Raising Fire

by James Bennett

  He pictured a pair of tremendous wings, white with age, their shadow falling over the tumbledown rooftops and crooked streets of medieval London, the pennants on the city wall snapping in the rush of wind. Inn signs had wheeled and doors slammed shut. Horses had reared, spilling carts of fruit as the shadow swept over the river, diving in low to envelop the sainted spires in a barrage of light and heat …

  “There were three thousand trapped on the bridge that day, man, woman and child. Not one of them escaped.” His voice was barely a whisper. “And Rakegoyle wouldn’t listen to reason. She wanted to tear the city apart.”

  “So you stopped her and all the curses came true,” du Sang said, relishing Ben’s discomfort. “Do you see? Rakegoyle fell into the Thames, her wings smouldering, and her bones rot there still. But her death damned us all nonetheless.”

  Ben winced. An ache was growing in the middle of his chest, the indigestion of memory. The old dragon’s death had proved a grim milestone in the history of Britain and the fate of the Remnants. Surveying the smoke coiling from Southwark, drifting from the ruined cathedral and the blackened bridge, King John had realised he couldn’t fight a war on three fronts—with the barons, the Pope and the Remnants—and possibly hope to win. He had to do something, anything, to restore peace to the realm. In the end, he realised that his kingdom, his newly built townships a mill for wealth, would never be free of the threat in its midst.

  Unless …

  “You’re saying this is my fault,” Ben said. “You know we had no choice.”

  “Didn’t we?” du Sang replied. “Do you fly over their rumpled beds and wonder, Ben? The too-angular slope of a hill. The muscular sweep of a valley. A river coiling like a tail … The secret bed of legends, exiled creatures of dreams, who now in turn dream, slumbering for centuries. Black Annis, the buggane, the fenodyree—where are they now? Grass has grown over their graves. Concrete grown over the grass. And yet here we are. The Remnants remain. And perhaps it was all for nothing.”

  “Fuck that noise. King John knew better than to make matters worse. The Great Fire of Southwark told him what to expect if he opted for a Remnant massacre. We were all sick of the fighting by then.” Ben hadn’t been present at that monumental meeting in Westminster Palace, but Von Hart had told him all about it. Thorney Island might’ve sunk with the weight of those summoned to hear the King’s proposal, their lances and crosses flashing in the sun, their cries loud enough to ripple the Thames. If we had given our peace to a dog, the King told them, it should not be violated. So then treat with Remnants. “We signed the Pact. We heed the Lore. It’s been that way for eight hundred years.”

  “The King has been dead for the same length of time,” du Sang reminded him. “It was a choice of evils at best.”

  Ben rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t like where this was going.

  “Get to the point. It stinks down here.”

  Du Sang let that pass. The rot must smell like attar to him.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he said. The gleam in his eyes somewhat put the lie to this. “So … is there anything else I can help you with? Freak weather reports? Miraculous storms? The unprecedented rainfall in Somalia?”

  “You’re a comedian, du Sang.”

  “The whereabouts of a Brooklyn waitress, recently spellbound and scarred?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  The way du Sang cringed told Ben that he had meant no offence. His offer was tactless, but genuine. He must be hungry. He felt colour rush into his cheeks. Wherever Rose was, she didn’t want to be found. He had lied to her, left her to the CROWS and given her a burden that no woman should bear, especially alone. Sure, he wanted to know where she was. The information was gold dust, precious and tempting. He would’ve given his right arm to know (the limb in question would grow back anyway), but after all his selfishness, his excuses and evasions, was he honestly prepared to spy on her?

  “No,” he said, more to himself than the boy. “Not this way.”

  Du Sang clapped his hands. “Then there is only the matter of the price.”

  Ben shuffled to the edge of the step, the black well tugging at him, longing to draw him into its depths. Head wheeling with questions, the whereabouts of the missing envoy, he was only half aware of his hand extending into a claw, the tip of one talon hanging over his outstretched forearm, ready to pierce the scales of his suit and open up a vein …

  “Here. This should keep you going for a few years.”

  And it would. Dragon blood was like Popeye’s spinach to the creature below him. Ben had seen it before, long ago. In a matter of seconds, the furrows of age on du Sang’s face would blush, tighten and fill out, his lips engorging to a sensual pout, his skin renewed, a downy pink. The scrap of hair on the boy’s skull, a last sorry lock, would flourish into glossy brown curls, spilling over his pointed ears and down his elegant neck. Ben would watch as his joints reset, clicking and jerking into place, flexing with limber muscle. His clothes, of course, would stay the same—there was nothing deathless about rags—but as he tasted the drops from Ben’s veins, a vision would soon be wearing them, to all intents and purposes a nineteen-year-old boy, only much older and much less naïve.

  All the same, du Sang didn’t crawl forward, crab-like, and extend his tongue. His eyes, chips of malachite, burned still, but with a mournful heat, as he looked up at Ben.

  “Non, Benjurigan. I’m afraid that won’t do.”

  Ben’s claw closed up like a Venus flytrap. “What? We agreed—”

  “Did we?” Du Sang turned his face to the spiders on the wall. “We have a million witnesses. Would you like to hear their take on it?”

  Ben glanced at the bristling arachnid army. He could imagine their voiceless verdict, the hiss of their legs rubbing together, their mandibles snapping, but other concerns eclipsed his revulsion. Were the webs around him thicker than before? He made out the faint strands, delicate and newly spun, adding to the ones that ran piano-like from the web to the surrounding walls. A spider dangled past his face, slipping down a silent wire as he stood and watched. He slapped it away, disliking the soft tearing sound as his arm came unstuck from the wall.

  What the hell?

  “OK, so you don’t want the sauce. What do you want?”

  “Nothing,” du Sang said. Before Ben could respond, the Vicomte sighed and went on. “Ever since I signed the Pact, years ago in these very catacombs, I have held my appetite in check. Oh, a nibble here at some chevalier’s neck might go unnoticed and unpunished. The Five Families sleep deep in coffin and crypt, no longer rising with the moon. As long as I don’t kill anyone or turn another, I endure in that narrow tract between Loreful respect and taking liberties. It is tiresome. I grow bored.”

  Du Sang’s face was a scratched mirror, reflecting the past. Perhaps he longed for the Age of Light, when he had been the freshly risen victim of some ghoulish duke or other. It must have been a feast to him, a banquet of visionaries under the stars, drunk on wonder and wine.

  Ben, who could guess where this was going, said, “We do what we must to survive. No one said it would be easy.”

  “Strong words, but your voice trembles. You lost your way too, isn’t that so? In whiskey and in women’s arms. What is it folks say these days about denial and a certain river?”

  “Don’t turn this around. We all agreed to do our duty.”

  Du Sang smiled, a sorry sight. “Oui. But duty does not sweeten the taste of a youth strutting along the Canal Saint-Martin, his skin doused in cologne, his veins awash with cocaine. Even when you visit the supermarché just so you can siphon the meat trays in secret, the hormones stick in your throat, making you retch, making you want nothing at all. What good is duty then?”

  “It’s the Lore.” Ben realised how weak this sounded, particularly now that the same Lore had placed him on death row. All he could offer du Sang was a drink. “I don’t see the problem. If it’s blood you want—”

  “No. You don’
t see. Fabulous vision clearly doesn’t mean fabulous insight.” Du Sang shook his head, his dry tendons creaking. “Your compromise is false. A war of attrition, just as the Curia Occultus intended: … but one of each Remnant may endure, awake and unfettered under the Lore, governed, protected and guided by the Guild of the Broken Lance, hereby appointed wardship of this bond for all the time to come. It was blindness. Blindness.” The boy merely looked sad now, beyond frustration. “I heard how you did for Jordsønn, you know. A hole near a bridge, a flash of fire, and the troll was ash.”

  “What did he expect? He was out of control, eating humans.”

  “Is that what I must do? Run riot from Picardy to the Pyrenees, flouting the Lore by infecting people with undeath?”

  “Don’t be absurd. Jordsønn was different. The Guild charged me with the task, and in the end it came down to—”

  “Duty,” du Sang said. “And the Three? Was that duty too?”

  “I didn’t kill the Three.” But Lord, I would’ve loved to. “Atiya—”

  Du Sang waved his fingers, dismissing Ben’s protest. “One of each. Awake and unfettered under the Lore,” he said. “Tell me, Ben, which troll and which witch has been woken from the Sleep to replace those deceased?”

  The question was simple, but the truth of it shot through Ben’s breast like an arrow. Would the world see the likes of those Remnants again? Hopefully not. Still, it made him wonder. He couldn’t recall any provision in the Pact for awakening a new representative or perhaps sending one into the Sleep. The harp, the lullaby—well, he’d thought it was ancient history now, pretty much done and dusted. A relic on the heap with all the others. Of course, all that had changed this morning. And nor could he ask the Guild or Von Hart about it. He sure as hell wasn’t about to ask the Whispering Chapter …

  Reflex jogged a hand towards his neck, but his elbow jarred, held by dense clinging strands.

  “Tell me, which scion of the Families will the Chapter rouse to replace me?”

  Spiders were swarming around him, a thick cloak sweeping over the skulls and binding him to the wall. He felt hundreds of the bugs on his skin, hairy, silent and quick, cobwebs lacing through his hair and over his cheeks, muffling his cry.

  “What are you doing, du Sang? This is fucked.”

  “I told you. I am bored.” The Vicomte crept across his bed in the middle of the well and hooked his fingers into the brickwork, climbing the staircase towards him. Another spider, larger, paler, but no less deadly. “Do you know what it’s like? Can you imagine? You walk into Notre-Dame and your shoes smoke a little. You swig holy water and catch a touch of flu. You wait for the dawn and the sun gives you blisters, soon healing in the dark. You are too old. Too seasoned. Too hard. And you discover that the myths surrounding you are mostly a pack of lies.”

  “C’est la vie.”

  Du Sang ignored him, creeping closer. “So, what can one do? A leap in front of a train at rush hour and you dust yourself off and walk away. A fall from the Eiffel Tower and five minutes later you’re bawling on a bench in the Champ de Mars. A jump off the Pont Neuf and the chains around your ankles carry you down, into the weeds and the filth, simply to float there for days, watching the keels of tour boats go by. You rot, but you endure. Eventually the chains slip off your bones and you float to the surface, cursing. Can you imagine?”

  Ben could imagine, up to a point. Sword, gun, rock fall—hell, even a tank shelling—he had survived all of these things. Nevertheless, he wasn’t immortal. Take his head and he would die. “You don’t …” He struggled in his bonds. “You can’t want this.”

  “I miss the old days, my friend.” Du Sang was on him now, his skeletal hands gripping his shoulders, his breath rank in his face. “The way you could suck out a baby’s eyeball and let the juices gush down your throat. Or seduce some young artist or other, bite the heat in their pantalon, revel in the shooter of blood.” The boy’s eyes blazed with remembered gluttony. “I am a foul thing. A frayed thing. And I am tired. Dragon fire is the answer.”

  The spiders scuttled over Ben’s hands, his feet, his face. A hundred spinnerets worked overtime as they hurried back and forth, cocooning him in silk—but it was still only silk. Nor was he troubled by du Sang’s teeth, lengthening, poised over his neck. His skin was a carapace, iron tough. This attack was so futile that Ben could’ve laughed, but for old times’ sake he held his scorn in check along with his flames. Despite the Vicomte’s confession to several grisly crimes, he only felt a weary sympathy. Lambert du Sang was far from the first Remnant to go cuckoo.

  He was about to say so when the tremors struck.

  A rumbling surged out of the dark, rattling up the well. The walls shook, bricks and skulls punched out of true, bouncing off Ben’s shoulders and shattering on the steps. The spiders needed no further warning, disappearing into the widening cracks, an ebbing tide of legs and eyes. Dank air bellowed from below, thick with the stench of rot and the sewers, making Ben gag. The shifting earth roared up the pit like the groan of some subterranean beast. In the uproar, he picked out a strain of music, distant and achingly sweet, a silver thorn plucking at his heart.

  It can’t be …

  Du Sang’s shriek drowned out the melody. A cascade of rock, muck and bone crashed down around him, wrenching the boy from his perch on Ben’s chest and hurling him into the well. The Vicomte clung to the ragged remains of his bed, his eyes bright saucers of blood.

  “What …” Ben shouted through the dust. “What’s happening?”

  Du Sang’s head turned this way and that, tracing the thrumming of the strands, the web vibrating in time with the convulsing walls. When he glared up at Ben, his words were garbled, threaded with fear.

  “A shattering of glass,” he said. “The turn of a key. A black door opening.”

  Ben had no time to question him further. The web broke under the boy’s weight and Lambert du Sang was gone, the bricks around him crumbling inwards, carrying him down into the dark, his howl echoing to silence.

  It was time to leave. Ben’s wings made short work of his cocoon. Pinions scrabbling at the walls, claws sparking off stone, he thrust himself up and out, the staircase collapsing under him as he headed for the light.

  Half an hour later on the Boulevard de Belleville, Ben walked in off the street and took a table in the Wu Palace, one of the many restaurants in the Chinese quarter. Paper lanterns hung outside the joint and the carved screens offered a refuge from curious eyes, folks who might enquire after a six-foot, broad-shouldered man with unkempt red hair and beard and only bare feet in the middle of winter. Dust cloaked his dark-scaled suit, obscuring the wyrm tongue symbol on his chest. Back in the cemetery, he had burst from the monument in a mess of shattered earth and graves, hurling cherubs and headstones aside.

  Shaken by du Sang’s news—or rather the lack of it—and the boy’s feeble suicide attempt, Ben didn’t care what the public made of him tonight. He was oddly heartsore, surprised that the thought of Von Hart’s absence should leave him feeling so empty and lonely. Was he even coming back? Let them stare if they wanted to stare; there wasn’t much point to anything if the last of the Fay was gone.

  He needn’t have worried. Apart from a TV in one corner and a tank full of koi, the restaurant was empty. The waitress, a city-looking girl with blossoms protruding—a little wildly, he thought—from her bobbed black hair, took his order with a smile and left him to half watch the news.

  The usual carousel of doom and gloom slid across the screen. Melting icecaps. War in the Middle East. A baboon of a president … It was enough to give anyone a headache. He was rubbing his temples when his food arrived and he attacked it with abandon, swallowing the dumplings whole and shovelling down the rice. In human guise, a full stomach would satisfy the hunger of the beast within. He had a feeling he was going to need his energy, even if he wasn’t sure about his next move. His encounter with du Sang had shaken him more than he’d like to admit. Things, it seemed, were falling apart, whet
her brought on by the breach in the Lore or the grind of modern times he couldn’t say. Either way, the Remnants were a mess. Endangered species, wasn’t that what the witch had told him last year? He had seen too much since to deny it.

  He ate, gathering his strength. Was running the only option left?

  He guzzled down a bottle of beer, washing the taste of the graves from his throat. Belching, he picked up the fortune cookie that the girl had left beside his bowl. The cheap confection of sugar and flour crumbled to pieces in his fingers, as if it wanted to open itself. He rolled out the narrow strip of paper, preparing to snort at the twopenny prophecy.

  Instead, he read the words and sat bolt upright.

  When the time comes, let me fall. VH

  The elegant handwriting would have given Von Hart away regardless of his signature. Ben was too relieved at this proof that the envoy still lived to question the message straight away. Exhaling, he pushed himself away from the table and, eyebrows raised, watched the strip of paper go up in flames, curling up in embers and a wisp of smoke.

  Magic. Some kind of spell. And for once I don’t mind.

  He was halfway to his feet, looking around for a sign of the hexenmeister himself, when he heard a moan. Turning, he saw the dark-haired girl standing by the entrance to the kitchen, her hands covering her mouth, framing her dinner-plate eyes, the blossoms in her hair shaking in denial.

  Ben followed her gaze to the TV in the corner. That was when he saw the earthquake in Beijing.

  SIX

  Zhoukoudian, China

  Thirty miles west of Beijing, dawn crept into the Zhoukoudian hills. The mist was lifting, swirling over Dragon Bone Hill, where a cave yawned, as though sucking up the darkness. The figure standing before its shadowed mouth knew that the cave was one of several in the area, part of a system winding back into the hills, old and deep. Dragon Bone Hill had been a world-famous site ever since archaeologists had dug up human remains here a hundred years ago. The fertile lands beside the river had been home to China’s most distant ancestors—the figure knew this too—squat men and women in furs, mastering the primal magic of fire …