Chasing Embers

by James Bennet

  “He stole the Star anyway,” Ben said. He had seen this part, floundering in the depths of her mind. He had seen the priest’s greed, the stone’s fire reflected in his eyes. And he had heard Von Hart’s divination in Berlin. Clouds…gathered. Treachery…stirred. And something went wrong… “He stole your regalia and…” A dagger, rising and falling. Blood spraying the flagstones. “He murdered you.”

  But that wasn’t all. In New York, the Queen had crashed into the Javits Center, unchecked by steel and glass. In the British Museum, she had torn through the roof of the Great Court like a pterodactyl through a fishing net. Tonight, she had pushed Ben down between the peaks with the ease of a bishop baptising a baby. Her muscles, both bestial and human, rippled with supernatural force. She was the lightning. She was the storm. He could not accept that a mere man, however cruel or learned, could have ended her life with a few savage stabs of a blade. Something else had weakened her, caught her off guard in the palace. Rendered her defenceless, unable or unwilling to resist…

  “You loved him.” The truth struck him as soon as he said it. There was no accusation in his voice, but Atiya’s face was as good as an answer, betraying the man that Ben had seen in the vision – his body locked with hers on the bed, his bare back beaded with sweat. “You were in love with Baba Kamenwati.”

  What would you know about love? he’d asked, dismissing the Queen as a heartless ghost, reborn to the world but removed from its cares. She had ridiculed his attachment to Rose, spat on his feelings as futile and weak. He realised now that her scorn stemmed from the very same source as his affection. Atiya was all heart, fury bred from spurned love, vengeance from the pain of treachery. Yes, she was a ghost, but she was also haunted. And she did not like his finger in the wounds.

  “You followed me and I have given you answers.” The Queen threw off the cloak of her sadness. Her substance grew sharper, hardening like clay. “It changes nothing. My purpose stands. The spirit bound within me longs for barwaaqo, God’s rain. A girl came to the temple, following an old map across an old land. With innocent blood, desperate to save her people, she summoned me forth from my grave. The little fool. Did she think her longing would be enough to control me? Am I not Queen? I have longings of my own. I long to reclaim my crown, restore my former powers. Then I will make the one who brought me to ruin pay…”

  Atiya made a gesture with her hands, shadow tearing at shadow, leaving Ben in no doubt what form her vengeance would take. Then she moved towards him, floating over the untouched snow. He clambered to his feet and edged in retreat, his back to the looming cliff face. There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Only this struggle under the stars.

  “You need to get with the times, lady,” he said. “Baba Kamenwati has been dead for thousands of years. You know, you kind of have that in common.”

  She wasn’t listening to him. “I will bring the rains,” she muttered in a small, childlike voice, a voice not her own. Then, in a stronger, echoing one, the voice of a queen, “I will have revenge.”

  He wrestled with her opposing desires – one to heal, one to harm – and failed to see anything good coming from either. Atiya’s tragedy aside, such power did not belong in modern times, untamed, unleashed. Where would her vengeance end? What chaos would come from meddling with the weather? And what of the relics in her possession, the energy they held, the temptation they would offer? Yes, he wished he could believe that the threat only lay at her feet, but he knew well enough that humans, once aware of such power, would do what they always did and reach for it. The Lore would shatter completely. Fingers get burnt. Wars start…

  He pressed his fears upon her. “What about the consequences?” He hated the whining tone in his voice. He didn’t want to beg. “Once you’ve had your revenge, what then? Somehow I don’t think you’ll just go back to your grave, take another aeon-spanning nap. You say you don’t want dominion, but the people in these times will fear you. And they’ll crave your power. A bad mix, if I know anything at all.”

  “What do you know? You are a wyrm. I am a goddess.”

  “I know how this story goes, better than anyone,” he told her. “The greed grows. The fear doesn’t last. Just like in the old days, when my kind were a moving target for any hare-brained peasant who fancied themselves a quick knighthood. Or who wanted gold, wanted to get laid. Suddenly we weren’t myths any more. We were monsters. And humans always deal with monsters in the same way.”

  The Queen hadn’t slowed her approach, and Ben’s plea curdled with his groan.

  “What you’re planning to do, it isn’t right. It isn’t natural.”

  “Half the world lives like kings while the other half suffers and starves. Is that natural? Do not speak to me of humans. I lost my throne, my kingdom and my life to one. Is it natural for such treachery to go unpunished?”

  Ben didn’t have an answer to that. Life isn’t fair didn’t seem to cover it. Such a callous truth did not ring true. Instead, he clung to his duty, the Pact he had made.

  “The Age of Myth is over. You said so yourself. It’s a little too late to redress a three-and-a-half-thousand-year-old fuck-up.”

  The Queen came closer, arms spread and trailing sparks. Her scintillating aura burnished the ledge, throwing beanstalk shadows up the rock face. Coldness to rival the ice pushed Ben back like a gale, pressing him into jagged stone. In the crux of the radiance, the Queen, a black candle blazing with flame. There was nothing human about her now. Nothing mournful. Nothing weak. She was a goddess on the mountain and she would not bend.

  “Gods can return,” she said. “Dominion merely lives in human hearts. When I am done, the world will know the power of storms. And the fury of justice.”

  Ben grimaced. Scales slid over his back, shielding him from the biting rock. As the Queen approached, lightning blistered his lips, nose and cheeks. Static needled his throat. Rubble skittered down, shattering on the ledge.

  “I can’t…I can’t let that happen…”

  His protest was futile. Atiya was changing, her spreading wings eclipsing the night. Stars shone in her massive flanks, splintering off her array of horns. Under her swelling weight, the ledge shook as if a train was approaching. The snow melted under her claws, clouds of steam rising around her. Her tail, a sinuous spear, lashed at the cliff face – once, twice – smashing deep clefts in the mountainside, splinters flying through the rumbling echoes.

  Through a cascade of rock, Ben watched the Queen take to the sky. Then rubble crashed down and buried him in darkness.

  NINETEEN

  Memories, broken islands in space, glimmered in the void. One of them, an important one, bobbed and turned in the comatose tide. The path that Ben walked along was a snow-edged grey stream carrying his delirious feet into the recent past. It cut through the patchy green, winter finally losing its grip on the foliage and fields of Central Park. The late February sunlight, fading too soon, gilded the surface of Turtle Pond. The glass rear of the Metropolitan Museum of Art reflected the shredded clouds, its sloped face a ripple of crystalline trees, hiding the ancient artefacts inside. Ben wore his beaten leather jacket, but he didn’t much feel the cold. Warmth travelled through his veins from the hand of the woman at his side, a small, pale hearthstone in his grip. She might as well have held his heart. It beat in his chest like a coal, aglow with contentment.

  They walked in silence, for the most part. Now and then she put her head on his shoulder, a mane of tousled gold. They’d been living in the apartment on Gold Street since last July, a couple of weeks after he’d asked and she’d reluctantly agreed, moving from the goldfish bowl of the LIU campus and into his treasure trove. He knew that treasure trove was the wrong term, but it was just how he thought of it. Just as he thought of her eyes as moonstones, the colour of gentle rain. Wasn’t Rose his most precious jewel?

  Yes.

  Today wasn’t Valentine’s Day and it wasn’t their first anniversary, but it was pretty close to both. Maybe that was why it had felt so spec
ial. Maybe that was why he’d chosen this moment to tell her. Or almost tell her. He never quite got the chance.

  Together they ambled up to the obelisk, standing tall and grey in the open. The weathered shaft of the ancient monument soared seventy feet into the sky, rising higher than the leafless branches of the trees and overlooking the sparse traffic that grumbled and coughed along East Drive. Crab apple drifted on the breeze. So did the ubiquitous fumes. And faint bergamot, whenever Rose drew near.

  “Cleopatra’s Needle,” she said, her pumps crunching on the snow-covered tarmac as she let go of his hand to cross the broad red hexagon that bordered the towering stone. “One of my favourite places in the city. Cleopatra was some queen, you know. She seduced emperors and generals. Wrapped them around her finger.”

  She rested her backside against the railings, holding up the finger in question, and he couldn’t help but notice which finger it was, the second from last on her left hand, wiggling shyly. Ben, who got that she was teasing him, looked up at the thick, tapering pillar, at the hieroglyphics etched into its side, pitted by pollution and acid rain. Thousands of miles from home, the pointed tip of Cleopatra’s Needle snagged at the passing clouds.

  He grinned, but awkwardly. “If I remember rightly, that didn’t end well.”

  He wasn’t the world’s greatest reader, and his knowledge was sketchy at best. He did remember a bit about the obelisk. Hadn’t it been a nineteenth-century gift from the then ruler of Egypt? The Khedive? He knew he was distracting himself, so he let the silence flood back in, and he wondered up at that long-lost cryptic language, while Rose McBriar wondered at him – another ancient mystery, had she but known it.

  “Ben…where do you see all this heading? Us, I mean.”

  The tone of her voice, hopeful and soft, drew his attention down from the stone and back to her. He would’ve made a joke, but the way that she bit her lip and kept her eyes averted, looking at the ground, threw seriousness over him like a cloak – a heavy cloak, his feet shuffling under its weight, making tiny, ragged snow angels. He knew that look. He’d seen it before, a hundred times. It also didn’t tend to end well.

  He screwed up his face. Rubbed his neck. “Rose. Maybe there’s something I should tell you first.”

  “Oh?” The glint of suspicion, muscling hope out of the way now.

  “Look, it isn’t—”

  Easy to explain, he was going to say, but circumstance interrupted him, because that was when the youths arrived.

  There were five of them. Four guys and a girl, if their grubby state didn’t deceive him. Like zombies in a cheap horror movie, they shambled out of the frozen shrubbery surrounding the obelisk, their jeans and jackets muddy and torn. Yesterday’s rags. A quick survey presented Ben with a carefully closing circle of washed-out faces and wall-eyed need. He caught the whiff of stale sweat and something else as well, a sweet chemical tang. Desperation, by Crack. Before he could speak, one of them, the girl, slipped her gangly, dreadlocked shape between Ben and Rose, cutting them off from each other. The others hung back as the apparent leader, a stocky, pockmarked youth in a dull green hoodie, slunk toward Ben and introduced himself by way of flicking out a knife.

  “Bit late for a stroll, dog,” Green Hood said. “Pretty cold, too.”

  Ben curled his lip. “So you thought you’d bring down some heat, is that right?”

  Green Hood looked around, indicating the empty park. No cops here, dog. The gang chuckled and the youth made an obligatory swipe, causing Ben to suck in his stomach and dodge backwards.

  “Gimme your wallet. And your jacket. Fuckin’ do it!”

  Something in Ben’s face made Green Hood nervous and he lashed out with the blade again. As Ben reached for his back pocket, steel sliced the back of his hand, a quick, vicious sting. He brought his hand up in front of his face, staring in mild surprise at the line of blood welling there. It just wasn’t polite.

  “Give him it,” Dreadlock Girl spat from over by the railings. “Give it or I’ll cut your bitch’s throat.”

  To demonstrate, she grabbed Rose’s hair and yanked her head back, steel flashing in her own grubby grip.

  “Ben!”

  Ben said, “You don’t want to do this.”

  Now Green Hood was staring at Ben’s hand too. He cocked his head a little to one side. He was probably wondering how that thin red line could be vanishing so fast, sealing up like a closed mouth – like someone had zipped the wound from the inside, the gash fading into clean pink flesh. His knife drooped, turned off by disbelief.

  The moment didn’t last. That was when Rose kicked out backward, her heel connecting with Dreadlock Girl’s shin.

  “Hey!”

  Dreadlock Girl staggered back, her knife hand falling to her leg, the other outstretched and flailing for Rose. Rose slipped out of reach and dropped to her hands and knees, her pumps slipping in the snow. Seeing that she was out of danger – at least for the next six seconds or so – Ben moved in to steal the advantage.

  The seams of his jacket made a loud popping sound, the leather stretching and tearing at the shoulders. Through the rips, there was an odd, unmistakable rippling of flesh, the glimpse of some harder substance, heart-shaped, interlocking, glossy and red. His annoyance must have shown in his eyes, because Green Hood choked back a cry and stumbled away from him, a sewer rat fleeing a searchlight. He was too late to make good his escape. Ben reached out, grabbed the back of his neck and flung the youth skyward. With a yell, Green Hood sailed twenty feet through the air and smacked into a nearby tree. Groaning, sneakers dangling, he hung insensible from the bare upper branches.

  The rest of the gang didn’t seem willing to share the view. In a rough huddle, the thugs skedaddled back into the bushes, vanishing as quickly as they’d appeared. Dreadlock Girl limped weakly down the path leading from the obelisk, ducked behind a trash can and was gone.

  Ben let them go. He walked over to where Rose coughed and spluttered on the ground. Squatting down, he offered her his hand, but she gasped and cringed, recoiling from the heat of him. Wide-eyed, she stared at the snow around his boots, at the slowly expanding circle of slush.

  But it wasn’t just the heat, he saw. It wasn’t just the shock of the attack, the impossible thing she had seen him do. There was something he had wanted to tell her, but he’d never got the chance. Now her face told him that he never could.

  “Ben…?” Her voice trembled in the February wind.

  He looked away, cooling and ashamed.

  Sometimes silence was worse than lies.

  Dawn broke over the Alps. The eastern sky blushed pink, the stars fading behind the moon, scarred and pale above the peaks. Elsewhere, the shadows withdrew, hoarding the last shreds of night. A buzzard keened a lone lament, soaring down the valley where a battered cable car rested in the drifts like a beached yellow ship. The severed wire track draped from the rock face, a ladder that the buzzard climbed, swooping up over the empty ski lodge and descending a shattered cliff face.

  The bird landed on a ledge to survey its kingdom – then squawked in alarm, feathers ruffling, as the rocks shifted under it. A claw broke from the shingly ground, sharp red talons clutching at air. The buzzard fluttered away into the pines as the stacked stones skittered aside. A scaly arm thrust out of the scree, dripping dirt and blood. The arm flexed, bones clicking, becoming less askew. A muffled groan, a pained rumble, shuddered over the escarpment.

  Ben had sprawled beneath the rubble all night, the constellations creeping by above, a bright, spangled procession. He had lain unseeing under rock, barely breathing, barely alive. Fragile was the thread that held him, an agonising skein. Boulders had flattened him, crushing him into the earth. He could only move his head a little, sucking on pockets of air, his arms, his legs, his back broken. Exposed bone touched the cold stone. The only warmth was his pooling blood, his strewn entrails fetid in the murk. Then blackness without dreams, his unique physiology deciding whether to heal or expire. His brain, intact, chos
e life. Perhaps disgusted by his bumbling quest, Death did not want him. Or wanted him to suffer more.

  The process took hours. Veins met veins like soldered wires. Muscles boiled, slick and wet. Where there was skin, scales formed, ossifying under the burden of earth, tentatively pushing against the rock. Inch by inch, scales covered the visceral mess, sealing lacerations, stitching tissue, smoothing broken bone. Blood flowed and his heart beat, thumping out the rhythm of revival. Once he was whole, his eyes cracked open, and immediately screwed up tight, his nerve endings shrieking in pain. His carapace thickened. His limbs bulged under the debris. The envoy’s suit rippled over him, a snug, liquid embrace. With the suit came memory. Worm tongue. Sola Ignis. Ben grunted and tasted dirt. Drank snow. Heard the silent dark. For endless minutes, he hauled on awareness like an anchor. Hand over hand he climbed the chain of his scattered thoughts until he remembered Rose.

  Remembered cold and scornful laughter.

  Your woman will die.

  Desperation did the rest. Mammoth proportions spread out in the dark, the human becoming monstrous, man into dragon. The rocks groaned and moved. Ben thrust up a fisted claw, punching his way out. Then, wings folded and tail limp, he rose from the rubble like a volcano, roaring anguished fire.

  Exhaled smoke drifted away. He searched the sky, already knowing that the Queen was gone. Her confession, however, was fresh in his mind. He had listened as she unravelled a three-and-a-half-thousand-year-old mystery, and the truth had left him with more than just a painful memory. Her hopes for Punt, her love for the priest, her anger at her betrayal – all of these things were a part of him now. He had shared in her life and her unlife. Staring into the southern sky, a cloudless blue expanse, he sensed the distance between them. He could feel her in his bones. In his mind, a hot glowing coal. The lightning that had passed between them had been a kind of copulation, implanting him with communion. It aroused and ashamed him at the same time. He was paradoxically alone and complete. For now, he must push guilt aside and take advantage of the bond.