CHAPTER FIVE
Death of Glints

Something was very, very wrong. The Gunner could feel it like a kind of cold heat filling the whole underground space.

“The glints, Walker? What the hell have you been doing to them?”

His voice echoed around the watery chamber. In the beat of silence that followed, the only sound was gravel crunching under the Walker’s feet as he paced the half circumference of the small beach. His tufted beard split lopsidedly to reveal a cruel smirk.

“Oh, I have done much; more than you could begin to understand. And when I have the boy in my power, I shall do more still.”

“I’m not talking about the boy,” grunted the Gunner, putting the thought of George away for later. Right now the blazing pieces of glass on the walls were what had his attention.

“The glints. The wise women, the sharp girls. You’ve been hunting them. All these centuries. The reason we all thought they were dying out as a breed; it wasn’t dying out, it was you. Picking them off. It was you. . . .”

The enormity of it robbed him of words for a moment. It was as if a great puzzle had been revealed to be the simplest of things, as if a fool should have seen it. The horror of it made his voice raw.

“Wasn’t it? How else could you get these heart stones?”

The Gunner held up the glass in his hand like an accusation. The threadbare shoulders of the Walker’s coat rose and fell in an irritable shrug.

“Heart stones? Pah! Baubles. When a man is doomed to walk the world beyond the natural span of his days, he needs a . . . hobby. Mine has been to collect a few dainties and eye-brighteners that give me pleasure.”

It was the pause as the Walker chose the word to describe his actions that confirmed the Gunner’s fears and triggered an explosion of outrage.

“You been killing them and stealing their warning stones for a bloody hobby!”

The Walker waved a bored hand at him. “You exaggerate. I don’t kill them. Killing them is superfluous. I may kill some, but it’s far from a habit and entirely not the point. After all, without their heart stones they’re lost and spinning in the wind. Their minds unspool and they’re fit for little but chattering and mowing like senseless apes, squatting in their own filth and dribbling into a cup.”

The Gunner shook his head. “Why, Walker? Why’ve you been doing this? Why would the Stone want it?”

The Walker almost spat his reply. “The Stone? The Stone wants none of it. This is my doing. The Stone has me cursed and in thrall to it, so I must do all its bidding; but not all I do is at its beck and call. I was a great man, centuries before you were anything—when you were just ore at the bottom of a mine that hadn’t even yet been dug—and I will be a man of power again!”

Spittle flecked his beard as his voice rose, and the light blazing out from the sea-glass mosaics reflected wildly from his eyes.

The Gunner overrode the rising wave of despair in his gut and twisted his face into a dismissive grin.

“Man of power, my Aunt Fanny. I seen blokes with gibbering shell shock make more sense than you. . . . Only reason you’re still around is you got on the wrong side of the Stone, and now you’re one of its servants.”

The Walker’s eyes blazed angrily at him. “And what are you, I pray? A lump of bronze in man shape who has broken his word and is himself now doomed to die alone and in the dark? These warning glasses light up when I’m here because that’s what they do when a Stone Servant or a taint is near. When I’m gone”—he waved his hand like a magician—“abracadabra, out go the lights.”

“Wait,” said the Gunner, appalled at the desperation he heard cracking through his words. “Those kids . . . don’t . . .”

“Oh, the children? The boy who thwarted me? Don’t worry about the boy. I shall turn him to my will.”

“I doubt it. You saw how he chose the Hard Way. He’s got grit, more grit than I gave him credit for.”

The Walker snorted in irritation. “He’s willful, Gunner, that’s all. He’s shot through with the stupid impetuosity of youth.”

“It’s grit,” insisted the Gunner. “He may not have known exactly what ’e was signing up for, but ’e knew it’d be rough. And he did it for the girl. He wouldn’t leave her in the lurch, and good on him I say.”

Dark humor danced in the Walker’s eyes. “Yes, good on him, as you say. Good on him for protecting the girl, good on him for caring, good on him most of all for showing me what he cares about, because if you find out what a man cares about, then you can take it and threaten it, and then you have a lever. And with a lever and the right place to put it, you can move the world. And I shall move the world. I shall change everything.”

“Leave the kids be, Walker. Don’t mess with them.”

“Sorry. Can’t oblige. I have a job for the boy if he is the maker he seems. Once, many years ago, I had two black stone mirrors, darker than the blackness you will be left to die in when I leave.”

He reached into his pocket, unsnapped two small circular silver mirrors from each other, and held one in each hand.

“Compared to the stone mirrors, these little pieces of glass in my hand are like a baby’s toy. A thief and a cheat took one of my black mirrors from me, afraid of the power they would give when used together. One stone mirror made of the right stone is a thing of some power, but two together . . . ?” His eyes blazed with an intensity that matched the heart stones on the walls. “. . . Two together can open portals, portals into worlds where there are vast powers that make even the might of the Stone pale into insignificance. And it is that power I shall harness and then free myself. The boy will make it for me, the girl will choose the stone he should shape—”

“No, Walker, the boy and the glint are j—”

The Walker cut across him with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The boy, the unmade maker and the plucky little glint? The poor dears. Poor, poor dears . . . Strange word ‘dear.’ Say it one way it’s something you love, spell it another way and it conjures up stags and antlers and the thrill of the chase. I love the chase, but you know what, Gunner? You know what part of it I really enjoy?” His smile widened, red and wet.

“The killing,” said the Gunner hollowly.

“Not just the kill.” The Walker grinned. “It’s the moment just before, when you know you can either kill or choose not to, and the prey knows it too. That’s the best part. When life or death are in your gift. That’s where the real power is. . . .”

He lifted his foot, and with an eye-twisting pop, gently and impossibly stepped into one of the mirrors he was holding, and then he was gone. The lights on the walls faded, and in their afterglow, before the blackness descended, the two mirrors hung in the air, facing each other; and the last sound the Gunner heard was the Walker’s voice, diminishing and very far off. It sounded like he was saying: “‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where there is an hind. . . .’”

Because the Gunner knew that hind was another word for a female deer, he knew exactly who the Walker was talking about, and he was filled with another surge of unbearably helpless fear for her.