Crow Jane

by D. J. Butler

  But Mab’s folk knew what she had, she thought, and they wanted it. And the rock and roll band, ragged and disorganized though its members were, was tenacious and motivated and had proved to hold more than one surprise for Jane. It might hold others still, and it would be coming after her and the hoof.

  And fundamentally, she thought, fixing her eye on the black bird that had dogged her vision down the millennia, she didn’t want to wait any longer. With the Calamity Horn at her side, she didn’t think she needed to.

  Jane raised her arms and began to chant, not in Adamic, but in Angelic. She knew fragments of the language, in the way that modern American kids all knew oddments of Spanish, because it had been in the air, part of the environment of her childhood. These specific words, the ones she now incanted, were a rhyme she had heard Father repeat every winter, many, many years ago.

  Jane’s plan was simple. She would summon the renegade Messenger, and when he appeared, she would kill him. Just as she had wanted for a long, long time.

  Recently, Heaven had come around to agreeing with her.

  * * *

  Three days earlier, sitting in a slowly-cooling bubble bath, Jane had realized that she was paralyzed.

  She had smelled the candle smoke in the same moment, with its thick reek of cinnamon and blood, but it was too late to do anything about it. The Legate paced slowly into her hotel room. He held the candle in his hand, its flame sputtering red like a Fourth of July sparkler.

  He wore red, as befitted his office. He was dressed at least a century out of style, even for one holding his office, in a half-cape-like mantelletta over white sleeves, and a broad circular galero that almost looked like Jane’s own hat, though with a flail-like tail. The similarity in their outfits only repulsed Jane; she wore her hat and duster for utility, and this man wore his garb as a statement of affection for the past.

  Jane had lived through the past—nearly all of it there was that a human being could claim to have experienced—she remembered it well, and she felt no longing for it. What she wanted was to move forward, to move on.

  The Legate smiled an ageless smile, raised his red candle in one hand and drew out a folded piece of parchment with the other. From where she sat, Jane could see the red sealing wax on the parchment, imprinted with the image of a pair of crossed keys. “I hold a letter,” he said, in a voice that was both withered and greasy, like a three-day-old hot dog on a gas station counter.

  Jane looked to be sure that the Calamity Horn sat on a hand towel beside the bathtub, in easy reach if she were able to move. Not that she’d need that for the Legate—as far as she could tell, he was a mortal man, though the crow seemed bothered by his presence. The bird had flapped to the furthest corner of the Las Vegas hotel room immediately on the Legate’s entrance and had stayed there since. It looked resolutely out the window, like it couldn’t bring itself even to acknowledge the Legate’s presence.

  Nor was she worried that the Legate would steal the gun. Its original enchantment bound it to Jane’s will and person, and anyone who fired it without her consent would find it a mediocre handgun, old and small. Jane had murdered the priest whose rendered fat had provided the curse-bearing anointing, and it was Jane’s will that activated the terrible, murderous enchantment of the Calamity Horn. He might grab it and run, but she would get it back.

  “Fine,” Jane said. “I hold a knife.” It was true, but it was also a bluff, inasmuch as she couldn’t move her limbs or raise the blade that rested in the water under her fingers. She did have emergency resources available if she had to draw on them, but she hoped it didn’t come to that.

  She didn’t waste time wondering how the Legate had found her or gotten into her hotel room—he was the agent of a great power, and he had means.

  Besides, she was almost enjoying this soak, with the raised bathtub right in the middle of the suite and the panoramic windows over the lights of the Strip, and she was determined that the man’s presence wasn’t going to destroy her evening.

  The Legate sank with aplomb onto the corner of Jane’s bed. He set the candle on the stand beside the mattress and crossed his hands on his own lap, still holding the letter. Maybe, Jane reflected, he wore the mantelletta and the hat to give him more bulk—he was a thin man, to the point of being bony, and Jane calculated she could easily lift him over her head and throw him. He might be self-conscious; a man’s size could limit his ability to exercise his charisma.

  “The contents of this letter might be of interest to you,” he suggested.

  That introduction guaranteed that Jane wouldn’t let on that she cared at all. “You’re fancy, for a mailman,” she teased the Legate. “Though I don’t see your patch for the National Association of Letter Carriers.”

  “You show very little deference for the Legate of Heaven,” the man frowned. He had a faint accent, which Jane thought might be Lebanese or Armenian or Hittite. She wondered where Heaven had found this man. He dressed a bit like a Cardinal, but that was mere fashion. He might be a rabbi by background, or a Sikh, or a Qodesh of Asherah. He wore wooden beads on a long string around his neck, but they were beads only, not bearing any other ornament. He thumbed slowly in a circle around the beads with his hands, and Jane saw a tattoo on the back of one hand that might be a picture of a tree, or a many-armed candlestick. “I was warned, but the extent of your indifference surprises me still.”

  “You people cursed me,” Jane pointed out. She could have said it bitterly, but the centuries had pounded the emotional vehemence out her. The facts were the facts, and she endured. “Indifference isn’t the word I’d choose to describe my feelings. You’re lucky I don’t kill you right where you sit, with a knife in the eye.”

  “This letter,” the Legate continued, “contains the release of your judgment. It contains your forgiveness.”

  That caught Jane’s attention, but she let no hint of her interest slip.

  “This letter contains your death.”

  Jane trembled, slightly, from the neck up. “Sounds all right to me,” she allowed. “Why don’t you leave it on the table there, and help yourself to something from the minibar on the way out?”

  “Forgiveness isn’t free,” the Legate shook his head like he had just discovered this terrible truth for himself. “Not for sins as serious as yours.” He slowly licked his fingers and snuffed the candle. “But I’m pleased that you’re willing to talk.”

  “Now’s the time to hit me up,” Jane chuckled to hide her relief at being able to move again, drawing her heels up to her buttocks in the deep, bubble-capped water. She wasn’t afraid of death—she longed for it—but she hated being told what to do, and imposed paralysis was someone else telling her what to do. “I put down some mad dogs for the State of Nevada last week and then I hit it big on the Cockroach Road. What do you want, a hundred grand?” Money didn’t matter to her, so Jane either had it in buckets or had none at all. She couldn’t starve to death and paid no utility bills and the Mare could catch her own provender, so when Jane got money, she spent it. Eat, drink and be merry, might have been her motto, for tomorrow you will certainly not die.

  “An eye for an eye,” the Legate intoned. “A tooth for a tooth.”

  “A death for a death,” Jane shot at him, and now she did feel bitter. “So why not kill me and get it over with?” Suddenly, she felt the full weight of the millennia at her back, and her heart filled with the pangs of the hundred cities that had burned around her and the thousands of men who had died on her blades. She was tired, she was unspeakably old, and she just … kept … going.

  “You lost your death when you took your brother’s life from him,” the Legate said dryly, as if she didn’t remember. He picked up the candle and tucked it into some hidden pocket beneath his mantelletta.

  “What, then?” Jane asked, but in her heart she knew where the conversation was going. She willed herself not to look to the side at the Calamity Horn.

  “You can have your death back,” the Legate finished, shaki
ng the letter gently like it was a birthday present and he was weighing it to guess what might be inside, “in exchange for the death of another.”

  “Why don’t you do it yourselves?” Jane asked. “You guys aren’t exactly averse to smiting, when you get the idea you’d like to do it. Ainok, Sodom and Gomorrah, Atlantis, Pompeii, San Francisco, New Orleans … why not strike this guy with a good old-fashioned thunderbolt, or a plague?”

  She knew the answer, but she wanted the Legate to say it.

  “This is a case where discretion will be necessary,” the Legate said slowly. “Heaven would rather not attract any attention.”

  Jane shook soap off her hand. “And you came to me,” she said, picking up the FN Model 1910, “because of my reputation for great discretion. Also, because I carry the Calamity Horn, a gun that is capable of wounding and striking down even the children of Heaven. And also because you have something you can hold over me. Here I am in Las Vegas, and Heaven is making me an offer I can’t refuse.”

  The Legate nodded. “All true. And also, we came to you because the target in question is an old friend of yours.”

  * * *

  On the rooftop of the meat packing plant, standing on top of the lightning bolt-bearing case, Jane raised her arms to the roiling sky and called the Messenger. Angels didn’t have true names, not in the way humans did, because the ka, the ba, and the body of an angel were not separate things, needing a name to bind them together and casting a shadow over the space among them. An angel was a unitary creation, a spiritual point rather than a cluster, and it had no secret name. Therefore, she couldn’t compel it; so instead, she invited it.

  Jane called in Angelic when she could remember the Angelic words clearly, and when she couldn’t, she supplied the deficit with Adamic. The two were kissing cousins, anyway, and often shared vocabulary—though Angelic, as far as Jane knew, had no profanity at all. So much the poorer.

  She touched the fragment of Azazel’s hoof and let the feel of the object drift into and seal her message with its tangibility. She spoke words of offer and negotiation in her incantation, telling the renegade that she had the thing he was looking for, that they could join forces, that together they could have what they both wanted.

  They were lies, and a trick, and in her heart she planned murder.

  The circle carried her words up into the heavens, soaring through and against the rain that pelted down. Lightning flashed in a chain along the horizon as she finished, and a vortex of silver in the dark clouds absorbed her false oaths, sucked them in and spun them out in all directions like meteorites slung at the far corners of the world.

  When she was certain the angel would hear, Jane stopped. Her ka ached within her and her body’s wounds, still in the final stages of healing, itched and stung. She dropped her arms and stepped down to the gravel rooftop, duster rustling and hat pounding like a drum from the fat raindrops.

  The crow flapped its wings as if irritated at what she had done, and glared at her balefully. If a flesh and blood bird had given her such a look, she would have cursed at it and blown all its feathers off.

  A car approached on the highway now, and Jane stepped forward and crouched at the edge of the roof to watch. Light poles were few and far between on this stretch of road, but the vehicle slowed as it passed underneath one, in front of the saddler’s, and she got a clear look at it. It was a brown van, hammered as only the van of a bottom-feeding rock and roll band can be, and she knew instantly who was inside. She was impressed, though, that they’d caught up with her so quickly. The van killed its speed and then its lights, and then it disappeared in the shadow of a small copse of trees.

  She needed Azazel’s hoof to bait the trap for the renegade angel, but that was surely what the band must be after. Jane considered her course of action for brief seconds, and then jogged down the stairs.

  She needed to hurt them, slow them down, keep them out from under her feet. And she had no fire left in her ka.

  The Mare stayed where she had hitched it, razor teeth bloodied by its contented grazing on chilled beef. She pulled the beast away, earning an irascible snort of protest, but no more—decades ago, she and the animal had had it out over which one of them was to be mistress, and they both knew that Jane was the rider and the Mare was her mount.

  She left the lights in the plant on. If the band really was following the hoof, they wouldn’t believe she was still in the building. But maybe, if she left the lights on, the band would think she was trying to lure them into an ambush. That might at least keep them off balance.

  She led the Mare out the back door of the plant and swung into the saddle easily. She kicked the beast into a canter and headed for the edge of the lot, where the boundary between the meat packing plant parking lot and a furrowed field of tall, storm-quaking sorghum was marked by a rail fence.

  The Mare easily jumped the fence, plunging into the tall cultivated grass without fear or hesitation. Jane watched the road as she progressed, trying to spot the musicians’ van—trees cut across her field of vision ahead of her, shading a lane through the planted space, and she thought a creeping darker-than-dark mass under the trees might be the van. Whoever was driving, slow as they were going, must have great night vision. Jane bent low over the Mare’s neck and looked for an appropriate tool.

  She found it quickly, where the crops gave way to a flat, hard aisle of dirt. There was a medium-sized tractor, and the sight of it gave her momentary pause.

  It had been several millennia since she had tilled the soil, but the scent of a moist, broken clod, or the sharp, fertile promise of a gleaming agricultural tool, still pierced her to the center of her heart. For an instant she was again Qayna of the young earth, who loved plants and taught them to love her back. The tall sorghum grass could have been the barley or emmer of her youth, and under the clouds and rain the land around her could have been practically anyplace, including the valleys to the east of Eden.

  A flash of lightning on the horizon, and an answering glint in the trees ahead that might have been a reflection on metal, brought her back to herself.

  Jane dismounted beside the tractor, whistling to the Mare an instruction to stand in place. She unscrewed the gas cap on the tractor’s tank and soaked a spare shirt in the flammable liquid. Tearing the gas-reeking cloth in half, she stuffed one half into the open tank, letting it drape wetly down the side of the tractor. The other half she wrapped around a fist-sized rock she picked up off the ground.

  Through the glass of the tractor’s cab, she saw the brown van pull to a stop under the gloom of the trees. Its door opened and men piled out.

  It was then that she spotted the raptor that could only be Twitch, the silver falcon with the long, incongruous horse’s tail trailing behind it, soaring above the trees and headed in her direction. Her wards of seeming and dissembling should hide the truth from the fairy at least for a moment, but Jane knew she needed to hurry.

  She repeated her stay whistle to the Thracian Mare, wedged Azazel’s hoof fragment firmly beneath the saddle, and retreated to the sorghum, holding in her hand the gasoline-soaked rag wrapped around a rock.

  Stepping a cubit’s length into the sea of grass, she pulled out a cigarette lighter and waited.

  The Mare stood calmly beside the tractor, ignoring the thick reek of gasoline and the band. That was a reflection of the Mare’s impressive discipline, and her centuries of training—her sense of smell was so acute that she had led Jane across three States on the trail of the brown Dodge van and never lost the scent. The falcon overhead cried angrily, and the Mare ignored that, too.

  Jane drifted a couple of yards to one side to get a better view; at a fence on the far side of the dirt aisle, she saw the rock and rollers climbing into the field.

  The men all carried weapons, and they approached the tractor with deliberate steps, fanning out like the fingers of a groping hand. Even in the storm-confused dim light of night, Jane could see that Adrian was in the middle of the line, holding som
e kind of machine pistol in one hand and looking down into the palm of his other. Jim walked beside him, sword drawn. Mike and Eddie came forward on the wings, holding pistols.

  She knew that what they saw must be the tractor, and beyond it, a parked motorcycle. Then the wizard hissed something and they all halted. He dug into a pocket and came out with a piece of glass that he held up to one eye like a monocle.

  “Son of a bitch!” he spat.

  Jane raised the lighter to the gas bomb in her hand—

  and the sky exploded into flame.

  ***

  Chapter Six

  Qayna raced under the spires of Ainok as the trails of flame hurtled earthward. She knew that each burning meteorite, bright despite the noon sun overhead and dragging behind it a plume of black and yellow smoke, must be a Swordbearer. She should be hurrying to get out of the city, she knew, but instead she ran toward its center.

  She wanted to warn Azazel; she owed him that much.

  The crow flew on ahead, just beyond her reach.

  Other Ainokites heeded the more sane imperative, though, and she struggled to push through them. Women and men of her own kind—not quite her own kind, but her kin, at least—rushed in a thick and burbling stream toward the gates of the city, and she had to push fiercely to force them to part and let her upstream.

  The Fallen were fewer, easier to see and avoid, but much more dangerous. They towered above their mortal subjects, and though Qayna had become accustomed to their appearance, the beast heads and limbs were still terrifying when they rushed at her at full speed. A towering Fallen with the lower body of a horse, Ezeq’el, trampled people who might have been her servants, or even her lovers; a giant with the face of an octopus or a squid dragged shrieking bodies with him as he plunged into one of Ainok’s great canals, finding it a more expedient route to the exits; a corpulent man with long yellow tusks jutting from his face and spikes growing from his back and shoulders lowered his head and charged through the crowd, leaving behind him a trail of mangled corpses and blood.