What the Ravens Sing, page 43
part #4 of The London Charismatics Series
At last, she understood. He had not come to play the arm of the law, but from the same desperate instinct that had driven all of them to this terrible place.
She set her hand on his sleeve. He stopped, the rattling flow of logic cut off by her touch. Her feelings warred inside of her, betrayal and rage fizzling against a helpless irritation. A begrudging respect.
“Thank you,” she said at last.
He nodded shortly, not trusting to words.
She pulled her hand back.
“But you should not have given them the serum.”
His mouth firmed, turning stubborn.
“I had my duty.”
“When this is over—if we survive—you can tell me whether your duty was worth it.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, slipping into the maze that wound towards the front.
It was time to take up the watch.
~
It had grown cold.
Around her in the trenches, men slept in shifts. She could feel the thread of doubt in them as they maintained the watch. Would this promised attack even happen?
Lily felt no doubt. Something was coming for them. She could feel it hanging in the air like the beat before a symphony.
She sat in the wider area above the command dugout under the cover of the camouflage netting. It was quiet and dark, the air damp and raw. The lanterns had been shaded to minimize exposure to any planes that might fly overhead. There were no fires. To stay warm, the men simply layered on more clothes or huddled together in corners.
Voices murmured in the shadows, trading low jokes or whispering a prayer.
Sam dozed beside her, snoring lightly, his long legs sprawled out in front of him.
Strangford climbed from the dugout. His uniform was stained with mud, two days of beard shadowing his jaw.
They hadn’t spoken since that terrible moment in the orchard. With the knowledge that the night was wearing away chilling her bones, she found she lacked the energy for anger. When he sat down beside her, she leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder and letting him slip his arm around her back.
She didn’t have to speak. She knew he could feel her through the place where his cheek rested against her hair.
“I keep asking myself whether it could have been different,” she said, offering the words into the darkness of the trench. “Whether there was something else we might have done—some other choice or accident—or whether it was always going to be this way. Whether it was … ”
“Fated?” he filled in.
He pulled back a bit, turning her face to his with a slide of his fingers. The night lent a deeper shadow to his missing eye, his too-short hair. He ran his gloved thumb gently along the line of her cheek.
“I wonder, Lily, whether ‘fate’ really means what you think it does.”
She straightened, frowning.
“What do you mean?”
“You are . . . hostile to it. Because you fear what it might take from you.” His eye was warm and terribly sad as he touched her. “But all of this was only ever borrowed. You might be able to change the future, but you could never change that. This isn’t some terrible price you had to pay to do great things, Lily. Losing what you love is just . . . living.”
Lily’s world quietly shattered.
He was right—of course he was right. She knew it better than anyone. In a way, it was what all of them had been trying to tell her for so long—Estelle with her affectionate dead, Robert Ash with his polished wisdom, and Sam with his bitter common sense.
Lily had been raging for years at all that fate—the Tao, her path—had demanded she risk. At everything it had taken from her . . . but it had never really been about the cost.
All of this was only ever borrowed.
She entwined her hand with his, her muddy and calloused fingers mingling with the familiar texture of his leather.
“I want you for longer than this,” she said.
It felt like a prayer, one roughened by the force of her need.
His gloved fingers held her in return. He leaned in, pressing his forehead to her own.
“Then find a way.” he said fiercely, tightening his grip on her. “If anyone can do it, it’s you.”
She threw her arms around his neck. He held her, his arms strong, clinging to her with equal need. She felt the rough texture of his cheek. The scent of mud and sweat mingled with the cedar and woodsmoke of Strangford.
All of which she knew in her bones could be gone by the time the sun rose.
“I promise to do whatever I can to assist with the endeavor,” he added dryly.
The laugh fell out of her in response, and for the first time in days, it tasted of something other than anger and despair—something she wasn’t quite sure how to name.
The change that came next was as subtle as a brush against the hairs on the back of her neck, but Lily knew what it signified in a way that flooded her core. She slid from Strangford’s embrace, catching up her halberd as she came to her feet, her gaze drawn to the west—a hundred yards across the night-black field of barbed wire and the dead to where the German Army waited.
“They’re coming,” she voiced, feeling the uncanny harmony of both foresight and onmyōdō dancing through her veins.
Strangford rose beside her.
At their feet, Sam woke, popping easily to alertness. He hopped upright, running a quick hand through his disheveled hair and straightening his coat.
He glanced over, quickly assessing Strangford, Lily, and the halberd she gripped in her hand.
“Time to cry havoc, I see,” he said.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Thursday, May 2
Four-thirty in the morning
The call to arms was a whisper. It passed down the trenches from man to man, sometimes in a word, sometimes a mere tap or gesture, rousing them from sleep. The darkness was suffused with the soft click of rifle bolts, the slide of mounting bayonets. The harder men smeared mud across their faces to darken them. The younger followed suit, quickly intuiting the reason for it.
Rows of wide-brimmed steel helmets lined the wall of the forward trench, men seeking places to stand or crouch with their guns held ready. In the surviving pillboxes or behind makeshift barriers, the machine guns aimed their deadly potential out into the void.
Lily waited in the midst of it.
Kazi sat on an empty ammunition crate next to a near-shuttered lantern, neatly siding rounds into the clip of his Webley. He checked it, then snapped it closed and slid it into his shoulder holster. A second Webley materialized from beside him. He slotted in three more bullets, making the same practiced assessment, and tucked it into another holster at his belt.
Beside her, Sam’s eyes widened as Kazi took out a third pistol.
“How many of those have you got?” he demanded.
“Four,” the inspector calmly replied, notching in a few more rounds.
“Where did you get four bloody guns from?” Sam exclaimed.
“The company quartermaster has more firearms than men at the moment,” Kazi returned. “And it is faster to pull another gun than to reload.”
“Is that one a Mauser?”
Sam’s tone shifted to one of irresistible curiosity as he went over for a better look at the German handgun.
The wind that blew from no man’s land was cold, whispering of death.
“Are you sure they’ve been spotted?” Ambarsan asked as he and Strangford approached. “There’s usually rather a lot of artillery before any attempted incursion unless they’re simply raiding for captives to interrogate. The Krauts like to soften us up with a few hundred tons of cordite before they waste any of their men.”
Lily thought of Bormio, sleeping quietly as the Stelvio Pass was silently ravaged.
“Not this time,” Strangford grimly replied.
He was thinking of it too. He would still be able to taste the fear of the men who died there.
Ambarsan’s skepticism continued to grow.
“Look, my lord—I don’t want to sound . . . unappreciative, but—”
“I know you don’t credit everything I have told you,” Strangford calmly cut in. “You have made what preparations you have out of simple pragmatism. A German attack must come at some point, and it is better to act as though even an unlikely warning were true than to be caught unaware. Nor have I told you all that I could. You’d have dismissed me as a madman if I had. You will see things tonight that you would not have thought possible outside the realm of dreams. I am sorry that this burden has fallen to you, captain, but it is upon us whether or not you choose to recognize it.”
“He’s telling you the truth,” Kazi said.
He had finished loading his Mauser. Having run out of holsters, he simply kept it in his hand.
“Who are you?” Ambarsan demanded.
“Tariq Kazi. Foreign Section—MI1c.”
“And what the devil are you here for?”
“To shoot things, I suppose,” Kazi sighed.
Dark air brushed the back of Lily’s neck, blown across the empty space that lay beyond the sandbags and the wire. A cold, animal fear electrified her skin.
“It’s happening,” she announced.
Sam turned his narrow gaze into the night, the breeze ruffling the raven-black feathers of his hair.
Ambarsan’s mouth thinned. Strangford’s speech had inflamed his doubts. In another moment, he would label the whole lot of them lunatics and order his company to stand down.
The first cry broke the silence.
It was singular, guttural, torn from a throat that did not sound entirely human. It echoed from the impenetrable shadows to the east.
In the trench, the close-packed bodies shifted as men up and down the line responded by instinct. Rifles cocked, boots grinding for traction against the packed earth as eyes moved to the gaps between the sandbags.
Strangford turned to Ambarsan urgently.
“Remember what I told you. Let them reach the trench, and it will be a slaughter. You must stop them before the wire. Send the men over the top if you can. They will only fight in close quarters—they carry swords, not guns—”
“What?” Ambarsan broke in, shocked.
Another scream sounded through the night—a third, a fourth . . . then a chorus of nightmarish howls from out of the age of monsters.
“Fire the line,” Lily ordered, her bones humming with the necessity—the rightness—as her muscles coiled in readiness. “Now.”
Ambarsan hesitated.
Kazi swept to his feet, taking hold of the front of his lapel.
“She bloody knows, damn you,” he seethed.
The captain swung between disbelief and horror, then pivoted, shouting the order down the trench.
There was a breath, a click—and the world in front of Lily blazed into fire.
Forty yards out, Beveridge’s trap lit up a quarter mile of the line with a snap of burning air, turning small rubble into a storm of deadly projectiles. Ten black shadows were illuminated by it, caught in the quick-swirling blaze.
The screams changed in tenor, shifting from violent anticipation to shock and rage.
The shadows, now torches, staggered forward . . . and once more began to run.
Ambarsan’s face paled in the firelight beside her.
“My God, they’re still coming.”
“They haven’t burned enough yet,” Lily returned grimly.
Her hand gripped the rough wood of the halberd. Her calves flexed, boot poised against the step of the ladder. She glanced back at Strangford, his scarred face illuminated by the dancing light.
“Go,” he said.
Foresight sparked through her, violence hissing in her blood.
Lily launched herself over the top.
The battle cry rose behind her with a vibration she could feel, punctuated by the rattle of steel and iron as boots ground against the mud. Firelight flashed off Sam’s blades as he ran in her periphery, his coat merging with the shadows.
The awareness that she was leading a charge fell away as everything inside of her focused on the demons running towards her encased in flame.
Their burning clothes and flesh turned the Wulfstruppen into illuminated targets. A machine gun rattled. One to her left took a hail of bullets, the force of the impact jerking his chest and shoulders. He took a staggering step forward once the gun fell silent, the light glinting off the sword in his hand, and fell.
Then his comrades were upon them.
Metal flashed, moving at impossible speed. Grotesque forms slammed into the frail and slender defenders of the Allied line. Men fell like cut grass, screaming through severed limbs, blood thickening the ground.
Lily forced it from her mind. There was space only for the years of training woven into the strength and agility of her body, and the familiar instinct that rose from inside of her with fierce, deadly joy.
Lily rode it like the crest of a wave as she charged toward the enemy.
Her target presented itself in the blazing form of a German berserker. One arm was blown away, the other raising his sword as his mouth opened in an inhuman scream.
The path ribboned out before her, spilling forward like water over stone.
Duck. Twist.
The halberd flowed as she swung the ax from behind, slamming the razor-edged blade into the base of the monster’s skull.
Nerves severed. The berserker’s body dropped. His arms and legs went still.
A pale blue eye framed in blistered flesh rolled up to where she stood, elongated teeth opening as though still trying for a bite. The nightmare of it threatened to paralyze her.
Move, move, move …
Lily brought the ax down again, this time through the thick bone of the skull.
Small fires burned across the battlefield, consuming the bits of scrubby grass by Beveridge’s trap, the charred remains of a few tree stumps. The orange light glazed the bodies of the dead. In the few moments it had taken her to kill the man at her feet, there were already so many fallen, both British khaki and French blue darkened with spilled blood.
Another nightmare of cracked and blackened skin screamed towards her through the smoke.
She met his blade with the ax, ready for the blow. It still jarred the bones of her arms, sending an electric pain through her joints. Her knees collapsed under the force of it, bringing her to the ground.
The sword slipped closer as her muscles screamed.
A bullet struck his shoulder, weakening his arm.
Lily lurched away, scrabbling against the mud.
A hand clenched around her arm, tossing her through the air like a rag doll.
She hit the obstacle of a tree stump, the impact pushing the breath from her chest.
The monster pounded towards her, sword raised, mouth red, ready for the kill.
Right path, she willed, pushing herself deeper as she scrambled for purchase against the wet ground, clasping desperately to her halberd. Right path.
Lily felt it, thin and gold, quick-moving as a snake, and threw herself into it with all the desperation of the damned.
A grenade flashed, cracking white against the darkness. She bolted, the direction pulling at her like a hooked line as some small animal part of her mind screamed that he would catch up to her—cut her down. He was simply faster than she was. He was too fast.
Here.
The knowing blazed at her. Lily pivoted, slamming the base of the halberd into the earth and angling the pike, bracing it with her body.
The sprinting bulk of the berserker slammed into it.
The halberd drove into his chest, the force of his speed embedding it halfway through the ax as the base of the weapon sunk further into the ground, Lily’s boots sliding a few inches across the churned-up earth.
Now.
Deliberately, without hesitation, she fell.
Lily hit the mud on her back with a skull-jarring impact, looking up at the blade of the monster’s sword as it swung towards her face—and then jerked, caught in a hail of machine gun fire.
His body danced against the skewer of the halberd.
When the burst of shots abruptly halted, he was still.
She pushed herself to her feet. Setting her shoulder against the dead man’s bloodied flesh, she shoved. The berserker toppled sideways. Grasping the haft of the halberd, she wrenched it free.
Back at the line, Kazi crouched in the cover of the broken pillbox, unloading his Mauser into the charred face of a nightmare. He kept firing even as the gun emptied. The smoking form of the berserker collapsed.
The firelight danced off a field of corpses. Her arms ached. Her ribs were bruised.
Behind her, a second line of Wulfstruppen slammed through the remnants of the blaze.
They were virtually untouched by it, moving with a fluid and impossible speed. One of them reached a stray Black Watch private. With a whip of his sword, he embedded the blade halfway through the soldier’s torso.
The berserker yanked it free. Another blow took off the man’s head.
They were already past her, around her. She heard the sound of tearing flesh in the darkness, choked screams of agony followed by a roar of victory.
Someone threw a flare. The red light bloomed from a shell hole to her right, casting a hellish illumination over no man’s land.
A berserker was tangled in the barbed wire that marked the last defense before the trench. His body jerked with the impact of gunfire even as two more leapt, impossibly, over the barrier, falling into the vulnerable underbelly of the line.
Six yards to her left, something that had once been human yanked its sword out of the back of a fallen French sergeant, then charged for a boy with a twisted leg who pulled himself desperately towards the sandbags.
