Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  She could feel it very clearly when her adrenaline dumped all at once, a cold-hot shock up and down her arms, a dropping weight in her stomach, a distant roaring in her ears. That’s impossible, she thought. That doesn’t happen, none of this can happen—

  She remembered telling Grisaille you get a front-row seat to this mess, and thought now, as the first spatters of blood began to hit the broken window, apparently so do I. Her own voice sounded very far away, distant, almost unconcerned, when she said out loud, “Does anyone have any idea what we’re supposed to do now?”

  “Yes,” said Leonora Van Dorne behind them, calm and composed. “I do.”

  CHAPTER 15

  What do you mean, you do?” Greta demanded at the same time Cranswell asked, “How the hell did you get out?”

  Van Dorne looked different, Greta thought. Something close to serene, despite the current situation. “That doesn’t matter,” she said, and turned, walked away into the uncharacteristic dimness of the entry atrium.

  Greta followed, making her way through broken glass and furniture, and one glance upward was enough to tell her why the atrium was dim: the great central skylight was dark red. It was raining quite hard, the sound of raindrops on glass both absurdly familiar and somehow obscene: thicker, heavier than water. Beyond, in the corridors leading to the exam rooms and patient ward, they could hear rapid voices. The nursing staff must be quite busy, she thought and, past the adrenaline, could manage to summon up some gratitude for their hard work.

  The others joined her. Van Dorne was standing under the red skylight, with a peculiar half-smile on her face: after a moment Greta recognized it from God-knew-how-many Egyptian statuettes.

  “I know what to do,” Van Dorne said again. “It’s the only thing, in fact. I caused this. That I did not know I was doing it is not an excuse.”

  “What are you talking about?” Greta said, staring at her. Djehuty hadn’t said anything about the magic spell causing rains of blood. “Van Dorne—”

  “I can never undo all the damage, I know that. But I can return what was stolen, at least to some extent.” She brought her hands up, held them like a pair of scales, nearly even. “If not the objects themselves, the historical artifacts, then the force they contained. A kind of balance restored, at least.”

  An uneasy suspicion was unfolding in Greta’s mind. “Don’t,” she said. “Whatever you’re about to do, don’t—”

  “Too late,” said Van Dorne, that weirdly serene smile more statue-like than ever, and closed her eyes, rapidly whispering something. She crossed her arms over her torso, like a pharaoh, fists clenched, trembling slightly—and then slammed her palms flat against her chest.

  There was a faint shockwave, and the lamps flickered for a moment before coming back up, and by their light they could see a rapid and horrible change overtaking Van Dorne. She seemed to shrivel, shrinking inside her clothes, the flesh dwindling from her to leave bone and skin; wrinkles arrowed across her face like cracks across a dam, deepening and deepening; her closed eyes shrank into their sockets, her hands nothing more than dry and twisted twigs, her silver-gilt hair draining to white and then coming out completely in great clumps, and still she stood there—on and on and on, from wizened to desiccated—

  —and then abruptly it was all over; her clothes crumpled in a heap, empty; a faint bitter dust skirled across the floor, and was gone.

  They stood, silent, stunned. The only sound was the hammering of the blood on the skylight overhead.

  “What just happened?” said Cranswell eventually, sounding very sick.

  “She turned it back,” Tefnakhte said, as if he was trying hard to make himself believe it. “She—used it on herself. The draining spell.”

  “So—wait, does that mean…”

  “All the mummies whose grave goods she drained have that back,” said Greta. “Right? The—the energy, or whatever it was, that she stole.”

  “I think so,” said Tefnakhte. “I think the patients who’ve suffered the episodes will be feeling quite a lot better just now.”

  Greta looked up at the skylight. The sound of the rain had not changed, hammering on the glass with an insistent rhythm, hard as pebbles. The crumpled heap of Van Dorne’s empty clothes lay in the center of the atrium floor, an awful kind of anticlimax.

  “She seemed to think the—uh—the whatever’s happening—was because of her,” Cranswell said, staring at the heap. “Like her doing that would fix it all somehow, take things back to normal, so why is it still raining blood—”

  “There’s something else going on,” said Greta. “There has to be. More than just her stealing energy—unless it’s like the summonings in Paris, what she’s done has damaged things enough to bring on catastrophe—”

  The sound of the rain changed abruptly, and she looked up again. “I think we should move right now, everybody. Get back.”

  They were all sufficiently on edge that they didn’t ask why, simply obeying, and Greta was awfully glad of it: just then the sound from the skylight intensified, followed by a crack, and then a violent crash as the glass failed completely under the onslaught of hail, spilling an unspeakable torrent of glass and blood and knots of ice the size of Greta’s fist into the center of the atrium. The coppery stink of blood was immediate and all-encompassing; the downpour didn’t seem to be letting up at all.

  Raining blood. Greta was a scientist, and had spent quite a lot of time training herself to accept the inexplicable when it was objectively true; her work with mummies relied on her ability to circumvent the but that can’t happen instinctive response. Here was incontrovertible evidence, splattering on the floor tiles, of something which could not be happening, and Greta did not have to work very hard at all to acknowledge that it was.

  This was happening. She wondered if the frogs were next, or ought that to be locusts? A lifetime spent in study, and she didn’t even know the right order of operations for the ending of the world. Was the red rain falling on London, too, swirling in the gutters and dripping from umbrellas? Had the Thames gone scarlet and slow? Had the earthquakes toppled St. Paul’s dome, sent the great hoop of the Eye spinning free, shattered the Shard?

  It wouldn’t matter, she thought, that Ruthven couldn’t come back from Hell; quite soon there would be no Earth for him to go back to, and all his beautiful things in his beautiful house quite vanished, along with Dark Heart, along with all the monsters they had rescued from the Paris catacombs, and Emily, and everyone she knew and had ever known: all her friends, Nadezhda and Anna and Hippolyta and the ghoul-chieftain Kree-akh and everyone. All of it gone. The understanding unfolded like a poison flower, realization after realization: I am going to die, and my friends are going to die, and the places I have loved are going to die, and the rest of the whole world is going to die, right in front of me, and I can do nothing at all to save us.

  Greta reached for Varney’s hand. If this really was the end of everything, at least she was with him; and there truly was nothing more she could do. All her skill and knowledge and experience was no longer relevant.

  It felt strangely freeing, in a way.

  Faust had been too busy to ask them questions other than what medical training do you have, and since Grisaille had once been a medical student and Ruthven had driven ambulances in the Blitz and had been pressed into service as a de facto scrub nurse, Faust hadn’t had to do much on-the-spot instruction. The initial chaos Grisaille had perceived was actually not a disordered mess of activity; after he’d been watching for a little while, he could determine that the groups of nurses and technicians were setting up individual triage stations.

  Listening to the chatter around them, and watching the live feed of Samael’s makeshift war room on one of the large monitors hung here and there on the walls, Grisaille was putting together a mental image of how the infernal civil service worked. The eight branches were under the oversight of the eight archdemons: infrastructure was Ozymandias’s division, Beelzebub ran operations, Mephistophe
les was health and sciences, Ahriman communications, Azazel arts and culture, Belial external affairs, Mammon budget and finance, and Fastitocalon—in place of Asmodeus—was in charge of monitoring and evaluation. At the moment all of them seemed to be working together as a remarkably well-organized group, and Grisaille was aware of the fact that he found this comforting.

  A little while ago the monitors had blanked out and lit up again to show a single shot of Samael, head and shoulders, with a chyron running along the bottom of the screen to reiterate his statements: Attention all citizens, I am afraid I must declare that as of this moment Hell is at war, the beautiful voice steady and serious but entirely confident. Grisaille had been impressed despite himself at the Devil’s skill with rhetoric; Samael’s speech had not been long, or fear-mongering, or falsely enthusiastic. He had simply told his people that a foreign armed force had invaded Heaven and was causing mass destruction; that Heaven lacked adequate defensive preparation or disaster management capacity; that therefore in order to preserve the vital and necessary balance between Heaven and Hell, he was providing them with reinforcements. He had concluded by offering reassurance: We are in no immediate danger here. I ask all citizens of Dis and Oldtown and the surrounding areas to remain calm and follow instructions given by the Department of Operations. A pause, then, This situation is bad, but not impossible, and I will do everything I can to keep you safe, informed, and secure—talking directly to the camera, and even Grisaille, interloper and noncitizen, had felt the warm regard of the Devil’s attention, a personal assurance, Samael would take care of him specifically, it would be all right. Grisaille had been manipulated by experts before, but he was aware of standing in the presence of a master, and minded it less than he thought he should. The situation was, in fact, being handled.

  (He was trying not to think about the fact that the situation being handled was not something he could really wrap his head around without wanting to gibber and hide under a desk, and that would be more unhelpful than Grisaille felt like being at the moment.)

  He and Ruthven had been given scrubs and gloves and caps and gowns. As they sat out of the way, waiting to be needed, Samael’s words still on his mind, Grisaille looked at his lover and was struck all over again at just how beautiful he was, despite the incongruity; the long eyebrows, black as inkstrokes, the huge silver eyes with their dramatic dark rims, heavy eyelashes; a short, neat, elegant nose, high cheekbones, and a mouth Grisaille had often wished he could draw: the delicacy of it, the sharp Cupid’s bow of the upper lip.

  “What?” said Ruthven, aware of his scrutiny.

  “You,” said Grisaille. “Just you.”

  Ruthven smiled a little. “You know, if this really does turn out to be the end of it all, I don’t have much regret. Everything’s worth it, to have had this little time with you.”

  Grisaille was horrified to find his throat closing with the threat of tears, and looked away, but when Ruthven took his hand and squeezed it gently, he squeezed back—wishing he were the sort of person who could say the right words, wishing a lot of things all at once. Wishing he’d had more time.

  “There they go,” said a nurse, and he was almost grateful for the excuse to redirect his attention back at one of the wall-mounted monitors: it had returned to a shot of the plaza covered with neatly arranged battalions of demons, disappearing group by group. Ahriman’s communications department was maintaining a live feed on the main broadcast channels, which Grisaille wasn’t sure was entirely wise; the rest of the population of Hell might not find it comforting to watch the battle play out in real time.

  “They still don’t have visual of Heaven,” someone said. “Must be the connection’s damaged on their end—that should be an easy fix, soon’s our people get up there—”

  Everyone, doctors and nurses and technicians and volunteers alike, was watching intently. The screen split to show Samael’s war room as well as the plaza, and Grisaille found himself wishing they had sound—and a moment later wished they didn’t, because the feed of the plaza flickered to bright static and then to a shot of somewhere he didn’t recognize at all, with a blurt of raw noise. The picture shook, smoke drifting across it, but Grisaille could make out what looked like ruined battlements in the background before a demon’s face, indistinct behind a full-face breathing mask, suddenly took over the shot. “Sir!” she yelled, before communications cut the feed to the broadcast channel, “it’s worse than we thought—there’s got to be a couple thousand of ’em, with flaming swords—they’ve knocked down half the citadel, send more—”

  That half of the screen went blank abruptly, and then the command center shot cropped itself to show only the table and the demons around it, rather than the big main screen on the wall—that’s a mistake, thought Grisaille, that looks like they’ve got something they want to hide, that’s not a good look if you want to maintain people’s trust—and then cut out entirely, going to standby color bars for a few moments. In the hospital, everyone was talking at once, and it took them a little while to stop talking even after the screens lit up again with what looked like a perfectly ordinary news show desk, with a conventionally attractive demon behind it.

  Oh my God they have news anchors in Hell, Grisaille thought absurdly, and was enormously glad when, a moment later, the first casualties started to arrive. Watching people pop into existence was even more disturbing than watching them disappear, especially when they had large white wings and were lying limply in someone else’s arms, liberally splashed with what looked to Grisaille like gold paint, but at least it was something immediate to focus on rather than existential lunacy.

  “Casualty!” the demon carrying the—angel, all right, fine, Grisaille accepted that it was a fucking angel—yelled, and a moment later a couple of nurses were there with a gurney, rolling it away to be seen to just as another couple of demons arrived with wounded angels, and another, and another: a steady stream of casualties, all splashed with that strange gold liquid, which Grisaille realized belatedly must be angel blood. The sound of the news show on the monitors was completely blocked out behind the cacophony of screams and groans and nastier noises, coupled with the raised voices of the medical staff.

  “Here we go,” Ruthven said, catching his attention. “Look sharp, this is only going to get worse,” even as somebody rolled a moaning angel on a gurney up to them and immediately disappeared back into the chaos. Grisaille glanced across the gold-soaked heap at him, and just before Ruthven pulled up his mask, he gave Grisaille a smile.

  They did a rapid examination: the angel had broken one wing in three places, one due to what looked like a machete cracking the bone—no, a sword, it’s a fucking sword wound, he thought—and had lacerations all down its side; golden blood was oozing from some of them, but others appeared to be partly cauterized.

  Oh, right. Flaming sword.

  “What’s your name?” Ruthven asked the angel gently, running gloved fingers down the other wing’s long bones.

  “Iofiel,” it managed. “Hurts…”

  “I know,” Ruthven said, “we’re going to give you something for that, and get you sorted out, Iofiel. It’ll be all right.”

  “No it won’t,” the angel moaned, “they’re—angels and they’re killing everybody in the name of God, why has He forsaken us—”

  “Not everybody,” said Grisaille, fetching the morphine. “There’s more help on the way.” Samael had said God was—what, AWOL? Presumably this was a different God, the one from the next universe over, with a somewhat more direct approach to things.

  Iofiel looked up at him with blank golden eyes, rimmed with tears. “Who are you?”

  “We’re volunteers,” he said. “That’s—it, really.”

  Ruthven took the syringe Grisaille passed him, and gave the angel its injection, and together they began to clean and stitch the worst of the wounds—the wing could be dealt with later, right now they needed to get this done as quickly as possible so they could move on to the next casualty, and
the next, and the next. Very soon Grisaille stopped really seeing the individual angels at all: there were only wounds under his hands, gold-drenched body after gold-drenched body, broken bones and torn flesh, and some of it he thought could be mended and some of it could not, and he didn’t have room to think about that right now: he was back in Ingolstadt, in anatomy class, and not surprised at all that angels should have muscle and bone and blood vessels just like humans; he might never be surprised again—

  “—What’s wrong?” said Ruthven, not to him, and Grisaille did look up from the wound he was cleaning, and realized that the background noise had changed: not just the cries of the ruined angels, but a steady chorus of coughing and sneezing underneath it, as if some irritant gas had been released into the vicinity.

  He straightened up, looking around, and stared. Almost every demon, doctors and nurses and technicians alike, seemed to be in some level of distress: puffy-faced, their eyes streaming, some of them sneezing and coughing helplessly into their elbows, as if—

  “Oh, bloody hell,” said Faust over the noise, shouldering his way through the ward. He, too, was liberally splashed with golden blood, his surgical gown covered with it, gloved hands solid gold to the elbow. “Uphir, Varamas, Decarabia, you’re done, get out of here, go mainline antihistamine until you can breathe again, don’t argue with me. Kharath, Muphas, Nyctur, Jopharel, take a break. Someone hack the building’s emergency protection system and get the smoke fans turned on to ventilate this floor. Now, people.” He clapped his hands.

  “What’s going on?” Grisaille asked as the three worst-affected demons were helped away by colleagues and the activity of triage began to resume. Faust sighed.

  “Demons are allergic to angels,” he said. “It’s a bloody nuisance, is what it is, but some of them are worse than others and I don’t have enough pairs of hands to spare, they’ll just have to do their best, and the smoke-evac fans will help a bit.”