Burning Ashes

by James Bennett

  By oak, ash and thorn,

  Nazarene crowned, Merlin mourned,

  Come, come roots with teeth,

  Blood-fed, black and earth born.

  For a moment, only the wind whined in answer. Then the platform lurched, a pulse of energy shuddering up the latticed panes before him, the light flaring around the tip of the Shard. A tall, stiff figure, Arthur stood his ground, watching the radiance ripple through the air, a faint circle of sigils spreading over the urban panorama. Deep in the mush of his putrefied brain, he envisioned the spell as his words took hold, seeds of magic sprouting across the city.

  To the north, a tremor rumbled under Shoreditch Park, splitting a fountain in two, swallowing a row of benches and scattering pigeons in flight. A tramp rolled out from under a bush, swearing and clutching his papers around him. Time to find a new place to sleep.

  To the east, Westferry Circus exploded in a shower of concrete and chunks of earth, the roundabout that had rested upon it splashing down into the Thames.

  To the south, Camberwell College of Arts, a grand nineteenth-century building of red brickwork and chimneys, collapsed with a crunch of masonry and shattered glass. Cats and dogs fled together through the haze, barking and hissing. Curious bedfellows in the chaos.

  To the west, Nelson’s Column, the 170-foot-high monument to the erstwhile admiral, shuddered as the chasm jagged across Pall Mall, circling the edge of Trafalgar Square. Shorn through the middle, the roof of the National Gallery caved inwards, burying Turner’s Fighting Temeraire, along with millions of pounds’ worth of classical art.

  Between these points, the great trench ran, rumbling and roaring across London in relentless arcs, each quarter eventually joining to form a circle. Through Mile End and Limehouse, terraces of houses slumped and fell as the streets shifted and sagged. The damage continued across Bermondsey and through Vauxhall, swallowing bus, train, car, lamppost, road sign, statue, shop, garden and tavern. The Thames thrashed as the trench shot across the river into Victoria, swamping both embankments. Lambeth Bridge cracked and fell under the barrage of water, dislodged by the sundering ground. On and on the trench plunged, jagging across Westminster and Soho. Big Ben trembled out an untimely gong. Shops along Tottenham Court Road folded into the spreading fissure, racks of clothes, mobile phones, televisions and foodstuff crashing into the maw. Bloomsbury, Clerkenwell and Angel all found themselves torn apart, bisected by the ambit of the chasm, devouring all in its path.

  When the circle finally closed in Shoreditch, a great cloud of smoke and dust rose from the capital, smearing the face of the sun. Birds wheeled across the sky, mired and squawking. A chorus of burglar alarms, barks and cries echoed through the brume, measuring out a breathless minute.

  Then, after the seeding, came the roots. At first, the growth was slick and green, new-born tendrils pouring from the trench, a knotted bundle dripping with sap. In no time at all, a hedge was creeping along the route of the trench, travelling from north to south for miles, flowing in an ever-joining wave of vegetation. As the hedge strengthened, rising to riddle through cracks in the ground and writhe up shifted and broken walls, the roots turned grey and then, spearing above lamppost and rooftop, a sleek and tarry black. The twisting stems swelled into branches, coiling from the spell-ploughed furrow. In minutes, the tangled mass had grown as thick as tree trunks, thrusting upwards into the sky.

  The Thames, choked by roots, thrashed and seethed, her flow checked. The briar, snaking from the water, lifted boats and snapped jetties, bearing them aloft like lost toys caught in a net. On either bank, random pieces of furniture joined them, as did uprooted toilets and baths, unmade beds and dinner tables, parked cars and the odd train carriage. A telephone box on the corner of Russell Square rode the vegetation up to the heavens, the leaflets stuck to it fluttering down. The briar tore the Union Jack bunting from Piccadilly, the plastic flags punctured and limp. Here and there, people hung in the snarl, some struggling, others not.

  With the thicket came thorns, a million, million thorns, each one as large as a tusk, as sharp as a shark’s tooth, black in the morning sun. The briar wove across the Oval cricket ground, the famous arena shrinking into shadow. Then it devoured Westminster Abbey, wrapping around the Gothic towers and rising further still. The British Museum, its roof only recently repaired, succumbed to the barrier, as did all the buildings along its path.

  Five miles in diameter, a quarter mile thick and five hundred feet high, the thorns encircled the city. The London Eye cowered under its uppermost reaches, the looming barricade at last slowing, the charm fulfilled. Roots with teeth, blood-fed, black and earth-born. A dense, impenetrable wall had imprisoned London, a barbed maze of countless corridors where none would dare venture. Where none could enter and live.

  King Arthur gazed upon his works, the light of triumph in his eyes. The sky, he knew, remained an open field, but the sky he could watch. The wyverns circled the spire of the Shard, hissing and shrieking, hungry for war. The machines beyond the wall would never force their way through, surely. Not in days. Not in weeks. With a joy that wasn’t his own, the corpse king again turned his mind to the great hecatomb constructed in the square below, a stamp of his authority and might. A warning to all who would challenge him.

  The Lady was drawing ever closer, approaching her conquered realm.

  And the sky would sing with screams to welcome her.

  THIRTEEN

  Two hundred feet above Bromley, Red Ben Garston hovered in the air, flapping his wings in shock. A shedload of plans had been running through his head, all of them ending in dead ends, except for one slender and dangerous notion. He had an idea to sneak back to his lair, find some way to reach the Remnant leaders that might remain in or around London, come up with a distraction, a way to lure the king into a trap. It was all he had. According to myth, the tales that surrounded him, the Fay had spawned his kind (the erlscion, isn’t that what the sword had called him?) to serve as protection, as watchdogs or muscle when needed, the rest of the time veiling the truth of their monstrous presence in human form. He hadn’t exactly been born as the brains of the operation. Nor was he going to win any medals for military strategy. If all else failed, he thought, then he’d simply have to ram headlong into the Shard, shatter the spire and see what fell out …

  The wall of thorns gave him pause. Someone—someone with a major skin condition and a golden crown, he suspected—had managed to barricade the city. He couldn’t believe the scale of it, the barrier of bramble that snarled from New Cross into the distance, a rough, thick ring rising to challenge the shattered heights of Canary Wharf. From the hub of the thorn wall rose the Shard, aglow with sunlight and the cavorting blue light, although the wyverns around the spire had gone, he noted. He drank in the scene through slitted eyes, his diving-bell heart thudding in his breast. Never a fan of mumbo jumbo, the sight of such a glut of the stuff couldn’t fail to perturb him. Such magic belonged to the Old Lands, the age of Merlin and the masters, not modern-day Britain. The panorama afforded him the grim understanding that things had gone south much further and faster than he’d feared. Coupled to this was a deeper wisdom, born from bitter experience. Where were the Lurkers? With all this excess of spell-craft, this blazing beacon before him and the decaying circles, the phantoms, the grey ghosts, should’ve been ripping the sky apart. Despite his fear of the spectral menace, he didn’t read anything good into their absence.

  One cannot reignite such magic without understanding the cost, Von Hart had told him, months ago and deep in the nether. I turned the Lurkers’ eyes from the earth. I summoned them here, to feed on a living source of magic …

  Ben swallowed a lump in his throat. Was the same thing happening as he tarried here, stalled by the horror below? Had the envoy offered himself as bait again? He’d made off with the Eight Hand Mirror, that was for sure, no doubt digging it from the rubble on Lantau Island. What was he up to this time? If what had happened to London wasn’t enough to draw the Lurkers, if
the sword in his grip had gone unnoticed, it pained him to think what was drawing their ravenous attention.

  Du Sang, his desiccated passenger, had his own take on matters.

  “Merde. Your city is in dire need of a gardener.” The Vicomte sat high up in Ben’s withers, clutching a fan of horns. “At least a little topiary, no? Perhaps an obelisk here. A unicorn there.”

  The wind carried off his sarcasm, but not soon enough.

  “Shut up. I’m trying to think,” Ben growled.

  “Oh, so that’s what it is,” Caliburn said, tingling in his claw. “I thought I could hear rocks grinding together.”

  Du Sang chuckled, making Ben grit his teeth.

  “It’s a long way down, chaps.”

  If either retorted, Ben didn’t hear them. His nostrils were flaring, catching a familiar scent. Smoke. Smoke on the horizon, drawing his eyes to the west. A thin black spiral stained the sky, rising from beyond the wall of thorns, somewhere out towards Vauxhall or Westminster. Squinting, he made out shapes in the distance, closer to him and airborne, their swamp-green wings spread to catch the wind, carry them over the barricade.

  I spy with my little eye, something beginning with “fuck.”

  Focusing, he counted twenty or more wyverns, the scaly, two-legged beasts weaving through the air like eels, squawking with dumb and vicious hunger. Wyverns weren’t fire-breathers like the bona fide draco breed and the lesser genus didn’t spit venom or gas either. Nevertheless, the beasts had teeth like knives, with claws and tails to match. At three tons apiece, a flock of them could cause a lot of damage, particularly against a human target. Wyverns also lacked the ability to change into human form, hence their absence from these lands for eight hundred years. Back in the Middle Ages, they’d been much like vultures or carrion crows, choosing to peck at the edges of battles rather than launch a direct assault. He’d never seen wyverns move with such coordinated intent before. The sight brought home the fact that the corpse king had bound the creatures in enchantment, chaining them to his will with the Horn of Twrch Trwyth.

  Fear crept under Ben’s scales, his heart beating faster as he noticed the wyvern riders.

  Goblins occupied six of the mounts, a small contingent sitting low in the saddle, short swords across their knees and crossbows slung over their backs. Ahead of them rode the two dead knights, the smaller skeletal one and the big rancid one in the red armour. Both commandeered their own mounts and bore mace and axe respectively. Leading the flock was King Arthur himself, his ragged cloak flying out behind him, his perpetual grin and hollow eyes fixed on his destination. Trailing blue light, as cold as winter and death, the flock sailed over the wall of thorns, heading for the smoke beyond.

  “Perhaps we should come up with a better—” du Sang said, but the wind whipped his words away as Ben snapped out his wings, drew in his claws and gave chase.

  His objectives were clear. This would be a smash-and-grab job. Loath as he was to give up the cover of the thorn wall, an attack from below wouldn’t give him a bead on his target. If the wyverns were anything like him, they were likely to smell him as he approached, so staying downwind was his best bet. That meant climbing for altitude, positioning himself above the king and hoping that no one looked up and saw him, at least before there was a chance to raise the alarm. Successful or no, he was counting on a swift dive towards Hampstead (about five miles to the northwest) to hide himself in the railway interchange tunnel, either to vent a victory cry or for a quick rethink. As plans went, it was about as subtle as a brick thrown through a window, but needs must and all that. If he could grab the king, grab the damn horn around his neck …

  Speed was key. With a snap of his tail, he thrust himself upward, seeking what cover he could in the shredded clouds, following the aerial convoy as silent as a shark. Du Sang, muttering to himself, pressed closer to Ben’s scales, shielding himself from the blasting air. If a stray gust caught him, it could blow him away like a paper bag, rags, bones and all. In Ben’s grip, Caliburn, the Sword of Albion, hummed with power, but remained otherwise silent.

  Six hundred feet above Westminster Abbey, the grand old building swallowed by thorns, he watched Arthur, his knights and the troop of goblins flit over the top of the barricade. The shadow of wings slipped over the wall, a quarter-mile stretch of evil-looking barbs with only darkness between them. Fall in there and one would become the proverbial needle in a haystack, Ben thought with a shudder, skewered on branches like spears. If he read some irony in the fact that the Houses of Parliament was now as full of pricks in reality as it had been metaphorically, he refrained from venting a snort and kept his sights fixed on his quarry.

  He made ready to dive as the convoy coasted beyond the limits of the wall and over Broad Sanctuary, the patches of green between the government buildings where, on happier days, office workers would gather for lunch and tourists used to mill. Now the streets lay empty and silent, the shadow of the barrier stretching into St. James’s Park. The smoke, he saw, was coming from a series of small fires in amongst a ramshackle encampment set beside the lake, a huddle of caravans and tents dotted across the green in violation of every bylaw known to man. Not that anyone was around to enforce them. The scent of cooked meat and trash curdled in his nostrils as he approached, swooping through the pall. Too late, he noticed the artillery behind the sandbags at the edge of the park, loosely arrayed along the eastern end of Birdcage Walk. Even from a distance, the gun placements didn’t strike him as modern, the weaponry an anachronistic gleam of brass handwheels, black iron mountings and barrels last seen, he surmised, sometime around World War I.

  Someone’s gone and raided the Imperial War Museum …

  The thought prompted him to turn his attention to the road below. Humans. Thirty or more of them bearing rifles, machine guns and shell casings. At the sight of Arthur and the wyverns, a great cry went up and men hurried to wrestle with the machinery, pointing the muzzles skyward. But these weren’t ordinary soldiers, Ben could see that. It wasn’t the lack of khakis or their panicked movements that gave them away either. It was the leather jackets that each man wore. Ben drank in the sight with a grunt, the black tee shirts, jeans and boots. And the motorbikes that cluttered the encampment, the grass churned up by skid marks. In the rows of Harleys and Triumphs, he was sure he could make out steer horns and skulls … Lip curling, Ben realised that he was looking at a gang of dragon-slayers. A banner of Black Knights from House Fitzwarren. What the hell were they doing here?

  Mounting an attack. Unbelievable.

  He thought this and then he remembered the attempts on his life that Fulk after Fulk had made over the years, riding out on the hunt to answer the Mordiford Shame. Most recently—most laughably—a Fulk had tried to kill him on the slopes of Snowdon, the upstart with the old familiar sword. She’d babbled something or other about a prophet, the lunewrought allowing the girl to track him. In the events that had happened since, he’d barely given the encounter a second thought, and he didn’t have the time now. A surge of admiration at the Fitzwarren courage took him by surprise, however, because he’d only regarded them as futile before, a medieval relic creaking into the modern age, along with a petty vendetta. Spei est Vindicta. All that crap. Seeing the knights here, focused on a target other than himself (and one that was no less formidable), struck him as somewhat disorientating. In countless clashes across eight hundred years, he never imagined he’d see the Black Knights as allies.

  These musings exploded in shrapnel as gunfire burst from the road below. Alarmed, Ben saw one of the wyverns blasted from the sky, the beast shooting up to the same height as him and clawing at the heavens, a cargo of goblins spilling from its back. The looks on their wart-ridden faces almost made the pain in his eardrums worthwhile. Then the beast was spinning down to crash into the thorn wall, screeching and trailing a spiral of smoke. A handful of goblins tumbled into the trees below, one splattering in a bloody green star in the middle of the road.

  But there were other
wyverns and other goblins. At a signal from the king, the beasts dropped as one into a dive, Arthur leading the creatures in a low pass over the road and the park beyond. Machine guns barked and people screamed as the wyverns snatched at tarp and metal, dislodging a couple of the tents and the gun placements in a shower of earth and mud. Ben forced himself to look as several of the wyverns returned to the sky with figures struggling in their claws, blood painting the air as the beasts tore off head and limb, viscera splashing down into the lake. Then and only then did he close his eyes, his guts churning. In a matter of seconds, two things had become horribly clear. One, the banner of knights was ill-equipped and outnumbered. Two, so was he.

  All the same, as the convoy wheeled over Pall Mall and back towards the park, Ben growled and drew in his wings, meeting the wyverns at the head of the flock with a blustering plume of flame. Two of the beasts went up with a whoosh, leathery pinions reduced to flakes of ash in the blast, joining the drifting smoke. The rest of the flight ignored him, however, eyes fixed on the human target. With cold grace, the corpse king yanked at his reins, the wyvern he rode upon veering sharply to his right and down, dropping to strafe the encampment again. The other wyverns, squawking in glee, followed in a rollercoaster of scales and wings, the goblins astride them swinging axes and swords.