Grave Importance

by Vivian Shaw

And then, with a mental sigh: One can always do what one must.

  Sir Francis Varney brought his hands together, closed his eyes, and began to pray: not for absolution, not for forgiveness, but simply for help, at the end of all things.

  The citadel of Heaven was breached; white fire roared from a hundred jewel-framed windows, crazed and cracked the blocks of solid ruby that crowned the battlements where they had not been knocked down to heaps of choking rubble. Fighting still went on within the citadel itself, shouts and cries and the clang of sword on sword, the duller thump of metal into flesh. In the space between the Nacreous Gates—sixty feet tall and made of solid pearl—and the entry into the citadel itself, bodies were heaped up in untidy piles: white and gold, red and black, angel and demon alike. The agate cobblestones were slick and sticky with their mingled blood. Crushed-jewel dust and acrid smoke stung the eyes and throat.

  Amitiel and Zophiel wandered through the ruins, hand in hand, golden eyes blank. Both were covered in dust, the hems of their once-white robes a muddy gold-and-scarlet mess.

  “The towers are gone,” Amitiel said quietly, looking up at where the three great central towers of the citadel should have been, gleaming with jewels, their white and gold banners proud and magnificent. The great golden bell that should have hung at the very top of the central tower would never sing again. “How did they bring down the towers?”

  “I don’t know,” said Zophiel. “I—it was never my thought to wonder how the Archangel Michael achieved his victories. I just knew he did, and that it was righteous.”

  Amitiel started walking again, toward the crumbled wreckage of the citadel gateway, and drew Zophiel with him. Both of them had been sick now, more than once, and the awful taste of sour ambrosia and nectar coated the inside of Zophiel’s throat. He had never experienced despair: never understood the concept, even, but as Amitiel led him inexorably through the streets of the citadel, past fires, past the rubble of ruined stone and ruined bodies, toward the faint but growing sound of battle—he thought perhaps he might be getting some idea.

  Hell: Samael’s command center. The last of the live video feeds had gone to blind idiot static; all they had was audio, and none of that was anything they wished to hear.

  Fastitocalon came around the table to Samael, put a hand on his shoulder. The Devil was sitting halfway down the long pearl table, watching the screens with a completely expressionless face: outside, it was raining steadily, a soft grey endless rain, on and on, like tears.

  “‘Why,’” Fastitocalon said softly, “‘all our ranks are broke.’”

  Samael looked up at him, and the blank red eyes turned their ordinary butterfly-blue. “‘The devil take order now,’” he said with the hint of a smile, and covered Fastitocalon’s hand with his own. “We tried, Fass. We tried. That has to matter a little, doesn’t it, in the end?”

  “I’m glad I was here. If it has to be over—well, I’m tired, Sam, I’ve been tired since Paris, I don’t know how much longer I would have been useful to you, but—I’m glad I could at all.”

  Samael sighed. “So am I. I wish I had acted sooner. None of my people could have worked harder, done more; this isn’t on them.”

  “It’s not on anyone, really,” said Fastitocalon. “Except perhaps Asmodeus and his inability to do his job. And don’t say you should have noticed that; so should we all.”

  “‘Upon the king,’” Samael said with a wry, crooked smile, “‘let us our lives, our debts, our over-careful wives, our children, and our sins lay on the king; we must bear all,’ as well you know, and don’t chop logic with me in the middle of the bloody eschaton.”

  Fastitocalon squeezed his shoulder. “I’m glad I was here,” he said again, more softly, and outside the grey curtains of rain lightened a little, for a while.

  In Tower Three, there was no silence; the chaotic combination of monitor tones and the cries of wounded creatures filled the air as comprehensively as the reek of blood and other, more unpleasant things. They had stopped receiving casualties some time ago. Either there were no more wounded to bring down for treatment, or there was no one left to bring them.

  At one end of the bloodstained ward sat five people, very still, with the blank stares of the traumatically exhausted. The worst of the blood had come off with their disposable gowns, but some of it had soaked through to what they’d been wearing nonetheless.

  Grisaille sat with his hand in Ruthven’s, their fingers laced together. Nadezhda, Anna, and Greta shared a couch. None of them spoke. None of them made a sound at all, despite the slow and continuous flow of tears down their faces.

  Greta was somewhere a very long way away, being slowly crushed between two unyielding objects, squeezing her chest; she could not breathe and did not care, because nothing mattered at all anymore: nothing was left to matter, everything was over.

  I wish Varney was here, she thought vaguely, at a distance. That does matter, a little, at the end of it.

  And in Grakkar’s the bartender was no longer bothering to charge for drinks. Many of the demons who had been here when it began were already passed out, beyond the reach of terror or anticipation; most of the others were on their way. Beside Varney, Cranswell had put his head down on the table. The woman Hippolyta was snoring faintly.

  Varney paid no attention to any of them, or to the fact that the TV news anchor had finally been replaced with a screen that said STAND BY. He was lost inside a place in his own head he had not visited for centuries, a place he had long thought walled up and locked away, completely inaccessible; but it had been there waiting for him as if expecting his return: dark, and musty, and smelling of lilies and damp stone.

  At first it had been just reciting the words, sunk into his mind so long ago that even unspoken he had remembered them ever since: repeating them like a spell: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, over and over until the words themselves lost all meaning and became nothing but syllables, incantation. Varney had expected—he wasn’t sure what—pain, violent resistance, a thunderbolt expressing disgust and displeasure that such a thing as he should dare, but at first there had been simply nothing: the blank silence inside his own mind, listening to himself go on and on and on in an empty room, talking to the walls.

  And then—some unknowable time after he had begun—something began to listen.

  The space inside Varney’s mind was different now. Larger. Less like a shut-up closet. Warmer somehow. He realized he had lost the thread: andforgiveusourtrespassesaswe… as we…

  There was no reply, but that sensation of space and warmth increased slightly, like a prompt. Whatever was listening was paying attention. That was too frightening to think about for very long, so Varney plunged ahead, not knowing if this was the worst idea he’d ever had in a life marked by terrible decisions, and said, Please, if you’re there, if you’re listening, please, is this what you want to happen, is this how it’s supposed to go, is this right?

  The words dropped into that warm and waiting silence—and a moment later came back:

  is this what you want to happen

  is this how it’s supposed to go is this what you want is this right is this right is this

  right is this right

  is this right

  is this

  is this

  is

  It echoed and re-echoed inside Varney’s skull, sounding vast and strange and quite unlike his own voice, and with the echoes a series of awful, unspeakable images he could not remember seeing. The seas clotted and boiling, the sky dark but for that terrible star, a fiery mountain crashing into the waves; cities on fire, vast nuclear explosions, the destruction of Earth in a sequence of shutter-click visions—had that happened, was that already happening, was everyone on Earth already dead or wishing that they were, all Greta’s mummies so much bitter ash on that wind, all our friends, all our enemies, all the world gone up in flames—and then the images changed, showed him somewhere all white and gold and
jewel-hued, impossibly beautiful, and a moment later that same white city laid waste, fire and battle and the screams of dying men—

  —no, not men, angels, those were angels and this was war in Heaven—

  Is this right, said his own voice, far away now, a still-reverberating echo that would not die. Is this what you want is this what you want is this—

  And there was a sense of titanic breath being drawn, something unimaginably vast preparing to speak: Varney felt as if he should hang on to something to prevent being pulled off his feet by a gale-force wind rushing past him, but his hair did not even stir. The intangible wind died away, followed by a pause long enough that Varney thought he might actually go mad waiting for it, and then a voice he did not so much hear as feel, inside his mind, inside his bones, the hollow spaces of his body, said:

  NO.

  One word, but it seemed to go on forever, gorgeous and clear and ringing and somehow warm, like brandy, like the glow of polished brass. When it began to die away, Varney found himself reaching for it, wanting so much to go on listening, wanting to hear more, and it was terrible and wrenching to find himself being drawn back out of the place inside his mind where the voice had come, being shaken back to consciousness, to awareness, someone’s hand on his shoulder, someone saying his name. For a moment he had to cover his face with his hands to hide his naked distress at the lack of that voice. It had felt like—thrall.

  “Varney,” someone was saying, “Varney, wake up, wake up, something’s happening.”

  CHAPTER 17

  For the people on Earth—a few had survived, at least for now, in dark places under the surface, and were hiding in the darkness feeling the rock shaking all around them and hearing small gobbling-chuckling voices in the creak and squeal of uneasy ground—there was no word spoken: no one would remember hearing “no” at all, only a word, or something like a word, which they could not recall. All those who had survived long enough to hear it, however, heard it very well: a voice that seemed to come not from the air or the ground, but from within their own minds: vast, huge, the voice of something unimaginably large, unimaginably powerful, whispering so as not to burst their eardrums with its lightest tone.

  A voice, and within that voice, around it, in its harmonics and its overtones and its echoes, more beautiful than they had ever heard, music. Some would remember it as a single note, hanging pure and glass-clear and perfectly sustained until it began to fade—a note that they would spend the rest of their lives trying to reproduce in some way, trying to hear again that ringing clarity, that sweet clean perfection of tone. Some would remember it as the swell and joy of choral music, massed voices raised together in complex and gorgeous harmony. Some would hear song and some would hear instruments and some all of it together, and in the music, woven through the music, part of it, a sweetness unimaginable in its warmth and peace: a feeling like being cupped in the palm of some huge incomprehensible hand, held with such care it took the breath away.

  None of them could remember, either, how long it had lasted. It felt like—moments, hours, years, decades, caught in the warmth and care of that regard, suffused with the sweetness of music; afterward there would be endless, endless arguments, and for once on the skin of the world all sides would be right. It did go on for decades; it was over in a sweet, passing, piercing moment; both were true.

  But when it ended, when the last echoes of it were no longer even imagined, faded to nothing at all, the people hearing it woke from dreamless sleep to find themselves at home, at work, in their cars, in their airplanes, wherever they had been when the world closed around them like a fan snapped shut and everything had turned to fire. All systems back to green across the board. Trucks had never shifted from their lanes; nuclear plant workers had never been toppled by earthquakes into spent-fuel pools; planes had never even veered off course. Those who had been conscious at the end of it could remember almost nothing; those who had seen their death coming, stared it in the face, recalled only a vague and improbable nightmare. In the space of time taken up by that voice’s music, the world had—healed itself, or woken from a nightmare of its own, and spun gently on in its diurnal course exactly as it always had and always would.

  What was that, people would ask in the months following, what happened, what just happened, why do I have strange dreams, and after a little while a quasi-scientific explanation to do with climate change and gas emissions and collective hallucination and volcanic smog would be patched together—and unlike other patched-together excuses for the unscientific statement we don’t know, would be globally accepted.

  “—something’s happening, Varney,” the voice said again, and he blinked his eyes open, stinging with tears for the loss of that music, that voice, that regard, and found Cranswell staring into his face.

  “What—” Varney began, and hated the sound of his own voice, raw and unbeautiful and ordinary compared to the echoes in his mind. “Aren’t you drunk?”

  “I was,” Cranswell said, “like everyone else in this joint, but—did you hear something just now? Some kind of music, or someone saying something?”

  Varney straightened up. The demons who had been draped over various chairs and tables seemed to have somehow sobered up, but several of them were hugging one another in a way that made Varney slightly embarrassed to have observed. He realized that, for once, no part of him was hurting. That he felt… better than he had in centuries.

  The music was gone but something of that warmth and sweetness remained, caught inside him, and he thought—looking at the expressions on everyone’s faces—that it had caught inside them as well, was still warming them, a kind of unfocused but gorgeous care. A sense of being seen, and not in the observed-and-judged way: a feeling of being somehow understood.

  Someone turned the TV back on—it had gone off, Varney didn’t remember that—and the STAND BY sign was still there, but as he watched, it shivered and turned to the familiar ENN news desk, empty. After a moment the anchor reappeared, and appeared to have been crying but was currently making a valiant attempt to pretend this wasn’t true.

  “—hello,” they said, swallowed hard. “I don’t—know what to say, this is the first time in my career I don’t know what to say, but—everyone—look outside, stop watching this network and just look outside—”

  They fumbled at something in their ear, set it down on the desk, turned to look at something other than the camera. “I’m sorry, I—I—can’t do this right now, can someone please take over—”

  The screen went black for a moment and then WE ARE EXPERIENCING TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES popped up, and Varney found he was suddenly, actually, amazingly still able to laugh.

  “What?” said Hippolyta, who had woken up and was blinking at the two of them. “Why don’t I feel like shit?”

  “I don’t know,” said Varney, pressing a hand to his chest, “but—what are you waiting for, let’s go and see what’s happening outside?”

  Greta, he thought, and something of that last echo of the voice’s sweetness, its warmth, rose in a tide inside his mind: he was suddenly, completely certain that Greta was all right. That—all of them were, somehow.

  What had just happened to Varney—and somehow because of Varney, to the rest of the world—was far, far too huge to contemplate, and so with the peculiar and selective practicality that had largely kept him alive despite himself, he simply placed it aside on a mental shelf to think about later. It seemed as if there might be a later, after all.

  Zophiel came back to himself slowly, regaining awareness little by little of his surroundings, of the weight of Amitiel in his arms. He wasn’t sure what had just happened, only that it was wonderful.

  There had been—fighting, hadn’t there, and dead angels, and bitter harsh smoke that burned in his chest and stung tears from his eyes, and he had—been holding Amitiel, the other angel’s face pressed into the cup of his shoulder, as the cracked and spalling jewel cobblestones shook beneath their feet and the crystal vault of Heaven
rang and chimed out of tune, harsh—thinking: We did this, we made this happen, this is all our fault, wanting it to be over—and then all the world went pure and blinding white.

  He blinked, the edges of things beginning to come back into focus. In his arms Amitiel stirred, raised his head, tearstained and uncertain and still so beautiful.

  It was like coming in from the cold. All around him, Zophiel could feel the rightness again, and had not even known that it was missing, had not known he was without something so basic to an angel’s nature that its absence felt numb and dizzying—how could I not have known, he thought, how could I not have realized it wasn’t there—

  “It’s Him,” said Amitiel in a tiny voice, and although his eyes were still suspiciously bright, the lashes drawn into heavy points with faintly golden tears, he smiled: tremulous, dawning, brilliant as sunrise. “It’s Him, Zophiel.”

  “I know,” said Zophiel, soft and wondering. They were standing in the vast courtyard between the gates and the citadel, and—the citadel was there, the highest tower halfway to the crystal sky, the battlements unscathed, the air innocent of dust and smoke. All around them stood other angels, blinking in the clear light, looking around themselves at the restored beauty of Heaven.

  “But we’re in the wrong world,” said Amitiel. “Aren’t we? I—walked through and you came with me into the other world, and—there was a war—dead angels—”

  “I think,” said Zophiel slowly, “I think wherever we are, we are in the right world. Or—we’re allowed to be.” He could still hear the echoes of a voice that was not a voice at all, but music; he could still feel the unutterable sweetness of that attention, that care. Of being seen and understood, all his deeds and misdeeds held up for inspection and acknowledged and recorded on some celestial ledger.

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Amitiel asked, still smiling, but the uncertainty was in his tone as well as his words.