Archangel

by Sharon Shinn

  She reached the very top of the mountain without once looking ahead or to either side for the terrible view laid out around her. She had kept her eyes doggedly on her shoes and the mealy ground through which she found her insecure footing. Now at the mountaintop it became even more important that she not look outward, not until it was too late, not until she wanted to be made so dizzy that she fell.

  Here at the very peak there was a promontory that overlooked the vast ravine down which the mountain itself retreated. Slowly, with infinite determination, Rachel inched forward to the very edge of the outthrust ledge. The wind whipped around her, spinning her first to one side and then to the other, but miraculously, she kept her balance. Her unbound hair streamed wildly about her face and shoulders; her skirt flattened against her thighs, then belled around her knees. She was so cold now that she felt, oddly enough, fevered. If she put her fingers against a frozen puddle, she thought, she would cause the ice to sizzle into steam and water.

  When her feet shuffled clumsily to the rim of the outcrop, loose stones rolled away from her shoes and clattered over the edge. She heard their hollow clicks and echoes as they bounced down the mountain. It did not sound so far. Carefully, she lifted her eyes from their fixed attention on her toes and took in the scene below her.

  Black emptiness at the base of a huge, angular well. The mountain she stood upon curved forward from either side to form a rough, precipitous canyon whose wicked slopes were almost vertical. Jagged boulders and spikes of wind-whittled rock offered their brittle spines to the fading light of the sun. The ravine was so immense that no sunlight fell all the way to its depths. It could easily have plunged straight through to the core of the earth itself.

  Rachel drew a long, ragged breath and did not look away. She had feared this her whole life, and yet, at this moment, she embraced it—the wild tumble of rock, the vertiginous height, the pummeling wind. Overhead, she heard the harsh call and flapping wings of mountain birds—vultures, perhaps, suspecting a death in the offing, or eagles, furious at this invasion of their domain. It was all so bitter and yet so beautiful. It would bring her the release she must have; it would set her free. It had been designed for her.

  She took one last, lingering look around, at the gray face of the sheer mountain, at the luminescent horizon lit by the milky sunset, at the silhouette of the giant mountain hawk winging swiftly her way, and then she closed her eyes.

  “Into thy great hands, Yovah,” she murmured, and stepped off the cliff.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Up to a point, Gabriel’s conference with the Samarian powermongers had been a success. They had all come, at any rate, and they had all been furious. Behind the fury he had sensed a frisson of fear, and that was exactly what he’d intended.

  He had refused to see any of them until they were all assembled, another ploy designed to irritate. Hannah had shown them all to a small meeting room and offered them food, and then faithfully reported to Gabriel their various condemnations of his intelligence, his character and his methods. But they had all come, and none of them left during the two hours he made them await his pleasure.

  “My lords,” he said to them all impartially upon entering the room. It was another deliberate slight, proof that he grouped them all together and did not care how they jockeyed for power or prestige in each other’s eyes. There were ten men in the room—Manadavvi, Jansai, river merchants and a lone Luminauzi official—and none of them looked pleased to see him.

  The first one to speak, not surprisingly, was the patrician Elijah Harth, who seemed the most affronted. “How can you possibly defend your actions?” the Manadavvi demanded coldly. “You come to us to preach unity, and at the first chance, you try to sow discord. It’s an ill beginning for all of us, Gabriel.”

  The angel nodded acknowledgment. None of the others was intelligent enough to attack first; they were still muttering phrases like “total outrage” and “how dare he.” Elijah had gone straight to the point.

  “I have acted precisely because you have proved to me that you have no interest in unity,” Gabriel responded.

  Lord Jethro slammed his open hand on a wood table, causing the glasses and trays of teacakes to rattle. “Ha!” he cried. “Myself I have done what I could to please you—fed you, entertained you, listened to your everlasting lectures—and what do you do in return? Send the river rising up over the breakwater! Don’t deny you did it—it’s been raining up in the Galo mountain for weeks now, and I know you and your angel tricks—”

  “Rain over the river, drought in Breven, wind in Gaza,” counted off Malachi, the Jansai leader. In his round fat face, his narrow eyes almost looked amused. “What’s the point, Gabe? What’s the problem? We didn’t bow down low enough to you?”

  “You didn’t listen,” Gabriel said softly. They all had to stop their muttering in order to catch his voice, because he refused to raise it. “You told me—each of you—that you had no intention of changing your ways to suit the teachings of the god. Malachi of Breven as good as told me there was no god at all.” There were muffled gasps and a few sidelong looks which Malachi ignored with no trouble at all. “Elijah—Jethro—Samuel—Abel—all of you swore to me that you could not alter a single item in your trade agreements, could not give up one of your privileges, could not free your slaves or enfranchise your workers or redistribute your wealth. And I said these things must be done to ensure harmony. And you said you did not care.”

  “But Gabriel, the things you ask for are preposterous!”

  “The trade agreements! It took me twenty years—”

  “And these things have been in place for two decades now,” Elijah cut in over the various indignant exclamations. “You say we have lived in disharmony with our god—but if that is so, why has he not made his displeasure known? Why has he not struck down a merchant or a slaver? Why have we all prospered and grown rich? Because Jovah favors us, that’s why.”

  Satisfied voices rumbled their endorsement of that argument. Gabriel spoke calmly.

  “And perhaps Jovah is readying himself to strike you. Perhaps he endured the reign of Raphael because he knew, as a god reckons time, that the tenure would be brief—and that all things would be made right again when a new Archangel ascended. Perhaps—”

  “Gabe, is this all about the goddamned Edori?” Malachi broke in. “Is this about you and that allali slave girl—”

  He had steeled himself for this. There was no chance they would not try to taunt him with Rachel; and so he remained cold. “This is not about my wife,” he said with glacier calm. “And it is only in part about the Edori.”

  “Because, Jovah give me salvation! if you don’t stop going on and on about the damned slaves—”

  “It is also about the Manadavvi bondservants, who are virtual prisoners to the feudal land system, and the non-status river workers who will not be given citizenship in any city—”

  “You’re crazy!” Jethro roared. “You want to rip apart the whole world so a few miserable laborers can cast a vote in a city election—”

  “He’s not crazy, he’s a fanatic,” Elijah said in a voice as icy as Gabriel’s own. “And fanatics think their vision supersedes the reality of everyone about them.”

  “You can call it fanaticism,” Gabriel said. “I prefer to think of it merely as justice.”

  “Gabriel, see, they’re not really people,” Malachi said with a confiding, earnest air. “Those Manadavvi peasants, the river rats, even those damned Edori—they aren’t people, not like us.”

  “They are people,” Gabriel said. “And to Jovah, their well-being is as important as yours. And if he is displeased at their treatment—”

  “Well, now, that is the sticking point, isn’t it?” Malachi said pleasantly. “What Jovah might do to us if you tell him we’ve been bad.”

  “Which is why,” Gabriel said, nodding at Elijah again, “I brought the rain and the drought and the wind to bear on you before you came. To remind you that Jovah has power�
�and that I can funnel it.”

  “I have to tell you,” Malachi said, “I’m not so impressed with a few weeks of hot weather. I’ve lived through worse, and always survived. Drought comes every few years to Breven, and we get through it and don’t even bother to tell stories about it.”

  “Well, the river doesn’t rise every year over Semorrah, and I say flat out that I won’t stand for it!” Jethro declared.

  “I’m sure our host will tell us we’ll stand for it as long as he has a point to make,” Elijah said. “But I have to ask myself if that’s true.”

  Gabriel watched him. “Meaning?”

  Elijah made an elegant motion with one well-kept hand. “Oh, we all know the tricks angels can play with weather—or say they can play with weather. And I grant you that I have seen thunderstorms move in and out on command. I have seen rivers rise, snows abate, clouds lift, and it was all very impressive. But how much of that, I ask myself, is really because the angel desired that it be so? It rains. It snows. The clouds move away. Eventually these things happen whether or not an angel flies aloft and puts in his prayer to Jovah.

  “And when you examine it,” Elijah continued, his voice more intense, “is that such an awesome power for a man to have? The ability to bring rain? If that is all he can do, should we be so impressed with an Archangel—with any angel at all? We have been taught since we lay in our cradles that angels could ask the god to bring down thunderbolts to punish evil men—but have any of you ever seen that done? Do you in fact believe it is a feat an angel is capable of? If the god will not smite us, and the angels cannot cause the god to smite us, why do we honor the angels? Or has the time come when we can dispense with the angels and worship the god in our own way?”

  There was a shocked but speculative silence in the small room as everyone present began to consider the vast implications of the Manadavvi’s speech. Gabriel, who had foreseen no other conclusion, waited imperturbably. Malachi, as he had expected, was the next to speak.

  “How about it, Gabe?” he said. “You want to prove him wrong—here and now? We can all go out to the top of your mountain and watch you call down a thunderbolt. I’d believe you then. We probably all would.”

  “I have too much respect for Jovah’s powers to do anything so foolhardy,” Gabriel replied. “Were I to call down a thunderbolt, its force would be so great it might destroy the entire hold. It could kill a hundred men where they stood. I am not so desperate to make my case.”

  “Well, then,” Malachi said equably, “I’m afraid you don’t have a pig’s chance on feast day of making us see things your way.”

  Gabriel nodded again and came to his feet. “Very well,” he said. “If that’s the case, so be it.”

  The others eyed him uneasily, rising uncertainly. He had gone to some trouble to summon them here; it seemed odd that he would so tamely accept their open defiance.

  “Very well what?” Malachi asked. “You mean, you’re just letting everything go on as it has done?”

  “Exactly,” Gabriel said smoothly. “The rains, the droughts, the storms in Manadavvi. All will continue unabated.”

  Now there was another angry murmur as they began to perceive his game. “You can’t allow that,” Jethro blustered. “If the river keeps rising like this, Semorrah will be under water in a month.”

  “And Castelana,” someone added.

  “Wait,” someone else said. “If the winds don’t stop, the whole summer harvest will be ruined.”

  “That’s exactly his plan,” Elijah said stonily. He faced Gabriel across the room, a proud, angry man who was not used to being outmaneuvered. “If weather is his only weapon, he will use it to the death. Is that not correct? You think to starve us out, flood us out—”

  “If necessary,” Gabriel said pleasantly. “I can continue the present patterns until the whole face of Samaria changes, until Gaza becomes a desert and all the cities are swept away. You are lords over your lands, but your lands may not be rich for long. All the wealth of Samaria can be redistributed when the earth itself changes. And believe me, I have the power—and the willpower—to change it.”

  They were staring at him. They did not entirely believe him, but they were not certain that he was not speaking the truth.

  “Impossible!” Abel cried finally, his voice faint and his face chalky. “Even if you had such power, the other angels would not allow it—”

  “Would they not?” Gabriel asked softly. “Ariel has agreed to my conditions. She does not like them, but she will not countermand me.”

  “The Archangel—” someone gasped.

  “Raphael?” Gabriel said. “Raphael has never been able to control the elements as I have. He will be of very little use to you, I’m afraid. In fact—”

  Exquisite pain suddenly lanced through his arm so sharply that he thought he had been stabbed. He clutched his arm, staggering a little to one side, glancing down quickly to gauge the severity of the wound, astonished that someone would dare attack him here in his own hold in front of all these witnesses. But there was no blood. There was no blade in his flesh. Only the cool amber glass of the god’s Kiss set into his very bone.

  “In fact, we’ll see what Raphael says about that,” someone was saying, and Gabriel forced himself to look up, to ignore the fiery arrows shooting up his arm. Elijah and Malachi were watching him curiously, but no one else seemed to have noticed his sudden inattention. “He’s due to come by the river cities in a day or two—we’ll ask him to take a hand in this. There’s no way he’ll let you destroy the whole lot of us.”

  Gabriel let his hand fall, though his whole arm now burned with a peculiar ragged flame. “I would advise you to do so,” he said, as steadily as he could. “Ask him to intervene on your behalf with the god. I would like to know how he answers you.”

  The river merchants had begun filing out the door. Malachi was right behind Jethro, murmuring the details of what seemed to be a business deal. Elijah hung back a moment, regarding Gabriel with serious, somber eyes.

  “This is a wretched day’s work you have done, angelo,” said the Manadavvi leader when the rest of the room had emptied. “You are dragging us all into a morass from which there is no easy climb out. You speak of harmony, but you are throwing us all into discord.”

  “If you believed in the laws of Jovah, you would believe in my cause as well,” Gabriel said. “You would see that you and these others are the ones who have been led astray.”

  “Have you no doubts? Do you not question whether one man with power should have the right to overturn the lives of hundreds who see the world from a different view?”

  “I am not one man. I am the heir of hundreds of other men and women who shaped the world according to Jovah’s plan. What you have made of Samaria is not what they intended.”

  “But the world changes.”

  “And it will change again.”

  “Jethro was right,” Elijah said, very low. “You are crazy.” And he too left the room.

  * * *

  Gabriel spent the rest of the day fighting the urge to fly down toward Luminaux and see what was happening at the Edori camp. By his reckoning, the Gathering had ended the day before, but there were undoubtedly a few of the nomads still left, cleaning up the site, or visiting between clans. He was not interested in the Edori, of course; he was irrationally and helplessly worried about Rachel.

  The sharp pain in his arm had slowly abated. Now it was a dull throb, no worse than a day-old bruise—and yet he couldn’t quite forget it. Until he had met Rachel, he had never had any sensation in his Kiss at all. It had led him to her, it had charted for him her unwilling reactions to his presence. He could not help but think any flash in its depths now was in response to something she had done or experienced.

  But she had not even spoken to him before she left. She had hated him since they met. She would not appreciate his flying down to Luminaux to spy on her when she was with her Edori friends.

  And she would be home in two or
three days. He could wait that long to ask her what had disturbed her so much that hundreds of miles away with his mind wholly focused on something else, she could reach out to him with such unexpected force.

  The next three days were very long. He kept himself as busy as he could. In fact, he spent a good portion of that time out on the Plain itself, overseeing the building of temporary shelters and food tents for the thousands of people who would gather here to sing the Gloria or merely observe it. He had no idea of just how many people would arrive. In Raphael’s prime, once, four thousand people had attended the Gloria, but that figure had dropped off in recent years—particularly as the Edori stopped coming. For his own inaugural performance … well. There were a lot of people who didn’t like him. But there were a lot of southern Jordana farmers and Gaza sheepherders and small-town dwellers who did; and the Edori, of course, could be expected to show their support for his wife. It was hard to say. He thought he might draw quite a crowd.

  He returned to the Eyrie late the day before he calculated that Rachel would be back, and spent the next morning trying to curb his restlessness. The ache in his arm had completely disappeared, but now the Kiss flickered at odd moments with foreign lights, colors that he had never seen in its crystal heart before. He did not want anyone noticing the phenomenon and asking what it might mean, so he wore one of his fine long-sleeved shirts around the Eyrie all morning, and hoped no one asked him if he was cold.

  He was singing the harmonics with Eva in the hour past noon when he spotted Matthew crossing the open plateau, talking with Hannah. His heart lurched against his breastbone; he actually missed a note of the song, causing Eva to turn wide, wondering eyes his way. He caught the beat again instantly, but his mind was no longer on music. He was scanning the faces of the other people who were strolling, sitting or standing outside in the arena, enjoying the gorgeous weather. Rachel did not appear to be among them. How long had Matthew been back?