Angels and Exiles (18 page)

So he left the room of masks and went as directly as he might to the concourse of the vast metal doors and the narrow door with a wooden handle, which he and Griss had so often haunted. He was seen soon enough, by one of the Hold’s thralls; and soon again his path crossed that of people who recognized him. No one barred his way, but more than one left running. Dagr paid them no heed.

Close to the great outer doors of the Hold he reached the narrow door he sought and passed inside, into heat rivaling summer’s finest bounty.

Seen through the visor, the room shimmers and sparks. Glories of green and blue tremble around the brightest lights, and motes of deeper colour swim quickly across one wall. Dagr moves toward the machine in the centre of the room; its half-melted shape pulls at his heart like the saddest story imaginable. His hands fall upon the warm metal, feel along the surfaces, like a surgeon palpating a patient’s abdomen, seeking for internal traumas.

Footsteps sound outside; the door is slammed open. Ormolf enters the room; and is struck immobile, his face undone, bloodless. Dagr is not cringing, nor running away. He should be; this is what his mind almost tells him he is in fact doing. But no, he has stood up and is taking a step closer to Ormolf.

“You’re dead,” whispers Hradulf’s second-born, eyes wide. “I killed you. You weren’t breathing, your heart didn’t beat. I left you for Sartog. I saw you dead . . . !”

“Oh yes,” Dagr says, his mouth moving without any awareness on his part of what he is about to say. “You left me for Sartog, and Sartog came. He ate me, he ate all of me, the flesh and the soul and the bones. Then he sent me back for you, Ormolf; we have unfinished business.”

Dagr moves swiftly; his arms feel small and weak, his entire body too short. But Ormolf does not fight back, and Dagr’s fist easily finds his throat, deals a solid blow to the larynx, stunning Ormolf. One savage kick to the knees and the young man falls. Now, much too late, he shakes off some of his terror and struggles, breath hissing in his bruised throat. Dagr’s hand comes up to Ormolf’s face; his thumb digs deep and gouges out the right eye. The youth’s hands fly to his face as he tries to scream. Dagr rests a knee on his opponent’s chest, seizes his head, one hand on the chin and one at the crown, and applies torque until at last the neck snaps with a muffled pop. Ormolf’s body goes slack; his ruined face falls to the side, hiding his mutilation.

Dagr rises to his feet with a grunt, returns to the side of the machine. His hand caresses the fascia, pauses at the stumps, waves in the air to feel the parts that should be there but aren’t, returns to the battered surface where lines and circles of yellow crusts mark long-gone controls. He almost weeps at the thought. “Machine, machine,” he whispers, knowing the sonic inputs are still functioning, “will you play a game?”

“Please select a game,” replies the machine’s voice. Dagr knows it a stolen voice, the voice of a woman he once held in his arms and kissed. His manhood swells in his trousers.

“Oh, let’s play a good one,” he says, the words strangers on his lips. “Let us open the gate.”

The machine whispers something, in the voice of the long-dead woman. It complains of missing knowledge, of damage and corruption. Dagr soothes its peevishness, tells it what it wants to hear, and when the machine grows too agitated and warns of active dangers, he knows the words that compel it to obey. Like an old man, his mind worn smooth with the passage of years, forcing his limbs into motion even as his joints protest, processes are initiated deep below them, in the bowels of the Hold. Dagr feels the stone tremble, a soundless quivering that runs up through the soles of his feet into the pit of his belly.

He speaks further, coaxing the machine through the phases. The barriers yield to his will; he remembers or imagines a young girl parting her thighs, and his penis forcing its way into her. One hand slips beneath his clothing to grab his rigid member. Hot as his palm is from contact with the machine, still it feels cool to his blood-stiffened penis. Things become easier now, the machine compliant, like the girl’s cunny yielding, no longer dry but lubricious. A clenching arises within him and he spills his seed along his leg, a blood-hot rope of semen soaking his trousers. More urgent words from him—he wants to intone the girl’s name at the same time, but it still hovers in dream-land, either unrecalled or not yet invented—and the last defences are breached. Locks fall open, yawning pits are uncovered, mechanisms align. A screech of metal rends the air as the heavy doors in the concourse burst the seal of rust and dirt binding them shut. The rock is slammed by a single sharp hit, a colossal steel hammer falling down upon an anvil. Outside, the blaze of the eternal lights waxes intolerably bright before blowing out.

And a woman stands before him, her skin dead black, her eyes gleaming obsidian, her body enveloped in fuliginous wings. She raises a hand; on its ink-dark palm he can read a webwork of lines darker still, their tracery clean and smooth, every branch and tributary distinct, like a diagram of a human hand rather than the thing itself. Her presence brings the fragrance of hammered hydrogen and the song of shattered space.

“I see you, pilot,” the ancestor says. “The gate is open.”

The angel grows larger, and he can see stars reflected in her eyes, and the strands of her coal-dark hair rising from her scalp. Her upraised hand reaches for him, and the ancestor lifts his mirroring one.

It is the other hand that Dagr lifts to the mask, and with fingers still sticky from his seed he grasps the rim of the mask and tears it off his face.

The ancestor leaves him, like a hand pulled out from a glove, and he half falls, supporting himself with one trembling arm. The angel is still floating before him, black in the core of a greater blackness. Her hand closes slowly into a fist, which she brings to her heart. There is nothing but her in the world, no machine, no room, no Hold, and yet Dagr steps away from her, still not upright, his feet scrabbling for purchase on a non-existent floor. Her wings open—huge, impossibly vast wings, wings that could shelter the Hold itself, wings that could cup the sun’s light and cast a shadow over the entire world. And she falls away, shrinking into infinity; for a second, Dagr feels that in fact she is unmoving and it is he who is falling, faster and faster, down a pit with no bottom.

She is gone. Before him is the machine, the half-melted blob of metal with its meaningless markings and missing parts; at its feet the mask of the unnamed ancestor, its faceplate dotted with both red and white.

The room is trembling. Outside, in the concourse, a godlike voice thunders, raging incoherently about mirrors, nearly drowned out by unearthly wails, like the hosts of the damned howling for the blood of the living.

Dagr steps around Ormolf’s corpse and steps outside. All along the length of the concourse, a galaxy of lights glows poisonous green, tracing the course of the cables. The huge doors have opened, and what has always lain behind is throwing off a furnace glare onto the opposite wall.

Turning his gaze away, Dagr flees along the concourse, toward the main doors. The floor thrums under his feet from the reverberations of a deep-buried screeching. Somewhere in the frigid darkness of the outer Hold, the eyed shaft must now be spinning like a child’s top.

A blast of snow greets him as he nears the doors: they have opened to the fullest, and the raging winds of the outside are blowing into the Hold. The sky is aflame with a pale orange glory, a blasphemy of sunlight in the midst of the Fimbulwinter. Behind Dagr a dislodged column falls onto the floor and shatters, sending out a hail of rock shards.

Dagr staggers out of the Hold. In the sky above, a ring of suns is shining, a necklace of flaming balls, warmer than a score of summers. He falls to his knees in the snow, his bare, torn hands sinking in to the wrists. The glory of the suns intensifies until the centre of the ring shines like white gold. Dagr cannot tear his eyes away, though the light burns them. From behind him, shrieks rise from the Hold, together with the sound of walls crumbling and hoarse exhalations that might be titanic laughter.

The central glow fades abruptly, and the suns flee from the ring, sliding outwards for an instant and then disappearing abruptly. The terrible night of the Fimbulwinter returns. Dagr’s sight is clouded by green-purple bruises, and for a moment he cannot see anything. Then he glimpses the stars, pinpoints of cold light nailing the darkness to the vault of heaven. One by one, they are going out, as if swallowed, occulted by something unimaginably vast.

I didn’t wear gloves when I went to get married today. My mother wanted gloves, white cotton formal gloves, or failing that black leather, like the gloves I wear aboard aerostats. But I wanted to be bare-handed; wanted the scar to show, the long purple slash over the back of my left hand. I had on my parade uniform, with the Claw pinned to it, and polished boots, and a morion, and a dulled sword at my side. I felt like a character in a puppet show.

The church was full of people. There were a few comrades from the College, and even old Professor Cruikshank. The priest had forced him to remove his prostheses at the door and he only had a single arm and three fingers to wave with. The rest were from the respective families. Forty or more on my side, all in their best clothes, all still smelling of fish; on the bride’s side, there were maybe sixty, and I didn’t have to imagine the dirt beneath their fingernails: I could see it.

I’d been waiting at the far end of my aisle for a good ten minutes when Senemyane finally made her appearance. Her dress was so awful I felt like laughing or crying. A hand-me-down from two generations back, something that must have served every cow in her family, regardless of her size. She’d had to pin it in a hundred places to make it fit on her slight frame; she’d have looked better in a potato sack. We began to walk toward the altar and each other. She was taking mincing steps, as if her feet hurt her from wearing something other than mud-crusted clogs.

I had to hold back to match her pace, to make sure we arrived at the same moment. Seeing her from closer up, I was surprised; last time I’d seen her, she’d been an ugly girl, and flat as a plank to boot. She’d grown up, filled out, and her face was now almost pretty. She reminded me a bit of a whore I’d favoured back in Lanthym; she had the same red hair, but I had to admit Senemyane’s features were more pleasant.

The priest joined our hands and turned us around to face the congregation. My mother and my uncle were in the front row. She’d been blubbering for hours and was still going on strong; some probably thought she was mourning the fact that my father couldn’t be here to see his only son get married, but I at least knew she was dying of shame, that I was marrying below my station in life.

My father’s brother Bernard stood next to her and kept his hand on her shoulder; he looked both uncomfortable and proud. I’d seen nearly the same expression on his face years and years ago, the day the mermaids came ashore, once the slaughter was done.

I was ten that autumn. I was still small for my age and I’d been denied the boats for another year or two. I’d never worked yet, except for small chores, so I had nothing worthwhile to do with my time. I was becoming too much bother for my mother, who had my four sisters to take care of, and I was sent to my Uncle Bernard’s house for three weeks so she could be rid of me for a while. Uncle Bernard lived out on the headland we called the Witch’s Spit. Most men there didn’t own boats; they worked on the
Handmaiden
, a big ship owned by foreigners that went far offshore, after large prey: jackfin, red-squale, even lorchas. Uncle Bernard had injured his foot badly and the
Handmaiden
’s captain had refused to let him aboard until he was fully recovered.

He took me in without complaint; he wasn’t a friendly man, but not unpleasant either. His foot by now had mostly healed, but he still couldn’t walk much. I was supposed to help him with his chores, but apart from fetching the rum bottle from the cupboard I was left fairly idle. With nothing better to do with his time, he taught me the rudiments of the craft: how to use a filleting knife, how to bait a trawl hook, that sort of thing. In the evenings, he went on and on about the
Handmaiden
’s expeditions, until I was both bored stiff and frustrated that I couldn’t have gone myself.

By the end of my stay he’d started to take brief strolls. He liked to go out at sunset; he enjoyed, and taught me to appreciate, the colours of the sky and water, the way they changed as the sun sank below the horizon. One evening, we went out some distance from his house, to a desolate stretch of the coast. The sun had vanished, leaving only a red-orange smear on the horizon. It was cool and I wrapped my thin coat tight about me. Uncle Bernard walked with a crutch to ease the weight on his foot; the round point of the crutch dug little pits in the sand. Suddenly he grabbed at my arm.

“What’s that? You see it? Down over there, past the rocks.”

I looked where he said—he couldn’t point, having one hand tangled in my coat and the other holding on to the crutch—and made out a squirming mass, indistinct in the twilight.

“It looks like a bunch of beached fish to me.”

“Come on!” He set off at a swifter pace, still holding on to my coat; when his crutch-tip came out of the sand it spurted a dribble of sand to the rear. I was dragged after him, and yanked to a stop when he stopped. We were ten or twenty feet from the squirming things. I blinked a few times before I saw them clearly: they had a fish’s body and tail, but then a small torso grew out, with thin arms and a tiny head.

“They’ve blundered ashore,” said Uncle Bernard. “We have to be quick. Haldan, run back to the house; bring the shovel and the big club, the one with the blue ring. And light the lantern, and bring it too. Hurry!”

I wanted to ask him why, but I had started becoming a man, and since I already guessed at the answer, I held my tongue. I obeyed him, ran to the house and back, carrying the two heavy long-handled implements under one arm and the lantern by the opposite hand. My uncle was waiting for me, some distance farther back from the living things. He carefully approached them, set the lantern on a rock, and beckoned to me.

In the light it became clear they were mermaids. They were about a handspan in length. Their skin was pale purple, their hair brownish green. They noticed the light, and they began to give voice, with reedy cries. They might have been washed ashore by a wave more powerful than others, had been left scattered over a strip of sand perhaps forty feet wide, stretching between a tidal pool and an outcrop of rocks.

Uncle Bernard handed me the shovel. “You take this,” he said, “it’s longer. Do as I do: keep a good distance from them. And be sure to strike at least twice: you’re not as strong as I am.”

He went around the rock then, and to the edge of the shoal. When they could see him clearly, they began to speak. All of them at once, so at first it was an unintelligible soft clamour. Uncle Bernard held on tightly to his crutch, leaned forward and brought down his club on the nearest mermaid. It smashed her head open in one blow; the little body convulsed, then lay still. The other mermaids kept up their babble, their voices now seeming to supplicate. Uncle Bernard killed two more, then looked back at me.

“Come on, boy. Don’t be afraid. Just stand at my side and be careful. Come on! Are you a man or a little child, eh?”

So I moved forward then, and raised the heavy shovel high and swung it down at a mermaid. I broke her body under the metal blade; when I raised it again, I could see the mess of blood staining the mermaid’s face, oozing from her crushed ribcage through the torn flesh.

“Be careful!” my uncle said, panting from his latest blow. “Don’t listen to them. Don’t pay attention to what they say. When there’s fewer left, you can understand them, so don’t listen.”

His club rose and fell, hard. I struggled with the shovel’s weight and could only manage a fourth or so of my uncle’s kill rate. There were nearly a hundred—so I suppose in retrospect—in the beached shoal. To the boy I was, the slaughter seemed to go on and on for hours, although it must not have lasted more than ten minutes in reality.

When there were only a dozen or so mermaids left, their voices—all alike, all with the exact same pitch and intonations—became easier to disentangle. And finally I could understand their words.

They said: “Oh please, kind sir, spare me. Oh please, sir, get me back to the water. Let me live, oh let me live.”

Uncle Bernard had told me not to listen, but I was ten years old, and they had a little girl’s voice, and I had never killed anything that spoke before. And so when my shovel came down and I heard the mermaid cry out for an instant before the blood filled her throat and silenced her, I grew cold to the marrow of my bones. Sweat ran down my back; my stomach clenched as if I were going to vomit.

Uncle Bernard and I were no longer side by side; we had missed some mermaids at one edge of the shoal, and he had limped over there, twenty or thirty feet away, to finish the job. He had his back to me. My shovel struck again, but I had rotated it involuntarily, and this time the edge came down and cut into the next mermaid’s head. Her face broke in two and her brains dripped out of her skull.

At this I lost my nerve. There was one mermaid left at my feet, pleading for her life. I didn’t have the strength to resist. Uncle Bernard was finishing his part of the job; the wet thudding of his club was cutting off the remaining frail voices one by one. I couldn’t throw the mermaid back into the sea; the water was much too far off: Uncle Bernard would see me doing it. Instead I dug into the sand beneath her with the bloodstained blade of the shovel, scooped her up, and carried her a dozen paces to the right, into the shallow tidal pool. I dumped her there, and instantly, as I had hoped, she fell silent. I strode back as nonchalantly as I could, started whacking the one whose head I had already cut open.

Only when I’d beaten her to a pulp did I dare raise my eyes from my work; I saw Uncle Bernard looking at me with that expression of mingled discomfort and pride. “Come here, boy,” he said.

He had seen me. He must have seen me. He’d fish the mermaid out of the pool, kill her with his club, then turn it on me; maybe break a bone or two, to teach me to be a man—and I knew that I would have deserved it. Yet I was still under the mermaid’s spell and I didn’t really care.

But to my surprise he just hugged me and slapped my back in praise, though hard enough to knock out my breath. “You’re a good boy, Haldan. We got all of them, eh? I’ll tell your ma, and she’ll tell your dad, they’ll both be proud of you, eh?”

We walked back to his house, and all the way he leaned on me more than on the crutch; in hindsight, it’s obvious his wounded foot hurt him badly, but to my naïve ten-year-old self it seemed a mark of praise and trust—of which I knew myself unworthy.

They gave me the Silver Claw after the debacle at Quinzach. That felt just the same. Getting a mark of trust and praise I felt I didn’t deserve. With the same underlying anger at the stupidity of those above me. They didn’t know, didn’t understand. How it was, how it had been.

Aboard the aerostat, we could all pretend to be heroes already. A full company of heroes, in our black leathers, with our shiny weapons. We could feel our skin taut with the spells and blessings of our wizards all wrapped around us. How could we lose, with that much magic about us?

Our section of the gondola had two small windows; it was night and the troop hold was plunged in gloom. Some of the men had wasted their glow-spell to cast greenish pools of phosphorescent light around them. They were fools to expend magic before combat, yet the glow did bring us all closer, infused us with the awe and mystery of our task. How could we not be heroes?

I sat by one of the windows, which looked down and starboard. This was my first major raid. I’d graduated from War College two years before, after a long apprenticeship. I had been trained in Ærial Infantry, which actually involved commando missions more than anything else. I’d flown missions throughout the Laethlin border war, and seen action in the skirmish with Holgart, but those were minor engagements. We’d sold our services to Melgrion for their war with Carheil, and this at last was serious business. I was so scared that I was constantly on the verge of shitting my pants.

The aerostat flew above the Pthal chain. There was a heavy cloud cover beneath us, and the ground was invisible. From time to time we could hear deep resonant detonations as the Carhellian forces fired off spells into the sky, blindly. The aerostat was shielded with tripled absence spells, and we’d been assured there was no way we could be found. Yet an hour before we’d heard the usual hollow boom followed immediately by another one, much sharper and much, much louder. I’d seen an orange glow reflected on the clouds; it came from behind us. I had craned my neck, trying to see in a direction the window did not allow me. At this angle, the glass distorted sight, smeared light into featureless curtains. But then our aerostat had shifted heading briefly; for a few seconds I’d got a clear view of what lay behind us, before we changed course again and it vanished from my sight. One of our sister aerostats had been hit by a spell, perhaps through nothing more than sheer misfortune. Despite all its protections, some of its bladders had been set aflame; it had nearly blown itself apart when the lifting gas had detonated. What was left of it was a twisted hulk, plunging toward the clouds and the ground below, like a torch thrown from the sky. Ammunition both magical and alchemical was being set off all over the remains of the gondola. Flashes of searing light crackled all along its length; demon shapes flickered around the falling wreckage, impressions of twisted wings and elongated horns, like something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, or in the pit of nightmares.