Blood and Iron (55 page)

“Speak freely.” Keith turned his back, buttoning his shirt against the chill in the air.

“I think you saved his life so he can take your place when you are dead, Dragon Prince.”

Keith scuffed a bootheel on the turf, turning around, pulling his swordbelt out to tuck the shirttails into his waistband. “Am I so transparent, Vanya?”

The blond wolf smiled, standing, the hauberk stretched out between his hands so he could assist Keith on with it. “It will be years, of course, before that becomes a worry. You may be old and gray by then.”

“Unless we die tonight.” Keith shrugged. “I should probably wear the swordbelt over the mail shirt. Don't you think?”

“I've never worn a mail shirt. I don't know.” And then Vanya's head came up, sniffing the breeze, at just the moment that it carried the sound of hoofbeats to Keith's ears. He turned, seeing in the twilight better than a human would have, although in shapes and movements and shades of gray, and caught sight of Carel standing in the stirrups of her trotting bay.
Somebody should teach her to post,
Keith thought.
Or at least ride a trot. She looks like a marionette.
Unfair: she was riding halfway well, for a woman who hadn't been on a horse a few Faerie hours and less than a mortal day before.

“Merlin,” he called when she was within earshot, and went to meet her. “A message of some haste, I take it?”

She nodded, beads clattering, the scent of a forge hanging around her as she shoved escaped braids out of her eyes with the hand that did not hold her reins. “We need to make ready,” she said. “I can feel them. They're coming.”

A little before midnight, in fact, Matthew was still sitting on the iron stair, chin resting on his interlocked fingers, pondering his future. Jane found him there when she led the rest of the group into the workroom. She laid a hand on his shoulder, a motherly gesture that made his skin crawl. “Are you ready, Matthew?”

“As ready as I'll ever be,” he said, and stood, carefully not looking at Kelly's blanket-wrapped body as helpful Magi came to move it to the side. “So we're beset by dragons, are we?”

“Apparently,” Jane answered, helping him to his feet.

Matthew rolled his shoulders back. His spine crackled. “How many casualties?” At least if there were a strain in his voice, it could be blamed on the evening he'd endured. In fact, he decided, a note of restrained fury wasn't out of line.

“None, so far.” Jane shrugged. She dusted her hands down her skirt. Matthew wondered if her palms were sweating. His were, itching under the rings. “Doesn't that seem unusual?”

“It does.” He shrugged and walked with her to the door. More Prometheans than he had ever seen in one place were wandering into the workroom now, familiar faces and ones he had never seen filling it to capacity and beyond. Some of them wore military uniforms. Most carried firearms. “Where did all these Magi come from?”

“All over the world.” She eyed him carefully. “Matthew, you don't have to go tonight. You've done enough, you and Kelly. Stay here with me.” Her hand on his arm was like a mooring rope, a promise of harbor.

Except I'm the
Flying Dutchman,
now.
“No,” he said. “It'd be silly to turn back now.” He patted her on the arm and walked away to join the ranks of Magi assembled around the base of the massive spiral stair.

“Matthew, stay—” she called after him, but she didn't follow. And he went.

There was no chime. No one raised a voice or cried “Go!” Instead, a ripple swept the crowd, a sort of
knowing
that prickled hair on necks and arms, and people simply started walking. Deasil: with the clock, with the sun.

The room was rectangular. Eddies of Magi collected in the corners, rejoined the spiral when there was a gap. There was no marching, no lockstep footwork. Just a casual amble, spiraling like the stair and fading inward, ever inward, as Prometheans—three abreast, in a steady stream— readied their weapons and began to climb the stair. They were clad for war, protected by Kevlar helmets and body armor modified with iron sigils and strung about with protective wards. Prometheans from around the world were represented. Matthew saw talismans made of granite, and ivory, and jade, and brilliant jungle-bird feathers among the qabbalistic and thaumaturgic ones. Prometheans were never shy about appropriating symbols.

They carried semiautomatic weapons, the ones who could handle them, and some had hung steel swords between shoulders or from hips, or wore daggers strapped to thighs. It was startling that Jane hadn't managed to find a way to bring a tank or two, now that he thought about it.

Matthew's foot was on the first tread before he knew it. He climbed, on the left-hand margin of his group of three, one step behind the woman in front of him. He felt eyes on him. He didn't turn to see if they were Jane's.

He didn't have a weapon in his hands, and it occurred to him how pitifully little he'd bothered to know about this spell, this task.
We'll build a bridge and go and get the children back, and cut Faerie out of contact with the mortal world so they can't trouble us anymore.

The man on his right side stumbled on a step edge. Matthew caught his elbow. He seemed to have been climbing for a long time, but when he glanced down, he could still see the workroom floor, thick with twining dragons, their steel eyes glittering lava red. He glanced up, and saw mist like lowering clouds. He walked up into it, clenching his hands at his sides.

He thought they'd come out into a firefight, that the Fae would be waiting to pick them off as they stepped off the stair. Except it didn't seem like a stair, at this end, but rather a gargantuan wrought iron helix with razored edges that he didn't dare touch, dimly lit with starlight. The Fae were well back, as if they had been expecting something to happen and did not want to risk proximity to that much iron. The earth was soft as if mole-chewed under Matthew's boots. He stepped aside, expecting another rank of Magi to follow him out of the mist and shadows, and then stopped, as he fully comprehended the size of the group surrounding him, and the nature of the army they faced.

Torchlight, witchlight, St. Elmo's fire lit the enemy in neon reflections of red and green and blue. Natural luminescence— if you could call it natural—provided eerier colors: lime, corpse-flower, a dappled blue like the skin of a poison arrow frog. He took a breath and smelled harrowed earth and something rotten, and the ozone thrill of an approaching storm. The night was so silent he thought he could hear the enemy's horse-harness jingle: no shouts, no chants, no challenges.
For we are beyond all that, you and I.

Around him, the Magi massed like a beast gathering itself to spring, silent still except for a slow, unified breathing. The Fae waited, the advantage of the slope behind them. Brave thoughts or not, Matthew found himself slipping back through the ranks, back between pressing bodies of strangers and people he had known, all of them straining forward like dogs on a leash. He laid a hand on the hard iron root of the bridge, rubbed his fingers into rust made sticky with old, dried blood.
Kelly's blood,
he thought.
The blood we all paid into this thing. And here it is.

Just doing its job.
He breathed in. He breathed out.
“Oh, how full of briers is this working-day world,”
he quoted to himself, and pressed his back against the bridge as Prometheus shouted with one voice, moved with one strength, and burst forward onto the field of battle. The crash when the ranks came together sounded like ships of the line colliding, tearing metal and clashing metal and the rapid-fire discharge of semiautomatic weapons like rivets popping out of a stressed seam. A storm slammed down on both armies like the angry hand of God, and all Matthew could see for some little time was the flickering lightning, as he crowded into the rain shadow of the bridge. He couldn't track the battle; it ebbed and flowed, and shapes as strange and wicked as demons moved in the half-light, in the flickering darkness and occasional, actinic brilliance of lightning or a hurled bolt of wrath from one of the Prometheans.

Those tricks didn't work on earth anymore, although Matthew had studied them as well as the next Mage. But apparently they still sufficed in Faerie.

Matthew closed both hands on his trouser legs and sank to the ground. He would have buried his face in his hands, was moving toward it in fact, but someone touched his shoulder and he lifted his head to see who it might be.

A wizened old man stepped out of the shadows along the ridged stem of the bridge, naked except for a leather apron, white hair growing in tufts from his ears and his beard braided in forked strands and looped over the apron belt. He held an iron hammer in one hand, and Matthew blinked. Blinked and looked quickly down at his own hands, to be sure the rings were where they belonged. They were, and here he was up to his neck in Faerie, a war raging not a hundred meters off, and his fingers didn't hurt at all.

“How is it you can touch iron?” Matthew shouted, above the swell of combat.

The old Faerie man looked from Matthew to his hammer, and laid that same knotty hand on the twisted trunk of the bridge. “I'm the Weyland Smith,” he said. “ 'Tis what I do. Now tell me, laddy. How would I go about tearing down this little construct of thine?”

Chapter Twenty-six

Whiskey and I rode out of the woods and into the confusion of battle. Torchlight and witchlight lit the scene for our part, turning the Fae armies into a horde of misshapen shadows, while at the base of the iron bridge I made out something like a thousand human shapes clad in camouflage, jean jackets, leather, Kevlar, and ceramic armor. Flashes of light stitched from among them—weapons fire, although I couldn't see if any of it made contact among the Fae. I couldn't, in fact, see much of anything at all but shadows moving in the darkness.

Whiskey stopped, solid as a statue, and I knelt up on his back, balancing myself against his crest. Jack-in-Irons I recognized, a headless, rattling shape backlit by fire and wreathed in smoke, swinging an axe as long as a man. He waded among the Magi, who scattered, and I saw his huge form shudder as bullets broke the corona of moon-colored light surrounding him. They must have been steel-jacketed slugs, because the giant sagged to his knees, still striking out wildly. Magi went down around him like mown wheat, and I saw other shapes, Elf-knights on horseback and what must have been the pack, afoot, charging in to fill the gap he had created.

I couldn't see Keith. But I picked out Carel, high on the hillside, the foxfire surrounding her hands matching the torn light that half shielded Jack-in-Irons and flickered from place to place, marking the muzzles of guns and drawing the fire of Fae archers. I marked a figure hurrying up the hill to stand beside her—
Morgan
—and wondered that they did not find themselves targets of the mortal Magis.

Wondered a second too soon, as a fevered, electric arc lanced the width of the battlefield. I shouted and felt Whiskey tense, ready to charge in among them . . . but the levinbolt twisted aside, scorched earth harmlessly, filled the air with the tang of ozone and burning soil.
Hope,
I wondered,
or Morgan?

No matter. Hope was here. I smelled the storm rising, and the breeze that brushed my face was cold and heavy with rain.

“Whiskey, bring me around to Morgan.” I slid back, forking my legs around his barrel, and grabbed a handful of mane. I hadn't ridden bareback so much since my childhood at the ranch . . . which reminded me of what my father had said, about visiting my mother. Soul-sold or not, if I couldn't feel love, I could feel duty all the more sharply. Duty, and guilt.

Whiskey extended into a hard run, skirting the battle. Snatches of song came to me, and mortal cries of pain. Gunfire, the hiss of arrows, the clash of blades. Darkness slid across the stars. “Gharne,” I said into the rising wind, wondering if his name could still bring him to me, wondering if I dared to leave the Cat Anna unattended, bound or not.

Jack went down, earthshaking in his fall, a huge dark shape outlined in dying light. The Magi swarmed over and around him. I looked away. I'd meant him for my part of the battle, and things would be harder without. I couldn't take Morgan; she was needed here. Hope and Carel were too, dammit. We all were. I saw the Fae hosts falling, the Magi a tight knot pushing forward now, the gap in their ranks scabbed over and healed without a trace. Whiskey stretched low and ran faster as the first drops of rain stung my face and thunder rolled, barely audible over the clamor of battle. Lightning danced, more golden than the levinbolts that wove among it, and the stench of ozone and burning meat grew unbearable.

Ian.
I wondered if my son was out there, fighting with his arm in a sling, or if Keith had ordered him into the rearguard. And if Ian had gone where bid. The flashes and foxfire and the flames, hissing in the sudden downpour, made an intermittent brightness that revealed the battlefield as plainly as a strobe freeze-framing a dance floor, and all I could smell was electricity and blood.

Whiskey snorted and dug into the hillside; Morgan looked up as we came. She stood beside Carel's horse, fingers clenched tight on the reins; the bay mare danced and snorted. Carel herself had both hands knotted on the pommel, and her face looked ashen in the television light. Morgan leaned on the reins as Whiskey skidded to a halt beside them, clods and mud flying from his hooves. “Where's Hope?” I shouted over the noise, and Carel shook her head and pointed at her ears, not glancing away from the battle. Another corona of moonlight, watery through the increasing rain, flared around a target, and that target fell. I couldn't see what Morgan was doing, but her lips were moving. She lifted her arm and pointed.