Steel Sirens

by Maxx Whittaker

  Our mounts are close enough our thighs touch. It’s the first human contact I’ve had in how long? I know how long it’s been for her.

  Talos cries and alights. Boots crash the brush.

  An odor of sick-sweet rot fills my nostrils. It’s picked up by something inside me, not a smell on the breeze.

  Emeree vaults from Falnir and draws.

  Knocking, sighting, and drawing - it’s one fluid process. I turn in the saddle and let fly.

  And again.

  A squeal fills the forest and the shape tumbles through the undergrowth.

  I glance overhead. Talos is just reaching a hover.

  Two shots before he reached the canopy.

  There’s no time to shout this to Emeree. She takes the clearing on long strides.

  “Ride a perimeter for me; search for more!”

  She grabs our prey and I spur Glaer through the trees. Talos sails above me, pitching and cresting, reporting the all-clear with calm cries.

  At the halfway, near where our attacker must have entered the clearing, Talos’ pitch raises.

  Glaer slows and shuffles, snorting his protest.

  A trail of broken saplings and crushed grass leads deeper into the forest, stalks streaked with blood and sticks hooking bits of entrail. A horse’s leg hangs from the low Y of a forked try, wedged by a torn haunch.

  I know two things immediately: The man in the clearing was no friend, and he was running away from something, not toward us.

  The leg and the size of the kill trail form an equation. How big was the killer and, by its size, what the hell was it?

  My hunter’s instinct bows to worry about Emeree. I whistle for Talos and ride back, eyes and ears trained.

  ***

  She’s pinned the corpse to a tree on a small embankment above a creek. It’s definitely a corpse now, if I had any doubt.

  She’s removed his helm and cut his throat with a surgical stroke.

  It’s a corpse. And it’s moving.

  My broken-off arrows jut from its eye socket. “This is my kill... “

  “And what a kill it was. Look at that! Got him right in the visor slot - pop!”

  “Mm.”

  “Lucky shot.”

  “Not luck. Skill.” There’s something cold in my heart, something that didn’t live inside me before. “I’ll do it again, too.”

  Emeree’s gaze never wavers, disassembling and reconstructing me with her judgment. She nods.

  “We didn’t kill him?”

  “Oh, he’s dead. He’s been dead.”

  This explains the smell. And the stillness, a vacuum of all living things.

  The creature twitches against his bonds. He snarls and bites the air, slavering at me.

  “Necromancy.” Emeree spits the word like a curse. “It’s disgusting. Trapping a soul before it can travel to Cailleach. Denied life or death. I smelled it in the glade, the moment my curse was released.” She stops in front of our captive. “What’s the source? Who’s crafted this evil…”

  On cue, the corpse thrashes more violently, opening deeper wounds where she’s pinned him with stakes.

  Emeree’s pinned him to the tree with no less than four spears. I’d say this is unnecessary. When it thrashes, immune to pain or restraint my mind changes.

  And I think of Thom.

  This is fine, what the corpse suffers now. I’m good with how he’s pinned.

  “What now? Burn him?”

  “Now, we take his head!” Her words flow out on a strange amount of glee. I can’t say I don’t understand. Ever since that morning in the Fortingall a strange agitation has simmered behind my thoughts. It took until now to identify it: Bloodlust.

  Emeree lunges in and spans her sword in an arc. His head tumbles free...and rolls into the creek.

  I flick a glob of gristle from my shoulder. “You couldn’t have beheaded him earlier?”

  “Catch it!” Emeree whoops, holding her sword on his writhing corpse. “Fish it out, quick!”

  I splash after the head, fighting my belief this is all a fever dream.

  Strands of grave-greasy hair escape my raking fingers. A high stone rolls the head and on my next grab, he bites.

  The dull clack of his broken teeth taps my flesh. It takes my boot and a reed to safely extract the head.

  It shivers and snaps the whole walk back. Even without lungs, he still moans and grunts. I hold it at arm’s length for Emeree’s inspection.

  “He’s not...giving up,” I manage, narrowly avoiding his gnashing teeth at my wrist.

  “Neither would you if your head had just been lobbed clean off. I wonder about you sometimes, Ewan.”

  “Me! I–”

  She chuckles. “You make it too easy.”

  “Make what too easy?”

  “Getting a rise out of you. You’ll never last in the wider world if you can’t accept the absurd.”

  All of this is absurd, I want to shout. The whole bloody mess. A familiar chippering sound starts inside my temples, like rats chewing paper. My vision wavers. It’s the sound of my sanity being gnawed apart. Somehow, I have to accept this.

  Emeree takes the head from me and shakes it. “Calm down, you! You know how this ends if you want release.”

  The head stops its madcap jig, remaining eye fixed on her. “Who!”

  Its voice is a millstone echoing down millennia. Ancient menace.

  “That’s better. And it’s ‘whom’,” Emeree says with a sly look at me. This confounds the head, and his eye lolls, searching for an answer somewhere back in his brain.

  I have a feeling she’s withheld our names on purpose.

  “Whoever controls this wight will know the host is dead. They’ll figure out where in short order. We need to get done and on the trail.” Emeree turns the head, inspecting it for something. Each rotation wafts that god-awful smell.

  “How is the wight useful to us? What’s it meant to do?”

  “The dead are tireless warriors. They win wars. It’s part of the reason we were made. The Orpha are fanatic about death rituals and necromancy.”

  “Hard to kill.”

  “Mm. Only by burning, unless you possess unconventional magic. Which I do not.”

  “Makes two of us.” I say.

  “And since the wight can exist almost indefinitely and communicate with their master often, it’s a vessel of information. Vague but plentiful.”

  I imagine thousands of reanimated men surging across a battlefield. No fear. No pain. No desire for self-preservation. Only the will of a master inside their soul.

  The head snuffles pig-like, sloughed flesh twitching between Emeree’s palms.

  I’ve seen and touched plenty of dead things, but this turns my guts.

  “What about this one? Something slaughtered his horse in the forest. Why would he run if he’s not afraid?”

  “That is curious,” she says, raising the head, peering at faded tattoos across its slack forehead. “I wonder what had the nutmegs to chase him? He was probably headed back to report on what happened. Now, he’s going to help us.”

  I’m deeply skeptical. He just wants to chew on our flesh so far as I can tell. “How do we get him to betray his master...Ask nicely?”

  “Why not? A lot of people react favorably to manners, you know.”

  I can’t tell anymore when she’s being serious.

  “There are ways to wrest control from whoever magicked him. Whether mine work anymore...we’re about to find out. If he can tell us their final destination, we can worry a lot less about tracking their progress.”

  “Catch them at the end. Brilliant.” This doesn’t change what’s happening now but some of the tension ebbs from my shoulders. We don’t have to chase the slavers over half a continent, hoping we don’t lose their trail. Or our heads.

  Emeree passes me the head, finishing her examination. “Hold tight. And be careful. Very careful. If it bites you...just don’t let it bite you.”

  “Great.”


  “But don’t worry about it.”

  “Kind of hard when it’s trying to eat my hands!”

  “I meant it in the same way people say ‘watch your step’.”

  “When people say that they actually mean watch your step and don’t fall and break your neck!”

  “They do? Gods, things have changed. Anyway…” She swirls a finger at the head. “Hold tight and don’t be too complacent. Or too rigid.”

  “Let’s just get this over with,” I say, dodging bites. “Bollocks it reeks.”

  “That may get worse, too. It’s just going to be awful in general.”

  “Emeree!” She doesn’t inspire confidence.

  “Ewan, hold him up! I can’t talk to him ten leagues from your body and down at your knees. We haven’t been together long, but sometimes I think you’re having sport with me.”

  “I’m having-!”

  Just when I’m ready to grind my back teeth into dust, she grins and waves her hands. “You’re so much fun. Up, up. Thank you.”

  She places three fingertips to its forehead.

  “I thought you didn’t practice magic.”

  “I don’t. But remember what I said about god powers.”

  “Ahh. Not magic.”

  For long moments, nothing happens.

  The head shivers, twitching impotently. Emeree’s wide eyes darken. Their silver and white in them drains like water through a sieve until they’re completely black. I fight the urge to take an involuntary step back. All sound outside the circle of our glade dissipates, and when I look to the sky, there’s no sun, no stars, no clouds. Flat, dull, and pale as a parchment.

  “Tethered one, I compel you.” Emeree’s voice is not her own, not the musical lilt I’ve come to know. There’s a tremor, at my core where my connection to her lives, that feels different, new. “I speak darkness that swallows the day. Heed the lady Cailleach and you will answer my command.”

  The head hisses, stilling on a raven’s screech. “Noo…” he moans.

  “I serve Cailleach, goddess of storms and darkness. All souls trapped in the Night are hers.” Emeree’s fingers pulse with cold white fire.

  He grates out a low humming sound. Resistance. He knows where they’ve gone, Kel and Bri and the rest. He knows where they’ll end up and still, he won’t say.

  I clench, fingers pulling away the sloughed flesh of his scalp. My joints burn. The surge comes without warning. A pulse of lightning sears my fingertips and sends wisps of smoke from the head’s charred hair.

  My hands spasm around his jaw. I can’t draw a breath and for a long moment my heart doesn’t beat. Pale flames continue dancing over Emeree’s fingertips; this is all I see, all I can focus on. She compels the head, but she stares at me.

  The wight’s head writhes against my blistered alms. His mouth opens, stretches. Its jaw cracks. The scream he emits comes from outside, beyond his severed throat beyond this clearing. Beyond this world. It tears at my ears.

  “Free, free...” he sobs, pleading.

  Emeree waits for me to speak. Me?

  I don’t understand what’s happened and don’t care. This is the first luck I’ve had in days. Embrace the absurd. “The slaves. Where are they being taken?”

  Its remaining eye has rolled back, and only black veins against ivory are visible. “East...South...The Rookery.” Each word thuds out like a stick beat against a hollow log.

  Emeree perks at the name. She nods for me to go on.

  “What for? What’s to be done with them?” I ask.

  He twists, writhes in physical terror at my questions. Emeree’s grip tightens, her fingers white with effort against his cheeks. “Answer him,” she commands.

  A quick surge of heat sparks from my hands. The stench of burned, rotted flesh fills the air with an oily residue.

  The wight moans, an unfettered sound that escapes the broken bough of his jaw. “Serve. Serve the purge. Glory in servitude.”

  I could squeeze. One thrust of my hands and I could crush his skull to bone and pulp. “Purge? They’ll be...killed? Or–”

  He panics again. Something grey green and clotted oozes from his nostrils.

  “We’re just about at his limit,” whispers Emeree. “They’ve sorted out he’s severed.”

  “Who is your master!” I shout.

  Milky eyes widen. His lips pull back into a rictus grin. He hisses; it takes me a moment to realize the wight is laughing. He thrusts out the thick, black slug of his tongue. Emeree yelps, anticipating his next move. I’m lost right up until his teeth close through the decayed tissue.

  Severed, his tongue falls to the ground. It wiggles through the leaf litter. I can’t help but stare at the grotesque display. All the while he hisses with dead laughter.

  “Done with you.” Emeree takes the head from me.

  The ooze from his nostrils has become ropes of tissues. Decay runs rampant. Before she’s muttered the words to sever our connection to the wight, his jaw falls off. Light returns to the glade, sun and shade, the sounds of the natural world.

  Emeree tosses the head toward the creek. It’s little more than a jagged bowl of skull and tufts of dry hair.

  We watch the remains bob and dip on a patch of swift current, and drift from sight under a canopy of ferns. Emeree’s arm trembles against mine.

  “Emeree.”

  “I’m all right. Just need a minute.” She leans against me, weighted by trust. “I’ve been free for what? A day? Best to pace myself.”

  Around us, the world returns to normal. Smells of the forest return, green and cleansing against the stench in my mouth. The world rights itself. A hush of breeze through the wood soothes me. I close my eyes and listen to the creek.

  I feel all of this around me, but not inside me. Not the way I did before, in the Fortingall. The Wood once filled me; now there’s space waiting to be inhabited by something I didn’t know was out there.

  A glance back at the wight’s pinned body hurries the moment along.

  “Do we burn it now?”

  “No need for this one. Cailleach has claimed him through me. Us. The dead who wander rightfully belong to her. Interfering with her as someone has here?” She whistles.

  “Got it. Makes her a little more willing to lend a hand. And about lending a hand...” I hold mine up, blistered and lace with red spider web.

  Emeree steps back, faces me and studies me. Her eyes are radiant and probing. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you are.” Her words are threaded along uncertainty but some of that space inside me glows with the silver light behind her eyes.

  Emeree starts to say something. Her lips part. My mouth crushes the words into hers -– without warning for either of us.

  She doesn’t pull away. The cool skin of her cheek eases my wounded palm. Our bodies fit together, shielded from meshing by leather and metal. Emeree’s long arms circle my neck. A slip of her tongue against mine provokes something animal. She ignites me. My hands fit her waist, grip, lash her close.

  I could almost fall in. Our kiss is all that makes sense.

  Accept the absurd...

  But don’t get lost.

  The second voice sounds like mine.

  I break the pressure of our lips.

  “It’s been so long.” Emeree’s breath heats a fine sheen of sweat at my throat.

  It has. And it might be too much. I nuzzle her thick black waves, skim the curve of her chest piece and let my imagination run.

  Emeree sighs against my skin. I must let go now or –

  Nervous hoofbeats thud at the clearing’s edge. Glaer snorts, spurring Falnir into a shuffle.

  The clearing feels more alive, existing more inside me. Danger is less a general fog over the area and more a bright crimson bullseye.

  “We should mount up. Whatever took the wight’s horse isn’t trouble we need.”

  We slide apart with slow friction.

  Emeree shrugs out a kink in her shoulder. “I’ve waited fifty years,” she says
, smiling.

  “Whoa,” I say, bouncing into the saddle. “I didn’t say no.”

  “Well, not with your body…” She drops her eyes to the seam of my breeches. This time I don’t try to hide it.

  “And not with my words. I really didn’t say no in any form,” I defend, spurring to keep up with her.

  “It wasn’t a yes or we wouldn’t be mounted. Not on horses, anyway.”

  “Wait. Let me see if I understand. You want to grind the grain in a clearing where we destroyed a wight, with some...thing circling us like prey?”

  “Arousing, isn’t it?”

  “Arousing?”

  Emeree laughs. “You said grind the grain. You don’t get to pick my words apart!”

  I grab my chest. “Oof. Trying to keep it decent for a lady’s ears.”

  Emeree drags on her reins and raises, searching the trees ahead.

  “What? What is it?” Danger has faded as we’ve ridden; I hardly feel it now. What does she see?

  “Looking for that lady you mentioned. I’m worried about her.”

  “Hah. If I see her again, I’ll ask if she’s a sailor.”

  Emeree falls back into her saddle. “Mmm. Please do.”

  This is an image I don’t need in my head right now. “I need a little help with some of what the wight told us back there.”

  “Whoever tethered him is powerful. To overpower the will of a god, even for a moment? No good.”

  “Us, together…” I chew on the idea with awe.

  “Together!” She’s breathless, face pinking. “I haven’t had that since...since the Sirens were together.”

  This brings me the first thing like real happiness I’ve felt in days.

  Years, if I’m honest.

  “Whoever the diabolist is, they took a lot of risks. But they didn’t count on Alix. When we find her, this arsehole will feel like a first-year hedge wizard.”

  “Aleska?”

  “Yes! You remember the stories well.”

  “Practically burned in. And Siri. She was always my…”

  Emeree’s horse stands at a dead stop. She stares at me, a brow raised.

  “Always my sister’s favorite.”

  “Huh. Anyhow, Siri is close. Do you feel it?”

  The sky’s clouded over as we ride. Against a sudden chilled gust, I search the mess of sensation inside. “Maybe? It’s hard to tell.”