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

by Janine Ashbless

  “Mmh!” chorused Penemuel, still gagged but doing better than me, in that she was at least sitting up, mostly.

  At that cry he swung from me to her, and knelt to lift her face in his hands. I might have felt hurt if I’d had time to think about it. But his turning away allowed me to see the staircase, and see what was descending it toward us.

  The saint had answered their prayers.

  Three hundred martyrdoms had left very little of Saint George that could be considered human. No eyes, for a start; just empty pits. He was mostly bone and charcoal now, crusted and black, though still draped in the corroded remnants of the scale armor he’d been buried in. God alone knows how he was still capable of animation, but I guess that goes without saying. Miracles are not always pretty.

  The priests, who’d been trying to retreat back up the stairs away from the fallen angel suddenly arrived amongst them, took one look at their divine ally on way down and just fell sideways off the steps, scrambling for the wall.

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” came Roshana’s disbelieving voice from somewhere beyond my field of vision.

  Penemuel struggled weakly in Azazel’s embrace, her eyes wide with fear. She had seen what he had not. I would have screamed a warning, but I had no strength. There was barely any air in my lungs, so I just gasped like a dying fish.

  The holy revenant carried a spear with a wicked iron head in his right hand. And as I watched he hefted it, aiming straight at Azazel’s back.

  Azazel turned. Maybe he did note our collective panic, or maybe his warrior instincts were just that finely tuned. He turned with inhuman speed and grace, reaching his hand out to whatever weapon was aimed at him. He had no reason to fear—he knew after all that nothing metallic could harm the father of weapon-smithing. I’d seen him catch bullets before now, and he was almost casual despite his speed. He back-handed the spearpoint as it descended, swatting it away.

  Well, he would have, if that narrow iron head had been capable of being blocked. Instead, angled downward in flight, it punched straight through his hand, through his stomach, clear out of his back somewhere in the kidney region—and pinned Penemuel through the chest. For a moment the two of them were skewered together, and everybody in the room froze in shock.

  Everyone except the saint, who drew his rusting short-sword. He had no face, so it was impossible to discern his expression.

  Azazel, hunched like a crow over the shaft impaling him, uttered a surprised groan. Then that became a roar of pure rage as he unsheathed his own flaming blade out of the air. Blood and hellfire steamed crimson in an atmosphere suddenly too thick to breathe.

  We’re going to die now, I thought.

  Step by step, writhing in pain, the fallen angel walked himself up the length of the spear-shaft, leaving a slick of blood up the ancient wood. He walked himself right off the end, and then he lifted his sword and launched himself at the stairs.

  I shut my eyes. I knew what was coming; I had seen this before. A wave of heat blasted across my skin and I tried to curl into a ball, while the screaming rose around me. It wasn’t a huge chamber, so there was nowhere to go to escape the flaming sword, or the two inhuman antagonists whirling around it. And they didn’t give a damn about collateral damage. The only reason I survived, I’m sure, was that I was flat on the floor and most of the fire went over me. I knew from the noises that people were running and struggling with each other, but that didn’t last long. Even the cries of pain didn’t last long.

  There was a terrible smell of burning hair and charred meat.

  I opened my eyes to a room full of stinging smoke, and started coughing weakly. Through the filthy haze limped Azazel, a great shadowy titan, with his mutilated hand crushed to his bleeding torso wound and his face gray with pain. He looked around him, and his gaze swept over me, but I can’t say for sure he even saw me. Instead he staggered over to Penemuel, who still knelt with knees spread and the spear angled through her chest. Her head was slumped, but her hands were free of her old bonds, and I saw the weak stir of her fingers that showed she was still alive.

  Azazel slid to his knees at her side and wrapped his arms around her. The smoke billowed as they vanished from this world.

  I could feel myself swimming in and out of consciousness. I tried to raise myself up, but my arms would not obey me. “Azazel,” I whispered, but heard no answer. “Roshana,” I tried, in vain.

  I lay there waiting for him to come back and save me, while the smoke oozed out into the church overhead and the sound of distant singing rose and then faded. Strange lights bloomed on my retinas. Sleep seemed by far the easiest option. Azazel would come back for me, I told myself, as soon as he had healed; any moment now.

  He didn’t.

  I shut my eyes, because there wasn’t anything to see. The world faded.

  Briefly I re-opened them once, when the sound of footfalls paused in front of my nose. I was looking neither at bare, sculpted feet nor dusty Ethiopian sandals, but at a pair of very shiny, very expensive-looking lace-ups. This surprised me, faintly.

  One of the toes lifted, hooked under my shoulder and rolled me over onto my back.

  “Milja. Oh dear.” Uriel shook his head at me and tutted. The handsome silver fox of an archangel hadn’t changed a bit since I last saw him, and the lingering smoke even gave him an ethereal halo, as if he’d just descended from the clouds of Paradise. “What did I warn you?”

  I realized that he’d used his feet because his arms were full. He was carrying Roshana, though I only recognized her because I was familiar with her little chartreuse designer rucksack. All her lovely thick hair was gone and her face was a raw red-and-black mass of burns. I could see most of her teeth.

  Uriel looked annoyed, I thought. Not furious, not defeated. Perturbed.

  “I’ll tell them to go easy on you,” he said, and as I finally blacked out, my last vision was of him, an Armani-clad Richard Geresque psychopomp with Roshana’s body draped over his arms, climbing the stairs through the haze toward the light.

  11

  DELIVERED THEM INTO CHAINS

  I woke up in Hell, and it was full of women.

  I lifted my head, because the blanket under my nose stank of sweat and feet. That movement taught me that my body was working again, even if my head thumped and my throat was parched. I was lying on a rock-hard bed. The room was full of beds—I mean full, no gaps at all between the frames, like a great bed platform—and they filled it almost to the door, which was metal and stood wide open to admit brilliant sunshine.

  The place was hot and sticky and crowded and full of voices. I looked around, blinking the grit out of my eyes. As the smell of sweat receded I caught a whiff of open toilet. The room was crowded with Ethiopian-looking women wearing long skirts and headscarves, who sat on the beds and stood in clusters on the scant floor space. There were children here too, mostly really young ones. Babies shrieked. Toddlers tumbled around.

  What is this? A hospital? A really awful hospital?

  If the priests had dumped me at a hospital, I supposed I had cause to be grateful.

  Some of the women were watching me, now that I’d started moving. Their faces displayed a strange immiscible expression of both curiosity and exhausted disinterest, as if nothing I did could have any meaning.

  Slowly I rolled to the nearest edge of the bed and tested my wobbly legs on the floor. Quite a few children stopped what they were doing and stared at me, but I ignored them. My eyes were on the outside door.

  Where am I?

  I staggered out into the sunshine, trying to draw moisture to my dry mouth. I was standing in a rough courtyard, hemmed in on three sides by buildings which also stood open to show roomfuls of women. There was a standpipe with a concrete curb, and for a moment I was tempted to run for that, but I forced my attention to the fourth wall which framed a steel gate, which was closed. There were a few people in faded uniforms, hanging around watching the civilian women as they sat in the sunshine talking and working at small d
omestic tasks. There were men among the uniformed ones, the only men in sight.

  Guards. They’ve got guns. Oh no.

  “Azazel?” I croaked.

  Nothing happened.

  I moved toward the big gate, my legs sagging beneath me, and a guard detached himself from the flirtatious conversation he seemed to be having with a young woman in a bright headscarf. He intercepted my path and waved the muzzle of his shoulder-slung rifle lazily.

  I couldn’t understand a word he said anymore. My linguistic intuition had deserted me along with the angelic possession, but I did grasp the general gist, which was Not this way; fuck off.

  My brain caught up at last. This wasn’t a hospital. It was a prison.

  “Do you speak English?” I tried.

  He rattled off more Amharic and repeated the gesture with the gun, which made me back off, hands raised in placation.

  “Does anyone speak English?” I asked, raising my voice and casting around. The hubbub of voices faded a little as people paused to stare at me. “I need to speak to your captain,” I tried, turning to the guard, and backed that up with a lie: “I’m American. You can’t hold me here. I need to talk to the American consulate.”

  Not even the lie worked. The gesture with his fingers was utterly dismissive.

  “For God’s sake—” My voice rose with my frustration and fear. But the result was exactly counter-productive, as for the first time he frowned and this time he really barked.

  “Hiğği!”

  I flinched, then obeyed best as I could. “Azazel,” I said to the empty air as I retreated across the courtyard, arms clenched around my torso for comfort. “Azazel, please come and get me!”

  He wasn’t listening, it seemed, and my mouth felt full of glue. I was desperate for a drink, so I lurched toward the standpipe. A short length of hose hung from the faucet, dripping into the concrete basin, and I fixed my eyes on that luscious promise. It didn’t matter if the water wasn’t clean; I was betting that my witchy body wouldn’t succumb to any germs.

  I almost had my hand on the tap when I registered the shouting behind me and turned. It wasn’t the guard, but it was one of his uniformed female colleagues, waving her arms and gesturing angrily at me.

  “I don’t speak goddamn Amharic,” I said through gritted teeth.

  She tapped her wrist and made a fierce shooing gesture in my face, still shouting.

  Really? What the hell kind of place doesn’t let people drink in this heat? “This is insane,” I said. She didn’t appear to be waving a gun, so I grabbed at the tap, and that was when she slapped me hard across the face, hard enough to rock my balance.

  “Iyyy!”

  Well, I’d picked that up in the last few days—it just meant ‘No.’ Stunned, I clutched at my ear, which was ringing, and tried to blink away the red stars flashing in my vision. I didn’t resist as she grabbed my blouse and manhandled me away from the standpipe, shoving me back toward the center of the courtyard, and then gave me another couple of slaps for good measure until I cringed away and kept retreating.

  I couldn’t stand up to them. These people were armed, and I’ve never fought, not even as a child. I couldn’t fight, and I couldn’t argue, and I couldn’t even burst into tears. I didn’t understand what was happening and it scared the hell out of me.

  Azazel!

  She stopped hitting me when I ducked and held my hands up and made it clear I wasn’t going anywhere near the tap again. She stood and watched me as I shuffled back toward the room I’d come from, blindly seeking shade. She didn’t smirk sadistically or anything. She just looked self-righteous and a bit irritated at having had to put some effort into putting me in my place.

  Every tissue in my body howled for water.

  Where the hell was Azazel? Was he okay? And if he was, why hadn’t he come for me? From the position of the sun beating down into the courtyard it was near noon, which meant…oh, at least twelve hours since the fight under Bet Golgotha. That was easily long enough for him to heal up and come back. And this place wasn’t like the monastery in Montenegro; it wasn’t consecrated ground, surely? So he ought to know exactly where I was. He ought to be able to hear me when I called his name.

  Thoughts churned through my dehydrated brain. My fallback champion in a crisis was supposed to be Roshana—but she was dead. Maybe. My brief glimpse of her burnt body hadn’t been enough to confirm that. But if she wasn’t actually dead then she had fallen into Uriel’s clutches which meant he knew what she was and she’d be dead really, really soon. Uriel would stop at nothing to recapture Azazel. I didn’t want to imagine what was happening to her now.

  There was no third backup plan.

  Shit, this situation was disastrous. What the hell was I supposed to do? Where was Azazel?

  I returned into the crowded, stinking barracks and the bed I’d woken up on. Another woman was sitting on it now, dandling her baby, so I perched on the very edge. At the other end of the room a squabble had broken out and several women were screaming at each other. I bowed my head, not wanting to look, not wanting to be a part of this. I was trying not to panic.

  I touched the side of my face, feeling the puffy swelling around the orbit of my eye. A lock of scorched and stinking hair crumbled when I ran my fingers through it.

  The kick caught me in my back right over my kidney, and knocked me off the bed onto the dirt floor. For a moment I had no idea what had happened, and then I managed to look up and see the mother’s barefoot sole pointed at me—before the agony surged so fiercely that I couldn’t focus on anything else at all. I half collapsed, keening with pain. I could hear myself swearing in both English and Montenegrin. Lights flashed behind my eyes.

  And when the tide of pain receded at last, it revealed a long red shore of rage. What the hell were they doing treating me like this when I’d never done a thing to any of them?

  When Azazel comes for me I’ll…

  And I pictured with avidity the whole prison levelled to smoking ruins and burnt corpses. The guards and the prisoners alike, the mothers and their skinny little babies, the deranged old crone sitting over there talking to herself, the lumpen teenager banging her forehead repeatedly against the concrete wall—all of them, without exception. I wanted to teach them a lesson. In that moment I wanted to kill them all.

  I’ll show you bitches.

  Then I caught myself. A vertiginous shame at my fantasies oozed up from the depths, though I resented it because it felt so much less comforting than the rage. I had no idea what these people had been through. I had no idea what transgressions or misfortunes or injustices had confined them here. The red judgmental rage—what right did I have to that?

  Is this what having Azazel inside me does?

  Is this what the righteous wrath of angels is like?

  I couldn’t cry, so I dry-heaved.

  When I looked up, there was a cluster of women standing in front of me. They looked like any of the other inmates, thin and shabbily clad, but it was obvious that one of them was the boss and that she was giving another—a young woman in a red headscarf—instructions. I stared blearily.

  Were they going to attack me? Was it safer to defend myself or just take it?

  Oh crap…

  I wondered if I was in any state to get to my feet and fight back. My body was on fire with pain already. I grabbed the edge of the bed and tried to pull myself upright.

  The girl with the red head scarf took a half-step toward me. “What is your name?” she demanded.

  For a moment relief was enough to overwhelm my pain. “Milja Petak,” I groaned.

  “You are American?”

  “Yes.” Again with the lie, but I had vague thoughts that the USA might have enough international clout to tip the balance in my favor. More than a small country in Balkan Europe, anyway. “Thank God you speak English. I thought… What is this place? Where are we?”

  Her lip curled. “This is Sekota Prison. Why are you here, feranji? Why did they put you in here
?”

  That wasn’t the easiest of questions to answer. “I behaved badly in a church,” I admitted, hoping that wouldn’t sound too reprehensible.

  “In a church?” Her eyes narrowed. What did you do?”

  “Nothing much…” Lies lies lies. If they knew they’d kill me.

  “Where?”

  “Lalibela. Are we far?”

  She relayed this in Amharic to the other women. Then she laughed in my face. “Stupid tourist! You come here and think you can do anything you like? And now you will get away with it because of your white skin and your passport? Hah! This is our country, not yours.”

  I didn’t answer that one, couldn’t even meet her eye. What could I say to defend myself? I’d murdered people, hadn’t I?—or brought in the agent of their death—and I had expected to get away with it, because I had an angel on my side and because might makes right.

  She held out her hand. “You have a passport?”

  I shook my head. The last time I’d seen my passport it had been going into a hotel safe in my cousin’s room in Montenegro. Since making it back to the States I hadn’t bothered to get a replacement. Azazel doesn’t have to pass through border control, after all. “It’s gone. I need to speak to the prison governor. I need to get out of here.”

  She just sneered at that. “Of course!”

  “I need a lawyer!”

  “Maybe I can speak to someone. Have you got money for me?”

  I patted my pockets, knowing it was in vain. “Money—no, not on me.” Someone had removed my jacket while I was unconscious; that jacket with all the useful pockets that held my money and my camera and everything I needed, down to my goddamn emergency toothbrush. It felt so unfair. “If I can get out of here I can get you money,” I promised desperately, though even that probably wasn’t true. Where the hell I’d find an ATM around here I had no idea. It was dawning on me just how alone I was, and how vulnerable.