فصل سیزدهم

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

How a Stone Weeps

The Sphinx settled back on its haunches. The one behind it rumbled a growl like distant thunder. Its tail lashed lazily and was still. Edie put her finger back into a fist and buried both her hands in her pockets.

The Sphinx still facing her—the nice one—looked like it had returned to its normal unmoving state. Edie kicked at the plinth.

“Hoi. I’m still here!”

“Scarcely,” sighed the Sphinx.

“What do you m—” began Edie.

“If you keep interrupting you’ll miss the answer, won’t you?” the Sphinx whispered, raising an eyebrow. Edie closed her mouth. She had to do it twice, but eventually it stayed shut.

“You are here. I can see that. But to know what a glint is, to truly comprehend, you must see things on a longer scale. And on a longer scale, you, him, all people are scarcely here at all. Compared to the life of stone or metal, you’re as important as a splash of rain that falls in a summer shower, and then dries out and is gone. What people do passes, but the rocks remain. Not forever. Just a lot longer than people. And the rocks remember.” “That doesn’t make sense. Rocks can’t remember. Rocks can’t think—” “Do you want an argument or an answer?” “I want an argument that makes sense.” “Glints bring the spark of what happened out of the rock.” George suddenly understood.

“You see the past!”

Edie turned on him as if he had somehow betrayed her.

“I don’t! I mean, it’s not, it’s—” Edie stuttered.

“It’s more than that,” said the Sphinx softly.

George felt his mind spinning wild, but it spun on a center, and that center was the conviction that he was right about Edie, that he knew her gift.

“But you do see the past. When it’s happening, when you did that thing, when everything went, you know, sickening like you’ve been kicked in the stomach, when your hair stood on end—” Edie shook her head angrily.

“I don’t know what ‘thing’I do. I don’t think I do anything. Something does it to me!” “But you were just there, and your hair kind of blew out and—” “Look! I wasn’t ‘there,’I was, I was—” Surprisingly it was the Sphinx that came to her rescue.

“She was ‘then.’Bad things that happen leave a mark on their surroundings. Good things, too. But people respond more strongly to bad. And glints, when they touch stones that have a mark in them, channel it. The past plays through them again.” George, in the midst of everything, found himself enthralled by the idea.

“That’s so—amazing! What’s it like when you—” Edie cut him off tersely.

“Terrible.”

The Gunner looked over their heads.

“It’s a waste.”

Edie looked up at him.

“What do you mean, a waste?”

“Using your question to ask them about it. I could have told you that. Any spit could. But you had your precious question and now it’s used up.” The Sphinx looked at them with a cat-that-got-the-cream smile. George found himself hating it.

“So we just answer another of its riddles, and get another question.” The not-nice Sphinx lashed its tail and turned on them.

“It doesn’t work like that. You get one question each day.” Edie looked on in silence as George took this in.

“And you don’t have a day. Not to wait. Not to live, probably.” George felt panic drop the bottom out of his stomach again. The Sphinx’s voice had a mocking triumph in it that he didn’t like one bit, mainly because it sounded so sure of itself. He turned on the Gunner.

“What does she mean?”

The voice of the other Sphinx came over his shoulder.

“Ask the shaveling.”

George spun on it.

“The what?”

Something was happening to the Sphinx. He realized it was retreating back into motionless, blank bronze. He asked again, urgently: “The what? Please, the shaveling? What shaveling?” The Sphinx’s eyes lost life and dulled before them—its voice retreated too, as if it were coming from farther and farther away.

“The dark shaveling. What is to be known, he knows. …” And as an echo of a whisper, before the sounds of the traffic still hammering past them on the Embankment drowned everything, George was sure he caught, on the edge of his hearing, the other Sphinx’s mocking whisper.

“And much that is not to be known—not by you, thing of flesh, little rain splash, so shortly here, so soon gone… .” George looked at Edie. Edie looked at the Gunner. The Gunner shrugged. Edie looked unimpressed.

“You don’t know what a shaveling is?” The Gunner shook his head.

“Do you?”

Edie shook hers. They both looked at George.

“Someone who shaves?” he tried.

“Oh, nice one,” said Edie. “Someone who shaves. Can’t be more than about four million of them in the city. You going to ask them all?” The Gunner grimaced at her and stretched out a kink in his shoulder.

“Don’t give him grief, you’re the one should have asked about the Stone Heart.” “Why?” said Edie, looking up with an intensity that stopped him stretching and made him look, unexpectedly, uncomfortable.

“Because we need to know what it is, don’t we, missy? Because we’re in big trouble and—” Again she cut him off flatly.

“What ‘we’? Is there a ‘we’ here that I don’t know about? Because all you’ve done since I found you is try to lose me and tell me to stay away. That’s not being ‘we.’That’s being ‘you.’And I don’t think I owe ‘you’ anything.” “But—”

“And don’t call me missy.”

The Gunner swallowed something. George wondered whether it was frustration or something closer to fear. Then he found himself wondering why—whichever it was—that Edie provoked such a reaction in the large soldier.

“But you were going to ask, weren’t you? That’s why you answered their question… .” George joined in.

“You did. You were going to ask, he’s right—” Edie swiveled her eyes without moving her face, and George, caught in the flatness of her gaze, knew exactly what it was about her that perturbed the Gunner. Her eyes, when they were like this, were not particularly human, or if they were human, they seemed so old that no human could have lived long enough to own them. They were eyes that had gone elsewhere and seen awful things and come back different. He realized that the flatness of her gaze was not dullness. It was as if her eyes were worn or bleached out by too much weather.

“I was going to ask. Then I changed my mind.” “But why?” asked George.

The Gunner exhaled in frustration.

“Never trust a glint.”

Edie stood her ground. “You going to start asking everyone who shaves, then, hope that you find the right one, the one who can tell you about your precious stone heart thingy?” “No,” said George, bridling. “I’m going to find a dictionary and look ‘shaveling’up.” “Good,” said the Gunner unexpectedly.

“You saying a dictionary’s a good idea?” asked Edie incredulously.

“Dunno,” said the Gunner cheerfully. “But it’s a good thing he’s having ideas and not just panicking or pissing and moaning. Because, unless you missed all that the Sphinx said, whatever he’s got to do, sounds like the clock’s running. Come on.” George jogged to keep up with the Gunner, who was crossing the traffic and heading away from the river.

“You know where we can find a dictionary? A bookshop maybe, or—” “I got no idea where we can find a dictionary, son, but I can do us one better.” “Better than a dictionary?”

“Yeah. I know where we can find a man what wrote one. Come on. Mind that taxi.” George hopped up on to the curb as a cab whined past, narrowly missing him. He looked back. He couldn’t see Edie.