, and in the next flash saw that the Cnihtengild had hemmed him into a narrow jousting space that bristled with weapons and fierce-looking faces. And more than that, at the other end of the gauntlet he saw the source of all those lights. It was the Knight and his charger.

The blue glass disks that were interlinked in the horse’s surcoat had each lit up, lancing blue light in all directions as the knight spurred the charger slowly forward off the dais. The lights bounced and waved hypnotically on the surrounding walls and windows, mirroring the sinuous rippling of the surcoat as the great horse stepped daintily over the low hedge, one hoof after the other, clopping onto the wet stone floor of the courtyard.

The Knight was shrugging his shoulders and rolling his head on his neck, like a boxer loosening up before a fight. He looked every bit as murderous and businesslike as the rest of the Guild in the flashes that George saw every time the bell tolled.

He moved back, roughly along the alley made by the now-visible, now-invisible knights. He wondered if they were actually there all the time, or only there when the flashes happened. He stepped sideways, planning to run into the low brick colonnades, where the Knight would be too tall to follow him easily. He could at least grab one of the metal chairs to use as a weapon.

Something hard, like the flat of a sword, smacked his head and made it ring, but not before he heard the jingle of a harness close by his ear, and the word
“COWARD”
hissed at him.

He held his ears and stumbled back across the now-obviously-more-than-imaginary jousting round. He must have staggered too far, because something big and flat and hard like a shield batted into his face and sent him sprawling back into the center of the narrow space.

And being hit in the nose was perhaps the thing that saved him. Being hit in the nose hurts a lot, but it also spikes adrenaline and makes you very angry, instantly. George got very angry very quickly, and a treacly black feeling surged up into his throat. He wiped his hand across his nose and wasn’t surprised to see a thin streak of blood on it. He remembered the Gunner, just after he’d first saved George, way back at the beginning of their nightmare journey, when he’d looked down at him and said: “You’re angry. Sometimes angry gets things done. This isn’t one of those times. . . .”

But he also remembered the way the Gunner had channeled his fury when fighting the Minotaur. That had been one of those times when angry did get things done. This, he knew, was the same kind of time.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Fine.”

And even though he was soaking wet and there was no point to it other than show, he turned, rolled up his sleeves, and set his legs a shoulder’s width apart. The Gunner may have been physically absent, perhaps lost forever, but there was definitely something of him in the way George planted his feet and held his ground.

He spat into the puddle and faced the Knight at the other end of the courtyard.

“FINE,” he shouted. “Do your worst.”

There was a flash, and in it, George saw the Guild, again looking as if they were somehow both projected onto and made out of the pelting rain itself; and they were all looking at him.

They just didn’t look like a happy band of knights in armor who were devoted to courtly poetry and rescuing damsels in distress, or slaying picturesque dragons.