Angels and Djinn, Book 3: Zariel's Doom

by Lewis, Joseph Robert

  Iyasu glanced at Azrael, but the angel was not listening and he did not want to interrupt the story, to break the thread of the djinn’s thoughts, to call her over. “And then what happened?”

  “I went home. But the next day, the old man was still there, preaching. And more people were standing there, listening.” She picked at her skirt. “It went on for days like that. More and more people listened to him, and people started to talk about him at the shops. At dinner. At work. People were afraid. Afraid of the judgment.”

  “Why were they afraid? What was going on in Ramashad? Why would they be judged?”

  She shrugged. “Greed. Lies. Murder. Ramashad was a city of business, of merchants and bankers, goldsmiths and slaves. All sorts of slaves. Slaves who didn’t even know they were slaves.” She trailed off and closed her eyes.

  “And you?” he asked softly. “What were you?”

  She smiled a tired, brief smile. “I made baskets.”

  “Oh.”

  She nodded. “After a few weeks, the soldiers came to take the old man away and we never saw him again. But the next day, an old woman appeared in the market, standing in the same place, preaching the same words. The soldiers came for her, too.” She paused. “But others always took their place, standing there, preaching about kindness. The soldiers would always come for them, and we would never see them again, but the next day there would always be someone new, carrying on.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “It’s not. Not really. Not for us. It was Zariel, that’s what he did, changing his face to carry on his work,” she said. “And one day, one of the soldiers figured it out. I don’t know how, but he did. The soldier discovered that after they threw a preacher into prison, that preacher would change into a soldier and simply walk out of the prison to freedom, and then change into a new preacher the next day.”

  “Change?”

  “Change his face, and his body, and his clothes. Or hers, sometimes.” Galina smiled with a faraway look in her eyes. “So the next time they went to arrest the preacher, they didn’t come with swords and irons. They came with clerics. We still had some in those days. One of them was an old seer, and she saw the preacher for what he was. An angel in disguise. And they called the angel a renegade, a liar, defying the ancient ways of Ramashad, as if Ramashad were holier than an angel.” She shook her head.

  Iyasu sighed. “I don’t understand how… well, yes, I do. It’s just… a city with holy clerics, you had the divine presence right there all along, people who spent years and years learning the wisdom of the angels, earning the trust and faith of the angels. Where were they? Where were your clerics all this time?”

  “I don’t know. We almost never saw them,” she said. “But we saw them that day. The seer led them, and the Sophirim grabbed the preacher and crushed him into the ground, and the Juranim seared his flesh with their bare hands, until he collapsed from the pain.”

  Iyasu looked up sharply. “Angels don’t suffer pain like we do.”

  “This one did.”

  “Maybe…” Iyasu shrugged. “Maybe because of his shape-shifting? Maybe he was weaker in the form of an old man?”

  “I don’t know, but I heard him screaming before he passed out. I was there. I saw it.” Galina looked at him for a long moment, conveying a vast ocean of images and sounds remembered from that day, all locked away in her mind, full of fear and pain. “It took time. Crushing the old man, burning him. He tried to become an angel again. And he did, somewhat. His white hair grew long and shone like the sun, and his old robes fell away. He wore armor, golden armor, golden plates and chains across his chest and arms. And his wings. I saw his wings. Two pillars of fire rising from his shoulders, writhing like the sand blown by the wind, blazing like the sun. But it wasn’t enough. The clerics broke him, somehow, and his burning wings vanished, taking their terrible light with them, and the clerics took him away. And we never saw him again.”

  Iyasu tore his eyes away from her and stared up at the stars as he tried to imagine an angel, an angel like his beautiful and unstoppable Azrael, being tormented and imprisoned by a pack of angry, petty, cruel little people. It was unthinkable. Impossible. With a swipe of her beautiful black wings, she could sweep away an entire army. He’d seen her do it more than once.

  But they took Zariel. Poor Zariel. And all because he changed his…

  Iyasu swallowed.

  Zariel is a shape-shifter. Back in Maqari, Jevad Tafir was also a shape-shifter, and he had shreds of an angelic soul about him.

  “They’re stealing Zariel’s soul,” he whispered.

  “What?” She sniffed and pushed her hair away from her face.

  “Nothing, nothing at all. Listen, Galina, we’re trying to find Ramashad. The city is lost, but it still exists, somewhere. We need your help to find it.”

  “Oh, I know. Lost. Buried. I saw that too.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No. No more stories.” She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “I hate that place. I hate remembering it. I almost wish you’d never come and reminded me of it at all.”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry for that. I am. But now I need your help, or more people are going to suffer. A war is coming. A war of clerics and angels, humans and djinn. But I think I can stop it, if you tell me how to find Ramashad.”

  “No. No, I’m not a part of this world anymore. I don’t play the game anymore. The grand game. Life and death, virtues and vices. I shouldn’t even be talking to someone like you. You’re a player. A serious one, too. So if you want to find Ramashad, you’ll have to find it yourself.” The woman stood up and strode away, across the courtyard, and through an archway into another chamber of the old fort.

  Iyasu sat there, watching her vanish into the shadows, and was still sitting there when another woman sat down beside him. “No luck?”

  “No luck.” He rested his head on her shoulder. “She isn’t going to tell me.”

  “Would she tell me?”

  “I don’t think so.” Iyasu turned over some of the woman’s earlier words from their long conversation, as she had wandered from madness into clarity. Galina had said many strange and disturbing things, things he had dismissed at the time as nonsense but now, now they seemed to fit into a large picture, a story of suffering and self-loathing that he was happy to not have fully heard. “It’s complicated. She’s pretty angry.”

  “About what?”

  “The world. Herself. Everything.” He paused. “She saw her entire world destroyed by an agent of heaven, her city plunged into the earth for its crimes, and only she escaped. Think about that. Can you imagine what that day was like for her? I can’t. I don’t even want to guess.”

  “Then what do we do?” Azrael rested her head on his head. “Should we keep talking to her? She’s the only person who knows the way to Ramashad.”

  A high whine flitted through the air. Iyasu glanced up and saw a peri racing through the air, whirling in tilting circles around Azrael’s head. The angel frowned at the dim blurry shape flying past her eyes.

  “Strange things,” Iyasu said as he watched them dart by.

  “Sh. Do you hear that?” she asked.

  “Hear what?” He could hear the whine of the peri’s wings, as well as the dim roar of the river and sharp crackle of the fire, and a dozen other sounds of life and nature, but nothing out of the ordinary.

  “He said something.” Azrael held out her hand and the peri landed in her palm, his papery wings rustling down his back as though he could not hold them still.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “He’s not saying it now, but he was saying something.” She peered at the little creature with its four red arms and huge black eyes. “It sounded like he said Ramashad.”

  The peri buzzed into the air again and loosed a stream of whines and whistles. Iyasu leaned closer, but he couldn’t make any sense of the noise.

  “There. You heard that, right?” she ask
ed.

  “Only a sort of whine.”

  “You didn’t hear what he said?” she asked incredulously. “He said, ‘Ramashad stands in the shadow of death, south of the manticore’s den.”

  The peri whistled again, this time with a different rhythm and pitch.

  Azrael blinked. “The manticore roams the white sands from the tower of the moon to the golden scar, but no farther, for it fears the footsteps of Tevad.”

  Iyasu stared up at her. “You can tell what he’s saying?”

  “Obviously. You can’t?”

  “Obviously.” He smiled. “But how does a peri know anything about Ramashad or manticores?”

  The peri whined and whistled again.

  Azrael shook her head. “He just said the same things again. Word for word.”

  Iyasu raised an eyebrow and whispered to the peri, “Ramashad.”

  The little creature whistled, and Azrael said, “The same thing again, word for word. It’s almost as though he’s just repeating what he’s heard, like a parrot. Wait. What if he’s reciting…”

  “…the Book of the Sun?” Iyasu looked across the courtyard to the archway where Galina Bolad had left them. “All these years here, alone with the peris. She must have been raving, repeating the words of the book to them, over and over. And they learned it.” He grinned. “It looks like we found the book after all.”

  Chapter 24

  Zerai stood on the sandblasted walls of Shivala, gazing down at the edge of where the green fields met the white sands, where civilization met the wilderness, and where four holy creatures stood watch over the eastern horizon. The living mountain called Sophir floated just above the ground, his rocky limbs bathed in white fire, while the frozen sentinel Juran stood like a statue of frost, defying the desert heat as she reflected the light of the sun from the countless facets of her crystalline form, shrouded by a whirlwind of burning sand and steaming snow. Farther down the wall, the falconer could see the bizarre flowing mass of water, bedecked with seven liquid wings all rippling with white foam, which was Tevad. While even farther still, at the southern edge of the wall, the incandescent pillar of Arrah shone so brightly that no one could say for certain whether she had wings, or flames, or even a body at all.

  After a moment’s reflection, Zerai turned his back to the desert and looked down into the city, a city of white walls and red roofs, of golden domes and slender towers, full of green life in parks and orchards and gardens, and all of it scarred and ruined by the cankerous field of destruction at the southeast corner where only half the wall had been restored, and a hundred homes still lay in ruins across the buried streets, all gray and silent and empty.

  “At least it’s quiet,” he said. “That’s something.”

  “Is it?” Lamia looked down at her city. “This little display of solidarity may keep the peace for a while, but it hasn’t changed any minds. The seers still think they should rule, the warriors still feel used, and the sculptors still hate that their beautiful works are being destroyed for something as petty as war. The schism is still here, but now we can’t see it.”

  “As long as no one dies today, it’s a good day.” Zerai handed Nadira a lump of bread dipped in oil, and she greedily went to work, sucking and chewing on the treat.

  “Can’t argue with that.” She glanced at him. “So what now? Will you stay?”

  “With four angels guarding the walls? Absolutely not.” He shook his head. “This place is a lightning rod for war now. Before there was a chance the djinn would move on, attack some other place, but not now. Now, they’ll come here.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “They took their power from an angel. From Zariel. And one thing I know about people with power is that they always want more power.” He jerked his chin at the four angels behind them. “And there’s all the power they could ask for, ready and waiting.”

  “You really think the djinn could defeat four angels?”

  “I think a war between angels and djinn and clerics is going to get a lot of innocent bystanders killed, and since I’m not an angel, a djinn, or a cleric, that makes me a bystander.” He grimaced. “A dead bystander.”

  “So you’re leaving. Again.”

  “Yeah.” He glanced at her. “You don’t have to come this time.”

  “I do if you’re going to survive out there,” she said. “And with the angels here, I feel a little better about leaving, actually. At this rate, one Sophirim isn’t going to make any difference.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” He smiled at her. “One Sophirim has made a huge difference to me already.”

  When they climbed down from the wall, they found a messenger in the street who was trying to find Zerai. The message was from Veneka. She wanted him to bring Nadira back to the palace.

  “Are you going? Even just to talk to her?” Lamia asked quietly, her eyes roving over the street full of young clerics-in-training all milling around with their brothers and sisters in a many-hued river of robes and tunics.

  “No. There’s nothing to say. She has her life and her priorities, and I wish her well. I do, I hope she’s happy.” Zerai hefted Nadira into her sling on his back. “But I have my own life to live now. Let’s go.”

  They walked straight through the streets of Shivala, ignoring the looks they got from the grim-faced Sophirim and Juranim keeping watch at the street corners, and they skirted the northern canal without incident. But there they found a lone woman standing in their path.

  “We thought you’d gone to look for Ramashad. It’s fine. You can come along if you want,” Zerai said as he walked past her. “But you can’t have her.”

  “Nadira is half djinn,” Samira said as she fell into step beside them.

  “And she’s half human.”

  “And I am a Tevadim. I can protect her in ways you cannot.”

  “You can also signal to other djinn where we are and put us all in danger,” he said mildly. “Which has already happened once, as I recall.”

  Samira stopped. “Talia was my friend. I helped her give birth to Nadira. I helped raise her.”

  “I know.” Zerai kept walking. “I said you can come along.”

  “But I can’t have her? You don’t trust me that far?”

  “Listen, sister, you’re a cleric and that means you have certain priorities, certain responsibilities, and sooner or later all of that is going to rear its ugly head and Nadira will be right in the middle of it. But I don’t have any of that on my back. I don’t have anything at all. Just her. She’s my priority. She’s my responsibility. Just her. Her life, her happiness. No politics, no destiny.”

  “I don’t understand. She’s not your blood, and you hadn’t even seen her until a few days ago. You’ve never even raised a child!”

  “That’s sort of the point.” He eyed the djinn woman. “Look, I know you don’t like me, or humans in general, and I don’t particularly like you either, or djinn in general. So I’m not expecting us to see eye to eye here. But this little girl has no family. And I have no family. And I don’t want anything to do with clerics and djinn and angels anymore. No more wars, no more disasters, not for me. Just a nice little house, somewhere quiet, with dates and fish and almonds, catching rabbits and singing after supper. That’s all I want for us. Telling stories, watching the stars, listening to the rain on the roof.”

  “That sounds nice,” Lamia whispered to herself.

  “Talia died because you wanted to sail across the sea in a storm,” Samira snapped.

  Zerai stopped and grimaced at the trail ahead.

  She’s not wrong. But she’s not right either.

  “Or, Talia died because you couldn’t steer the damned boat,” he muttered. “So let’s just say we both failed Talia, and we both don’t want to fail Nadira, and let that one lie.” He walked on.

  They climbed up onto the high bluffs between the desert and the sea, and Zerai frowned at the familiar path ahead.

  “Are we sure we want to go north again?�
�� Samira asked. “Danya was in this area. Others could be too.”

  “Maybe. But she attacked Shivala from the southeast, and since she’s not someone who needs to pick her targets carefully, that makes me think she was coming from the southeast,” Zerai said. “So my gut tells me north is safer.”

  “Fair enough,” the djinn agreed.

  They walked on, and when they came to the place where they killed Danya they saw the gray ashen stain on the ground where the strange djinn had died, but they walked on without a word spoken.

  The sun set and darkness quickly swallowed up their path, so they made camp. Samira raised a stone enclosure from the ground and Lamia built a fire of white halograss, while Zerai changed Nadira’s underclothes and fed her the juicy chunks of a ripe peach he had taken from one of the groves they had passed in Shivala.

  Morning brought a stale scent to the still, cool air and Zerai sat up squinting into the pale, colorless light filtering through the dusty haze of the desert to the east. But then the dark shadow of a tall serrated blade cut through the mist and he dashed to his feet, yelling, “Lamia! Samira!”

  The women lunged out of the shelter, hands raised for clerical battle, but they froze at the sight of the dark shadow looming above them. It stood there, still and silent.

  “What is that?” Lamia asked.

  “I’ll look.” Samira vanished in a blur of dark robes and a cloud of dust, and then she returned a moment later with a deep frown etched across her brow. “Come and see.”

  “Is it safe?” Zerai asked.

  “Safe enough,” the djinn answered.

  They stepped softly and carefully down the rocky slope past deep black cracks and bright glimmers of quartz veins, all the while with the dark shape of the thick serrated blade towering over them like a giant’s scimitar, until they reached the desert floor. There the morning mist and dust lay thinner and the air stood clearer, revealing a strange sight. Before them lay scattered the dry and empty carapaces of hundreds of monstrous crabs, all split and cracked, all slowly crumbling apart in heaps of legs and shells, some with brittle eye stalks still raised blindly toward the morning sun.