On Wings of Bone and Glass

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  The eyes narrowed. Was he listening?

  “You don’t want to be up there,” I said. “And we don’t want you to suffer alone. You don’t have to suffer alone.”

  And it—it smiled. The demon, using Sedetnet’s face.

  “No,” I said. “Sihret, no—”

  It looked past me, at the ruined march of buildings lining the southern verge. Stretching wings with that broken glass shriek, it rose and glided over us, drawing the darkness deep over, and paused only to look down over the field of Threnody-Calling-Forward, which was calling forward now.

  “Don’t!” I cried. “Sihret, please!”

  It flashed a grin over its shoulder and dove from the walls, and in its wake a sound broke from the earth, a grinding moan that dragged matching cries from the survivors. With the thing flown past us we were free to move, could we bear to in the face of that unnatural sound, but some of us did; some of us ran for the southern edge of the city, and reached it in time to watch the demon drag its fell wake over the ancient battlefield, and see the soil rent asunder by skeletal hands. Barely three hours past our Pyrrhic victory, all of us sodden with fatigue and numb with grief, and I was watching our deaths claw themselves free of the earth as above them hovered an inverted angel, a corruption made manifest. I thought of Sedetnet’s heart, blackened and twisted in that cage, and I wept with frustration even as I sought the others.

  I found them with Rose amid the chaos of our army in its panic. “Rose!” I cried. “Rose, we must retreat!”

  She had blanched beneath her brown skin, but remained steadfast. “I know. We’ll fall back to the north, and come around westward and try for the road to Evertrue. They might cut us off, but if we’re quick enough....”

  I knew now the source of that sickness in her eyes. There would be no time to arrange for the careful conveyance of the wounded. Even if we failed to abandon them, our haste would kill a great number of them. But we had no choice.

  “Go,” she said. “Fetch forth your genets, and the people we left underground. The moment everyone’s mounted, we’re leaving. They’ll be off the main hall.”

  I nodded and ran for the stairs. As I launched myself down them, I heard footsteps in my wake and paused.

  “Go on,” Chester said, tense.

  “Why—”

  “The last time you were down here alone, someone slit your throat,” he growled.

  What could I say to that, save that he was correct? I resumed my madcap descent, taking the stairs at a rate advisable only for someone enchanted against injury. Chester followed at a less precipitous speed, but once we reached the athenaeum he made up the distance, and was first on the ramp leading to the enormous hall. I passed him on it, and we reached the floor in tandem and sprinted for the first opening off the hall. I needed no other direction; even with the demon oppression clouding my senses, I still knew where the genets were by the glimmer of their magic. I was calling before we’d reached the room where they’d taken shelter, and in answer they were rising.

  “Almond, Kelu,” I said. “Emily! Serendipity! Quickly, all of you. We must go.”

  For once, I was grateful for their ingrained obedience, for they instantly filed out the room in orderly rows. Almond gave me the fleetest of embraces before parting from me to await direction. The only perturbation in this sea of submission was Kelu, who came a fraction off the beat, as if to stress the choice she made. Her eyes, when they met mine, were uneasy; unlike the others, she was willing to consider the ramifications of my haste. I shook my head, a minute twitch of chin, and she jogged past me. She would have questions later, I knew, but I was grateful she’d deferred them.

  “This way,” I said, and with Chester at my side we retraced our steps.

  The symmetry of the situation should have been sufficient warning. Had I not told Eyre we were writing the story of the elves’ redemption? And yet, I could not have known for that very reason. I had assumed that the story was mine.

  We exited the corridor into the main hall where once a human king had betrayed an elven king, and there we were beset by human scholars intent on betraying an elven scholar. Chester drew his sword before I’d recognized the shadows parting from the enormous columns were more than a confused misperception, and to his credit he immediately targeted and slew the human I would have expected to be the greater threat: Roland, who’d been responsible for my near demise in the library. But Roland was only one of the armed men. Powlett, unconstrained by Chester’s attack, was at liberty to engage, and he lunged past my friend’s guard and into me. I saw the gleam of light on steel, aimed for my chest, and wondered if after an entire day of fighting I had anything left to heal a wound that critical.

  But I was never to know the answer to this question, because a white blur intercepted the blow intended for me, and Almond died with Powlett’s blade below her collar.

  For a very long moment, in that pregnant silence between heartbeats, I watched bright blood soaking white fur, spreading in pulsing gouts. My hands, I perceived, were reaching for her as she fell. I thought I was yelling—my throat hurt with it—but I heard nothing. Only that hush, and that pause that I wanted never to end, because I knew when time resumed the gentle heart that had devoted itself to my happiness would cease to beat, and mine would continue on, inexorable and pitiless, and leave me with the most senseless of deaths I could conceive.

  I begged my heart to wait on hers, but inevitably, it squeezed again, and time lurched forth. I fell to my knees with Almond’s body in my arms. Powlett staggered back, began to turn as Chester sprang for him. The genets were crying out. I heard Kelu’s voice. I thought I heard Kelu’s voice. I felt as if the only noise in my ears was my heart beating endlessly, too fast, as I sank down over the genet’s body. If I could convey her to the surface quickly enough—if I could find Ivy, or Carrington—if I could just push the blood back into her body—

  I cried out her name, and didn’t know my own voice. The silence spread with the abruptness of a lightning strike, and everything around me suspended, crystallized.

  And the angel came.

  16

  One could not bear to look upon an angel, and could not but do so. It was the beneficence of the sun made manifest, but like the sun it was terrible in proximity, a burning away of non-essentials that left the spirit naked. We were not meant for intimacy with such power. God, one perceived with the abruptness of a gasp, held Himself at a remove to enable us to embrace Him at all. But I was here in a hall steeped in the history of grief and treachery, holding the limp body of someone whose blood was so innocent it had been seen from the firmament, and drawn down this luminary.

  RISE

  Had the command been leveled at me, I would have obeyed. But it was not. Against my arm, Almond turned her head. Her lashes fluttered, parted just enough to reveal lavender eyes, their pupils dwindled in the face of that light to mere pricks. Her mouth parted around lips gone sticky with blood. Pliant even in death, she answered, but what stepped forward was not her body, but her immaculate soul, a thing shaped only barely like the creature I cradled to my breast. My eyes spilled at the sight of her, knowing that her death was irrevocable, and that she was as beautiful in truth as she had seemed while living.

  The angel did not float before her, because that would have implied air, and weight. It existed outside such earthly things. It appeared illuminated on the face of the world: neither male nor female, but with a face of supernal symmetry, beyond any description that might have implied attractiveness. It was glorious, and terrifying, and its wings were a halo of light with nothing in common with anything as mundane as a feather. And this creature looked upon Almond’s soul and did not turn away.

  CHOOSE

  YOUR LIFE

  OR YOUR MASTER’S

  From behind I saw Almond straighten, her soul retaining for just a while longer the memory of carnality, the need to square shoulders and make answer.

  “I… I don’t understand,” she whispered.


  CHOOSE

  “But that isn’t a choice at all,” she said. She looked over her shoulder at me, and the light of the angel shone through her face. “My master. Always.”

  The angel vanished. Almond’s soul dissipated in a whorl of sparkles, and once again I was holding her body as around us everyone resumed their interrupted movement. I thought Powlett died to Chester’s sword. I thought the genets were crowding closer. I lost all of that, because as I gasped out my desperate negation, the curse binding my blood unraveled with the quickness of a fall. My heart beat three times, a triple-thump, too quick, and power flooded in its wake, a bright and riotous flood, like joy unlooked for. The world embraced me again, gave me to know that I had been standing outside it, holding myself apart, and that this obtained no longer and it welcomed me home… and I felt that welcome spreading through me and the royal gifts to all the elves, felt the magnitude of Almond’s dying gift, and I sobbed into her hair, smelled the sweetness of her fur a final time.

  Chester’s hand on my shoulder brought me from my paroxysms, barely. I looked up through my tears, saw the incredulity in his eyes.

  “Morgan,” he said, low. “Was it just you, or….”

  “It’s all of us,” I whispered. “I have it all, now, the Prince’s power to compel and the magic that is an elf’s birthright. And Chester, I cannot bring her back…!”

  I expected commiseration. But Chester gripped my shoulder and said, “No, you can’t, or you would render her sacrifice meaningless. She made this choice out of love for you, and that choice freed a race. Your duty now is to be worthy of it.”

  “I can’t,” I said, stricken.

  “Then your duty is to strive for that goal, and to be as clement with yourself for failing as you would have been with her.”

  Almond had never failed in anything. Could not have. But he was right: she would have forgiven me any offense. I cleared my throat and nodded. “Powlett and Roland?”

  “Dead. And the sight of the angel has struck the rest of them dumb. Do you think, perhaps… has it delayed the demon’s harvest?”

  “I doubt it.” The power in me roiled, begged egress. “But I don’t think we’ll be fleeing now. Take them up to the surface. I’ll follow.”

  “Morgan—”

  “I’ll be swift,” I promised. “Hold no fear, Chester. I am less vulnerable now than I was when I could not die.”

  Studying me, he nodded slowly. “Yes. I can feel it on you now like a sun.” And then he turned and called the humans to him, and as reluctant as they were to follow they did not want to stay underground with the bodies of their fellows.

  They left me with the genets, and the hall with its starburst design inlaid on the floor, twice baptized now in guiltless blood. Hearing the approach of small, familiar feet, I said, “Do you suppose I should raze it? If I tumble the ceiling, there will be no excavating it again.”

  Kelu’s voice was subdued. “I don’t think she would have wanted that.”

  I looked up at her.

  “She would have said…” Kelu trailed off, laced her fingers in front of her belly. “She would have said that everyone and everything deserved a chance at redemption.”

  “Even us, who failed her so badly?”

  Kelu shook her head. “Chester was right. The angel gave her a choice and she made it. We shouldn’t take that away from her, no matter how unworthy we feel.”

  “And do you feel unworthy?” I gathered Almond’s body and rose.

  “Even now you still ask stupid questions,” Kelu said, and I was surprised to hear tears in her voice. “Stop doing that. She did… she did an amazing thing. She was a genet, and an angel came to her.”

  “Yes,” I said softly. “She was an amazing person.”

  Kelu studied me for so long I wondered at it. Then she said, “You look ready. You going to go fix all this now?”

  “Yes,” I said, and did not question my certitude. With Almond’s body in my arms, I set off for the stairs, and all the genets followed.

  My mind was busy all the way up the stairs. I had seen an angel, and my soul was still reverberating with the shock of it, and with the liberation that had come close on its heels. But I was not so far gone that I could not see the puzzle pieces fitting together. Chester himself had said it: she made a choice. Kelu had reiterated it. Some of the pain of witness had involved the brutal implacability of the angel’s existence, because it had seemed to make everything so simple. And yet, that simplicity had not devolved to the rejection of volition. In the end, the angel had made everything patently clear: one path, or the other.

  Choose.

  It must have been that way with Marne as well. The angel had not spread those wings and obliterated the enemies of the battlefield, though seeing one I could not doubt its capacity to do so. The angel must have given Marne a choice, and that choice had involved his sacrifice. To save… who? Us? The elves?

  And then there was Winifred. She had gone offering a trade, her life for things set right. Humanity would have it that she’d been given a mission, but what if she too had been given a choice between paths? What had the angel asked her, and what had she answered, to bring us to this point in history?

  Now Almond. A simple choice, perhaps to reflect the narrowness of her life experience. Herself, or the beloved other. And she had chosen, inevitably, and this had unlocked a potential she would never have anticipated was contingent upon her more personal decision.

  It was implied in the angel, somehow, in its existence. It was a clarifier of choices, so that we could respond with the free will endowed us by our Creator. Which suggested that the demon was all that opposed it. The angel set itself apart from us, was designed almost to force that separation, so that we might be free to make that choice.

  Demons needed a host.

  I knew then, what I had to do.

  There was no encompassing the world into which I entered. I held sorrow in my arms, beheld hopelessness in the sky, and faced the grace of a long-sought liberation. The elves were free; we were doomed; and God was in His Heaven, waiting. I was cognizant only of a numbness, and had nothing left to shed either for joy or grief. There was only the task before us.

  I sought my own and found them at the southern end of Vigil, staring out over the field where hundreds of thousands of revenants were now on the march, such as their uncoordinated advance could be called a march. Rose was standing some ways apart from Eyre and Carrington; my classmates had formed another group beside the professors, with Amhric at their edge. I drew abreast of Ivy and my brother, both of whom made room for me before recognizing my burden. And then Ivy’s eyes widened. She reached for the genet and I shook my head.

  “Gone,” I said.

  Standing behind her, Amhric said, “Is she the one responsible for the gift?”

  “She is.”

  He was standing next to Ivy; shoulder to shoulder, he was just a touch shorter than she was, and looked much the same as he always had but… more present, somehow. His fingers, when he brushed their backs against my jaw, conveyed a quality I could not name but recognized for its mortality. We were living in the present moment, knowing that those moments would one day run their course, and that imbued all our acts no matter how minor with a sincerity that had been absent. “You have seen only her sacrifice,” Amhric said. “See what she bought with it. Look, my brother, at our people.”

  To tear my gaze from the fight advancing on us was difficult, because, I sensed, I wanted to dwell in my own sorrow. To look instead on the elves…

  They no longer shone with that febrile glitter, nor did they seem drawn on the face of the world—a quality they’d shared with the angel because the angel did not belong to this world either. They looked like people with whom one could share a life, and at the sight my hands tensed around my burden. Did Ivy now see me as something less supernal? Someone with whom she could share a life, and die with when we were called home?

  “So,” Amhric said, quiet. “We are whole.”<
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  “But that won’t help us much,” Rose said from beyond him. “The elves are puissant… far beyond the humans right now, and perhaps they will always be. But we remain too few for the force ranged against us now.”

  “What she’s not saying,” Guy added, “is that there’s no way we’re going to survive. The moment we leave the city, that entire army is going to lunge for us. We might outrun the first few ranks, but that’s about as far as we’ll get before the rest of them tear into us.”

  “There’s a chance,” Radburn said. “If they act the way they did before, they’ll try for the shortest distance between us, and that will put them at the base of this cliff which can only be surmounted by the road leading up to the gate.”

  “We should be so lucky,” Chester said from behind me. “I doubt we will be.”

  “So do I,” I said. “Which means we need to attempt the decisive win.”

  I had all their attention now, and their skepticism.

  “That being?” Rose asked.

  “We banish the demon,” I said. “Your scriptures say without the demon the dead are powerless.”

  “Just like that,” Radburn said, unconvinced. “We just waltz up to that—” Pointing now at the distant figure that seemed to draw all the darkness from the sky like the point of a tornado, “—and sprinkle some holy water on it?”

  “Holy water doesn’t banish demons,” Rose said.

  “What does?” Eyre asked.

  “Choice,” I said. “Choice banishes demons.”

  Rose’s expression had hardened. “Choice brings demons as well, my lord.”

  She had misunderstood me, and I was too tired to explain. “You will have to trust me.”