by Sharon Shinn
“So why am I still living—this time?”
He leaned forward, his beautiful face vivid with intensity. “For that very reason! Because Gabriel will not play the god false! The Gloria is scheduled for six short days from now—yes, you start, it is much closer than you realized!—and you and Gabriel are to lead it. If you are not there to sing at Gabriel’s side, what will he do? Will he take Ariel or Judith or Hannah to the Plain and bid them to sing at his side? I think not. I think Gabriel is incapable of singing alongside any woman but the god’s chosen bride—which is why you must be kept alive. Once you are dead, of course, Gabriel is free. The god may choose a new wife for him, or Gabriel may choose his own—but the original restrictions will be lifted. While you are alive, Gabriel is bound. Once you are dead, everything changes.”
Now Rachel leaned forward, as intense as the Archangel. “Rut the Gloria must be sung,” she said urgently. “Don’t you realize that? If all the peoples of Samaria do not come together on the Plain of Sharon, the god will smite first the mountain, then the river, then the world. We will all die—you, me, Gabriel, every one of us. If Gabriel does not sing, will you sing? That is the power you are so desperate for—will you take it, and see to it that the world is saved?”
He flung back his head and laughed. Angels and mortals sitting across the room, too far away to overhear their conversation, caught the melody of that laughter and joined in. He straightened, started to speak, glimpsed her face, and started laughing again. It took him a good five minutes to regain control.
“Oh, I do apologize, but that is so funny,” he said, shaking his head and pressing a hand theatrically to his heart. “Rachel, my dear, haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? For the past twenty years I have led all the peoples of the world in a mockery of the Gloria! A false angelica by my side, and no love of the god in my heart! For twenty years! And no thunderbolts have fallen—no cities were destroyed—the world spins on as it always has. And as it always will! Rachel, it is such a monumental but such a liberating thought—there is no god at all! He does not guard us, he does not punish us, he does not know if we live or breathe or die—he is not there! I have contravened every law laid down in the Librera, and he has not struck me dead. There is no god. If Gabriel fails to lead the Gloria, and there is no Gloria, we will all survive. If I fail to lead it, if it is never sung again—nothing will happen at all. We have been enslaved, all these years, to the idea of a god, without any proof of his existence. And now it is time that the people of Samaria realize that what they have loved and feared and obeyed is a divine and comic hoax.”
Rachel simply stared at him. She realized suddenly that he was mad—power-mad, certainly—but more than that. He was lunatic. If he had questioned the existence of the sunlight or the soil, she would have been less appalled. That anyone would doubt Yovah’s existence was, to Rachel, absolutely incredible.
“You may not have believed,” she said, her voice very low, “but the masses were sung. The harmonies were completed. The people of Samaria came together and satisfied Yovah’s requirements. He did not strike you dead, though I can’t guess why you were spared, but he withheld his wrath from the rest of the world because the rest of the world believed. Not a year of these twenty has gone by that angels did not hold hands with humans and sing of the glories of the god. The voice of Gabriel alone was sweet enough to gladden Yovah’s heart—maybe it is Gabriel that the god listened for, and not for you. And Yovah heard that silver voice, and was pleased, and held back his wrath for another year.”
“Well, maybe,” Raphael said, unimpressed. “But he will not hear that silver voice this year if you are not at his side. And then we shall see what the god thinks of this whole world of gullible believers. And I can tell you what that is right now. He does not think of us at all.”
“You’re insane,” she whispered.
He shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said. “I am Lucifer. I am the man who will rip the mask off the face of the god himself.”
Rachel rose to her feet. She had touched neither the food nor the wine, hut she felt as disoriented as if she had been drugged or intoxicated. Dizzy, she brushed the table with her fingers to catch her balance, when a hand came out to steady her from behind, she was almost grateful.
“Ah, Saul,” Raphael said, and she jerked away from the angel standing behind her. Saul grinned down at her. Fire seemed to flame around his head; his eyes were blacker than the ravine below the mountaintop. “Escort Rachel back to her room and make sure she is comfortable.”
“Glad to,” Saul said, reaching for her arm again. Rachel shoved him in the chest and stepped back, nearly tripping over her chair. Both the angels laughed.
“I don’t want him near me,” she said.
“I don’t have the key to her room,” Saul said. “I can’t lock her in.”
Raphael said, “Maxa will accompany you. He has a key.”
“He could just give me the key,” Saul suggested.
Raphael looked amused. “Maxa has the key,” he repeated. “If you need it in the future, you will know where to find it.” Saul laughed. Raphael came to his feet and made Rachel a lovely bow. “As always, I have greatly enjoyed your company, angela,” he said. “I trust you will find things very pleasant during the remainder of your stay in my house.”
And he allowed Saul and the gray-haired guard to lead her away.
For a long time, Rachel stood in the middle of her room and tried to make herself think. Raphael’s offhand series of admissions—to murder, deceit, and heresy—were so complex, so unnerving, that any one of them could have struck her speechless. To have heard all of them so swiftly, one after the other, was almost more than she could comprehend. Slowly, the pieces began to fit together in her head.
He had been the source of her misfortunes all along. That much he had admitted in so many words, but now, for the first time, his actions made sense, at least as seen in the context of his warped ambition. It was Raphael who had destroyed her parents’ village—Raphael who had ordered the destruction and enslavement of the Manderras—Raphael, no doubt, who had directed the Jansai to try to kidnap her on the very streets of Velora. How astonished Raphael must have been when Gabriel all unwittingly stumbled upon his bride in the slave cellars of Semorrah! How he must have schemed to get his hands on her even this late in the game, fretful that no opportunity presented itself until so close to the time of the Gloria itself. Or had he guessed, weeks before it crossed her mind, that she would be unable to resist the lure of the Gathering, and so bided his time until that great day dawned?
And now, after several attempts, he had secured her; and he would keep her at least until the Gloria was past; and then the god alone knew what would become of her.
And he was not the only one in this castle who wished her evil.
She shivered and shook herself free of her trance. If Maxa were persuaded to give Saul the key—and of this she had no doubt—the wanton angel presented her nearest and most immediate danger. The heavy armoire across the doorway had baffled the servants this morning, but would that stop Saul? She doubted it. But it was a starting point. She surveyed the room.
The bed was bolted to the wall, but there was the armoire, the chest of drawers, the cheval mirror, a table and a chair. She could employ them all. Working swiftly, she dragged every last scrap of furniture across the room, bracing each one against the last until, front to back, they formed a barricade that stretched from the doorway to within three feet of the opposite wall. She tried wedging pieces of firewood between the wall and the chair she had ended with, but there were no logs long enough or sturdy enough to bridge the gap.
Well, she was long enough. She could protect herself.
Accordingly, she wrapped the bed quilt around her for warmth and positioned herself on the floor, her back to the rungs of the chair and her feet laid against the unyielding wall. It was not a very comfortable position, but she felt a certain savage triumph lighten her mood as she tested the fit of he
r body in her line of defense. The angel had great strength; he might very well force the lock and push in the door so brutally that the wood splintered and her own bones snapped in two. But she would not be the first link in the chain to break.
She built up the fire again, then settled back in her place on the floor, a weapon in her hands. A thin, springy length of firewood, it ended in a raw point where it had been ripped from some dead tree. She rubbed it against the rough floor, methodically and incessantly, to sharpen its edge to a razor fineness that could pierce a man’s chest if propelled with sufficient force… .
Driven by purpose and fortified by determination, she would have passed the night almost calmly had not the wind chosen this evening of all evenings to show off the full range of its bluster.
There was never silence in Windy Point, but Rachel had never heard anything like this. A storm must have moved in and settled, lashing the stolid mountain with rain and wind and hail. Every crack and joint in Rachel’s room seethed and sobbed with air, rising first to a furious pitch of shrieking, then dropping to a low, desperate moan. The window clattered in its frame, but that jittering sound was lost beneath the almost human voice whispering through the chamber—screeching through, mewling, begging, chortling, bellowing—as its moods took it. Rachel clenched her jaw and resisted the primitive urge to wail in return.
So loud was the wind, so unremitting, that it covered the first telltale scrapings at the door. She did not realize that someone was trying to get in until she felt the shudder of the chair against her back; sudden pressure ran down the whole massed blockade of furniture and buckled her legs against the wall.
Choking back a cry, she stiffened her knees and shoved her shoulders against the rungs of the chair. She snatched up the pointed stick, holding it like a spear before her. Again she felt the scrape and shift of furniture inching forward. She braced her free hand on the floor and strained her whole body backward, making herself a wedge, a boulder, a bulwark, a thing of bone and rock and iron.
She did not know how long she remained there, inflexibly opposing a contrary pressure that had ceased to be exerted. It felt like hours that she kept her tense, arched pose. It was not her bones but her muscles that betrayed her, becoming shaky and loose and unreliable, unknitting from her elbows and her knees and causing her head to sag down from her numb spine. She collapsed forward, waiting for the whole room to rush inward as Saul triumphantly swept all her defenses before him, but nothing happened. He was gone; he had left sometime during the night. The lightening gray outside her window told her in the most dispirited terms that she had fought her way through to another morning.
She drew her knees up and rested her head upon them, still shaking in every muscle and joint. She had survived; she was not dead or ravished or even mad. Perhaps Yovah was watching out for her after all.
And then the wind started again.
By the time they brought her breakfast, two or three hours later, she really did think she was on the verge of delirium. It was Windy Point itself which had driven Raphael insane; the wonder was not that he had turned on the god but that he had not turned on himself as well. Sleeplessness, a sort of continuing, familiar terror, and the accumulated shocks of the past week were having their effect on her, but nothing like the maddening assault of the wind.
The knock on the door caused her to leap half a foot into the air, but she did not answer the first summons, nor the steadily more urgent calls that came in through the heavy wood. She did not have the strength to clear the furniture from the doorway, and she did not care if she never ate again. She would die here sooner or later. It might as well be of starvation, if the wind’s demented music did not drive her first to fling herself into the fire—
The wind’s music. She stood absolutely still, considering that. And then she ran across the room to the pile of clothing she had left on the floor the day before. Pawing through her dresses, linens and woolen stockings, she crowed victoriously when her hand fell on her learning pipes. Holding them up, she examined the instrument more closely to determine how it could be disassembled. She saw that the pipes were closely woven together with thin leather strips. If she had a knife, it would be easy, but—
She did have fire.
Crouching on the hearth, she held the bunched pipes against a half-dead ember. It took a long time for the leather binding to yield; her knees had given way and she had sunk to a cross-legged position long before the thin strap blackened and began to smoke. She brushed aside the coal and took up a rough piece of kindling, rubbing it along the weakened patch of leather till the last stubborn strands parted. The eight pipes rolled loose in her hand.
Sorting quickly through them, she picked three reeds—those that formed the major chord—and, after a moment’s hesitation, the pipe that played the seventh. Then she crossed to the window, where the wind was most apt to blow in, and wedged the largest pipe into a narrow slit between the casement and the wall.
It was only a few seconds’ wait before another gust surged in past the glass. And through the tube. And made a noise like a faun piping a love song to a beautiful unwary virgin.
She could make the wind play music.
Almost feverishly, she searched the casement for another convenient gap to hold the next largest pipe; nothing was quite right. But the reed that played the fifth interval against the big pipe’s dominant note fit snugly into a crack right below the window.
And when the next blast of air shook the castle, she had harmony.
Her hands were shaking violently as she crossed and recrossed the room, looking for the right finger holes for her remaining two reeds. There was a place, finally, in the far wall for the middle pipe, the major third; when the wind rushed in and set all three pipes trumpeting at once, she thought she would fall to the floor and weep. She felt her shoulders unknotting, felt her mind growing light and peaceful. Such a simple thing, such a small thing, and yet she could feel the music healing her. One more reed to place—
It took her nearly half an hour but eventually she secured it, high above her bed in a tiny crack in a crumbling line of mortar. The outer counterpart of this wall, apparently, was half-protected from the elements, for the temperamental wind only reached it sporadically, sending faint, intermittent puffs of air through the throat of the smallest pipe. The three other reeds also sounded at random—sometimes the major third, sometimes the minor, every once in a while all three at once; when the seventh note sounded, by itself or in harmony, Rachel felt a shiver run from her shoulders to her fingertips. So must music have sounded to Yovah on the morning of the first Gloria of the world.
The longer the music played, the more lightheaded she grew. She was giddy; she began to dance around the cold prison which had suddenly become a place of grace and symphony. On a hunch, pirouetting past the blocked doorway, she paused; snaking her fingers behind the armoire, one more time she tried the stubborn, immovable deadbolt. As if oiled by a smith, it fell smoothly into place. She laughed aloud. Music had restored her, and harmony had made her safe.
The euphoria on top of her strenuous night left her exhausted and drained. She collapsed onto the bed, still smiling foolishly as the erratic lullaby played from the walls around her. She was so relaxed now that the minute she closed her eyes she was asleep, and she slept through another mealtime and repeated poundings at the door.
It was the last hour of the afternoon when she opened her eyes, as she could tell by the faint gold light limning the irregular pane of her window. She had slept deeply if not as long as she needed to; she woke clearheaded and sober, though not completely rested. Her fire had gone out and the room was freezing. She had forgotten to retrieve her quilt before she slept, and now she shivered with a deep and ineradicable chill. Her pipes still chirped sweetly at odd moments, which caused her to smile faintly, though she did not feel in the least cheerful. But she did not need to be cheerful; what she needed was to be serene, and that the harmony had accomplished.
She had awakene
d knowing exactly what she must do.
She had decided, the instant she had secured the door, that she would not open it again. Clearly, there was no way out for her but death, although Raphael intended to prolong her life as long as it suited his purposes. If she must die, she could at least make the sacrifice a meaningful one—and the only way her death would not be a total waste would be if it freed Gabriel of his bond to her before the Gloria.
Which meant that she must kill herself, and instantly.
And there was only one sure way.
She was numb with cold, but that was a good thing, she thought. She rose, shaky with chill but not with nerves, and glanced around the room for anything that might still need doing here. No; nothing. Slowly enough, because she was not eager, but firmly enough, because she was not afraid, she crossed the room to the single rattling window, and tried the lock that had so intractably stayed in place.
And it, too, yielded under her hand. And the window swung open, and all the icy wet mountain air poured in, swirled around her, and laid its hungry kisses on her hair.
She had to fetch the wooden chair to gain enough height to climb out, and she had to wriggle her shoulders to force them through the narrow casement, but all in all, it was not hard to escape. The fortress was built into the pitched terrain of the mountain, so that the angled, rocky ground was only a few feet below her. She jumped, landed awkwardly and fell to her shoulder, bruising her hip, thigh and elbow. This high up, outdoors at the onset of night, it was colder than she had believed possible. But none of this mattered. None of these discomforts would she have to endure for long.
Fighting the wind, which lashed at her hair and the loose ends of her skirt, she struggled uphill toward the highest point of the mountain. Twice more she fell, once knocked over by a blast of air so strong that it forced her to her knees and once twisting her ankle on a buried rock. By now, her toes, fingers and cheeks had lost all feeling. Her brain was nearly numb as well—or perhaps she was just trying not to think. Frozen foot before frozen foot, up the dark mountain she went, into the teeth of the wind.
