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, just go.
A catacomb, she said. A lump of ash. A rotting rope swinging from a tree. It matters not. Let the thought pass.
With every leg bone, my saint grew taller; with every shoulder and hip bone, broader. Her face creaked as she wrenched out a mandible to make room for more hyoids. Ulnas and radii separated with eerie, hollow pops, dangling impossibly from my saint’s shoulders as more bones joined them. Soon her arms undulated like kite strings whenever she cracked a window to feel the breeze.
My legs must be more robust, my saint said.
Like, trees? I asked.
Like barbican walls.
I hadn’t known my radio was on. As we crossed a county line, a local talk station blasted awake.
Beware, the radio said. Beware the many trying to destroy everything pure and good. Who would put condoms in every school, and child-killing pills there too.
My guilt, which was riding in the back seat, woke up from its hourly nap and leaned toward the front.
I said, at catechism, they say everyone has a right to be born into the arms of our lord.
I, the saint said, was born into the arms of our lord.
We sourced additional femurs from a St. Frances in New York. A church in Kentucky yielded supplementary tibias from a St. Bonosa, martyred at age four on the main stage of the Colosseum.
My saint’s shanks swelled into a pair of siege towers, groaning with age and fury.
My car broke down a few days later, but by then she’d outgrown it. She loomed over the St. Martin of Tours Church in Louisville, threw shadows over a Ferris wheel that hung precariously between Galveston and the Gulf of Mexico.
She took strides the length of a city block.
She bore us up, supporting us with the ankle bones of burned girls, the hip sockets of disemboweled virgins. Her ribs wound round and round her torso like a bandolier. In that high, protective cradle, we slept.
Sometimes we spotted a police car 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 at the invitation of another saint with a bone to spare.
We are here, the saint said.
We were looking at a flat, one-story building with a steel fence and razor wire around it.
It’s another clinic, I said. It looks open. But . . .
Dozens and dozens of people were lined up against some kind of automatic gate, bodies pressed against it, faces red from screaming, bare 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 far from here. They were blocking the entrance.
The rampart of sin, I thought. A wall of human flesh.
I was sitting on a clavicle, close to the warmth of her halo. I looked around. My saint had amassed stacks of patellas on either shoulder, reminding me of cannon fodder. The twelve-year-old girl huddled in my saint’s rib cage.
The saint loped toward the fence separating the angry crowd from the clinic. She lifted a foot. She meant to escort us inside.
A crack rang out from the ground below. I looked down into the ribcage. The twelve-year-old was staring at the palm of her left hand. There was a hole in it.
Another crack. A bullet grazed the shinbone of tiny St. Maria Goretti—Maria Goretti, stabbed to death at age eleven, but not before forgiving her would-be rapist as she bled out.
For a second, I felt like I was forgetting to breathe. I looked up at the top of my saint’s head. The fire of her halo had stretched into the sky, an impossible tower that seemed to touch the clouds. Seeds of flame rained down from it, a relentless hellfire of bombs, each too small to do much damage on their own.
A fire was spreading through me, too, a seething heat 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 prison after refusing to marry a local governor.
I found one of the patella bones and felt the heft of it in my hands. I aimed at a man in camoprint coveralls and threw.
My saint swung around, arms pivoting like trebuchets, elongated fingers positioned to crush.
I’d missed. Several of the men below hadn’t. My saint’s body rumbled with dozens of impacts.
She had many, many bones.
But no shield.
The twelve-year-old screamed.
Crawling, creeping, slipping, whispering a prayer that I would later absolutely deny as anything other than panicked gibbering, I crept along the saint’s clavicle, grabbed onto her patchwork jaw. Pulled.
She knew.
She opened her mouth, and I crawled in.
If I die here, I said, make my bones your aegis.
The words blasted out of her like a horn of Gabriel. There was not a person manning that hell gate who did not hear me.
Another man had joined the first below. He saw me through my saint’s left eye socket. He bore a semi-automatic weapon so chunky and modified it looked like a handheld tank.
I met his eyes, I leaned out, and I smiled.
I had to twist my neck to do what came next. A disk popped somewhere behind my molars, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Then I searched once again for the halo atop my saint.
The light bore into the backs of my eyes, and I saw, at last, the glory.
****
About the Author
Hamm’s work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, Diabolical Plots, and more. Hamm lives in Los Angeles and writes under the protective blankie of a pseudonym. Hamm can be found on Bluesky @hammonddiehl.bsky.social.
Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the November 2024 issue, which also features short fiction by Isabel Cañas, Aimee Ogden, Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, P H Lee, and Ai Jiang, plus a novella by Ashok K. Banker, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.
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