Valkyrie, Chapter I: Ursula

Ursula, as she had recently begun to call herself in the uneasy privacy of her thoughts, stood facing the wind on the quarter deck of the messenger ship Musk Ox, the thrum of the slab-sided ship’s stormlord engine reverberating through the steel beneath her boots. A flock of starlings wheeled and circled off the ship’s port rail. Below, the farmland of the Verangian border lay spread out in tidy squares belted with stone walls and strips of uncleared forest. The countryside was so quiet, nothing like the roar and clamor of Lundheim or the rattling horror of the western front. The silence made it hard to sleep at night. 

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Major Schroeder had come up on her unawares, his footsteps obscured by the engine’s rumble. His bald pate and the wolf’s head pins at his uniform collar glinted in the fading sunlight as he leaned back against the rail and folded his sinewy arms. 

Ursula tucked her chin against her chest to hide her blush. “Yes, sir.”

“The rail lines are already being built, the farms and herds handed over to our settlers,” said the major. “We’re going to rebuild this country into something our people can be proud of.” He was silent for a long while. The wind whistled over the deck. It was getting cold.

“I’ve heard your father’s set to be provincial governor.”

Ursula gripped the rail harder, her knuckles whitening. A sour taste filled her mouth.

“He must be proud to have such a decorated son. Sixteen confirmed kills. Awarded the Imperial Aegis at twenty-six.”

She could still taste the lipstick, waxy and sweet. She could still feel cool silk on her shoulders. Stand up. I’m going to show you how to be a man.

“Maybe you’ll let him know who taught you how to fly.”

Ursula forced a smile. “Consider it done.”

“Good man,” said Schroeder, baring his teeth. “I’m mustering out once the fighting’s done. A government post would mean a little security in my declining years…”

The knot in Ursula’s stomach drew tighter. Her palms were slick on the cooling steel of the rail. The ragged shadow of a cloud swept quick over the deck. “We all want to be safe,” she said, forcing the words out. Her mouth was dry. The sour taste had returned. “That’s why we fought. So we can be ourselves.” She met his gaze and found it steady. Her pulse fluttered. “Do you ever-”

He was gone. There was blood all down her front. The rail where he’d stood was twisted and torn and the deck was scarred and her ears rang with a high, whining shiver. Blood covered her right palm where a chunk of shrapnel had torn it open. Something roared past, the sound of it muted, and she whipped about to follow it and saw what was left of the major flopping a few yards away, a tangle of pulped flesh and shredded fabric, a single blue eye staring fixed and wild from a mask of bloody muscle. Ursula choked back vomit as the dull thump of machine gun fire cut through the ringing in her ears. A pair of fighter planes, Verangian-made Khussers, dove by off the Musk Ox’s starboard side. 

Ursula tore her eyes from major’s remains and put him out of her mind, crushing the thought as small as she could make it. How’d they get so close? Radar should have nailed them miles out. More machine gun fire rattled against the messenger ship’s hull. The deck tilted beneath her feet as the Musk Ox banked. The ship’s smokestacks coughed black banners as she began to pick up speed. It doesn’t matter. 

She braced herself against the rail, fixing the hatch that led down belowdecks in her sights. Get to your plane. Now. Before they shoot the Ox out of the sky and this whole mission goes tits up out of nowhere, and it doesn’t matter who you were or weren’t or could have been.

The roar of propellers built as the Khussers came around for another pass. Their machine guns were already chattering, tracers flaring white in the gathering shadow of sunset.

It doesn’t matter.

She didn’t think of what she’d been about to tell the major. She didn’t think about his single eye rolling mad and blue in the ruin of his skull. She didn’t think about the stretch of deck between her and the hatch, or the fighters howling toward her.

Just get to the plane.

She let go of the rail. Gunfire thundered, ripping into the deck and filling the air with sparks and flying shrapnel. 

She ran.

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“They’ve been up a long time,” fretted Saskia, plucking at a loose thread on her cuff. From the mountain road she watched the fighters trail after the Rastish messenger ship like gnats circling a sow, all miles away over farmland and pasturage. Tracer rounds flickered white in the distance around the airship’s rectangular bulk, throwing thin shadows over its gunmetal hull. One plane was trailing smoke. She could feel its pilot’s furious irritation, a staticky whine chewing at the edges of her thoughts. She’d raised that one herself.

“Wights are unreliable, and those fighters are old.” A dry, wheezing chuckle came from the coffin strapped to the bed of the truck she stood beside, an old Rastish Royal with rusted panels and patched tires. “You should have waited for me.”

“Sunset’s not for sixteen minutes.” Stanislav, seated on the hood of the truck, cleared his throat noisily and spat phlegm into his handkerchief. His horned head dipped as he inspected the result. “Saskia knows what she’s doing.”

“Say that again when they’ve wasted our fuel, spent our ammunition, and lost a week’s hard necromancy with nothing to show for it.”

“Quiet,” said Stanislav. He gave Saskia an encouraging smile. 

Saskia’s heart fluttered. She knew the old changeling would never think of her that way, would never lower himself to fucking a student, much less a fat, ugly one whose merchant-class parents had fled to Rastlund just before the war. His praise still made her blush, though. More than blush. At night, when you’re alone… She stopped herself. Better to stay clear-headed, to keep her attention on the moment. High command wanted the Musk Ox shot down and its cargo hauled back to Udarest, so that’s what mattered. Mapmaker’s cunt, I’m sweating like a troll in summer. She wiped her damp palms on her sides, the heels of her hands sinking into the soft, yielding flesh of her hips. Her belly hung in a generous crescent to just below the tops of her thighs, which tapered down to dimpled knees and skinny calves. 

Thoughts of her body felt like thoughts of death. She racked her mental catalog of spells for one that might at least make her feel less helpless, knowing even as she did that there was nothing. Transmute earth to water. Purify water. Conjure witchlight. Cut shadow. Conjure image. A heap of curiosities and party tricks, her slender necromantic talents already wrapped up in the hissing knot of salvaged consciousness she’d forced into the wight. 

I wish that I could reach out and pluck it from the sky, she thought. I wish that I could crush it in my fist.

A pair of fighters dropped like stones out of the messenger ship’s belly, noses down. One pulled up hard and leveled out too slow. Two wights converged on it, streams of machine gun fire converging like the blades of a pair of shears.  The fighter plane came apart. The other pilot took his time, skimming low over the fields below and looping around to climb back toward the messenger ship and its attackers from below. A plume of dust hung in his wake. Another distant rattle and two wights fell from the sky in flames. He shot up through the rest.

No, thought Saskia. She felt her own creation’s terror as it scrambled to locate the new arrival. Don’t let it go wrong. Please don’t let it go wrong.

“Don’t panic,” said Stanislav. His pale eyes followed the messenger ship’s slow progress across the open sky and the thick serpents of black smoke it trailed.“We still have her.”

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Down the ladder one-handed, bloody palm held tight against her chest. Through the passageway and past the airlock to the cargo bay where two black-uniformed IMI agents stood guard over whatever had compelled rear admiral von Brohn to send them haring back to Lundheim from the front. Whatever we’re about to die for, Ursula thought, repressing the insane urge to laugh as she barreled past the agents and shouldered her way through the unsecured hatch onto the flight deck, a low-ceilinged bay set aft of the engine room and built to launch biplanes in combat. A pair of attack vents, angled ramps leading down to open air, were sliding shut. Kermann and Vogel had already launched. 

The one-eyed deck chief, Hart, waved Ursula toward her fighter at the far end of the bay past the airmen coiling fuel hoses around their arms and checking the winches that would reel the fighters back in after. If there is an after, she thought, jogging toward the heavyset engineer. “Lieutenant,” he grunted. “Eight of them, give or take. Looks like undead pilots in scavenged planes. Should be easy pickings.”

She nodded, injured hand clenched at her side. Her nerves were still singing. Even through the Musk Ox’s hull she could hear the thunder of gunfire and propellers. Her plane — a long-winged zweihander, temperamental as a housecat and quick as a grease fire — was fueled and ready. Hart helped her up onto the boarding ladder. He had an easy six inches and five stone on her, and his rough hands on her waist made her feel, for a moment, delicate. She scrambled into the cockpit. The deck crew cleared her blocks and spun her up while she strapped herself in. She released her brakes and began to taxi as her launch vent ground open, the bay floor swinging down. She picked up speed. Her injured hand curled as though of its own volition around the stick’s molded grip, smearing it with blood.

I’ve forgotten my gloves.

A Khusser roared past the mouth of her vent. A wight sat crouched in the cockpit, skin worm-pale, grizzled hair streaming. Its machine guns spoke in sequence with its plane’s propeller, muzzle flash throwing shadows on the walls of the vent as she dropped free and the fields below spread themselves out around the shadow of the biplane. There was smoke there, rising in three slender towers. Wrecks. Maybe— 

No time for that.

It was a perfect shot. She couldn’t have set it up better herself.

She freed the trigger’s guard and squeezed. Her guns barked. The Khusser came apart, tail shivering, port wing bending, breaking. It pitched, starting to tumble, and the pilot wight came scuttling out onto the fuselage in the moment before the engine blew and the propeller tore back through the cockpit in a blast of flame and smoke. Then Ursula was past and the pinwheeling wreckage was gone. She laughed, the wind in her face, altimeter spinning, engine roaring louder as she plummeted through smoke toward the farmland below. Gravity thrust her back against the cracked and weathered padding of her seat as she pulled up, hauling back on the stick and pumping her port brake flap to bring her around in a hard turn a few hundred meters above ground, the last rays of the setting sun flashing through the distant mountains. She could almost count the furrows in the wheat field below. Above, the Musk Ox thundered west at flank speed while the circling Khussers strafed her flanks, their shadows long and spidery on the earth below. Ursula began to climb.

The rattle of gunfire and the whine of propellers grew louder as she closed with the battle’s outskirts. Kermann’s plane climbed up from the Musk Ox’s port shadow, nose skyward, two wights hard on her tail. Ursula leveled off in the messenger ship’s turbulent wake. It felt simple. It felt easy. In the cockpit she was nothing but herself. No stubble coarse and greasy on her cheeks, no maddening itch in the sour, sweaty valley between her anus and her tucked-back cock. She picked her fly from the swarm and banked in a long, gradual climb to follow it as it came around for another run on the messenger ship.

Let Kermann handle himself. I want to hunt.

The Khusser dove, firing. She let it plummet toward her sights. 

Got you.

The Musk Ox heeled suddenly to starboard as her port flank blew open in a spectacular cloud of fire and molten metal. Something hot and moving faster than Ursula’s eye could follow punched a fingernail-sized hole in the plane’s windscreen, slashed her left cheek, and drew a fierce white line of pain across her ear. She flinched and clapped a hand to the injury, stifling a scream she knew would only tear the wound further. When she looked up the Khusser was gone. The canvas of her biplane’s wings hissed where flying shrapnel had punched through it.

No. No, no, no.

Ursula banked, bracing her elbow against the cockpit’s rim and pushing herself up out of the seat as far as her restraints permitted for a better view. The wind brought tears to her eyes. The messenger ship was sinking fast, trailing smoke and fire. She couldn’t see Kermann. Three Khussers flew in formation after the Musk Ox’s descending bulk. Two more were circling wide out over the farmland below, a kilometer off, coming around fast. Where is he? Where’s the sixth?

Gunfire clawed at her starboard wing. She juked, but not fast enough to keep it from ripping through her rudder. Canvas billowed freely from snapping struts. Her stomach rose into her throat as the Zweihander’s nose tilted down and the howl of the wind rose to a keening shriek. She clawed at her instruments but they were foreign to her, useless glass and metal, the stick slippery with blood from her cut palm which had torn open again when she’d squeezed the trigger. The plane’s propeller stalled with a harsh, grinding clunk.

I’m going to die, she thought. No one has ever heard my real name and I’m going to die. 

She stomped on the air brakes and they tore free of the biplane’s wings.

The furrowed earth rose up to meet her.