CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hung at the Tate

All the blood in George’s body was obeying the call of gravity as he hung upside down, nose to the brickwork of a high chimney. He could feel his heart slamming as it fought a losing battle, trying to pump blood out of his head and circulate it normally, back up around his body. His ears pounded with a percussive swoosh and thud that got louder and louder until he was sure his head was going to burst with the pressure. He hadn’t been held upside down since he was a toddler. He had a sharp memory of his laughing mother stopping his father from dangling him over a pile of leaves, and he remembered the relief as his dad had turned him the right way around, and how they’d all tumbled into the pile and had a leaf fight. He must have been about six, and those were the happy days, when his mother’s laughter was just that, not a means of hiding something. The thought of her seemed to come from another life. He wondered if she was back in the country yet, if she knew he was missing. She must. Somewhere out there, she must be looking for him. She had to be.

He tried to think what he should do, and then just at the point where he was beginning to see little dancing spots of black unconsciousness whirling in from the edge of his vision, the gargoyle’s other leg talon closed around his neck—not hard—and he found himself being turned the right way up and brought face-to-face with the great feral cat head.

Spout’s stone eyes seemed to bore into him as the pressure that had built up in his head drained away and the black flecks whirled out of sight. His heart was still jackhammering in his chest, but the noise in his ears quieted to a background bass thump.

One feline eyebrow rose higher than the other, signaling a question. The stone mouth worked, trying to get a word out from behind the great teeth, with the awkwardness of someone trying to dislodge a fish bone without using his hands.

“Gack?” he said, and paused as if waiting for a reply. When none came, he grimaced and appeared to try again. “Gowk?”

Somehow the strangest thing, stranger than hanging off the top of the tall industrial chimney in the grip of a flying gargoyle, was the fact that the gargoyle appeared to be trying to talk to him.

George knew there was something wrong with this. He knew it in his guts.

“Why aren’t you dead?” he asked, his voice as raw as the wind whipping around the top of the stack. He realized he also wanted to know why he wasn’t dead, why the thing hadn’t ripped him limb from limb or dropped him to shatter on the stone below.

Spout looked at him, and though he said nothing, George was shocked to see that he shrugged. When something with a twenty-foot wingspan shrugs, it’s about as big as a shrug can get.

By all the rules about spits and taints that George had learned since he had fallen into this layer of unLondon, where statues walked and talked and flew and fought, Spout should have been dead, back on his perch, never to move again. George had seen the Gunner smithereen him with some of the last bullets from his gun. He was a taint. That meant he was dead. When taints were damaged like that, they were finished. On the other hand, spits—like the Gunner—had a stronger animating spirit holding them together. Even if they were badly damaged, as long as they could find their way back to their plinth by midnight, the time the Gunner had called “turn o’day,” they were revived. Taints didn’t have the same strong animating spirit to hold them together. They had a void at their core. Instead of a personality, they had malice and envy.

Spout was a taint, and Spout had been blasted to shards in front of his eyes. That meant he should never walk the city or swoop over its rooftops again. That meant he should no longer be a threat. That meant he was just an ornament.

Except he had swooped. He had swooped and grabbed him. And he was looking at him expectantly. And George had no idea why. Unless . . .

With a jolt, he suddenly thought he knew what Spout wanted. It wasn’t complicated. Spout wanted what the Walker had wanted. He wanted the broken dragon’s head in his pocket.

The jolt he felt was elation: a moment ago, George had had no hope and a strong conviction that there was no way out other than a long drop or a short (he hoped), nasty encounter with Spout’s ripping talons. Now he had something to exchange for his life. He didn’t mind giving up the broken piece of statuary, not if it bought him his life, not if it bought him the time to rescue the Gunner and find Edie.

“Look!” he blurted. “Look, I know what you want. Here. I’ve got it. Put me down and you can have it—Oh.”

Until his scrabbling hand found nothing where his coat pocket should be, and his mouth hit the “Oh,” his plan had been almost instant and great.

He’d bargain with Spout by threatening to toss the broken dragon’s head into the deep river below, unless the thing put him on the ground in one piece. Only, what his hand had discovered, an instant before his mind remembered, was the now presumably lethal fact that he had given his coat to Edie when the rain had set in. The coat in whose pocket he’d put the dragon’s head.

“Oh,” he repeated. “Bugger.”

“Gugger?” echoed Spout nastily, head still cocked.

“Exactly.” George’s voice sounded as defeated as he felt.

“Gackly?”

“Yes,” said George. “Gackly.”

He was getting hysterical. He must be. There was a big sound rising like a tide inside him, and it wasn’t a scream or a yell. It was laughter, and there was nothing funny about any of this.

And then he couldn’t stop the laughter, not even as Spout adjusted his grip on George and launched himself off the top of the chimney into the great gulf of air below. Tears of mirth streamed into George’s eyes as he flew through the air, so he saw the white metal blade of the Millennium footbridge below him through a blur, as the gargoyle swooped low over the river, heading north.

“Gackly,” he choked, as the first chunk of laughter burst out of his nose in a convulsive snort. The great white dome of St. Paul’s loomed straight ahead.

“I’m guggered. . . .”