Dragon Shield by Charlie Fletcher

legs pistoned into a sprint. Tragedy was peering round the next corner as if to see if the coast was clear. He looked back, flashed a grin, and waved them on.
    Will looked up into the sky and had the nasty feeling the hawk had just flown closer.
    He wondered if he’d just lied to Jo for the second time in a minute.
    He had no idea if they were going to be safe. And he was pretty sure the hawk was trouble.

7
    The Eye of Horus
    The stone hawk hung in the air, wings stretched wide, cutting slow circles across the sky as its unblinking eyes scanned the city streets.
    From this high London did not look like a map. It did not look like anyone had planned it at all. It looked like an accident, a mess of roofs jumbled together without any rhyme and no more reason than the contents of a crammed toy-box would have shown if they’d been dumped out onto the floor by a fretful child.
    The river writhed through the city in a series of powerful curves, like a thick brown snake, but apart from the choppy flow of the water, nothing was moving in the glimpsed streets beneath.
    And that is what the hawk’s eye was looking for.
    Movement.
    Hawks are not praised for their wisdom, like owls. They are not prized for their song, like nightingales. They are feared for their purpose, which is to spy from on high, and then stoop to kill. Hawks are feared because they are hunters, and rightly so. They have no mercy, no gentleness, no remorse. Hawks are death-from-the-sky.
    On the edge of its field of vision something flickered.
    The hawk blinked the blue disk of its eye and tipped its wings, drifting silently across the evening air towards the spot where the stillness had been momentarily broken.
    Deep in the Ancient Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum, a mile away, nothing was moving, except shadows. The four lion-women were now on their hands and knees looking down into the black stone coffin with intense concentration; the band round the outside was still glowing with blue light, and the hieroglyphics within seemed to be moving like agitated stick-cartoons.
    The lion-women ignored them entirely, concentrating on the inside of the stone coffin which was carved out in a rough man-shape.
    It had – like the bath it resembled – been filled with water. It was – unlike a bath – showing the four lion-women everything the hawk was seeing, like a screen projected on the inky surface of the liquid. The blueish light coming from it was sending the shadows dancing across the walls and ceiling.
    The image disappeared for a fraction of a second as the hawk blinked.
    ‘There,’ said one of the lion-women. ‘It has seen something.’
    ‘THE HAWK IS THE SKY,’ said the strange everywhere-voice that came from nowhere, or from all of them at once despite the fact that their mouths did not move. ‘THE SKY CONTAINS THE SUN AND THE MOON, WHICH ARE ITS EYES. SUN AND MOON SEE EVERYTHING.’
    The lion-women bent closer over the sarcophagus to examine the picture playing across the surface of the liquid within. They looked rather less like women and considerably more like lionesses gathered at a water-hole. The small cat, a bronze statue whose golden earrings and matching nose-rings marked it as a considerably tamer and very distant cousin of the four huntresses, purred beneath their bodies, twining in and out of their arms and legs. They paid it no mind.
    They were concentrating on what the hawk’s eye was showing them. The huntresses were sharing the hunter’s eye and quivering with sympathetic anticipation as it swooped lower.
    Again the hawk saw movement, and this time it was close enough for them to see that what it saw was a boy running along a street, pushing a girl in a wheelchair. They ran out of the hawk’s view as they turned into a narrow lane, but they had been visible for long enough to recognize them
    ‘People. Moving,’ said the lion-woman with the stick. ‘People should all be held unmoving by the Great Curse.’
    Four pairs of