Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

Dead dead I’m dead now

“Thomas!” the crossbowman said desperately. “I’ve killed you!”

Thomas saw his drooping eye.

“Jacquot?”

“Jesus Christ, forgive me,” Jacquot said.

The old cardinal near him disliked his words so much he unhinged his jaw and bit Jacquot’s face, dragging the skin from it and leaving his lidless eyes staring in disbelief.

Blood all over the young cardinal, his silk gloves.

Jacquot fell.

Thomas did not fall, though he expected to.

Through the bone the point tickling the heart I feel it

Panic in the courtyard.

It seemed everyone shouted or screamed at once.

People fled, running for the gates.

I can’t I can’t I can’t

Thomas gathered strength in his mighty thighs and leapt up on the cardinals’ table. Cardinal Cyriac grew larger. Blood on his face like a dog at the stag. Growing new eyes. Growing bird’s legs beneath his robes.

Thomas ran past this monstrosity and made for the pope.

The thing that had been Cardinal Cyriac reached for him with one of its hands, snagging the sleeve of his left hand.

He turned and lopped the hand from it.

It screamed in rage.

The girl’s blood hurt it.

Three more loping steps to the pope’s cathedra.

Almost there.

The pontiff in orange stood with his hands out, magnificent, smiling.

Thomas’s legs pumped.

Something awful behind him, the smell of sour milk and burning.

If he stopped, if he slowed, it would break his neck from behind.

The smoke from the braziers in his eyes.

ARE YOU SURE?

Yes.

Are you?

His sword fell and struck the pope’s miter, cleaving the three crowns, and cleaving the head.

The crowd screamed in outrage.

His sword went all the way to the chin and the man’s eyes rolled back white and dead, the wound smoking. The arms, though. One of them (not an arm so much as a fly’s limb) grabbed the sword by the blade and yanked it. It spun in the air and away, over the walls of the courtyard. Thomas saw it for an instant, moonlight on it.

You’ll never hold a sword again

Another head was growing from where the first one had split.

A wicked seraph.

A fly’s head, but golden.

Baal’Zebuth.

One of the fallen.

A biting fly.

Shrieks of fear and horror.

The spear!

He pulled the spear out of its sheath.

The thing that had been the pope slapped him now with the arm that was still a man’s arm.

Not in the face.

In the chest.

It hurt.

The peeled head smiled in its two halves.

Dizzy.

Intomyheart!!! but i can still do this ican still

He blew out of his nose, bloody now.

This is what i’m for i do this i drive it home i’m strong

strong please

He hammered down the spear in his fist with all his might, his hips in it.

It moved so fast.

It was as though it wavered in the air.

He missed.

Then something irresistible grabbed his arm.

Jerked it behind him, the pain dazzling.

Ripped it off.

His arm off still gripping the spearhead.

He looked around and saw it.

The other devil had it.

The lionish one, his wound almost gone.

i never had a chance did i

DO YOU KNOW WHAT WE ARE

ONLY ONE IS OLDER

ONLY ONE IS STRONGER

AND HE HAS LEFT YOU TO US

I’LL SHOW YOU

YOUR HEART HAS TWELVE BEATS LEFT

TRY TO LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO WATCH THIS

Delphine saw Thomas run for the false pope and her hands went to her mouth. She wanted to run toward him, help him, save him, but she knew she would never reach him. Could not stand against them. She kept her place near Pope Clement, holding his hand to strengthen him. He was shaking, but he did not run.

Delphine screamed with hope and joy when she saw her Thomas cleave the wicked one’s head,

So strong he’s so strong

but the nature of her scream changed as the thing in the orange robes changed. She screamed Thomas’s name over and over again and fell to her knees watching his arm ripped from him, watching him fall on the table like a pile of laundry, then roll onto the flagstones.

Dead.

She screamed, “NO!”

She screamed, “PLEASE!”

They came.

She begged her Father in Heaven in Latin, then in Hebrew, then in Aramaic to stop them, but they came.

Six wings, six wings, and two wings.

Twelve-eyed thing, Fly-headed-thing, Lion-thing.

Tall enough now to look in second-floor windows.

They stank and a noise came from them, and heat.

Everything they walked past or over began to smolder.

They were coming toward her, toward Clement. One latched onto the brickwork of the palace and flung it over on a group of knights who had moved forward to fight, finishing some of them; the devils waded into the remainder, throwing them aside, treading on them, killing them like blind puppies.

Getting closer.

Clement’s shield bearers began to fall away and run.

Not Delphine.

The twelve-eyed one, its mouth an O of fire, held its regrown hand over a dead man clutching a spear; the corpse jerked to his feet, his head lolling on a broken neck and his tongue out. The dead man now convulsed and threw his spear where the devil pointed.

At Clement.

The throw was true, but Delphine threw herself in front of it.

It went through her, into her abdomen, through her viscera, out the other side.

The worst pain she had ever felt.

Behind her, men grabbed the pope and ran with him for the palace.

She fell, bleeding so fast she could hear it spatter.

The twelve-eyed one picked the dying girl up by one arm like a poppet while the other two came near.

Careful not to get her blood on it.

The moon, blood red over them, wheeled madly as she dangled.

God, the stink of them.

Those twelve eyes drilling into her face.

The fiery hole singeing her hair, her gown, blistering her face.

WHAT ARE YOU WE’LL FIND OUT NOW

For the first time she knew the answer.

She smiled.

She looked sleepily at it, almost gone.

You know what I am.

OH.

THAT.

The lion-faced one used the knight’s arm like a pick.

The fist still holding the spear.

THEN YOU SHOULD REMEMBER THIS.

It whipped the knight’s arm, driving the spear into her side.

She clenched her teeth, still smiling.

It bit her legs off and flung her into the middle of the courtyard.

And she died.

Robert Hanicotte shook his head.

His mind was going.

His silk gloves were spattered with blood.

He crawled under the tables and ran for the gates, but he found himself pushed back as those who had tried to get out the gates now flooded back in.

An abomination chasing them.

So that’s what was in the Jewish quarter.

A surge of corpses squeezed into the courtyard, not separately; they moved as one thing. Once inside, it re-formed itself. Four legs, or three, at its pleasure, composed entirely of stacked corpses. It moved around the courtyard gathering up fleeing people with its horrid mouth. It was fast. Human ribs as teeth. A light in the middle of it its sentience. When the bodies that formed the ends of its legs wore out, it left them behind and newer ones moved down, upside down, their arms clutching at whatever it wanted clutched at, their backs and chests taking its weight, unmindful of their broken necks. It fed found bodies into itself, or killed living ones. All manner of dead seethed in its frame; Jews and Christians, soldiers and midwives, the clothed and the nude; even a woman with a stag’s head turned in the top of a limb, waiting her turn to be moved to the end to clutch at others and bear weight.