The Alleluia Files

  “I cannot even imagine what this might be,” Jared said.

  “Long-distance communications device,” Christian said. “Its transmission travels along a sound path that very few other machines can intercept, so it’s virtually a dedicated line. It can be programmed to contact up to ten different receivers, but I couldn’t think of who else you would want to contact except each other—and me. So that’s all I programmed them for.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mercy demanded. “Sound waves and communication devices—”

  “Unless I miss my guess, I can be sitting in Monteverde and use this little contraption to talk to you while you’re sitting in Cedar Hills,” Jared said. “Am I right?”

  Christian nodded. Mercy set her communicator on the table with a snap. “That’s not possible! And if it was possible, it would be—it would be wicked! Yes, it would, Christian, don’t you laugh at me!”

  “Why wicked? How can something this innocent be considered harmful? A device that makes it possible for friends to converse even if they’re not in the same room?”

  “Because technology in and of itself is harmful! Because it leads to war and destruction!”

  “The whole Gloria was broadcast across Samaria, and we haven’t slipped into war and destruction yet,” Christian reminded her. “Technology is not always to be feared. It can have repercussions, yes, but these little communicators offer no hidden terrors. They are just a way for you to keep in touch with Jared and me.”

  “I don’t like them,” she said flatly.

  “I understand that,” Christian said gently. “And I do respect your feelings. And you don’t have to use them. But will you allow me to show you how they work in case an emergency arises and you find you need to get in touch with one of us right away?”

  She eyed him mutinously for a moment, clearly unsettled, but unable to marshal any convincing arguments. This had been a difficult evening for her. All the things she believed in were being challenged, all the things she abhorred were being forced upon her; and yet she was too honest to deny that times were growing desperate and dire measures were called for.

  “May I show you?” Christian asked again. She looked over at Jared, who gave her a sympathetic smile.

  “I don’t like them,” she said again, but she picked up her cylinder.

  Christian took Jared’s. “It’s very simple,” he said. “This yellow button turns it on. These ten buttons are the ones you push when you want to contact someone. I am number one. You, Jared, are number two, and Mercy is number three. I’m Jared and I want to call Mercy. So I flick on the yellow switch, and then I punch the third button.”

  Instantly, the cylinder in Mercy’s hand emitted a soft peeping sound. She gasped and dropped it, but Christian caught it before it rolled off the table.

  “Now I’m Mercy and I want to see who is contacting me. I push in the red button.” The beeping stopped. “I put the grill end to my mouth and I say, ‘Jared, is that you?’ Then I push the green button, and put the grill end to my ear.”

  Jared took his own communicator back from Christian. “What do I do now?” he asked.

  “You push the green button again. It toggles you between transmit and receive. You speak into the grill now.”

  Jared put his lips to the end of the cylinder. “Hello? Mercy? Are you listening?” He turned the grill to his ear.

  “No, you must push the button again. All right.” Christian spoke next in a high, squeaky falsetto. “Why, Jared! You gave me such a fright! Don’t you know it’s past midnight?”

  Mercy grabbed it from him. “Give that to me. Hello, Jared? How can you tell if this stupid thing works?”

  “Push the button. Put it to your ear.”

  Jared spoke back into the microphone. “You can hear it coming out of the speaker. It’s a little creepy.”

  Her eyebrows flicked up. “I can hear your voice! Right in this little tube!”

  “And you’ll be able to hear it over a distance of a thousand miles,” Christian said. “There might be some static from time to time, especially if the weather’s bad. And sometimes if you’re deep in a mountain range, the transmission isn’t too clear. But essentially you should be able to talk as easily as you are right now.”

  Jared gave Christian a big grin. “I like it!” he said. “What other fun stuff have you merchants been hiding from the angels?”

  “Everything else Bael has put a moratorium on,” the other man replied promptly. “You’d be surprised at some of the prototypes that exist. And next year—if Omar is not Archangel— you will begin to see some amazing machinery make its way onto the open market.”

  “Christian—!”

  He smiled over at Mercy. “Well, you will. None of it anything to alarm you, dear heart. But machines and technologies that will”—he spread his hands to indicate a canvas of rich, incredible beauty—”color every inch of your world.”

  “My world is quite bright enough as it is, thank you.”

  “And let us not be sidetracked from the issue at hand,” Jared interposed. “We are not concerned with the influx of new technologies sometime in the uncertain future. We are concerned with keeping in touch with each other, now, during this crisis. Mercy, do you understand how the cylinders work?”

  She gave him a frosty look. “They seem simple enough.”

  “Fine. I take it we should keep these by us at all times, in case someone is trying to contact us?”

  “If you can,” Christian said. “I’m sure there will be times that won’t be convenient.”

  “And perhaps we should plan to meet again in—a month?— to see what any of us has learned or done.”

  “That sounds agreeable,” Christian said.

  Mercy smiled with what appeared to be an effort. “You do not have to wait a month to come see me, or talk to me only on this little machine,” she said. “Either of you.”

  “Very well, then,” Christian said, smiling back at her much more warmly. “Then I won’t.”

  Jared was so surprised by the tone in the merchant’s voice (and minutes after he’d called her “dear heart,” too!) that he yawned and stretched his arms above him, just to distract himself with motion. Come to think of it, they had been sitting here for hours. He was starting to feel a little cramped in the back of his legs, in the upper muscles of his arms, his right arm particularly—

  Mercy was looking over at him with a frown. “Jared. That’s odd. Look at the colors in your Kiss.”

  He lowered his arm quickly to see the glass heart of his Kiss dancing with small impatient flames. “Huh,” he grunted. “Did the same thing a few weeks ago when I was sitting by firelight. Must be a reflection. Never noticed it before.”

  “Nonsense, I’m sitting right here and my Kiss is as pale as a chip of ice,” Mercy said. “Do you feel any pressure? Any pain?”

  Well, he did, but he was not about to admit it to Mercy. “No,” he said. “I think it’s just the firelight. Every Kiss is unique, you know. Each one probably responds to a different set of stimuli—light, color, motion, heat.”

  “The presence of your true lover,” Christian added. “Isn’t that what the legends say?”

  “The legends that only the young girls believe,” Mercy said with a sniff. “Jared, I think maybe you should go see a priest, or even one of the oracles.”

  “Mercy, I’m fine! Thank you for your concern. Anyway, I think it’s the firelight. Look, Christian’s Kiss is filled with just as much color as mine is.”

  And Mercy glanced over at the merchant, whose glowing amber Kiss could be glimpsed through the fine white lawn of his shirt. And then she looked sharply into his face, where a faint smile and a fainter blush made him appear both self-conscious and a little amused. And then she herself colored deeply, and caught her breath, and looked away; and nobody could mink of a word to say for at least two minutes.

  “Well, I think I’ll tell our host that we’re ready to pay our bill,” Christian said at last, in the mo
st calm and pleasant voice imaginable. “It looks like we’re all through here.”

  So that was a strange ending to an otherwise fairly productive day, but Jared made no comment to Christian as they retired to the merchant’s home. Mercy, who had come to Semorrah on other business, was staying elsewhere, and planned to leave early in the morning. They made brief enough farewells, then separated for the night.

  Jared lay awake a long time in the elegantly appointed room that Christian always reserved for him, and stared up at the ceiling watching the white lights of Semorrah flicker across the tile. Well. Christian had always been fond of Mercy—everyone was—but Jared could not believe that the suave, sophisticated businessman could actually have fallen in love with the matronly angel. And, since the last of her children had been born nearly fifteen years ago, Mercy had shown surprisingly little inclination to take on lovers, something most angels did as a matter of course. She had seemed content, fulfilled, and energetic, running Cedar Hills, raising her three daughters, and overseeing the lives of all her friends. She had not seemed to want for anything.

  Jared turned to his side, spreading his left wing over his body like a quilt. But it had been startling indeed to see the amber lights sparking in Christian’s Kiss, moments after the merchant had spoken of true love. Mercy was right; most people believed that the stories of sympathetic kinship between Kisses were romantic fairy tales designed to appeal only to the young and foolish, and yet … There were enough stories about predestined lovers brought together by their flaming Kisses that you almost had to give them some credence. Susannah and her Archangel lover—that was the most famous tale. Come to think of it, didn’t the legends say that Rachel’s Kiss would light every time she heard Gabriel sing, and that his took fire every time she was hurt or in danger?

  Jared shifted irritably. He could not get comfortable, though Christian’s expensive furniture was not at fault. His own Kiss had glowed with secretive, insistent colors tonight, and he had felt its dull ache deep in his arm before it had occurred to him to check for the source. He had seen the colors, but not felt the pain, one time before, and then in the ransacked camp of Ileah when he heard the Jacobite girl singing…. According to myth, of course, the Kiss would light only for your true love, your soul mate; it should not respond at random to the presence of dozens of possible candidates. Surely Jovah did not think the young rebel girl was Jared’s one true love. And even if the god had so decided, it seemed ludicrous to think that the fugitive Jacobite was staying at the Berman House, ordering room service and haughtily directing the staff to wait upon her. Surely it was nothing more than a reflection of the firelight and a chance pressure on his arm. No matter what Christian said.

  But he did wonder where Tamar had gotten to.

  He wondered even more late the next day, when Christian freed himself of his other duties and met Jared for a late meal on the rooftop patio.

  “Good afternoon, angelo, I trust you are enjoying yourself,” Christian greeted him before directing three servants where to place various trays of refreshments. “I know how easily you get bored, so I’m pleased you’ve curbed your impatience long enough to join me for lunch.”

  “I know that the food here will only be tolerable if I eat it in your company,” Jared retorted.

  Christian seated himself and waved the servants away. “True,” he said, unfolding a napkin and spreading it over his silken trousers. They looked very expensive. “It’s a little trick I have for encouraging my guests not to linger. You should try it at Monteverde.”

  “None of my guests ever linger. In fact, I rarely have guests, because I am never home. My mother and my sister complained of this delicately last time I was there. So my plan is to return immediately and not stir outside my doors until I leave for Isabella Cartera’s.”

  “Give la Cartera my love.”

  What you have to spare, Jared was tempted to say, but did not. “So! You said you might come back from your meeting with news.”

  “Yes, and so I did, though I don’t know how valuable it is. I told you I have—a contact—who feeds me information on Bael’s activities.”

  “Yes, and I wish you would tell me—”

  “I cannot. If I have no discretion, I have nothing. But I trust this source.”

  “Very well. And you learned?”

  “Up till now, Bael has been operating pretty much at random—going to the known Jacobite hideouts and hoping to roust a few dissidents. He’s also given the Jansai license to raid Edori ships on the open sea.”

  “That’s new,” Jared commented.

  “He says not. I think the scale of the attacks has been stepped up a little. But, anyway, till now they have just been looking for potential Jacobites, not anyone in particular.”

  “And now they have names and faces?”

  “A few,” Christian confirmed. “They’ve always known the name of the de facto leader, a man named Conran Atwell. He’s pretty much run the group since Fairman died. But apparently now they’ve put together a list of eight or ten of the Jacobites they consider the most dangerous or the most persuasive, and they’ve found somebody who’s willing to supply descriptions as well.”

  “Which I assume you have copies of.”

  Christian nodded. “Even better. Apparently some artist in Bael’s pay sketched up portraits based on these descriptions, and so we have pictures. Would you like to see them?”

  “Of course. Just so I’ll know them when I come face to face with any escaped Jacobites.”

  Christian laid aside his fork and took up a small leather portfolio that he had brought with him. “This is the key one. Conran. Looks like any old man you might meet on the street.”

  Jared took the paper and studied it a moment. True enough, but even in this badly rendered sketch, the man possessed a certain force of personality. He had been limned with high cheekbones, dark eyes, and a full mouth; the thinning hair, lightly shaded to indicate gray, must once have been black. “Is he Edori?” Jared asked.

  “I don’t know. Does he look Edori?”

  “A little. He has that—undomesticated expression.”

  “All the Jacobites do. At least in these pictures.”

  Jared glanced at the next three and heard Christian pronounce their names, but none of these portraits conveyed the same sense of intensity as the first one. Two of them were men; the third was a woman. Jared forgot their features immediately.

  “I confess I’m not sure I’d recognize any of them if I passed them on the street,” Christian said. “So I don’t know how the Jansai will. But I suppose—”

  “Jansai?” Jared repeated.

  “Oh, yes. Copies of these have been circulated to all the interested Jansai. There’s a reward for their capture, too. Not much for your run-of-the-mill Jacobites, mind you, though for Conran Atwell I believe the sum is fairly substantial. As it is for this woman, for some reason. She doesn’t look like she’d be particularly ferocious, now, does she?”

  And Christian handed him a portrait of Tamar.

  And Jared felt the Kiss in his arm explode in a painful burst of fire.

  “I know this woman,” he said carefully.

  “Really?” Christian sounded amazed. “During what unlikely social function did you make her acquaintance?”

  “In Ileah. I told you. There was a Jacobite there. This is her.” The shape of the face was not quite perfect, and the expression of the mouth was too serene, but it was Tamar; there was no question. “I can’t imagine that she could be on anybody’s list of criminals most dangerous to the realm. She scarcely had enough strength to keep body and soul together.”

  Christian took the picture back to study it more closely. “Perhaps she has unsuspected depths. She looks here like she’s fairly determined.”

  “Indomitable,” Jared agreed. “But—powerless. I have never seen anyone who looked so alone and friendless.”

  “Well, she’ll certainly be friendless if Bael’s Jansai catch up with her,” Christia
n said. “Where do you suppose she disappeared to?”

  “I wish I knew,” Jared said. He took the portrait back. “Could I get a copy of this? Of all of them, when it comes to that?”

  “Certainly. I’ll have copies made immediately. So you plan to look for her again?”

  “For any of them. Although, based on my luck with Tamar, I don’t know that I’ll be able to convince them that I am not the enemy.”

  “Well, they must come to trust us, and you’re as likable as any angel,” Christian said. “Though that’s not saying much. Where do you plan to look?”

  “You’re the one with the mysterious connection to information. Where do you suggest?”

  “Ysral,” Christian said promptly. “That’s where many of them are thought to have sought refuge. And the Edori, of course, have welcomed all of Samaria’s castoffs for the past hundred years.”

  “All right, then. That’s where I’ll try. Right after Isabella’s party.”

  “I’d love to join you for the fete,” Christian said with a grin. “Unfortunately, I have other plans that weekend. I was invited, you know.”

  “Well, Isabella promises to introduce me to any number of respectable and charming young women. I have to admit I’m dreading it.”

  “For a man with your gifts and attractions, you seem remarkably eager to escape romantic coils.”

  “With respectable young women,” Jared said with a grin. “I do not mind entanglements with the reprehensible kind.”

  “Mercy was right,” Christian said. “It’s time you grew up.”

  Jared considered his friend for a long moment. “Since you brought up her name,” he began, but Christian forestalled him with a laugh.

  “Spare me the fatherly advice. From you it would be ludicrous.”

  “She’ll never leave Cedar Hills,” Jared went on unheeding, his voice slow and serious. “And she’s not likely to jeopardize a friendship that means as much to her as yours does. And— you know—”

  “And I don’t believe I expressed an interest in your opinion, anyway,” Christian interrupted.