Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom

by Lewis, Joseph Robert

  “Everyone all right?” Lamia asked.

  He nodded. “Fine. Where are we?”

  “See for yourself.”

  He looked up and saw that they were no longer on the desert floor. The sandy dunes were far behind and below them. Now they stood on a rocky path, more than a third of the way up the western face of the northernmost of the four holy mountains. His eye easily traced the narrow path back down to the desert behind, and turning upward, he could also see that the path ended only a few paces ahead at a large amphitheater carved into the living rock of the mountain. Seated around the sides of that arena he saw dozens of young men and women, all in gray robes and tunics, all twisting their necks to stare at the newcomers.

  And in the center of those young people, all alone, he saw a figure of pale gray stone, the shape of an enormous man made of rock and earth, clothed in moss and small leafy trees, with his legs crossed beneath him as he hovered effortlessly in the cool mountain air.

  Zerai nodded. “Oh.”

  Chapter 19

  The angel Sophir had no face. The front of his head was a smooth, featureless blank of gray stone marked only with a few white streaks and veins, and dark green moss covered parts of his neck and one shoulder. The tiny trees on his arms and back raised their branches in joyous little gestures like acacias on the plains of Tigara, and faint flickers of white fire danced in his joints, around his elbows and the crooks of his fingers.

  “Hello.” The angel’s voice rippled through the earth beneath their feet, a deep resonant voice that nonetheless sounded soft and gentle. “Welcome.”

  Zerai stood up and felt the loose sand trickling down off his shoulders and out of his hair as he moved. Nadira squirmed about, so he hefted her up into a sitting position on his hip, where she promptly began sucking her thumb and patting his cheek a bit harder than he liked.

  Lamia walked up the path and into the wide circle of the amphitheater, and Samira followed her. Zerai hesitated, wishing he had a moment to call for Nyasha, but failing that, he raised his head and strode into the arena behind the others, trying to keep his eyes on the faces of the clerics-in-training.

  Eon once sat here. And his brother, Saifu. This was their life, their childhood. Here, with the angel.

  Look at them. They all look so calm, so confident. Nothing more than curious.

  And young. Fifteen. Ten. Five.

  God, where was I when I was five? Running barefoot through the gutters of Azumar, probably.

  Look at them.

  The young clerics gazed down from their seats at the strangers. Not a single one of them coughed or shuffled or looked away. They were fascinated, and placid as a frozen lake.

  “Holy Sophir.” Lamia bowed before the floating Angel of the Earth.

  “Little Lamia.” There was no expression on the angel’s blank face, and yet Zerai could feel the immortal smiling down at the cleric. “Who are your friends?”

  “This is Samira, a Tevadim from Odashena.”

  “Samira Nerash.” The djinn woman stepped forward and bowed to the angel. Zerai scanned the crowd for some reaction to the word Odashena, but if they recognized the fact that the woman before them was a djinn and not a human, none of the young clerics acknowledged it.

  “And this is Zerai, a falconer from Naj Kuvari.”

  He stepped forward and nodded to the hovering creature of stone and moss. “Hello.”

  Perhaps it was a subtle shift in the white stone veins on his face, but the angel seemed to smile even more. “Hello, Zerai. How is my brother, Raziel?”

  “He’s fine. Not as funny as he used to be, but he’s well.”

  “Not as funny?”

  “We used to joke…” Zerai felt his mouth run dry. He didn’t want to talk about Naj Kuvari, or anything about his home. His old home. His home with Veneka. His life with Veneka. “It’s nothing. He’s fine.”

  “I see. And who is this little one?”

  Zerai looked at Nadira as though he had forgotten she was there, still sucking her thumb and absently patting at his rough, sandy cheek. “This is Nadira. She’s an… I’m… She’s with me, I’m taking care of her now.”

  “Ah, I see,” the angel said. “What a wonderful burden to take upon yourself.”

  “Uhm. Yes. It is, I guess.”

  “Holy Sophir, we need your help,” Lamia said. “There’s… well, there’re two problems.”

  “What is the first?”

  “Trouble in the city.”

  The angel turned to look at her. “Has the djinn warrior returned?”

  “No. Well, yes. But she’s dead. I… We killed her.”

  “I see.” The angel paused. “And what is the trouble in the city?”

  “Friction. Pressure. Imbalance.” Lamia frowned and took a deep breath. “I’m afraid that a schism is forming between the clerics, even within the houses.”

  “It has happened before,” the angel said. “And sadly, it could happen again.”

  “This time, it almost happened because of this little girl.” Lamia nodded at Nadira. “The seers think there’s something special about her.”

  “Clearly.” Sophir tilted his gray head to one side.

  “So they wanted to keep her, to study her, I guess.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And when I demanded that they explain themselves, they refused,” Lamia said. “They were treating us like servants, not equals. They think they’re above us. They think we’ll follow their commands, enforce their judgments, and never question their holy sight.”

  “No, do not question their holy sight,” Sophir said. “Never question that, any more than they should question your holy strength. But their intentions? Their desires? These are only human, and imperfect. Question them without mercy.”

  Lamia hesitated, glancing at Zerai. He looked back with blank and tired eyes. He had no help for her, no experience in politics, secular or clerical. The only conflicts he had ever solved had involved demons and swords and fire, and at that moment, he almost wished his world consisted only of dim brutish monsters that he knew how to identify, and run from.

  “Holy One, if the seers do divide the houses, what should the rest of us do?”

  The angel laughed softly, making the mountain above them groan and shudder with amusement. “I never thought I would hear that question from you. Have you really forgotten? What did I teach you, little one?”

  Lamia sighed and nodded. “I know. I will. I do.”

  “Do what?” Zerai asked.

  She looked down at her empty, dusty hands. “I remember, we’re all supposed to remember, that the weight of the world, and all its problems and darkness and confusions and sorrows, are only that. Weight. And we the Sophirim are the masters of weight, and weightlessness. We can bear what no one else can carry. We can raise the fallen, and remove the obstacles that no one else can shift.”

  “Well, that’s fine for big rocks and heavy trees,” Zerai muttered. “But we’re dealing with people, and politics, and fear. And a child.”

  Lamia smiled. “Even the hardest riddle has the simplest solution. A word. And that’s all the Arrahim have. Words. They can’t tear the clerics apart. They can only open the doors to discord. It would be our mistake to listen, to follow, to walk through those doors. Keeping the peace is simple. All we have to do is keep it.”

  Zerai shook his head. “If you say so.”

  “I do,” said the Angel of the Earth. “It is.”

  “All right.” Zerai paused. “There’s something else we need to ask you… Holy One.” He had lived for years just a few paces away from Raziel, and in all that time he had never adopted the custom of calling the angel by anything other than just his name, even in front of all the young healers-in-training. But on this mountain slope, in this gray theater full of strangers whose faces betrayed not a single thought or emotion, standing in the shadow of a stone colossus floating in the empty air, the falconer felt the weight of ritual upon him. “The second problem that Lamia
mentioned. Before she died, the djinn warrior said something to us. I asked her where we could find her people, her city, Ramashad.”

  “And?” the angel prompted him.

  “She said her people lived in the fury of Zariel.”

  Sophir’s gray and white face tilted back sharply and he squared his shoulders, shaking the tiny leaves of the tiny trees growing from his stony flesh. “You are certain? She said the name Zariel?”

  “Yes. I assume he’s an angel,” Zerai said. “Who is he? What does he have to do with the djinn?”

  For a moment, Sophir did not respond. Then, quite slowly, he unfolded his legs and arms and drifted down to stand on the ground in front of them. Zerai took a step back. This was worse. Before, floating in the air, the angel had projected an otherworldliness that set him apart from the gray reality of the ground and the people and the dirt. But now, standing on his own two legs, wreathed in pale tongues of white fire and clothed in living moss, he seemed far more monstrous. And far more real. Now he looked like a man, gigantic and powerful, hideously deformed and buried under cloaks and skins of rock and earth, his face shrouded by marble, his fists armored in granite that sparkled with hidden ore.

  “Long ago, our brother Zariel went to a city in the eastern desert. A city of djinn. A city of cruelty and selfishness, of greed and violence,” Sophir said. “Zariel is the Angel of Change, he is the force that allows one thing to become another, from the shifting seasons to a decaying log to a caterpillar in its cocoon. He is nothing, and everything. He is the promise that something can be made better than it is.”

  A small silence spread out between them, and the wind began to rise.

  “I do not know what happened in the city of the djinn,” the angel continued. “I only know that Zariel went there not as a creature of light to shake the earth with his voice, but in the guise of a djinn elder, to lead and inspire with his wisdom, and wit.”

  “So he can change his appearance?”

  Sophir turned his heavy head and the white marbling contorted into stern, frowning waves. “All angels can change how they appear to the eye, over time, but Zariel can change his shape and features in a single moment. It was his nature. True change, true transformation. That was his goal in the djinn city. To transform the people there. To change their culture, their habits, their beliefs. Their very souls. But the city vanished, and Zariel with it. When I learned of this, I wept, for surely Zariel had failed in his task, and with no other recourse, buried himself along with the djinn to rid the world of their evil and his failure.”

  “But angels can’t die,” Zerai said. “You can’t destroy the body or the soul, even if you separate them. I know. That’s what happened to Raziel in Naj Kuvari. So Zariel must still be alive, somewhere, somehow.”

  “Of course he’s alive,” Sophir growled. “But buried. Lost. Sealed away, deep inside the earth, never to return to the light again. He lies in darkness, alone, for eternity.”

  “Well, apparently not,” the falconer said as he shifted Nadira to his other hip. “The djinn warrior, Danya, she knew about him. Maybe the djinn dug down there and found Zariel’s body. Or maybe when he sank the city into the desert, the djinn rose up against him and captured him, or tortured him, found some way to tear apart his soul so they could steal his holy powers.”

  “Impossible,” the angel muttered.

  “It’s not impossible, we’ve seen it.” Zerai raised his voice. “I saw it in Maqari where a djinn called Jevad Tafir murdered a king and stole his face to rule on his throne, and then murdered thousands of innocents. You saw it in Shivala when another djinn called Danya Kaviim tore down the walls and murdered your brother and sister clerics by the hundreds. Djinn can’t do these things. Clerics can’t do these things. But angels? Angels can do anything.”

  “Not anything!” Sophir roared.

  Zerai winced and stepped back, and Lamia threw out her arm to shield him, as though she feared the angel might strike them. The falconer glared up at the stone behemoth. “No one is accusing the angels of anything. We have two killers, both djinn, but both more powerful than anything except an angel. A seer, my friend Iyasu Sadik, looked at Jevad and saw traces of an angelic soul mixed up in his djinn soul. And it’s starting to sound like it’s Zariel’s soul giving the djinn this power.”

  Sophir stepped away and turned his back so he could face his mountain peak high above them all. The angel said, “What you say may be true.”

  Zerai raised his eyebrows and paced away.

  May be true? That’s all he has to offer? That’s what we crossed the desert to hear?

  “Holy Sophir,” a new voice said. “If I may.”

  Zerai looked back sharply and saw Samira walking calmly around the gray angel to stand in front of him. She said, “Right now, all we have are pieces of the truth. We need to find the whole truth. Then we’ll know what really happened to Zariel, and what we must do next.”

  The angel inclined his head.

  “Can you tell us how to find Ramashad?” she asked.

  “No, I have no idea where it was,” Sophir said. “But even if I had known then, that was another time. The land has changed over the centuries. So even if you found the place where Ramashad once stood, you will find nothing there now but sand. The old ways are shut.”

  “Maybe.”

  The angel clasped his thick, rocky hands behind his back, shaking the small trees on his shoulders. “But then, you are a Tevadim.”

  “Yes, I am. And if a way can be shut, then it can also be opened again.”

  Zerai glanced up at the faces of the young would-be clerics, and then turned to gaze out across the desert, where he spotted a small funnel of sand and wind dancing across the crest of a pale dune.

  Is she really just going to blindly search the entire desert for some trace of a city that fell into the earth centuries ago? Doesn’t that sound insane to her?

  Maybe not. And that leaves me here, stranded at the center of the desert.

  But there must be food and water here. So I suppose this is better than dying at the edge of the desert.

  Slightly.

  As if she had been listening to his thoughts, Lamia turned to him and said, “You’ll probably want to stay here, I imagine.”

  “Probably.” He sniffed. “You know, you may want to stay here, too.”

  Lamia shook her head. “Samira’ll need help out there, when she finds the city.”

  “If she finds it.”

  “Right.” She folded her arms. “You should be fine here. Safest place in the world, really.”

  “I’m sure it is,” he said flatly. “Unless there’s a war.”

  “There won’t be, not as long as Samira can find Ramashad first.”

  “I’m not talking about the djinn, I’m talking about your brothers and sisters here,” Zerai said. “What if there is a schism? When people are scared for their lives, they can get desperate. Irrational. Dangerous. What’s to stop Shivala from tearing itself apart?”

  “Since when do you care about Shivala?”

  “I care about people. And so do you. If you go out into the desert, maybe you’ll save lives, maybe not. But if you stay here, you can make sure these people live.”

  “These people… and you.”

  “Absolutely, and me. And Nadira.” Zerai looked the cleric in the eyes. “I know you have a lot on your mind right now. A lot to fear. But I’m not playing any games here. I just want to live. That’s all. When you first met me, I was all alone with a little girl in my arms. Hunted, attacked, captured, freed, captured again, escaped. But has anything about me changed?”

  She looked at him and the child on his hip. “No.”

  “No. I don’t care about the seers, or anyone else. I just want to get away from all this, and find a quiet little corner of nowhere,” he said.

  “And do what? Watch her grow up?” Lamia nodded at Nadira.

  “Yeah. At least for a few years. Then maybe I’ll find something to do. Fishing, mayb
e.”

  She laughed.

  “Why is that funny? Falcons and eagles make excellent fishers.”

  Thunder screamed across the heavens, shaking the earth and shivering the sands of the dunes into white cascades that flowed like water across the desert. Zerai winced and ducked on instinct, and then peered all around for the source of the ear-shattering sound, and he found it in the southern sky. A huge plume of black smoke was rising from the slopes of the next mountain peak, and even as he watched the dark clouds swell and curl in the air, he saw blue-white blades of flashing crystal rising up from the dim rocks.

  “Ice,” he muttered.

  “And fire,” Lamia said, shielding her eyes as she stared at the roiling smoke.

  Brilliant and angry blazes of red and yellow flame spurted above the stony outcroppings, throwing bright rays of light across the slopes and refracting through the tall towers of ice. One of the frost towers cracked, groaned, and fell with agonizing slowness, down and down, until it crashed against the stone skin of the mountain and shattered. And even across that great distance, Zerai could hear the screams of people in pain. People dying.

  “Is that where Juran lives?” the falconer asked.

  Lamia nodded. “And five hundred of her Juranim archers.”

  The young Sophirim clerics all leapt to their feet and gazed south, all their impassivity broken, revealing them to be the excitable, confusable, talkative young people that they truly were. And from the chatter racing around the amphitheater, one question echoed again and again: “Have the djinn returned?”

  “It’s not the djinn!” Samira called out to them. “Listen to me! My people can feel the presence of each other, even at great distances, and I can tell you that there are no djinn on that mountain now.”

  “Then who are the Juranim fighting?” one apprentice yelled back.