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by A. A. Attanasio

  Defiant of gravity, she hurls toward the starred, green eyes.

  The unicorn flares backward, and Ethiops strikes

  with the obsidian blade. In the same fateful instant, Falon hurls the charm, catching Morgeu's shoulder a glancing blow. The impact of the witch-queen's magic throws the demon violently out of Morgeu's body. A black wind pulls banners and battle-smoke after him as he falls off the Earth and plunges through the day sky toward the starved moon.

  *

  A hurricane blast lifts the arms of the dead like

  supplicants and whirls crows, loose helmets, and leaf litter downwind with a roaring rush as Ethiops flies past on his way into outer space. Limp and shivering, the unicorn lies in its black blood, its life-force a shadow widening through the matted grass.

  Morgeu and Falon sit numb in its shadow, which is a

  piece of night under a pelt of stars. Around them, saffron vapors of sunlight carry the cacophony of battle into the blue sky. Within the darkness of the unicorn's spilled life, a hush holds. The two souls stained by it, gaze mindlessly, full of the emptiness in which the animal bleeds.

  *

  The confusion of the battle engulfs Ygrane.

  Positioned on a broad avenue within sight of Londinium, she is supposed to ride with the Graal into the city, but Severus Syrax has not opened the way for her. The gates remain shut, and the queen's caravan and Merlinus with his Wheel-Table are stopped by burning barricades.

  The infantry that Uther placed around them has

  fallen under waves of the Furor's elite warriors, Death's Angels. Plastered in white ash to resemble corpses, the deathly fighters loose volleys of flaming arrows and leap howling through streamers of tar smoke, battle-axes

  flailing. Kyner's horses mill and his men struggle to pull them about before this terrifying assault.

  The twenty-seven fiana posted to guard the queen loose arrows at the enemy from among toppled wagons

  and spilled freight boxes. The smoke from the flaming volleys and the close in-fighting offer few targets. Battleaxes crash through muscle and bone, and horses topple screaming. Other steeds rear and scream in reply and

  churn around, seeking escape in the press of frenzied killing.

  Kyner heaves about from the thick of the fray, where

  his broad Bulgar saber, Short-Life, flashes crimson as it hacks at the ghoulish warriors. Half his men are dead.

  Through the torn smoke, he sees fiery wings drag

  darkness across the sky as more tar-burning arrows loft toward his line. And through their veils of smoke, more corpse white howlers charge, cutting down the packed

  horses like top-heavy seedpods.

  Signing for the drummers in the war carts to signal a retreat, Kyner gambols among fallen, thrashing horses. He hacks at the gruesome ax-men rushing toward him. By deft horsemanship, he eludes them and breaks for the queen's wagon. A new line must be formed, though already he can see that defense now is hopeless. Death's Angels whirl out of every quarter. His only reasonable hope is to die before he sees his queen defiled and murdered.

  The riders who can obey the drum retreat fly after

  him, hurrying toward the caravan where priests kneel and Druids dance in prayer. Clattering onto the stones of the highway, Kyner bellows at the queen's black-draped

  wagon, "Show the Graal!"

  Ygrane cannot hear him. From the moment the

  fighting began, she has been in trance, summoning the unicorn. She regrets sending it after Morgeu—and this poisonous feeling carries bitterness from four uncompleted lifetimes as queen. Four times through history, she has presided over the defeat of her people in battle, and the blood of slain champions stains her soul. This is her punishment for betraying Morrigan by stopping the

  sacrifices and serving the chiefs. Her people are doomed.

  In darkness nine times the depth of night, cold rage

  twists in her for betraying her people. Her selfish hope of saving her child has used up her magic, and she has no power to send against the barbarians. The Graal alone offers strength, but she is too small a being to carry its glory. She needs the unicorn to conduct enough of the Graal's force to change the timewind. And she knots with rage at having sent her familiar away during this dire climax.

  The unicorn, feeling the queen's suffering, has

  hurried to return and, inflamed with her poisonous

  bitterness, has dared to slay her enemies. The killing inspires a deadly fury in the beast. With each thrust of its tusk, the life-forces it spills from organic bodies jolts through its antenna, and it tastes the lives of humans.

  Acrid solitudes sluice through the star beast. It

  absorbs the human experience of squalid misery, fear, anguish, brutal physical pain inflicted by others of its own kind. And the ugliness of these dim, cruel lives compacts to a wrathful urgency to pull away and flee the hideous

  narrows of the Dragon's pelt.

  Then Morgeu abruptly comes clear from the Dark

  Dweller's shadow. The sight of the queen's daughter jars the unicorn loose from its fury. The queen's fiana shouts as he rides closer, the charm he bears touching the air with a hot pressure like sunlight. In response to this gleaming magic, darkness filled with bigness pushes from beyond Morgeu and hurls her from her mount.

  The unicorn leaps back, too late. Reverberant pain

  cuts through the animal to the queen's core, and she cries out. Her handmaids flurry over her as she wrenches free of trance, and she pushes them aside and clutches at her swollen abdomen. The unicorn's death shadow has passed into her. And it webs as well the tiny heart in her womb.

  *

  Lailoken stands atop the rim of the Wheel-Table,

  despairing at the whirlwind of fighting in the crowded fields.

  The gates of Londinium remain closed, and there are no archers on the ramparts offering covering fire. Uther and his cavalry have disappeared in battle-smoke, and the wizard knows he must go to him.

  The king will need the dragon-magus. The fighting

  on the highway is thick. Kyner's soldiers grapple with enraged waves of Death's Angels. If they break, the

  caravan's left flank will be exposed, and the trophy-mad barbarians will soon be killing each other for the right to slay the queen. The table—the Graal—all lost!

  The sorcerer scans for allies and finds none near

  and no one aware of the queen's plight. Each of the Celt chiefs battles desperately in his own tangle of blood-mad tribesmen. The fiana and Kyner's remnants alone protect Ygrane.

  For an instant, Merlinus marvels at the lethal military cunning—the evil intelligence—that has so furtively

  delivered the allies to this desperate moment. Someone has deftly coordinated the series of raids that has opened a path to the queen's wagon, and he squints down the length of his staff, looking for demons.

  First, he spots Azael, his mammoth bulk hunched

  nearby. Still as a mountain, the demon concentrates on guiding the Death's Angels through the tangled mob of fighters to the queen. His unbodied, weightless shadow is the psychotic force of the frenzied tribes.

  Merlinus swings his gaze along the road and finds,

  closer yet, Ethiops. The demon coils about a knoll on which are strewn the dead bodies of the Y Mamau. Morgeu on

  horseback hunches under wolf pelts in the afternoon heat,

  a black dagger in her rigid grip, while her head lolls and her livid hair swings like a bloody rag of clawed meat.

  The wizard stands taller at the sight of the unicorn, and his heart's brails reach but cannot grasp. Shouting mutely against the uproar, Falon rides through the war mist, a charmstone in his hand shining like a piece of the sun. Abruptly, Ethiops seizes Morgeu in his coils and flings her at the unicorn. A lifetime's suffering cries from the beast when the ritual blade pierces. An instant later, out of the black-tented wagon, the ray of Ygrane's shriek shoots from her darkness.

  Before Merlinus can react
, Ethiops rushes away as

  if from an exploding star. With black coils stretched out and vaporous as a whipped comet, he swiftly disappears over the world's brink. Twinkling briefly, he burns through the atmosphere into space. Merlinus holds on to his hat, his robes lift, and branches and tufts of sod whip past in the demon's wake.

  Immediately, the wizard chants protection for the

  queen and searches for her with his brails to be sure she is unharmed. He feels her gigantic pain—the unicorn's death killing her—and he yelps as he breaks contact. Jolted, he teeters a moment on the rim of the Wheel-Table—then

  freezes, his face a blur of fear.

  Astride the road, the Furor towers, giant storm silver beard streaking away from his hideous face like the

  ferocious rays of a star.

  Merlinus falls to his knees and cowers behind his

  staff. The Furor has won! Ethiops has put death in the unicorn—and the unicorn, the gift of the Furor, puts death in Ygrane's womb. Azael slaughters Uther's army under the walls of Londinium, where Ambrosius and Hengist died.

  And Lailoken cowers in dread before the rageful god.

  The shouts of the wizard's demonic words whisk

  away in the Furor's proud laughter. Already, the music in the god's soul frames this victory to a story he will soon sing to his daughter, Beauty, and to all the shining Aesir: Their magic has given him the power to command Dark

  Dwellers from the House of Fog and to crush the champion of the Fire Lords!

  Gray robes, ample as veils of rain, swing outward

  from the Furor as he aims his spear.

  Lailoken stands, still shouting his futile barbarous

  commands. His strength against the god is as a shout

  against a tornado. He stands defiant, now that he

  recognizes death is inevitable. Lightning crashes in the attic of the sky, and the Furor's one eye swivels with rage and fixes his aim with spiteful accuracy on the creature the Fire Lords fashioned.

  "You and your masters want to murder the future—

  but the gods of this world deny you!" The Furor frowns so hard his skull seems to leer through his flesh. "Lailoken, enemy of the Wild Hunt! I cursed you once! Now you will know dying!"

  The spear hurtles at Lailoken, a bolt of lightning

  directed by the gaze of the enraged god. "Optima!" the demon-man wails for his mother, for the Mother, for Her, who birthed him to this death.

  The bolt sears past Merlinus, singeing his beard,

  laving him in white heat. His conical hat snaps away, and the silver hairs of his head stand straight out, bristling with crackling static energy. In the lightning-glare of the near-miss, he sees the Furor's wrenched eye loosen with

  disbelief and then stupefied shock. He aimed to kill his enemy and does not want to believe what he sees.

  Heat slaps Merlinus from behind, and he crouches

  low, staff braced crosswise in his hands above his head to fend a blow at his back. An instant later, his alarm widens to astonishment. The war god's spear has soared across the battle plains and landed among Horsa's men—striking Azael!

  The river slope where the demon hunched in

  concentration swirls with white flakes of ashen remains. A blizzard of incinerated astral flesh floats into the dying wind like milkweed tufts and dandelion fur.

  The Furor's death-masked warriors lower their

  weapons, shaken by the blue bolt that has blasted the heart of their army. Thunder wrings the air, and they fall back in confusion from their assault on the queen's

  caravan.

  Kyner's men hurtle after them across the fields.

  Swiftly, they break the barbarians' confused line and scatter them into rabid, individual fighters, enraged spin-offs swiftly enclosed by lancers and bowmen and pierced with death like boars.

  Merlinus jumps from his high vantage on the rim of

  the table, eager to reach the wounded queen. The Furor's incredulous face remains only a stain in the brown air. He will stand there for days, wrath broken, stupefied by the incense of defeat, the sickening smell of war—spilled entrails, scorched flesh, rot, and fear.

  The wizard lands on his feet, shouting for buoyancy,

  and the bounding recoil of his spell shoves him across the road and up against a barricade of toppled trees and

  upturned wagons. Exhausted from fright, he stands there senseless for a moment, only gradually becoming aware that his nose brushes a crimson slipper.

  When he lifts his eyes, he meets the tired frown of

  Ygrane. She has crawled from the wagon and used her presence to block the god's spear. Simply placing herself in the wizard's vicinity protects him, for the Furor took an oath upon the Storm Tree not to spill the Celtic queen's blood—

  an oath his spear has obeyed.

  *

  When the Furor's deflected spear strikes Azael, the

  explosion knocks Uther out of his saddle and plops him among severed entrails. The battle stops. Fighters become gawkers in the echoes of thunderous aftershocks, looking everywhere fervidly to see who calls lightning out of the blue.

  Sorcery!

  The sky fills with the twilight murk of Azael's plasma, and the sun dims to a watery red moon. Thick mist hangs like webs in the sudden calm, motionless as the smoke of decomposed stars.

  Shadows flit rapidly through the gloom: Sid warriors

  with their rib-whittled lances stabbing the dazed, fallen soldiers of the Furor and skewering their ichorous souls to be fed to the Dragon.

  Pulses of energy from the Furor's bolt, the Celtic

  queen's massive burst of deflecting force, and the unicorn's spilled life attract the Drinker of Lives. It rises toward the planetary crust, and its magnetic presence heaves up

  through the cavernous Otherworld into the landscape

  above.

  Clouds like a jagged mane, eyes of blue Carnarvon

  rock and Highland shale, its gullet in the long Tamesis, the Dragon drinks in the squandered power of gods, demons, and mortals alike. Wray Vitki rides this upsurge of

  dragonforce for one final glorious killing dance.

  Black as a beetle, with dragonish shoulder-plates

  and helmet of steel teeth, the dragon-magus manifests against the yellow lacquer of demon smoke. He rides

  Uther's horse—and the surf of a roar builds as the troops spot him running through the enemy, harvesting storm-riders and Death's Angels with the sword Lightning. The allied troops surge forward with murderous zeal, thinking he is the king. And he is.

  Uther slips and slides in the gore where he has

  fallen and struggles upright. He, too, holds the sword Lightning. Wray Vitki has copied him and the sword.

  Figuring that the magus has probably mimicked his horse as well, he looks for it. In the tan haze it is hard to see anything clearly, and he gropes among shadows of men

  lanced upright and staggering about with ghastly wounds.

  He finds his horse shadowed against the broken yolk of the sun. Standing atop a fallen warhorse, he

  mounts his steed and rides after his forefather. The sepia battlefield glows with eerie muffled lights and smoky flares.

  Renewed sounds of struggle resound dully, voices

  shouting as from the deep.

  He rides through this phantom landscape with the

  sword Lightning braced against his pommel, ready to swing right or gouge left. No one approaches him. No one sees him. He is a ghost, as are his horse and his sword and his future.

  In twilight murk, Wray Vitki shines with his own black light. Uther sees him leading his clansmen in brilliant cavalry sorties, slashing in and out of the enemy ranks with a dancer's precision, inspiring his men to bold and savage attacks. He rushes to a gallop, and still he cannot get close to the swirling horsemen.

  All around the king, the feral-faced Sid reap souls

  with their lances. They march with the stabbed amoeba shapes of human s
ouls to the river and feed the Dragon. In the onyx-slick water, the amorphous blobs re-form briefly into their previous shapes, and drowned figures bob and roll into the depths before sinking into the black maw of the behemoth.

  Above the river of souls, Londinium shines like a

  palace in the gloom. The gates swing open, and Severus Syrax marches forth at the head of his elegant army. Soon, with the magister militum's remorseless phalanxes pressing the tribes away from the city into the killing range of the cavalry and the encircling Celtic chiefs, the rout sweeps the Furor's people—warriors, women, and children alike—into the sedges. After that, the slaughter continues in narrowing whorls.

  Uther sickens and slides from his horse. With the

  sword Lightning for prop, he kneels and heaves hollowly over a lopped hand. When he looks up, Wray Vitki stands above him. The magus removes his steel-fanged visor and his squamous visage wrings Uther's soul. It is the adder-eyed, hasp-jawed human face of his nightmares.

  "Grandfather Vitki—" the king groans.

  The magus, who has lived five hundred years

  staring at danger, forcing the details of every difficulty to take on the intensity of magic, salutes his distant grandson.

  Though the young king is only a weak changeling of the lethally cunning men who preceded him, he is good. Five hundred years of battles and bloodletting to create a king gentle as a priest! Where his chest would be, the dragon-magus feels pride—a mysterious warmth that binds—a

  near-love. That is the emotion that he has chosen for his

  last human feeling.

  Overhead, spears of sunlight shred the brown

  effluvia, and a fresh breeze sighs from the forest and rolls the amber fog into the river. Wray Vitki's long life is over.

  Uther reaches a hand out for him, in gratitude for

  doing the killing that he could not. Grandfather Vitki turns away and does not look back. His human form scuttles to a lizard shadow in the mists.

  *

  Merlinus finds the queen in her black-veiled wagon,

  lying among pillows and bolsters, attended by her clever, quiet handmaids. She glows pale as a candle. The charred pain of the wounded unicorn crisps in her.