Archangel. Undead, like the Demons and Angels Sloane had never seen but had only heard about from his master. Like the Imago he had encountered once or twice and been severely disappointed by.
The Archangel was the reason he had to operate during daylight hours, this much was obvious. Sloane had to be gone by the time the creature could walk free.
At least there would be plenty of daylight down in Australia.
He focussed his gaze sadly back on the victim, who returned his look with glazed eyes.
“Please,” the victim managed to slur.
“This is unfortunate,” Sloane said, “but … look, I don’t suppose you could be convinced to apologise? There’s been a lot of begging and crying, a lot of babbling, but … well, it’s about the Atonement, you see, like we were talking about before. I can’t–”
“I’m sorry,” the victim’s eyes widened and bloody drool leaked from his ruined mouth. “I’m sorry, I am, I’m sorry for what I did, I’m sorry, please, I’m–”
Sloane stepped up, pushed his scalpel into the victim’s nose, and bore inwards and upwards, leaning in, crunching on through while the body spasmed and voided what little remained in its bowels. He held it firmly until its last movements had flailed away to stillness.
“I just can’t seem to bring myself to finish things off until I hear an apology,” he explained to the now empty room. It was funny, he reflected. Nothing had left, and yet here he was, talking to himself in a plastic-sheathed room containing a large piece of meat and a strong smell of faeces. “It’s just so unsatisfying if I can’t get that last little bit of the script out there. Thank you for making it easy for me.”
A TRAINING MONTAGE, OF SORTS
If the sisters were ever going to butt heads with the Destarion, Gabriel said, they would need to be as close to their full Pinian authority as possible. Since they weren’t quite ready to commit group suicide for the cause, and since they were already considerably more advanced than the Archangel had expected, he agreed that it would be a good idea to continue their development in this life. It would, he was as sure as he could be without actually being sure of anything at all, only assist their focus in the next life.
Their transition from Vandemar triplets to whichever incarnation of the three Disciples came next would, by general agreement, be suspended as a discussion topic for the immediate future. Perhaps group suicide for the cause would become an option later – or perhaps, as Ash said when Aunt Agñasta was out of earshot, the Archangel Gabriel could continue to go fuck himself. It was an open issue.
For much the same reason as their potential run-in with the Godfang, it was agreed that as much Pinian-focus as possible was needed before they made any move towards the Demons, Mercy and Fury. Whether it was to attack or to cooperate, their position in the interaction would only be strengthened by their increased Discipleness.
And so they trained.
It was rather slapdash. Gabriel had never trained Pinian Disciples before. They’d always known how to do the things they did, he said. They’d been doing them when he got here. Still, he did his best. He told them about the things the Disciples could do, the powers they had, the deeds they were famous for. He asked them about the things they could do, and together they attempted to map the two lists against one another.
Most important, in Gabriel’s mind, were Ariel’s athletic and aquatic talents; Ash’s martial skill and proclivity for fire; Roon’s uncanny technical aptitude, mysterious insights and physical strength. He got the three of them working on these facets of their lives in a methodical and regimented manner that even Ash approved of. And he roped Jarvis and Aunt Agñasta into recalling any and every little thing about the sisters’ childhoods, searching for more threads to pull.
It was Jarvis who mentioned how Ash somehow managed to keep ice from melting in drinks, and after an enjoyable Saturday evening testing the hypothesis they concluded that she could make ice last longer, but not so much so that it couldn’t be explained by other factors. And also that Tumblehedge had far too much liquor in it.
All in all, any attempts to consciously hone their elemental skill sets met with little success because they had no idea where to start. What little talent Ash possessed seemed entirely accidental, dependent upon her mood and the situation, and they didn’t dare manufacture the required conditions. Ariel was at home in water, but didn’t seem to have any particular ability to control it. And as for Roon, and her elemental power…
“Maybe it’s because of the exile,” Gabriel said on one occasion. “This planet is made of stone, and we call it Earth, but it may not be the element as you know it in your bones. It may feel alien to you for longer than the others, especially since you’re all just getting started again. Water, Fire, even Ice … these are sort of ever-changing and capricious forces. Earth is more enduring.”
“Ice is just a crystal, a solid with a lower melting-point than other rocks,” Ariel objected. “It’s basically part of Earth. Or Water,” she saw Gabriel’s pained expression. “Sorry.”
“According to the legends,” Gabriel said dryly, “the Second Disciple was given Ice not only because it served to tame the Fire, but because the First and Third Disciples kept fighting over it and this was the only way to make them stop.”
Ariel squinted. “That sounds made up.”
“Lots of stories about the Firstmades sound made up,” Gabriel shrugged. “How about the one where the Infinites exiled Earth into a hidden solar system, and the Pinians forgot they were Pinians and got jobs as a mechanic, a soldier, and a … what were you again?”
“You’ve got a real mean streak there, Gabe,” Ariel grinned.
Roon was, however, far more in tune with reality outside the veil, with the past, and with technology that could harness the natural law. Most likely for the same reason she was slow to reacquire actual elemental powers. The Earth was quite literally grounded, and slow to respond to new states of affairs. It remembered more.
“It will happen,” Gabriel said, “or it won’t.”
“Very helpful,” Ariel said for her sister.
“Sorry.”
“I just can’t get past the feeling that I’m sitting here trying to do magic to a glass of water,” Ariel went on, staring gloomily into the glass on the table in front of her. “Like a six-year-old.”
“Whatever helps,” Gabriel said. “Think of it as manipulating molecules with the electrical currents in your brains. Think of it as spooky magic. Don’t think at all.”
“Easy enough,” Ariel muttered.
One thing the Archangel advised them not to try was soul-journeying or any related activities. After hearing a few of his stories of the misadventures and disasters that occurred when people’s souls – even those as experienced as Firstmades – went wandering, and knowing what they did about the Destarion and the Atonement, the sisters were only too happy to avoid the lost art. It was easy enough not to do it, after all, since they had absolutely no idea where to start anyway. Ariel had tried a variety of yoga and meditation styles over the years and never come close to being able to possess world leaders and make them apologise for ruining things, and then die. She had to concede this was probably for the best.
During the days, whenever they weren’t in one or another of the places of worship scattered throughout the eastern sprawl training or talking with Gabriel, they trained at home. Their regular day-to-day lives also continued, but they were all in the fortunate position of not having to worry about it too much. Ariel would occasionally have work to do, but she was a big enough name to take it or leave it. Ash usually only had a few missions a year and was expected to relax and unpack thoroughly between each one. And Roon … well, Roon worked constantly, and the groups she worked for waited for her to send them a message suggesting she had something for them. She didn’t get paid by the hour, she didn’t do commissioned work, and she wasn’t part of any organised department. If she went five years without contacting anyone, the top ten tech companies
in the world would sit and sweat about the possibility that she was selling her ideas to the eleventh.
They also worked on the chapel renovations with the help of a small team of builders, Jarvis overseeing the work. After asking Gabriel a few idle questions about the process, they established that it ought to be possible to dedicate a new extension that had not previously been a church even if it was technically on a property that had previously contained a church soiled by a Demon a couple of hundred years earlier. They agreed not to tell him what they were doing. It would be a surprise, Ariel said.
They didn’t see Laetitia again during this time. The First meeting between Imago and Pinian-in-exile had gone poorly, and the Imago was keeping her distance. Gabriel assured them that she was around, and would be ready to help when the time came. He also assured them that she wasn’t draining the blood of anyone particularly important, although in that case the term ‘assured’ probably wasn’t the best one to use.
And time passed.
GABRIEL’S SLIGHTLY REVISED PLAN
Gabriel had absolutely no idea whether things were working out. He assumed Stormburg and his laboratory assistants on the other side of the veil were collecting data and plotting the progress the Pinians were making in their attempts to return to full focus, but the truth was, he just didn’t know. He knew practically nothing about the mysterious Elven theorist and his resources and processes. He was vaguely aware that there had been an Angel involved, acting as a sort of signal booster. That had been unacceptable – an Angel, reduced to a component in a comms system – and so Stormburg had made changes.
Probably. Gabriel didn’t know that either.
Stormburg hadn’t contacted him since the Atonement – if you could even call it contacting, when your head split open and you finger-painted a series of abstract riddles on the wall in your own brains, only to find that hadn’t actually happened and was only what it felt like. And then left you to decode the abstract riddles from the memory of how they’d felt as brain-smears on an imaginary wall.
He wondered if Stormburg had known the Destarion was going to perform the brutal stunt. It was possible. Stormburg was a relentless intellect much like Roon Vandemar, and you couldn’t put much past minds like that. He sometimes wondered if Stormburg had planned it. That seemed far-fetched, since the Godfang was unlikely to act on a Lowland Elf’s instructions. But then, Gabriel would have said it was unlikely for the Godfang to use the Lost Disciples as crowd control weapons in the first place. Events had a way of spinning out of control.
The thing that caught him by surprise every time was that the world had steadily improved. Even before the Atonement. Ever since the catastrophic collapses and chaos following the veil’s appearance and the rearrangement of Earth into a dizzyingly confusing globe of rock hurtling through space, and the disappearance of a huge segment of the world’s landmasses and population and the incidental vanishing of the entire rest of the urverse, yes – things had gotten better from that juncture.
The only way they could have gotten worse, admittedly, would have been if everyone in the world had died and the planet had been blasted to sterile stone. And that was an alarmingly credible scenario – it had apparently happened to Mars, according to the theories Laetitia and the Angels tossed around. It was difficult for them to be sure, of course, because they hadn’t been around when Earth had been whole. And Gabriel didn’t remember particularly well.
But it hadn’t happened. Earth hadn’t been bleached by solar radiation.
Instead, humanity had clawed back as it always did. It recovered, licked its wounds, then got angry about it, and turned rebuilding civilisation into an act of vindictive retribution against an apparently uncaring cosmos. Within a couple of generations they only had one another’s stories to go on as to what had happened and what the world had been like before, and once they all started moving around and meeting up with one another again it turned out they all had slightly different stories. And so there were fights, because that was humans for you.
And despite even this, things continued to improve. Humans learned, and grew, and invented, and changed their environment to suit their eternal dissatisfaction. A century passed, then two, then five, then a millennium. And the world of humans got steadily better, by all objective measures. Crime, war, violence and poverty, they all – by and large – decreased even as the population skyrocketed, which was … bizarre, in Gabriel’s experience. And literacy and life expectancy, quality of life and the prevalence of life-improving technology – by and large – all rose. There were spikes in that happy graph, of course. Sometimes human inventiveness and savagery overlapped and a worldwide conflict with nightmarishly brutal instruments of death occurred, and then the humans reeled back into their separate little nations and had a bit of a think about what they’d just done … and then they fucked and had babies and told the babies that the other nations had been to blame, and that was humans for you.
At the same time, and as a direct result of their ever-more impressive, worrying technology, the misconception of hardship increased. There was less suffering and danger in the world with every passing year, but people were more aware of each minor instance, and they could feed from one another’s paranoia at the touch of an interface. And those in power, confronted with the impossibility of controlling an unsustainably huge population with unprecedented access to information, had no choice but to undermine and destroy that information.
They turned it into fear. Because what else could the powerful do? Confess that things were fine and that people didn’t need to keep investing in the war machine and the painfully artificial and devastating social strata that kept the ruling class in power? That was obviously madness.
Gabriel had been concerned by this. In fact, he’d worried about it for so many years he had lost track. It seemed as though escalating irrational fear and increasing destructive capability was a pair of lines destined to intersect horribly, and sooner rather than later. After a while, shattered and numb, he realised that human lethargy was going to force human paranoia to plateau, and it looked like that plateau was going to be somewhere below the threshold of total mutually-assured-destruction no-holds-barred global annihilation. He still sat raw-eyed and trembling in his holy-ground hidey holes some days, rigid with terror at the thought of how many thermonuclear weapons the humans had rigged up and could set off as a result of one poorly-translated communiqué. Thousands and thousands of tiny little suns, just sitting in metal tubes all around the world. There were enough to, if not crack the planet open like an egg or throw it out of orbit, at least render its surface uninhabitable for a hundred thousand years.
In the end, though, it wasn’t the corruption of electronic knowledge and communications that brought the world to the brink of ruin. It wasn’t nationalism or religious extremism or super-weapons, although the germs humans began to unleash on one another were truly horrifying. Those were all problems, yes, and they were all very much things that everyone loved to panic about, but in the end it wasn’t any of that.
In the end, it was just billions and billions of humans, eating and shitting and breeding and playing with their precious, silly machines. And suddenly the planet’s atmosphere and biosphere became a pair of rampaging juggernauts bent on scouring the world clean of the hominid pestilence that had been tormenting them for millennia. The seas rose up, the skies opened and fire scorched the ground, the very stones shifted and parted to swallow homes and factories and forests. Gabriel honestly hadn’t seen it coming.
If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn it was the Pinians themselves, awakening from their exile-slumber and punishing their subjects for making a horrible mess. Making an example of a few tens of millions of them for the sake of the rest. Unfortunately, Gabriel did know better. The Pinians were not responsible.
And that was a damn shame, because that meant there was nothing much they could do about it.
HARLON, SON OF CONROY, SON OF JANGO
Harlon ca
me to visit one Sunday afternoon in late September, little over a month since Roon and her sisters had first encountered the Archangel Gabriel. It was full daylight, so thankfully Gabriel was not in the house. He was most likely hiding from the traditional Sunday crowds in one or another of his go-to churches.
Harlon went straight to the garage after meeting Jarvis at the door and greeting Aunt Agñasta as politeness and sanity dictated. He was accustomed to Ariel and Ash either being away on their respective professional errands, or otherwise aloof with a side-order of teasing and wariness, so he didn’t go out of his way to seek them out. He wasn’t there to see them anyway. Smiling, he picked his way through the stacks of machinery, components and testing equipment, all of which seemed to be new since his last visit.
After the deaths of his ruthless, greedy father and his quite simply monstrous grandfather, Harlon had been a mere child of four years. His inheritance had been held in trust until he turned sixteen, with a year on either side of that milestone for observation, competency and aptitude testing, all of which he had passed with considerable flair. Since then, after thanking his board of directors for their corporate and legal stewardship, Harlon Berkenshaw had been doing his best to repair Synfoss.
Not its reputation. He, like Roon’s famous sister Ariel, had found that at a certain level of notoriety there was no such thing as a reputation-damaging event – or a reputation-saving one. A reputation, good or a bad, would continue under its own unstoppable momentum and was fuelled by itself. In the same way, wealth continued to multiply no matter what one did to spread it around. But he was doing what he could to fix his company’s practices, its actions around the globe, and the damage it was doing to the environment – to name just a few things. And almost all of it, one way or another, he could attribute firmly to the blazing-dark star that was twenty-three-year-old prodigy Roon Vandemar. A star that had become the absolute centre of his universe a year ago.
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