Burning Ashes

by James Bennett

  “Life. So fragile. So precious,” he said. “And death, so overrated.” He gave a little laugh, no joy in the sound. “Look at this world, Ben. Look what it’s come to. Even this ice is fleeting, melting under our feet. For a while there, I thought we had a chance. That we could go on and build something better. But no, we’re all slaves to desire, selfish to the last. Gold, power, blood …” He shook his head. “So much blood. We are all of us monsters, are we not?”

  “Yes.”

  The Vicomte shuddered, letting out a frosty breath. He looked up at the stars, twinkling like pearls on satin above.

  “Tell me, what do you think is out there? What awaits a creature like me? Heaven? Hell? Nothingness …?” He turned the last word into a sigh, betraying his hope. “A true ending, free of sorrow and pain.”

  Ben grunted, aware of the minutes bleeding out, stealing the chance of salvation. And he’d never been fond of goodbyes.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Du Sang …”

  The Vicomte smiled up at him, his fangs white in the dark.

  “Very well. I won’t keep you. Let’s make this quick.”

  With this, Ben pushed regret from his mind, drawing himself up. A promise is a promise. He stretched out his neck, a rising diadem of horns, a furnace glowing behind his teeth. Through the heat haze around his snout, he looked down to see du Sang waving his arms.

  “Mon dieu! It will not do!”

  For a moment, Ben thought that the vampire had changed his mind, opting to face destruction like the rest of them, at the hands of the Fay. But no. He remembered the Vicomte’s words on the top of the Arc de Triomf, Barcelona, the flames swirling at his back.

  Even dragon fire wasn’t enough, quelle surprise …

  With a heavy breath, he shrugged off dragon form, his body dwindling, folding inwards on the rise. In no time at all, a red-haired man in a scaled suit stood barefoot on the snow, his features pained. He stood before du Sang, Caliburn in hand.

  One strike. One strike and you’d turn me to dust … The Fay metal is a bane to our kind.

  “Bonne nuit,” the sword said.

  And the Vicomte, closing his eyes, replied.

  “Goodbye.”

  Ben raised the sword, a flash of silver in the dark.

  When the sword fell, there was only ash, drifting with the snow on the wind.

  TWENTY-THREE

  A speck before the dark, Ben fleeted over the lake. He couldn’t look back now; the time for looking back was done. Hell, Du Sang had got what he wanted, which was more than he could say for himself. He only wished he would meet such a merciful end. Good luck with that. Flat, long and blue, the glacier stretched out under him, narrowing to meet the bordering mountains, the jaws of the future awaiting him.

  Between the peaks, the maw loomed, a starless, wavering mouth. There was no way he was looking at the Eight Hand Mirror—he’d even seen that from afar, up on the precipice. He didn’t know what had happened to the frame, but the void it once held had far exceeded it, released from the earthly bounds of old yet unremarkable wood.

  Blast you, fairy. What have you done?

  Cupped by the snowbound slopes, a frayed nothingness clawed into the air, gnawing at the dusk, devouring the stars. Three thousand feet high or more, he judged, his shadow sweeping over the ice, heading for a vaguely triangular rent in the sky that made him feel like a mote in comparison.

  Here, reality met with its antipode, the torn gateway of the nether. The Dark Frontier.

  As he drew closer, Ben could see, with a chill to his marrow, exactly what was shredding the portal, rending and chewing on its edges, the fissure widening, a gradually opening wound. The clamour of mastication echoed across the tundra, rebounding off ice and rock, off the stricken dome of the sky. It was a hollow drum inside his skull, beating out fearful recognition. Lurkers! Hundreds of the bastards, edging the breach on all sides, a seething, pale boundary. From this angle, it was like looking down on a nest of termites, a swarm devouring a fruit from the inside out, the perspective dizzying, sickening. Picking out their busying shapes, he winced at the sight of them, the glassy, ravenous ghosts. Pincer, mandible and claw were working overtime, ripping at the physical plane. Tentacles, slick with ichor, lashed at the egress, lacerating the sky. Bulbous eyes gleamed in the gloom, fixed on the borderland banquet.

  Despite his horror, Ben prayed that they would stay that way, his approach unmarked, an overlooked morsel. Gorge rising, he grasped what he was seeing, the knowledge a fist in his guts. Piece by piece, the phantoms were feasting on the fabric of Creation, stuffing its unravelling essence into jaw, proboscis and beak, and down their ethereal throats. He had seen such a frenzy before, of course, in car park walls, in a gathered, unified mass, but never on this scale. And if he’d wondered about the absence of the ghosts, oddly missing from the battle befalling Britain with all its unleashed and ruinous magic, here he found his answer. Von Hart must’ve come here, mirror in tow, and punched this hole in the cosmos. Somehow, he’d expanded the gate, granting the creatures their aeons-long wish, to dine on the dying earth.

  Nice one.

  It made sense. Before, in the guise of the Ghost Emperor, Von Hart had managed to distract the ghost-beasts, giving Jia time to steal the fragments of the harp. For all the havoc the envoy had wreaked, there was method in his madness, not that the insight, Ben conceded with a growl, was going to help him any. There was no end to the Lurkers’ appetite. Give it a week, a month, and what would remain of Svalbard? A black hole, nothing more, growing ever wider, the ocean rushing in …

  Did Von Hart know what he’d summoned? The origin of these freaks? Ben doubted it. The envoy was a latter-day Pandora, opening a deadly box. His longing to reunite with his people had blinded him to the truth. A fact, considering his efforts, which struck Ben as bitterly ironic. Even cruel. But then why should the anarchy spare the fairy when everyone else had suffered, caught up in the end of the illusion, many of them destroyed? I thought … I thought you could save her … A grim thought followed this one, but Ben allowed it. A shiver of satisfaction ran up his spine as he pictured facing the envoy, looking into his violet eyes and telling him that he was wrong.

  The Fay are already here, he’d say. Do they look golden to you?

  Under this, the hint of revelation, the pieces of the puzzle clicking together, insinuations of a deeper purpose. A desperate, dangerous need …

  Are we not flesh, Benjurigan?

  These suspicions drew him on, shooting over the lake. Drew him on like the tides in the air, the slow, gravitational pull of the portal, sucking up the distance. A mile or so from the mountains, he found that he could resist that pull, shove it off with muscle and scale, as though rejecting questing hands. Any closer, however, and he sensed that resistance would weaken, the inverse mass of the nether swallowing him like a spider down a plughole. That’s if the Lurkers didn’t swallow him first.

  Turning his attention to the light, the foxfire igniting the shore, he angled his wings, slowing and decreasing lift. He had little choice; the pressure in the air was curdling with an earthbound force, rippling and pulsing below. It wasn’t hard to see where it was coming from. The confluence warred above the lake, an unseen maelstrom in the sky. The emanations threatened to tear off his wings, urging him to land. Sword in claw, Ben banked, veering around the scene. The radiance, foggy as it was, hurt his eyes. Squeezed his brain. Electricity fizzed in his nostrils, the spice of occult interference.

  Magic. Open sesame. All that shit.

  In a faint rosette that stretched off in all directions, the energy leapt and crackled. Light flickered along sapphire veins, the elaborate, knotted pattern carved in the ice. The spell. The summoning. Whatever. He’d seen symbols like this before. Sun wheels and pentagrams. Udjats and all-seeing eyes. Last time, the glyphs had shone in Day-Glo paint, protecting the walls of Club Zauber, keeping the Lurkers out. Here, etched in the lake, he guessed that they served the same purpose, shielding their arch
itect’s efforts in case the gate wasn’t distraction enough, its disintegrating limits drawing the spectral threat. Atop the slope on the far shore, the threshold touched down in a jet-black spindle, absorbing the rock, a mere hundred yards from the edge of the circle.

  And in the middle of the circle—surely, the hub of a much greater one, spreading out across seas, across continents—the architect stood, a tall, thin figure on the ice. Arms spread, Von Hart, the envoy extraordinary, was directing the streams of light like a pale puppeteer, the energy bursting and crackling off his fingers. Rivers of blue snapped across the ice, converging on the edge of the spell. Like a lightning rod, the fairy drew on the magic around him, channelling the flailing loops and thrusting them up at the darkness above. In the pull of the nether, the force dragging at the gate, his robes—red, silk, star-spangled—fluttered around him like wings yearning for flight. His white-gold hair shone in the radiance, a beacon in itself. It was too bright for Ben to see his face, though he could envision the strain upon it. The concentration. The need.

  That need was all around him, threading through the atmosphere, as sour as the light. On the ionised air, a smell like sweat drifted to Ben’s nose, rank with urgency. In that moment, he was grateful that the light spared him the envoy’s expression, knowing he’d see the same thing he’d seen in the White Dog’s eyes. In De Gori’s. In Jia’s. The same desperate longing. Lunewrought. The touch of madness. But it was more than that, he reckoned. The Fay metal spoke to a hunger that was already present. Hidden. Cradled in the heart. Hadn’t he seen the same thing in the mirror for years, the threadbare hope in his gaze? He thought so. He thought he’d see the same thing in all Remnants and without looking too hard. In that moment, with the wind usurped by the abyss and the ache of his trials in his bones, it was hard to feel anything but sympathy for the creature below. His onetime ally, Blaise Von Hart.

  But sympathy wouldn’t serve him here. The envoy was indeed the architect of all these things. The shattering of the harp. The opening of the gate. And whatever his reasons, his weakness in doing so, Ben had only come here to stop him.

  I’ll face you, old friend. One last time.

  He couldn’t rely on the strength of the ice and so, with a blink of will, he changed in mid-air, his bulk shrinking inward. He landed, with a grunt, on the lake. Frost crackled, melted by the soles of his feet, the heat in his flesh. The static in the atmosphere plucked at him, teasing his hair into flamelike tufts. In human form, the surrounding pressure felt even greater, bearing down on his shoulders and back. Soupy and cold, the air buffeted around him, and he moved forward as if wading through water, shielding his eyes from the blazing circle. As he raised the sword, the boundary danced in silver, the hilt throbbing in his grip.

  You forgot something, fairy. You may live to regret it …

  On ground level, through the capering light, Ben could see what the envoy was about, the reason for all the symbols. He’d seen enough now to guess at the science, the equation unfolding around him. Conducting the beams, Von Hart was spooling the power in his hands and pouring it toward the shore. The ice there split and twisted, the rock melting, flowing upwards in bubbling, abstract shapes. Ben caught sight of the rainbow shimmer deep in the mix, absorbing, reflecting the envoy’s magic, a prism he’d come to know. Like liquid glass, the ice fused and surged skyward, ten yards across and twice as thick, arching, glistening, into the dark.

  The bridge. The ley. He’s repairing it …

  The thought drew Ben’s eyes to the fissure, tracing the stretching span. It arced up to the point where the light ran out, consumed by the void. Squinting, he noticed the gleam up there, a silver streak dwindling into the black. It was the severed end of the ley, snapped months ago by the harp and left hanging, suspended, over nothing. But he got it now. He understood. For years—centuries—the silver ley had linked the earth to Avalon, the Font of All Worlds. In time, the rot had set in, creeping through the dark to the High House itself, into an orchard and up palace walls, at least according to the Lady. Broken or no, the fall of the bridge had come too late to stop it. Too late to sever the worlds completely.

  The memory, the dream, was a knife in his skull.

  Your world is a canker. Nothing more …

  No. It was the gate, he realised then. The door of Creation. Sealed after the Battle of Camlann when the Fay—except one, that was—had left this world, abandoning the failed Example and departing into the nether. A gate recently opened by Jia Jing, the sin-you breaking the charm. It was the gate that linked the Earth to the nether, just as much as the road, the Silver Ley, stretching off to God knows where. To Avalon, the Isle of the Bad Apples … As long as the door remained open, the canker would continue to spread, the connected worlds bound by plague as much as fate. The doom of the dying magic.

  Unseen, veiled by centuries, the plague had festered, the Fay withering behind closed doors. For those same centuries, the Remnants had either been asleep or preoccupied with the business of survival. Civilisation had rumbled on. Cities rose that blackened the sky. Poisoned the seas. Melted the icecaps. The humans forgot the magic in their midst, reducing the truth to fable, to myth. Remnants of belief. No one had noticed the tumour until it was too late. The worm, gnawing away at the heart of things.

  O Rose thou art sick …

  But the Fay were returning. The echoes of the lullaby had called to them, ringing out across the gulf. And some doors, Ben had learnt, should always stay shut. In this case, the breach drawing all to the wound, the rotten core of the chaos.

  But how to close the damn thing? How?

  As if the notion mocked him, the vision in the deep became clear, a distant disturbance along the ley. Like a baleful star, a cloud, silvery, ghostly, was approaching through the dark, the fracturing rays betraying great speed. Holding his breath, he made out a faint rumbling. It sounded uncomfortably like hooves. Hundreds of them, pounding in his head.

  Riders. A company of Fay. Bound for the gate.

  The thought chilled him in a way that no ice could.

  He turned his attention back to Von Hart, the envoy rippling in the light. If I can reach him somehow. Tell him the truth … He might not be able to save the earth, but he was pretty sure that he could throw a spanner in the works. At least stall the disaster, prevent the Fay from alighting. He didn’t hold out much hope, but what else could he do? What other way to break the spell, stop the bridge from mending?

  And in his heart, a darker, more desperate idea, prickling under his scales.

  Kill him.

  With this, Ben stepped into the circle. The effect was immediate and anguished, the light shrieking at his intrusion. Caliburn, he noticed, took the brunt of it, the eldritch force homing in on the blade, magnetised by lunewrought. The runes along its fuller shone, blue as the surrounding ice. On its crossguard, the jewelled quillons sparkled and shone, liquid in the brilliance. Aware. In his grip, the hilt grew colder. Needles sank into his flesh, freezing his fingers, binding him to the sword in pain. Gritting his teeth, Ben pressed on, crossing the outer ring. The blade, he believed, could withstand the barrage—withstand anything, according to the weapon. He doubted that he’d have made it this far alone. Caliburn was drawing the fire.

  The proof of this came as he reached the second ring, pushing himself through the light, glyphs beaming under his feet. A bolt of energy, sharp as fangs, bit into him, spearing through him from chest to rump. Jaw locked, spine straight, he spasmed, slipping on the ice, the sword a blur before him. In the dissonance, he couldn’t hear himself scream, his throat raw. White fire filled his skull, bursting with untold heat.

  Still, he pushed on, forcing himself through his shock, the bolt passing, crackling away over the circle. At once, his bulk swelled. Horns sprouted up on his shoulders. Scales rippled up and down his neck. Rhino-sized and snarling, he thrust himself forward, tendrils of light clinging to his legs. Burning with cold, he crossed the boundary, heading for the inner ring.

  Von H
art, curse you … Sparks played in his hair. Danced between his teeth. Veins stood out on his neck, ripe with determination. The energy clawed at him, his transformation stymied. He grew and dwindled, grew and dwindled, snared by the light. He felt the scales on his back peeling away, prompting another howl. The stench of scorched flesh rose in his nostrils, sickeningly sweet. His shoulder blades ached, unable to summon wings. A sting at the bottom of his spine informed him of the danger. The magic, it seemed, was wrenching at his essence, finding its echo in his bones, eager to soak it up. Another bolt, another misstep, and the spellbound circle might consume him completely, unravel the stuff of his making. Our endless magic runs in your veins. But your flesh? Your flesh was born solely of their dreams. Divided, the dragon ripped from him; he’d reach the envoy merely as a man, naked and exposed to the elements, breathing his last in the snow …

  Biting back pain, his mind clinging to his body like a cloak in a high wind, he staggered, smouldering, across the ice. And he reached the edge of the inner circle.

  Veiled in silk and rainbow light, Von Hart noticed him then, throwing a glance in his direction. Eyes bright, the envoy hissed at him between his teeth.

  “Stop! Come no closer!” he said. “Don’t break the circle.”

  That’s the least of your worries, old friend.

  “Fairy,” Ben growled through the maelstrom of light. “I’m gonna break your neck.”

  “You stand here … at the heart of the world …” The envoy’s effort threaded through his words, a song of yearning and strain. “The knot that binds all together. The Cardinal Locus. Undo the spell and all is lost. Stay back. For your own sake!”

  Right.

  Through the brilliance, Ben could see the sense of this, all the same. Framed by the inner ring, the envoy stood inside a burning core. A heart, in fact, a few feet wide in diameter, carved into the ice. Under his boots, the light cavorted and flashed, beating with power. All the same, there was something unhealthy about the sight. The rhythm seemed off, a galloping pace. No doubt scaling to a kind of magical … cardiac arrest. Cataclysm. Symbols, faint, hung in the air, spilling from the envoy’s lips. One by one, they winked out as he paused, the prism dimming, the ice on the shore slowing. The bridge, as yet, unforged.