io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “We Will Bring Siege to the Bastion of Sin that Cries Out in Your Prayer” by Hammond Diehl. Enjoy!
We Will Bring Siege to the Bastion of Sin that Cries Out in Your Prayer By Hammond Diehl
You revere your patron saints. Your Marys. Your Joans. Your Catherines. You should fear them.
If one ever heeds your prayer, and she arrives stripped of skin, of fingernails, of every organ and every last fuck to give, her halo a boiling crown of furious yellow flames, demanding you bolster up her body with the bones of the burned, the gutted, the girls: Be ready.
You summoned her. You must be ready to deal with the consequences.
You’ll lie to yourself, that you were only begging for guidance, for strength. You’ll lie to the media afterward. You’ll lie to the doctors and nurses as you squirm in your hospital bed, blind—temporarily, you hope—as they pump you full of substances that feel like grace in your veins.
Not this.
Not.
This.
This isn’t what you wanted at all.
You may believe the lie. They may believe the lie.
But she knew the truth the moment she heard your invocation. And if you’re smart, you’ll accept it.
You’ll have a better likelihood of surviving the war.
The one you prayed for.
****
She introduced herself with the two good teeth she still had left in her skull. Ground them right into my left forearm. Later she’d say that she’d tried to shake me first. I’m not sure I believe her.
It was hard to miss her, even in the early-morning gloom of my bedroom. Her crown of fire must’ve burned a foot high. That’s what halos really are, in case you have catechism next Sunday and want to dazzle someone with the truth. I wouldn’t recommend looking directly into one. Certainly not once it reaches its full potential.
Girl, she said. You called me.
She was speaking directly into my head. Which was good. My parents do not sleep soundly.
No, I responded wordlessly. Or was this the first lie I told myself? I’d just had a dream, a vision. The good saint . . . who was it, again? Panic robbed me of language.
You showed me the rampart of sin, she said. Built of the flesh of man. I will bring siege to it as you asked. You will fetch me a shirt of chain, and a flail of thorns, and a destrier hardy enough to lead a charge through a thousand screaming pikemen.
I’d risen by now, eyes never leaving her, bare feet inching away toward the bedroom door, away from her—it, a four-foot-tall skeleton, standing impossibly upright, between me and the second-floor window that she’d inexplicably breached.
I don’t have any armor, I managed. Then I ran to my bedroom wastebasket and vomited. The sun was just starting to peek through the curtains.
She stared at me through black sockets.
How many matins in a row, now?
You see inside my body as well as my mind.
A holy light shows all.
So you . . . see my situation.
I see what you need. Now, my armor. My weapon. My horse. Bring them to me.
I didn’t ask why, like a sane person would. I said what I did have, which was $10, a very used truck, and just enough scholarship money to put me through a single year at the diploma mill down the turnpike.
Resolved, the saint said. I shall wear no armor but the mantle of God.
But, I say from my head, all I need is some gas money. They shot the doctor at the clinic down the road, so I just need enough juice to get to the next one. It’s the next state over, but the ride’s not too bad.
Show me this clinic “down the road.” In thy mind.
I closed my eyes and concentrated, wondering, around the edges, what language this saint had spoken in life.
The medica has indeed gone to God.
I sat on my bed.
Yup, I thought to the bones.
Projectiles.
Mmm hmmm.
The saint clacked up to me on timeworn toes. She bid me to get dressed, to pack lightly. I followed her orders. Then she climbed onto my back, and we crept downstairs, through a living room with couches mummified in plastic coverings and walls choked with novenas. Christ hung on a foot-high cross over the mantle. He looked exhausted.
We snuck outside, bundled my things into the truck. She inspected it like a general.
We will find the bastion of sin that cries out in your prayer, she said. And we will bring siege to it.
What bastion of sin? I thought to her.
She ignored me.
But first, I will need more bones.
****
Penitents make pilgrimages to see their saints. They plot their routes in neat lines, so as not to disturb that godly sense of order that makes the angels smile.
Saints make their own pilgrimages. Those routes, we can’t see. My saint’s path made sense only to her.
She rode shotgun, wagging her antique-white fingers toward this highway exit or that. In Ohio, we snuck into the Maria Stein Shrine of the Holy Relics and borrowed a femur from a St. Victoria, tortured to death in a North African prison. In Louisiana, we liberated a crowbar from a junkyard. The dogs there lowered their eyes at our approach.
Be this a sword? my saint said.
I couldn’t help it. I chuckled.
A matching sound seeped out of her, from the spaces between the disks at the nape of her neck. It made my condescending laugh sound like a croak.
Next day, my saint brandished the crowbar as we burst into the Church of St. Joseph. A certain St. Valerie awaited us under a canopy of glass and gilded copper. Valerie lent us a spare arm—all that was left of her after her beating at the hands of Roman soldiers.
Where did you come from? I asked my saint somewhere along the Floribama line. By then we’d picked up a passenger, a twelve-year-old girl whose father had thrown beer cans at us as she scurried into the back seat and begged us to go,