Silvertongue by Charlie Fletcher Read Free Book Online Page A

before all evidence that it had ever been there was gone.
    The moment she held the heart stone in her hand, Edie knew she was whole again.
    She looked up to the ridgeline of the land ahead of her and saw the silhouette of the hare against the pale sky. It seemed to sense her gaze, because it twitched its ears, dropped its head, and was gone. She walked out of the waves and up to where the rabbit had been, and sat leaning against the smooth wood of the wall, looking out to sea with no worry about what might be behind her on the land.
    After a bit the owl came and sat on the wall next to her.
    Other than staying close, it gave no sign of any particular interest in her. Edie sat gazing out at the dark water as the light changed.
    “Thank you,” she said.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Dark Horse, Black Tower
    N ature abhors a vacuum, so when the Walker used the black mirror to escape into the outer darkness, something from the outer darkness escaped into our world to take his place. In the same way that the old darkness in the London Stone had needed to take substance and shape in order to move in the world, and so had taken over the Duke’s horse to become the Night Mare, so the new darkness had taken the first substance it had met as its own: that substance was the ice crystals thrown up in the wake of the Queen’s chariot. This is why it became the Ice Devil.
    The shape it took was that of the being who it had swapped dimensions with, which meant that the Ice Devil pacing back and forth on the top of Tower 42 was a Walker-shaped figure whose slightly stretched and twisted body was made from permanently whirling ice crystals.
    It had already recognized the presence of the old darkness, a force with powers akin to its own as it overflew the London Stone, and it had felt that power staring back. It had acknowledged the kinship and had been acknowledged in turn, because of course the old darkness had itself once escaped into this world from the same outer darkness.
    In the exchange between the two darknesses was also communicated the idea of the taints: the fact that the taints were useful hands and wings and claws with which to move upon this world. And it was for this reason that the Ice Devil had called them to him.
    It had sent out the command “Come,” and they had. Throughout the night, flight after flight of gargoyles and phoenixes and pterodactyls and all manner of winged stone creatures had arrived and perched wherever they could find claw- or foothold at the top of the skyscraper.
    Wingless taints had also heard the call and had run, trotted, or shambled through the snow to the foot of the tower. Those who were equipped to climb had begun the long ascent on the outside of the building, and those who couldn’t waited in a tormented rabble of misshapen creatures below.
    The clean straight lines of the tower’s top had gone as the arriving taints had bloomed all around it like a parasitical fungus. The new and increasingly crowded aerie of monstrous creatures were also affected by the proximity of the Ice Devil, and froze up, catching the falling snow in their various hooks, folds, and hollows. Giant icicles began to form on the more pronounced extremities of this outer flange, and every now and then a shifting gargoyle would send ice and snow tumbling slowly through the night air to explode on the ground at the tower’s foot, to the consternation of the earthbound taints congregated below.
    The intense icy temperature at the apex of the tower caused cold air to fall down the sides of the building in what looked like an unendingly slow cascade of fog from dry ice.
    The Ice Devil had cordoned itself behind a living wall of taints encircling its fortress in the sky, and it walked the unlikely parapet of this aerial stronghold, mapping the other lines of power that it could sense crisscrossing the jumbled urban landscape beneath. There were lines of power it understood, and others that it sensed but did not know the nature of, and