The Iron Wyrm Affair

Chapter Thirty-Two Bannon’s Ride

White bone, red muscle, dark metal. Stink-steaming hides of several colours twitching, shaking free of offal and straw. The hooves coalesced, metal shards bending as sorcery crackled, sliding up splinters of bone as they fused together to become legs.

Emma Bannon stood, her eyes open but sightless, black from lid to lid. Her outstretched hands were loose and cupped; she leaned forward as if into a heavy wind, but her curls only riffled slightly. Her ragged skirts fluttered, and her pale flesh marked itself with charter charms. The spiked glyphs did not glow.

Not completely. The symbols sliding against the texture of her skin were black as well, their sharp edges fluorescing with traces of eerie green foxfire.

The chant came from her slack mouth, but she was not voicing it. Her lips parted, her tongue still; the words swelled whole from her passive throat. The Language was not Mending or Breaking, not Naming or Binding or Bonding. It was not a Language of the White or the Grey. It was the deepest Black, that tongue, and it was given free rein.

Discipline was not entirely inborn, but it was not entirely chosen, either. Rather, the predisposition and character of witch, charmer, mancer or sorcerer narrowed choices until, in the last year of Collegia schooling, the practitioner arrived at the Discipline that in retrospect seemed a foregone conclusion.

The non-sorcerous feared the Grey and despised the Black, thinking the names meant things they did not. The White was often capable of causing the most harm as it sought to cure, and the Black was the restfulness of night after a hard day’s labour – or so its practitioners said.

The White disagreed, vehemently. The Grey kept their own counsel.

And yet, even among the Black, the Endor were … well, not feared. But held in caution. Once, one of their kind had brought a shade back to flesh to answer a king, a feat still whispered of with awe.

The haunches built themselves, massive, meat rearranged and muscles attaching to re-fused bone. Clockhorse metal filigreed each bone, ran threadlike through the muscles, and crackled with the same rot-green foxfire as the charter symbols on Emma’s skin.

A figure appeared behind her, indistinct through plaster dust and the smokegloss of sorcery. Two figures, one leaning heavily on the other, both tall, well-muscled men, picking their way through scattered bricks and the destruction of a sorcerer’s passage. One man was dark-eyed. The other’s irises burned yellow in the gloom.

Emma’s delicate fingers tensed. The chant took on sonorous striking depth. The withers appeared, and the thing was unmistakably a horse, but too big. The stitched-together pieces of horsehide flowed obscenely up its legs, hugging naked iron-filigreed musculature. The neck lifted in a proud curve, the vertebrae knobs of glassy polished bone, lengthening to fine thin short spikes of mane. The tail was a fall of metal-chased hair, and its head was two clockhorse skulls melded together to create a larger, subtly changed thing. For it had sharp teeth no horse, Altered or pureflesh, would have, and its bone eyesockets were emptily, terribly dark.

The steed stood very still. A ripple went through it as the hide finished its patchwork. More metal quivered and flung itself from the floor, sorcerously magnetised into plates of armour. A saddle appeared, shaping itself from shredded leather tack.

The amalgamation of flesh, metal, bone, and sorcery became a massive destrier, its shoulders straining as ætherial force struggled to violate Nature. Armoured in metal barding and caparisoned in green and black, a gossamer fabric made of dust and foxfire cloaking the hurtful edges, it stood slump-shouldered and obscene.

The sorceress’s fingers flicked. The chant halted, turned on itself inside her throat, and birthed a Word.

“X––v!”

It did not echo, but it continued for a long time, a hole torn in the world’s fabric, a curtain pulled aside. And something … descended.

The Khloros lifted its massive head. Leaf-green sparks flamed in its eyesockets. A clashing ran along its length as the armour shifted, settling, under the fabric of dust and æther cloaking it.

Crackling silence. But the Work was not finished, for as the sorceress strode forward, the black gem at her throat gave a burst of radiant spring-green flame as well, scorching eye and mind alike. She leapt, caught the pommel, and her foot found one huge silver-chased stirrup. Light as a leaf she vaulted into the saddle, and as she did, spurs jingled, oddly musical. Her own armour appeared, metal striking her Black-charmed skin and spreading as if liquid, flowing up her legs to make greaves, rising to encase her thighs and torso. Her head tipped back, dark curls tumbling feather-free before the helm grew from spiked shoulders. The green became patterns of charter and charm, flowing through sorcery-blackened metal, and the sharp-scaled gauntlets creaked as her fingers flexed again, their paleness disappearing like birch twigs under a flood of ink.

From the helm’s shadowed depths, the Word came again.

“X––v!”

The Khloros, the Pale Horse, neighed. The sound shattered what little of the stable’s interior remained intact, and both onlookers flinched.

“X––v!” A final time, the Word resounded, full of the rush and crackle of conflagration.

The Khloros shook its spiked mane, and its front hooves lifted. It reared, its rider moving with fluid hurtful grace, melded to its sudden poisonous loveliness. By the time the Word’s thunder died, the Khloros was an unholy, beautiful thing cloaked in twisting pale green fire. At the heart of every flame was the black between stars, a thin thread of utter negation.

The helm’s triple spikes nodded among firefly flickers of stray sorcery. The Khloros wheeled, a caracole of exquisite, diseased elegance. Its hooves left frost-scorch on the shivering, unwilling ground. From the darkness under the three spikes came the sorceress’s voice, and yet it was not hers. It was the lipless sigh of Life’s oldest companion.

“Death,” she whispered.

The Khloros unleashed itself with a musical clatter of metal against stone, another shattering neigh blowing a hole in the only remaining untouched wall in the stable. It leapt forward in a foaming wave, and the two men had gone to their knees in the ruins. The roof creaked dangerously, but neither moved. The Shields clutched each other like children wakened from a nightmare. One was paper-pale, trembling as if with palsy, and he leaned aside to retch uselessly.

The yellow-eyed Shield swayed. His face was alight.

“Beautiful,” Mikal whispered.

In the distance, the screams began.

They rode.

The earth itself repelled the Khloros, so its hooves struck ash-green sparks from a cushion of screaming air. Its gait flowed, its neck arched and its metallic tail sparking on the wind of its passing. The Rider moved with the massive beast as one, and the breathless screams of Londinium were as music over the drumming hoofbeats.

For the Rider did not merely call forth the pale horse. The sorcery flowing through her had not reached its high tide yet. With every hoof-fall, the city quaked like a plucked string.

And the dead answered.

They rose from their graves, gossamer shades with wide-stretched rictus grins. The Khloros could not step above ground uncontaminated by Death; few places were closed to it. Sanctified ground was no bar to it, for the dead were part and parcel of the hallowing.

This was what caused the screaming. As the Pale Horse cantered, its Rider staring straight ahead under her triple-peaked helm, the dead within sound of their passing rose like veils. The stronger among the deceased, newly woken or newly buried, ran like dogs or rode horses of their own, spectral rotting things with soft pads instead of hooves.

For as long as there was Londinium, there were equines to serve, to labour … and to die.

The living cowered and fled, though the dead shied away from their warm breathing fear. Some few claimed to have seen the face of the Rider, but they all agreed it was a man. Those whose gaze did pierce the deep shadows of the helm stayed silent, for they recognised the white-cheeked, burning-eyed woman they glimpsed. The silent ones were those whose candles were already flickering, and within a week those few had been laid to rest in cold earth.

To the west the Dead Hunt rode, a freezing wind tearing shutters from stone houses, shattering windows, bursting chimneys and grinding cobblestones and brick facing in weird lattice patterns. The West End, the homes of the rich and influential, cowered under the lash of the Eternal. There were those on Picksdowne who claimed to see the insubstantial dead rising from the street itself, and the clapperless, immense Black Bell hung in the Tower tolled once, sharply, the Shadow lifting its malformed head and staring with eyes like two flat silver coins. The dome of ætheric protection cupping the Palace of St Jemes lit like a white-hot bonfire, sensing something dreadful afoot.

The Rider cut through one corner of Hidepark, and for months afterward there was a black scar in the lush greenery near the Cumber Gate, one the quality affected not to see as they drove past on their daily promenades.

Then she turned, sharply, to the north, wheeling as a giant bird will. None but the tide of half-seen crystalline shades following her witnessed the helmed head lift, as if she studied the heavens, searching for … what? What could such a being be chasing, on such a night?

Whatever it was, she found it. For sudden tension bloomed in the Rider’s figure, and her scaled gauntlets tightened on the reins. The Khloros’s massive head rose, too, as if it could taste the spectral traces of a traitor’s passage against the velvet-yellow clouds reflecting Londinium’s nightly glow. The pale horse champed, and its hoofbeats took on new urgency.

A final Word broke free of the Rider’s throat. It was feathered with diamond ice, a weightless sound, and the dead flowed forward, streaming around the Khloros. The Rider shimmered as if under cold heavy oil, fog flash-freezing and scattering sparks of foxfire sorcery. The Pale Horse’s hooves hit a billowing cushion of vapour, and its bulk heaved up with a gasping-fish leap.

Khloros and Rider flew, on a white-billowing cloud of the dead. Their melting shadow touched the earth below, terribly black and crisp though there was precious little light to cast it. A withering stole through the dark hole of that shadow, and as they flew, the living in houses underneath cowered without knowing quite why.

It was over two hundred miles to Dinas Emrys, and the Rider had to reach it by dawn. As long as the strength holding the ætheric conduit open held, the Khloros would bear her.

Following a gryphon-borne traitor, Death flew from Londinium.