The Prison of the Angels

by Janine Ashbless

  She shook her head slowly. Her cheeks were flushed.

  “The question is, where is he now, if you can’t find him? How is he able to hide himself? Can he have gone back to Heaven?” This suggestion was a bit of a stab, because Azazel had never been terribly clear whether Heaven was a place or a state of being or a spiritual status.

  “Not with Azazel inside him.”

  “So he’s here on Earth somewhere, right?”

  She nodded cautiously.

  “So he’s underground, or under cover somewhere, is that safe to assume? I mean, the Host always finds you two quickly when you come out in the open.”

  “Yes. That makes sense; I can’t see him anywhere.”

  “Could he be in a church?” Egan asked. “That would hide him from your eyes, wouldn’t it?”

  She put her hands in her hair and tugged at it, her irises whirling gold. “The moment he steps onto holy ground, the Host will see him. He is not loved by them. And now he has killed, and carries one of the Fallen within him. I do not think he will risk their disapproval.”

  “What if he were to possess a cat or something?” I asked. “To hide, I mean?”

  “Uriel?” she said incredulously. And, I couldn’t help thinking, a little incautiously.

  “He’s too snobby, right?”

  “Possession is a Nephilim trick.” She looked pained. “We learned it from our children; when they were slain they could take another’s skin and walk the world inside them. That would be—must be—forbidden to the Host.”

  “Like I said, he’s not entirely sticking to the rules right now.”

  “He has made of his own flesh a prison for Azazel,” she said firmly. “He must maintain that, unless he wants his captive to break free. He will be in material form.”

  “Okay, so—not in a church, and not in someone else’s body. But here in this world. Yet you can’t see Azazel?”

  “That…is more like scent than sight.” She whimpered. “But no. He’s gone.”

  “Then the Adversary, I’m guessing, has hidden inside one of the Watchers’ prison cells.” I felt mildly triumphant, as if I’d just demonstrated an examination equation on a lecture-hall whiteboard. “You and the Host can’t see in to any of those, right? They’re sealed. It makes sense that that’s where he’d hole up. They’re his seals so he can pass through them—we’ve seen that in Jotunheimen. So we have to search the prisons.” I felt an urge to stride about. “And you already know where they all are, don’t you? Azazel said you’d worked them all out!”

  She sat up hard. “Azazel exaggerated,” she said darkly, before vanishing from the room—leaving a scorched black imprint on the cushions that looked, I thought, a little like a winged figure.

  That wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting.

  “Okay, right,” said Egan, standing and glancing about as if he half-expected to see her hiding in the corner of the room. “Do you think she’s coming back?”

  I looked into the open palms of my hands, thinking how strange they looked, as if they belonged to someone else entirely. “What do I do if Azazel’s dead?” I whispered.

  Egan turned to face me, his lips compressed to a line.

  “This must be what you’ve been praying for.” I didn’t say it with any vehemence; the words seemed to have barely the strength to crawl from my throat.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All this. It’s worked out better than you could have hoped for. Samyaza’s out of the picture now.” Penemuel’s losing it, big time. “And Azazel’s…gone.” I sank down onto the broad arm of a chair as all the energy drained out of my bones. “Maybe he’s dead already. You must be pleased.”

  Egan frowned. “You’re right,” he said. “Or, you would be right, but you missed out one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You love him.” He cleared his throat. “And I might not like that, but it’s a part of you. It’s who you are. Before we even met, he was there already; right back when you were a kid he was already there.”

  Before that, Egan. He’s part of my family history, back to prehistoric times. He’s in my blood.

  “And I can’t excise that from you. I can’t tell you to get over it and move on. I can’t want you to be a different person. The Milja I know is… You.”

  I bit my lip.

  “I couldn’t pray for you to be torn apart.”

  My eyes blurred. I reached out one hand blindly, longing for his clasp—and at that moment, without warning, Penemuel reappeared carrying a globe.

  We recoiled from each other.

  It was a big old-fashioned globe, on a polished wood stand, that looked like it had come out of a museum somewhere. Sailing ships breasted the darkened oceans, wallowing alongside monsters of the deep. She dumped it in the middle of the rug, pulled a box of colored pins out of her pocket and began to stick them in the map. Her hands moved so fast that I couldn’t follow their blur.

  Then she stood back. “I know less than Azazel liked to claim,” she said grimly. “I made use of your Internet, I confess, and I worked out where our brothers were likely to be imprisoned, no more. There are necessary conditions. Places where humans have lived without interruption for the last five thousand years—and been settled, not nomadic. Places where there are legends of gods buried beneath the earth. Gods or giants, dragons or heroes. So this is my best guess, no more.”

  We moved in to see the results. Bright-headed pins studded the globe, but not regularly. By far the greatest cluster sprawled across Asia: China and India and down the islands of the Far East. A smaller cluster bristled around Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. I spun the globe with a finger. A sparse scattering in Central America. A single pin in the USA, on the North-West Coast. Whole landmasses stood blank.

  “The Pillar of the West reneged on his duty to protect his humans,” Penemuel said, rubbing her arms distractedly. “We still don’t know why. The Pillar of the South has been incarcerated for two millennia and unable to stand as guardian. Populations have been wiped out. The imprisoned have been forgotten in too many places. So many of my brothers must have died alone in darkness.”

  “How many are left?” I asked, a cold feeling in my stomach.

  “Less than a hundred, I think,” she answered. “Perhaps only sixty or seventy.”

  Sixty or seventy. Against a Heavenly Host four-hundred strong. The odds looked suddenly so much worse than I’d thought, and I felt my entrails knot up. Even if Azazel did free them all, how could they hope to fight back?

  The second War in Heaven was dead before it had even begun.

  “If you are right,” she said, her voice shaking with passion, “the Adversary might be in any of those places. Or hiding in one of the forgotten tombs. I have no chance of finding him. I cannot search them out, I cannot see the doors—and many, many of them will be on consecrated ground. If I set foot there the others will see me.”

  And you will have to go underground. Which you dread.

  “Where is the last place you would want to go?” I stuck my finger on Ethiopia. “He’ll have gone back there. The authorities have closed the site to tourists after that ‘terrorist firebomb,’ so we can’t help you look. We can’t sneak you in. You’d have to assault the prison on your own.” And you can’t bring yourself to do that, can you? “Lalibela.”

  She raked her arms with clawed fingers and made a noise like an animal in pain. “No!”

  “It makes sense.”

  “No,” said Egan, startling me. “You’re both wrong.”

  We stared.

  He put his hand on the globe and spun it slowly. “If Milja’s right, and he wants you, then he won’t have hidden where you have no chance of finding him. Not for any length of time, anyway; maybe just long enough for you to calm down and stop trying to carve him to shreds. He wants to talk. He wants to see you. He’ll have gone somewhere you both know, somewhere special. Somewhere with memories, where you met, where he shared a confidence…wher
e he begged you to come with him.” He met Penemuel’s eyes. “And he’ll be sitting there feeling massively sorry for himself, and waiting for you see the light and come to him. He’ll be somewhere he thinks is obvious.”

  I frowned.

  “Believe me,” he said.

  “Wait here!” Penemuel ordered him. Then she reached out a hand, grabbed my shoulder, and hauled me across the breadth of the world.

  12

  DOLINE

  It was the smell that hit me when I arrived; a warm night air heavy with wet soil and plant life that seemed to squeeze the winter air of Ireland right out of my lungs. For a moment I felt like I was drowning. I grabbed Penemuel’s arm for support and that turned out to be a good thing, because we were standing on the edge of a big boulder and it would have been a long way down if I’d lost my balance.

  A long, long way down. As I adjusted my preternatural sight to the starlight and saw what lay at our feet, I caught my breath. It was the maw of a sinkhole cave, almost perfectly round, fringed by sub-tropical forest and plunging straight down from pale limestone cliffs. It was at least a couple hundred yards across. Maybe bigger—it was hard to judge scale. I couldn’t see the bottom. Cicadas skreeked in my ears.

  “Where are we?” I asked. A long way east of Achill Island, I guessed, since it seemed to be the middle of the night here. And quite a lot further toward the equator.

  “These days, China,” Penemuel said. “It has been millennia since I came here. The landscape has changed. What can you see?”

  “Well, there’s a great big sinkhole about a yard that way. Can’t you see that?”

  She shook her head.

  “It must be sealed from your sight. That’s a good sign, right?” I tried to squint into the shadowy depths. “Is it what you were looking for?”

  “They call it a tiankeng: ‘heavenly pit.’”

  You used to meet here? Sneaky, Penemuel.

  “It’s quite a long way down,” I said unhappily.

  Penemuel’s fingers bit harder into my shoulder. “What if it’s a trap?”

  “It might be. Ow!”

  She slackened her grip a little.

  “I don’t think it is, though. The Adversary has freed you from the earth twice now. Ethiopia and Norway. Twice. I can’t see that he’d do that if he just wanted to trap you again. We should maybe just go with what he said; he wants to talk to you.”

  “You will have to go look for me.”

  “Well then,” I snapped, “you should have brought Egan. He might be able to rappel down or whatever.”

  “I want him safe at home.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  She glared at me, her eyes burning yellow. “You belong to Azazel,” she reminded me forcefully. “You will do whatever is necessary to save your Master.”

  Whatever? The implied threat made my insides run cold, but I bit my lip and nodded.

  She seemed to calm down a little. “As will I,” she added in a low voice. “It may not be pretty.”

  I wished she’d stop unnerving me. I tried to smile. “I can’t climb that, you do know. I mean, it’s physically impossible.”

  She took a deep breath. “Then we will go together.”

  I felt sorry for her, even if she was behaving like a bully. I could almost see the panic clawing at the back of her eyes and I knew that she was far more frightened of that darkness below than I was. The worst that awaited me was death; she risked eternity. “Let’s go then,” I said.

  She hitched me onto her hip like I was a toddler, and I wrapped my arms around her neck. I could feel her shaking. I could feel her tense for the leap.

  And then, before I could change my mind, we were hurtling outward through the night air and then down, down, down into the yawning throat of the sinkhole. I caught one glimpse of stars rushing up toward us from below, then I shut my eyes and just clung on.

  Our landing nearly jolted the teeth out of my skull, but at least Penemuel found somewhere firm to stand. I opened my eyes and saw the greenish stars again, then realized that they were fireflies looping and veering all around us. Nothing else was visible.

  It took a moment for me to remember I could see in the dark if I wanted, and another to adjust my eyes.

  We stood in our awkward embrace in a garden of moss and ferns. Faint bluish light streamed in from the circle of night sky far overhead. Tumbled rocks underfoot, the remains of the long-fallen cave roof, were blanketed with verdure and felt soft to my toes as I wriggled out of the angel’s embrace and found my own footing. She didn’t want to let me go, though; now she was the child and I’d found myself demoted to teddy bear. I had to pull myself free. As soon as I staggered out of her reach she wrapped her arms around herself and stared up at the sky, moonlight silvering her anxious face. I could see the yellow glow of her eyes.

  “You okay?” I whispered, but I couldn’t tell if she heard me. Her terror of this subterranean pit was undisguised and completely understandable. Equally clear and justifiable, to my mind, was her suspicion that we’d dropped into a trap. But what could we do about that? “Come on,” I said more firmly.

  She twitched her chin and the tremble ran through her whole frame. “You go look.”

  I sighed. “Alright; you stay here. I’ll just…”

  I didn’t bother finishing my muttered sentence. She wasn’t listening, after all. I picked my way cautiously over the mossy stones, spiraling outward to survey our heavenly pit. It was paradisiacal, now that I could see it; a tiny botanic Eden untouched by human sin. Ferns thrived in the still, moist air, carpeting the floor and hanging off the limestone walls. Toward the center of the circle, where daylight must be strongest, there were even small ginkgo trees twisting up from the cracks between the rocks. Luminous fireflies danced like enchanted lamps, casting their greenish light, and the stars overhead shimmered in answer. I could hear a stream running somewhere nearby and everything smelled of rain—in fact as I spiraled outward toward the rock walks, I could see water dripping off every overhang, catching the diamond moonlight.

  Uriel? For some reason I didn’t dare speak his name out loud, feeling as if it might trigger some catastrophe. Archangels might overhear. Traps might be sprung. Or maybe it was just that this place was so beautiful in its hush and its isolation that any change must be disastrous.

  Then I saw him. He was right at the back of the overhang, where the chamber belled out away from the shaft of light and the rock was bare, too shadowy even for moss. If it hadn’t been for my preternatural eyesight I might never have seen him at all, because he was very still. He lay reclined on one hip as if he’d collapsed there, under a thin waterfall of seeping rainwater. The rivulets fell on alabaster skin, because he was dressed much like he had done for Burning Man—leather trousers and no shirt—as well as into the hanging curtain of his hair, soaking it from silver to gray. His head was bowed, too heavy for his neck, so that all I could see of his face was the pulled line of his mouth.

  I stared. Angels can’t help but look beautiful, no matter what the circumstances—I suspect that if one were trying to beat me to death with a baseball bat, I’d die thinking ‘Wow, he’s hot’—but this was almost too much. My first suspicion was that the tableau had been arranged for Penemuel’s benefit, but then I realized that there was something about the crook of his shoulders and press of his splayed hand against his stomach that made me read pain in every line of his body. The water that fell upon him seemed to steam, as if he were inhumanly warm.

  I should have been filled with hot hatred and rage, but the serpent in my belly was cold.

  “Penemuel,” I said under my breath. Then louder, loud enough that she couldn’t fail to hear me; “Uriel?”

  Muscles jumped and twitched over his torso, and I saw his shoulders heave as if gathering for action.

  “What the hell’s going on, Uriel? You killed. You’re not allowed to kill people.” My words came out as icy as a Norwegian mountainside. Partly I was trying to distract him from running;
he usually couldn’t resist a chance to explain things to me. But it really did matter, and not just to a bunch of dead heathens. If Uriel wasn’t sticking to the rules then something very weird was going on, and we needed to know.

  And I wasn’t exactly in a position of being able to fight him myself, was I?

  He lifted his head and grimaced at me, blinking. Now that must be a sign of something wrong, I thought. His voice, when he found it, was hoarse; “Milja, my little shadow. Wherever I go, up hill or down doline, there you are snapping at my heels. People will start to talk.”

  That was hardly fair. Most of the time it was him pursuing me. I inhaled, tasting the bitterness of the words on my tongue. “Well. You’ve got something I want.”

  “Oh, of course. You want.” He pressed his hand harder against his stomach and I knew—with a flash of triumph—that I hadn’t been wrong about the pain. His face was etched with it, and I could see a faint ruddy light outlining his fingers, almost as if something in his entrails was glowing with heat.

  Azazel. My Azazel.

  “You’re just insanely greedy, you know that?” Uriel drawled.

  “Me?”

  “You’ve already got one poor besotted lover who’d roll over and die for you. Isn’t that enough? Why do you have to chase after another?” He bared his teeth, flecks of spittle flying with the effort of speech. “Are mere humans not good enough for you, that you have to have a Son of Heaven as well?”

  He has a point, doesn’t he? ‘A truth that’s told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent.’ My father had read William Blake’s poetry to me when he was teaching me English.

  Damn you, Uriel.

  “I’m sorry,” I said slowly, green poison in my voice. “I guess you can’t comprehend what it’s like to love someone. To feel like a part of you has been torn out when they’re kept from your sight. To ache for their presence. To be consumed by the thought of them night and day for whole years of your life. That’s just not something you understand, is it?”