Stoneheart (12 page)
T
he door buzzer woke George, firstly because it was loud, and secondly because it wouldn’t stop. He stumbled to his feet, squished across the map of Madagascar, and pressed the intercom.
Because it was that kind of flat with that kind of intercom, a blurry black-and-white image of the doorstep came to life on the screen by the controls.
Edie’s face filled the frame, eyeballing the camera, mouth in a determined line.
“Hey, stop that!”
She took her finger off the buzzer.
“How did you—”
“Shut it,” she hissed. Her eyes flicked up and out of frame. She loomed back in again and whispered.
“Have you got a back door?”
George felt woozy. His hand hurt. His head was catching up fast.
“Wait a minute, how did you find me?”
“You gave the taxi your address, I heard. Now—”
He was still trying to find a way to explain that she could not know where he was, so that he could start believing that she wasn’t there at all, and go back to sleep.
“No, but how’d you know which is my buzzer?”
She hopped up and down with frustration. Her hand dived into the front pocket of her jacket and struggled to remove something.
“Easy. Had to be the top flat. The one with the gargoyle on the balcony.”
George snorted.
“We haven’t got a gargoyle.”
She held the sea-glass up to the camera. It was so bright it left ghost trails on the screen as she waggled it back and forth.
“See? You have now. It’s walking up and down, sniffing.”
George realized there was a noise outside the kitchen. A noise coming from the balcony. It was more a scraping noise, but he could hear sniffing and whistling behind it. His guts went cold and watery again.
“Hang on.”
He slid over to the doorway and peered around the edge into the living room. Beyond the brass bust of his mother, beyond the sliding door to the balcony, something moved. And as it moved the motion-detector light on the balcony clicked on, and it wasn’t a cat or a burglar, but the gargoyle with the cat face and the broken wing and the whistling rainspout. Its blank sandstone eyes were peering into the room, and its talons were scraping along the glass, looking for something. They were heading toward the handle.
George dived back to the intercom. I see it.
Edie looked up and nodded. She pocketed the glass.
“So since it’s on the front of the building, I wondered if you had a back way out. Oh.”
He could see her staring at the glass.
“What?”
“The glass changed color.” She looked down the road, both ways. “I think something else is coming.”
The Raven flapped around the corner into St. Georges Square a moment before the Walker strode into view. The bird flew higher, until it was almost at roof level. It perched on the balcony of George’s apartment. The gargoyle was still scrabbling at the door handle. It sensed the bird and turned. The bird returned its look with an unblinking black eye, then stepped back off the railing and dropped like a stone.
The Walker arrived at George’s door and stepped up onto the porch at just the moment when the Raven landed on his shoulder. This was the kind of stylish touch the Raven prided himself on. The Walker ignored it, leaned into the keypad, and appeared to peer at it.
Edie was nowhere in sight.
A young couple bounced up onto the step behind him. The man carried a paper-wrapped bottle of wine in his hand. The woman pressed the buzzer and said: “Kay? Sorry we’re late!”
The door buzzed and three of them walked in, though if you’d asked either of the young people, they’d have sworn they were only two.
They got into the lift and pressed the next-to-top button. The only clue that somewhere in their subconscious minds they might have been aware that they were sharing the small space with a tall hooded man in a green coat with a bird on his shoulder, was that they stopped talking. And looked as if they suddenly were having less fun than they had been moments ago.
The lift announced the floor and they stepped out. The Walker watched them. As the door closed he muttered: “You forgot the wine.”
The young man made a face at the girl.
“I forgot the wine!”
She looked at his empty hands.
“Idiot.”
In the lift, ascending, the Walker looked at the paper-wrapped bottle in his own hands. He slid it into his pocket as the lift announced the top floor.
The door slid open, and he stepped out onto the landing. The door to George’s flat stood wide. The Walker remained still. He shrugged his shoulder. The Raven flapped through the door.
Most birds panic when flying in a confined space. The Raven didn’t. It flapped around the apartment with slow gravity-defying wing beats, seeing everything: the whiteness of the main rooms, the jumble of George’s room, and the absence of anything resembling an actual George on the premises.
It paused on top of the bronze head of George’s mother, which it streaked with a thin splash of droppings, and peered through the glass at the gargoyle on the balcony. It shook its head.
The gargoyle hoot-whistled through the corroded pipe in its mouth and turned away, wings cracking open as it launched into the night sky. The Raven flapped back out of the door, to where the Walker was pacing the hall.
“Gone?”
The Raven just hopped onto his shoulder. The Walker strode into George’s apartment and closed the door behind him.
George emerged from the underground parking at the back of his apartment building to find Edie already there. She flashed the glowing sea-glass at him. Lets run.
“Okay.”
And because that seemed to both of them to be all that needed to be said, that’s exactly what they did. They ran out of the small backstreet, and across a major street, and along a narrow empty road that turned sharply into a busy riverside four-lane, and then kept on running on the wide pavement.
Edie grimaced.
“I’ve got a stitch.”
He nodded.
“Me, too.”
Neither of them stopped running. Neither of them focused on the buildings or the people they were running past. All they worried about was getting away from whatever was behind them. Edie knew a lot about running like this. All that mattered was that you didn’t stop, that there was always a space in front to run into that you didn’t run into a dead end, so that whoever was behind you didn’t catch up.
They ran into Parliament Square and had to cross the road to escape the barriers that ran at street level beneath the ornate gothic cliff on their right. In the middle of the square George came to a halt and bent double, trying to get his breath. Edie tugged at him.
“Come on!”
He shook his head, too out of breath to speak.
“It’s not safe here. Look!”
She grabbed the back of his hair and pulled his head up, pointing around the square. Statues loomed all around them. Big Ben looked down on them, its lit clock face hanging in the sky like a second moon.
“Too many things here.”
“Taints,” he gasped.
“Too much everything. Come. We need to keep to the river.”
He followed her across the street, every muscle in his legs begging him to stop. A thick mass of traffic lurched past, penned in by crash barriers, cutting them off from the continuation of the Embankment beyond the Houses of Parliament.
Edie started to climb the barrier. This time it was George’s turn to pluck at her. He pointed at the well-lit underpass to their left.
“This way!”
She shook her head and hopped over the barrier.
“No. Never underground”
“What?”
“Never underground. The Gunner said. It’s more dangerous.”
“Oh, come on—” he began.
“For you,” she said.
He followed her over the barrier and waited for a gap in the cars.
“Where are we going?”
She didn’t hear him, or if she did she must have decided not to answer.
“Edie, where are we going?”
She looked at him quickly, then went back to watching the cars.
Its we now, is it?
He flashed the memory of driving away from her in the taxi. It hadn’t felt good then, and it felt worse now.
“I guess it is.”
“And why’s that, all of a sudden?” she spat.
“Because you came and found me again.”
“Found you?”
He shrugged. Opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Edie saw a gap in the traffic and dived across the road. He followed her, weaving path through the headlights and the horns. A Porsche flashed him and blared a warning as it refused to slow enough for both of them to reach the safety of the Embankment. Edie nipped in front of it and George had to slam to a halt. He saw a blur of pinstripe and an ugly shouting mouth from the driver, then it was gone and he ran across the lane.
He couldn’t see Edie, only the benches and the Embankment wall and the lights of the South Bank reflected in the river beyond.
“Found you?” She was behind him. He exhaled in relief.
“Saved me.”
“Did I?” Her eyes were unblinking. He met them with a level look of his own.
“Yeah. You did.”
She waited, lifted her shoulders briefly, then dropped them.
“I guess that’s a thank-you then, is it?”
He had no idea what it was about her that infuriated him so much, but he felt it every time he looked into her eyes, and almost every time she spoke. Only, the truth was she had warned him that the gargoyle had found him, and she had no reason that he knew to have done that. Maybe it was that that he found so infuriating. He matched her shrug.
“I guess so.”
She let his eyes go.
“We need to keep moving.”
He stayed still.
“Where to?”
She snorted at him.
“The Black Friar. Or did you forget?”
He shook his head. The pain in his hand was returning.
“How do we get to it? Or him, or whatever he or it is?” Come on.
He ran just behind her shoulder. The pace was slower now—not much, just enough to talk as they went. She pointed with her chin.
“Black Friars at the end of Blackfriars Bridge. We just follow the riverbank until we get to it.”
“That’s …” He couldn’t find the right word to fit their situation. So he chose a hopeful one. “That’s good.”
“No it’s not. The Black Friar is in the City, and all roads into the City are guarded by dragons like the one we ran into.”
His stomach lurched as he had a horrible flashback of the dragon’s head staring at him, and his hand twinged sharply as he relived the pain of the talon zag-ging the wound on his hand.
“So that’s bad.”
“Would be if the Gunner hadn’t told me how to get round them.”
He asked the question that had been hanging unasked between them.
“Where is the Gunner?”
“Now you ask,” she said bitterly.
“Edie. Where is he? What’s wrong with you?”
She stopped dead, so fast that he ran into her back. She turned on him, and her eyes, he was shocked to see, were wet.
“He saved you. He jumped on the dragon, even though he was hurt bad, and he saved you. Probably saved us both. And he told me what to do and how to get you to the Friar, and you know why? Because he was pretty sure the dragon would kill him. But he jumped in and saved you anyway. And you just turned your back and ran, and only now bother to ask about him. How selfish is that?”
He couldn’t believe her. He felt gut-punched. The Gunner couldn’t be dead.
“He can’t be dead,” he said.
“How would you know? You were too busy hailing taxis.”
“No,” he said quicker now, remembering. “If he gets back on his plinth by midnight, he’ll—he’ll recharge. He’ll heal. It’ll be all right. It’s how it works. If he’s on his plinth by turn o’day—”
“George.” Her voice hit his small flicker of hope like a bucket of ice-cold water. “He was having trouble walking
before
he jumped back on the dragon. He didn’t think he’d be all right. And I think he knew what he was doing. More than you, right? He was sacrificing himself to save us.
“But I didn’t—”
“No. I don’t want to hear what you ‘didn’t.’Save your breath and figure out what it is
you’re
going to sacrifice if we ever find this Stone Heart thing.”
“What?” He was still trying not to feel so awful about the Gunner.
“What the Sphinx said. ‘Your remedy lies in the Stone Heart, and the Heart Stone shall be your relief… . You must find the Stone Heart, and then you must make sacrifices and amends for that which is broken by putting on the Stone at the Heart of London that which is necessary for its repair.’she recited. “Or did you forget?”
“No.”
“Good. Because it’d be a bloody shame if you get to this stone, and he’s sacrificed himself to help you, and you still haven’t got a clue about what to do, wouldn’t it?”
“Hold on,” he said quickly. “If I’m such a pain, why did you come back?”
“Because he told me to look after you. Actually, he said we had to look after each other, but you’re as much use as a dolphin on a bicycle. …”
She turned and pulled ahead of him, and he was too busy trying to keep up to think of an answer. And what energy he did have left over for thinking was suddenly being used for thinking about the Gunner.
And the worst part of thinking about the Gunner and what he had done, was that he hadn’t done the one thing George knew people did to each other. He hadn’t let George down. George, on the other hand, had let him down. Grief and guilt are a nasty combination, and the more he absorbed them, the sadder and more exposed he felt, out here alone in the dark street with the black water to his right pulling at him as he tried to keep up with Edie.
T
he Gunner sat with his back propped against the wall of the church. He looked broken. The bridle chains lying beside him on the pavement still smoked. He was staring up Fleet Street. The dragon, no longer white-hot, was climbing up onto its plinth. It was clearly too worn out to fly. As it climbed, it looked, despite its lion’s body, more lizard-like than ever before.
“Well, that was something out of the quotidian, I’ll grant you that, Gunner.” Dictionary spoke without looking around. Like the Gunner, he was not going to take his eyes off the beast scaling its high plinth.
“Say again?” coughed the Gunner.
“I don’t see that every day,” Dictionary said, after a brief pause.
“You think he’s done, the dragon?”
“Most certainly not. It is not his nature to be done. It is his nature to guard. And, as with any guard, he will not long leave his post, lest whilst in the pursuit of one interloper he leaves the way open to another.”
“That right?”
“That is how he was made.”
“Well, what a maker meant, the made must mind, right?”
“So I have heard it said. So I feel it in my bones.”
“Got bones, have you?”
Dictionary paused. He jerked his head and barked wordlessly.
“Tchah
—I
feel
I have bones. Aching bones.”
“I know what you mean.”
The Gunner got to his feet painfully. He tucked the bridle chains into his belt.
The dragon’s head came up at the sound of metal clinking against metal, and there was a shadow of red in its eyes as it peered straight down the center of the street at them.
“He heard that,” Dictionary observed mildly.
“Then he’ll know me next time,” grunted the soldier.
“Where does your path take you?”
“The long path? I got no read on that. But tonight?” He stretched. Took a few steps that were really limps disguised as walking. “Tonight, like snakey there, I need to be on my stone for the day’s turn, or else …”
Dictionary looked at the clock sticking out from the facade of the Law Courts like an unexpected pub sign.
“Fewer than three hours to midnight.”
The Gunner dragged his eyes from the dragon and looked up at the jerking wigged figure.
“Better get a start, then. S’ only a couple of miles, but it feels like it’s gonna be a long slog after the going-over he gave me.”
“And the children?”
The Gunner suddenly sat down again, exhausted. He busied himself with attaching the bridle chains to his belt as if this was what he had sat down for. Actually, he was barely able to stand. He just didn’t want to talk about it. Dictionary watched him, unusually motionless, not twitching at all. A gray bird settled on his head and squittered white down the back of his jacket. When he spoke again his voice was flat and harsh as a church door slamming.
“And the
children,
Gunner?”
“What must be, must be. And I must get my breath, and be on my stone at turn o’day.”
The Gunner finally met his eye. “—The children are on their own.”
“Not if you send a pigeon.”
The Gunners head came up. He shook it to clear it. He wasn’t thinking straight. He should have thought of that.
“Well?” said Dictionary. “Is that not your conceit? Is that not how the brethren of military spits communicate between themselves?”
“Worked in the trenches. Works in London,” mumbled the Gunner. “You’re right. But I’ll need to get a—”
Dictionary raised his hand. The gray bird hopped off his wig and onto it. He slipped off his plinth and crossed to the Gunner. The Gunner nodded and pulled a stub of pencil from one pocket and a tiny roll of paper from the other. The effort exhausted him.
“Shall I?” said Dictionary, and exchanged the bird for the writing materials.
The Gunner sat against the cool stone, eyes closed, gently holding the bird as Dictionary wrote. Then he took the minute scroll from him and attached it to the bird’s leg. He breathed into its ear.
“All the Jaggers. All the soldiers. Watch out for gargoyles. You’re a messenger, not a taint’s teatime snack.”
He gently lifted his hands, and the gray wings fluttered and the bird lofted gently into the night sky.
The Gunner watched it disappear into the night.
“Thanks, Dictionary.”
Dictionary just handed him back the pencil and paper and harrumphed. The Gunner got to his feet.
“Better make a start.”
Dictionary watched him stagger off. The Gunner turned.
“If I don’t…”
Dictionary nodded.
“It’ll not be just Jaggers and soldier-spits keeping an eye out for the children, Gunner. You have my word.”
The Gunner held his eyes for a beat, then nodded back.
“A word from you. That’s a thing well worth having.” Dictionary inclined his head in something like a bow. “You do me a kindness. Godspeed.”