In Ashes Lie (43 page)

The Dragon found its foothold on the very scaffolding erected for the cathedral’s repair. Eight days before, the architect Dr. Christopher Wren had met with others to discuss its restoration: the mending of its broken roofs, the straightening of the leaning walls, the support of a pillar that had settled askew under the weight of the central tower.

Now a spark alit on the edge of a board laid to patch a hole in the leads, and burrowed its way inward.

The exhausted defenders in the hellish oven of the churchyard fell back, defeated. The Dragon dug its claws into the board, flames licking across the parched timber. Stone could not burn, but its fittings could, and with ravening hunger the Fire tore inward, seeking the power below.

In the cracked, chipped floor of the nave, the entrance opened up. Marching in grim, battle-ready file, the knights of the Onyx Guard and their erstwhile commander emerged, weapons in hand.

They arrayed themselves across the south transept, Sir Peregrin Thorne anchoring one end of their line, Dame Segraine the other. The tombs of London’s worthy forefathers and foremothers stood between them like shield brothers. The vaulting stone heights of the ceiling concealed the flames for now, but the blocks ground ominously against one another, shifted by the thundering heat. The wooden roof above was too high for anyone to douse the flames, even if water could be brought. All they could do was wait.

Wait, and prepare. Gripping the hilt of his sword in both hands, Prigurd Nellt drew in a slow breath, letting his great chest expand—and
grew.

The days when a giant could walk the land in his true form had passed. To live in the Onyx Hall, or the home of any other faerie monarch, he drew himself inward, diminishing his bulk until he could live—if not comfortably. But here, hidden by walls of stone and flame, with the ceiling so high above, Prigurd could be as he once was.

The giant’s shoulders swelled upward and out. Head bowed, Prigurd grew, flexing arms as thick as an ox’s body, shifting legs the size of mighty trees. In his hands, the sword kept pace, until three men together could not have wielded it. Hewn from the stone of his rocky northern home, the blade held a touch of that cold chill, and the giant smiled to think of what it could do.

No Dragon would eat his home. Not this day, nor any other.

The wooden roof was well in flames, but the Fire had not the patience to wait. With a roar, its power struck downward, and the stone of the ceiling shattered as if blasted by gunpowder.

A blazing column punched through to the floor, smashing into ruin the recumbent monument of some long-dead knight. Upward curved the flames, a thick band coiling about itself, until the gathered fae could barely look at it, or breathe the searing air. The stone beneath calcined white, crumbling into powder that spun into a stinging whirlwind, the herald of the Dragon.

Eyes squeezed shut against the dust, Prigurd did not need to see. He knew which direction was forward, and the enemy, like him, was too large to miss.

Bellowing a war cry, Lune’s brooch a tiny star upon his shoulder, the giant hurled himself into battle.

The tip of his ancient sword carved a broad slash through the twisting mass of flames. It was not like striking flesh, nor like insubstantial fire; the Dragon’s body was semisolid, offering a modicum of resistance to his blade. Expecting more, Prigurd had thrown himself with too much force. He fell forward, one shoulder slamming into the body of the beast.

Skin crisped, and Prigurd roared, but the Dragon felt it as well; the vortex shuddered backward, colliding with the transept wall. The cathedral shook, and more stones fell from above. Several of the knights staggered, but they recovered their feet quickly enough when they saw they had an enemy to fight.

For Prigurd’s sword had carved free a writhing mass that fell to the floor below, where it quickly reshaped itself into a monstrous salamander, as tall as a cart-horse. Two of the knights charged it, driving it back from the main battle, and Dame Segraine cupped one hand to her mouth, shouting into the howling chaos of battle above. “Prigurd! Cut it small—we shall do the rest!”

Trapped beneath a suffocating wall of flame, Prigurd had no breath to reply. But he was a child of the earth, born of solid stone, and did not burn as softer flesh might. Setting his hands against the blaze, he
shoved,
and sent the Dragon spiraling backward, out of the transept and down the long reach of the nave. Its substance split around the thick pillars, regrouping on the other side, but by then Prigurd was there, swinging his sword in a two-handed grip that hacked away one lump after another.

He drove it down the nave, shouting in wordless joy. For the first time in forgotten ages, Prigurd was a giant again, and battling an enemy worthy of his strength. If tombs split under his blows or the Dragon’s, if columns cracked and stones exploded outward from the raging heat of this contest, he did not care. The house of Heaven’s divine Master was no concern of his, nor the decaying bodies of the mortal dead. This creature threatened his home. He would throw the beast out the western doors and drop the portico on its head. He would kick it down Ludgate Hill and drown it in the stinking waters of the Fleet. He would tear at it until nothing remained to be torn, and when that was done—

The arching ribs of the ceiling collapsed in the western end of the nave, raining burning shards of timber behind the stone. The sudden inrush of air breathed new life into the Dragon, which recoiled upon Prigurd with a dizzying blow. It knew where the entrance lay, though the floor had closed behind the Onyx Guard, and knew the giant drove it from its prize.

Whips of flame lashed Prigurd, pinioning his arms, stilling the cold blade that kept biting into the Dragon’s flesh. The Fire lifted its prey bodily and flung him the length of the nave, two hundred feet, until Prigurd’s slide was halted by the mighty pillars of the crossing. In a flash it reclaimed all the distance it had lost, and bent to strike at the vulnerable stone beneath.

But the rest of the Onyx Guard were there, harrying its sides like rats, ramming long pikes into the boiling heart of the flames. It flicked them aside like ninepins, then found Prigurd had recovered. The giant set his feet wide and seized the Dragon in a wrestler’s grip, dragging it backward into the quire, where the benches fell instantly to ash. With a wrenching twist the Fire smashed Prigurd into the south wall. The towering monument to old Elizabeth’s Lord Chancellor Sir Christopher Hatton cracked and fell, and crushed beneath it the simple tablets of Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Francis Walsingham.

Peregrin shouted. By supreme effort, he and another knight had moved Prigurd’s sword close enough to grab. The giant took it in hand once more and stabbed it into the Dragon’s flank; with that as a lever, he forced the beast off him, and gained his footing once more. Working like a peasant hewing wood, he chopped again and again, raining blows down upon the beast, sending its salamanders in all directions, where the other knights chased them down.

Yet now he was in the wrong place: the Dragon stood between him and the entrance, not the other way around. Prigurd realized this too late, as the Fire eddied suddenly backward, into the crossing once more.

He leapt after it with a desperate bellow. If it had but an instant to draw in its power, it would break through. Not into the chapel below, the little chamber in which the parishioners of St. Faith met, but into the space that could be reached by no mundane path.

He could not let it happen. And so Prigurd, knowing little of what he did, knowing only that he must stop his enemy by whatever means he could, and trusting to blind hope that this would crush the beast for good, reached for a strength greater even than his own.

His sword struck, not at the Dragon, but at the four massive columns surrounding them.

Weakened by long neglect, off balance from the tremendous weight of the tower above them, they gave way like twigs. The pillars snapped, and all the height of St. Paul’s crashed down into the crossing.

The Dragon vanished beneath the onslaught. So, too, did Prigurd. And the stones of the floor, supported from beneath by the arches of the Jesus Chapel, pulverized into dust.

The burning wreckage fell through into the little church of St. Faith, and blazed into terrible light. For in that space—bounded by stone, sealed with care, and thought by its bookseller parishioners to be the safest place in all of London—rested the close-packed volumes of their printed wealth. From cheap broadside ballads to leather-bound editions of Virgil and the Church Fathers, it was the greatest library in all of England.

Gone, in an instant of annihilating flame.

 

Above, the knights of the Onyx Guard staggered to their feet, coughing and blind. Segraine wiped her streaming eyes and saw the infernal pit where Dragon, giant, and entrance had stood. Flames danced everywhere around them, more and more of the ceiling collapsing in, but those were small creatures, scarcely more than flickers of spirit, not the great beast that had been.

Peregrin stumbled to the edge of the pit and seized hold of something. “Help me!” he choked out. Going to his side, Segraine found he had an arm—shrunken and black, but still gripping the hilt of a sword. It gave her brief hope, and together they pulled... but what came out of the blaze was nothing living.

She would never have recognized it as Prigurd, were it not for the helm and sword. All the giant’s size had shriveled, leaving behind a decrepit, withered body that might have belonged to an ancient and long-dead human. She and Peregrin dragged it eastward into the relative safety of the quire, where a portion of the ceiling yet held, and there they collapsed, joined piecemeal by the knights of the Onyx Guard.

“We must take him to Lune,” Segraine said, coughing. If they stayed much longer, it would be all of them dead, and not just the giant.

Peregrin stared down at the corpse, his expression broken and lost. Before him lay his terrible enemy, the traitor of his brotherhood: gone, with a hero’s death. The fire that burned in the underground chapel was fire only, not the Dragon. And
nothing
was passing through that entrance—perhaps not ever again. Prigurd had destroyed St. Paul’s, but saved the Onyx Hall.

Finally the knight shook his head. If tears made tracks through the filth on his cheeks, no one could tell them from the sweat. “We must flee,” he said, “and we cannot carry him.”

As one, they all turned and looked past the roaring pit of St. Faith to the cathedral’s western end. The new portico there yet stood, but outside was all the burning City, with no clear path to safety.

Peregrin was right. They would be lucky to bring themselves out. Segraine folded the hands of Sir Prigurd Nellt over his chest, tucking the now-reduced sword beneath them. “We will remember you,” she whispered, and gave her former captain one final salute.

Then the knights of the Onyx Guard left the wreckage of St. Paul’s.

Jack fought his way into awareness one inch at a time, his head throbbing as if it had been split by an axe. Lune’s hands were supporting him, though when his vision cleared, he saw that the faerie Queen looked no better than he did.

St. Paul’s.
Now he remembered.

He would call it a miracle that the Onyx Hall survived, but he was not certain what, if anything, God had to do with faerie palaces and the preservation thereof.
Perhaps the Almighty answered my prayers.
He somehow doubted it.

Lune’s words drove all thoughts of God from his head. “The wind has dropped,” she said, her voice cracking on the last word. “Nicneven has come.”

The silence rang in his ears. No voice whispering of sickness and death, no wintry blast chilling the Onyx Hall to black ice. Blessed, blessed quiet, and a breath of warmth to carry it.

And the Gyre-Carling had come.

Jack reeled to his feet, went to wipe his face on his sleeve, and realized there was nothing to choose between the two. Lune managed a faint smile. “She is not inside yet,” the elfin woman said. “We have time to bathe and dress.” For once Jack didn’t dread the finery that was no doubt in store; he had no desire to meet Nicneven looking like the inside of an oven.

As for what happened when he did...

One thing he had decided, after the knights went above to do battle, before the cathedral’s collapse felled him like a tree.

We will give her Vidar if I have to dig the whoreson up myself.

 

Molten lead runs like blood down Ludgate Hill, streaming from the dying body of London’s great cathedral. In the north, the roof timbers of the venerable old Guildhall shine gold in the night, a second beacon for those watching from the fields to the north, or those across the river. The papier-mâché statues of the giants Gog and Magog have fallen at its feet. In the heart of the city, embers smolder, and here and there small blazes still dance, but three days of destruction have reduced it to a desolate plain, smoking like Hell itself, and spiked by the broken fingers of brick chimneys and stone walls, survivors of the holocaust.

Those who fled before it huddle under blankets if they are lucky, nothing but their shirts if they are not. Guards watch over them, keeping the King’s peace, trying—where they can—to capture those who would plunder others in their misfortune. Elsewhere the battles continue, for with the dropping of the wind hope comes for the first time that they may, at last, be able to extinguish the Fire.

Any man who has fought these three days breathes the same prayer, hoping it will rise with the smoke into the heavens, and to the ears of the Almighty Lord.

Let the wind keep down, and what is left be saved.

PART FOUR

The Living Few