CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Gunner in the Dark

“‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where there is an hind. . . .’” The Walker’s words seemed to hang in the dank air long after he had left the Gunner alone in the darkness, reminding him that the Walker had left to hunt Edie. The Gunner was sick with the certainty that the Walker would get her. There were just too many heart stones belonging to other glints arranged on the four walls of the underground water tank, like grisly trophies, to leave any room for doubt. The Walker clearly knew what he was doing. Each of those worn pieces of sea-glass had been the precious possession of a woman or girl, the kind of possession none of them would have given up without a fierce fight. The Gunner wondered how many of the heart stones had been pried from cold, dead fingers. He felt weak at the thought. “Right,” he said to himself. “Smoke break.”

He felt for the wall behind him and slid down to a sitting position, hunched against the damp stone at his back. He reached under the tarpaulin cape he wore around his shoulders and fumbled something out of a pocket. There was a scrape and then a match flared into light, and the red end of a cigarette was ignited.

He held the match out at the end of his arm, not wanting to waste a moment of its illumination as he sucked hungrily at the cigarette between his lips. He used the fleeting light to orient himself in the space: he saw the castle-shaped outlines of the sea-glass fragments, and he noted the disk hanging in the center of the room, reflecting the tiny flame in his hand. Then it guttered out and he was in the dark again.

The only sound was his breathing, interspersed with his inhaling and exhaling the tobacco smoke. Each time he inhaled, the red dot at the end of the cigarette glowed brighter, like a tiny heart pulsing.

He took an inventory of how he felt, and what his options were. He felt wrong inside, still twisted and hanging by a thread, which he realized was the result of having broken his oath in order to try to save Edie. He imagined this wrongness was going to get worse. It certainly made him weak, and it seemed to be making it hard for him to think as straight as he normally did. The thing he was most worried about, after what was going to happen to Edie and then George without him there to help them, was what was going to happen at midnight.

Midnight, or turn o’day, was the time when the statues based on real people, the spits, had to be on their plinths. It wasn’t optional, it was part of what they were and how they were. An empty plinth at turn o’day meant the death of a spit. When it returned or was returned to its plinth after turn o’day, it never walked again, and became no more than a human-shaped lump of metal or stone. Since he was now paying the penalty for breaking an oath sworn by the Stone and the hand that made him, he imagined that midnight might mean, if not the end of him, the start of an eternity of wandering, like the Walker, in thrall to the dark powers pent in the Stone.

He didn’t seem to have much chance of leaving this subterranean cell before midnight unless the Walker got him out the way they’d come in; and there just didn’t seem much likelihood of that. Even if he’d had his normal strength, he didn’t know how deep underground he was, and he certainly didn’t think he could claw his way to the surface, given the fact that the last time he had tried to lift his arms to do so, he had failed so badly. The Walker’s power over him seemed to be working. He wondered if the Walker would be back before turn o’day, before midnight came and brought his death.

He wasn’t looking forward to the Walker’s return, if only because his sneering boastfulness was hard to bear, on top of all the bad things that were happening to the Gunner. And then he thought of a way to stop having to see the Walker’s face at least, and that gave him a plan.

“Come on, you dozy beggar,” he said to himself as he grunted and heaved himself back onto his feet.

If the glint’s glasses blazed into life because of their power to warn when a taint or a Stone Servant like the Walker came near, and that was the perverse way the Walker provided light for himself in his subterranean lair, there was something the Gunner could do. The fact that it involved disassembling the Walker’s carefully made castle shapes only increased his desire to do it.

He unhooked his tarpaulin cape and felt for the mural on the wall behind him.

By sucking hard on his cigarette, he caught a pale reflection in some pieces of glass on the wall. He carefully laid his cape on the gravel beneath the castle outline, and reached high and wide, using both hands to brush a glass piece off the wall and onto the tarpaulin.

“Abracadabra to you too, mate,” he muttered in grim satisfaction.

Once he’d convinced himself that he’d cleared that wall of heart stones, he bundled up the tarpaulin and turned one hundred eighty degrees to the wall and walked in a straight line off the gravel spit and into the water. As he passed the center point of the space, he stopped and cast around with his hands in the air until they clattered into the spinning disk on the chain. He tugged hard, and there was a percussive spang noise as the chain parted and the disk came free. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his matches. He lit one and stood there, hip deep in the water, looking at the disk in the light of the small flame.

It was an old pewter plate: on it, someone had scratched a series of concentric circles with turreted castles around the edge, as if marking the points of the compass. Roads led from the arches in the base of each castle. They made a cross where they met in the center of the plate, joined by another series of circles like the central boss of a shield. There was writing all over the design, but all the Gunner had time to read was “The King and his princes . . .” and “Occidens” before the match guttered out. He carefully stowed the plate inside his jacket and headed for the glass castle on the wall.

“King, my eye,” he snorted. “You won’t need all this malarkey, because when you pop back in here with the lights out, I’ll bloody crown you for nothing.”

And though there was no one to see it, he grinned as he reached for the first piece of sea-glass on the wall ahead of him.