In Bonds of the Earth (Book of the Watchers 2)

by Janine Ashbless

I followed the casual wave of her hand toward an undifferentiated heap of detritus on the far side of the chamber, disconcerted. A cluster of ghosts sat over it, their eyes gray and baleful. “Roshana, this is an archaeological site. You shouldn’t have disturbed anything.”

  “It’s my land. I do what I like with it.”

  Oh boy, she’s her father’s daughter. “But the bones…” I thought of all the ghosts outside too. “Human ones? They belong to a tribe, you can’t just…”

  “The tribe’s long gone; nobody now even remembers its name.”

  I shook my head. “But there are protocols, there are—”

  “Which bit of ‘It’s my land’ wasn’t I clear about?”

  I looked to Azazel in dismay, but he wasn’t paying any attention. What the hell did he care about mortal propriety and sentiment? He was looking at the rock slab at his feet. He crouched to place one palm flat on the face of the stone, as if feeling for a heartbeat.

  “Nothing,” he said softly. “No one there. Can you hear anything, Milja?”

  “There are remains,” Roshana told him. “I had a hole drilled under that corner and sent a probe-camera in for a look.”

  If Azazel was listening, he didn’t respond to her words. Instead he hooked his hands around the angles of the slab and heaved the huge weight aside as if he were flipping a child’s mattress.

  I couldn’t help myself. In fact we all three pressed forward to look into the space revealed below; a rectangular cist maybe a dozen feet long, hewn into the bedrock.

  There was a body. It was somewhat taller than human normal, as Azazel sometimes gets when he’s angry. It was dark gray in color, and a little collapsed, like the papery remains of a long-abandoned wasp nest. We could see the empty eye-sockets, and the bared yellow-ivory gape of the open jaws. I shrank back. Roshana folded her arms as if in vindication. I don’t know what she’d promised Azazel.

  The fallen angel clenched his fists. Dust began to whip across the floor, circling him. He stretched out his hand over the pit and I was startled to see a red worm of glowing light ooze out of the cadaver’s crumpled ribcage, like a vine tendril questing upward toward the sun of his open palm.

  Then, before it could touch him, the tendril faded and fell apart—and without warning the whole body fell into dust.

  We held our breath.

  “He let them die.” Azazel’s voice was very low, very even, at least to start with. “Mi—the Boatman… They got sick, but he could have saved them. He is the Pillar of the West—it is his job to preserve and guard and keep the Word. He could have saved them, but he didn’t, and when they died out so did the Egrigoroi in their care. Jomjael died in the dark, slowly, buried alive.”

  He turned to Roshana. His voice sounded like the grinding of rocks, and there was a red light like burning blood leaking from his eyes and his mouth. “You say there are more of these mounds? Hundreds more? More bodies?”

  She nodded, for once too cautious to speak aloud.

  “Why?” His face was a black mask over seething hellfire as he turned it up to the roof overhead. “WHY?” he roared, and I clapped my hands over my agonized ears. “Why did you let them die?”

  I lurched backward and crouched against the curve of the cavern wall, shutting my eyes, but even through my closed lids I saw the column of flame burst up around him, boiling against the ceiling. I felt the heat on my skin. For a moment I thought he’d been struck down by the wrath of Heaven. But even in the midst of the burning I heard his voice.

  “You were supposed to keep them prisoner until Judgment! What are you doing, Michael? What are you doing!”

  Don’t call him!

  Then it went dark and quiet—so dark and so quiet that I thought I’d gone blind and deaf, though it was only the contrast with the former effulgence and clamor. I could smell my own crisped hair. The backs of my hands were stinging where I’d flung them up to shield my face.

  I blinked, trying to bring moisture to my parched eyes. Slowly the dim leak of daylight swam back into view. I could see Azazel crouched on the edge of the grave, a knot of darkness, his head down, his shoulders shuddering. A figure stood over him, silhouetted against the silvery dribble of light.

  Michael? I wondered. He heard! He found us!

  But it wasn’t Michael. It was Roshana. She stooped over Azazel, one arm draped across his shoulders, and kissed the back of his head. Through the ringing in my ears I could make out the faint murmur of her voice.

  “It’s all right. It’s all right. I’m here, Father, and I will help you. I will help you make everything all right.”

  Oh no. Oh no, no, no. I couldn’t have her pushing in like that. Damn it, Roshana—just stop that.

  I staggered forward from the wall. “Azazel, listen. This is awful, I’m sorry. But I’ve had an idea. I think I know how to get you in to rescue Penemuel.”

  8

  LALIBELA

  Someone,” said Azazel grimly, “has put a great deal of effort into fortifying this place against people like me.”

  Ethiopia was nothing like I’d imagined. I’d pictured—oh, an arid dusty plain dotted with mud huts or something. Instead we had mountains all around us, with the little town of Lalibela clinging to the green flank of one to our left, and the land was gloriously lush and alive with flowering bushes, here at the end of the rainy season. Jacaranda trees made a purple haze in the gardens beneath our feet and bright yellow daisy-heads of tickseed sunflowers gilded the grasses. We were sitting at a table in the Ben Abeba restaurant right at the fringe of the town—a building so eccentrically modernist as to resemble something designed by Dr. Suess—because Azazel didn’t dare get any closer to holy ground and because it was exactly the sort of place he couldn’t resist; high up, completely open, with sweeping curves and platforms of concrete upheld by great iron pillars.

  “King Lalibela,” I answered, thumbing through my Ethiopian guidebook. I had an avocado and papaya smoothie in front of me, while he nursed a glass of tej, the local honey liquor, and propped his bare feet up on the railing. “He fell into a coma and had a vision of Heaven, and the angels ordered him to rebuild this city as a mirror-image of the Holy Land. So there’s a group of churches that represents Jerusalem and another one that represents Bethlehem, and a Mount of Olives and a River Jordan, which I think was dug out by hand. Oh, and a Tomb of Adam, and the three graves of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It’s like a medieval theme park for pilgrims. So they didn’t have to walk all the way to Palestine.”

  Azazel hmphed. “And all consecrated. Just to protect her prison. Which is sealed from my eyes and my ears anyway.”

  “You should read these stories…the whole place was supposedly built by men working the dayshift and angels working at night. Saint George came down from Heaven to complain he didn’t have his own church, and then supervised one being built. The church of Bet Abba Libanos was carved out in one night by King Lalibela’s wife and a gang of angels. And there’s a pillar in Bet Maryam that’s kept completely covered up because it has a full prophetic description of the beginning and end of the world carved into it miraculously by Jesus, and the details are too scary for humanity to cope with. It all sounds a bit crazy.” I sucked in my lips. “Or, you know…not.”

  “Penemuel clearly warrants heightened security.” He was gazing down over the hillside like he thought he’d be able to spot her sepulcher among the tin rooftops. “More than ever I did, it seems.”

  I felt a little affronted. “Maybe the angels just trusted my family more,” I snipped. “Which,” I had to admit, “was a mistake. Obviously.”

  “You sound…wired, Milja.”

  “I’m a bit nervous, yeah. The Church here have had the Book of Enoch since whenever it was written, right? Which means they never forgot about the Watchers like we did in the West. So there are…however many…priests down there in town just waiting for their fallen angel to try and break out. They’ll be ready for this. Worst case scenario, one of the Host might even have rocked
up and warned them you’re out and on the prowl.”

  “Avansha will be there to watch your back. And if anything happens to me, she will see you home.”

  “If anything bad happens to you, I’m assuming the kill-zone will take out me along with most of Ethiopia.”

  “You might be right.” The grim twist of his lips made my nape prickle.

  “Tell me about Penemuel, will you?”

  “What about her?”

  “You were close?”

  “We were brothers.” He paused a moment. “Yes, we were close. It does not mean the things you fear.”

  I flushed. “What’s she like? I mean…is she like you?”

  He considered the question. “I can only speak about Penemuel as I knew him, years ago.”

  “Of course.”

  “He wasn’t like me. He thought too much. Worried too much. Always saw the potential danger in every action. Argued with Samyaza constantly over whether we were doing the right thing. It vexed him that your mortal lives are so short, that there is so much for a Son of Earth to learn that he is barely able to teach his own children before he dies. Penemuel thought that there should be a way for your kind to preserve knowledge, so that it might accumulate. Otherwise, he said, nothing would ever change. So he invented the written word. And thus changed everything.” He cast me a sideways glance. “You owe Penemuel a great debt, if that is any encouragement.”

  “Yeah. I guess.” It didn’t make me feel more courageous about what we were planning to do.

  Azazel reached a hand toward me across the table and tangled his loose fingers in mine. I clung to them for a long moment, trying to look brave.

  “Will it hurt, to have you…riding me?” I asked in a low voice.

  “I don’t believe so. I will make myself very small and inconspicuous.”

  “Will you be able to poke around inside my head?”

  He smiled crookedly. “Why—have you something to hide?”

  I laughed.

  “If you prefer, Avansha could play that part, I’m sure.”

  No. No. NO. “No way. If one of us has to jump in and save the day, it’d much better be her. She’s the one with the Nephilim superpowers or whatever. And the money. I’m just the mule.”

  As if on cue, I caught movement at the corner of my eye and saw Roshana ascending the long curved ramp toward our table. She was checking something on her phone and wore—along with a smirk of satisfaction—a broad-brimmed sunhat and the most beautiful long white blouse that managed to be both flowing and figure-hugging.

  This is my step-daughter? I asked myself bleakly.

  “All sorted,” she announced, sweeping off her sun shades to bat her dark lashes at us, and stooping to kiss Azazel on the cheek. “I’ve changed some birr, and had Mario book us a hotel safely out of town. There’s a car on its way to pick us up, and a local guide waiting for us at the churches.”

  “What, now?” I said.

  Roshana smiled at me a little pityingly. “Reconnaissance. I thought it’d be a good idea for us two to get a thorough look around before trying anything funny with Big Boy here. The site’s apparently rather labyrinthine.”

  I wished she wouldn’t talk about him like that. Azazel just looked faintly amused.

  “Okay,” I admitted. “Good idea, I suppose.”

  “Of course it is.” She looked over at her father, arching a brow. “We’ll call you when we’re ready, shall we?”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  She dropped a pile of what I assumed to be the local currency on the table, and crooked a finger at me to summon me from my chair. “Let’s go.”

  And I obeyed, of course.

  We were met at the entrance to the church complex by our guide, Eskinder. He wore shiny shoes, neat slacks, a jumper and bomber jacket, obviously considering the day a little cool despite what—to us—seemed like the pleasant low-eighties warmth, saved only from tropical swelter by the altitude of the plateau. He greeted us with a dignified little smile. “Selam. Hello and welcome to you, Mrs. Smith and Miss Jones.”

  Well, Roshana had clearly taken the subterfuge bit between her teeth.

  I thought that she looked uncharacteristically pale and uneasy in that moment, but she visibly gathered herself and responded.

  Eskinder sorted out tickets for us and indicated another man who waited patiently a few yards away. “We must take off our shoes when we go in to the churches, so he will come with us and look after them.”

  “Hi,” I said awkwardly to the unnamed guy. “Thanks.”

  So our tour began. Roshana wasn’t wrong; we’d have quickly got lost if we’d tried to make our own way around, even though she had some sort of map that she tried to follow on her phone while we walked. I don’t think any sketch-map could have done the place justice, not in two dimensions. We needed Eskinder to find the churches, and then to explain just what it was we were seeing.

  The whole site was excavated into a slope of soft, volcanic rock. The architects had started by digging trenches ten or more meters deep to expose huge blocks of raw stone, which were then carved and hollowed out into churches without a speck of mortar or a length of supporting timber. So the roofs of the buildings were level with the surrounding ground and their red walls were austere, the keyhole-shaped windows kept small to maintain structural strength. Chambers and tunnels had been cut into the trench sides too—chapels, store-rooms, crypts, and water channels to drain the heavy rains of summer down into the River Jordan. Grave niches of priests and pilgrims pocked the exposed rock faces, mostly empty now except for those that held the bedding of hermits. A network of hidden underground passages connected the churches on many levels according to Eskinder, which made Roshana and I look pointedly at each other over his shoulder.

  I’d already reminded her not to talk about our mission while we were on holy ground, nor to use any personal names. There was too much danger of being overheard.

  But we asked questions. Oh boy did we ask questions. Eskinder seemed pleased with our evident interest. And I can’t speak for Roshana, but I was knocked out by the scale and artistry of the site; at first impressed, then awed and moved, and finally really quite cowed.

  I’d expected a tourist honeypot—this was after all billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World. But there were very few international tourists and a great number of Ethiopian people, men and women draped in white shawls, moving quietly and with patience. They raised their open palms when they entered a church, and kissed the stone doorposts. Small crowds of boys sat learning their letters (“Religious school is very good for discipline,” Eskinder told us,) and from somewhere unseen a choir of young male voices chanted, the sound making my skin prickle eerily. A group of women sat against a wall, winnowing flour to make communion bread. These churches were not just heritage, and they were certainly not museums. They were living centers of active worship, and it was going on all around us.

  There were also a lot of flies. I fanned at them with my guide book.

  Our guide tried to put it all in context, telling us about how Menelik, the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, had brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia; how even before the nation converted to Christianity, Judaism was established and influential here. “This is a very old way of Christianity, like the Apostles would have known. We eat no pork in Ethiopia. During services men and women are separated, and all stand. At the center of every church there is a Holy of Holies, which only the priest may enter, and inside that is a replica of the true Ark of the Covenant.”

  He showed us the narrow staves with the T-shaped heads that priests used to lean on during services that lasted three or four hours, and to beat time with upon the floor as they chanted the liturgy. He showed us boxes of sistrums, like metal rattles with wired disks.

  “Egypt,” said Roshana, dryly. “The sistrum came from Egypt.”

  “Yes, there are many connections here with the Coptic Church.”

  “Isis,” she muttered in my ear as
he turned away. “They were used in Isis-worship.”

  It all made me feel like my own Orthodox religion—which we like to claim is the direct and original version of the Faith—was an upstart innovation along the lines of Protestantism.

  That didn’t mean the churches here were grand. Far from it. The thickness of the walls meant that most interiors were surprisingly small, and lit by bare bulbs on long trailing wires. The thin rugs on the floor were laid directly onto roughly chiseled rock, so that every bump and notch could be discerned by our stockinged feet. ‘Tuck your pants into your socks,’ the guide books had warned, ‘as some have complained of flea-bites.’ And the sweeping drapes that curtained off each Holy of Holies ran heavily to red sateen and gold chintz. Every interior was dark, slightly dusty, and slightly damp from the breath and bodies of the faithful. The rock of the interior walls was polished greasily smooth between knee and shoulder height from the passage of so many people over so many centuries. But the painting style I’d found so childish back in the Chicago gallery seemed powerful in its simplicity here, the bright colors glowing from the shadows and the wide sloe eyes staring as if into my guilty heart. It was an old faith—old in soul, and far too old and too deep-rooted and too sure of itself to care what the outside world thought of it, or to care much about the outside world at all.

  Everything that mattered here took place inside—inside these walls, underground, in the hidden depths of the human heart.

  I couldn’t tell if my nervousness was claustrophobia, or a creeping conviction of my own foolishness and sin. The smell of frankincense took me straight back to my childhood, and I felt shrunken, all the individuality I’d accrued in my life an illusion. My defiance of God and my desire—even my love—for Azazel seemed petulant and adolescent in this place.

  I did try to stay focused. In every church I stood for a few moments and listened, hoping to catch Penemuel’s stifled voice. But I heard nothing.

  And we did try to gather clues narrowing down the presence of a supernatural prisoner. The trouble was that there was an excess of possibilities. Every church seemed to have some unique feature that roused my suspicions. Bet Medhane Alem, the House of the Savior of the World, was the very first we visited and the single largest rock-hewn church in the world, the only one truly cathedral-like in scale. It was barred all around the outside by thirty-six huge pillars in just the way the Parthenon was, though not the least bit Hellenic in detail. Once more I was reminded of a vast cage. Then we passed through a tunnel into the adjoining pit of Bet Maryam, the House of Mary, which was reputedly the oldest church here and sheltered the prophetic pillar that was too dangerous for mankind to read. It was also the one with the most elaborate interior frescos and carvings, and Eskinder pointed out a wall-painting of two bulls in combat.