T
he gryphons didn’t seem to be following George and the Queen as the chariot raced along the river toward the looming sweep of Waterloo Bridge and the concrete bunker buildings that squatted theatrically beside it. George kept expecting the taints to suddenly accelerate into view behind them, so he stayed facing backward holding the Queen’s spear at the ready for just such an eventuality.
Something rolled against his leg, and he twisted around on reflex, but it was only the Perseus’s bag, which the Queen had thrown in the chariot next to the stone arm. He reached down and steadied it.
“Don’t open that,” snapped the Queen.
“I’m just stopping it from falling out!” he shouted back.
She reached back with her foot and pushed the bag forward against the inner wall of the chariot in front of her, treading on it to keep it in place. “Just don’t open it,” she said.
George scanned the sky behind him. The hairs on his neck were suddenly prickling upright, but the sky was empty, though he could have sworn that he heard something like wing flaps in the sky. He took a deep breath and told himself that he was getting jumpy.
“Why not?” he said, as the Queen pulled on the reins, sending the horses hard right up the slope of the approach road to the bridge proper.
She never got to answer, because at that point the four gryphons that had obviously been stalking them, low down and out of sight on the other side of the river wall, bounced up and over the parapet and yammered into the attack, eagle beaks snapping and shrieking as they came.
“Go!” yelled George, and heard the Queen crack the reins. The chariot picked up speed, but nowhere near enough to outrun the ice-sheathed taints, who slipped through the sky toward them with a bulletlike velocity.
Once more they fought in pairs, and as George stabbed the lance at the first one that came at his face, its partner dipped in and pecked at something behind him. George missed with the lance as the attacker flipped its wing and sheered off at the last moment. He saw the other as a blur on the edge of his vision, and expected to see it ripping at the Queen’s exposed back.
Instead he saw its talons closing on the stone arm at her feet.
“No!” he shouted, and without time to reverse the spear in his hands, slammed the blunt end of the haft into the back of its neck with all the strength he could muster. It squawked in outrage and turned to snap at him. He pulled back the spear haft and punched it into the gaping beak, right down the throat of the creature. Then he swiveled violently, pitchforking the gagging taint off the back of the chariot. It hit its partner just as it swooped in to the rescue, and the two gryphons were, for a moment, a whirling, snapping ball of ice and stone as they tried to disentangle from each other, before depth-charging into the snow in a great cloud of powder.
He staggered to keep his footing on the bucking chariot, which lurched badly sideways as the Queen crested the approach road to the bridge.
“George!” she shouted. He turned to see the third gryphon had flown in from the side and was taloning the stone arm away. George stomped his boot into the side of the gryphon’s head, buying himself just enough time to get his balance and retrieve the arm, which he did by grabbing its hand in his. As the gryphon darted in again, he swung the stone arm like a club, knocking the taint into the snow just ahead of the chariot.
The gryphon made the fatal mistake of raising its head to shriek at him in protest before launching itself into the counterattack an instant too late to avoid the whirling scimitar blade on the chariot wheel, which smithereened it into a savage hail of ice shards and stone fragments.
George rammed the stone arm into the space between the front wall of the chariot and the bag. “They’re trying to get the stone arm!” he shouted. “They’re trying to free the darkness.”
The Queen nodded and put her foot on it to keep it from rolling out.
“Behind you . . .”
He looked up to see that the three remaining gryphons were jinking into the attack. He stabbed at the leading one with the lance, and missed. The second one darted in, and he jabbed at it, only to have the third one attack as he was at the limit of his thrust.
It didn’t attack
him
, but grabbed the shaft of the spear instead, yanking it hard. It slipped out of his hand, but he managed to regain a grip only a foot from the end, which was almost worse than useless, because he had no way of controlling the spear at all, and it pulled once more, almost hoisting him off the back of the chariot altogether. The second gryphon rejoined the attack, and the two taints working together managed to easily twist and wrench the smooth pole out of his hands.
“They got the lance!” he shouted as the third one screeched and threw itself at his face once more.
He felt a sharp pain in his ear as the creature’s talons scraped past his cheekbone. Without thinking, he punched his open palm into the chest of the creature. Despite the jarring impact, he gripped on, and as he felt the heat flare in his hand, he had a deep and instantaneous impression of the flawed and grainy stone that the taint had been carved from. Again, without conscious thought, he sent the heat in his hand into the flaws and between the grainy matrices of the rock. As he twisted his grip he saw the taint wheel upside down in his grasp, and then disintegrate into three separate parts, which spun into the snow behind them.
The moment the stone fragments came to bits in his hand, he felt a wave of tiredness, like a physical blow. He looked down at his hand.
“Okay,” he said, breathing hard. “Okay.”
“Not okay,” said the Queen shortly. “Not okay at all.”
George looked back and saw what she had seen. The chariot was going too fast to get a good count, but nine or ten gryphons had bounced up and over the side of the bridge and were sweeping in at an angle to join the two remaining ones behind them.
“GO!” he shouted.
“They’re not the problem,” she shouted back. “Look ahead!”
He tore his eyes off the phalanx of shrieking gryphons accelerating toward them and looked ahead, over the plunging heads of the horses.
The end of the bridge was seventy long yards away, but not only was there no way they would make the other side of the river before the incoming gryphons tore into them, there was no safety there in any case.
There was worse than no safety.
There were two figures blocking their way.
The floor of the chariot was still lurching up and down, so his vision was blurred. One of the figures was indistinct, but the other one was unmistakeable.
It was a taint, and not just any taint.
A dragon.
Here I am again, thought George.
Between a rock and a hard place.
“Only one thing to do!” he shouted. “Keep going straight ahead.”
“I know,” said the Queen, smiling fiercely and snapping the reins hard. “Keep them off my back as long as you can.”
The horses must have sensed this was the end of the chase, or maybe it was because a light wind had blown some of the snow off the top surface of the bridge so that it was less deep, but whatever the reason, they picked up speed as they hit the down slope, so that the taints didn’t catch them quite as fast as George feared, but closed up in a solid menacing formation right behind them.
George heard a muffled
WHOOMF
from the dragon ahead of them, but he didn’t dare look around, for fear one of the gryphons would put on a sudden burst of speed and grab him. His shoulders tensed and he ducked down, hoping the front prow of the chariot would give some protection from the fireball he knew must be rushing toward them.
“Boy!” called the Queen, her hand reaching back and feeling for his shoulder.
“Ram it!” shouted George, out of ideas. “Just ram it.”
The Queen laughed, a wild and raw sound, so unexpected that George had a quick look behind him. “No need,” she whooped. “They’re opening the gate.”
George’s quick look turned into a long one. He was unable to move his eyes from the sight now blocking the end of the bridge.
It was a wall of fire; not just any fire, but a bright multicolored fire he had seen before. It was the wildfire of the true dragon, the Temple Bar Dragon. And the wall was no ordinary wall. It was the fiery re-creation of the old Temple Bar gate to the City that the Dragon had blown across George’s path a lifetime ago, or so it seemed. It rose in twisting spirals in front of his eyes, an elegant gatehouse on top of a broad double gate, which opened as they galloped toward it, just wide enough to let them through. And on the other side, George saw the Railwayman beckoning them urgently.
“I don’t . . .” began George.
“Nor do I.” The Queen laughed and cracked the reins one last time.
George spun and looked at the intent, furious line of gryphon faces straining to catch up with them—four, now three, now two yards behind.
And then there was a flash of light as the Queen stampeded her horses through the gate and the whole gatehouse flashed past on either side of them. George saw the double doors slam shut like the gates of hell, cutting off any view of their pursuers.
The gates bucked and jumped with the impact of the chasing taints slamming into the other side. As the Queen reined in, something bright and white snarled over George’s head and landed in front of the gates, tearing them open.
It was the Temple Bar Dragon, stoked up to a white heat of fury.
It jerked the gates open and looked at the twitching, stunned bodies of the gryphons lying in the snow beyond, where they had knocked themselves senseless. One unlucky gryphon shook its head, trying to clear it, and saw the Dragon looking down. The gryphon opened its beak to shriek defiance, but the Dragon just incinerated it with a blast of fire that jetted from its mouth like a hose. It swept the flames across all the figures until they were no more than featureless half-melted blobs of rock, scarcely recognizable as what they had once been.
And then it turned and looked at George.
George knew it was looking at him and no one else, because it coughed something that might have been a small and spark-enhanced laugh, and then very delicately traced a sign in the air, a mark that hung between them in thin slashes of fire for a full five seconds before blinking out.
George looked down at his hand, where the same mark had been slashed by the same talon. He held it up and showed it to the Dragon.
“Thanks,” he said. And because his brain was still catching up after their headlong flight, he added, “But I thought you were a taint. . . .”
The Dragon just bowed its head, very slightly.
“Dragon. Save. City. Must,” it said, the words sharp and disparate. “Maker. Save. City. Can.”
“Well . . .” began George.
“So. Dragon. Maker. Save,” it finished.
“It was old Dictionary talked it around,” said the Railwayman as the Queen reached down a hand and pulled him up on to the chariot. “Said he and the Dragon had always had the love of London in common. He said that they’d spent so many years looking at one another in the long hours of the night and talking about it that they were, in their own way, if not mates, sort of neighbors, like. Dictionary understood this chap’s been made to defend the city. And as you can see, he’s already been in a barney with some of the other dragons what didn’t have as strong a sense of their purpose as him. So he didn’t take much talking around at all, if you follow.”
George saw the Dragon cooling in front of him, the white heat flushing down to red and then pink and then back to a deep burnished gray in front of his eyes. And now that the bright glare of the heat was off him, he saw the rent in the Dragon’s wing and the half-torn-off ear.
“We must get going . . .” began the Queen, but George jumped off the back of the chariot, and without thinking why he was doing it, or how, he crossed to the Dragon and reached up a hand. The Dragon bowed its head, and he felt the torn ear. It was no warmer than a dog’s ear now, and unexpectedly soft to the touch. He gently pushed it back into place, closing the tear, and then he closed his eyes too and felt the metal beneath his touch. Where stone was granular, the metal was more like a fluid, as if he could feel the molten state that had flown into the mold.
“What’s he doing?” asked the Railwayman.
“Man’s work,” said the Queen. She nodded at the wall of ice murk visible over the rooftops. “And we must be on our way, for there shall be more need of healing before this is over. Come, George.”
George opened his eyes and saw he had mended the Dragon’s ear. It shook its head like a dog does, just to make sure everything was attached, and then it smiled, as much as a dragon can. It looked at the Queen as George went to work mending its wings.
“We. Both. Come.”
E
die and the Gunner had followed the Raven into the mirror held in the Gunner’s hand. They staggered out of the sunset light on the hospital roof and back into the dimly lit interior of the Black Friar’s pub, to find the Friar kneeling in front of one mirror with a candle held right against the glass, while Little Tragedy did the same on the other side of the arch. Edie’s breath plumed and her teeth started chattering as soon as her feet hit the carpet. The interior of the pub was now well below freezing, enveloped deep within the ice murk. As soon as Edie breathed in, the piercingly cold air burned her lungs and she instantly felt the hairs in her nostrils freeze up.
“Thank God!” breathed the monk. “You must go now! You cannot live long in here; we are mired in the murk, and the fire itself can scarce find purchase on this all-consuming cold.”
“Trafalgar Square,” said the Gunner, throwing an arm around Edie, who was already beginning to shake, despite her fur coat.
It wasn’t hard to see how close they were to having been stuck in the mirrors, as the glass was clouded by ice rime everywhere except where it was right next to the candle’s heat.
The Friar reached above his head and twisted the great rings of mosaic in the ceiling.
As the Raven came to perch on her shoulder and clacked in her ear, Edie understood he was switching the mirrors’ destinations from
When
to
Where
.
“Go now, and Godspeed,” bellowed the Friar. “Come and find us when this is over.”
“What?” squeaked Little Tragedy. “Come find us? Why? We shall be all right, shan’t we? Old Black? We shall be right as rain, yeah?”
“We shall find out.” The Friar shrugged. “This has never happened before. We shall stay put. As guardian I cannot leave.”
The Gunner nodded at him. “Be lucky, chum.” He smiled and pulled Edie into the mirror.
“Th-th-thanks,” stuttered Edie as she looked back. It was so cold she was getting a brain-freeze just breathing, and she thought her teeth might just shatter like fine porcelain as they clattered together uncontrollably in her shivering jaw.
They fell into the blackness.
The Friar bent to pick up the candle that he’d left propped against the mirror, and then looked up as something brushed quickly past him. Whatever it was moved so fast that its slipstream guttered the candle in passing, and it blinked out, unable to fight off the surrounding cold. The Friar tutted and reached backward.
“The matches . . .” he said, and turned to find no reply, and no Little Tragedy either, just a lone candle and a box of matches on the floor in front of the other mirror, too far away to keep the frost from glazing over the last teardrop-shaped patch of clear mirror. He realized only then what had brushed past him and followed the others into the mirrors.
“You imp,” said the Friar sadly, and sat cross-legged between the two mirrors, scraping slowly at the matchbox with fingers that were now starting to shake badly.
The first thing Edie saw when they tumbled out of the mirrors was that they were in another pub. The second thing she saw was that it was thankfully light outside. And then the Gunner opened the doors, and the third thing she saw was the square beyond.
Trafalgar Square was, of course, covered in snow, but what was most striking was how crowded it was.
Spits were spread right across the great piazza, from the top, where they lined the balustrades along the terrace outside the classical portico of the National Gallery, right down to the traffic island facing Admiralty Arch and the long sweep of open avenue leading to the palace beyond.
“Wow,” she said.
The Gunner blew out his cheeks and exhaled in wonder. “That,” he said, “is quite something. I never knew there was so many of us.”
“
Gack
,” said something that bounded toward them from the side. They turned to see Spout bobbing and smiling at them. He flapped to the top of a gray pillar and waved his wing at the center of the crowd at the lower end of the piazza, next to the foot of the tall column.
“Eigengang!”
he screeched.
“Eigengang. Goung gint! Gear. Gook gear!”
He jabbed his wing emphatically downward at Edie and the Gunner as they walked out of the shadow of the pub door.
“Eigeng—”
Spout began, bouncing up and down in barely controlled excitement, only to stop abruptly as something white trickled down his forehead. His eyes rolled up to find the Raven perched nonchalantly between his ears, adjusting its feathers, before squinnying a second splatter onto the cat-gargoyle’s head.
“I think he thinks you should calm down,” said the Gunner, looking up. Spout hissed and shook himself. The Raven floated off into the air and coasted behind Edie as she hurried toward the boy running up the square in her direction.
Although she knew who he was the moment she laid eyes on him, there was something about him that had changed. She couldn’t figure out exactly what it was, but he not only looked older but he seemed to carry himself completely differently—taller, like he wasn’t trying to hide or somehow excuse his height or the breadth of his shoulders anymore.
What it was, she realized, was that he was no longer turned in on himself, hunched around an apology for what he was. Even his face looked different, with his hair now pushed back out of his eyes, so different that she could scarcely remember the worried and regretful boy she had taken such a firm dislike to so long ago on the parking ramp to the garage under the park. It was also the look in his eyes. He still looked worried, but it was a capable worry. It was the worry of someone who was dealing with something bigger than himself.
“Edie!” shouted George, raising a hand. “We need you. We’ve got a dragon, but we need you!”
And as she walked toward him, oblivious to the interested glances of the forest of spits of all shapes and sizes she was passing, George in turn was struck by the change in Edie. The Raven on her shoulder was one thing, but he’d seen that before. He’d seen the confident stride and the jutting jaw too. What he hadn’t really seen was this smile. It was easy and unforced and matched by a level look in her eyes that was both straight and just tinged with enough of a sparkle of humor at the back of it to make his stomach flip.
Thank God you’re okay, he thought. But what he said was: “What took you so long?”
She pointed at his bare arm. “What happened to your sleeve?”
They stood there and, with interruptions from the Gunner and the Queen and occasionally Spout, quickly brought each other up-to-date with their adventures. George told her that the High Admiral had been watching the City ever since dawn had broken, and that he was sure the taints had all congregated on Tower 42, the black skyscraper in the distance, turning it into a citadel in the sky. He had used his telescope and seen a figure pacing the icy battlements, who he did not recognize. They both agreed this must be the Ice Devil. George omitted to tell her that the Admiral had remarked how from certain angles, the figure, though larger, had reminded him of the Walker.
As George explained about the ambush at the river and how they had been unable to find the mirror, Edie saw the Queen looking at her. Something passed between them that was beyond words. The light in Edie’s eyes dimmed a bit as George rolled on, but by the time he had explained about the Temple Bar Dragon, and pointed out where it was now perched next to the High Admiral on the top of the column, she had taken a deep breath and combed her fingers back through her hair and was doing something to it behind her head.
George looked down from the Dragon to see her face unguarded by the normal shifting curtains of hair, and just as she had seen the rightness of his face now that she could see all of it, so he smiled despite himself as he saw her face clearly.
“What?” she growled.
“Nothing,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” she said. “Braiding this mess. If I’ve got to get wet and look for this mirror, I’m not going to need my hair in my eyes, am I?”
He flashed the memory of her drowning face in the ice hole, a long flag of dark hair slashed across her white face like a strip of seaweed, and he understood the courage it took for her to make light of what she was going to have to do.
“No,” he said. “You’re not. You know what else you don’t need?”
“What?” she said, bridling.
“Guts,” he said, clapping her on the arm. “I reckon you’ve got them to spare.”
“Enemy ahead!” came a ringing seaman’s bellow from above. “Prepare to repel boarders!”
The High Admiral, a tall stone figure in a cocked hat worn broadside on, was pointing his sword to the east.
“The sky’s black with the devils!”
The Queen gripped Edie’s arm. “We must go now!”
Suddenly there was no time for good-byes as Edie ran and jumped up into the chariot next to her.
“Spout!” shouted George. “Go with them. Look after them. Keep an eye on the sky.”
“
Gack
,” croaked the cat-gargoyle, and spread its wings.
“Edie,” shouted George as the Queen urged her horses into motion. “Good luck.”
“I’ll find it,” she called back. “You just try to stay alive long enough to work out how we’re going to get up there to use it!”
“Okay,” he yelled to the disappearing chariot and the girl’s hand raised in farewell.
“Or just stay alive,” she said quietly, and turned to steady herself on the front wall of the chariot as the Queen recklessly flung her horses straight down the steps, heading for the river.