Silvertongue (11 page)

G
eorge dropped headfirst through the sky, legs bicycling, hands reaching downward, reflexively trying to cushion the inevitable impact as the wide sweep of road around the south end of Hanover Square rushed up to meet him with blank white finality.

He opened his mouth to yell, but the wind forced the words back into his throat, so the “No!” he was shouting at the world was lost.

All he heard was the wind rushing past and the blood pounding its last in his ears. And one word screeched out of the cold morning behind him.

“
Eigengang!
”

Spout swooped in below, and tumbled himself on his back. George had no time to think—all he saw was that the stone wing unfolded beneath him like a giant out-flung catcher’s mitt. And then he hit it, and though the impact was hard enough to jar the air out of him, it also spun Spout the right way around, which cushioned the blow. Spout grabbed him and lurched to a stop, having hooked the claw at the end of his other wing on to the gutter of a building on the side of the square. George smacked into the wall, between two windows, and just hung there, getting his breath and enjoying not being a splat mark in the snow below.

“Nice catch,” he said as soon as his lungs had recharged with oxygen.

He patted the stone wing draped protectively over him.

“Very nice catch. Thanks, Spout. You saved me again.”

“
Gack
,” agreed the gargoyle, sounding rather pleased with himself in a way that George, in the circumstances, felt was entirely justified.

They hung there for a long moment, and George stared through the window in front of him. It was an office full of cubicles and computer monitors. His eyes slowly skated over the mundane jumble of each desk. Each one was fundamentally the same space, but strewn with different personal items—mugs, photographs, the odd figures that people stuck to the top of their screens. It was just everyday stuff, the things working people let silt up around their workplace in an unconscious attempt to make the blankness homey and specific to them. His eye rested on a quartet of wild-haired trolls that someone had arranged on the windowsill in front of him. They lined up next to a paperweight, a thick circle of clear glass embedded with a photo of a laughing woman and child.

The sight of it made him feel very alone.

They made the city seem emptier.

They made him suddenly and sharply miss people.

He thought of his mother. He wanted her to be safe. He hadn’t thought of her much in the past few hours, but now he did, and he desperately wanted her to be there, laughing and telling him the stories of her day, the ones where she couldn’t help acting out all the people she’d been with. He knew she wasn’t going to be a perfect mum, because she wasn’t built like that. She would never give him all the attention he wanted, because she always had at least one eye on herself to see what she looked like and how others were reacting to her. That was because she was an actress. Or maybe it was
why
she was an actress. But whether it was the chicken or the egg, he didn’t mind now. He realized that whatever he’d found out when he saw the soldier with his dad’s face had not only made him feel okay about his death, it had let him feel okay about his mum. Only now that he didn’t have the black treacly feeling of anger inside him did he realize that a lot of it came from what he felt about her—but could never say. Where he’d felt angry with her, he now felt worried.

The weight of knowing that this layer of London might never again be full of bustling people with their novelty mugs and framed family photographs and pointless troll collections bore down on him.

It was his fault.

He’d better get going.

“Come on, Spout,” he said. “Let’s get to the Clocker before something happens to the Queen of Time.”

Spout unhooked his talon from the roof edge and flapped hard. In a couple of wing beats they were cresting the buildings across the square and angling across Oxford Street toward the great store.

Because his eye was taken by the familiar bulky figure of Dictionary stumbling out from under the canopy and waving at him, he did not at first notice that he was too late. It was only when the Clocker raised an arm in greeting from beneath the Clock of the World that George noticed the Queen had gone.

Spout came to an untidy landing and George stumbled toward the front of the store.

“Where is the Queen of Time?” he gasped, pointing up to the elaborate plinth.

“Never fear, my young friend, the lady has flown east to discover what has obstructed time’s smooth passage and if possible remedy it!” boomed Dictionary.

“No!” exclaimed George. “She must not go yet. . . .”

Dictionary looked at Clocker. They both looked at George. George looked at his feet. They all looked at Spout.

“
Gack
,” he said helpfully.

“Why ‘No,’ if I may ask?” said Dictionary.

“Because the Sphinx said so,” explained George. “That’s why I came. To try to stop her going before we’d had a chance to put the darkness back.”

Again the two figures exchanged a look.

“Put what darkness back . . . where?” ventured the Clocker.

“And why?” added the man of letters.

George got to his feet, took a deep breath to drown his rising disappointment and fear of the futility of the course they were embarked on, and told them everything that had happened with the Sphinxes. They remained silent as he spoke, and neither looked anywhere but his face.

“So you see,” he finished, “we can’t fight the Ice Devil before we deal with the darkness.”

“But the lady has flown east,” said Dictionary.

“And not returned,” said the Clocker, who stiffened and held up his hand. They watched him as he stood on the canopy above them and listened, his eyes closed, his face straining into the air, the concentration on it so intense that he almost seemed to be trying to smell and taste as well as listen.

“What?” whispered George. “What is it?”

“Listening,” said the Clocker, eyes still shut. “Listen hard enough, can hear almost everything that is. Can hear fault in clock before even see it lose time. Can hear individual cogs turn, springs unwind, ratchets move. City is like a clock . . .”

His eyes opened. He looked deflated. “Something has changed. Cannot hear her.”

“Wait,” said George, incredulous. “Are you saying you can normally hear her?”

“She is one of the great cogs in the city. Can hear the great cogs if I try.”

Then, just on the edge of hearing, George caught a flap of wings. Spout heard it too, because he spun in the snow and looked east.

“What?” said Dictionary.

“Wings,” said George.

Dictionary’s face cracked in a smile, and his shoulders relaxed.

“Why see, Clocker, all is well, your fears are unfounded, the great lady is . . .”

The words died on his lips as the flying figure flared its wings and came to rest on a parapet, looking down at them.

“A dog,” finished Dictionary.

The dog-gargoyle stood looking unconcernedly away from them, silhouetted against the sky, its tongue lolling out of its jaws. It looked precisely like a bat-winged dog until it turned to look at them head-on, and then the lopsided, one-eyed and one-eared shape of the head was instantly recognizable as the creature Spout and George had just fought.

“
Gaing gack
,” said Spout.

“Yeah,” agreed George. “He came back.”

The dog barked at them.

Something squirmed beneath Dictionary’s tight coat buttons, and Hodge stuck his head out and responded with a hiss of pure feline fury. Spout looked impressed. He turned and emitted a similar noise at ten times the volume right back at the dog.

The gargoyle lurched to its feet and started to patrol back and forth with a stiff-legged gait, snarling and barking at them.

“Why’s it come back?” said George.

Dictionary waved a disgusted hand at the roofline.

“Because the canine intellect is greatly inferior to the feline, part baying braggadocio, part craven yelping when the master’s hand is turned against it. In short, it is stupid.”

The dog turned its back on them and lifted its hind leg in an unmistakable gesture of contempt.

“It can’t be . . .” began George.

“It is,” said Dictionary as a stream of liquid arched out over the street and spattered the ground in front of them.

“Didn’t know they could do that,” said George wonderingly, impressed despite himself

“They are rain spouts. Channeling water is what they do on a normal day,” said Dictionary, stepping back. “I told you it was stupid.”

Spout launched into the air in a flurry of snow.

“Why else would it make a spectacle of itself with all this showy micturation?” finished Dictionary as the dog flapped out of sight, pursued by Spout.

George didn’t have an answer for that.

And almost immediately, as soon as Spout had disappeared from view, he didn’t need one.

The dog-gargoyle had not been beaten by George. Even with half its head sheared clean off, it had gone for reinforcements.

And then it had come back as a decoy.

It had drawn off Spout and distracted George and his companions so effectively that they only heard the two dragons when they burst out of the snowdrifts right behind them.

And then it was too late.

T
he time for listening and thinking had clearly passed. Now the Sphinx had given her answer, all the spits started talking at once, and the more they talked, once again, the less any of them seemed to listen. Even the Queen and the Gunner waded in and started trying to outshout the others. The gist—if there was a gist— seemed to be a great discussion about whether they should all stay here, or find somewhere to better defend themselves if the taints attacked en masse, or even preempt the possible attack by mounting one of their own into the heart of the City.

Edie thought they should be trying to find ways to help George, if he was the one who had the key to ultimate victory; but this key point seemed to be drowned in the rising tide of the argument.

As often happened when she was in a crowd, Edie began to feel very solitary. She walked off to the edge of the group to retrieve her boot, hopping as she went, to keep her sock from getting soaked by the snow.

She leaned on the stone wall curving along beside the river to keep her balance as she put the boot back on. When she was done, she looked across the black water at the distant bank and thought about what the nasty Sphinx had said. She had certainly not said it to make Edie feel any better about her mum. Or had she? Edie had always sensed the Sphinx’s hostility, right from the moment Edie had glinted the zeppelin raid that had mutilated her. So why had she said it? To make Edie feel worse.

If that was the case, she had succeeded perfectly. She pulled the earring made from her mother’s small heart stone out of her pocket and looked at the pale light shining inside it, the flicker that said, “She is alive.” She felt the sharp treacherous swoop of hope in her stomach again and tried to ignore the pain that came after it. The Sphinx was right. Hope was double-edged. If you stopped hoping and expected the worst, you were, in Edie’s experience, much less likely to be disappointed. Every time she looked at the heart stone, something in her soared into cleaner, clearer air, but she had a horrible feeling that the higher you went with it, the farther you’d fall.

She had just decided to put the stone away and not look at it again until George got back, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to find nobody there. Instead the corner of her eye caught a flutter of oily black feathers darting around the other side of her, and then she felt a tug at her fingertips, and by the time she’d turned back, she discovered that the Raven had returned and had pecked her mother’s stone out of her grasp.

The bird landed on the top of the stone wall a foot away and cocked its head at her, the stone dangling and twisting at the end of its long beak.

“Hey!” gasped Edie, stepping forward and reaching for her stone.

The Raven hopped backward along the wall, not too far, just enough to make her take another step.

“Please . . .” she cried. The prospect of losing this last link with her mother, and all the vulnerable possibilities it had opened up, was suddenly more than she could bear.

The Raven hopped back again, just out of reach.

“Come on,” said Edie in desperation. “I freed you.”

The Raven’s beady eyes bored in to hers. It ducked its head twice, then hopped back another foot.

“Seriously . . .” said Edie. “Don’t make me . . .”

She didn’t know what to do, but she did know that it was going to be whatever stopped the Raven from flying off with her mother’s stone. She suddenly remembered the Fusilier shooting the Raven, blowing it to a cloud of slick black feathers.

That recollection triggered the next flash, when the bird had been tugging George’s bootlace at the top of the Monument and the Gunner had shot it, and it had spun around George’s foot like a propeller before dropping to the ground and dying again.

She turned and looked for the Gunner in the crowd behind her. All she saw were backs, and then she spotted his tin hat as something tapped her shoulder.

It was the Raven again. At first her heart jolted horribly when she couldn’t see the heart stone in its beak, but as it flew back up the stone wall she saw the glass winking at her on the top of it.

She was about to shout for the Gunner when the Raven, as if reading her thoughts, picked up the earring and held it out beyond the edge of the wall, high over the water slapping the stone embankment below.

It didn’t drop it, but it definitely looked at her pointedly.

Edie looked back. She was pretty unbeatable in a stare-down, but the Raven had millennia of practice on her. Edie blinked first.

“Okay,” she said.

The Raven brought the stone back from the drop and awkwardly twisted and ducked its head, exactly like it was beckoning her.

She stepped forward.

It hopped back.

She took another step.

It hopped back again, keeping the exact same tantalizing distance between her outstretched fingertips and her mother’s stone.

“Please don’t play games,” she said. “It’s not a toy.”

The Raven nodded and hopped backward.

“It’s important. To me. Please.”

She wasn’t used to telling people what was important to her. It felt too much like giving them a tool to use against her. It felt dangerous and unguarded to be saying it out loud. It felt odd.

It felt even odder to be saying it to a bird.

The Raven looked at her as if it were again reading her mind. And unless that mind was going, and she was losing it completely, the Raven seemed to roll its eyes at her.

Then it very slowly, very deliberately nodded, one, two, three times. It hopped around and jabbed its beak up the Embankment, away from the crowd, toward the City. It was definitely pointing.

“You want me to follow you?” she said. Talking to birds was not something she was going to get used to any time soon.

It nodded again. She looked back at the crowd of spits. Even the soldiers who had been facing outward when she arrived were now facing inward, joining the great roiling argument. No one was seeing her go. She should tell them. . . .

The Raven slid into view, between her and the crowd. It hung in the air in the disturbing way it sometimes did, treating all three of Newton’s laws of motion with equal and eerie contempt. It shook its head very deliberately.

“Why not . . . ?” she said, and then noticed it wasn’t carrying the stone in its beak.

“’Cos they’ll stop you coming. ’Cos they don’t understand,” said a scratchy little urchin’s voice from behind her. “’Cos they don’t want what you want, do they?”

Edie turned.

There was the earring.

And the hand that was holding it belonged to the one living person—after the Walker—who she trusted least in the whole world.

Little Tragedy.

He smiled a very complicated smile at her and twisted her mother’s heart stone in the light.

Then he held his finger to his lips, pointed at the crowd that was suddenly too far away, and crooked it in a beckoning gesture.

“Mum’s the word, and step lively,” he whispered. “I ’spect you’ll want to see this. . . .”