Lilith Saintcrow - The Iron Wyrm Affair

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 .

Ears ringing, blood slicking his face, Clare staggered upright. That is precisely the problem with cannon. Difficult to aim, especially when firing from a suspended carriage . He shook his head, and Valentinelli was suddenly before him, crouching and bloody. The man’s thin-lipped mouth moved, his dark hair half singed and wildly disarranged. Clare blinked, realising he was deaf.

Temporarily, or …

As if in response, the world poured into his ears once more. A sudden overwhelming welter of noise scored through his tender skull, threatening to turn his brain into thin gargling soup. His knees hit the smoking dirt, and Sigmund appeared, a thread of bright blood sliding down his filthy, soot-stained face.

Clare strained to deduce, but his faculties would not obey. The coja, false friend, had turned on him. Whatever bolt the immense arachnid mecha had fired at them was no help either.

The bolt. Electrical in some fashion? The mecha was swimming in electrical force; the capacitors are maintaining at a high rate. The core! Masters’s core!

The thought was driftwood to a drowning man. He clung to it, his mental grasp tightening with the strength of desperation.

A shifting stream of values! That’s it!

For a blinding moment he saw it all – the Blackwerks, where every difference was a range , not an orderly single value. The trouble was not irrationality. Rather, it was rationality not wide enough to contain what it saw.

The world is wider, Horatio, than is dreamed of in your philosophy .