Silvertongue by Charlie Fletcher Page B

the scene. London was covered in snow. In fact it was more than covered. It was buried. The fire was still blazing beneath the center of the arch, but out beyond the red and orange of its flames, and below a crisp blue sky, the city had gone monochrome.
    It was no longer snowing, but given the size of drifts all around them, this was maybe because all the snow had run out.
    Beyond the arch all was white punctuated by gray buildings and black tree trunks. It would have been magical if it hadn’t been so still. The absence of people or movement made it a sad sight, somehow. The snow deadened everything. It hung in great cornices from the tops of the buildings, and lay so thick on the ground that cars were buried up to their windows and wore thick snow-caps on their roofs. The cold made her breath plume.
    The Queen crouched in front of the fire, holding a hotel teapot directly over the flames. She looked over at Edie and smiled. Edie heard a loud sneeze and a “Gah” from the other side of her.
    She stopped chewing and turned to look at the source of the explosion.
    “Dictionary!”
    The big man twitched and ducked his head in a half-bow that would have been more effective had it not dislodged his wig and slid it dangerously askew. He stood and straightened it with a surprisingly shy smile.
    “Ah. I give you joy of this fine, fresh, and unworldly morning, my dear. And I am told that you, whom I wrongly called a mannerless sprunt, have turned out to be a doughty nonpareil after all!”
    “Doughty what?” said Edie, looking at George, who just shrugged, equally baffled.
    A thin figure with complicated glasses, one eye obscured by a dark lens, appeared from behind the great man’s shoulder.
    “Brave heroine. Or somesuch. Dictionary wordy man but means well. Introduce self. Am.”
    “Clocker,” said Edie, realizing who he must be. “George told me about you. You gave him chocolate for me. It was good.”
    “Obliged,” said the Clocker, beaming at her. “You asleep last time we met. Or didn’t. But inordinately happy to see good self safe. And well. Indeed am,” he said with a nervous bob that made all the instruments hanging off his coat jingle at once. Combined with his rusty green coat and the snow, they gave him the look of an amiable—if spindly—Christmas tree.
    “They come out of the dark last night, and me and him nearly blew holes in them,” said the Gunner, thumbing in the direction of the Officer, who was still looking alertly out at the wintry scene. There was still nothing moving in the snow-clogged landscape. Even the solitary bird perched on the spikes topping the wall around Buckingham Palace Garden seemed frozen into stillness.
    The Queen pushed past Dictionary and the Clocker and knelt in front of Edie with the smoke-blackened metal teapot and a china mug.
    “Warm milk. Drink it,” she ordered, pouring from the pot.
    “So what’s happening?” Edie asked George.
    “We don’t know,” he said. “Clocker and Dictionary passed loads of taints heading east on their way here last night.”
    “Into the City,” interrupted Dictionary. “No doubt in my mind that something is afoot, something inimical to us brewing within the Square Mile. ’Tis plain as a pikestaff that dark days attend us. All people erased from the city at a stroke, this unseasonable and unnatural snow, all portend evil. Not a word I use lightly, but I am muchwhat confirmed in my apprehension that a new devil walks the earth, and this snow is his footprint.”
    A beat of silence followed as everyone absorbed his gloomy words.
    “Still, we’ve been talking about what to do,” said George, rallying. “We’ve got a plan.”
    In the distance Edie saw movement, but it was just the bird gliding off the wall and landing nearby.
    “I just want to find my mum,” said Edie. As she said it, a horrible thought came to her, cloaked in the memory of a dream and the sandy hands pulling at her feet, and she scrabbled in her pocket.