The Visitor (12 page)

T
hough General Gowl had received his visitation late in the spring, it was several days before he called a meeting of his officers to relay the message he had received from the Rebel Angel. One of those present was the general's closest colleague, the Colonel Bishop, Lief Laron Comador Turnaway, a long time associate, who was stunned by what the general had to say.

“We have
always
said that the Spared, all of them, are here in Bastion,” said the bishop, querulously. “It's an article of faith. After the Time of Desperation, all those who were Spared were miraculously joined together in the great trek, and they all came here. Either they arrived here or they were frozen en route and bottled once we arrived and discovered how bottling could be done. We have
never
believed there were Spared…out there.”

“I know,” said the general in a strong voice. “But it was revealed to me that some, perhaps many, may be out there. Out of a great cloud of darkness lit by flame, I had a vision.”

“A vision,” said the Colonel Bishop, doubtfully.

“I was visited by a Rebel Angel,” said the general. “Who commanded the Spared to go out into the world and bring our lost brethren into Bastion while there is yet time.”

“How are you going to do that?” asked Colonel Doctor
Jens Ladislav in an interested voice. “Are we to offer an invitation, or what?”

“We are to take an army,” said the general, frowning so the listeners would know this was serious. “We are to go out and offer salvation to the unenlightened. Those who are Spared will accept, and those who are not Spared will reject, and if the ones who reject fight us, we'll kill them, that's all.”

“We have a non-aggression agreement with the demons,” Doctor Ladislav offered. “They may object to this.”

“That's why we're having this meeting,” grunted the general. “We need to figure out what to do about the demons…”

“…also,” said the doctor, “there's the matter of how many Spared we might find out there. Bastion won't support a great many more people than are already here.”

“We can bottle a lot of our people to make room,” offered Over Colonel Commander Achilles Rascan, of the Bureau of Defense. “We have lots of unproductive elderly, lots of supernumerary children among the poorer classes. Or we could bottle the outsiders before we bring them in.”

“Ah,” said the doctor, still in a pleasant voice. “I hadn't thought of that.” He turned to the general. “Do you think it matters to the Angels? I mean, whether the Spared are bottled or not before they come in?”

“No difference at all,” snorted the general. “We bring them among the Spared, either way.”

“But…” murmured the doctor, “if that is the case, why do we need to gather them into Bastion at all? It will be most inconvenient. Surely we can just bottle them out there, build a repository and put someone in charge of maintenance.”

The general squirmed slightly in his chair, frowning. “They want us to gather them, that's all. They said so. They didn't say where the bottle walls had to be.”

“Ah,” murmured the doctor, hiding incipient hysteria with a serious nod. “Putting the bottles outside Bastion will make it much easier. I'm glad the Angel will allow that.”

He subsided, taking notice of the expressions of those around the table, which were variously interested, avid, or
appalled (a junior member of Rascan's staff who hid his expression behind a handkerchief).

“Over Colonel Rascan will begin by strengthening the army,” said the general. “It'll take some time as we have to deal with outsiders for the purchase of weapons and supplies. And we'll be sending out many, many small missions to start bottling any Spared Ones they find out there, as well as spying out the strengths and weaknesses of the places we'll be conquering.”

The doctor kept his face expressionless as the general remarked in his direction, “And we'll need medics trained as well. To take care of the wounded.”

“Perhaps we should just let the bottling teams take care of the wounded,” murmured Jens. “It would be more economical.”

“No,” said the general. “We have to keep up our numerical strength. We can't be bottling five or ten percent of the army after every battle.”

“Very true,” said Over Colonel Rascan. “Though of course the doctor is correct in certain cases. I think for the seriously wounded, bottling would be more sensible. A seriously wounded man with a lengthy recovery time is a drain upon resources.”

The junior officer who had retreated behind his handkerchief excused himself and slipped out the door.

“Bottling out there will be rather different from bottling in here,” remarked the doctor. “In here, we merely put those to be bottled through a demon portal and the demons cut out an appropriate bit of flesh before putting the bodies down the chutes into the firepits. They do the bottling, the labeling, and add the bottles to a community wall—or leave it for our Bottle Maintenance people to install in a house if it's a private installation. If we do it out there, with our own people, we'll need a lot more maintenance people trained. Or, it would require a contingent of demons to travel with us, and since our agreement with them specifically forbids our going outside in any kind of…aggressive way, we may find that difficult to achieve.”

“I know,” said the general in a surly voice. “We all know. Of course there are problems! There are always problems, and it's your job to figure out how we can get around them! Perhaps Bottle Maintenance will have to train some people to go with us. Maybe we'll have to conquer the demons first and enslave demons to do the bottling. Get them out of the way, so to speak. At any rate, this meeting was just to announce the Vision. It was a real Vision, by the way,” this with a searing glance at the Colonel Bishop. “Not something I dreamed of while I was asleep.”

The general did not mention the rite he had conducted before receiving the visitation. Such things as this, Hetman Gone had impressed upon him, were not to be spoken of. Leaving the rite aside, there was no reason he could not expand upon the vision part of the thing.

“The Rebel Angel came to me up on the roof, late last night, long before dawn, in smoke and fire. It said we must…avenge ourselves against those who refuse the faith of the Spared. I know it will take a while to get used to the idea. It took me a while, even though I heard it from the angel's own lips. So, I thought we'd meet a span from now, same day and time, to report our progress.”

The general started to rise, but the doctor stopped him by asking, “Excuse me, General, but did the being you saw actually say it was one of the Rebel Angels?”

The general frowned. “I asked who he was; he asked me who I thought he was. I said I thought he was a Rebel Angel, and he didn't contradict me. I wouldn't have dragged you all in here otherwise!”

He nodded at each man, got to his feet and departed, surrounded by the Holy Guard of Bastion. Jens stayed behind, staring moodily at the table while the others rose and departed, some silently, some whispering, all troubled to one degree or another.

“So?” asked the Colonel Bishop, from behind Jens's shoulder. “What do you think?”

“I think,” said the doctor, “that I would feel more secure if the Rebel Angels had appeared to all of us.”

“Visions…well, they tend to be solitary things,” said the bishop, twisting and stretching his neck as though to unkink it, a sign the doctor well knew to be one of nervousness. “All the books say so. Which doesn't mean the visions are untrue.”

“Not necessarily,” said the doctor.

“No, not necessarily,” agreed the bishop. “What worries me is that I'm not at all sure we have the strength to take on all the rest of the world.”

“From what I know about the Outside…”

“Which is more than the rest of us,” said the bishop, a bit sarcastically. The bishop's tolerance for the doctor's derelictions was wearing a little thin as envy and irritation gradually overtook forbearance.

“I don't know a great deal more, Bishop, but from what I do know, I'd say we aren't strong enough. Unless we have some weapon or system that I don't know about.”

“Where would we have obtained such a thing?” the bishop asked.

The doctor shook his head. “I don't know, Bishop Laron.”

“But you go outside! You should know!” This was said as a challenge, almost reproachfully.

The doctor replied slowly, carefully. “I go along the borders seeking medical knowledge, which I use for your benefit and the general's as well as for others of the Spared. I have never seen a weapon in Bastion or along its borders that would make Bastion stronger than the people outside.”

After a moment's simmering silence, the bishop remarked, “Perhaps the general needs to talk to his vision again. Perhaps it has some special weapons to lend us.”

When the bishop left the room, the doctor stared after him with a long, measuring look before murmuring, under his breath, “A prospect that I, personally, would find extremely worrying.” It worried him to the extent that he brooded his way to an anonymous door giving on a narrow corridor leading to narrower passageways and steeper staircases, all of them winding through the Fortress like mold in a cheese.

With the exception of several elderly maintenance super
visors, the doctor probably knew the Fortress better than anyone else. He knew that the general's quarters were connected by a short stair to the lavish penthouse that opened directly upon the roof garden. He knew that particular stair was reputed to be the only access to the roof garden, but he also knew that chimney sweeps and roofers and people who maintained the water tanks and carried water to the garden had to have access, and they most certainly did not go through the general's quarters to get there.

Therefore, there were alternate ways to get there, and he had long ago gone looking for them, finding many, among them the route he was now following. If the general had indeed received a visitation from a Rebel Angel in the smoke from the great chimney, perhaps some sign of that visitation might still be present.

The last constricted stair went between two huge flues to end at a thick stone that pivoted near its edge, creating a door so narrow that even the slender doctor had to turn sideways to sidle through. He was deep inside the great chimney's bulk, at the inner end of a crooked passage, above which the smoke was driven horizontally, hiding the place completely. He paced slowly among alcoves and intervening chimney pots, searching for footprints or hand smears that might have been left by a soot-garbed, fiery angel as it came or went.

After a time he found a broken stone in the likeness of a threatening monster, and as he went toward it he recognized the signs of a hidden door. The mechanism took him only a few moments to solve before he entered a slit between two towering flues, a deep dogleg passage with strange signs and symbols marked upon the walls, probably with a burned stick. At the corner, the passage widened, and here he discovered a huge brazier half full of dead coals standing in an area befouled with loathsome-looking spillage that gave off repugnant stinks.

While he had no desire to touch it or, indeed, even to go closer, the matter demanded investigation. He took up a lengthy stick, partially burned, perhaps the very one that had been used to make the symbols on the walls, and used
it to probe the remnants of the fire. He scratched up a lump of carbon that could have been anything. He scratched more deeply to find another lump of carbon, this one only charred. He took it between thumb and forefinger to pull it clear, stepping back with a muffled exclamation as it came into view. The charred part was a wrist. The largely unburned part was a hand, the right hand of a very small child.

The doctor stood for a moment frozen, a sick violence in his belly, eyes filling with tears that were whipped into runnels by the wind. For several days, the Fortress had buzzed with rumors that one of the general's children had disappeared. Angelica. The five-year-old daughter the doctor had seen at the general's birthday reception, playing tag with the other children. Laying the object back into the brazier, the doctor swallowed deeply and bid his bowels to contain themselves. When he was calm he went past the brazier to another stone monster head, finding another door through which he explored only far enough to verify that it gave access to the general's roof garden.

He returned to the brazier, used his handkerchief to wrap the hand and the lump, as well as several other anonymous lumps that did not seem to be merely charcoal, and put them in the deep pocket of his coat. He then stood a long, long moment in thought as his coat lashed around his legs, listening to the wind. The storm was still building. It would be windier yet before it was through, and even in this sheltered place, he could feel the rising gale.

He took the brazier by its legs and deliberately upended it, spilling the ashes upon the roof tiles to be driven about in tiny whirlwinds, like tattered gray veils. He left the brazier on its side, as though it had blown over, though he carefully checked the contents once more, this time finding nothing but ashes.

Taking a last look around and being careful not to leave either footprints or a trail of ash, he found his way back to the monster-head door, and from that to the pivoting stone, the stairs, and eventually his rooms, where he pocketed sev
eral items from a hidden closet before going down to ground level and out into the streets.

He was followed, as he often was, by one of the bishop's henchmen as he wandered aimlessly, having tea in this place and a sandwich in that, looking at shoes in that shop and then another, which finally convinced the henchman, who was tired of blinking against the wind driven dust, that the doctor was up to nothing in particular. When the henchman departed, the doctor purposefully made his way along to a ragged bit of wasteland beside the railroad where a few hardy trees were bent almost double by the wind and a good many tufts of dried grass whipped the air. A drift of white wildflower bloomed under the eaves of one of the blind-walled sheds that hid the place from view on all sides. This was the closest bit of “natural” land the doctor knew of, and “natural” land was necessary to his purpose.