Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  "Then you tell me, Bartolemei, what we are to do with my trophy. Now that we have captured it, can the Weaver's magic be turned against her? Is there in all your vast and hallowed wisdom any antidote for this poison?"

  "They've crossed the bridge?" the minister asks instead of answering her. "The Weaver's army is on the hub?"

  "What the fuck do you think?" Selwith Tinker snaps back at him and tucks her ebony wings away. The Glaistig's minister nods once, his face gone almost as colorless as the flesh of this new evil the Weaver's conjured, and then he kneels to get a better look at the Seraph.

  III. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)

  Julia Flammarion sits alone in the dingy motel room across the street from the Gulf of Mexico, watching the brilliant winter sun outside the wide windows. There are seagulls like white Xs drawn on the sky. The room smells like disinfectant and the menthol cigarettes the man she slept with the night before was smoking. His name was Leet-Andrew Leet-unless he was lying and his name was really something else. He got angry when she asked him to use a rubber, and he called her a skinny redneck bitch and said he ought to call the police because he knew she wasn't really eighteen, but then he used one, anyway. He was gone when she woke up, and there was twenty-five dollars and thirty-three cents lying on top of the television. She's holding all the money in her left hand, crumpled into a tight wad. Her mother would say this means she's a whore now, even though she didn't ask Andrew Leet for the money and she knows that he only left it to get even with her for making him use a rubber.

  The television's on, because she doesn't like the silence, doesn't want to be alone in the motel room with nothing but the sound of her own thoughts and the wind and squawking seagulls and the traffic out on Ariola Drive. Earlier, she turned the volume up loud and left it on a channel that was nothing but news and weather, all day and all night long. Back home, there's no television, and not much of anything else, either.

  Julia thinks that maybe she'll use some of the money to buy breakfast at the IHOP a little farther down the strip. She's always wanted to eat breakfast at an IHOP, blueberry pancakes and link sausages and black coffee and orange juice; besides, it isn't enough money for another night in the motel. Not that she needs another night. She's been in Pensacola Beach almost a whole week, a week since the bus ride from Milligan, and she's done almost everything that she came here to do. She's had sex with four men. She's seen two movies in a real theater, Sophie's Choice and Gandhi. She's gotten drunk on frozen strawberry daiquiris, learned to smoke, and she's watched the moon rise and the sun set over the ocean. She bought a yellow Minnie Mouse T-shirt at a souvenir shop and wore it so people might think she'd had enough money to go all the way to Disney World. She hitchhiked back across the three-mile-long Pensacola Bay Bridge and all the way to the zoo in Gulf Breeze where she saw more kinds of animals and birds and snakes than she'd ever really believed existed. She'd bought a red bikini and then spent hours walking up and down the beach, where she found cockles and periwinkle shells and two shark's teeth. She got a sunburn and watched teenagers skateboarding. She'd met a drunk old woman outside a bar who told her stories about hurricanes and her lazy ex-husband who'd turned out to be a homosexual.

  Behind her, the angel makes an angry sound like a forest fire, like she's back home and all Shrove Wood is going up in smoke, but Julia keeps her eyes on the pale blue sky and the hungry, wheeling gulls.

  "It don't make no difference to me," she tells the angel. She knows it isn't real, that it's only something wrong with her head makes her hear and see angels and worse things than angels, but she also knows it's usually easier if she doesn't ignore them when they speak to her. "You do as you please. I've come this far. I'm not going to chicken out now."

  The room fills with a smell like hot asphalt and fresh lemons, but she doesn't look away from the window.

  "You're just gonna have to find another crazy girl," Julia tells the angel. "'Cause this one's done with you. You can fly right the fuck back to Heaven or St. Peter or whoever it is you came from and tell them I said to mind their own damn business from here on out."

  There's a sudden crackling noise from the television, and Julia almost turns to see.

  "You go and break that, I can't afford to pay for it," she says. "Leave me alone."

  The angel clacks its teeth together, clack, clack, clack, and the hot asphalt and lemon smell gets worse.

  "No," Julia says and reaches for the remote control to turn off the television so that maybe it'll stop making the staticky sound. She presses off, but nothing happens. "Fuck you," she says, and the angel hisses. She prayed that it wouldn't follow her, that maybe it would get lost or distracted somewhere between Milligan and Pensacola, but it didn't. Every single thing she's done the last six days, its been right there behind her. It watched her while she fucked Andrew Leet and those other men. It wandered the theater aisle during Gandhi and Sophie's Choice. It floated above the reptile house at the zoo.

  "You ain't been listening to me, but you should. I said you can't have me, and soon enough you'll see that I mean what I'm saying."

  The angel screams, and its wings are thunderclaps and St. Elmo's fire trapped there inside the motel room with Julia. But it knows she's not afraid of it anymore, and she knows that it knows. Before she took all the money her mother kept hidden in a Mason jar under the front porch and left the Wood for good, Julia went out to the sandy place where she'd seen the angel the very first time. That was seven years ago, when she was still just a little girl. A wide clearing in the slash pine and briars and Spanish bayonets, and sometimes rattlesnakes and copperheads sunned themselves there. The first time she'd seen the angel, there'd been a huge canebrake rattler stretched out on the hot sand, and the angel had burned it until there was nothing left but charcoal. Before she took the money and set out for Milligan, she went back to the clearing and called the angel and told it that it couldn't have her. She wasn't going to be some sort of saint or nun or something, and she wasn't going to end up like crazy old Miss Sue Anne who lived by herself in a shack on the far side of the deep lake at the end of Wampee Creek. There were crumbling plaster statues stuck up all around the shack, statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus and St. Giles, the patron saint of people who are afraid of the night. And sometimes Miss Sue Anne rowed out onto the lake in a leaky boat and said prayers and did root magic so all the evil things God had told her lived in the mud at the bottom couldn't come up to the surface.

  "What I said, I still mean every goddamn word of it," Julia says, having to raise her voice to be heard above the television and the racket that the angel's making. "You go find someone else, someone who wants whatever it is you're selling, 'cause you can't have me."

  And then the angel tells her what happens to suicides, tells her for the hundredth time all about the special corner of Hell reserved for people who are that cowardly, people who think they know better than God when and where and how they ought to die. And when it's finally finished, the angel slips away, taking all the noise and the strange smells with it. And Julia sits on the edge of the bed, biting her lip so she won't start crying, and she tries hard to think about nothing but blueberry pancakes.

  IV. The Soldier and the Angel

  The wheels turn as the wheels have always turned, the bands of granite and basalt and fire which are this flat, revolving world, and at its dim center the hublands lie, as still as still will ever be. The fixed point about which all creation revolves, the pivot and the axle, the rod and the shaft, and the Dragon-dreaming the coming of the Weaver, the massacre at the Dog's Bridge and the routing of his armies before the Weaver's Seraphim-stirs in his ancient slumber. His dreams spark and drive the gears of half-forgotten machineries buried in the caverns and tunnels far below Kearvan Weal, and all the world shudders and holds its breath.

  "Did you hear that, beast? Did you feel it?" Selwith Tinker asks the Seraph, and it watches her with seething amber eyes, but doesn't answer the question or make any other reply. It came awake some
time during the long night, which has now almost ended, but hasn't yet spoken a word. As this thing is her rightful prize, the Keeper of Keys has permitted Selwith to stand vigil in its prison cell, the filthy hole where it was taken once the Glaistig's ministers and conjurors had concluded their examinations and the Seraph was lifted onto a pallet and carried from the noisy, crowded hall. It has been stripped and flogged and chained to the wall of the cell, its wrists and ankles bound in shackles fashioned from some melding of stone and living flesh that the vampire woman has never seen before and doesn't begin to comprehend. Its great tattletale-grey wings are spread out against the black rock and pinned firmly in place with fishhook spikes of iron and blue flame hammered straight through feathers and muscle and bone. The Seraph's toes can almost touch the floor of the cell, where its spilled blood has gathered in a wide and sticky pool; its blood or whatever the Weaver has given it instead of blood, something the color of gully orchids that stinks of sunlight and ammonia.

  Selwith wrinkles her nose, wondering how that blood might taste, how it might feel on her tongue, wondering if tasting it would kill her slowly or all at once. And then the world shudders again, and she sits down on the floor, a safe distance from the Seraph's blood.

  "He's waking up," she says. "Is that what she wants, your White Lady, this Weaver? Has her year of butchery and devastation, and your nativity, has all this been merely some great fucking show to get his attention?"

  Again, the Seraph doesn't deign to answer her, but it stares down at Selwith Tinker with those blazing yellow-orange eyes, eyes choked with enough pain and hate and contempt that she suspects actual words could never do its thoughts justice, anyway. She thinks they'd be mere anticlimax compared to the force of that stare.

  "The cunt," Selwith says, speaking half to herself now. "Well, she's getting her wish, if all this has been only to wake the fucking Dragon. She's getting her heart's desire, and we'll all be getting it right alongside her."

  Another purplish drop of the Seraph's blood falls to the floor, striking the pool with a sound like hot steel against anvils, like breaking glass. Selwith forces herself to smile and not turn away from those cruel eyes.

  "Between them, beast, what do you think will be left?"

  The Seraph grits its teeth and strains against its bonds with such sudden violence that, for a moment, Selwith Tinker beleives it might actually manage to tear itself free. She gets to her feet again, her own tattered wings unfurling, and braces herself against the bars of the cage in case the jailer's devices should prove inadequate after all. But they hold, the fetters and the spikes and chains, and the Seraph gasps loudly and shuts its eyes.

  "Come on, you murdering bastard," Selwith growls at it. "I know you can do better than that. The Weaver put everything she's got into you, right? Yeah? So tear yourself down off that wall and let's find out what'll really happen when one of you fuckers finally dies."

  The Seraph closes its eyes, and Selwith, unexpectedly freed from the blistering heat of its gaze, finds herself confused and shivering in the darkness. Somewhere beneath the floor, miles and miles below the brittle navel of the world, the Dragon stirs, fully half awake now, and the vampire sinks to her knees. It's almost over, all of it, she thinks, and none of us can change a single thing.

  Dust and small shards of rock sift down on her from a fresh crack that's opened in the ceiling, and Selwith looks up at the Seraph. With its eyes shut like that, she might almost believe that it's despaired at last and nothing now remains but a beautiful, empty shell hanging from a wall.

  "No," she says. "You're still in there, aren't you, beast? She made you, and the Weaver would never have found the simple mercy to give anything she'd made the capacity for surrender. She'll have seen to it that you'll still be fighting when all the world is nothing but a cinder for the stars to wonder at."

  Blood leaks from the Seraph's parted lips, and in the gloom under Kearvan Weal, the silver designs worked into its ivory skin have begun to glow, whorls held within whorls, lunatic tattoo spirals forever looping back upon themselves.

  "What's this?" Selwith asks it. "You gonna show me something pretty now?" And she reaches into a pocket of her vest and takes out the flintlock pistol she's carried all the way from the ruins of the city where she was born more than a thousand years ago. The city of scholars and libraries and the knowledge of the world revealed and kept safe for ages beyond memory. One of the dozen or so cities the Weaver razed on her march towards the hub. Selwith has loaded the pistol with a polished bit of melted nickel and iron that fell smoldering from the sky, and she whispers a faithless prayer to all the gods of the wheels, the holy retinue of night and day, twilight and dusk, that there might be some fearful scrap of cleansing magic in the thing. She raises the gun and aims it at the Seraph's head.

  "And she would call us monsters," the vampire woman laughs, pulling the hammer back and tightening her grip on the trigger. "Look at me, beast! Look at what your White Lady has made of me!"

  The Seraph opens it eyes, twin embers that have become bottomless magma pools, and when it speaks, its voice is a hurricane without wind, a devouring inferno without heat, rolling through Selwith's memories and hopes, her loss and sorrow, through all the dead spaces behind the vampire's eyes. Selwith squeezes the trigger and tries to turn away, but its words have already begun taking her apart, dissolving her like a handful of salt in water. The flintlock pistol explodes in her hand.

  "She's coming," the Seraph says. "On the heels of the cockcrow of this last day of all, she is coming."

  And hearing that, the Dragon opens its eyes.

  V. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)

  When Julia Flammarion has finished her late breakfast-the stack of blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup and butter and a little dollop of whipped cream on top-she leaves a ten-dollar tip for her waitress and then pays the woman at the register. The cashier tells Julia to have a nice day and come again, and Julia smiles for her and thinks perhaps this is the very last person who will ever see her smile. She leaves the IHOP and walks west on Ariola, back towards the dingy motel room that is no longer hers. She has six dollars and some change remaining from the money that Andrew Leet left on the television. Her whore money. Julia leaves the sidewalk and wanders out between the sea oats and the low white dunes onto the beach. The sun is warm, even though the wind is colder than it was the day before. She pulls the lime-green cardigan tighter about her shoulders and buttons it. It's one of the few things she took with her from the cabin in Shrove Wood. Her mother gave it to her as a birthday present two years ago; there are small pink flowers around the cuffs and the collar, and she didn't want to leave it behind.

  Past the motel, Julia comes upon a man sitting on a produce crate in the sand, picking a twelve-string guitar, playing some song she's never heard before, so maybe it's something he wrote himself. She stands there listening, watching his fingers pulling the music from the strings, and when the song's finished, she puts the rest of the money in his open guitar case. He grins and thanks her, this shabby, handsome, easy man, the sort of man that would have made her daddy scowl, the sort he'd have probably called a no-account hippie freak. She wishes that at least one of the men who'd been her lovers over the last six days could have had this man's eyes or his strong, callused fingers or the soft light that seems to hang about his face. Her men were all ogres, she thinks, cursing and pawing at her, slobbering and grunting like hogs when they came. This man would have been different. He asks her name, and she tells him the truth, then thanks him and walks away as he begins playing another song she's never heard. She would have liked to stay and listen to it all and any other songs that he wanted to play for her, but hearing more of that music, she might have changed her mind.

  Julia follows the beach, the sand that is so white it makes her doubt the beaches in Heaven could possibly be any whiter, the water like peacock feathers lapping at the shore, vivid green blue going hyacinth out where the sea starts getting deep. And there are no clouds in
the sky today, and she thanks Jesus for there being a sky like that. She figures that he's still listening to her prayers, even if she is a thief and a whore. Mary Magdalene was a whore, too.

  Julia finds a cinnamon-colored starfish, wider than her hand and half-buried in the sand, and stoops to look at it. But she doesn't touch it. The starfish might still be alive. Leave it be, she thinks. Let me just look at it a moment more. And she's still looking at it when she hears the angel somewhere close behind her, its wings scorching the day. The starfish begins to steam and writhe in the sand, five arms curling in upon themselves, and the cold gulf water hisses against it. In a moment, it has shriveled and gone as black as the rattlesnake did that morning in the clearing when she first met the angel.

  "That wasn't necessary," she says. "Destroying beautiful things isn't going to change my mind," and the angel makes a spiteful, sizzling sound. Then it tells her the day and the hour that the handsome man with the guitar will die, and it reminds her, again, what happens to suicides.

  With the toe of her left sneaker, Julia heaps wet sand over the scorched starfish so she won't have to look at it. But only a second or two later, the sea sweeps in and uncovers it again.

  "Maybe if you were real," she says, "I might be more afraid of you." She looks up, staring out across the water. There's a yellow fishing boat floating in the distance, a canary speck against all the blue. She wishes it were summer and that the sea weren't so cold.

  For the hundredth time, the angel tells her that she's a sane woman, but Julia knows that's a lie.

  "Even if it were true," she says, "you might just as easily be a demon as an angel. You sure seem a lot more like a demon to me. Even if you were real, I don't think I'd believe in you. That's still my choice, you know?"