Murder of Angels (40 page)

“I didn’t
want
to come here,” Niki says, and she wonders how many times she’s said that since San Francisco. She holds her head up and tries not to flinch at Pikabo Kenzia’s cold eyes almost as impervious, as impenetrable, as the eyes of the idol towering over them all. “Spyder told me I had to come, that I had to come or two worlds would die, mine and yours. That’s what she said. That’s why I jumped off the bridge. That’s why I
died
.”

“And you believed her? Do you even believe yourself?”

“I
saw
things. She showed me things—”

“Listen, it’s really not what you think,” Scarborough interrupts, and the murmuring crowd grows suddenly and ominously silent. “She’s not a hierophant,” he continues. “I don’t even think that she knows what a hierophant is.”

“You,”
Pikabo Kenzia roars, “you do
not
speak here!”

But Scarborough Pentecost continues, as though he hasn’t heard her, “The Weaver
lied
to her. You just said as much yourself. The bitch has lied to everyone—”

“Another word, another
sound,
and I will personally cut the tongue from out your mouth.”

“You’re enemies of the Dragon,” Niki says quickly, before Scarborough can say anything else. “That part’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Hierophant, that much of what she told you is the truth. We have opposed the Dragon for more than a hundred centuries.”

“But whatever Spyder’s trying to do to destroy it, you don’t think that it’ll work.”

Pikabo Kenzia steps down from the altar and walks past the killing table with its scabby iron trough, the hem of her robes and her bare feet almost silent as she strides across the floor to stand on the other side of the fire pit from Niki. The flames between them, the flames and so many other things that Niki knows she could never comprehend, and now she can see that the witch’s eyes are the softest shade of violet.

“You’re going to kill me,” Niki says and looks away from Pikabo’s eyes, into the depths of fire and cinder-black logs.

“No, Hierophant. I’m not going to kill you, nor will I allow any other here to raise her hand against you.”

Niki doesn’t take her eyes off the burning logs, determined not to let the red witch see her surprise or relief or confusion. “You said I was condemned.”

“Yes, you are condemned. You are, I suspect, damned. But that’s not my doing. It’s the Weaver’s, and it’s not my role to pass sentence upon you.”

“Spyder…” Niki begins, and then she realizes that there are human bones mixed in with the logs in the fire pit, the cracked shafts of long bones and ribs and a jaw going slowly to ash, and she wishes that she were home in her room, and today she and Marvin might go to a movie or to Fisherman’s Wharf and have boiled crabs at McCormick’s and Kuleto’s. If only she knew the way back to the Palisades, and then some trick to turn Spyder’s magic inside out, and she’d never tell Daria or Dr. Dalby a word of what she’s seen. They wouldn’t listen anyway.

“You were about to speak?” Pikabo Kenzia asks her, and Niki shrugs and forces herself to look up, looking away from the scorched bones, and she meets the red witch’s gaze through the dancing curtain of fire.

“The Weaver,” she says. “I loved her very much, a long time ago, and then I lost her. But I thought that I still loved her. I thought I could trust her with my soul.”

“And she used your love to her own ends.”

“Did she? Or is that just the easiest thing for you to believe?”

The red witch doesn’t reply; she sighs and tosses a pinch of something powdered into the fire pit, and it begins to burn more brightly and the flames take on an unhealthy greenish tint.

“I may not sentence you,” Pikabo Kenzia says. “You are a being more powerful than all but the Dragon and the Weaver herself. As I said, I may not pass sentence, but”—and she pauses for a moment and peers deep into the flames, adds another pinch of powder, and the fire gutters, then burns almost as green as leaves on a summer’s day—“I do have a role in all of this. That much was written at the beginning, even before Dezyin came down from the stars and set the spokes to spinning,
that
much was certain. Now I can only follow the course of my life.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

“
We
brought you here to show you what we know, what we believe is the Weaver’s design for you, in hopes that you will listen and believe in turn.” And then, in an instant, the fire is extinguished, and there are creaking, mechanical noises rising from beneath the floor—gears and pistons and unseen engines—and Pikabo Kenzia takes a step back from the pit. Niki follows her example.

“When the Weaver came, she came to destroy the Dragon, which she mistook for something else, something malignant from her world. There are those of us who believe that she thought the Dragon to be the ghost of her father, and some others say she thought the Dragon was a powerful demon. She went out among the people and worked miracles and eventually raised an army against Kearvan Weal, the Dragon’s hall at the world’s hub. She was not entirely unsuccessful.”

“But the Dragon was stronger?”

“No, not stronger. They’re like darkness and light, the Weaver and the Dragon, like life and death, equal and inseparable. In the end, what little remained of the Weaver’s armies fled across the spokes, returning to their homes or hiding in the wilderness. And that’s when we learned what had happened to the Dragon, that it had been changed somehow by its contact with the Weaver. Her beliefs had infected it, as though her mind were a disease,” and Pikabo Kenzia presses the tip of her left index finger to the point between her violet eyes. “A disease to which even eternal creatures like the Dragon are not immune.”

Niki glances back at Scarborough again, and this time he’s watching her, and their eyes make contact for an instant, long enough that she can see that he believes what the red witch is saying, and then he looks quickly away.

“The Dragon saw something in the Weaver that shattered its very soul, Hierophant. What this thing was, I cannot even begin to imagine, nor do I ever want to. But the inner wheels fell dark following the war, and there was talk that the Dragon had sent forth newly conceived lieutenants to find and kill the Weaver. She calls these beings
angels,
and she fears them above all else.”

“Yeah,” Niki whispers, more to herself than the red witch. “This part’s starting to sound familiar.”

“But now, all these things are history,” Pikabo Kenzia says, gazing intently at Niki from the other side of the fire pit. A few wisps of greenish smoke are still rising from the ashes, and the smell reminds Niki of fresh basil. “What concerns us
this
day is that you understand the choice that you have been condemned to make.”

“Spyder said I was to travel the Serpent’s Road, and cross the Dog’s Bridge—”

“That would take you to the ruins of Kearvan Weal, where we believe she’s opening a portal.”

“A portal to where?”

“A passageway between this world and the one you have come from, a portal through which the Dragon will be driven before the passage is closed again, exiling it there forever. She convinces her followers that she’s doing this to
save
our world, but we suspect her motives have more to do with revenge than salvation. And regardless, we can’t stand by and watch while another world is ravaged that we might finally be free of the Dragon.”

Niki listens to the mechanical sounds coming from beneath the floor and thinks about her final night in San Francisco, standing at the window of the hotel room talking to Daria for the last time, and then her vision of blue fire and a dragon rising from the bay to devour first one city and then a planet, and eventually, an entire universe.

“And the philtre,” Niki says, “Spyder needs the philtre to open this portal.”

“Yes. The philtre and the Hierophant and a surrogate whom she has chosen to stand on the other side in her stead.”

“But I don’t
have
the philtre,” Niki tells the red witch, and a cautious glimmer of something like hope washes quickly across Pikabo Kenzia’s scarred face and is gone.

“The Weaver can open the portal without the philtre,” she says. “There are other ways, if she has been successful in finding a surrogate. Without you and that talisman she would never be able to shut it again, but she’s mad, and driven, and so that alone might not stop her from
trying
.”

“She was in Padnée,” Scarborough says, still looking at the floor. “Do you know what happened to Padnée? Maybe she died there.”

“Your friend has a sort of thoughtless courage, Hierophant. But it won’t save him, if he speaks again.”

Niki turns to Scarborough and holds a finger across her lips, shushing him, and he looks up long enough to roll his eyes at her.

“The Weaver can’t die, not so long as she’s here,” the red witch says. “Only in the world where her existence began may it be undone. Would that it were otherwise. Our assassins would have killed her years ago.”

“But if I don’t have this philtre, then I can’t do what she wants me to do. I’m useless to her.”

“No, you are
still
part of her key, and you still have a choice to make,” and the women in the temple begin to talk among themselves again, louder than before. Niki looks to Scarborough, but he’s turned his back on her.

“You must understand what lies before you,” the red witch says, and when Niki looks again, the triangular fire pit has vanished completely, and in its place is a circular table made from the same gray stone as the rest of the temple. The top of it is a sort of three-dimensional map, rugged mountain ranges and deep river valleys and oceans chiseled from the rock and painted so realistically she almost believes that if she reached out and touched an ocean her hand would come back salty and wet.

“
This
is our world, Hierophant,” Pikabo Kenzia says, and Niki realizes that the table’s much more than just a map, that it’s a globe, a globe for an impossible hemispherical world. She listens while the witch points out the craggy rim of the Palisades stretching the entire circumference of the globe and shows Niki the catwalk road through the mists to Padnée. At intervals, the globe is divided into bands, each one narrower than the one before it, bands which make Niki think of the nested circles of Dante’s
Inferno
. And she understands that, unlike the equator or the Tropic of Capricorn, these divisions are not imaginary.

“The wheels turn,” Pikabo Kenzia says, and the globe seems to respond to her voice, so that each circle begins moving to the raw scraping of stone ground against stone. The outermost band, which includes the Palisades and the wide blue ocean called the Outer Main, turns clockwise, and the next band in turns counterclockwise, and the next clockwise, and so on to the still center of the globe.
The hub,
Niki thinks, recalling what the red witch has said, and she recognizes the Dog’s Bridge spanning a blistering sea of molten lava.

“Nesmia, where we are, is here,” Pikabo tells her and points at the globe, “well inside the third wheel, beside the river Yärin. Even by the Serpent’s Road, it’s a long journey to the halls of the Dragon.”

“It doesn’t matter how
far
it is,” Niki replies. “I’m not going there, not if what you’ve told me about Spyder is true—”

“You’re still not listening to me, Hierophant. Whether you go or not, she will open the portal.”

“How can you
know
that?”

“Because I have
seen
the things she’s done. We have nursed the victims of her war—” and Pikabo Kenzia’s eyes flash with some cold, inner fire, and she spreads her arms wide to include all the women in the chamber. “But first she will come looking for you. And we can’t stand against her.”

“And you think I can,” Niki says doubtfully, looking at the tortured maze of canyons and volcanoes at the center of the globe.

“I’m saying that you have a
choice
. There is a way that you can defeat her, Nicolan Ky,” and the sound of her name from the red witch’s lips makes Niki look up from the table’s lunatic geography. All the women along the walls have fallen silent again, and there are dark and bloody tears streaking Pikabo Kenzia’s cheeks.

Daria stands alone in the night filling up the house and listens to the wind whistling through the trees, across tarpaper shingles, and around the eaves and sagging, leaf-gorged gutters.

She left the rental car in the Tutwiler’s parking lot and took a taxi back to Cullom Street. An old Ford station wagon painted lemon yellow for a taxi, and the burly Mexican behind the wheel mumbled things in Spanish that she couldn’t understand. After the dream, after she awakened in the dark hotel room and sat for almost an hour, smoking and listening to the comforting rhythm of Alex sleeping beside her, she got dressed as quietly as she could and managed to slip out without waking him. She left a note on her pillow, hastily scribbled on a sheet of hotel stationary. “I love you,” she wrote, “and I will come back, if I can.” There wasn’t anything else she could think of to say, or at least nothing she had the time to write down, and so she decided that would have to do.

She had the Mexican drive her to an all-night Western Supermarket on Highland Avenue, where she bought another pack of Marlboro Reds, a bottle of cheap Merlot, and a small flashlight. The flashlight was an afterthought, and she finished half the bottle of wine before they reached the abandoned house at the end of the street. Standing at the edge of the driveway, she paid the driver and tipped him ten bucks; he grunted something grateful in Spanish and then drove away. It didn’t surprise her when she found the front door standing open.

The wind sounds like voices, a lot more like voices than it sounds like wind, dozens of lost children muttering to themselves all at once. And she wonders again if coming here was suicide, if she’s come here to die and maybe she’s not so different from Niki after all.