by Sharon Shinn
Gabriel watched his fork make patterns in the food on his plate. “Gabriel,” Obadiah said. “Where’s Rachel?”
“You mean you didn’t send her back here?” Nathan asked in surprise.
“She hasn’t been here at all,” Hannah said quietly.
Gabriel looked up. “She’s with the Edori,” he said.
“She just spent months with the Edori!” Obadiah exclaimed.
“Well, now she’s spending some more months with them.”
“Did you quarrel?” Nathan wanted to know.
“When did we not?”
“How long will she be gone?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t know. As long as she wants. She says she’ll be back in time for the next Gloria.”
“The next—but that’s a year away!”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to find her?” Obadiah asked quietly.
Gabriel gave him one quick, fierce look. “No.” The younger angel raised his eyebrows and sat back in his chair as far as his wings would allow.
“Do you know where she is?” Hannah asked.
“No. She’s safe. I would know if she wasn’t. Let it go. This is between the angelica and me.”
No one said anything for a few moments. Gabriel concentrated on his food until a servant brought fresh biscuits, and they all had another helping.
“So,” Obadiah said finally. “What next?”
“I have to go to Breven,” Gabriel said, “to Semorrah again, to Castelana, to the Manadavvi holdings—make the whole circuit. See what kind of cooperation I can get now that everyone knows I’m not bluffing. And now that most of the malcontents”— he paused—”are dead.”
“Do you want us to come With you?”
Gabriel rubbed his hand over his face. “I need someone to stay behind and see to whatever crises arise in Bethel while I’m gone. That should be you, Obadiah. Nathan—I want you to come with me as far as Jordana.”
Three pairs of eyes were instantly fixed on his face. “Jordana,” Nathan repeated. “You mean Windy Point.”
The Archangel nodded. “Not all his angels joined Raphael on the mountain. Some of them must still be there, or perhaps they’re in hiding elsewhere. And Leah. I didn’t see her at the Plain, although she could have been there. We must find out what the situation is.”
“When do we leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
The flight to Windy Point was uneventful, though Gabriel found himself continually watching the ground below him when they were near enough to make out shapes and figures. From the air, it would be easy enough to spot a small caravan of Edori, though it would be difficult to tell which clan they were and who rode with them… . But he did not see any Edori at all.
They arrived at Windy Point early in the day under a beaming sun. The fortress, always uninviting, seemed particularly dour this day, and they circled it once from the air. Gabriel was trying not to remember the last time he had arrived at this castle, seeking a way in, and the sight that had greeted him on a promontory a few hundred yards above the towers… .
“I don’t see any signs of life at all,” Nathan called to him. “Perhaps it’s been abandoned.”
“We’ve got to go in,” Gabriel called back. They banked and dropped slowly, aiming for the public landing ledge on the lower level of the fortress.
The wide portcullis was standing open, and no one stopped them as they entered. Neither did anyone answer their shouts of greeting or their hammering on the metal gong in the entry hall.
“I don’t think anyone is here,” Nathan murmured.
“You may be right.”
“But it feels—creepy in here.”
“I know.”
They chose a corridor at random and began exploring. They did not even encounter servants in any of the halls or kitchens or anterooms they first checked. The passageways echoed emptily with their two sets of footfalls and their infrequent, low-voiced words.
“No one in here.”
“Nothing in this room.”
“I don’t like this.”
They went through the entire lower level of the fortress without coming across a soul. As they climbed up to the second level, both of them paused a moment, washed with a faint sense of dread, but they said nothing and continued up the stairs.
The first room they came to was the great dining hall, haphazardly lit by sun through the filthy leaded windows. Here they found nearly everyone who had not accompanied Raphael to the Gloria.
They lay together at tables and on wide chaises, and now and then, embraced upon the floor—lovers and good friends with their arms around each other, more solitary fellows with their heads pillowed upon their hands. Angels lay intertwined with mortals, spreading their great soft feathers over their supine companions. Platters of meat and plates of bread and pitchers of wine still sat upon the tables. The only sounds were the small patter of fleeing mice and the droning buzz of hungry insects.
“It does not smell like death,” Nathan said, his voice very faint, wondering. “Could they all be merely drugged? Sleeping?”
“A powerful potion, to keep men sleeping for a week,” Gabriel replied. He stepped forward, carefully descending the stone steps into the room. “Let us see.”
But they were dead. Between them, the brothers checked for breath at every mouth, felt for every absent heartbeat. There were perhaps fifty bodies in the room, half of them angel, half mortal. Not one was living.
“I feel sick,” Nathan said when they met each other in the center of the mausoleum.
“And well you should.”
“Raphael did this? To everyone who did not believe him, who would not go with him to the mountain?”
“So it would appear.”
“But he—they were his friends, his disciples—”
“Raphael had no trouble dealing death. He had done it for twenty years, though we didn’t know it. It was life he could not sustain.” Gabriel glanced around the room one more time. He was feeling remarkably detached from all this, but he was not deceived. It was merely the flip side of Nathan’s undisguised horror. It was too large for him to comprehend, so his mind dealt with it coolly. He could not stand to examine the reality too closely. “Did you see Leah among the corpses?”
“No. You didn’t either?”
“No. She must be somewhere in the fortress.”
They found her, three levels up, in an ornate bedroom decorated in swaths of pink silk. She appeared to be sleeping; the three maids who attended her seemed to doze as well in their overstuffed rose-colored chairs. Gabriel was taking nothing for granted, however. He examined each woman, touched his fingers to each slack mouth.
“All dead,” he said to Nathan, and motioned him out the door.
They went through the fortress from top to bottom, efficiently, methodically, opening every room and closet to see if they could find any living refugees. There were none. They had one moment of strange excitement when, at the very top of the castle, they happened upon a narrow corridor down which they could hear patchy music playing.
“Someone’s alive,” Nathan whispered, grabbing his arm. “Gabriel, do you hear it? Someone’s playing a flute or something.”
Gabriel nodded, and they crept slowly down the hallway. It was a novice, perhaps a child, blowing fitfully on a reed pipe. They could hear first a single note, then a broken chord, then a single sustained note again. The doorway into the small room was open; this musician was making no attempt to hide.
But when they edged cautiously into the chamber, it was empty. They looked quickly at each other and then searched the room again with their eyes. There was no place to hide. No one was in here. For the moment, the music had stopped.
“Haunted?” Nathan breathed.
Gabriel was examining the door. It had been broken open with some kind of heavy weight, and the lock had been smashed. He showed Nathan, who shrugged.
They both jumped when the music started again, two notes, then on
e, then a minor seventh chord, all blown in concert with the rattling of the window casement as the wind shook the glass. Gabriel’s eyes went quickly around the room, following the pull of the music.
“Look,” he said, pointing first to one reed stuck in the wall, then another, as he spotted them. “The wind is the musician.”
Nathan’s eyes were wide. “Who would do this?”
“Anyone who lived in this castle and loved harmony. There was no other music in Windy Point.”
“Who, though? And where is he now?”
Gabriel spread his hands. “Dead, now, no doubt. Raphael seems to have left no one behind.”
“This has become an evil place,” Nathan said softly. Gabriel nodded.
They left shortly after that, making their way as quickly as possible down the winding hallways and out through the portcullis, into fresh air and sunshine again. Gabriel felt a tremor from shoulders to heels as he stepped outside the fortress. It was as if he shook off a malevolent spirit trying to curl between his wings and wrap icy fingers around his throat.
“Aloft,” he said to his brother, and they sprang in tandem into the air, rhythmically stroking their wings against the heavy, capricious wind. Gabriel angled himself upward, over the mountain, through the low-lying clouds, into the frigid layer of atmosphere where breathing was just barely possible. Nathan asked no questions, but followed closely. Gabriel slowed to a hover, his great wings sweeping the air with a steady motion, and raised both arms above his head.
When he began singing, he felt Nathan’s shock even in this cold, still place. He clenched his hands, keeping his arms upraised, and continued to sing. The air was so clear that his voice rang against it like a hammer against a chime. His breath was so warm, so heavy, that his words seemed to take bodily form and fill the empty skies around them with birdlike shapes. He forced his fingers apart, stretched his hands to Jovah and sang the prayer again. Behind him, Nathan added his baritone in harmony. Their voices climbed through the snowy atmosphere and reached the god’s ear.
Lightning shot between them, nearly singeing Gabriel’s wing. The Archangel fell back, lost altitude, and beat the air madly to regain balance. Seconds later, sound arrowed down after the burst of light, a rolling boom that sounded like glass crashing all the way down the stairwell that linked the sky to the earth. Then a huge explosion threw the sound back up to heaven, wave after wave of rumble and collapse.
Gabriel folded his wings back and began to drift downward, Nathan behind him. They landed somewhere in the Caitana foothills far enough away that they did not have to see how the thunderbolt had sheared the fortress from the mountains, destroying every stone and stick of the castle in the process.
“Even so,” Nathan said over their campfire that night, “none of the problems that are Jordana have been solved.”
“I know,” Gabriel said. “First, we have to pick a site and build another hold. Perhaps in the southern part of the province this time. Near the Heldoras, I think.”
“A fortress can wait,” Nathan said impatiently. “Who will watch over Jordana? Which angels? Who shall lead them? Someone who can deal with the Jansai, not to mention the river merchants—”
“I’ve already decided all this,” Gabriel said. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“No, who?”
“You, of course.”
Nathan stared at him. Gabriel smiled, for the first time in this long, dreary day. “Well, who else?” the Archangel asked reasonably. “You’re the one I trust most.”
“But Gabriel—”
“I know. You’ll need help. We’ll send a third of the Eyrie angels, a third of the Monteverde angels. We will all be spread too thin, but we will do the best we can.”
“But Gabriel, I—”
“Of course you can do it. I know it will be difficult. Ariel and I will help as much as we can.”
“But—”
“And I certainly don’t expect you to do it without friends,” Gabriel said. “Ariel has already agreed to donate Magdalena. Permanently, of course. You do realize that this is a lifetime assignment. That you and your children and your children’s children will henceforth be citizens of Jordana—”
“Magdalena?” Nathan cried. “You and Ariel agreed—”
Gabriel smiled again. “This time, we are heeding the wisdom of Jovah,” he said gently. “The two of you seem to have been called together for a purpose. This is the only purpose I can think of. Will you do this for me? I can think of no harder task in all of Samaria and no man I would rather ask to assume such a heavy burden.”
“Yes,” Nathan said, his voice low and strangled. “Yes. But Gabriel, you knew I would.”
* * *
The next few weeks passed in motion. Gabriel flew between Breven, Semorrah, Monteverde, Luminaux, Mount Sinai and the Heldoras so often that he began cursing the slowness of his wings, wishing for a faster mode of transport. He could not imagine how anyone endured the tedious hours of travel on foot or even by horse.
Yet everything was coming together. He found the merchants, the Jansai, even the haughty Manadavvi, cowed and eager to come to terms. The liberation of the Edori was the first step, and next were the sworn oaths to leave all peoples in peace and in freedom. It would take him months or years to sort out some of the other injustices, particularly among the wealthy Gaza landholders and their tenants. But he had made a start.
He spent time with Nathan and Maga in the Heldora Mountains, watching the construction of the new hold. This was to be modeled more after Monteverde than the Eyrie, an open, accessible community in which mortals mingled with angels. So be it; angels had been aloof too long. Maybe it was time to find new ways into and out of the Eyrie, so that anyone could come there who wished … and any who were there could leave… .
But anyone who had wanted to leave the Eyrie had already done so, and showed no disposition to return.
It was late summer, and Gabriel had seen no sign of Rachel, heard no word. He had not really expected to, and yet he had hoped. He could not keep himself, still, from scouting out the campsites he saw below him during his long, wearisome travels, looking for Edori, for certain Edori, for one woman traveling among Edori. But he never saw her. He never got close enough to the ground to identify gold hair shining incongruously bright among all the dark heads clustered in the camps. He kept his word.
Two months gone by, nearly three. Nine more months, at the longest, before he would see her again. He willed the world to begin spinning faster, the days to shorten, the nights to whirl by. That next time, he would swear no vows, he would accede to no impossible terms. He would make no mistakes. The next time she left him, he would be right behind her.
Gabriel was in Velora when the strange rain began falling. He had stopped to check on Peter and the orphanage so that the next time he saw Rachel, if he ever saw Rachel again, he could tell her how well all the children were doing. The Archangel and the schoolmaster had just stepped outside to complete their farewells when the rain began to patter down around them. Only it wasn’t rain.
“You’d think you were in Breven,” Peter remarked, holding a palm before his mouth to screen out the dry, drifting particles. “Sandstorm like this.”
“I don’t think it’s sand,” Gabriel said. All around him was the oddest, softest hissing sound as the tiny grains whispered through the air and sprinkled to the ground. He could feel the mealy buildup in his hair, in his wings. He fluttered his feathers impatiently to clear them.
“No, I believe you’re right. It’s—well, rice or something. Seeds, I think. Great Jovah, where is this coming from?”
“I have no idea.” Gabriel squinted up at the overcast sky and could see nothing but the swirling mist endlessly forming and falling. “I can’t even guess what it is.”
People were sticking their heads out of doorways and windows, cupping their hands to catch the strange bounty. The children had, by some primal telepathy, instantly realized something unusual was afoot and broken free of t
heir teachers and their classrooms. They were already running through the streets, catching the falling seeds in their open mouths, dancing under the dry, slick rain.
“Oh dear. I’m sure they shouldn’t be eating this, whatever this is—” Peter began.
Gabriel laughed. “It’s falling from heaven,” he said. “Surely Jovah is sending it. It must be safe.”
“But what is it?”
“I don’t know.”
No one in Velora, in fact, seemed to know, but like Gabriel, many citizens seemed to have deduced that Jovah was sending them some kind of rare gift. Already, buckets and pans and cook pots had been set outside in front of doors and on top of flat roofs. Women walked through the streets with their skirts spread wide to catch the grains as they fell. Gabriel stopped a dozen or so as he passed them, asking, “Do you know what this is?” All of them smiled and shook their heads.
He flew back to the Eyrie to find a similar scene in the arena in the center of the hold. Every imaginable container had been laid out on the open stone; the plateau was so crowded with trays and cauldrons and vases that he scarcely had room to land. He ducked quickly inside the first open door and shook the seeds from his hair.
“What is this stuff?” he demanded of the first person he saw, who happened to be Hannah.
She was smiling. “Don’t you know? It’s manna.”
“Manna?” He glanced back toward the plateau, still snowy with descending seed. “But it hasn’t fallen on Samaria in generations—”
“I know.”
“And why has Jovah chosen to send it to us again after all this time?”
“Someone must have asked him for it,” she said, meeting his eyes squarely. “It is said that Hagar herself first wrote the prayer that the god responded to with this gift.”
And then he knew where Rachel was, and that she wanted to see him.
Two days later, he left in the morning and arrived at the foot of the Corinni Mountains in the early afternoon. He had brought gifts with him, and he carried as well his silver recorder on its chain around his neck. In his free time (what little there had been of it in the past weeks), he had practiced. He now had a repertoire of six fairly creditable, albeit simple, songs.
