by Rebecca Lim
I should have seen it coming; it had already been foretold by Azraeil himself. He had touched the side of Lela’s face, marked her as his own. I’d misread everything — had thought Azraeil was to take Mrs Neill and some stranger. The two to be reaped at the same instant. Not a stranger, I realise now. Lela. Mother and daughter.
And I’d dismissed Ranald all along when I should have seen … Because I did see, but did not understand.
‘Oh, Lela!’ It is Justine, crying tears of salt over Lela’s mortal wounds.
Someone cups the side of Lela’s face and I imagine it is Azraeil come for us. He picks Lela’s body up off the cold, linoleum-tiled floor, cradling it tenderly against his broad chest. And I feel a warming pain in my extremities, in my left hand, as if it comes not from me but from his touch.
‘Mercy,’ he says into Lela’s blind eyes.
But I am not blind; I am not deaf. I may be trapped within Lela’s body but I know that voice. It is not Azraeil, after all. But Sulaiman.
I say his name, my lips moving soundlessly, and in the saying realise that I know him. Not just Sulaiman inside, no. Lela’s eyes may have failed, but not mine. When he holds me to him, I see him and know him and remember that we were friends once, years ago.
He is one of the Eight. And his name is Gabriel.
Some know him as Cebrail, as Jibril, as Gavriel, as Jibrail. He is known by many names, the herald of mysteries, the light and the mirror. He has been hiding the brilliance, the pure energy, of his being within another. All this time, he was here. In plain sight.
Though he can take any form he wishes at any time, I realise now. For he is a shape shifter of extraordinary talent, able to make of himself anything under heaven. As Uriel is, as Luc is, too.
As I was, I comprehend suddenly. And am no longer. I feel a stab of intense sadness at the thought.
‘Te gnovi,’ I gargle audibly through the blood in my mouth. ‘I know you.’
His touch is like living fire. It’s almost enough to revive the dying. Almost. But Lela is marked for death and even Gabriel cannot resurrect the dead. It is not within the compass of his powers.
He was my friend, once. Like a brother. My protector and my champion. And I loved him dearly. The only ones more dear to me were Luc and … Raph, I remember with a start.
Instantly, Raph is standing in my mind’s eye. The physician, the healer. Tall, pale, broad-shouldered, like something out of a classical painting. Sable eyes, obsidian hair, every single strand straight, even and perfectly the same, wortherittle too long for fashion. A strong face that is all angles and planes, with a straight nose, a mouth made for laughter and compassion. Skin of a pale ochre colour, like desert sand, the burnished surface of an alien star. White raiment so blinding that its outline is indistinct. Like a living statue, a being of pure fire, youthful in aspect, yet ageless.
And then time seems to stand still. And everything with it. Save for Gabriel and me.
‘I warned you,’ Gabriel says. ‘I warned you, but you would not listen, and now you see what transpires when human emotions are allowed full rein. Jealousy, violence, rage, death. Why will you not stay your hand as we have counselled you repeatedly? Why must you always act? With heart foremost and not mind?
‘Your beloved, Luc, is a liar,’ he continues as I look upon his countenance with longing and regret. ‘Nothing he does, or directs you to do, is intended to be straightforward — you have drawn that human boy here for nothing but the purpose of sorrow. Agony, fear, complexity, misery, pain and corruption, these are Luc’s preferences in all dealings, and his bedfellows. You would do well to heed me now, as you never did in the past. Now, more than ever, Luc seeks you, and you may not let yourself be found. Everything hinges on it. You have not been — how do these humans put it? — keeping your head down. Do nothing, Mercy. Just survive. That is the best we can hope to offer you.’
‘What if I wish to do more than nothing?’ I cry. ‘Do more than merely … survive? How could you think that I’d be content to “live” like this? I want out. Now. I’ve had enough. Life is about choice, remember?’
‘It isn’t possible.’ Gabriel’s voice is regretful. ‘If absolute freedom were restored to you, the outcome could not be guaranteed. And it must be; everything hangs on it. I cannot say more on the subject. The less knowledge you have, the better. You were always … dangerous, unpredictable. As much as your paramour was and ever has been. And you’ve only grown more so. You’re not supposed to be sentient. You’re not supposed to have overcome all the obstacles we have placed in your way. That wasn’t part of the plan.’
‘I … don’t … understand,’ I rasp.
Gabriel’s smile is rueful. ‘You’re not supposed to. It’s a … miracle that we’re even having this conversation. I didn’t think I’d ever hear your voice again, in any lifetime, Mercy. Oh, and I hear you — it is undeniably you, despite that human shell you’ve been forced to assume. Uriel was right: beyond all understanding, despite all our safeguards, you’re back.’
‘I’m not back,’ I snap, sudden anger choking my voice. ‘I’m like Frankenstein’s monster; a golem set at the city gates, howling at the sky. Shambling, mindless, half alive.’
Gabriel’s tone grows unexpectedly gentle. ‘So much more than a mere golem, Mercy. Think of Lela, Jennifer, Lauren, Lucy, Susannah and Ezra before them — what great change you wrought in each life. You’ve shown compassion even for Justine, who has never been shown compassion by anyone, even herself.’
‘I liked Lela’s life,’ I mutter. ‘It was so simple. Why couldn’t you have just let me stay, grow old …’
Go with Ryan, I finish, for my ears alone.
Gabriel’s voice is harsh. ‘Raphael is the architect of this plan; raise your complaints with him. I argued against it from the start. To go from absolute, unmitigated freedom to … to …’ His arms tighten about me. ‘I would rather have been put to the sword than endure what you have. In all seriousness, it was not possible for you to remain in one place for too long. We had to move you; have had to keep moving you. Could not leave you as Ezra, as Becky, as Yael, Menna, Saraswati, any of that legion we have been forced to use — all good, blameless lives. Knowing what you’re like, what you’re capable of, Luc would still have found you. The only other option was to have you bring Luc in on your own, and either let us deal with him or have you slay him yourself. You were fully justified in doing so, but you considered it the ultimate betrayal.’
Slay him? Slay Luc? Ultimate betrayal? What did Luc do to justify death at my hands? I love him, would never wish him harm. There is that ache again, inside, when I think of us, in our place, the whole world wished away, the whole world we two, and we two alone.
‘Even after everything Luc’s done to you,’ Gabriel continues, ‘you were too … wounded, too numb, to understand which was the best course, let alone raise your hand against him. It took a millennium just for us to find you, then another for you to properly heal.’
Gabriel and Uriel might believe me to be ‘back’, but there’s still a blank, dark sea at the core of my memory that refuses to yield up its secrets.
‘Though you’ve proved you’re good at betrayal,’ Gabriel adds without bitterness or explanation. ‘No, on balance, this has probably been a more than fitting punishment. Free will comes at a price. You’ve been forced to learn over and over again what it means to have none, which must be especially … testing in your case.’
A stinging anger rises in me that we are debating questions of philosophy while Lela Neill lies dying.
‘You’re wrong,’ I say. ‘Uriel, too. Humans exercise free will every moment of their waking lives. How do you think Ranald died? He chose to kill himself, which has to be the ultimate expression of one’s free will — the freedom to destroy oneself.’
Gabriel laughs mirthlessly. ‘Uriel did mention your views hadn’t changed, had only … radicalised. People like Ranald are expendable, fodder — easily constrained, easily derailed. Any of our o
rder, any of Luc’s, from highest to lowest, may command them. They are spoilage and excess, weakness and vice, irredeemable, unrepentant, low, worthless. Eventually, that which defines them devours them. If there is any free will there — and I don’t believe it for a second; they were never made in from n>our image — it is the will to have one’s will enslaved. To cede control. That is hardly what I would term free.’ He almost spits. ‘Love life? Revere it? They are no better than wild animals.’
‘When I knew you,’ I say in confusion, ‘you were not so …’
‘Harsh?’ Gabriel’s laughter sounds forced. ‘I’ve observed and reflected upon humankind … oh, it seems like time without end. All the terrible wrongs they perpetrate on themselves and on each other, their wanton, moral blindness, make me question even my own purpose.
‘But enough prevarication; it is time for you to go. I can tell from your face that you know exactly what I mean. It is no longer wise for you to remain here. Any thought you had of “saving” this one, you may set aside. Forget her. Forget any of these flawed vessels we procure for you.’
‘Cut me loose?’ I plead, not believing for a second that he’ll do it.
Gabriel’s voice is weary, tender. ‘You know I cannot do it. Do not ask it of me,’ he says regretfully.
Uriel had said the same thing to me, when I was Carmen Zappacosta.
‘You were always good at running the party line,’ I reply bitterly.
‘And you turned from us and condemned yourself,’ Gabriel snaps. ‘You think we have little better to do than to keep you safe?’
I feel the air between him and me begin to supercharge with energy, begin to burn like dry tinder.
‘Don’t make me angry, Mercy,’ he warns. ‘You are in no position to win any argument you enter into with me today.’
‘Prove it.’ The challenge in my voice only intensifies the lightning in his eyes. ‘Prove that the Eight have been behind my … condition all this time. You say I can’t trust Luc? I can’t trust you, either. If I believed you, if I could remember how the hell I got into this mess, then I wouldn’t fight this … situation so hard. I’d find it easier to do … nothing. Let myself be blown from one place to another like the waves, like the clouds.’
‘Then believe this.’ Gabriel’s voice is as the wind ghosting through ancient pines; a perfect storm building rapidly out over the ocean. ‘For it is as Uriel told you. It has always been for you, always. This is how it was for you, and how it can never be again. Believe it and mourn.’
Chapter 21
In that instant, Gabriel collapses into a towering cloud of fine, silver mist above me, swirling and dense, taking all the heat with it. As I fall to the floor, I look up into the lightning at the heart of that cloud and it falls upon me, like a rain of mercury, a rain of fire, and engulfs Lela, me, us.
Consumes us. Becomes us. Three-into-one.
Gabriel moves through — like a swarm of raging locusts, like the Holy Ghost itself — and I feel, as I did in my dream of Ryan, our separate strands, all there. We are wholly distinct, although somehow loosely contained together in the one vessel. Lela is in there, like a locked box, a closed circuit, her soul so twisted and hooked in deep that I can’t find a way to break through to her. She can’t free herself; she can’t slip the knot. And there is a knot, I’m certain of it. I can feel us, her and me, anchored inside her body by bonds no human being could hope to sunder.
The pressure builds and I feel every cell, every nerve ending, in Lela’s body convulse. There’s a vast electrical storm inside us that is more potent than anything a mortal alone could withstand. It burns through the veil of time itself so that I see, I see —
— myself and Luc, a shining multitude at our backs, the Eight arrayed against us, holding their instruments of power aloft, a shining host behind Them, stretching farther than the eye can comprehend. It is what Uriel showed me before: the two of us the epicentre of something vast, a conflagration waiting to happen — but seen through Gabriel’s eyes.
I feel a shock when I behold my golden beloved again, as if the moment is now and not some long distant past that has already slipped through my fingers. Luc’s beauty, his terrible power, is piercing, and when I see myself through the lens of Gabriel’s gaze, my left hand grasped tightly in Luc’s right — so tall, pale and luminous the two of us, even amongst that shining throng — I know that, in that moment, I was invincible because I was under Luc’s protection.
For he was the highest ranked of them all, whispers that small voice inside. Or so he claimed for himself.
Luc and me, me and Luc, proof against all the world.
What happened to us?
Then I see a steep, distant mountainside — in Greece? Tibet? Russia? — inaccessible to all save the most foolhardy; the soil scorched for leagues around, every tree, plant, animal and rock in the vicinity of the deadly crater upon one lonely slope utterly destroyed, reduced to ashes. That term they use on news bulletins everywhere these days pops into my mind: collateral damage.
I see Gabriel combing souks, markets, fairs, uprisings, gatherings of every form and description in a thousand cities that will never live again. In search of something, someone — me? I sense his frustration, his growing anger, how he almost tears down the physical world in his search — leaving in his wake unnatural storms and weather patterns, random lightning strikes that devastate all. Like me, he is not always the most … even-tempered.
Then he takes us into a series of chambers deep beneath the streets of an ancient human city. It is a place truly out of nightmare: both crypt and ossuary, piled high with centuries of the jumbled dead. Walls, floors, ceilings all carpeted with bones — grinning skulls, femurs, tibias, pelvic girdles; full skeletons arranged in grisly tableaux; everywhere the bodies of the ancient dead laid out on marble tombs, arranged in sepulchres in the seeping walls. The smell of decay, mildew, waste, the dust of ages, is thick in the air, which is itself alive with the sounds of running water, of rats and mice, of creeping, chitinous life.
In this hellish domain stand seven men, unnaturally tall, preternaturally beautiful, youthful, unmarked, ageless, each like a beacon, a lighthouse, unto himself. They have no need for external illumination, for each is a being of pure fire, casting no shadow.
They are gathered about a stone table, discussing in low voices the remains laid out upon it. Only one is missing from their number: flame-haired, emerald-eyed Gabriel, who steps now into this chamber, which is the last in a series of echoing rooms so deep within the earth that mortal man has surely forgotten them.
‘Brother, well met,’ says the being I knew as Jeremiel, silver-eyed, auburn-haired, with a voice like exaltation. It sends a shiver through me to see him again, to hear him, though the words he speaks are already dust and memory.
I see Uriel there, too, one eyebrow raised sardonically as he says, ‘You took your time, brother.’
Gabriel ignores him, asks of Jeremiel eagerly, ‘Can you be certain …?’
In answer, the circle of men, of creatures more than man, part to allow Gabriel into their midst. What I see on that marble dais — twisted, blackened, shrunken — brings a ringing scream to Lela’s blue-tinged lips that wrenches me out of memory into the present.
And I see that my left hand is afire, the flames fully visible though it is daylight.
I hold my burning fingers up to my face, and my cries of anguish echo off the walls of the Green Lantern, breaking against the still forms of all the humans that surround me. I feel the heat of the flames bleed into the air, but the pain is only a ghostly trace of the original agony that once almost consumed me. Of that agony I felt when I woke to find Them standing over me, judgment in Their eyes, every one of Them, all those years ago.
Where did the time go? Where was Luc when I begged Them to put me out of my misery in that grim realm of the dead, and They denied me? Forced me to live.
The full horror of that memory, of what I was reduced to, assails me again and I cannot spe
ak the words, though I think them. Why didn’t you do it? Why didn’t you put me down like a dog?
As if in answer, I feel Gabriel surge through Lela’s dying frame, as though he has become reduced to his base particles, like some kind of sentient gas, a storm front of liquid fire, of inexorable energy. He leaves no physical mark of his passing, but, like a swarm of raging locusts, like the Holy Ghost itself, he has eaten away at the foundations of my absolute, unshakeable faith in Luc, and now there is doubt there, in my gaze, where before there was none.
Who lies to me? Who lies?
He leaves us and coalesces rapid into his human form. I take a great, heaving breath, coughing and gasping, no longer racked by the torment of spiritual possession.
The being that is Gabriel gently lifts me into his arms again. ‘So you see,’ he utters sorrowfully, ‘how easy it was to carry you out of that place and devise a means of hiding you inside a vast array of human lives over many, many years. You were nearly spent when Selaphiel located you. While it is true that we want to keep you and Luc apart, it is not true that we wish you … dead. We were simply forced to find a means of shielding you from Luc’s attention, of throwing him off your trail. He was looking for you in all the places we had been, and we have only managed to stay ahead of him all these years because we Eight united in this purpose almost as soon as you were … lost to us.’
Is that pain in his gaze, I wonder. Why would he have cared if I was lost? Why must Luc and I — star-crossed lovers, if ever such a thing existed — be kept apart?
Gabriel frowns. ‘The only flaw in Raphael’s plan has been that strange continuing connection you have with Luc — as if he marked you in some way that cannot be seen by any save him. It is especially strong when you are asleep, when the linkages between soul and body are at their weakest. When you are at rest, he has access to your thoughts and pursues you across all the hours of darkness, only to have that connection snatched away at daybreak.’
