Read Online Silvertongue by Charlie Fletcher - Free Book Online Page B

and exuded into the intervening streets, filling them with its impenetrable gloom.
    Somewhere in the middle of this, the Old Soldier was trying to light his pipe. The Young Soldier stood behind him, barely able to see his companion at arm’s distance. The fog was so thick that even the flare of the match as the Old Soldier struck it only showed as a brief frosted globe of hazy light against the side of his face, before sputtering out.
    “It’s a ruddy pea-souper and that’s a fact,” mumbled the Young Soldier.
    “Pea-soupers weren’t this cold. And they weren’t this thick,” replied the Old Soldier. He held out his arm. He could barely make out the pipe stem in his hand.
    “You don’t know where we are, do you?” said the Young Soldier.
    “Nah. We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way, baa baa baa . . .” said the Old Soldier. “Little black sheep who’ve gone astray.”
    He unlooped his belt and fumbled for the Young Soldier’s hand.
    “Hold this end, don’t let go, at least that way we’ll both stay lost in the same place and won’t get split up.” And he walked forward slowly, feeling along the side of the building like a blind man. The Young Soldier followed, clinging on to his tether. It was painfully slow going.
    “He was all right, Hooky was,” he said after a bit.
    The unseen figure on the end of the belt ahead of him just grunted.
    “I never seen nothing like that,” continued the Young Soldier. “It done my nut in, I don’t mind telling you.”
    “You was made with your nut done in, youngster,” growled the other. “Now keep your trap—hello.”
    The youngster stopped. The belt went tight between them.
    “What?” he said nervously. “Oh blimey . . .” He dropped the belt and quickly unshouldered his gun.
    “Why’d you do that?” said the Old Soldier’s voice. “You dropped the belt. I said hold on, didn’t I?”
    “I thought there was trouble,” admitted the Young Soldier. “I’m sorry.”
    He reached ahead with his hand, swiping it back and forth, trying to find the Old Soldier in the murk. Now the panic started to rise.
    “Oh bloody hell,” he whined. “I’ve gone and done it this time, haven’t I?”
    The Old Soldier stood watching the Young Soldier’s hand with a grin of enjoyment as he lit his pipe. He was not in the murk. He was two paces ahead of the Young Soldier and standing knee-deep in the snow under a bright blue sky, a wide swath of clear air that cut through the ice murk like a firebreak in a forestry plantation. The murk rose up on either side, so that the Old Soldier was in a canyon between two sheer walls of dark fog, walls that were so flat and smooth that it seemed as if the roiling gloom within was being held back by giant sheets of glass.
    It was out of one of these flat walls that the Young Soldier’s hand was waving.
    “Just stay where you are,” said the Old Soldier. He calmly stuck his pipe in his mouth and took the time to strike a match and get it going properly this time. He took several deep happy puffs.
    “You still there?” he said to the shaking hand sticking out of the fog wall in front of him.
    “Yes,” came the quavering reply.
    “Right,” said the Old Soldier, grabbing the cuff of the Young Soldier’s jacket.
    “Oh, thank God,” said the relieved voice from inside the murk.
    And then the Old Soldier yanked him forward, and the Young Soldier’s face and then his whole body stepped out of the wall of murk and into the clean air.
    He stared around him, blinking. “Hang on. You been standing in the clear all that time? While I was in there?” he asked querulously.
    “Had to get my pipe going,” explained the Old Soldier, smiling innocently. “Now come on. Looks like St. Paul’s down there. . . .”
    “Right,” said his companion. They walked toward the south elevation of the great cathedral, partially emerging from the fog wall in which it was embedded.
    “Blimey,” said the Old Soldier. “We ain’t