Thief (21 page)

But either way the titan paid him no mind as he spoke with Sherial. For a mere human was surely too insignificant for one as powerful as he to notice. He didn’t look down upon him, Mikel realized with concern. The titan barely even knew he existed. He probably barely knew mankind existed.

As the two of them spoke, Mikel finally started paying attention again. His turmoil unable to be dealt with, somehow he had found the strength of will to accept it and move on. Now was the perfect time to find out more about what was going on here. He doubted Sherial had guessed how much he could learn, given the time to sort through the snippets she gave him. Then again maybe that was an over confidence. She understood an awful lot, and forgave even more.

Listening with every sense he possessed, he picked up fragments, much as he would have had he tried to read a newspaper being blown in the wind. But still he understood a little of what passed. Only a fraction, but enough to give him serious chills.

For a start the titan too believed their mission was doomed to failure. The demons were too powerful for mortals to overcome, and the angels too pure to go near them. Any others not close enough to the Lord to be banned from going near the demons were likely to end up with the other unfortunate wretches in the pit. The victims he believed were destined to rot until the Lord decided to intervene, any millennia now. A millennium, Mikel realized, to Atal was nothing.

But the titan went further in his thoughts, showing a coolness that was simply terrifying to the thief. He believed that the angels had only themselves to blame. They had been shown the light; they had been given their path, had even been guided along it, yet they had chosen to stray. While perhaps they were not evil and they had not rejected the lord, they had still chosen to enjoy his gifts above his service.

This period of pain would perhaps be a good object lesson for them. In time they would emerge, cleaner and clearer, the hardship tempering the excesses of their youth. As for the humans themselves trapped within, they too were victims of their own weakness. While all perhaps did not fully deserve their fates, it was not forever. The lord would act in time to right all the wrongs. He believed that it was the Lord’s will that this had been permitted. That after all, was the purpose of free will. In time all would be set to right, and all would understand the purpose.

In doing what she was, Sherial and the others who had supported her, while not actually going against the Lord’s will, were perhaps not completely obeying him either. He wasn’t sure of it, and told her so, but his doubt was enough to scare Sherial as perhaps nothing else could. Atal wondered if perhaps the younger angel had been too long with the humans. If perhaps some of their ways had rubbed off.

But he didn’t try to stop her, if only because he wasn’t sure. Instead he told her to examine her thoughts closely, to make sure there was no deviance in them, as he would examine his. He told her to ask their Father for his wisdom, and to listen clearly. It was, Mikel gathered, a question more of faith than anything else, of trust in the Lord to do what was right. Bad things happened because the Lord allowed them to. He allowed them for a reason, and always his reason was right. Was Sherial going against him, not trusting him, or was she doing what was always intended by him? That was the titan’s question and Sherial’s dilemma.

Listening to them as best he could, Mikel for the first time discovered how the humans had been caught up in this mess. They were the dabblers. The people who’d experimented with black magic and demonology, usually for a laugh. Until something went wrong, and the joke they thought they’d been having, turned up for dinner. For if they’d been truly evil they would have been no use to the demons, and like the dark man’s disciples would be porridge by now. It was only because they had both good and evil in them that the demons wanted them. Being partly white, they could provide food for the demons while being partly dark meant they could enter the lair and be trapped.

It was a scary thought. A party trick, a joke, a curiosity, and suddenly a man could go directly to hell. He wondered how many had ever realized that. He wondered if those who sold black magic paraphernalia had ever written a warning on their products. ‘Caution – This product could send you straight to Hell!’ He wondered how many had thought that a simple chalk marking on a floor could prevent the demons from crossing. It would almost have been funny, if it wasn’t so tragic.

The titan told them he would make no attempt to prevent the mission. He understood Sherial’s love and forgiveness, and though he felt it was not her place to forgive the angels their errant ways, nor to contest with the fallen, given her compassionate nature it was perhaps acceptable that she try to rescue them. When she was older and wiser, perhaps she’d see things differently.

And then he turned to Mikel, and the temperature rose a million degrees in a split second. Sweat literally streamed off the thief as his eyes made contact. For he suddenly realized that he too was involved in this insanity and that he too might be going against the Lord’s wishes. More immediately he might be going against Atal’s. But Atal’s questions were different to those he had asked Sherial. For if Sherial was but a child, then he was at best an infant. He couldn’t have understood what she did. It would have been insulting if he hadn’t been so relieved.

Did he understand the inherent dangers involved? That he could be killed or worse? That Sherial would not be able to accompany him in? Must never be allowed to go even close? Did he even have the faintest idea of what he was getting himself into? It was like being interrogated by an army with a single voice, as the titan’s thoughts raged through him, a deafening crescendo of power. Yet Mikel knew Atal was trying to be gentle, whispering in his thoughts.

Mikel didn’t answer, he didn’t need to. The titan had already seen in him everything he needed to see and everything else besides. In a split second the titan had probed down to his tiniest molecule, examined his entire life moment by moment, interrogated his every doubt and then dismissed him.

Mikel knew why Atal let him be. He had decided he had to go through with this insanity on that afternoon in his garden when Sherial had shown him hell, and angel or no angel, he had decided to do it because he couldn’t stand the thought of them suffering like that. Leaving them to their captors’ mercy was simply intolerable. He hadn’t changed his mind since, he couldn’t.

The titan knew that. Atal knew everything about him, and especially why he couldn’t back out, with or without Sherial. Moreover, he accepted it as valid. For Sherial this might be a wayward venture, but for Mikel given his limited human nature, it was only normal behaviour, and given his beliefs and values, the only course he could take. He was too immature to know a better way.

But there was more. For a brief moment the titan seemed to waver as he looked into Mikel, hesitant for perhaps the first time in millions of years. Though quite what he was unsure of he didn’t say. Still Mikel, through Sherial’s eyes, picked up enough to know Atal had suddenly discovered something new in the mix. Something that told him the venture was a terrible gamble. More so than he had thought before. Yet Atal had also seen the prize and accepted that while the risk was higher than he’d first thought, so was the pay off.

In the instant he had scrutinized Mikel he had seen something. Something that changed his perception of the entire mission, yet perversely something that didn’t change things a single iota. Mikel was naturally intensely curious, but not game enough to ask. It was all he could do simply to hold himself together in the presence of the titan.

Atal didn’t care to pass whatever he’d learned on to them, nor did Sherial ask though she surely had the right. Sadly, Mikel was beginning to realize, Sherial was possibly the most trusting person in existence, and she trusted the titan’s judgement without hesitation. If he had meant for them to know what he had seen he would have told them. He hadn’t, therefore it was for the best that he didn’t tell them. Which left Mikel’s curiosity raging. But not for long.

An instant later Atal left him with a smile, if that was the word, a feeling of warmth in his heart, not a human warmth, but still something good. The titan too told him he thought that the little pebble showed promise. Mikel couldn’t bring himself to feel slighted by the titan’s belief; after all he had some conception of just how powerful this creature was. Besides, Atal also left him a gift. A present of knowledge, lodged deep within his mind.

And then he was gone. Vanished as if he had never been. And Mikel fumed slightly. Why did everybody tell him he had promise? It was enough to drive him to drink. If he would ever have allowed himself to drink. But he couldn’t fume for long, not when he started examining the gift he’d been left with, and understood its wonder.

It was a map. An unbelievably detailed map of this entire world, and most especially their target. Yet those human words didn’t do it justice. It was also an encyclopaedia, a tomb so large it couldn’t have been held by all the computers on Earth. Like everything else lately, it wasn’t written in any language, but painted. Perhaps sculptured was the right word? In the angels’ own divine form of communication. Mikel didn’t so much read it as live it.

It was knowledge far more massive than anything he had ever imagined, far too large for him to hold in his mind. Atal had clearly understood his limitations, and Mikel knew intuitively that it would unfold for him as he read it, as he needed it. All he had to do was think of anything they had passed, anything they were going to, or anything else on this world, and instantly it was there in his minds eye. In the same way as he concentrated on anything in the real world, if he focussed on anything in the map, it enlarged and he saw more detail. And more detail without end should he choose.

Mikel sat down, staggered by the wealth of what he found in his mind, while the world around him disappeared. His understanding of it didn’t compare to the titan’s understanding unfolding in his own skull.

Curious, disbelieving and fascinated, Mikel retraced their journey from the moment they had entered this world, studying their every footstep, and wondered how he could have missed so much about it. How he could not have noticed the special rock formations they’d passed, the gullies and the water flows, the hills and valleys all perfectly placed. He saw and understood the natural processes that had shaped them to be everything they were, and even a little of what they would become with time.

He’d walked on a forest trail older than Europe and never even realized. Now he could know it, could feel the history of the path, relive the people, the animals that had walked it before him, watch how their feet and hooves had worn it smooth over the centuries, all that knowledge held somehow within his own tiny mind.

He’d seen animals and plants by the score along their path, yet he’d never really seen them for what they were. Each and every one of them the product of millions of years of careful evolution, perfectly suited to their environment. Looking at each of them in turn he saw how they were all perfectly adapted for their life in this world. He understood their role in the ecosystem, their niches. He knew their history, their creation, their evolution.

And then as he looked deeper he finally understood evolution itself. How it operated, and how different it was from everything he’d learned as a child. Everything he’d been taught, or that mankind believed. Natural selection, - what a joke. For how, he suddenly wondered, could any have been so blind as to think that species evolved by chance? How egotistical to believe that one-day mere men could understand it? Control and manipulate it? For everything from the tiniest bacterium to man and the entire world itself was carefully guided in its progression. Nothing was left to the chance of natural selection.

Time went by as he lost himself in the wonder that had entered his mind, and it wasn’t until Sherial pulled him out of his revere that he realized the sun had set, perhaps many hours before.

Even as he became once more aware of his surroundings, and discovered that his limbs were stiff, the air was cold on his skin, and his stomach was grumbling furiously, he was almost angry for having been pulled away. But quickly, seeing her anew, he found himself once again drawn back to reality and her. He could never be angry with her.

Mikel slowly pulled himself back to the present, and joined her by the fire that she had carefully lit for him. The usual congregation of woodland creatures surrounded the camp, yet all had left the food she had gathered for him, untouched. They would do anything she asked. So would he.

As he sat and listened and watched her, for the first time in all their time together he found himself able to concentrate on something else. Yet he didn’t ignore her. He simply had so much going on inside him that he couldn’t truly focus on anything else.