Seraphs (12 page)

After the bath, wrapped in an afghan, I ate cottage cheese, frozen blueberries, a bowl of canned beans, and a fresh pear, which had been trucked in on a mule train. The pear had cost me dearly, but was worth every dollar. Fresh fruit in winter was for rich people. Or someone willing to do without necessities. I fit into the latter category, and had gone without much protein for the past month. In an ice age, one had to choose between survival supplies and pleasure. Paying for the pear had been one such choice. I ate every part of the fruit except the seeds, which I kept for Rupert and Jacey. I couldn’t grow weeds in summer, but my best friends had greener thumbs. Maybe they could grow a pear tree.

With my aches and pains relieved, and appetite appeased, I curled in bed and studied the
Book of Workings,
trying not to think about Audric out in the night, watching over my detainee. The
Book of Workings
wasn’t a magical book. It had no special powers or energies, and few ready-made incantations. It was more a roadmap, a schoolbook, a compilation of the learnings of the first neomages. Having no teachers, they had been trying to find out what they were, and what they could do. The book was divided into three parts, the back of the book devoted to warfare. It was to that section that I turned, covers up under my chin, two blades in the bed, and my amulets around my neck.

Toward midnight the smell of burning and rotting spawn filtered in, the scent harsh as burned feathers in the back of my throat. I was breathing the foul flavor when I found the pages on exorcism. Unlike seraphs, mages are mortal and, unlike humans, we have no souls. Mortal and soulless, mages can’t call on the One True God, God the Victorious, for help. Prayer doesn’t work for us. He doesn’t hear us. Seraphs will hear us if we, or innocents, are near death, but many theologians insist that God won’t. Other theologians contend that if he doesn’t hear an intelligent creature, it proves he isn’t real and never was, but that was a theological argument for passionate believers and heretics, and all I wanted to do was cast out an evil demon, if it could be done without calling on the name of the Most High.

To my knowledge, Hindus, Muslims, and Jews did not traditionally cast out demons when their people were possessed. Some Hindus tried to placate Darkness, leaving offerings so demons would depart. Only Christians historically cast out minions of the Darkness. Christians, who, by faith, called on the blood and name of Christ to overpower a possessing demon. Blood given in willing sacrifice had great power over evil. I had been raised Christian by my parents and the Enclave priestess, who hoped to persuade the Most High to give us souls. It hadn’t happened. And since I had become an outcast, I hadn’t really worshipped, the faith of my childhood waning. Ergo, I wasn’t equipped to deal with a case of possession.

In the pages on exorcism, I discovered two things that might help me. A conjure to track a Darkness through mage blood, and a seraph who offered its power to first bind and then exorcise demons. The winged-warrior Mutuol promised his name and power to help mages defeat evil in one-on-one spiritual combat. I studied the implements and methods offered in the resource book for mages.

Once bound, the incantation on exorcism might work. A daywalker was not technically a demon—an immortal being who was spirit but could manifest in one or two physical forms. A daywalker was mortal, a Minor Darkness, restricted to one physical shape. It was soulless—much like neomages, though few mages would have accepted the similarity. My Bible beside me, my blades on the tables and floor around me, I studied the incantation suggestions, sought scriptures to bring Light and power to them, and made copious notes.

This wasn’t some conjure to heat bathwater. This was warfare. I had to do it right or I might die in the process. Many early neomages had.

Chapter 12

They threw him into the cell, weak with blood loss. He fell hard on his severed wings, the bones bending with his weight, buried his head in his arms, and wept. He didn’t hide his sobs, his voice broken, like cracked bells and splintered flutes. The pain was beyond anything he had experienced since they’d first clipped his wings, rendering him unable to fly from the deeps of the pit, unable to defeat time, unable to contact another of his kind. Since that time, the Darkness had merely shaved the stubs of his wings every twenty-four hours, the trimming keeping him bound. Until today, they had merely allowed the heat-driven mage to try to force him to mate. Merely.

Today, to punish him, they had cut him deeper, much deeper. Using human steel, daywalkers had removed his wings to the shoulders. They had broken him utterly. It was the smell that ruined him. The growing aroma of sex and death, like nothing he had ever smelled before. He had failed the Most High. Because of the scent, the strange odor, he hadn’t been able to prevent them from taking his essence.

Fists clenched, he beat his bed until his hands bled, screaming, his broken voice echoing down the hallways. His blood trickled across his naked back and onto his feathers, blood that smelled of life and Light, of blooming flowers, scents that taunted, recalling the earth that he had once loved enough to abandon heaven. The scent nearly overpowered the smell of the walkers he had killed, their rancid blood sprayed against the walls and spilled over the floor. His blood, a thing of life and healing, a construct of heaven, had been turned against him. He screamed, his agony long and loud. Somewhere near, he knew the Darkness was laughing.

“Watcher?”

His cries stopped, breath ragged.

“Watcher?”
It was the bell-like voice he had heard before while in pain.

He laughed, the sound ugly, defeated; raw with the torture he had endured. “What? What do you want now? I did what you suggested. I fought. I killed them with my fists.” He remembered the sound of bones breaking; the heated spatter of blood. “But they had locked the cell door behind them. I was still trapped. And more came.” He dashed tears from his face. Across his back, dried blood cracked with the motion. “They clipped my wings to the shoulder. I am ruined.”

“You are not ruined. A mage is near. You can call her. She will come.”

“I don’t need another
mage,
” he said, his tone heavy with loathing. “They took my essence today. And they gave it to a mage. She will deliver a litter of first-generation kylen to the Dark. The Most High will condemn and drain me utterly. I will have no more chance of penance until the end of time and the human judgment.”

“There is hope,”
one voice trilled in his head.
“Help is at hand.”

“A mage has freed my wheels,”
another voice belled, higher-pitched, softer.
“She will rescue us.”

“The Most High will not drain you unto death, Watcher. When we are freed, we will carry your claim to Him. We will trust you, and you will trust us.”

Slowly he sat up, severed nerves flooding exquisite agony through him. His unhealed flesh split, blood running in rivulets. “You say
we.
Yet I have heard only the name of Zadkiel.”

“I stand above my mate’s prison, a place the Dark One created to trap her.”

“Your mate? A
cherub
?” he whispered, startled. Except for the Watchers who had allied with the High Host, no Darkness had ever successfully trapped a winged-warrior. And he had never even considered that one of the cherubim could be imprisoned.

“Yes. She feared for me,”
he crooned.
“She left the Most High in the Last Battle Glorious, the battle where I was nearly destroyed. Her prison and the snare that holds me are new constructs. New things such as I have never seen.”

“There are no new things,” Barak said, his mind racing with possibility.

“So we had thought. ‘No seraph, Holy or Fallen, has imagined or created any new thing,’ ”
he quoted from the
Book of the Light, “ ‘except for sin. Except for sin. Selah. Only the Most High can create a new thing, only God the Victorious and his humans, who breathe with his breath, may dream, devising that which they have not seen, humans with their stories, songs, and poems, humans with their machines which they imagine and build. So it has always been,’ ”
he finished the quote, his tone dropping low with disquiet.
“Until now.”

He wrapped his knees with his arms to stop their trembling. “And now?”

“Beasts, dragonets, have entwined themselves upon me. They smell of Mole Man, and the scent slows my defense. Though I still have my wings, I am unable to fly, unable to transmogrify, trapped in a substance that secures me. My mate is chained and imprisoned within my sight. All this is new. Selah,”
he whispered, seraphic for, “Think of that.”

“Humans built it? Humans working with Darkness?”

“Humans and mages. But a mage has seen us, possibly one of the
foretold
ones.”
His tone rang with awe.
“The essence of this mage, this daughter of man, was similarly trapped, yet she escaped. She is still near. She can save us. You can summon her.”

“How? I have no token of hers.”

“You have access to the daywalker, the boy. She claims him. She takes his blood,”
Zadkiel said.

“The boy is mine,”
Amethyst belled softly.
“Mine.”
Barak wasn’t sure what they meant, but if they offered freedom, he would agree to anything. “If your words are faithful and your bargain fair, call me by my true name.” It was a test and a barter. No seraph called a Fallen One by his true name, that given by the Most High at creation, the name forfeited at his abandonment of the Light. Watchers were Fallen, even those like him, who hoped for redemption, who allied with and fought beside the High Host in the ongoing war. No Watcher was
sanctified
. No Watcher was holy.

“Baraqyal,”
the two voices belled together.
“Baraqyal.”
And the seraph said,
“Gird thyself, and bind on thy sandals.”
It was a warning to prepare for battle.

Audric didn’t wake me Friday morning by sneaking in for my daily beating; my eyes opened on their own. My head was resting on my arms, neck cricked into the pillow. The black-pig wall clock chimed. I’d slept two hours. Roosters sounded, their calls demanding. The charcoal sky held a silver wedge of clouds in the east. Beneath my cheek was a page of notes and a finished incantation. Groggy, I sat up and reread the paraphrased text taken from the Old Testament. It would have helped if I knew Forcas’ true name because then I could have used it in the binding, but even so, it wasn’t bad. Not bad at all.

Stretching to ease my petrified muscles, I went to the back door and out onto the deck. The scent of coffee reached me. Audric toasted me with a cup in the dim light. He was wrapped in blankets, sitting before a secluded fire. Rupert was a bump beside him, unmoving. I held both fists out to Audric and flashed my fingers open three times. He toasted me again and nudged Rupert, who rolled over.

I ate and pulled through the primary moves of savage-chi, stretching protesting muscles. Dressed in two sets of underleggings and tees, extra socks, and my dobok, I made sure the seams were straight, the blades easy to pull, and that the amulet necklace was secure around my waist. Then I phoned Jacey, told her what I needed, gathered up supplies and my pages, the result of my wakeful night, and went into the cold, my breath misting in small puffs.

The sky was patchy blue through the clouds with a red frosting of sunrise on the eastern mountain tops, the temperature a cold twenty-one degrees. At the edge of the shield, I set down my supplies, all but one of the pages I had worked on in the night, and studied the being in the trap. The legendary daywalker. It looked human, sitting on a rounded boulder shaped like an egg with the pointed end buried in the dirt. One knee was bent, its arms around it. Like so many of the locals, like Rupert and Lucas, like the Cherokee, its skin had a pale olive cast in certain light, and it wore its black hair in braids. The walker wasn’t dressed for the cold, but wasn’t shivering, and it stared at me, its eyes still red, but now flecked with blue.

I gripped the handle of the walking stick, the bloodstone hilt warming my hand. If I’d carried it last night, I would have remembered more about the walker. The prime amulet had many uses, including being a repository for memory. My memories of the daywalker were contained in it, along with the incantation of the rune of forgetting it carried.

Holding it, I studied the walker, comparing it against the first time I saw it. Then, it had worn cornflower blue pants and shirt, its eyes like fine labradorite, a pellucid blue and green. Today it wore brown pants and a dull green shirt, both crusted with splatters of dried blood. Its eyes glowed the red of the pit, but blue flecks grew wider as the sun rose.

Suddenly it appeared right in front of me. I stepped back fast. Fangs unhinged, it laughed, tossing the tanto in a glittering arc, catching the hilt one-handed. I steadied myself. The beast was contained in the shield incantation. It couldn’t get away until I released it. It spat at me, and this time I didn’t move, the spittle splatting and sizzling on the shield.

Satisfied, I turned to Audric. “How was it?”

“Lovely. Nice breeze, two owls keeping me company, Rupert snoring. Good fire. Coffee. Could have used a book, but the walker kept me occupied with constant chatter.” He had let the air out of the mattress and rolled it up, and put out the fire. He looked invigorated and steady, not like he had spent the night exposed to the ice-age weather.

I looked far less refreshed. I had seen my dull, unglamoured skin and the circles beneath my eyes in the mirror when I brushed my teeth. “You learn anything from it?”

“It seemed surprised that I knew its master had your blood. It has an entire litany of things it wants to do to you and with you. Nothing new or inventive, but all entertaining. It offered to share you with me.”

I grinned. “Stupid of it.”

“Very. What’s your plan?”

I indicated Zeddy and Jacey, who rounded the building, coming from the alley. They each carried shovels and Bibles. “It’s complicated.”

“Humor me,” he said dryly.

I told him. When he stared at me, I shrugged, found a stick, and traced a dotted outline of a ring around the outside of the shield holding the daywalker. Using a shovel borrowed from Jacey, I set the blade against the frozen ground and started digging. It wasn’t easy. I looked up to see Zeddy digging too, starting across from me. Luckily—or maybe he knew more about incantations than I gave him credit for—he was digging clockwise. Audric and Jacey were speaking in low tones, their backs to us. Just as well. Audric hadn’t had to share his opinion of my plan. His expression said it sucked Habbiel’s pearly toes.

When a four-inch-deep, four-inch-wide, miniditch ringed the spring and stones, I stopped digging, breathless, body wet with sweat. I had left a foot-wide space, not yet dug. Zeddy, who had finished his arc before I did and looked much more refreshed than I, even after a night of burning spawn, would have dug it as well, but I waved him away. “The rest I have to do,” I said. “You should get ready to help me. Like I said when I called.”

“Sure, Miss Thorn,” he said. Shouldering the shovel, he walked to a tree, sat down on the roots, and picked up his Bible. “Which book?”

“Genesis 14:20. ‘And blessed be the Most High God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.’ But keep a finger in Psalms. If I have problems with him, recite those verses on the list there”—I pointed to the page I had put by my supplies—“in the order given.” The page was covered with verses in Psalms that referred to defeating enemies.

I positioned my candles and the stones I had brought from the loft, looked again at the incantation, and shoved the paper into my dobok. I had never created such a complicated conjuring circle. I had no idea if it would work or if I could control the energies I was calling up. A walking circle was a dangerous construct, the conjure not as stable as one where the energies were called and then cut off when they reached the critical zenith. The energies in a conjuring circle were stabilized with salt. This circle was stabilized through the body of the mage herself. If not utilized, the energies would just keep rising.

Walking beside the path of the circle, I lit candles, placing each in the lee of a rock, protected from the wind. Satisfied, I positioned a bag of goodies I might need and drew my walking stick blade. I was prepared to fight, should the new circle break down the inner shield I was trying to encompass, and free the walker. I put both feet into the trough we had dug, one in front of the other. “Okay,” I said. “Start the chant.”

“And blessed be the Most High God,” three voices said in unison, Jacey, Rupert, and Zeddy. They had positioned themselves equidistant around the circle, each just beyond a candle. I hadn’t told them where to stand, and wondered if Audric had positioned them or if they had known it themselves. Or maybe it was just luck.