Califia's Daughters (32 page)

“Tomas, heel,” she said as she passed through the room and walked briskly away in what she hoped was the direction of the Captain's rooms, so that the other Angel was forced first to close the door and then to scurry in order to shoulder Dian aside and take over the place in front.

“Your name?” Dian asked the back, but the woman walked directly on. Dian followed but deliberately slowed, exaggerating her limp and smiling now, and the woman would have lost her had she not waited at the next corner. Dian sauntered along with a hand resting on Tomas's back, and spoke to him in a casual but carrying voice.

“You know, Tomas, one of the difficulties of coming into a system like this is, you don't have any way of learning the ins and outs of how things work unless someone tells you or you see it in action. Take official duty, for example,” she went on, and grinned wickedly at a startled D pushing a cart of cleaning supplies. “Some places, guards on duty aren't allowed to talk outside of transmitting orders. That's fine. That's how it works. Other places, now, guards running orders from higher up start to feeling that the orders are theirs, that they're every bit as big as those who actually gave the orders.” Dian was strolling now, baring her teeth in mock cheer at any passing Angel, even at her guide, whose back was becoming increasingly rigid. “Now, that's just plain foolish, wouldn't you say, Tomas? Yes, I thought you'd agree. You're very sensible, ‘cause you know, once that happens, once a guard starts imagining rules that aren't there and other people find out about her attitude, well, now, it's not too long before someone comes down on that guard like a ton of bricks. Sometimes it's someone from above, sometimes from her own level; either way, that guard is pretty flat. All because of making up some rule that isn't there, in order to feel important. ‘Course, if it is a rule, nobody's offended. But if it's not, and people find out it's not, well—”

“Delia,” the guard hissed at Dian over her shoulder. “The name is Delia. Now, would you get moving?” Dian agreeably sped up her stride to a fast crawl, smiled widely, and shut up. It was good to know that word of her actions outside the gate had spread and survived the night's beating. Perhaps, come to think of it, even been fed by it—certainly this guard seemed hesitant to cross Dian openly. However, she might be a lowly messenger. Have to find out Delia's rank, thought Dian, and then they stopped in front of a door. The Angel knocked twice, and at a brief mutter from within she opened the door, then shut it after Dian and Tomas.

The Captain sat in a soft chair with her feet stretched out to a wood fire. Next to her sat the woman whom Dian had seen the night of the beating, who resembled the Captain although her eyes were closer to brown—sisters according to Margaret, or by blood, maybe cousins. Between them rested an ornately carved low table with a silver tray and coffee service, two translucent cups and saucers, and a plate of small cakes. The two women studied Dian with their similar eyes, those of the strange woman analytical rather than compelling, and cold where the Captain's hinted of passion. Dian held her hand out, the fingers gesturing down, and Tomas sat. The gazes of both women went to him.

“He's very obedient,” the other woman commented at last. Her voice was slightly nasal, as if the resonators had been blocked or crushed, and the effect was slightly creepy. It was not a voice to obey, but definitely one to avoid crossing.

“He's young, but he's intelligent and wants to please,” Dian agreed, and waited for further sign of what was demanded of her. Finally, the strange woman turned back to the Captain and leaned forward with her hands on the arms of the chair.

“Must go. I'll let you know what they decide, shall I?” Something about the thought seemed to cause her secret amusement, as if the offer were a joke shared by two adults over the actions of infants. The Captain seemed to agree with the attitude, if not the humor.

“It's hardly necessary, but I'll see you tonight anyway,” she said from the depths of her chair. The other woman stood up and walked past Dian as if she were not there, and Dian stood alone, an Angel awaiting orders from her Captain.

THEN SHE TOOK UP HER SWORD WITH BOTH HANDS AND WENT TO ATTACK HIM FULL OF RAGE.

T
WENTY-SIX

S
PRING CAME, EVEN TO
A
SHTOWN.
T
O
D
IAN, THOUGH,
the fragrant sweet-pea blossoms that splashed up the walls and tumbled from window boxes, the birdsong and the kites in the clear blue sky, the rich smell of new-mown grass and freshly turned earth and the voices of children playing out of doors all had an air of unreality, of stage dressing—like, she thought in one of her blacker moments, some diseased whore in skillfully youthful makeup.

Her mood that gentle late-March morning was black indeed, and she stalked the streets, savage and short-tempered and every bit as dangerous as the person she had, for two and a half endless months, been pretending to be.

There were a number of reasons for her blind and savage march through Ashtown's gleaming roads. For one thing, she'd been inside this putrid, cheerful little town for nine godforsaken weeks and two days, while the time left to inform the Valley of what was on its way built, crested, and passed: Miriam's people would be packed and on the road south, with nothing but the briefest of greetings from Dian to give them pause. She had not confronted them that snowy evening, she had not returned from Robin's cabin; she had failed, and Judith would pay the consequences.

It might not have been so unbearable if she had been able to relax occasionally, but for every hour of every one of her sixty-five days here, she'd had to be on her guard against softness, friendship, self-revelation. Every person she encountered hated and feared her for what her uniform meant. The only exceptions were themselves clothed in black: Angels inside the Center, where the camaraderie of soldiers provided a veneer of friendship; Margaret, who remained an enigma despite daily familiarity and physical intimacy; and Captain Breaker, whose emotions, often unfathomable to Dian, most emphatically did not include fear—or even, Dian suspected, its corollary, hate. In all that time she had not seen Robin once; she was no closer to seeing him than the day she'd arrived. Nor had she seen a trader with bright blond hair, although she hadn't expected to: anyone who would Destroy books would scorn to live in a city that cherished its amenities as Ashtown did.

Added to those frustrations was this pregnancy, nearly two thirds of the way through now, which meant she had to piss every ten minutes, couldn't eat anything interesting without suffering the most ungodly heartburn, had to see the midwife every two weeks (and was finding it increasingly difficult not to murder that good woman, to wrap her own stethoscope around her neck until she gagged on her platitudes about proper diet and positive attitude and exercise and breathing and goddamned nipple preparation, for shit's sake), and was nudging toward the time when she would be forced into maternity leave, lest her soft outline make an Angel an object of amusement in the streets.

But the final straw, the panic that pressed in on her and was about to drive her off the edge into desperation, was the sure knowledge that she was losing Tomas.

Breaker was clever, Dian gave her that, as clever with dogs as she was with people. Four weeks of seeing Dian regularly, always with Tomas present, developing a simple friendship with the big, unsuspecting animal. Then a month of gradually increasing independence with him, of reason and absolute authority saying, “He has to learn to obey me, Dian,” and “It's not a good precedent, Dian, for an Angel to have a weapon her Captain can't handle,” working up to “He handles better when you're not looking over his shoulder, Dian, why don't you leave us alone for an hour?” Then last week the arrival of a very large but exceedingly stupid smooth-haired bitch, some kind of Great Dane mix brought south through Portland from Idaho, all this culminating in that morning's command—not request, command—that in six weeks Tomas would accompany Breaker on her four-day trip north to meet and escort Queen Bess to Ashtown for her annual visit. Without Dian.

Savage and ugly as an ink smear across a watercolor of spring, she prowled the tidy streets and alleys of her self-imposed prison; poor Tomas, pacing beside her with her fingers brushing his shoulders, had no idea what had put his mistress into this foul mood. She barely noticed the alacrity with which the road in front of her opened up, or the way children were snatched from her path, or the sudden gulping silence that eddied through the streets as the citizens became aware of this black Angel bearing down on them. Dian: the embodiment of uncontrollable fury and irrational death that they put up with, and turned very blind eyes to, as the price one had to pay for security; one of the Vampires
(whisper it!)
who occasionally snatched up a citizen
(but surely only those who deserved it, and not one of mine, not my family, not today).

Dian took no notice of the averted eyes, tight lips, and rigid shoulders. She was entirely taken up with her own impotent rage, with fury at the delay and at the visibly rounding belly pushing out the front of her black tunic under the jacket, with the maddening, never-ending burn in her left breast, like some small, sharp-toothed animal that always gnawed harder on bad days, and the throb in her apparently healed leg that on cold days and depressing ones demanded that she consciously suppress a limp. She ached with the frustration of suppressed violence, she longed to let go and do something truly vicious, to anyone, but she held herself in, feeling herself a maniac under tight but marginal control, and continued her patrol.

Halfway through the morning, she dropped by the Angel station located next to the smaller of the town's two movie theaters, quiet still. She lodged a report and used the station toilet, then came out and turned down the street to the stall that sold cups of thick, sweet coffee, the kind the midwife forbade her. She took the cup, put her coin down, and walked away, so the woman could take the money without trepidation. Most of the Angels just took—and often considerably more than cups of coffee—but from her first patrol Dian had made it clear that she accepted no gifts. Word had spread fast, and by the end of the day the shopkeepers were all aware that the new Angel with the dog paid her way, that she was polite, but that when she put on that smile, you'd better back off, fast.

The morning was uneventful, perhaps because her mood preceded her in the street and instantly doused any potential hot spots. The closest she came to action was when she approached a pair of furious merchants, so deeply immersed in their argument they did not notice the nervous silence that fell over their neighbors. She had tapped them each once on the shoulder with her unpowered wand; two red and irritable faces turned in her direction, then went abruptly pale, and the two frightened women faded away with identical sick smiles, in opposite directions. Dian slid the wand back into its clasp on her arm, and went on, even more infuriated now at this reminder of the daily intimidation she practiced, and at the spineless acceptance of her black-clad presence by the people of Ashtown.

There was no violence all that morning, not even any graffiti. No one came to her for help, but then that was hardly out of the ordinary. Angels were not there for helping, except under the very direst of straits; as for settling disagreements, one might as well submit to the judgment of a venomous snake. Angels were for repression, pure and simple, to carve away troublemakers with swift efficiency and thereby smooth the lives of decent, law-abiding citizens. At any rate, so the law-abiding citizens reassured themselves, and the town lawmakers always voted for the continuance of the Ashtown Guard, for their salaries and equipment and steady increase in numbers. Some of the more sensitive might have difficulties sleeping occasionally, as they recalled the smirk on the face of Captain Breaker's sister during the discussions on these matters, and in the still, dark hours they might wonder if the town Council controlled the Guard, or the Guard controlled the town. Come morning, however, their worries seemed silly. Hard times called for hard measures, and the Angels were an important tool for the preservation of order. A sharp tool, granted, and one with no apparent safe handle, a tool that could slice the unwary. Best to avoid Angels, at all times. But they were only a tool.

And I,
thought Dian,
I am an Angel. That smirk is on my face too, because I can see who controls this town. We do.
I
do.
It was a thought as sour as her stomach, and it wormed its way into her more deeply with every snatched-up child and averted pair of eyes.

The woman with the mule did not see Dian until it was too late. Dian came around a corner from a shadowed alleyway into the afternoon sun and was greeted by the sound of thick blows on flesh and one voice raised over a confusion of others. Above the crowd of perhaps two dozen heads an arm emerged, grasping the light end of a heavy-handled crop. The stubby butt end flew through its arc and disappeared, landing on some unseen but solid body at about shoulder level. A burst of voices, most raised in protest but a few in encouragement, nearly covered the bray of the victim, and Dian did not wait for more. With Tomas at her knee, she snapped the wand down into her hand, thumbed it to a mild charge, and slapped it indiscriminately against anything in her way. With a series of singing cracks followed instantly by stifled curses and outraged gasps, her path cleared miraculously, to open on a tableau consisting of: a mule with blood running down its unkempt neck, ears back and four feet planted in an implacable refusal to carry a load larger than it was; the broad back of its infuriated owner, flaying those ears with slurred but blistering imprecations and the upraised crop; and the half-circle of onlookers, backing away rapidly at the unheralded but not unexpected irruption of this dark harbinger of violence. Dian ignored them and reached forward to lay the heavy hand of authority on the sweaty, muscular shoulder in front of her.

Perhaps what followed was Dian's fault. Her failure to take normal precautions, or even to duck more quickly, may have arisen from her secret hunger for something, anything, to happen. Perhaps it was only an awful mistake on the part of this trader, a relative stranger to Ashtown who had not been here often enough to develop the automatic caution of the native, a Traveler whose small voices of warning were swept away by her drink-fueled fury at being crossed by the stubborn animal, by the power of bending the dumb beast to her will, and by the glory she felt at the scene she was creating among these rustic Ashtowners. She, too, was someone who liked a good fight, and she felt the hand on her shoulder as the opportunity to indulge in something more exciting than beating a mule (which she'd have to stop doing in a minute anyway before she killed it and had to carry the load herself). In either case, the result was the same: the woman's instinctive response to the interfering hand was a sharp backward jerk of her upcoming elbow. It connected, hard, with Dian's mouth.

The woman turned with the crop raised, filled with the anticipation of a spot of dirty fighting, and then she froze in horror at the sight before her: a tall Angel in black, blood on her teeth, wand at the ready, murder in her icy blue eyes. The woman barely noticed the huge and angry dog at the Angel's knee, crouched quivering beneath the restraint of his mistress's outstretched fingers, the circle of rustics held rigid as if by the same gesture, their apprehension giving way now to open fear. The onlookers' collective gasp that had accompanied the impact of elbow and mouth had cut off into silence, instantaneous and absolute. A leaf could have been heard dropping to the street, had it dared move. Certainly the only sound was the slobbering breath of the injured pack mule and the macabre strains of an accordion from the next street over. Dian began slowly to smile, and the trader's befuddled brain finally recognized what she was facing. The bloodied crop fell to the ground, and she would have moaned had her throat been capable of it.

Without taking her eyes from the woman's, Dian deliberately rotated her head, spat a gob of blood into the street, licked her split lip with a contemplative tongue, and allowed the grin to come back onto her mouth. She reinforced her command to Tomas with a tiny push of her hand toward the paving stones, then reached over with her free hand to click the wand back into place on her forearm. Thus unarmed, she crouched slightly, her hands at waist level; the fingertips of both hands twitched inward, inviting the stranger to come at her. To the onlookers she looked like a cat with a mouse. Or, with the blood trickling from her lips, like a Vampire at midnight.

The artificial stone-cold sobriety that results when alcohol is converted by terror had hold of the trader now and, knowing she was a dead thing, she answered the invitation in the only way possible. There was a knife in her hand moving toward Dian's belly, and the blade might easily have gutted the pregnant Angel had its wielder been more sober and less afraid. Dian turned it easily on the guard built into her left sleeve and stepped forward so that her rigid right hand could deliver a straight-fingered thrust directly into the woman's stomach. The fight was over before it began. With the trader retching at her feet, Dian turned her back and picked up the woman's two weapons. The crop she tucked under her arm. The knife she used to slice through the pack's belly bands, then she drove it deep into the load and tugged. The animal skittered away from the sliding packs, stepping on its owner's hand and kicking her leg before it came near enough to the onlookers for a woman to reach out reflexively and grab its halter. The trader had regained her breath and squealed at these additional blows. She snatched her trampled hand to her chest and sat hunched up, cradling the cracked bones and squinting up at her attacker. Dian contemplated the knife, testing her thumb against the wicked point; she stood over the woman for a long moment, then flipped the knife over in her palm and threw it hard and deep into the woman's packs.

A brief wince at the damage being done to her property gave way to disbelief and the faint beginnings of hope as the woman realized that she was not about to have her own knife turned on her. She began uncertainly to answer Dian's unfailing smile with one of her own.