A Saint Unleashes Vengeance The place It is Wanted Most in This Fiery Quick Story

io9 is proud to current fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. As soon as a month, we characteristic a story from LIGHTSPEED’s present subject. This month’s choice is “We Will Deliver Siege to the Bastion of Sin that Cries Out in Your Prayer” by Hammond Diehl. Take pleasure in!

We Will Deliver 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. It’s best to worry them.

If one ever heeds your prayer, and she or he arrives stripped of pores and skin, of fingernails, of each organ and each final fuck to provide, her halo a boiling crown of livid yellow flames, demanding you bolster up her physique with the bones of the burned, the gutted, the women: Be prepared.

You summoned her. You have to be able to cope with the results.

You’ll mislead your self, that you just had been solely begging for steerage, for energy. You’ll mislead the media afterward. You’ll mislead the medical doctors and nurses as you squirm in your hospital mattress, blind—quickly, you hope—as they pump you full of drugs that really feel like grace in your veins.

Not this.

Not.

This.

This isn’t what you wished in any respect.

You could consider the lie. They might consider the lie.

However she knew the reality the second she heard your invocation. And should you’re sensible, you’ll settle for it.

You’ll have a greater probability of surviving the battle.

The one you prayed for.

****

She launched herself with the 2 good enamel she nonetheless had left in her cranium. Floor them proper into my left forearm. Later she’d say that she’d tried to shake me first. I’m undecided I consider her.

It was arduous to overlook her, even within the early-morning gloom of my bed room. Her crown of fireside should’ve burned a foot excessive. That’s what halos actually are, in case you have got catechism subsequent Sunday and need to dazzle somebody with the reality. I wouldn’t advocate trying straight into one. Actually not as soon as it reaches its full potential.

Lady, she stated. You referred to as me.

She was talking straight into my head. Which was good. My dad and mom don’t sleep soundly.

No, I responded wordlessly. Or was this the primary lie I instructed myself? I’d simply had a dream, a imaginative and prescient. The great saint . . . who was it, once more? Panic robbed me of language.

You confirmed me the rampart of sin, she stated. Constructed of the flesh of man. I’ll carry siege to it as you requested. You’ll fetch me a shirt of chain, and a flail of thorns, and a destrier hardy sufficient to guide a cost by means of a thousand screaming pikemen.

I’d risen by now, eyes by no means leaving her, naked ft inching away towards the bed room 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 bed room wastebasket and vomited. The solar was simply beginning to peek by means of the curtains.

She stared at me by means of black sockets.

What number of matins in a row, now?

You see inside my physique in addition to my thoughts.

A holy gentle exhibits all.

So that you . . . see my state of affairs.

I see what you want. Now, my armor. My weapon. My horse. Deliver them to me.

I didn’t ask why, like a sane particular person would. I stated what I did have, which was $10, a really used truck, and simply sufficient scholarship cash to place me by means of a single yr on the diploma mill down the turnpike.

Resolved, the saint stated. I shall put on no armor however the mantle of God.

However, I say from my head, all I would like is a few gasoline cash. They shot the physician on the clinic down the street, so I simply want sufficient juice to get to the subsequent one. It’s the subsequent state over, however the trip’s not too unhealthy.

Present me this clinic “down the street.” In thy thoughts.

I closed my eyes and concentrated, questioning, across the edges, what language this saint had spoken in life.

The medica has certainly gone to God.

I sat on my mattress.

Yup, I believed to the bones.

Projectiles.

Mmm hmmm.

The saint clacked as much as me on timeworn toes. She bid me to dress, to pack evenly. I adopted her orders. Then she climbed onto my again, and we crept downstairs, by means of a lounge with couches mummified in plastic coverings and partitions choked with novenas. Christ held on a foot-high cross over the mantle. He regarded exhausted.

We snuck outdoors, bundled my issues into the truck. She inspected it like a basic.

We’ll discover the bastion of sin that cries out in your prayer, she stated. And we are going to carry siege to it.

What bastion of sin? I believed to her.

She ignored me.

However first, I’ll want extra bones.

****

Penitents make pilgrimages to see their saints. They plot their routes in neat strains, in order to not disturb that godly sense of order that makes the angels smile.

Saints make their very own pilgrimages. These routes, we are able to’t see. My saint’s path made sense solely to her.

She rode shotgun, wagging her antique-white fingers towards this freeway 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 demise in a North African jail. In Louisiana, we liberated a crowbar from a junkyard. The canine there lowered their eyes at our method.

Be this a sword? my saint stated.

I couldn’t assist it. I chuckled.

An identical sound seeped out of her, from the areas between the disks on the nape of her neck. It made my condescending chuckle sound like a croak.

Subsequent day, my saint brandished the crowbar as we burst into the Church of St. Joseph. A sure St. Valerie awaited us below a cover of glass and gilded copper. Valerie lent us a spare arm—all that was left of her after her beating by the hands of Roman troopers.

The place did you come from? I requested my saint someplace alongside the Floribama line. By then we’d picked up a passenger, a twelve-year-old lady whose father had thrown beer cans at us as she scurried into the again seat and begged us to go, simply go.

A catacomb, she stated. A lump of ash. A rotting rope swinging from a tree. It issues not. Let the thought go.

With each leg bone, my saint grew taller; with each shoulder and hip bone, broader. Her face creaked as she wrenched out a mandible to make room for extra hyoids. Ulnas and radii separated with eerie, hole pops, dangling impossibly from my saint’s shoulders as extra bones joined them. Quickly her arms undulated like kite strings every time she cracked a window to really feel the breeze.

My legs have to be extra sturdy, my saint stated.

Like, bushes? I requested.

Like barbican partitions.

I hadn’t identified my radio was on. As we crossed a county line, an area speak station blasted awake.

Beware, the radio stated. Beware the numerous making an attempt to destroy every part pure and good. Who would put condoms in each faculty, and child-killing capsules there too.

My guilt, which was driving within the again seat, awakened from its hourly nap and leaned towards the entrance.

I stated, at catechism, they are saying everybody has a proper to be born into the arms of our lord.

I, the saint stated, was born into the arms of our lord.

We sourced further femurs from a St. Frances in New York. A church in Kentucky yielded supplementary tibias from a St. Bonosa, martyred at age 4 on the principle stage of the Colosseum.

My saint’s shanks swelled right into a pair of siege towers, groaning with age and fury.

My automotive broke down a number of days later, however by then she’d outgrown it. She loomed over the St. Martin of Excursions Church in Louisville, threw shadows over a Ferris wheel that hung precariously between Galveston and the Gulf of Mexico.

She took strides the size of a metropolis block.

She bore us up, supporting us with the ankle bones of burned ladies, the hip sockets of disemboweled virgins. Her ribs wound spherical and around her torso like a bandolier. In that top, protecting cradle, we slept.

Generally we noticed a police automotive pacing us, cherry lights dim. The media didn’t know what to make of us.

We crossed into Mississippi a second time. I assumed it was on the invitation of one other saint with a bone to spare.

We’re right here, the saint stated.

We had been a flat, one-story constructing with a metal fence and razor wire round it.

It’s one other clinic, I stated. It appears open. However . . .

Dozens and dozens of individuals had been lined up towards some form of automated gate, our bodies pressed towards it, faces crimson from screaming, naked arms and shoulders slick with rage sweat. Their eyes glared up at us blackly beneath baseball caps festooned with beer logos and crosses and brims artificially frayed in factories very removed from right here. They had been blocking the doorway.

The rampart of sin, I believed. A wall of human flesh.

I used to be sitting on a clavicle, near the heat of her halo. I regarded round. My saint had amassed stacks of patellas on both shoulder, reminding me of cannon fodder. The twelve-year-old lady huddled in my saint’s rib cage.

The saint loped towards the fence separating the indignant crowd from the clinic. She lifted a foot. She meant to escort us inside.

A crack rang out from the bottom beneath. I regarded down into the ribcage. The twelve-year-old was staring on the palm of her left hand. There was a gap in it.

One other crack. A bullet grazed the shinbone of tiny St. Maria Goretti—Maria Goretti, stabbed to demise at age eleven, however not earlier than forgiving her would-be rapist as she bled out.

For a second, I felt like I used to be forgetting to breathe. I regarded up on the high of my saint’s head. The fireplace of her halo had stretched into the sky, an not possible tower that appeared to the touch the clouds. Seeds of flame rained down from it, a relentless hellfire of bombs, every too small to do a lot harm on their very own.

A fireplace was spreading by means of me, too, a seething warmth I had feared, had denied.

Had nurtured.

For weeks.

My saint steadied me on her shoulder. On the shoulder of St. Agatha, age fifteen, who died in jail after refusing to marry an area governor.

I discovered one of many patella bones and felt the heft of it in my palms. I geared toward a person in camoprint coveralls and threw.

My saint swung round, arms pivoting like trebuchets, elongated fingers positioned to crush.

I’d missed. A number of of the boys beneath hadn’t. My saint’s physique rumbled with dozens of impacts.

She had many, many bones.

However no protect.

The twelve-year-old screamed.

Crawling, creeping, slipping, whispering a prayer that I might later completely deny as something apart from panicked gibbering, I crept alongside the saint’s clavicle, grabbed onto her patchwork jaw. Pulled.

She knew.

She opened her mouth, and I crawled in.

If I die right here, I stated, make my bones your aegis.

The phrases blasted out of her like a horn of Gabriel. There was not an individual manning that hell gate who didn’t hear me.

One other man had joined the primary beneath. He noticed me by means of my saint’s left eye socket. He bore a semi-automatic weapon so chunky and modified it regarded like a handheld tank.

I met his eyes, I leaned out, and I smiled.

I needed to twist my neck to do what got here subsequent. A disk popped someplace behind my molars, and I couldn’t assist it. I laughed. Then I searched as soon as once more for the halo atop my saint.

The sunshine bore into the backs of my eyes, and I noticed, finally, the glory.

****

Concerning the Writer

Hamm’s work has appeared in Unusual Horizons, Kaleidotrope, Diabolical Plots, and extra. Hamm lives in Los Angeles and writes below the protecting blankie of a pseudonym. Hamm will be discovered on Bluesky @hammonddiehl.bsky.social.

Please go to LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to learn extra nice science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared within the November 2024 subject, which additionally options brief fiction by Isabel Cañas, Aimee Ogden, Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, P H Lee, and Ai Jiang, plus a novella by Ashok Okay. Banker, and extra. You’ll be able to await this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should purchase the entire subject proper now in handy e-book format for simply $4.99, or subscribe to the e-book version here.

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