Call Your Steel

by G. D. Penman

  Lucia had stopped spinning in the air and was plunging back towards him, her head sweeping from side to side as she tried to sight Metharia. With the strange double vision the Eaters of the Gods possessed both of them saw, as much as they felt, the sudden draw of power beneath the earth. It was only then that Kaius realised that he had given Metharia total darkness.

  The air all around them hummed with the electrical discharge beneath the earth. The coarse silver hair on Kaius legs and flanks stood on end. The earth shuddered beneath their feet.

  A pointed bone burst up out of the earth, bleached white and looking like nothing so much as a spider's leg. An impression that grew more accurate as another, then another, burst out of the soil, trying to impale Kaius as he danced away. The leg's hooked into the surface and dragged Metharia's body up out of the ground.

  Her body was still mostly human from the waist up. Her head was more skull than flesh apart from the huge webbed ears that framed it. She leapt from beneath the ground to tackle Lucia from the air. Lucia let out a great storm of fire all around them, inadvertently keeping Kaius at a distance. But that just set Metharia off cackling again. A brutal and fluid noise now that her throat had completely changed its shape. In the midst of the roaring flames and the creaking sounds as Metharia crushed her wings against her, Lucia was screaming,“Why are you doing this? What did I ever do but care for you?”

  Metharia's still human arms broke apart into hooked and barbed bone spurs that she raked across Lucia's scales. She broke from her cackling to shriek, “You do not matter. You never mattered.”

  Down on the ground beneath them, Kaius was muttering and weaving layers upon layers of his will all around him. Remaking himself into a more suitable shape and calling allies from across the world in a sudden star-burst of his power.

  Lucia reached the apex of her acceleration away from the ground and they began to fall. Metharia managed to hook a claw under one of the larger scales and plucked it off Lucia with a triumphant snigger. She snapped her spread claws back into a single bony spike and drove it into the gap in Lucia's armour.

  Blood rained down onto Kaius and he launched himself into the air, half formed, with a wail of wild fury. Metharia dragged Lucia's lashing head down to meet her gaze as they fell to the crushing earth. Her mutating face froze for an instant in a terrible grin.

  A wave of air buffeted them up and then Kaius tore between them sending a spray of gore and Metharia's chitinous body flying off into the farmland. He grasped Lucia's limp body with a single clawed foot.

  He spiralled down to deposit her gently on the ground before beating his wings and soaring across to the ruined farmstead Metharia had just ploughed into. He recognised this place. He knew that the nobility had favoured it, and when he unleashed another torrent of threads of his will, they fastened on to the creatures he knew would be there.

  A storm of carrion birds followed in his wake. He was the point of the arrow and they flooded in behind him. He snapped his wings in against his feathered body to increase his speed and managed to catch Metharia as she was scrambling out of the shattered timbers of the farmhouse.

  He hit her as a bird, raking claws first, and drove her back into the ruined building. By the time she was scrambling up again his body had shifted. The feathers were melting away into fur and he looked like nothing more than a huge black cat.

  She reared up with her dagger pointed front legs poised to impale him. All of the birds in the sky converged on her in a flurry of violence. They pecked at her eyes and clawed at the joints of her chitin. None of them did damage, or at least not enough to stop her, but every one of them distracted her while Kaius circled around in huge lopping strides and pounced onto her back.

  The added weight drove her from her legs but she hit the wet ground and sank in without any real injury. She snorted in laughter until his jaws closed on the soft skin of her neck. Then she flailed at him and poured out a fresh storm of lightning that danced all over her body. Kaius leapt howling back into the mud. She climbed back to her feet with more confidence. She was about to rush forward at the still stunned Kaius when a curious prickling sensation crept over her new body. She opened and shut her eyes slowly. She felt... good... in a queasy kind of way.

  She staggered and knocked over the last wall of the farmhouse. With painstaking effort, she turned her gaze downward and saw the insects latched onto her body. Their stingers were painlessly penetrating her flesh just as they had been bred to do. Recognising the drug infiltrating her blood, she let out another pulse of lightning. She fried every one of the beetle larvae still attached to her and let them fall in a shower all around her.

  This time Kaius made no attempt at subtlety. His front claws raked down her chest, finding purchase in the ribs just below her breasts. With that point of leverage, he raked down at the connection between her soft stomach and chitinous lower half. He locked his jaws under her chin and tore out her the pale skin of her throat. Even coated in her blood, he did not stop raking at her body until the soft flesh tore to shreds and the chitin was laid open.

  Beneath the hard armour and the mask of humanity ,there was a rubbery black leather hide that turned away his claws with a screech. Metharia barely even flinched as her flesh sloughed off. Plates of chitin still covered her arms and she dug their barbed points into his back, extended barbs from them and then used that grip to lever Kaius off and fling him into the air.

  Kaius tumbled up, changing shape as he flew. He looked almost human by the time Lucia caught him. Her flank oozed red but she had enough sense to heal her wound before plunging back into the fighting. Lucia twisted in the air after catching him in her forelegs and unleashed a torrent of flame to keep Metharia at bay. With the shell of her back already cracked and clawed Metharia shrugged it off. She extended a pair of leathery wings to match her fresh-grown skin, with more ivory spurs of jagged bone protruding from their span.

  Her laughter had finally stopped after her windpipe was torn out, cast away, and trampled into the mud. The stings were effecting her more than the violence had. The entire world spun in a graceful spiral around her, colours were brighter and sounds were louder. She was not sure how much of it was her new senses suddenly developing, and how much was the recreational venom and she did not care.

  She belched out a maelstrom of lightning across the fields and staggered after it with Kaius’ location still locked in her head. She gained a little speed and then began flapping her wings. Her many limbs dangled beneath her like a squid dragged from the water as she took flight. In Lucia's arms Kaius called out, “Hold me still, I am trying something.”

  Around Metharia's lumbering flight he wove slim bands of air and swiftly worked them into a mesh. Just like everything else, it grew easier each time he did it. It wrapped around Metharia, as it had all of the Eaters before but with a discharge of lightning, the complex designs that Kaius had woven together dissipated. His sigh of relief became a grunt of disbelief. At least now he understood why Negrath had been considered a threat through all of the unfathomable centuries and wars. He drew in a deep breath and shouted over the whipping wind, “Gain height. She cannot fly as well as you. She has not learned yet”

  Lucia grit her teeth and beat her wings faster. They rose ever upwards above the city and the lands all around. They flew higher and higher until the air was growing too thin and Kaius had to drag a huge column of it up with them. Metharia trailed behind. Apparently, her throat was healing because she bellowed up, “You destroyed me Kaius. You took everything away from me. All for her? For this mewling waste? I should have killed her a long time ago.”

  She began to close the distance as Lucia tired. In her drug fuelled frenzy she was salivating and ranting, “That first night I should have gutted her instead of rutting with her. I should have greeted you wearing her rotting entrails.”

  They left the clouds far below and the blue sky faded into stars. Kaius looked up past Lucia into the dark and a smile cracked his face. He made a connection be
tween their minds, just like it was before, because he did not know if he could draw a breath to speak up here. “Let me go. I will lead it away from the city.”

  Through the same connection, he heard her old sing-song voice whispering back, “If I let you go you will die.”

  She tightened her grip around him and he stroked his hand across her scales with something resembling love, “If I die I will be remembered kindly. This place that you have made. This new world. It does not need warriors or monsters. Let me do this for you. Let me go.”

  Her talons gripped him tighter as they broke the surface of the sky and they drifted there in the dark. His last word came to her as though from a great distance, soft as a whisper, “Please.”

  Lucia let him go. The pull of the world, so distant beneath them dragged Kaius down as she watched in horror. From this altitude he could see the entire continent encircled by its bitter oceans. The Land of The Gods. There were the mines and mountains of Vulkas. The vine ridden forests and overgrown pastures of Walpurgan. The sweeping ocean empire of Ochress curved around the southern coast. At the centre of it all there was the cataclysmic blast radius of the Glasslands and the Ashen Dales. The wastelands that had been his home.

  Rising with arthritic beats of newborn wings came Metharia, gasping for air. Kaius looked human again and muscle memory re-asserted itself. He called steel around himself, smooth and perfect. It began to glow as he fell faster and faster. Metharia must have spotted that tell-tale glow in the pitch darkness because she drifted into his path.

  With a jerk of his hand he tore the last of the air from her lungs. The lungs themselves burst out of her mouth in the explosive change of pressure, lolling around like fat tongues. This far up he could not call on any stone to block the lightning that she lashed out at him and in the jittery haze of called speed he watched the electricity curve and arc towards the metal of his armour. He was struck and once again the calculated and pressurised lines of will holding him in this shape disintegrated.

  He managed to dismiss his armour before it could crush him but it was ill timed. He was just passing Metharia as the liquid metal fell away. She lashed out with eight barbed black limbs and ripped tatters from his golden flesh. Gobbets of meat whipped away from him into the sky and he would have screamed if he had the air. Instead, he locked onto the rear leg closest to him with crushing jaws and bore down with all of the might that he could muster. He broke through the remaining chitin and tore the limb off at the joint.

  It was cold up here, chill enough to freeze the blood as it left her, but not quite enough to numb the pain. She kicked him off, and for a glorious moment he was falling freely away from her again. She realised that her wings were still extended, fighting against the push of the wild winds that were nearly tearing them from her back. She dragged them flush against herself and fell after him.

  Kaius quickly wove a more human shape for himself. He was still faceless and clawed. Still stony skinned, many winged and gigantic. But the underpinnings were familiar. He launched spikes of air at her but all they did was slow her momentum.

  They both fell, burning bright towards the rapidly expanding world. Kaius spun in the air, slowing their descent with a cyclone of wind, and throwing Metharia away with its spinning force. They both fell silently for a time, bolts of lightning crackling wildly all around Kaius as he angled from side to side to avoid them. They struck the layer of clouds and the blazing heat dissipated them with a hiss.

  Kaius called the water from the clouds and added it to the whirlwind. Each time Metharia launched another discharge of lightning at him, it was caught by a sudden burst of water and dragged into the tempest.

  He was faceless still, but Metharia could swear that he was mocking her. She spread out her wings to control her fall and to bring her closer to him but she was too close to the outside of the huge spiral. The wind snagged her wing and she whipped around. The water battered at her as she tried in vain to push through to the other side. Her own lightning, still leaping around in the darkness of the storm, hit her and she lost all of her senses.

  Metharia tumbled out of the cyclone so Kaius braced himself and slowed the spin. The water fell as though dropped from a bucket. Buffeted by the winds, Kaius descent was much more gentle. He touched down on the surface of the glass so softly that it did not make a sound. The glass, once so thick that it could support an army on the march without a creak was broken.

  Cracks as thick as his arm extended out in every direction. Metharia was nowhere to be seen. She was lost beneath the surface. Kaius drew himself back into a human shape. Being small would make it easier to navigate under the surface, if it was as he remembered. He called a sword and leapt down into the dark.

  He need not have bothered. Metharia was impaled on the titanic spikes of crystal, just a quarter mile's drop beneath the surface. Her new body was spread-eagled, like a pinned moth, where the angled spires of glass entered her oily flesh. Each time she slipped down, the angles of the spikes pulled her limbs and wings further apart. Stringy flesh was exposed and Kaius, hanging from the side of another spire of green tinted glass licked his lips in anticipation. Her massive, bat-like head hung halfway off her narrow shoulders, attached by only a quivering tendon and a stretch of skin.

  Even now her blazing green eyes narrowed in fury. Lightning crackled all over her length and she began to laugh again. It was a bitter, gurgling sound coming from a ruined throat and a mouth never meant for speech. Small patches of gas, drifting around in the enclosed air, popped into bright bursts of green flame around her. She gathered up the last of her might. There was opportunity here.

  Kaius did not flee the coming storm. He did not leap for the surface, he just watched as Metharia grew brighter and brighter with gathered electricity, shuddering and sparking. He called the air. He called all of the air across all of this underworld, sensed the fuzzy patches that were not like the rest, the bad air, the gasses of corruption that had been trapped here since the city beneath the glass had died. He drew all of those pockets of flammable gas together into one and herded it up towards the electric mass of Metharia. Beneath the surface of the earth, far from the sunlight, the gas and crackling lightning touched

  .

  Chapter 24- The Ballad

  Lucia drifted slowly down towards the ground, keeping a safe distance from Kaius and Metharia as they brawled and unleashed their fury upon each other. She saw the coloured lights flashing under the Glasslands but she felt the explosion as an impact on her wings. A circle of ash blew out from around the glass, expanding across her lands, and knocking her people from their feet.

  The glass shattered into huge shards and fell into the pit beneath, exposing the blackened and ruined civilisation buried there. The earth shook and she held herself there in the sky, waiting to see if the monsters would emerge and continue their brawl. After countless long moments, the glass finally stopped falling, although a hissing stream of ash poured in from every direction. She flew closer and peered down into the void. She opened up all of her senses, all of the layers of vision and scent and sound that this final form afforded her. Nothing moved and nothing lived in that crater. With a sob caught in her throat, Lucia flew back to the people who needed her and buried her choking regret.

  The city was silent at her approach. The people could not meet their master's gaze. Even the proudest nobles would not look at her directly. She launched herself from outside the city gates and coiled around the top of her tower. With a hiss of frustration and exhaustion, she tore the balcony doorway open and forced her way inside. She spread cracks across the ivory surface of the tower and blackened it with soot in her anger. There were no questions that day. No nobles made entreaties, and the council of commons was silent until nightfall.

  She flew over the pit again when the moon had risen far enough to give illumination, but there was no sign of Kaius or Metharia. For a moment, down in the pitch blackness beneath the glass, she caught a glimpse of movement. Faster than she even knew that
she could move, she dove into the city below.

  It was a shifting pile of ash that had drawn her attention. There was nothing alive down there. Slipping across the collapsing dune, Lucia caught a glimpse of something dark and familiar. She padded over, the ash playing softly through her talons as she drew closer. Her head snaked down until it was level with a dark cloth case that she had not seen since another lifetime. She reached out with a claw and hooked the strap of her sickle-harp case. She was not capable of tears, but a great heaving motion racked her body. Terrible gouts of flame spilled past her jagged teeth as she tried to gulp her sorrow back inside.

  By dawn she was back in the Ivory City, working out the details of dissolving the council of nobles with the few councillors that had independently exhibited radical ideals. She broke from that discussion to invite the union of merchants to make bids on the salvage rights to the black city that had been the Glasslands. It was an essential debate as every human working salvage on the glass was now dead. The noble families that had members interested in history were invited to accompany the expeditions and above all to write their findings down. For too long history and truth had been the word of the Eaters, tempered only with the subversive songs that she and the other bards had kept alive.

  To the sound of her deep breathing, as other jabbered on and on, the strings of her sickle-harp thrummed. She had been glancing at it through the proceedings. Trying to fit an instrument she could no longer hold without shattering into her new life. As an offhand thought, she commanded that a school of history and music be constructed in the city. After many hours of unexpected debate it became a fully-fledged school. It would housed in the Halls of Bone and Steel with details to be confirmed. The Forms would now be considered an art-form and would be taught to anyone with an interest. Side by side with more abstract and practical subjects taught by noble experts and tradesmen. There was immediate speculation about new entertainments to replace the Trials. That debate drew out for pointless hours too and it was only just before nightfall, and her traditional retreat to solitude, that Lucia realised what would soften the ache in her chest.