Murder of Angels

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Come on, Sleeping Beauty,” he says, peeling back enough of the gummy, fibrous material that he can see her right eye and most of her forehead. “Wake up, Theda. It’s fucking showtime.”

  And then that single eye opens wide, almost all pupil at first, empty and hungry and glaring hatefully up at him. Walter jerks his hand away again as her lips part and a trickle of alabaster fluid leaks from the corners of her mouth. He stands up and steps back from the tub, because he knows that Theda can do the rest for herself. She coughs and more of the blue-white fluid drains from her lips.

  “Come on, little girl. The old woman out there has to take a leak.”

  “Fuck you, asshole,” Theda gurgles and shows him her teeth, so Walter kicks the side of the bathtub as hard as he dares; Theda’s cocoon splits open a little more, and the rotten-peach smell grows even stronger than before.

  “You better watch yourself, little girl,” Walter warns her. “One day you might not be so goddamned indispensable anymore.”

  “Hey, fuck both of you,” Archer growls, and she gets up off the bed, reaching for her jeans and sweater draped across the back of a chair. “There’s a fucking gas station down the street. When I get back here, the two of you better have your shit together.”

  And he wishes that she wouldn’t go, because he doesn’t want to be alone with Theda, doesn’t want to be alone in the motel room while the day winds down, and the shadows grow longer, and the girl they found in Stonington Cemetery slowly tears herself free of the tub. But he’s not about to ask Archer to stay, because she knows too much about him already, too many soft underbellies revealed, and, besides, she wouldn’t stay, anyway. He leaves the bathroom and sits on the bed, watching her dress and trying not to hear the sounds that Theda’s making.

  “We’ve only got about an hour and a half until sunset,” Archer says, pulling her raveling cable-knit sweater on over her head, then fishing her long hair out of the collar. “After dark, we might not have a lot of time to spare.”

  “Take your gun,” Walter tells her, and he reaches for the pack of cigarettes she’s left lying on the bed.

  “Yeah. Just get her out of there, okay?”

  And then their eyes meet, not something that happens as often as it once did, and for a long moment all the secrets they’ve shared and the secrets they will always keep from each other hang heavy between them.

  “I haven’t come all this way to fail,” she says and turns away. The first one to blink, and she steps into her jeans, left foot first, then right, trying to hide the doubt she wears like a murdered albatross around her neck, the misgiving he sees every time he looks at her. “I didn’t choose exile just so I could watch the Weaver’s handiwork from this side of the goddamned gate.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Clean her up, Walter. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” and she hands him the rest of her cigarette.

  “Just be careful,” he says again, and then Archer Day leaves the motel room without another word, shoes in one hand and her leather wallet in the other, her .38 hidden beneath the bulky sweater. And he sits on the bed while the monster dressed up in a girl’s skin sits in the bathtub, talking to herself and picking spiders from her hair.

  “Have yourself a good little nap, Vietnam?” Scarborough asks, and Niki looks up at him and the oil lamp on the chest of drawers, and then she rolls over so she can see the small stained-glass window on the other side of the bed. Shards of orchid and sapphire, cobalt and chartreuse, stitched together with lead solder to make some flower that she’s never seen before. The glass is dark, the design difficult to discern, no sunlight to bleed through the window and set the colors ablaze, and so she knows that it must still be night, or night again, and she’s slept through an entire day.

  “How long have I been asleep?” she asks.

  “Just a few hours,” Scarborough replies, and the chair creaks when he shifts his weight.

  “But it’s still night—”

  “You’ll get used to that after a while. Long nights, longer days. You’ll adjust.”

  “Where’s Spyder?”

  “So, how you feelin’, Vietnam? The doc, he said the wooziness should pass.”

  “I asked you where Spyder is, and please stop calling me that.”

  Scarborough Pentecost leans back in his chair, lifts the front legs off the floor, and rubs at the side of his nose. “Stop calling you what?” he asks.

  “Vietnam. My name’s Niki.”

  “All I’ve heard anyone call you is Hierophant, and I figured just about anything would be better than that. And Vietnam isn’t so bad. There was this great bar in Nah Trang, the Truc Linh—”

  “I’ve never been to Vietnam,” Niki says, lying down again because she’s too dizzy to sit up any longer. “I’m from New Orleans.”

  “Is that so?” and Scarborough leans forward so that the front legs of his chair bump loudly against the floor. “I’m from Boston, myself. But I spent a little time in New Orleans, on business.”

  “So how did you get here?”

  “Long story,” he replies. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

  “Scarborough, where’s Spyder?”

  “The Weaver,” he says and thoughtfully rubs at his nose again. “Right, well, she’s with Esme, down on the rampart above the eastern docks. I wouldn’t expect them back anytime soon. A warship showed up a couple of hours ago and dropped anchor in the harbor.”

  “A warship,” Niki says, and she looks fretfully back at the darkened stained-glass window again.

  “I get the impression you don’t really know what’s what around here, Niki, or what sort of hornet’s nest you’ve been plunked down in.”

  “I don’t even know where here is.”

  “Are you hungry? Eponine always has a big pot of something on the fire. Her cooking’s not half bad, most days, if you don’t mind the taste.”

  “Thanks, but maybe later. I need to talk to Spyder.”

  Scarborough Pentecost stands, and now he’s looking at the stained-glass window, too. His face is filled with a hundred thoughts that Niki can’t read, things that she can only guess at, but she guesses that he’s afraid and tired of being afraid.

  “It’s probably going to be a while before you see her again,” he says. “She told me to tell you that.”

  “That figures,” Niki whispers. “She just left me here?”

  “You’re to stay put, Vietnam, unless this thing with the ship gets too hairy, and then I have orders to take you and head for Auber and don’t look back.”

  “And where’s Auber?” Niki asks him. She vaguely remembers hearing the name passed between Spyder and the fish augur, Auber and a Madame Tirzah, but it’s only a word without meaning, two syllables signifying nothing at all. She thinks about shutting her eyes and going back to sleep.

  “It’s a city, a city on dry land, mind you, about three hundred kilometers northeast of here.”

  “And how are we supposed to get there?”

  “There’s a boat waiting for us. With a little luck, we’ll slip out of Padnée right under their noses.”

  “Padnée? Is that the name of this place?”

  Scarborough walks over to the window and opens it, cranks a brass handle and the pane slides up a foot or so, letting in cool night air and the faint smell of saltwater. “You’re starting to get that not-in-Kansas-anymore feeling, aren’t you, Vietnam? Maybe Narnia or Earthsea or Oz, but definitely not Kansas.”

  “I told you, my name’s Niki,” she says and sits up, moving slowly because she doesn’t have the strength to move fast; her head aches like she’s been drunk for at least a week.

  “Hell, you were lucky. I woke up at the Palisades all by my lonesome. Spent fucking days wandering through those rocks before I found the road to Padnée.”

  “Did you jump off a bridge, too?” Niki asks, and he shakes his head.

  “No, some stupid son of a bitch who didn’t know a gun from his dick put a bullet in my head,” and Scarborough make
s a pistol with thumb and index finger and thumps himself smartly between the eyes. “Like I said, it’s a long story.”

  Niki puts her pillow behind her back, and when she stops moving around the dizziness begins to subside again. “Are there a lot of us here?” she asks. “I mean, people who died there and wound up here.”

  “I don’t think so,” Scarborough says, kneels next to the open window and stares out across the rooftops towards the sea. “Just me and you, so far as I know, and the Weaver. But I’m not exactly sure she counts.”

  “Why not? Why wouldn’t she?”

  “She’s some serious mojo, that one. Sometimes, I think she’s almost as bad as the fucking Dragon, and we just haven’t figured it out yet. And, what’s more, Esme says she didn’t have to die to get here.”

  “Why’s that ship in the harbor?”

  “Looking for your sweet little brown ass, Vietnam. Now maybe you should stop asking so many damn questions and get some more rest. If the word comes to move, you’re going to need all the strength you’ve got. The doc said that hand of yours was pretty bad.”

  “Why would they be looking for me? What have I done?”

  Scarborough turns away from the window and smiles at her. “’Cause you’re the goddamn Hierophant, that’s why. And around here, that makes you one part Jesus Christ, one part hydrogen bomb. You and that philtre, you’re the Dragon’s worst nightmare.”

  Niki sighs and stares down at her hands, the right bandaged snugly in fresh white cloth. “I don’t have the philtre, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.”

  “You might know that, and I might know that, but the Dragon, all he knows is you’ve come to drive him out, send him packing.”

  “I have?” Niki asks, and she makes a tight, painful fist with her right hand.

  “That seems to be the case,” and then there’s a rumble like thunder, and the whole house shudders around them. Scarborough curses and cranks the window shut again. “Well, Vietnam, that would be our cue. The fuckers just opened fire on the rampart, and I bet there’s a landing party on the way. Do you think you can walk?”

  “Yeah,” she says, “sure,” though it’s a lie, and he brings her clean clothes and her boots, and helps her dress while the warship’s cannons roar and pound the walls of bone.

  Archer Day keeps her eyes on the sidewalk as she retraces the two blocks back to the motel, that squalid box for whores and junkies and drifters. Above her, the pale November sky is as bleak and unfamiliar as this whole goddamn city. Birmingham’s no uglier than most of the cities she’s seen here, but there’s something different about it, something worse, like a fat green worm burrowing inside a shriveled apple, or a malignant tumor hiding beneath malformed flesh. Something past black and mean coiled at the soul of this city, and seeing it, feeling it, makes her more homesick than she’s been since leaving the world where she was born. More weight to stand beside the knowledge that, no matter how the coming night plays out, whether she fails or succeeds, she can never go back; more weight that she might question the sacrifice she never thought to doubt until it was too late to change her mind. And maybe that’s always the way with martyrs, she thinks. Everything noble and glorious until your head’s on the block or the rope’s drawing tight around your throat.

  In the weathered concrete at her feet, there are faint impressions of leaves and pigeon tracks, frozen like the moment she let the red witches in Nesmia Shar lay their salt circles round her and mark her naked body with runes painted with the blood of innocents and beasts. It seems unthinkable that could be only four years past, her exit, the moment when the witches’ chant of discharge reached its pounding crescendo and the priestess pressed the obsidian blade of a dagger against Archer’s throat.

  Only four short years, but it might as well have been her entire lifetime and all that other time, that other world, never anything more than a hazy, half-remembered dream. On this day, in this haunted Southern city, she might only be a lunatic choking on false memories.

  “Lose yourself, wanderer,” the priestess whispered in her ear. “Forget everything but your quest, and your pain will be diminished.”

  And now, looking at the squalor spread out around her—cement walls and abandoned brick ruins, rusted, disused train tracks sprouting sickly weeds between their ties and the trash littering the streets—she knows that she is losing herself. The fabric of her being dissolved bit by bit in the acid dissolution of this place. I am to die for this, she thinks bitterly and kicks at a crumpled Taco Bell cup. How many people born here would lift a finger to save it, and I’m supposed to die for it.

  “You are brave, daughter, and you will shame us all with your forfeiture,” the priestess said, those words in the same instant that Archer felt the blade of cold volcanic glass break her skin, that first warm trickle down her neck. “Always, you will be remembered.”

  One meager life traded for an entire universe, that was the bargain, and, as Walter often says, it seemed like a good idea at the time. The wide-eyed acolyte of the red witches in their towers on the river Yärin and, in those days, she believed with a faith that she cannot now even imagine.

  “Someone has to stop the Weaver, or a world and all its life and beauty will die,” and Archer hadn’t even thought twice before adding her name to the lottery that would determine who would make the passage. A child with a head full of holy duty and naivete dressed up as courage.

  The trickle of blood pooling between her breasts, the seep before the hot flood. “The White Road lies before us all,” the priestess said, “and the gods will know you by your deeds.” And then she cut Archer’s throat from ear to ear, and her life sprayed out onto the temple floor, and her loosed soul spilled out into something else.

  And she was across.

  She found the man named Walter exactly where they’d said she would, not sane, because no one touched by the Weaver can remain sane, but not a lunatic, either, and she told him the things he’d been waiting so long to hear, and together they’d begun hunting for the surrogate. Walking the witches’ White Road and even then, even after the rapture of death and the horrors of resurrection, even after her first appalling view of this wilting Earth, even then, she still believed. But as the short days and shorter nights rolled over her, as she saw deeper into consequence and desperation, and they finally found the abominable child who thought she’d been chosen by a protecting angel—the child she and Walter had both lied to so that Theda would continue to believe that deceit—as this place soaked in through her skin, Archer Day began to see. And that sight led her quickly to regret, and now there are mornings and nights when she thinks this world and the Dragon deserve one another, that maybe the cataclysm the witches have sent her here to forestall is only simple fate.

  She has sat in motel rooms in Chicago and Manhattan, in Boston and Pittsburgh, and imagined city skylines set ablaze and the sun hidden behind black sulphurous clouds. It would be a mercy, she’s thought, again and again. It would only end their miseries.

  “You will be tempted to turn from the Road,” the priestess in the high tower above the wide green waters of Yärin warned her. “Truth will seem as lies, and lies will take the place of truth.”

  Archer knows that either she’s weak or the priestess was a pompous old fool.

  She looks up from the sidewalk fossils, and there’s a great fire-colored wolf crouched only a few yards ahead of her, blocking the way back to the motel. It curls its black lips to show her yellowed canines as long as her fingers. The hair along the massive hump of its shoulders stands on end, raised hackles to tell her not to move another inch, and a taunting growl begins somewhere deep in its throat. The wolf’s eyes are as colorless as ice, and its breath steams in the late afternoon air.

  “Harlot,” it snarls, and Archer reaches for the .38 tucked into the waistband of her jeans, moving as slowly as she can, as quickly as she dares. “I know you, witchling whore. You have come all the way here to do my master’s work.
He will smile on you for your services.”

  “You don’t know me, demon,” Archer tells it. “And I am nothing of your master’s.”

  “He will make you his whore, when the Weaver is undone. He may even show you the way home.”

  “Liar,” she whispers, her hand closing tightly around the butt of the pistol.

  “That’s all you want, child. He knows that. I know that, too. I smell it on you, that longing,” and the fire-colored wolf flares its nostrils.

  “Liar,” she says again. “All you are is lies.”

  “Soon, witchling, lies will be the only comfort left to you. You should learn to treasure them.”

  Archer draws the gun and aims it at the wolf’s broad skull. It laughs at her and takes a step closer.

  “What are you still fighting for, apostate? You’ve despaired. There’s no quest left in you.”

  “Then I’m fighting for myself,” Archer replies, and a delivery truck rumbles past, oblivious of the monster on the sidewalk. “If that’s all I have left, then that’s what I’m fighting for.”

  “An admirable purpose. Do your gods know this?”

  Her index finger tightens on the trigger, and the wolf smiles and raises its enormous head, baring its throat to her.

  “If you still had the courage, would I die, do you think?” it asks.

  “Why don’t we just find out, puppy dog,” Archer says, trying too hard to sound brave, too hard to sound like fear’s the very last thing she could even comprehend, when her hands are shaking and she can smell the piss running down the insides of her thighs.

  “You’re catching on, witchling,” the wolf growls. “But don’t catch on too slowly,” and it lowers its head again. “There’s no shame in being a puppet. Not if the right person’s pulling the strings.”

  And then the wolf is gone, and there’s only the sidewalk and the crushed Taco Bell cup, the wind and a few dry brown leaves rustling hurriedly past. Archer Day sits down on the curb, the revolver cradled in her lap, and cries until her head hurts and she can’t cry anymore.