by Sharon Shinn
These two months had seen an unprecedented surge in violent weather from northwestern Gaza all the way to the lower coastline of Jordana. Along the coasts, hurricanes sprayed venomous water into the marine cities, leveling a few of them, rendering one or two unlivable. In the deserts near Breven, continuous rain had turned the sandy miles into virtually impassable swampland; and nowhere were farmers assured of receiving appropriate amounts of rain for their specific crops. The angels, who had always successfully petitioned Jovah for more snow, less rain, gentler winds, these days sang to him in vain. If he listened, he did not care. If he answered, it was with more storm. They had no certainty that he would view this new request with any more interest.
The oracles had chosen to meet at Mount Sinai not only because it was midway between their own retreats but because it was the oldest and most venerable seat of holy power on Samaria. Here the original settlers had first communicated with their god; here were the archives (in texts now mostly unreadable) that described those earliest encounters among divinity, angel and mortal. Here, they hoped, Jovah might still pay attention to the crises of his people.
They arrived almost simultaneously, young Mary from Gaza and ancient Job from Jordana, and together entered the cool, echoing stone hallways of Mount Sinai. Rebekah had died a year ago and no one had come forward to replace her, and the remaining oracles were at a loss. Their own callings had become clear to them in unmistakable visions, but if anyone in all of Samaria was dreaming of the honor of becoming oracle, no one had stepped up to claim the position. They had each asked Jovah for guidance, but he had failed to respond to either one.
Ghostly gaslight from eternally burning sources lit their way through the pale granite corridors, and they followed the familiar turnings to the central chamber, where they could summon the god. Here, a glowing blue plate was set into the stone wall with a rolling chair even now placed casually before it; this was where the oracle would sit to commune with the god. They could almost believe Rebekah had just this moment stepped away from her seat there to stretch her stocky legs; both of them wished she was here now to consult with them.
“Mary, would you care to lift our petition to the god?” was Job’s formal invitation, but he was the elder and this was delicate work, and so she yielded the place to him. He sat with a certain reverence before the pulsing screen, running his hands experimentally over the strange hieroglyphics on the shelf before him. When he touched a symbol, it would appear on the face of the blue plate, forming words in a language so old only the oracles could learn it; and when the god responded, he did so in the same forgotten tongue. They called this bright screen the “interface,” though it was a word that had little meaning to them. So did the oracles before them name the device, and the oracles before them, back to the founding of Samaria.
Job worked slowly, as he always did, because this alien language did not come easily to him and he did not want to err. He constructed his first message, a simple greeting, merely to confirm that Jovah was awake and ready to hear petitions. He was relieved beyond measure when the reply came quickly back in navy letters laid against the glowing screen.
The second part of the message was complex and had to be carefully worded, so he read it aloud to Mary before touching the key that would signal to Jovah that his thought was complete. “The Archangel Delilah has been irretrievably injured and can no longer fly in your exalted service,” he quoted. “It grieves us to say we believe a new Archangel must be chosen, so that all your wishes may be promptly carried out. Are we correct? Must a new Archangel be selected?” Mary nodded, and Job sent the message to Jovah.
There was a long pause before the interface wavered and reformed, new letters marching across its screen. “If the Archangel cannot fly, she cannot be Archangel” was the uncompromising response. “She cannot serve.”
They had expected it, but it was a blow nonetheless; and they were already mentally recasting the phrasing to soften its impact on Delilah. Jovah was not, though they did not like to spread this information, the most sympathetic of gods in his direct dealings with the oracles.
“Who then should be Archangel in her place?” Job typed laboriously onto the screen. “Jerusha is leader of the host at Monteverde, and very capable. Micah leads the host at Cedar Hills, and he has the trust of all the merchants and landowners. Both are young, able to serve the seventeen years that remain of Delilah’s term.”
He had barely sent the message when the screen wriggled and Jovah’s answer appeared starkly before them. They read the name once, twice, silently, then looked at each other in astonishment.
“The angel Alleluia, daughter of the angel Jude and the mortal woman Hope?” Mary said aloud. “Can he truly mean that? Is he sure?”
“I can scarcely ask the god if he is certain,” Job replied with grim sarcasm. “And he has well and truly named her—that is her father and that is certainly her mother.”
“But she is—no one knows her, not the river merchants or the Manadavvi—even the angels…”
“She is scholarly, certainly, and reclusive,” Job said, as if defending Alleluia, as if he was not as shocked by Jovah’s choice as Mary was. “But her knowledge of Samarian ways is no doubt extensive—”
“Job, we are in a crisis here!” Mary cried, striking her hands together in frustration. “Every day a fresh storm breaks across the Jordana deserts, and the oceans along the southern coasts are fierce with waves. The Bethel farmers are crying for succor, which Manadavvi landowners can give them, but at a price no one can afford. Half of Breven is turning into some kind of factory as they build more and more of those machines—and who is to regulate the merchants? Who is to stop the storms? Who is—the angel Alleluia! Who will listen to her?”
“Jovah, perhaps,” was Job’s simple reply. “He must have chosen her for a reason.”
Mary tossed her hands in the air, a gesture of despair. “There is no reason in Samaria anymore,” she said. “No reason in Jovah’s ways, no reason at all.”
“Trust in the god,” Job said. “We have no choice.”
“Ask him again,” she urged. “Make certain—”
He splayed his hand in a gesture of futility, but complied, to ease his own troubled mind as far as possible. “Confirming: the angel Alleluia of the Eyrie, daughter of the angel Jude and the woman Hope?”
“Yes,” came Jovah’s answer, as quickly as his last reply. “Name her Archangel immediately.”
Job looked soberly at Mary. “So speaks the god,” he said formally. “We must carry the news at once to the angels.”
Mary took a deep breath and expelled it on a hopeless sigh. “Then we must,” she said. “To the Eyrie first, I suppose, since we are here. I do not want to be present when Delilah hears the news.”
“I feel sorry for her,” Job said softly.
“Delilah? Yes, except that she brought it on herself—”
“For Alleya,” Job corrected. Mary looked startled to hear him use the shortened name by which people addressed Alleluia; it did not seem a formal enough address for one who would soon be Archangel. “She is no more fit for this job than a mortal girl fresh from the northern foothills.”
But his words gave them both pause, for, more than a century ago, just such a girl had come to power as the bride of the Archangel Gabriel, and she had not done so ill.
Mary sighed again. “So perhaps there is hope after all,” she said. “Jovah defend us in our hour of need.”
“Amen.”
They stood—suddenly both inexpressibly weary—and made their way back out of the flickering gray tunnels. They felt, if possible, even more anxious than they had been going in, for no one would like their news, and no one would think their problems were on the way to being solved. What could they do? They could not gainsay the god. He had knowledge beyond their own; his inscrutable choices were always wise over the reckoning of centuries.
So they left, and climbed slowly down the mountain, and forgot, or did not realize, that th
ey had failed to shut down the interface screen that linked the mortals of Mount Sinai with their god. And they did not see, because the message appeared an hour or two after they departed, that the god had more words for them, written in a tongue that only they would understand. Just two words, straightforward and plain, but no one was there to read them; and even if anyone had wandered by chance into this most holy of places, almost no one would have been able to decipher the god’s arcane request.
Caleb Augustus stood on the mountaintop with his hands folded across his chest and prayed one last time that his theories of aerodynamics and meteorology were sound. Then he took a running start, unfurled his arms, and leapt off the point of the low mountain. For a few fateful seconds he sank rapidly; then the air caught under the great leather wings strapped to his arms, and he was lofted above his former perch. He laughed aloud. He couldn’t help it. He was flying, impossible but true—he was flying!
It didn’t last long, though longer than he expected. Two vagrant currents caught him almost playfully; he could feel the breezes curl, then shred apart under his outstretched limbs. He knew from past experience that pumping his arms furiously did almost nothing to increase his altitude or slow his eventual descent, so he concentrated on keeping his shoulders level, his wrists high, catching the breezes as they swirled him in one direction, then another. Like a bark boat in a shallow stream. Wherever the element took him, he would go.
It took him, and fairly unceremoniously, to the rocky ground a few hundred yards from his jumping-off point. One minute he was gliding along, coasting like a hawk above its prey, the next he was tumbling gracelessly through the empty layers of air to land in a painful heap on the stony ground. But this he had learned about from experience, too, and he had taken care to pad his chest and his knees and his head with soft wads of clothing. He rolled awkwardly to his knees and climbed to his feet—and then spread his wings again and laughed out loud once more.
“I was flying, Noah, you should have seen it!” he shouted. “Give me five years and I’ll figure it out. I swear, I’ll be the first mortal on Samaria to take wing alongside the angels.”
There was boundless joy in that thought, and it sustained him through the long, tedious process of disassembling his wings, carefully unrolling the soft, stretched leather from the light wood frame and just as carefully loosening the myriad joints of the frame and collapsing it into one small bundle. A long trip and two hours of preparation beforehand, five minutes of flight, then two hours of cleanup afterward; most men would call that a small return for such a great investment. But then, Caleb reminded himself, they weren’t visionaries, creative geniuses, scientists like him. They might have pleasures that lasted a little longer, but surely none that were more intense.
And another two hours on the road back home. Someday, he promised himself, he would fly back to Luminaux, coast lazily in on his great stretched wings, and set the city agape—if anything could elicit such a reaction from the Luminauzi, which he rather doubted. Someday—but for now he had to settle for loading his bundles into a rented cart hitched behind a borrowed horse, and plod back to the city at a rate that was almost wrenchingly tedious compared to the pace he longed to set.
Early winter dusk was wrapping itself across the far horizon as he first spotted the faint azure haze that signaled the approach to Luminaux. The city was illuminated with a combination of gaslight, candlelight and the new marvel, electricity. Indoors, these lights were a reasonable white, but outdoors the residents of the Blue City filtered everything through tinted glass to give the entire public arena a somewhat aqueous glow. Even by day, Luminaux flaunted a similar color, since it was built of sapphire granite and cobalt mica and overrun with phlox and delphinium. There was no place like it anywhere in Samaria, and Caleb loved to come home to it by night.
Once inside the city gates, it took him nearly another hour to dispose of the horse and the cart and store his experimental wings. By then he was famished. He strode west from the city till he reached the Edori camp, maybe a hundred patched tents clustered around a third as many fires, but no one there had seen Noah.
“When will he be back? Do you know where he went?” he asked a cluster of teenagers who were sitting on the farthest edge of the campground, playing some dice game or using that as a plausible excuse to engage in the inevitable rituals of courtship. Caleb had learned long ago that, in an Edori enclave, it was unnecessary to look for friends or relatives of the man you were hunting up; everyone in the group was equally likely to know the business of every other clansman.
“I think he went to town,” one of the girls answered, as if “town” were a foreign place hundreds of miles away, not a collection of buildings she could see clearly from where she sat. “About an hour ago.”
“Do you know where in town?” Caleb asked patiently.
“There’s a place. There’s a singer there,” one of the boys volunteered. “He’s been going there almost every night.”
“I remember him raving about some new soprano,” Caleb said with a smile. “You don’t happen to remember just where she’s performing?”
“It’s named after an angel,” the girl said helpfully. “Cherub. Something like that.”
Caleb could not help laughing. “Well. Thanks. I’ll go try to find him. If you see him before the night’s over, tell him I was looking for him. I’m Caleb.”
They smiled and nodded and benignly watched him go. He set off back toward the lights of the city, shaking his head very slightly. Odd group, the Edori. They would welcome any stranger into their midst with the utmost friendliness, incurious and unalarmed; he could as easily have stayed all night at the encampment awaiting Noah’s return, been offered food and drink and a place to sleep by any of a dozen total strangers. No wonder they were a dying race, nearly herded into slavery and extinction 150 years ago and, now, crowded out of their nomad life by an aggressive, expanding population that had no patience for their unhurried ways. He liked them, but he knew he could never live such an undirected life.
Under the blue streetlights he paused to get his bearings. Luminaux boasted more nightclubs and symphony halls than any other city in Samaria—there was no such thing as a separate entertainment district, so no telling where Noah’s new singer might be. Something to do with angels. What could the girl have been talking about?
But two blocks of aimless walking led him by fortunate chance to his destination—a low, dark building with lightless windows and a door curtained over with black velvet. Guarding the door was a glass statue of an angel lit from within by a turquoise flame. Her crystal hands held a triangular pennant, white letters embroidered on a blue serge field, and the single word spelled “Seraph.”
Must be the place, Caleb said to himself, smiling, and pushed through the soft door to enter.
Inside, there was scarcely more light. Faint blue bulbs outlined a narrow stage at the far end of the room and traced the aisles between tables and doorways. Candles provided a touch more light at each table, but Caleb noted that the seated patrons leaned close together to get a better look at each other’s faces. Servers made their way cautiously through the dark thicket of chairs and bodies, balancing trays and memorizing their steps between stations.
Someone was on stage, playing tentative-sounding chords on a magnificently tuned dulcimer. Must be the interim entertainment, Caleb thought, since it sounded more like background music than a headline performer. He had no musical ability himself, but it was impossible to live in Samaria and not acquire, effortlessly almost, discriminating taste and the ability to judge talent. Music flowed through Luminaux like electricity through the wire; it provided more wattage than the Gabriel Dam on the Galilee River. Luminaux would as soon paint itself crimson as forego its music—and this idle performer was not the one people had crowded into Seraph to see.
For the place was quite full, every table taken and two or three dozen patrons leaning against the uneven walls or standing by the stage in small, excited groups. It w
ould be hard to find Noah in this shadowy place, peering past groups of strangers to search for the familiar face. Caleb eased his feet forward onto the dark pathways and made his way almost by feel from table to table, scrutinizing all the patrons as he passed.
He had traversed maybe three densely packed rows when he came across a small table jammed up against the east wall with an angled view of the stage and only one patron seated there. He could tell it was a man but couldn’t see his face, so he said “Noah?” in a low voice and waited for a response.
“Yes, who—Caleb! Where did you come from? Are you with anyone? Have a seat!”
Caleb laughed and sat down. “I came looking for you. A couple kids back at the camp said you might be here. Once again, I commend the Edori on their group intellect, the ability to sense the actions and emotions of one of their tribe even though separated by a geographic distance that can transcend hundreds of miles—”
The grin was hard to see in the dark but unmistakable in the voice. “I probably told someone where I was going. Why were you looking for me?”
“You said it couldn’t be done—”
“No! You didn’t get those damn wings to fly!”
“Yes—I, even I—lowly mortal that I am.”
“I don’t believe it, not fly. You glided, am I right? You jumped off a mountain, came down, swirled around in the thermals a little, but you weren’t self-propelled. You didn’t have control, you didn’t get distance. You weren’t flying. Am I right?”
Caleb waggled his hands dismissively; a technicality merely. “I was airborne, that’s what counts. I got the start, I got the germ of flight. Okay, so it lasted maybe ten minutes—”
