Crow Jane

by D. J. Butler

  “Maybe I left out the legions of tortured sufferers,” Jim suggested. “Hanging on racks in the kingdom of Heaven to suffer until Judgment Day because their mortal lives weren’t suffering enough! Oh, wait, no, Heaven doesn’t want those people … it sends them away, to somewhere more fitting for them.”

  “Is that what you want?” the Legate asked slowly. “You want to free the damned souls in Hell?”

  “What I want,” Jim roared, so loud and fierce that Jane took a step back and her hand strayed close to her gun, “is to be left alone! By you, by my father, and by everyone else!”

  He looked like his father in that moment, and it took Jane’s breath away.

  He also looked like Jacob, whom she had killed without meaning to.

  “I don’t care who sits on that throne,” Jim bellowed, “so long as he leaves me in peace!”

  “No one sits on the throne!” the Legate charged to his feet, veins popping out in his head.

  Jim checked his tirade.

  “No one?” Jane asked.

  “No one.” The Legate sank back to his seat.

  “Who runs Heaven, then?” Twitch asked. “You can’t have a kingdom without a king, can you?”

  “No one,” the Legate said again.

  “The seraphim.” Raphael said it with conviction, and liked the sound of it so much that he said it again. “The seraphim. It has to be.”

  “You’re right, child of Mab,” the Legate agreed. “A kingdom with no king is an abomination. It’s a ship without a captain, and must run aground. We have to end this terrible situation.”

  “How do you know there’s no captain at the wheel?” Twitch asked. “What did you do, sneak a peek when nobody was looking? There’s not even a little man behind the curtain, pulling on levers, no one?”

  The Legate ignored the questions.

  “You’re not going to invade Hell,” Jane clarified. “You’re going to invade Heaven. And you need the Calamity Horn so you can shoot the seraphim with it.”

  “Then why do you need me?” Jim demanded. “Take the gun. Kill her. She wants it. Look at her, you can see it in her eyes. Only leave me alone! I am not a part of your revolution, I have nothing to do with my father.”

  “Is that how your father sees it, too?” the Legate asked softly. “Does he have nothing to do with you?”

  Jim said nothing.

  “We need your father and his hordes.” The Legate spoke quietly, but with a note of finality in his voice like he was pronouncing sentence.

  “You have the Swordbearers,” Jim said.

  The Legate shook his head. “They are here to execute a Writ, and only because Qayna was good enough to put Raphael’s life in danger.”

  “I’ll be better than that,” Jane muttered.

  “We have sympathizers.” The Legate smiled. “The third part of the host of heaven, I believe, is the traditional figure. But they won’t take up arms unless they are confident of victory. We need the Horn, and we need your father’s help.”

  “I want nothing to do with it,” Jim insisted.

  “If you refuse,” the Legate said deliberately, “then we will have to kill you, and use your father’s hoof as a lever to involve him anyway. I can’t have you running around free with this knowledge, James.”

  “Kill me.”

  The Legate arched his eyebrows, nodded, and turned to Jane. “Kill him,” Heaven’s rebel emissary told her, “and the death letter is yours.”

  “Go to Hell.” Jane laughed. “Pun intended.” Lightning flashed across the well of darkness overhead, and the rain picked up, heavy enough now to pummel its way down through the ring of fire and splash Jane in the face.

  The Legate’s eyes flashed with irritation. “Raphael—” he began.

  The golems stepped forward.

  Jane’s fingers brushed the butt of the Calamity Horn. “Go for your gun, you angelic son of a bitch.” She stared at Raphael, eyes boring through the puppet-mask of the Deputy’s body and imagining the six-winged Bearer of the Word within. “I’m begging you, please, as a personal favor to me, go for your gun.”

  ***

  Chapter Nine

  Fat drops of rain spattered Qayna’s face as she dropped down from the ridge and into the open mouth of Hell.

  The slope was muddy and she fell more than once on the way down, coating her doe-skin tunic in gray slime. Her nostrils rebelled against the stink of the crater and her eyes shied away from the multitude of dead and dying birds that lay floating in it. Her own crow circled above the hole in the ground, indifferent to whatever killed all the other fliers. The mud was not the result of the rain—it and the few scattered drops were the after-leavings, the remnants, the stirrings in the wake of the flood.

  The Flood, Qayna knew that Shet’s descendants would forever after call it. The windows of heaven had opened and the fountains of the deep had ruptured and everything Qayna had ever known had been obliterated by choppy water.

  Qayna had drowned.

  Only it hadn’t killed her. And after several long days of painful torture, being dragged about by the currents of the deep and gnawed by one strange, eyeless monster after another, she had admitted to herself that, whatever the Flood might do to the Fallen and their children, it wasn’t going to end her existence.

  She’d armed herself with weapons that wouldn’t weigh her down: knives. Then she’d swum to the top, flung herself upon the gnarled, beheaded floating trunk of a tree and begun coughing mud and brine from her lungs. She was still hacking up black ooze when Nuh’s boat had passed her by, old Nuh (white bearded and bent over, though he was hundreds of years younger than Qayna—Father and Shet and everyone she had known in her youth all long dead, other than the Fallen and Raphael) oblivious to her, standing on the deck of his bowed, air-tight ship and scratching the long neck of a giraffe.

  Qayna hadn’t bothered to try to get his attention.

  After the Flood had come the monsters. The storm and high water had wiped out the people—the many—who had loved the city of Ainok and embraced its rule, but they also guaranteed that anything that survived them, anything that didn’t come off Nuh’s weird floating wooden chest, would be preternaturally tough.

  Things already living in the deep had survived the hammering of cold water and crawled out hungry and pissed. The ugliest, strongest, most misshapen experiments and progeny of the Fallen had also made it through forty days and nights of rain and the slow receding afterwards. Qayna had been glad to be armed—she had pricked more than one monster into leaving her alone, and used her knives to hack her way to freedom after learning that even the digestive juices of a scabrous, six-legged land whale weren’t enough to free her from Heaven’s curse.

  Most of the Fallen had also survived. Other than Azazel, Raphael and Shet and their army hadn’t taken prisoners, and once they had razed Ainok to the ground they had lost interest in pursuing the fleeing survivors. After the Flood, Qayna had more than once hidden in a mud-strangled copse or under a shattered roof or in a festering pile of dead bodies to avoid attracting the attention of one of Ainok’s rebel lords.

  Bull Head had nearly stepped on her.

  Weeks later, the higher ground had begun to dry out—like Ararat, where Nuh and his people had settled—but most of the face of the land was still a mud flat, pocked with ruins and the few trees tenacious enough to have hung on through the devastation. And, on the trail of a rumor she found hard to believe, Qayna returned to Ainok.

  To find it a gaping hole.

  And at the bottom, with yellow light flickering from it, an opening.

  Qayna scrambled to her feet in a thick, fetid pool at the bottom of the crater. This might be exactly the spot where the Grand Plaza of Ainok had once been, she thought, though it was hard to be sure with most of the local landmarks obliterated. As if to confirm her guess, she stubbed her toe on a block of white stone the size of her torso.

  “Password?” The voice was slithery-huge, a serpent’s hiss, and Qayna recogn
ized the snake-headed giant who had hemmed her and Jacob in when she had tried to escape the Plaza before. He wore a kilt and sandals and stood in front of a cavern entrance vast enough to hold a small town, smoke and light and movement enlivening the space behind him vaguely. She chuckled. It pleased her sense of irony that this same Fallen who had tried to keep her trapped would now try to keep her out.

  “It isn’t funny,” Snake Face protested. “Tell me the password, or I’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t have a password,” Qayna said. “But I’d like to be polite about this. How about you let me in because I’m an old friend of Azazel’s? Or at least, could you tell him Qayna is here? I used to come in and out of Ainok freely.”

  “Those were more trusting times.” The Fallen snatched her from the mud with both hands and sank his long fangs into her belly and chest. Qayna quivered and jerked, but tried not to react, letting the long saber-like teeth completely impale her. She burned as her veins filled with venom, and her limbs shook.

  Then the giant threw her to the mud. She hit with a loud splat! and bounced. There she lay still a moment, letting the fire raging in her veins cool a bit.

  “Fool,” the serpent-headed colossus hissed, and resumed his station in front of the cave mouth.

  Qayna climbed to her feet. “That’s just what I was going to say.”

  The Fallen gaped.

  “You could bite me again,” Qayna said. “It would hurt me again. But it still wouldn’t kill me.” She drew her longest knife and held it ready. “And this time, I’ll stab you back, right in the soft tissues inside your mouth.”

  Snake Face hissed in irritation, but he snapped his mouth shut and he stepped aside. The crow led the way.

  The mephitic stink of the crater was even thicker inside the cave. Qayna’s lungs ached, but it was less painful than being buried under the Flood.

  The vastness of the cavern shrank but it never became less than huge, a rough-hewn, rock-ribbed tunnel descending at a steep angle into the bowels of the earth. It never fully dried out, either, though the air became warm and the moisture consolidated into a reddish trickle of a stream in one corner of the passage, leaving crunchy footing on the rest of the floor. Light came from sputtering red torches set irregularly into brackets in the wall.

  At least the dead birds were gone.

  Qayna walked forever. When she had finished walking, there was a gate. Beside it waited a giant figure in breastplate, greaves and kilt, leaning on a spear. He looked totally human, other than the scabby bird-like talons that jutted into the gravelly earth under his greaves. Under long, white hair, his face was mostly grave, with just a tiny hint of a smile playing around his lips.

  “Again?” she asked.

  The giant shook his head. “I am Baraqyel,” he said. “I’m not going to bite you.”

  “Stabbing me with a spear won’t work, either. Trust me.”

  Baraqyel ignored the joke and turned away. “I am to bring you to the meeting of the Council.”

  Qayna followed him, through the enormous doors, which opened at his slightest touch. “Does that mean it’s true?” she asked. “Azazel has returned, and is once again Head of the Council?”

  “Azazel has returned,” Baraqyel agreed. “Whether he is to preside is the issue that is now before the Princes.”

  Beyond the gates, chaos reigned. Gibbering, moaning howls filled Qayna’s ears, and her eyes were unwillingly stuffed full of the spectacle of torture. A mob of people—humans, people of her stature—ravened and tore at each other, impaled each other on spikes, pummeled and clawed at each other’s faces and tore each other limb from limb.

  She felt sick.

  With his spear, Baraqyel carved a path through the bodies. As she walked among them, Qayna looked into the eyes of the writhing tortured torturers and saw bottomless need and black despair.

  “What’s wrong with them?” Qayna asked her guide.

  “They are dead,” he told her, “and unhappy.”

  Qayna looked over her shoulder as she followed Baraqyel out of the cavern and up a spiral stair on the other side. Maybe, she thought, she shouldn’t be so eager for her own death.

  Another long corridor, full of arches and grated windows, erupted at its end out of the rough face of a jagged stone wall, and became an arching bridge. Over her shoulder, she saw that the wall both dropped and climbed out of sight, apparently infinite.

  Qayna followed Baraqyel out along the slender catwalk until it terminated in another door, this one in the side of a ponderous, impossibly huge stalactite. Creatures guarded the door, hunch-backed, slithering things whose claws scratched on the stone and whose long tongues waggled suggestively at Qayna.

  Her guide battered them aside with the butt of his spear. “Wait here,” he instructed Qayna, and then he entered the door, shutting it behind him and leaving her alone with the creatures.

  One ogled her with mismatched eyes, one enormous and the dark yellow color of a sick man’s urine and the other wide and almond-shaped, with a green pupil like a cat’s. The other rubbed four filthy, long-nailed hands together, scratching at its own bleeding knuckles and snickering.

  “I bite,” she warned them, and spat on the floor.

  The door opened again and Baraqyel whisked her inside. “Keep quiet.”

  The interior of the stalactite was a single room dominated by a circular table, its surface above Qayna’s head. One seat at the table was larger than the others, a throne, and the space before it was slightly raised. It was vacant. The other seats were filled with the princes of the Fallen, most of whom Qayna knew by sight only. There was tusked Semyaz, there was Bull Head, there was Ezeq’el the centauress. Their faces, where Qayna’s view wasn’t blocked by her poor angle, wore expressions of fear, surprise, disgruntlement, confusion, anger, malice, greed, and fatigue.

  Azazel sat among them and smiled.

  “Again I object.” Semyaz glared at her with his piggish eyes and flapped his eagle’s wings once.

  “You object for the wrong reasons,” Bull Head rumbled. “Don’t object just because Azazel made a motion.”

  “Is no one allowed to object to anything Azazel says?” Semyaz snorted pig slobber onto his own chest and the table. “Has he become our lord and master without discussion?”

  Bull Head stomped to his feet and pounded the table with his knuckles. “You waste my time, Semyaz! And you look like a petulant child!”

  “Enough!” Azazel shouted.

  Bull Head opened his mouth to say something and Azazel cut him off with a flick of his hand.

  “Enough, Yamayol.”

  Bull Head nodded slightly and dropped himself back into his seat.

  “She has no right,” Semyaz sulked.

  “She is the Marked Woman.” Azazel slowly stood. “She was present at the beginning, and I think she will be present at the end. She has every right. She is the witness. Besides,” he smiled again, and Qayna almost felt charmed by the titanic bat-winged and goat-legged Fallen, “we have already voted on this point of order, Semyaz, and you have lost.”

  Baraqyel shepherded Qayna into a corner. There was nothing in the room but the table and its seats, so Qayna assumed she was condemned to witness from an impossibly bad vantage point, but Baraqyel stooped without a word, lifted her and placed her on his shoulder. His white hair covered her legs like a cloak.

  “I call for the question,” Ezeq’el announced. With her horse’s body, she stood beside the table rather than sitting in a chair. “Enough yammering. Our situation is clear, our choices are simple.”

  “Second,” Bull Head lowed.

  “The question has been called for,” Azazel said. “All in favor.”

  A ragged unanimity of hands approved the motion.

  “The candidates for President of the Infernal Council,” the bat-winged Fallen continued, “bearing the titles Lucifer, Satan, the Adversary, Moloch, the King of Hell, are Semyaz …” the boar-headed giant grunted and raised a hand in acknowledgement, �
�Belial …” a mass of tentacles and scaly flanks at the far end of the table shuddered, “and Azazel … that’s me.

  “All in favor of Semyaz … Belial … Azazel.”

  Hands rose in three waves, Baraqyel voting for Azazel along with many others, and then Semyaz jumped to his feet bellowing. “A tie! Deadlock! No ruler, or a triumvirate!”

  “Vote again!” “Kill one of them!” “No!” An explosion of animal noises and yelling dominated the chamber for long moments.

  “Silence!” Azazel roared one word, and the racket cut off. He looked across the Council chamber at Qayna. “Do you abstain, then?” he asked her.

  Qayna almost fell from her perch. Her crow settled slowly on the back of the empty throne and stared at her. “Me?”

  “It’s a trick!” Semyaz howled, and his supporters pounded on the table with their fists and stamped on the floor with their hooves. “He’s cheating!”

  “Point of order!” Belial shrieked. The voice from the mass of tentacles sounded like metal grinding on metal, but somehow it formed intelligible words. “All parties present vote.” Something like a beak, beneath something like a golden eye, shoved its way forward through the tentacles and fixated on Qayna. “He has done you hurt, woman. I have not.”

  “All parties present vote,” Bull Head agreed.

  “No!”

  “She is the Marked Woman,” Azazel repeated. “She’s practically one of us.”

  “All parties present vote,” Ezeq’el agreed.

  They all stared at Qayna. She stared back, wondering whom she would offend if she said anything. She didn’t mind the thought of being killed, but she balked at the idea of being trapped in the torture-orgy below.

  “No!” the boar-headed Fallen Prince roared, and his hand fell to the hilt of the falchion at his belt.

  The table froze. Somewhere under the table, a claw scratched nervously on stone.

  “Do you challenge?” Ezeq’el drawled slowly.

  Semyaz’s eyes flitted around the table, counting his friends and enemies.

  “No,” Yamayol rumbled.

  For a long moment, Jane wasn’t sure Semyaz agreed.