by Tad Williams
“Why would you go out of your way to speak to this Countess?” Anaita asked when I finished. “Let alone risk an incident of the sort you nearly caused?” She seemed the sweetest of all those gathered, her voice that of an innocent young girl, her appearance as delicate as a rainbow just before it fades into the sunlight, but I didn’t kid myself—“sweet” is relative when you’re talking about a creature who was probably spearing demons right and left in the last great war against Satan’s hordes. “Why would you put yourself in such jeopardy, Angel Doloriel? You know the creatures of The Adversary mean you nothing but harm.”
“Even a born liar can be useful, Mistress, if only by paying attention to the lies he chooses to tell and the way he tells them,” I said politely. “I wanted more information. I was upset on behalf of Heaven and disturbed that such a thing as the missing soul could happen.”
“This smacks to me of arrogance and pride.” Karael’s voice rumbled like a distant storm. It might have been hard to imagine Anaita smiting demons, but it was pretty obvious Karael probably smote a dozen or so before breakfast every morning, just by way of an eye opener. “You did not seek the counsel of your superiors. You did not address your concerns to Archangel Temuel or any others.”
“And, now, because of your well-known stubbornness, you have become entangled with one of Heaven’s dire foes.” Chamuel’s light was pearly and there were times when I could almost make out a manlike shape beneath the radiance, like something seen in a mist. “Someone has spoken your name to a dreadful primordial spirit—a ghallu, a slave of Old Night, which has put both your bodily raiment and your immortal soul, Heaven’s generous gifts, in danger.”
Which meant I finally knew what was after me, or at least its name, but I didn’t like the “soul in danger” part very much at all.
“We are also not pleased that you changed your earthly dwelling without consulting any of those who watch over you,” said Raziel, the sexless one who had been silent so far. Raziel was dark, if an angel can be dark, its light old and ruddy like a sunset. “You are a soldier of Heaven. To act without consultation suggests you do not trust the love that the Highest and the ministers of the Highest have for you.”
“That troubles me, also, Doloriel,” said Terentia. “Se raises a question I would have asked myself.” (Heavenly speech has a way of talking about the angels that are neither male or female without reducing them to “it”.) “I would hear you answer herm.”
This was perhaps my most dangerous moment in front of the Ephorate, because they were absolutely right, of course. I don’t trust Heaven—or at least not everyone in Heaven—to have my best interests in mind. I had developed this habit over years of petty disappointments and irritations, but sometimes it seemed to run deeper even than that, as much a part of me as the shell on a turtle or the claws on a badger.
“I…I was confused, Masters,” I said. “That’s the only defense I can offer. Caught up in time and earthly things, I judged that there would be a better moment to share everything with Heaven—as we’re doing now.” It was lame but it was all I could come up with, and at least there was a little truth to it. “If I’ve disappointed or sinned against the Highest, I beg pardon.”
“It is presumptuous to think that you might disappoint He who made you,” said Karael. “Did the whore of Hell say anything else to you—this Countess of Cold Hands?” He spoke her name with such withering distaste I had no doubt that if she stood helpless before him, then he would have blasted her to cinders without an instant’s hesitation. “Are you certain you have told us everything?”
Karael scared me. Just by standing there so bold and beautiful he made me feel like a miserable, dirty little sinner, and at that moment I couldn’t imagine telling him anything but the truth. “I have, Master. Did I do wrong?”
A pause fell over the gathering. I could dimly sense currents of thought running between the five of them but it was communication far too lofty and swift for me to understand.
Chamuel broke the silence. “Archangel Temuel, what have you to say? After all, Doloriel is your charge.” Chamuel hadn’t spoken much more than Raziel. His inner fires were banked low, at least to my senses, but he gave the impression of depth and solemnity: to gaze on his Heavenly form was to sense something vast and awesome lurking just out of sight.
The Mule took a moment to compose his thoughts, or at least that’s what I hoped he was doing, since it was also possible my personal archangel was getting ready to throw me under the bus. “I am honored the Holy Ephorate desires my opinion,” he said at last. “Doloriel’s tradecraft is good. It is true that he can be one of the more headstrong spirits, but as you know, that is often the case with Heaven’s servants who exist in time on the plane of Earthly existence. And as we all know, there are occasions when such traits are useful. A more composed spirit might have succumbed to the hunting demon.”
“A more composed spirit might not have been pursued in the first place,” pointed out Terentia—a touch unfairly, I thought, but of course I didn’t say so.
“Then perhaps it is time we gathered Doloriel back into the heart of the fold,” said Anaita. “Perhaps it would be a kindness to let him return to the Celestial City and exult in the closeness of the Highest as we all do.”
For a moment, listening to her sweet Bo Peep voice, I really wanted that, despite everything that makes me who I am. Yes, I thought, bring me back to Heaven for good. Let me live here and sink into the glow and the warmth and the certainty. No more questions, no more responsibilities, no more fear of failing a needy soul…It truly seemed the nicest thing that could happen. Only for that moment, though. Then I got over it.
I said, “You’re too kind, Mistress,” but suddenly it all seemed different again, and I wanted nothing else in all of Creation except to get out of that ineffably beautiful, blissful place and back to stinking, dangerous, unpredictable Earth. Because that was where my work was, not up here in the shining streets and tranquil gardens of Paradise.
Perhaps the Ephorate sensed my thought in some way. All five went quiet, and the fire of their beings grew lower, or seemed to, which I guess meant they had turned away from me to speak among themselves once more. I looked over to Temuel, but he too had retreated into himself, his essential light turned down as if it had a rheostat. It seemed like I waited a very long time in that timeless place before anyone spoke again.
“Go back, Doloriel, and do what the Highest has given you to do,” said the crystalline blaze of hope and solace that was Terentia. Relief washed through me—something a little less vivid than joy but still very real. “Know, however, that your fitness for that task has been questioned and that our judgement is not yet complete. Walk with caution. God loves you.”
I bowed my head as the five angels reached out and touched me, one after another, little bursts of joyful fire, and then they were gone, as was the Anaktoron itself. Temuel and I abruptly found ourselves in the middle of the great thoroughfare known as the Singing Way with the sweetly murmuring crowds of Heaven eddying around us like phantoms of light and fog.
“You’ve had a close brush, Doloriel,” Temuel said. “I don’t think a second gathering of ephors will be so lenient, so try to fly a little closer to the ground from now on, will you?”
I didn’t really have anything to say to that, but I mumbled some promise. Now that the danger of my personal dissolution was over, at least for the present, I was even more unnerved to realize how close to it I had been.
“One thing,” Temuel said. “I didn’t hear everything that passed between you and the Ephorate. Did they ask you about the Magians? Or about the name Kephas?”
Both of these were completely new to me, and I wondered if Temuel was taking the good cop role in some complicated process, working on me after the council had softened me up. “Never heard of either of them,” I told him truthfully.
“Ah,” he said. “No matter. Just some speculation of my own. You may disregard it.”
This was all m
aking me extremely nervous. “What’s this all about? And why are they picking on me? I didn’t do anything to cause any of this.”
Temuel’s light warmed to soothing sunrise pinks and yellows, the archangelic version of someone putting a comradely hand on your shoulder. “No, Doloriel, but sometimes when things go very wrong and even the highest are frightened, innocence is not enough for salvation.”
I let this cryptic phrase echo for a moment. I was feeling a chill again, and now I really did want to get away as quickly as possible—to escape the place that every living soul on earth wanted to reach. “Are they really that frightened up here? Just because one soul wasn’t where it was supposed to be?”
For a moment the Mule’s pearly light guttered like a flame in a high wind. It took me a moment to realize he was surprised. “Of course,” he said. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Don’t know what?”
He spoke slowly, like a grownup breaking bad news to a child. “The soul known on Earth as Edward Walker was only the first to vanish, Doloriel. Others have gone missing since then. More than a few.” His voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. “So, yes—they really are that frightened up here.”
eleven
foxy foxy
“KARAEL? KARAEL, General of the Glittering Host—that Karael? Wow, he’s a heavy hitter.” Sam sounded impressed. “You really got the treatment.”
“Yeah, even I’ve heard of him,” said Clarence. The two of them were helping me clean up the wreckage of my apartment and pack it up for storage—not that I had a lot worth keeping, especially after the place had been ransacked. I’d lived there for a couple of years and a lot of people knew it. It had been the first place the ghallu went looking for me, which meant I was going to have to stay away from it for a while.
“Everybody knows Karael, kid.” Sam took a swig of his ginger ale. “I’m not surprised they brought in someone like him, though. If that Walker guy was only the first, if other souls are going AWOL—well, shit, no wonder they’re panicking up at the House.”
I hadn’t said anything about the other two names Temuel had floated, first because I didn’t trust the kid, second because I wanted to check into them myself before muddying the waters. I’d tell Sam when I had a chance.
Meanwhile, Sam kicked at a bunch of scattered hot rod magazines that someone had dumped on the foor while searching the apartment. “You’re not really keeping all this, are you, B? What are you planning to do, open a Museum of Crap someday?”
I ignored that and gathered up the magazines. Sam wasn’t exactly Mister House Beautiful himself. He lived in the seedier section of Southport, you could barely see his living room carpet under all the newspapers and pizza boxes, and his bathroom towels had sweat stains on them. “But I still don’t know why someone would send a monster like that after me,” I said. “Look at this place—they were searching for something. And it wasn’t just that hell-beast in here, either.”
Clarence looked up from where he was picking up tableware that had been scattered across the linoleum. I suppose I should have asked him to put it in the sink to be washed after being Hell-handled, but I hardly ever use any of it except to stir coffee and butter toast, anyway. “What do you mean, Bobby?” the kid asked.
“What do I mean? Look, this place is a mess, sure, but a ghallu is a spirit of elemental disaster the size of a small car and hot as the inside of a crematory oven. It pursues. It captures. It kills. You don’t summon one of those and tell it, ‘Oh, and take a look in the guy’s kitchen cabinets while you’re there.’ That’s like asking a grizzly bear to audit my tax records.”
“You don’t pay any taxes,” Sam pointed out.
“Shut up,” I acknowledged. “You understand, Junior? They want to catch me or kill me, but they also think I know something. Or that I have something they want.”
Clarence suddenly looked a bit nervous. “You think they’ll come back?”
“If I stayed here? Probably guaranteed. Which is why I’m going to be kicking it in some rent-by-the-hour motel tonight, and then some different but equally charming spot tomorrow night.”
“Trust me—he’s slept worse places,” Sam said.
“Yeah, thanks for making me look good in front of the kid.” With the boxes loaded into my car, the aparment looked sad (and almost tidy.) “Let’s go down the block,” I said. “I’ll buy you boys some lunch before the phone rings and one of us has to go off and mess around with dead people again.”
Sam got a call to a client in Spanishtown as we were finishing, and Clarence went with him, so I walked back to my car alone. I put my jacket on because the thin February sunshine wasn’t enough to keep me comfortable. I wished the spring would hurry up and arrive. It’s funny, but even regular trips to the permanently glorious weather of Heaven doesn’t change the pure pleasure of walking out your door one day and finding that warm days have arrived, that suddenly wearing a jacket makes you too hot.
I kept my eyes open as I went through Hoover Park, although I was nearly certain that the demonic beast someone had sicced on me was strictly a nighttime diversion. I told you how much energy it takes to sustain something so scary and unusual, right? It’s a factor of ten more difficult to make one of those manifest in full daylight. Still, something a bit more civilized than the ghallu had tossed my apartment, and the horned monstrosity probably hadn’t done anything as delicate as stringing up Grasswax by his own nerve fibers either, so I tried not to let myself be distracted by the heedless civilians all around me. I saw the guy waiting out in front of my building from almost a block away, which gave me plenty of time to clock him as I approached.
My car was parked farther down the street, and there was a chance I could have got into it without a confrontation, but he didn’t look too intimidating. He was fairly tall but pale and thin—really thin. That was one of the first things I noticed. He looked like a middle school kid wearing his dad’s suit. He didn’t stand still, either, but jittered and dance-stepped in place, apparently not the least self-conscious, although as I watched a woman with a stroller and an old man with a bag of groceries both gave him a wide berth. And his skin was so completely white—bloodlessly white—that for a moment I had the chilling illusion his dark baggy suit might be what he’d been buried in.
It wasn’t worth the trouble to try to slip past him to my car, and in fact I was a bit curious, so I kept walking toward him. When he finally heard me he spun all the way around to look at me and I realized that he was alive but more than just ordinarily pale. He was some kind of albino, although his eyes were tawny, not the more common pink. To put an interesting twist on it, he wasn’t just albino but Asian, too—a combination you don’t see that often, even in cosmopolitan San Judas. More importantly though, from his first words, it seemed clear that my unpigmented Asian-American friend was not entirely sane.
“Dollar Bob?” he said in a chirpy voice. “Mr. Bobby D? Dollar Man?” He stopped bouncing for a moment and frowned, his whole face creasing into a sock puppet of the mask of tragedy. “Or am I wrong again? So many people have said no today! No, no, not Dollar!”
“Who the hell are you?” My choice of words wasn’t entirely random. He did have something of the look of the Opposition, but that might just have been his skin condition.
“Don’t know me? Everybody knows me! All over downtown!” He giggled and did another little soft-shoe shuffle.
“Well, I don’t—and I don’t want to, either.” But he didn’t have the smell of serious danger on him, at least as far as I could tell. Still, I kept my hand in my jacket pocket where my .38 was hiding.
His eyes got big. As I said, the irises were sort of yellow-brown, the irises vertical like a cat’s or a fox’s eyes. Whatever he was, he was definitely in the “other” category. “Oh, but I know you, Mr. Bobby Doll-dollar!” he exclaimed. “And I think you have something you might want to sell. I know lots of people who want to buy. I can arrange! Good business, huh? Good for everyone!”
&nbs
p; “I don’t have anything to sell.” Was this guy with the Noh-mask face some kind of lost spirit who’d seen me and Sammy and the kid cleaning broken furniture out of the house and now was hoping to scam a few bucks? The creatures that fall through the cracks in the great war between Us and Them often wind up homeless, and with his too-roomy suit and his loopy dialogue this pale fellow certainly could have been one of those, but there was something about him that wouldn’t let me dismiss him so easily.
“Really really truthful true?” The albino leaned way down and then squinted up at me from below. “No little something you might have found? No pretty shiny? A little flippy flappy something that needs a special helper to find a market?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and his presence was beginning to depress me. It was bad enough that the bad guys knew my apartment—was every fairy-tale gutter-rat in Judas going to come hang out there, too? Plus, there was just something about the guy that creeped me out. Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me that the folks who had tossed my apartment thought I knew something…or had something that they wanted. And this guy thought I might be trying to sell something.
“Just out of curiosity, pal,” I said, “how much do you think you could get for a—what did you call it? A ‘pretty shiny’? I mean, if someone knew where to find such a thing?”
“Oh, he would be a very rich man. Yes indeed!”
“But how do I know we’re even talking about the same thing?” I was trying to find a way to get him to identify whatever he was looking for without admitting that I didn’t have it and didn’t know what it was. “We need to be a little more specific.”
He laughed as if genuinely pleased by what I’d said and threw his scarecrow arms in the air, sleeves flapping. “If you have it, Mister B-Doll, I know people who want it. Don’t need to say more than that!” He spun. Jazz hands.
I wanted to pop him one just to get him to stand still. “Look, I don’t have time to mess around. I don’t know you, and I don’t do business with people I don’t know.”
