Unnatural Issue

by Mercedes Lackey

  “It still won’t,” she temporized. “But I will listen to your arguments.”

  “Taking her to dinner,” of course, meant either bringing her to the Officer’s Mess or getting what could be scrounged up at the local bistro. She wondered which he would choose and was pleasantly surprised when it was the bistro. There were no actual regulations forbidding officers from consorting with nursing sisters, but she had no wish to attract any more attention than she had from the English military. She wasn’t a religious sister, she wasn’t a trained nurse, and she wasn’t French, even though she was serving with the French nurses. And she certainly didn’t have official or parental permission to be here.

  She really didn’t notice what dinner was. Horse, probably; when it came to anything that you might cook and eat, the French were inclined to put a sauce on. And it didn’t matter. It could have been boot soles for all she cared. She had Charles all to herself, for the first time ever, and she set out to make a good impression on him.

  It must have worked. He invited her to dinner the next day as well.

  The six days—only six—of being in reserve passed far too quickly. The men in reserve got a chance to eat decently, sleep in beds, clean up, get rid of lice, have minor injuries and problems like trench foot cleared up. They got light drill daily, but mostly, they were supposed to rest and recover. Charles would be the first to admit that a great deal of his pleasure during those six days was in the dinners he had with Susanne. Finally he could talk to someone else about magic, about the bone-shaking distress he felt in the land because of the horrors of this war, the fear that the Elementals of this part of the world were being destroyed or driven off. You could say things to a woman you couldn’t admit to a man. She was a good old thing, was Susanne; she listened patiently and carefully, and if she couldn’t reassure him, at least she didn’t shower him with platitudes.

  They even managed to round up Almsley and his man Garrick for two of these dinners, making for a lively discussion over the table. Peter tried briefly to persuade the girl that it was in her best interest to emigrate, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

  He felt as though he was living like a human being again for the first time in months. Six days was not enough. His men clearly felt the same, and to be honest, they didn’t look recovered when their six days were up.

  So it was with decidedly gloomy feelings that he and his troopers made their way back to the Front—to a different series of trenches this time. Besides having to work really hard to convince himself that his country needed him out there, he was laboring under a sense of failure for another self-imposed task. He hadn’t been able to talk Susanne around to evacuating to the colonies, and now it would be at least two weeks before he could see her again. She was so damned stubborn; if only she would see reason!

  Once they got into the relief trenches, it became a matter of going silently and with no lights. The relief trenches were within reach of the guns, and any light would give the spotters something to sight in on. This was a night of no moon, which was good for keeping undercover, and it was good because the boche artillery had to fire blind; but it was bad because he couldn’t see anything, and he was rearmost man.

  Perhaps that was how he got separated from his own troop. Because he went around a corner—and suddenly, he was alone.

  As in, completely alone. There was no warning, it was as if he had suddenly been transported to a place that had been abandoned. The sense he always had, of knowing where his men were—well, he couldn’t sense them. He strained his ears, but he could hear nothing but the ever-present rumble of artillery and, nearby, the soughing of the wind. No footfalls, no murmurs of voices, nothing.

  Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. His stomach felt queasy, and if he’d had hackles to raise, they’d have been up.

  And just as a chill crept down his spine, he felt with a shock of recognition that he wasn’t alone anymore.

  He sensed it first: a draught of icy cold wind, colder than the winter wind he was used to, and carrying the scent of corruption with it. Then he heard it—a faint, but menacing moaning.

  Then a starshell burst overhead, and he saw it. Saw, as the shell dropped lower and lower, the limbs clawing their way up out of the muck on either side of the trench. Saw the half-rotten corpses dragging themselves to their feet. Watched in horror as they turned their eyeless heads toward him.

  With a yell, half fear, half panic, he opened up on them with his service revolver.

  It had no effect, of course. They were already dead. Worse, he knew some of them; the decomposing features weren’t so far gone that he couldn’t recognize some faces, and some of them had been his own men. With horrible sucking sounds they pulled themselves out of the mud and to their feet. As they piled into the trench, hands grasping for him, the paralysis of terror suddenly wore off, and he turned and ran—

  Only to stumble to a halt when a second starshell burst and showed him that he was blocked on both sides by an army of walking dead piled into the trench and spilling over the top.

  He pressed himself against the wall of the trench. Maybe they won’t find me. . . .

  But within moments, he knew that was a false hope. They all turned their eyeless faces in his direction and started forward at a shambling walk.

  He scrambled up the side of the trench, frantically clawing at the boards shoring up the dirt. He made it out just ahead of the horrible groping hands and stumbled away.

  The damned things followed, piling up against the side he had just scaled and using the bodies of those who had gotten there first as a staircase.

  Sheer, total terror engulfed him. He shook like a leaf in a high wind, and his mind spun in circles. He appeared to be the only truly living thing in this entire landscape of death.

  The dead glowed with their own phosphorescence as they surged after him, moving much faster than they had any right to.

  He screamed and ran.

  But more of them were pulling themselves up out of the earth in front of him, and he dodged frantically out of their way. This wasn’t like the fight back at Branwell Hall; then, there had been four of them, they had the proper weapons, and Peter had fought these things before. Now he was utterly alone, without the right weapons, on alien ground—and the things that were after him wore the faces of his dead companions. He would never see Rose again. She might not even learn what had happened to him.

  So he did the only thing he could. He ran, spurred on by fear that ran hot through his veins and galvanized him

  Only to fall headlong into a shell crater.

  He turned his fall into a tumble, managing not to break his neck or anything else, until he fetched up in the muddy bottom of the crater. He scrambled up the other side, or tried to, but the silent dead ringed the rim, cutting him off from escape.

  He had no blessed salt, no blessed iron, no—anything. As he put his back to the wreck of a cart down in the bottom of the crater with him and fumbled his rifle with its fixed bayonet off his back, he could only send out a single, magical, despairing cry for help and pray that someone, anyone, was near enough to “hear” it.

  He did not expect the answer that he got.

  From the earth at his feet, a dozen or more little brownie-like creatures erupted. In their hands were tiny flint blades. He heard a shrill whinnying sound and the pounding of hooves, and a moment later, a shining white equine form plunged through the mob of walking dead, slashing from left to right with the single horn in the middle of its forehead.

  A second white creature, this time a stag with a magnificent spread of antlers, appeared on the opposite side of the crater; it bugled a challenge and charged the dead with lowered horns.

  Its challenge was answered by the little manikins at his feet and by a long, drawn out howl. Three white wolves appeared between the stag and the unicorn to attack, as the brownies charged from below with those wicked little blades.

  Every time the unicorn’s horn touched one of the dead,
it dropped to the ground, lifeless again. The stag merely broke them in pieces. The wolves did likewise, and the brownies set upon the broken and cut them to pieces.

  For a moment his heart leaped. But another starshell showed him the truth: Charles’ rescuers were themselves wounded and weary—and sick. They were inextricably linked to the land, and the land was sickening, dying. The stag missed as often as he hit, and he stumbled a little when he tried to charge. The unicorn looked to be on his last legs; the light of its horn was dim, and its coat was harsh and dingy. The brownies only had their little flint knives, and the wolves were emaciated. They had come to his rescue, but they themselves were falling.

  One of the wolves went first, then three of the brownies, pulled down and buried beneath piles of walking dead. Then the stag went down with a despairing squeal.

  And that was when the shelling began.

  He heard the telltale whistling first and instinctively flinched to one side. A moment later, the shell exploded not far off, sending a rain of dirt and body parts down on him. Another shell followed the first, and another, while the Elementals and the dead tore and fought at each other in unnerving silence. Charles too fought on, in a haze of exhaustion and terror.

  A third shell—a fourth—bracketed them. The Elementals had descended into the shell crater with him; they were all standing together now, facing the horde of walking dead that stumbled and tripped down the sides of the crater toward them.

  Another pair of shells landed even closer, this time, throwing half-corpses down the side of their crater. These things writhed and snapped and grabbed until the brownies cut them to bits, bits that, horribly, still moved. An unattached hand clamped itself around Charles’ boot until he bayoneted it into the ground.

  Two more shells fell even closer. The remaining wolves whimpered, and the unicorn pressed into his side.

  Where were his men? Hadn’t they figured out he was missing by now?

  Despair clawed at his soul. He was going to die, and it would not be a clean death.

  Five more shells, one after the other, whistled through the sky and sent gouts of debris up to rain down on them. The walking dead paid no heed at all.

  What were the wretched Germans trying to shoot at? Had they actually spotted the white hides of his Elementals? Were they using those to sight in on?

  It didn’t matter. None of this mattered.

  Belatedly, he remembered that he had hand grenades in the rucksack on his back. As more and more of the walking dead poured down to meet the combined weapons of his allies, he slipped out of the straps and fumbled one out, armed it, and tossed it.

  The resulting explosion wasn’t as impressive as the shell, but it cleared a path partway up the crater wall.

  He urged the Elementals to follow him, and scrambled toward that gap in the enemy lines. If he could get there, he could clear more of a path out with another grenade. If he could do that, they might be able to—

  He heard the shell whistling overhead.

  Overhead.

  No! he thought, and then the world erupted in light and sound and then plunged into darkness.

  18

  THE little bistro was very good about giving Peter and Susanne a relatively quiet table, and even better about turning the provisions Peter supplied into quite decent meals. They even managed to turn that wretched plum-and-apple jam into a rather delightful sauce. “You’re being rather foolish, old girl,” Peter said, as he refilled Susanne’s glass with the decent pinot noir that Garrick had managed to find, somewhere. “Think about this: You could do just as much good, if not more, doing your nursing back in Australia. The lads that make it back will need someone who knows what they’ve been through.”

  She shook her head, her mouth set in a stubborn line. He sighed. He knew that look. “There aren’t enough nurses here,” she countered. “You know that, you’ve seen the wards when a rush comes in.”

  “But the magic—” he protested. “Think of what you could do with Earth magic for them!”

  “I’m using it all the time here, every day, or half of those fellows wouldn’t live through the first night.” She raised her chin and defiantly challenged him to counter that, and he knew that he couldn’t. She could do what no doctor—other than Maya—could do. She was right, she was keeping men alive who by rights should have died.

  Peter sighed anyway, because he also knew that the real reason she was not going to leave had nothing to do with the nursing. He knew what was going on; it was as plain as could be every time she looked at Charles. She was utterly smitten and probably had been from the moment she first set eyes on him. For a moment he was silent, caught up in an internal debate.

  Should I tell her about Rose? That was the question. The poor thing had no idea that she had a rival, because the rival had only materialized after she’d been sent across the Channel.

  In the weeks following the invasion of Belgium, when everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before Britain declared an official war, lives had suddenly accelerated. Men tidied their affairs, sold horses and yachts and motorcars. Some who had put off engagements proposed and wed within days, while others broke off engagements on the grounds that they didn’t know if they were going to come back alive. Thankfully, there were a lot fewer of those. There were so many applications for civil marriages and special licenses, in fact, that clerks could hardly keep up with them. Churches and registry offices were booked solid with weddings religious and civil. And when that started, Peter had had no doubt that there was going to follow a veritable rain of babies around about April.

  He would have bet that cool, calm Charles would not have been affected by that frenzy, that primitive urge to make sure you produced at least one child before you went off to an uncertain conflict. Charles, unlike most Britons, had been sure that it would not all be over by Christmas, but he hadn’t rushed into anything. Peter would have wagered any amount of money that Charles would never let his instincts overcome him.

  He would have been wrong.

  It all happened over a garden party. The magicians of England all knew, by now, that this was going to be a long and hideous war. They knew that many would be called up, and many would not return. Elizabeth Kerridge had known, had been certain, that this gathering of both sexes of magicians was going to be fevered, and she had figured that at least one, if not several, engagements were going to come out of this gathering. She had said as much to Peter, half in jest and perhaps half in warning. Had Charles known that? He might have; he might have simply decided that his mother was going to pitch girls at him until he decided on one. It might have been that, the moment he saw one he had known as a boy and been friends with, he figured he had better just give in and take someone he could get along with. Branwell was going to need another generation. He was the only child, the heir. It was his duty.

  Or perhaps they really were meant for each other.

  Peter had not seen the actual meeting, but he’d had it described to him. The two had looked equally surprised to see the other. There had been a moment when the eyes of Charles Kerridge met the young woman’s, followed immediately by Charles leaving the reception line and going straight to the side of young Rose Mainwright, and not moving away from her for the rest of the night. The next morning, it was official. They were engaged. Charles told Peter later that Rose was an old friend he had long ago lost track of, someone he’d played with as a child until her parents moved to Blackpool. She was an Elemental mage too, a Water mage, like Peter.

  Peter liked her; she and Charles were obviously comfortable together.

  Susanne didn’t know about Rose. Not that Charles was hiding anything; he just never would think to tell her. So far as Charles was concerned, Susanne was just someone he was helping, certainly a friend, but nothing like as close a friend as, say, Peter. They weren’t of the same social class, as Charles had pointed out before this. Why should she care if he was engaged or not?

  He was completely oblivious to the fact that
Susanne was infatuated with him; Charles could be desperately thick about emotional matters sometimes.

  So should I tell her about Rose? Peter pondered this while Susanne ate hungrily and talked about her work on the wards. He finally shrugged to himself and decided that it wouldn’t matter what he told her, she wouldn’t believe it unless she saw it with her own eyes.

  Which, if he finally got his way, was simply not going to happen. She would be in Australia, where there was a shortage of women. She’d have dozens of hearty young fellows vying for her, and in no time at all, she would forget about Charles.

  He was about to change the subject to how she thought the Elementals here were faring, when he felt it.

  She did too.

  Cold, and dark, and death. And they recognized the signature of that black pall of magic.

  Richard Whitestone.

  They both clutched the sides of the table as if the earth itself had moved, and fought free of the clinging tentacles of that horrible power. Susanne was the first to speak.

  “Father—” she said, looking terror-struck and nauseated at the same time. He didn’t blame her. How had Richard Whitestone managed to find them across the Channel? And how had he gotten here in the first place? Was an attack imminent? How much time did they have before a horde of walking dead broke down the door to the little bistro?

  She looked stunned. Peter had already gotten the inadequate little knife in one hand and the fork in the other and was looking around for liches. Richard was obviously working necromantic magic, and very powerful stuff—

  He couldn’t possibly be using it against the Germans, could he?

  When no walking dead appeared, he shoved away from the table. “I’m here, and you’re here, and there’s no army of dead coming at us—so who is he attacking?” he wondered aloud.

  And both of them got the answer at the same moment. “Charles!” they chorused. “He knows Charles helped me,” she said, anguish in her voice. “And your trick worked; he can’t possibly know that I am here, so he’s going after Charles!”