Wren the Fox Witch es-6

by Joseph Robert Lewis

  Severed heads and limbs fell to the ground with rhythmic precision, and the bodies fell a moment later, quickly piling up into rounded walls of flesh and cloth and dirt. Omar tried to relax as much as he could, allowing the motions of Daisuke’s ghost to guide his body, but his body was still very much flesh and bone, and within the first few moments of the battle Omar could feel his arms and back beginning to ache.

  But the samurai raged on, butchering the dead with relentless skill and artistry. Every cut was perfect and every flourish brought one more corpse to its knees as the blinding seireiken flashed again and again and again.

  The island of motionless bodies around him grew wider with each passing moment, and Omar found himself dashing and lunging around the edge of his abattoir, spiraling slowly outward until the entire width of the road was nothing but dark lumps and mounds from one side to the other.

  “Arrows,” the samurai whispered.

  “What?” Omar spun around and Daisuke slashed a pair of arrows out of the air before they could pierce the Aegyptian’s back. He blinked. “Oh.”

  They returned to the fray but found that the marching dead to the north of him were no longer marching down the road. The stiff-legged corpses were stumbling out into the fields to the east and west, shuffling clumsily through the tall dead grass and the thick snow covered in ice.

  Omar cut down his last blue-faced man and turned to look back toward the city. The moaning mass of the dead still pounded on the gate, pressing against the armored doors as the Vlachian arrows poured down from the top of the wall.

  “Nadira!” He jogged toward the wall, scanning the crowd. “Nadira!”

  “What?”

  He looked to his left and saw her sitting on a small stack of pale blue bodies at the side of the road in the shadows of a tree. Omar grinned. “Tired?”

  “A little bit.” She nodded at the gate. “Is there any chance you can get your friends up there to stop shooting at us while we’re cleaning up this mess?”

  “Probably not.” He slipped his seireiken back into its clay-lined scabbard, instantly plunging the road back into utter darkness. “You mentioned Gideon a moment ago.”

  “Did I?” She shrugged. “I run into him every few hundred years. He’s still carrying a torch for me.”

  “But you don’t feel the same way?”

  She flashed a brief, cold smile. “No, I don’t feel the same way.”

  Omar glanced out at the road again, seeing the small hills and ridges of dead bodies as though for the first time. “Good God. And this is what you do now? Haunt the battlefields, year after year, slaughtering men, filling up graveyards? I had such high hopes for you. Noble ambitions. We were going to save mankind, you and me, and Gideon, and the others. We were going to meet God. We were going to find all the answers, the meaning of it all. Life and death, and the immortal soul…”

  He gestured helplessly at the dark road full of dismembered corpses. “And look at us now. We’re little more than animals. Killers. We’re destroying the world, not saving it.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.” Nadira stood up and rested her saber on her shoulder. “Tonight we’re saving lives, the lives of the innocents living in this city, and the lives of the soldiers who would be out here dying for their lovely duchess if not for us. And when I haunt my battlefields, I’m saving the lives of my people.”

  “For Eran?”

  “For Damascus. My home. My people.”

  Omar sighed. “That’s a very narrow view of the world. A single city. A few thousand souls. We were meant to serve so much more.”

  “Maybe you were, but not me.” Nadira spat in the road and started walking toward the gate. “I keep my city safe, and I keep her sons safe so they can go home to their wives and make babies and keep my city alive, until the next war. That’s what I am.”

  “That’s not enough,” he called after her.

  “It’s more than enough. Now get your ass moving. We’ve got things to kill.”

  Omar nodded and started forward, but he paused to stare up at the eastern end of the black walls. There in the distance, he could see the pale thin fingers of the aether just beginning to slip over the battlements, and he could hear men screaming.

  Chapter 14. Pain

  Wren stood by the railing and watched the ships burning in the Strait. The screams came from everywhere now, some in the palace, some in the city. The thin wailing sounds skittered up and down her spine, and she shivered as she gripped the edge of the balcony. The maelstrom of aether was now a great flood of mist pouring up the sides of the tower high into the air where it blossomed outward, spilling across the city in thin streamers of palest blue and green.

  “I can’t let you do this.” She shook her head slowly, trying to summon up the courage to face the woman beside her. Wren swallowed and turned.

  Baba Yaga stood just a few paces away, both of her thin hands clutching the railing as she stared out at the ships beyond the Seraglio Point. “You don’t have children of your own, do you, girl?”

  Wren shook her head. “No, but I hope to, one day. I think.”

  “Then you don’t know what it means to love someone, to truly love someone, beyond all reason, beyond all sense, beyond life and death,” the old witch said. “Husbands and wives choose each other, falling in and out of love on a whim, blinded by lust or jealousy or greed. It’s nothing like the love you will have for your child.”

  Yaga let go of the balcony and turned to face Wren, to tower over her, to take the girl’s shoulders in her bony hands. “When you feel the child growing inside of you, it will terrify you like nothing else. The knowledge that there is a living creature trapped inside your body, feeding on your flesh, beating upon your bones from the inside, and all building toward the day when he will burst forth, red and white and vile. A hideous wrinkled thing, glaring and screaming, covered in your blood, covered in your filth.”

  Wren tried to pull away, but the witch held her fast.

  “And then you’ll take this tiny monster in your arms, and wipe away the blood and the filth, and he will look at you. He will look into you,” Yaga said. “And after all the pain, all the misery, what do you? After all you have endured and sacrificed, all you have given to him, do you hurl him away and dash out his brains for a moment of peace? No. You give him even more. You press his mouth to your breast and you feed him the milk of your flesh.”

  Wren looked away but the witched grabbed her chin and yanked her gaze back to the old woman’s face.

  “And you’ll go on feeding him, day after exhausting day. Feeding him, washing him, protecting him from the world, protecting him even from himself.” Yaga released Wren’s arms and pushed the girl back against the wall. “You’ll endure the tantrums and the nightmares and all the pains and fears and failures he’ll have as he grows. And you’ll go on giving, and giving, and giving to him. All of your strength, every last shred of strength in your body and soul, all to keep him alive, to see him grow into a man. And for what?”

  The tall witched smiled a hideous smile of crooked yellow teeth. “All to watch him leave. To go off into the world, to find some other woman to give him his own screaming little monsters.”

  Yaga backed away but kept her eyes fixed on Wren. “That is love, girl. It isn’t pretty or kind or fair. It’s a madness all to itself. But don’t worry if you don’t understand it yet. You will. One day, you’ll hold your own screaming monster in your arms, and you’ll understand.”

  Wren nodded, and for a moment her voice failed and she couldn’t speak at all. “Maybe. But right now, all I know is that there are other mothers and other sons out there tonight and they’re all trapped in their own nightmares. They’re suffering, not because the world is cruel, but because of you. And you can stop it with a word. Please stop it, now.”

  The tall woman folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the wall to gaze out at the sea again. “Not tonight. Tonight, let them scream.”

  “How can you say tha
t? There are babies down there shaking in agony, and starving because their mothers can’t feed them,” Wren spoke faster and faster. “It’s the dead of winter, but no one can light their evening fire in the hearth. How many children will freeze to death tonight, Yaga? There are old grandmothers curled up in their beds, with their hearts bursting from the strain of this. And every soldier in the city will soon be lying helpless on the ground, leaving Constantia undefended. How long until the Turks realize their enemy is vulnerable? How long until they start firing their cannons, hurling their shells, and setting fire to the city? By morning all of Constantia could be rubble and ash, and countless thousands of people, innocent people, will be dead!”

  “Let them die.”

  Wren curled her hands into fists and felt her rinegold ring pressing against the edge of her palm.

  Damn you, Gudrun, and all the rest of you. What good are the souls of the valas of Denveller if you won’t help me stop this witch? We’re supposed to save lives, not ruin them!

  The faces of three shriveled crones appeared dimly before her, and Wren glared at the ghosts, but they only cackled in silence and faded back into the shadows.

  “Two months ago.” Wren looked up. “You said the Turks captured Koschei two months ago, right? That’s when it happened?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, from what I’ve heard, that’s the same time the dead started to rise from their graves all over Vlachia.” Wren swallowed and wrapped her arms across her belly to stop them from fidgeting and shaking. “And that can’t be a coincidence. Are you making the dead rise? Are you making their souls cling to their bodies?”

  Yaga turned her head with agonizing deliberation, slowly shifting her gaze away from the sea to return to the girl’s face. The old witch’s long white hair fluttered on the dark breeze, and a murder of crows cackled and screamed as they flew past the open balcony. Wren flinched away from the black birds, but they were already gone, already winging away into the night.

  “In Rus, the dead do rise from time to time,” Yaga said softly. “It’s only natural. The buried bodies freeze, and the aether in their blood freezes too. And sometimes, if the death is sudden enough, if the soul is angry enough, or crazed enough, that soul will drag its own body up out of the ground and walk the earth again.”

  Wren nodded. “How often?”

  Yaga shrugged. “Maybe one or two in a decade.”

  The girl frowned. “That’s all?”

  “And when word reaches me that there is a dead man walking about, I send my son to settle the matter. The body is broken and burned, and the soul flies free, usually to haunt the aether mists as just one more sorry little ghost.”

  “But now, what’s changed? Why so many? What did you do?”

  “Nothing.” Yaga’s wrinkled face hung grim and slack upon her skull. She still bore a strong echo of the beauty of her youth, but in the shadows of the tower, with her hair flying about her, with her voice rasping in the dark, all Wren could see was the dim reflection of her own mistress Gudrun, ancient and insane, cackling and drooling in the long black night.

  “Nothing?”

  “I did nothing. How could I do anything when my precious Koschei was gone?” Yaga bowed her head and looked back toward the sea. “I did not eat, which is nothing for our kind. I need no food to go on living, if that is my choice. But also, I did not sleep. Not since that night, the night they came to tell me that my Koschei was gone, lost to the enemy, taken away. So I didn’t sleep. And I haven’t slept since that night.”

  “Two months without sleeping?” Wren furrowed her brow as she tried to remember Omar or Gudrun ever telling her about how much sleep a person needed. “And you can do that? Not sleep?”

  The old witch grinned out at the dark outlines of Constantia, and in the distance the faint screams and cries of mothers and fathers and children echoed in the streets. “It is possible for me to go on living without sleep. But I suppose I have paid a price for that, too. The nightmares that taunt me at the borders of my sleep, the fears that I ran away from…” The old woman shook her head. “…they found me all the same. All of the horrors that I could ever imagine, all of the torments my tired head could conjure up, are here.” She placed her hand over her eyes for a moment.

  Wren gaped. “You’re having nightmares? While you’re awake?”

  Yaga nodded. As she leaned forward, her heavy bracelets clanked around her wrists.

  The girl watched the woman’s unsteady hands clutching the railing of the balcony. “And your rinegold, I mean, your sun-steel bracelets, they’re always on your arms, and you, you’re always having nightmares. It is you. Your whole body is resonating with fear and sorrow, and it’s all flying out into the world through the aether.”

  Yaga said nothing.

  “You’re waking the dead.”

  Yaga grinned.

  “You have to stop.”

  “I can’t stop!” Yaga snarled and held up one clawing hand as though poised to tear her own heart from her chest. “The nightmares are never-ending. I can see them now. Koschei burning on a pyre, his face reduced to melted black wax around his white, staring eyes. Koschei on the rack, his bones cracking, his breast bursting. Koschei with a nest of vipers in his bowels, wriggling out through his skin and shredding his flesh with their fangs. My boy, again and again and again, with his face white and red and black, screaming and screaming!”

  Wren lurched forward and wrapped her arms around the woman. “It’s all right. It’s not real. None of it is real.”

  Yaga shoved her away. “But it is real!” She pointed out across the palace grounds to the three huge ships still sitting at anchor in the channel, surrounded by the smoking remains of the Hellan destroyers. “He’s there! He’s shrieking and gasping, all alone on a rope in the dark. And tomorrow they’ll do it all over again, and I’ll see it all over again!”

  “You need to sleep, Yaga,” Wren grabbed the woman’s hands and tried to make her focus. “Are you listening to me? You need to sleep, right now.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Again she pulled out of Wren’s grasp and stumbled to the railing. “I’ve been trying to sleep for weeks. I lie in the dark, all alone, in the quiet, and I close my eyes and try to think of nothing, try to rest, to slip away. But my mind never rests. The nightmares churn on and on and on!”

  “Drugs! What about drugs? I can make something to make you sleep. I know a dozen plants that can put you to sleep in a heartbeat,” Wren said breathlessly. “Take me to your herb cellar, or to the palace kitchens. I can do this, I can help you sleep!”

  “No! Not now. I can’t, I can’t.” The old woman clutched her head and leaned back. “How can I sleep when my baby is screaming in agony right in front of me? How could I forgive myself? How could I ever face him again, knowing that while he was in hell I was resting in my own bed?”

  Woden, give me strength!

  Wren swept her right hand across the balcony, hurling a great fist of aether out of the maelstrom beyond the railing and sending it into the witch’s chest. But Yaga merely raised an arm and the wave of aether burst apart into glimmering motes in the cold air.

  “I’m trying to help you, Yaga,” Wren said slowly. “I want to help you, I do. I want to give you peace. I want to end your suffering, end your nightmares, end your pain. But if you won’t let me help you, then I’ll just have to stop you, because I’ll be damned if I’ll let you kill everyone in this city for your grief, no matter how much you love your son.”

  Gudrun, Kara, this is your last chance. I swear to the good lord Woden that if you don’t help me now I will throw this ring of yours into the sea and leave your souls trapped in the dark until Ragnarok comes!

  Wren made a fist, and a shape appeared in the air before her.

  “Kara,” Wren whispered.

  The ancient vala glared, her long black braids clattering with tiny bones. “You’re a fool of a child. How dare you threaten us? How dare you!”

  All around h
er, the dim shades of the eight valas of Denveller appeared, short and tall and crippled, hissing at the girl in black.

  Damn them all. I can do it alone!

  Wren thrust out her hand and the aether obeyed her. The mist rose and smashed across the room into the old witch, sending her reeling against the far wall.

  Yaga straightened up and pushed her long silvery hair back from her face. “I’m tired of this.” She pointed her hand at the girl and the aether rushed back across the room.

  Wren dove to the floor and swept her hand over her head, guiding the aether up and away from her as she scrambled behind the wall at the edge of the stairs that led back down to the ground level. The aether swelled and flooded past her, racing and racing through the wall and out into the night, and when it finally stopped she dropped her arm to her side, gasping for breath and drenched in sweat.

  Wren scrambled to her feet and dashed across the room. Yaga glared at her and raised both arms, but the girl crashed into her waist and knocked her to the ground before she could summon up another wave of freezing mist. The two women collided with the wall and then toppled to the floor in a tangle of skirts and hair and bones.

  Huffing and straining, Wren grabbed the old witch’s wrists and wrestled her arms down to her sides as she rolled over. After a moment’s quiet struggle, Wren sat up on top of Yaga’s chest with the older woman’s arms pinned at her sides under Wren’s knees.

  Wren leaned back and blew a curling lock of red hair out of her face as she paused to catch her breath.

  Well, that wasn’t so hard after all.

  “Now what?” Yaga grunted through her clenched teeth. “Are you going to sit on me forever? I am immortal, you stupid little girl. I will never grow tired, but you are already exhausted. Soon I’ll throw you to the ground, and crush your heart with my bare hands.”