Marc Zicree - Angelfire

I moved without thinking, chimes tangled in my fingers, rushing up the aisle, leaping, grabbing, managing somehow to get my arms around the struggling flares. I felt the warm chill of their changed flesh, the homely fabric of their clothing. I was surprised when my human weight had an effect; they dropped suddenly and my feet met the chapel’s firm floorboards.

Magritte sobbed in my ear. Her voice faltered. We were buoyed upward.

“Keep singing!” I shouted.

“Scared,” she keened, and turned the cry into a note and the note into a trill of song.

“Me, too,” I murmured, and wondered how long we could keep this up. My arms around the flares, the chimes I held were useless. And Magritte was weakening.

There was a crack like thunder and the ceiling above us ripped apart in a hail of debris. The Storm surged into the breach; I could feel and hear the alien wind, sucking at us from above. It stirred the chimes tangled in my hands, but the chaos voices drowned out their song.

Faun let out a cry of despair and fury and twisted in my grasp, her fists striking glancing blows across my shoulders. Javier screamed. We were being lifted again, tugged from the solid earth toward the looming shadows. I looked up.

The Storm’s maw was gaping, black, eternal and ablaze with unnatural, translucent flame in a thousand hues. And behind it Something smiled, unseen, and hungered.

I don’t ever want to feel that touch again.

I tightened my grip. In response, Faun lashed out with a charge of pure, freezing energy that blinded all my senses. My arms went numb, my legs spasmed, my head exploded with hot-white pain. Faun twisted away and flew upward. Javier shot up after her, slipping from the circle of my arms.

I grabbed desperately, clumsily, losing the wind chimes. But I caught one thin ankle with a hand that seemed part of someone else’s body. With the other hand I captured Magritte, crushing her against my side. I would not let go. I swore it to myself, to Tina, to God, to the Source. I would die before I’d let go of either of them.

Enid’s voice cut through the storm fury like a velvet knife, accompanied by a sheet of chime-song. Melody reached up into the blazing darkness and joined battle with it.

Above us, in the Storm-mouth, Faun twisted this way and that, a stray ember thrown from a fire to die. Javier reached after her. The unearthly wind crescendoed, roaring, wailing like a maddened animal, like a lost soul. Then it was gone so suddenly that all sound, all sensation, seemed to have been sucked out of the room.

And with it, Faun.

I quivered in the aftermath, dimly aware of Enid’s voice flowing around me. Javier was a dead weight in my arms, his fey light extinguished. He weighed no more than a young child. My legs felt as if they were made of rubber, not flesh and bone. I sank to my knees on the hardwood floor.

Magritte, halo dimmed, sagged against me, panting. She touched Javier’s face with a trembling hand. “He’ll be all right,” she whispered. It may have been a promise or a prayer.

We both looked to Enid. He still sang, desperation in his eyes, sweat gleaming on his face. His voice was raw and his fingers faltered on the strings of his guitar.

I got to my feet, passing the limp Javier to Delmar, who had come into the chapel with Enid. “We’ve got to get the waterwheel online,” I said. “I’ll need Colleen, Goldie-hell, I’ll need everybody you can get.”

Delmar nodded. “I’ll take care of these two. And pray the others got to safety.”

“Where will you take them?”

“Down. Into the caves.”

I headed for the unfinished millhouse, trying to keep my eyes from being drawn to the sky. I knew what I’d see. The weak shimmer of chimes, powered by human hands, held the Storm at bay, but it hadn’t been repulsed. Its unnatural clouds roiled overhead, licking the treetops; I felt them as a hot weight on my soul.

Mary met me near the center of camp, Goldie and Kevin Elk Sings at her side.

“Magritte.” The name tumbled out of Goldie’s mouth the moment he saw me. His hand clutched my sleeve.

“She’s okay. How did you-”

“Delmar,” said Mary. She seemed dazed, wounded. “The drums.”

“Faun,” I said.

She nodded. “I know.”

“There was nothing I-”

“I know. If there were a way you could have saved her, she’d be here now. But the others … you… they’re still with us.” Her eyes came in to sudden focus, locked with mine. “We’ve got to protect them.”

At the millhouse the great wheel was still, poised above the water. A cascade of curses rolled from the open door. We dove inside.

The obscene litany came from a stocky gentleman with an impressive shock of white hair and five o’clock snow on his jaw. Within the halo of white, his face was the color of a boiled lobster and glistening with sweat; a sledgehammer was clenched in his fist. Like Thor or Vulcan, Greg Gustavson must surely be capable of tossing thunderbolts.

Colleen was here, too, crouched above him in the confusion of large wooden gears that formed the mill’s mechanism.

Greg ceased cursing long enough to look at Mary and say, “Before you ask, it can’t be done. She’s not ready. The clutch isn’t finished, and if it were, the wood’d be too green yet.”

“Great Scotty’s Ghost,” murmured Goldie.

I looked up into the recesses of the building. About a dozen feet above our heads a beam as big around as a century oak stretched the width of the millhouse. It was suspended from the ridgepole above its cradle by a web of ropes. Along with the framework of gears that would drive the grinding plates below, there were several pulley-wheels, their lines threaded through the millhouse walls through small, high windows. They connected the mill to our system of chime lines. They were useless without the wheel.

I swung up next to Colleen amidst the machinery and knelt to inspect the clutch “Scotty’s Ghost” had mentioned. I could feel the Storm above us, circling like a vast bird of prey, muttering to itself, looking for another opening.

“What’s the good news?” I asked.

“The good news is the gearbox is finished. The bad news is-”

“I didn’t ask for the bad news.”

Colleen shot me a sideways glance. “Well, you’re gonna get it anyway. Bad news is, these brakes need work.”

She ran her hands over the curved wooden brake pads that were intended to slow or stop the wheel. “These are smooth,” she told me. “Too smooth. It’d be a miracle if they could brake this thing under normal circumstances; there’s no way they’ll survive if the shaft hits the cradle moving.”

“Which it will do,” said Greg Gustavson from below, “if the wheel catches running water.”

“We have to get it in the water,” I said. “Now.”

Colleen met my eyes, then looked down at the engineer. “What if we bypass the clutch and-”

“If you drop this thing in the water without a clutch, it’ll tear the whole mill apart,” he snapped. “We’ve got to be able to disengage the gears.”

“Or stop the water,” said Kevin quietly. The boy hovered behind Mary, working his hands around and around the barrel of a wooden flute. Somehow I got the feeling he never put the thing down.

Greg shook his head. “The lock’s not finished yet, Kev. We got caught with our pants down. We’re not ready.”

“How fast can you get the wheel into the cradle?” I asked.

Greg shot me a glance that asked who the hell I thought I was to come onto his turf and start issuing orders. “In a matter of minutes, but what’s the point? I told you, if that wheel hits the water in motion-”

“Then Kevin’s right,” I said. “Our only chance is to stop the stream. Then we can lower the shaft into the cradle and use the brakes to control the momentum.”