forty-five
how a world ended
OKAY, BEFORE I explain to you what happened while my face was being chewed off by felis mythicus giganticus, let me tell you the good news: I was certain now that Anaita’s power really did have limits.
Knowing that wasn’t a lot of help right then, what with the fangs and the drool and the huge jaws crushing my skull, but it meant that we actually had a chance. Not a good one. Not even a statistically significant one. But a chance.
See, nobody (at least nobody like me) actually knows where the high angels get their power. “Direct from the Highest” is what we’re told, and that may well be true, but I’m pretty sure there’s more to the story. The power is rationed, apparently by rank, and the higher up the ladder you go, the more pure force the angels in question can bring to the dance. Someone like Anaita, one of the chief powers of the Third Sphere, could bring a great deal of it to bear where she wanted, on Heaven, on Earth, or even here on Kainos. In fact, she had a great deal more freedom to use power on Kainos because the place pretty much belonged to her. But this was the kicker: she didn’t have the right to that power.
So Anaita could call on far greater resources than she needed, far more than Sam, Clarence, and I could ever hope to match: if angelic power were water, she had a fire hose the size of the Holland Tunnel, and we had squirt guns. But just like someone using a fire hose, the water had to come from somewhere, and so did whatever heavenly reserves she was drawing on. More important, she had to disguise the fact that she was using it, because any massive deployment of angelic force was going to attract notice Upstairs.
I’d been suspicious that she destroyed such a small portion of Kainos during her scorched earth hissy fit. Yes, she wanted to preserve the place, but she never really found out whether I was there or not, and she hadn’t managed to capture Sam either, who was at least as much of a threat to her secrets as I was. That suggested that she didn’t dare use that level of force for very long. Yeah, she could come down and rain destruction like a helicopter gunship, but only for so long before someone back in Heaven was going to start wondering what she was doing.
Which explained why she’d mostly worked through others, sending Smyler after me instead of just obliterating me with a snap of her fingers, and using Sam and the other renegade angels to do the groundwork of populating Kainos.
The big cats were the final giveaway. The monsters were the manifestations of Anaita’s power, yes, but she was using them because they were a comparatively thrifty way to get rid of us. Create something with hunting instincts, muscles, talons, and fangs, then turn it loose, and you get much more bang for your buck than just vaporizing everything in front of you. The fang-toothed kitty tasting my face at that moment might have been nasty, but it was actually a sign of weakness. Anaita was trying to take us down on the cheap, because she needed to keep what she was doing hidden from Heaven.
I promise you, I didn’t spend as much time thinking about all that at the time as I just did describing it.
The cat-beast had me down, but it hadn’t yet found a way to get its jaws squarely around my skull, and I was doing my best to hang onto my facial features, hitting, kicking, squirming, rolling. Still, several seconds of that hadn’t done me any good, and I was already running out of strength. I pulled the knife I’d stashed in my boot, wishing really hard that it could be something longer, stronger, and sharper than a leaf of flint with string wrapped around one end to make a handle. I knew I wasn’t going to make any major puncture wounds with it, so I just started slashing at everything I could reach, trying to cause pain. This might have been the imaginary sort of giant cat, but until I learned otherwise, I was going to assume that its nose and mouth and eyes were its weak spots, like almost any other predator.
Sadly, I seemed to be learning otherwise, or else I was just pissing it off. It bit down on my hand hard enough to make me drop the stone knife, and when I punched its nose with my other hand it only reared back, mouth wide and teeth very obvious, ready to go for my throat. Then something hit it.
Crock! That’s the noise it made, like someone throwing a large rock against the side of a concrete building. The cat reeled and stumbled back a step, one half of its face suddenly a different shape and oozing gray stuff that might have been blood. Clarence swung his club again, a stone the size of a volleyball tied into the fork of a thick branch, but only managed to hit the beast on the shoulder this time. It shook its head and snarled.
One of its eyes was gone, or at least lost in torn tissue and broken bone, but the cat was nowhere near dead. Clarence tried to yank me away by my collar and only yanked me onto my ass instead, but I’d found my spear, and just managed to lift it high enough to pierce the creature’s throat as it came at me. The force of its leap knocked me over again, but the spear had struck home. The cat twisted and contorted itself, trying to get a paw on the stick wagging in its neck.
I grabbed at the spear, got lucky, then braced myself and tried to force the beast toward the second pit, but even with half its head crushed and a spurting hole in its windpipe, Godzilla-Garfield was still intent on killing me.
One rear paw slid over the edge of the pit into empty space, but the thing began to push back hard against the spear, as if it knew what I planned. So I let go of the spear and threw myself at the giant cat, hitting the creature low in its body, right in the ribs. My weight and momentum pushed it flailing and snarling over the edge. I went with it, but most of my body landed on the rim of the pit, and Clarence caught my leg.
It may not have been a real cat, it may have bled gray, but it died just like any desperate, angry living thing on those sharpened stakes at the bottom of the hole. Not that I spent long watching it.
“Where’s Sam?” I gasped as I used Clarence’s arm to pull myself back to safety.
“In the house.” Clarence had reached some kind of battle clarity, exhaustion and fear canceling each other. His voice was like a robot’s.
“Then let’s fucking run,” I suggested.
I stole one look back at Anaita, who did not appear too upset by the destruction of her pets. Made sense if they were things she’d just made, but it didn’t help my plan any: I wanted her angry. Not to the point of burning down the house and all the rest of us with one pissed-off gesture, but close to it. Clarence and I dug across the drifting snow and black ash toward the building. Luckily for us, Anaita felt no need to hurry.
“Duck!” I shouted at Clarence as we burst through the door. I grabbed his head and bent him down to keep him from getting tangled. “She’s coming!” I shouted to everyone else. Not that they needed to be told. The door we had dragged shut behind us simply flew apart, with a snap-snap-snap chorus of broken timbers and a whuff of displaced air, then the Angel of Moisture glided through—right into the web of ropes and rattles the pilgrims of Kainos had strung in the entranceway. As she thrashed her way angrily through this minor distraction, several Kainos men and women stood up from their hiding places on the second floor landing, screaming wordless battle cries (okay, shrieks of pent-up terror) and letting their arrows fly. None of them had been living in this place long enough to become marksmen, but enough of the wooden arrows struck Anaita to make her cry out in rage. She ripped loose those that pierced her, flinging them away as though they were no more than burrs and stickers from a walk in the country.
As the archers fired, others all over the house began pounding on the walls with tree limbs and shaking their rattles, making so much noise that even I lost track for a moment of where I was and what I was doing. Then a chance arrow struck Anaita right between the eyes.
If she’d been human it would have killed her, but of course she wasn’t. Still, it got her attention. She turned to look in the direction of the archers, her face contorting in a mask of fury; then the stairs leading up to the second floor simply flew apart, like an explosion without the explosion. The pieces of wood hurtled in all di
rections. One of the larger fragments hit Clarence in the leg and knocked him flying. Several of the Kainos pilgrims went down and didn’t get up.
But Anaita’s sudden attack on the screaming archers and other noisemakers had snapped me back into gear. Even as stair boards turned into wooden shrapnel, I dropped to my knees and crawled across the main room toward the wooden box where the Mecca cube—and something else—was hidden. This was the crucial bit, and if the thing wasn’t there waiting for me, well, Anaita would have the leisure to shred us into component molecules and spread us around her invented world like dandelion seeds in a tornado. And I would go wherever angels wind up when a very powerful, very angry higher angel decides to dispose of them.
Still on my hands and knees, with broken boards raining down all around me, I reached up and opened the doors of the cabinet, then felt along the inside, just in front of the Mecca cube. It was there.
Anaita had brushed aside the distractions of the doorway like they were cobwebs, shredding the hand-carved rattles and the rope curtains knotted full of sticks and clattering stones. She was crackling with energy that bent the air around her, and she had a look on her face that I wouldn’t have wanted to see on a five-year-old having a tantrum, let alone on one of the most powerful beings in the universe.
“Wait!” I shouted, and scrambled to my feet.
She turned to me and the anger simply vanished. She became cold as a statue. “You.” That was all she said.
I knew I had perhaps a second, maybe two, so I held up the thing I’d taken from the cabinet. “Just thought you should see this first,” I said, showing her the horn.
Cold as a statue? No, colder. Like an ice storm turning the sky black. Like the front of a glacier just before it rolled over you and ground you into the earth. “What,” she said, “is that?”
“This? Come on, you know what this is.” I hefted the bloodshot ivory thing in my hand, bounced it once or twice. It weighed a little more than I would have expected—not as much as a curved, four inch piece of ordinary horn, more like a petrified souvenir. The whole universe had come down to something the size of a paperweight. “This is Eligor’s horn. I found it. And he’s coming for it.”
And just like that, Eligor was there. No burning line in the air, no dramatic blast of light and smoke and brimstone, he was just . . . there. In his Kenneth Vald face and body, dressed as though he was going to receive the Entrepreneur of the Decade award from some grateful civic body.
“Greetings, Angel of Moisture,” he said.
Anaita looked at him, then at me, then at the horn I held cradled in my hand. “What nonsense is this? What are you doing here, Eligor?”
“Don’t I have a right to be here?” He smiled. “Didn’t I help you build this place?”
She didn’t smile back. “You and I made a bargain, Grand Duke. Would you interfere now? Are you very certain you wish to do that?”
“Who’s interfering? I’ve just come to have some of my property returned. Angel Doloriel? I believe you have something of mine.”
“Impossible.” That was all she said, but there was a lot going on behind that single stony word and that mask of chilly indifference.
“Right here.” And I flipped him the horn. I watched it spin through the air toward him. Every living creature in that big room watched it too, all the pilgrims cowering on the stairs, even Anaita herself. He caught it with the ease of a man reaching out his hand to see if it was raining. Then it dissolved into a cloud of starry light, and Eligor absorbed it.
For half a second everything seemed frozen. Anaita hadn’t moved, but it seemed like something was heating up inside her. I could feel a pressure beating out from her, a force that could devastate everything in the church-shaped house. “Impossible,” she said again, but she sounded less certain now, maybe even confused. “Conspiracy!”
I held my breath. The next few seconds would tell. If everything went right, then maybe, just maybe . . .
“Don’t, mistress! It’s a trick!”
Ed Walker half-ran, half-tumbled down the stairs from the second level. He caught the string of his bow on a newel post and instead of untangling it, simply let it go. The bow sprang back, swung hard around the post, and clattered to the steps just as he reached ground level and threw himself down on his face in front of Anaita.
“Ed, no!” someone shouted from the upper floor, a cry of genuinely astonished horror.
“Mistress, you built this place for us, not these others!” Walker’s words came fast and breathless. “Not these so-called angels who’ve brought us nothing but death and destruction.” He looked at me and glared. “Don’t fall for their tricks. Don’t take our home away because of them. It’s not true—that’s not the horn you had, that’s Eligor’s other horn. He and the angel worked this up together. It’s a trick!”
“You shit,” I said. “You treacherous little shit.”
“Shut up.” Walker didn’t even look at me now, just stared up at Anaita. She seemed even more like a statue now, something impossibly fine and rare, with supplicants appropriately arranged at her feet. One supplicant, anyway—Edward Lynes Walker, the unofficial leader of the pilgrims, the man who hadn’t liked our plan from the beginning. “Spare us, mistress. Spare us and spare Kainos.”
“Dear me,” said Eligor. “You seem to have rolled snake-eyes, Doloriel.”
I’d done everything I could. There really wasn’t anything left but to fall down on my knees. I’d wanted to do that for a while, anyway. I was exhausted, a bloody mess from the wounds the big cat had given me, and I’d kept going this long on pure adrenaline.
“Okay,” I said. “You win.”
Anaita looked at me. I swear, she had never looked more beautiful than at that moment, a frozen, perfect immortal beauty. It was hard even to look at her. If she’d been a huge rock, mariners would happily have steered right into her, foundered and drowned while singing her praises.
“Of course,” she said. “There was never any doubt. Did you really think I was foolish enough to hide the other horn here on Kainos?”
I was so very tired. “I admit it did cross my mind.”
“You must have thought you were quite clever. I can imagine your logic. Where would she keep it, this oh-so-important object? In Heaven? Of course not. In Hell or on Earth? Why make it easy for her enemies to search for it? Ah, but here on Kainos, the place that can only be reached with her permission—”
“Or mine,” said Eligor. He sounded like he was enjoying this.
“You may go away now, Horseman.” Anaita wouldn’t look right at him. I don’t know if that was because she was scared of him or because she was trying to resist the urge to blast him into sparkly cinders. “Unless you mean to challenge me. As you already conspired against me.”
Eligor laughed. “My dear, you give yourself too much credit. Challenge? Without the permission of our masters? That would violate the Tartarean Convention and several others. As for conspiracy, my little friend Doloriel asked for a favor. I granted it to him because it amused me to do so. I, of course, had no idea what he planned to do with my horn.”
“Of course.” Anaita bit the words off and spat them at him.
I couldn’t do anything. This was going all kinds of bad, and I was helpless to change it. The two of them were talking! Like they had just bumped into each other in front of the laundromat and were catching up on old times.
“Seriously, though,” said Eligor, “that horn must have been a worry. I had the feather in my safe in my office. Couldn’t have been more protected. But someone took it away from me anyway. And I had the devil of a time getting it back—if you’ll excuse the expression.”
“So, the horn isn’t here,” I said, forcing myself into their little tête-à-tête. “So I guessed wrong. It was worth a try.”
“There were moments I almost had respect for you, Doloriel.” Anaita ha
d returned to her calm, emotionless voice. The weird thing is, I could still hear bits of the childlike tones that we all knew, that soothing, sweet voice still submerged in the goddess persona, like a toddler fallen down a well. “But ultimately, you were a mistake from the beginning. I should never have let you continue to exist.” She shook her head. “Did you really think I would keep the horn somewhere you or some other sneak-thief could reach it? Hide it in my house? In a museum? Or here?” She laughed, and I heard something then that I hadn’t heard before, even in her rages—the sound of something that had nothing human in it. “Since the Grand Duke and I made our bargain, the horn has never been out of my keeping. Never! An army of angels could not have taken it from me—or an army of demons.” She placed her hand over her heart. The spot began to glow. “You, with your sad little tricks. Sammariel hid my feather in a hidden pocket, folded into time! How clever! Did it never occur to you that if he could perform such a trick with a mere fraction of my power, I might be capable of things you could not even grasp?”
And then she reached into her own chest, as effortlessly as reaching into a coat to pull out a wallet. A moment later, she withdrew her hand. Sparkling, shining with a sickly pale glare, the horn lay in her palm. All I could do was stare at it. If I hadn’t been yards away from her I might have been able to reach out and touch it, but it was hopelessly beyond my grasp. “Here, annoying angel. Is this what you wanted? To buy back your demon sweetheart?”
“Why?” I said. “If you knew—if you knew all this already—why go to so much trouble to frame me?”
“Frame you? You have not been accused of half of what you’ve actually done, Doloriel. And as for what you’ve done to me, by my divinity, if you spent eternity in the lowest pits of Hell, you couldn’t possibly pay for that. You’ve spoiled so much. Even when you were alive, you were a thorn in my side.”
My eyes slowly lifted from the horn to her face. “When I was alive?”