by Tad Williams
The last thing they placed on the floor of the dark room—it looked like the same warehouse floor where Bald Thug had met his untimely but probably richly deserved end—was not much bigger than a corgi dog. It wasn’t a dog, though, it was a human baby. We could hear its thin cries, the hoarse, hitching sobs of a child who’d been crying a long time.
“I cannot watch,” said Halyna and turned away.
I wish I’d done the same, but instead, I watched it all. One of the robed figures lit a fire in a trash can lid. None of us made a comment now, except for sharp intakes of breath when the knife came out, and helpless noises of disgust and horror when one of the masked men slit the child’s throat and drizzled the dying infant’s blood into the flames.
I wanted to kill the Nazi bastards so bad now, I wished I’d gone into their place with C4 strapped to my chest and taken the whole floor out in a blast of cleansing fire, even if it meant I went with them. But I hadn’t. I’d played with them like they were just punks. I hadn’t thought them worth my attention beyond that. My bad.
So I kept watching their miserable, badly shot little video.
It only got worse after that.
twenty-three
shadow swimming in light
IT WAS so bizarre, watching it happen in that tiny little window on a laptop computer screen. It almost felt if we were spying, as if this were happening right now and we were kids staring through a keyhole, trying to find out what grown-ups really do.
“Is horrible,” said Oxana. The child had stopped moving, and was tossed to one side like an empty bag.
“Who are these people?” Wendell asked.
“Neofascist crazies,” I said, “but they clearly have bigger ambitions than just making the trains run on time. They’ve been spying on me for weeks. They think I know where Eligor’s horn is hidden.”
“Is this really the Eligor we’re talking about?” Wendell asked. “Grand Duke of Hell?”
“You know him?” Clarence was surprised. I guess he thought only crazy angels like me dabbled in this kind of stuff.
“I know about him, just like any American GI used to know who Himmler or Goering were. He’s one of the worst there is.” Wendell looked at me. “What do they want his horn for?”
“No idea,” I said. “I suppose they could be working for Eligor, but I can’t imagine him hiring a bunch of clowns like that. He’s too smart.”
“And do you have this horn of his, or know where it is?” Wendell watched me, daring me to explain what an angel might be doing with such a thing.
“No. But I want it for reasons of my own. Good reasons,” I told him, stung by his doubtful look.
Clarence leaned over to Wendell and said, in a loud, theatrical whisper, “Girl problems.”
“It’s nowhere near that simple, damn it! But I promise you that it’s connected to everything else going on here, that my reasons are honorable, and I want these murdering fascist fucks not to have it almost as much as I want to have it myself.”
“What happening now?” asked Oxana, who had barely been listening to us. “Is all dark.”
I turned back to the laptop. The little rectangular window had indeed gone black, as though Uruk’s little snuff film had ended. But it only stayed that way for a moment. Then something began to grow in the darkness.
At first it was only a bloom of yellow light, pulsing slowly on the floor around the smoky fire. Blood smoke, I reminded myself. Blood of an innocent. But then it began to rise, more like fog than light, and as it gradually grew into a column of shifting, sickly yellow, I could see that something crouched at the center of it, where the fire had been. That something was barely touched by the surrounding glow, its shape distorted and wavering as if this were being filmed beneath the ocean, or on another planet where the pressure was a thousand times greater than here. The light rose in a circular yellow smear until it became a single, unbroken column, a pillar of poisonous-looking vapors.
The thing that crouched inside the light was huge, and blanketed in shadow. I could see no obvious shape to it except that at the top of the mound of darkness two narrow slits blinked, gleamed. Eyes. Then the mouth sagged open. “Who summons me?” it said, in a voice like a cement mixer full of stones and offal.
I knew that voice.
Halyna had come back, drawn by our shocked faces as much as by the terrible, rumbling voice.
“So it’s you, you fat bastard,” I said.
Baldur von R. now came back into frame, kneeling beside the column of light, dwarfed by the thing he had conjured. “Sitri, great prince! You who are called Bitru, Master of Secrets! We summon thee! We bind thee! While you remain in our circle you will do no man harm!”
“Excuse me while I swear,” I said to Wendell and Clarence. “Fuck me sideways! I can’t believe even the Black Sun are stupid enough to make deals with Sitri. He’s as bad as they get.”
The figure in the column of light suddenly shifted, stretching in some places, shrinking in others, still a shadow-puppet but a little easier to see. It had the shape of a man, now, but with great hawklike wings and the face of some kind of cat.
“And what do you wish of me?” The deep voice sounded amused.
“Your help to throw down the mongrels and unbelievers! Your help to bring an age of purity back to the Earth, an age of power for those who truly deserve it!” I could hear the hitch in von Reinmann’s voice—he was terrified by his own success. I might have hated his slimy guts, but I didn’t blame him for being shocked. Performing a demonic invocation and having Sitri show up is like setting a mousetrap and finding you’ve caught a grizzly bear.
“And in return, will you perform a certain task for me?” The voice stayed the same, but the silhouette in the oceanic currents of light and wavering shadow stretched into something else—a tree with human fingers, but still with eyes of fire. Before von Reinmann could respond it shifted again, becoming the shadow of a crude, crooked chair.
The neo-Nazi leader was mesmerized by the changing shapes. “Of course, Master,” he quavered. “Of course, great Sitri! We will do anything you ask. You honor us with your trust.”
Sitri became a pillar of standing stone. “I honor you with my restraint,” the grating voice said. “One word from me and your souls would be strung like ribbons on the doors to outer darkness. Remember that.” This time the shift was more convulsive, and when it ended the shadow was swimming in the pillar of light, a thing of tentacles and beaks and trailing strands, part squid, part jellyfish. “You will find that which I desire, and you will bring it to me. To aid you in this, I will give you power over three servants, the Nightmare Children, the Boneless Ones, and most fearsome of all—”
The shape stopped speaking. For a long moment, nothing moved in the yellow light except a few strands tugged by some impossible current. Then the figure shifted again, suddenly and violently, stretching into a shape that seemed too long, too many-jointed and angular to fit into the slender column. It might have been a man made of broomsticks; it might have been a scarecrow built of long, thin bones.
“What is that?” it asked, and the harsh voice took on a colder, even more threatening sound. “What does that creature do?”
Von Reinmann looked over in the direction of the camera. “He . . . records this historic meeting, great Prince Sitri! For the glory of the Black Sun!”
“No.” A moment later a great blackness leaped out of the light, straight toward the camera. Every single one of us flinched. Halyna, who had been leaning on my shoulder, damn near got knocked on her ass. The monitor went black. The video was over.
For a long moment we all stared from the blank screen to each other. Then Clarence said, “I think I might have to be sick,” and staggered off toward the bathroom.
“And this is who you’re up against?” Wendell had lost much of his healthy color. He looked like I felt.
�
�Every fucking day. But not just him.” I turned to check on Halyna, but she and Oxana had retreated to the couch across the room and were whispering anxiously. “In fact, to be completely aboveboard, I don’t think Prince Sitri gives a damn about me at all. It’s Grand Duke Eligor he wants to damage. They hate each other. If that horn goes public, Eligor is in serious trouble with the rest of the nobles of Hell, so Sitri wants to find it.”
“But why?” Wendell closed the black video window. “What’s the struggle over the horn all about? Why is it even in circulation?”
“You’d better get yourself some coffee,” I said. “Even Harrison doesn’t know all of this. And when you know the whole truth, you may want to re-think getting involved. Like I said, these are some serious bad folks.”
“I don’t care if it’s the Adversary himself,” Wendell said. “They have to be stopped.”
“The Black Sun? Yeah, I’d be happy to take them out if the chance arises. But they’re not what matters here.”
Because though I could never make anyone else understand it, the only thing that truly mattered was getting Caz back. Demonic rivalries, Nazi child-murderers, angelic vendettas, none of it meant anything if I couldn’t save her.
“I feel it too,” she’d admitted to me. “I have since the first.” That was what mattered.
• • •
Once I’d laid it all out for them, Wendell and Clarence seemed so overwhelmed that I sent them home, sending two of the new untraceable phones with them. They looked like they’d been in a firefight, which wasn’t that surprising. I mean, it’s one thing to find out that things are different behind the scenes than you thought they were, another to find out that not only are things different, but that the truth is batshit crazy. We all, angels included, spend most of our time acting like reality is pretty safe, that the world is more or less familiar, and most difficulties can be dealt with simply by determination, hard work, and (if we’re sentimentalists) good intentions. But it just isn’t so, and sometimes it’s painful to be reminded.
The Amazons retreated to the bedroom after the angels left. When I heard the noises begin I thought they were taking comfort in each other’s bodies, but after a little while I realized that, while that was true, it wasn’t in the way I thought: They were sparring. At some point they must have changed to bladed weapons, because the tank, tank, tank noise of steel on steel filled the apartment. Our neighbors had no idea how lucky they were that Caz had insisted on thick concrete walls.
It was nearing midnight, and I was exhausted after one of the longest days I’d ever had outside of Hell, but I still had a few things to do. I didn’t want to wait for Fatback to be human-brained, but I did want to get him going on some of the new information I wanted, now that I’d confirmed that Donya Sepanta was Anaita. I especially wanted to know more about bugbears, or at least more about how to kill them. Also, I now had the ominous words of Prince Sitri to consider. “I will give you three servants,” he’d told the Black Sun crew. I already knew the Nightmare Children better than I’d like, but the bugbears, or as he’d called them, the Boneless Ones, were a lot more powerful than the swastikids. I didn’t even want to guess at what the third servant might be, but it was likely to be another escalation and I wanted to be prepared.
To my pleasant surprise, old Javier answered the phone at Fatback’s house. George was back in town, he told me, and was feeling much better for his stay in the valley. Yes, he’d let me ring through to voicemail, although if I just called back in half an hour, he said, I could talk to the boss in person.
I was simply too tired. I left a message for George, then, on an impulse, called Gustibus. One of the Russian nuns picked up the phone and informed me Gustibus had retired, which I hoped meant only that he’d gone to bed for the night. I asked her to have him contact me and gave her the number off one of the new phones.
I could scarcely keep my eyes open at this point, but I also felt a kind of jerky, wired restlessness that made me want to drink. That’s one of the things about booze that keeps bringing me back, like a man who can’t give up a woman who keeps breaking his heart: It shut my brain up sometimes when nothing else would. It sucked the jangle out of my nerves enough to let me sleep on some bad nights when sleep was the only thing that might help me.
That’s not an excuse, or rather it is an excuse. Yes, I drink more than I should, and if I didn’t have a very fit angel’s body which could heal a deep wound in twenty-four hours or less, I’m sure my liver would be in a jar somewhere in a medical museum, next to Rasputin’s famous kielbasa and Einstein’s deli-sliced brain.
• • •
I had just stretched out on the couch, hoping to watch some sports news or something that would shut off the parts of my brain the vodka hadn’t reached. Halyna came padding out of the bedroom in her socks, pulled on a hoodie, and went outside to smoke a cigarette. I had just decided that college football must be the second most over-discussed sport in the world—after golf, of course, which has no serious competitors—when Halyna came back through the door with a very weird look on her face.
“Do you know bats?” she asked.
It took me a moment to shift gears, but the baseball season was long over. “Bats? Like flying rodents?”
“Yes. Bats. Do you know them?”
“I know a little bit about them. Why? Did you see one outside?” I thought maybe she’d found an injured or sick one and was about to warn her about rabies, but the expression on her face was weirder than that. “What’s going on?”
“There is . . . bat on the fence. I think. And it is talking.”
For a full two seconds I literally couldn’t figure out what she was saying, what bizarre wrong-turn in her mental Ukrainian-English dictionary had taken her so far down the road to impossibility—then I suddenly realized what was going on. I leaped up and rushed to the door, pushing past her in my hurry. She followed me out into the apartment courtyard.
“There,” she said, nervously quiet. “On fence.”
Something was indeed hanging on the fence, and it did look quite a bit like a bat, except that one wing was much larger than the other, and the body itself looked more like some kind of slug, except with a lot of furry legs. As I approached, the little beast turned its head all the way around on its shoulders, so that it faced me even with its back toward me. It looked a bit like one of those tree-climbing, branch-tapping critters, a potto or a loris or something, if pottos and lorises were made of mucus and had one really large eye in the middle of their faces.
“You are the most stubborn, frustrating, self-absorbed man I have ever met,” the thing on the fence said in a voice that, despite the distortions of demon-throat and -mouth, was unmistakably Caz’s. “And remember, I’ve spent centuries in Hell, so I’ve met some pretty irritating men. And did I mention your insanely swollen idea of your own capabilities?”
“I’ll take this,” I told Halyna. “It’s for me. Long-distance.”
interlude: via snotgoblin
YOU ARE the most stubborn, frustrating, self-absorbed man I have ever met. And remember, I’ve spent centuries in Hell, so I’ve met some pretty irritating men. And did I mention your insanely swollen idea of your own capabilities?
For one thing, you are very, very hard on nizzics. The one you re-programmed, to use your modern word, is ruined. It sits on top of the candle flame all day, shivering and moaning. If you feel the need to reply, and I’m sure you will—because when have you ever kept your mouth shut, even when you needed to?—you can just burn a little white camphor under this one’s nose, and it will be ready for a new message. Please don’t do what you did to the last one. You have no idea how hard it is for me to get hold of these and get them to you.
Now here’s the important part: You CAN’T get me out of here, Bobby. Don’t even think about it. You had every piece of luck imaginable last time, but you still barely made it back to the world. Eligor w
anted something out of you, so you survived. That won’t happen twice. I’m serious. Don’t do anything. Let it go. We would never work out, anyway. In real life, you’d leave me, or I’d throw you out before a year had passed. We’re too different, and I’m not just talking about the Heaven and Hell difference.
Take care of yourself, you stubborn, terrible, wonderful man.
• • •
Later, sent back in reply:
• • •
• • •
Okay, it’s about two hours since I got your message, Caz. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find white camphor after midnight, even in Jude? I finally found an Indian grocery store that’s open twenty-four hours.
What do you mean, we couldn’t be together? Do you think I really like being who I am and living the way I live? I went to Hell for you, don’t you think I could learn to wash dishes and keep my mouth shut while you watched stupid reality television shows that you liked and I hated? I don’t claim to be perfect. There’s probably a sliver of room for improvement.
In fact, my number one goal these days is to try living like any old suburban working stiff. I’m not joking, Caz, I’m really not. I’d give my wings and halo—okay, I don’t have either of those, but you know what I mean—to be able to lie in bed with you all day, to make love and read the Sunday papers (if people still print actual newspapers). My bosses could tell me, “Thousands of souls aren’t going to get to Heaven if you leave your job,” and I’d say, “Yeah, sorry to hear it. Just send my severance package to my home address. I’ll be in bed for at least the next month.”
