Stoneheart by Charlie Fletcher Page A

once.
    “Nothing,” they both replied rather quickly, looking away from each other.
    “Still,” harrumphed Dictionary, “not a man to disturb lightly. Perhaps I can help. It is mere vanity, but I pride myself on a tireless knowledge of the metropolis.”
    “The boy’s got the taints stirred up. He don’t know why, but they’re after him. That’s why we went to the Sphinxes, seeing as how they’re halfway between us spits and the taints.”
    “And what crepuscular illumination were they able to shed on this dilemma?”
    “What does crepuscular mean?” interrupted Edie.
    “Dim,” said Dictionary, with a sour twitch of his shoulders. George could see he didn’t like being disturbed while he was talking.
    “Well, why not say dim? All these long words are like talking in code.”
    Before Dictionary could reply, George broke in. He wanted answers, and he didn’t want Edie starting another argument.
    “The Sphinxes said I needed to find the Stone Heart. I think they said the Black Monk—”
    “Friar,” said the Gunner.
    “The Black Friar could tell me what it was.”
    “’Course, it’d save a lot of time and—you know, if you happened to know what the Stone Heart was, Dictionary,” said the Gunner hopefully. “Then we wouldn’t have to bother the Friar at all. And that would be …”
    He seemed to run out of words.
    “More convenient?” suggested the other statue. There you go.
    “So we need to fathom the meaning of the Stone Heart,” said Dictionary, suddenly swiveling and lowering himself so that his stockinged legs hung off the edge of the plinth. He riffled through the book in his hand, but came up with nothing. He clutched it to his chest and rocked back and forth, eyes closed in thought.
    “Stoneheart? Stone heart? A heart-shaped stone, perhaps. Or the heart of a stone—but that could be any stone, and looking for any stone in this great city would be like trying to find a grain of wheat in a wheat field. No. Stone Hart perhaps—'hart,’as in a statue of a deer, a male deer, carved of stone?”
    He opened one eye and looked at them. No one nodded, so he closed it again, rocked some more.
    “Or Stone Heart, perhaps being a disease of the affective organ, in need of physick, as in gallstone, kidney stone?”
    George nudged the Gunner and spoke quietly.
    “I don’t understand what he’s saying.”
    The Gunner put his finger to his lips and looked at the rocking figure above.
    Edie’s voice cracked the silence.
    “Neither does he. He doesn’t know what it is.”
    The rocking stopped. Dictionary opened the other eye and focused on her.
    “Why, in faith, what I took for a helpmeet and a paranymph is no more than a mannerless"—his fingers fanned the pages of the book at speed. He found the word he was searching for and speared it with his finger—"a mannerless sprunt.”
    “Sprunt? He called me a sprunt!” bristled Edie.
    “I know,” said the Gunner wearily. “He found it under the S’s. If he was looking under P’s he’d probably call you a pest. Or a pain in the—”
    Edie jutted her chin suspiciously at the figure above her and tugged on his buckled shoe.
    “Is a sprunt like a glint?”
    Dictionary shuddered and pulled his foot up out of her reach.
    “A glint? Not at all. ‘Glint’ does not appear in my dictionary, being an ungodly word, a mere superstition beyond even the wildest Frenchified imaginings of the Romanists. A sprunt is a common word, widely used, as any child even of the female inclination knows, meaning anything short that will not bend.”
    George looked at her. His lip, despite itself, twitched.
    “What?” she asked dangerously.
    “You might be a bit of a sprunt.”
    “You might be getting a puffy one if you start calling me names, too.”
    Edie pushed George hard. He had to grab her jacket to stop falling backward. There was a ripping noise and the clink of glass hitting stone. She swung at him, punching his shoulder hard enough to make him let