Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

  “What are you guys talking about?” said Hippolyta. “What spell?”

  “… Okay,” said Cranswell, “this is gonna be kind of a long story.”

  “You’re sure you want me doing this?” Greta asked, standing by the OR table. Faust paused in the doorway.

  “You going to keep asking stupid questions?” he said.

  “Look, I’ve never done trauma surgery,” she said, “I sew up cuts and set bones, the worst thing I’ve done in months was an emergency appendectomy on a were-something, and that was only because they refused to listen to their boyfriend and didn’t come in until the thing was ready to pop—”

  “One of your vamp friends told me you dealt with a punctured lung in the middle of a battle,” said Faust. “I suggest you shut up and get on with it. In here,” he added, moving aside for aides to roll a gurney in, and was gone.

  Fuck, thought Greta. “Okay,” she said out loud to the people shifting her winged patient to the table. The angel was unconscious, covered in gold—blood, that’s angel blood, she made herself think—and they’d already intubated. Not good. Neither were the monitor readouts on the screens once the leads were applied. “Talk to me. What do we have?”

  “Single sharp-force injury to the left chest, hard enough to crush,” said one of the aides, a demon who was clearly having some difficulty with the allergen but still functional. “Dyspneic on arrival, weak pulse, improved a lot once we intubated. Looks like a blow from a bladed weapon, multiple depressed rib fractures, left-side hemothorax. The right wing’s broken in three places, but—”

  “Never mind the wing for now, as long as it’s not bleeding,” said Greta. “Do we have imaging? Someone get me ultrasound, and—oh, hell, what do you do for blood transfusions for these poor bastards, you can’t have angel blood lying around—”

  “Dr. Faust’s come up with something,” said one of the aides hurriedly. “It’s—it’s actually lake water run through a bunch of filtration and processed in the MRI scanner to adjust its pneumic signature—it’s better than nothing—”

  “Get me at least three units,” Greta said, cutting him off. “I want him closer to hemodynamically stable. Start running the replacement stuff into him right away—thanks—” She took the ultrasound wand somebody handed her, ran it over the angel’s wounded side, looking at the black-and-white display screen on the machine they’d rolled over. It wasn’t possible to tell what kind of bleed was causing the hemothorax, not on ultrasound, but the fact that the angel wasn’t already dead suggested it wasn’t arterial. “Okay. I want that hemothorax relieved, give me a 14-gauge.” She held out her hand, not looking away from the damaged chest wall, and was faintly gratified when the capped needle and syringe were placed into her palm almost at once.

  This she knew how to do, but hadn’t done in years: easing the needle in over the rib, pulling back on the plunger until that incredibly strange golden blood appeared; threading the cath down over the needle, watching the gold flow through the tube, letting the blood out from the pleural space, allowing the angel’s lung to reinflate. The numbers on the monitors changed almost immediately once she’d let off most of the blood, and Greta sighed. Good. He’d need more work to repair the wing, but at least he’d probably live long enough to get it.

  “Okay,” she said. “Keep an eye on him, have someone sort out that wing, keep him stable, he’ll probably do. Who’s next?”

  It was a little impressive just how quickly they were able to wheel one patient out and the next one in. Greta stood up straighter as they brought her another wrecked angel.

  “Oblique fracture, right femur, internal bleeding,” said the orderly without her having to ask, as they transferred the angel to her table. It was obvious that a sharp end of bone had nicked some serious blood vessels; one thigh was swollen, a deep cut across it gaping open with the internal pressure. They’d put a tourniquet high on the leg, as high as possible, which was why the angel was here instead of wherever they were using for a morgue, and this one was semiconscious, making little choked sounds of pain.

  “I need one of you to be my anesthetist,” she said. “Who’s most qualified?” The nurses and the aides and the volunteers all looked the same, gold-splattered scrubs and gowns, masks and caps. One of them came forward.

  “I’m a nurse,” he said, “not an anesthetist, but I might be the best you’ve got, Doctor—”

  “Good. Get going. I want Versed, and then IV propofol, whatever you’ve got that pretends to be propofol, and oxygen, and watch his sats. If you can hear me,” she added to the angel, “I know it hurts, we’re going to fix that, and sort out your leg: you’re safe here, you’re among friends.”

  “Who…?” it managed.

  “I’m a doctor,” she said, and for a moment felt as if she might know what it was like to be only what she was, a thing that fixed, not a person with a tiresome personal life: a thing that repaired, the way some of the mummies were Things That Coded. “I’m here to help.”

  The nurse had fetched the appropriate drugs and was beginning to inject them into the angel’s IV, and it gave a little sigh and closed its eyes again; she watched on the monitors, but the vitals were still steady, if less than great.

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s get on with it,” and thought absurdly, Let’s fix a femur, and reached out for a pair of forceps already clamped on a pad of gauze soaked with topical antiseptic. Now that she’d gotten somewhat settled, she was getting used to reaching out a hand and having someone put the tool in it, and that was a kind of luxury she’d seldom had before—except at Oasis Natrun—no, she wasn’t going to think about that. At all.

  She was going to bloody well get on with it. Like Faust had said. Do the job that is in front of you, and do it to the best of your ability, and do it until you can’t do it anymore, and then—get out of the way.

  Nobody was paying any attention to Zophiel.

  Once the host of Heaven had marched off, flaming swords in hand, the rest of the inhabitants had gone into a sort of jubilation, singing and playing their harps and praying and—not paying any attention to Zophiel. He slipped past a knot of angels on their knees and made his way through the palace to find Amitiel still standing on the other balcony: standing with his wings folded tightly and his arms wrapped around himself. Zophiel noticed with a kind of horror that his halo was tilted ever so slightly out of true.

  “Why don’t I feel joy?” Amitiel asked, looking up at him with blank golden eyes. “Everybody else is—triumphant?”

  “I don’t know,” said Zophiel, and—because no one was paying attention—wrapped his arms and his wings around Amitiel and held him close. That was the only thing that felt completely right, the only thing that had seemed to fit, ever since their return.

  “They’re killing the other angels, aren’t they,” Amitiel said into his shoulder. “On the other side.”

  “They’re killing false angels,” said Zophiel, but even he didn’t sound as if he was entirely sure. “It’s all right to kill false angels, they’re profane.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “I don’t know,” said Zophiel. “I’ve never thought about it.”

  “The demons looked like—people,” Amitiel said. “On the wrong Earth.”

  “Do you—” He stopped, stroking Amitiel’s curls. “Would it help if we went to see the battle?”

  “Can we do that? Are we allowed?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “Let’s find out.”

  Varney had moved on to whiskey after the second dose of blood. Cranswell watched him watching the TV, the picture reflected in his eyes, and wondered if they’d feel it when the world actually got around to ending: would it hurt?

  The ENN anchor was looking somewhat exhausted, but their hairstyle was pristine; Cranswell thought that was a function of being a news anchor: you developed natural resources of hairspray. He could remember the morning after the Gladius Sancti thing, sitting in the Savoy, watching a different but pr
actically interchangeable anchor blithering about the state of the city on a different but practically interchangeable TV.

  Beside him, Hippolyta was on her third large scotch, which didn’t seem to be having much of an effect. “I guess there’s one good thing about all this,” she said. “You guys don’t have to figure out how to return that stone tablet thing you stole.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Cranswell said. “You’ve got a point, though. Also we don’t have to explain about Van Dorne vanishing, on account of everyone else is gonna vanish, too.”

  “What do you think is happening up there?”

  “On Earth? No fucking clue,” he said. “I remember there’s supposed to be locusts and boils and darkness and—wait, no, that’s the plagues, isn’t it?”

  “They’re practically the same,” said Varney without looking away from the TV. The chyron now read, Nacreous Gates secured in joint advance between infernal and divine troops, active combat continues with mounting casualties. “John of Patmos, while a thoroughly creative thinker, was undoubtedly inspired by earlier works.”

  “Figures you’d know it,” said Hippolyta.

  “He did get the order wrong,” Varney said. “Unless the seven seals and the horsemen and so on happened somewhere else. In Revelation, it goes seals, horsemen, trumpets, and the bloody rain and hail are supposed to have fire mixed in with them. And a mountain is hurled into the sea, and then we get Star Wormwood. Clearly whatever runs this version of reality hasn’t done its reading.”

  “We should complain,” said Cranswell. “Send a sharp letter.”

  “‘I want my expectations managed with more integrity,’” Varney said, and took a sip of his drink. “No, that’s Edmund; he writes the sharp letters. Wrote, I mean. I suppose it’s a mercy that the Walkie Talkie building is getting destroyed along with the rest of it; he won’t have to complain to the Times about dreadful architecture any longer.”

  “What do you suppose he’s doing?” Cranswell asked. “Ruthven, I mean. And Grisaille. They’re down here, too, right?”

  “Probably same as us,” said Hippolyta, and drained her glass. “If they have any sense at all, I mean. Time for another round.”

  At some point, Greta had lost count of how many casualties she’d seen: it all turned into body after body to be repaired, golden blood vessel after golden blood vessel to be clamped, bone after bone to be set, endless sutures: there had never been a time when she hadn’t been covered in golden blood, when she hadn’t had open wounds under her hands, when she hadn’t been barking out orders: all the world had shrunk to the operating table in front of her, the angel to be fixed before she could get to the next one in line. Briefly, near the beginning, she’d thought of Nadezhda and Anna in the other ORs, wondering how they were holding up, but she simply hadn’t had the attention to spare for following that train of thought for very long.

  They kept running out of blood replacement and someone was busy flipping back and forth from the imaging scanner, which was running at full power, a twenty-desmarais mirabilic field reversing polarity six times a second, turning the lake water into a pneumic-neutral substance the angels’ bodies wouldn’t reject that still carried a healing charge. Someone else was busy spinning suture thread out of raw firmament and cycling the autoclave over and over to sterilize tray after tray of instruments.

  She didn’t know how long she had been working, and it did not matter, except that she began at some point to lose her voice, and that was distantly annoying; all she was really aware of was the line of broken angels, waiting for her, waiting for Dez or Anna or Faust, waiting for help, and the one under her hands was trying very hard to die and she was trying very hard not to let it and someone touched her shoulder, someone a long way away said her name, said, Greta, stop, they’re dying too fast, there’s too many, the ones waiting in line are already dead, we’ve done all we can do—

  “Fuck you,” Greta snarled, “I am not giving up,” and the monitor squealed its awful single note and no, fuck this, fuck everything, the chest was already open and she had never held a hot and lifeless heart between her hands before but she was doing it now, pressing and releasing, pressing and releasing, oh, beat for me, you stupid thing, beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, and over it all that blank idiot squeal, like a skewer going through her skull from ear to ear—

  “Greta,” whoever it was said again. “Greta, it’s over.”

  That squeal. It wasn’t the sound of desperation. It was the sound of despair.

  “I know,” she said, barely audible, and her hands inside the angel’s chest went still.

  In Samael’s command center, the blue-glowing projection of the rift had changed in real time, reflecting the transformation overtaking it; the scale had had to change, zooming out farther and farther to be able to show the whole thing as it grew. On the main screen the video feed was half-obscured with blood, showing several crumpled bodies under a blanket of dust; it shook from time to time. All of the demons watching had fallen silent.

  In the world above, the boiling seas hammered what was left of the coastline with hundred-foot waves; the cities burned, the deserts turned to glass and cracked wide open, every volcano on Earth—even those that had been extinct for thousands of years—erupted at the same time; from the International Space Station, astronauts and cosmonauts alike watched in silent horror as the blue of the planet’s oceans turned a deep and terrible red. Vast clouds of smoke blotted out the view of continents and islands. The awful light of the single remaining star crawled on their skin. Nuclear stockpiles went off one by one, scything away the remains of half the planet’s population in a series of unthinkable blasts. The ocean’s burden of shipwrecks rose to the surface, crewed by dead men, sailing before poisoned wind.

  In Heaven, Amitiel and Zophiel peered through the shifting, changing, shimmering discontinuity that was the rift, into a smoky, dusty, reeking strangeness: through the smoke they could pick out what looked like ruined battlements, heaps of—

  “Those are angels,” said Amitiel softly. “Dead ones.”

  Before Zophiel could stop him, he closed his eyes and stepped through the rift, into the other world. Zophiel said something under his breath that he absolutely should not have known how to pronounce, took a deep breath, and stepped through to follow him.

  The smell hit him at once, an awful combination of burning and blood—and yet somehow being here felt familiar, despite everything, even without the constant comfort of their God’s attention. He thought dimly that they had lived here for so long, on this world’s Earth, that they had grown used to it; was trying not to think that it felt more like home than their own Heaven.

  Amitiel was walking slowly toward the pile of bodies. Golden ichor was everywhere, splashed on the ground, soaking the angels’ robes, staining the white feathers of their wings.

  “Don’t,” said Zophiel. Amitiel ignored him, reached down to touch the nearest body.

  “It’s still warm,” he said wonderingly. “I think it’s alive—”

  “Don’t,” Zophiel said, too late: he’d already bent to roll the angel onto its back.

  The golden eyes stared sightlessly past Amitiel. The gold-clotted insides slithered out of the gaping wound from neck to abdomen with a slick plop Zophiel could have done without, and he was only just in time to catch Amitiel before he fell, holding him while he was helplessly, violently sick.

  “Is it one of ours?” he managed when it was over. “Zophiel, is it one of ours or theirs?”

  Zophiel let go of him long enough to reach out gingerly and touch the angel’s wing. It felt—exactly like an angel’s wing should feel.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly, numbly. “Amitiel… I can’t tell.”

  In Grakkar’s, every pair of eyes was fixed on the television screens, watching frozen as the numbers of dead grew higher and higher. Every pair but one.

  Sir Francis Varney looked into the depths of his glass, swirled the amber liquid, looked through it and t
hrough time. All the mobs, all the desperate flights through the darkened countryside, all the gasping fainting damsels, the death and turning of Clara Crofton, the lies and the thievery and the slow sinking decay, dying over and over, gunshot after gunshot, breathing his last in a country inn’s bedroom, waking to the touch of moonlight; all of the things he had done, and done to others, and had done to him, over the centuries. It had been a very long, and very strange, life; and in it there had been nothing close to sustained pleasure, nothing close to joy, until the very end. Until he’d woken from agonized fever-dreams to find a human bending over him with gentle hands.

  He’d snapped at her, raw instinct, and wanted at once to sink into the floor and disappear, and she had not run away; had not run away at all, was—still not running, even now.

  Varney had said it to her, more than once, in the beginning: what he was could never be forgiven for its very nature, he was a damned and unholy creature doomed to eternity outside the sight of God forevermore. He had long ago—so long ago—given up all hope of absolution, turned his face away from forgiveness.

  Forever is not long at all, he thought now, and drained the glass. He’d told the others about Revelation a little while ago, and the language of that book still resonated in his mind; brought with it other language, other words, graven so deep in memory that even now they came back to him, so many centuries after he had lost the privilege of pronouncing them and hoping to be heard. He thought of Tefnakhte, back in the world, asking for help in a language dead for thousands of years, begging a god for answers that did not exist, asking the questions anyway.

  There was nothing else to do in all the world, all that was left of it. No other options, no more last chances, no one left to appeal to, except one.

  I can’t do this, he thought. I’ve forgotten how. Even if I could, and somehow avoided being struck by righteous thunderbolts for daring to try, nothing would deign to hear me.