Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

“If you don’t, I think he will find you.”

“Who?”

“The fallen angel. The bad one. It’s coming.”

Père Matthieu Hanicotte climbed the tree.

The wind picked up again.

The priest prayed silently, forming his mouth around the unvoiced Latin but giving no thought to the words; his mind was on the sky above them and he listened, as she did, to the awful noise battering them from above. Growing closer. The stink pouring down on them was as bad as the noise, and he fought hard not to retch, for fear that if he started he wouldn’t stop until he had fallen from the limb he clung to. The noise grew louder and closer yet, banging like fists inside his skull. He squared his mouth to scream, but Delphine’s small hand stoppered it. He looked up at her where she perched on the small branch above his. She pulsed her hand and shook her head no. Tears wet her cheeks, and her mouth, too, was a rictus, but she did not cry out.

Don’t, her eyes said.

Please.

He choked back the sound in his throat and clung tighter to the rough branch that swayed wildly in his arms and between his knees. The wind raged, needling his face and hands with small debris. He was becoming dizzy. Squinting, he glanced up to make sure the girl was still holding on, too.

She was.

But it was over them now.

Its round mouth of fire hot behind backlit leaves.

The idiot scream in his head formed into words.

WHERE ARE YOU LITTLE WHORE WE’LL FIND YOU IF WE HAVE TO PRY UP EVERY ROOF FROM HERE TO THE SEA AND YANK UP EVERY TREE THAT’S IT ISN’T IT YOU’RE IN A TREE WE SMELL YOUR FEAR CLOSE YOUR THOUGHTS OF HOW YOUR DEATH WILL BE BUT IT WILL BE WORSE AND DEATH ISN’T THE END OF IT YES! HERE! We see you.

Now a white hand

A fucking hand!

the size of a pony snaked down from the sky on the end of an arm with far too many joints. It pulled branches from their tree. Now the priest did scream. As did Delphine. More hands. Five? Six?

They grabbed the tree now and heaved and shuddered it up from the earth. It turned upside down, turning around Père Matthieu as he fell, buffeting him with branches and what leaves remained, but slowing his fall so when the earth rose and whacked his side and head and banged his knees together, he lost the wind from his lungs but broke nothing.

He watched the tree recede above him, her face white in the foliage, her legs padlocked on her branch.

NO! he tried to scream, but his flat lungs allowed only a croak.

The thing above him held the tree like a toy.

It was an abomination.

Six wings.

Six arms.

Pulling the tree apart now.

Why must you hurt her she’s so small

Twelve eyes glowing and a round mouth of fire.

Père Matthieu clasped his hands together in prayer, unable to form words but imagining an angel of God coming down.

Then he saw it.

It came.

A small moon, newly risen, amber behind the clouds, moving fast.

One of the thing’s twelve eyes cocked that way, but the rest stayed fixed on its task. It shook the tree.

Something fell.

One of those white hands just missed it.

The girl.

The priest stumbled to his feet, tried to get beneath her, but he was too far away. Too old. Too slow.

Still he ran.

He had some air in him now, and he cried out.

“God, please!”

The light from the cloud dove as a falcon would, one of the smallest and fastest of them for which kings pay the price of towns, and it caught her.

And was itself caught.

A hand jerked its beautiful ankle.

More tore at its wings.

The forgotten tree tumbled, slowly, as if in a dream.

The angel, yanked backward, lost its grip on the girl, and she fell again; something from the other (a tail?) grabbed for her and missed.

A sword of pure moonlight flashed in the angel’s hand.

The two fought viciously as another dark shape closed in.

The girl fell.

Closer to the ground now.

Close to the priest.

He ran under her.

Her form grew bigger swiftly, coming at him.

Please, God.

He caught her, mostly.

His nose bloodied, his eye shut, his mouth full of grit.

They rolled.

She smelled of juniper.

Somehow he picked her up and ran.

Thomas lay in his gully, covered in sticks, struggling to stay conscious—the wheel from the dropped cart had hurt him.

He had to watch for the girl, but he could not tear his eyes from the fight.

An angel and two devils.

The end of the world.

The battle pitched through the sky, careening over Auxerre, then back over the fields. Now a light, golden-orange and lovely, just the sort the sun casts through clouds before it sinks, broke and lit up the river and the eastern part of town. Then everything went black, and the light shone only in flashes, painting scenes that formed in instants and dissolved into darkness again. Now a mass of black tentacles roped around the source of the light; now a beautiful arm glowing with pale light flashed down with a sword, cutting some of these, and causing the firmament to shudder like a ripple going through a pan of water. Thomas knew somehow that what he was seeing was not precisely true, but a translation; he had no way to understand what he was seeing, so his mind painted its own pictures. Now one black, winged thing tore at the beautiful winged thing with a mouth like a lion’s mouth, over which its two eyes blazed with insanity and rage. Now the six-winged darkness wheeled down, and fire from its round mouth spouted against the beautiful one, in a huge gout that impacted against its target and was deflected, flowering and raining down all over the fields, lighting up the countryside here and there in a multitude of small fires. Everything went black again until the three figures locked together, the black ones driving the illuminated one down and down, into a field of barley not far from the river. A screaming sound that was at once animalistic and mechanical shocked Thomas’s ears and raised all the small hairs on his body.

The shock of their fall dug a deep trench, knocked trees down in a circle, their tops pointed away.

In the barley field, great beings, beings the size of windmills, thrashed and rolled and gouged the earth. Two of them were as black as though holes had been cut in the fabric of the world; one shone like the full moon, just that heartbreaking in its beauty, casting mad shadows through the grain and the trees and along the hills as it moved. Now its light grew fainter as the six-winged one pinned it down and smothered it. Thomas stood up to see the two-winged one rise up, filling the air with a lion’s roar that was at once tortured and triumphant; its great arms whipped down and thrust a spear at the source of the light, which sputtered and quit. The ground shuddered so hard that Thomas was knocked from his feet.

At just that moment, every bird in the forest and fields cried out in a great cacophony, even those that sing only by day, so loud and crazed that it even drowned out the roaring wind.

Thomas realized that he was shouting, but, even realizing it, he couldn’t stop. A warm rain began to fall, but what fell was thicker than water, smearing on the knight’s face, even into his mouth, affronting it with the coppery, salty taste of blood.

He covered his eyes with his hands and curled his knees up to his chin, still shouting hoarsely, at the edge of his sanity.

He passed from consciousness and, mercifully, dreamed nothing.

F or they had been so long alone in the lower depths, the fallen had made their own kingdom there and declared themselves lords of that place. From the first days of their captivity, they had ignited false stars on the roof of Hell to make a mockery of what was above. They had dug dead rivers and gouged seas that smoked and blistered; they had raised cruel hills; they had set forests of iron beneath an igneous moon.