Free Stoneheart by Charlie Fletcher

suit no men may wear, neither peasants nor kings,
    Yet no man goes without me.
    What’s got by me shall be well known.
    What lies at me is the reason for things.
    All may touch me when I am soft, none when I am stone.
    Lose me and you will falter—yet if I am taken, you will find courage anew.”
    The moment the Sphinx began to talk, George closed his eyes. He just concentrated on what he was hearing. He thought of different kinds of suits: business suits, diving suits, suits of armor, tweed suits, lawsuits, sailor suits—nothing made sense. It just didn’t. It was like the crosswords his father used to do, clues within clues, cryptic like a code that only grown-ups understood. His father used to try clues on him, and he hardly ever understood the answers, even when he explained them to him. There were words that meant secret things, other words that meant you had to take words to bits and use their letters to make new words, and lots of shorthand winks at the puzzlers that the regulars would get to help them on their way.
    He could see his father laughing at some particularly clever clue when he’d solved it. He could hear him saying it was simple if you remembered that words could mean more than one thing, saying you had to read the clues again because they might not mean what you first thought, saying that sometimes they were there to send you down the wrong alley.
    He opened his eyes. The Sphinx’s smile was especially annoying. He closed them again. Suits—what other kind of suits were—And then it hit him like a bright flash, and he was talking before he had finished the thought.
    “Hearts. Hearts! You’re a heart.”
    His eyes opened fast enough to see the surprise ripple between the two Sphinxes. The Gunner gaped at him.
    “Heart?”
    George knew he was right. It all fell together as he spoke, and he felt something like clean air blowing through his mind.
    “I am a suit no men may wear —that’s ‘suit’ like suits of cards, so it’s got to be clubs, spades, diamonds, or hearts. No man goes without me? Well, it’s got to be a heart, because if you don’t have a heart you’re like a thing without a battery, you don’t go at all. What’s got by me shall be well known? Easy—if you’ve got something by heart, you know it well. What lies at me? i.e. what lies at the heart of something— is the reason for things …”
    He could feel the Gunner looking at him in amazement. More than that, he felt elation sweeping him onward, his mind becoming faster and clearer as the rest of the riddle almost seemed to solve itself as it tumbled out of his mouth.
    “All may touch me when I am soft, none when I am stone? A soft heart is easily touched, but a stone heart isn’t affected by anything; it’s untouchable! If you lose heart, you falter, but if you take heart, you get your courage back. Heart. The answer is heart. You have to answer my question!”
    He realized he was jabbing his finger at the front Sphinx, like he was in charge. It didn’t feel particularly wise or polite, but it felt good.
    “You want to know how to stop the taints killing you?”
    “Yes. I answered your riddle. You have to tell me!”
    The Sphinx sat back on her haunches and looked at her sister. The sister spoke.
    “Your remedy lies in the Stone Heart, and the Heart Stone shall be your relief. To end what has begun, you must first find the Stone Heart, and then you must make sacrifice and amends for that which was broken by placing on the Stone at the Heart of London that which is necessary for its repair.”
    George looked at the Gunner. The Gunner looked at him.
    “What’s the Stone Heart?”
    The Gunner shrugged. They both looked at the Sphinxes. The Sphinxes looked enigmatic.
    “What’s the Stone Heart?”
    If a cat can shrug, that’s what the Sphinx closest to George did.
    “We answered your question. If you don’t understand the answer, maybe you should have asked a better one.”
    All the good feelings that had