A
s the strange party worked its way through the snow-choked streets toward the Embankment, they discussed what the Old Soldier had told them of what he had seen within the City, and the murk in the night. The Queen and the Gunner were particularly horrified at the death of the Duke. The Officer stayed silent and trudged ahead of the group, stamping a path that the children could follow in the hip-high snow.
“I knew there was darkness in the London Stone,” said Edie. “I felt its pull worse than any stone I’ve glinted, even though I never even touched it.”
The silence that followed was broken only by the clump and squeak of their feet compacting the freshly fallen snow as they walked on.
“Wonder what would have happened if—” began George.
Edie turned and interrupted him with a snort. “If I HAD touched it? If I had touched it, I’d have . . . I probably would have, you know . . .”
“Lost your mind,” finished the Queen. “The darkness pent in the Stone would have burned out your sanity and cored your mind like an empty husk. You’d have been left a haunted, dribbling idiot.”
George and Edie watched the Queen’s cloak swirl around her shoulders as she turned back to plow ahead of them in the Officer’s wake.
“Nice,” said Edie.
“Especially the dribbling bit,” agreed George, hoping for a smile. But Edie’s face was as wintry as the snow-blanketed buildings on either side of them.
“Anyway,” he went on, “that wasn’t what I was going to say. What I was going to say was, I wonder what would have happened if I
had
put that broken dragon’s head on the Stone.”
“You mean if you hadn’t stayed because of me?” Edie said. “You’d have gone back to your layer of London and wouldn’t have remembered anything or known about any of this, would you?”
“No. It’s not about you. Not always, anyway,” he replied, suddenly irritated. He had woken with an itch on his upper arm, and that itch had now become a sort of dull pain, the kind you get from being punched hard on a muscle. He didn’t need to look to know that the third and last twining vein of stone was again moving slowly toward his shoulder, marking the duel he had yet to fight before he was done with the Cnihtengild’s challenge. He’d forgotten about it as he slept in the night, and all the unfamiliar events occurring around them had pushed it to the back of his mind. Whatever Edie’s problems were, they didn’t involve the fear of the Knight on his eerily hollow horse being out there somewhere, slowly riding toward a fight that George had no confidence in surviving. He looked over at Edie and saw that she was looking down at her hand, which held the earring heart stone that had been her mother’s. The moment she noticed him looking at her, she reflexively closed her hand and pocketed the stone, and there was something in the unguarded protectiveness she showed in doing it that touched him and made him remember the roller coaster of hope and disappointment she was on.
He caught the Queen watching them both, and remembered what she had said about Edie’s extra vulnerability, having been taken over the line into death and back. He felt suddenly ashamed of the irritability he’d let escape. He was tired and worried. And as annoying as Edie could be, with her defensive spikiness and her willingness to fight and argue with any- and everyone, their predicament and the icy blight that was being visited on this layer of London was not her fault.
“I didn’t mean . . .” he continued, trying to make eye contact through the long sweep of dark hair she’d let fall forward, obscuring the side view of her face. “I meant that I was wondering if this is all getting worse because of
me
.”
She didn’t turn her head. The only response George got was from the Raven, who was riding Edie’s far shoulder and had him fixed with its unblinking, shiny, black-bead eyes over the top of her head. The fact that she had acquired this supernatural companion somehow made him feel both worried and a little jealous. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but the way she had instantly and easily accepted the fact that this bird chose her—as if it were nothing, as if having a raven ride your shoulder was the most natural thing in the world—perturbed him. He didn’t trust the bird. That was what it was.
“Look—” he began.
“What?” she cut in, way too fast for politeness.
“Put a sock in it, you pair of moaning Minnies,” growled the Gunner, coming up behind them and putting a great hand on their shoulders. “It ain’t the time for a competition about whose fault any of this is; but if it was, I’d say if I hadn’t broke my oath and let the Walker take me, we wouldn’t be in this trouble now. So stow it, or you’ll start making me feel all guilty and wobbly, and then I’ll be needing one of these ‘shrinks’ of yours, and then where will we be?”
He stopped abruptly as they turned a corner on to the Embankment.
“Bleeding Nora . . .”
George and Edie stopped too. The dark obelisk of Cleopatra’s Needle had been guarded by two Sphinxes the last time they had been there. Now it was girdled by a great jumbled throng: statues of all ages and types, bound by one common thing, which was that they were all human. It was a great gathering of the spits, and even as Edie and the others approached from a distance, two things were apparent: firstly, there was a debate in progress, and secondly, a ring of soldier statues at the edge of the crowd faced outward, their backs to the debate, rifles and muskets with bayonets fixed, swords drawn, eyes watching the sky and the approaches to the Needle.
“I’ve never seen a gathering like this,” murmured the Queen.
“I’ve never heard of one. I think this is the first time so many of us have been in one place,” agreed the Officer.
“Oh well. In for a penny, in for a pound,” said the Gunner, with an attempt at cheeriness as he led them onward.
George turned to Spout. “Better stay back here,” he said. “In case they don’t know you’re one of the good guys.”
“
Goog gai
,” agreed Spout, and jumped up to perch on a tree in the shadows.
The rest of them walked slowly toward the jumbled mass of spits bunched at the river’s edge ahead of them.
“I can’t see the Black Friar,” muttered Edie.
“Yeah, but you can see everyone else,” said George in a voice tinged with wonder.
And the closer they got, the more intense the strangeness around the obelisk became. Once the eye adjusted to the fact that this seething knot of humanity was made from stone or bronze, the smaller details began to stand out: their clothes displayed an extraordinary mishmash of epoques and professions—men in armor argued with men in suits and ties, and elaborately bewigged heads bobbed next to crowns and steel helmets and bearskins and tricornes, while at the center of one of the most vehement knots of debate, a bearlike man with a great bald head atop a large shambling frame swathed in a long overcoat swapped terse words with a tight-britched figure who buzzed around him like a wasp, cutting great swaths in the air with his hands as he tried to make his point. This was the second detail that became immediately apparent: a lot of men—and a few women—from all ages of Britain’s history were gathered in this crowd, and they all appeared to be talking at once. The reason the noise level was so high was that they didn’t seem to be complementing the talking by doing much listening, which only encouraged the people they were talking at to speak even louder.
It did seem that every spit in London was here: in the water beyond the Embankment wall George could even see a statue of a boy on a dolphin—which he recognized from farther down the riverbank in Chelsea—now jumping and diving into the river.
The outer ring of bayonets and blades relaxed and parted a little as they reached it. Two gray stone seamen, each armed with nothing more than sailors’ knives, made a gap for them.
The taller one grinned thinly. “Gunner.”
“Jack.” The Gunner smiled in greeting and nodded at the other sailor, who wore an oilskin coat tied around his middle with a piece of string. “Bosun. Strange days.”
“Aye, and worse weather to come, I’d say,” said the one the Gunner had called Jack.
“Strange days and strange shipmates,” said the Bosun, nodding at George and Edie.
“Boy’s a maker, the girl’s a glint,” explained the Gunner, making the introductions. “George, Edie, these sailors is mates of mine from the east end of town. Jack Tar and the Bosun. Their normal billet is Trinity Square. They’re—”
George interrupted with a grin. “Merchant seamen. From the memorial. My dad took me to see them once, when we went to the Tower next door. He was a sculptor. . . .” he explained. “He liked you. I mean, he liked what you were. Are. As statues.”
Memory flashed and he saw his dad on a bright spring afternoon. He had his sketchbook out and was doing a quick pencil drawing of the two statues. They had a similar square-jawed heroic quality in their making, as the Gunner did, but like him they were somehow more than just idealized caricatures of heroes. They looked windswept and used to the weather in all its guises, and instead of uniforms, they wore the kind of working sea gear that real sailors assemble through years of experience. He remembered his dad commenting on the Bosun’s choice of belt, for example. George pointed.
“He liked the string around your middle.”
“So do I,” grunted the Bosun. “Keeps my trousers up.”
The Queen pushed in close behind George and Edie and peered into the hubbub surrounding the Needle.
“What’s happening?”
“Jaw bloody jaw,” said Jack Tar. “Too many kings and dukes and generals, and not enough sense, if you ask me. They’re all used to getting their own way, see, and nobody’s got a firm hand on the tiller.”
“We’ll see about that,” said the Queen, nodding at the Gunner. “What have the Sphinxes said?”
The Gunner dived into the inner throng, pushing great men to left and right as he made his way to the Needle itself. The Queen looked at Jack Tar, waiting for an answer.
“There’s a problem with the Sphinxes,” he said. “First off, she says we’re asking the wrong questions, and she’ll answer the right people when they ask it. And secondly . . .”
“There’s only one Sphinx,” said Edie, looking around for the second one. George saw that she was right. They were one Sphinx short.
“Yeah,” he said, suddenly wanting to be close to the Gunner as more and more eyes nearby began to notice them and stop talking. “Come on.”
The Officer pushed a way through the crowd for them. The noise of chatter was still very loud and sustained, and every now and then voices rose in anger and turned into bad-tempered shouting.
A king wearing chain mail blocked their way as he stood in the stirrups of his charger and started jabbing his sword in emphasis at a lavishly wigged nobleman on a smaller horse.
“Oi!” said Edie, stepping back sharply to avoid being trampled by the charger. She stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled shrilly to get the rider’s attention. “Coming through, mind your back. . . .”
“That’s Richard the Lionheart,” said George, recognizing the statue from the edge of Parliament Square.
The king spun on his horse and glared down at them with such an intensity that the first thing you noticed was
angry
and only then
king
.
“I know very well who I am, boy, but who,
pardieu
, are you, girl, to be whistling at a king as if he were some hound to be called to kennel at your whim?” he bellowed, raising his sword.
Two loud gunshots cracked through the clamor and reduced it to instant silence as all the statues tensed and looked around for where they had come from.
They saw the Gunner standing at the shoulder of the Sphinx, who snarled and shook her head as if disturbed by the explosions from the smoking pistol the Gunner was pointing into the sky.
She slowly got to her feet and towered over the crowd, stretching like the giant cat that she partly was. And then she looked straight at George and Edie.
“They are the
right
people,” she purred in a slow dreamy voice.
A
t the words of the Sphinx, perhaps underlined by the warning glare from the Gunner at its side, the Lionheart backed his horse up with an ill-natured dig of his stirrups, and the crowd parted for George and Edie. They felt every eye in that immense, strange crowd turn and strain for a look at them as they moved forward onto the plinth next to the Sphinx. Edie glanced at the side of the great lion’s body before she looked into the finely modeled human face beneath the elaborate Egyptian headdress. She saw there were no shrapnel holes punched into the animal’s flanks.
“It’s the nice one,” she breathed to George.
“I hope so,” he answered. “Because I wouldn’t like to meet one angrier-looking than this.”
The Sphinx’s normally impassive face was twisted into a very dark and unpromising scowl.
“I am not angry at you, child. I am out of sorts.”
“Where’s your sister?” asked Edie.
The Gunner cleared his throat. “Er, you remember what the Bow Boy said about the call, and how he heard it but didn’t go, and now we know which side of the line he’s on. . . ?”
“Yes, and I remember you saying the Sphinxes were somewhere between spits and taints, half animal, half human.” said George. “So I suppose . . .”
“We both heard the call. Only one of us answered it. I have always seen the human side of things, but my sister had become too taintish of late,” said the Sphinx, her tail lashing behind her in a slow flick of irritation. “I did not think we should go. I did not like the call. I do not like being told what to do. I do not like that whatever is doing the calling thinks it can call us to heel, as if we were common house pets. We are not dogs, after all.”
The Sphinx arched her back in a decidedly feline stretch and lay back down in her usual position. Her eyes remained on George and Edie.
“What is calling?” said George.
“A voice from the outer dark. From the darkness before time. Something unknowably powerful and dangerous. Someone let it through.”
The Sphinx was not looking at George as she said this, but sometimes one can
not
look at something just as pointedly as one
can
look at it. And he knew she was talking about him as surely as he knew that the great icy blast that had shot past them as they returned to this layer of London from the Frost Fair was the source of that dark voice. A voice he had let into this world.
“How do you know?” said Edie, staring at the Sphinx with a gaze as unblinking as the Raven’s on her shoulder. “If it’s unknowable, how do you know? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Ah, little rainsplash, there you are,” sighed the Sphinx. “And still asking such interesting questions.”
George could tell how much Edie disliked being called a rainsplash by how fiercely she jutted her jaw at the giant cat with the human face.
“And you’re still giving such unhelpful answers,” she retorted. “How can you know all this if it’s unknowable?”
“Because it has happened before: the old darkness imprisoned in the London Stone came from the same place long, long ago. It is only the strength and exact nature of the power of this new darkness that is unknowable—not the fact of its existence,” replied the Sphinx. “This kinship explains why the two darknesses are working together and combining their strengths.”
“How—” began Edie, but George stepped in front of her. He knew she irritated and perturbed the Sphinx in a way he didn’t, and while she seemed to be answering questions without needing a riddle answered first, he didn’t want her provoked.
“What has happened?” he said quickly. “Exactly?”
“The new power comes from the outer darkness, a dimension beyond and without time. Coming here, it has sent a shock through all the layers, which has cut this layer of London off from the present, and the future.”
“That’s stupid,” said Edie. “We’re in the present, aren’t we? I mean this is all happening . . .”
“It’s not the real present. It’s just now,” explained the Sphinx. “The real present is a living thing through which time flows from the past into the future, like blood through a vein, keeping the body of the universe alive. This ‘now’ we are trapped in is disconnected from that present and cannot flow forward into the future. And like a vein through which the blood cannot pass, it will eventually die.”
There was a great rumble of shock at this news, and so many of the spits started shouting questions at once that it was impossible to distinguish any one voice.
Another shot cracked flatly into the air, and silence returned abruptly, this time everyone turning to see the Officer pushing through the crowd with the Queen. Once more their way took them past the Lionheart, and once more he bridled as one of the Queen’s daughters pushed at his horse in the tightly packed crowd to make a space for her mother to pass through.
“Unhand my horse!” snarled the Lionheart as he jerked his reins and made as if to cuff the daughter, only pulling the blow as he realized it was, in fact, a girl he was about to hit.
In an instant the Queen had her spear point parked dangerously under his chin.
“She whom you would strike is of as royal a blood as you, boy; and I, her mother, was Queen and conqueror centuries before you were whelped! Bar our way one moment longer and I shall take your sword and thrash you with it until you bawl like the great baby you show yourself to be!”
Regal eye met regal eye, and in very short measure the male eye blinked first. The Queen removed her spear tip from its uncomfortable proximity to the Lionheart’s Adam’s apple and leaped up onto the dais next to the Sphinx.
A faint growing rumble of discontent began to well up again, and she quelled it with a look as she started to speak. “Of everyone here, I am the only one ever to have destroyed this city; and having washed my anger in blood once, I shall not see it happen again. To the victors may go the spoils, but only a destroyer knows the true cost of the destruction they have wrought, and only then too late.”
In the crowd a few of the generals nodded.
“She’s right,” said a spit in a World War II RAF uniform, a statue that George remembered Edie commenting on a lifetime ago as they had begun their quest, by St. Clement Danes. She had said he had a lot of death about him.
“What has happened before shall not happen again!” continued the Queen, turning to the Sphinx with a great flourish of her cape. “What can we do?”
There was a small groan from the crowd. The Sphinx shook her head from side to side.
“That is the wrong question.”
“We already asked her that,” said a voice from the crowd.
The Queen looked unexpectedly deflated to see her grand gesture go flat so quickly.
“Been like that all morning,” said the RAF officer to the Gunner. “Too many kings and generals, not enough bloody common sense.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say, Bomber. . . .” retorted a periwigged figure, waggling an enraged scepter at him. And with that, the crowd of spits started arguing and bickering among themselves louder than before.
George found Edie looking at him, something between despair and disgust spreading across her face. The Raven was gone, he noticed.
“I know,” he answered.
And in a sick lurch of his stomach he realized of course that he did. He knew exactly what to do. He knew exactly what the question was, and he knew that there was only one person who could ask it. So amid the argumentative din rising around them like an angry sea, he turned and put his hand out to steady himself against the Sphinx’s great forepaw.
He looked up into her eyes, to find they were waiting for him. He couldn’t say whether the smile in them was friendly or hostile, but that, he supposed, was one of the things that just went with being a fabled enigma. He cleared his throat and spoke quietly but steadily.
“What can
I
do?”
The Sphinx jerked to her feet. The sudden movement was enough to get the attention of the crowd, and George sensed once again that all eyes were on his back.
“That,” said the Sphinx with a purr like honey, “is exactly the right question.”