E
die was drowning again. She felt the horrible ache of exhaustion in her leg muscles as she tried to run in the snow, which covered the ice beneath her. She winced at the burning pain in her lungs as she rasped for breath in the cold night air. She heard the Walker chasing her down, his breath coming in harsh ugly counterpoint to the crump of his boots pounding heavily through the dense snowpack behind her.
Despite herself, she turned again to see him, just enough to recognize his silhouette backlit by the flaming torches of the Frost Fair fire reflecting off the gutting blade that he held low to his side as he ran. And as she looked back, knowing she shouldn’t but not quite remembering why, she felt the sickening lurch once more as her shoe plunged down into nothing, where the treacherous hole in the ice was lying in wait for her unseeing foot.
Knowing what was happening, she threw her arms wide, trying to stop herself on the sides of the ice hole, but as time slowed and she fell into the dark water, she realized with another jolt that the Walker, the Frost Fair, and London itself had mysteriously disappeared entirely.
She twisted as she plunged into the water in a treacly slow motion and saw that there was suddenly no ice at all, and that the only hole was the one she was making in a gunmetal sea that stretched to the horizon all around her.
She had enough time to note the way the small waves caught the moon, their interlocking surfaces like a wilderness of knapped flint heaving slowly in the moonlight—and then her face hit the water and the shock of the cold slapped her back into normal speed, and she was fighting to get back to the air with a mouthful of salt water.
She struggled to swim up through a vortex of bubbles, but no matter how hard she kicked and pulled for the surface, the black water pulled her down and down, until there was nothing left to make bubbles with, and only the sound of her blood pounding in her ears. Her lungs ached with the effort of keeping the last breath inside her as they burned every last bit of oxygen. And this time there was no Gunner to rescue her or drop a heart stone through the hole in the ice to light her way; only death closing in all around her.
Her last thought was to reach into her pocket and pull out her mother’s heart stone, which she did with numb fingers, thickened and made clumsy with cold. She held it in front of her eyes, but it had ceased to blaze forth any inner fire and was as lightless as the water around her. She caught only the reflection of her own staring eyes and the long hair ribboning across her pale face like tendrils of seaweed, binding her to the blackness that surrounded her.
She opened her mouth to scream “No!” as the last air in her lungs burst for the surface far above, and the icy water entered in its place and started drowning her. Then she woke.
She gasped for breath and tried to sit up, but a firm hand pushed her gently back among the pillows and blankets as her mind came out of the dream and returned to a world no less strange but—in this moment and this place—better and safer.
The Queen smiled down at her. Edie saw the comforting curve of the wide stone arch above, the large square-cut stones uplit by the flames from the fire burning at her side.
“A dream, child. A bad dream, no more. Sleep. You are safe. For now.”
Edie remembered her mother’s heart stone. She scrabbled it out of her pocket and was relieved to see it still had the spark of fire at its core. It had only died in her dream. She clenched it in her fist and lay back in the cocoon of stolen hotel duvets and pillows.
“I was drowning.”
The Queen smoothed Edie’s hair from her face, in a mother’s unconscious gesture that Edie felt like a sharp pang of something from her past.
“We are all drowning, child. The world is drowning. And there are other ways to drown than in water. But you shall not die tonight. You are among friends.”
Edie looked around. The weird romance of the scene struck her. Maybe it was the fire and the stone and the snowstorm beyond, but it was both otherworldly and ancient. The Queen’s daughters stood over the flames, talking quietly in the red glow. Beyond them the Gunner leaned on a stone at one side of the arch, relaxed but alert, looking out into the night, his large hands unconsciously playing with the two small mirrors they’d used to travel back from the Frost Fair, like a man practicing a coin trick. And when Edie moved her head, she could see the Officer on guard on the other side, his long coat belted around him, collar up. The crackling fire threw bright sparks swirling into the air and illuminated the snowflakes falling just beyond the warm glow of the arch.
There was a grunt and a snuffle from beside her, and she looked over to see George fast asleep in his own cocoon of white duvets, the mad-bomber hat pulled low over his eyes. Edie smiled as he snored.
They had sat up late before going to sleep, and Edie had been touched, although she hadn’t shown it, by the horror he had showed as she told him about her misadventures with the Walker and her drowning at the Frost Fair.
“You like the boy,” said the Queen.
“Yeah. But not like that,” said Edie without thinking. “He saved me. He’s . . . like . . .” She stopped and searched for a word she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It was a word she didn’t use much, which made it all the more surprising when it found itself and popped out without her being able to control it.
“. . . family.”
The moment the word came out she knew it was right, and she wished she’d had the sense to bite her tongue to stop it escaping. Somewhere inside she knew she’d betrayed herself.
“You trust him?”
“Much as I trust anyone, yeah, suppose I do,” she said, and then shivered as a chill passed through her.
“You’re cold, child. Let the girls warm you.”
Edie looked over at the two girls standing close to the fire as their mother waved them over.
“You feel the cold?” she asked.
“We feel it. We just don’t mind it as much as flesh and blood does.” The Queen smiled. “Besides, the girls aren’t warming themselves for themselves. They’ve been warming themselves for the both of you. Bronze absorbs heat well.”
The daughters lay down on either side of Edie and grinned at her. She felt warmth coming off them in waves.
“Like radiators,” she said.
“We’ve been called many things before,” said the girl on her left.
“But a radiator is a new thing.” The one to her right laughed.
Edie felt she’d said something rude, and though saying rude things was not anything she normally gave two hoots about, she didn’t want to be impolite to these girls or their mother. After all, they’d saved her too. And more than that, she liked their quietness. It was a very strong kind of quietness. They made no fuss, but they were obviously tough and fearless and very brave. Edie wasn’t used to seeing people she wanted to be like, so she didn’t know how to behave.
“It’s not a bad name. I mean, I don’t mean it like that. I reckon it’s like radiant, right? And radiant means, you know . . .”
And here she found herself blushing and hating herself for it.
“Beautiful,” said the Queen.
“Yeah. But I mean that sounds soppy. I don’t know, sort of weak,” Edie fumbled on.
“There’s nothing weak about beauty, child,” snapped the Queen. “The only weakness in it is if you think it means anything important. The ugliest thing in the world is a beautiful woman without the brains or courage to know that it is nothing more than an accident.”
Edie kept quiet.
“Now sleep. We will watch over you from without, and within; may Andraste guard you in your dreams.”
The warmth from the two girls at her side was making Edie finally drowsy again. “Who’s Andraste?” she murmured.
“She is the goddess of the Iceni, moon mother, maiden, thread-cutter, Lady of the Silver Wheel, and Victory herself. May her far-seeing eye watch over you in the blackness of sleep, and may her wings of comfort heal you.”
“And who are the Iceni?” asked Edie, her eyes closing.
The Queen spoke very softly. “We are, child. My daughters and I are the last of the Iceni, one of the greatest tribes of this island, made to stand again long after our true memories had faded from the earth.” She looked to the distance and shook her head. “Once I was Boadicea, queen of thousands. Now we are but three. But once? Once we were something.”
“You’re still something,” mumbled Edie. And then she fell asleep.
The Queen watched her with a slight smile on her usually austere face until Edie’s breathing became regular. Then she stood decisively.
“She’s asleep.”
“Good,” said the Gunner, squinting back into the light as his eyes adjusted from watching the outer darkness.
The Queen’s face had lost all traces of the smile, and her voice was low and urgent.
“Wake the boy. Things are worse than we feared.”
L
ong, long ago, before history started and the wildness of the world was tamed, there was a great struggle between the light that gave life, and the darkness that walked the earth spreading ignorance and hatred, feeding off the terror it left in its wake. Only after a long and brutal fight did light win this struggle and pen the darkness deep in the rocky heart of the world.
Ages later, but still long before the time of the Romans or even the Druids that came before them, the people of the island needed a sacred stone. And the place where they went to hack that stone from the living rock was the place where the darkness had been defeated. They went there because they knew it was a sacred place, but they had forgotten why, or they would have chosen a different spot and a better stone. But because the struggle between light and the darkness had happened so long before their distant ancestors had even been born, the memories of precisely why the place was sacred had been lost. And so the Stone was carved from the earth, and when it was moved to its new place, the darkness went with it.
And the darkness stayed imprisoned in the Stone.
And waited.
It waited close to a crossing place, where a broad slope of wooded land latticed with streams met the broad river to its south. It waited through the long fall of centuries and watched those virgin woods retreat as the men built a hamlet, then a village, then a bridge and a town. It waited while the town spread all around it, stealing more and more of the woods and the hidden green spaces within them. It waited and watched as the town rose and fell, was burned and rebuilt, and grew more bridges on either side of that first crossing. It waited while the town grew to a city as wood and thatch gave way to stone and brick. And it watched brick and stone in their turn give way to steel and glass as the quiet river crossing that had become a great growling beast of a city ran out of land and rose up to steal the sky in its stead.
It waited because it knew that one day it would again walk free, and it also knew that while stone itself does not last forever, it lasts much, much longer than people or their memories do, and it knew that one day something would happen to release it.
And then, in the moment when the Ice Devil came to the city, stopping time so violently that all the people disappeared and permanent winter came on its tail, the darkness knew the long wait had ended.
It knew it even before the Ice Devil passed over its stony prison and frost-shattered it open.
But still it waited. It didn’t wait because waiting had become its habit over the aeons it had been pent in the Stone. It had simply forgotten the shape in which it had once moved in the world, just as someone confined to a hospital bed for a long time forgets how to move their legs.
It waited because now that the long imprisonment was over, it needed just a fragment, the tiniest mote of extra time to start remembering.
Snow and silence filled the anonymous stretch of Cannon Street. The only place the flakes did not stay was on the ornate grille in front of the Stone. When the flakes landed on the hot metal they melted instantly in a tiny hiss.
And then the Stone caught the scuff of hooves and the cautious tread of hobnailed boots. And the darkness coiled within it, a great fiend ready to spring.
“I’m only saying,” grumbled the Young Soldier, “that my boots is hurting.”
“Your boots is always hurting,” replied his older companion. “Give it a rest and keep your eyes peeled. If old Hooky up there hears you whining, there’ll be merry hell to pay.”
They were following the hook-nosed Duke as he slowly moved his horse forward, cautiously snaking his way past the snow-covered cars frozen in the middle of the street. His sword was drawn and held at his side. He looked calm but ready for anything that might surprise him.
He stopped alongside a double-decker bus, raising himself a little higher in the saddle, as if sniffing something on the wind.
“’Old up,” said the Old Soldier.
“If he’s the general,” said the Young Soldier, scratching himself, “what’s he doing out front, up the sharp end?”
The Old Soldier sighed and took advantage of the pause in their forward progress to pull a battered pipe from the chest pocket in his battle dress. He stuck it in his mouth and sucked on it reflectively.
“Well, young ’un. It ain’t like we haven’t had this conversation before, is it?”
“I’m just . . .”
“You’ve just got a memory like a bleeding sieve is what it is. First off, he’s cavalry, see, and in his day cavalry went out in front and done the forward scouting. Secondly, he don’t quite trust us, which looking at you I can’t help thinking he’s half right about. And finally, he’s a hundred percent copper-bottomed, writ-up-in-the-history-books, kicked-Boney-in-the-arse-at Waterloo, fire-eating hero, isn’t he?”
“But ain’t we heroes?” whispered the Young Soldier.
“I dunno,” said the Old Soldier, “but I do know we’re mincemeat if he hears you rabbiting on like this, and that’s a fact.”
He nodded toward the Duke, who was leaning forward on his horse, craning for a view around the front of the bus. Something on the other side of the street was getting his full attention. He reached back and silently waved the soldiers forward.
“Come on,” said the Old Soldier, gripping his pipe between his teeth in a grimace of unwelcome anticipation. “Keep your cakehole shut and stay low.”
They ducked below the snow-laden roofs of the cars and low-ran quickly forward to the bus. The Duke backed his horse a couple of paces and leaned down to talk quietly to them.
“Something’s got my horse spooked,” he said as he smoothed the neck of the large stallion. The soldiers could see it was trembling, and it pawed skittishly on the ground as the Duke continued. “Something over there.”
They peered through the windows in the bus, trying to see across the street.
“Nothing what I can see,” began the younger soldier, looking around. “Where are we anyway?”
“Cannon Street,” replied the Old Soldier.
“There’s nothing on Cannon Street,” said the Young Soldier. “No taints what I can think of, nothing except . . .”
“The London Stone,” said the Duke calmly, nodding across the street. “Over there.”
The Old Soldier peered through the frost-rimed glass of the bus window. He couldn’t see much, and what he could see was bleary and indistinct. He turned to find the Duke looking at him. One of the things that made the Duke such an uncomfortably good leader—if you were a follower—was that he seemed to be able to give orders without actually speaking them. The Old Soldier nodded and cleared his throat quietly.
“I, er, could crawl over and have a look-see. . . .”
“Ah, if you’d be so kind.” The Duke nodded. “I’d be much obliged.”
The Old Soldier pocketed his pipe, dropped to his knees, and crawled around the rear of the bus. He edged forward through the snow, his zigzag route dictated by the need to keep cars between him and the Stone until he could get close enough to get a better look.
Only once did he pause and look back, and as soon as he saw that the others could still see him, he gave them a thumbs-up, put his finger to his lips, and continued on until only a taxi stood between him and the strip of pavement in front of the London Stone’s cage.
He tried to look under the taxi, but the snow was already too deep. So he quietly propped his rifle against the side of the vehicle and reached up to the passenger door handle.
“What’s he doing?” breathed the Young Soldier, voice suddenly cracking with tension.
The Duke put a hand on his shoulder. “He’s doing a damn fine job, youngster. Using all available cover, if I’m any judge. . . .”
The Old Soldier quietly opened the passenger door and crawled inside the taxi. The only thing between him and the ten feet of clear air separating him from the Stone was the thin glass of the side window. He calmly turned the peak of his cap backward, and lifted himself off the floor just high enough for his eye to sneak a peek over the lintel of the window.
“Bloody hell,” he whispered.
Maybe something heard him. Or maybe it was just coincidence, but at that moment there was a noiseless detonation and everything seemed to jump, just an inch or so, and then all was still again.
“What was that?” said the Young Soldier nervily.
“Steady,” whispered the Duke, raising his sword.
Because the rest of the city was so silent, they heard the snow moving before they saw it.
The Young Soldier looked down at his boots. “Er . . .” he began.
The Duke reined in his horse, which had skittered sideways.
“I see it. . . .” he breathed. At their feet all the snow was moving. Because there was no wind, the effect was not of the flakes being blown, but more like them being sucked beneath the bus, toward the Stone. “I see it, but I’m damned if I know what it is.”
The Old Soldier crouched in the back of the taxi, staring in disbelief at the Stone. From where he was watching he could see that snow was being pulled into it, or more precisely, into a thick black crack that had split the Stone from top to bottom. Blackness emerged like a slow-motion gush of oil, which came out as the snow was sucked across the ground into the crack, as if to take its place. Where the darkness met the ornate iron cage guarding the Stone, it simply dissolved the metal.
The blackness flowed across the pavement toward the cab. Indeed, by the time the Old Soldier had noticed this, he couldn’t see if there was still time to get out and escape.
“God ’elp us!” he swore, and started to back out of the cab.
He looked down before he put his foot on the road, which was lucky. A thickening stripe of blackness, darker than oil, was now moving purposefully across the ground, sucking in all light and reflecting nothing back, like a tear in the fabric of all that is, through which could be seen the outer darkness. It had already flowed beneath the taxi and was moving steadily toward the bus, as if it had a mind of its own.
Perhaps the Old Soldier already sensed that the darkness flowing beneath him did have something like a mind, because he hesitated an instant before calling to the others.
“Oi,” he shouted. “Move yourselves. There’s something coming under the bus!”
“What?” said the Young Soldier. “What kind of something?”
“Move back now!” ordered the Duke, tugging on his horse’s reins. The horse responded instantly, dropping slightly onto its powerful haunches and beginning to corkscrew around and leap away, when it suddenly jerked to an abrupt halt.
The Duke kept on going. He slid off the saddle and tumbled down the flank of the horse, into a snowdrift in a very un-ducal jumble of cloak, boots, and flailing sword.
“Bedamn and blast the blockheaded booby who made me stirrupless!” he exploded, stumbling to his feet with the reins still held tight in his hand.
The horse shrieked, and the Duke was nearly yanked off his feet as it reared in terror.
“Steady boy!” he cried, instantly forgetting his own recent indignity as he tried to calm the frightened animal.
“It’s got him by the hoof!” shouted the Young Soldier, pointing in horror.
The Duke stepped back, narrowly avoiding a flailing foreleg as the horse attempted to break free from the darkness spiraling up its back legs in fast-moving black tendrils. The tendrils did not wind around the skin of the animal. They seemed to leach into it and replace its very substance, as if the darkness were replacing the metal body and taking its shape, like ink filling a bottle. The Duke stared in a mix of horror and outrage as the clean bronze curves of his horse were devoured from within by a black darker than coal.
“By God, it shall not have him!” roared the Duke. He leaped to the rear of the animal and slashed his sword at the thickest tendril of darkness reaching out from under the bus, joining the horse to the split in the Stone across the street.
The sword stuck fast in the darkness with an impact that all but jarred it out of the Duke’s hand, and then a side tendril sprouted from the main one leaching into the horse and moved up the blade.
“No sir, you shall not have my damn sword either!” spat the Duke in cold fury as he jerked at his blade, snapping it cleanly two-thirds of the way down, where the darkness met the untainted metal.
CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK
. He heard the sound of rifle fire from across the street. He took one last despairing glance at his horse—now darkness all the way to its heaving neck. The horse lashed its head from side to side in panic, as if it were drowning in the rising tide.
The Duke ran to the sound of the guns.
He slid around the corner of the taxi, kicking up a flurry of snow, in time to see the two soldiers firing into the Stone.
The Old Soldier spun and then put up his gun as he recognized the Duke.
“All I could think of doing, sir,” he panted. “Not a blind bit of good.”
There was another shot as the Young Soldier reloaded and pumped a new round into the Stone, to no discernible effect.
“Save your ammunition,” barked the Duke.
The horse’s frenzied shrieks suddenly stopped dead. There was a beat of silence. They heard a snort and the sound of hooves slowly clopping nearer, then a single hoof pawing the ground.
They turned slowly.
The horse stood behind them. The bronze horse had become a black horse, from the bottom of its hooves to the tip of its ears.
It seemed bigger.
Black smoke drifted from its eyeballs.
The Old Soldier raised his rifle.
The Duke reached out a hand and slowly pushed the gun aside.
“No,” he said simply. “I don’t know what in Hades this is, but I know a fight when I see it, and I know this kind of battle will be close work, blades not bullets.”
The Dark Horse pawed snow backward as its sable eyes smoldered at them.
“And I intend to start by getting my damn horse back.”
“That’s not your horse, not anymore. . . .” said the Old Soldier.
“Looks black as the devil’s horse,” added the Young Soldier.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said the Duke. “Some bloody devil, anyway. Whatever was in the Stone has got out.”