Alabaster

"Please," she says, "if there's another way," and from the other side of the door there are sounds like small claws against the dry wood and a woman's nervous laughter, and Dancy squeezes her eyes shut.

"I don't have to do this," she says, trying to ignore the noises coming from the church. "There must be somebody else besides me, somebody stronger or older or more-"

Something slams itself hard against the inside of the door, and Dancy screams as the carving knife slips from her sweaty fingers-

– and the church doors splinter and burst open, unleashing a gout of freezing, oily blackness that flows down the cinderblock steps towards her. Darkness that's not merely the absence of light, but a darkness so absolute that only in passing has it even dared to imagine the possibility of light, darkness become a living force possessed of intellect and hate, memory and appetite. It surges greedily around Dancy's legs, stickier than roofing pitch, tighter than steel jaws about her calves, and in a moment more it has begun to drag her towards the open doorway-

– and Dancy catches the knife in the last second before it strikes the cinderblock steps, and she shakes off the deception, nothing but some unguarded scrap of childhood fear turned against her. She glances over her left shoulder, wondering if the angel's hiding itself somewhere in the trees, if it's watching just in case she needs help.

You never needed anyone's help before, her dead mother whispers. That night at the creek, the night it dragged me down to the deep place, or that day in the Wood, you didn't need anyone's help with the first two.

"With those first two, I had the shotgun," Dancy tells her, which is the truth, and she wishes that she'd thought to take her grandfather's Winchester out of the cabin in Shrove Wood before she burned it to the ground.

It wasn't the shotgun killed them, her mother whispers, her voice like someone who's trying to drown and talk at the same time.

"It helped, I reckon," Dancy says. "It was better than having nothing but this old knife. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not even very sharp anymore."

This time her mother doesn't bother to answer, so Dancy knows that she's alone again, no murdered ghosts and no vengeful angels, and so it's time; she takes a deep breath and stares at the doors to the old church, the peeling white paint and the symbols that have been put there to keep her out. Then Dancy uses the tip of the knife to cut something invisible into the air, something like the sign of the cross, only there are more lines and angles to it. She does it exactly the way the angel said to, her own secret magic to undo all the monsters' hexes, and then the albino girl climbs the last two steps and reaches for one of the rusted iron door handles. She isn't surprised that the door isn't locked.

II. The Retreat to Kearvan Weal

"It was lunacy to bring her here," snarls the Glaistig, Queen Consort to the King of Immolations, and then she bares her teeth and stamps angrily at the rough stone floor of the hall with her goatish hooves. There's still blood in her tangled ash-blonde hair, bloodstains on her long green gown and a few spatters drying on her face. It might only be her own blood, the vampire woman named Selwith Tinker thinks, or it might be the blood of the Glaistig's defeated King. Either way, it hardly seems to matter now.

"Then tell me, my Lady, where would you have had us take it?" Selwith snarls back, staring the Glaistig directly in her simmering yellow eyes, and never mind propriety or inevitable recriminations or the Glaistig's celebrated temper. A nervous murmur begins at one end of the long hall and moves to and fro through the press of bodies, passed from one to another of the creatures who have crowded into the deep rift near the roiling, molten heart of the world. The ragged handful of captains and corporals and sergeants of the Dragon's army who have somehow survived the Weaver's latest and boldest assault upon the Dog's Bridge, all the leathery wings and skittering, jointed legs, the spiderkin and troll wives, the werewolves and demons and sloe-eyed wraith folk. The lucky ones who lived long enough to be driven back by the silver shields and lances of white light, who fled like midnight before an untimely dawn, racing one another across the hublands, over glistening lava fields and dry calderas, through ash storms and oil marshes and steam to the black dunes and beyond, past the shattered foothills and into the deep mountain passes, coming finally to the ancient gates of the Dragon's hall at Kearvan Weal. Now, as one, they cringe and draw back from the Glaistig and Selwith Tinker, from the broken but not yet dead thing lying on the floor between them.

The Queen Consort narrows her eyes and licks at her thin, pale lips. "Should I think you wondrous brave, vampire, for dragging this filth into our last sanctuary? Did you expect there might be some reward for your fatuous audacity? The Weaver's Arch Seraph, and you bring it still breathing here amongst us."

"And I say to you again," Selwith replies, baring her own teeth, her razor canines and incisors, and she leans nearer the Glaistig, "where would you have had me take her?"

"Why is it still living?" the Glaistig asks and kicks viciously at the unconscious form sprawled between them. "That, my dear witless Selwith, is the question which I would put to you in this hour. Why, by all that burns, is this abomination still drawing air? Why have you not divided its wings from its shoulder blades and its head from off its throat?"

Selwith Tinker smiles and takes one step back, then bows her head as she unsheathes her sword and holds it out to the Queen Consort. "Perhaps," she says, "it's only that I had no desire to rob my glorious Lady, newly widowed and so freshly come down from her tower into this war, of the honour of sealing all our fates. Take my own blade, my Queen, and deliver the whole world into the arms of the Weaver."

"Don't mock me," the Glaistig growls, and the folds of her gown shift and flutter furiously. "Whatever favor you may have wrestled from my husband, do not consider it handed down to me."

"I wouldn't dare, my Lady, neither his good favor nor his knowledge of our enemies."

The Glaistig snorts and turns to address one of her court ministers, a tall man in vestments the color of embers and smoke. "What is this fool saying, Bartolomei?"

The minister frowns and glances anxiously from the Queen Consort to the fallen Seraph and back again to the Glaistig. He swallows and clears his throat. When he speaks, Selwith can hear the fear in his voice.

"This is indeed a very delicate matter, your Grace. The Weaver has invested her most terrible magics in the creation of these beings, these fiends that she's set against us. They ca

"Please, my Lady," Selwith persists, speaking loud enough that she knows everyone and everything in the hall will hear her. "Honor me this day by striking the death blow with my humble, undeserving-"

"Silence," the minister hisses and snatches the vampire's weapon from her hands. There's a dim, hesitant titter of laughter from somewhere in the crowd which the Glaistig's minister immediately stifles by rapping the butt-end of his staff sharply against the paving stones. "By this childish impudence, you hazard your own undoing, Captain Selwith," he sneers, and a moment later, the sword dissolves into wisps of iron-scented vapor that are quickly scattered by the hot wind blowing through the hall.