T
he moment George stepped off the parapet of the river walk and out into the empty air, the falling snow stopped tumbling to the water below and started to land on the invisible surface of the Impossible Bridge, all around him.
It felt weird as his leading foot felt unexpectedly solid ground, where his eyes saw nothing but a long drop. But by the time his other foot touched down, the few snowflakes that had already landed were ghosting an outline of solidity beneath him.
“Right,” he said.
He took a last look back. Ariel was standing on one foot in midair, her filmy clothing fluttering about her in the gentle breeze, which seemed to blow everywhere she went. She raised a hand and gave George a surprisingly wide smile.
“Well done, boy, for much more is always lost by fleeing fate than facing it. I wish you well, whatever the outcome.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I think.”
I am your worst fear. Will you face me
? boomed the Dark Knight, in a voice like a thunderclap.
George felt the vibrations of sound hit him head-on as he kept walking forward. He kept going because he knew something the darkness clearly didn’t: his worst fear had been about his dad. He had worried that he’d died thinking George had meant the last angry words he’d flung at him, unaware they were to be their last words; that he’d died thinking George didn’t love him. He’d lived with the fear that this had somehow been responsible for his dad’s death. But he’d faced that fear when he’d stood the Gunner’s watch on the memorial. He’d faced it and it had evaporated.
So now he decided that he’d feel frightened but just not show it. And as he moved forward, it seemed to be working. He heard his dad’s voice saying sometimes you just had to walk the walk, even when it was the last thing you felt like doing, and how it actually helped, because once your feet started walking, your heart and your brain had no choice but to follow. He hadn’t understood it then, but now that he was doing it, he knew exactly what it meant.
“Yes,” he said.
Are you ready to face your fear
? repeated the Knight as George walked right up to the lance.
And then there was no chance to turn around, because he was too close, and he had stepped past the tip of the lance, reaching for the horse’s head.
“Yeah,” he said. “But why is my fear hiding?”
And though his flesh crawled at what his good hand was doing, he plunged his fingers into the eyeholes, through the dark smoke curling out of them, and took a firm grip. He looked up into the eye slits of the Dark Knight’s helmet, and tried to clear his mind as he felt with his hand. The hand tingled, as it had when he mended Spout’s wing, only this time he was not feeling for the place where sundered stone fragments wished to rejoin. He was feeling for the flaws in the metal, the places the welding was weakest. He felt the heat in his hand radiate through the outer sheets of metal. The Knight must have felt it too, because he tried to back up the horse.
What are you doing, boy
? he roared.
“Using a making hand to mar,” said George. “Like this.”
And he closed his eyes, felt the flaw in the welding, and with the next toll of the bell he flexed his muscles and ripped the armored front clean off the face of the Night Mare within.
“HA!”
There was the sound of a great invisible host roaring in approval and smashing their weapons against their shields like a thunderclap, followed a beat later by a crack of lightning. And in the lightning George saw that the Dark Knight had not ridden alone. Rather, he had ridden as the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild had ridden, before the darkness had taken him over and filled the hollow shell of the man and horse with the blackness of the Night Mare.
Unknown to himself, the Dark Knight had ridden with all the Knights of the Cnihtengild, the phantom band of war-scarred horsemen now ranged on each side of the Impossible Bridge.
The Dark Knight saw them at the same time, and reined his horse backward toward the City shore. As they reversed, the darkness smoked forward in wisps leaking from the exposed inner void of the horse’s skull.
Now you die
, screamed the darkness.
Now the light goes out
.
And he kicked the charger forward, the sharp lance point barreling in through the big flakes of falling snow, straight toward George’s heart.
The bell tolled again, and in the flash that came with it, George saw the Cnihtengild. He saw that every battle-hardened face was looking at him, not the Dark Knight, to see if he would stand.
What they didn’t know was that he had passed the moment when he would let himself run.
He’d taken the leap of faith.
All that remained, he thought, was the landing.
He braced one leg at an angle behind himself, twisting his hips so that his chest remained head-on to the Knight.
Death whistled toward the core of his being, his heart pounding in time with the horse’s hoofbeats.
And in the moment before impact, he realized he had never, ever felt so calm.
This was it.
In what felt like a life spent running, this was the great unavoidable.
And as he faced it, he abruptly stopped feeling alone.
He stopped feeling like a lonely boy of thirteen summers.
He felt older, much older, almost ancient, and stronger than any one person could ever be.
He felt the great weight of every earlier George, every Chapman, every mother, every father down the long centuries who had lived before him and struggled and made and endured to bring their line to this point in the world, and they were all somehow standing with him, their shoulders to his.
It was as if that long line of dead men and women had shouted a great “Yes!” and stamped their feet in approval as he straightened his back and hacked his heel into the ground.
And then it was over.
His stone arm snapped up and caught the tip of the lance dead center in the open palm of his outspread hand.
The impact and the forward momentum of the horse and rider jarred the breath out of him and jolted him so badly that his jaw jumped and he bit the side of his tongue by mistake. They slammed him at least twenty feet, but he kept his leg braced and held his footing. A great pile of snow built up behind his foot as it plowed backward.
And then the horse stopped.
George looked up.
“That it?” he said, and spat a thin twist of blood into the snow at his side.
The tip of the lance had fused into the stone of his hand.
He looked along the long length of the great spear, into the black eyes smoking out of the Knight’s helmet.
“Now. You want me to tell you about
your
fear? Because I can.”
The Knight tried to jerk his lance free, but George closed his open fingers into a fist that gripped it like a vise.
“I can feel your fear. You need a shape. You have no form to exist in within our world, so you need a shape, because without it you would be nothing. And you know what?”
He spat sideways without breaking eye contact, so he missed the second red star that bloomed in the snow as his spittle hit it.
“I’ve been frightened of a lot of things, too many things, in fact. But even I can’t figure out why I should be afraid of nothing.”
I am nothing. I am everything
, screamed the darkness leaking out of the horse’s torn headpiece.
“No,” said George, thinking of the Stone Corpse. “You’re not everything. You’re just fear and pain and evil. And that isn’t everything. I mean, it may be where you come from, but not here. In this world everything balances: like for like, ill for ill, good for evil, and for every dragon . . . ? Guess who?”
And with that he bent the tip of the lance into a right angle and jerked the Knight, who was trying to backpedal the horse, forward and right out of his saddle.
“HA!”
The bell tolled, and the Cnihtengild moved as one, engulfing the Dark Knight. And as the bell continued to toll, in the accompanying flashes George saw them hacking and ripping at the fallen Knight. He heard the darkness shrieking in rage and then something like terror, and he felt the lance gripped in his stone fist begin to shake more and more as less and less of the darkness was left with a place to be.
The Cnihtengild were ripping great panels off the black shape and throwing them aside. As they did so the darkness lost its form and twisted and flowed into the remaining sections of the statue, desperately seeking a way to stop dissipating.
It flowed into the arm holding the lance, then on into the hand. The metal bulged and buckled as too much darkness tried to find a shape within too little space. Then the darkness swelled into the thin lance, twisting as it rammed itself farther inside, so that the metal writhed and fattened like a snake. The Cnihtengild tore the metal plates of the arm apart and wrenched open the hand, so that for an instant the darkness flared and leaked out of the end of the lance like some exotic bloom. Then George felt the pain in his hand explode, as the darkness forced itself from the lance tip into his arm.
In the instant of shock, he stared at the darkness entering the white limestone fist, trying to find fissures and veins in which it could hide and take form, and he knew exactly why the last vein had been made of this stone and no other. It was exactly the same white gritty limestone as that of the London Stone, the Stone where he had refused to make a sacrifice, the Stone where he had chosen the Hard Way. He choked out a savage bullet of laughter through the pain coursing up his arm, along with the darkness.
“Come on, then!” he gasped.
The darkness couldn’t flow fast enough through the narrow tip embedded in his hand. In a flash of light as the bell tolled, George saw one of the Cnihtengild swing the savagely nicked blade of a great battle-ax down on the lance, severing it in the middle.
Darkness poured out and writhed in the air, like a many-headed hydra, each blind tentacle swirling about, trying to find somewhere to be, to take shape in.
“Come on!” sobbed George as a new and sharp pain tore across his chest and arm, and the stone kicked and buckled beneath his clothes with a horrid life all of its own. And then there was a tremendous ripping noise as the shoulder ripped out of his shirt and the two coats he was wearing, and the stone that had spread across his chest began to unfurl and peel back like an answering bloom to the dark flower at the other end of the arm and lance that connected them.
The pain was like an enormous plaster that had been stuck to his skin being slowly pulled off. It was too acute for him to even cry out in protest as he watched the stone flare off his shoulder into matching tendrils that reached out to the darkness beyond.
He just stared openmouthed, his whole body trembling in shock as the stone and the darkness met and whirled around each other, like two strange sea creatures, a black and a white squid twisting and squirming around each other in a titanic struggle for supremacy.
There was a final ripping noise and a jerk of excruciating agony, and then the darkness and the stone were wrestling horribly on the ground as George backed away, shaking with the knowledge that the stone arm had been ripped off.
He knew he couldn’t survive that.
And then he felt the last thing he expected. A small warm hand slipped into his and squeezed. It squeezed the right hand, the one he was sure had been ripped off. He looked down and saw his own hand, red and raw from where the stone had unpeeled itself, but flesh and blood. In it a golden hand.
“Good, boy,” whispered a voice in his ear; and as he tried to look at the source of the warm breath making all the hairs on his neck suddenly and inexplicably stand to attention, she was gone in a flash of gold, soaring into the sky above the struggling stone and darkness.
The stone jerked and snapped and then inexorably tightened around the darkness, squeezing it within itself. It was, in the end, an uneven fight because the darkness needed a shape more than it needed to win; because if it had destroyed the stone, it would have been left without a way or a place to be. There was a final wrench, and the last thin tendrils died back into the evolving shape of the stone, and all there was left to see was the white limestone twisting and flexing into the shape it had adopted before flaying itself free of George’s body. Then all was still on the snow-covered bridge, and George stood panting, looking down at a stone arm lying at his feet, surrounded by the discarded plates of armor that had once been the Last Knight of Cnihtengild, and the dead body of the Duke’s horse. All the darkness had left the statues, and the jumbled fragments of the Knight’s glass-inlaid surcoat once more blazed clear blue every which way out into the air around them, so that George appeared to be standing in a thicket of lights as he bent down and picked up the arm.
The bell had ceased to toll, but in the glow from the Last Knight’s armor George could see the ghost band of the Cnihtengild panting with their exertion, resting on their saddlebows, looking at him.
“Take the horse back to its plinth, and then take the Knight and
his
horse home,” he said, pointing at the shattered fragments of the statues. “The darkness that took them over wasn’t their fault.”
Ariel dropped out of the sky and looked quizzically at him.
“He deserves to live to fight another day,” said George.
“HA!” roared the Cnihtengild. George thought he saw them raise their weapons in salute, and then he definitely saw them dismounting and picking up the fragments of armor.
“Good,” he said. The weight of the stone arm in his hand felt almost too great to carry even the short way back to the chariot.
“It was fated,” said Ariel.
“Maybe,” said George, climbing back over the wall onto the Embankment, “but this isn’t over, is it? There’s the Ice Devil, and he looks like a bigger problem altogether.”
“I am a mere minister of fate. That’s not my job. . . .” Ariel shrugged.
“Yeah,” he said, climbing into the chariot and feeling the cold biting at his one bare arm, making him feel strangely lopsided. It was a good feeling, he reckoned, given that it meant he still had two flesh-and-blood arms.