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

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

We Will Convey 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 need to concern 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 present, 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 implications.

You’ll mislead your self, that you just had been solely begging for steering, for energy. You’ll mislead the media afterward. You’ll mislead the docs and nurses as you squirm in your hospital mattress, blind—briefly, 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.

It’s possible you’ll imagine the lie. They might imagine the lie.

However she knew the reality the second she heard your invocation. And in the event you’re good, you’ll settle for it.

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

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 unsure I imagine her.

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

Woman, she mentioned. You referred to as me.

She was talking immediately 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 informed myself? I’d simply had a dream, a imaginative and prescient. The nice saint . . . who was it, once more? Panic robbed me of language.

You confirmed me the rampart of sin, she mentioned. Constructed of the flesh of man. I’ll convey 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 a thousand screaming pikemen.

I’d risen by now, eyes by no means leaving her, naked toes 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 the curtains.

She stared at me by black sockets.

What number of matins in a row, now?

You see inside my physique in addition to my thoughts.

A holy mild exhibits all.

So that you . . . see my scenario.

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

I didn’t ask why, like a sane individual would. I mentioned what I did have, which was $10, a really used truck, and simply sufficient scholarship cash to place me by a single 12 months on the diploma mill down the turnpike.

Resolved, the saint mentioned. 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 highway, so I simply want sufficient juice to get to the following one. It’s the following state over, however the journey’s not too unhealthy.

Present me this clinic “down the highway.” 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 frivolously. I adopted her orders. Then she climbed onto my again, and we crept downstairs, by a front room with couches mummified in plastic coverings and partitions choked with novenas. Christ held on a foot-high cross over the mantle. He appeared exhausted.

We snuck exterior, bundled my issues into the truck. She inspected it like a normal.

We are going to discover the bastion of sin that cries out in your prayer, she mentioned. And we’ll convey 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 loss of life in a North African jail. In Louisiana, we liberated a crowbar from a junkyard. The canines there lowered their eyes at our strategy.

Be this a sword? my saint mentioned.

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 snicker 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 mentioned. 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 mentioned.

Like, bushes? I requested.

Like barbican partitions.

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

Beware, the radio mentioned. Beware the numerous making an attempt to destroy every thing pure and good. Who would put condoms in each college, and child-killing drugs there too.

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

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

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

We sourced extra 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 primary stage of the Colosseum.

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

My automobile 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 women, the hip sockets of disemboweled virgins. Her ribs wound spherical and around her torso like a bandolier. In that top, protecting cradle, we slept.

Typically we noticed a police automobile 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 mentioned.

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

It’s one other clinic, I mentioned. It seems to be open. However . . .

Dozens and dozens of individuals had been lined up in opposition to some form of computerized gate, our bodies pressed in opposition to it, faces pink 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 appeared 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 offended crowd from the clinic. She lifted a foot. She meant to escort us inside.

A crack rang out from the bottom under. I appeared 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 loss of life 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 appeared up on the prime 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 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 fingers. 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 under hadn’t. My saint’s physique rumbled with dozens of impacts.

She had many, many bones.

However no defend.

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 mentioned, 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 under. He noticed me by my saint’s left eye socket. He bore a semi-automatic weapon so chunky and modified it appeared 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, ultimately, the glory.

****

In regards to 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 problem, which additionally options quick fiction by Isabel Cañas, Aimee Ogden, Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, P H Lee, and Ai Jiang, plus a novella by Ashok Ok. Banker, and extra. You may look ahead to this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should buy the entire problem proper now in handy e book format for simply $4.99, or subscribe to the e book version here.

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