The Last Guardian of Everness

  Wendy giggled. “But I’m not going to let him forswear love! Not while he’s my husband!”

  “I was thinking of a guy named Wil. He’d be perfect. But where in the money would it be?”

  Wendy said, “I know that! The wizard Franklin snared the lightning with a kite string, Galen said. I bet he keeps the Ring in Independence Hall. See there?” She pointed at the framed hundred-dollar bill, using the unicorn horn as a pointer.

  Peter whispered to Raven, “What’re we going to do, pal? No one can use two talismans, that’s the rules. We need the Wand to fight the selkie. And the Moly Wand can only be used by the innocent. Are you innocent? I sure as hell ain’t. There’s no time to get anyone else.”

  Raven looked out the windows. The armies of Azrael were drawn up in ordered hosts. The vast majority were selkie.

  Peter said, “I know what you’re thinking, pal. Let the house get destroyed first, eh? But that ain’t going to happen. Look, you might like your wife just as much as now as when she gets sane . . .”

  Raven sent Peter a dark look. “She will wither and perish without her dreams. To make her bitter? Ordinary? Without love or delight? I would kill before I would let. . .” And then he choked, realizing what he was saying.

  When Raven had stepped over to talk to Peter, Wendy had stepped next to the eagle on the bedpost and whispered a few words to it.

  Raven and Peter both flinched when the eagle screamed, “It is so!”

  “See!” chirped Wendy. “The eagle says it’ll be all right. Don’t be such a worrywart. Besides, who says you men get a vote anyway?”

  And before either of them could stop her, she picked up the Moly Wand.

  “Wendy!” screamed Raven. “Put it down!” He started around the bed toward her. She said something to the eagle, which Raven did not hear, ending with, “. . . I promise.”

  Raven noticed some of the light had gone. The other eagle, surrounded by a wreath of stars, had vanished.

  He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Wendy! I told you not to . . .”

  “Let go of me, silly! I’m all right! And yes, I still remember my parents, and I still believe in fairies, and I still believe in miracles . . .”

  Her voice trailed off.

  Raven let go of her shoulders and backed away, his eyes filling with fear, the back of his hand against his mouth. “No . . .” he said.

  A look of wisdom, of memory, of thought flowed into Wendy’s blue eyes, and they looked like deep pools of clear water. She said, “I guess it wasn’t a miracle, was it? Koschei said I could have another person’s life if only I would agree. But I didn’t agree. But someone must have agreed, or else Koschei would not have been able to get Azrael’s life out of Galen’s hand and put it in Galen’s body. Galen was drawn to me because I had his life in me, didn’t I? You told Peter his son was dead. Why would you have said a thing like that?”

  She looked at her husband intently.

  “It was not my doing. . .,” Raven said. “I did not know that it really would work.”

  “Silly! Then why’d you do it?”

  He said nothing.

  She said, “My daddy says strong men at least can admit what they’ve done. I used to brag about how strong you were, you know?”

  Raven was silent. The sinking, cold ache in his heart, forgotten for a time, now chilled him.

  “Don’t you have anything you want to tell me, Raven Varovitch?” She spoke in a clear, crisp tone of voice.

  Peter said, “What the hell’s going on?What the hell’s she talking about?”

  Raven said in a pleading voice, “You were dying!”

  She shrugged. “I was afraid, at first. Then I got over it. Why couldn’t you? Couldn’t you have been brave? For me?”

  “But you were dying!”

  “You sound like a broken record. But at least I wasn’t killing anyone.”

  Peter said, “What’s all this about?! Wendy!”

  Wendy said, “Tell him, Raven. Tell the truth. The angels hear you when you tell the truth, and the devils hear you when you lie, that’s what Mommy says. And she should know.”

  But Raven backed up further, his expression one of misery and anger, and said nothing.

  “Wendy?” said Peter.

  Wendy said softly, “I think my husband helped a demon kill your son.”

  Peter looked at Raven with a look Raven knew the men Peter had killed on the battle field had seen before they died. “You’re a dead man, Varovitch, if she’s telling the truth.”

  “Wendy—” Raven tried to sound strong, but it emerged as a sob. “I did not mean to—I thought—He said it would be a stranger!”

  Her face grew cold. A look of angry sorrow, of contempt, came into her eyes.

  Raven shouted, “I did it for you!”

  The look of contempt faded into a blank stare of indifference, as if she were looking at someone she did not know.

  The church bells fell silent.

  II

  At that moment there came such a howl of wind, such an explosion of lightning and thunder, that Raven once more grabbed his wife, pulling her further from the windows, his other hand raised as if to ward off a blow.

  Through the gaps in the wall they saw three flying figures, winged with storm clouds, falling, swooping, and diving, like three hawks fighting. Winds and thunder and lightning darted from their every gesture and glance. Great sweeps of black cloud swirled around them, stirred to hurricanic wrath by the battle in the air.

  The battle passed over the house. Falling and flying, black as a crow in his waistcoat, his lace a spot of electric white at his throat, Fulgrator shook his dreadful javelin, smiling and fierce. With a whine of bagpipes and a clash of blade on shield, his brothers plunged across the gulf of air toward him, and their footsteps echoed with thunder.

  Soil and shrubs and sections of wall were thrown into the air; lightning danced across the gathered horde, slaying a score; thunder dazed and maddened another so that the horses of those kelpie still on land reared and plunged, trampling friends. Seal-men, gunmen, and thrown riders fell under reddened hoofs.

  In the next moment, the three storm-princes were whirled aloft, fluttering like leaves in an October gale, thrown high into the yellow-red sky. They were small, darting shapes seen in the wide spaces opening between the piled towers of black cloud, and flashes of lightning and wild tumult followed them.

  The beam of lightning no longer swayed atop the central tower. Fulgrator, it may be, had gathered all his power high above to struggle with his brothers.

  When the storm-princes flew high, the earth below grew calm again. Azrael’s forces were in disarray, for the kelpies’ ordered retreat had turned to chaos, and the giant of fire stepped out from his cloud of smoke and lashed out against them with his two torches, setting galloping horses afire.

  The forces to the north of the courtyard, however, were not in disarray. Here was the ice-giant, the remainder of the squad of gunmen dressed as soldiers, and an innumerable horde of selkie marines.

  Azrael raised his staff and waved it in a great circle: the signal for the advance. Seal-men in the shape of men, armed with belaying pins, pikes, marlin spikes, and pickaroons, gave forth a cheer and stormed the house.

  A large group ran up the half-fallen balcony as if it were a ramp, coming toward the gap in the wall. In their midst glided the ice-giant; and the shouting faces of the marines were at the level of its waist, so that it seemed it waded among them. In one great hand it held a truncheon; the other hung limp at its side. Snow and freezing rain from its deadly breath swept the air before and after it.

  Behind the giant, marching in an ordered wedge, came a squad of gunmen. They had donned heavy coats over their flak jackets, collars turned up; some of the men worked the actions of their rifles with mittened hands to prevent the metal parts from freezing to each other.

  Wendy, in Raven’s arms, slapped him. He stumbled back across the room so that he was near the ruins of the door.


  Behind Raven, a sly Irish voice said softly, “Have ye not reckoned why yer lassy knows so much of the House so suddenly? So unnaturally?”

  Raven was the only one who turned his head. Peter and Wendy were staring out the windows.

  Where the fall of the balcony had torn away the wall, three selkie officers in red coats and white wigs led a chuckling crowd of able seamen, brandishing truncheons. The three officers, noses high, raised flintlock pistols in their paws and fired, while their men gave a ragged cheer. The figures disappeared behind a wash of black-powder smoke, while poorly aimed lead pistol balls rang from the stone or pitted the wood of the house. A hammering thunder erupted through the air when Peter emptied his machine-gun into the selkie crowd. A dozen were slain; the rest cowered back, some throwing themselves from the third-story balcony to escape. Why the bullets were able to strike them, but not touch the giants nor the kelpie, was not clear.

  Wendy shouted, “The giants are coming!”

  Peter tossed the empty rifle aside and raised the hammer in his hand, hefting its weight, aiming . . .

  Raven looked up. Atop a roof beam sat Tom O’Lantern in his red cap, his little eyes glittering with malice and hate. “Galen’s life is in her body, it is, put there by yourself, ye murderer. Now that life struggles to come out, and it speaks through her. It’ll eat the poor lass up, and then ye’ll be a twice murderer. But look! Here is the American Wizard Franklin who tamed Jove’s bolt with Yankee know-how!”

  It was true. An apparition looking like Benjamin Franklin stood in the room next to Raven. There were bifocals on his nose, a wry smile of jolly good humor at his lips, and an absurd-looking raccoon-skin cap on his head. On the chain of his pocket watch, dangling over the slope of his plump vest, hung a ring of palest gold.

  Meanwhile, at the gap, the selkie fell aside, shouting encouragement. The ice-giant appeared at the top of the slanting balcony, faceplate of ice gleaming. There was a hiss as it drew in its breath.

  Peter threw the hammer with a powerful sweep of his arm. The muscles in Peter’s arm stood out like knots of iron.

  “Take the ring!” Tom O’Lantern hissed at Raven. “Forswear the lady’s sweet love! Ye are not worthy of it anyway!”

  The skull of the frost-giant exploded in a spray of ice and brains, and pale-blue ichor. The huge body toppled backwards, crushing gunmen and selkie, and any splashed with fluid from the falling corpse were burned with cold, frostbitten, or killed, as if they had been splashed with liquid nitrogen.

  When the giant corpse hit the ground, strangely, it shattered like a hollow sculpture.

  Wendy cheered and clapped.

  Through the eastern windows, Raven saw for a moment, two storm- princes whirl by, a flutter of kilt and coat, arms knotted about each other, gleaming javelin tangled in bagpipe flutes. The third prince was stalking down through the corridors of air, descending toward the house, horsehair plume of his helmet snapping in the wind, and footsteps booming in midair.

  “Or will ye do naught to help your friends?” whispered Tom O’Lantern, voice thick with hate.

  Selkie dressed as sailors were at the gap, but they threw themselves on their faces when the hammer Mollner, flung by some invisible force, yanked itself out of the shattered skull of the frost-giant and flew by overhead toward Peter’s upraised hand.

  A look of fear appeared on Peter’s face just before the hammer struck his hand. He was bowled out of the bed on which he sat and flung to the floor.

  “My hand!”

  A mob of selkie rushed into the room, waving their pikes and bludgeons, jumped over the bed, laughing for joy.

  Selkie also rushed out from the shattered main doors to the room, coming suddenly from behind.

  Raven was seized by four of them and flung down before he could react. A fifth selkie loomed over him, brandishing a bludgeon, and aimed a blow at Raven’s skull.

  He turned into a seal. The blow did not fall.

  His human skin fell away like a white leather coat, and his sleek black body, which would have been so lithe and streamlined in the sea, now flopped forward, fins waving feebly. The bludgeon clattered down atop the seal.

  The men holding Raven down turned into seals. Their hands became flippers, and, without legs to stand upon, they flopped helplessly to their bellies.

  Raven shoved them aside and stood up. One that tried to bite him, he kicked in the head.

  Peter, with the hammer in his left hand, clubbed to death the two seals within arm’s reach. But he seemed as helpless as they, for both his legs and now one arm were limp weights, and there was a look of fear and horror on his face. “My arm! I can’t move my arm!”

  He was grimacing a terrible grimace, and his sweat-slick face was splattered with blood and brains from the seals he slew.

  Wendy had the Moly Wand in her hand. And where she waved the wand, selkie fell to their bellies, human disguises gone. In a moment the whole herd of selkies in the room lay writhing and helpless on the floor, flapping their fins and barking.

  Many immediately turned on each other with barks and snarls of outrage, and slashed at each other with their teeth, as if hosts of hidden treasons had suddenly been revealed.

  Peter pulled himself upright, clutching the bedpost with his left hand, clutching the haft of Mollner in his teeth. Now he twisted his shoulder to drape his right arm across the headboard, and with this he propped himself, while his legs, puny and ridiculous, twisted off to one side.

  He spat the hammer into his left hand. “Oh, shit!”

  For he saw the angry eyes of the fire-giant staring in through the broken panes of the southern windows.

  The giant drew back his titanic arm, readying the torch he used as a bludgeon to sweep through the room and crush all within; but he saw Peter propped against the headboard draw back the hammer, awkwardly, left- handedly, readying to throw.

  The giant hesitated, sparks and smoke drifting from its nostrils.

  They stared at each other eye-to-eye, man and giant, and, for a moment, neither moved.

  Azrael de Gray stepped in through the breach in the wall, Koschei the Deathless behind him to the left and the storm-prince in Roman armor to his right.

  Behind them both came the few surviving gunmen: black-jacketed men in blue helmets all.

  Azrael kicked aside or stepped over seals in his path as he came forward. Then he stopped, seeing Peter with the hammer raised.

  The two creatures stopped behind him, one step into the room. The tall thin shadow that was Koschei radiated a grave stench, and the bony fingers ringing his crown brushed the ceiling. The storm-prince’s face was hidden in his helmet’s shadow, and his plume and red cloak flapped in the wild winds his smallest gestures caused. He stood with his gladius poised above his buckler.

  It would have been hard to say whose eyes where more horrible to behold, Koschei’s or Azrael’s. Koschei’s were mere points of baleful light, floating in dark pits of eye sockets, inhuman and terrible. But Azrael’s could have been human, and had once been.

  Peter looked over his shoulder at Azrael, then glanced back at the giant. He shifted the balance of the hammer slightly, to allow him to throw in either direction. Peter looked between them, watching both out of the corners of his eyes.

  And perhaps he spared a glance for his one remaining arm, which, he held tense in the air before his face. “One down, one to go,” he muttered hoarsely. But it did not sound funny.

  One gunman raised his rifle, but Azrael raised his hand, “Wound not my kin!”

  The giant stiffened his shoulder. Peter glanced that way. Azrael touched his necklace of magnets and whispered a name. “Somnus, benumb them. North Star’s Blood puts them in my reach.”

  Raven felt a heaviness close in upon his limbs. He sank to his knees, fell forward, his face resting only inches from the buckles of Ben Franklin’s shoes. The ghost or apparition of Franklin had not moved or spoken, anymore than a statue would have.

  Raven tried to remember the names and t
he charm to drive off this magic, but the only thing in his mind was the accusing, indifferent look he had seen in Wendy’s eyes.

  The giant now made its move forward, but Azrael shouted, “Surtvitnir! Stand away!” And the giant snarled, belching smoke, and moved back perhaps a foot from the windows, but did not lower his torch. The burning bludgeon waited, the size of a tree, still poised to smash into the room.

  Azrael said, “Bromion, why did you not render these here thunderstruck and dazed?”

  The storm-prince answered in a soft voice, smooth and silky:

  “Know the archangel Uriel, regent of the Sun, was here. Angelic footsteps sanctify; and sacred precincts we spirits go not near.”

  Azrael tapped his staff to the floorboards, and when he let go of it, inexplicably, it did not fall, but stood.

  Wendy had fallen, and the unicorn horn still was tucked into her skirt. Azrael stepped forward, kicking seals aside, to where she was.

  For a moment he stared down at her. Raven, watching with paralyzed eyes, could do nothing.

  Careful to avoid the touch of the fallen Moly Wand, Azrael picked up Wendy with arms around her shoulder and legs, the way a man might carry his bride.

  Azrael stepped out onto the balcony and held her over the drop.

  “I have said I would cast you from this high place if you did not yield Clavargent to me; nor do I lie.”

  He put one arm about her waist and dropped her legs so that all her weight was supported in one hand.

  At this same moment, Raven saw a tiny figure drop down from the roofbeam to the Moly Wand.

  Azrael said: “Somnus! Unchain her limbs!” And to Wendy he said: “Now draw forth the Silver Key from your skirt and put it in my hand!”

  “Lassy! Catch!” The Moly Wand flew across space; Wendy caught it; she swatted Azrael across the face.

  Immediately his hand turned to flaccid white leather; his face became a hood made of Galen’s skin; his boyish features fell away like a cloak, revealing the tall, dark, majestic man beneath; hawknosed, with grim lines deeply graven about his mouth; his eyes were dark and cruel, and his hair was dark as well except where age had left white streaks above his temples. He stood up, a foot taller than Galen, and his clothes ripped to tatters across his shoulders and down his legs.