On Wings of Bone and Glass

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “Safe,” I said firmly. “Where I need not fear for you until I return. And I will need you, all four of you, to help your kin. They are not accustomed to freedom the way you are. They need examples.”

  Kelu blew out a breath, ruffling her wet hair. “Trust you to make a mess of this too. Just let us all go and it’ll all work out, is that it?”

  “I’m afraid my priorities must be ‘kill the dead’ then ‘teach the genets the principals of liberty and equality,’” I answered, dry. “But I assure you, it’s on my list.”

  “I remember you.”

  We all looked up at one of the topmost cages, where one of the Black Pearls had crept to the edge to look down at me.

  “I didn’t hope that you would,” I said, cautious.

  “But I do. You told us stories. You said you would come back.” She cocked her head. “I didn’t expect that you would be telling the truth.”

  “I am a little late,” I said. “For that I apologize.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “You remain a strange elf.”

  “He’s our strange elf,” Serendipity said, joining me to look up at her sister—no, dam, I thought. They were bred to look alike, but something about her reminded me. “And he says we won’t be safe unless we go underground, so we should go.”

  “We are never safe,” said another of the Black Pearls, in the cage beneath the dam.

  “What he means,” Kelu said, “is that if we don’t go underground there’s a good chance we’ll get ripped apart by animated skeletons.”

  A long pause. A whine from the direction of one of the other cages.

  The Black Pearl dam eased herself out of her cage and dropped to the ground. “I don’t know that it matters much how we die. But I’m used to living, so I might as well keep doing that.”

  Kelu sighed. “Thank God, another pragmatist. Come on, help me drag everyone else out of here before something new explodes or falls down or makes things otherwise worse. Almond, your sisters will listen to you. I’ll take care of the Peppercorns over there. Emily, Serendipity, get your sisters out since they seem to have been bred with at least a little initiative, then scatter and see to the rest.”

  The genets murmured their acquiescence and trotted off to coax their brethren into joining them. I waited to feel some sense of satisfaction at the sight, but in my heart I knew only grief and worry. What would we do with them when the battle was over? What future could they possibly grasp out of the wreckage of their creation?

  “You borrow too much trouble,” Chester said. I glanced at him, surprised, and he smiled, faintly. “It’s on your face.”

  “Trust God,” Ivy agreed.

  “And let’s find something to fight with,” Guy said. “It won’t be long now.”

  We met Rose and Kemses at the gate to Vigil, which was being reconstructed at a rate that only magic would have allowed. Human mages, beneath the direction and coaching of more experienced elves, were shoving enormous stones together, remaking the arch that time had felled. It would have been an impossible task without magic; as it was, the mud made everything more complex, and the rain, and it was a grim force that went about the business of fortifying a town far too riddled with openings for anyone’s taste.

  “This is the plan,” Rose said. “We’ll sortie out through the western gate and attract them in our wake. The gate will become our choke point. From there, we should have a fairly straightforward defensive action.”

  “They won’t go over the walls somewhere else?” Guy asked.

  “There are sheer cliffs under most of these walls,” Rose said. "The best ingresses are through the gates, west, north, and east, and the eastern bridgehead crumbled completely and took the entire road with it. Someone will have to rebuild it in peacetime; there won’t be any getting up it without siege ladders of a size I wouldn’t want to climb.” She shook her head. “From what the histories say, they’re stupid opponents. They’ll spend all their time attempting to scale the northern cliffs—unsuccessfully—unless we draw their attention elsewhere.”

  “And the northern gate?” I asked.

  “Inaccessible,” she said. “It was once reached by a long ramp, like the southern gate, but it’s gone now, and the motte’s walls are too high on that side. No, their first opportunity for ingress will be the western gate.” She drew in a breath. “Which is good because I’d like to keep them off Threnody-Calling-Forward. There’s nothing formal written on the subject, but I suspect if they march across that plain they might wake everything under it, and then truly we’ll be reduced to praying to God for intervention.”

  “Just tell us where you want us,” I said.

  She nodded. “If it doesn’t distress you, my lord, I’d like you out in the sortie. The king can’t go, who would otherwise be one of our brightest sources of magic. You’ll do in his stead.”

  One less worry for me. “Of course.”

  “We’re going too,” Ivy said.

  “Why can’t the king go?” Radburn wondered.

  “The king cannot kill,” Kemses said. “But he can die.”

  “If they put enough effort into it,” Rose agreed. “And I’d rather not take the chance, since he can’t defend himself. He’ll stay here on the battlements. Once—” She looked up at the arch, “the battlements are up.”

  We observed a moment’s silence, watching a giant broken piece of stone levitate, the rain plinking off it. It hovered, edged in circular runes that frothed and popped like bubbles, and slowly settled into place beneath the direction of several shouting men and elves.

  “It won’t be pretty, but it’s better than nothing,” Guy said.

  Rose snorted. “We ride out in a quarter hour, my lord.”

  “I prepare, then,” I said, and saluted her, much to her amusement, and we dispersed to make ready.

  Ten minutes later my own were awaiting me alongside their horses, barely visible in the dark. But I knew them anyway, and stopped at the sight.

  “We found mail shirts, at least,” Radburn said. “Along with the cache of weapons they were using on you down there. I admit, it was fun dragging it out of the clutches of those idiots—no offense, Doctor Carrington. They were complaining that we’d get them ruined for any historical archival purposes or somesuch. Can you imagine such blather?”

  “I had forgotten they were down there,” I said, startled. To have had the scholars of Vigil loom so large in our list of antagonists for so long, only to completely overlook their existence... I supposed it made sense that they might have been swept away by the caliber of enemies that faced us now, but it still disturbed me. “Why are they there and not here?”

  “They’re not fighters, you see,” Guy said dryly. “That’s why they had only one person do the work of stabbing you.”

  I had not imagined Guy capable of kindness, but if he knew Carrington’s role in this—and from the look in his eye, the tilt of his head, he surely did—then to obfuscate it was an act of mercy. “You mean to tell me they’re hiding below ground while the rest of us labor against evil.”

  “That’s how it is almost all the time anyway,” Radburn said, dismissive. “Someone else dies for the people drinking chocolate from porcelain cups in a fancy parlor. Don’t act so surprised, Morgan.”

  “An invading army from a neighboring country is a whole different matter from actual demons and walking corpses!”

  “To us, maybe.” Radburn shrugged. “Not to them.”

  “It’s better that they remain,” Chester said. “They’ll get in the way, Locke.”

  I glanced at him, met his eye. Looked at the others and knew what they were too polite to say in front of Carrington: that they feared we would be betrayed. I sighed. “So they would.”

  “Here,” Ivy said, hoisting up a mail shirt. “Bend down, you’re too tall, my dear.”

  As I lowered my head for her, Guy said, “And we have swords. Some of them apparently consecrated with your blood. Seemed appropriate.”

  “We did clea
n them,” Radburn said.

  “I should hope,” I said. Ivy pulled the shirt over me. It was nothing more complex than two sheets of mail buckled together along the sides, but she went to work, fingers tugging at wet leather. “I see I won’t be rid of any of you—”

  “Did you think it even possible?” Ivy said.

  “But Doctor Carrington—”

  “I’m John’s healer,” she said firmly. “Or, at least, I’ll heal him if he gets injured, which I hope he won’t because I want to test these abilities on zombie flesh. If women affect living things, then surely tissue and blood and bone will respond to us whether they’re in a living body or a dead one.”

  “A fine experiment,” Eyre agreed. “Hearing it I could not help but wish to sponsor it. Science requires sacrifice.”

  I started laughing. “You are all insane.”

  “Embroider it on our war banner, when you get around to issuing us one,” Guy drawled. “Locke’s Madmen. A special regiment of the Prince’s Own.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, petting the drake’s forelock. “Let’s go to the work, then.”

  “Sooner begun, sooner done,” Eyre agreed, amiable.

  That they could all be so calm... I could sense their agitation, but their determination as well. They harbored no doubts on the course before us. Looking up, I found Amhric on the new wall by the glow of him, visible in the gloom as a mandorla of autumn-colored light. I knew he was looking at me; that he had not come to see me off because he knew I would return.

  “Well,” I said. “Let us keep our appointment with destiny.”

  “Now that’s a proper history book sort of comment,” Radburn said, satisfied.

  We met Rose at the gate, where inevitably she was waiting to lead the sortie. “Remember,” she said to us. “Your purpose is not to fight. None of you have any training in it, and if you try in all likelihood you’ll only foul the movements of the knights who are here to protect you. Your purpose,” lifting a finger, “is to blaze brightly. All the magic you can exude, you project. You are our bait. We’re your escort. You light the way, we rush back, the people on the wall and at the gate do the killing. Understood?”

  “Understood,” I said for my friends.

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s go then.” Lifting her voice: “God with us!”

  “God with us!” her knights cried back, and we rode.

  It went wrong almost immediately, of course. We had been watching the advance of the host since Rose and her scouts had spotted them at sunset, and though nightfall and the rain had made the dead difficult to track, she’d put her most farsighted scouts on the problem, and used a combination of their reports and her estimates of their speed to gauge their distance from the city. She’d even set her knights to the work of igniting and maintaining bonfires on the walls, and though that light had not penetrated far, it had helped—or so we’d believed.

  We rode out of the gates, turned down off the road to head for the plains... and crashed into the dead.

  This mistake we might have weathered had we not been encumbered by our inexperience. Throughout history the Vessels of the Church had done all in their power to prepare their priesthood for this fight, had drilled for it since the time of Winifred, had made and pored over accounts of witnesses. Rose in particular had several hasty consultations with the elves who’d joined us, and while not many of them were old enough to have fought on the battlefield, some remained and they had made their best efforts at recalling how the fight had gone. But not all this served, for the dead did not fight like men. They bore no weapons, nor armor. They were not afflicted or discouraged by our best efforts to dismay them. They responded only to light and life, and that with witless craving, and they were implacable. Only weapons seared with magic could deter them, and only if we severed their limbs and heads from their bodies. If we’d needed any better proof that the enchantment that trammeled the elves was demon-born, the sight of the dead healing every insult short of complete dismemberment would have served as proof. And their being unarmed seemed guaranteed to evoke carelessness. What could they do, short of beating us to death?

  But the answer to that was that their skeletal fingertips were as cruel as claws, and thanks to the enchantment, could not break. Nor could their fists, or their teeth. And they flung themselves, not at us, as one would have expected a normal foe… but at our horses.

  Oh, the screams of the horses. I knew they would repeat in my nightmares. Men could be prepared for an uncanny battle. Animals? All they knew was that the carnal stench of their decaying attackers was accompanied by pain and broken limbs. When in desperation Ivy or Carrington healed them, the horses knew only that the pain vanished, and then returned again when new rents opened in their flanks. Their confusion and agony blent until their spirits broke, and they tried to flee. But there was nowhere to go, and the dead dragged them down and sucked the life out of them, and left us afoot, separated from our escort and protected solely by our weapons and a single drake.

  Chester had had formal weapons training, and he, Guy, and Radburn had taken lessons in boxing, something I’d never had the health to do though it was a typical sporting activity for young men. Eyre had learned the sword at a time when duels were more common. All of them had had some training under Last.

  None of us were up to what we faced. And we would have died, had it not been for Ivy and Mary Carrington.

  The bone and marrow that carried our opponents to us; the sinew and rotting flesh that clung to them in mucilaginous wads; the blood that had dried on them, so, so many ages ago… all of it answered to their sorcery, and this they learned when Carrington flung a hand toward the creature about to tear the side from Eyre’s body... and detonated it. That it was a wet thing, still partially enfleshed, saved us from being ripped apart by the bone splinters that flew from it, but only just. Seeing it, Ivy turned to the fight with renewed determination. The women herded us into a rough ball and between the two of them, they destroyed the dead, faster and more certainly than we could have.

  “Give me what you have,” I said to the others. “And I’ll give it to them.”

  “Take it!” Eyre said.

  So I did. As carefully as I could while working as quickly as I could, afflicted on all sides, in the grim quiet of a battle fought by voiceless foes with only the crunch of breaking bone and the panting and sick noise of flesh parting as accompaniment, I drew the magic from my male friends and gave it to Ivy and Carrington. When they ran low, I drew it from the drake until I ceased, because to draw more would be to unravel it. I pulled from myself until I felt the enchantment digging into me, and my wounds began to gape rather than heal.

  We strove to find the knights from which we’d been separated, and could see nothing though I could sense them: the guttering of their spirits as they poured themselves into the killing. I prayed that they would survive, that the Vessel would survive. I knew suddenly how the elven host, even secure in its immortality, could die to these things, knew and mourned Last and the mother I would never come to know.

  “We can’t keep going like this,” Guy said. He hacked at a limb, staggered as the mud sucked at his foot. “The women are getting tired.”

  “Hell with that, I’m getting tired.” Radburn backed into the drake’s side, blocking the face of a skull trying to bite him. “God damn it, this is ridiculous. I haven’t been bitten by so much as a dog until now!”

  “We’re almost out of energy,” Eyre agreed. “We need a plan.”

  Well for them to say. For a time there were no other words: we were trying to make our way back to Vigil’s gates, but we paid dearly for every step we won. As I plied the staff and strained to find anything to feed the women, I thought of Eyre’s comment. Almost out of energy. Almost out of magic. Almost out of life.

  “Oh God,” I whispered. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll die.”

  “What doesn’t work?” Radburn asked.

  “Do you trust me?”

  No answ
er. Then, an exhausted Ivy, healing her own wounds and turning back to the fray, “Do something, Morgan. Please.”

  I slapped the drake on the shoulder, catching its attention, and dragged its face to mine by the horns. “You,” I said to it, ignoring the gore-drenched forelock that slapped my cheek. “You can make it back. Go now. Go now and don’t turn back.”

  It was breathing, heavy as a bellows, and I could sense its resistance. I willed it to obey, and with a snarl it ripped its face from my hands and vaulted over the fray. My last sight of it was its gleaming hide engulfed by the dark and the rain.

  “Oh, God, I hope you know what you’re doing,” Radburn moaned.

  “I do too,” I said, and before I could question myself, gathered all their lives into my hands… and pinched them as I would a candlewick. As one they collapsed, and I fell with them as I threw my own energy out—to the king, who caught it in sure hands.

  And then I knew little. Pain, I thought. I had covered my friends with my body as best I could, and the dead poured around us, or over me. But we were no longer sources of life and light, and Vigil was a surer beacon: to it, they went as if pulled, and troubled us no more.

  12

  I waited, and the wait was interminable. I thought my friends breathed—prayed they did—but I could not lift myself from them to discover whether I had saved or slain them. Until the host had passed us by I lingered in a twilight of my own making, aware only of the shuffle of unnatural feet and the clicking of exposed joints and the miasma of rot. The rain made it worse; even the mud felt contaminated, and it was only growing deeper as the night advanced.

  But at some point, the noise no longer impinged on my consciousness. I became aware only of the rainsong. And distantly, cries and clashes that suggested battle. Distantly.

  Brother, I whispered—as he had whispered to me so long ago, and I had heard his voice as an echo of my own in a chocolate shop, in a seizure, like a calling—brother, now.