A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Hero says man started killing them again, though.”

  “Well, yes. But that was another age. Another time.” Oracle gave the pot a final stir.

  “If Changing Woman’s sons got rid of all the monsters when the world began, why do we have monsters now?” Orphan asked.

  Oracle stared into the darkness, her eyes half shut, her mouth pursed. After a long time, she said, “Same reason, Orphan. This is a different age, another time.”

  In the Place of Power, two shiny black creatures came unseen by a secret way, quick as snakes through tunneled stone, deep beneath the Dome, then upward to the place where the Witch lived. To them she had no human name but only a coded impulse, a unique mastery, a key that fit their particular lock. She was the reason they had brought the six-year-old child they carried with them, the child who cried for her aunty as she had ever since they had taken her.

  “Where did you find her?” the Witch asked.

  “South. Almost to Artemisia,” said one of the creatures.

  “Come here, girl,” the Witch said, setting aside her mask.

  And she, the child, seeing a human face, even one like this, was foolishly glad, for she thought people were kinder than the creatures that had brought her here.

  “Go look again,” said the Witch. “This is likely not the right one.”

  Obediently, the beetle-black creatures returned to their seeking, and the woman drew the child through doors and down hallways, deep into her apartments.

  “What’s that?” the child screamed hysterically. “What’s that!”

  “It’s only a chair,” she said, putting the child into it and strapping her there.

  “What’s that?” the child screamed again. “Don’t do that! Don’t!”

  The woman did not answer, but merely lowered the helmet, down and down until it hid the child’s eyes.

  “Now,” said the Witch. “Now, let’s see!”

  For a brief time the child went on crying.

  CHAPTER 2

  In the village there had always been a Miser’s House, back of Wicked Stepmother’s House, just below the ruined castle, but there’d been no Miser in it for a long time. Then one day, groaning over the notch in the ridge, came one truck and another one and one more yet, all of them making a rackety-clack and smoke from the boilers on the back, with the men in them red-faced and yelling, bolstering, roistering, asking where was Miser’s House. Three truckloads of stuff they put in Miser’s House, piles and stacks of paper, and teetering towers of boxes, and lumpy sacks of this and that, and old falling-apart furniture, going back and forth, up and down, cursing and spitting and laughing and yelling. When the trucks were empty, they went away and a little vehicle came, rattling and smoking, to bring Miser himself.

  He was thin and papery with a voice like cards being shuffled. He scuttled like Orphan’s squirrel, quick, quick, out of the truck, into the house, then one side of his white, wrinkly face showed at a window behind a tattered curtain like a mouse peering from a hole. Miser’s lips always trembled as though about to say something, but they very seldom did.

  “What’s he scared of?” Orphan had asked Oracle.

  “Everything,” said Oracle. “But mostly that someone will steal something from him.”

  Orphan hadn’t seen anything going into the house that was worth taking out of it, but as Oracle said, that was typical. As it turned out, Orphan was about the only one Miser wasn’t afraid of. Every now and then she’d go sit on his porch and sing to him, because she thought he might be lonely. She sang “Big Bad Ogre Had a Farm,” and “Eensy Weensy Wivern,” and “This Old Troll.” Miser would peek at her from the corner of the window, and after a while from the corner of the door, and later yet, from the open door.

  “ ‘This Old Troll, he played eight, he played nick-nack with his fate. With a nick-nack, paddy-whack, throw the imp a bone, this Old Troll came trolling home.…’ ” she finished up with a long note.

  “Very nice,” whispered Miser, easing the door a crack.

  “Poet says men went to the stars,” she told him. “I want to know about it.”

  “True,” said Miser. “Yes. They did. Rats. Deserting a sinking ship.”

  Through the open door Orphan could see Miser’s hallway and stairs, both piled with boxes on the sides leaving only a narrow trail between, all the edges softened by velvety dust, the banisters draped in cobwebs that trailed lumpy pennants of dead flies. She wondered once again how Miser could stay so rusty black and papery white living in all that dust, but it didn’t seem to stick to him any more than spiderweb did to spiders. Oracle said it was his natural milieu. He swam in it, like a fish in water.

  “Can you tell me about it?” she asked. She wouldn’t have asked if she wasn’t so curious because Miser wasn’t a good storyteller. He pinched his words as Oracle said he did his pennies.

  “Men went,” he said reluctantly. “That’s all.”

  “How?” she demanded. “When?”

  He sighed, a rusty sigh. He went away from the door, and after a time he scraped back, dragging a rickety chair along behind him that he set inside the door, close enough that he could close it quickly if a thief came along.

  “Long time ago,” he whispered, “men were profligate.”

  “What’s profligate?” Orphan asked.

  “Wasteful, ‘Waste not, want not,’ that’s the motto, but men forgot it!” His voice actually rose beyond a whisper for a moment, then sank back and started over again. “They used up their inheritance. They didn’t save things. They didn’t take care—take care of things.” He gestured at the hallway behind him. “You have to take care of things, Orphan.” He panted and bit his lip.

  “How did they go? On ships?”

  “They built a station up in space, a great wheel that rolled and rolled, between earth and the moon. They mined the moon for minerals. They took hold of the sun for power. They built sky ships, and they went away. To the stars.…” His voice trailed off.

  Then he said, “That’s all,” got up from the chair, and shut the door.

  Just as Orphan was about to leave, the door cracked open a little, and Miser’s nose came through the crack. “And they should have taken their awful walkers with them!”

  Orphan had no time to ask what awful walkers were, for the door was shut tight.

  Later that day, she found Oracle and Bastard and Ingenue and two or three others sitting in the park, so she asked about awful walkers.

  “Walkers?” Oracle mused, pausing in her crocheting. She was making a coverlet for Orphan, who had only two raggedy blankets to her name. “I’ve never heard of walkers, awful or otherwise.”

  “Maybe those damned impudent things,” spat Bastard, who had been leaning back with his hands behind his head, taking the sun. “Arrogant creatures. Stopped me when I was coming here for the first time! Asking questions!”

  Oracle raised her head and asked, “What were they like?”

  “Like each other!” Bastard growled, rubbing his fingers across the red scars on his forehead where the letters B and R were branded. “Like as twins! Wearing black helmets. I told the driver to go through them or over them, but he wouldn’t. Coward!”

  “How many of them?” asked Oracle.

  “Two Driver told me they always go by twos.”

  Oracle asked no more questions then. Later, however, when Hero returned from his most recent stint of rescuing maidens or killing monsters, she asked him about walkers.

  “Oh, yes,” Hero replied, applying oil to the muscles in his arms and flexing them slowly back and forth, one-two, one-two. “I’ve met them. Always the same, striding by twos throughout the world, helmeted in black, with voices like fire. They say they are looking for a girl-child. At first it was for a toddler; later, year by year, for older children. They ask if I am aware of any children being fostered, or of any adopted, and I tell them no, I am not aware of any such. My quests seldom include children.”

  Oracle believed Hero’s awar
eness pretty much stopped at Hero’s skin, which in this case was probably fortunate. “What do they do if they find such a child?” she asked in a studiedly offhanded tone.

  “I have heard they take them away,” said Hero, with equal but genuine uninterest.

  He had heard the truth. Whenever the walkers found dark-haired, dark-eyed little girls who were adopted or being fostered, they took them, deaf to protestations, unmoved by tears, leaving the protesters alive or dead, depending on whether they had contented themselves with screams and tears or whether they had tried to keep their children by force. None of these girl-children ever returned, and yet it seemed none of them had been the right one, for in years following, the walkers were searching still.

  So much Oracle learned by questioning this one and that one, as time went on.

  Following his abortive visit home, Abasio fell into habit as into a pit. Though he had not forsaken the idea of adventure, days spun into seasons and seasons into years while he did nothing at all about it. The fact was, he was too comfortable as he was. He had his rooftop shack, his books, his meals at Purple House or at a songhouse, his forays on behalf of Young Kerf. He did almost exactly what he wanted to at any hour on any day. He had a wide assortment of acquaintances among truckers and travelers, many of whom spun flavorful tales that both amused and intrigued him. Over the years, he had made himself useful to Soniff as well, and Soniff used Abasio for all manner of errands to do with attending to business.

  “Got to attend to business,” Soniff told him. “Got to make sure the little shop guy pays his dues regular and doesn’t get hassled by some other gang once he does. Got to be sure your drug shipments are coming in regular. Got to pick up the brothel receipts every day and make sure new whores—new faces, anyhow—are coming in from next-city-north and old faces are sent on to next-city-south.”

  He sent Abasio to Echinot, next-city-north, to straighten out a problem, which he did in timely fashion, seeing nothing new or different in Echinot to make him stick around. So far, experience had taught him one city was almost exactly like another.

  Late in the afternoon he caught a ride back with a water-trucker, not realizing until they were on the highway that the man was buzzed out of his skull and likely to kill them both. Abasio was trying, with no success, to get the driver to stop when two black-clad figures stepped from the borrow pit along the road, flashed across the pave like dark lightning, and laid hands on the vehicle. The truck stopped running, as though commanded to do so, and slid to a stop, half into the pit.

  “Get out,” commanded one of them, or both in unison, the command coming from some unimaginable distance.

  Abasio got out, but the trucker, who was simply too far gone to understand what was happening, stared blearily through the glass as though wondering why the truck had stopped.

  “Get out,” the voices said once more.

  No action on the part of the trucker. With growing apprehension, Abasio jittered from foot to foot, wanting to pull the man out, uncertain whether he should try.

  He was given no opportunity. One of the walkers reached into the truck and pulled the man out. Abasio saw the trucker rising at the end of the walker’s arm, straight up, that heavy man held at arm’s length as though he weighed nothing, nothing at all, then the walker’s hand let go and the trucker went on rising in an arc, impossibly rising, like an arrow shot from a bow.

  “Have you seen a dark-haired girl about thirteen?” the other walker asked Abasio, coming close to him and glaring with its red eyes, drawing Abasio’s eyes down, away from that arc in the air he’d been trying to follow to its end.

  Abasio gulped. Yes, he had. He’d seen girls like that in Fantis, various places. And in Echinot too. He said where, painfully. As he spoke, spit ran out of his mouth and down his chin. He didn’t even try to wipe it away.

  “Girls without families,” said the walker.

  Abasio said he didn’t know if they had families or not. He hadn’t spoken to them. He’d just seen them, one place and another.

  The walkers turned and went away.

  Abasio stood heaving for a few moments before slowly, unwillingly walking across the road and out into the prairie land beyond, trudging along in the same line the trucker had been thrown, keeping on even when he was certain he’d gone too far, way too far. He finally told himself he’d take another dozen paces, and on the tenth one he found what was left of the trucker smashed onto a rock outcropping. Abasio turned aside to empty his stomach, noisily and messily.

  He drove the truck on into Fantis himself. All the way there, he kept going over and over the incident in his mind, how he’d felt, what he’d heard and smelled while it was going on. He told himself he should have either been more scared or less! He should have been more scared because of what the creatures could do. He should have been less scared because they didn’t look menacing. It was almost as though the walkers themselves had controlled exactly how terrified he was; as though they’d decided just how much to frighten him, enough to make him answer fully and at once, but not so much as to make him fall down in a fit.

  Could it be some kind of ray they broadcast? Some smell they had, maybe. Pheromones. Grandpa used to talk about pheromones. Could there be a smell you didn’t even know you were smelling that would make you weak and trembly and sick to your stomach? Or a sound you didn’t know you were hearing? And if they could do that—was there anything they couldn’t do?

  He left the truck at a truckers’ hostel, telling the people there what had happened and where they could find what was left of the trucker. He wanted to talk to someone about it, and he briefly considered discussing it with Elrick-Ann. He decided not to. Better to keep such matters to himself.

  Orphan was walking in the woods one day when she found a baby griffin. She was shuffling along, kicking up clouds of last year’s oak leaves, when the guardian-angel began whistling in her ear, shifting its weight from one side to the other, fluttering its wings and generally making a nuisance of itself. When Orphan looked to see what had upset the angel, she saw the baby griffin, half-buried in leaves at the foot of a tree. It was all crouched down, trying to hide its pinky-bronze body under its little wings that were hardly sprouted yet, and when she picked it up it tried to bite her with its tiny soft beak that couldn’t even pinch.

  The angel froze against Orphan’s neck, making no noise at all. Orphan sat down and put the griffin in her lap.

  “Where’s your mama?” she asked the baby. “What are you doing down here all by yourself?”

  The baby quit struggling and crouched again, making a tired little noise.

  Orphan took off her knit hat that Drowned Woman had made for her and stretched it around the baby to keep it warm while she looked around. She stood back from the nearest tree and looked it all up and down, seeing if there was a nest. Then she did the next tree to that, and the next half-dozen, but there wasn’t a nest anywhere.

  She thought of taking the baby home, then sighed, knowing what Oracle or Hero, either one, would say about that. Orphan fetched all kinds of animals home, all the time, but none of the people in the village were what she’d call supportive. Orphan knew perfectly well what the animals wanted and what to do for them if they were hungry or hurt. They were like kinfolk, so she told herself, feeling it to be so, but none of the other villagers understood that.

  The guardian-angel fluttered off through the trees and landed on a rock outcropping, where it sat and whistled at her, over and over, quirrup, quirrup, quirrup, meaning “Come over here and look,” the way it did when it heard grubs under bark or found wild raspberries. When she got there, the angel flew up the wall a little way, and when Orphan stepped back to see where it was, she saw the griffin nest, or at least she saw the neatly arranged sticks sticking out of a small cave about halfway up the rock wall. Griffins built neat nests, according to Hero. Like little log cabins turned upside down.

  “You crawled all the way over there, didn’t you?” she asked the baby. “All the
way over under those trees.” She could certainly see why it had gone in that direction. All the other directions were more or less straight up, which is the way she would have to go if she was going to take the griffin back to its mother. She briefly considered asking Hero to do it, setting the idea aside almost at once. Hero wasn’t sentimental about baby things. Certainly not about baby monsters. If he climbed up there, he would probably kill the other hatchlings, if there were more, and the parents, too, if he could find them.

  No. If this baby was going to be returned to its home, Orphan would have to do it herself.

  The hat would serve as a carrier if she tied it around her waist with her belt, which she did She had no shoes to take off, but she did hike her smock up between her legs and stick it through the belt in front. These preparations quickly accomplished, she started up the wall, reciting to herself Hero’s instructions for removing oneself from pits, chasms, and crevasses.

  “Three points in contact before you let go of the fourth. Keep your eyes on where you’re going. Don’t look down. Don’t worry about how far up you have to go. Just worry about the next grip up, the next step up.”

  There were plenty of handholds, though some of them were slimed with one thing or another. She only slipped twice, neither time very badly. The baby began to whimper when she was almost there, which is no doubt why the big one reached the nest almost at the same moment Orphan did.

  The first Orphan knew of it was when she looked up to find her view of the rock wall blocked by a pair of fully expanded, scaly wings, the sun glinting off an open beak that was unmistakably stabbing at her.

  “I’m bringing it back!” shouted Orphan, more angry than frightened. “By the wind’s knees, monster, I’m bringing home your child!”

  The beak slammed shut like the door to a vault. Orphan climbed over the ledge into the cave, where she untied her belt and unfolded the hat, disclosing the baby, which she hurriedly placed in the nest before standing back to await whatever would happen next.