The Realms of God--A Novel of the Roman Empire (The Shards of Heaven, Book 3)

by Michael Livingston

  In that moment, Acme, singing, stepped into the gate and was gone.

  27

  A LEAP OF FAITH

  PETRA, 4 BCE

  Lucius Vorenus was a step slower than Tiberius. Strike by strike, he knew he was losing ground.

  He was surprised, in fact, that they had made it this far. After the shaft of strange indigo light had descended onto the summit, the earth had ceased to quake, the rain had ceased to pour, and the winds had ceased to howl. But that still left plenty of obstacles. He had doubted that the horses Dorothea had given them would make it up the mountain, for instance, especially when pushed at speed by their desperate riders. He had doubted they’d make it through the first line of guards even if they did.

  Luck had taken care of the horses, who jolted and clattered and heaved but somehow didn’t fall. And Titus Pullo had taken care of the initial men at the processional gate, wading into them like he was a far younger man, laughing as he swung his blade.

  That had only left the rest of the Romans. And the demons. And the son of Caesar. And the Shards. And whatever it was that had been wrought by bringing them together.

  In their younger years he and Pullo had argued about whether the gods were real. Vorenus had believed, but Pullo never had until the big man had nearly died in Alexandria. They’d been told that the Shards were signs of the death of God, but they’d then heard Caesarion argue that something of God was left. And now, it seemed, God—or at least a part of God’s powers—had been summoned to Petra.

  Yes, Vorenus had thought as he’d run onto the summit, it would be surprising if any of them survived this.

  Already they had lost so much. Selene was gone. The wonderful little girl, the one who’d grown into such a powerful woman. Pullo had told them all when they rode past the shattered courtyard of the tomb where they’d once kept the Ark of the Covenant. She had died to save Miriam. Like Caesarion before her. Dead to save them all.

  Pullo had cried to tell it, and Vorenus had not dared to look through his own tears to see Juba’s reaction. There simply was no time for such things now. Either he would allow his pain to feed his will to live and fight on, or he would allow it to swallow him and he would perish. In this moment there was little else to be done. Afterward they could grieve.

  If anyone survived.

  Vorenus hadn’t known what to expect upon the summit, but he was still surprised at what he saw. The Ark, the Palladium, and most of the other Shards of Heaven sat on waist-high slabs of stone around what once had been a beautifully paved courtyard. Light was falling from each of the Shards like liquid power that ran forward across the ground in taut, glowing ropes, pulsing and strong, to join at a central point. Where they met there stood a tall, thin rectangular block the color of pure indigo.

  What it meant, what it was, he had no idea. But it was the work of demons, of Tiberius, and it had to be stopped. As Pullo had occupied the men at the gate in the wall, Pantera and Juba had made their assault to the left. Vorenus and Lapis had gone to the right.

  There was a Roman beside each of the Shards, Vorenus saw. They were transfixed, staring at the glowing thing amid them. Their skin was pale, their eyes sunken as if they were being drained of their spirits from the inside.

  But past them he had seen the scholars, and his old friend Didymus had shouted out to him.

  He thought about killing the men holding the Shards, but he didn’t know what that would do. So he’d fought his way toward the scholars. Didymus had saved Lapis when she was about to be killed by Tiberius, after all. And if anyone could tell him what to do now, it would be the librarian. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  Tiberius was fighting in a blind but powerful rage, and it was all Vorenus could do to get his blade up for every blow. Even so, the younger man struck with such ferocity that several times even a parry had ended with cut flesh. His left thigh. His right shoulder. Just enough to slow him even further. Just enough to make it inevitable.

  There was a popping sound from behind him, a low yawn in the air. Then he heard Thrasyllus shouting off to his left. “A leap of faith!” he cried out. “Didymus! The leap!”

  Vorenus blocked another blow, staggered backward, and chanced a look at the scholars. Didymus was kneeling beside a body, and with bloodied hands he pointed at the strange monolith in the middle of the tumult. “Go! The gate! The Book! Stop her!”

  Tiberius was coming again. This time, instead of reaching forward to block his strike, Vorenus pulled back. As Tiberius brought his blade slashing forward, Vorenus didn’t clash against it. Instead he let it glance off his own, just enough to keep it at bay but not enough to break the other man’s momentum. Then, as Tiberius strained to maintain balance, Vorenus lunged forward and brought the fist of his free hand into the back of his skull.

  Tiberius clattered forward to the ground, bouncing across the red line of power that extended out from Shard of Fire. The son of Caesar screamed, but Vorenus saw him no more. He was already turning to the strange object that Didymus had called a gate. In the corner of his eye, he saw that Juba had fallen down across the green beam of power on the ground. His body was seizing, his eyes transfixed and unblinking at the heavens. Behind him, Pantera was fighting three, losing ground even faster than Vorenus, being pushed out of sight beyond the indigo monolith. What had become of Pullo back at the wall, he didn’t know.

  Having faith in his old friend, and not knowing what else to do, Vorenus took two bounding steps toward the glowing gate and dove into it.

  * * *

  All times became one time.

  All moments became one moment.

  He was frozen in space above the stones of the Mount of Moses as days rose and fell, as years spun around him, backward and forward. He was a phantom, a foreign whisper in a haze of the blurring shadows of faces living and dead and yet to come.

  And he was beyond it all, too, in a place where the world washed away to a point of white light in a rolling wave of darkness, where the darkness then shrank back as the sun rose to cast its light upon a white shoreline and a green country that stretched out to the distant horizon beyond it.

  Here and not here.

  Now and not now.

  Vorenus lived. And Vorenus died.

  Countless lives and countless deaths.

  Endless silence and endless breaths.

  Vorenus died. And Vorenus lived.

  And then all things merged into one, and he stood in a running river bright as crystal, on rocks from the beginning of time. Above and away stretched the expanse of a black dome filled with stars like white diamonds, held high by long columns of gold and silver, emerald and jade, sapphire and beryl, jasper and ruby.

  Shapes drifted in the darkness above, and he knew them not.

  Ahead, on a rise beside the river, flanked by a crystal book stand, sat a broken throne.

  Vorenus moved toward it, and his hair drifted with the motion, weightless, as if there were waters above the waters and he strode through them. He moved through the waters, and the waters moved through him, and as he did so it seemed like the world flipped on a horizontal axis, as if up became down and when he at first thought he was stepping deeper into the river he was actually stepping out of it.

  It was a heartbeat. It was a lifetime.

  Then he was there. And he saw that the throne before him was shattered, missing pieces, and that the book stand was bare and empty.

  You are not to be here, came a voice that was both deep and rich, calming even as it commanded.

  Vorenus turned, looked back to where he’d come. The gate he’d passed through was there, an indigo portal above the shimmering glass of the waters. A man who was not a man was floating down to stand between him and the river, silently descending on white wings that stretched out and in with patient ease. He was half again as tall as Pullo, and his thick and strong body was wrapped in plates of golden armor etched with glowing lines of silver. As his booted feet came to rest on the ground his wings swept once more and
folded back behind him. A mighty helm had hidden his face, but it, too, folded away from sight, and he stared down at Vorenus with eyes of gilt flame, his jet-black hair wafting from his shoulders in the invisible depths that surrounded them.

  He was, Vorenus thought, beyond the wings, the model of a man. Not the fearful symmetry of the demons back on the Mount of Moses, but the exalted embodiment of what a man should be. Powerful and perfect. Exalted and extraordinary. He was, in a word, beautiful.

  “You’re an angel,” Vorenus whispered, reaching back through distant conversations to find the word that befit the being.

  I am Michael, it replied.

  The angel’s mouth moved, but if it made sounds Vorenus could not truly hear them. The voice and the words instead seemed to well up in his mind as if he’d thought them himself. They didn’t match the movement of the angel’s jaw.

  You are not to be here, Michael repeated.

  “I know,” Vorenus said. He took a step backward out of instinct, and the angel’s armor glowed, as if its power were moving to the surface.

  You are not to approach the throne, Michael said.

  Vorenus froze, uncertain. Then he carefully brought his step forward again, back to its original place. The glow of the angel’s armor diminished slightly, but it still seemed full of power.

  You are not to be here, Michael said again.

  “I didn’t mean to come here. The gate—”

  You are mortal.

  Foot by foot a massive blade folded out from the angel’s fist in an action that seemed both mechanical and impossibly organic. Extended, the edge of it began to hum with a heat that shivered the air around it.

  This time the angel did not speak. Towering and terrible, it simply slid forward with effortless speed and powerful might—and its great blade swung down upon Vorenus.

  Out of instinct, Vorenus raised his gladius, which was still wet from the waters through which he’d passed. It met the blade of Michael, and there was an explosion of pale blue light between them.

  Vorenus crumpled to his knees from the blow, but his gladius did not break. The angel drew back its weapon. Impossibly, Vorenus still existed.

  You are not mortal, Michael said. The angel’s head cocked sideways as if it had never considered such a possibility before. Then it turned to look back to where Vorenus had come from. The waters were there, bright and smooth as crystal, and the indigo gate.

  “I am,” Vorenus said.

  You are not.

  “No, I shouldn’t be here. But I followed someone. A demon—”

  The angel’s head whipped back around to look in the other direction, past Vorenus. It opened its mouth to make a soundless scream. The blade in its hand folded inward with smooth precision. Then, in steps so long they seemed to be leaps, it strode past Vorenus to stand before the throne. It looked at the crystal stand.

  It is gone, Michael said.

  “What’s gone?”

  The Book of Life and Death. The angel’s arm swept across the empty book stand.

  “What Book?”

  The angel stared at him, his eyes pitiless in his perfectly symmetrical face. The Book of the fates of the living and dead. You did not take it.

  Vorenus felt like his heart should be racing, but when he thought about it he didn’t know if his heart beat at all. “I didn’t. The demon—”

  It was one of the Fallen.

  “Acme,” Vorenus volunteered, remembering her evil touch. “The demon’s name was Acme. I came here to stop her.”

  You failed, the angel said. Michael’s gaze moved between the gate, the stand, and the great dome of lights above. It almost seemed to be reading something. The Fallen is gone.

  Vorenus turned, thinking he should run back to the gate, back to the world he’d left behind. “I have to go after her while there’s time. My friends—”

  Time holds no sway here. You will return when you left.

  Vorenus didn’t understand how that could be possible. How he could he return at the same moment he left? What about the time that he had spent here?

  The angel was staring back at the gate. Its face was impassive, but just as the being’s voice had welled up from within him, Vorenus felt that he was frowning.

  “The Book,” Vorenus said. “What can she do with it?”

  Inscribed in the Book are the fates of souls, the angel said, as if that was all the answer that was required.

  Vorenus was no scholar. He didn’t know this place, this being. He didn’t know what questions to ask. Wishing Didymus had been the one to be here, he thought through all that he knew of writing, trying to understand. “Can they change the Book?”

  The Fallen can erase the names.

  “Erase the names?” Vorenus turned his attention back to the crystal stands and what the angel had said. “Would that erase their souls?”

  The Fallen is gone, Michael repeated. The Laws have been broken.

  “Laws?”

  But the angel wasn’t looking at Vorenus, and it did not answer him. It instead looked up as two more angels descended in glory, their elegant wings sweeping in windless perfection. They landed, and Vorenus stood between them, looking up as they spoke over his head.

  One had hair of silver, and appeared to be clad in white robes. Raphael, the first angel said, the Book has been taken. The barrier has been pierced.

  The one called Raphael nodded, and its face appeared to be grave and troubled. The Laws have been broken, he said.

  The third angel was armored, but whereas Michael was clad in metal plate and exuded power, he was instead clad in a hardened leather cuirass that Vorenus found familiarly Roman. A Fallen, said the third angel, come to the throne.

  Vorenus looked to the throne before them. It was a shattered ruin. This was the throne of God? The Shards were supposed to be pieces of the throne. Wasn’t that what Didymus had once told them? Was that why the gate had brought him to this place?

  The Laws must be restored, said Michael.

  Only Father can restore, said Raphael. Gabriel knows we are only to maintain.

  We can do little else, agreed the one that Vorenus assumed must be Gabriel.

  “Is God dead?” Vorenus asked.

  The faces of the three angels turned to him.

  He does not know, Raphael said.

  He cannot understand, said Gabriel.

  Michael stared at Vorenus, as if he was studying him. God is here, he finally intoned.

  “Here?” Vorenus looked around. They were alone.

  God is here, repeated Michael, and his hand rose to point an armored finger at the center of Vorenus’ chest.

  The Laws have been broken, Raphael repeated, seeming to ignore Vorenus once more. They must be restored.

  We must maintain, Gabriel said.

  Vorenus was looking from Raphael to Gabriel, confused, before he suddenly realized that Michael was still staring at him. There must be another way, the angel said.

  The two other angels turned to face him, but Michael had turned away to face the broken throne. Our Father unmade himself for these beings. It is against this that the Fallen fought. It is for this reason they have broken the barrier and have taken the Book. They will unmake the unworthy ones, and so they will unmake our Father.

  Vorenus swallowed hard. He indeed felt unworthy, but he was still determined to try to do what was right. And what did it mean to unmake the unworthy ones? Were those humans?

  But God is here, Michael said. He lives still. He remains in them. One of them can restore the Laws.

  “What Laws?” Vorenus asked.

  They have not the strength, Gabriel said.

  They have not the knowledge, Raphael said.

  “Can I do what needs to be done?”

  You have heart, Michael said, but you lack the strength. You lack the knowledge. The Fallen pierced the boundary. Only one of the Blessed can restore it.

  Vorenus felt hopelessly lost. The Fallen were clearly those angels who’d fought and lost i
n their war against the divine will and become demons—and the Blessed were no doubt those who’d been loyal to the decree of God, like the three great beings before him. But what was the boundary? What were the Laws?

  Still, despite his uncertainty about so much of what was happening, Vorenus was a logical man. It was one of the few things that separated him from his beloved but emotional Pullo. “You need an angel’s power in a human life,” he said.

  God and man and angel, Michael said.

  One must go, Gabriel said.

  Raphael nodded. Be born. Live. Die. Repair.

  I will go, Michael said. I, alone.

  “What are you saying?” Vorenus asked.

  But Michael did not answer. The angel was striding past him. Upon the waters of the river he walked, until he stood beyond them, beside the indigo gate. He reached out, and he touched it.

  I can go, he said. A vessel is here.

  You must go, Raphael said.

  We must maintain, Gabriel said, and to Vorenus it sounded like a warning.

  “I don’t understand!” Vorenus shouted.

  Raphael turned to him slowly. You do not belong here.

  “I came to protect the Book,” Vorenus said.

  You failed, Gabriel said. But you will return.

  “Return?”

  You do not belong here.

  “To the Mount of Moses?”

  Gabriel nodded. Yes.

  “I cannot defeat the demons alone.”

  You must, said Michael. His hand had not left the gate, and he did not turn. I will come, and you will protect me.

  “Me protect you?”

  I will not be what I am. A swollen belly. A child. Pain and suffering. I can see it in time now, but I will not know it soon.

  “You’ll be a child?”

  A soul. With the power of God to repair what has been broken.

  You will not remember us, Raphael said. To Vorenus, the angel’s voice sounded sorrowful.

  You will remind me, Michael replied.

  It is the only way, Gabriel said. The Laws have been broken. They must be repaired.