Blood and Iron (56 page)

Hope stood in darkness a little beyond, gowned in black or indigo and unhorsed so I hadn't seen her. The lightning didn't much reveal her, which made me smile tightly around the taste of rain. I heard more gunfire and winced, but Morgan shook her head. “I'm glamouring,” she said. “Most of what they shoot is unreal. The only problem is, the Magi bear iron, which shatters the glamours as fast as I build them, and they've already laid warfetter on half our troops.”

Blinded, deafened, or simply made too weak to stand: a magic so old it's recorded in the Táin Bó Cúailnge. "Hell,” I swore. “Morgan, I need Carel and Hope.”

“Take them,” she said, unhesitating.
It will cost us lives.

Yes, and it might save us all. Gamble, or play the safe cards and have no chance at all.
I nodded, and grabbed the reins of Carel's mare. Morgan held them up. “Gharne, where are you?”

“Here,” he said, yellow eyes hanging in the night. “And none too soon. Your Cat Anna is a dull sort. Is this the war?”

“Part of it,” I said. “Can you find Murchaud in all that?”

“No problem.”

“Do it. And if you see Keith, tell him I'm leaving. Go carefully, and meet me in New York if you can.”

“I understand,” he said, and the amber of his eyes winked out as the stars had, before.

Carel blinked and seemed to shake her body back on as I turned her mare and led it toward Hope. “Elaine?”

“We're taking the battle to them,” I said, and tossed her the reins. She caught them awkwardly, but her seat had improved with practice. “Come on.”

She followed. I came up on Hope from an angle that let her see me, not fancying a lightning strike if I surprised her. She stood with her hands by her sides, holding the heavy fabric of her skirts away from her legs, the rain streaking her dark hair down her cheeks. Lightning hammered here and there, wherever her eyes rested, striking the bridge, coruscating in brutal opposition to the Magi's levinbolts. I gulped in awe at the power she wielded, and wondered who her father was. She didn't take her eyes off the battle when she spoke, shouting over the now ceaseless crackle of her storm. “What?”

“We're going to the city to break some things,” I called back, unable to hear my own voice.

She must have, though, because she shook her head. “Ian's out there.”

“So is Keith,” I snapped.

Then she did look at me, and scintillating light reflected in her enormous eyes. “Ian isn't doomed.”

Damn her. And damn her twice for being right.
I heard hoofbeats, and Carel didn't shout so I didn't bother to turn. “Come on. Maybe we can save them both, at least until tomorrow. ”

Her eyes rested hard on mine for a moment, and then she jerked her gaze away. Murchaud drew rein beside us, his steed a black, batwinged thing that bore the same kinship to a horse as Gharne did to a falcon. “That's all there is, right?” Her words were bitter, and so soft I wasn't sure she meant me to hear them, but they fell into a lull in the storm. “Push the end back another day.”

“Yes,” I said. “And hope our children do the same.”

She sucked her lips and nodded, and held out her hand to me. I hauled her up behind me, Whiskey steady as a bronze statue, and glanced from Carel to Murchaud. “New York City,” I said. “And ride!”

We chirruped our steeds into a gallop, breakneck across the slippery turf, away from the iron bridge as fast as a running horse could carry us. Carel called moonlight out of nowhere to guide our steeds; it turned each leaf of grass into a construction-paper representation. The rain fell behind us, although lightning still tore and flashed, and in a few moments we entered the second valley, beyond the shallow hill. It was Carel who opened the passage under the thorn trees, and Carel who led us into it.

Her mare shied and snorted, but the presence of Whiskey and of Murchaud's un-horse were comfort and pressure enough to move her forward into the tunnel under the earth. “I promised you no caves,” I said as the Merlin sealed the hill behind us, hoping to provoke a laugh.

“I promised you nothing,” she answered, and the way opened before us into light-rippled shadows and the torn edges of reality. Carel put her mare into a trot, and we followed for some hours. Until big trees arched over, and Whiskey's hooves clopped on packed earth and roots. “Inwood Hill,” Hope said over my shoulder. “Brilliant.”

“We still have a long way to ride.” Carel leaned forward in her saddle. “Heya! Follow me!”

The bay mare leapt forward and Whiskey and the un-horse surged after, two abreast as the earthen trail gave way to pavement, headlong down the hill, under the tunneling, half-leafed trees. I judged it late evening, dry and crisp, cold for October. Traffic noise drifted up to us, the bean sidhe shriek of an ambulance announcing a death.

Carel led us through a small park at the bottom of the hill, past a baseball diamond and a small, gawping group of mortals. Whiskey flicked his tail at them, silver-shod hooves ringing like glass bells on the pavement. “Thank you for the shoes,” he said over his shoulder.

I didn't answer, but I smiled.

Carel turned us east. The racing steeds hurdled vehicles and knocked aside pedestrians, careless and savage in their grace, and people stopped, pointed, and shouted. Whiskey drew even with Carel's steed, despite the mare's lighter burden, and laughed in delight at his prowess. The Merlin clung to her saddle gamely and let the mare have her head. I risked a backward glance when I heard Hope gasp, and my laughter turned into something else.

Murchaud's batwinged stallion had taken to the air, and glided behind us on unholy slow beats of leather wings wreathed in flame.

Just a few blocks, and Carel turned southward. Whiskey paced her. The sirens were behind us now, and ahead. Whiskey grunted and staggered when one forehoof, trailing slightly on the side where his shoulder had been wounded, clipped the edge of a Cadillac going over, and the Seeker might have winced at his pain, but I laid a steadying hand on his neck and urged him forward. He didn't need it. He was game, and he ran as if his heart alone were enough to carry him, each stride jarring my bandaged knee and spiking pain all the way to my teeth.

This street was wider, and ran diagonally, a great slice cut across the orderly grid of Manhattan. Broadway. A Faerie Rade down Broadway. Carel did indeed have a certain inimitable style. “Times Square, right?” she yelled over her shoulder. I nodded and shouted something wordless back. The beating heart, as it were, of the capital of the Promethean World.

Carel had given up on the reins entirely and clutched her mare's black mane, laughing like a maniac and singing between the gasps. I caught a word or two over the wail of sirens, the thunder of hooves, the leathery stroke of the unhorse's wings: something about broken hearts and lights on Broadway.

The Merlin's sense of humor would be the death of me yet.

Southward, and the traffic grew, and the honking grew, and all around us glistened white lightbulbs by the millions. Whiskey staggered, lather flying, and caught himself. Hope clutched my waist and I clutched his mane. Flashing lights splashed us with red and blue and amber, and I couldn't hear Carel singing over the shouts and the screams. Something wet struck my lips. I wiped blood and froth onto my sleeve, and still Whiskey ran. There is no courage like the courage of horses.

The lights in front of us flashed like Christmas, and the horses ran faster than horses had any right to. I wondered if the police meant to give us speeding tickets.

More than a hundred and fifty blocks, over iron roads. Carel's horse seemed to withstand it better; there must have been mortal blood in that mare. I could feel the pressure of the city on me like an iron pin in every joint, like a thousand eyes turned toward me. Shouts to stop and then bullets whistled past us. There was a black van parked across the road, and men in blue before it. “Don't kill the cops,” I yelled into the water-horse's ear, and then wondered why it mattered. We were here to break things.

Whiskey gathered himself, and I set myself and felt Hope lean into it too.

Neon, then, and the thud of hooves shattering pavement, the crawl of lights across the billboards, and the glass wall of a television studio across the way. Carel reined her horse around, and Whiskey sat back on his haunches in a gymkhana spin that almost cost me Hope. I turned to see the un-horse sail through a firestorm of bullets that spattered off his hide and, judging by the shouts, fell back among the shooters in a molten rain.

He glided over our heads as well, and settled behind us. Mortals fell, scurried and ran, a hellrider too much even for a New Yorker's composure.

Hope released her hold on my belt and raised her hand, and—rainless, thick with lightning—her storm slammed shut over the sky. Electrical discharge crackled from building to building, a latticework across the heavens. Whiskey reared up, storybook charger, and threw back his head with a stallion's high, ringing challenge. His hooves clattered on pavement when he came down, and the scabbed shoulder split, threading crimson over his lathered hide.

I looked up at the lightning; the wind from the unhorse's wings stirred my hair. My heart thumped in my chest. Carel Dragonborn, the Merlin, sat up on her bay mare beside me. SWAT officers from the van, regular police, trained twenty or fifty firearms on us.

“I could kill them all,” Hope said. “That would make an impression.”

“It would,” I answered, and swallowed hard. Carel turned to me, a haunted look. I shook my head and said, “I have to try.”

“It won't work,” Hope said. She slid down Whiskey's side and grabbed my boot. “They're mortal. You know what they'll do.”

“Yes,” I said, and moved Whiskey forward, toward the men with the guns, a little too fast to hear whatever it was that Carel was chanting under her breath.

“Elaine,” Hope called after me, in the tones of someone who doesn't expect to get another chance to say something. “Elaine. It's a girl.”

I didn't turn back to smile at her, because I wouldn't have kept going if I did.

Keith should have been in the thick of the fight, leading from the front the way a wolf should lead. Instead he sat his bay horse on the hillside, surrounded in darkness, Morgan on his left side and wounded Ian on his right. They were spread out so as not to make one target and screened behind a row of Daoine Elf-knights, but the sorceress stayed within earshot of him. It was Fyodor down there with the pack, and that was wrong. It itched in his blood, on his skin. His blood bay picked the tension up and shifted, snorting, tossing his head to try and shake the reins loose from Keith's trembling hands.

Keith soothed the animal, stroking his mane flat with the palm of his right hand, coarse strands catching on his calluses. “Easy, boy.”
Think of the battle in front of you, and not of your wife, lad—

Not quite his father's voice, which might have been why it didn't steady him. He glanced left, caught Morgan's profile in reflected light. “We're failing,” she said, as if she felt his eyes upon her. “Dragon Prince, it's not enough—”

“And I'm stuck here watching it and shouting orders,” he said bitterly. “This is it. This is everything we have.”

“Near enough,” Morgan said, turning her head to watch as her raven soared over the battlefield, grown to three times his natural size. The Magi were pushing outward, out from the root of the iron bridge, pushing the Faeries back. Bodies littered the field, which was lit with the ropes and lights of sorcery and the gunfire of the Prometheans.

Petunia whinnied and backed a step as bullets splattered off the wall of air that Morgan had set before them, and Keith steadied him again and stroked Excalibur's sheath where it banged against his leg.

It was down to a crawling battle now, the Fae advancing where they could against the overwhelming gunfire of the enemy. “I should be down there,” Keith said again. Fyodor
was
leading the pack. Keith could see them like a dark wedge among the gaily colored Fae, giving as good as they got. They moved as if they made up one animal clothed in different hides. They had no recourse to wolf shape, here on the dark of the moon, but like the Magi they carried firearms and unlike the Magi they had no fear of base metal bullets.

And still the Magi advanced. Wolves wouldn't die of iron, but they would if struck by magic, and the flat valley around the bridge gave no cover. It should have hurt the Magi too, but arrows and slings were no match for automatic weapons. Faerie blood soaked the harrowed earth; Keith could smell it over the reek of cordite.

“Christ,” Keith said, frowning an apology when Ian flinched. “Ian, stay with Morgan. I'm going.”

“Sire—” Ian said.

Keith shook his head. “Even the bard is down there. It's where I should be too.”

“I wish the Merlin were here,” Ian said.

“Yes,” Keith answered, drawing his wife's sword from Arthur's sheath. “I wish she were too.” And then he trapped the sheath between his knee and the stirrup leather, so it touched his red horse too. He clucked to Petunia, gave him all the rein he wanted, and touched him with his heels.

The horse leapt forward as if struck from behind. Keith raised his fey blade and shouted—no.
Howled.
“To me! To me! To me!” And they came. They ran, Fae and wolves alike, falling into his guard and fanning around him like a crescent moon. He looked down and saw Eremei Fyodorovich maintaining a long easy lope at his stirrup, holding what looked like a Kalashnikov.

A halo flickered around Keith as he rode, shouting: Morgan le Fey's ward and guard. Magi's spells shredded off it like waves off the bow of a ship. He waved his sword wildly over his head and shouted again, driving down upon them, driving forward to split them apart and send them running in dismay. Bullets struck him; they stung like pebbles as they passed through his body; the wounds healed bloodlessly. They struck his brave red horse as well, and the stallion pressed forward, unfazed by the impacts, Arthur's scabbard healing the wounds as fast as they could be dealt.