Archangel

  He could not, as he wished, break off in the middle of his song and go rushing down to look for her, but never in his life had he found it so hard to sing. When two of the other angels arrived a few minutes early, ready to take their turn in the duet, Gabriel motioned them in and allowed the younger one to finish his own part. “Sorry,” he mouthed at Eva, and quickly left.

  Thank the god she was back. He had been more worried than he realized.

  She was not, however, in her room. Well, then, in the dining hall, or visiting with Hannah. He would try the dining hall first.

  She was not there—but Matthew was, hungrily consuming a late lunch and telling Hannah amusing stories. The Edori waved when the angel came in, and Gabriel came over, forcing a smile.

  “So you’re back,” Gabriel said. “How was the journey?”

  “It was fine from start to finish,” Matthew said. “We spent a day with the oracle and a few days in the Blue City and many days with the people, and every day was a feast for the soul.”

  “Matthew says Rachel sang at the Gathering,” Hannah said.

  Gabriel looked sharply at the Edori. She had been singing? Had that been the source of the pain in his arm? “And was she nervous?” he asked. “I know she is not used to performing—”

  “Ah, the girl sings like honey bubbling up through rock,” Matthew said. “I had heard her sing years before, mind you, and I knew, or thought I knew, what to expect, but the voice of her—! You would not believe it. It stopped even my strong old heart.”

  “I hope she didn’t overdo it,” Hannah said somewhat anxiously.

  “No, no, just a couple of songs. She was that embarrassed at the applause and the praises, but all of it rightfully hers! You’ve picked yourself a fine one, Gabriel.”

  The angel smiled again. “And where is she?” he wanted to know. “I went to her room, but—”

  Matthew opened his dark eyes very wide. “But she’s not here! She decided to travel back with her Edori friends.”

  Gabriel felt a sudden nauseous clutch in his stomach. “She’s not here?” he repeated stupidly. “But—I thought she’d come back with you.”

  “Aye, and she meant to. But you should have seen the girl, so sad and drooping as the two of us were riding back alone. So I told her, ‘Lass, you go back to camp, and ride in with the people. I’ll tell your fierce husband that you’ll be here as soon as their horses bring you.’ So she went back.”

  “But—when will they be arriving?” Hannah asked, more visibly distraught than Gabriel. “There is so much left to do—”

  “Two days from now, it should be,” Matthew said. “They planned to leave two days after I did, and the Edori travel fast.”

  “Is she safe?” Hannah said, again putting into words Gabriel’s exact concern. “I mean—”

  “Safe? With the Edori? Dear lady, they travel their whole lives long. How could she not be safe with them?”

  “But you’re sure she is coming,” Gabriel said, and for the life of him he could not keep the urgency from his voice. “These Edori are coming to the Eyrie—they do plan to go to the Gloria.”

  “Oh, aye. Most of the Edori do. Don’t be troubling yourself, Gabriel. She’s with friends. She’s happy. She’ll come back to you calmer for a few days spent with her people.”

  “They’re not her people,” Gabriel said sharply, before he could stop himself. Matthew’s dark eyes fixed on him, but the Edori said nothing. Gabriel took a step backward. “All right. If she’s not here, she’s not. Two days, you said? I’ll be looking for her then.”

  And he stalked out, not even bothering to wonder what the stolid Edori and the cool-mannered Hannah might make of his unmistakable perturbation.

  So that was bad enough; and the intervening two days were nothing, as far as he was concerned, but a test of endurance; but there was worse to come. For when the first Edori bands arrived in Velora, he flew down to look for his wife—and she was not there.

  He had had the foresight to ask Matthew which clan Rachel had traveled with, so he was able to ask the first Edori he saw for the location of the Chieven campsite. This he discovered with no trouble, and he found himself smiling at the pretty young woman who crouched over her fire, cutting up meat for a stew.

  “Naomi of the Chievens?” he asked as she came to her feet, wiping her hands on a wet rag.

  “You must be Gabriel,” she said, and again her mischievous smile woke a like response in him. “I’ve heard you described.”

  “I can’t tell if I should be pleased or alarmed that you recognize me from that description,” he said, “since it cannot have been a flattering one.”

  She laughed aloud. “You’d be surprised,” she said. “Did Rachel send you for her things? I packed them most carefully, since she was so adamant—”

  Instantly, his good humor vanished. “Send me?” he repeated quickly. “But she—Matthew said she was with you.”

  Her own smile abruptly faded. “With me? No, they left the campsite two days before we set out—”

  “Yes, and Matthew said she was so lonely for you that she turned back that same afternoon. That she decided your clan would be here in time …” His voice trailed off. The dark eyes looking up at him were huge with fright.

  “But she never came back,” Naomi whispered. “We were there two more days, she knew right where we were. She could not have gotten lost—”

  He felt physically, violently ill; for a moment, he thought he might actually faint. He put his left hand over the Kiss in his right arm. “Something happened to her,” he said, as calmly as he could. “I knew it at the time, but I didn’t believe—What could have happened after she left Matthew? They could only have covered a short distance before she turned back. Were there Jansai in the area?”

  Naomi shook her head. She was still staring at him, but now her hands had come up to cover her mouth. She had strong, roughened hands, used to labor, quick and deft, but they looked helpless and shaky now. “The Jansai rarely bother the Edori in Bethel,” she said, her voice thready and faint. “And they would not take a lone girl who looks as she does—she does not appear to be Edori—”

  “They tried to take her one day in Velora,” he said grimly. “Or—it was very strange that they attacked her here—perhaps …”

  “Raphael,” Naomi breathed.

  He felt his blood quite literally reverse itself in his veins. As soon as she said it, he knew she was right. But—”Why Raphael? Why would he have any reason to take her?” Gabriel demanded. “It makes no sense.”

  “I know,” Naomi said, her voice still so low he could hardly hear her. “I never truly believed her before. But—”

  “Before? Before when?”

  “When her parents died. When her village was destroyed. She said it was destroyed by angels.”

  The earth rocked explosively under Gabriel’s feet. Unconsciously he put out a hand to steady himself, and was surprised when the Edori woman took hold of it. Her chilly, spasmodic grip was actually a comfort. “She told you that Raphael destroyed her home?” he said. “She named him?”

  “Not then. She was very little, you know, when we found her. She just wept and wept and spoke of the angels flying in like giant hawks, ripping houses from their foundations, throwing fire into the gardens—But it was years before she mentioned Raphael. And then, once we saw him. We were in Luminaux the summer she was fourteen, and he was there. He was in a parade going down the blue streets, and Rachel saw him, and she said to me, ‘That’s him. That’s the one who led the angels that killed my family.’ And I looked, and I saw that it was Raphael—and I told her never to say such a thing again.”

  “And she never did?”

  “Not to me. I doubt if she said anything to anyone else. I was—I thought she was hallucinating. I thought she must be wrong. The Archangel—” Suddenly her voice changed, became a cry. “Oh, Gabriel! What have I done? What’s happened to her?”

  Now he was the one to squeeze her hand for comfort.
“You have done nothing. None of this is your fault. If Raphael has indeed taken her—”

  “But why? What does he want with her?”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I don’t understand. It has something to do with power, but I don’t know exactly what he hopes to gain—tying my hands, perhaps. But if that were so, why has he not told me he has her? It makes no sense.”

  “What will you do?” Naomi asked.

  He disentangled his hand. A cold, pure rage was coursing through his body, replacing the shock, the fear, even the anxiety. That he would dare. That he would dare. “I know where she is—where she must be,” he said. “I leave for Windy Point on the instant.”

  “How will you rescue her?”

  “Perhaps I will merely kill Raphael with my own hands.”

  “You can’t do that,” Naomi said, genuinely horrified. “To take a man’s life—”

  He smiled grimly. “I have never done it,” he said. “I don’t know that I am capable of it. But I will retrieve her, never fear.”

  “Wait—you must take food with you—blankets,” she said, turning back toward her tent. “Let me get you—”

  “Naomi, I have no time. And I cannot carry—”

  “You can carry this much,” she said from the tent. “Be still a moment. You can’t travel all that way with no provisions.”

  Within minutes, she was back, and he had to admit her packing was efficient. She had filled a leather pouch with dried meat and fruit, a flask of water and a flask of wine. The pouch was attached to a thick leather strap that she swiftly buckled over his shoulder, being careful not to touch his wings. Across his other shoulder she slung a soft, closely knit wool blanket that was so thin and light he could scarcely feel its weight. This she looped once around his waist and tied at his hip.

  “There. That won’t get in your way any, will it?” she asked breathlessly.

  He shrugged slightly and arced his wings once, back and forth. “No,” he said, unexpectedly smiling at her. “Thank you. You’ve been magnificent.”

  She came closer. She wanted to take his hand again, he could sense, but she didn’t quite have the nerve. “Bring her back,” she said. “She is—I lost her once, and she is so precious to me. Bring her back.”

  “I will,” he said, and moved away.

  “Gabriel!” she called after him. Impatiently he turned. The Edori woman stood watching him, her face puckered with worry, her whole stance forlorn.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Be good to her,” she said, so softly he almost could not hear her from a few yards away. “She loves you.”

  He was working his great wings; he was aloft; he was angling up over and past the Eyrie and continuously gaining altitude; and still those words sang in his mind. She loves you. She loves you. What had Rachel told her friend that she would never tell him, or had the bright-eyed Edori drawn this conclusion with no hard evidence from Rachel herself? Was it possible it could be true?

  He shook the questions from his mind and concentrated on the task at hand. It was a good eighteen- or twenty-hour flight between Velora and Windy Point. It was unlikely he could go all that way without stopping. He should have paused at the Eyrie, perhaps, to tell someone where he was going. If he did not return within a day or two, there would be pandemonium. So close to the Gloria for him to be gone, without a word to a soul …

  Well, if he did not find Rachel before the day of the Gloria, his presence would be worthless anyway. Archangel and angelica singing in harmony, that was what the Librera specified. Without Rachel’s voice, his own meant nothing.

  Without Rachel, his whole life meant nothing.

  She loves you.

  It could not possibly be true.

  Night gradually superseded day as Gabriel flew steadily, tirelessly, across the world. He followed an unswerving northeast course for the Caitana Mountains, cruising at a dangerously high altitude. None of the other angels, he knew, liked to travel so far above the earth, complaining of the bitter cold and the buffeting winds, but he had always liked it—the higher the better. The higher he flew, the nearer he felt to Jovah, the more convinced he was that the god laid a warm hand across his back and guided him between the stars. A fanciful thought, of course; there were no stars this close to the world. And even if he broke through the harrier of Samaria’s heavy atmosphere, winged his way out into the dense black night of space, he would not be any nearer to his god. Jovah was everywhere, above the clouds and below them; he resided in the peaks above the Plain of Sharon, he slept in the empty rooms at Mount Sinai. He was in the Eyrie—he was even, Gabriel had to believe, in the porous, brittle stones of Windy Point. For surely Jovah had not allowed Rachel to go there all alone, without protection.

  There were no prayers specifically designed to guard a dear friend who had fallen into the hands of the enemy. On Samaria, among all its people, no one was supposed to have any enemies. But there were prayers of benediction, of defense and preservation, and these had been sung in the past over a traveler leaving on a quest or an adventurer attempting some perilous feat. Surely Jovah would hear these supplications and understand. Surely, he would wrap his hands around the angelica’s frail body and protect her from harm.

  On and on Gabriel flew, so high above the terrain that he could barely make out its whorls and features in the light of the three-quarter moon. Now and then he caught the distant sparkle of firelight from some traveler’s camp or the widely scattered lights of homesteads. It was long past midnight before he was aware of his first fatigue, but it was not severe. He dropped a few hundred feet to take advantage of the warmer air closer to the surface, but he did not slacken his pace. A sense of inexplicable urgency drove his wings in their unfaltering cadence, a nameless fear kept his eyes open and his mind alert, even as the texture of the night began to fray slowly into dawn. He had wasted too much time already; he should have set out on his search the day he felt the Kiss burn in his flesh. He could not delay an hour longer, even a minute, or he would be too late.

  He did not know what would happen if he was too late. He did not know what doom he sensed, or even how logical his panic was. He only knew that the certainty of it kept him in the air another hour, and another, until sunrise gave way to mid-morning which gave way in a slumbrous, heated fashion to noon.

  He was in Jordana now, no more than two hours from Windy Point. But the fast, sustained flight had wearied him almost to the point of idiocy. He felt his wingbeat slow and his vision begin to blur. It would do him no good to arrive at Windy Point dazed with exhaustion, unable to do battle with Raphael or succor his wife. He angled in for a landing, feeling dizzy and motion-sick as his feet finally touched the unmoving earth.

  It was perhaps an hour past noon. He would let himself rest four or five hours, and then be on his way again. Undoing Naomi’s careful knots and buckles, he removed the blanket and the leather pouch from his shoulders and made a hasty camp. A few mouthfuls of food, two swallows of water, and he stretched out on the half unfolded blanket. Within minutes he was asleep.

  His dreams were dark and violent, and prominently featured Rachel and Raphael. His wife was crying; the Archangel was laughing. Blending in with Raphael’s voice was a higher, sweeter laugh that he could not place, though he knew he recognized it. His dream-vision shifted and he was staring at the perfect heart-shaped face of Judith. She continued to laugh. He reached out huge hands to slap her across the cheek—once, twice, a third time. She backed away from him, smiling still.

  With a supreme effort of will, Gabriel forced himself awake, disturbed by his dream and no longer interested in sleeping. It took him a moment to get his bearings. He was lying in a patch of sunlight, covered with a light sweat, and his hand was tangled tightly in the hem of the blanket. He had not been hitting anyone after all.

  But perhaps the unconscious anger at Judith was not so misplaced, for hadn’t he left her alone with Raphael upon the occasion of the Archangel’s last, ill-fated visit to the Eyrie? It had bee
n the last time he had seen Judith as well; Hannah had told him that she had left the mountaintop to reside, for the time being, in Velora, and he had not had it in him to feel even the smallest regret. But she might have done him a grave mischief before she left—she might have told Raphael, who had wanted to know, just exactly where Rachel was—

  He sat up, shaking his head and stretching his cramped arms. A little tired still, but fine; ready to travel. He stood, flexing his great wings and feeling their smooth, oiled response. He could fly another whole day, and a day after that, if he had to, to get to Rachel in time… .

  In time for what?

  He glanced up, gauging time by the position of the sun. Two hours or a little less until sunset. Already the sun was gliding on down toward the horizon, which, in this part of the country, meant the jagged range of mountains just past the Caitanas. He needed to get to Windy Point before the sun went down. There was no way to explain his conviction, but he was absolutely sure. At sundown, the whole world would falter or disintegrate on its own… .

  Shaking his head again (where were these absurd fantasies coming from?), he took three running steps and flung himself aloft. Instantly, the wind took him. Northern Jordana was a tricky place to fly through at any time, and today, it seemed, the country was suffering from the tail end of a storm. Gabriel fought the errant currents, gained altitude and settled into a fast, mile-eating pace.

  The sun flirted with him, dropping behind a mountain peak, then reappearing at some lower pass, molten and golden-red. The troublesome wind suddenly swirled once around him, then settled under his wings like a dog making itself into a footrest for his master. It was almost as if the breeze had been shaped by unseen hands, leashed, and brought to serve him. In any case, it made his flight easier and faster. He was over the stony terrain around Windy Point just as the sun dipped completely below the horizon.