Drinking Midnight Wine

  And then, at last, the message came to an end. The Voice was gone, and the only sounds in the dead room were the quiet creakings of muscle and bone as Hob’s body slowly returned to normal, and his exhausted, pitiful sobbing. Even after his human shape was restored, he lay curled up on the filthy floor, crying and whimpering and hugging himself tightly, as though to stop himself falling apart. The great and mighty Nicholas Hob, sobbing like a hurt child.

  Angel looked down at him from her chair. In all her short time in the material world, she had never seen anything so clearly evil, so remorselessly cruel and malevolent, done by one living creature to another. She rose slowly from her chair and knelt beside the shaking, helpless Hob. And without quite knowing why, she took him in her arms and held him to her. She held his face gently to her breast, and his tears soaked her black rags. She’d never seen him so weak, so helpless. She felt helpless too—not something she was used to feeling. She tried to comfort Hob, in her own awkward, ignorant way, and in her helpless anger at what had been done to him she found a new, different link between herself and Hob; that in the end, for all their power, they were both at the mercy of forces greater than themselves.

  Finally Hob stopped shaking, and after a while he stopped crying too, or perhaps he just ran out of tears. He lay limply in Angel’s arms, his head still resting on her bosom. His breathing gradually slowed to something like normal, and tears and sweat no longer dripped off his chin.

  “He always hurts me,” he said quietly. “My father. When he talks to me. I may be his son, but I’m still mostly only human. Sometimes I think he hurts me deliberately, unnecessarily, just to remind me who’s in charge. There’s never been any love between my father and me, in either direction. I’m just here to carry out his orders. I’d love to hurt him, the way he hurts me, love to punish him. Kill him. But I never will. I can’t even defy him. I’ve tried to out-think him, outmanoeuvre him, but in the end, as old as I am, with all my hard-earned experience and knowledge, he is immeasurably older and far more powerful. The Serpent. The Old Enemy.” Hob sounded horribly tired to Angel; hurt and defeated, even broken. She held him a little tighter, and tried to understand why. Hob sounded like a small child, beaten for reasons he could never hope to understand. Angel lowered her head next to his, to catch his last quiet words. “I’ll never be my own man, never be free. Never be anything more than my father’s bloody puppet!”

  He started to cry again, helpless with rage and frustration, and suddenly he pounded one fist against the floor, till the skin on his knuckles broke and blood flew on the air. Angel reached out and restrained his bloody hand with her own. Hob raised his face to look at her, and for a long moment they stared into each other’s eyes. Something passed between them, something new to both of them. And then Hob began trying to sit up, and Angel immediately let him go. She knew better than to help him, as he forced himself back onto his feet and then collapsed into his chair. She resumed her seat on the other side of the coffee table. Neither of them said anything. Hob remembered how it all began.

  The Serpent saw Angel fall. Saw her plunge through the shimmering realms, down and down and finally out into the material, and Mysterie. He watched as she burned across the sky like a meteor, plummeting to earth at last like a falling star, landing with a crash that shook the world in more ways than one. The Serpent then spoke to his son Hob, and told him to go to a certain place and retrieve what he found there. Which was how, just under a year ago, Nicholas Hob came to be standing beside his elegant and powerful car, deep in the heart of south-west England, looking dubiously at the ancient burial mound known as Silbury Hill.

  There was a cold wind blowing, though up until now it had been a hot and muggy day. He hunched his shoulders inside his long leather coat, and flexed his fingers inside his heavy driving gloves. He didn’t like being back at Silbury Hill. It had been seven hundred years since he’d last been here, and the place still disturbed the crap out of him. To the casual eye it was just another burial mound, big enough to be named a hill but otherwise unremarkable. Even the legends surrounding it were pretty generic. That the mound held the body of some ancient chieftain, along with his treasures. Or perhaps it was the secret tomb of some great and potent hero, sleeping in majesty, waiting to be called forth again in the time of England’s greatest need. There’d been several fairly major invasive digs here in this century alone, but no traces of a tomb or a body or treasure had ever been found. The legends persisted. Of King Sil, or the King in Gold, or The Rider On The White Horse.

  Hob knew the truth. That the mound was thousands of years older than that. He knew what was really buried there, deep and deep in the cold wet earth, held down by the weight of the mound, wrapped in iron chains blessed with terrible prayers and curses, doomed and damned to lie deep in the ground till Judgement Day, and perhaps beyond.

  Grendel Rex, the Unforgiven God.

  Hob shivered, and not just from the cold wind that always blew around Silbury Hill. There were giants in the earth, and some of them slept badly. Still, if you were looking for a fallen angel, a morally ambivalent spot like this was certainly the right place to start. A hill older than history, where good and evil, reality and unreality, and even Time itself became uncertain when the wind blew in the wrong direction. Hob took a deep breath and started up the hill. The steep, grass-covered mound was strangely unsteady under his feet, as though it wasn’t always there. Hob stared straight ahead as he climbed, careful never to look down. It took him a lot longer to reach the top of the hill than it should have, but then, there was more to Silbury Hill than just three dimensions.

  When he finally reached the summit, and had stood there for a while bent over and gasping for breath, he saw that Angel was lying curled up at the bottom of a deep crater, like a sleeping child. The grass all around had been burned away by the shock of her impact, leaving only dark scorched earth and a pit twenty feet deep. Angel lay in its centre, pale and naked and unharmed, like a worm in a bitter fruit. Her bare skin was so bright a white it almost glowed, and Hob could feel the power in her, like a presence on the air. She sat up suddenly, alerted to his arrival by some unknown sense, and her blood-red eyes locked onto his. Hob froze in place, staring back at her, unable to look away, knowing he was finally face to face with something as powerful and primal as himself. Angel was breathing unsteadily, as though breathing was a new thing to her, and when she finally smiled at him it was a tentative, uncertain thing.

  “Hello Angel,” said Hob. “Welcome to the material world.”

  “I hate it here,” said Angel, her voice thick and slurred. “I feel … small, limited. Vulnerable. They have given me body and mind and language, but they’ve taken away my memories, of who and what I used to be. I fell so far, diminishing all the time, and it hurt all the way down. Thrown down. Thrown out. I don’t want to be here!”

  She shrieked that last to the grey skies, but no one answered. Hob made his way carefully down the steep side of the earth pit, took off his long coat and wrapped Angel in it. His heart was beating uncomfortably fast, but when he spoke he was pleased to find that his voice was calm and steady, despite his dry mouth. “The material worlds aren’t so bad, Angel. There are lots of entertaining things to do to pass the time. Come with me. I’ll look after you, teach you the ways of the world. It’ll be fun.”

  “Yes,” said Angel. “I want to go out into the world … and do things to it. But I don’t know what, yet. So I’ll stay with you. You know things. And you feel … something like me. Who are you?”

  “I am Nicholas Hob, and I am just what you need. No one else can teach you the things I’ve learned. Thank your lucky stars I got to you first. Not everyone could understand you like I do.”

  But Angel had already lost interest in his words, and was staring intently at the leather coat around her, concentrating on the feel of it against her skin. Touch was a new thing to her. Hob had to smile—Angel was a blank slate, on which he could write anything he wanted. The thought excited him,
and the fact that she was so very dangerous, and could turn on him in a moment, and just might be able to destroy him, only made it that much more exciting.

  Hob poured Angel another glass of winter wine with a hand that was perfectly steady. He noted that they were getting near the bottom of the bottle, and mentally ordered one of his dead servants to bring another. Hob drank, like he did everything else, to excess. One of the joys of such a powerful and long-lived body was that it could take practically any amount of punishment and abuse. And after one of his father’s little chats, Hob felt he was entitled to a pick-me-up. Angel was studying him thoughtfully over the rim of her glass, but Hob pretended not to notice. Awakening Angel’s emotions had never been part of the deal. She was there to be his partner, and that was all. Anything else frankly scared the crap out of him. For many reasons, not least of which was that if Angel ever decided she was a woman scorned, well … In years to come they’d probably be able to point at a ten-mile-wide crater and say, That’s where Bradford-on-Avon used to be. The dead servant strode soundlessly into the parlour, carrying a fresh bottle of winter wine. The thick layer of frost coating the bottle had already crept up to cover his grey hand and arm, but the dead man hadn’t noticed. Hob signalled for him to put the bottle on the table and open it. In many ways, Hob preferred his servants to be dead. You never had to worry about their loyalty, or paying them, and you never had to put up with any backchat. Of course, they weren’t nearly as much fun to maltreat, but then, you couldn’t have everything. Or at least, not yet.

  “I’m going to have to piss soon,” said Angel, with that matter-of-fact directness that Hob never failed to find disconcerting. “Such a curious thing, this body, with its needs and appetites and functions. But then, so little of the material makes sense to me. I know I should stay out of Veritie; just being there diminishes me even further, but … there’s something about the real world that draws me to it. Things seem to matter more, there. Things can be decided in Veritie, and brought to conclusions.”

  “Change is dangerous for such as us,” Hob said carefully. “It threatens what we are. We’re weaker there, less significant. That’s why the thunder godling was able to knock the snot out of you at the railway station.”

  Angel scowled immediately. “Next time we meet, I’ll rip out his heart with my bare hands and he can watch me eat it as he dies. I want to meet him again. It was fun, fighting someone who could fight back. Most things break too easily when I play with them.”

  The dead man happened to be leaning over the table beside her, opening the new bottle. Angel gripped him casually by the arm, and tore the limb right out of its shoulder socket with no obvious effort. The dead man lurched, but didn’t fall, and when he straightened up his face was still expressionless. Hob sat very still. A few beads of sweat had popped out on his brow. It did him good to be reminded that the same arms which had held him so comfortingly could just as easily tear him apart at a moment’s notice.

  Angel looked at the dead arm thoughtfully, turning it over and over in her hands, as though looking for some significant detail that had escaped her. Finally she sniffed dismissively, and dropped the arm to the floor. She drank her wine and looked at Hob again, as though nothing of any import had occurred. To her, it hadn’t.

  “Angel, dear,” said Hob. “Please don’t damage the merchandise. They’re needed, all of them, for the next stage of my father’s plan.”

  “More of this plan that I can’t know about,” said Angel moodily, her dark mouth pouting like a child’s. “Was that what your father wanted to talk to you about?”

  “Among other things, yes. The opposition is gathering together. We can’t have that. So I’ve been ordered to do something about it.”

  He gestured for the dead man to pick up his discarded arm and leave. Angel ignored him, staring into her glass again, her crimson eyes far away.

  “It’s not easy, being mortal,” she said suddenly. “This body they gave me is as near-perfect as anything can be in the material worlds, but it will run down, eventually. Everything does, here. Nothing lasts.”

  “As opposed to where you came from?” said Hob. “Are you perhaps remembering something of who and what you were, before you were … demoted?”

  Angel looked at him sharply. “You have to keep asking, don’t you? You’re desperate to know whether I was cast out from Heaven or Hell. Well I don’t know. I’ve forgotten so much because I had to, to stay sane. I couldn’t function here, on this messy, limited plane, if I still remembered the glories of the shimmering realms. I try to remember things about my past existence, even small things, but they’re all gone. And I have to wonder, were my memories taken from me, or did I choose to forget? Did I agree to my descent, for some forgotten reason? There’s a hole inside of me, Hob; a great aching wound that I can sense but not comprehend the shape of. I have been robbed of all the better parts of myself, and been left just aware enough to know it. Bastards!”

  The wineglass shattered in her hand as it closed convulsively. Shards of glass fell to the floor, apart from one great sliver that protruded from her palm. Angel looked at it for a moment, entirely unmoved, and then pulled it out. She didn’t wince, and only a spot of bright red blood showed where the sliver had been. She studied the piece of glass for a moment, and then let it fall too.

  “Pain. Pleasure. So bright, like sparks in the flesh. Hard to tell apart, sometimes. They’re all part of this body’s weaknesses, its vulnerabilities. I hate the arbitrary nature of this place, where damage and death can come out of nowhere, at any time, for no real reason or purpose. Once, everything I did, everything I was, had purpose. I know that. And if I ever find out who has taken that from me, I will punish them for all eternity.”

  “Even if it turns out to be you?” said Hob.

  “Perhaps especially then,” said Angel.

  Hob handed Angel his glass of wine, hoping to distract her. Angel’s brooding made him nervous. Curious as he was over her origins, it better suited his purposes, or rather his father’s, if Angel remained lost and uncertain. It made her easier to manipulate. Angel accepted the glass, but didn’t drink from it.

  “I will return to the immaterial,” she said softly, implacably. “I will go back to where I belong, reclaim my due, even if I have to destroy all the material worlds there are to be free of their grip on me. I will tear whole civilisations apart and dance laughing in their ruins. I will see the end of all the breathing, bleeding, lesser things, if that’s what it takes. And not all the Powers and Dominations there are shall stand against me.”

  Hob felt very cold. She could do it.

  “Unless … that’s what I’m supposed to do.” Angel was frowning hard now. “Perhaps that’s why I was sent here, to be made angry enough to become the destroyer of peoples, and of worlds. In which case …”

  “When you can’t depend on logic,” Hob said reluctantly, not liking at all the ways Angel’s thoughts seemed to be going, “rely on your feelings, your intuition. Do you feel Good, or Evil?”

  Angel shrugged. “I’m not sure I understand the concepts properly yet. Morality is so confusing. I’m not sure either term applies to me. Feelings and instincts are both useless to me, with so little frame of reference to place them in. I feel … confused. Tired. Trapped.”

  “All right,” said Hob. “Then follow the argument through. If you need so badly to be free of your material existence, why not kill yourself? If you die, your spirit should return to the immaterial. I say should; I have no direct evidence that that’s what occurs. Even after all my very long life, some things still remain mysteries to me. If you can’t do it yourself, I’m sure I could help. After we’ve carried out my father’s plans, of course. He wouldn’t allow either of us to die while he still had a use for us.”

  “If I were to die, they’d just send me back again,” said Angel. “Thrust me back into the meat, into blood and bone and hair. I just know that’s what they’d do, the bastards! I have to stay here, until … until I do
whatever it is I was sent here to do.”

  She shrugged suddenly, and drank her wine. Some of the tension had gone out of her, perhaps because she’d realised she’d followed the argument as far as she could, for now. Hob allowed himself to relax a little, too. Angel was never so dangerous as when she was thinking.

  “Tell you what,” he said casually. “It could be that you were sent here to help me. Once the Serpent’s plans go through, the nature of the material worlds will have changed so much, that perhaps that will be enough to free you. Certainly by the time we’ve finished with them, Mysterie and Veritie won’t be anything like they were.”

  “Perhaps,” said Angel, apparently no longer interested. “I want to go back into town, find the thunder godling. Descendants of lesser gods should know their place. Perhaps he was behind the man we caught watching us; the man who followed the dead man back here.” She frowned suddenly, and looked sharply at Hob. “Why so many dead? You don’t need them to protect you. You have me.”

  Hob grinned wolfishly. “The dead are my army, my weapon. Our target has a blind spot, you see. Being so closely linked to the living world, she can’t see, detect or defend herself against the dead.”

  “Why are you always so careful never to refer to her by name?”

  “Because to name her is to evoke her, to raise her from humanity. Neither my father nor I want that. We daren’t attract her attention before all the parts of the plan are safely in place.”

  Angel considered him thoughtfully. “You’re afraid of her, aren’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Hob. “I’m just the Serpent’s Son, while she is …so much more.”

  “But …”

  “Change the subject,” Hob said steadily.

  “All right,” said Angel. “Answer me this: how did something as great and powerful as the Serpent produce a merely mortal son like you?”