Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Not a bit of it! It is my dearest hope that I leave this village penniless. I intend to leave this village penniless! Listen careful now, for this is the crux of the matter. This here gold’s meant for bonuses. Yes! Recruitment bonuses! In just a minute I’m going to stop talking. I’ll reckon you’re glad to hear that!” He waited for the laugh. “Yes, believe it or not, Sergeant Bombast is going to shut up and walk inside this fine establishment, where I’ve arranged for exclusive use of the common room, and something more as well. Now, what I want to do is to talk—just talk, mind you!—with lads who are strong enough and old enough to become soldiers. How old is that? Old enough to get your girlfriend in trouble!” Laughter again. “But not too old, neither. How old is that? Old enough that your girlfriend’s jumped you over the broom, and you’ve come to think of it as a good bit of luck!

  “So I’m a talkative man, and I want some lads to talk with. And if you’ll do it, if you’re neither too young nor too old and are willing to simply hear me out, with absolutely no strings attached…” He paused. “Well, fair’s fair and the beer’s on me. Drink as much as you like, and I’ll pay the tab.” He started to turn away, then swung back, scratching his head and looking puzzled. “Damn me, if there isn’t something I’ve forgot.”

  “The gold!” squeaked a young dinter.

  “The gold! Yes, yes, I’d forget me own head if it weren’t nailed on. As I’ve said, the gold’s for bonuses. Right into your hand it goes, the instant you’ve signed the papers to become a soldier. And how much? One gold coin? Two?” He grinned wolfishly. “Doesn’t nobody want to guess? No? Well, hold onto your pizzles… I’m offering ten gold coins to the boy who signs up today! And ten more apiece for as many of his friends as wants to go with him!”

  To cheers, he retreated into the tavern.

  The dragon, who had foreseen his coming from afar, had said, “Now do we repay our people for their subservience. This fellow is a great danger to us all. He must be caught unawares.”

  “Why not placate him with smiles?” Will had asked. “Hear him out, feed him well, and send him on his way. That seems to me the path of least strife.”

  “He will win recruits—never doubt it. Such men have tongues of honey, and glamour-stones of great potency.”

  “So?”

  “The War goes ill for Avalon. Not one of three recruited today is like to ever return.”

  “I don’t care. On their heads be the consequences.”

  “You’re learning. Here, then, is our true concern: The first recruit who is administered the Oath of Fealty will tell his superior officers about my presence here. He will betray us all, with never a thought for the welfare of the village, his family, or friends. Such is the puissance of the Army’s sorcerers.”

  So Will and the dragon had conferred, and made plans.

  Now the time to put those plans into action was come.

  The Scrannel Dogge was bursting with potential recruits. The beer flowed freely, and the tobacco as well. Every tavern pipe was in use, and Sergeant Bombast had sent out for more. Within the fog of tobacco smoke, young men laughed and joked and hooted when the recruiter caught the eye of that lad he deemed most apt to sign, smiled, and crooked a beckoning finger. So Will saw from the doorway.

  He let the door slam behind him.

  All eyes reflexively turned his way. A complete and utter silence overcame the room.

  Then, as he walked forward, there was a scraping of chairs and putting down of mugs. Somebody slipped out the kitchen door, and another after him. Wordlessly, a knot of three lads in green shirts left by the main door. The bodies eddied and flowed. By the time Will reached the recruiter’s table, there was nobody in the room but the two of them.

  “I’ll be buggered,” Sergeant Bombast said wonderingly, “if I’ve ever seen the like.”

  “It’s my fault,” Will said. He felt flustered and embarrassed, but luckily those qualities fit perfectly the part he had to play.

  “Well, I can see that! I can see that, and yet shave a goat and marry me off to it if I know what it means. Sit down, boy, sit! Is there a curse on you? The evil eye? Transmissible elf-pox?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s…well, I’m half-mortal.”

  A long silence.

  “Seriously?”

  “Aye. There is iron in my blood. ’Tis why I have no true name. Why, also, I am shunned by all.” He sounded patently false to himself, and yet he could tell from the man’s face that the recruiter believed his every word. “There is no place in this village for me anymore.”

  The recruiter pointed to a rounded black rock that lay atop a stack of indenture parchments. “This is a name-stone. Not much to look at, is it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But its mate, which I hold under my tongue, is.” He took out a small, lozenge-shaped stone and held it up to be admired. It glistered in the light, blood-crimson yet black in its heart. He placed it back in his mouth. “Now, if you were to lay your hand upon the name-stone on the table, your true name would go straight to the one in my mouth, and so to my brain. It’s how we enforce the contracts our recruits sign.”

  “I understand.” Will calmly placed his hand upon the black name-stone. He watched the recruiter’s face, as nothing happened. There were ways to hide a true name, of course. But they were not likely to be found in a remote river-village in the wilds of the Debatable Hills. Passing the stone’s test was proof of nothing. But it was extremely suggestive.

  Sergeant Bombast sucked in his breath slowly. Then he opened up the small lockbox on the table before him, and said, “D’ye see this gold, boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s eighty ounces of the good red here—none of your white gold nor electrum neither!—closer to you than your one hand is to the other. Yet the bonus you’d get would be worth a dozen of what I have here. If, that is, your claim is true. Can you prove it?”

  “Yes, sir. I can.”

  “Now, explain this to me again,” Sergeant Bombast said. “You live in a house of iron?” They were outside now, walking through the silent village. The recruiter had left his drum behind, but had slipped the name-stone into a pocket and strapped the lockbox to his belt.

  “It’s where I sleep at night. That should prove my case, shouldn’t it? It should prove that I’m… what I say I am.”

  So saying, Will walked the recruiter into Tyrant Square. It was a sunny, cloudless day, and the square smelled of dust and cinnamon, with just a bitter under-taste of leaked hydraulic fluid and cold iron. It was noon.

  When he saw the dragon, Sergeant Bombast’s face fell.

  “Oh, fuck,” he said.

  As if that were the signal, Will threw his arms around the man, while doors flew open and hidden ambushers poured into the square, waving rakes, brooms, and hoes. An old hen-wife struck the recruiter across the back of his head with her distaff. He went limp and heavy in Will’s arms. Perforce, Will let him fall.

  Then the women were all over the fallen soldier, stabbing, clubbing, kicking and cursing. Their passion was beyond all bounds, for these were the mothers of those he had tried to recruit. They had all of them fallen in with the orders the dragon had given with a readier will than they had ever displayed before for any of his purposes. Now they were making sure the fallen recruiter would never rise again to deprive them of their sons.

  Wordlessly, they did their work and then, wordlessly, they left.

  “Drown his motorcycle in the river,” the dragon commanded afterwards. “Smash his drum and burn it, lest it bear witness against us. Bury his body in the midden-heap. There must be no evidence that ever he came here. Did you recover his lockbox?”

  “No. It wasn’t with his body. One of the women must have stolen it.”

  The dragon chuckled. “Peasants! Still, it works out well. The coins are well-buried already under basement flagstones, and will stay so indefinitely. And when an investigator come through looking for a lost recruiter, he’ll be met by a univer
sal ignorance, canny lies, and a cleverly-planted series of misleading evidence. Out of avarice, they’ll serve our cause better than ever we could order it ourselves.”

  A full moon sat high in the sky, enthroned within the constellation of the Mad Dog and presiding over one of the hottest nights of the summer when the dragon abruptly announced, “There is a resistance.”

  “Sir?” Will stood in the open doorway, lethargically watching the sweat fall, drop by drop from his bowed head. He would have welcomed a breeze, but at this time of year when those who had built well enough slept naked on their rooftops and those who had not burrowed into the mud of the riverbed, there were no night-breezes cunning enough to thread the maze of huts and so make their way to the square.

  “Rebels against my rule. Insurrectionists. Mad, suicidal fools.”

  A single drop fell. Will jerked his head to move his moon-shadow aside, and saw a large black circle appear in the dirt. “Who?”

  “The greenshirties.”

  “They’re just kids,” Will said scornfully.

  “Do not despise them because they are young. The young make excellent soldiers and better martyrs. They are easily dominated, quickly trained, and as ruthless as you command them to be. They kill without regret, and they go to their deaths readily, because they do not truly understand that death is permanent.”

  “You give them too much credit. They do no more than sign horns at me, glare, and spit upon my shadow. Everybody does that.”

  “They are still building up their numbers and their courage. Yet their leader, the No-name one, is shrewd and capable. It worries me that he has made himself invisible to your eye, and thus to mine. Walking about the village, you have oft enough come upon a nest in the fields where he slept, or scented the distinctive tang of his scat. Yet when was the last time you saw him in person?”

  “I haven’t even seen these nests nor smelt the dung you speak of.”

  “You’ve seen and smelled, but not been aware of it. Meanwhile, No-name skillfully eludes your sight. He has made himself a ghost.”

  “The more ghostly the better. I don’t care if I never see him again.”

  “You will see him again. Remember, when you do, that I warned you so.”

  The dragon’s prophecy came true not a week later. Will was walking his errands and admiring, as he so often did these days, how ugly the village had become in his eyes. Half the huts were wattle-and-daub—little more than sticks and dried mud. Those which had honest planks were left unpainted and grey, to keep down the yearly assessment when the teind-inspector came through from the central government. Pigs wandered the streets, and the occasional scavenger bear as well, looking moth-eaten and shabby. Nothing was clean, nothing was new, nothing was ever mended.

  Such were the thoughts he was thinking when somebody thrust a gunnysack over his head, while somebody else punched him in the stomach, and a third person swept his feet out from under him.

  It was like a conjuring trick. One moment he was walking down a noisy street, with children playing in the dust and artisans striding by to their workshops and goodwives leaning from windows to gossip or sitting in doorways shucking peas, and the next he was being carried swiftly away, in darkness, by eight strong hands.

  He struggled, but could not break free. His cries, muffled by the sack, were ignored. If anybody heard him—and there had been many about on the street a moment before—nobody came to his aid.

  After what seemed an enormously long time, he was dumped on the ground. Angrily, he struggled out of the gunnysack. He was lying on the stony and slightly damp floor of the old gravel pit, south of the village. One crumbling wall was overgrown with flowering vines. He could hear birdsong upon birdsong. Standing, he flung the gunnysack to the ground and confronted his kidnappers.

  There were twelve of them and they all wore green shirts.

  He knew them all, of course, just as he knew everyone else in the village. But, more, they had all been his friends, at one time or another. Were he free of the dragon’s bondage, doubtless he would be one of their number. Now, though, he was filled with scorn for them, for he knew exactly how the dragon would deal with them, were they to harm his lieutenant. He would accept them into his body, one at a time, to corrupt their minds and fill their bodies with cancers. He would tell the first in excruciating detail exactly how he was going to die, stage by stage, and he would make sure the eleven others watched as it happened. Death after death, the survivors would watch and anticipate. Last of all would be their leader, No-name.

  Will understood how the dragon thought.

  “Turn away,” he said. “This will do you nor your cause any good whatsoever.”

  Two of the greenshirties took him by the arms. They thrust him before No-name. His former friend leaned on a crutch of ash-wood. His face was tense with hatred and his eyes did not blink.

  “It is good of you to be so concerned for our cause,” No-name said. “But you do not understand our cause, do you? Our cause is simply this.”

  He raised a hand, and brought it down fast, across Will’s face. Something sharp cut a long scratch across his forehead and down one cheek.

  “Llandrysos, I command you to die!” No-name cried. The greenshirties holding Will’s arms released them. He staggered back a step. A trickle of something warm went tickling down his face. He touched his hand to it. Blood.

  No-name stared at him. In his outstretched hand was an elf-shot, one of those small stone arrowheads found everywhere in the fields after a hard rain. Will did not know if they had been made by ancient civilizations or grew from pebbles by spontaneous generation. Nor had he known, before now, that to scratch somebody with one while crying out his true name would cause that person to die. But the stench of ozone that accompanied death-magic hung in the air, lifting the small hairs on the back of his neck and tickling his nose with its eldritch force, and the knowledge of what had almost happened was inescapable.

  The look of absolute astonishment on No-name’s face curdled and became rage. He dashed the elf-shot to the ground. “You were never my friend!” he cried in a fury. “The night when we exchanged true names and mingled blood, you lied! You were as false then as you are now!”

  It was true. Will remembered that long-ago time when he and Puck had rowed their coracles to a distant river-island, and there caught fish which they grilled over coals and a turtle from which they made a soup prepared in its own shell. It had been Puck’s idea to swear eternal friendship and Will, desperate for a name-friend and knowing Puck would not believe he had none, had invented a true name for himself. He was careful to let his friend reveal first, and so knew to shiver and roll up his eyes when he spoke the name. But he had felt a terrible guilt then for his deceit, and every time since when he thought of that night.

  Even now.

  Standing on his one good leg, No-name tossed his crutch upward and seized it near the tip. Then he swung it around and smashed Will in the face.

  Will fell.

  The greenshirties were all over him then, kicking and hitting him.

  Briefly, it came to Will that, if he were included among their number, there were thirteen present and engaged upon a single action. We are a coven, he thought, and I the random sacrifice, who is worshiped with kicks and blows. Then there was nothing but his suffering and the rage that rose up within him, so strong that though it could not weaken the pain, yet it drowned out the fear he should have felt on realizing that he was going to die. He knew only pain and a kind of wonder: a vast, world-encompassing astonishment that so profound a thing as death could happen to him, accompanied by a lesser wonder that No-name and his merry thugs had the toughness to take his punishment all the way to death’s portal, and that vital step beyond. They were only boys, after all. Where had they learned such discipline?

  “I think he’s dead,” said a voice. He thought it was No-name’s, but he couldn’t be sure. His ears rang, and the voice was so very, very far away.

  One last booted foot co
nnected with already-broken ribs. He gasped, and spasmed. It seemed unfair that he could suffer pain on top of pain like this.

  “That is our message to your master dragon,” said the distant voice. “If you live, take it to him.”

  Then silence. Eventually, Will forced himself to open one eye—the other was swollen shut—and saw that he was alone again. It was a gorgeous day, sunny without being at all hot. Birds sang all about him. A sweet breeze ruffled his hair.

  He picked himself up, bleeding and weeping with rage, and stumbled back to the dragon.

  Because the dragon would not trust any of the healing-women inside him, Will’s injuries were treated by a fluffer, who came inside the dragon to suck the injuries from Will’s body and accept them as her own. He tried to stop her as soon as he had the strength to do so, but the dragon overruled him. It shamed and sickened him to see how painfully the girl hobbled outside again.

  “Tell me who did this,” the dragon whispered, “and we shall have revenge.”

  “No.”

  There was a long hiss, as a steam valve somewhere deep in the thorax vented pressure. “You toy with me.”

  Will turned his face to the wall. “It’s my problem and not yours.”

  “You are my problem.”

  There was a constant low-grade mumble and grumble of machines that faded to nothing when one stopped paying attention to it. Some part of it was the ventilation system, for the air never quite went stale, though it often had a flat under-taste. The rest was surely reflexive—meant to keep the dragon alive. Listening to those mechanical voices, fading deeper and deeper within the tyrant’s corpus, Will had a vision of an interior that never came to an end, all the night contained within that lightless iron body, expanding inward in an inversion of the natural order, stars twinkling in the vasty reaches of distant condensers and fuel-handling systems and somewhere a crescent moon, perhaps, caught in his gear train. “I won’t argue,” Will said. “And I will never tell you anything.”