A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Ah,” said the old man. “Well, that’s a quick decision.” He turned to Arakny. “And what about you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “The girl is a nice enough girl, but she’s not family or a close friend. On the other hand, she has my library, and I should take some steps to retrieve it. Also, my whole duty is the acquisition of information, and I am learning things here in the Place of Power that I did not know, things my people do not know I am weighing whether I should risk my life to learn more, or go back to my people with what I already have.”

  “Or put what you know down onto paper and send it by messenger,” said the old man.

  “What messenger?”

  The old man turned to Tom. “I was thinking of Coyote.”

  “He would take the message,” said Tom.

  Arakny thought this over silently for some moments. “You don’t care if all Artemisia knows about this?”

  The old man shrugged. “Up until now, we’ve played a quiet game, but now the gamepieces have begun shouting. Now we win or we lose, and it doesn’t matter who knows.”

  “And if we win?”

  “Life has a chance. You Artemisians may go on with your noble experiment at civilizing mankind.”

  “And if we lose?”

  “Death gathers. Tyranny is triumphant once more. Evil stalks the earth, and all life dwindles into death. Yours and mine and Coyote’s and Bear’s. And your elk. And your bison. And the forests planted by the Sisters to Trees. And all the fish in the seas. All.”

  She shivered, trying twice before the words would come out. “I’d like to see the thrones so I can tell Olly about them, but I will tell Wide Mountain Mother as well.”

  “Tom will take you,” said the old man. When they were out in the hallway, Abasio said, “You don’t look at all eager.”

  “I’m not,” Tom said flatly. “I’m an engineer, or I like to think so. I like things to be definable, measurable. The thrones are not definable, and they make me feel inadequate. Uncomfortable. No matter His Wisdom said to show you.”

  They went with him through the security points and the dusty labyrinth, past huge old doors that Tom said had never been opened in his memory, down the last stretch to a door in every way similar, except that the dust lay less thickly around it. When the gigantic portal swung open, it blocked the entire corridor and gave them no way to go forward but into the room itself.

  “Follow the tracks,” Tom told them, pointing at the dusty floor, serpent-trailed by wheels. “I’ll wait for you here.” He had no wish to go into the room again. He had not slept well since he had been there last.

  They went alone, laying their hands against the pillars, feeling moisture and a barely discernible vibration, as of some huge engine in motion, some mighty heart beating far underground, perhaps at the center of the earth itself. The dust rose beneath their feet and fell again, half-covering the footprints they had just made. The wheel tracks twisted and coiled, and they followed in the same path, coming at last to the place the pillars stopped, the open place before the dais.

  The air was clear. No smoke. No mist. Three great chairs, carved all over with creatures. Carved eyes saw them, carved faces perceived them, carved mouths opened imperceptibly wider, carved nostrils took their scent. On the left-hand seat sat a woman. Not entirely human, thought Arakny. Not entirely dead, thought Abasio. The figure was half-absorbed into the stone, but its eyes also saw; its nostrils smelled their presence. High on the back of the chair was carved the word Hunagor. In the center chair, the figure was male, with the word carved high above his head: Werra.

  The right-hand chair was empty of human form, though it, too, had its crowded quota of other beings. It bore the name Seoca. The dais was deep in dust, though none lay on the chairs themselves. The air around the chairs seemed to tremble, as air shimmers over a heated roadway.

  Abasio wanted to speak but did not. He knew his words would not penetrate this air. He glanced at Arakny and found her eyes on him, wide and slightly frightened. He put his lips near her ear and whispered, “All the things carved there. They’re still alive.”

  She looked again. The creatures had lived once. Each of them had come to sit in a particular chair. Each of them had been absorbed into it. Maybe they were, in a way, still alive. She shuddered. Maybe they were … the thing itself. Not merely thing, not merely being, but both. An indescribable amalgam, ancient as stone, partaking of stone, but sentient and aware and awfully, dreadfully alive.

  They stood a moment more, scarcely breathing, unspeaking, finally backing away until they were among the sheltering pillars, then quickly and more quickly following their own tracks back the way they had come. When they stood clear of the great door at last, gasping as though they had run a great way, Fuelry shut it behind them.

  “Who are they?” Arakny whispered.

  “They? The thrones?” he asked, as though surprised.

  “Sitting there?”

  “You mean Hunagor? Werra? People. I knew Werra. My father knew Hunagor.”

  “Not human people,” said Abasio firmly.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “They don’t look entirely human. They’re—they’re different.”

  Fuelry rubbed his face and chin with one hand, as though scrubbing away cobwebs. “They were human.”

  “You have only to look at them,” insisted Abasio in a hushed voice, as though he were afraid of being overheard.

  Tom said patiently, “But you see, I knew Werra. He was as human as His Wisdom is.”

  “Will the old man come down here? Sit there? Like them?” Arakny asked.

  “He says he will. When the time comes. Which will not be for many years.”

  “Tom,” Abasio insisted, “if you know that, you must know other things. What’s the purpose of all this?”

  He led them back the way they had come. “I can only tell you what Seoca has told me, over and over. The purpose of Gaddi House is to protect the earth and the place of all life upon it. That’s what the thrones do! I don’t know how they do it, not entirely. I know parts of things. People come here. They talk to His Wisdom. He gives them instructions and supplies. The people leave again. They go out into the world, here, or there, as he commands. They do things, this, or that.

  “But I don’t know them all. I don’t hear what’s said to them all, see what’s given to them all. I don’t know how it all fits together. I don’t know what’s behind these other doors.”

  “This place is old,” whispered Arakny.

  “Seoca says this down here is ancient beyond counting, but I never believed that.”

  Abasio shook his head. “I think he spoke truth.”

  Arakny asked, “Will Coyote take the message I’m going to write?”

  “His Wisdom says if you write your message, I am to send it.”

  They returned the way they had come. When they came through the last secured door, which Tom locked again behind them, Abasio stopped short, head alertly cocked.

  “What’s that?” he asked in a surprised voice.

  The other two listened, at first hearing nothing. Then they made it out against the susurrus of moving air, a plaintive whistle, a strain of melody. It came nearer, though still far off, seeming to emanate from a cross- corridor a considerable distance down the hallway where they stood.

  Two men emerged from one side, the tune emerging with them. Without seeing Abasio or the others, the two men crossed the hallway and disappeared down the cross-corridor, the tune following after.

  “Whistler!” Abasio choked out. “And Sudden Stop, the weapons man! What are they doing here?”

  “They are agents of His Wisdom’s,” whispered Tom. “Two of His Wisdom’s most trusted men. They have just returned from the cities of manland.”

  “I know,” Abasio gasped. “I saw them both there!”

  Though Arakny looked at him curiously, Abasio said nothing more, though his mind was full of confusion. When he had first seen Whistler, Sudden
Stop, and the old man with the donkey, he had assumed they had encountered one another accidentally. Later on, when he found out who Whistler and Sudden Stop were, he had been sure of it. But perhaps it had not been accidental. Perhaps they had been traveling together. Why? What had the drug merchant and the arms merchant been doing here?

  When they returned to their suite, Arakny wrote her letter, spending considerable time at it. It was almost midnight before she finished. She put her letter into a small bag made of heavy cloth that Tom had provided. Something for Coyote to get his teeth into, Tom had said.

  When morning came, Tom arrived to take them to Olly, saying that Arakny’s missive was on its way. He stood waiting for them calmly enough, but Arakny saw the little beads of sweat along his hairline and the almost imperceptible twitch at the corner of one eye. He didn’t much want to leave Gaddi House. Well, neither did she, though Abasio seemed immune to her terrors.

  Terrified or not, they went out the massive gate and strolled, as Tom had said they would. Arakny tried to convince herself it was like an early morning walk in any civilized place, though in places the ground was blackened and the trees were dead. Where there was still grass, it was sere at the tops but green at the roots. Recent warmth and rain had started it growing again. The air was almost springlike.

  That being so, why was she gasping? She could not seem to breathe as she ordinarily did. The air did not nourish her lungs. It was smothering her. So too Abasio, and Tom Panting, both of them, like running dogs.

  She looked around, but there was no one else abroad in the place. No person, dog, cat, no song of bird. The air was utterly still. She reached for Abasio’s hand, unaware she had done so until she felt his fingers squeezing hers, looked at his face to see the same apprehension there that she felt. He took a painfully deep breath, heaving at the air as at a monstrous weight.

  They approached Qualary’s house, the horrid pressure increasing with every step. Each breath came unwillingly, for now there was a smell, too, rank and choking. Even Tom coughed, giving them a swift, apologetic look. They came to the door of the ordinary house. Tom knocked The door opened.

  “Good morning, Tom,” said Qualary Finch, her voice reverberating as though echoing from some great distance, the sound coming as through delirium or nightmare: Goooood Moooohrniiing.

  Tom said something, they could not hear what Olly came from a bedroom yawning, to throw her arms about Abasio, about Arakny, to weep glad tears at seeing them. All of it veiled, distant, unreal, each act in slow motion, each sound resonating, all of them caught in nightmare and unable to waken.

  And then the pressure and the smell surged up around them like a tide of foulness, making them struggle and crouch and turn to look, gasping like caught fish, for the street behind them had filled with walkers, rank on serried rank of them, forms that had slipped silently into place like gamepieces, file after file, black helmets aligned in an obdurate grid.

  And there, suspended before them like trophies, exhausted and pale, were Burned Man and Oracle, whom Abasio did not know, and old Cermit and Farmwife Suttle and Drowned Woman. Whom he did.

  “Grandpa!” cried Abasio in a huge voice, and then in one of shattered surprise: “Ma!”

  Came a crow-call of command to make the enormous rank and file of walkers turn as one and go trampling away, feet stamping down, the road shivering and the air crashing, leaving behind only a hundred or so to surround Ellel, her pale hair a snaky tangle around her face, her mouth open in a toothy grin of amusement, her eyes glittering at their expressions of confounded pain.

  “What are you doing with them?” cried Olly, though Qualary reached out for her, trying to quiet her. “Why have you brought my friends here?”

  “Not only your friends, it seems!” cried Ellel in a triumphant voice. “Not only yours, no. And we are keeping them here for reasons you well know, Gaddir child. Keeping them safe, for a time. Their safety depends upon your doing precisely what we—I—want you to do.”

  The hostages were taken away. Tom got the others inside Qualary’s house and shut the door behind them. Though Abasio and Arakny were boiling with impotent rage, Olly was silent and pale.

  “Why does she have Abasio’s folk? How did they get your Oracle?” Arakny cried to Olly. “If she is, as you have said, a true Oracle, then wouldn’t she have known they were coming?”

  “Hush, hush,” Tom soothed “Arakny, this ranting does no good We must be calm. We must think. Perhaps the Oracle did see them coming and also saw beyond that! Perhaps she let them take her for a reason.”

  Arakny, muttering, threw herself into a chair.

  Olly broke her silence to say, “Oracle might have done that, for a reason.”

  Her voice was so quiet that it gained all their attention. Abasio asked, “Was my ma in this village of yours?”

  “Drowned Woman,” Olly replied. “She took care of me when I was a little child.”

  “Drowned Woman!”

  “She tried to kill herself when you ran off to the city,” said Olly. “But your grandpa summoned a resurrection team, and they brought her back. Afterward, she had no memory of you, or him, or anything much, so she was sent to a village as an archetypal Suicide. She was my friend. Is my friend As is Burned Man.”

  “Burned Man? He’s the scarred one?”

  “Burned Man. An archetypal Martyr. Also my friend. He taught me … many things.”

  “Hostages,” said Abasio bitterly. “I thought when I came home from the city, I had done with hostages.”

  Tom raised his voice, demanding to be heard. “There is no immediate threat to them. Remember that. Let’s not be impetuous, thereby making things worse.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t seize up Abasio and me as well,” growled Arakny.

  “No,” murmured Olly. “She wants Abasio here fuming and fussing, for she thinks that may influence what I decide to do. You, Arakny, she does not know, but she’ll leave you alone while she assesses your worth to her. That’s the way Ellel is.”

  “That’s true,” said Qualary, wonderingly. “That’s exactly how she is.”

  “I suppose,” said Olly, still in that strangely expressionless voice, “I suppose I have only to do what they want in order to get my friends free of her.”

  Tom Fuelry shifted uneasily.

  Abasio cried, “There are things to consider first!”

  “I know,” said Olly. “And there is no great hurry.”

  “There’s no great hurry,” agreed Tom. “Their shuttle isn’t ready yet.”

  “They admitted that you might need additional information,” whispered Qualary. “They even said you might want to go to Gaddi House.”

  “Did they now?” Tom’s head came up. “They said she might want to go to Gaddi House?”

  Olly got slowly to her feet. “Berkli said that. I think he and Mitty were trying to be helpful. But it was his saying so that made Ellel decide to take hostages.”

  She drummed her fingers upon the table “Well, what is done is done. Now the longer we stay here, the more danger there is to all of you. And to Qualary herself. Ellel brought the hostages to assure that I return from Gaddi House. Let us give her no time to add to their number or change her mind. We’ll go now. Though I may have to come out again, at least the rest of you will be safe there.

  “Qualary, can you go to Ellel?”

  Qualary shivered. “Yes. I can.”

  “Tell her—tell her I am going into Gaddi House. Tell her I am going there to learn to use my—my talent safely and well. Say that I want to see the shuttle this afternoon, that I will do whatever is needful to obtain the release of my friends.”

  Tom cried, “Are you sure? Is this really what you want to do?”

  “I don’t know what I want to do,” she said simply. “I’m not sure what I must do. But this will give me time to think about it.”

  She took Qualary’s hand and squeezed it. “Go now. We don’t want her to blame you for anything.”

  Q
ualary went out, observing the walkers on the opposite side of the street, strung out here and there along the way. They did not stop her, but they watched her, jittering and mumbling to themselves. They were not trustworthy. If she made a wrong move, they’d kill her without meaning to, without caring. She made herself walk slowly, fighting down the urge to run. If she ran, she would die.

  She heard the others come out behind her and cast a quick look over her shoulder to see them walking quietly across the grass. The walkers watched them go, jittering, twisting, muttering, but not stopping them. Resolutely, she looked where she was going. Merely doing her own task would be quite difficult enough.

  Ellel and the others were in an anteroom of the Dome, while beneath the Dome itself were all the thousands of walkers who had been in the street. Ellel stood motionless, looking at them. Beside her, Berkli moved jerkily from one pillar to another, his voice raised in irritation.

  “How long do you intend to keep them here, Ellel?” He gestured at the walkers as though to push them away. “How long?”

  “Until I need them for something,” she replied in a careless voice. “I may need them for something. Perhaps to quell a rebellion.”

  “Why? Are you casting me in the part of rebel?”

  She laughed. “No, Berkli. I see you for what you are, an uncooperative Domer, one who cares little for our accomplishments and even less for human progress.”

  “I care a great deal for human progress!” he cried. “I’m just not sure what it is.”

  “You never will be,” she snapped, catching sight of her servant. “Well, Qualary! What is it?”

  Qualary delivered her message, her head bowed submissively.

  Ellel snarled, “You’ll bring her to the silo this afternoon. Is that clear?”

  “She said she would need to see the silo,” said Qualary. “See the shuttle. She needs to see everything, understand everything, so you’ll all be safe.”