Heaven's Bones

I am a Recording Angel.

Once there was a city of fog where beauty hatched sometimes in the mud, where ancient kings sat underground in lead coffins, where Father Thames lurked green-bearded in the sewers, and where machines were being born. It was a city of underground rivers, although few of its inhabitants remembered its lost waterways anymore.

I live there now, in a tunnel that ought to be a river, in a brick-walled passage where Romans born in Albion, Romans who never knew Rome, once barracked. Man's great machines, trains bejeweled with electric light and steel, pass overhead, roaring like dragons triumphant, carrying their cargo from parish to parish.

I claim kinship with them, though I'm but a poor construct, a failed machine, mere flesh, not like my sisters. Like the trains, my sisters are terrifying and beautiful, sculpted by clever, cruel hands into creatures of flesh and metal.

The trains thunder through the heart of London and frighten the old gods, but inside is clockwork as delicate as the gears embedded in my sisters' bone and muscle.

I like the close darkness of my lair, and the hum and thrum of the engines just overhead as comforting as the rain outside a fire-lit room. The pale new electric lights shine weakly through the grates. I
have company: the skeleton of a man sleeps disjointed in the corner. The bones of a dog are mingled with his pelvis and thighbone. When I'm about to go to sleep I'll sometimes hear a dry whisper from that corner: an old tale or a snatch of song. It's a comfort.

Sometimes, very late, I venture onto the platform, knowing that it's night only by the silence, and I forage for food. Some of those who master the trains know of me and will leave me sandwiches wrapped in greasy paper, and strong working-man's beer, and cakes their wives baked.

Some, glimpsing me creep, beetle-backed, beneath the grates, call me monster. Others, seeing the same, call me the Angel of the Underground.

Sebastian Robarts, skilled of hand and mad as a March hare, made me an angel, and named me Seriah. Cursed Trueblood infected me with the Mists, the Mists that gift me with visions of the past. Angel I'll stay until the Mists venture underground to find me again, through the tunnels past Knightsbridge and Newgate and Buckingham Palace, and that may never be.

Robarts read of the Recording Angels in his uncle's library, how they kept the books of heaven, how one stood behind every human and noted every deed or thought, whether good or evil. But I am made and not created and only stand paralyzed while time eddies around me like the sea.

In my bower, brick against my back with the secret rivers of London trickling ten feet beneath my feet, I sit and remember what's happened and some of what will happen—because it is the same thing. The trainmasters will never know that, nor the whores in their palaces, nor the gentry with mud on their boots, and it's a blessing on them they don't. Robarts who made me couldn't understand it. Maybe Trueblood did, bad cess to him. The future is a matter of record and the past is yet to come, and I a spark who floats above the embers, seeing pieces of stories for a time.

Bones on a beach, scattered and yellow. Here one has a scrap of tendon still adhering. That one is half-buried in jeweled sand. Only Heaven knows how they fit together. That's how I see the past, and the future's past, like a broken ivory necklace.

Once there was a house in the bend of a river, where slaves chopped cotton and their master and his kin lived in a state they called gentility. Terrible things happen when a person is given absolute power over another. This was no exception
.

Once there was a boy with the gift of cursing who grew to be a man who loved his Sight-born sister, so much that he sought to destroy her and all who bore her blood. Such is the nature of love that it is a shiver away from all-consuming hatred
.

There was a boy who saw the truth of things when he touched them and a girl who wanted to heal with her own hands and another boy who wanted so very much to fly …

Shall I tell you?

Yes?

Well then …

Fanny Weldon didn't remember much about her life before the Fire. She had vague memories of a gentle voice singing her to sleep, or of riding in a close carriage, all bundled up in stiff, itchy clothes.

And sometimes the screaming at night.

“What is that, Mama?” she remembered asking.

And her mother would purse her lips and look up from her embroidery, out the window at the darkness.

“Nothing, my dear. An animal in pain. Let your father tend to it.”

But the sounds continued, whimpering now, sounding very human.

“Mama! If it's a rabbit that a fox got we must put it out of its pain, mustn't we, Mama?”

“Hush, dear. Don't interfere in your father's work.”

But now, after the Fire, she never heard the screaming.

The servants were gone, replaced by invisible hands that tended the house and fields, whispering, bodiless, in corner and corridor. Mama kept always to her room. Fanny had to admit to herself that she didn't much like visiting Mama now.

Papa didn't seem to want to talk to her much, but that was nothing new. Nowadays he seemed to be always searching for something in the desolate plantation, something he never found, and it made him impatient and bad-tempered.

To herself she admitted that she liked Riverbend now, after the Fire. She liked wandering the misty banks of the rivers and the dark borders of the woods.

She didn't like the way her father looked at her sometimes. But that was true even before the Fire.

There was someone else, she realized dimly. Someone who should be there. Not a servant, not quite. Had she ever had a sister? Someone whose absence was haunting, like the space where a tooth was missing.

The day of the Fire
. Late November, 1864, with a trace of the summer's heat lingering in the chill autumn air. Even Fanny knew about the armies of the North descending on the plantations, of Sherman destroying everything in his path, of the stories of slaves taking what vengeance they could. She knew better than to ask about it, but when visitors came she would hide beneath the lip of the great central staircase or behind the thick tapestry curtains and listen.