Scylla was an angel. Still, she was close enough to human to want to run and hide from what she faced.
But her silver fingertips danced swiftly across the keypad, entering the code sequence that would open the door as if they knew that the only answer was, as always, perfect obedience.
God punishes us because He loves us. To hide from His punishment is to hide from His love. She repeated that truth over and over, but for the first time in her life she found no solace in it.
The final number was pressed. A low tone signalled acceptance. Motors hummed. The door yawned open to admit the fallen angel and her charge into the anteroom of God’s chosen one.
Soon His justice and His love would shine on them both.
—
“Sweet Jesus in a bank vault.” Marchey muttered as he watched the two-meter-wide, half-meter-thick armored door swing ponderously outward. It looked like a tacnuke would make about as big a dent in it as an exploding cigar.
This Brother Fist had a really deep and unshakable faith in the love of his flock, didn’t he?
Scylla gave him a look. He stepped cautiously inside, unable to guess what he might find waiting for him. The door rumbled shut behind them, closing with a massive and absolute finality. Lockbolts the size of his arm pistoned into place, sealing them in.
He sniffed the air. It was sweet and clean, the oxygen content at or slightly above normal, heady as wine after the overused fung of the tunnels.
Separate life support. Brother Fist was a cautious man. A man of the people, too.
His angelic escort took his arm and led him through an arched vestibule and into a wide rotunda under a high-vaulted ceiling. This hemispherical chamber was as beautifully wrought as the tunnels were crude. Graceful carved pillars outset from the facet-cut walls bracketed the broad mosaic floor. At the far end, a white-stone altar table and real wood pulpit on a raised dais confirmed that it was a chapel.
His gaze was drawn upward toward the source of the golden light flooding the chamber. It came from a glowing one-meter sphere at the center of the ceiling dome. The globe was a representation of the Sun. Around it smaller spheres, the planets and moons, each exquisitely rendered in translucent tinted glass, wheeled in their endless dance and painted their colors on the walls.
Scylla gave him no more than a few seconds to appreciate the loving artistry that had gone into it or the chapel. Or to try to understand the melancholy air that permeated the place, a feeling of disuse. Of misuse.
She pulled at his arm in obvious impatience. “This way.” She towed him toward a wide door between two pillars at the far right. A last glance over his shoulder gave him a closer, better look at the altar.
Cold crawled into the marrow of his bones when he saw the thick webbed straps which had been bolted to the sides of the altar table. Its top was scratched and chipped. Dark brown stains were caught in the cuts and gouges…
Scylla hauled him around to face her. “You are going to see Brother Fist now,” she warned in a low, hard voice. Her face was an unreadable mask. “If you are disrespectful, I will punish you.” Her silver fingers dug into the meat of his upper arm. “If you make the slightest hostile move toward him, I will strangle you with your own guts.”
Marchey shivered, knowing that she meant every word. But he was damned if he was going to give her the satisfaction of showing his fear. He forced a smile, even though it made his mashed lips sting and begin bleeding again. “So you’re in charge of protocol, too?”
She snatched him off the floor by his arm and shook him until his teeth rattled. “Understand me, little man!” she hissed. “Even if you are alone with him, I will know what you say and do. I am an angel! Do not forget that for a single moment. If I come after you, there will be no escaping my wrath, and no mercy once I have you in my hands.”
She shook him again, nearly wrenching his arm out of its socket, then pulled him close. So close that he could see every red-and-black line tattooed on her face, could count her red-tipped, razor-sharp teeth. Her voice dropped to a knife-edged whisper.
“If you misbehave I will send you to Hell. Slowly, infidel. Skinless and screaming to die. Do you understand me?”
“I… do,” Marchey mumbled, desperately trying to contain the cyclone of dread whirling through him. The image of that bloodstained altar burned in his mind, lending a terrible credence to her threats.
Maybe she saw through the tissue-thin remains of his self-control and knew that she had him cowed. She nodded. “Very well.”
He staggered drunkenly when she slammed him onto his feet, and would have fallen but for the iron grip she had on his arm.
A commbox had been cemented to the wall next to the door. Scylla pushed the callbar. A low, absurdly cheerful tone sounded, then from the box issued the soft, rasping voice he’d heard in the landing bay. Once again the sound of it made him shiver.
“Scylla.”
She meekly bowed her head. “Here, Master.”
“You may enter.” There was the muted clunk of lockbolts withdrawing. The door swung toward them. Marchey saw that it had been backplated with a layer of steel-wrapped, reinforced stonecrete.
Just as when he’d opened his ship’s airlock, the first thing to hit him was the smell. It came gushing out in a turgid, gut-twisting wave, so thick it seemed almost liquid. It was a smell he knew, one that could slice through the strongest hospital disinfectant like a scalpel through a rose petal.
It was the sickly-sweet, septic stench of something long diseased and dying.
—
Scylla froze on the threshold, nerves shrieking a warning and fight response jittering through her.
Her eye narrowed. Nostrils tattooed with scales and barbs flared as she sniffed the air. What was that smell?
But she already knew the answer to the question: Brother Fist. It was a smell she knew as well as her own face in the mirror, a sweet perfume He had begun to exude just a year before: His own attar of holiness. Her first days away from His side she had missed it.
Then why did it seem like such a loathsome stench now? Was this yet another effect of her eroding angelic state?
She forced herself to stifle her unworthy revulsion and put one foot in front of the other. This twisting of her senses was a final deception, cast against her to keep her from her rightful place at Brother Fist’s side. One word, one touch, and all would be right again.
She stepped through the doorway, and at last she was returned to His holy presence.
Yet seeing her Master did not bring the comfort she so desperately craved. It only made things worse. The time apart, some inner failure, something was making her see Him differently from the way she should.
He was dressed in His black cassock and seated in His usual place, the big thronelike chair near the wall of screens that let Him look into every corner of the Eden He had created. That was as it should be. Yet instead of stern and strong and righteous, He looked old and weak and—
—sick.
She tried to smother this blasphemy even as it was being born. It was just that the Hand of God was heavy on His shoulders. It was a failure in her perceptions, a betrayal by her untrustworthy senses. The other was impossible. Unthinkable.
Ashamed that she had been prey to such a profane thought in His presence, she bowed her head, praying that when she looked up again the scales would be gone from her eyes.
“Brother Fist,” she intoned with abject humility, speaking His name like a talisman that would give her strength and lend truth to her senses. “I have returned.”
“My angel,” he replied in a thick, phlegmy rasp. “You have done well.”
Scylla hunched her shoulders. That praise heaped on the burden of her manifest unworthiness was a weight greater than even the shining metal armor that proved she was an angel could bear. Heart stuttering with fear, she steeled herself to confess.
She was never given the chance. Brother Fist spoke first. What he said and how he said it instantly banished all thou
ghts of confession from her troubled mind.
“Leave us now, Scylla.” His tone was brusque, impatient, as if she were an annoyance, not His angel and right hand.
Her head snapped up in surprise. She stared at Him in wounded incomprehension, unable to believe that He would dismiss her so offhandedly. She had been away for over fifteen days, braving the Profane World and putting her very soul in peril for him, yet He did not seem to care. His eyes were fixed on the infidel Marchey, and had she been forced to describe the look on His face, she would have said it was one of greedy expectation.
“But—but this man is dangerous, Master!” she protested lamely. Suddenly a sickening apprehension crawled through her. I have fallen so low that I am no longer worthy of His love. He sees. He knows. I have become less than dust in His gaze.
Brother Fist’s eyes had begun turning a yellowish color some three years before. Another sign that the Hand of God was on Him, he said; it was the reflection of the golden streets of Heaven. Those sallow eyes blazed with petulant fury now. A fury directed at her. It rooted her to the spot, unable to speak or move.
“I said leave us!” His skull-like face hardened, and he beat on the arm of his chair with a bony, blue-veined fist. “Get out, you stupid bitch! Out!”
Scylla turned and fled, cringing under the lash of His displeasure, and knowing He would strike her dead with a thought if she did not remove herself from His sight. She stiff-armed the door out of her way, choking back the bewildered cry of pain and appeal lodged in her throat.
Her cubby was on the opposite side of the chapel so that she would be close at hand to her Master, and it was there she sought refuge.
Her metal-shod feet clattered across the mosaic floor as she crossed it in a stumbling run. Once inside her room she flung herself down on the raised foam pallet that served as her bed, burying her face in the forgiving softness. Her breath came in hitching gasps, but she did not cry.
Angels do not cry.
Ever.
To do so would be an abomination. To do so would be the final damning iniquity.
Biting back some hot wet force boiling inside her and threatening to burst free, she made herself sit up. She held out one trembling hand. Her right hand.
At a mental command her right buckler released itself. She shucked the weapon off and laid it aside. Gleaming silver metal still covered her palm and fingers like a second skin, but with the buckler gone the needle-scarred area on the back of her hand was exposed. Like her weakness. Like her manifest unworthiness.
She partially extruded the talons on her left hand, the gleaming white ceramyl blades as sharp as the line between sin and obedience, between damnation and grace.
Sharp enough to slice into the tattooed flesh at the back of her hand like corruption had insinuated itself into her soul. Blood welled up around each blade, the price Brother Fist said God demanded when He was failed.
Her one green eye slid shut to hold in the strange wetness gathering there. The blood was born in pain, and that was good. Pain was the ladder one climbed to return to grace, and she bore it gladly. Each throb was a rung that lifted her higher.
The pain was cleansing. It washed away the hurt and confusion, leaving only her essential suffering self, naked to God’s judgmental scrutiny.
I am an angel.
She gritted her teeth, digging her talons deeper to root out every corrupt tendril of doubt and resentment.
I was brought down to serve Brother Fist To carry out His will and protect Him.
Blood pooled around her talons, a shimmering ruby set in a silver brooch.
I am His to be used as He will I am my duty. Without it I am nothing. I must serve with no expectation of reward in this life, and any punishment I earn should be received gladly, for it is just that I suffer for my failings.
Her whole body trembled as she balanced on the knife point of pain. Sweat glazed her forehead. She held her breath, afraid that it might carry a scream if she released it.
There is nothing of me or mine more important than my duty to my Master. If He asks me to lay down my life, I should rejoice that I can pay the price He asks of me.
She closed her eye, the better to see Truth as she recited her catechism.
If I allow Him to be hurt either by action or inaction, God Himself will condemn me to eternal damnation for failing my duty to protect His Servant.
Scylla’s green eye opened. She saw her path clearly.
She was Brother Fist’s angel. His protector. The man she had brought to him was unpredictable, maybe even dangerous. Her Master was alone with him, unaware of the threat the infidel posed and undefended from him.
He had ordered her away from His side, away from where she could watch over Him. That (hurt!) was His right. He had not ordered her to listen in and act as hidden guardian, but then again He had not ordered her not to, and how else could God’s Will be done?
Her talons retracted, the china white ceramyl smeared with the red of her own blood. She stood up, flexing her wounded hand. It felt aflame, but functioned perfectly. Her angel body could block the pain, but she kept it from doing so. Pain kept the doubt and deception at bay. Pain was truth. Pain was clarity of thought and action. Pain was grace.
It felt good to be back on the True Path once more, the angel once again in her rightful place at Brother Fist’s side.
—
The door closed behind Scylla. Brother Fist touched a stud on the control pad on his chair arm, locking it after her. Bolts thudded back into place, sealing it tight. Marchey flinched at the sound.
“Come, sit down, my dear Dr. Marchey,” Fist called, beckoning him closer. He smiled. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” Fist spoke softly, a clotted, wheezing, tubercular rattle to his voice. His tone was arch, ironic.
Marchey looked around, choosing the seat farthest from the wasted figure in the oversized chair. He lowered himself into it reluctantly, gaze averted from his host.
Once he was sitting down he surreptitiously took in his surroundings. The cubby was quite large, the space broken up by foamstone dividers. Fist sat at its center, on one side of him an elaborate, slightly archaic comp, on the other screens displaying views from all over Ananke. The cubby’s walls were lined with bookshelves packed full of antique bound books and permem cubes. A few choice art objects were scattered about the room, some grotesque, some quite beautiful.
But for the surveillance screens, it could have passed for a professor’s study, modest and comfortable. Two other things spoiled the effect. One was the nauseating reek that permeated the air, making it smell like a carrion eater’s lair.
Then there was the room’s owner and occupant.
Marchey had to psych himself up to taking a long hard look at the man who’d had him kidnapped. He raised his eyes hesitantly, pulse pounding with trepidation.
Brother Fist looked like his nearest relative was Sister Death. He was a skeleton draped with loose saffron skin, raised from the grave and infused with some sort of awful unlife. His black cassock hung on him like a shroud. His cheeks were gaunt and sunken, his mouth a thin-lipped, liverish slash, his teeth white and sharp. His eyes were jaundiced, feverishly bright, and were fixed on Marchey with a greedy, crazed intensity.
But it was not his physical appearance alone that sent flight-response adrenaline pumping through Marchey’s system, turning his heart into a clenched fist and making his skin prickle with cold sweat.
The primitive human animal in him scented a rabid sickness that the civilized physician in him would try to identify with meaningless labels like psychopath, egopathy or sociopath. Words created to describe monsters but falling far short of capturing their dark essence, just as a word like bomb cannot convey a millionth of the horror of one going off on a crowded sidewalk.
Such creatures can be nearly impossible to identify because of their ability to hide themselves, like fatally venomous chameleons. Clever lurking things, discovered only when someone accidentally stumbles across a
cellar floored with human bones or a storage locker stacked full of severed heads. He seemed like an okay guy, the neighbors say afterward. Pretty much kept to himself.
But when guile and pretense are discarded, there is no mistaking that it is a thing only nominally human, born of woman but reared in hell and suckled on poison. It is revealed as a cold-blooded and savage thing of unspeakable drives and an absolute disdain for any life other than its own.
Brother Fist laughed, a hacking, mirthless sound that sent a shudder of revulsion up Marchey’s spine. “Do I frighten you, Doctor?” he asked, carious yellow eyes bright and cunning.
Marchey bit down on his first reply. Shitless.
“Aren’t you, um, trying to?” he asked in as close to a normal voice as he could muster.
Brother Fist’s smile made Marchey think of the gleeful, grinning rictus sardonicus worn by skeletal, scythe-wielding Plague in medieval art.
“Perhaps a little. I so wanted us to get off on the right foot. I may be unwell, but I am undiminished. I have power. Over this place, and now over you.” He gestured as if to take in all of Ananke. “This place is mine, created in my image. I have made it into a crucible, my dear doctor. I am at its center. I am its center. I am its maker and master, flame and furnace. Tell me, do you know what a crucible is?”
“Yes,” Marchey said, the words seeming to come out of his mouth on their own. “It’s a vessel for smelting ore.”
A nod. “Excellent. The crucible is a means of reducing excess and impurity, creating something useful. I am the smelter. I am the furnace. In my crucible all that does not serve my purposes is burned away. Individuality is cauterized. Autonomy is immolated. Love is cremated. Trust is boiled away. Hope chars to the blackest ash…”
Marchey watched those awful yellow eyes glaze as the old man intoned his lunatic litany in a rustling hypnotic monotone. Everything but the old man’s eyes and voice seemed to fade away.
“The smelter’s art lies in heating the crucible to the proper degree. Razing the human psyche until only fear and faith remain. Until they are fused into one. Fear and faith guarantee perfect, unquestioning service. From the crucible emerges a material fit to be beaten into a tool.”
Flesh and Silver Page 12
