Burning Ashes

by James Bennett

  Outside Bicester, the king had halted and blown his horn. The horde had hunkered in a pall of gloom that rose like fog from the land. Others had joined them. Black shucks had crept from the lych gates of churches to answer the sonorous echoes. The ghostly dogs, once haunting the graveyards of erstwhile Britain, had fallen in with the fray, sucked into the billowing storm, their tongues lolling, hackles bristling. Bugbears had followed them, the former as shaggy and ursine as the name suggested, their maws shaped like an owl’s beak and their wide round eyes a sickly yellow. Ghouls had come after, pushing off tomb lids and abandoning the bones they gnawed upon, their ragged bodies, damp, bald and grey, merging with the waiting battalion. And after them came still others. The grims and the gargoyles. The shugs and the shellycoats. The moon hares, wyverns and sooterkin.

  As one, the horde moved off again, heading for the dawn and the capital. Behind them, terror. Panic. Tears. England invaded. Reclaimed.

  Arthur had never been an earthly king and less so now, his body a vessel for blue fire, his purpose steered by another. Thus, we take back our sovereignty. He looked out from Parliament Hill, the black cloud churning behind him, eager to meet the spiralling smoke on the skyline. And there were more than monsters in the rabble now, more than strange beings and beasts dragged from their broken beds. As the horde had charged across the Home Counties, people had found themselves snatched up in the cloud, grabbed by passing hook-nailed hands, by questing lassos and whips. Humans, swept along in the enchanted torrent that bore the king and his ghastly knights, stumbled and wept in the brume. Men, women and children, too late or too slow to run away or simply caught in the king’s path like rabbits in the headlights, trudged roped and bound together, a thousand or more, their numbers swelling by the hour. Well, an army had to eat. Even as he lingered here, surveying the gates of his kingdom, Arthur’s riders galloped out, dispatched to circle the smouldering city and intercept the ones who fled, the choked lines of traffic and the straggling refugees, with the purpose of driving the crowds back to London. There was no escape from destiny. One by one, the people would kneel. One by one, they would honour their One True King.

  At Arthur’s chest, his horn rested, dormant, silent for now. Soon enough, he would call them. Soon the great ones would rise. Dragons. Giants. Bound to his will. He grinned at the city—the dragon city—but his withered walnut of a heart did not blossom at the sight. The flames in his eye sockets flared no higher, even after fifteen centuries’ absence. A worm slipped between his teeth, climbing from the bed of rot in his bowels, as he regarded London with a hunger not his own.

  Eventually, his eyes settled on the Shard, the tallest of the towers rising from the skyline. How the building glittered and shone, much like the walls of Camelot! How the sight resembled a sword rising from a lake! Yes! There, Arthur would drag his prisoners, punish the ones who dared to defy him. There, his subjects would bow to the throne. And in the greatest square, he’d raise a fire like the land had never seen. A glorious hecatomb of flesh and blood. A beacon for the Fay, a chorus of souls to shatter the sky and welcome the return of the Fallen Ones. Let no one living, Remnant or human, doubt the power of the one who came. Let no one doubt her rule. The High House of Avalon would suffer no resistance.

  This was the coming of the king. Once, as now, he remained the harbinger of an otherworldly queen.

  A harbinger of the future.

  EIGHT

  Dragon dreams, deep and dark as they are, seemed less and less like dreams to Red Ben Garston. In a pool of blood, he lay sprawled on the cavern floor deep under London, the tombs looming around him like mourners at a grave. He didn’t remember shrinking back into human form, lying naked and flat on his stomach, his scars growing as pale as the chamber walls, his hair slick with the mess that had poured like wine from his beast-sized veins, dark and just as red. Nor could he recall a pain like this, a pain that lingered, refusing to recede, carrying him down into darkness. It was the darkness he fought against, his brain foggy and slow. At the same time, part of him wanted to sink into its embrace, accept its comfort, an end to his troubles. Yes … He was dying. At least he was doing so next to his lair, he thought, in an idling, remote fashion. At least he’d sliced off the envoy’s suit. Caliburn, the Sword of Albion, had seen to that, even if his flesh couldn’t heal the wounds that the blade had inflicted. At least he was dying free …

  Benjurigan …

  Who said that? Who was down here? he wondered. The envoy had vanished and it wasn’t the sword, that was for sure. The sword could never manage a tone like that, all syrup and rustling leaves. Sunlight through branches, that was what went through his mind. Flashing silver on his face. The light was cold, however. Cold as frost.

  Garston. It’s a strange name you chose for yourself. “Gar,” meaning “great” in the gallic tongue. And stone meaning stone, of course. There you lie, too. As heavy and as old as one.

  “I’m … kind of busy,” Ben muttered, his breath stirring ripples in the blood. “Dying …”

  Yes. But no one will mourn you, wyrm. You’ve outlived your purpose by centuries. Console yourself with that.

  “Thanks. I will.”

  Laughter, somewhere in the cavern, a high, bright sound. Like music. Like bells.

  Scowling—couldn’t he get a minute’s peace even at his funeral?—he opened his eyes. Somehow, he found himself looking at the sword. Fallen against a rock, Caliburn lay at a shallow angle on the cavern floor, the blade turned towards him. Was that the source of the light on his face? He thought so. In the glow, he made out a pair of eyes watching him, leaf-shaped and violet. Amused, perhaps, but not really. Not really amused. The woman inside the sword—looking out at him from the sword—couldn’t hide her displeasure so easily.

  “Come,” she said.

  And everything changed. One moment he was lying face down on the ground, the next, he found himself slipping towards the blade, a bloody mote, magnetised by a word. He caught a brief impression of rushing stars, a rainbow smeared across an infinite darkness (the nether), and an emptiness booming in his skull. The next he was lifting his head from the earth and spitting out clumps of grass.

  What the fuck?

  “Drink,” the woman said.

  He couldn’t see her, but he took her advice, dragging himself across the turf to the little brook that was gabbling a few feet in front of him. Jesus, his throat felt raw. He tried to ignore the fact that the brook ran out not far from where he lay, the waters trickling over the edge of the land and scattering into darkness, diamonds on oil. It was as though the idea of earth, the grassy verge overhanging the gulf, ran out. He’d seen that somewhere before, hadn’t he? As he scooped and guzzled water, a balm to his throat, he could feel his wounds tingling at last, responding to the magic in his flesh. By degrees, the pain faded, the cold, sweet water hissing on the coals in his breast, his anger at Von Hart coiling into the steam of weariness. He was alive. He was healing. The why of it still escaped him.

  He froze, water cupped to his mouth, when he noticed the feet on the opposite bank. A woman was standing there. But she wasn’t the same one, he realised, the dark-skinned stranger who’d peered out from the sword. Slowly, he followed the shape of her legs up to her hips. Up to her breasts, her face. She stood there as naked as he was, pale, slender and blonde. But this woman wasn’t looking at him; her eyes were empty and blank. With a gasp, his heart shrivelled up in his chest, flinching from an inner punch. Forcing out a name.

  “Rose?”

  She didn’t answer him.

  How can this be?

  Ben was on his feet at once, up and leaping across the brook, his arms parting in embrace. As he approached her, he slowed, a misgiving tugging at him. It wasn’t just the way that she ignored him, her face, expressionless, betraying no sign that she knew he was there. Drawing nearer, he could see the smoothness of her skin, her body and limbs, unscarred by the glyphs that the priest had carved into her flesh, a year ago in Cairo. He wasn’t likely
to forget them, her occult mutilation, because he’d been too stupid to protect her, and ultimately to save her. As he drew closer still, he could see that there was something wrong, a weird, waxy sheen to her skin. Thinking this, the lines and whorls became clear to him, bringing to mind a sculpture, a carving in wood, either aspen or oak. A couple of yards away, he halted, breathing hard. The simulacrum had fooled him, all right. A clever lattice of leaves, each one an autumn gold, comprised the figure’s hair, tumbling down her polished back. The artist had embedded flakes of jasper to resemble her eyes, a depiction of the way she’d looked at him once upon a time, one day by an obelisk in Central Park. And later, when she’d loved and feared him in equal measure. Doubted him.

  Was that bergamot drifting on the air? His nose twitched, a tear slipping over his lip, falling to the grass. He missed her so much. He missed the comfort of pretending, the sweet bliss of ignorance. Time had stripped all that from him now. Stripped it from him with witches and fate and a shattered fairy harp, leaving him with nothing …

  Despite himself, his hand reached out, reached for her belly, the polished bole symbolising pregnancy. He choked, realising that this was as close as he’d ever get to his child, the son or the daughter that Rose McBriar bore. A year had passed. She would’ve given birth by now, surely.

  Stay away. From me. From us. I don’t even know who you are any more.

  Did he even know? The memory of those words held all the weight of a judge announcing a life sentence. When she’d left him, turned her back on the desert sands, his draconic seed had been growing inside her and, Lore aside, he had no way of knowing what pain, what danger that might bring. On top of this, the Whispering Chapter had revealed that they knew all about his “depraved coupling” with a human, his love affair with Rose. To him, the affair remained a brief oasis of joy in centuries of loneliness. He didn’t know if the Chapter had learnt of her whereabouts or not, or if it mattered now that the Chapter had fallen. It was hard to think about, knowing that in the real world, he had no way to reach her, no way to find her, that he didn’t even know where to start looking.

  Still lying to yourself, old wyrm?

  An image of the Vicomte Lambert du Sang crept into his mind, crawling across the web of memory, echoing from the tunnels under Paris.

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

  Ben blinked away tears, angry at himself and afraid. His concern for Rose wasn’t simply down to his personal failings: he feared for her life. For the life of his child. But this was just a stupid statue, a joke designed to tug at his heartstrings, remind him of his shortcomings. Mock him …

  Before his fingers connected with wood, Rose burst into flame. With a cry, he watched dark rings spread out from the sculpture’s belly, chased by embers in the grain. The next moment, the inferno took hold, the fire licking up around her limbs, her hair a whoosh of cinders and smoke. When he fell, sobbing, to his knees, he found that he was only clutching branches, burning fragments hot against his chest, his scales forming as if to shield his heart. Swiftly, the sculpture crumbled, charred chunks and ashes filtering through his arms, drifting into the dark like stars, swirling and winking out.

  There was no time to grieve. He heard the laughter again, a light clarion, coming from across the brook. Glowering, his head snapped in that direction.

  “What the hell is this? Stop fucking about.”

  “Is that how you greet your queen?” Nimue said. “At least you have the good grace to kneel.”

  Ben climbed to his feet. Scales rippled, thick and red, across his flesh. Horns protruded from his shoulders. His face remained human, his unkempt hair symbolising the fire in his breast. Through his rage, it occurred to him then that he didn’t need the envoy’s suit, after all. Perhaps he’d never needed it. Last winter, Jia had told him that she’d conjured up her own suit via meditation, some kind of mental focus, retaining enough of her bestial form for the purpose. We don’t all need a nursemaid, she’d said. That had smarted at the time, but he’d been thinking about it ever since. Standing here, he tried to apply the same level of concentration, breathing in and seeking control, preventing himself from changing fully into dragon form or from dwindling back into human shape. To his surprise, his flesh wavered between these states, a fairground organ of rippling scales, bulging muscles and undulating horns. If he could think his scales into resembling a suit, let them shrink and wrap around his humanoid proportions … A new trick. He could see how it was done. But it was going to take some practice.

  The distraction stopped him from jumping across the water and clawing the Lady apart.

  “That was cruel,” he told her.

  The Lady cocked her head, the snow-white coils of her hair rising to a tightly bound point atop it.

  “Oh? Then you deny that you saw your woman as an object? Don’t scowl at us so, Benjurigan. We merely plucked the vision from your skull, here in this garden of dreams. As for her fate, that was always her own affair.”

  More Fay bullshit.

  The Lady stood across from him, looking much the same as when he’d seen her before, his hand closing around the pommel of the sword, sparking wondrous yet unwanted visions. And she was a vision, no doubt about that. A gown of sheer blue silk wove around her limbs as if she’d reached out a hand, snagged a passing zephyr and wrapped it around her. Up close, he noticed that her features, somehow alluring despite their severity, matched the sharpness of her ears, the helices tapering into thin brown points. A delicate tiara, a lunewrought lattice, glimmered upon her stacked braids. Under the laced branches of the trees, she regarded him with violet eyes, her gaze somewhere between distant and amused.

  “She’s in danger, isn’t she?” he asked. “I—”

  “She is human,” Nimue replied, as if that was an answer. “At least, she was …”

  “You’re in no position to judge me. You lot aren’t exactly saints.”

  “We were gods, once,” she sighed, unmoved. “Alas, we are not what we were.”

  You’re the Fallen Ones, he thought, but didn’t say. Fallen and fucked off into the nether.

  “Yeah? Well, join the club,” he said. “You might say that some of us got burned. No thanks to you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I don’t really have time for this out-of-body, dream-sequence shit. A dead king marches on London, the envoy has run away and I guess that you’re looking to play homecoming queen. Considering the stink of your magic, none of that gives me the warm fuzzies. If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to wake up now.”

  He sounded ungrateful, churlish even, but he didn’t care. If the Lady had healed him, if the dreaming brook had undone the sword’s lacerations, then it stood to reason that she wanted something from him. He didn’t need a near-death experience to wise up to the fact. Again, he had that uncomfortable feeling of standing here in Von Hart’s shoes, dragged in over his head, an unwanted but necessary pawn. Probably an expendable one.

  “Plus Rose is in trouble,” he added, in a gruff, awkward tone, as if it was an afterthought and not the thrust of his worries.

  “How sweet. You think we’ve given you an excuse to see her,” the Lady said. “Not that she ever needed your help.”

  His eyes narrowed into slits as Nimue laughed again. “Don’t trouble yourself so. Here in the Orchard of Worlds time moves differently than on the terrestrial plane, if it moves at all,” she told him. “Still, we retain some arts as an oracle. You’ll never see Rose McBriar again. Not while you live.”

  That hit him like a hammer, a blow to his guts, and he stopped himself from sinking to his knees, the scene spinning around him. He looked up, fighting for balance, but there were no stars overhead to fix him, help him get his bearings. Only an endless darkness, the darkness of the nether. Familiar, empty and cold.

  Ahead of him, beyond the Lady, he took in the trees, their tangled, blossom-clad branches resolving into the strict rows of a plantation. Petals, sweet-smelling and white, drifted on th
e breeze. The trees went right up to the palace, the walls crystalline and soaring, the tallest turrets spearing the black. The sight steadied him, awe freezing his feet to the ground, his location, dreamt up or not, dawning on him. When he’d first lifted Caliburn, in the depths of Snowdon, he’d seen a lot more than the Lady. If he dared to turn around and look over the precipice, he somehow knew that he’d see the same labyrinthine coils of light, the golden skiffs flying about them and silver veins riddling the dark. The thought made him giddy. He stood in the grounds of the palace that hung in the uppermost branches of the Great Tree. The Isle of the Apples.

  He had dreamt his way into Avalon, the mythical homeland of the Fay.

  Fay, he reminded himself. Get a grip on yourself. You can’t trust a word she says.

  “Why …” He gathered his breath, sucking in air or whatever passed for it in this place. “Why am I here?”

  “A strange question,” the Lady said. “One of our greatest creations. The glorious dragon. Creature of fire and flight. The wonder of a thousand stories and more.”

  Ben grunted. “It’s been said.”

  “You’re the spawn of Jynnyflamme, are you not? Jynnyflamme, who hatched from the egg of Pennydrake, the legendary mount of King Arthur himself. You’re as tangled up in this tale as anyone.”

  “Don’t I know it. But that isn’t exactly an answer.”

  The Lady held out her arm, as slender as a willow branch.

  “Come. Tarry with us awhile.”

  Ben rolled his shoulders and then jumped across the brook, moving away from the precipice and the scorched ring of grass, a scar like the one in his heart. This kind of taunt, this disregard for compassion in the name of amusement, wasn’t exactly new to him. Long had he railed against Von Hart’s mockery and games, so it didn’t surprise him to encounter the same penchant here, in the shadow of the palace walls. The sculpture, clearly intended to prick at his failings, only served to remind him that for all their apparent playfulness, the Fay weren’t known for their benevolence. At least not any more. There was usually a price for their help, and their games seemed to share one thing in common—people tended to get hurt. The Fay were like sweet-scented flowers, enticing innocent prey in the forest, the petals hiding a sticky and noxious prison. Only recently, he’d found himself caught up in fairy machinations, the envoy’s treachery and his breaking of the harp. And he’d seen the state of Arthur and the army that followed him, a dangerous rabble if ever there was one. Flowers. Right. It was enough to remind him who he was dealing with; he’d had his fingers pricked by the thorns.