A Plague of Angels

  “So you think Ellel will find her?”

  “I know she will. Probably within the next few days.”

  “And then what?” asked Mitty.

  Ander smiled. “We don’t need her until the shuttle is finished, do we? A few days should be plenty of time to convince her of our cause.”

  “She has to be willing,” said Berkli. “Ellel can’t drug her, or hypnotize her, or—”

  “I’m sure Ellel knows what Ellel can do,” said Ander stiffly. “She probably knows better than you do.”

  An uncomfortable silence fell. Mitty got up heavily and came to sit next to Berkli, while Ander rose, beckoned to several of his Family members, and began to select food from the table.

  Mitty half turned his back on the Anders, stretched chubby fingers between two buttons of his tunic, and scratched his hairy belly as he looked across at Berkli, who murmured:

  “Speaking of experience, Mitty, since she’s just now found the right girl, what has she done with all the wrong ones? All those babies and girls the walkers have been bringing in over the years?”

  “Don’t ask her,” whispered Mitty, his face twisted in revulsion. “Really, Berkli. And don’t ask Ander, either. He might tell you, and you don’t want to know.” He cast a glance at Ander’s back, then focused once more on his scratching fingers. “I’ll tell you what I know, however. Almost twenty years ago, she had Dever, the engineer, build her a replica of the guidance helmet and the input and output consoles.”

  Berkli drew in his breath sharply.

  Mitty mused, “I’m not sure of anything, mind you. There’s no obvious evidence to—confirm anything. Perhaps it’s not something one really wants to confirm. And what would I do about it if I found out?”

  They shared a long glance, both of them thinking of the thousands of walkers at Ellel’s command. Berkli’s fears were amorphous, based more on instinct than knowledge. Mitty, however, had a very good idea what similar mechanisms had once done, long ago, before men went to the stars.

  “What can the walkers do?” Berkli whispered, as though reading Mitty’s mind.

  “You mean in addition to destroying all life on the planet?”

  “Surely that’s exaggerating.”

  “You yourself told Ander what they can do. So far, Ellel’s kept most of them out in the world, searching, moving quickly from place to place. When they move fast enough, the damage they do is limited. But have you thought what will happen when they aren’t needed to search any longer? When they gather all in one place?”

  Berkli thought about it, feeling himself grow pale.

  Ander had turned to watch them, his eyes narrowed.

  “We were just saying we hoped you’d keep us informed,” Berkli said, forcing himself to look up with a kindly, civilized smile. “Please do, Fashimir. We can’t wait to hear.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Farmwife Chyne, high up the valley of the Crystal, heard a commotion out by the pigpen one evening and went out to find a young troll breaking down the gate to get at the pigs. Luckily, as Farmer Chyne was later to say, it was a young one. Had it been an old one, or one more alert to her presence, likely his wife would not so easily have dispatched it with the splitting ax. When Farmer Chyne came home, he buried the troll and built a fire on the grave to confuse the scent if its kin came looking, then he repaired the pen.

  The following morning, Farmwife Chyne was struggling to get a reluctant sow into the newly repaired sty when the two strangers came. They approached so silently that the first she knew of them was when a huge hand reached over her shoulder to take hold of the gate. She turned in fright as the sow was catapulted past her with a terrified squeal, then the gate was shut and she was alone with her back to it, facing two tall, helmeted figures who regarded her with bleak, expressionless eyes.

  “Who—” she gasped, unable to breathe. They weren’t menacing her. Some tiny part of her mind noted that, even as it also noted that she was icy with fear. The pig had weighed three or four times what she did, but it had flown through the air like a bird. And yet they weren’t menacing her. No. No.

  “Have you seen a girl …?”

  The voice was soft but hot, like a searing wind coming under a door. Like the hot wind, it caressed insinuatingly, letting her know it could dry her to a shriveled twist of leather if it liked. The two looked almost exactly alike. One was a little bigger than the other Except for that, they could be twins.

  She clutched her bulging stomach and leaned back against the fence, sagging onto a feedbox. One of them reached toward her, perhaps startled by her action. Her flesh shrank from his touch as from the touch of a serpent or a great hairy spider.

  She gripped herself, forcing calm, trying not to look at them, wondering who they were looking for. Who? Some slave escaped from the city? Some concubine? The first words the creature said made her believe she was right.

  “We’re looking for a girl.”

  She had a split second of vision: fire, burning irons, a scream shivering the air, the stench of burning flesh. She gulped down hard, trying to control herself. “A girl?” She shook her head. “There’s no one here but me and my husband, when he’s here. Just now he’s down the valley a bit, cutting hay.”

  “A girl who might have been passing through,” said the other creature. He—it turned away from her, and she saw the naked blade at its belt. Such blades should be shiny. This one wasn’t. It was stained, as though he disdained to clean it, preferring it to declare its purpose.

  “Who are you?” she asked without thinking, the words coming of themselves. She choked back, biting her tongue.

  Both of them regarded her with blank, impersonal stares. “Why do you ask?” whispered one.

  “You’re not—not citymen,” she said. “You don’t look like citymen. I’ve seen them on the screen. You don’t have any tattoos.” Oh, heaven, heaven, help me stop talking! she thought. Help me be still!

  The taller of them said, “We’re not citymen. Who we are is none of your concern. We’re looking for a girl who might have been passing through. She’s about twenty, slender, with black hair and dark eyes.”

  She stared into their eyes and knew that death waited there. For her and the child she carried and the man down the valley. Unless they were convinced she was too frightened to dissimulate, unless they were convinced she was stupid and above all, truthful Truthful!

  “I saw such a girl,” she said, gaping at them. “But it was a long time ago. Weeks She asked me the way to the nearest city.” Truth, or almost truth, spontaneously uttered out of some spring of deception she had tapped in her panic. She did not want to die, but the girl had been mannerly and kind. She didn’t want the girl dead, either.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said she’d find the city by turning north at the bottom of the valley,” said the Farmwife. “She thanked me and went on.” Almost truth.

  “Nothing else?”

  She screwed up her face, sorting through her memories. She had to give them something else, something … conclusive. “Ah—she asked when my baby was coming. I told her not to tell anyone she’d talked to me.” She swallowed, trying to moisten her throat. “My husband doesn’t like me talking to strangers.”

  That brought a grimace, like a scythe edge, a drawing back of the lips before biting.

  “But we are not strangers,” said one.

  They turned and strode away from her, out the gate and on down the road. She leaned back against the wall, heaving, her breath coming and going as from a bellows. Oh, she was sick. She had been touched by something venomous, and she could not say what. Beside her, on either side, the blackened ground smoked as though a fire had burned there, and all around the sty a bitter smell hung like a pall.

  After a long, long time she crept into the house and lay down in her bed, the covers pulled over her face, breathing her own warmth as though in that comforting dark she might be safe. So one shuddered when one heard the rattle and knew one had almost
stepped on a snake. So one shuddered when one saw the smooth brown body of the spider, just in time. So one shuddered when one stopped, just at the edge of a hidden precipice, knowing death was only inches away, a breath away.

  What were they? Oh, what were they?

  She clutched her belly again, realizing there had been no movement in there for some time. The baby had been kicking like a little mule, day in and day out, but now it was as quiet as she herself had been.

  When Farmer Chyne came back that evening, he said he had been accosted in the hayfield by two strangers who asked if he had seen anyone on the road. He had seen a woman, he told them. Some time ago. He had told her to keep moving.

  When he had said this, he stared at her as though in the grip of some great doubt. “Did you see them?”

  “They came here,” she admitted. “They asked me what they asked you.”

  “What did you tell them?” he demanded, anger burning at the back of his eyes. Anger and fear.

  She shook her head. “What could I tell them? I see no one.” Then, to distract him as much as anything, “But it is time I must.”

  He shook his head in turn, clamping his jaw shut. “We’re better alone.”

  “Husband, needs must. I need you to go down to Wise Rocks Farm and ask some help from Farmwife Suttle.”

  “We ask help from no one,” he said stiffly.

  “If you want a live child, you will go to Wise Rocks Farm and tell Farmwife Suttle I have need of her. There’s something not right, not with me, not with the child. If you want a dead child and a dead wife, then we will ask help of no one.”

  He fumed. He cursed. He had been as disturbed by the two strangers as she, but he would not admit it. He would never admit to fear or to doubt. She persisted, calmly, saying the same words over and over.

  “The ewes bear without help!” he cried. “What different are you?”

  “I am not young,” she said. “And old ewes sometimes die lambing, as you well know. But it’s up to you.”

  He fumed; he said he might go, he did not say exactly when that might be.

  Abasio returned to his home in Fantis.

  “Where the hell you been!” CummyNup cried from behind the protective wire barrier at the top of the stairs leading to Abasio’s rooftop shack.

  “Don’t shout,” begged Abasio, tottering on the rickety landing. “My head.…”

  “The resta you, too, from the looksa you. Where you been?”

  CummyNup unlocked the barrier and dropped the wires with a clangor of bells and janglers, designed to wake the dead if disturbed in the night.

  Abasio shuddered. “What day is it?”

  “Sixt’-day. So where the hell you been?”

  Abasio stared at him owl eyed. “I went riding in the country.”

  “For a week?”

  He shook his head. No. Not a week. Not possibly. “Greens were going to fight the Survivors,” he managed to dredge up from a memory not merely foggy but virtually opaque.

  “Last Sevent’-day. Right. It’uz on the Big Show. Wally Skins was the firs’ dead, and nobody Green was lef’ standin’.”

  “Oh,” he said bleakly, unable to remember why he had cared about that. “Well, it was two days before that.”

  “Nex’ to las Fift’-day.”

  “Then Right Soniff told me to find Litt—Young Chief some kind of amusement, so I went riding. There was a refugee.”

  He’d found the refugee Olly. And he’d been in bed with her. No, he couldn’t have been in bed with Olly. That must have been a dream. What would Olly have been doing in the city, in that place?

  “So where’d you go?” CummyNup demanded.

  He explored his memory, finding what he sought after some delay. “Out to farm country. South.”

  “How long it take you?” CummyNup shook his head. The days didn’t add up.

  Abasio grimaced. It had to have taken him at least three days to get there and get back. Which meant he’d returned on Seventh-day. Probably. He seemed to remember something about that.

  “I musta got buzzed,” he said, unhelpfully.

  CummyNup shook his head. Abasio didn’t drink. Not much.

  “Where?” he asked.

  Abasio shook his head. He couldn’t remember. In fact, he couldn’t remember much. The dream. If it had been a dream. He’d ridden out, gone to Wise Rocks, met the girl Olly. Ridden back. He’d thought of her all the way back. He couldn’t get her out of his head. No, she hadn’t been in his head. She’d been in his body, in his bones. He’d actually hurt, wanting her. He’d been shaking. So he’d told himself, you want a woman, find a woman. So he went to a songhouse but none of the women … none of them. Then—then he’d gotten drunk and found her again. Or maybe not But he’d been somewhere.…

  “Where you wake up this mornin’?” CummyNup persisted.

  “Truckers’ hostel,” he admitted. It was the practice for songhouse keepers to have their better class of customers dumped at a truckers’ stop when they became unruly or unconscious. Lesser folk were simply dragged into the street.

  “Well, Basio, I say this for you,” CummyNup said. “You don’ usual go off like that, but when you do, you sure do it all! Baby Purp, he been lookin’ for you five days. He bored all to hell.”

  Abasio shuddered, saying, “I need sleep You get word to the Young Chief I’m home but I’m sick. Tell one of the boys.”

  “I’ll tell Warlord, tha’s who. He been lookin’ for you too.”

  Abasio merely gaped, unable to think of a reply. CummyNup gave him a look and stepped over the wires onto the stairs, waiting while Abasio rigged the alarm once more, fumbling the job badly before he turned and went into his shack. He was walking funny, as if he hurt somewhere.

  CummyNup stared after him. If Abasio got buzzed, he hadn’ got buzzed where anybody could find him, not since late Second-day. Usual, a man went off and got buzzed, somebody fall over him, somebody see him somewhere, but Abasio, he jus’ gone.

  Sighing, CummyNup clumped to the bottom of the stairs where Soniff himself was waiting.

  “He back?”

  “Yeh.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Don’ think he know,” CummyNup said.

  “Well?”

  “He sick. He be comin’ along, soon’s he’s feelin’ better.”

  Soniff growled, but he let it alone. If Abasio was really sick, he couldn’t do anything useful anyhow.

  Abasio took a full day and a handful of stimulants to recover himself sufficiently to wait upon the Young Chief, who was disinclined to forgive Abasio’s absence.

  “I was worn out, so I overslept,” Abasio said for the fifth or sixth time.

  “That’s no reason,” snapped his leader. “You could’ve slep’ here at the House jus’ as easy.”

  “I was out looking for something new and different for you, Chief.”

  “Nobody could fin’ you,” growled the Young Chief, sounding like an angry puppy attacking a slipper.

  Abasio gritted his teeth and groveled. “I’m sorry, Young Chief It won’t happen again.”

  Young Chief pouted. “I was waitin’ and waitin’ for what you foun’ for me. What was it?”

  Abasio thought frantically. What had he found, besides a girl he could not get out of his head? “I’ve found a new drug,” he said “Whistler’s just down from the hills, and he’s brought a new drug.”

  “Where’s it at?” Young Chief asked with mild interest. He enjoyed drugs, though Soniff would not let him have them often.

  “Whistler should have it ready for me now,” said Abasio. “I’d have had it for you earlier, but—”

  “I know,” sneered his master. “You overslep’.”

  Abasio didn’t move. He was suddenly overcome by a wave of futility and despair. What was he doing here? Why had he come back to the city? Why was he submitting himself to this petulant child-man whom most of his own men, including Abasio, despised? Why hadn’t he stayed out there, gone on to
visit his grandpa, maybe stayed with him? Why hadn’t he stayed where Olly was!

  “Well!” demanded his Chief. “How long I suppose’ to wait?”

  “I’ll get it,” Abasio said. “Right now.”

  He backed out of the presence, out of prudence rather than respect. Young Chief kept a set of throwing knives by his chair, not that he could usually hit anything with them, but he’d been known to try with people who displeased him and who presented a broad enough target.

  At the top of the stairs he encountered the other of his two unfailing supporters, TeClar Chingero.

  “Whatso, Basio?” TeClar greeted him. “You been missin’. We been lookin’ for you all over everwhere.”

  Abasio shrugged. “Listen,” he muttered. “CummyNup’s already been at me. You don’t know where I was, and I don’t know where I was, and let’s just leave it, okay? I went out looking for something for the Young Chief, and next thing I know, I’m waking up in some truckers’ hostel.”

  “You got buzzed is what CummyNup say.”

  “Well, he’s probably right, and so what? I suppose I’m the only damned Purple ever got buzzed? Neither of you ever did that, huh?”

  TeClar grinned at him. He was a faithful friend, like CummyNup, faithful forever, at least so their mama had told Abasio when he’d accompanied the brothers on a visit to her home near the edge of Green territory. The District was not a safe one. TeClar and CummyNup had been born as the result of a night-rape, but Mama would not leave because the building was among the newest ones in Fantis and surprisingly free of vermin. Though the twins wanted her to move into Purple homeground, they hadn’t been able to find a place that was clean enough to suit Mama.

  “You need any help, Basio?” TeClar asked.

  Lord, he needed something. “You can help me find Whistler.”

  TeClar nodded solemnly and moved behind him down the stairs, past the glass case that held the Book of the Purples, past the Wall of Respect covered with the likenesses of Purples killed in battle or on tallies, and onto the front stoop, where the two men on guard duty were drinking honey-beer in a state of considerable relaxation.