فصل سی و چهارم

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The Man of Many Parts

The 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.” 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.

“Nonvogliolassiewanyoustronzoweebasturt.”

“You’re hurting her. PLEASE!” shouted George.

The head nodded, grin widening, eyes rolling in pleasure. And George couldn’t take it, and he couldn’t run, because Edie wasn’t screaming for him anymore, wasn’t screaming at all, but was putting all her efforts into hanging on to the grids and not letting the Grid Man snap her neck by mistake. And maybe he could have run if her eyes hadn’t been locked onto his like tractor beams.

So he lurched forward and kicked at the Grid Man, and as soon as he got within reach, the taint batted at him and sent him sprawling across the pavement with a casual backhand.

Edie tried to disentangle herself and escape, but the Grid Man clamped down on her. George rolled back onto his feet.

“Leave—her—alone! Please!”

Grid Man sneered and raised Edie high above his head, and both Edie and George knew he was going to snap her neck or dash her against the pavement, and both knew there was nothing George could do.

“Run, George! Just run!” she shouted, the words coming raw and ragged from her throat.

“No!” shouted George.

And two things happened at once. A black bird hopped out of the shadows and looked at George and then at the Grid Man. Then it hopped onto the Grid Man’s shoulder and clacked its beak, and the Grid Man smiled brutally and flexed.

And George heard a sound he’d heard once before. It was the crash of hobnailed boots. It was the sound of hobnailed army boots hitting the ground.

Just for a moment, both children’s hearts leaped as they thought it was the Gunner come back from the dead. But a thinner, vinegary Cockney voice that they had never heard before cut in like a straight razor.

“Put her down, you nasty jerry-built pile of foundry slag.”

The wiry Fusilier stood behind the Grid Man, rifle held ready to thrust the long-sword bayonet into its back. The Fusilier was a lighter-framed man than the Gunner had been, but he had the same dogged set to his jaw.

“Cheyirprobbieignotopileatolieyirsel!” spat the mouth parts of the Grid Man. He didn’t move an inch, although the bird did flap off to one side and watched from a more prudent vantage point.

“Or I’ll gut you like a kipper.”

The bird clacked its beak. Grid Man started to move, but the Fusilier moved faster and more decisively. With an explosive “HA!” he lunged forward and stabbed the sword bayonet into the gap running down the Grid Man’s spine, between the segments of back. Sparks dropped from the bayonet’s edge as he rammed it home to the hilt, like sparks from a grinding wheel.

Grid Man convulsed. He dropped Edie. As soon as she hit the pavement and rolled, George darted across the space and pulled her in to the wall. He felt her arm trembling with shock under his hand.

They both stared at the two statues, locked together by the bayonet plunged through the Grid Man’s back. The Fusilier held the bayonet steady, but you could see from the strain on his face and the shaking of his arms—not to mention the tendons standing out on his neck—that he was fighting the efforts of the Grid Man to turn on the blade.

“Stop. Get back on your plinth. Or I’ll do you. It’s close to turn o’day, and taint you may be, but you ain’t that stupid. . . .” hissed the Fusilier.

The Grid Man snarled, and then did something horrible to himself. With a series of grinding and shearing noises, he started to turn himself around on the bayonet, bit by hit, like a human Rubik’s Cube. First, one section of head rotated and fixed an eye on the Fusilier, then a shoulder section turned itself around. Then the top of 300 The Man of Many Parts the head swiveled, then a lower leg, and so on. With a nasty final jerk, the two chest sections rotated in opposite directions on either side of the impaling bayonet, and the Grid Man was facing the Fusilier.

“Crikey!” he said, studiously unimpressed. “You are an ugly bastard.”

Grid Man raised the thick ellipsoid grids in either hand and they started to spin, faster and faster, like a pair of angle grinders. He thrust them toward the Fusilier.

The bird clacked its beak encouragingly.

“Sorry, chummo. Your choice,” said the Fusilier, leaning back.

Blam! Blam! Blam! He fired into the body of the Grid Man. The recoil jerked the bayonet loose and he stepped back.

The Grid Man didn’t blow to dust as the pterodactyl had. He fell back and started to fall apart. His head snarled at the Fusilier.

Blam!

The head stopped moving and all the sections dropped into piles of coiling brass swarf, like the metal off-cuts from a lathe, squirming and writhing in on themselves in knots of shiny worms. They knotted and reknotted themselves tighter and tighter until there was nothing left on the pavement except the smell of burned metal and the suggestion of a man-shaped scorch mark on the stone.

The Fusilier rested his gun butt on the pavement and looked at it, breathing hard. So did George and Edie. The bird looked at it. Having had more experience in these matters than any of them, it thought faster and decided it was time to leave.

It opened its wings quietly and took a step forward into the air.

The Fusilier’s eyes caught the movement. His hand moved in a fast blur.

There was a click as he unsnapped the bayonet and a whirr followed by a simultaneous thock and squawk! as he threw the sword-size knife hard and fast across the pavement.

The Raven found itself pinned to the side of the building, with a blade through the wing. It didn’t feel any pain, just irritation.

“No, you don’t,” said the Fusilier, as he rapidly fed bullets into the magazine of his rifle through the open breech, and slammed the bolt home on a live round.

“Squawk?” clacked the Raven, trying to look friendly and unthreatening and cuddly, which is a problem if nature has fitted you out in greasy feathers, and decided you should wear basic bad-guy black.

“Not a chance,” said the Fusilier, and blam. He blew the Raven into a cloud of feathers that would have been the makings of a very stylish feather duster, if your tastes leaned to the stricter end of the goth spectrum.

The Fusilier retrieved his bayonet and slung his rifle 302

The Man of Many Parts over the shoulder. He looked all around, checking that the coast was clear before he looked at George and Edie.

“Thank you,” said George.

“Thank the Gunner and old Dictionary,” said the Fusilier. When he spoke more quietly, his voice was less vinegary and more of an astringent wheeze.

“The Gunner’s okay? You’ve seen him?” said George, his spirits lifting even further. The Fusilier shook his head with a finality that sent George’s spirits straight back into a tailspin.

“No. From what he wrote, I don’t reckon there’s much chance of any of us seeing the Gunner ever again. Not as a walking spit. Think he’s done for. He sent a note. By pigeon. To all of us. Saying he was scuppered. Asking us to keep an eye out for you two, as it were.” “Oh,” said George, a lump rising in his throat.

“Yeah,” wheezed the Fusilier. There was a pause. “He was something, wasn’t he?” Before George could speak, or maybe because he couldn’t quite trust himself to yet, the Fusilier switched attention to Edie.

“She okay?” he asked.

George saw that Edie was still shaking. Her face, always pale, now seemed almost translucent. Her eyes were open wide, but her dark pupils had shrunk to the size of periods.

“Edie?”

She heard his voice from a long way off. It seemed to take a lot of effort to turn her head, and almost impossible to focus on him.

“You okay?”

She felt her ears. She was almost surprised to find them both present and attached. Her neck felt badly wrenched, and she rubbed it.

“Bet your head hurts from being squeezed in that waffle maker,” he said.

“I’m all right.”

She wasn’t. She knew it. He could see it. But he could also see arguing with her would just make her dig her heels in and make it worse. He didn’t have the energy for an argument, and she looked like what energy she did have was all being used to keep upright. He decided to keep an eye on her. She looked like she might faint at any moment.

The Fusilier just nodded.

“That’s a good girl. Right. You need to get off the street, sharpish. Got anywhere to go?” They shook their heads. He checked his watch. Scowled.

“Okay. Follow me, at the double. I know a place where you can get a bit of sanctuary. Dunno what you done, either, but upsetting that bird’s not a clever idea. We better get away from here.” George look at the feathers twisting up into the night sky.

“But you blew it to hell!” he said.

The Man of Many Parts “Which is a lot closer than you think,” grunted the soldier drily. “So we better get moving.” He shouldered his rifle by the strap. “You don’t want to be here when he gets back.”