Thief (32 page)

Minutes, hours later his mantra began to pull him away from the pain, and with a sense of elation he knew he was becoming stronger again. The hope had fired through him, giving strength to his soul. The strength to resist.

“I’m going to get you.” He screamed his defiance at them, hoping that they heard, and feared. A primitive but satisfying hope. But he marshalled his anger quickly and re-entered the meditative stage. Now, when he was finally beginning to think, was not the time to give into emotion. The years of discipline took over, and once more his mind roamed free over the problem, fury and pain ignored as best he could.

Why did they fear the angels? Clearly whatever knowledge the demons had, the angels also had. They could both fight fire with fire. And with one side being inherently good and the other side evil, they naturally opposed each other. But angels didn’t fight. He had to leave that paradox behind.

So what was the other knowledge that both sides had? And more importantly could these six misfits use it against them? So wrapped up in his thoughts was he that he didn’t notice the others approaching, surrounding him, watching. He didn’t even feel it when one of them tapped him on the shoulder.

Clearly Mikel realized, they both had mind power. The same psychic power that Grould held in abundance, yet surely to an even higher level. Yet if that was so why had they sent Grould at all? Surely they must have known he was doomed to fail. Then they also had the natural power that Lea exercised. They could control the animals.

No! He shook his head in instant denial. Something was wrong with that picture. He could suddenly see it so clearly. Sherial had never controlled the animals at all. They had come to her again and again and again out of innocent love. He saw the simple truth of it, of her court. They loved her. The creatures of the woods adored her. As did he. Lea controlled, Sherial simply loved, and was loved absolutely in return.

Sherial was loved. Sherial had other knowledge. The two facts became one and he knew triumph even as demonic pain overcame him again. Love was their knowledge. Love terrified the demons. Even its memory was a nightmare to them, and they fought it with all they had.

More fire possessed him as the demons heard him thinking of her. Fire and ice ripped through him, causing him to scream out once more. But even as he screamed he knew hope, and his discipline pulled him back to the world stronger and more determined yet again. For the first time in months he knew hope and perversely the more often the brand burnt him, the greater that hope burned within him.

He ignored the hand he discovered holding a wet cloth to his face and returned to his diagram. Quickly he drew a line through the centre of the empty piece of pie, and in one segment wrote ‘love’, in the other ‘hate’. For that was the centre of their knowledge. Angels loved and demons hated. That was surely the knowledge they held.

But something was still wrong. Why?

He racked his brains in desperation, trying to fathom the error he’d made. For some reason, love and hate didn’t look right mixed in with the other forms of knowledge. They weren’t forms of knowledge. What were they?

He scrubbed them out and thought. They were emotions surely. Things people feel rather than know. They were physical needs and emotional reactions, screwed up into a twisted mess that called itself a mind. They surely weren’t knowledge. They didn’t require years of study by learned men over many centuries. Even babies understood them. Yet when he looked at it like that he already knew he was making a mistake. He was somehow underestimating them. For those emotions were powerful things, incredibly powerful. Many men would prefer death over a broken heart. Others gave their entire life over to love. Hadn’t he nearly killed himself making love to Sherial? Hadn’t the others too?

Another revelation hit with the power of a lightening bolt. He didn’t know! He had assumed. They all bore the marks of the angels, they had all been recruited by them, yet that did not mean they all had loved as had he and Sherial. Was it important? He didn’t know. But it was galling that he should have assumed so much on simple circumstance. What else had he assumed?

Another bout of agony ripped through him, and he fought it as before, even more determined to win through. He was close. He was so god damned close he could taste it. It gave him strength, and once again he bested it. Somewhere deep within he asked himself, was the demons’ fire as terrible as before? He almost dared hope as the thought crossed what little remained of his mind.

“You miserable shit heads are dead meat!” The cry of defiance simply ripped out of him by itself. He hoped they heard and feared. It was a faint hope, but still a hope.

On impulse Mikel drew a line through the centre of his circle and extending out to the edges of the universe. One end he labelled ‘love’, the other ‘hate’. And that looked so right. Then working on instincts he didn’t understand, off to one side he wrote down a list. A list of the things the six of them had in common. First there was power. For all of them had some form of power, whatever it be, and all of them had far more than their fellows. Far more.

Mya he recalled, had called herself a ‘world class mage’, one who had tried to change her world by stopping their wars. Lea too was a clan leader, and a respected guide in their council of trails despite his tender age. He also had the strongest talent of any of his people, befriending and controlling more creatures at once than any two others, so he’d said. Hermen had said almost nothing about himself, but he filled the role of mad scientist to a tee. Wasn’t his pet project though some sort of new energy system, a free energy?

The others he wasn’t too sure of, but knew them to be powerful. Why didn’t he know? He cursed himself. He should bloody know. It was absolutely bloody essential to any possible plan and yet he hadn’t found out. He hadn’t even tried to find out. He had let bleakness blind him, and was a fool for it. That then was also the purpose of the demon brand. To wrap him up in so much misery and despair that he stopped trying. Stopped even thinking. And it had worked for far too long. He briefly cursed his stupidity and weakness.

Under ‘power’ he quickly wrote the word ‘love’, for all of them loved angels, some perhaps even unto their own destruction. And all of them too were loved by angels. All of them also bore the marks of angels.

Under that quickly came ‘duty’, ‘honour’, ‘determination’, ‘courage’ and ‘decency’. For in taking this role on they’d all showed those qualities. Underneath those words another appeared, ‘good’. He hadn’t written it, another had, but instantly he saw it and knew it was the correct word. In a flash he understood. They were all good people, even him. They tried to help their fellows, to be fair and kind.

Acting on instinct at the two ends of the line, under ‘love’ and ‘hate’ he wrote ‘good’ and ‘evil’. The two correct names for the spectrum extremes. It was like the opening of a window into a whole new world.

“Ahh Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” He screamed it out loud, as he finally understood the depth of his own idiocy. He screamed it a lot more, heedless of who might have heard. It was only important that he heard it as he cursed himself again and again.

No wonder their knowledge, their skills their talents had failed. He saw it in the instant he saw the diagram for what it was. A map of the universe and its only true dimension, good and evil. All of their talents, skills, knowledge, in fact everything else, were neutral.  What’s the opposite of science? No knowledge? Superstition? Ignorance? What’s the opposite of magic? The same? Dullness? The opposite of psychic was non-psychic, the opposite of strong, weak, the opposite of control of nature was no control of nature.

None of these things were inherently good or bad. They were just neutral. They might be powerful, but not much else.

“A magician can curse or bless, a scientist can create a bomb or a vaccine. Lea can control the animals to attack or help, Grould can heal or kill with his mind as can Abrax with his body.” He muttered it aloud, lost in his understanding and his wonder at his own stupidity. Even a thief he realized, can be good or bad. And somewhere along the way he had chosen good. Stealing from those who harmed others, giving to those who needed it.

“And Sherial can walk through every defence I’ve ever heard of without trouble!” In his mind’s eye he saw her again in his room, gently hovering above him, and without ever having set off an alarm. He saw her in his underground workshop. He saw his empty freezers and missing gargoyles. He remembered her complete lack of knowledge about the very systems she’d overcome. Technology did not compare to goodness. How could he have forgotten that? How could he have been so completely blind?

As if on cue his final revelation came to him, and along the ends of the line, outside the universe, he wrote ‘God’ and ‘Devil’. For that’s what this game was really all about. The angels were on the side of God and goodness. The demons were simply evil spawn of hell.

The shock of unearthing the depth of his ignorance was overwhelming. In his arrogance, in his blindness he hadn’t seen something so incredibly basic. He, and as he suddenly realized had the others, hadn’t thought of the power of goodness, or of God much. He had instead believed in the power of the intellect and science. He relied on his wits, and used science and intellect as a crutch to pin his life upon while questions of love and goodness remained untouched.

Looking around him at last, he suddenly noticed the others, staring at him as though he’d gone mad. They almost looked as though they wanted to run, to leave him in his insanity far behind. It was irrelevant. He looked into their eyes, their very natures, and saw instantly that they too were exactly the same as him, egotistical fools. Each had made the same stupid mistake he had. Each and every one of them had believed their unique ability was what ruled their life, and why they had been chosen by the angels. Every one of them was like him, an arrogant, fat-headed idiot. He screamed it at them while they looked back at him, surely wondering at his sanity.

Goodness was far more fundamental than talent, based on love and God. Goodness was what allowed them to be who they were. It had motivated them all their lives, forced them and directed them to become everything they were. If they had not been good first, they would not have been driven to become as powerful as they were. Goodness underlay all their strengths.

And therefore lack of goodness underlay all their weaknesses. – “Or lack of belief in goodness!”

It was like the opening of another door into his past as he saw exactly why he’d failed. He’d entered a demons’ lair and not taken even the basic precaution of believing that God, that Sherial, that his own goodness would protect him. It had made him weak, vulnerable. It had allowed them to stick this nightmare on his face, something they could never do to an angel, a true believer, - or someone who held the love of an angel inside him. He hadn’t accepted her love to him, and he had paid the price, failure.

He had been too weak to be with Sherial.

The memory suddenly screamed out of the deepest graveyards of his mind like a jet, and held him prisoner until he acknowledged it. The other side of the coin.

The light had finally dawned revealing the full extent of his mistakes. He had made the same blunder with Sherial, and he groaned aloud in his misery. In believing himself a talented thief rather than a good and decent man he had weakened himself with her too. Sherial liked his skills, enjoyed his body, admired his discipline, but above all she loved him. In turn while he desired her form, worshiped her goodness and purity, he also loved her.

Yet his love was also a lie. He loved her, yes. He’d admitted it to himself, said so and done everything he could to prove it. Everything except the one thing he had to. He hadn’t allowed himself to love her fully, nor believed totally in her love. He hadn’t trusted her.

He had fallen in love and mistaken it for, no, - for once he had to be truthful, - he had tried to pretend it was only animal lust. He had always known it was far more, and had denied it even to himself. Especially to himself. He had used every single paranoid defence to keep her away, to deny what both of them needed absolutely; each other.

And why? More truth hit him in the face like a hammer. Because he was afraid.

It was the simple truth and it hurt. He was utterly terrified of losing himself in another, of losing his identity, his privacy. He had lived in total secrecy for decades, somehow believing himself completely separate from, and if he was honest, above other human beings. Yet Sherial had come into his life and from that instant his world had started crumbling, leaving him naked and vulnerable. A terrified worm, suddenly exposed to the sunlight, and wanting nothing more than to hide away again in the cool dark earth.