Graham was silent.
“I asked you a fucking question, soldier. Is . . . that . . . clear?”
“Yes.”
“Do I look like your fucking friend?”
Graham was confused. He looked around to the other hunters for support, but found none.
“I asked you a question, soldier. Do I look like your fucking friend?”
Graham held his hands out wide, obviously unsure of what Martin was trying to ask him. “I don’t . . . I don’t—”
“Do I look like your fucking peer? Do I look like some villager?”
“No,” Graham managed.
“Damn straight I don’t. But you know what I do look like? I look like your God damned commanding officer, Graham, so I had better hear a ‘sir’ come out of you. So let me try one more time. Is what I said perfectly fucking clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
Martin looked slightly pleased with himself. He turned to Rick. “Would you mind terribly helping us repair the Carrion barrier?”
Rick had a slight smile on his face as well. Ellen had seen that look before. It was a look of approval.
“I’d be delighted,” Rick said, and then he motioned towards the exit. “After you, Lead Hunter.”
One of the rooms in the complex had a one inch thick gap in between two of the walls. The corpses would look through the crack, and a few had managed to wiggle their fingers into it. Because of this, it was the only room that offered any privacy. Arturus doubted that the privacy was worth it, though.
Kelly led Arturus in.
He could hear the undead brushing against the crack-ridden walls.
She sat down on the stone floor, the dust stirring around her and clinging to her robe. She looked up at him, and Arturus sat beside her.
She took his hand in hers. “I wanted to say goodbye,” she told him. “I wanted to tell you all the things I was going to tell you, but never got the chance because our future was cut short. I love you, Turi. Maybe I don’t know you well enough. Maybe I’m in love with the idea of you that I have in my head. Maybe, but I don’t care. I love you. We were going to make it back to your village. They’d be skeptical of me at first. They’d think I was some kind of witch. But you’d go on being you, and I’d earn their trust. First, they’d just think I was useful because I could give them insights into their enemy. Then, after a while, they’d learn to truly accept me. It would be at about that time when I would have told you that I wanted to have a child with you. And you would have made a wonderful father. Galen would make a terrific grandfather. Imagine, please Turi, imagine, the pain I went through at childbirth. Imagine your joy as you see our first child. Imagine the fights we have over naming him. Imagine his first steps. His first words. His first everything. Imagine how ferociously we would fight the devils knowing that we have to protect our son. And imagine him growing up and living on his own. And then we turn and look at each other. We who have been through all those experiences. Then, those two people, they could say they loved each other. They could really say it. You and I, we don’t know. We feel it, but maybe the feeling wouldn’t have been enough. Don’t be you, Turi. Be that man who raised a child with me. Be that man who really loves me.”
Arturus looked up from the dream she’d laid before him. The Kelly in front of him now was a dangerous woman. A woman who could take advantage of him. Who could break his heart. Who could have used him to gain the trust of his village before betraying them. But this other Kelly, the one that had been faithfully by his side for a lifetime. The one that had borne his child and who had helped him raise it. That was a Kelly he could love.
Then let this Kelly be that one.
Of course he loved this woman. She wasn’t dangerous. There was no way she could betray him, now. She could only be as faithful to him as any woman could be.
Arturus squeezed her hand. “It is as you say. We have done those things. Let us die that way, together.”
She leaned forward and kissed him, more passionately than she had before, more desperately—more honestly.
“I don’t want to be a corpse,” she whispered. “If I die before you, will you burn me?”
“I shall.”
“And if you die before me, I’ll burn us both.”
Arturus nodded. “I wish we were on Earth, so that a miracle could happen, and we would be saved.”
“We’re alone, here, my love. There are no gods to save us. No one to even know why we died.”
He remembered what Galen had said about dying. About how Galen said his world would shrink in until he was alone with himself. How would Arturus then feel, knowing that all his efforts had been in vain? Was there any one thing he had done in his life that he could really say made the experience of living worthwhile? Was there anything he had accomplished, or experienced, that made damnation a price worth paying?
No. But no one asked me if I wanted to be born, so I just did the best I could.
Kelly threw herself into his arms, knocking him back a little from where he sat so that his back touched the uneven wall. He held her, seeing the corpses through the crack over her shoulder. One’s blood blackened eye was pressed up to the gap. Another had shoved its finger so far in that the skin had been rubbed off it. Black, half coagulated blood dripped down from the flayed digit.
Mother, whoever you were, I hope you would have been proud of me.
It occurred to him then that there was no reason left for Galen to keep any secrets.
It’s time. I will at least get to know the truth before I die.
He held Kelly a little longer because she was crying. She was probably thinking about her life. About what it had amounted to. Maybe she had come up with the same answers he had. But eventually her crying stopped, and her breathing evened out, and her body went limp in his arms. He laid her gently against the stones—and stood.
He walked back into the main room to find out where his mother was. To find out how his father had fallen in love with an angel. To finally find out why it was he’d been given the birth he’d never asked for.
Arturus saw that Galen must have found time to tend to his beard while he and Kelly had been in the other room; it was as well trimmed as ever.
It’s death. He’s preparing for death.
Turi walked up next to his father and sat down beside to him.
“Tell me a story,” Arturus said.
Galen smiled. “It has been a long time since I’ve told you a story, Son.”
“They were never just stories,” Arturus said. “They were lessons. They were your way of sharing with me what you’d learned. I want that very much right now, to know what you know.”
“Was there a story you wanted to hear in particular?”
“The one about my mother.”
Galen looked up to the ladder which led to the tower. The sound of metal scraping on stone filled the air for a moment. Outside there must be a corpse, perhaps wearing armor or with some other metal accoutrement, who was being pressed into the stone. Then the noise stopped.
Galen took a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were no longer focused. He wasn’t staring at anything in this room, Arturus knew. He must have been looking at events which had happened long ago.
“Things were different,” Galen said. “The Carrion was a vile place, but not so horrific as today. The armies of Blood and Stone were still sleeping in their city. Maab was not yet the supreme leader of the Mithric tribes. She was second to another woman, just as terrible but not quite as smart. Her name was Igraine, and she lived in the compound from which Maab now rules.
“Charlie, who you may remember from when you were a young boy, and Severn, Michael and Klein, they were all her slaves. Maab’s slaves in particular, but under Igraine. They wanted freedom. They wanted to be able to worship their God. It was Maab who instituted the practice of castration. Before it hadn’t mattered so much what the slaves believed. Igraine had thought there was no way to really change peoples’ minds. Maab
proved her wrong. Maab found a way to bend people to her will. Then Igraine spread the practice. You can imagine the pain and suffering that was inflicted.
“But there was hope. The crux of the power of the Mithric tribes was a man named Lucreas Crassus. He was the one who taught La’Ferve how to fight. He was the one who taught Gilgamesh how to control the hounds. Who taught Nephysis how to raise the dead—though on that score Nephysis may have surpassed his tutor. This man was intensely interested in the Infidel Friend, and he knew they were looking for something. They were looking for a fallen angel. Not a Grigori, mind you, but an actual fallen angel, straight from Heaven.
“Oh, the infidels had always been searching for one, ever since anyone could remember—but this time it was different. This time they knew they’d seen one. They used some form of alchemy on the feathers she’d molted and found her to be legitimate.
“It was this that gave Charlie a purpose to live. Not that he liked the Infidel Friend, mind you, but he loved God. And the idea that there might be an angel here, well that filled him with hope because if he could speak to her, he figured he could find out what it was that God wanted him to do. He might learn who God actually was, and how he could earn his way into Heaven.”
Arturus felt a pang of nostalgia so strong that it almost made him double over. This story, to be sure, was nothing like the stories Galen had told him when he was a child, but the feeling was the same. He felt . . . safe, and he hadn’t felt that way in a long time.
“Now, I told you that the Infidel Friend used alchemy on her feathers to verify that she was from Heaven,” Galen was saying, “but I didn’t need alchemy to know. I knew. I found her with the initial stilling, who knows how far she’d fallen and for how long, lying vulnerable in a room. Usually devils ignore those with the stilling, but there was a Minotaur that had detected her. Perhaps it simply had acquired a taste for stilled souls, or perhaps it could somehow tell that she was from Heaven, and the idea angered it, but whatever the case may be, it tried to kill your mother.
“I fought it as best I could, with all my knowledge and all my skill I held it off. It would lead me out into the wilds and try to circle back to get her. It would call its dyitzu to its side and send them at me. When finally I managed to get her moving and was able to drag her through the halls of Hell, it sent hounds to track me. We ran and we ran and we ran, but it would not relent.
“She sang to me, sometimes, when we occasioned to feel safe in a chamber for a night. She sang to me the Song of Heaven. I learned things that would terrify Charlie. I learned that she had never met God. That she had never met anyone who had. I learned that she didn’t even know if He had existed. I also learned her name, which was Evariel.
“Now angels may be holy to those people in Harpsborough, but believe me, they are very terrible things. It’s not that they are evil in the way the Father Klein understands evil, it’s that they don’t view human life like we do. It’s not sacred to them. Evariel was evil in the way that I view evil. But as I fought to protect her, she began to see me as more than just a damned soul. She saw me as more than human. I was her friend. Rick was with me, then, of course. She saw him as a friend, too.
“I would tell her stories, just like I am telling you now, during that long chase. She learned about humans for the first time. About our wishes. Our loves. Our pains. And one day, she cried. It is a terrible thing to see an angel cry, Son. It is good that you’ll never have to experience it. There is something so pure about them, so . . . perhaps holy is the right word. I grabbed her up in my arms and I begged for her to tell me why she cried. She said that now she knew why she had fallen—why she’d been exiled from Heaven.
“‘Why?’ I asked her. She told me they must have known that she had developed the ability to love a human. She believed, even though she had not yet committed the crime, the fact that she could have was why she was cast down. On that night, Turi, we loved each other. In the morning she was horrified. She could not believe that she had done what she did. She felt as if I had dirtied her. She told me I had taken advantage of her in her weakness.
“Then she ran.”
Galen paused for a moment. The undead rustled softly against the stone walls. The gentle snoring of Johnny, who was asleep in one of the other rooms, came and went. Came and went. Came and went.
“I chased her,” Galen’s face, which had remained expressionless for nearly all of Arturus’ life, was forlorn.
I never knew him. I never saw his mettle tested. Whatever the horrors the Carrion has brought me, it has at least let me know my father.
“I chased her,” Galen said, “not to break her wishes, for I accepted that she no longer wished to see me, but to protect her from the Minotaur which tracked her. Sadly, the Minotaur found her before I did. I came upon them as they fought. Your mother was formidable, and it might be that she could have defeated a normal Minotaur, I don’t know, but this one was different. This one was somehow more terrible than the rest. I came to her aid and was able to distract the beast. When finally I was able to escape its clutches, I set about searching for her, but she was gone.
“Unbeknownst to me, she had found one of the forgotten passages into Igraine’s compound. A guard hadn’t discovered her, but Charlie had. Now Maab had already made the Christian’s recant, but some of them weren’t willing to let go, even though they had pretended to. Charlie picked up one of her feathers and used it to show his people that there was hope. Your mother, she had been wounded badly, and she couldn’t remember much at all. Charlie was convinced that when your mother regained her memory, she would be able to tell them about God. It was this hope that allowed him to unify the Christians and win them to his banner under Maab’s very nose.
“But they were betrayed. One member amongst their ranks went to Igraine and told her the truth. Igraine bade the man take his time and worm his way into Charlie’s inner circle.
“The Minotaur which I had so long fought also found out that Evariel was in Igraine’s compound. He arranged for himself to be captured and brought in. They kept him chained in a room where they would sacrifice unruly prisoners.
“Then, Igraine’s spy finally entered Charlie’s inner circle, and they let him meet the angel. Then he told Igraine how to find your mother. Your mother was captured and put in a cage where all the slaves could see her. It was clear now that she was with child. Then, before long, you were born.
“That was when the Infidel came to me.”
Arturus had let the voice of his father lull him into a state very near sleep, but at the mention of the Infidel he snapped into sudden alertness.
“The Infidel?”
“He spoke to me. He too was looking for Evariel. I told him she had been taken, but he’d known already. He was the one who told me that she’d had you. I was overjoyed because I’d feared she was actually dead. I was overjoyed because I learned that you existed. But I was in misery, too. Your mother and I had parted on terrible terms. You and your mother were being kept in one of the most impregnable fortresses ever devised in Hell. Your mother had found a way in, but try as I might, I could not. Then I came up with a plan, and the Infidel agreed to it. I would rescue you, and he would pretend to steal you. He would lead the forces of Igraine astray.
“But why?” Arturus asked. “Why would the Infidel help you?”
“A couple of reasons. Back then he wasn’t interested in you, Son, he was interested in your mother. Also, he owed me a favor.”
Arturus wanted to ask why the Infidel would owe his father a favor, but Galen had started to talk again, and he was loath to interrupt him.
“So I went in that place. Like the Minotaur before me, I allowed myself to be captured. They took me to be sacrificed to it, but instead of me dying, I slew it. Then I found your mother. She was still in her prison. I took you out of her arms. She wept, and I left. The Infidel kept his part of the bargain. He led a merry chase. In the aftermath, Maab came to power. She sent men after you, but they all chased the
Infidel. Then Charlie’s people revolted and Maab stopped caring about you. Charlie and his men broke out and made their way across the Carrion, Maab’s soldiers in pursuit. By then Rick was helping to raise you. We agreed that we wanted you out of the Carrion, so he took you for a while and I led Charlie’s people out. Then we all settled down.”
“But what happened to my mother?”
“The Infidel had helped me, so I agreed to help him. I left you with Rick at Harpsborough and traveled back into the Carrion to find your mother. Maab had moved her to one of her other compounds, and it took some time to find her. When we did, Son, it was . . . horrific. It’s not that they hurt her, Turi. They turned her. When we found her she wanted you dead. The Infidel did his tests on one of her feathers. She had fallen too far. Her body was no longer of Heaven, she’d turned into a Grigori. I couldn’t, I couldn’t make myself kill her, and it didn’t matter one way or another to the Infidel. So she’s still there, in that compound. And she wants you dead, Turi.”
Arturus took a deep breath.
Galen’s eyes returned to the present. “I promised Rick that we would tell you about the angel that we knew. The one that befriended us and learned to love humanity. He didn’t want to tell you about the devil she’d become. I have broken that promise, but I think he’d approve.”
“Maab did that to her,” Arturus said. “Maab turned her into a monster.”
March till Death (Hellsong Book 3) Page 14
