by Mary Carol Chambers

The harpy's wings overshadow us. The villagers stampede through the streets, wailing, trampling each other.

She consumes the slowest ones first, the elders and abandoned toddlers. She has round, pale eyes, an upturned nose, lips curved like an owl's beak, needlelike fangs. Instead of hair she has fleshy blue folds that rise and swell when she gorges. She has the breasts of a chimpanzee.

"Hurry, Teacher! Do something!" I cry.

My mentor, mage Dona Sary, stares from her window, her face as gray as the harpy's fangs. She is silent.

I shake her shoulder. "Teacher! The harpy! Do something!"

She groans. "There is nothing I can do."

"What do you mean, nothing? We must do something! We must stop her!"

She shakes her head. "What spell could stay her, or weapon slay her? I see her immune to both."

I can smell the stench of the harpy's breath then, along with the coppery odor of blood. "There must be some way to destroy her--there must be!"

Dona Sary sits down heavily on her broad three-legged stool. "Bring me the scrying mirror. I'll try to find a weakness. Hurry!"

I fetch the scrying mirror. She places one hand upon her forehead and squints into the black, unsilvered plate. Outside, the screams escalate. I hear the harpy's grunts as she feeds.

"There is one way only," says Dona Sary at last. "She must be beheaded, with a blade made and wielded by the same hand."

"The blacksmith!" I shout. "He can both make and wield a sword!"

The wind from the harpy's wings shatters the glazing on the window. She is very near.

Dona Sary stares out of the opening. "I fear it is too late for the blacksmith. It is too late for all of us--unless--" Suddenly she heaves herself to her feet, wraps both hands around my head. "It's up to you, child!

"From tiniest forgotten shred
of monster's prey undevoured,
Regenerate, never true dead,
but remade, till time's last hour--"

A gigantic, bloody talon thrusts through the window, crushes the wall. Dona Sary shoves me from the cottage, as the harpy splits the roof. "Go! Find a piece of metal, sharpen it--keep sharpening it--"

The ceiling falls in. I run. Dona Sary's long scream follows me, but it stops as the harpy's gluttonous grunts begin.

The blacksmith's shop is wrecked and deserted, but metal lay everywhere. I rummage until I find a narrow length of iron that might, with persistence, take an edge. Perhaps Smithy would have heated and pounded it thin first, but I haven't the strength or the time. I seat myself at the great round grindstone, and begin to scrape. The noise of it hurts my ears.

As it does the harpy's. She shrieks, and blows her foul breath in my direction. Shaking her gory wings, she hops toward me. I stop grinding but still she approaches, searching for the source of the noise.

I grab my blade-to-be and run.

She hears my footsteps and turns to glare at me. I dodge among the ruins of the village shops and cottages, trying to stay out of sight. But she tracks me, listening.

I escape into the orchards beyond the town. With a beat of her poison wings, she withers the leaves above me, exposing me. I sprint for the bluffs--surely, among the boulders and cliffs I will find some cave, some crack, to slip into, some crevice too narrow to admit her bulk. But as her shadow covers me, I realize it is too late . . .

She drops upon me, her talons pinning me to the rocky ground. With one foot she holds me down, and with the other she tears my left arm from its socket. I scream as she bolts it down. She then sinks her fangs just beneath my jawbone and pulls it away. I can no longer scream. I can no longer see. I can no longer live.

After a time of blackness, I become aware of a great pain at my wrist. I am, in fact, my dismembered hand, severed at the joint. The pain intensifies. An arm extrudes from my agony, then shoulders pool together. Then a trunk heaves into being. Then legs, feet. At last my head is formed, my eyes, my ears, and finally, my mouth. Clever Dona Sary, to cause my mouth to regenerate last, so the harpy would not be wakened by my screaming.

She sleeps beside me, reeking, crusted with blood. For a long time I stare at her, frozen with horror. Then I realize my hand still holds a length of metal. Not yet sharp.

I creep as silently as a cat among the boulder-strewn slopes, until I find a crack beneath the rocks into which I can slide. I scrape my blade upon the walls, again and again--

The sound of metal upon stone awakens her. She hears me. Even from my hiding place I hear her shriek, feel the ground shake as she beats her wings. I shrink within my crevice, silent, scarcely breathing. She searches, listening. Watching. Sniffing.

She finds my hiding place. She scratches at it, howling, frothing. She beats her wings against the rock above, and the very hill crunches like a walnut shell.

As she catches me in her jaws I remember to strike her with my blade, but it does nothing. Not yet sharp enough. She feeds.

I am nothing more than the bones of a toe, yet I ache--I sear--I split. A foot grows from me, a leg. Hips, trunk, shoulders, head, sprouting in agony from a maelstrom of pain. At last I am whole, staring once more at the sleeping harpy at my side. I rise, searching for my blade. I find it two yards from the tip of her folded wing. I creep away once more, looking for shelter, looking for stone.

I scrape; she hears, I run, I die. And I am remade, and I escape. Again. Again. Each time my blade is a little keener, a little closer to the killing sharpness I need. So I scrape and grind like a madwoman.

She comes for me. I strike, but I fail, and I die.

A sliver of flesh, no more. And from that I painfully coagulate into a human once again. I steal away as always, then I run, run as far as I can. I find a good chunk of rock and I begin, grinding quickly, quickly, so that sparks fly about me.

Soon I hear her rage, the pounding of her wings. I scrape, I grind. I smell her stench and her noxious wind. I scrape. Then she is upon me. I strike, and for the first time, she bleeds! Her blood is black and sizzles as it drips. I strike again. She screeches, and tears off an arm. I strike again, and she rips open my gut. I strike, and she bleeds, wailing, shuddering. I hack her neck, she cracks my shinbone. But her eyes glaze. I cut through half of her neck. She stiffens, and vomits a stinking acid upon my arm and my blade. My skin blisters, the blade smokes. But I continue, I cut, I cut--

Her head falls. She collapses. Her body convulses, her wings tremble and twist.

My blade disintegrates into steaming globs. I heal, still in pain, but in jubilant pain. I gaze at her as she lay dead beside me. I marvel at the sudden beauty of the blue gleam on her shining gray pinions, the soft russet of dried blood on their tips.

I look past her, as I have not had the leisure to do before. I see her colors reflected in the world beyond. Blue mountains gleam above the shining river, where gray wisps of clouds gather in russet sunlight. Blue that is not poison. Gray that is not death. Russet that is not blood.

From the mountains, I see a dark shape rise. I hear a monstrous cry.

The harpy's sister. She has heard her nestmate's death wail. She is coming.

I look back at my own body, newly remade. My limbs are whole. My hands are strong. Dona Sary's magic still throbs within me.

I go to find more metal.