by Tad Williams
I suppose I’d better take a few moments to explain how some of this angel stuff works. It’s a little different than what you learned in Sunday school, and it definitely comes up short on harps and clouds.
First of all, don’t bother asking me about what my life used to be like when I was alive or how I died, because I don’t know. None of the folks I work with do. We might always have been angels but we tend not to think so, since our memories only go back a few decades at most, and we all feel pretty comfortable inhabiting living bodies and hanging around in the actual world. The oldest angel I ever met in terms of service time was my first boss, Leo, who could remember working all the way back in the 1940s. That doesn’t prove anything, of course. They might recycle us like glass bottles for all I know, steam us out each time and then fill us up again, century after century. When you’re an angel of the Lord you just have to get used to certain ambiguities.
There are tons of angels, and not just in Heaven. For one thing, every single man, woman, and child on this planet has a guardian angel. You can’t see ’em, feel ’em, or usually even sense ’em, but they’re right there with you from your first slap on the backside until the moment you take your last breath…and a little bit beyond. Some people think they also work to keep you safe from physical danger and from the snares of the Opposition, which could be true, but I haven’t heard anything for certain about that. Anyway, it’s not my jurisdiction. As you may have gathered, I’m an advocate.
Okay, so at one per living soul that means there’s got to be seven billion guardians at any one time. I’m assuming when they finish with one person’s life they start on another’s, but again, this is all guesswork. We advocates are a bit more rare. Me and Sam and Monica and the others each seem to work about five deaths a week, so let’s call it 250 or so per year per angel. At a rate of 50 million or so deaths worldwide every year that makes work for about 200,000 advocates (assuming everyone in Timbuktu and Katmandu is on the same afterlife system as us, which is far from certain). For every ten or so there’s also one or two working field support for the others, but other than Chico the bartender (and did I mention Alice?) you haven’t met any of those yet.
I know, I know, numbers are not what you’re interested in, except those of you who are engineers. No, you want to learn how it all works, don’t you?
All of us Earth-based angels, guardians and advocates and even special ops (don’t ask because I’m not telling), report to archangels. The archangels report to Principalities, who also judge individual souls, as you’ve seen. Together we’re called the Angels of the Third House, which is Earth inside Time.
There are at least two other Houses, or spheres, each with three more types of angels, but this isn’t Sunday school so I’ll save that for another time. Above it all is the Highest. I haven’t met Him yet. I understand He’s pretty busy, what with making the universe work like perfect clockwork and yet keeping His eye on the sparrow and all that. And as I think I said, I’ve never known anyone else who’s met Him either (or else none of them bothered to mention it to me).
We advocates are expected to live among the folks we’re going to be defending, to know them and understand their ways, which is why we have bodies. They’re not our real bodies, I’m told—not that anyone knows that for certain, but as I said, I’ve never been recognized by a relative or an acquaintance and I don’t know anyone else who has either. Anyway, between being part of a small group (by comparison to the guardians or the Holy Host or whatever) and living and working on Earth, being an advocate is a bit like getting sent to one of those backwater colonial outposts: after a while, you couldn’t move back to the old country if you tried. I sure as heck couldn’t live in the Celestial City for very long. Too bright. Too many people singing. And a distinct lack of distilled spirits, the only kind I really like.
On the negative side, we’re among the few angels who actually have to deal with the Opposition on a day to day basis, really get to know them, and it’s pretty much as unpleasant as you’d think. For one thing, most of the Hell-folk take the struggle really, really seriously. They’re kind of like student government nerds with fangs. They’ve been at war with Heaven for millennia and they intend to beat us someday. They’re not stupid enough to provoke something big—that might bring down both sides—but they’re always scraping away at the foundations like cartoon tooth decay. As far as they’re concerned Milton and the others who say they can’t ever beat us are just propaganda artists shilling for Heaven in hope of a cushy spot up at the House. Like I said, they’re playing the long game, and they’re always playing to win. It just tires you out sometimes.
Why don’t haters get tired as fast as the rest of us? There’s a question you’d think the afterlife would have answered for me, but no.
Meanwhile, there are also a few odd souls from both sides who’ve dropped out of the game altogether: tweeners and renegades. Most of them sell information to survive and so most of them have some kind of price on their heads. We advocates deal with them, from time to time. I even like some of them in a guarded sort of way.
Put it all together and it’s more than a bit like the Cold War used to be—deadly dangerous but invisible to most of the living, and we’re all expected to play our part in the struggle. My job is to make certain that as many souls as possible make it into Heaven, and like my friend Sam I’m pretty good at what I do, which is one reason why, even though my attitude sucks, my bosses mostly leave me alone.
Another reason, as I was about to discover, was that even the big boys up at the House don’t know everything. That was a lesson I would rather not have learned.
So there I was, standing in the Outside version of Edward L. Walker’s driveway while various heavenly and infernal minions fresh in from headquarters made themselves useful (or at least busy). Some were drawing glittering golden lines in the air or scrying with instruments of black glass. Grasswax gave me a look of quite impressive hatred from his place at the center of it all, then snatched a small, sticky-looking thing out of the air, which I assumed was Hell’s version of Walker’s guardian angel, and carried it to one side where the two of them proceeded to enjoy a spirited conversation—“spirited” meaning that Grasswax shook the Hell-minion around like someone trying to flick snot off his finger as the minion squealed out its innocence.
“He was here, Master, he was here! We was with him when he died!”
“Then where is he?” Grasswax stared at the underling until it started to steam like an abalone on a hot stone.
“We doesn’t know! We is confused!”
“Curse you. I’ll have to call Scorchscar.” The prosecutor produced a handful of fire and held it up before his face and said, “Prosecutor to Prosecutor’s Office, put me through to the inquisitor immediately.” He scowled at me, his cheek-holes pulsing wetly. The weird thing was, Grasswax was more scared than he was acting, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. Not that I’m an expert on infernal psychology. “By the Master’s hot, pimpled arse—I’ll be stuck here for hours!” he snarled at me. “This is all your fault somehow, you fucking little cloud-jockey, and I’ll make you pay for it. Don’t you try to sneak off!”
I turned away with the prosecutor’s charming voice still ringing in my ears: I had my own call to make. Just because the house in old Palo Alto was now so full of shining angelic presences that it looked like a Christmas display didn’t mean I could assume everybody knew who needed to. I took out my phone, which in its Outside form appeared as a rod of silvery light. A moment later Temuel was in front of me, although nobody else could see him or hear him.
“You’re joking, right?” he said when I told him the situation, but the Mule didn’t sound quite as dumbfounded as I would have expected. “No? Then I’ll get a fixer out there right away.” Then the magnitude of it apparently began to set in. “This is bad, you know. This is very, very bad, Doloriel. Hang tight and don’t say anything to the Opposition.”
“Not even, ‘Let go of my balls?�
�� Because I can promise you, Grasswax is squeezing pretty hard at the moment.”
“Just do your job.” And that was all. He was gone. But if Temuel hadn’t known about the missing soul then where had all these heavenly functionaries come from? Not to mention all the nasty little things from the Opposition side? I put the question away for later, because just then a new, extra-shiny Zipper flared beside me and the Mule’s fixer appeared.
Another quick note: “Fixer” is actually a sort of job description. They’re really called “ministers”—not the priest kind but more like a government minister. You hardly ever see one. You hardly ever want to see one. Their job is to quickly remove the “fuck” from “fuck-up”, and nobody wants to be involved in one of those situations.
I already was, of course. A really big one, from the looks of it. I had a feeling it was going to be a long time until I saw my apartment again.
The fixer/minister looked a bit like a plague doctor from the seventeenth century, in long white robes and a strange white mask that might have represented a novelty drinking bird or a Winnie-the-Pooh Heffalump. He also may not have had any feet under those robes, but it was hard to see because he kind of glowed down at the bottom. He also moved like someone who knew no hurry.
He spent a long time staring at the car and the corpse, then at last turned to me. “You Are the Advocate?” He even talked with audible capitals.
“Yes, Minister.”
“Tell Us What You Know.“
I did, as concisely as I could, without guesses or assumptions. I had met one of these guys before (that’s another story) and knew that the last thing you wanted to do was waste their time. The one I met before had been half a whim away from demoting me all the way to the Bless the Beasts Division, where I’d be watching over depressed field mice, and that case hadn’t been anywhere near this serious.
I had just finished my story when another light glimmered in the air, this one dull and smoky-red, and someone else stepped through—or some several, to be precise: a woman and two men, although all those terms fall very far short, descriptively speaking. My friend Sweetheart is about the size of an Alaskan bear but these two guys could have been his bigger brothers. Both had necks wider than my chest and sported the dead gray skin common among the less pain-sensitive minions of Hell, as well as facial expressions that suggested a hammer-blow on the head would barely get their attention. In short, they had the look of argument-winners—the “you and what army?” kind of arguments.
The female demon, though, was something else. I don’t think I’d ever seen anything like her outside of a few fetish magazines (professional research only, of course). She was tiny, for one thing, especially standing between those two bonebreakers, and she was also astonishingly lovely by any normal standard, with straight white-blonde hair, skin as pale as milk, and long, stockinged legs prominently displayed by a schoolgirl miniskirt. She looked like Wonderland’s Alice as dressed for success by a committee of manga-reading Japanese businessmen. I didn’t expect to see one of the Opposition’s heavy hitters looking so mainstream. Usually they’re big on horns and fangs and weird, crusty skin.
As she got closer she only got more gorgeous, although now it was plain that the irises of her eyes were the color of…well, of something really red. (I was going to say “blood” but that’s a bit of a cliché already, isn’t it? But that’s certainly what color they were—like big shiny drops of the stuff.)
“What piece of shit are you handing me this time, Grasswax?” she asked as she reached us. She might have had the trace of an older accent, but mostly she sounded like Hayley Mills, one of those sweet, super-plummy upper class English voices—“Oh, Mummy, I’ve lost my pony and I’m ever so weepy about it!” But Grasswax positively flinched when he saw her. Oh, my goodness yes, she was cute, but she was also the scariest thing I’d run into lately, that was for sure. This she-thing was one of the nobility of Hell, after all, so she had to be quite a few notches above me on even the most generous comparative organization chart.
The fixer from our side gave her a little nod of respect. “Countess.”
She barely glanced back at him. “Minister.”
She walked past me as if I wasn’t there and pulled Grasswax aside. From the look on his face I guessed she wasn’t going to be asking him the whereabouts of a good coffee bar. I was still staring as she led him away, so much so that the fixer had to make a throat-clearing noise.
“Angel Doloriel?”
It was hard to turn away from her, even when the competition was an impatient, high-ranking angel. The other side’s fixer was a small, slender woman, but something about the way she walked was mesmerizing. You know the chesty way some small dogs have that shows they think they’re really big dogs? The Countess, whoever and whatever she was, might dress like a schoolgirl but she walked like a very confident stripper.
No, classier. Like a prima ballerina. Yeah, a ballerina from Hell.
“Sorry, Minister. I was…thinking.”
“I Hope I’m Not Taking Too Much Of Your Valuable Time, Doloriel.” Now that I could see him closer up it became clear that the minister wasn’t exactly normal himself. For one thing, unlike most higher angels, the fixer had eyes, but they were almost entirely white except for a pinprick of black at the center, which, with the mask, made it a little hard to tell where he was looking. The other thing was that he had at least six or seven fingers on each white-gloved hand. I couldn’t help wondering what that was about.
“Not at all. Sorry.” I turned my back on the prosecutor and his boss so I could concentrate on my superior. The beautiful little Countess was a demon, I reminded myself—a powerful one. Infernal nobility can appear in any form they choose to, but what was inside that yummy exterior was certain to be extremely ugly. More important, personal experience told me that each and every one of Hell’s residents would tear me into little pieces if I let my guard down. No matter what they looked like, they were all monsters of corruption. “What can I tell you, Minister?”
“Repeat Once More All That Happened From The Moment You Received The Call,” he demanded.
Under his strangely unemotional gaze I went back over everything I could remember. I didn’t say anything about Sam and his trainee, but I did mention I had seen Grasswax just the day before on another case.
“And You Are Certain You Arrived Here Before The Prosecutor Did?” The beak of his mask swung toward me as if sniffing for truthfulness. “Quite Certain?”
“You don’t think Grasswax would actually do something that crazy, do you?” I wondered whether I should mention again how angry the prosecutor had seemed to be about the missing soul. Did Grasswax have a guilty conscience? “How? How would he even have pulled it off?”
“We Couldn’t Say.” The minister made a sniffing, offended noise. “But If You Are Saying He Couldn’t Possibly Have Managed It, Then Your Role In The Matter Becomes Even More Significant.”
Oh, no. No way I was going to get rolled up for something I didn’t do. “I’m not saying any such thing, Minister. I had nothing to do with any of it. I was as surprised as you are.”
“Really? Then You Might Be Aware We Are Not Particularly Surprised.” He shook his snouted head, looking more than ever like a very creepy child’s imaginary friend. “We Feared It Might Come To This.”
I had no idea what he meant and told him so.
“We Have Heard Enough From You To Make Our Report, Angel Doloriel,” was all he said. “You May Go. God Loves You.”
Most of the regulars had drifted into The Compasses by the time I made it back, although there was still no sign of Sam or his sidekick. I had stopped at Morton’s Café to eat an early dinner and watch the shadows lengthen across downtown as the sun stopped trying to light the darker bits of San Judas and eventually gave up and went to bed. Now the lights of downtown and the big black empty of the harbor filled the windows.
“Are you all right?” Monica asked when she saw me. “I was worried about you.” She had
sobered up a bit, so maybe she was telling the truth. “Was that guy’s soul really missing?”
“You heard about it already?”
“Of course we did. Somebody called in a minister and that never stays secret long. Alice at the office said everybody in the city’s talking about it!” Which meant everybody in the city with wings and horns, anyway, although the Walker suicide was probably going to draw quite a bit of earthly attention as well. “What was it like?”
I shrugged. “What was it like? Like nothing. They pulled out the corpse but the important part of the guy just wasn’t there.”
“Oooh.” Monica made a face of sympathetic worry. “How freaky!”
Jimmy the Table and Sweetheart and some of the others made their way over. The one good side of the whole nasty mess was that for at least one night I didn’t have to pay for my own drinks.
“Do you think the Other Side did it?” Monica asked. “Are they trying to provoke something?”
“Jeez, how should I know? They sent in one of their own fixers quick enough. Female, called the Countess?”
Jimmy the Table let out a shrill laugh. “I heard about that bitch! They said she wore a necklace of human balls to the company Christmas party!”
“I don’t think the Opposition celebrates Christmas, darling,” Sweetheart gently told him.
“Some party, then—don’t matter.” Jimmy was very pleased to be the one with information. “Anyway, if they put her in charge, that’s some serious shit. You ask anyone who knows—the Countess is a definite bad ass. You remember Zippy? Zippoo-whatever?”
“Zepuriel,” said Sweetheart. “The one with the cute bottom?”
