It was over in a moment, not even a supernatural storm could sustain itself at that level for long. But when the rain subsided, Valkeyria was gone.
And now, too weary to think, Jeanne only turned herself towards the distant airfield that she had flown out of. Home. She wanted to go home . . .
White bird
In a golden cage
On a winter’s day
In the rain
White bird
In a golden cage
Alone
It was a shock to the airfield command to hear Jeanne’s voice on the radio reporting an encounter with Valkeyria.
It was a greater shock to see what landed. A strange construction, some frankensteinian creation, as if pulled from a science fiction serial, half woman, half silvery white airplane. It was not much larger than a woman, if that woman could bear carrying swept-back metal wings on her back, and enough armor to make a medieval knight go to his knees.
They only heard snatches of the encounter out there on the tarmac, between what had been Jeanne Blanchette and the engineer they all knew had been her lover, Henri Dubois. Mostly it was drowned in the static on the radio, static that sounded like electricity weeping. “ . . . it does not come off . . . but . . . I cannot . . . it was not my fault! Would you rather I had died?”
But they did hear Henri’s shouted reply to that question, which rang across the airfield like the bullet from an executioner’s rifle.
“Yes!”
The man made a gesture in which horror and revulsion were equally mixed, turned, and walked away without looking back, as the terrible static sobbed over the airwaves and the men in the control tower fell utterly silent.
They sensed that, had the rigid skin allowed it, the strange figure on the runway would have sagged in despair.
And then, as the static faded and the silence stretched as tight as an over-wound violin string, the figure raised her head, and—from the posture—looked into the sky.
“Clear the runway,” said the voice, like Jeanne’s but with a hardness in it they had never heard before. “There are Boche in my sky. When I am finished with my patrol, there will be fewer of them.”
“But Jeanne—” someone ventured.
“Jeanne Blanchette is dead,” the voice replied, hard and dead. “I am La Faucon Blanc, and the skies are mine.”
White bird must fly
Or she will die
White bird must fly
Or she will die
White bird must fly
Or she will die
White bird must fly*
*Lyrics: “White Bird” by It’s A Beautiful Day
Sgian Dubh
Mercedes Lackey
Not for the first time, Roddy MacSgian wished he hadn’t been born a bloody metahuman.
It wasn’t that he was unhappy with being dragooned into MI6 . . . the good gods knew that every man jack and plenty of woman jills were needed in this war. The bloody damned Nazis had run over everything in their path and had eaten most of France by now. About the time they took all of the Netherlands, they had started bombing the hell out of London . . . not just the damned Luftwaffe but the Luftwaffe Übermenschen too. The “Superior Men,” like Eisenfaust and his squad. Blitzkrieg, they called it, and it looked like a lightning storm every night. Not that Roddy had seen it when it first started, no, he’d been where the Auld Woman said he belonged, right on the farm, tending the shaggy, sleepy-eyed cattle, like his father, and his father’s father, and so on back to the first of his line to hold that particular piece of Highland land. Not that he wouldn’t have volunteered if the Auld Woman hadn’t strictly forbade it, on account of his being the only male left of his clan, the oddly named clan, “Son of the Knife.” But even so, they wouldn’t have taken him. Not on account of his being the only male left of his clan, but on account of his size. He knew jockeys who were taller than he was. The Auld Woman said it was the Pharisee blood in him; once he’d gotten his marching orders, the learned fellows at MI6 looked interested and said that it might well be he was almost pure Pictish. Whatever the case was, it was a fact that Roddy topped out at four feet tall, and they didn’t make uniforms in his size, nor boots, nor rifles that weren’t taller than he was.
So when the whole bleeding War started, and the Nazis began wrapping up other countries and taking them home, and Tommys started joining the Frogs at the border of Lorraine, well, the Auld Woman wanted him to stay. He saw no reason not to; the Army had no bleeding use for him.
That was true through the months and weeks that followed right up to the point where three things happened. The Blitz began and Spitfire, and then the rest of Wing Alpha, suddenly proved that the Nazis weren’t the only ones that could spawn what the authorities decided primly to call “metahumans”; The Yanks didn’t sit around on their hands the way some people had predicted, as newsreel footage of the Ubermenschen in action was enough to convince even a pacifist that the Germans weren’t going to stop at the Channel.
And he, Roderick MacSgian, woke up to find himself in a bed that was not his own.
The lady already in the bed, Deidre of the grass-green eyes and flaming hair, of the tiny foot and the winsome smile, of the breasts of a goddess and skin like newly skimmed cream, who he had in fact been dreaming about before he woke up, was not anyone he’d have had a ghost of a chance with. She proved it by screaming her fiery head off.
And Roddy, panicked, did . . . something.
And found himself back in his own bedroom, though he missed his bed by about a foot and landed on his arse on the cold stone floor.
It was that bruising that convinced him he hadn’t been dreaming.
Now, even the Auld Woman would admit that Roddy had a knack for thinking quickly, especially when things went badly wrong, and the first thing that flashed into his head was that he had better be able to prove he was in his cottage and not in Deidre MacFarland’s bed ten miles away, which meant he’d better get himself one or more sober witnesses to this at some point in the next five minutes.
He pulled on a pair of pants with naught on beneath, because he slept with naught on, shoved his feet into boots, and ran out into the street. “Didja hear that?” he shouted to his neighbor, who was just feeding his hutch of rabbits, doing his best to look wild-eyed.
“Roddy, ye wee bastard, I heerd nowt!” the neighbor laughed. “Ye bin dreamin’ again.”
Then the neighbor sobered, for it was known that the Old Blood was thick in the MacSgian family, and although the Auld Woman swore that not a bit of the magic had made its way into him, there was always the chance it was late in coming. The neighbor knew this, because it was his wife it was that stood for the East in the Auld Woman’s monthly Gathers. “It wasna that sort of dream, now?”
Roddy shook his head, rubbed the back of his neck and looked sheepish. “Och nay,” he said, and forbore to say what kind of a dream it was.
Now Deidre MacFarland was a canny lass, and before she went accusing a man of being where no man should have been at six in the morning, and especially not a man she did not know, and did not care to know, she made certain inquiries in that man’s neighborhood. And being not wanting to be made a fool of, when she found witnesses that he’d been standing in his own back garden at six-oh-one, she kept her mouth tight shut.
And being no fool, and a month later, sober reflection on Roddy’s ability to keep his own mouth shut, and a good memory telling her that not everything about Roddy MacSgian was less than a proper man’s size, when a general, no less, came and took him up by special draft, Miss Deidre MacFarland gave him a proper patriotic farewell which bid fair to match that dream. And even at this moment, his ability to be ten miles (or more) awa’ in seconds was known only to her, him and MI6.
By the time the general came for him the village and most of the district knew of his other talent, for it had manifested in front of most of them.
Roddy could turn invisible.
He’d done it in full view, in front of a y
oung host of people, in the middle of market-day, when he was in the public house when he was supposed to be making rabbit hutches for the Auld Woman.
Now the way that came about was this. The Auld Woman was as tightfisted as any six Scots put together, which is saying a fair bit, and the wood and nails she had given Roddy to build those hutches with were all scavenged from every scrap of an abandoned structure that the Auld Woman’s sturdy boots could carry her to. Before he could even use the nails, he had to straighten them, and after having banged his fingers and thumbs to flinders doing so, he reckoned he needed a dram or two or three to take the ache out. As to why the Auld Woman wanted rabbit hutches, well, she and every other person in the village remembered the Great War, and the meat all going to the soldiers, as well it should. That was rationing, and it was understood as something that had to be done. There was War again, and the young men marching off, and there was no doubt the little fellow that looked like Charlie Chaplin and sounded like a madman needed to be put down. Even the Auld Woman, though she would not let Roddy go, said that Hitler was doing some wicked bad things and needed to be put down. But it was a hard thing to be sending the cattle off and getting no meat for yourself.
Ah, but there were plenty alive who remembered the last dust-up. And remembered rabbits now . . . the last time the rabbits had been poached, mostly, but you needed a more reliable system than poaching for a war that looked as black as the inside of a widow’s hat. The last time, no one had been making tinned rabbit, and the chances of rabbit-rationing were pretty slim. So hutches were being put up all over the village, and rabbits, after all, could be fed on hay and grass and cabbage leaves and such-like that was easily come by in the country.
So the Auld Woman was to have her hutches too, and no shilly-shallying about the work, for all that she had given him shite to build with. And he was just lifting his second dram to his lips when he heard someone sitting at the window of the pub exclaim, “Ach! ’Tis the Auld Woman a coomin’ this way!”
And the men that had been standing shoulder to shoulder with him at the bar cursed, and looked through him, no more did the Auld Woman see him when she poked her head in through the door.
When he went visible again, there was a great old to-do, the Auld Woman boxed his ears and checked him for magic and still found none, and he wasn’t at all surprised when the general turned up looking for him. Likely so, and rightly done. With talents like his, there was a lot even a little fellow could do.
By then, of course, the Auld Woman had cast his Weird, and had summoned him, and looked at him in the way that made him go hot and cold together, and told him soberly that though he hadn’t a smidge of the Old Magic in him, he had something else, and he had best go to use it for to save a great many lives.
So that was why he was in a tiny little fisherman’s smack on the English Channel, one among hundreds, maybe thousands even, of more tiny little boats and not so tiny boats and great huge troopships and all manner of craft, all rushing towards a place called Dunkirk. They were going to evacuate troops off the beaches, the troops of the Allies that had been trapped there by German troops and a tank division, and three Ubermenschen—Panzer-Wolf, Panzer-Loewe, and Panzer-Tiger. He was going to save, if he could, the pride of the USA, the first two metahumans to come from the United States to fight at the side of the British and French—Dixie Bell and Yankee Doodle.
And here he was, one lone, little man, crouched in the bottom of one lone, little boat, trying not to be sick, with the weight of the Alliance on his back and the blessing of the Auld Woman on his head. Not Young Roddy anymore. Now he was something else entirely. He was, by fiat of MI6, Sgian Dubh, the “little black knife,” the last, hidden, and most desperate of the weapons of a Scot.
In the chaos that was the evacuation of the Allied forces from the beachheads up and down the coast of France on either side of the seacoast town of Dunkirk, it was easy for one small man, going the wrong way, to make himself lost without ever going invisible. In fact, going invisible was probably ill-advised; he’d have been trampled.
It was unbelievable, probably horrible, and Roddy was right glad that the darkness hid most of it from him. The fear was so thick you could cut it. The smell of cordite and smoke mingled with the smell of blood and death and the smell of the sea. The men crowded onto the beaches were in despair, seeing escape from the meat-grinder that was the Nazi Blitzkrieg, and yet fearing that they would be cut down before reaching safety. The noise was incredible. The beaches were being shelled, and the edges of the evacuation harried by Nazi storm-troopers. If there was a hell on earth, this was it.
And yet it was not as bad as it could have been, and he knew why. The tank division had halted far short of here. The commanders on the ground expected it to arrive at any moment and were harrying their men into the hundreds of tiny shallow-drafted boats coming right up to the sand that would take the evacuees out to the larger ships.
It was not going to come. In fact, it would not arrive until the beaches were deserted and every last man that could be got off, had been.
That was the Auld Woman’s doing, her and her Gathering, and Gatherings and Moots and Meets wherever they had been alerted as to the need for a Great Work tonight. Roddy was entirely vague as to what they were doing, but he had no question as to how it was being done.
Magic.
Magic that ran in Roddy’s ancestry, but that he did not share. Not that he was terribly unhappy about this. There were all manner of rules about using magic, and he was pretty sure he would run afoul of them. And the wizards and witches and sorcerers and what-all generally seemed to always be having some sort of quarrel with each other, which made it all the more rare that they ever could get together long enough for a Great Work, like chasing off the Spanish Armada or stopping a German Panzer division.
But the men here didn’t know that was happening, and wouldn’t believe him if he told them, so they were vibrating between panic and apathy, though they tried to show neither. And Roddy couldn’t blame them, seeing as he was steadily making his way towards the enemy lines rather than away.
In an hour, he had cleared the jam-up. That was when he went invisible.
Immediately he felt a rush of relief. Every moment since he’d waded ashore, he’d felt terrified. It had all sounded so simple, back in that briefing room. Get onto the beach, under cover of the evacuation; ghost his way to his contact, find out where Dixie Belle and Yankee Doodle were being held, free them, or more likely, help them to free themselves. They were infinitely more powerful than he was. Both of them could fly without needing an airplane; Yankee Doodle shot some sort of energy blasts from his eyes and Dixie Belle was unbelievably strong. He’d seen footage of Belle punching holes in airplanes and picking up cars. Freeing them seemed almost trivial; two people like that, probably all he had to do was go invisible, meet his contact, go invisibly to wherever they were being kept, unlock a door or some such, and they would do the rest.
But of course, he hadn’t been able to take on his invisibility, and he had felt as if there was a target painted on his back the whole time he had been scrambling through that mess—short as he was, he stood out as something unusual, and the Nazis knew the Alliance had its own metahumans now, and why would there be someone as short as he was on that beach unless he had something to make up for what he lacked in size?
But now, now in the safety of a copse of shattered trees, he faded into nothingness and drew a deep, relieved breath. Now he had only to get through the enemy lines and find his contact. From here on in it should be smooth sailing.
Roddy was coming to the conclusion that nothing was ever as simple as it seemed. He had found his contact easily enough, and the first complication set in right there. His contact was a woman—a girl really—and one who carried a rifle on her back as casually as Deidre MacFarland carried a tennis racket.
They huddled just outside the high brick wall—with broken glass or other nastiness atop it, no doubt—where she said Belle and
Yank were being kept. “Eet ees some sort of laboratory,” she had explained. “It was so before zee Boche came, and zay took it ovair. So, you poof yourself within, mon ami, free zem and—”
“Ah, it doesna worrrk that way, lassie,” he whispered apologetically. “I canna go where I havena been before, or at least—” he amended hastily “—where I know some’un that’s there.” He flushed, thinking of Miss Deidre. The Auld Woman would have been scandalized to know how little she slept in . . .
“Nom du nom! Sacre merde . . .” The young woman swore vehemently under her breath. “You can at least poof out again, no?”
He thought about that, and flushed again. “Ah . . . I dinna think so,” he admitted. “I canna see where we are, ye ken. It bein’ dark an’ all. I mean, I could likely go home, but not out here. It’ll haveta be the harrrd way.”
The woman tossed her head, and unslung her rifle. “It is not to be helped, then,” she said with resignation. “I will to remain here. Someone must report if you do not succeed.”
For a moment he felt a surge of resentment, but in the next moment he realized she was right. “Right,” he said with resignation. “I’m off.”
He might be invisible but that did not mean he was undetectable. Dogs could smell him, for instance. He could leave footprints. People could bump into him and he could bump into things. In fact, he had to be twice as careful in tight quarters, as he couldn’t see where his feet and arms were.
So the first step was to get past the dogs. Prowling carefully about downwind told him that there were two with their handlers at the gate, and at least two more patrolling the area between the walls and the building. He considered this carefully. He couldn’t slip past the ones at the gate; there wasn’t enough room between them, and they would surely smell him. He could go over the wall, perhaps, but then he would still have to contend with the dogs and handlers inside.
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