by Tad Williams
“But now, the loose ends will be cut off, or burned away.” She lifted her other hand, the one without the horn. It had a strange waviness to it, as if I saw it from several directions at the same time, or through thick glass. “Horseman, you have no business here, so depart. You have my feather. I still have your horn. Our bargain is still in place.”
“I’ll be going, I promise,” said Eligor, grinning. “But I confess I find this fascinating. I’ll watch a bit longer, but I won’t interfere.”
“As you wish.” She looked down at Ed Walker, still prostrate on the floor. “And you have done well, little pilgrim. Kainos will survive. But you will behave yourselves from now on, and treat me with the respect your creator deserves.”
“I knew it.” I said it loudly.
Anaita turned just the slightest bit toward me. “Silence. You are no longer important, Doloriel. You are the first loose end that will be trimmed.” She lifted her hand toward me, spreading her fingers, so I started talking fast.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “I knew it would all come down to the same old shit. It’s not even real evil—it’s just selfishness.” I pulled myself up into a half-crouch. I was still too far away to do anything but get burned to ash, but if you gotta go, you might as well do it upright. “You actually think that what you want is more important than what anyone else wants, and you think that having power proves it. The last important angel who fell, the Adversary—that was what he thought, too. People act like it’s some kind of terrifying, incomprehensible evil, but it’s not. It’s the same greed you see in a sandbox full of children. ‘Give me that! I want all the toys! Mine!’”
“I told you to be silent, Doloriel.” A little heat crept back into her voice. “You cannot even grasp what I’ve created here. The mistakes of the Highest—I’ve fixed them. It was worth every death, every deception. With you and your friends gone, Heaven will never find this place. Little angel, spiteful little angel. You cannot grasp the beauty, the perfection, of what I’ve made!”
I stood. It was painful. “And you’ve failed to grasp a few important things yourself, my lady. For one thing, everything you’ve just said has gone straight to Heaven. Because the lines of communication have been open this whole time.” I pointed to the Mecca cube, which had at some point begun to glow in its open cabinet, a thin but vibrant pale, pale violet-blue, like the first shift from dawn to daytime sky. “In fact, I believe that you’ve just made what’s called a full confession.”
Her entire face changed, twisting in fury that even Eligor might not have been able to match. “What?”
“Oh, and one other thing.” I’d been wondering what had kept him so long, but there Sam was, standing just behind her. “This.”
But instead of simply knocking the horn from her hand as we’d planned, Sam reached through Anaita with the God Glove. I shouted out in surprise—he wasn’t supposed to use it anywhere near her—but my voice was lost in the sudden wail of anger and shock from Anaita as Sam’s glowing hand forced its way through her body from behind, making her writhe like a hooked fish—no, an electric eel, sparking and discharging—then knocked the horn out of her grasp. It bounced across the floor, a simple object apparently obeying simple laws of physics, and landed only a yard from me.
“You!” she shrieked, turning to see Sam, still caught with his glowing hand sunken in her body. She did something I couldn’t quite make out, lashing out with her arm; there was a burst of white light, a great crack of heat and sound, and Sam went flying across the room. She staggered, but pulled herself upright again, looking around as if for her real enemy, someone more significant than a mere advocate angel. “Traitors! Thieves!”
By now I had the horn in my hand. I turned to Eligor, who was watching the whole thing with a gleeful expression. “You want this? I want Caz!”
“Throw it to me.”
“Not until I have her! Don’t fuck with me now, Horseman! No tricks! I want her, the real thing, the Countess, just like you promised!”
“Little angel,” he said, “you are no fun.” A moment later Caz appeared, pale hair flying as she tumbled to the floor. She lay on her side, gasping. It sure looked like her, and there was nothing else I could do to make certain before Anaita turned us all into ashes. I tossed him the horn. It flew end over end across the room, but before it even landed in Eligor’s hand it was peeling apart into flecks of light, being absorbed back into the Grand Duke’s person. For a moment I thought I even saw his real face, horns now proudly in place once more. That’s all I’ll say about it. Then the Vald face returned.
“And now I’ll let you have the rest of your fun,” he said. “Because things are about to get crowded.”
He vanished. Caz didn’t. I couldn’t really enjoy it, though, because a very, very unhappy Anaita was only a few feet away from me.
Suddenly light began to stream down from above. The roof and upper floors of the house peeled apart and began flying away, up into the sky, and as they rose I could see a thousand bright, winged shapes falling down toward us through the swirling snow.
Something hit me, smashed me to the floor. Anaita stood over me, her beautiful face now something else entirely. “First what you love—then you,” she said, and every word was a serpentine hiss. She reached out her hand, the invisible air rippling and bulging around it, and then flung something toward Caz where she lay on the floor.
But something else got there first. Clarence, who had already been limping toward her, dragged my beloved out of the way just before the entire wall behind her burst into a foam of molecules. Clarence, bless him, didn’t even glance back, but kept dragging her out the front door. I saw Caz look up just before she slid out of sight, and for the first time she saw me. Her eyes went wide.
Then the room was full of moving lights, of whispering, half-visible wings and beautiful glowing shadows. I heard Anaita shriek, and then I heard that shriek get smaller and smaller. I turned. Where she had been, a dark unreflecting shape like a huge dark gem now stood—a prison, I supposed. A casket, I really, really hoped.
The entire room was swirling, becoming unstable. There was so much light! I could barely see to crawl through the blinding, directionless glare to the spot where Sam had fallen.
He lay curled on his side in the splintered wreckage of the wall. The arm that had worn the God Glove was gone, only a blackened stump left below his shoulder. He was bleeding from a dozen wounds, red streaming out onto the floor.
“I see the cavalry showed up,” he said, but he was forcing air through his lips by sheer effort of will.
“You’ll get help, Sam. You’re an angel, you’re tough. Hang in there.”
“Oh, yeah. All . . . the king’s horses.” He coughed blood.
“Why did you do it? Why did you use the Glove? You said yourself that she could control it!”
“Because even with Walker’s trick and the other stuff, she wasn’t confused enough. We couldn’t . . . risk it going wrong.” He twitched, then shivered all over, but without much strength.
“But, Sam . . . !”
“Heaven . . .” he stopped to cough, “was never going to let me back in. One way or another . . . I was gone.”
I could barely understand him. I’m pretty sure his jaw was broken. Clarence and Caz staggered up. She dropped down to my side—I could feel her, smell her—but she was carrying a handful of snow from outside and wasn’t paying any attention to me. She squeezed it over Sam’s mouth, trickling water onto his tongue. He tried to smile. “Come on, B.” His voice was very faint. “A last drink without . . . without a proper toast?”
“I don’t think there’s any booze here,” I said. I don’t even know why I said it.
“Why ruin . . . fourteen days of . . . sobriety?” He grinned. Damn, he was strong. There was blood between his teeth, and red bubbles forming in the corners of his mouth. “Water’s f-fine. Just fine.”
“Shut up. I’ve been . . . grooming the kid . . . to keep an eye on you.”
Clarence didn’t say a thing. He was crying. You don’t see angels cry much.
I couldn’t see so clearly either. “Sam . . .”
He lifted a hand, struggled for a few seconds before he could form a word. “Confusion . . . !” The hand fell back.
“. . . to our enemies,” I finished, but Sam wasn’t listening any more.
forty-six
bobby’s blessings
I CAN’T REALLY tell you what happened next—well, not much of it, anyway. I remember Caz wrapping her arms around me. I remember turning to put my face against her neck because losing Sam hurt so much that I didn’t know what else to do. Just as the fact struck me that she was actually there, Caz herself, the woman that I loved enough to go to Hell for, we were surrounded by astonishingly bright light. I couldn’t hear anything but the beating of wings and something that I swear to Jiminy Cricket was the sound of the world’s biggest, most spiritually committed choir. Then everything flew up into the air, or at least I did, we did—Caz was still there, sort of, but we were both fractured, flying apart, breaking up like light shattered by a prism.
And then nothing.
• • •
I woke up in my apartment. Not Caz’s apartment—mine. The one that I’d moved out of because of the infestation of swastika-shaped occult creatures, among other reasons. That apartment.
I had about three seconds after consciousness rolled in when I could lie there and tell myself that none of it had happened—that Sam was still alive, and Caz hadn’t been snatched out of my arms yet again. I wanted to believe it. God, how I wanted to. But although I was in bed, I was fully dressed except for shoes and yet not even slightly hung over. Something was definitely out of whack.
I jumped up and ran out of the apartment, then down to the street, stepping on sharp things I could feel through my socks and not even caring. I was desperate to know what day it was, and I got halfway down the block, stumbling and staring and probably terrifying the shit out of the other pedestrians before I thought to check the phone in my pocket for the date.
December 11th. Time had passed. It had been five days since Clarence and I stepped through that mirror smeared with my blood and into Kainos. Which meant that everything I remembered had actually happened. My world really had ended, and now I was alive again in some pathetic imitation place where everything I cared about was gone.
I returned to the building slower than I’d run away. I didn’t bother to go check the apartment where the Amazons had been. I was pretty sure the cleanup crew from Heaven had scrubbed away all forensic traces. It was probably even rented again. Heaven is thorough.
I found my most recent gun, a Glock 17, stashed in my sock drawer, along with several of my favorite knives. Like I said—thorough. They could do everything except put my heart back in my chest.
I got on the phone and called the office. Alice answered. “It’s me, Bobby,” I said.
“Oh,” said Alice. “Hurrah.”
Everything back to normal. Except it wasn’t, and it never would be. “What’s my current status?”
“Don’t worry, Dollar. I’m happy to drop everything just to answer a question that you should already know the answer to.” I heard a wrapper crackle, then the sound of Alice eating something crunchy while she searched the official database, or pretended to. “You’re currently on compassionate leave, whatever that means.”
“I want to talk to Temuel.”
“So go talk to him.”
“I want him to call me. Give him a message from me, tell him that.”
“I live to serve, Master.” Crunch, crunch. “Done. Any other ways you want to annoy me?”
I couldn’t think of any just then, so I hung up.
It was interesting to discover that I could have my insides torn out and still keep functioning as if I actually cared about living. While I waited to hear from Temuel, I called Clarence, just to see what the kid had to say. Ominously, his outgoing message, after a few formalities, continued, “And if this is Bobby, please let me know when I can call you. We really need to talk.” I didn’t leave a message, but I checked my own voicemail. Sure enough, the kid had left several over the last couple of days, all variations on a theme of “Call me,” but I just didn’t want to. Clarence had come through the disaster with flying colors, and I was pretty sure he was missing Sam just like I was, but I couldn’t bear the thought of one of his optimistic chats right then. I’d talk to him later, if I went on living.
While the Mule continued not to return my call, I wandered around the apartment like a depressed robot, checking things out. Heaven’s cleaners had been hard at work. The paint was new, the carpet was new—hard to get out those squashed-swastikid stains, I guess—and there was even food in the refrigerator, although it was laughably unready-to-eat. Somebody had badly misread my personnel file if they thought I was going to make a stir-fry from scratch. However, some brilliant soul had also left an unopened bottle of vodka in the freezer. Good stuff, too. So after another hour or so of waiting for a call from my archangelic supervisor and trying to find some music in my collection that didn’t make me feel like I wanted to bash my head against the wall—even Kind of Blue made me jumpy, which should tell you something—I gave up and opened the bottle. My kind superiors had offered me a first-class ticket to oblivion, and the only alternative I could see was to stay sober and sit around thinking about Caz and about Sam and about the big empty that had once been my afterlife. I decided it would be rude of me not to accept Heaven’s invitation.
• • •
A day later, give or take a few hours, after a long drunk and a series of nightmares so bad I’m not even going to talk about them, I was back on Planet Apartment, a bit hung over but more or less sober again, and in need of something to do to avoid going seriously, permanently crazy. It wasn’t like the heartache I’d had the first two times Caz had been snatched away from me. I didn’t have the strength for that, I guess. Maybe I had finally accepted the fact that the universe hated me. I felt like I was in a car with the fuel tank almost empty, the engine sputtering, still moving, but pretty soon all the momentum would be gone, and I’d coast to a halt in the middle of big, big nowhere. Until that happened, though, I couldn’t think of anything else to do but keep rolling forward, even though it was all but pointless. There were still some things I didn’t understand, and I figured I might as well satisfy that curiosity while I still had a little strength.
I called the kid and told him to meet me at the Compasses, hoping he’d have a few answers. I still didn’t know why I was even alive and free instead of banged up in Heaven’s equivalent of a supermax detention facility. Our bosses usually don’t like loose ends, and I was about as loose as they came.
To my shock and horror, I discovered that although everything else had been fixed up for me and returned to normal (as if such a thing was even possible), when I checked the parking spot for my apartment I found the same horrible yellow thing I’d been driving, Temuel’s taxicab. Apparently the universe was still having a few laughs at my expense. Just looking at it depressed me, so I decided to walk.
Clarence was waiting when I got there. Quite a few regulars were around as well, and it might have been my imagination, but it seemed like they were all trying not to make it obvious that they were watching me with keen interest. The only person who acted normally was Chico the bartender, who grunted in recognition, slid me a vodka tonic, then went back to cleaning glasses with a bar towel.
“I’m really glad you called me,” Clarence began, but I held up my hand.
“Just a second.” I downed half the drink. “Okay, better. You were saying?”
He gave me a look that had a little too much of Sam in it, except more disapproving. “You don’t need to do that, Bobby.”
“Not dead, but definitely in heavenly custody. They froze her in some big blue block of . . . I don’t know what. Then they took her away. I’ve heard she’s already been tried and convicted.”
“What? Tried? You mean they had a trial already—the biggest one in centuries? Was it public?”
“In Heaven?” Clarence snorted. Some of my cynicism appeared to have rubbed off on him. “No. But everyone knows.”
I looked around the bar where everyone knew lots of things that I probably didn’t know. They looked like that didn’t bother them, but it sure bothered me. “What about the Mule? Why won’t he call me?”
Clarence shrugged. “Can’t say. I haven’t heard anything official about him, and I haven’t seen him either. But he’s still in charge of the San Jude departments, as far as I can tell.”
“Shit. They’re just going to sweep the whole Anaita thing under the rug, I bet. Did you make a report?”
“Report?” His smile was not a happy one. “I’ve been grilled by every fixer on Heaven’s payroll, I think. They wanted to know everything. Everything.”
“Shit. And shit. What did you tell them? Did you tell them . . . ?” I looked around. Nobody was paying attention except Monica’s friend Teddy Nebraska, who, as usual of late, was looking at me like he wanted to say something. I didn’t particularly want to be said-something-to, so I looked away. “Did you tell them about Caz?”
“No.” He frowned. “And they didn’t ask. I don’t know why. They didn’t ask about your trip to H-E-double-hockey-sticks, either. But they wanted to know everything about your . . . conflict, I think that was their word, your conflict with Anaita.”
I stared at him. The thing with Clarence, I could never tell if he said things like “H-E-double-hockey-sticks” to be ironic, or if he really was some reincarnated youth minister. “Okay, let me try another one. Why the hell am I free? Why did the cleaning crew go to all the trouble of re-doing my apartment and even filling my fridge with fresh crap I’ll never eat?”
