The Wounded Ones

by G. D. Penman

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  November 17, 2015

  The Far Realms were a lot like the Archive drawn large. The air tasted of nothing and hung at a temperature so moderate you couldn’t even detect it. The sky was the same blinding white as the Fae magic, and the sand beneath her feet as she staggered along was only a shade darker. The white of staring directly into the sun. There were a great many Fae scuttling around, floating by and blinking into sight for only a moment before moving along, but they paled in comparison to the number of humans. Each of them seemed to have been paralyzed, and they drifted in cocoons of force so delicately constructed that Sully could barely sense them. Only their eyes betrayed the fact that they were still alive. Wild and terrified. Every so often one of the Fae would stroll by and a cluster of humans would drift off after them, heading into the empty expanse that rolled out in every direction. Ogden was bound up in much the same way, drifting alongside Sully and the Faerie that had granted her wish. Another of the Fae manifested a loop of chain around her waist and started to drag her along.

  The arch of the portal was the only solid object that Sully could see anywhere. It only took a moment for her to understand why. Why would you need buildings when there was nothing to shelter from and you had no possessions? Why would you have objects or art or history when you could satisfy any desire with a thought? It was no wonder these creatures were so alien. They hadn’t risked touching Sully to heal her, so it didn’t take long before the pure white expanse all around her had become a little gray around the edges. She walked on through the ceaseless shifting sands with only a few small comforts. She had gotten Mol Kalath to safety and it would be able to return to the hells it knew. Ogden was here with her, so he was going to get the kind of punishment for his crimes that she wouldn’t have wished on anyone. Marie was going to live a happy life.

  Sully wasn’t sure about that last one. She didn’t know if she could trust that the Fae had done what they had said they’d do, but there weren’t many other options left by that point. She wasn’t getting away, she couldn’t kill them all, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to get them to stop by asking nicely. “What is the point of all this? Why are you stealing people?”

  The Faerie closest to her was probably the one speaking, but they all sounded alike. “We have not had access to fresh live samples from your dimensional strata for many of your millennia. Locally grown stock assimilates our traits too swiftly for us to produce statistically significant results.”

  She wished she hadn’t asked. Even so, there was nothing to do to stave off unconsciousness from her blood loss except talking. “My wish from earlier, is it really going to come true?”

  “I adjusted the probability as completely as possible in favor of its completion. There are few true impossibilities once you have skewed reality far enough.”

  “Uh, thanks. I guess.” Sully looked at the pallid thing as they trudged on.

  “It is unclear to me how well-developed human senses have become. The easiest way to ensure your compliance was to grant your request with the utmost accuracy.”

  “You were scared I’d catch you in a lie?” Sully smirked, and a trickle of blood ran down her chin.

  “Fear is an emotion. Emotions are—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we suck for feeling things, I got the memo.”

  They trudged on for what felt like hours but could have been minutes. There was a ringing in Sully’s ears that wouldn’t quiet and even the white sand right in front of her looked gray and hazy. She stumbled one time too many and the Faerie sprang on her. Its hands plunged inside her, shredding her uniform but passing through her skin unscathed. She could feel it inside her. Touching things that hands were not meant to touch. She tried to vomit but a finger traced over the underside of her stomach and halted it before it could happen. The whole process was over so fast that Sully didn’t even have time to breathe but when she did, she found that the half-drowned sensation of her collapsed lung was gone too.

  When she had enough air to stand up, she wheezed out, “Thanks again.”

  “Your damaged body was inefficient for the task at hand.” It strode on.

  There was still nothing in sight, and as far as Sully knew the desert was going to go on forever. The floating bodies and the Faeries drifted on ahead. It wasn’t like she was a prisoner at all, really. She could have run whenever she pleased. There was just nowhere to go. A whole world, a whole plane of nothing but sand and light and the Fae. She closed her eyes and let the power flood in. This close to the source of magic there was no longer any point in quantifying it. It was as close to infinite as anything Sully had ever dreamed of and it flushed through her so fast it was as if she wasn’t there at all.

  She trailed after the procession for a while longer. Letting the plan that she had been so careful to keep from her thoughts resurface. There was nothing that she could do to help the people here. Even on her own plane, the Fae had been so powerful that she wouldn’t have been able to free their prisoners, but here all of reality was theirs to control. Clementine and Ogden, all the bystanders who had been sold off to the Fae as payment for their service, they were all as good as dead. Sully was too, but she couldn’t bring herself to be upset about that. She’d done all that she could to put her affairs in order.

  The Fae were fundamentally selfish creatures—Sully doubted that the concept of self-sacrifice would have even crossed their minds. Humanity was just too alien for them to understand. Even now she couldn’t really bring herself to hate them, but she didn’t need hate and anger to drive her forward. Not when she had people left behind her that needed protecting.

  There was all the time in the world for her to trace out the spell. It was so familiar to her that she didn’t even have to think about it. It was almost bizarre to think that she had never cast the original before. When she got to the part where she had amended it so heavily, she stripped out any limitations and went with the version she had first learned. It was near to completion when she noticed the Fae looking at her from the next dune. “What is the purpose of this? You have lost. Your world has fallen. Nothing that you do now matters.”

  Sully grinned. “The purpose is . . . fuck you.”

  When the Fae spoke again, it was like thunder in Sully’s skull. Hammering down onto her already fragile mind with all the subtlety of a lightning strike. “Still you do not recognize your own utter insignificance. Compared to me you are nothing. Your existence spans barely a moment of my eternity. Your mastery is so feeble it cannot even stretch beyond the moment of casting.”

  Blood began to flow from Sully’s ears once more and another trickle escaped from her nose. The Faerie pressed into her mind with a will like a scalpel blade but still she churned out more and more spellfire, linking the Inferno to her own reserves of magic, repeating the lethal mistake that Dante had first set on paper centuries before with a smile on her face.

  “Even this paltry spell is beneath my notice. You mean to conjure fire? The mightiest flames that you have ever been able to summon are as nothing to me. You think yourself an inferno? You are a guttering candle in the midst of the raging typhoon of my raw might. You will blink out and I will go on.” Sully laid the final line of spellfire. The spell hung ready to be unleashed. “Tell me, foolish mortal. What does a candle do in the face of the storm?”

  She met the gaze of the monster and smiled. “It burns brighter.”

  With her arms spread wide and the infinite power of the Source rushing right through the open channel her body had become, Sully unleashed the Inferno, one last time.

  November 18, 2015

  London was burning. That was what the few scorched and terrified soldiers who had returned from the attack told their superior officers when they finally arrived in Ireland. Something had gone terribly wrong with the Fae’s portal, but before it had collapsed shut, there had been some sort of explosion. One poe
tic soul who was missing half his face described it as being like the gates of hell falling open. There had been some consultation with the few remaining demons and Magi, but no consensus had been reached on what could have caused it. The damage was expansive. Central London, the part that Blackwood insisted on calling the Old Town, was burned down to the ground. The only good news was that it seemed to have burned the heart out of the curse that afflicted the city too. London had finally stopped growing and the latest half-built constructions on its outer limits had collapsed.

  The Fae that had survived the blast had fled in short order, and the few sightings of them so far suggested that they were in poor shape. Without the steady recuperating flow of magic from their home plane, they seemed to be withering rapidly. Pratt had dispatched the few remaining Magi to hunt the Fae down and avenge both their fallen comrades and their beloved leader, Magus Ogden. There were already plans for a statue of him to be built in Manhattan. Pratt decided to wait a week before taking bids on it.

  Gormlaith heard all these things and more, shambling around and handing out cups of tea to the soldiers. None of the soldiers had a clue who she was, beyond being the owner of the beaten-up cottage at the edge of camp, but she had a maternal quality to her that they appreciated. Particularly when it meant a nice cup of something warm while they were on guard duty.

  Mol Kalath took up fully half of the cottage, huddled by the fire in a despair so deep that even Gormlaith couldn’t penetrate it. Most of the other demons were heading home, back to the lives that they’d left behind. Mol Kalath didn’t seem to care. Its mate had visited in the late morning, a huge spike-riddled bear-like thing that couldn’t squeeze through the door, but even its guttural wailing hadn’t been enough to make the demon move.

  The other half of the cottage held Blackwood, who was no longer a prisoner but who had nowhere to go for now. He had plans for after the chaos and the flames had died down to catch a portal back to the outskirts of London and reassert himself as ruler, or at least kingmaker, but for now he was content to listen to Gormlaith’s whispered reports and to speculate along with her on their meaning.

  Before the end of the day, the Americans broke camp. A group of Magi came to haul away the carcass of the Hydra, which was starting to get a little ripe, so Gormlaith was quietly pleased with herself that she’d harvested the parts she wanted in the middle of the night. The tents and the temporary walkways were all broken down until eventually Gormlaith’s swamp returned to its state of cold damp misery, with the addition of a great many boot prints and almost as many graves. Gormlaith trailed around after they were gone, picking up every shiny scrap that she could see amidst the scrub grass. There was some kindling and string that she’d have had to do without. Some metal pegs that she could repurpose into something useful. The portal points had been the most fruitful. Ritual components that she would never have been able to lay hands on in her life were just laid out for the taking.

  By nightfall the silence outside of the cottage’s walls had become oppressive. There was an unpleasant intimacy to being together now that everyone else was gone. It was enough to have Blackwood abandon his plans. There was a little house in the Scottish Borders that he was fairly certain was empty, so he bid Gormlaith farewell and vanished to wait out the next few days in solitude. If Gormlaith gave a damn about any one of those things, she showed no sign of it. Instead she settled in to read an ancient and crumbling book on the history of the Fair Folk and more specifically on the opening of portals to the Far Realms. After an hour, she produced a scrap of paper and started scribbling fragments of a formula. It didn’t take long before the demon was hanging over her shoulder and rumbling comments of its own.

  February 12, 2016

  By now it was almost a habit for Gormlaith to go take a stroll past the stones at midnight. The demon skulked around them at all hours, never flying far enough away for the circle to be truly out of sight. The big black bastard probably should have been an annoyance to Gormlaith, but now with her purpose withered away and her only daughter gone, it was just nice to have some company, even if the conversation was still sparse.

  When she arrived this night, Mol Kalath was sitting up on its hindquarters, staring into the circle, as if it might light up at any moment. It didn’t look away from its vigil, but it held out a wing to keep the worst of the rain off the old woman as she waited beside it. “I CAN FEEL HER.”

  Gormlaith rolled her eyes. “You say that all the time.”

  “THIS TIME IT IS MORE TRUE THAN THE OTHERS. THIS TIME IT IS LIKE SHE IS ONLY A ROOM AWAY. A WISH DRAWS HER BACK, I CAN FEEL THE SHAPE OF IT JUST BEYOND THE WALLS OF THIS PLANE. ANY DEMON COULD TELL YOU THE SAME. SHE IS COMING BACK.”

  “Well, I haven’t many more of your lot to consult with now, do I? You must be the last one in the word by now, and nobody’s answering my summons.” Gormlaith blew on her hands and rubbed them together.

  “THEY HAVE NO NEED TO. THE DANGER IS PAST. THE FAE ARE GONE.”

  She grumbled. “That don’t help me get any bloody answers though, does it?”

  “SHE COMES. LOOK TO THE CIRCLE.”

  At the center of the circle there was a tiny spark of flame. It couldn’t have been much bigger than the light of a candle, but in the pouring rain and pitch darkness it shone out. Gormlaith took a step toward it but the demon stopped her with a bark. “WAIT.”

  The fire erupted, first into a blaze, then into a pillar of light. Demon and crone stared up as it seared the clouds away and then blinked out, all in an instant.

  The moment the fire was gone, they rushed forward, Mol Kalath bowling Gormlaith over in its excitement. The ground was too hot to touch, but it danced over the flame-smoothed stone to reach the blackened heap at its center. Gormlaith had only just tripped and stumbled down into the circle when the heap started to scream. The sound was piercing in the sudden silence of the night. A mindless wail of pure anguish, more animal than human. It sent steel shooting right up the old woman’s back. That was her baby crying.

  She rushed forward and knocked Mol Kalath aside with a gust of wind before falling to her knees by Sully’s side. The thing on the ground was blackened all over but as it wailed, that charcoal coating cracked and glimpses of wet red flesh could be seen underneath. Here and there was a glimpse of white. Bone or tooth. The few places that looked human were so blistered and raw that Gormlaith couldn’t understand how Sully was still alive. The screams got worse when they tried to move her, until she was nestled on Mol Kalath’s back and fell so silent that Gormlaith had to scramble up and make sure she was still breathing.

  Back in the cottage, she surveyed the damage as Sully’s lidless eyes stared out at her from the ruined mask of a face. Uncomprehending. “We’ll be needing a healer. This is well past herbs and mud. Go, demon. Fetch help.”

  Mol Kalath fled into the night and launched itself into the tempest, grateful for the thunder because it drove away the memory of the screams.

  February 18, 2016

  Visitors had come after the healer from Manhattan had done all that she could. It was impossible to keep stories from spreading, even for Pratt, and he couldn’t have any legends growing up around his lost general, not when things were finally settling down again. With no small reluctance he took a flight over to Ireland with an entourage of lackeys and a few of Sully’s friends who had been clamoring to come and see her—two colleagues from the IBI and the girlfriend who had provided such useful leverage, but was now, tragically, leaving the country to pursue opportunities elsewhere.

  He made certain that he had the first audience with Sullivan so that he would have the most time to spin anything that she was likely to say before she repeated it to anyone else. Ideally, he would have made the trip by himself, but Chijioke Okoro, who insisted on the ridiculous abbreviation of Ceejay, had managed to make many friends throughout the American administration, many of the same ones who had favored Sullivan in h
er day. Pratt couldn’t afford to alienate that faction at this juncture. Not when their martyr might be about to come swinging back into the fray once more. There had been a great deal of conflicting information about Sully and her current state, so when Pratt ducked into the smoky cottage, he really didn’t know what to expect.

  She was sitting by the fire under a heap of furs looking at least a decade younger than when he’d last seen her. Her hair was little more than a red fuzz, regrowth from after the healing was completed and no more. Her skin had a puckered pinkish appearance that he would have found disturbing if he hadn’t been distracted by the fact that all the scars and freckles that had given her face its character appeared to be gone. He nodded to her politely and perched himself on the stool that seemed to have been set there for his use, even if his backside did overhang it ever so slightly. The old woman whom he had been informed was Sullivan’s mother was lurking in the back corner of the house. She had been glowering at him since they had first arrived, and he had decided to pretend she wasn’t there until she became necessary. “Good evening, Miss Sullivan. How are you?”

  “Good evening, Mr. Pratt.” Her voice was still rough and ragged at the edges, but the undercurrent of malice that he was so used to hearing, the fury that had made her so easy to manipulate, seemed to be gone.

  “Your mother will have told you who I am?”

  “You’re the Prime Minister of America. I used to work for you. I was the general of your army.”