“S
omeone’s hurt!” shouted George.
“Sounds like a boy,” said Edie, pushing past him and staring eastward.
They all stood frozen, listening to the distant screams, trying to figure out exactly where they were coming from.
“Somewhere on Piccadilly,” barked the Officer, starting off in that direction.
“No,” snapped the Gunner. “South of there. In the park. Look . . .”
Just for an instant George saw it, above the snow-laden treetops of Green Park. At a distance it looked like three birds fighting, but only for a moment. George’s eyes adjusted to the scale of the winged creatures, and he realized he was seeing two bat-winged gargoyles swooping and tearing at the third winged human figure, like crows mobbing an owl.
The human figure was flying lopsidedly. He was swatting at the gargoyles with a bow in his left hand as they lunged at him. His right arm dangled loosely, somehow bent the wrong way.
Then one of the gargoyles folded its wings and dropped like a stone, using all its weight to hammer the boy out of the sky. They dropped below the top of the trees and were lost from sight. But not from hearing: the sound of the impact reached them, followed by a cry of agony and terror, and the sound of something like a terrier snarling and tearing at its prey.
No one gave an order.
Everyone ran at once.
“It’s the Bow Boy. From Piccadilly Circus,” shouted the Queen.
The statues outran the two children, but even with their added strength and size, running through the thick snow was like running in a dream, the kind of bad dream where, however hard you try, you’re never quite running fast enough.
George knew those dreams.
He also knew how they ended.
He knew they were going to be too late.
He turned and looked back at the arch. Spout sat on the cornice of snow, quivering like a dog. George saw there was just one chance to save whoever was screaming in the unreachable distance.
“Spout!” he yelled. “Go! Help the boy!”
“Taints won’t just do what you tell them; they ain’t . . .” began the Gunner.
There was an eruption of snow as Spout leaped into the air, his wings unfolding with a sharp decisive whip crack. He powered through the air, accelerating as he went, great wing beats kicking up the snow around them as he passed over and disappeared into the trees.
“Blimey,” said the Gunner. “Never seen that before.”
“He’s not going to get there in time.” panted Edie, chopping her way through the snow a couple of paces behind George.
“He’ll still get there before us,” gasped George. Although he seemed to have been hurtling through London ever since he’d broken the carving at the Natural History Museum, this new sensation of running in snow made him tired in entirely new and more painful ways.
The screaming stopped dead.
The sudden silence was shocking in itself, so much so that the Queen and the Officer came to simultaneous halts, and stood straining to hear any more noises.
George heard the Officer curse under his breath as he ran past him.
“Damn and blast.”
George kept plunging ahead in the wake of the Gunner, who hadn’t slowed one bit as he ran in under the trees, unholstering his pistol as he went.
“Look out!” shrieked Edie as something large came crashing through the branches in their direction—an angular jagged shape getting bigger with startling rapidity as it spun straight at them. The Gunner ducked and George swerved, and then the thing hit the snow and cartwheeled between him and Edie in a savage series of impacts before embedding itself in the trunk of a tree.
They stared at it.
“Your gargoyle,” said Edie, deflating.
It was a stone wing, torn off at the root. George looked at it for an instant longer, then threw himself forward into a lurching snow-hobbled sprint.
“Spout!” he yelled.
“I’m sorry . . .” shouted Edie, trying to keep up.
George said nothing more. He needed all his breath to keep running. The extra surge of energy was not despair, because Edie was wrong.
The wing wasn’t Spout’s.
He heard the crack of the Gunner’s pistol ahead of him, and then he burst out of the trees, crashed through a hedge, and stopped dead.
Spout was fighting two gargoyles at once. Or rather, he was fighting one intact gargoyle with the other one, whose wing he had obviously just torn off, swinging the damaged one by its undamaged wing, using its truncated body like a hammer.
The intact gargoyle yammered in fury and pain as Spout stood astride the broken-winged figure of the boy, cutting huge swaths of air with his gargoyle-hammer, trying to keep it at a distance and prevent it from darting in to rip at the unmoving figure on the ground.
As Spout’s improvised bludgeon whirred past its snarling face, it pounced in and latched on to the boy’s outflung leg with its teeth, shaking it with the growling terrier noises George had heard from a distance.
Up close there was something truly horrible about the inhuman fury and malice in the taint’s onslaught. It seemed to want to hurt the boy even if it meant putting itself in greater danger, a danger that manifested itself almost immediately as Spout gave it a bone-crunching blow with its partner. The intact gargoyle was knocked head over heels. There was another sharp crack as the gargoyle-hammer broke, leaving Spout with a second dismembered wing in his talon.
He tossed it over his shoulder and leaped for the undamaged gargoyle, who took to the sky just too slowly to avoid Spout catching it by its foot. Spout stayed on the ground, one talon hooked around a park bench, anchoring his desperately flapping adversary and stopping it from escaping.
Spout was panting with exhaustion. George could now see how much the uneven fight had taken out of him. He had a great gouge across his chest, and one of his brows was lopsided, having been sheared off by a blow from his attackers.
“
Eigengang! Gow, Eigengang!!
” he howled hoarsely at George.
“Shoot it!” George yelled at the Gunner.
BLAM
. The Gunner’s first shot knocked the gargoyle out of Spout’s grip. It stuttered in midair, nearly fell, but then flapped away. Spout launched himself after it.
“Again!” roared Edie, who had caught up with them.
“Your bloody pet’s in the way!” snarled the Gunner in frustration, running after the disappearing gargoyles, leaving George alone with the injured boy.
“Spout! Leave it!” George shouted. “SPOUT! GET DOWN.”
Spout swooped lower, exposing the gargoyle. The Gunner stepped sideways and rested his gun hand against a tree, steadying his aim.
BLAM
.
The gargoyle flew on.
“Too far for a pistol . . .” the Gunner growled, squinting along the gun’s sights.
BLAM
.
He shook his head in frustration.
“What I need is a bloody—”
CRACK. CRACK
.
The sound of two distant shots smacked flatly across the snow. The gargoyle suddenly tipped in midair and cartwheeled into the very solid sidewall of the Ritz hotel in an impact they felt as much as heard, even at this great distance.
For an instant it stayed there, as if embedded in the masonry, then it plummeted straight down out of sight, unmistakeably dead.
“. . . rifle,” finished the Gunner wonderingly. And he raised his head from his point of aim and squinted across the snow toward the sound of the other gunshots.
“Who the hell was that, then?”
As if in answer to his question, the Old and the Young Soldiers broke out of the distant trees, waving and running toward them.
George relaxed a fraction, which was a mistake, because just as he did so, something hopped toward the still figure of the Bow Boy and leaped on him, sinking its teeth into his ribs and starting to shake him from side to side. It was the now wingless gargoyle.
George didn’t think, he just leaped, throwing his arms around the barrel-chested creature and wrenching it off the boy. The gargoyle kicked at George with its feet, winding him enough so that he loosened his grip. The thing twisted and reared its head back to strike: George had a sickening impression of stone fangs and angry eyes blurring at him, and just managed to jerk his head sideways so that the rough granite skin of the creature painfully grazed his cheekbone as it struck, instead of pulverizing his skull.
He latched on to the taint with an even tighter grip, to prevent it being able to head butt him again, keeping his own head buried in its shoulder, like a boxer riding out a flurry of blows while he figures out what to do next.
“Shoot it!” yelled Edie.
The Gunner spun to see what was happening behind him.
“Might hit George!” he spat in frustration. He dropped his gun on its lanyard and ran back toward George and the snarling gargoyle. He was too far away. The gargoyle was forcing its head back, ready for another blow, and George’s grip was weakening.
“GIRL!” shouted the Queen. She was running toward them, also too far away to be able to help in time.
And then she stopped.
Edie stared in shock.
The Queen cocked her arm and threw her spear. It flew through the air and landed a yard in front of her.
“GIRL!” roared the Queen. “You . . . !”
Edie understood and was moving before the Queen got to the next word. She ripped the spear from the ground and reversed her grip as she spun on her heels. As the gargoyle broke George’s grasp and snarled in victory before slamming his head to pulp and oblivion . . .
Edie struck.
The bronze spear entered under the monster’s jaw and came out the back of its head, effectively stapling its mouth shut as Edie continued her forward momentum, vaulting over the creature, snapping its neck backward, and ripping it off George. It lashed out a savage back kick with a sickle-sharp talon, but Edie twisted out of the way without letting go of the spear. She gritted her teeth and used all her strength to jerk it even farther backward.
The taint’s head snapped off with a sharp cracking noise, and its body twitched and was still.
Edie looked down into George’s eyes, still wide with surprise.
“That,” she said with a dark and somehow terrible smile, “felt good.”
Inside herself, the ache of hoping against hope was suddenly a little less painful.
T
he Old Soldier and the Young Soldier wasted no time in telling the other spits what had happened to them and all about the ice murk within the City. There was a shocked silence at the fate of the Duke. Then the silence was shattered by a spasm of coughing, which made them all look down to where Edie and George were crouched on either side of the Bow Boy, who lay in the snow, unmistakably broken.
His bare torso was heaving for every breath, each of which looked more painful than the previous one. A headdress like a wreath made of feathers lay at his side. The Gunner bent and picked it up. “You know who he is?” he said.
“Cupid,” said Edie.
“Eros,” said George.
“Same thing,” said Edie. “Fancier name.”
“You’re both wrong,” said the Queen. “Mind you, so is everybody. He is not Eros. He is Anteros, his brother. The opposite of Cupid. Cupid is god of the loved. Anteros is god of people whose love is not returned. He is the god of the unloved.”
“He doesn’t look good,” said George.
The Bow Boy opened his eyes. His normally handsome face was stretched tight with pain and fright. His words came out ragged and thin with desperation.
“Nothing good . . . nothing good going to be safe, not safe or good ever now . . .”
“What’s he saying?” said the Officer.
“Darkness walks again,” coughed the boy. “Darkness is calling.”
He coughed some more and caught his breath, his eyes rolling upward to look at Edie. She smoothed his hair. He closed his eyes.
“Darkness is calling,” she said to George. “That doesn’t sound great.”
“Not unless you’re a goth,” he said, trying to find a smile.
“Goths,” she snorted quietly. “They don’t know the first thing.”
The boy’s eyes opened.
“I’m broken,” he whispered.
“Get you back on your plinth; by turn o’day you’ll be right as rain,” said the Gunner cheerily.
Edie felt a tremor go through the boy. “What happened?” she said softly.
When the boy spoke, he stared straight up into the sky, as if the blank clouds above were somehow carrying a projection of the past that only he could see. His voice was so thin and ragged that every now and then it just wasn’t there, as if a hole had been worn in it.
“It was a normal midnight. The lights were on, the people were out. The cars and taxis were all going past like usual . . . Then it struck thirteen and . . .”
“And everything stopped. And the people disappeared,” filled in Edie.
He nodded and licked his lips as if he was parched. George scooped snow into a ball and held it to his mouth. He swallowed some and smiled thanks.
“Nothing happened. Anywhere. I’ve never seen anything like that before. So I just watched, and I waited . . . and it was all quiet and still, and the snow started to fall. It was . . .” He smiled again. “It was . . .”
“Nice?” guessed Edie.
He shook his head. “It was peaceful. It’s never peaceful in the circus. There’s always noise and people and something happening, hurrying or shouting or . . .” He coughed. George offered him more snow, but he shook his head.
“It was quiet. And the neon lights looked so . . . They never look pretty, not to me, just bright and flashing, but in the snow, in the silence with no people . . . just for a moment it was lovely.”
He smiled at the image only he could see.
Then his face dropped.
“Until it started.”
“What started?” asked George.
“The calling. The darkness calling. Not like a noise, not exactly, more than a noise. A pull.”
“What kind of pull?” asked Edie.
“Just like a word you can’t hear that gets inside your head and stops all your other thoughts and words. Just a word . . . just ‘COME.’”
“Come?” said George. “Come where?”
“Just ‘COME.’ I knew if I started flying I’d know where to go. It was like a magnet, pulling me to the east. To the darkness in the east. And then they started flying overhead. . . .”
“The gargoyles?” said Edie.
“Taints. All the winged taints. They must have heard it too. I saw them flying past.” He looked at the other statues. “You felt it too, yes, the pull?”
The statues looked embarrassed. George and Edie both noticed.
“No,” said the Gunner. “No. We didn’t feel it.”
“Ah,” whispered the boy. “I see. I always wondered . . .”
He was shaken by another spasm of coughing. The Gunner leaned in and put the boy’s winged wreath gently back on his head.
“Well, you know now, don’t you?”
The boy nodded. A tear rolled out of his eye.
“What does he—” started George.
The Gunner cut him off. “Later. He ain’t got much more in him, and this is important.” He turned to look down at the boy.
“Two taints came back. This morning. Those two . . .”
The memory seemed to trigger a panic attack. The boy started hyperventilating. The Gunner put a big hand on his chest and rubbed it like a man calming a horse.
“S’all right. Why did they come back?”
The boy’s eyes closed. “To punish me,” he breathed. “The darkness punishes everything.”
“They attacked you because you wouldn’t answer the darkness’s call?” said George.
The boy nodded, eyes bright. “I did hear the call. But I stayed. I just knew it was not for me. Not for who I
really
am . . . I’m not one of them, you see?”
“No,” said the Gunner quietly, keeping his wide hand on the heaving chest of the boy. “No, son. You’re one of us.”
The boy began to smile, and then his chest stopped moving and his eyes rolled back in his head as his leg kicked a couple of times.
And then he was gone.
“Right,” snapped the Gunner, rising to his feet in one decisive move. He pointed at the two soldiers. “You two, bearer party, put him back on his plinth, keep your eyes peeled, meet us at the Sphinxes, double-time. Move now.”
“Why do we—” began the Young Soldier.
“It’s not a debate, it’s an order. Stow it and catch hold of his legs,” snapped the Old Soldier, stashing his pipe in his breast pocket and slinging his rifle across his back. He bent and took hold of the Bow Boy’s shoulders and lifted. His companion took the legs, and they moved away.
“Let’s crack on,” said the Gunner, and led the rest of them off at a trot.
Spout lofted off a distant tree from where he had been keeping an eye on the sky, and flapped after them.
“What was that all about?” said George, trying to keep up.
“The darkness is calling the taints to itself,” said the Queen.
“Not that,” said Edie. “We get that the darkness is a bad thing. He meant the other thing. . . .”
“The ‘now you know’ thing you said to him. To the Bow Boy. About not being able to hear the call or being able . . .” agreed George. “What was that about?”
“He’s human shaped, but he’s not a real person,” said the Gunner. “There’s spits and taints, and then there’s the ones in between. We’re spits because we’re made to be real people, right? Taints is made to be frightening imaginary creatures, yeah? And in between . . .”
“In between there are the ones we’re not sure of,” finished the Queen.
“You’re not sure because they’re not sure,” said Edie, suddenly having a memory flash of Little Tragedy, betraying her with sadness in his eyes.
“Yeah,” said the Gunner, turning to look at her with a keen eye. “The Bow Boy didn’t know. But he heard the call. And he refused it. And so now I guess we all know which side of the line he is on. And what it cost him to find out.”
“I think we’re all going to be asked to pay that price, sooner or later,” said the Queen. “I think this darkness would claim us all.”