by Tad Williams
“Yeah.” Then something clicked. “Her enemies.”
“What do you mean, Bobby?” Clarence asked.
I looked around, but with Walker’s departure most of the other inhabitants of the Third Way had turned from us, perhaps because they didn’t want to know what we were talking about. I could tell by their faces that they were frightened, that angels didn’t mean many good things to them anymore. “I think that’s it,” I said quietly. “She wants to be worshipped. I think that’s what Gustibus was pointing toward. As an angel, she was just one of many doing the Highest’s work, however important she might have been compared to you and me. But I saw her in her home, and if you want to talk about a five-thousand-year-old Persian-American princess, that’s our girl. And if she was going to be worshipped again, like in the old days, she didn’t want lumps and idiots doing it, she wanted the best and the brightest. Like these.” I made a small gesture to indicate the people around us. “She wanted the smart ones, the rationalists, the kind who back on Earth hardly even believed in Heaven.”
“Really? All this—just to be somebody’s deity again?” asked Clarence.
“You don’t get the goddess out of your system that easily, kid. Yeah, it makes sense.” I felt like a piece of the puzzle—only a small one in our present situation, but still a piece—had finally fallen into place. “Why else would she risk everything to build something like this? First of all, it takes balls, serious angel balls, to go against Heaven this way, not to mention bargaining with Hell. Why else would she strike out on her own and build what’s basically a colony? Because she wanted worshippers again, her very own. That’s what she’s done here. But it’s gone wrong, and so she’s pissed off.”
“Ha. Pissed off doesn’t begin to describe it,” Sam said. “She came in on a chariot of light. I didn’t see it, but Ed Walker did—it’s one of the reasons he’s so angry. She came in on her chariot. It was pulled by those two lions, but they flew. They were made of light and diamonds, and they flew. She came in like a Phantom jet and she scorched everything around the house. You saw that, I’m sure.”
“But she didn’t burn the house,” I pointed out.
“I think that’s because the Going-To-Mecca cube is in there, but I’m not sure.”
“Or because it’s her church.”
“Huh?” Sam wiped his hand across his face, wearily. “Sorry, say that again. Even us angels need sleep here sometimes, just like on Earth.”
“Haven’t you wondered about the way the house is built? Taller than it should be? That big tower? It’s a stealth temple. It’s where she expected to be worshipped.”
Sam pursed his lips. “Maybe, but I’m doubting she expects much worshipping now. Not after what she did. Those of us who weren’t there could still hear her, even from miles away, so loud her voice echoed in the mountains, demanding that we turn over the traitors.” He looked at me. “By the way, those traitors are you and me, buddy—but mostly you, I’m afraid. Still, I’m pretty sure she won’t deal too kindly with me, either. Besides me, the last two Magians still here, Kelathiel and Phidorathon—we called them Kiley and Fred—were watching the settlement, and she vaporized them, along with a couple of dozen poor souls who happened to be there at the time. The only good thing was that she didn’t stay long, that she didn’t hunt the rest of us down and wipe us out right then.”
“You’re right, that’s hopeful. It means there’s some limit to her power, either here or because of something back in Heaven.” I filed that one away. I still didn’t think we had a snowball’s chance in a game of Tartarus tennis, but I wasn’t giving up without some kind of fight.
A little while passed in silence, not the peaceful kind of sitting with old friends so much as the exhausted kind. Clarence and I hadn’t done much except to take a long walk, but seeing what Anaita had done to the place had hollowed me out, and I didn’t have much left. Also, I truly didn’t think we had much of a chance. It was a familiar feeling, in a way, like the hours before a major action back when I was in the Harps, especially after we lost our top-kicker Leo, and he didn’t get resurrected. It was all there—the doubt, the fear, the feeling that what you really wanted to do was start screaming about how unfair it was and never stop, or even just pick a direction and start running. But in the Harps we never did, mainly because everybody else was in the same position, and if you buckled, the whole wall might collapse and come crashing down. But, damn, the wall sure felt shaky.
“Anything else I need to know about the physics of this place?” I asked Sam after a while.
“What, you mean like, ‘You can avoid dying by jumping twice and then using your special Survival coin?’” Sam smiled sadly. “Ain’t a video game, B. This is pretty much just like Earth. Superior force beats weaker force. We don’t eat, and the souls themselves may not die, but they disappear and don’t come back if their bodies die here. We found that out after You-Know-Who blew our asses up. As the kid said, I’m guessing that the ones who got killed went back into real Judgement.” For a moment I saw the deep hurt he’d been keeping hidden. “God, I hope they did.”
“Yeah, but she’s got that wired somehow, too,” I said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t risk freeing all those souls. She must have some way to silence them about Kainos when they’re being judged. Maybe the same trick she used on me at my trial. Or she’s keeping them away from judgement altogether.” I confess I shuddered a little. “What was it like here before everything went to shit?”
“How do you mean?”
“What was the routine? Did the wicked witch visit often, when she was Kephas?”
“I’m sorry about that, Bobby. You were right about her. I just didn’t want to hear it. I’d put too much into the place. I let myself get conned into believing in something again.”
“It doesn’t matter now, Sam. I just want to know all the odds.”
“You think there’s something we can do other than just get barbecued like so much brisket?”
Clarence wasn’t saying anything, but he was clearly listening. I had come to like him enough that I was truly sorry I’d got him into this not-so-fine mess. “Who knows?” I said. “But I live in hope, so please answer the questions. The Mecca cube, for instance. Does it connect to anything besides Anaita?”
“Just Herself, as far as I know. She used it to send us messages, instructions, back in the days when we all believed in this. And we could call her with it if we had an emergency. She didn’t like that much—even then, when she was Kephas, she was kind of a pain in the ass about answering questions—but it always worked.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway. Do you still have your magic glove?”
He was a bit surprised. “Yeah. Tucked away in here.” He patted his crude jacket. “But I don’t think I can use it against her. In fact, I’m pretty damn sure of it, because Fred—Phidorathon—had one, too. All us Magians do. Walker said Fred tried to use it against her when she came. All that happened was that Fred burned up like a road flare, hand first, then all down him. At least it was quick. In fact, I might use it that way myself, if it comes to it.” He laughed, and for a moment sounded a bit more like the old Sam. “Better quick than slow.”
“Don’t do anything stupid. We’re not totally out of options.”
He gave me a look, mostly cynical, but with just enough interest to make me feel like a real bastard, because even I didn’t believe any of my half-baked ideas had a chance of working. Too many variables, especially variables as crazy as whether Eligor could be trusted. Yeah, that’s what I said. If we had even the tiniest chance to survive this, it would be because the archduke of Hell, who hated my guts and had already swindled me several times, would decide to do something that would help me. He’d accepted the deal I offered him in Five Page Mill, but that meant exactly nothing. In fact, since even if he fucked me again, Eligor himself would stay fat and happy, the odds were distinctly against his honoring
his promise.
“Options? Tell me,” Sam said.
“Is it safe? Can all these people be trusted?” Clarence asked.
It was a fair question, but as I said, none of the Kainos-folk seemed to be listening. Still, I beckoned Sam and the kid to get up and move with me a little farther away from the camp. It wasn’t until long afterward that I realized I never checked to see where exactly Ed Walker had gone.
“It’s like this,” I said when we’d settled ourselves against an outcropping some distance away. “We really don’t have a prayer—no pun intended—against our goddess friend if we’re just going to try to trade shots with her.”
“We’re not going to trade any shots, anyway,” said Sam. “You may have noticed that other than the Mecca cube, there isn’t any technology here that would make a medieval peasant scratch his head. We’ve got arrows, spears, clubs. Shit, we haven’t even got around to smelting bronze yet. So how are we going to fight You-Know-Who? This isn’t Kansas, but it isn’t the Emerald City, either. You could throw the world’s biggest bucket of water on her, and it wouldn’t do a thing.”
“I know. But I’m not just going to lie down and die, either. The bitch has been after me for months, sent that Smyler psychopath after me, brainwashed Walter Sanders and banished him to Hell—yeah, I know, kid, I haven’t told you about that, but guess what, she did. Oh, and she murdered a really nice young woman who was a friend of mine. And now she wants you and me on a stick, Sam. You too, Clarence, since you’re with us. She won’t leave any witnesses.”
“Harrison,” he said.
“Huh?”
“You promised you’d stop calling me Clarence.”
“Shit, yeah, I did. Look, if we survive, I promise I’ll do better.”
“That’s so like you, Bobby,” he said, but without too much heat. “Give a promise you know you won’t have to live up to.”
“The only kind worth making, my friend, the only kind worth making. Now, just let me spin out some stupid, hopeless ideas, and you guys can start shooting them down.”
“I’m too tired,” Sam complained. “Can’t I just tell you now that you’re full of shit, it won’t work, and you’ll get us all killed, so I can get some sleep?”
“Not a chance, big guy. We’re all in this for the duration, but it may go down as soon as the sun comes up, so we need to do our talking now.”
Sam sighed. “Shit. You probably won’t stop talking even if you do burn up.”
So, as the familiar and yet wildly foreign stars wheeled through the sky above us and the camp fell into silence and sleep, I explained to them the novel way I’d figured out to get us all killed.
Because who wants to die some boring, old-fashioned way?
forty-four
white on black
IT STARTED snowing during the night, swirling tiny white flakes that stuck in hair and clothing but never came thick enough to make drifts on the ground. Not until the wind rose, anyway. After that it all moved pretty quickly into what you’d expect in the hills in midwinter back home, and that’s basically where we were, even if this was a California that hadn’t known a human footstep until recently.
I was finding it hard to sleep, so I got up and wandered through the camp and out to the edge where I could brood by myself. As I stepped out of the last knot of Kainos-folk sleeping huddled together for warmth, I saw a lone woman standing sentry, several layers of cloth and skins wrapped around her, a spear in one hand and something I couldn’t quite make out in her other. I could see it, of course, because I have Super Angel Vision (a bit better than human normal, not really x-ray eyes or anything) but it was way too weird-looking to be any weapon I could think of. The sentry watched me approach without saying a word, but she seemed to make a small, strange noise as I passed. It took me a moment to realize it was the sound of her teeth chattering. I turned back.
“You sound cold. Can I take the watch for you?”
She stared. “You’re an angel, aren’t you?”
I had the feeling that we weren’t quite as popular as we used to be, but I told the truth. “I am. Doloriel.” I stuck out my hand. “But back on Earth I’m called Bobby.”
She nodded, clearly quite used to the phrase, “back on Earth,” but she didn’t look particularly thrilled to meet me. “An angel. Are you friends with Sammariel?”
“Years and years.”
She nodded again. “He’s from San Judas, same as I am. A lot of us early ones were, like Ed.” Behind the very red tip of her nose was a young, intelligent face—everybody was fairly young here, at least in appearance—and a pair of dark eyes that looked like they’d seen things their owner wished they hadn’t. “You know Ed?”
Now it was my turn to nod. “Only now, in the flesh, but yes.”
“Yeah, everybody knows Ed. He’s kind of the mayor. Well, not really—that’s Nathalie Weng, but only because Ed said if we elected him he wouldn’t do it.”
I had become a little uncomfortable about Edward Walker. It was hard to reconcile the quiet, angry man I’d met with the well-known and apparently popular scientist and businessman whose life I’d studied. Still, there wasn’t really any precedent for what he and the others had been through. “And you are?”
“Oh, sorry.” She stuck her spear into the ground, butt-first, and extended a hand in a fingerless glove of the burlap cloth I already thought of as “Kainos cotton.” “Lyra Garza—Lyra, like the star. My father was an amateur astronomer.”
I couldn’t help smiling a little at the coincidence. My Counterstrike unit had been the Lyrae, nicknamed “the Harps.” “Where in Jude are you from? Because I’m from there, too.”
“Small world,” she said, then looked around. “Almost literally, at least the human population.” She shook her head. “A few hundred of us, max, with a whole world to explore and build in. Then this shit happens. Sorry. I was at Stanford. I lived in Barron Park, over by the university.”
“Downtown, me, usually somewhere within walking distance of Beeger Square. I’ve been meaning to ask you—what’s that thing you’re holding?”
She looked quickly from her spear to the weird, bulbous object. “Oh, this? It’s a rattle. Dried oak gall, a big one, full of rocks. In case I have to wake everybody up. It’s pretty loud.” She squinted at me as she pushed a wisp of hair from her face. “You offered to take my watch, didn’t you? That was nice, but no. I want to do my part, and I’m not going to be much of a fighter if it comes to it.”
“I hope it won’t come to it,” I said. “At least not for you and the rest of the . . .” I trailed off. “I forgot to ask Sam—what do you call yourselves?”
She smiled, and for the first time I saw her as something other than a poor soul shivering on a cold hillside. “We argued about that a lot at first. We spoke lots of different languages at home, and now we’re all speaking . . . well, whatever it is we’re speaking here, and the words have different meanings.” She laughed. “I’d love to study it, actually, this angelic language thing, and how it translates to all of us. That’s a career study and more, right there. I was an etymologist—was, who am I kidding? Always will be. Anyway, you can imagine, lots of smart, freaked-out people. In the beginning we were much happier arguing than exploring or building, most of us. I think it was the . . . well, to be honest, the religious nature of what had happened to us that made us settle on ‘pilgrims’.”
“Pilgrims, huh? But you wound up being more the Plymouth Rock kind than the going-to-Canterbury kind.”
“A little of both of those, I think. But we’re also the going-to-Lourdes kind.”
“Hoping for a miracle?”
“Well, we sure are now.”
• • •
I took a long walk, thinking about what Lyra said and a million other things. I wandered until I would have worried about finding my way back if I was a normal human, but my sense of
smell and direction were both pretty good, so I located the camp again without trouble. Dawn was still a short time away, but most of the pilgrims were up and getting ready to move. Getting ready to walk toward danger and maybe even destruction. Talking to Lyra Garza had made it even clearer to me that even if I hadn’t been involved in bringing them all here, as Sam had, I still wanted badly to keep these people safe. And if that unlikely circumstance actually came to pass, it would be interesting to see what happened with this little colony of pilgrim souls starting over again on what was, for all purposes, Earth Two—The Reboot.
In the cold, windy dark, Sam explained to the pilgrims what he thought should be done to ensure their chance at survival. There were questions, of course, lots of them, but I was surprised and pleased by how practical most of them were. A few were adamant about wanting to keep running, that they didn’t want to take the kind of risks Sam and I were talking about. We told them they could go, but only a couple of dozen actually left. That surprised me, too.
Shortly after sunrise we started out. At least we hadn’t needed to feed everyone. They say Earth armies march on their stomachs, but ours could survive on heavenly righteousness alone. At least until the serious shit started happening. Then all the righteousness in the world wasn’t going to save us.
Clarence was way too chatty for this early, especially in a world where I couldn’t get any coffee, so I sent him off to talk to various folk Sam had picked out to handle different parts of our plan. Besides, I wanted to chat with Sam in private, and privacy was already pretty damn hard to come by, surrounded as we were by nervous pilgrims.
The private talk didn’t happen right away. First Sam and I had to have a long meeting with Nathalie Weng, an Anglo-Chinese woman from Shanghai with the self-confident air of a tiny General Douglas MacArthur. I liked her, and I liked her deputy as well, a thin, thoughtful young man named Farber, who had lived in Freiburg while he was alive. I say young, but he mentioned how a bomb had flattened his house “during the war,” and I don’t think he meant the Gulf War since, as far as I know, that conflict never reached southern Germany. That was the thing about the Kainos people—they looked like the student-age counselors at a summer camp, but most of them had probably reached seventy or eighty before they died, some of them more.
