فصل چهل و ششم

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Walker’s Deal

The Gunner’s eyes bored into George’s, making him want to curl up and roll away to escape the heat of their gaze. He felt the tug of the Stone at the end of the alley.

The Gunner blinked twice.

“Bloody glints. Right, then.”

And he swiveled and ran off after Edie. George was shocked.

“Hey!”

The Gunner stopped and looked back.

“Where are you going?”

“Where I’m needed.”

And then he turned the corner and was gone.

George wanted to help Edie. And he wanted to give back the thing he’d broken and make amends with the Stone and stop this. Maybe he could quickly— He wasn’t wearing his coat. Edie was. And the nub of dragon’s head was in the coat.

“Bloody glints.”

And in a surge of anger, blacker than the tower ahead of him, he ran back after the Gunner and Edie; and every step he took away from the promise of safety tore at him and made him angrier with her and her unreasonable attachment to the sea-glass.

The Gunner reached the base of the Monument. There was no sign of Edie. He craned his head and tipped the brim of his tin hat, trying to see if she was already at the top of the column. There was no one, and no sign of movement visible in the cage above.

The Gunner did a quick circuit of the plinth. By the time he got back to the door, George was running into the square.

“Where is she?”

The Gunner shrugged and pointed at the door.

“Maybe she’s climbing inside. . . .”

George shook his head.

“She didn’t have the money to get in.” He showed the Gunner his ticket stub.

“Well, you better get in there and see. And if she’s not, you better get her heart stone and all.” George thought of the three hundred and something steps, and he got angrier. Fine.

Then something else hit him.

“Heart stone?”

Walker’s Deal The Gunner shrugged.

“Heart stone, memory stone, seeing stone—they calls it lots of things. Oh—” George’s head was whirling.

“Hold on. I’m looking for the Stone Heart, and I’ve been looking for it with someone who you just remember to tell me carries something called a heart stone—and you don’t think that’s important?” The Gunner scratched his head in embarrassment.

“Well. Yeah. No. But they never calls it ‘the Stone Heart,’you know, mostly they calls it the memory stone or the heart stone. Besides”—he pounced on the thought that was going to get him off the hook he suddenly found himself on—”besides, you said the glass just showed you the Stone Heart, and it’s on Cannon Street. So it’s not like the glass itself, or the glin—Edie—was the stone heart all along and we missed it, is it? So no harm done, as long as we get it for her, sharpish. Talk after, eh?” He pushed George toward the door.

He showed his ticket to the doorkeeper. The Gunner heard him explaining that he had left something at the top and being waved through with a bored mumble.

The Gunner felt relief. George had made him feel stupid, like he’d missed something. And it wasn’t just because he had missed something. It was because the boy had changed. Whatever he’d been going through was making him stand straighter and take charge. He wasn’t a sniveler like he’d seemed when the Gunner first saw him. He grinned.

He paced around the column again, and then something caught his attention. It was a smell. His nostrils wrinkled and he bent over a scar on the pavement. It was a scuff, but it had raised the stone slightly, as if it had been done while the paving stone was wet concrete. Except the paving stone was not concrete. It was an old stone slab. But from the grit that the Gunner picked up and rubbed between his fingers, the mark was new. And it had been made by something with the power to paw a groove in a stone slab.

He moved a yard farther back and found something that stopped him dead. It was a hoof mark, plashed into the tarmac on the edge of the road. His head came up and his hand went for his revolver.

But there was nothing to see. An office building disgorged a small crowd of men and women in dark business suits. They walked away from the Monument, chattering and laughing, their colorful ties flapping in the gathering breeze.

And then he saw it, a lone figure walking toward him against the good-humored flow of the lunchtime office workers. A tall figure in a long flapping green tweed coat, hair whipping in the wind as it escaped from a grimy John Deere hoodie.

The Walker headed straight for him.

Without trying to draw attention to what he was doing, the Gunner straightened and casually walked a few yards to his left, to stand in front of the door, in case George came out. He didn’t know what the Walker wanted, but he knew he didn’t want George to run into him. And he had, he realized, been expecting him ever since he’d seen the Raven trying to tug George out of the cage above his head.

“I thought you’d be along. Never far from that bloody bird, are you?” The Walker came to a sort of pacing halt in front of him, edging from one foot to the other as he looked the Gunner up and down. He threw back the hood of the sweatshirt, exposing his gray, gaunt face to the elements. “And have you, pray, seen that damned bird? He’s never quite where he should be. Were he to have been, no doubt I should have got here sooner.” “Sorry about that, mate. He had to go.”

The violet eyes looked the Gunner up and down with distaste. He looked at the revolver hanging loosely in his hand.

“Had to go?”

“He was being a nuisance. If you know what I mean.” “I know exactly what you mean. He’s very good at being a nuisance. It’s one of his finest qualities,” said the Walker.

They stared at each other.

“He’ll be very annoyed when he gets back.” “Not my problem,” said the Gunner.

The eyes flashed. The scowl curved into a momentary smile of anticipation, like a hungry man smelling a bakery in the distance.

“Oh, but pardon me, I think it will be. One thing he doesn’t do is forget—” The smile bubbled into a fleeting and quite unappealing simper. “—being what he is, and all—if you get my allusion.” “I get nothing from you. Where’s the girl?” “The girl?”

“I’ve seen the Bull’s marks, Walker. Where is she?” The Walker began to pace more obviously: three paces one way—turn—three paces back.

“I had no intention to mix my plans with the girl. The girl is a distraction to the stratagem.” “Talk English.”

“I assure you that I am talking an English older and better than the oaf grunts that drop out of your mouth, my mock-martial friend,” sneered the Walker. “The Bull was given an item of the boy’s dress. I nearly had him at his house. The Bull followed the smell. You know how children excite his appetites.” “So why’d he get the girl?”

“In every finely judged enterprise there is the possibility of an unexpected variable. In this case it appears the boy gave the girl his coat. The Bull is not to blame.” “Where’s he taken her?”

“I met him pawing his way up the path of the old Fleet Ditch. You know where he lives. Disappointed to find he brought me no boy, but a girl, I let him continue homeward with her. All you have to do is find the boy and escort him there and effect an exchange. It is an endeavor so simple that I believe even so rude a mechanical as your stolid bronze self may effect it without confusion.” The Gunner clenched his fist and decided not to plant it in the middle of the sneer. Not until he knew more.

“Just let her go.”

“When you bring the boy to the Bull. And then the Bull will bring the boy to me. I don’t need the girl. I need the boy. I need what he has.” “Why’s that, Stone Servant?” spat the Gunner.

“There are amends to be made.”

“He’s going to make his amends. He’s been trying to do that ever since he realized what he’s done.” “Or what he is.”

“He doesn’t know that yet.”

“You haven’t told him?”

“I ain’t told him because I ain’t sure what he is. All that matters is that you’re out of order. He’s going to make his amends—” The Walker suddenly exploded, spittle flying across the gap between them as he screamed, “Damn HIS amends! I don’t give a Spanish fig for HIS amends! You think I like being a Servant of the Stone? I was a Man of Power! I HAD servants, and not just flesh and blood! I want what was broken so I can make MY amends.” He glared at the Gunner. The outburst had only intensified the fury of his gaze. The Gunner shrugged.

“Way I heard it, you have to serve the Stone because you offended it out of greed and wanting more power and all. The boy crossed the Stone without knowing what he was doing.” “So his ignorance trumps my intelligence? I think not.” “Compared with what you must have done to end up as cursed as you are, he’s done nothing.” “You plead for him? How moving. Sadly, the Stone is not sentimental. If I make his sacrifice, some fraction of my curse is lifted. And maybe . . .” His hand reached inside his John Deere sweatshirt and pulled out the figurine he had taken from George’s room.

“I have his image, too. Made by a maker. The Stone may swap one servant for another—” “Walker, I can’t let you do that.”

“You can’t stop me.”

The Gunner raised the revolver in his hand. The Walker sneered and rolled his eyes. He flicked his long straggly hair out of his face with a bored snap of his wrist.

“And you certainly can’t kill me.”

Blam! blam!

Two shots, fired so fast as to almost blend into one. The little figurine of George exploded into chips of clay and dust as the force of the bullets pinwheeled the Walker backward, his long coat scything through the air as he hit the pavement.

“But I can stop you putting his likeness on the Stone,” said the Gunner flatly. “You’ll not claim his soul that way.” The Walker lay there for a moment, winded. Then he snapped back to his feet in a surprisingly limber move, and dusted himself off.

They both calmly looked at the two bullet holes in the sweatshirt. By chance—perhaps—the bullets obliterated the end of the logo on the sweatshirt, turning “John Deere” into “John Dee.” There was no blood.

“I liked this garment,” said the Walker slowly.

“You should thank me then, Mr. Dee,” said the Gunner, holstering the gun. “At least it’s spelled right now.” The Walker was making a great play of examining the back of his coat, where the bullets—again without a trace of blood or gore—had emerged. Actually, he was trying to control a great rage boiling up inside him. He smiled unconvincingly, lips white with tension.

“You’re just a thing. Made of metal. Made by man. Remember that. A man made you—a man can unmake you. I am a man.” The Gunner shook his head.

“You ain’t a man, Walker. You ain’t anything like a man anymore. And you ain’t been for a long, long time.” The Walker held his hand out.

“Shoot first, think later is always a poor stratagem, Gunner.” He fingered the holes the Gunner had blown in his sweatshirt. The flesh beneath was not even scarred. “These holes will cost you, because they reminded me of your—capability. Give me the bullets. I don’t want you meeting the Bull with an unfair advantage.” “You’re dreaming!”

“The trouble with being a soldier is you think you can solve any problem by pointing a firearm at it. Well, not next time. Give me the weapon or the bullets, or by the hand that made you I will let the Bull do what he will with the girl-child—boy or no boy!” He held his hand out and snapped his fingers. “By the hand that made you, Gunner, all the bullets!” The Gunner tore a small pouch off his belt and held it out. The Walker looked inside.

“And the ones in your gun, Gunner. All the bullets, none hidden, and swear it by the hand that made you.” The Gunner looked sick. He broke the revolver and upended it, holding the cylinder between finger and thumb with a dainty kind of disgust as he dropped the bullets out of their chambers into the bag in the Walker’s hand.

“Swear it!” snapped the Walker.

“By the hand that made me, that’s all of ‘em.” “You know the penalty for breaking a Maker’s Oath?” “Oath-breaking’s more your line. But I know the deal.” Walker’s Deal “Break the oath and you Wander. Forever. No child is worth that. You can only begin to imagine the pain Wandering brings.” He eyed the Gunner. Then strode off all of a sudden, his head twisted back over his shoulder.

“Find this boy. Take him to the Bull. Life for life. Fair trade. Those are my terms. And if he tries to approach the Stone without giving me what I want, if he tries to make his amends and not mine, I can still cause more harm to a mortal than you or any of yours can dream of. Or prevent.” And with a cloaklike swirl of his ragged tweed coat, he was gone.