CHAPEL OF THE FALCON

By Matt Spencer
 
 

Chapter Ten
The Lord and Lady of the Hour
 
There’d been sweetness aplenty last night, in the bed they’d come to share, but little gentleness—no room for it with everything else that surged through them. To taste each other’s writhing flesh was to taste each other’s souls... everything else they were or had been or would be, through worlds and realms and ages. When they finally collapsed into unconsciousness together, they met in their dreams, for more the bright, mad visions, of new kinds of passion.

He took a while to open his eyes, even with her shaking him. Once he did, he sprang up. ‘What’s going on out there? Finally howling for our blood, are they?’

‘No,’ she whispered as she peered through the curtains. ‘They’re not angry... They’re scared!’

They dressed quickly. As they made for the door, he caught her by the shoulder. ‘Don’t forget this.’ He held out her dagger.

‘Can’t you see? This is something else!’

‘All the same,’ he hissed.

In the frosty dawn, people ran screaming past each other, their glassy eyes full of stark, hateful despair. For a while, it seemed impossible to pinpoint any source of the pandemonium. One might think the plague had broken out in the village, the way everyone’s brains sizzled in some shared vision of malignance, a madness agreed upon. It was not quite that, nor was it a gale of marauding wraiths, phantoms, or a massive beast rabidly laying waste. Nor was it some gaunt, rotted, and faceless man-shaped being striding about, infecting all it touched with lunacy and agony. Yet it was all those things at once and none of them, a presence that drifted from street to street, in and out of sight between the buildings, somehow only ever glimpsed, in ragged strands of rotted cloth and flesh, to fester in the mind in its wake. The creature forced nothing upon its victims, but rather ripped away some protective shroud from within them. Whatever had kept their blackest notions from fuming out and painting the world around them, no matter where they looked. Some of them huddled, wallowed, and whimpered while others raged and lashed out at each other. This creature needn’t lift a finger against anyone’s property, for they tore the town and each other apart just fine on their own.

Frionti and Heidira darted from street to street, barely evading the flailing mob. In the end, it wasn’t hard to find, not for them. The howling gale spilled like a tide of blood from the wide-flung doors of the church. As they climbed the hill, the apparition strode down the front steps to meet them, in full view, as though emerging for the first time, its flayed hide fluttering behind it in bloody tatters like a cape. Its scorched-black bones had been sharpened like blades, the razor edges jutting through the pulsating meat. The slimy red skull grinned in triumphant freedom.

Only for a moment did Frionti and Heidira freeze. Looking down, she spotted her garlic-poisoned dagger in hand. When she looked back up, Frionti gazed at her lovingly. Then his eyes met the leaking, hollow chasms of the thing’s eye sockets, and he walked calmly towards it. Heidira circled them, stooping to cut a line in the earth. Little by little, the clamour of the townsfolk died away, ’til the only sounds were the whimpers of the wounded and dying. Heidira found her way back to the starting point and sealed the circle. All sound ceased, but she still heard and saw the tempest raging within the circle, around the two beings within. Frionti lifted his arms, mirroring the creature. Then it was the one mirroring him. For a while, they moved as one thusly, like two fellows met by chance, with no quarrel between them, just some strange, idle game.

Heidira might have watched forever in patient fascination, but it was the silence that threatened to unnerve her. Not even the morning larks sang. She dragged her feet back and forth. No sound rose from the dirt. She looked down at her knife. Little good it would do her now. Instead, she set it down, opened her mouth, and sang. Her song filled the air, filled the skies, filled the world. Within the circle, Frionti sprang into the air. His back arched, his neck stretched, and his limbs lengthened, catching the funnelled red winds like silk on his tapered fingers. Without breaking stride, he moved in the mad dance of her song. He moved the winds, and the winds swept the bloody, shredded fiend into their cyclone. Before long, it seemed as though the marauder had never been a single, solid thing but a sculpture of loosely jointed twigs, brush, and cloth, fused together by an agony that had been left to fester in the bowels of the church, its prison, something that had never wanted to be bound together as a singular awareness.

The louder and clearer Heidira sang, the faster and wilder Frionti danced, and the further the pieces were pulled apart within the tempest of the circle. Frionti became a blur, like his body had liquified. The other had no shape left at all. Heidira’s voice found and hit the song’s final, ethereal note. She snatched up her dagger and slashed the circle. In an instant, the maelstrom dispersed into a warm summer wind that puffed against her face. Within the sundered circle, there stood a man-shaped rift in some eternal midnight, through which ran a network of veins that glowed like burning coal. When he turned, he was once again Frionti, her Frionti, dirty and rangy and weary. His glassy eyes stared past her. She turned to follow his gaze. The townsfolk had gathered, staring in bewilderment. As she met their eyes, she knew they’d seen all, and they’d heard her song while it had been the only sound in the world.

Frionti stepped up next to her. His hand slipped into hers. One by one, the townsfolk all fell to their knees before their new god and goddess outside the church. The surge of it nearly sent her into a panic. Then the heat of all he’d absorbed in there pulsed through his hand into hers, filling her, igniting her. She felt the elated rumble form in his gut as though it were her own.

‘It is accomplished, my love,’ he whispered in a voice that wasn’t his... not as she’d heard it in her waking life, anyway.

Before she knew what she was doing, she turned, took him by the shoulder, and turned him roughly to face her, with a strength she hadn’t known she possessed. ‘Only beginning,’ she whispered.

They pulled each other close for a savage, consuming kiss such as only a god and goddess can endure. They came to their senses, to the sound of heavy carriage wheels rolling along the old road into town. The mesmerised crowd parted, trancelike, for four massive draft horses. The carriage pulled to a stop several yards away from Heidira and Frionti. The coachman climbed down and opened the door. Out stepped a tall, scarlet-clad, stately woman with milk-white skin, golden hair, and blazing violet eyes. Heidira stood at respectful attention. Frionti didn’t recognise this woman, but he followed along instinctively.

Lady Seibre approached. ‘Well then, my children... Heidira, my darling. I see you’ve called forward the missing piece in the puzzle of our designs, as I knew you would. Yes, indeed. This shall be the perfect place to start.’

‘Oh?’ Frionti grunted. He didn’t like the way this lady looked him over like a mule, as though she might prod open his mouth to inspect his teeth.

‘Charming, too.’ Lady Seibre met Frionti’s eyes. ‘Perhaps a rough edge or two to smooth down... but indeed, I can already tell, he surpasses my expectations very nicely.’

He returned her amiable smile. ‘As did what rose from the cellar, no doubt.’
 
CONTINUES NEXT MONTH