Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

A woman who was holding Delphine’s leg screamed.

Then another.

Delphine was dropped, but thankfully landed on her feet.

She worked her arms free from the hastily bound blanket as a man yelled, “I’m blind!”

“Me, too!” said another.

“God help us!”

Rutger pulled the tongue from the one who said that and flung it to the ground, now looking around madly for whatever or whoever had struck the people blind.

All of the townsfolk and acolytes near the girl had lost their sight, falling on all fours, groping their way toward the walls of the church or the buildings nearby, moaning or sobbing or praying. She took a thumb in the eye from one of them, got kicked in the back, and scampered between the legs of another. It was chaos.

A knight with a face somewhere between a man’s and a lion’s had entered the square from the direction of the river. His armor was bloody, as was the axe he carried head-down in his left hand. He was riding a grayish horse with human mouths where its eyes should be and hands instead of hooves.

Rutger, who was a head taller than he had been, started moving toward Delphine, flinging the blind out of his way; his eyes seemed to be multiplying, now four, now eight. The ghastly horse at the far end of the square reared, the hands at the ends of its forelegs grasping at the air.

Now Delphine saw the angel; it stood in an alley, unseen by the devils in the square, more purely itself than it had been upon the mule. Its beauty crushed something inside Delphine and made nectar of it.

It looked right at her.

Then, with what seemed very little effort, it pushed over the glover’s shop it stood next to, a woman screaming from the top floor; the building fell heavily between Delphine and the devils, shielding her from their view.

The angel said only one word.

It said, Run .

The wind picked up, now rushing north, then turning hard south as though something massive were sucking air in and blowing it out again. Thomas and the priest looked at one another, the sound of the rustling leaves thick around them and the sky seeming to glow faintly green, though the sun was well down.

The glowing coals of their fire went out entirely.

“The girl,” Thomas said.

The priest licked his lips and looked at the sky.

A tar-black cloud of sorts bled up from Auxerre, tapered from the ground like a snake’s tail, spinning. He had heard of such a thing before; a sailor had told him of spouts that came down from the clouds and played on the face of the sea. But this one did not dip down from clouds; it rose from the ground and spread, making clouds where there had been none, blackening the faint green of the sky like ink polluting water. The tapered cloud, spinning ever faster, swayed now like a seductress at her dance, kicking up debris at its base.

The two men thought they heard the sound of screaming, but it was impossible to tell if it was coming from Auxerre or the awful wind, which blew harder now, sucking in, blowing out.

“Mary, Mother of God,” the priest said, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

“We have to find her!” Thomas said, pulling the priest into the cart, but neither one of them could make the mule move. So they went on foot, at something between a walk and a run, Thomas still limping on his hurt leg.

Now the ground shook, as though something impossibly heavy had fallen. One corner of a stone farmhouse to their right collapsed, and the wind blew harder yet, slowing the men to the speed of a steep uphill walk. Stinging twigs and other small missiles pelted them, and then a branch tumbled from the sky, catching the priest on the crown of his head, knocking him down. Thomas took his hand and yanked him up; they trudged on, coming to a higher place on the road. Shielding their faces with their arms as best they could, they saw that a second spinning cloud had joined the first, both of them tearing trees from the ground and sucking them upward. A man’s shout rose from a farmhouse nearby, and the men saw why; the two clouds had broken contact with the ground. Their tapered bottoms became tails, and their thicker tops seemed to become wings. One of the clouds grew two great black wings, and the other grew six that seemed to fold in on one another

Seraph good sweet Lord a fallen seraph

and, just like that, both of them bled themselves up into the larger cloud that now covered most of the sky.

The exhausted priest stopped running and fell to his knees.

God God God

“Where are you?” the priest said.

“Here!” Thomas said, but the priest was looking at the sky.

“WHERE ARE YOU?” the priest now screamed, gnashing his teeth.

Thomas yanked him up, but he pulled away, shaking his head. Finally he collapsed against a tree and wrapped his arms around it, refusing to move farther.

Thomas left him and trudged on for Auxerre, where the bells of the cathedral were ringing with great urgency.

The cloud had become a proper thunderhead now, its tops chaining with jags of lightning.

Everything about the sky was wrong.

It was a sky of Revelation.

The ground shook again, harder than before, raising a chorus of shouts from the town.

The bell stopped ringing.

Thomas stopped walking now, transfixed by the spectacle taking place in the sky.

And then he saw it.

A great blackness against the sky.

It circled twice, then stopped. How unlike a bird it was, though it had wings, or at least explained itself with them; no bird could just hang in the sky like a still image of itself. It peered down into the fields, its face almost feline, but wrong, its teeth black in a sickly glowing mouth. It roared, and its roar was familiar, that lion’s roar in grotesque.

An angel of wrath

A lion tearing an old man in an arena

It saw something that interested it; a great black limb, now an arm, now a sort of paw, reached down impossibly far and picked something up.

A girl.

Christ, no, no, not her.

But it was not her.

This girl was older and wore a dark dress, though her hair was the same length and color. She hung limply, doll-sized. The lion-devil’s two hot eyes regarded her, and then it huffed in disappointment, bit the legs from her, and flung her so she spun end over end into the greenish night.

It was closer now, and a great stink came down from the sky, at once sour and burned. Still it looked down in the fields, pulling the roofs from houses, knocking carts over to look beneath them.

A flung cart hit the road near Thomas, its wheel flying off and striking the knight above the eye, knocking him to all fours.

It was coming closer.

It searched the road, the field.

Thomas crawled into a gully and pulled branches over himself.

But it was not looking for him.

It wanted Delphine.

Pére Matthieu hugged his tree and shuddered, too afraid to move again, and too angry that God had abandoned them to these horrors. “Where are you, where are you,” he said at intervals, but it was not until the wind calmed down that he heard a voice above.

“Here,” it said.

It was small and scared.

Delphine.

She was up a tree.

Of course.

She had run to the same strong old oak tree that had attracted him.

With her to protect, some small strength came back to him. He let go of the trunk and reached up to her.

“Come down,” he said.

“No. You come up.”

“I’m old. I can’t climb a tree.”