On Wings of Bone and Glass

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “I was too,” I answered. “But we won.”

  She exhaled and nodded.

  Rose and Kemses had indeed survived, and were in weary conference around a much smaller fire on a mound of broken brick that raised them out of the oleaginous muck. At the sight of us they rose, though with what energy I knew not.

  “My king,” Kemses said.

  “E Sadar,” Amhric replied, and Chester eased him down next to the fire.

  Rose bowed to me, and a very different woman she was, smeared in muck, with a torn tabard over her riding gear, and hollow-eyed with exhaustion. Even her voice sounded as if it had been crushed between stones; I could not imagine that thin rasp leading a congregation in song in a clean and perfumed cathedral, but it suited the warrior and her battlefield throne. “My lord. You saved us from rout.”

  “We all saved us from rout,” I said. “Tell me, Rose. Tell me how bad it is.”

  She managed a humorless smile. “For complete neophytes, we acquitted ourselves well, or so your liegeman tells me. But our men have been halved, my lord, and that counts your elves as well.”

  Halved. The reality of it was staggering. We had destroyed the entire host, but lost half our number in the reiving? I reached blindly for the ground and slumped onto it. Inane observations cluttered my mind, fighting to push out the shock: how much my feet hurt in my boots, and that I was still sore from sitting on the battlements, and that the bricks under me were uneven and there was a point jabbing into my flank.

  “We could have fared worse,” Rose said. She lowered herself until she could sit across from me, and at this sign everyone else settled as well. “But I will not soften the blow, my lord. We are in dire need of reinforcements. I arranged for the muster before we left for Vigil; because of that, I have hopes they will begin arriving next week.” She threaded her fingers together and rested them in her lap. I noticed the blood beneath her short fingernails. “Of the elves, of course, I cannot say.”

  Kemses said, “If they were going to use the Door, they would have already.”

  “We could send someone through it and call the rest of us home?” I said.

  “We could, and we should,” Kemses agreed. “But that is a ride of weeks. Do we have weeks?”

  Before the demon came? I rubbed my face with both my hands, smearing it with God knew what grime. “I doubt it. But it may be that humanity will be our salvation anyway. The elves remain bound.”

  “Even bound they are fearsome warriors,” Rose said.

  “But not as effective,” Kemses said.

  She nodded, then looked at me. “What shall we do, my lord?”

  Naturally it was my decision to make, who had never so much as studied military history. Then again, I was sitting next to someone who had. I met Chester’s gaze, and he managed a weary lift of his brows.

  “What do you say?”

  “What, am I now your military advisor?” he asked, with a twitch of his mouth.

  “You studied it—”

  “I took two semesters of it,” Chester said, and now he was laughing, a husky chuckle. “The man you want is Radburn.”

  “Well, then, let us have him,” I said.

  Chester grinned and pushed himself up. “He will be insufferable.”

  “Good,” I said. “That we should have some small moments of pleasure is a blessing.”

  “I’ll be ready to hear you say that again when he arrives and starts on one of his interminable lectures,” Ivy muttered.

  I slid an arm around her and let my head slump on her shoulder. She set her arm around my waist.

  Radburn, when consulted, made an exasperated noise. “You want me to draw up a plan without telling me anything about the enemy’s probable powers?”

  “They’re dead,” Chester said. “They kill things. It’s hard to kill them back.”

  Radburn threw up his hands. “Not the dead, idiot. The demon.”

  “That,” I said, “is what I left you here to research.”

  Guy, who’d strolled along in Radburn’s wake with hands in his ragged pockets, for all the world like a man on holiday, said, “We looked, but the books are remarkably silent on the matter of demonic capabilities. A great deal of drama and far too much poetic license: the end of the world, rain of frogs, men unmanned, women swooning, so on and so forth.”

  Amhric murmured, “It is like with demons as it is with angels. And kings. They do nothing directly.”

  Everyone looked at him.

  “How can it be the end of the world if they can’t actually do anything?” Radburn asked, exasperated.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They inspired a king to betray an allied nation, and that seemed to wreak enough evil.”

  “And the rain of frogs... that seems to go along with the dead walking,” Ivy said, tugging a dirty curl as she thought. I hadn’t seen that gesture since we’d inhabited a clean classroom, and it tore at me to see it here in the dead of an autumn night, surrounded by the wounded and the corpses of the fallen, in a city where we might yet lose our own lives. “A symbol that the world behaves unnaturally in the presence of demons.”

  “That seems reasonable,” Guy said. “Since the world behaves unnaturally in the presence of angels. But I don’t see how demons are anything like kings?”

  “Kings can’t kill,” I said. “Is that what you meant?”

  Amhric nodded.

  “Surely that makes our jobs easier,” Ivy said. “If the demon can’t kill us directly....”

  “Hearts can burst from fear,” Chester said. “And you can drive a knife into your own heart if you are pushed far enough.”

  We all stared at him.

  “He’s right,” Amhric said into the quiet. “Do not underestimate the foe because he will not lift a sword. There are more ways to die than we can count.”

  Radburn cleared his throat. “Well. So, an enemy of unknown powers, who can also lift the dead from the ground. And we’re beside an enormous boneyard from a climactic historical battle. We’re down our numbers by half, and our reinforcements are on the way up the road right now? Did we find out how many?”

  Rose said, “The Church rides.”

  “Which means....” Radburn said.

  The Vessel lifted her chin. “There are some thirteen thousand churches on the continent. Each has a complement of at least twenty-five knights. Some have complements of up to five hundred. Which means, sir, that the Church is riding, and bringing some million men with it.”

  “Million?” Radburn repeated, stunned. “Some... million... men?”

  “You have an army!” Chester exclaimed, stunned.

  “An entirely separate army from the one the First Minister commands,” Guy observed, interested.

  “We care nothing for politics,” Rose said. “This is what we have been buying land and training knights for since Winifred’s visitation. This is our day, at last, and if the vanguard here has been cruelly winnowed, still we will have the last word.”

  “Once everyone arrives,” Radburn said. “In a week, you said?”

  “They begin arriving in a week,” she corrected. “But though most of them are concentrated in Troth, they are some riding from the furthest corners of the continent, so—”

  “It might be more like two months for some of them.” Radburn rubbed his brow. “They might arrive just in time to preside over our deaths.”

  “Or be defeated in detail, if they arrive in clumps,” Chester said.

  “And we don’t know when the enemy will show,” Radburn said.

  “They might never,” Guy said. “There’s no law that says all the dead things in the field need to stand up and start chasing us.”

  “The law of folklore does so say,” I murmured.

  “The dead will walk,” Rose said. “They already have.”

  “Then why haven’t they? The others. Why are they still in the field?” Radburn asked.

  “God knows,” Chester said. “We don’t. So the question is... what do we d
o?”

  Radburn sighed. “What we do is leave here at best speed, join up with the Vessel’s forces, and then return when we have all our strength. Staying is suicide.”

  “Do you know how many wounded we have?” Rose said. “And how few wagons? How would we transport them?”

  “I don’t know,” Radburn said. “And they might die if we leave Vigil. What I know is that we’ll certainly die if we don’t.”

  There was a ferocity in Rose’s dark eyes, visible even in the firelit gloom. I passed a hand over my face, realized anew how exhausted I was, how exhausted we all were. “This is not a decision we should be making while fogged with an entire day’s fighting. We can afford a few hours’ sleep.”

  “The answer’s not going to change after you wake me up,” Radburn said.

  “I know,” I said. “But we owe it to the wounded to make our plans with as clear a mind as we can manage in the time we have left. God willing we will have a few days to improvise something.”

  “And if we don’t?” Chester asked, quiet.

  “Then we will do what we can,” I said. “But we need two or three hours.”

  A tense silence yoked us, and then Rose said curtly, “Two hours.”

  As she left us, Guy said, “Well, you’ve made an enemy there, Radburn.”

  Radburn sighed. “Much as I’d like to wave my hand and change reality—ah, in a way beyond that which I can now, given magical compulsion—the numbers cannot be gainsaid. We are too few, and vulnerable.”

  “I thought half the battles in history had been won because of pincer movements,” Ivy offered, bleary.

  “That would require both halves of the pincer to be strong enough to do any good,” Radburn said. “We are what might be generously called a ‘diversionary force’, which is to say dead if actually engaged.”

  “Right,” Ivy said. She tugged at my sleeve. “You said something about sleep.”

  “I did,” I said. “Tell me there is somewhere I can lay my head down.”

  But finding a creditable place to sleep required peace, and peace was something I lacked. Making our way down from Rose and Kemses’s look-out, I was beset by elves who wanted to speak to Amhric, and of course I could not abandon him. No sooner had I extricated him from his auditors than I found myself faced with Carrington and Eyre, and that happy reunion I would not delay though I was barely on my feet by then. It was full again an hour before Ivy finally guided me to the last of the partisans who wanted my attention, and with a glad cry I collapsed against the drake’s side. It nuzzled my back, forge-clean breath gusting over my sticky coat.

  “Finally,” Ivy said, dropping into the circle made by its forearms. She peered over its elbow to watch Chester directing Amhric into another such hollow, beneath one of the drake’s wing arms, then beckoned to me. “See, he is safe. So you can rest with me, where I can finally be certain your appendages are all in the right places, and not leaking.”

  I slid over the drake’s arm into the space beside her. “I promise I am bruised and weary but not missing anything important.”

  She grinned. “Are you sure? Shall I check?” At my expression she bleated a laugh into my shoulder, and I pulled her close, glad of the warmth of her, and the humanity of her after too many hours watching the desecration that was an army of animated corpses, rent of their spirits and personalities. I pressed my nose into her hair, breathed the scent of her skin past the sweat and blood scent, and sighed to ruffle it.

  “All right,” she murmured. “I admit, I don’t have the energy to make good on that threat.”

  “Good,” I replied. “For I have no energy to respond to it.” My eyes caught on the gleam of her hair, wondered that I might find the gleam strange. “I... believe the sun is up.”

  She lifted her head, blinking bleary eyes. We looked east, and there a thin ray pierced the cloudcover, gilt the edge of the city’s ruined towers and bridges.

  “Oh,” she whispered. “Do you know, I half believed we’d never see it again?”

  “Me neither,” I whispered. I drew her closer and she rested her cheek on my chest, and together we stared east as more and more light parted the clouds, scattered their ragged remains, and limned the entire city in gold until it shone. I wept at the sight, long trails of painless tears that clouded my eyes and gathered the effulgence into beads on my lashes that spangled the world in brilliant gauds.

  As much as we needed sleep, we needed that sight more: the blessing of light after too long a darkness. With a sigh of repletion, Ivy turned into me and closed her eyes, and I felt her body slacken. I remained awake a little longer, watching the sunlight gleaming in hair the color of tea, and I thought of home and believed, briefly, that we would see it again.

  Briefly.

  Chester crawled to my side, setting a hand on the drake’s forearm. “Morgan? What is that?”

  I looked up. So did the drake, arching its sinuous, powerful neck and staring north until its lips pulled back from its teeth and I felt its growl as a vibration beneath my ribs. Against the backdrop of that perfect sunrise, with that light spilling over us like a divine benison, there was, in the northern sky, a blot. As if a child had tipped over an inkwell, the black was spreading, bleakly liquescent, so quickly we could lose entire portions of the sky if we blinked too long.

  A cold wind empty of any scent or life or moisture, empty of anything, stung us, pulled the drake’s mane back. An eerie half-light settled on the northern edge of the city as more and more of the world fell beneath the silent coating.

  Amhric joined Chester, and together all of us looked north as it came for us.

  “We’re too late,” Chester said.

  15

  I woke Ivy, wishing she’d had longer than a few minutes to rest. She jerked awake with a tiny noise of startlement, then saw the weirdling shadows cast from the drake’s arms and pushed herself upright. She said nothing—did she have to? I helped her up, and the four of us watched as the darkness engulfed the horizon, spreading its cloak closer to the sun until at last it eclipsed it. The morning was snuffed like a candle, and this darkness was more complete than the gloaming we’d suffered beneath the clouds, the thick rain. Even the snapping bonfires seemed to dwindle, as if the darkness pressed on them, could smother them. Perhaps it could.

  What the others sought when they stared north, I knew not. But I could sense the presence approaching, even as I hoped desperately that I might be wrong. That there might be redemption at the last, and an averted battle.

  But I was not wrong, and as the darkness seeped past us, heading south, a figure lit on the northern battlements.

  How could I recognize him, when he had had so many bodies? I had known him as a man and a woman, a protean sorcerer and a prince, a lover and an antagonist and a madman. But I knew him now, intimately enough to see that the soul of Sihret, Marne’s Red Prince, had been smothered just as surely as our bonfires had. He retained a body of epicene perfection, nude now and marmoreal in its pallor. But a deep shadow fell over his face, hiding all but eyes that glowed, with neither pupil nor iris... just a blank brilliance, cruel and blind.

  And he had wings. Or, he had the frames upon which one could have stretched wings. They were skeletal limbs, drawn from too-taut skin, and they seemed as wide as the sky. But they had neither feather nor vane, and the skin frayed from them halfway down their lengths, leaving the bone exposed, and those dreadful fingers became clear, flattened shards where they rose into the dark. The wind that flowed past them shivered their joints, and they made a sound like broken glass, painful screeching scratches that put the hair up the back of my neck.

  Had that been everything, perhaps we might have reacted. Perhaps we might have thrown ourselves on him, borne him down, and ended this before it could escalate into a war we could not win. But it was not everything, because the demon clung to him with tenuous fingertips, like spills of black blood down his throat and over the notch between collarbones, and from there wafted out into the shroud that
had stolen the light from the world. It had form, and no form; it was given form by our terrors, and flickered into and out of those shapes, never settling. It was the wellspring of all the cruelties, fears, and anguishes that tore at a soul, and every single person in Vigil recognized it, and was struck numb as prey before a predator out of nightmare.

  Amhric was right. The demon was not even fully seated in this world, and it did not need to kill. It could petrify us into a silent rigor that entrapped us until the dead tore us down and added us to their ranks. My heart raced uncontrollably, and I remembered too well the ugly whispers, the caress of tongues in one ear. The Red Prince lives, the Prince lives, the Red Prince lives and will release us all!

  ...save that I was not the Red Prince. And Sedetnet, I saw, was not fully consumed by the evil using his body to reach the world.

  I forced a step, and my body answered. It did so without grace, as it had when wracked by the worst agonies I’d suffered. But it answered, and so I tried another. Step by step, I made my advance from the shadow of the drake, and looked up into the eyes of the man who was not my enemy, who was become our enemy, who had played so many roles he no longer remembered himself.

  “Sihret!” I called. My voice was too thin, too small. I inhaled until my ribs hurt, and then I cried, “SIHRET!”

  The elf who had been prince turned his head slowly toward me, as if the vertebrae had seized. My neck ached, watching the motion.

  “Sihret!” I cried. If only I could win him down from his perch. If I could touch him....

  His gaze was such that no one could tell any longer what he focused on. But his face was tilted toward me. I dared hope that I had distracted him from whatever course had drawn him here. Though I shook with the panic induced by the demonic presence, though sweat slicked my skin and made my hands tremble, I lifted them to him. “Come down,” I said. “Please. There’s so much I need to ask you.”