A
s George had told Edie, the High Admiral had been watching the City since first light. He had seen the blank gray escarpment of the ice murk spreading inexorably across the horizon to the east. It had widened and seemed to grow taller as it approached, as remorselessly as bad weather rolling in across the sea.
The Admiral had noted that the one building that remained visible in the City was not only the tallest, but seemed to be at the dead center of the blooming cloud. He had spent the day scanning it with his telescope, and as the rest of the spits had poured into the square below, had shouted down and kept them updated with what he could see from his lookout position atop the column. He commanded a great view from his lofty aerie, which was just one of the reasons why this sailor with one empty sleeve pinned to his much-bemedaled frock coat was known as the High Admiral.
The one good eye he had left had seen many strange things, but what he seemed to be seeing on top of the distant dark tower was something new. Though most of them had arrived under cover of darkness, he saw the last few winged spits coasting in at dawn and joining the rookery of gargoyles and other grotesque flying creatures that had blossomed around the building’s rim, changing its sleek silhouette into something lumpy and unwholesomely organized-looking, like a blighting fungus. He’d seen the slow cascade of icy air falling off the top of the building down into the ice murk below, and as a sailor he’d known enough about how weather works to see that this confirmed his suspicion: the dark tower was the center of the cold blight afflicting the City and spreading toward the rest of London.
He’d seen the strange elongated figure of the Ice Devil striding back and forth along the icy battlements of his citadel, and he’d watched the occasional patrols of gargoyles that had detached from the battlements and gone off on who knows what business throughout the day. He’d also seen enough of the Ice Devil to be reminded, at certain angles, of the Walker. But the most disturbing thing he had seen was the Ice Devil when it stopped pacing and just stood still.
In those moments the High Admiral, a man whose visible wounds attested to how little he cared for his personal safety in battle, felt the unfamiliar twinge of fear. The reason he felt this unaccustomed sensation was this: he was pretty sure that just as he was looking at the Ice Devil, so the Ice Devil was looking straight back at him. And the Ice Devil’s gaze was almost palpable in its malign intensity.
All that had been the most disturbing thing, until now.
Now the flying taints were peeling off the side of the black tower and spiraling into a winged maelstrom that circled the Ice Devil. Next, the Ice Devil gesticulated with his arms, and the spiral flattened into a disk whose thin edge became a storm front, which thickened and grew as it headed straight toward him.
It was at this point that he had hailed the spits below and warned them to prepare to repel boarders.
The Admiral turned to the Temple Bar Dragon, who was perched awkwardly next to him, looking in the same direction.
“You’d better get below. There’ll be hard pounding before this is over.”
The dragon just looked at him, raised an eyebrow, then turned back to look at the approaching cloud of taints.
“Pound. Them. Shall. I,” it spat. And as it spoke, the Admiral could feel the heat building up in the scaly body next to him.
“My. City. Ice. Cloud. Swallow. Not. Forever,” it continued harshly, tendrils of smoke starting to curl out of its reddening eyes. “My. City. Free. Made. Free. Born. Free. Stay. Free.”
“Can’t say fairer than that,” admitted the Admiral, putting his telescope away and drawing his sword. “But if you get in the way or set anything on fire up here, you’ll have to find somewhere else to fight.”
All across the square below, the spits were ready, spread behind every balustrade or fountain edge they could find, waiting for the attack.
The Gunner joined George behind one of the four massive bronze lions at the foot of the column.
“You just keep your head down,” he said.
“Why haven’t these lions come alive?” asked George, nodding at the great bulk next to them.
“No one knows exactly,” said the Gunner. “But they never have. Some say they’re made wrong, others that they have one purpose, and they won’t come alive until it’s their time to fulfill it. That’s why they’re known as the Last Lions.”
“What purpose?” asked George.
“Don’t know. Some say there’s something under this column that they’re defending, others that they only come alive when the land’s at its deepest peril, or some mumbo jumbo like that. Me?”—he rapped the butt of his pistol on the side of the lion with a clang—“me, I think they’re just lazy, like all cats is.”
Before George could ask another question, the sky did indeed seem to go black as a cloud of airborne taints poured over the rooftops in a howling avalanche of fangs and claws and talons.
Battles don’t have much sense or shape, not when you’re stuck in the middle of them. If you’re high above them, there are patterns that can be discerned as the struggling masses attack and retreat. You can see power flowing and whirling back and forth as the forces feint and dodge and stand fast in their turn. You can even, if asked afterward, draw neat diagrams that appear to make a clean and clinical sense of the bewildering chaos and carnage that it actually is for the person stuck in the middle of it.
When you’re in the middle of a battle, with your boots on the ground, you’re lucky if you notice anything beyond your immediate vicinity. In fact, most of the time you’re lucky if your boots are on the ground. In George’s case it was his knees and then his chest as the Gunner kept pushing him out of the way of a succession of diving and snapping taints. He crouched against the lion, wanting to fight but knowing he had to keep guard of the darkness trapped in the stone arm, which he was clutching tightly. The Gunner shot a gargoyle out of the sky in front of George’s face and shook his head in frustration.
“It’s that damn stone arm of yours!” he shouted. “It’s like wasps and a bloody jam pot. Here . . . !”
He unclipped the groundsheet he normally wore as an improvised cape around his shoulders and threw it down to George.
“Wrap it up. If they don’t keep seeing it, we’ll have it easier,” he yelled, and was then hit by two small taints at once.
The taints each fastened on to one of his arms and ripped them sideways, exposing his chest to a third one that slammed into him. Before George could leap to his aid, the Gunner had head-butted the taint as it tried to bite his face—ramming the sharp edge of his steel helmet into its beak and shattering it. The force of the blow snapped his chinstrap, and as the helmet tumbled off the back of his head and the taint fell off his chest, he roared in anger and clapped his two outflung hands together, clattering the two smaller spits into each other in a shattering impact.
They fell to the ground, and he put a bullet in the one he had head-butted, and then turned to finish off the other two. Nothing remained of them except ice fragments.
“That’s a bit queer,” he said. “Where’s the bloody stone?”
Another taint whirled to the ground and pancaked across the flagstones in a smoking mass between them, taking the Gunner’s mind off the strangeness of the ice taints, who had no stone body. He nodded at George, who had been narrowly missed by the crashed taint.
“Keep your head down, son.” He grinned. “It’s gonna get hotter before this is over.”
The Gunner looked strangely younger without his helmet. His hair stuck up in an unruly tuft above the shorter sides. He scraped his fingers through it and scanned the piazza for the next threat.
The Officer came tumbling over the top of the lion and landed with a crash next to George, trying to throttle a stone pterodactyl that in its turn was straining to rip his throat out with its fanged beak. The Officer’s pistol swung wildly around on the end of its lanyard.
“George, my gun, if you’d be so kind . . .” he gasped.
George leaped forward and grabbed for the swinging weapon. The pterodactyl snapped at his hands, but he got them around the oversize pistol and jammed the barrel into the creature’s chest, pulling the trigger. The hammer clicked noisily, but there was no accompanying explosion or bullet.
“Ah,” said the Officer.
George just dropped the gun and grabbed the pterodactyl’s beak without thinking much. He felt the heat in his hands and the loose particulate molecules deep in the stone. He swiveled his hands around the two halves of the beak, and as he did so he felt a granular smearing as he wiped one set of molecules into another, joining the top part to the lower, gagging the surprised taint so that its saucer eyes widened and bulged even larger.
It dropped to the ground and hopped around, furiously but ineffectually tearing at its beak with the talons on the end of its wings, trying to open what was now one piece of stone. It was almost comical in its rage.
The Officer looked at George with a new respect. “That is some trick you’ve got there.”
George nodded. The Officer looked at the hopping pterodactyl.
“Seems almost a shame to—”
BLAM
. The Gunner blew its head off.
“Not to me it don’t,” he grunted. “Behind you . . .”
Two taints were swooping in, their eyes fixed on the bundle that George was wrapping in the cape. The Officer leaped on one and clubbed at it with the pistol he had hurriedly reversed in his hand. The Gunner shot the other one three times before it died, so close to George that its body knocked him flying.
The battle was a series of small fights just like this, all rolled into one giant maelstrom of violence. What George couldn’t see was that the taints were beginning to isolate and pick off groups of spits at the edges of the square, and having surrounded them, attack from all sides and destroy them before looking for the next vulnerable pocket of men. The king who had smacked the Lionheart on the helmet was in one of these pockets, slashing and hacking with a thin ornamental sword while the six spits around him were torn to pieces. Then the taints swarmed him, the force of their attack ripping him up and out of the saddle. There was a series of terrible breaking noises, and then they dropped him into one of the two fountains, where his broken body hit with a tremendous splash and explosion of broken ice, and then lay still, his curly wig splayed alongside his cropped head suddenly looking less like an elaborate hairpiece than an exhausted yet faithful spaniel.
The taints howled off and joined another attack that was boiling around the empty plinth, where the Euston Mob were fighting back-to-back.
George had seen the king’s body tumbling into the fountain and had felt sick at the impact it had made, but an instant later another attack had blurred past, and he was backed into the lion’s side by the Officer and the Gunner, who had obviously decided they could protect him best by shielding him with their bodies. For several minutes all George could see of the fight were fragments snatched in the gaps between their two broad backs. And then, although the sounds of gunfire and shrieking and yelling all around were deafening, the Admiral’s voice cut through to them from above.
“To the sky! Look to the sky!”
George jerked his head upward, and saw for the first time how the battle was being fought in the air above his head. The Temple Bar Dragon had been firing gouts of wildfire at the airborne taints. These multicolored air-bursts hung in the air and faded into skeins of smoke that overhung the battle below. Through the smoke looking east, George saw immediately what the Admiral was shouting about.
Four struggling figures were being carried off by teams of larger taints, their greatcoats flapping as they twisted and fought to free themselves.
“It’s the Euston Mob,” breathed the Gunner.
George stared in horror as one of the soldiers dropped his rifle. A taint unhooked from his arm and dived straight down, catching the gun before it fell to the ground.
“What the hell did it do that for?” said the Gunner. “Why’d it catch the gun?”
The taints carried their struggling victims out of sight, over the top of St. Martin’s church. And almost as if this were a signal, the taints that remained disengaged and poured out of the square in their wake. In less than one minute the whole echoing piazza was silent except for the moans and cries of the hurt. George looked up to see the Lionheart looking down at them, showing his teeth in a wide battle-drunk smile. “I did not know London held so many taints.” He laughed. “But we saw them off, by God!”
“It doesn’t, and we didn’t,” said the Gunner, looking at the Officer. “I killed two that weren’t stone to my knowledge, maybe others.”
“What do you mean?” said the Lionheart.
“Something is making taints out of ice,” said the Officer. “Copying them.”
“Nonsense.” The Lionheart laughed.
“He’s right,” said George.
“All the more for me to kill, if they dare to come back,” snorted the Lionheart, riding off.
“They’ll come back,” said the Gunner.
“Why would they take the Euston Mob?” said George, remembering with a sharp pang how the four soldiers had saved him only the night before; how he had sat with them and enjoyed their easy company.
“I don’t know,” replied the Officer. “But I don’t like the way they took care to keep that gun. It was only our guns that saved us this time.”
George looked around at the shattered bodies strewn across the piazza. If this wasn’t the finish, then he worried about what that would look like. Surely it could not be worse. “I shouldn’t have brought the arm here,” he said, feeling desperately sad and guilty. “None of this . . .”
“Nonsense, boy. There’s no other place in the world you should have brought it if not here, for where else could you defend it from those who would free it?” rumbled the bearlike man in the overcoat.
George looked at him.
“George. This is Bulldog. Bulldog—George,” said the Gunner. “He knows a thing or two about keeping on scrapping when all looks lost.”
“Pleasure.” Bulldog nodded, looking a little bit like a gangster as he smiled around the cigar in his mouth. “Though, if you’re feeling guilty, try working out how we can use these mirrors of yours against that thing on top of the tower.”