Seraphs (28 page)

Eli, to my left, shouted from Isaiah, “Thou shalt be visited of the LORD . . . and the flame of devouring fire.” As he yelled, he pumped the bag under his arm and shot gouts of fire from his flamethrower. Spawn screamed and burned and died.

The EIH fighters drew swords and shouted together, “I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them. ” The words brought me up short, and I misstepped. Teeth sank in my calf, above the battle boot. Pain shocked through me. With a single swipe, I beheaded the beast and kicked its teeth loose, the head flying away into the swarm. I settled myself with a simple crab move, wondering at the heretics’ choice of scripture. They were speaking from Exodus, the words of the enemy of the people of the Most High.

“Jehovah sabaoth!” I shouted, the words that came to me the first time I went into battle, as all battle cries that fight Darkness are given.

“The seraph I told you about is close,” I said to Durbarge and Eli. “I smell him.” And a mage was close too, gibbering, insanity like a festering wound in her mind.
“Take me, take me, take me, take me, take me,”
she cried silently. I tripped and fell, landing flat. Eli stepped over me, shouting my name, firing his flames. But the mind of the mage pulled me down into the cramped and flashing corners of her tormented memories.

I see
him.
His wings are iridescent green, softening to a paler green, like new leaves, on the underside and down. Silver hair curls around his high brow, gray eyes flecked with silver, and a narrow jaw with pointed chin. Barak. Baraqyal. The seraph.

His nevus pulses with fear and desire. Demon-iron shackles him to the wall of a chamber set aside for torture. Laughing daywalkers cut into his wings, hacking with demon-iron blades and with human steel. Severing them.

Gagging with reaction, with horror, I jerked back out of her mind. But not before I saw through her eyes, across a shadowed corridor. The seraph she desired was there, in a cell, only feet from me. Holding my weapons blade-down, I curled under Eli’s feet, between his legs, letting him fight over me. He held swords, and handled them the way he danced, with effortless ease. “Seraph? Barak?” I shouted.

“Here, mage!” he belled back, filled with joy. “Here I am! She sent you to me!”

She.
The mage near him? No. Not her.
Seraph stones.
He meant Lolo. Suddenly, I was sure of it. I had the mage’s vision of him just now. And in a dream, in the vision of Lolo’s past, I had seen within the mind of the priestess a silver-haired seraph with green wings. Barak.
Baraqyal.
The name of the first seraph to take a mage as lover.

“Thorn?” Eli called, taking the head of a spawn with a back swing, and another one’s arms with the follow-through. “What’s going on?” When I didn’t answer, he said, “I want you between my legs, but not like this. Get up!”

My glove-covered knuckles brushed the smooth floor of the passageway. Suddenly I glimpsed a secret truth, saw it fully formed in the way of my people—a mage-truth. Barak, Baraqyal, had been the lover of Daria, the first mage to mate with a seraph, the first mage to produce a litter of kylen. I had questioned it before. Now it was all a horrifying kind of certainty—if Lolo was also Daria. “Yes,” I said. Beside me, a spawn fell, a leg half severed, its mouth working, sharp predator teeth rimed with blood. Almost mechanically, I brought the tanto down, beheading it. The blade jarred twice, on the thing’s spine, and on the stone beneath. A second one fell across the first, burned and smoking.

If Lolo had known he was here, then had she set all this up? My birth? Thadd’s birth? Machinations and devious, conniving schemes, set in place so we could—what? Rescue her lover? Take his place? Had she allowed so many to die, just so she could free Barak? Could Lolo have done this? And worse, if she had done all that, was I being foolish to assign only one motive to the wily old woman? Either way, could I leave him here, being tortured?

“Thorn?” Eli shouted.

Mage-fast, I spun from between his legs to my feet. “This way!”

Blades blurring, my flesh shining with speed and battle-lust, I ducked into a constricted cleft and out the other side. Raced along a narrow corridor. The tunnel was empty. No guards, no spawn. Holding swords low for defense, I looked into a cell.

Behind me, I heard a cry of pain and the grinding sound that flesh makes against rock. Eli squeezed into the tunnel and raced to me. “The others are too big to make it through. They’re holding the pass. What are we—Holy moly. It’s a seraph,” he said.

An exceptionally notorious seraph. “Meet Barak, also known as Baraqyal, the father of the kylen,” I said, hearing my bitter tone. “A Watcher. One of the Fallen Allied.”

“Dang, woman,” Eli breathed, leaning in toward the bars. Even shorn of his wings, the seraph was utterly beautiful.

Silver hair slid over his perfect body, a veil that glistened. He glamoured a kilt to cover himself to his knees, and the kilt shone like his hair, like kyanite stone. “You are not in heat,” Barak said. “You have engaged in battle dire, then, to reach me here.”

“Yeah. We did.” Two Flames buzzed into the corridor, lighting it with a brilliance that blistered my vision into a white glare. They soared through the demon-iron bars and danced along Baraqyal’s body, singing a piccolo of notes, high-pitched and pure, a beautiful song. He laughed and held out his hands; they lit on his palms and he crooned to them, sounds like bells, in a language no mortal could speak.

As if Barak had given them orders, they darted to the bars and sliced through them like plasma torches. Red-hot demon-iron fell to the corridor chiming minor tones, ugly sounds, off-key and dull, leaving the cell open. Lips parted with wonder, Baraqyal stepped into the hall and threw out his chest as if unfurling his wings, breathing the foul air as if it were clean. The movement cracked open the wounds on his back and the Flames darted to him, droning urgently. They did something to his back and he laughed. It was a beautiful sound.

Screams and clashing steel sounded through the cleft to the outer hallway. Gunshots echoed and cordite overrode the smell of brimstone, followed by the scent of human blood and excrement. Human death. From a doorway down the hall, Durbarge crashed, trailed by Joseph, carrying Tomas. They had found another way in. The EIH operative was badly injured, an avulsion on his thigh gouting blood. The thigh muscles had been sliced away from the bone and hung forward. The Flames darted into the wound, instantly sealing torn vessels. The seraph followed their motions, his eyes wide. I could have sworn that Barak had never seen them heal.

“The succubi nest,” Durbarge said to Barak. “Where is it?”

“Ahh,” Barak said, turning from the healing Flames as Tomas took a weak breath. “Succubi. That is the scent that caused me—” He stopped and looked into my eyes. His were silver and guileless, and I distrusted such forthright-ness. It was too easy to see his beauty and forget that seraphs couldn’t be trusted to speak the complete truth, only the parts the Most High deemed important. Worse, the Most High no longer spoke to Watchers. Did they have to speak truth at all? “You are too late,” he said. “The eggs have hatched. The larvae were moved through the tunnels and away, south.”

Too late?
The thought shattered through my defenses. “Moved?” I asked.

“Their scent grew stronger for hours. At its apex, there was great movement in the tunnels to the south, movement that was both Darkness and Light, human and mage. Then all the scents were gone.” He breathed deeply, testing the air. “But for the pitiful creature across the passageway and a few spawn, most are no longer here.”

“What about Zadkiel and Amethyst?” I asked. Barak’s eyes flickered the slightest bit. If I hadn’t still been seeing with mage-sight, I would never have noted it.

“They are far below. I am wounded, without weapons, unable to transmogrify, unable to fight Darkness.” Quick translation, “I’m not going down with you.” Big shock there.

“I won’t ask you to go down with me. But give me a boon.” When he didn’t turn away, I said, “Give me a seraph feather.” The words were as much a surprise to me as to him. His eyes narrowed, and this time he didn’t try to control the reaction. Seraph feathers, freely given, were strong weapons in the hands of a battle-mage, powering her other gifts. I might be only a half-trained stone mage, but I knew the power of a seraph feather.

Barak hesitated. “Though I am not among those Powers and Principalities who rebelled and fought against the High Host in the Battle of Heaven, as a fallen Watcher I have long been away from the Most High. I have been trapped here, in the lair of the beast, for decades. The gift might be weak. Or . . . polluted.” When I stared at him, silent, he bent to the feathers on the cell floor and reluctantly lifted one. The wing moved with a lifelike shudder as he plucked and said, “Stone and fire, water and air, defense and flight prevail. Wings and shield, dagger and sword, blood and shelter prevail.”

A sudden spike of instruction came from my amulet necklace, from the visa, and I bowed deeply, saying, “Stone and fire, water and air, blood and kin prevail. Wings and shield, dagger and sword, blood and kin prevail.” The compulsion from the visa ceased.
What the heck did I just do?
I accepted the feather and bowed again over the gift.

Almost three feet long, it was a primary flight feather, lighter than air, and power trembled through it. A current of air lifted it. Barak could have chosen a small, insignificant feather. Instead he had given me his best. It was a lustrous, deep green that threw back the plasma light of the Flames in burgundy and silver and ocean blue. I was ashamed of my earlier distrust, and touched the feather to my forehead once before sliding it through my dobok belt. I met his beautiful eyes and said simply, “Thank you.”

A surprised look crossed his face. “Much welcome, neomage. Fight true.”

I walked to a clear place and dug in the bag over my shoulder, pulling out a stone jar of clean salt, never used. The supply was limited, and so the circle I made was small, barely large enough to hold me, sitting yogi-style. Prepared to draw on the stone beneath me for power, I placed an amulet in front of me, outside the circle, settled myself, and closed the salt ring, shivering with the energy that quivered up my spine.

I looked at Eli and Durbarge. “Don’t kill the daywalker.” At Durbarge’s fierce glance, I added, “I, uh, I sorta bound one of those to me too.” He reached for his sigil, before his fingers grudgingly clenched. I figured he wanted to arrest me, but thought he had better wait for a more propitious occasion. Like, if we survived the night in a hellhole.

Taking a calming breath, I opened the stone jar holding the scrap of cloth saturated with the walker’s dried blood. I began to chant, “Malashe-el. Malashe-el. Attend to me. Malashe-el, attend and obey.” Long minutes passed. Demon-fast, the walker appeared before me. The rune of forgetting blazed on its chest and it carried a sword of demon-iron. It swept the blade back with a swish of sound; I held up the cloth. “Hold,” I said, praying the word would stay the blade. I hadn’t opened a shield of protection. Demon-iron held power of its own and would surely disrupt the energies I had drawn around me.

The blade stopped at the apex of its arc, quivering slightly. “Drop the blade,” I said. The walker’s arms trembled with resistance until I repeated the command. Its fingers slowly opened. The sword dropped to the floor with a clang.

This was not a boy. Now it looked like a man, fully grown, in its late twenties, perhaps. Deep black hair was still long and braided, but a stubble of beard marked its chin. It wore black, a short-waisted jacket of silk velvet over a black charmeuse shirt with lace cuffs and nubby silk pants. Its eyes were red and labradorite in equal measure.

Untouched by sunlight, tainted by the dark energies in the place, my mage-sight saw it as it really was. A mesh of power the reddish-black shade of old blood passed through its body, as though the webbing of a spider wrapped it. The mesh twisted along the walker’s legs, into its intestines, through its loins. The other threads were interlocking rings of blue Light, a conjure that swathed it, plunging into its body, entwining its heart and lungs.

I understood immediately that any exorcism I had done on the surface was useless here, close to the power sink of the resident evil. But I wasn’t powerless. I could try to bolster the power of Light that held it. From my place on the floor I looked into its face and said, “By the power of your Mistress, see the Light.” I had clearly said the correct words because the red in its eyes vanished like a mist dissipating over a sea at dawn, leaving its labradorite eyes clear and sparkling with relief, a blue-gray-green. “Bring me my blood.”

“By the power of my Mistress,” it whispered, and tears glistened in its eyes.

I pointed to the amulet. “Take that. When you have my blood, bring it to me.”

Faster than my eyes could follow, the walker snatched up the small peridot nugget and was gone.
That was easy,
I thought.
Too easy?
Settling myself again, I tried to follow the amulet’s progress through the tunnels. It led deep, demon-fast, to a place I had seen before.

I closed my eyes, envisioning the cell trapping Mistress Amethyst. I had linked the trails of the warren into a map and stored it in a stone. I gripped it now and compared the map to the walker’s position. Its path led into the foulest parts of the lair, a pall of unbreathable smoke occluding many of the tunnels. Or the smoke could be a Dark trap. In a quick mind-skim, I sniffed; it was the stench of burning spawn flesh, not conjures. Suddenly, I lost the walker’s trail.
Seraph stones.
All in one motion, I broke the circle and stood.

Suddenly Malashe-el was standing right in front of me, its lovely eyes blazing with Light and filled with tears. “My Mistress says this to you. My master has your blood. He is approaching the Mistress’ prison. He goes to drain unto emptiness the Holy Ones he trapped, and he carries a chain coated with Mole Man’s blood.”

“Crap,” Eli said, understanding. Silently, I echoed the miner’s mild obscenity.