Текст книги "Dreams of Gods & Monsters"

Автор книги: Лэйни Тейлор

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

47

THE BOOK OF ELAZAEL

There was nothing for it, after that. After they perp-walked her through the site, every set of eyes drilling into her, malicious and condemning. After they put her in a car and slammed the door and ordered her returned to Tamnougalt to await her escort home. It was a couple of hours’ drive, the sere pre-Saharan landscape of the Drâa Valley surrounding her in all directions, and she had nothing to occupy her but her strange coursing exaltation and outrage.

Well, nothing but that and… all the things known and buried.

All the many stirring things. A corner protruding from a floodplain—maybe a cask or maybe a world. All she had to do was blow away the dust. Eliza started laughing. There, in the backseat of the car, laughter poured from her like a new language. Later, when the government agents came to fetch her, the driver would report it, as preamble to explaining what happened after.

When she stoppedlaughing.

Back in the “good old days” when she’d had nothing to worry about but building a monster army in a giant sandcastle in the wilderness, Karou had periodically driven a rusty truck over rutted earth and long straight roads to reach Agdz, the nearest town where she might, with her hair covered by a hijab, pass unremarked while buying supplies. Bulk bags of couscous, crates and crates of vegetables, chewy, hardscrabble chickens, and a king’s treasury of dried dates and apricots.

She looked down on Agdz now, from the sky. Unremarkable. She passed over it, feeling the pull of the others in her wake, and kept going. Their destination lay a little farther on, and was somewhat more remarkable. She spotted the palm grove first, an oasis, the green as surprising as spilled paint on brown ground. And there, within: crumbling mud walls so like the crumbling mud walls they’d just left behind. Another kasbah. Tamnougalt. It had a hotel, Karou remembered, the sort of sprawling out-of-the-way place that would allow for a quiet interlude for their small, strange band, while not so out of the way that they wouldn’t find what they needed.

“We can get ourselves together here,” she said. “They should have Internet and outlets. Showers, beds, water. Food.”

Their tiny shadow-moths grew larger as they dropped down to meet them, and they set themselves down in the shade of the palms and released their glamours. Karou took in the sight of her friends first. Zuzana and Mik looked weak and dehydrated, sweaty and showing signs of sunburn– Note to self: You can sunburn while invisible—but the worst was the strain etched into their expressions, and a disturbing laxness about their eyes that made them look unfixed, not fully present. Shell-shocked.

What had she done, bringing them into war?

She looked to Virko next, still afraid of what she would see in Akiva’s eyes. Virko, who had been a lieutenant of the Wolf, and one of those to leave her alone at the pit with him. The only one to look back, true, but he had left all the same. He had also saved Mik’s and Zuzana’s lives. He was stalwart and weathered, well accustomed to the rigors of flight and battle—no sunburn for him or fatigue, but the strain was there in his face, and the shock. And still the shame, Karou saw. It had been there since the pit, in every glance.

She gave him a look that she hoped was focused and clear, and she nodded. Forgiveness? Gratitude? Fellowship? She didn’t quite know. He returned the nod, though, with a solemnity that was like ceremony, and then, finally, Karou turned to Akiva.

She hadn’t really looked at him since the portal. She had seen him, in brief moments unglamoured, and she had been, every second, attuned to his presence, but she hadn’t looked, not at his face, not into his eyes. She was afraid, and… she was right to be afraid.

His pain was undisguised, so raw it made her own pain sing straight to the surface, pure enough for tithing, but that wasn’t the worst part. If it was only pain, she might have found a way to go to him, to reach for his hand as she had on the other side of the portal, or even for his heart, as she had in the cave. We are the beginning.

But… the beginning ofwhat ?Karou wondered, desolate, because there was rage in Akiva’s eyes, too, and an implacability that was unmistakable. It was hatred, and it was vengeance. It was terrifying, and it froze her in place. When she had first lain eyes on him in the Jemaa in Marrakesh, he had been absolutely cold. Inhuman, merciless. What she had seen on him then was vengeance as habit, and fury cooled by years of numbness.

Later, in Prague, she had seen his humanity return to him, like a thaw releasing a heart from ice. She hadn’t been able to fully appreciate it at the time, because she hadn’t understood what it meant, or what he was coming back from, but now she did. He had resurrected himself—the Akiva she had known so long ago, so full of life and hope—or at least, he had begun to. She still hadn’t seen him smile the way he had back then, a smile so beautiful it had channeled sunlight and made her feel drunk with love, at once light-headed and firmly, perfectly, gratefully connected to the world—earth and sky and joy and him. Everything else had paled beside that feeling. Race was nothing, and treason just a word.

She had just begun to feel that smile was possible again, and the feeling of effortless rightness, too, but, looking at Akiva now, it felt very far away again, and so did he.

As she understood it, there had been several thousand Misbegotten soldiers as recently as last year, and the final berserk push of the war had reduced that number to those she knew from the Kirin caves. Akiva had endured that, survived it, and then he had endured and survived the death of Hazael, and now he was here, safe, while possibly—probably—he lost all the rest.

What Karou saw in him was vengeance still molten, and it was wrong, it wasn’t where they were supposed to be, but it felt… inevitable. Brimstone had told her, just before her execution, “To stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength,” but maybe, thought Karou, sick at heart, it was just too much to expect. Maybe that strength was too much to ask of anyone.

The feeling of half death was with her still. She felt flattened out, or hollowed out. Again.

She turned to her friends and, with effort, spoke almost evenly. “Could you two go in and get a room? Maybe it’s best if the rest of us aren’t seen.”

She thought—hoped—Zuzana might make some sarcastic comment to that, or suggest riding right up to the gate on Virko-back or something, but she didn’t. She just nodded.

“Do you realize,” asked Mik, in a bald effort to jostle some Zuzana-ness back into Zuzana, “that our three wishes are about to come true? I don’t know if they’ll have chocolate cake here, but—”

Zuzana cut him off. “I’m changing my wishes anyway,” she said, and counted them off on her fingers. “One: for our friends to be safe. Two: for Jael to drop dead, and three…”

Whatever she meant to say next, she didn’t manage it. Karou had never seen her friend look so lost and fragile. She cut in. “If it doesn’t include food,” she reminded Zuzana gently, “it’s a lie. At least, so I’ve been told.”

“Fine.” Zuzana took a deep breath, centering herself. “Then I could really use some world peace for dinner.” She was all dark-eyed intensity. Something was lost in her. Karou saw it and mourned. War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. It’s ugly, and you don’t even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know.

And who was Zuzana going to be, now that this knowledge was hers?

“World peace for dinner,” mused Mik, scratching his beard stubble. “Does that come with fries?”

“It freaking better,” said Zuzana. “Or I will send it freaking back.”

The angel’s name was Elazael.

The church founded by her descendants—and they preferred the term churchto cult, naturally—was called the Handfast of Elazael, and every girl child born in the bloodline was christened Elazael. If, then, by puberty, she had not manifested “the gift,” she was rechristened by another name. Eliza had been the only one in the last seventy-five years to hold on to it, and she had often thought that the worst thing of all—the cherry on the cake of her awful upbringing—was the envy of the others.

Nothing glitters in the eyes like envy. Few could know this as profoundly as she did. It had to be something special to grow up knowing that any given member of your large extended family would probably kill and eat you if it meant they could have your “gift” for themselves, Renfield-style.

The Handfast was matriarchal, and Eliza’s mother was the current high priestess. Converts were called “cousins,” while those of the blood—venerated even if they didn’t have “the gift”—were “the Elioud.” It was the term, in ancient texts, for the offspring of the better-known “Nephilim,” who were the first fruit of angels’ congress with humans.

It was notable that in Nephilim scripture, both biblical and apocryphal, all the angels were male. The Book of Enoch—a text that was canon to no group except the Ethiopian Jews—tells of the leader of the fallen angels, Samyaza, ordering his hundred and ninety-nine fallen brethren to, essentially, get busy.

“Beget us children,” he commanded, and they complied, and no mention was made of how the human women felt about this. Unsurprising in writings of the era, the mothers had all the agency of petri dishes, and the progeny that sprang from their wombs—accompanied by, one surmised, extreme discomfort—were giants and “biters,” whatever that meant, whom God later bade the archangel Gabriel to destroy.

And maybe he did. Maybe they had existed, all of them: Gabriel and God, Samyaza and his crew and all their enormous biting babies. Who knows? The Elioud dismissed the Book of Enoch as absurd, which was kind of the pot calling the kettle black, Eliza had always thought, but wasn’t that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, “My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.”

More or less.

The Handfast had its own book: the Book of Elazael, of course, according to which there weren’t two hundred fallen angels. There were four, two of whom were female, one of whom mattered. Victims of corruption in the highest rank of angels, they were maimed and cast unjustly out of Heaven a thousand years ago. What had become of the three other Fallen, or whether they did any begetting of their own, was unknown, but Elazael, for her part, by way of congress with a human husband, was fruitful and multiplied.

(As a side note, it said a lot about Eliza’s insular childhood and early education—or lack thereof—that she was a teenager before she learned that the governing body of the United States was called “Congress.” In her world, it meant the act that leads to “begetting.” Coupling. Loin fruit. Doing it.As a consequence, congressstill sounded sexual to her every time she heard it—which, living in Washington, D.C., was often.)

In the Book of Elazael, unlike in the patriarchal Book of Enoch, or Genesis for that matter, the angel wasn’t the giverof seed, but the receiver. The angel was mother, was womb, and, credit nature or nurture, her offspring weren’t monstrous.

At least not physiologically.

The Book of Elazael wasn’t written down until the late eighteenth century—by a freed slave named Seminole Gaines who married into the matrilineal clan and became its most charismatic evangelist, growing the church, at its height, to number nearly eight hundred worshippers, many of whom were also freed slaves. Of the angel Elazael herself, he wrote that she was “ebon-dark, and the quicks of her eyes white as starfire,” though, living eight hundred years after she did, he was hardly an unimpeachable source. Beyond that obviously massive heresy—a black mother angel; no, even better: a fallenblack mother angel—the book was actually pretty orthodox, derivative enough that it could almost have been the result of an epic session of magnetic poetry, Bible edition.

You know, if magnetic poetry had existed in the late eighteenth century. Or refrigerator doors.

In any case, what Eliza wanted to know about her heritage would not be found in the Book of Elazael. At least, not that edition. The real book of Elazael was within her.

She… contained it. Not in her blood, though only those of the blood had it. It was, in fact, encoded on the thread of her life, that tether hooking soul to body that would be found on no anatomy chart ever drawn in this world. She didn’t know that, even as she fell headlong into it, in the backseat of a car on a long, straight road.

Right into the heart of the madness that had claimed each and every “prophet” to come before her.

48

HUNGRY

There were no french fries to be had at Tamnougalt, and, in what Zuzana considered a blatant breach of hospitality laws, there was no chocolate, either—except in liquid form, that is, and hot chocolate just wasn’t going to cut it right now. But if she was back to her old self enough to crave these things, she was notback to her old self enough to complain about them.

And I never will be again, she thought morosely, sitting in the shade on the rooftop terrace of this new kasbah. Well, not new, obviously. New to her. It was strange to see people ambling around in their cool leather slippers, at home in this place that reminded her so much of “monster castle.” Just add a few homey flourishes, like Berber drums and some big woven cushions laid out on dusty rugs, fat candlesticks bearing years of wax drippings. Oh, and electricity and running water. Civilization, of a sort.

Though Zuzana rather doubted that any running water everwould be able to compete with the thermal pools at the Kirin caves for awesomeness. After Karou had left her and Mik alone in there, they had indulged in a daydream of bringing people to the caves from Earth—not rich adventure tourists, either, but people who needed and deserved it—to “take the healing waters.” They’d be carried on the backs of stormhunters, and sleep on fresh furs in the old family dwellings. Candlelight and wind music, a banquet under the stalactites of the great cavern. Imagine, being able to give that experience to someone. And Zuzana didn’t even like people! It had to be Mik’s good nature rubbing off on her, whether she wanted it to or not.

They had the rooftop terrace to themselves for the moment. The others were down in the room, hiding out, sleeping, and doing research. Mik and Zuzana had taken it upon themselves to procure food, and so here they were, menus spread before them on plastic tablecloths.

They hadn’t talked at all about the battle. What was there to say? Hey, Virko sure tore that angel apart, huh? Like he was slow-cooked chicken, ready to fall off the bone.Zuzana didn’t want to talk about that, and she didn’t want to talk about the other things she’d seen as they made their escape, or to compare notes and know whether Mik had seen them, too. It would make them more real, if he had. Like seeing Uthem, whose revenant necklace she had strung herself, set upon by a half-dozen Dominion. And Rua, the Dashnag who had carried Issa through the portal. How many others?

“You know what?” Zuzana said. Mik looked up questioningly. “I am too going to complain. Why even bother living if you can’t complain about the absence of chocolate? What kind of life would that be?”

“A pale one,” said Mik. “But what absence of chocolate? What’s wrong with this?” He was pointing at the menu.

“You better not be messing with me.”

“I would never joke about chocolate,” he said, hand to heart. “Look. You’re missing a page.”

And she was. And there it was, in black and white on Mik’s menu, spelled out, as every item was, in five languages, as if chocolatewere not universally understood:

gateau au chocolat

torta di cioccolato

pastel de chocolate

schokoladenkuchen

chocolate cake

But then the waiter came to take their order, and when she said, “First we’ll have the chocolate cake, and we’ll just eat it while you’re making the rest, so bring that first, okay?” he told them—with what struck Zuzana as an entirely inadequate display of regret—that they’d run out.

… white noise…

But this was when Zuzana felt the nature of the change within herself for a certainty, because it wasn’t a big deal. Her lines of context had been redrawn, and the one for “Big Deal” had been scooted way the hellback. “Well, that’s a bummer,” she said. “But I guess I’ll survive.”

Mik’s eyebrows lifted.

They ordered and asked that the food be brought straight to their room—and the waiter triple-checked the quantity of kebabs and tagine, flat bread and omelettes, fruit and yogurt. “But it is enough for… twenty people,” he pointed out several times.

Zuzana regarded him levelly. “I’m veryhungry.”

Eliza wasn’t laughing anymore. She was… speaking. Sort of.

The driver was on his phone, shouting over the sound of her voice even as he sped down the long, straight highway. “Something’s wrong with her!” he yelled. “I don’t know! Can’t you hear her?” Twisting his arm around to hold the phone nearer to her raving, he lost his grip on the steering wheel momentarily, swerving onto the shoulder and back with a squeal of rubber.

The girl in the backseat was sitting ramrod straight, eyes glazed and staring, speaking without cease. The driver didn’t recognize the language. It wasn’t Arabic or French or English, and he would have known German or Spanish or Italian to hear them, too. This was something other, and unutterably alien. It was fluting and susurrous and wind-borne, and this young woman, held rigid in the grip of some… fit… was spouting it like she was possessed, her hands moving back and forth in dreamlike underwater motions.

“Do you hear that?” the driver shouted. “What should I do with her?”

He was glancing manically back and forth between the road and the sight of her in his rearview mirror, and it took… three, four, five of these quick back-and-forths before he finally craned his head around in disbelief to confirm that he was really seeing what the rearview mirror was telling him.

Eliza’s hands sculled lightly back and forth in the air as though she were floating.

Because she was.

He slammed on the brake.

Eliza slammed into the seat backs in front of her and crumpled to the floor. Her voice cut off and the car fishtailed, humping up onto the shoulder with a violent jouncing that ricocheted Eliza’s inert body between the seats for a long, angry moment as the driver tried to wrest the vehicle back onto the road. He did, at last, and screamed to a halt, jumping out into the cloud of dust he’d made to wrench open her door.

She was unconscious. He shook her leg, panicking. “Miss! Miss!” He was just a driver. He didn’t know what to do with madwomen, it was far beyond him, and now maybe he’d killed her—

She stirred.

“ Alhamdulillah,” he breathed. Praise God.

But his praise was short-lived. No sooner did Eliza push herself upright—blood was streaming from her nose, garish and slick, over her mouth and down her chin—than she lapsed straight back into that otherworldly raving, the sound of which, the driver would later claim, tore at his very soul.

“Rome,” said Karou, as soon as Zuzana and Mik came back into the room. “The angels are in Vatican City.”

“Well, that makes sense,” Zuzana replied, choosing not to give voice to her first thought, which had to do with the happy prevalence of chocolate in Italy. “And have they gotten hold of any weapons yet?”

“No,” said Karou, but she looked worried. Well. Worried was one of the things she looked. Add to the list: overwhelmed, exhausted, demoralized, and… lonely. She had that “lost” posture again, her shoulders curled forward, head lowered, and Zuzana did not fail to note that she was turned away from Akiva.

“The ambassadors and secretaries of state and whatever have all been talking each other to death,” Karou elaborated. “Some in favor of arming the angels, some opposed. Apparently he hasn’t made the greatest impression. Still, private groups are lining up to pledge their support, andtheir arsenals. They’re trying to get access to make offers, but have so far been denied—at least, officially. Who knows who might have bribed a Vatican insider to get word to Jael. One of the groups is this angel cult in Florida that apparently has a stockpile of weapons at the ready.” She paused, considering her words. “Which doesn’t sound scary at all.”

“How did you find all this out?” Mik marveled.

“My fake grandmother,” Karou answered, indicating her phone, plugged into the wall. “She’s very well connected.” Zuzana knew about Karou’s fake grandmother, a grand Belgian dame who’d had Brimstone’s trust for many years, and who was the only one of his associates with whom Karou had a real relationship. She was stupendously rich, and though Zuzana had never met her, she felt no warmth for her. She’d seen the Christmas cards she sent Karou, and they were about as personal as the ones from the bank—which was fine, whatever, except that Zuzana knew that her friend craved more, and so she wanted to neck-punch anyone who disappointed her.

She only half listened while Karou told Mik about Esther. She watched Akiva instead. He was sitting up on the deep ledge of the window, the shutters drawn behind him, his wings visible, drooping and dim.

He met her eyes, briefly, and after she got past the first jolt she always got from looking at Akiva—you had to battle your brain to convince it he was real; seriously, that’s what it was like, looking at Akiva; her brain wanted to be all Pshaw, he’s obviously Photoshopped, even when he was right in front of her—a dragging sadness seized her.

Nothing could ever be easy for these two. Their courtship, if you could even call it that, was like trying to dance through a rain of bullets. Now that they’d finally come to the brink of an understanding, grief dragged a new curtain between them.

You can’t drag the curtain back. Grief persists. But you can crash through it, can’t you? If they had to suffer, Zuzana wondered, couldn’t they at least suffer together?

And when the knock came at the door—their food—she thought that maybe she could help. At least with physical proximity.

“Just a minute,” she called out. “You three, into the bathroom. You don’t exist, remember?”

There followed a brief whispered argument that they could simply glamour themselves, but Zuzana would hear none of it. “Where would they put the food, with an enormous chimaera taking up half the floor, an angel perched on the window ledge, and a girl on the bed? Even if you’re invisible, you still have mass. You still take up space. Like, allthe space.”

And so they went, and if the room was small, the bathroom was much more so, and Zuzana saw fit to arrange them within it as she chose, pushing Karou by the small of the back and then giving Akiva an imperious look and toss of her head that said, You next, and she pressed them together into the shower and shut them in. It was the only way Virko could fit into the room, too. It was all perfectly reasonable.

She closed the bathroom door. They’d have to take it from there. She couldn’t do everything for them.