CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Stroke Dolorous

The Last Knight barreled through the rain, his lance aimed unwaveringly at George’s heart. George backed up until he felt a wall behind him, and then he ducked and rolled sideways.

He knew the invisible knights had him hemmed in; he had the throbbing nose to prove how hard it would be to try to barge through their cordon. It was a thick impenetrable wall of horse’s bodies and shields and men with weapons. But he also noticed when the knights became visible at the next flash and toll of the bell that lower down, under the horse’s bellies, there was plenty of space to escape at ground level.

So that’s what he aimed for as he ducked and rolled for safety, hoping he wouldn’t find a hoof in the way. As it happened, a hoof found him and gave him a glancing blow on his shoulder, but apart from that, his plan worked pretty well. As he rolled, the bell tolled in another flash, and he saw the belly of the horse above him. He hauled up onto his feet and sprinted across the courtyard to the relative shelter of the low brick colonnade.

He heard a roar of disapproval from the Cnihtengild, heard someone clearly shout “CRAVEN!” and turned in time to see the Knight hurriedly raise his lance to the sky and try to apply the brakes by leaning back and hauling on the reins. The charger’s head came back, and its hooves locked into a slide. He could see why the Knight had raised the lance; because if he hadn’t, he would have definitely speared himself a nice big office building.

George ducked sideways and flattened himself against the inside of a pillar and held his breath. In front of him was the plate-glass wall of a coffee shop. The shop was closed, but a girl was stacking chairs and wiping tabletops. She looked up, and George was sure she saw him, so sure that he was about to shout for help, when he heard a horse’s hoof slowly clopping closer. He saw in the reflection in the plate-glass window the lights on the war horse’s surcoat as it stepped slowly into the arch behind him.

He saw the Knight try to bend his head low enough to get into the colonnade, but there wasn’t enough headroom. He looked down and saw the lance jabbing in beside him, tapping his leg.

And that’s when he remembered that if he could see the Knight in the reflection of the coffee shop window, then the Knight could see him right back.

“You must fight,” said the Knight. “You must come out and fight, or you must forfeit as a craven varlet.” His voice echoed ominously in the low-roofed space.

“I am fighting,” said George. “I just don’t have a weapon!”

A twinge of pain in the scar made him look down at his hand. He remembered how it had cut through the tentacled arm of the earth creature that had grabbed him in the underpass the day before. He remembered how the Temple Bar dragon had looked at his hand in a kind of wonder. He remembered making the bullet that had killed the Minotaur. He remembered the Gunner’s look of awe as he had told him he was a maker.

And then he looked down at the lance that was tapping him on the leg. Somehow the tapping was too ignominious to bear. The Knight was cajoling him to fight as if he were a toddler having to be coaxed out of a hiding place in a playhouse.

He thought of the power in his hands. He thought of how he had just been called Ironhand.

And then he moved. His hand flashed down and grabbed the lance, about one foot six inches from the tip. He knew what he would do, and he tried to focus his mind in order to do it. He was going to snap the lance and then he would have a pointed weapon of his own, and the lance would be blunted. This would be a good thing on many levels, not the least because he was pretty sure the sculptor who had made the Knight had decided not to equip him with a sword.

It was an act of desperation, but somehow George knew from the pulsing pain in his scar that it would work.

His hand closed around the shaft of the lance and he tried to put every ounce of strength and will into it. At the very least he would bend the thing and render it useless.

It was a good plan, and he did put everything into it. He put so much willpower into squeezing and tugging at the lance that when it neither snapped nor bent, he remained clenched on to it for too long, and when the Knight kicked his horse so that it sprang backward, George was dragged out into the open, like a terrier refusing to loosen its grip on a particularly enjoyable stick.

As he was dragged out, he suddenly had a horrible vision of what his hand would look like if he slid down the lance and the blade sliced it open.

Without thinking, he flinched.

He flinched because he let the fear in.

And as he flinched, the Knight flicked his arm and the lance sideways and sent him skimming across the rain-slick courtyard floor as effortlessly as a man twitching a fishing rod.

George spun to his feet and looked for the next place to run.

The bell tolled, and he saw the Guild advancing behind him in a solid and ominous wall of armor and general-purpose grimness.

“You must stand. You cannot run. You must fight. Refuse to fight and you forfeit,” bellowed the Knight.

“I am fighting,” shouted George. “You’ve got a bloody horse and a weapon. All I’ve got is running!”

However, he was in a dead end. So he stood his ground, because when there’s nowhere to run, and all the talking hasn’t worked, that’s almost all you can do.

And when the Knight pricked his horse forward and lowered his lance, George did the one other thing he hoped the Knight wasn’t expecting: he ran toward him.

He didn’t plan it, but it came to him as he was already kicking into a sprint. His dad in the park, a rugby ball, cold winter afternoons. And the words: “The trick is to zig when they expect you to zag.”

The stutter step. The key to wrong-footing the tackler on the other team. His dad had spent hours trying to help him get the hang of it. Do it right, and a hefty opponent closing in on you at speed wouldn’t have enough room or mobility to change his direction in time to catch you. It was the perfect tactic.

The only problem, he remembered five steps into the run, was that he’d never really been that good at rugby and was particularly crap at selling the stutter step. Often he just tripped up and tackled himself.

He erased the thought and focused on the tiny circle at the end of the lance as it sped toward him. When it was two paces away, he jinked left but went right, and the lance tip tried to follow him, and whiffled past his ear as he ducked and dug in, his left shoulder grazing along the side of the horse’s chain mail as they passed.

He reached the safety of another colonnade and looked back to see the big horse outlined by the office building beyond, trying to one-eighty at speed; sparks flew from its hooves as its skid sent up a huge backlit wall of spray.

George didn’t wait to see them get their balance again. The bell tolled, and he saw in the accompanying flash that the Guild were arranging themselves in another long line, cutting off his most obvious route of escape. But he also saw, at the end of their gauntlet, not a blank wall but the sentry-box-style gatehouses he’d flown in over with the golden girl. And beyond the gatehouses, the traffic and lights of the city beckoned.

He didn’t think twice, just clenched his fists, ducked his head, and ran his heart out, tearing past the sporadically visible walls of knights. He had to get there before one of them positioned himself at the end of the line and cut off what he was pretty sure was his last chance of escape.

He ran so fast that his heart bounced alarmingly hard against the inside of his rib cage; but he saw that he’d made it.

None of the Guild was going to be able to block his exit. He didn’t let up on his speed. He wasn’t going to slow down until he’d put a lot of ground between the Knight and him. Or until he threw up or had a heart attack or something. He felt the jag of elation as he closed in on the open gate. Two paces out, he allowed himself to look back.

This meant he was facing the wrong way when the gate slammed shut.

He hit it in a pile-driving shoulder charge. He hit it so fast and so unexpectedly that the impact was somehow dulled with shock. He saw stars, bright tiny stars that whirled around in front of his eyes. It didn’t really hurt so much as take all the breath and hope out of him in one bone-crunching impact. Except no bones crunched. The only thing that broke was his spirit.

He opened his mouth to say, “What?” but didn’t have the breath to voice the word. He turned and saw a flash of gold beyond the tightly arranged black bars of the gate.

He couldn’t believe it.

“Ariel?”

Her slender arm serpentined through the bars, and her hand found his upper arm. She squeezed it gently.

“You cannot run. You cannot refuse the duel.”

He shook his head in disbelief, trying to shake some of the stars out of it.

“You closed the gate? You?”

She squeezed his arm again. Given the fact that he saw in the next flash of flame that the Knight was now aimed at him from the other end of the two long ranks of the Guild, it didn’t give him the comfort he imagined she’d intended it to impart.

“Open the gate!”

She shook her beautiful golden head sadly. He was sure he heard real regret in the catch of her voice. Which made what happened next almost worse.

“I cannot, boy.”

The Knight lowered his lance for the third time and kicked the horse forward. Its hooves danced through the puddles, sending up great sheets of spray as it bore down on George.

“Okay fine,” he said desperately. “Let go of my arm and I’ll climb over.”

“I cannot do that, either.” Her hand clenched around his upper arm like a manacle and pinned him to the gate.

“But why?” he shouted, heart freezing at the sight of the inbound knight.

“Because I am a minister of fate.” The new note in her voice was as hard as a diamond and cold as ice. “And no one, absolutely no one, cheats fate, boy.”

She spat that last “boy” as if she were getting something really disgusting out of her mouth. And no matter how hard he struggled, he couldn’t break her iron-hard grip as it pinned him to the metal gate like an unmissable target.

Clang! The bell tolled its final note, and in the flash, George saw the Guild rise in their stirrups and shake their weapons at the sky, in celebration of his death, and the fatal lance tip sped in toward his heart—three meters, two meters, one meter—Game Over.

He reflexively jerked his head away. He actually sensed the wings of Death flying in to gather him as he closed his eyes and felt a tremendous impact. Something felt horribly wrong, and he heard his scream of pain as if it were already coming from outside him. He felt himself leave the earth in one brutal savage jerk, and his head seemed to explode. Then his spirit soared into the sky, and he opened his eyes, knowing he would see himself being drawn into the light. . . .

Instead he saw Spout looking down at him with his implacable stone eyes as he flapped into the night sky.

“Gack?” the gargoyle inquired drily and tightened its grip on George’s chest. It swayed into another lopsided wing beat, circling north.

George looked down, still half expecting this to be an out-of-body experience, still imagining he was going to look down on his impaled body.

What he saw instead was the Knight and the horse and the lance thrust through the gate, up to the hilt. He also saw that the figure writhing on the end of the weapon was the source of the screaming—not him. Her golden shape was the last thing George saw before his eyes fluttered shut and unconsciousness swept in and anaesthetized him.