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

by Janine Ashbless

  But the chamber was not a prison cell, or even a single room. It was a labyrinth. For a moment we stood, pressed into the doorway, confused by what it was we were seeing—many corridors, or one complex hall? Great rough pillars had been hewn out of the living rock, with graves chiseled into every face and bones stacked high in every slot. Between the pillars narrow little passages wound about to create a catacomb that reminded me, more than anything, of the shelved area in my old college library basement. The walls were painted all over with pictures of patriarchs and saints in a style now familiar, though down here the bright colors had all degraded to shades of brown.

  ‘FFS,’ Roshana wrote succinctly on her phone screen.

  I could only nod.

  ‘Where?’

  I shrugged, and set off hoping she’d stick close. It would be all too easy to lose each other in here, though I tried to keep a straight line heading forward. Like some monstrous snail, we left a wet trail behind us, but the drips from our sodden clothes died off as the distance wore on. This catacomb was vast, though there was no grandeur to its rabbit-warren structure. There must be tens of thousands interred down here; articulated mummies no more, just anonymous piles of skulls and femurs and less identifiable bones.

  Azazel hated this—the low roof in particular. I could feel his rebellion throbbing inside me.

  Every so often we’d hit a pinch-point, where the tunnels would end in a blank wall that had only a single entrance to the next, near-identical-looking chamber. This feature was the only thing that kept me pressing on with any hope that there was some sort of linear structure to the maze.

  Then we came at last to a dead end, with no egress before us. Just a plastered wall with a huge fresco of Saint George slaying the dragon, surrounded by scenes of his three hundred martyrdoms. The princess in the main story, I noted, had very wisely hidden up a tree.

  Roshana surveyed the dead end with an expression of extreme annoyance that needed no words. She looked like she had been personally affronted by the architects. Then she shot me a look that said, Well?

  Trying to gather my wits, I let my gaze flit over the wall-painting as I leaned back against a knurl of rock. I was busy thinking about how many doorways we might have passed to either side without realizing. The visual part of my mind was meanwhile parsing pictorial torture after torture, noting how the pagans were always depicted in profile while the good guys were full-face, counting the speckled scales on the dragon, seeing the faint horizontal striations under the surface of the plaster…

  I caught my breath.

  Stepping forward, I laid my hand on the flank of the stallion that George rode. The broad wash of white paint did not hide what lay underneath so effectively as the darker, more complex parts of the fresco. My fingertips could not discern the pattern, but there was the faintest visible discoloration.

  Frantically, I signaled for the phone.

  ‘Blocks,’ I wrote. ‘Not rock.’ An opening here had been walled up and then plastered over to hide the aperture. I started to scratch at the paintwork.

  Roshana understood my message at once. She made a fist and punched the horse right below the strappy harness on its rump. A big piece of damp plaster cracked away, and when she pulled it out we could see a line of mortar between squared stones.

  I nodded wildly, and helped her pull the decaying plaster away in plates. Detritus covered our shoes. Together we revealed most of a blocked-up archway, by which point I was panting in the stale and humid air.

  Stand right back, her hands signaled me. And when I obeyed—reluctantly—she started to attack the wall. Her fine little hands should never have been able to take that sort of abuse. Every bone in her wrist should have been broken at the first blow. Her shoulders should have been dislocated. But what actually happened, in front of my wide eyes, was that the rotten mortar gave way and the hewn stone shifted and the weakest block crashed back into the space revealed beyond. After that she got her hands in and pulled the stones out one at a time into the room with us, tossing them aside.

  It all made more noise than I’d have liked.

  At last the hole was big enough to climb through and even Roshana paused for breath. I stepped up to shine my torch into the void.

  There was a big empty chamber behind the wall. There was something else too; I saw it in that fleeting moment that my flashlight wasn’t pointed directly within. A faint reddish glow, instead of utter darkness. The shine of a candle, or a lamp turned right down low, hidden out of my direct eyeline. I backed away.

  Roshana saw the look on my face.

  This was no time to beg for the phone and write anything. ‘Light!’ I mouthed, pointing.

  She leaped through that hole like a jungle cat. Shocked, I scrabbled to follow her form with my flashlight, though God knows whether or not she needed it; she might have been able to see in the dark for all I knew. I think she hit the ground with her outstretched arms and flipped into a crouch, but maybe I was conflating my hopeless glimpses with memories of movie stunts. I certainly saw her stand and start to turn back to face me—just as the priest hidden to the side of the portal stepped out and swung his staff at her head.

  Roshana slammed her arm up and caught the pole, twisting beneath the swing and wrenching it from the priest’s hands. Effortlessly she extended her pivot until she was face-to-face, then punched him in the diaphragm. No… Through the diaphragm. She thrust her hand right up under his ribs, buried almost to her elbow in his soft insides. He didn’t scream. Maybe she’d collapsed his lungs or something.

  I dropped the goddamn flashlight in my shock.

  By the time I retrieved it, the fight was over. I scrambled in an ungainly fashion over jagged and tumbled stonework. The beam of my light cruelly spot-lit Roshana as she stood up from the still spasming wreckage of the priest’s body, spattered in gore, and lifted her bloody hand to her face. She licked her fingers, then wrinkled her nose in disappointment.

  I didn’t see that. I couldn’t have seen that.

  I could feel the clamminess of my clenched fists.

  “What?” she asked harshly. Her eyes gleamed like polished jet. “If he’d hit you, Daddy would have come out and killed him. If he’d escaped, he’d have just gone and got his friends. How many do you want us to have to kill?”

  I couldn’t answer. I should have felt terrified and nauseated by her brutality, but mostly I was just full of rage. He’d been an old man, with a white beard. She could have put him down without killing him, surely? My desire to slap her was so strong, and my hands so twitchy, that I could only fix on the smallest criticism.

  I put my finger to my lips to reprimand her for speaking out loud.

  Roshana shrugged dismissively. “This room isn’t consecrated. That feeling of being watched? It stopped as soon as I came in.”

  The room sure as hell was consecrated, though it was unlike anything we’d come through yet. It was round, for a start; drum-shaped and plastered and painted a deep bloody red. There were no central pillars, though there was a broad wooden staircase leading up to a trapdoor in the roof at the opposite point to that we’d entered. Around the walls were painted four angels, their huge extended wings touching at the tips, left hands held up in warning, right hands wielding swords. Their black almond-shaped eyes seemed to exude a tragic foreboding.

  But I believed Roshana when she said she didn’t feel under surveillance anymore. Dead air, I thought. Heaven’s Faraday cage.

  There was nothing else in the cave—nothing except the lit stub of a candle near the wall, the corpse of a priest that I could not bring myself to even look at, and a round disc of stone in the center of the floor, like the dais of a fountain that wasn’t there. “I’m going to be sick,” I muttered. I wanted to make her feel bad for what she’d done.

  “No you’re not. You’re going to find the Bookworm. I’m just here to do the heavy lifting, remember. Come on, honey, what now?”

  I stalked over to the dais. It was a single piece of stone ex
actly three cubits in diameter, my angel-tripped brain told me—which I interpreted as less than five feet—and about ankle-high. Incised deeply into the center was another cup-and-circle symbol. Ancient symbols of heavenly order standing watch for untold centuries, long before Christianity or even Judaism came to this land. The sun and the moon stand over my head.

  “She’s right here.” I pointed at the flagstone. “Under that. Can you shift it?”

  “Hmph.” Roshana dropped to a squat, gripped the edge of the disc with her hands and gave it an experimental shove. The stone didn’t shift.

  Oh Jesus Christ forgive me, she is covered in blood. I can smell it, like copper pennies.

  “It’s a plug,” she mused. “I have to lift it.”

  “There’s a chip in the stone this side,” I said, not looking, trusting to luck that I’d be right. “You can get your fingers under.” Because if she couldn’t lift it I’d have to call Azazel out, and then there was no saying how far things would escalate. Backing out of the way as she came around, I watched as she felt for purchase, clenched her jaw and, with a grunt, heaved the stone up. A gush of fetid air issued from the gap beneath.

  “Careful,” I warned, as she flipped the stone disc right up on its edge. “We’re right under—”

  Too late. The flipped lid fell backward with a crash of stone that echoed around the cave.

  “—the churches,” I finished, wincing. The uncannily attentive part of my mind had correlated the distance and direction we’d walked, compared it to all the maps and diagrams we’d seen, and reckoned we were close to Bet Maryam and Bet Mikael.

  Roshana examined a split nail, frowning, and didn’t seem to hear my words. Then she looked into the pit revealed at her feet. “That her?”

  I bent forward to see, and my throat closed up until I couldn’t catch a breath.

  Oh God—Azazel got off lightly, didn’t he?

  At least during his incarceration he’d been able to see the distant sky. At least he’d been able to breathe, and speak to his captors. Here before us a shaft barely wide enough to accommodate a human body had been plunged vertically into the earth. Its occupant had been dropped in feet-first, and sealed—airless, lightless, alone—in a living tomb. For five thousand years, with only the muttered prayers of guardian priests, working shifts, to mark the torturous passage of days.

  I could see a pair of dark, bare shoulders and the back of a slumped, close-cropped head.

  That’s unbearable…

  “Penemuel,” I said softly, reaching down to touch her scalp. “It’s me.”

  She heard. Tilting her head back, she looked up into my face, her teeth bared in a rictus around a thick leathery gag, her eyes as black as the darkness she’d stared into for millennia. Her dried lips were cracked and bleeding, but I knew the angel-woman from my dream. A wordless hiss issued from her throat, and then turned into a moan.

  This was beyond cruelty.

  “Get her out of there,” I gasped.

  “Coming up,” Roshana said, and reached in to grab her by the shoulders. I heard Penemuel whimper and I wanted to stop my ears and gouge out my eyes.

  Penemuel’s long naked body slithered out of the hole as if some bizarre birth were being enacted, with Roshana as the bloodstained midwife. Not actually tall enough to lift the Watcher all the way, Roshana got her rear up onto the lip of the shaft and then dragged her horizontally across the floor. The fallen angel wasn’t in any shape to assist in her own rescue; it was immediately obvious that her arms were bound against her torso with a long crisscrossed rope of dried rawhide which was wrapped tight round her body from shoulder to ankle, and which strapped her legs together. The gag was knotted cruelly underneath her ear.

  “Snap these,” I demanded.

  “No.” Roshana, weirdly, didn’t seem to be upset by any of this. Her expression was as disdainful as if she’d just pulled a handbag out of a sales pile and then decided she didn’t like the look of it anyway. But she deigned to explain, for my benefit. “If she can’t then neither can I. It’s not a question of strength, it’s about blood. This is a job for”—and goddamn if she didn’t smirk—“pure-bred monkeys.”

  “You think this is funny?” I gasped, whipping off my plastic necklace.

  “More…ironic.”

  I decided to stop talking. Peeling away the sheath to reveal the wire core of the necklace, I slid the flexible saw behind the bonds at Penemuel’s ankles. There was most space between rope and flesh there. And yes, it saved me bending over more disconcerting parts of the bound and naked and twitching body of a still-beautiful woman who was making bits of my brain do backflips. I swore under my breath, knowing just how much hard work this was going to be.

  But I’d done it before, in releasing Azazel. The vile bonds were tough, but I could feel the tiny titanium saw teeth bite as I went to work. I could do this.

  Roshana stood with her less-bloody hand on her hip, tapping her toe as she watched. Overhead, a muffled chanting had begun, and an unidentifiable shuffling. Neither of us remarked on the new noises.

  “There!” With sweat beading on my temples and my fingers sore from pulling the tiny handles, I finally snapped through the hardened flesh rope that bound the angel. That left me the job of trying to unwrap her, tugging the stiff cordage from her skin. It had been bound on so tightly that it was stuck to her flesh, tearing away to reveal raw pink patches that made my stomach lurch.

  Penemuel moaned from behind her gag, and twisted her legs apart. I tried not to look.

  Roshana, with a glare at the trapdoor, strolled over to where the priest lay dead and picked up his staff. She snapped it across her knee effortlessly, and the broken ends looked wickedly sharp. “Hurry up,” she muttered, twirling the improvised weapons in a casual kata. In the half dark, barely illumined at the margins of the flashlight, she looked like a vampire-slayer preparing for the next wave of incoming monsters.

  Except of course, I realized, we were the vampires in this story. The good guys were the ones in the church overhead.

  That was the moment the trapdoor was flung open from above. Light—electric light, from many bulbs—flooded in, making me blink. I stared up at a ring of priests clustered around the doorway at the top of the stairs. Voices poured down on us too, from that group and from others unseen in the church nave, and I could hear every one of them and understand every word. Most were praying, calling on Saint George to defend them, but others were less pious.

  “What is happening?”

  “Has he escaped?”

  “Women! Why are there women there?”

  “Where is Brother Yohannes?”

  “Blood! Can you see the blood?”

  I glimpsed the gray wall behind the trapdoor, carved with the crude haloed figure of a saint, and in recognizing it I knew exactly where we were; underneath Bet Golgotha, the holiest church on the site. Its embargo on women made more sense now, given my own history.

  The first priest started down the stairs, and as Roshana closed to meet him others looked ready to follow suit.

  “I don’t think we’re getting out of here without help,” she said. “Time to call Big Boy out.”

  Instead I hauled Penemuel into a sitting position. I was still trying to free her of her bonds, my hands tugging ruthlessly, my head whirling with hot thoughts like flames. She writhed and I knew I was hurting her, but now I couldn’t take time to care. I was thinking that if I could release Penemuel then she could take us far away without involving Azazel. He was churning inside me, longing to rise, blotting out my caution. I wasn’t afraid of the priests—they were only men. I’d seen how Roshana dealt with them, and they died easily. Yes—there went that next one, and it wasn’t even shocking anymore. I was sure she could hold them off until I joined her—and then I’d show her what I could do. I was convinced that I could handle a few old men easily. I wanted to fight. I wanted to smack down those interfering priests and rescue Penemuel so that she would adore me, and stride out of there the
victor leaving Roshana gaping in awe and then—

  And then I won’t have to let Azazel go.

  The realization hit me. The hot parade of my reckless thoughts, that clotted intermingling of his instincts and mine, suddenly struck me as near-insane. I’d been inflated like a balloon by the demon inside me, his confidence and his pride and his eager lust, until I was terrified of shrinking back to human proportions.

  I was tripping on Azazel and I didn’t want to come down.

  “Milja!” roared Roshana, thrusting the slumping body of the priest aside. “Call him!”

  But it wasn’t her command that forced me into action. It wasn’t the sight of another of our victims bleeding all over the floor, or the horror in the faces of the priests hesitating at the foot of the stairs, staves raised, shouting at us to surrender the demon. It was a glimpse I caught of the stone relief in the room above and beyond those stairs. It was cracking like a pie-crust, as if under sudden terrible pressure from behind—and a twisted black limb was thrusting its way out through the crumbling rock.

  The priests still in the church scattered the hell out of sight of the trapdoor, yelping.

  “Azazel,” I whispered. “Please, quickly!”

  He came out fast, much faster than he’d entered me—and it hurt beyond anything I could have imagined; it hurt like all the fires of Hell tearing through my flesh. I let go of Penemuel and slammed to hands and knees, screaming as I felt him erupt from the whole length of my spine. I was convinced he’d physically split me open. I think I blacked out for a few seconds, because I opened my eyes to find myself curled in a fetal position on the rock floor, wet with sweat.

  Everyone in the chamber had gone deathly quiet all of a sudden.

  Azazel, stark naked, was crouching over me. He cupped my face, his eyes concerned. “You’re not hurt, Milja,” he said gently.

  If I’d had a voice I might have begged to differ, because every cell of my body still felt that fading agony. But I couldn’t speak, and could barely draw breath. It was like he’d sucked all the strength out of me with the force of his departure. I was a pair of wide eyes in a body paralyzed by the physical shock; not just a mere human again, but the weakest and most helpless of specimens. “Unh,” I said, drool pooling under my cheek.