فصل پنجاه و ششم

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Sacrifice

The Gunner held the Walker tight in his massive bronze embrace, his arms pinioned to his side. The Walker’s head was slumped forward, his black and gray hair tumbled over his face in greasy straggles. Whatever it was Edie had glinted had sucked the will and energy out of him, it seemed.

George looked at his watch.

Four minutes.

“I better go.”

“Yeah,” said the Gunner. “And good luck.” There was something in the way he said it that made George stop and turn.

“What happens? When I put the head on the Stone?” “You get what you want. It’s over.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Hurry up,” said Edie.

“Tell him,” said a vicious voice. The Walker’s head raised a little, and a violet eye peered at George. “Tell him to say good-bye.” George felt there was a long list of questions that he should know the answers to, but that he now didn’t have enough time to ask.

“What happens?”

The Walker shrugged.

“It ends. You make your amends. You return to your vision of safe happy London, sans spits, sans taints, sans anything strange and unexplainable to disturb your soft happy life. And good riddance to you.” “But I’ll remember all this, right?”

“Edie,” said the Gunner, “get George to the Stone.” “If I put this on the Stone Heart, are you saying that I—what? I forget you all?” The Walker spat.

“Stone Heart? That isn’t the Stone Heart. It’s the London Stone. And yes. Make your trifling amends and return to your even more irrelevant existence,” said the Walker.

“Edie!” snapped the Gunner.

She took his arm and pulled him toward the shabby building with the stone embedded in its facade. His mind was racing.

Behind them, the Walker struggled, worming his hands into his coat.

“No, you don’t,” said the Gunner, squeezing him tight.

Edie pulled George up to the low grating in the building side. Behind it the Stone sat there, innocent as any other lump of masonry. Except, Edie could feel a dark, massy pull reaching out from it. She stepped back.

“Go on, then.”

He checked his watch. One and a half minutes. Ninety seconds to say something that made sense. Except he didn’t think anything made sense. Especially what he was really thinking.

He looked at Edie. Her jaw was set in its habitual jut, but there was a smile, and above it were shining eyes nearly as dark as the hair that framed them.

“I’m a bit scared,” he said.

“Everyone’s scared,” she said.

“If I do this, I think I won’t … I mean, you’ll be . . . or I’ll be in a London, where none of this makes sense. So I won’t believe you.” He cleared his throat. “I won’t know you. I mean, you’ll still be in this—this un-London. This scary place. And you’ll be alone.” “I’ll be fine,” she said, hearing that she was saying his words back at him. “Hurry.” She widened the smile, and her eyes seemed to shine that bit brighter. He looked at her.

“You’re not scared of anything.”

“I know. So I’ll be fine. Go on.”

He looked at her. Wanting to remember it all. Her face, the jaw set, the chin jutting at him below a tightening little smile.

“Edie, what if the Sphinxes gave me an answer that has two meanings? I mean, that would be perfectly like them, right?” “George, get a bend on, will you? You know what the Sphinxes said: ‘To end this, you must find the Stone Heart, and then make sacrifice for that which was broken by placing on the Stone at the Heart of London that which is necessary for its repair!’Do it! Time’s running out. Remember what the Friar said about that!” And the mention of the Friar jolted George, and it jolted him because he remembered what the Friar had said about Sphinxes spinning riddles even when they were answering. At the same time, out of the corner of his eye he saw the Walker trying to squirm out of the Gunner’s grasp, and he thought of the derision with which he’d said the London Stone was not the Stone Heart— —and then he thought of the Friar again, and it was with such a sharp immediacy that he almost believed he could hear the rolling, cheery voice as it chuckled, —What could be better for them than an answer with two meanings? Except one with three! What is the Stone Heart? Who can say?

He turned on Edie, the new thought bursting out of him in a geyser of words.

“Edie, wait, stop talking, just listen. Just listen! The Stone Heart and the Stone at the Heart of London? What if they are two different things, instead of two ways of describing the same stone. What if this London Stone is the Stone at the Heart of London, but the Stone Heart is something else entirely, something we’re missing?” She shook her head. Not wanting to entertain anymore talking, wanting to get this over.

“Like what? I mean, forget it—”

“I don’t know what the Stone Heart would be then, but you know what the Friar said, he said it could be anything, anyplace, anyone—” “No time for this, George—” she said flintily.

He felt desperate, like he was almost grasping it.

“No, seriously, what if there’s more to this than me just making good what I broke and going home to extra maths and a bunch of kids who don’t like me any more than I like them? I mean, Edie, look!” He showed her his hand, the one with the maker’s mark.

“I made a bullet, Edie. And it worked). What if—?” She shook her head and cut him off.

“There’s no time for ‘what if,’George. This is when you do what you do—and good-bye, yeah? There’s no point us both being stuck here, right? It’s like climbers: one falls off and is dangling by the rope, and the other one holds on as long as he can, but in the end he’s not strong enough—and why should they both fall off the mountain? So come on, George. You’re safe now. You get to go home. No one gets to go home, he said—but you do! Yeah, you’re special, George. You get to do the thing they said you couldn’t; you beat them, don’t waste it by not going home. Make it mean something by going home and being happy! Cut the rope! It’s not your fault I’m dangling. If you were dangling I’d cut the rope without a thought, so do it!” “No.”

He looked at his watch.

“I’m not leaving you alone here. I’m not forgetting any of this.” “You idiot! You could be free!”

“But you’d be stuck here. Alone.”

“I got on fine before I met you.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“So what? If you forget all about this, you wouldn’t know about it, so you wouldn’t even have to feel guilty—you idiot, you total absolute idiot!” And she hit him, openhanded.

In the face.

And he just stood there. And she hit him again.

And he just looked at her, something hardening in his eyes.

“GO!”

And this time her open hand constricted into a fist, and when it hit him, his face rocked back and there was blood on his lip.

“I told you never to hit me again,” he said thickly.

“And I told you not to tell me what to do,” she retorted, cocking her fist.

“Still here?”

He turned and bent over the grille.

“Fine. See you.”

“Yeah. See you,” she said with a last look at his back. Then she turned away and walked back to the Gunner, wiping something from her eye.

“S’all right,” said the Gunner. “You’ll be all right.” “Oh, please,” said the Walker, sounding exquisitely bored. “Glints are never all right. They almost all come to bad ends. Tell her the truth.” “Excuse me, miss,” It was George’s voice. She turned.

He was standing there looking confused. There was no recognition in his eyes. It was horrible. He was hunched over and apologetic like when she first saw him. All the steel that completing his quest seemed to have put into him appeared to have drained back out of him.

“I’m sorry, but I’m … do you know where I am?” He looked embarrassed. “Sorry. But I don’t know how I got here. I think I’ve had a bit of a turn.” His arms flapped helplessly. She remembered the boy she’d disliked at first sight.

“Sorry. No idea.”

And she walked away.

“Edie.”

She stopped. And it hit her. And she whirled.

George grinned at her. Standing straight and unapologetic.

He threw the dragon’s head up in the air and caught it.

“Thought I’d keep a hold of this. See how hard the Hard Way really is.” And there it was, in his wink. A flash of steel. “You don’t get rid of me that easily.” And to their great embarrassment, they both started laughing and found each other hugging—though the moment they realized this was happening, they stopped it immediately and just beamed at each other.

“That was a horrible trick,” she said.

“Yeah. You deserved it. All that ‘cut the rope’ rubbish.” “You didn’t have to do it, George. I mean it. I’m not scared of anything.” “I know.”

There was a long beat as they stopped smiling and looked at each other. She took a deep breath.

“I’m scared of everything,” she said.

“I know that too.”

George didn’t know what to do. So he hit her com-panionably on the shoulder.

“How very sickening,” said a nasty voice behind them. “You have found your own little Stone Heart.” The Walker was still gripped by the Gunner, who was smiling and shaking his head.

“Unfortunately, we have to go now,” said the Walker, squirming his hands out of his pockets. He could only move his lower arms, but in the end it was enough. There was a flash of glass in each one.

He held them parallel with each other. And before anyone could do anything, he had raised a knee, and with an eye-twisting motion, stepped into one of the small mirrors.

As soon as the foot touched the mirror, there was a splash of light and the Gunner’s head snapped back so violently that his hat fell off. And then there was a small whoosh as air rushed in to fill the place where the Walker and Gunner had been, as they appeared to be sucked into the mirror.

For a horrid moment two mirrors hung in midair, held by no hands, facing each other, with the Gunner’s hat and the dagger on the ground between them like a black bowl and a knife.

And then all four objects were gone.

George and Edie stared at the emptiness in horror.

“He took the Gunner!”

Edie slumped to the ground, needing the building wall to support herself.

“The Gunner’s gone.” She couldn’t believe it. “We don’t even know where he’s taken him!” she finished.

George sat next to her. He felt tired. Very tired. But he also felt certain.

“It’ll be okay,” he said.

“How?” she said exhaustedly.

“Dunno,” he said, watching the people spill out of Cannon Street Station as if nothing strange ever happened. “But it’s our turn now. Boot’s on the other foot.” “What?”

“We’ll have to rescue him.” He smiled, trying to look confident. “It’ll be okay.” She stared at him in horror and sudden frustration.

“It won’t. It. . .”

She looked away and stared at the spot where the Gunner had been, and tried to remember where she’d seen the hat and the dagger lying together like a black bowl and a kitchen knife before. And the memory of someone shouting: “. . . gates in the mirrors!” at her across an expanse of ice came to her. But before she could make the connection, the memory of that ice took over, and the other terrifying thing, the thing that she had suppressed by shouting at the Walker, was swimming back up into her head—and she realized it was so big that she had to tell him.

“George. I saw him! The one that took the Gunner. I saw him before—” “You saw the Walker before today?”

She nodded, fear rising nauseously in her throat as she knew what she had to say, knowing that saying it out loud would be like making it real.

“About a hundred years before today, maybe two hundred!” “What?”

“I saw him when I glinted in the Thames. I saw him at the Frost Fair.” “You can’t have . . .”

“I did. And he was drowning someone. It was—it was . . .” She couldn’t go on.

“It was . . . horrible?” he ventured. It was me.

He stared at her.

“It was a girl in a bonnet, and he drowned her, and it was me.” And for a long time they looked away from each other and said nothing.

“Well,” George said finally. “We can’t let that happen either, can we?” Then, as the sun dipped, they stood up without any more words and walked together toward the light.