Burning Ashes

by James Bennett

  All the same, curiosity got the better of him. With a caution that he tried to mask as shyness, he sidled up beside the Lady, peering down into her face. Her beauty arrested him despite himself and he coughed, looking away. Nimue didn’t appear to notice, however, or if she did, the effect she had on others wasn’t new to her. She merely slipped her arm through his, her skin soft on his scales, and proceeded to lead him down a row between the trees, under the blossoming boughs.

  “Long ago, when the world was young, we foretold a coming darkness,” she said, with the clear and candid air of royalty. “For time out of mind, our people had graced the earth, guiding humanity to wisdom. But it was only with a union of magic and mortal flesh that we perceived a chance of glory. A child born of both worlds, who could lead mankind to the greatest heights of evolution. A king to walk the land like a god.”

  “Arthur,” Ben said. “You mean Arthur. The Pendragon.”

  “The Example, yes. With this in mind, the High House declared a great golden age. Against the darkness, we set our swords. Indeed, it was with a sword that the test began. In lunewrought, in star fire, our smiths forged a mighty weapon. With our spells and the hope in our hearts, we bound the fate of your world to the blade.”

  Caliburn, Ben thought. It’d love to hear you say that.

  The Lady slowed, shaking her head at some inner rebuke, a faint shiver of bells.

  “Perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There are many worlds, Benjurigan. Worlds beyond number, all dangling like fruit on a vine, spiralling through the orchards of the cosmos. Look.”

  Ben looked, following her outstretched arms to the trees around them. There was fruit up there, yes, hanging from the branches, but unlike any he had seen. Some, he noticed, hung in clusters of buds, unformed, small and hard. Others looked fat and ripe, weighing down the sheltering boughs. Each one held a different shape and a different shade, swirling with colours at their core, red, gold, blue and green, a myriad of shifting hues. More than likely, the Lady was showing him a vision, a conjured metaphor to illustrate her words. He was getting used to this nonsense too. Was the ground even solid beneath his feet? Was the palace simply his idea of one, what he expected to see? The Fay, he knew, were famous for their glamour, for illusions and fugues. Last winter, he’d seen one shatter for himself—not only in the glass of the Eight Hand Mirror, but in Jia Jing’s eyes.

  The thought made him sneer.

  “So we’re nothing special. Is that why you left?”

  He hated the tone that crept into his voice, the petulance of a child. What could he say to impress on her the time passed, forever wasted? The impact of her absence on the Remnants, her forgotten children? He found that he lacked the words.

  “Please. Have patience,” Nimue said, turning back to him. “All worlds are special, Ben. All worlds hold the power, the potential to become something more. More than simply blood and dust. But Creation is vast. As vast as the nether that holds them. Gods, long forgotten, seeded this orchard. Seeded even the Fay. Once, the light held sway, igniting every corner of the cosmos, bringing wisdom and joy. Bringing peace. Alas, it did not last.”

  “I know this part,” Ben said, remembering. “There was a cataclysm, right? No one seems to know the gory details. In a nutshell, the gods went the way of the dodo. Or went mad. Became dreams.” He shuddered, feeling the chill of the encompassing darkness. “Dreams that can take on flesh, if we’re unlucky enough.”

  In his mind, a goddess on a mountainside, telling him that the world was dying. But he hadn’t wanted to listen then.

  “The First-Born became the Fallen,” the Lady said, wrenching him back to the here and now. She spoke in the same light tone, but he could sense the sorrow under it. “In our decline, we took up the ancient duty, travelling the leys of Creation, silver in the dark. Throughout the ages, we’ve tended to the scattered worlds. Each one forsaken, adrift in the wake of extinct gods. Yours was one such world. A world that we longed to heal and advance, cultivating paradise. A mirror of Avalon. Heaven on Earth.”

  “I know this part too,” Ben told her. The knowledge, so vast in scope, so numinous, dazzled and frightened him. He preferred to keep things simple. “Things didn’t end well.”

  The Lady looked down at her feet, the hem of her gown flowing over the grass. Was she hiding a tear? He couldn’t tell. But her sadness was apparent now, a sombre music in her voice.

  “The Example failed,” she said. “Humans, alas, had no flair for ascension. Our magic shone like sunlight through the trees, potent, plentiful, but only the purest of souls could see it. That is the nature of belief. After a fashion, we tried to … dramatise the matter, making use of certain props. Artefacts, tools. We shaped a sword and bound it to an earthly destiny. We made a cup and filled it with the stuff of innocence, asking all to drink. And in the end, we forged a harp, begging a king to stay the turning tide. It was no use. Greed, pride and hatred were a thousand thorns, strangling our hope. And the king fell, a mortal echo of our own debasement. The sword lay buried under rock until this, the tolling of the darkest hour. One alone saw the cup, the greatest of knights, and then the grail vanished forever. The harp … well, I’m sure you know all about the harp, yes? And of late, the harp has summoned us hence once again. Or rather, its undoing.”

  Ben stopped, the Lady halting beside him. Under the trees, the branches fruiting with countless worlds, he faced her with a scowl.

  “You abandoned us.” His tone was an axe, chopping through her fancy speech. “Were you planning on coming back? If Jia hadn’t stolen the harp, I mean. If Von Hart hadn’t destroyed it …” His ire ran out, the language confounding him, a thickness in his throat. “Scratch all that. It’s too late now. You can’t take it back.” Later. I’ll deal with this later. “Looks to me like we’ve got bigger problems. You said that you’re not what you were. Well, neither is your king.”

  “No. You speak true.”

  The Lady released him, reclaiming her arm. Without a sound, she drifted over to the nearest tree and placed her hand on the trunk. For a moment, Ben thought she was weeping and he resented the surge of guilt in his breast. Why should he feel sympathy for her after all that the Fay had done, turning their backs on the world, on the Remnants, leaving them all to struggle through the ages? Leaving them all to die …

  When she looked up again, up into the branches, he followed her gaze to a large fruit hanging a few feet above him. Even from a distance, the markings on its flesh struck him as familiar. The frayed edges of continents. The blue immensity of seas. White streaks here and there that he took for clouds. Its perfect shape, fat and round. A single fruit on a narrow branch, lonely against the darkness.

  Earth. That’s the Earth.

  “How long does the fruit stay ripe when cut from the branch?” she asked him. “We couldn’t know what our departure would cost us. We were in grief. Traumatised by the failed Example, the end of our golden age. In our pain, we did not see. We left your world to its fate, burying the sword with the king. One by one, we destroyed the gates, closing the roads through the nether. One alone, we left intact, although locked and bound by a charm, because …” She frowned, some private concern stirring the smooth waters of her face. “We didn’t have the heart,” she said and fell silent.

  The heart for what? Ben wondered. To abandon us forever?

  He got the impression that she’d been about to say something else, but he let it slide, caught up in the spell of her admission as she went on. “And alas, we have come to learn that the circles of protection crumble and decay when cut off from their immortal source. The earth sours much the same. In your world, magic dies. Phantoms gather, drawn to the stench. Through the darkness, we heard the echoes of the harp, catching our attention. Reminding us. A great enchantment has come undone. A certain failsafe, a certain spell, has triggered to signal our return. Arthur, the Once and Future King, has risen.” She swallowed, glancing at Ben, then away into the trees. He couldn’t mistake the fear in
her eyes, the shadow of an ancient shame. “Or … a corrupted version of him. Ever was he linked to the health of the land, a living symbol of nature. Now he has … soured. Arthur has become a tyrant of death. A bringer of war. An omen of the end.”

  Ben clapped his hands together.

  “Terrific,” he said.

  The Lady wheeled on him, her face distraught.

  “What would you have us do?” she said, in a bladed breath. “For all our arts, we cannot turn back time. All we can do is open the way again, the last silver road. Let your world drink from the font, the eternal source of magic. Even as we speak, a company of Fay rides across the nether, bound for the gate to your world. The envoy will meet us there, Benjurigan.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got things all sewn up,” he said, though he wished that even news of the cavalry didn’t sound like trouble. “I’ll ask you again. What the hell do you want from me?”

  Because until your company gets here, I’m facing an army on my own.

  A wind was coming up, rattling the branches of the trees. The fruit, dangling, was swaying above him, a soft clarion of bells. The noise, musical and sweet as it was, set his teeth on edge. It sounded like an alarm, telling him that his time in the orchard was short. This wasn’t just a dream. He was under a spell, surely. His draconic flesh, while resistant to magic, couldn’t withstand the workings of the Fay, the erstwhile masters. At least not for long. Nimue, Our Lady of the Barrows, had drawn him here from a pool of blood on a cavern floor to attend to her need. All the same, these kinds of spells had a shelf life, he knew. Somewhere, healed of his wounds, he guessed that he was waking up, shaking off the fugue.

  He leant towards her, keen to hear her reply before he did so.

  “Arthur’s awakening has failed,” she said. “And in the wake of the chaos, Von Hart lacks something.” Nimue, her words tinkling, cried through the storm of thrown-up blossoms and leaves, her gown whipping around her. “Something vital. Something he left behind. The sword, Caliburn, should have fallen into his keeping. Instead, I sense it in yours.”

  “Yeah. Well, one of us wasn’t taking a nap,” he said, thinking of the sword in the mountain, its steely disdain. You’ll just have to do. “Someone had to—”

  “If only I could reach out, across this gulf, and take it,” she said, in a way that let him know she wasn’t entirely speaking to him, her regret plain, verging on bitterness. “The walls of your world yet hold, Benjurigan, and the road to the gate is long. Do you grasp what the High House asks of you?”

  “You might want to elaborate.”

  Again, she sighed, her disappointment echoing the sword. “In this dire pass, the envoy would have brought us the blade. One cannot underestimate its power. The earth and its fate are one. Alas, Lord Blaise will come to the gate empty-handed. And we are running out of time.”

  Now he remembered Von Hart in the cavern, his urgency. His need.

  We must fly to China and recover the Eight Hand Mirror. We must somehow rebuild the bridge.

  He had no way of knowing if the gate remained on Lantau Island, buried under rubble on the southernmost tip of the Fan Lau peninsula. It was a lead, of sorts. But a long way to go if he was wrong …

  As if reading his mind, the Lady said, “Find the gate. Find the envoy.”

  “Oh, I’ll find him,” Ben told her, with a fierce nod. We haven’t finished our conversation. “I’ll find him and break his neck. If it’s the last thing I do.”

  The Lady frowned, disliking the sound of this.

  “Bring us …” she pressed her insistence through the swirling petals, “bring the envoy the sword.”

  He wanted to ask why. Why was the weapon so damn important? In what way were the earth and the sword linked? He was tired of all these guessing games, the truth veiled, always just out of sight. But before he could stop her, she stepped towards him and grabbed his face, her hands cool on his cheeks. Violet urgency searched his eyes, even as his nostrils filled with the scent of her, honeysuckle and fresh sap, swimming in his skull. He was aware of her breasts, an inch from his chest, and his eyes grew wide as she pressed her lips to his, a soft yet firm entreaty.

  She broke the kiss. Released, he staggered away from her, a hand to his mouth as though stung.

  “Do you love your queen?” she asked him. “Will you refuse us in our darkest hour?”

  He gave her a wounded look. What had she plucked from him? Memories, pain, and now a taste of his loneliness, the warmth of her creeping into his bones, sunlight falling on ice. He felt blood rush into his cheeks, his legs weak, even as the flesh between them took on a hardness, twitching with helpless desire.

  Curse you, fairy. No …

  Before he could speak, object to her boldness, the Lady said, “Bring the sword to the gate, Benjurigan. Bring us Caliburn, the World-cleaver. It’s the reason why we have spared you.”

  Then the gale picked him up as if he was a leaf and flung him out into darkness.

  NINE

  Midnight. Tower Bridge. Ben sat atop the remaining turret looking out over the Thames. The streetlights on both banks shimmered on the water, the moon rippling round and full. For the most part, the buildings around him lay dark, monoliths shadowed in the depths, peppered by the odd reflection of a neon sign or an office block window, blinking on an automated circuit. In the distance, the cracked dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral hunkered over the wreckage as if mourning the shambles of Ludgate and Fleet Street. The fires were dwindling now, the smoke drifting away, leaving darkness to shroud the ruins. No trains rumbled along the tracks. No taxi honked nor rickshaw rattled. No crowds chattered outside restaurants and clubs. No planes flew overhead, but to the west, he swore he could make out the whirr of choppers, somewhere near the city boundary.

  The silence doused his thrill of being outdoors again, free of the underground vaults where he’d woken an hour before, lying naked and healed in a drying pool of blood. Recovering the sword, he’d made his way through the dark, stumbling and grunting away from the sordid sepulchres, until flowering into a red-winged beast that shot from the mouth of a tunnel on the West Hampstead interchange. Caliburn in claw (he had no fear of the lunewrought now, the blade had done its worst), he’d swept over the darkened city, taking in the streets below with growing unease. Regent’s Park lay silent, a black expanse edged by abandoned buses and cars. Soho sprawled in noiseless neon, litter dancing down Old Compton Street instead of partygoers. Further on, the Gherkin rose over the pickle of buildings that had once comprised the City, Bank station, Cannon Street and Leadenhall Market all trampled by a giant’s boot.

  It was here that his rage petered out, cooling into something deeper and sharper. As he’d veered for Tower Bridge, her broken back silhouetted below, he could no longer ignore the fact that there were people down there, from Camden to Clerkenwell, residents of London in the ruins. On Sandwich Street, he’d seen an old man hanging out washing in his backyard. At King’s Cross, a woman in a burka was rattling her keys in a roll shutter lock, opening her shop for the evening. Tents had appeared in Inner Temple Gardens, the squalid stretch of tarpaulin suggesting that the city’s homeless had banded together, huddling around small fires, seeking strength in numbers. These sights shocked and impressed him as he flew, making him realise that despite the terror that must’ve been blaring from every TV and radio station in the land, despite the knowledge of monsters abroad, blowing up power stations and flooding parks, there were some in the city who hadn’t fled. Perhaps there was nowhere for them to go. Perhaps they didn’t quite believe what they were seeing, couldn’t accept the danger. More likely, Ben surmised with a twinge in his heart, the ones who remained simply had an extra dose of London pluck. If the city burned, then by George, they’d burn too. No one would take that away from them.

  There were pigeons too, he noticed. Still pigeons. Pigeons carried on about their business in Trafalgar Square, pecking at the pavement in Holborn, decorating the statues of princes and dukes. And rats. Rats sc
urried through the bins, revelling in the feast with all the glee of vultures picking at a corpse. There was life here, after a fashion. Perched high on the bridge, Ben tried to console himself with the notion. It didn’t do him much good.

  Not all of London was dark. There was another reason he’d landed here, travelling from one place to another. Less than a mile away, the Shard rose from the south bank in pyramidal splendour. A thousand feet of steel and polished glass, the blade of the building skewered the night. The top of the Shard stood open to the air, her walls culminating in latticed leaves that almost, but not quite, kissed, a marvel of modern architecture. Light swirled around the pointed spire, the uppermost floors of the sky deck blazing with spectral radiance, as blue and as cold as frost. Ben knew that light. He’d seen it before and recently, creeping through an alien crypt. Glittering in a corroded circle. Burning in a dead king’s eyes.

  Yeah. And shimmering in the Lady’s gown.

  From a distance, the cavorting brilliance brought to mind a crown, a blazing symbol of tyranny presiding over London. The light flickered, wheeling shapes caught in the glow. A flight of wyverns, twenty or more, were shrieking and circling around the spire. From a distance, the slender, two-legged serpents—he couldn’t think of them as dragons, poor cousins as they were—looked too small to present much of a threat, but Ben didn’t kid himself. He couldn’t take them all on alone.