Stoneheart (19 page)
He caught sight of their horror-struck faces and took a breath. When he spoke again it was almost apologetic.
“Well, it won’t be good.”
“What does that mean, ‘a day to repine and a day to repair’? Is that like two days?” said George.
“No. It means you have one day to both be sorry for what you’ve done and to try and make amends. Those twenty-four hours will have begun when you broke the stone. I don’t suppose you know what time that was?”
“About three forty” said George, remembering looking at his watch and thinking how long it was going to be before the school tour of the museum finished, just before he turned and lashed out a the little carving jagging into his back.
“Then you must reach the Stone Heart within a day of your offense, and it’s already nearly the Low Twelve. Tomorrow is upon us.”
“What’s the Low Twelve?” asked George.
“Midnight. Turn o’day. The time of death and ignorance, but also the time of rebirth, because what can be reborn that has not first died? You have until three forty tomorrow afternoon until—”
“Winnowing and crushing?” George interrupted gloomily.
“And so forth, yes.”
“I don’t even want to know what winnowing is, do I?” asked Edie.
“It won’t help him, no,” answered the monk. “But don’t be downhearted. There is, as I said, a way—a marked way.”
“And if I make my amends, it’s all over? I’m safe?”
The big monk nodded his head, his eyes closed solemnly, his fingers lacing together over the crest of his stomach.
“Only by making your sacrifice can you be assured of the Easy Quietus. Any later and you are only guaranteed the Hard Way.”
“What if he doesn’t find the Stone Heart at all?” asked Edie.
“If he doesn’t go to it at all, then the taints will undoubtedly catch him and make whatever the Hard Way is seem like a mercy by comparison. He must find the Stone Heart. And he cannot come to it empty-handed. He must bring what was broken.”
“The dragon carving,” said George.
“If you have it,” said the monk. “If you don’t have it, you better go back and find it. Do you have it?”
He leaned in. George, for a reason he couldn’t explain but felt deep in his gut, shook his head.
“I did pick it up.”
“Good.”
“But I left it in my mum’s flat.”
“You idiot!”
The Black Friar leaned back.
“Well, easy then. Just tell him where the Stone Heart is, and we’ll go get the thing he broke and bring it there, and Bob’s your uncle!” Edie said.
“Bob is not my uncle and it’s not that easy. There are, in a city like this, many things that may be the Stone Heart. For each, it is different. For each, the journey is a new path never walked twice.”
“Well
what
is the Stone Heart?”
“From the way the Sphinxes phrase it, it could be anything, anyplace, anyone, even. Sphinxes spin riddles even when they give answers. And what could be better for them than an answer with two meanings? Except one with three. What is the Stone Heart? Who can say?”
Edie was losing patience. It felt like the walls were closing in.
“This is mumbo jumbo. How does he get to the Stone Heart?”
“Edie,” George broke in.
The Black Friar closed his eyes and turned his head to the ceiling. He spoke as if reciting from memory.
“The Way is always marked, and these are the marks of his way. He has to climb the Winding Stair. The Winding Stair will lead to the Memory of the Fire. Where the Memory of the Fire is caged he will catch a fire, and the caught fire will show him the path to the Stone Heart.”
He opened his eyes and looked at them with satisfaction. They looked at each other.
“Is that another
riddle?”
spat Edie in disbelief.
“It’s a map of words,” said the monk.
“Why can’t you just tell us?” asked George, feeling the fear and the frustration building in his chest again.
“Because I don’t know the end, my dear chap. I only know the way. And the fact is, the way is hard. Though, if you had the fragment, I might be able to help more?”
It was the hungry look in his eye that stopped George thrusting his hand into his coat pocket and tossing the nub of dragon-shaped stone onto the table between them. It wasn’t anything he could argue or explain. It was just something he felt.
“We’re going to have to get wet again,” he said to Edie.
“What?” she said in shock.
“We have to go back.”
T
he Friar stood at the door of the pub as Edie and George emerged under his arms into the night air.
“If you return with the broken fragment, I may be able to speed your quietus,” he boomed. “Yes, children, bring it to me, and I will see what I can do.”
“Thank you,” said George. “We’ll be back.”
“And mind you, stay aboveground until you do. Because until you do, you are still prey to their hunger.”
“What hunger?” said George.
“Whose hunger?” asked Edie.
“The hunger of unmade things,” said the monk, as if that explained everything.
Despite wanting to leave, George turned back.
“That’s what you said about what happened to me in the underpass. What does it mean?”
“Look at the mark on your hand, boy. If it is right and you are a maker, or if you are to be a maker, then you have broken an ancient bond by using making hands to mar.” He looked at George’s uncomprehending face and started again. “You have used gifted hands, hands made to make things, to break things in anger. All things that have been made—statues, spits, and taints—feel your power and the affront it has caused. Even things not yet made will reach out to you and crave the form you might give them.”
“The ground was reaching out to me?”
“The clay sensed your mark and the gift you carry. Everything seeks form in a universe designed to break things down.”
“How do you know I’m a maker?”
“How do you know you are not? You say your hand broke the dragon carving at the museum, and you say the same hands cut through the clay that was attacking you in the underpass. Maybe you’re the maker the mark says you are. Or maybe you’re something else. But your hands do seem to have power, wouldn’t you say?”
Before George could register how little of that he really understood, the Friar stood back and waved.
“Safe home, my little friends. And safer back.”
“Thank you,” said George, nudging Edie.
“Yeah, thanks for the crisps and the heater and all,” she said. And then, only slightly resisting George’s hand clamped on her arm, she let him lead her across the road, under the shadow of an imposing white Art Deco building from whose heights clean-cut statues of women animals seemed to watch.
As George looked back and waved, he saw the Friar raise a hand and then disappear back into the pub.
“Now run!” he hissed at Edie as they turned onto the Embankment.
“You’re going to run straight into another dragon if we—” she began.
“No, I’m not,” he said, jerking her hard to the right, up a narrow street like a canyon, with tall anonymous building facades running up both sides.
“What—?” she started.
“Later,” he gritted, and ran faster.
“Good,” she muttered under her breath. “So we’re
not
going to get wet again.”
The two of them flew up the street and turned. She could run as fast as him, he noted. They kept running. They passed a dark side street, and at the end of it he caught a sudden glimpse of a tiered steeple rocketing skyward like an illuminated wedding cake. It flashed past and he ran on, crossing another couple of streets and passing under an archway. As soon as they’d entered the space beyond the arch, he slowed.
“So what was that about?” panted Edie.
“We’re not going back to my mum’s,” he replied, taking stock of where they were, still walking forward, eager to put distance between them and the Black Friar.
“But you need to get the carv—Oh!”
He had pulled the small dragon’s head from his pocket and showed it to her as he walked.
“I see. You lied to the monk.”
She almost sounded impressed. He nodded.
“Did you trust him?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No. But that doesn’t mean anything. I don’t trust anyone.”
“Well, he looked just a little bit too eager when he asked if I had it with me. I mean, if it’s the key to my getting out of this nightmare, I’m not giving it to anyone. I’ll take it to the Stone Heart myself.”
He looked around as they walked.
They were in one of those quiet and occasionally magical oases that hide behind London’s busier thoroughfares. It was, for a start, gaslit. The light was both softer and spookier than the fluorescent lights he was used to. If it hadn’t been for the electric bloom of un-tended computer screens in the elegant windows of the sombre brick buildings around them, it would have been possible to imagine they’d passed under the arch into an era earlier than theirs by a hundred years.
He walked on through a gate and found himself looking across a big courtyard, toward a red pillar box. He stopped when movement caught his eye.
“What?” hissed Edie, bumping into his back as he pulled up short.
An imposing figure in a flapping robe was walking briskly across the space between them and the pillar box. He had a pile of papers under his arm, and a long gray 280
The Man of Many Parts wig that fell in rolls of hair down around his neck, onto his shoulders. His face was angry and determined, and only looked angrier when a sheaf of papers slipped from his grip and spilled across the ground. He looked around, as if searching for some lackey to pick them up for him, then doubled his scowl as he bent to retrieve them himself.
“It’s a judge,” whispered Edie.
George decided to turn around before they were noticed. There was something very forbidding in the scowl under that wig.
“What?” he said, as they doubled back past a looming building on their left.
“He’s a judge. I’ve been here during the day. This is where the judges and the lawyers are. Come here in daylight, you see them all strutting about like they know everything about everything. You see them all twanged up in little wigs and cloaks and stuff.”
“Twanged up” was a phrase her dad had used. She’d never used it before. She didn’t know why it had slipped out. It was the way he described women who were all dressed up to go out. No matter how she tried to not think about it, bits of him kept surfacing when she wasn’t expecting it. It was like walking along a beach at low tide. Every day was a new one, and you never knew what would be uncovered.
George turned right under another archway and decided not to worry about why a judge was walking about in the middle of the night, “twanged up” or not. He paused and got his breath next to a sundial. There was an inscription reading: SHADOWS WE ARE AND LIKE SHADOWS DEPART. He shivered and moved on through some arched cloisters and out into the space surrounding a louring church and its attendant company of plane trees.
He stopped and leaned against the railing surrounding the end of the church, which was rounded and defensive, more like a turreted bastion than a place of God.
Edie slumped onto a step and watched the shadows. She noticed George didn’t look too relaxed, either.
“You think this is a good place?”
“I don’t know. It’s a church.”
“Says it’s a temple,” she said, looking at the sign.
“Temple Church,” he said, reading it. “Same thing.”
“It looks more like a castle,” she said, looking up through the plane trees at the curved wall, topped by defensive crenellations. “It doesn’t feel like a good place, George.”
“I know.” He shivered. “I don’t think you have to be a glint to get that. It feels haunted.”
She wondered whether to tell him about ghosts. About how they existed, but nothing to worry about. About how it had taken her a long time to realize that they just hung about like echoes that had forgotten to diminish. They didn’t, wouldn’t, and couldn’t do anything to the living. They weren’t people. They didn’t appear to have minds at all. They were just repeating loops of something that once was and now wasn’t. They were insubstantial, like the memory of a faint hint of a smell. They were absolutely nothing compared to the reality of the past that slammed into her when she was glinting.
She’d almost trained herself not to notice them.
She wouldn’t even bother telling him that the judge they’d seen dropping papers as he walked between the gas lamps was one. There wasn’t any point, anymore than drawing George’s attention to the discarded burger wrapper at their feet, or the irrelevant pigeon coming to roost in the trees above their head. For her they were just part of the streetscape, something you walked on by.
“Let’s not hang around, then,” she said, getting up. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere we can be safe for the night. Somewhere we can work out what the Black Friar meant by the Winding Stair.”
She sat back down again.
“You mean we don’t know where we’re going?”
“I mean we’re stuck inside the City because of the dragons. But maybe tomorrow morning we can go to a library and look up this Winding Stair. Or buy a tourist guidebook or something.”
“I haven’t got any money. To buy a guide. I spent it all on the taxi getting to your house to warn you.” She pulled a small handful of change out of her pocket. “About a quid left.”
He jingled the change in his pocket, pulling coins out of the plasticene lump where it had got stuck.
“Eighty-five pence.” He held it out to her. “Here. It’s all I’ve got. But when this is over—”
He stopped. His wallet, stupidly, was in his backpack with his phone, locked away in the Natural History Museum. The world of school trips and cloakrooms and cash machines seemed a long way off. He felt a strong tug of yearning for that simpler world that seemed only a thin overlay away from where he was now. It was the same tug that he’d felt looking up at the airplane when he was stuck inside the cone of fire with the dragon. He would give anything, he realized, absolutely anything to be back in that humdrum everyday world. But all he had to give, right now, was the change in his hand. He pushed it closer to her.
“When this is over I can get you lots. Whatever I owe you. More.”
“I didn’t say that because I want your money!” she said, looking at the scrabble of coins reflecting the streetlights. She realized that she wasn’t feeling angry because of the money. She was feeling angry because George had a way out. His saying “when this is over” made it clear that for him “this” was a temporary state that he might be able to get out of. And the truth for Edie was, she realized, that “this” was something she was stuck in. And she’d still be stuck here when he was out of it.
And realizing this, she asked herself why she was sticking with him. She’d been frightened and alone before she saw him running across Hyde Park with the Gunner. But she had survived. She’d survive after he was gone, she thought. But she’d be alone again. Maybe that was what was making her angry.
She remembered the swoop of hope that had propelled her off the bus and made her run after them, in the hope that George would be like her, would be able to make sense of things. But she now realized that he was different, that his “this” was something he could—if he was lucky—escape. It was a layer of the world he’d fallen into, and if he could find the Winding Stair, he could maybe climb back out of it. Her “this” was set and sealed because it was hardwired into her being, bone deep and inescapable. Her “this” was who she was and how she saw the world, not something she’d fallen into. It was like living in the falling-apart seaside town she’d once had a home in: she used to watch smiling happy people come for the day, unpack their shiny cars, and play and sit on the beach, facing the sea with their backs to the grim warren of crumbling houses and failing shops behind them on the Front. They always took their laughter and brightness with them when they left as the sun went down. They were like George.
He was a tourist.
She was here for the duration.
So she stood and stuck out her hand and took the money and zipped her pocket tight so she wouldn’t lose it.
“This isn’t enough for a book. We’ll have to nick it.” He pushed off the railings and jogged on. “Come on, then. This place gives me the willies.” They retraced their steps through the cloisters, and went left through the courtyard and out the gate, and headed north, away from the river.
The Temple Church sat quiet and unwatched now that they had gone, keeping its secrets to itself. The only thing stirring was the irrelevant pigeon in the trees above where George and Edie had been.
The irrelevant pigeon—which wasn’t, of course, either irrelevant or a pigeon—opened its eye and stretched its wings, then flapped off above the rooftops, like George and Edie heading north. It knew, in its dark raven heart, that of all the directions it could fly in, north was the one that gave it the greatest pleasure. It had no idea why. But flying slowly north always seemed the most suggestibly ominous way a raven could fly. It was a little detail, but when you were as old as it was, collecting points for style was one of the things that stopped you getting bored with the way history kept repeating itself.
Below the Raven’s balefully slow wing-beats, George and Edie found themselves suddenly out of the quiet streets and on Fleet Street. Night buses cannoned past, racing minicabs and late-night drivers to the lights.
The Man of Many Parts George looked at the lights and the colors and the shop fronts, and felt a little dizzy. He started to walk left, but Edie’s hand stopped him.
“You in a hurry to go another round with that dragon, then?”
He only half heard her, but it still irritated him.
“I’m in a hurry for everything, or didn’t you hear the Friar? I’ve got less than fifteen hours to sort this out before I get ‘winnowed.'”
“You want winnowing, keep right on, then. Temple Bar’s down that way.”
He stopped. He saw the Law Courts and thought he could make out the spiky outline of the dragon silhouetted against the church wall beyond it. He crossed the road and hurried along a street continuing north instead.
“Fetter Lane,” read Edie.
“Fetters are chains. Like handcuffs. On your legs,” said George.
“I know,” she said. “They don’t go in for cheerful, do they, these city people naming their streets? I even saw a Bleeding Heart Yard once. Had a horrible atmosphere. I didn’t touch anything and got out as fast as I could.”