The Prison of the Angels Page 28

  Gabriel uttered a grumbling snarl, and for a second the lion in him was very audible. “If you think I am going to help you imprison anyone, Michael, then you need a few thousand years down there yourself to show you the error of your ways.”

  “And these tame apes are the ones that released you, I assume? Is that why you favor them?”

  “Let me state it plainly: a compromise must be reached for the good of all. We are the four Pillars of the Earth, two Watchers, two Children of Earth. We will find a way.” He made it sound like a threat.

  “A compromise? Are you insane? We do not compromise with disobedience and rebellion! We hold the line!” He looked to the other archangels for backup. “For thousands of years we have held that line, we have kept order, we have obeyed the Divine Plan. That is what we are here for, isn’t it? Is there any other reason for our creation?”

  “Did I not make myself clear, Michael?”

  “And let me make myself clear,” countered Michael, “that the Host will not tolerate the Scapegoat or his kind roaming free upon the Earth.”

  “And I,” said Azazel, just to make things worse, “will not tolerate the imprisonment of a single one of my brothers any longer.”

  They glared at each other, snorting like bulls.

  Uriel rolled his eyes. “Well this is going to work out, then.”

  “We could kill them all,” Raphael suggested uncomfortably. His gaze met Azazel’s, and I recalled the bitter history of personal friendship and betrayal between them. “Would you accept that? Would that be better than an eternity of imprisonment?”

  Azazel swayed. “It would be more merciful,” he said, his eyes so black that they reflected not even Michael’s shining armor. “But would Our Father agree to the slaughter of brother by brother?”

  Not one of the archangels answered. Because I knew what to look for, I saw the tiny cringes of dismay.

  Of course, Azazel does not know. He still assumes that it was lust that Gabriel was punished for.

  “Because I will not,” my demon lover concluded with a horrible grin. “We will be free. And we will see all our suffering paid back in full.”

  He was enjoying this in a way, I realized; this truculent bloody-minded defiance, this ‘I will fuck you over before I concede an inch.’ He could not win, could not even negotiate from a position of strength, but he could make it hell for anyone who took him on. Inat, indeed.

  “You will never be free!” Michael snapped. “The Earth belongs to the Righteous!”

  “Shit on your righteousness—we have suffered long enough! We will have the justice we deserve!”

  “Sure, you’re both talking out of your arses!” Egan rasped, pushing me behind him. He’d not spoken since we arrived in the Colosseum; now the words seemed to erupt out of his breast. “Look at you!” he shouted; “Look at you shiny bastards! How long have you been around, hey? How stupid are you? Have you not learned a thing?”

  The angels stared.

  “There is no righteousness! There is no fecking justice, not on this Earth! Have none of you been paying the slightest attention? There never was and there never will be—no glorious City of David, no New Jerusalem descending from the clouds, no fecking Kingdom of God Here on Earth! You know what there actually is?” His hands stabbed the air, grasping at invisible worlds. “There’s killing each other, and there’s not killing each other—that’s all. And if you manage to stop killing each other for long enough, there in the little cracks between the Not Killing Each Other you’ve got enough space for a square yard of freedom, or a little particle of justice, or a few moments of goodness. And that’s as good as it ever fecking gets.” He’d gone pale with rage. “So don’t you give me this bull about the world you want. You don’t get to choose that. No one does. You find a way to stop killing each other—and us—and you back the feck off and let everyone be.”

  He shut up. The staring did not stop. Even Azazel’s glowering gaze seemed more somber.

  Raphael lifted his hands. “Well,” he said gently, “I’m with that guy.” Which was big of him, considering. “Let us find a way to peace.”

  “That is all we ever asked for,” said Azazel. “To be left to our own devices.”

  Egan’s shoulders sagged. I put a hand on his arm.

  Michael cast Raphael a wounded look; they were supposed to be allies against Azazel, of course. There had been a shift in the dynamic of the argument; I could feel it. “What do you propose, Brother?” he asked contemptuously. “Should we let them all out? Should we let them mate with their ape-wives and spawn new Nephilim? Shall we tell the Host, ‘Yes, it does not matter—it’s alright to root whatever you want, breed however you like, for Our Father has changed His mind?’”

  The unspoken sentence that followed was clear: How long do you think the Host would stay intact and loyal?

  “Azazel,” put in Gabriel, “will you accept that there must be no more Nephilim?”

  “You would tell us to stop loving?” Azazel asked hotly. “We must love, and be loved.”

  “I say merely that it be done in a way that does not result in offspring. The Nephilim are too destructive. Our blood has shaped the Race of Man in ages past, but that is enough. Too much salt makes a meal inedible.”

  “Fine,” he grinned. “Set us all free and I promise we will slay our own children in the womb.”

  “No,” said Michael and I simultaneously, though for very different reasons. “You can’t do that to women you love!” I protested. “That’s just—”

  “You would trust the Watchers?” Michael overbore my words. “You think that they would never make any mistake, or weaken in the face of their wives’ tears?”

  “You can trust us as far as we can trust you,” sneered Azazel.

  “I think it will go badly for humankind if the Fallen walk the Earth at all,” said Raphael gloomily. “They are a fragile race, prone to worship.”

  “As they should be,” put in Uriel. He’d been keeping out of the discussion, I noticed.

  “Prone to the worship of idols. Anything more powerful or beautiful than themselves.” Raphael looked sharply at Azazel. “If the Fallen set up thrones here on Earth, we condemn Man to slavery.”

  “Willing slavery. Come on.” His grin was pure, trolling evil. “They’ll love it.”

  “Raphael’s right,” said Egan dryly, repaying the compliment. The two of them seemed to have reached an instinctive accord, despite that attempted murder on the Vatican Museum stairs. “It would utterly screw us up. It would change everything. Maybe that’s the route you want to go down. Maybe that’s a price we can pay for escaping Armageddon this time. But it’ll be the end of human history, don’t think it won’t be.”

  “The Fallen will set up no thrones on Earth!” Michael cried. “I will not permit that! That is my line in the sand!”

  “And mine is that we will be free!” Azazel shouted back. “Stand here and fight me to the death to decide that, if that is what you want!”

  “No,” I said under my breath, hopelessly.

  “I have a solution,” announced Penemuel, speaking for the first time, her voice ringing cool and clear over the masculine growls.

  Azazel turned a snarl on her, all wolf-fangs. She had betrayed him for Uriel, after all, I reminded myself. His grunt of “What?” was ungracious and bestial. But it was at least a question.

  “Oh right, the Repentant Watcher,” Michael sneered. “I’m sure she can be trusted.”

  “Do you doubt my word?” asked Uriel, cold as ice.

  “You betrayed every one of the Watchers in your care, Michael, and let them starve to death,” Azazel snarled. “Don’t talk about trust.”

  “Silence, all of you!” snapped Gabriel. “Let her speak, if she has any sense to bring to this brawl!”

  Penemuel took a couple of steps forward, ensuring that all eyes must be upon her. I couldn’t help admiring her poise and confidence.

  “We are already in agreement. The problem is, we all co
ncur, that if the Watchers are freed, where shall they go? We are barred from Heaven, we cannot be seen to roam the Earth, and we cannot survive in Hell. So where shall we go?”

  “There is nowhere else,” Azazel grunted.

  “There is, now.” She smiled, though it did not reach her eyes. “Things have changed since we were last free, Azazel. I have been looking around.” She reached into the pocket of her frock coat and extracted a fat paperback book, very dog-eared, which she brandished. “The humans have done something remarkable. Something we could not. They have created new worlds. Worlds where decisions are made for good or evil, where hearts are broken and won, where hope is found and innocence lost. I have been to these worlds. They are real realms of the spirit.”

  “Books?” said Azazel with contempt. “Just words!”

  “No. They are places that the human spirit goes to be reborn. Landscapes and people that they recognize just as they recognize their own homes. Places as real as any memory. This book here, they made into one of their movies, so that everyone knows now what the heroes look like, how to find their way on foot from here to there as easily as walking about their own home. I have seen these places, Azazel! I have walked under silver trees and through the streets of fair white cities far greater than this Rome.”

  “Stories are fixed. There is no room for us there.”

  “Not as fixed as you think. Humans are unendingly inventive and they will not leave things alone.” She dropped the book on the floor and from her other pocket pulled a tablet with a lit screen. “Here is another world,” she said, holding it out to him. I glimpsed what looked like a computer game landscape with a character standing in the foreground, shifting slightly as she awaited player direction. “Humans live in there, through their avatars. They converse, and love, and strive there. They die, but are resurrected to try again. They can do anything they desire.”

  Azazel took the little computer in his hand, contemptuously. The landscape, a tree-girded temple on a coastal cliff overlooking turquoise waters, was near photo-realistic. It looked like holiday-brochure porn. If it had been a real place, I’d have been longing to visit.

  “Ten million people know this one world, and even this location in that world,” said Penemuel. “Think about that—it’s almost as many as were alive when we last walked the Earth! They long for it, and they talk about it among themselves, and oh, they dream about it at night, Azazel. Their dreams are ours to enter from these realms. We will have myriads at our fingertips. We will have worlds we can shape, and rule. There are no Divine Laws there. We will be able to do just as we wish there, and the humans will love us for it.”

  He shifted his shoulders as if fluffing up feathers. “You really think I’d go into that thing?” he said, jabbing the screen and making the avatar wiggle.

  “No! That world is not contained inside the machine—any more than the Kingdom of Heaven is found squashed between the printed pages of a Bible! This is a window—a door—and nothing more. That world is…” She waved her hands, indicating the air all around us. “Everywhere. In their heads and their hearts most of all. And there are dozens of these worlds—hundreds. Whole galaxies. Do you see? We could take our brothers into any that they chose. Anything that suited.”

  He frowned at her, then cast a swift, suspicious glance at the other angels. They all looked as puzzled as he did, which perhaps helped reassure him that this was no conspiracy. Even Uriel looked nonplussed. Azazel looked down at the screen again, at that perfect, picturesque landscape. It probably didn’t hurt that the MMORPG character looking out at him was female, and impossibly well-proportioned, and clad in a deeply impractical excuse for armor. “You’re suggesting exile,” he said. “Just a bigger prison.”

  “If it is a prison, then it is bigger than this Earth. Bigger than what you would call freedom. And it will go on getting bigger. They never stop creating, Azazel. The human mind is bigger than all Our Father’s Creation.”

  Azazel laughed. “How can I trust a word you say? You abandoned the fight!”

  “I have found a way for you to win it.” Her gaze was steady. “Listen to me; I will go into this exile too. I have no fear of it.”

  “Penemuel,” said Uriel uncomfortably, but she didn’t react.

  Azazel’s mouth pulled as if he was trying to dig words out from between his teeth.

  She turned to Michael. “And what is more, the Host do not have to know. So far as they are concerned, nothing will have changed. You are very good at not telling them everything, are you not?”

  “I don’t like it,” he growled, but without conviction.

  “Since there are no Watchers left alive in your Quarter, Michael,” said Uriel coldly, “I’m not even sure why you should get a say on this.”

  Michael pointed a warning finger. “And I’m starting to think the Christians are right about you, Satan.”

  Rather to my surprise, for Uriel was normally no fighter, his face went hard, his eyes gleaming blue. “I am the Pillar of the North and this is my domain. You will not disrespect me here.”

  I felt the ground tremble beneath our feet.

  “Brothers,” Gabriel rumbled warningly. “Let us return to the point of debate: exile of the Watchers to these new spiritual realms.”

  “I see no reason to tell the Host,” said Raphael with exaggerated calm, as if the others’ bluster had been wiped from the minutes of the meeting. “It would only cause confusion if they were to know.”

  “Our Father will know,” Azazel pointed out grimly.

  “Has He interfered to stop you doing one single thing since your release?” Penemuel asked. “Has He halted this conclave?”

  “I believe,” said Raphael hastily, casting please don’t say anything glances at Gabriel, “that this is a matter left for us to deal with, just as the First War.”

  “But what is to stop the Fallen coming back?” Michael demanded. “These ‘doors’ of yours are uncountable, and cannot all be guarded.”

  “Then let us make a Covenant between us, binding all sides,” said Gabriel. “The Watchers will go into exile voluntarily. They will be free to act as they wish in these new worlds, provided they do not force any Child of Earth to enter or remain in those places. They will be free to take lovers among dreaming humans, but never in the flesh.”

  “And you’ll stop the nukes,” I said forcefully. And then, into the silence, “What? We’re representatives here, aren’t we? We get to set rules too, right?” I felt Egan squeeze my shoulder.

  “We will stop the weapons,” Raphael agreed, giving the others a hard look. “In fact that must be the first thing we do.”

  “Though we could just start again from scratch, with cockroaches,” suggested Uriel hopefully.

  Gabriel cleared his throat. “We will save the Children of Earth from burning their world,” he said. “Can we all agree to that? After all, if they die out, there will be nowhere for the Watchers to go.”

  The angels nodded, with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

  “Fine. Whatever. Yes,” grumbled Uriel.

  “Do we agree to this Covenant? Azazel?”

  My lover hesitated, studying Penemuel as if he hoped to read her thoughts. It was hard for him to trust anyone, I knew. He’d been betrayed far too often.

  “Azazel, please,” I said softly, pulling out of Egan’s arm to approach him. “You’ll be free. You and your brothers. That’s what you wanted all along, wasn’t it?”

  He switched his hot black gaze to me and made a peculiar attempt at smiling. “Do you trust her words, my love?”

  “She’s not lying about books or online worlds. I don’t know what it would be like to live in there permanently.” I bit my lip. Penemuel’s particularly pragmatic brand of disloyalty was that—unlike certain other people I’d grown close to—she wouldn’t fight for a cause she thought lost. If she’d agreed to go into exile too, I doubted very much that it was a trap she’d sacrifice herself to bait. “It’s got to be better than what’s going o
n now, though.” I reasoned. “I mean, if your brothers knew, they’d want to take that chance, wouldn’t they?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Michael?” prompted Gabriel.

  He shifted from foot to foot. “If you swear not to tell the Host,” he said. “They are mine to lead, mine to command.”

  “And we will need them all to save the Children of Earth from the flames,” Raphael pointed out. “We rely upon their numbers.”

  Michael grunted, but looked pleased despite himself. “Yes.”

  Gabriel let out a long breath. “We have an accord then. There will be a New Covenant in Heaven and on Earth.”

  Penemuel grinned in relief, and when she cast a glance at Uriel even he shrugged and nodded.

  “So there must be a sacrifice,” said Gabriel. “Has any of you here a child to give up?”

  18

  ALL THE COMPANY OF HEAVEN

  Oh come on!” I blurted. “Do you lot have to be so primitive?”

  The angelic faces turned toward me were as blank as if I’d suddenly started doing chicken impressions.

  Of course, I told myself, they are primitive. More ancient than the whole human race. “Can’t you all just sign a piece of paper, or promise on your honor or something?” I asked hopelessly.

  “Milja,” said Gabriel gently, as if I were a child; “there must be blood. What else but blood will rise up and cry out if the Covenant is broken? What else will take vengeance?”

  Blood conducts intent between the spheres. I looked to Egan for support, but he was just grim-faced and silent.

  “Has it got to be a child?” I asked, thinking of Isaac, thinking of Jesus, thinking of the animal substitutes offered at the Temple for the firstborn children of the people of Israel. So far as I knew, not one of the angels here had any living issue.

  Gabriel hesitated. “Not necessarily. A child is best. A willing and obedient sacrifice.” He looked around the small gathering. “Anyone?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Godssake,” I swore, not caring if I offended any of them. “It’s got to be me, hasn’t it? If you need blood. Bastards. I’ll do it.”