Alabaster

"You will not speak," Kenzia says to the alchemist, and the tone in her voice is enough to prevent him from even asking why. The red witch closes her eyes a moment, then opens them and glances up at the naked woman standing alone on the table.

"We ask nothing of you, daughter, that you have not already pledged," Pikabo Kenzia says, then looks down at the dagger in her hands. "You are brave, and you will shame us all with your forfeiture. By your sacrifice might this world be saved. By your grace and willing death, might others live."

And if he were not now too afraid to move, Alundshaw would join the rest and damn his mistrust and the Glaistig's suspicions. Well, I can shut my eyes, he thinks. If nothing else, I can at least shut my eyes.

"The body of woman is like a flash of lightning," Kenzia says, "existing only to return to nothingness. Like the summer growth that shrivels in winter. Waste thee no thought on the process, for it has no purpose, coming and going like dew."

I can shut my eyes.

And the floor rumbles again.

"Like a wall, a woman's body constantly stands on the verge of collapse," Pikabo Kenzia continues, speaking faster now, as if she's afraid there won't be time to finish. "And still and always, the world buzzes on like angry bees. Let it come and go, appear and vanish, for what have we to lose?"

The woman on the table spreads her arms wide, as if in welcome, and Alundshaw can see that there are tears in her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks. Pikabo Kenzia leans towards the fire pit and drops the Seraph's feather into the flames. For only an instant, the fire burns a brilliant, exquisite blue, and the chamber is filled with the screeching of eagles and a blistering wind that reeks of gunpowder and battlefield carrion.

Don't watch it, Alundshaw thinks, his mind gone desperate and wild. Don't see what's coming, but he can't seem to remember how to shut his eyes.

The awful grinding sound comes again, and this time bits of masonry are shaken free of the walls and the stone table wobbles.

"Leave this place forever, you murdering son of a whore," the red witch growls and swings her black dagger around, slicing her companion's belly open. "Be gone, and take all your foul brethen with you!" Ezcha's blood spills into the sluice, and hisses when it reaches the fire. She screams, and the second time Pikabo Kenzia's blade sinks deep into the younger witch's gut, the alchemist finally finds the will to close his eyes.

XI. The Dirty Work of Angels

The shadows gathered in the old church on Dry Creek Road have kept Dancy busy for the better part of an hour. Rushing her suddenly from behind, their not-quite insubstantial fingers tearing at her shabby clothes or snatching strands of her white hair, then darting away to safety again. They've taunted and jeered and mocked, hurled threats and mildewed hymnals, and they've promised her, again and again, that she won't live to see another sunrise. There are scratches on her arms and face, the best they can manage with their shadow claws and teeth, a few drops of blood to whet their appetites for what's to come. They've backed Dancy all the way down the narrow aisle to the pulpit, where she stands with her back to the altar, her carving knife held out and glinting faintly by the unsteady glow of their will-o'-the-wisp eyes. She's noticed that their eyes have gotten a lot brighter, as if tormenting her has stoked some furnace hidden within them.

"Would you run, child, if you could?" the wolf-woman shade asks Dancy, and then, addressing all the others-"Brothers and sisters, if we took pity on this poor, misguided ragamuffin and let her leave now, would she even have the good sense to go, before Elandrion gets here?"

For an answer, there are ugly gales of laughter, hoots and whoops and uproarious fits of giggling.

"Do what you like," Dancy tells them. "I'm not going anywhere until I've done what I came here do to." But this only makes the shadows laugh that much louder.

"Oh, little girl," the wolf-woman shade snorts, "you're so preciously earnest. Such a stalwart little urchin, you are. It's a crying shame there's just the one of you. A pity you won't last longer. If only we could bottle you, I dare say none of us would ever go hungry again."

And then Dancy hears something behind her, and she looks over her right shoulder to see the monster glaring down at her from the pulpit. Its gnarled fingers grip the edges of the lectern, fingers that end in sickle talons, and they sink into the rotten wood as though it were clay.

"You're Elandrion?" Dancy asks it, turning to face the monster, and it grins and stands up straighter, though its bandy hind legs and thorny, crooked spine hardly seem suited to standing upright at all. It's so tall that its head almost scrapes against the sagging sheetrock a good ten or twelve feet above her.

"That's not my name," the monster replies. "I let them call me that, but you, you should know better than to believe I have a name." And Dancy thinks the monster's rheumy mud and blackwater voice must be the very soul of the swamp, this swamp and every other swamp and bog, every single marsh and slough that has ever been since the first morning of Creation, the creeping, impenetrable spirit of every quagmire and bayou and bottomless, peat-stained lake. Since the days of dinosaurs and screeching pterodactyls and dragonflies big as herons, this thing must have lain waiting for her in the wet places of the world, biding its time, murmuring her name in its sleep.

It's too much for me, she thinks, but Dancy knows her angel believes otherwise and has no intention of coming for her until the monster's dead.

"Am I?" it asks, feigning disappointment, and the monster grins even wider than before. "But I've heard so many stories. All the birds know your name. The birds, they think you're the goddamn Second Coming or something. Yeah, they tweet and twitter and squawk your name just like you're the bloody Virgin Mary her own damn self, come down from Paradise to put matters right."

Dancy backs slowly away from the thing behind the pulpit, sparing a quick glance at the shadows. They've all fallen silent now, but have moved in closer to her. They loom up around her, stretching themselves tall and thin, made bolder by the monster's words, by the sight and stench and sound of it.

"No, you're something special," the monster says, and it's wide, unblinking eyes remind Dancy of hardboiled eggs-no pupils or irises in there, just those two bulging white balls poking out below its scaly brow. They loll lifelessly from one side to the other as it speaks and leak viscous rivulets into the hair sprouting from its gaunt cheeks.

"I remember one like you, long time ago, five hundred fucking years if it's a day. A red Indian boy, but I don't recollect what they called him. He came looking for me, too. Thought he was toiling for the gods, just like you. I still got a few of his teeth stuck up under a rock somewhere."

"I didn't walk all the way out here just to listen to you talk," Dancy says, gripping the knife as tightly as she can and wishing again that it were her grandfather's Winchester shotgun, instead. The monster stops gri

"No, I reckon not," it snarls, and she can feel its voice rattling about inside her chest. Dancy thinks it's probably some sort of miracle her heart's still beating after the force of those four words inside her.

"You come here to lay me low," the monster says, "to show me what for and make the night safe for decent folks, ain't that about right."

"Something like that," Dancy tells the monster the shadows call Elandrion, the thing her angel had no name for. It flares its nostrils and sniffs the air around her.