“απερίσκεπτη θρασύτητα ήρθε … Reckless audacity came...to be...conflated? No, considered, the courage of a loyal ally,” Brother Gregory mouthed the words of the ancient tome as he read, moving through the unfamiliar syntax slowly. A chill wind howled outside, guttering the tallow candles low but not quite extinguishing them. The uncertain light seemed to make the alien greek script crawl and slither across the page. He squinted, straining his eyes to pick out the next few sentences. It was a miserable night, and the only solace to be found was to escape to the warm Mediterranean heat that existed only within his mind.

The cathedral had been raised as a glorious monument to God, and that it was, but little thought had been given to the comfort of its earthly caretakers. Reluctantly Gregory closed the book, handling the ancient vellum with the care of long practice. The small garret was chilled despite the oil flames that burned fitfully beneath bubbling alembics and blackened brass condensers. The air was sharp with the smell of astringent chemicals and unguents. Alchemy like all fields of endeavor brought glory to God by better understanding His Mysteries and, if distilling a little cyanide to destroy rodents, or milk of the poppy for toothache helped Brother Gregory of Ferrara afford the occasional manuscript or barrow of coal, then so much the better.

Speaking of which… Gregory climbed from his bed, blowing the hair of his tonsure from his face with a quick exhalation. The cold cut at his spare frame and he quickly slipped on his brown robe. The wool was coarse and growing threadbare but it was a balm on a cold night. A small brazier guttered as the coal burned down. He would have to gather some more from the storage room below or face the unpalatable but not unfamiliar sensation of shivering beneath his bedclothes.

“Gallia est omnis divisa,” he muttered to himself as he shuffled down the stairs, ignoring the fanciful carvings of gargoyles and demons that some pious artisan had immortalized in stone. It was not a night to dwell on the beyond, the miserable cold quite drove the theology from him. A flicker of movement caught his eyes as he crossed behind the nave. A young woman praying before the altar, head bowed and hands clasped. What could drive a creature to such an excess of piety that they would kneel in the cold nave in the middle of the night. He considered ignoring her, she was no thief certainly and therefore no proper business of his.

Duty and curiosity won out over the desire for a warm bed. It had nothing to do with the fact that she was young and female. Obviously. With practices solemnity he moved into the nave behind her, walking softly but without real intent to stealth.

“Peace be with you my child,” he began.

There was hardly a ripple to disturb the water. The river was black under the moonless sky and the clouds veiled the stars. Oars of long oak, blackened with pitch and charcoal sank silently into the dark waters, propelling the black ship forward with slow deliberate strokes. A soft wind whispered across the forested river bank, all but concealing the creaks and groans of the ships timbers. A score of men plied the oars, their bodies wrapped in heavy furs despite the late summer warmth.

In the distance a low hill shouldered its way half-heartedly into the starless night. Lights flickered above a shabby palisade surmounted by a single ramshackle watch tower. More majestic, an ancient steeple built in the days the Romans still ruled the Isle to the east, thrust upward like a boney granite finger. The Roman’s had never come this far, but their hateful God had made the journey. Their Dead God and his Priests.

“Is this the place Brenna,” Hralfdan rumbled, a thunderstorm trying to whisper. The big Dane from Hedeby and therefore suspect. Charcoal blackened every inch of his face, save for his teeth which nature had blackened already. Hralfdan had only one arm, though his muscular torso gave him a fearsome strength. Brenna thought him the greatest sailor she had ever met.

“This is the place,” she replied grimly. The big bosun nodded and leaned his massive weight to the steering oar. Brenna’s face was black with charcoal too, and her fine Roman leaf mail was concealed beneath the pelt of a black bear. She had waited half a lifetime for this moment and wasn’t about to give Loki any opening to steal it from her.

“Watch me All-father,” she murmured in Norse, pressing her hand to the hilt of her sword in invocation of Old One Eye.

“Morrigan, bear witness,” she said in Gaelic, causing several of her crew to shift uneasily. It would not bother them that she was invoking a foreign god, they merely mistrusted a language they didn’t speak. A moment later the stem post ground ashore against the soft gravel laden mud like the nails of Hel. Without a word the reavers poured over the side of the blackened long ship and waded ashore swords and shields held high.

The great oaken doors, laboriously carved with the torments that sinners could expect in hell, flew open. Above the bell tolled incessantly, sounding an alarm that would come too late. The village beyond the door blazed and screams tore the air as hard eyed Norsemen ransacked the small wattle and daub huts before tossing flaming brands into the thatch. A few of the men had tried to make a stand but they had been no match for the cold steel of the Vikings. Brenna strode into the church, the sword in her fist slicked with the blood of an unfortunate watchman.

How many times had she walked down this aiel? The glowering statues of the Dead God’s saints glared impotently as she strode into the nave, wreathed in the smoke of their congregations destruction. The altar was as she remembered, draped in purple cloth and piled with the gold and jewels of the communion service. As the Lady of Raven’s had promised an aged priest knelt before the altar in desperate suplication.

“Priest!” she bellowed in Gaelic, the rasp of smoke in her throat making the cry terrible beyond her own abillity. The man pretended not to hear. His knuckles were white for the ferocity with which he clasped them together. She stalked towards him, in no hurry. There was a scream and a thump behind her. The bell peeled twice more and fell silent, its tongue stilled now that its ringer lay dead on the floor of the nave. She had pictured this in dreams and visions, seen it in the flames at Uppsalla at the High Feast.

“Priest!” she yelled again as her hobnailed boots clacked on the first of the stone steps. The elderly priest turned, his face contorted with terror. She must look a demon in black helm and mail, her skin darkened with charcoal. She was a demon. Tonight she was.

“Be gone fiend!” the priest called in a quavering voice which barely rose above a desperate whimper. Brenna pulled off her helm and let her long dark hair fall nearly to her waist. It shone like oil in the candle light. No sign of recognition flickered in the old mans eyes. She lifted a bowl of holy water, a fine silver dish chased with intricate carvings and poured it over her face, washing the charcoal away to reveal the pale white skin beneath.

“I am no fiend Father,” she said in Gaelic, her voice hard and brittle as sea glass. The priest was crying. The tears ran down his face in great salty rivulets. He reeked of wine, age and his own urine.

“You baptized me, dont you remember?” she asked with seeming gentleness. In her dreams she had lived this moment a thousand times. It kept her going through hungry winters, through driving storms that stole mens hearts. The priest shook his head in mute rejection and she seized his face with a hand to each temple, her fingers like iron on his fragile aged skull.

“LOOK AT ME!” she roared, forgetting in her excitement to speak Gaelic, though her meaning was unmistakable. With an effort of will the old priest met her dark eyes. For a moment there as panic but then, like an icedam giving way, it melted to recognition.

“Dirdre,” he breathed it started as a question but ended as a statement rising in horror.

“What are you doing here?” he gasped. In her fantasies she had crucifixed the priest, gelded him, nailed his body to the wooden crucifix behind the altar, but now that she was here at the end of all she had planned since the last time Vikings had visited this small hamlet over a decade ago, since they had carried off a little girl to their far icy shores, nothing but a single phrase filled her mind. She spoke the phrase slowly in Gaelic as precise as that of a poet, lending each syllable the funeral solemnity of a dirge.

“Be sure your sin will find you out.”

The priests neck snapped with a pop that was audible even over the ruin of the village and Brenna, who had been Dirdre, rose to her feet, leaving the corpse on the cold stone steps. She turned to her men as they streamed into the church.

“Burn it all down.”

Bullets bored into the fuselage like railroad spikes being driven through ancient sleepers, the sound so loud that the shattering of the cockpit glass seemed like an afterthought. The rush of air and the roar of the engine crashed over them now that the dam was broken. Glass and timber rattled around the interior of the cockpit or was swept out into the warm tropical sky by the onrushing air. Opportunity threw the aircraft into a steep side slip, dropping the nose and sacrificing precious altitude for more speed. Her pursuers roared passed, the nondescript grey biplanes still spitting gunfire, though their pilots had, for the moment, lost their chance at a kill.

Below them the green profusion of the Belgian Congo spread as far as the eye could see, broken only by the tapering muddy strip of the mighty river itself as it wound its way to the horizon. Though they were only a few hundred miles from Kinshasa, it wouldn’t be long before the trees closed over the tanin laden waters, concealing it from the air. Steam rose from the jungle in long rivulets stretching towards the brilliantly blue January sky like the tendrils of some great unseen beast was questing for their aircraft.

“Ms Knox,” came Alcander’s disapproving voice from the rearward passenger seat.

“If you get any closer to the treetops we are going to wish we had hired a boat!” the archaeologist shouted over the roar of the slipstream. His tone was deliberately light but his stress was apparent from the way he bit off his words, and from the way the back of her seat creaked under his grip. Opportunity pulled her goggles down to shield her eyes from the wind rush, her auburn hair flew backwards like a snapping pennant as she craned her head to watch the enemy scouts curling around for another pass.

“Can’t you outrun them or something?!” someone shouted from the passenger compartment. The treetops were nearly close enough to touch, streaking past in a green tide.

“That’s really not how engines work!” Opportunity shouted. Their aircraft was a DH.50, an old mail plane that Jack Buchannan had scared up from God alone knew where. The enemy was, she thought, a pair of aging Avros, a great war surplus scout that the Belgian’s, the Dutch, the British and damn near everyone else still had in service. Though they bore the markings of the Belgian air force it was a fair bet that they were in the pay of the mysterious Germans. They curved around in a long arc and began to close to firing range. Unladen, the DH.50 might have been slightly faster, but weighed down with the expedition, its gear, extra fuel, and floats to allow it to land on water, it wasn't close. The Arvo’s seemed to leap forward, orange flashes stabbing as their lewis guns spewed lines of tracer fire. Opportunity hauled back to the stick to lift them out of the hail of death. The heavy machine wallowed sickeningly as it shed airspeed and maneuverability. With a curse the young pilot slammed the mixture to full rich, averting a stall for a few heartbeats before she shoved the stick forward, yo-yoing the passengers with a chorus of shouted curses.

Both enemy scouts howled past, their guns falling silent as the shot was spoiled once again, though the DH’s airspeed was now dangerously low and the trick wouldn’t work a second time. A treetop slapped the undercarriage and Opportunity yelped, climbing as quickly as she dared but resisting the urge to haul back on the stick and send them into a lethal stall. Behind her rifles cracked as Lucien or perhaps Jack opened fire, the rapid click click of the bolt actions lost in the howl of the now open cockpit. Even the reports, normally painfully sharp, were washed out by the rushing air. It was a valiant effort, but the odds of a man in a bucking cockpit, moving at over a hundred miles an hour, scoring a hit at some critical point on another target moving away at the same rate were vanishingly slim.

The Arvos curved around in long graceful arcs lining up for the kill. Without speed or altitude the DH.50 was out of tricks and an easy target. The scouts closed quickly, holding their fire this time as they must be growing near to the end of their ammunition. Lucien and Jack continued their metronomic fusillade, the angle of attack made the shot a little easier when the enemy was closing, but not much.

“There has got to be some bloody thing you can do!” Alcander shouted into her ear, but Opportunity wasn’t listening, her attention completely focused on the incoming Arvos. They were close enough now that she could make out the helmeted head of the pilots, their glasses catching the mid morning sun in erratic flashes.

“For what we are about to receive,” she muttered inaudible and both enemy machines opened up within a heartbeat of each other. Bullets chewed into the fuselage like horde of angry woodpeckers and rounds spanged of the engine cowling like hail on a tin roof. Smoke fountained from the manifold, oily black, and reeking of burning castor oil, choking the passengers and pilot before being whipped away by the slip stream. The DH.50 staggered like a whipped horse and just when it seemed they must be torn apart by the bombardment, Opportunity threw the aircraft on its side and the slipped below the level of the trees, the tip of the left wing touching the muddy brown Congo river for a instant before she leveled off, sliding into the few feet of clearance the vast flow carved through the jungle. One of the enemy machines, in an effort to keep its guns aligned, dipped too low. It’s undercarriage caught the canopy and, like an origami puppet, the machine vanished into the jungle with a booming crash of shattering timbers and rending metal. The second Arvo, realizing its peril, pulled up but too eagerly. The machine wallowed for a critical half second, offering an almost zero deflection shot to the rifle men in the rear of the compartment. Lucien shouted in triumph as the figure in the gunner’s seat of the second machine slumped sideways and tumbled from his cockpit, the body performing a slow half rotation before vanishing among the trees. The surviving fighter was gone in an eyeblink streaking away over the treetops, toothless and impotent.

“We made it!” Alcander crowed in jubilant relief.

“No we didn’t,” Opportunity shouted back, wiping a the oil that coated her face and goggles. Bright orange flames stuttered to life around the engine which had developed a jarring thumping note. Instinctively she cut the fuel line and dropped the nose, smothering the flames better to risk a crash than to burn. For a moment there was silence save for the whistling wind before a sheet of brown muddy spray obliterated the world.