Silvertongue by Charlie Fletcher Read Free Book Online Page B

there was nothing as strong as the brother power it had felt in the Stone. But when it returned to the facade of the building, the darkness in the Stone was gone, almost completely.
    The Ice Devil loped around the high perimeter of the tower, trying to sense where this power had gone, and then its attention was taken by a disturbance in the crowd of terrestrial taints beneath. They had parted in order to let something through, and the moment the Ice Devil saw it, it knew it for what it was. The dark horse shape of the Night Mare stood looking up, and this time there was more than a nod.
    There was a connection.
    The darkness smoldering out of the horse’s eyes slowly circled its way up into the night sky and met the falling ice smoke. Where the darkness met the ice, a third thing was formed, a kind of thick and unwholesome gray miasma that billowed outward from the tower in all directions as it filled the roads and alleys, enveloping the surrounding buildings in a light-leeching cloud of freezing ice murk.
    In the moment of connection, the Ice Devil and the darkness realized they both came from the same place outside this world, and that they could conquer the world by joining forces. The Ice Devil also learned that the obstacle to this was the moving points of power and light it had sensed, called spits. And it agreed with the darkness that the first order of the day was to destroy them, them and the two other powers that moved with them.
    The Ice Devil watched the Dark Horse turn and walk into the ice murk, toward the edge of the City.

CHAPTER NINE
In Shtuck
    “S he said thank you,” said George. He sat wrapped in a blanket, looking over at Edie in the firelight. She was fast asleep. “The goddess Andraste looks after her in her dreams.”
    “She is safe for now,” murmured the Queen.
    “For now?” said George, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and wishing the Gunner hadn’t just shaken him awake, especially by gripping his shoulder. The pain of the stone vein twining up his arm had been rekindled and immediately reminded him of the clock ticking down to the moment when he would have to face the final duel with the Last Knight of the Cnihtengild, a duel that he felt was more death sentence than fair fight. He shivered despite himself. “It doesn’t feel like any of us are particularly safe right now. Doesn’t feel like any of us even know what’s happening. Which is pretty harsh.”
    “We’re all in shtuck, right enough,” growled the Gunner. “But Her Majesty here reckons Edie’s in deeper, because of having been dead and all.”
    “But she—” began George.
    “The girl drowned. She was dead. We all saw it. And yet she came back. The heart stones of the dead glints, the ones the Walker killed, they brought her back. But she was—make no mistake, boy—dead!” said the Queen emphatically.
    “I’m not saying she wasn’t. And my name is George, not ‘boy,’” he said. “What does ‘having been dead’ mean?”
    “It means the barrier between life and death is weaker for her now that she has crossed it twice. It means death will come farther into life looking for her than it will for you, for example. She is a fearless girl, but too little fear can be as dangerous as too much.”
    “So we’ll keep an eye out for her then.” George shrugged.
    “It’s more than that,” said the Queen sharply. “It means she’ll be changed. It means she’ll favor the darker side of herself. She may harm herself by the choices she makes.”
    “Okay,” said George slowly. “No offense, but that just sounds like stuff the school shrink says when he doesn’t know what else to say. Edie’s a fighter, not suicidal.”
    “School shrink?” said the Gunner with a questioning tilt of the head. “What’s that mean?”
    George scrabbled quickly for a way to explain this, trying not to think about how bizarre it was having to translate the modern world to a bronze statue in the middle of a snowstorm.
    “When