Lady of the Black Irons

In the end, Man destroyed the heavens and the earth.

Man said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. It fell from the heavens and rose in mighty plumes and consumed the earth in fire, and a great poison swept across land and sea.

And on that final day, Man ended his work which he had made. 

Thus did Man destroy nearly every living thing that moveth, and shroud the earth from the firmament, so that day and night were as one.

And when the age of silence had passed and the earth had shed its poison, the ancient abominations – which God did not intend to let walk upon the earth – crawled back from the shadows to grasp at the seat of dominion.

-Terminus 1:1-3, 4:6-7, Book of the New Dawn

***

A lone huntress swept her binoculars across the horizon and found her mark: the dark geometries of a distant village that spread its bones under a dust-blown aluminum sky. Amid the camps and ruins stood a great stone church that seemed to have survived the end of the old world.

“There you are,” she said. She lowered the binoculars and listened. Death, that dauntless pilgrim who followed ever at her heels, seemed to whisper to her in the wailing wind, calling on her like an old promise. 

The desert stretched enormous before her, a featureless sea of hardpan and whirling sand. There had been a highway here once. Half-buried, rust-eaten husks of automobiles sprayed across the wasteland like the forgotten toys of some puerile giant. She’d stopped at each of them to dismount her horse and rummage through their remains for provisions. One yielded a can of beans two days back. Nothing since.

Asha Moriscant stroked the horse’s neck and looked up at the waning sun, its needles pinwheeling behind the wet of her strange eyes. The horse grunted, his stride slow and labored. Two hours until sundown. Two hours until the biting cold would creep across the land and surrender its weight upon them like a man’s height of earth atop a coffin lid.

Would there be food before the cold found them? Her prolonged fasting during her days as an apprentice Warden at the Temple had prepared her, but the horse didn’t share the fruits of her training. He would need to eat, and soon. She’d not given the horse a name when she’d traded for him back in Broken Hill. Naming a thing made it dear to the heart, and this skinny old nag wasn’t long for the world even then.

Asha was a young woman, one who might only have just become a mother in the traditions of her people, but still her girlhood was far behind her, an antiquated thing that seemed lifetimes ago. The Lady of the Black Irons, as Asha was called by her people, had not been girlish even in her small years. The upbringing of her kind was joyless and unforgiving: the ancient arts of war, subterfuge, alchemy. Training, research, discipline. These were all she knew until the day she was finally given her guns and named a Warden.

It had been so for generations uncounted, since before the Judgment had struck the world in the time of her father’s fathers. Her body was young, but her keen eyes and hard heart bore the old wisdom of her station and the weight of her duty.

Her dress was that of the fighter-folk in this part of the world: pistoleros, horse herders, caravan guards. She wore a short duster over an ashen vest and shirt, open at the collar and rolled to the elbows. One boot concealed a strapped shiv that had killed four men and a woman in its time. The hood of her cloak kept her rough shag of hair from her face and concealed her telltale eyes from wanderers on the road. 

Twin bandoliers crossed at her chest and her gun belts crossed at her hips, oiled brown leather holsters resting on her thighs. Within were the black steel pistols of the Temple, after which she was monikered. Inlaid with ornate vinework of Thracian gold, they were crafted especially for her hands by the priest-smithies in the meticulous tradition of the Temple forebears, whose dogma had reawakened when the Judgment loosed the old fiends upon the world. She would die with these pistols in her hands, and not before long, she reckoned. Her kind were known to live long and fell many darklings in their time, but they're ever shorter lived in this new world – a world that went gray when Man bridled the Atom and summoned ruin from the sky.

Night fell, and the horse collapsed while she made camp. She did what she could to give him comfort, and then stroked his face, cooing softly. “Thank you, friend,” she said. “Thank you for your company and for the gift of your flesh. You’ve done more good than you know, and you may well have saved my life.”

She ended his suffering. The pistol crack cleaved through the perfect silence of the indifferent night, and was gone.

Asha cleaned what she could of the meat and roasted it at her campfire. She ate, staring into the flames and warming herself with memories of her triumph at Red Ridge.

When she'd left the town, the people had bowed and offered gifts. They’d danced and laughed in their great hall, and a troubadour sang of Asha’s coming:

“—A knightly maiden fair was she,

Who raised us up from shattered knee.

And with her guns, whose aim was true,

The devils of the land she slew.”

They had called her a hero, but they knew nothing of her. The things she’d done. She did once carry the Flame in her breast, but it had been extinguished over long, gruesome years of horror and violence. Still, she knew that tales of heroes ferried hope across the wastes just as dust carries on the wind, and so she let them believe. One look at her face was enough for those who knew of her kind: Asha’s disquieting eyes swam with golden fire, as had those of her father, and all of their sires who came before. 

At the Temple, she was taught that there were seedlings of truth in the ancient myths: that long ago, gods and monsters did indeed rule over earth and sea, but that mankind’s unchecked prosperity had chased them into the dark corners of the world. Asha’s kin – Clan Moriscant, exorcist-knights and witch hunters – had stood sentinel for ages untold, soldiers in a clandestine war against the monstrous devourers of Men.

Now, after the nuclear Judgment and the Long Quiet that followed, humankind has rekindled, but its numbers are few, and its enemies unafraid.

Asha arrived by morning. The town of Luro was a ragged patchwork of shanties and huts, but for the great stone church at its center, before which she now stood. It cast long shadows in the morning sun. For a moment, she saw it as the townsfolk of Luro must have seen it: a lovely thing, a symbol of hope. A survivor of the Judgment, standing tall and grand in the new world that mankind was slowly building, brick by brick and life by life.

She put her hand on the door and could sense the calamity that waited within. Her heart quickened. She closed her eyes and whispered the words that had forged her into what she was: 

“I am the bulwark that holds back the tide. With my body, I will shield mankind from black waters. I am the blade that cleaveth the root of evil. With my hand, I will smite those who threaten the innocent. I am the Flame that scours the darkness. With my life, I will purge the Shadow from this world. I am a Warden, and this is my vow.”

Her heart calmed, and she flung the great doors open and entered.

“—That we may walk in the grace of our Holy Mother,” an old priest was sermonizing, “and remain in Her favor until we meet Her on Her throne in the Glorious Kingdom.”

The doors banged shut behind Asha, and a dozen faces turned from the pews to regard her. They wore the same desperation that she had seen time and again in the years that she wore her gun belts. They clung to the hope of community, of survival for their children, and religion would warm their hearts as liquor curbs a weak man’s troubles.

“Ah,” the priest said, gesturing at her, smiling, “another of our Mother’s children has come to hear the Word. Come, come. You're most welcome. Comfort yourself by the warmth of the Holy Flame.” His voice was honeyed brandy. 

Asha looked upon the faces of the congregation. “Ladies, sirs,” her words echoed off the stone. “Leave. Now.”

“Beg pardon,” a ragged man said, standing, “but this is—”

The thunderclap of Asha’s revolver boomed in the church vaults, and shards of a stained glass window fell in a spray of colored rain. Someone screamed, and the churchgoers got to their feet and fled at once, shouldering past Asha down the center aisle. She let them pass, eyeing the priest. The doors slammed shut behind the last of them, and all was quiet.

The priest took a step back, aghast, showing his palms.

“Well,” Asha said, “alone at last, eh?”

“What is the meaning of this?” the priest stammered. “Please, sheathe your weapon! This is a house of God!”

“God,” she said, studying him. “I’m sure they think so,” flicking her head toward the door. “You’ve seen to that, haven’t you?”

“You’ll find no coin here,” the priest said. “Collections are only taken on Moonsday. Luro is a poor village. We want no trouble with you, wanderer. Please, go in peace.”

Asha smiled darkly. “Coin. No, you’ve no need for such earthly trifles. You deal in damnation.”

“And salvation,” he said. He spread his hands and offered a grandfatherly smile of such saccharine sympathy that it might have broken a lesser heart. “Whatever you’ve done, you are not beyond the Mother’s mercy. Now, please.”

Asha stepped forward. “Hang your illusions, fiend. You and your master are unwelcome in this world.” She pulled back her hood and flung her cloak to the ground beside her.

The priest stared, unbelieving. “Your eyes,” he managed. Grim understanding and a swell of fear broke across his face. “I see. Then the bloodline endures.” He turned his back to her. “Most troubling.”

“I’ve been looking for you, Thaeaj,” Asha said. “Long and far have I walked, for many years, and many more.”

The priest’s shoulders hitched with his laughter, deep and cold and piqued with malice. “And found me you have, young fool.” His voice was forged anew: resolute, powerful. A liar’s voice; a murderer’s. Asha had known many and more of both. “You should not have come, Warden,” he turned and regarded her with wild eyes, long teeth shining behind a sly grin. “And you have come alone?” He shook his head and spoke with playful disappointment: “Folly. Where are your armies? Where are the proud banners and high parapets of House Moriscant?”

The priest’s face was as a wax mask now, an inert thing that cracked and bulged as the bones beneath shifted into a lunatic caricature. A scarab scuttled from underneath his vestments.

“Dust!” he spat. “Ash in the fallow fields of a world that was. Your time is done, savior.”

“I remain,” she said. “That is enough.”

“Oh?” the priest cackled. “We shall see.” His eyes peeled shut and rolled behind their lids, and he spoke in a deadened chant, words of power that were ancient when the earth was yet unformed: “Loth uundor imhphalaej. Loth beealuh vaedaehhret.”

“Yes,” Asha said, “say your words. Pray. It won’t avail you now. You and I both know that your god is not the forgiving kind.”

The priest’s eyes snapped open, huge orbs swirling with inky fathoms. He brayed laughter. Beetles and bulbous spiders dashed from beneath his collar across the skin of his face, which whitened and split as a chitinous form began to pierce through. “But what is there to forgive? You are too late, child. They have taken the sacrament.”

An icy wince stole into Asha’s guts. There would be dark work in the village of Luro this day.

“Soon,” the thing boomed, its human vessel sloughing into a flaccid, bloody pile on the stone floor, “their bellies will burst, and from their flesh shall spill the thousand-eyed children of our sweet Mother! Time-Eater! Beloved consort of the Worm!” 

Its guise abandoned, the mad djinn Thaeaj, Lord of Lies, towered enormous atop its flailing skirts of tentacles. Its horned carapace shone with slime and the red gore of its shed man-skin. Rows of multitudinous eyes rolled madly and found Asha, and its mouths hissed and clicked with the voice of swarms.

“Then the afflicted will be purged,” Asha said, drawing her revolvers, “but not before you.”

“No, heretic!” the monster screamed, “You will be delivered unto the Mother!” It thrust a long, barbed finger at her, its tentacles whipping and writhing wildly, roaches and carrion worms spewing from its orifices in ebon waves. “You will sup of her milk and your blood will writhe with the eager seedlings of her waiting young!”

“Come then,” Asha leveled her pistols, “and die for Mother.”

The colossal thing shrieked and threw itself at her, whirling.  

Asha’s guns boomed as she flung herself sidelong, a massive tentacle splintering the pews where she had stood. Bullets ripped through a battery of eyes, a spray of violet gore dashing against the monster’s skull. She landed on her shoulder and rolled behind a pillar. The djinn’s shrieks rattled the church windows. 

Asha flicked her wrists and emptied the cylinders. Her hands flashed to her bandolier and the chambers were loaded anew, the process as quick and effortless as a breath. She crouched and launched herself forward as a tentacle swept blindly at her and slammed through the shaft of the pillar behind her. She watched as great chunks of rock crashed upon the church floor. The entirety of the place seemed to groan around her.

That was it, then: Blind, the monster would forge its own tomb of the church stone.

Asha dashed forward, strafing the flailing creature and emptying the smoking chambers of her black irons into the clumped and weeping pustules that nested its remaining eyes. Her shots were true, and explosive gouts of ropy fluid erupted to paint the ruined pews with black viscera.

Thrashing and shrieking, the monster reared up on its hindlimbs to reveal a sprawling chaos of gelatinous egg sacs barnacled to its soft underbelly. They wriggled with violent life, and then burst before Asha’s bullets could find them. The buzz of the swarm became the world, drowning even the djinn’s nightmarish screams, and great flights of insects flooded toward Asha’s face.

She was prepared. In a fluid motion she holstered a pistol, dipped into a pouch on her belt, and flung a cloud of pale powder in front of her, then another. The neurotoxin was homebrewed, and would kill a man within a day, but she’d spent long years dosing herself, building immunity. The swarm around her jiggered and fell, and threatening waves of the things ebbed away from her and back into the folds of the djinn’s honeycombed undercarriage.

The stone dust and the toxin powder and the creature’s noisome gas were thick and stifling, and Asha squinted against them, trying to get her bearings. Then, all at once, everything stilled.

Danger. Her feet launched her backward, but too late. A wicked raptorial foreleg came flying out of the dust and slammed her across the chest, sending her sailing. She crashed bodily into a rubble of pews, and for a moment, she was lost. Her hand automatically went to the sheath at her backside and came slicing forward in a great wing as a tentacle fell toward her throat. The blade of her kukri whistled through it, and the stump convulsed and retreated into the dust.

She stood, her chest an electric maze of pain. Broken ribs. But no time. Her boots carried her over tumbled stone and splintered wood and throngs of scuttling insects. She circled the demon, firing volleys, her footfalls sure in her battle-dance. She settled behind the pillar nearest the great double doors and crouched, reloading.

The voice that issued from the once-great djinn was desperate, terrified, sucking wetly at the air and heaving up strings of black foulness from its mouths. She had heard it before from Thaeaj’s kin. Though each was a singular monstrosity, they sounded quite the same when engulfed by the fear of failing their masters.

Asha eyed the doors, then stood and fired a single shot into the demon’s bulk. It shrieked and spun on her, whipping its tentacles forward and thrashing the pillar to the ground. As the keystones sighed and fell, Asha sprinted down the center aisle, aimed her shoulder at the double doors and barreled through them, rotted splinters needling red constellations into her cheeks.

She rolled onto the hardpan and into the sunlight as the church vaults crashed and thundered behind her, burying the demon Thaeaj and its venomous young. A great nova of dust blasted from the ruin, and Asha loaded her guns in the swirling grit.

She stood, waiting, listening. Hot pain throbbed in her chest. The desert wind howled. 

At last she heard them: the insectile shrieks of the Mother's newborn children. The humanoid forms of the townsfolk emerged from the outskirts like towers in the fog, shambling toward her, their eyes shining with a mad hunger that she knew well. One of them screamed at her, blow flies spilling from its mouth and twisting in the dust.

Asha closed her eyes, mouthed a prayer in the old tongue, and set about her work.