Stoneheart (20 page)

Above them, waiting for them to catch up, on a length of dripping guttering, the Raven thought of bleeding hearts and realized it was hungry. It watched them pass beneath and then flapped off over the roof of the building, heading northwest. It was thinking of the Walker, but it happened to look down just as it crossed the City boundary, and had a better idea.

It turned on a wing tip and dropped like a rock, heading toward a nondescript modern building faced in cheap-looking shiny pink stone on the north side of the street. You could tell the architect had liked drawing angles, because the building had nothing to say to the buildings on either side of it, and it said its nothing in a collection of meaningless lines and points that didn’t even look decorative.

But in the front, at ground level, there was a nook: half sentry box, half downlit shower stall. And the nook was occupied. And it was into this nook that the Raven sideslipped, coming to a halt on the tarnished metal shoulder of a statue that was almost human, in parts. Or rather, the shoulder of a statue that was in parts. And almost all of those parts were human.

The Raven clacked its beak next to an ear in an almost-human part of the head.

Back in the canyon of Fetter Lane, George was trying to explain his plan.

“I’m looking for a park or something,” George said after a while. “Somewhere we can sleep and no one will bother us.”

Edie fired off one of her snorts.

“Parks are freezing. This isn’t like
Babes in the Wood,
where we snuggle down under the trees, and kind birds 288

The Man of Many Parts drop leaves on us to keep us warm and toasty under a compost duvet. Parks are rubbish for sleeping in.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

“A vent. Somewhere a buildings letting off heat. And you sit on it on a nice opened-out cardboard box and you get old papers and stuff them up your clothes, and another box or two for cover.”

They came to the junction with another big street.

“High Holborn,” she said, looking up at the sign on the side of a building. “No parks around here.”

“Fine,” said George. He was feeling really tired suddenly. Tired of this. Tired of the nightmare. Tired of being scared. Tired of being confused. Tired of Edie snorting at him.

“You find us a nice warm vent, then,” he continued. He just wanted to sleep.

“Fine,” she said, and set off heading right.

“Why this way?”

“Because we’d better head away from the edge of the City, hadn’t we? To stop us walking toward trouble.”

They walked on. No more was said, because both of them were so tired that everything was getting to feel disconnected and distant—even the fear and thoughts of the taints. Only irritation with each other seemed immediate enough to keep them going. So they each, in different ways, nurtured that irritation so as to stop just giving up and stopping.

They walked under the overhanging eaves of an ancient half-timbered building. It was different enough for George to stop and step back to look up at it, rising above him in a four-floored cliff of black timber and white plaster and leaded casements. It had a steep pitched roof and brick chimneys. It looked like something off a Christmas card.

And there was an arch leading to a small courtyard in the middle of it.

“We could go in there. Look!” He pointed back to the middle of the road. A tin-hatted fusilier stood on top of a war memorial, one foot resting on a rock, pack on his back, horizontal rifle held loosely in one hand as he looked alertly west, away from them.

“We’ve even got a guard at the door.”

“He’s not the Gunner,” said Edie suddenly, exhaust-edly, wishing he were.

“Yeah, but he’s a spit. Come on. Let’s see. It’ll be safe.”

And it would have been safe. Except, while they were busy heading away from the city boundary so as not to walk toward trouble, trouble—thanks to the Raven—had been walking toward them.

If George hadn’t stepped back into the street to look up at the half-timbered building, they might have been safe, because the Raven had had to lose sight of them to go and alert the Grid Man. But George stepping back on the pavement was the thing that the bird’s eye picked up, and then things started to happen.

The Raven swooped and clacked in the ear of the Grid Man, and the Grid Man crossed the road, clanking and scraping as he came, so that the sound of metal protesting against stone was the second sound that alerted Edie and George to the fact that something bad was happening.

The first sound was the one that got them, though. It was the
clack shuffle clack
that he made. And as he got closer, first Edie, then George, turned their heads and saw him.

The Grid Man was roughly in the shape of a squat, muscled man with a heavy-browed head and backswept hair. He did not walk like a man, however. He walked like a toy robot that never takes either foot off the ground as it slides them forward one at time. That was the scraping shuffle noise. At that point they stopped seeing what was human about him, and started seeing the inhuman bits. George saw that he was made up of parts of a human figure, as if someone had cut his body into pieces and then stuck them back together, only leaving gaps between all the chunks, so that the statue looked like it was wearing its own skin as a disconnected suit of armor. The face was cut down the middle, the wide channel of the cut running down through the nose and mouth, and two horizontal cuts—one through the upper lip, one just above the eyebrows—divided it into six chunks. Each section moved slightly out of time with the other parts, which made its scowl seem to happen in stages. The pieces of body, some of which were more machine-part than human, moved with a similar out-of-sync quality. Rods of metal jutted out of the body chunks, as if holding the whole thing together, like meat skewers through a kebab.

The clacking noise came from two thick metal grids held in his hands, about the size and shape of tennis rackets. It was made by a metal ball that he hit from one grid to the other as he walked.

Edie, standing close to the building, looked at George. He didn’t look at her. He spoke quietly, trying not to alert Grid Man to her presence in the shadows.

“Get out of here. They just want me.”

The
clack shuffle clack
speeded up.

“Okay,” whispered Edie. “Just run.”

And she melted back into the archway, mingling with the shadows, not daring to run in case the noise of her feet drew attention to herself.

George paused to flick a glance at the Fusilier high on his plinth.

“I don’t suppose . . . ?”

The Fusilier didn’t look around. George decided he didn’t have time to try and persuade a statue to move if it showed no sign of being able to, so he spun on his heel and exploded into a sprint, heading east. He realized he’d done so much running on these unforgiving pavements that his feet were bruised and painful. About ten steps in, he just forgot the pain and ran.

The Grid Man sped up, but he wasn’t exactly built for speed. The
clack shuffle clack
increased in tempo, then stopped abruptly. George noted it and kept running.

Behind him, the Grid Man tossed the metal ball in the air and swung the right-hand grid like a tennis player powering in a forehand smash. As he connected with the ball, there was a shower of sparks as metal hit metal, and the resounding
clang
was so loud that this time George did turn, which was fortunate, because it probably saved his leg.

He saw the ball hurtling toward him at ankle level, and he lifted his foot on reflex. He didn’t get it quite high enough as the ball grazed the sole of his shoe, and at that velocity, the force of the graze was enough to rip a chunk of rubber off the shoe and take his legs out from under him. He managed to break his fall with one hand, but he still hit the gritty paving stone with enough force to knock the wind out of himself for a moment, and his right cheek slapped the ground in a hard snap of pain so jarring that he felt his teeth rattle.

The impact and the jag of pain blew the fear out of him along with the air, and in its place came that black treacly feeling, so strong he could taste it.

Behind him, the ball continued on its trajectory and then began looping up in a slow parabola.

He struggled to his feet and looked down the street at the Grid Man. He was now accustomed to the fact that the meager late-night traffic didn’t notice what was going on in his London.

He wiped his mouth and stared at the statue across sixty yards of litter-blown pavement. Grid Man just looked at him, his eyes blinking out of time with each other. It felt, for an instant, like a showdown in one of the slow old Westerns his dad had tried to make him love as much as he did. George spat, expecting blood. There was none. Just that dark taste.

“Better luck next time,” he muttered, trying to decide which way to run. He was relieved to see the Grid Man had no other ball to cannon at him. Something made him stand there, waiting to see what the taint would do next.

He didn’t see that the ball had tightened the arc of its flight, and had now curved back in on itself, like a boomerang retracing its steps.

Grid Man raised one arm and smiled, an out-of-phase smile that spread across his segmented face in disconnected jerks. It looked like he was waving, or saluting. To George’s eye the gesture had a mocking quality to it. He raised his arm in imitation, and waggled his fingers in farewell.

“Yeah, right. See you …”

Because he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, he didn’t know that the Grid Man had just put his grid in the air like a baseball player’s glove, in case the metal ball now hurtling home toward the back of George’s head missed its target.

Because he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, he had no way of knowing that the last thing about to go through his mind would be two spinning kilos of metal ball.

Because he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, and because she
could
see what was incoming behind him, Edie stepped out of the relative safety of her shadowed archway and screamed like a banshee.

“George! Behind you! Get down!”

He ducked without using his brain, the adrenaline doing the thinking for him. He felt the punch of air as the ball careened past his left ear, and saw the Grid Man twitch in disappointment as the ball clanged home into the grid he was holding in the air like a catchers mitt.

George scrambled around and ran, jinking left and right, trying to be a moving target, looking for an alley to dive down, his shoulder blades itching in anticipation of another volley. None came, and he sidestepped into a slit that suddenly revealed itself between two buildings, bouncing off brickwork as he failed to complete the turn cleanly. He grinned in relief.

Just before he heard it.

“NO!”

Edie’s voice.

“Geeoorge!”

He’d heard her shout before, but he’d never heard fear like this, fear mixed with pain. It froze him.

Grid Man had Edie. As soon as she had broken cover to shout a warning, one segment of his head had swiveled sideways at right angles, pointing his right eye at her, while the left side of his face stayed looking down the street toward George.

Grid Man saw her, and then moved toward her. She ran into the shadows under the arch and found she was in a cul-de-sac. By the time she turned around, he was blocking the way out. He shuffled forward, gently clacking the grids on the end of either hand together in a taunting mockery of a man clapping.

She really did have nowhere to run, and when she tried to duck under his arm and break past him, one of the metal rods that seemed to skewer him together shot out and caught her under the chin, like clothesline tackle. Her feet flew up and she crashed backward, and things went white then black as her head hit the ground. She can only have been knocked senseless for an instant, but when she opened her eyes again she was upright and moving. And then she tried to move her feet and realized they were kicking in the air, and the reason her head hurt was that he was carrying her by her head, holding it between the grids—not hard enough to crush her skull, but hard enough to hold her in the air. Her hands grabbed the grids in self-preservation, her small fingers lacing through the metal tracery as she took as much of the weight as she could off her head and neck. He carried her like a rag doll, and her body swung from side to side as he walked. She kicked at him with her heels as he emerged back into the street, and that’s when he squeezed, and her head really did feel like it was being squished in a vise, and that’s why she screamed, although she didn’t know she was doing it.

George was still frozen in the narrow alley. His heart jackhammered away as if it were trying to punch its way out of his chest and keep on running away all by itself. He looked down the alley.

It was a dead end.

He caught himself looking around to see if he could reach a drainpipe and climb his way to safety and keep running away. He instantly hated himself for the thought.

Edie screamed again. Closer.

He hated himself even more for thinking of leaving her. So he stepped back into the street.

Grid Man was walking toward him, Edie hung from his grids, swinging like the clapper in a bell as he lurched from side to side.

George had no idea what to do.

“Put her down!” he shouted.

Grid Man lurched on. Now Edie could see George; she clenched her jaw tight shut. She wasn’t going to scream in front of him. Only the treacherous tears squeezing out of her eyes betrayed her.

“Look,” said George, “put her down. You don’t want her!”

Grid Man’s eyebrows rose and fell, one after the other. His smile was split into two halves and neither one of them was nice. He shook his head from side to side, with the jerkiness of bad robotic dancing. He opened his mouth to say something, and the sound of his voice came in an unintelligible mashed overdub, coming out of the divided mouth in different pieces. The deep disjointed voice didn’t sound like any language George had ever heard. It ground out of the lip sections like an angry Italian trying to outshout a drunk Scotsman through a mouthful of ball bearings.