Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom

by Lewis, Joseph Robert

  “I’m not here to justify anything, I’m just following orders.” She paused. “But I’m not some lapdog of the Arrahim, either. Come back to the library with me.”

  “You’re not listening. I’m no criminal. And she’s not your prisoner!”

  “No. Not my prisoner. Under my protection. We go back, we ask the seers why they want the child. And if I don’t like the answers, then I make sure you leave safely, under my protection. Deal?”

  Zerai debated the offer. It sounded too much like a surrender to him, but even as he tried to plan some last minute escape from the warrior in his grasp, his eyes wandered up and he saw a Juranim archer standing on the rooftop at the end of the street, taking aim at his head.

  Waiting for a clear shot. So much for bargaining.

  “Agreed.” He loosened his grip and she stepped away, massaging her throat and then gathering up her armored gloves. Zerai slipped his sword away and showed the archer his empty hand, and the Juranim lowered his arrow. Slightly.

  “My name is Zerai Saqir,” he said. “And this is Nadira Bashir.” The little girl glanced up at the sound of her name with a toothy smile.

  “Lamia. Lamia Vasara.” She slipped on her gauntlets as she studied him, giving him a moment to see how small and lean she was. It jarred with his memories of the Ebana brothers, two tall warriors who fought like angry gods against the ghuls and ifrits with their bare hands. She seemed nothing like them, except for her short black hair that just barely fell into her eyes.

  They walked back to the library, slowly and deliberately, allowing a handful of other warriors to join them. The Sophirim that Zerai had hit in the head didn’t seem very pleased to see the falconer walking freely with his sword at his side, but Lamia silenced him with a look and he fell into step beside her, and said nothing.

  When they reached the library, Zerai was surrounded by Sophirim and Juranim, and he was thoroughly regretting each and every one of his decisions that afternoon that had led him to this moment. He saw the Arrahim seers standing in their dusty courtyard, waiting to receive him, waiting to take Nadira away.

  “I trust he didn’t prove too difficult to capture,” said the older woman who had sounded the alarm.

  Lamia ignored the remark. “Why did you summon us? Why did you want him brought back here?”

  “That’s a private matter, a very sensitive matter,” the seeress said. “I’m afraid we cannot discuss it at this time. But suffice it to say that we do need the child, and it would be prudent to keep this gentleman in custody for the time being. I’m sure you understand.”

  “No, I don’t.” Lamia folded her arms over her chest. “We’re not your private police force. We don’t serve the whims of the seers. We serve the city. Now, I brought Saqir back here in good faith, and you’re going to answer my questions, or we let him go.”

  The seeress blinked, clearly unprepared for any debate on the matter. “I think I’ve made myself perfectly clear, captain. Please bring them inside. Now.”

  “No. Give us a reason, now, or we leave. Now.”

  It was late in the afternoon. The shadows were long and deep, and the steady breeze in the open streets was rapidly cooling, but in that courtyard Zerai felt the air growing hotter. He glanced to his left where one of the Juranim stood with an arrow in her hand, and the tip of it was glowing a dull, angry red.

  He didn’t dare turn his head to look back at all the others, but he could see Captain Lamia Vasara, and her male comrade, and one other Juranim to his right. Every one of them looked ready to break. Dark bags under their bloodshot eyes, countless bloody scrapes on their arms and legs, dirt and sand caked into their hair and hands.

  Half of their closest friends were murdered two weeks ago, and they’ve probably all been on watch ever since then, waiting for the djinn to return, waiting for the call to war, waiting to be sent out to die.

  Zerai wrapped both arms around Nadira and slid his right foot back slightly.

  The seeress regained her composure and glared at the warriors. “This is not the time, nor the place, to be discussing the—”

  “Then we’re leaving,” Lamia announced.

  And as one body, the Sophirim warriors and Juranim archers all turned and marched out of the courtyard, and Zerai marched out with them with little Nadira weighing heavily in his arms.

  Chapter 13

  It was just past noon on the third day of their march through the mountains from the bronze city of Dalyamuun when Iyasu came to the crest of a ridge and saw a great sea of pale mist. The soft whiteness filled the vast emptiness between the jagged teeth of the golden mountain peaks, hiding the slopes and valleys completely, and the young seer walked down the path a few paces so that his feet bathed in the gentle current of the cool vapor.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “Vourukasha,” Hadara said. “The world sea. This mist bleeds out on every wind across every sky to every land, and its currents carry the seeds of all life. Look there.”

  He peered off in the direction that she pointed and he spied a small eddy in the mist where the vapor swirled quickly and then slipped out beyond the walls of the mountains, carrying the tiny white motes of seed pods on its insubstantial breath up into the sky.

  “Where do the seeds come from?” he asked.

  Hadara smiled. “Where do you think? Come along.”

  The tall woman led the way down the path, plunging into the mist with the grinning Rahm leading his stallion right behind her. Iyasu exchanged a curious shrug with Azrael and they too walked down into the wall of silvery fog.

  It was nearly silent in the white corridors, with only the haunting calls of distant birds warbling and echoing off the mountain walls. The rocks themselves hovered in a state of indecision, half sharp and half unreal, as though wrapped in sleep and waking dreams. Iyasu guessed that he could see no more than five paces in any direction, and for the first time in a long time, he felt his gifted vision fail him. He could see no paths, no animal tracks, no signs of changing weather. Without his sight, his sense of the world around him contracted, making him feel small and blind and naked. But Azrael strode along as calmly as ever, and he took solace in her strength and fearlessness, even if he couldn’t share it.

  The path meandered down, and farther down, plunging them deep into the mist so that even the sky faded beyond the layers of white vapor overhead. The air grew colder, and in its stillness it left a clammy sensation on Iyasu’s arms and face. He shivered and wiped his skin dry on his sleeve, only to have it glistening coolly a moment later.

  After half an hour of steady hiking and seeing nothing but the endless white expanse of the sea of mist, Iyasu was about to ask where exactly they were going when a dark shape appeared in the fog. It loomed high and crooked above them, and as they came closer the object resolved into a massive column, bent and winding and covered in huge jagged flakes of bark.

  “What sort of tree is this?” Iyasu peered up, but could not see any branches or leaves.

  “Haoma,” Rahm answered.

  Iyasu shook his head. The name meant nothing to him.

  A few minutes later they passed a second tree covered in crumbling threads of brown and white, and it too twisted up into the mist without any sign of leaves or blossoms. But as Iyasu walked by it, he did see something sparkle in the crevices of the bark. Coming closer, he peered into the shadowed nooks and saw a strange procession of shining gold beetles, none larger than his thumbnail, streaming up and down the hidden paths of the tree’s inner skin. The ones marching up all carried tiny white motes in their pincers, and the ones marching down carried fragile drops of water on theirs.

  When they reached the third tree, the fourth was immediately next to it, and there after the twisting, spiraling giants appeared on every side of them, closer and closer together. Iyasu looked up so often now that he sometimes stumbled, and Azrael had to steady him more than once so he wouldn’t crash to the ground, or into Raska’s flicking tail.

  He sto
pped abruptly, staring upward. Two of the giant trees seemed to meet in midair, their trunks becoming entwined so that they continued upward as a single being.

  These things… they’re not trees. Are they vines?

  Moments later Rahm stopped and pointed to one of the huge brown trunks to their right. It twisted less than its sisters, and instead of spiraling upward, this one angled forward, reaching out from the mountainside at a gentle slope that was only slightly steeper than level. The tall warrior left the trail, saying, “Here. We’ll take that one.” He patted Raska and turned the horse loose to wander down the trail by himself while Rahm and Hadara approached the huge vine.

  Iyasu followed them, ever more bewildered and curious, but not at all worried or afraid. Wherever they were going, the two easterners seemed quite confident of their path as they hiked up onto the strange plants, which were no wider than two horses standing flank to flank. Walking on the rough, broken surface of the huge woody tendrils proved harder than it looked, as nearly every foothold sloped away to one side or the other, and the plates of bark slipped and crunched beneath their weight, tumbling over the sides and vanishing into the mist below, which had already swallowed up their view of the ground. Now they walked through empty space with nothing but fog on every side, above and below, and the eerie calls of unseen creatures echoed through the void.

  The seer continued to scan the skies all around, searching for the source of the strange warbling cries, and then he heard one that seemed far closer than any other, and he looked straight up, squinting into the mist. And there, directly above him, he saw a white shape slithering through the fog. It swayed and undulated from side to side, passing and passing on, its scaled belly rippling overhead in soft shades of silver and gray. And then a great pearl fin swished silently through the air, stirring the mist into a violent eddy that whirled and hissed as the force of the fin propelled the great beast across the sea of clouds.

  And then it was gone. Iyasu looked back at Azrael, who had also witnessed the passing of the behemoth, and the angel shook her head slowly as if to say that she too had no idea what the creature was, or whether it was a danger to them, or whether she could protect them from it. He nodded, and continued on after Hadara, a bit faster and a bit quieter than before.

  With every step, they climbed higher and farther out from the mountain, trekking ever deeper into the cold, wet expanse of white nothingness. Iyasu kept his eyes on Hadara, hoping that the fixed point of reference would keep him balanced with no landmarks in sight, but after three steps of this experiment, his sandal shot out from under him and he fell on his back, and nearly rolled off the huge vine but a hand grabbed his arm and lifted him back up, setting him on his nervous feet.

  “Thanks, love.” He opened his eyes and saw not his dark angel but instead the grinning princess watching him.

  “You’re welcome. Love.” She laughed and walked on.

  Iyasu blushed at Azrael, who smiled and said, “You’re lucky I’m not the jealous type.”

  He shook his head. “Actually, I was just thinking that I’m glad Rahm isn’t the jealous type. But really, I’m glad no one here is jealous, because I don’t think I would last long if any of you were.”

  Half an hour after his slip, Iyasu saw more and more of the huge brown trunks hovering like shadows out in the mist, rising in parallel to their own pathway, and all seeming to converge on some great unseen peak ahead of them. He looked down quite a few times, and confirmed that the golden beetles were still streaming up and down the cracks in the bark beneath their feet.

  And then they reached their destination.

  A shadow appeared before them, a vast storm cloud shimmering high and broad in the distance, and then suddenly the mist parted all at once to reveal the enormous heart of the Vourukasha sea.

  If it was a tree, it was like no tree Iyasu had ever seen before. The single living organism towering over him rose like a forest of slender green shoots, thousands upon thousands of green columns and tendrils reaching up from an enormous round white mass, and below that mass extended the equally vast forest of roots, the rough, twisting, knotted brown tendrils that reached down into the earth, each one swarming with golden beetles streaming up and down with their motes of water and life. But the green shoots… Iyasu gazed up at them, too thick to see through to the far side and too tall to see whether they ever blossomed into leaves or flowers.

  “What is this place?” Azrael asked softly.

  “This is the Gaokerena,” Hadara said. “The tree of life.”

  “The tree of life?” The angel looked at the woman strangely. “It’s changed.”

  “Of course. Life tends to do that.” The princess smiled.

  “It moved, too.” Azrael looked around at the vast walls of mist obscuring the rest of the world. “It used to stand in a garden between two rivers, far to the north of these mountains.”

  “Yes, she told us that,” Hadara said. “The angel, I mean. Simurgh.”

  “Is she in there?” Azrael asked, nodding at the forest of green shoots. Iyasu heard the strain in her voice and looked at her, studying her face, wondering what she was feeling at that moment, but he couldn’t be certain what it was.

  “Oh, yes.” Rahm waved them onward. “Won’t be long now.”

  Iyasu gave up trying to fathom the warrior’s sense of time and tried to ignore the ever-present danger of slipping off the massive haoma root and plunging into some dark ravine far below the mist.

  The divine sight and insight of the angel Arrah presented the seer with more than one challenge in his daily life, from the endlessly detailed memories that threatened to blur the lines between past and present, to the constant state of distraction as his senses teased out every little nuance of what he saw and heard. But by far, the worst part of the angel’s gift was the intense experience of physical pain, because what was pain but one more of the senses to be honed and focused upon? And right now, his feet were in quite a bit of pain.

  There’s a reason seers like libraries. Quiet. Dim. Cushioned seats.

  They trekked higher, and now their root began to slope upward more sharply, slowing their progress and forcing them to hike and climb with their hands. This seemed to prove no obstacle at all to the warrior and the princess leading the way, but Iyasu found himself falling farther and farther behind, and constantly aware of Azrael standing just behind him, waiting patiently for him to move on.

  As he huffed to catch his breath, Iyasu beckoned her to come closer and said, “All right, my ego says I’ve gone far enough on my own.”

  “For someone who’s done nothing but walk for the past two years, you’re disappointingly fragile,” Azrael said with a subtle smile.

  “I come from a long line of fragile men,” he said. “Short. Thin. Bony.”

  “You’re lucky I love you for your soul.” She scooped him up in her arms with a wink.

  “Oh, I know.”

  The Angel of Death spread her long black wings and leapt lightly off the rough brown root and glided swiftly through the cool air and caught up to the two easterners just as they stepped off the root and into the dense forest of green stalks and columns. Rahm gave the angel a hesitant look as her dark wings faded away into the pale midday light, but then he turned and led the way into the dense green wood.

  “This is all one plant, one tree?” Iyasu asked.

  “It is,” Rahm replied. “Try not to break anything. It makes her angry.”

  “Simurgh?” Iyasu tried to study his surroundings, bending all his powers of observation to learn about this strange and ancient place. But the green stalks were all the same, none of them marred by signs of harsh weather or clumsy beasts or hungry insects. No tracks marred the dusty ground beneath their feet. He saw no nests or webs, not even a fallen blade of grass. “How did you meet her, exactly? I assume you didn’t just stumble into this place?”

  “I was born here,” Rahm said. “My mother was dying trying to give birth to me, so my father called for Sim
urgh, and she brought them here and taught him how to save her, and I was born at the angel’s feet.”

  “Your father summoned an angel?” Azrael asked. “How?”

  “They were old friends. My father was born… well, a bit different.”

  “He was an albino,” Hadara said. “White as snow.”

  “Hadara!”

  “Well, he was. There’s no shame in it. It’s nothing to do with him, or you. It’s just skin.” The princess glanced back at Iyasu. “Little white Zal was left to die on a mountain, but Simurgh found him and raised him herself. And then when Zal went out into the world and got his poor wife pregnant with a big-headed baby of his own, he called for the angel to help him.”

  “I was very big,” Rahm admitted cheerily.

  “Did you live here? As a child?” Iyasu asked, staring around at the green forest with new eyes, as though tiny foot prints and toys might appear now.

  “No, not at all.” Rahm laughed. “After I was born, we went to Zathruda, where I spent many long days riding beautiful horses and kissing beautiful girls.”

  “Too many girls,” Hadara muttered.

  “But then you came back here?” Iyasu prompted them to continue.

  “Yes, of course. When I decided to search for King Kavad, naturally I came here first to ask Simurgh for her wisdom. Her vaunted wisdom.” Rahm exhaled through his flared nostrils. “But instead of telling us how to find the demons, she sent us south to Dalyamuun. So now I’m going to have a few choice words for her holiness.”

  Before Iyasu could think of a diplomatic way to convince the warrior not to begin their meeting with the angel with any course insults or accusations, the four of them emerged from the dense green woods into a clearing. The thick growth at their feet resembled grass, but it was white and stringy, barely able to stand upright, and mostly lay in thick tangles, piled upon itself until it lay knee-high. But as they waded up onto the strange white grass, the seer’s focus was not on his feet, but on the figure reclining before them.