فصل سی ام

CHAPTER THIRTY

Dead in the Water

The Gunner was facedown in the mud and not moving. He’d walked down the Strand, every step hurting worse than the one before, and by the time he’d reached Trafalgar Square and turned left under the lofty pillars of Admiralty Arch, he knew he was in worse trouble than he’d imagined.

He carried the heat of the Temple Bar dragon’s fire in him like a growing poison. It was a heat that sapped all his energy. Never before had he felt like he was made of bronze. He had been made to be a man in uniform, and if he had ever been asked, he would have said he felt like any other man. But no one asks statues these kind of questions, not even other statues.

Inside himself, where the poison of the fire was lodged, he felt looser, almost liquid. Where he had felt solid he now felt soft, and the outer skin, beyond the heat, felt like scrap metal that he had to drag along with him, metal that could burst or break at any moment. He hated the feeling. It was the memory and the pain of his birth, the time when something that was not him but just a possibility of him poured hot and molten from formlessness into his present shape; and in the birth memory was the realization that this is what his death would feel like, and in that thought was the corroding poison of the dragon’s fire.

The pain he remembered was not the pain of the molten bronze pouring into the gunner-shaped cast at the foundry. It was the pain of cooling into that shape, of becoming solid. It was the pain of all the other things that the metal could have been made into dying as he became the Gunner and not them. And because the number of things the molten bronze could have been shaped into was infinite, so was the pain of their possibilities dying.

He stumbled up the Mall, and as he passed St. James’s Park to his left, he caught the flat sheen of the lake through the trees. And he thought that if he could get to the lake and get into the water he might cool this burning, sapping pain enough to continue across into Green Park and from there to Hyde Park Corner, and get to his plinth before midnight. Although, by the time he thought it, the fire-poison was gnawing at him so badly that he really would have been happy to lie in the cool inky-black water until midnight came, and the consequences of not being on his plinth at turn o’day happened anyway.

Dead in the Water The pain and the damage was so severe that oblivion and never moving or seeing again didn’t seem so bad.

He hoped the kid would be okay. He was pretty sure the Friar wasn’t as black as he was painted. Not like there was much choice. And the strange girl, the glint. All that hurt inside her. All that pain she would give to those close to her. Still, she was all he could trust.

The boy probably deserved better.

He splashed into the lake, sending a family of sleeping ducks skittering away across the ripples in protest. He fell to one knee, then sat back and laid his body in the cold mud just below the shallow water.

It didn’t help.

He’d expected the water to fizz and steam off him as he lowered himself into it, he felt so hot inside. But the water didn’t boil, and there was no hiss, no hot water vapor rising beneath the spreading plane trees.

It didn’t help a bit.

And now he had used up all of his energy getting to the lake, and he had none left to get home in time. Maybe ever.

“Stupid,” was the last word he said.

Then, with a last gargantuan effort, he rolled onto his great chest and tried to crawl out of the mud, knowing he wouldn’t make it, knowing he’d try anyway. He almost made three feet, and then his arms and legs gave out and he slumped facedown into the mire at the water’s edge. His head twisted sideways, and his helmet came off, and his cheek plowed into the mud and water.

And then he was still.