The Golem's Eye

Surrender now, and I will ask my master to research the necessary spell."
    The skeleton gave a screeching cry of contempt. "Ask your master? Will it really be so easy? Are you on such equal terms? I doubt it very much. All of you are subject to the whims of human masters, and I alone am free!"
    "You're trapped in a festering bag of bones," I said. "Look at you! Not even able to turn into a bird or fish to get away."
    "I'm in a better state than you," the skeleton snarled. "How many years have you been working for them? Change shape all you like, the fact remains you're a slave, with threats and manacles binding you to your task. Ooh, look—now I'm an imp, now I'm a devil! Who cares? Big deal!"
    "Gargoyle, actually," I muttered. But only quietly; his point had hit home.
    "If you had half a chance, you'd be here with me, roaming London at will, teaching those magicians a thing or two. Hypocrite! I defy you!" The vertebrae cracked, the torso turned, white bones reached up and grasped the granite column. With a heave and a gasp, Gladstone's skeleton was climbing up the obelisk, using the ancient carved hieroglyphs for footholds.
    My companions and I watched it climb.
    "Where's he think he's going?" the bird asked.
    The gargoyle shrugged. "There's nowhere for him to go," I said. "He's just postponing the inevitable." I spoke angrily, since Honorius's words had contained more than a grain of truth, and that knowledge hurt me. "Let's finish him off."
     
    But as we rose, spears lifted, silver ornaments glinting darkly in the dusk, the skeleton reached the uppermost point of the ancient stone. There, it clambered awkwardly to its feet and raised its ragged arms toward the west and the setting sun. The light shone through the long white hair and danced on the hollow innards of the skull. Then, without another sound, it bent its legs and launched itself up and out over the river in a graceful swan dive.
    The orangutan hurled its spear after it, but really there was no need.
    The Thames that evening was at high tide and in full spate; the skeleton hit the surface far out and was submerged instantly. Once only did it reappear, way downstream, with water gushing from the eye sockets, jaw champing, arm bones flailing. But still it made no sound. Then it was gone.
    Whether the skeleton was carried straight out to sea, or drawn down into the mud at the bottom of the Thames, the watchers on the bank could not say. But Honorius the afrit, together with Gladstone's bones that housed him, was seen no more.

35
     
    Kitty
     
    Kitty did not cry.
    If her years in the Resistance had achieved nothing else, they had succeeded in hardening her emotions. Weeping was no good to her now. The magnitude of the disaster was so great that normal responses were inadequate. Neither during the crisis in the abbey, nor immediately afterward—when she first halted her desperate flight in a silent square a mile away—did she allow herself to slump into self-pity.
    Fear drove her on, for she could not believe that she had escaped the demon. At every corner, using old Resistance techniques, she waited thirty seconds, then peeped back the way she had come. On every occasion, the road behind was empty of pursuit: she saw only slumbering houses, flickering lanterns, silent avenues of trees. The city seemed indifferent to her existence; the skies were filled with impassive stars and the blank-faced moon. There was no one out in the depths of the night and there were no vigilance spheres abroad.
    Her feet made the faintest tripping sounds as she jogged along the pavement, keeping to areas of shadow.
    She heard little: once a car humming past on a nearby road; once a distant siren; once a baby squalling thinly in an upper room.
    She still carried the staff in her left hand.
    In her first hurried shelter, a ruined basement of a tenement block within sight of the abbey's towers, she had almost abandoned the staff under a pile of rubble. But useless though it was—good for nothing but killing insects, the benefactor had said—it was the only thing to have come out of the horror with her. She could not let it go.
    She rested a few minutes in the cellar, but did not allow herself to sleep. By dawn, central London would be swarming with police. It would be fatal to remain there. Besides, if she shut her eyes, she dreaded what she might see.
    Throughout the deepest hours of night, Kitty worked her way east along the bank of the Thames, before reaching Southwark