Authors: Sharon Shinn
The scraping of metal against metal ceased. Rachel strained
every nerve to hear a whispered curse or the sound of a renewed assault upon the door. There was a moment of silence so long that she almost believed her visitor had crept away, and yet … she could still sense a presence outside, ghostly and frustrated, speculatively eyeing the door. After a long, long moment of tension, she heard soft footsteps circle once, then retreat down the corridor. Surely she imagined it, but she also thought she heard the whispering, shushing sound of wing feathers brushing against the tattered bricks of the hall.
Three more days passed, identical to that first one. Three more nights, also identical, down to the midnight visitor. Each night, Rachel waited, breathless, soundless, before the door, hands curled into fists, heart pounding at a maddening pace, listening to the scratching and scraping at the lock. She never spoke, nor did the angel on the other side, but she was sure he knew she heard him, that he smiled to himself as he pictured her panicked face blanching on the other side of the door.
Every night, after he left, she gave in to her frantic terror. There was a stiff, rusted deadbolt lever on her side of the door, and every night when her visitor departed she struggled to twist it home. But it was soldered or bent into place; though she fought with it ten minutes or more, she could not get it to budge. She had no way to make her room secure—and she knew that sooner or later he would find the right key. The thought turned her colder than ever in her unwarmed prison.
The fourth morning, when the servants brought her breakfast, she was ready for them. Grouched to one side of the doorway, she waited till they had stepped just inside, arms laden with trays of food and wood for the fire. Then she dashed out into the hall and down the first turning the corridor took.
Instantly, there were shouts and footfalls behind her. She raced madly past doorways, through a crisscross of passageways, hopelessly lost within minutes in the gray tangle of arches and stairwells and doorways. The light along these halls was murky and erratic, filtering in through a few narrow windows irregularly appearing along the walls. The uneven surface of the flagged floor tripped her up several times as she made her incautious flight. Once she fell to her knees, scraping her hands as she broke her fall, but she was instantly up and running again.
She had nowhere to run. She had no hope of escaping. When more servants boiled up the stairwell from a lower level, running hard to cut her off, she surrendered with only token resistance. “I want to speak to Raphael,” she said as they grabbed her arms and pinioned them tightly behind her. “Let me speak to the Archangel.”
Obviously his staff had been instructed not to talk to her, for at first no one answered. She began to struggle then. She had pretended to flee merely to get attention. “I want to be taken to the Archangel!” she shouted, stiffening her legs and bracing her feet against the stony floor. “Take me to Raphael!”
Finally one of them answered, in a strange north country accent that she had rarely heard, even in her Edori days. “He iss not here,” said the speaker, a drab but powerful man who looked as rugged and as flinty as the mountain itself. “He will b’back tomorree. See’m then.”
So she allowed them to return her to her room. She half-expected her food or fire to be taken away from her as punishment, but there were no repercussions. The day passed as all the others had.
But this afternoon she spent some time working on the dead-bolt attached to her side of the door. Using some of the butter saved from her breakfast bread, she attempted to oil it into docility, but it stubbornly refused to move. Defeated finally, she tried to think of alternate methods of security or escape. Her eyes turned involuntarily to the window across the room. She had no wish to flee down the treacherous mountain, and she assumed Raphael had made sure she could not try it, but she had not even cheeked. Maybe the window lock would yield to her; maybe, driven to desperation, she would in a day or so be willing to risk the flight down the stony slope, into the black ravine… .
But she discovered, after twenty minutes of wrestling with the iron bolt holding the glass in place, that this lock too was immovable. She laid her opened palm against the cold, foggy pane and felt the glass shiver when the wind glided over it again. And again, sending in its inevitable plaintive call, part cry and part whisper; and again—
Turning away from the window, she nervously picked up her pipes, hoping with their sweet, childish music to drown out the mistuned oratorio of the wind. And indeed, she felt marginally
better while she played, soothed and rehumanized, though she had not mastered the reeds well enough to play two notes simultaneously.
And then she realized why Windy Point seemed such a sinister place, so eerie and evil: There was no harmony here. Angels did not sing, voice against voice, as they did in the Eyrie on a constant basis; nothing, no one in Windy Point worked in concord. She had been right, a day—two days—years ago, when she instinctively felt that Yovah would not hear her from here. He had forsaken this corner of the world because it held no harmony.
She cradled the pipes against her chest and drew herself together in a small bundle. And she was lost in this soundless, soulless place, that even the god had deserted.
Depressed by the dirge of the wind and the bleakness of her own thoughts, Rachel had passed a difficult night; she fell asleep late and was still sleeping when Raphael’s servants attempted to serve her breakfast. It was their pounding on the door that woke her, and she stumbled groggily across the cold floor to admit them. Well, it took some effort: She had pushed the heavy wooden armoire across the floor the night before, wedging it as tightly as it would go against the door frame. The idea had been to block the entrance of her midnight visitor, although she had not been sure the weight of the armoire would be enough to deter him should he be fortunate enough to find the key. It had stopped the servants, though, and that cheered her.
They threw her fulminating looks as they entered with their usual stock of food and fuel, and this time they watched her more closely to make sure she didn’t make another break for freedom. One of them pointed an accusing finger at her as he prepared to leave.
“Too-night,” he said, in that looping hill-country accent. “Yoh will hof dinner wif the angel.”
“Raphael is back?” she demanded. “I will see him tonight?”
“Be ready,” the servant said, and left, and locked her in.
Oh, she would be ready. She had been ready for five days now.
This day passed with even more excruciating slowness. Once she had washed and dried her hair, and decided which of the old woolen gowns was the warmest for the trek through the drafty castle to whichever dining hall Raphael considered suitable for
entertainment, there was, as usual, nothing much to do. She practiced voice exercises again, played on her pipes, chipped at the two obdurate locks, and waited.
The light had begun to fail, the signal she interpreted as middle evening here, when the aging gray servant cum guard came to fetch her. She was on her feet before the door had completely opened.
“He iss here now,” was the man’s greeting. “You wanted so much to speak wif him.”
Rachel swept haughtily before him out of the room, then waited for him to lead the way down the labyrinthine hallways. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother to spit on him,” she said frigidly. “But today, I have a few things I’d like to say to him.”
And that little spurt of defiance helped her gain confidence as she followed the guard down three flights of stairs and dozens of passageways till they gained the dining hall of the Archangel.
The smell of overcooked food told her that this was indeed a meal she had been summoned to. Otherwise, she would have thought she had stepped into a nightmare.
She had entered a huge room, so high-ceilinged that she could not tell if the roof was raftered or merely arched stone. Great doors led off the chamber in six directions, but there were no windows to let in light or air. The whole place was illuminated with clusters of candles, but still, it seemed gloomy and underlit. Unseen breezes teased at the insufficient flames and, in sudden swift gusts, extinguished whole candelabra at once. The flickering flames that remained revealed and then shadowed the activities below.
Everywhere, great angel wings were draped over chairs, tables, lounges and divans. There was something indolent, almost abandoned, in the outflung feathered limbs. Low voices were interrupted at sudden jarring moments by loud bursts of laughter; now and then a call rang out from one side of the room to the other. Glassware chimed against silver, pewter clinked against china, as diners poured wine and carved meat and passed plates, and yet the pace was so sluggish, the movements so slow—
Rachel had frozen in the doorway, seized with a curious, reluctant dread. The guard prodded her from behind but she remained where she was, looking more closely about her. Angels were intertwined with humans everywhere she looked. Those
great white wings overlapped frail mortal shoulders and drew them into clumsy, inexact embraces. Nearly every angel in the room was male, and every human female. The women sat forward in the divine laps, wrapping their arms around the thick necks or running their fingers through the ruffled feathers. In a far corner of the room, three winged shapes gathered around one small human form; Rachel could vaguely hear a medley of seduction and supplication as the girl’s voice rose higher and higher on a note of distracted panic. The silent servants who wound through the room brought pitchers of fresh wine to every table, and those who were not slumped forward on some shoulder or backward on some chair raised their glasses for more.
All the angels of Windy Point were drunken and stuporous; and this was the court over which the Archangel ruled.
“Rachel! My charming guest! Over here, my dear. We’ve saved you a place at our table.”
The mellifluous voice jerked her head around. Even in this dim light, it was impossible to mistake Raphael. He had come to his feet and was waving her forward. From this distance, in this light, he appeared to be bathed in a topaz glow emanating from the sheen of his own body. Hair, feathers and skin shimmered with gold highlights. He stood in an aureole, motioning her toward his table.
She crossed the room and came to rest before him, simply staring.
“It is a bit much compared to the austerity of the Eyrie, isn’t it?” he said sympathetically, pulling out a chair and gesturing for her to be seated. “It isn’t always quite this relaxed, I assure you, but I’ve returned after a few days’ absence, and my host is glad to see me. This is in the nature of a celebration, you understand. We are ordinarily much more decorous.”
“I wonder why I doubt that,” she said, finding her voice along with her habitual sarcasm.
“Because you are a sullen and suspicious girl by nature, of course,” he replied smoothly. “I can’t imagine what Gabriel sees in you.”
Laughter erupted from a small circle gathered at Raphael’s table; it was the first time she had consciously realized that Raphael was not at this post alone. She glanced quickly around to note three other angels at his table, two of whom she had never seen before—and
one of whom she instantly recognized. Saul. The fair-haired, rapacious angel she had first met in Lord Jethro’s house—
He grinned at her. She felt an irrational wash of terror, and quickly looked away. Raphael was still smiling at her, extending his hand.
“But sit down, my girl, sit down,” he said. “Eat with us. I understand you were so anxious to see me that you went scampering through my castle the other day. Unfortunately, as I said, I have been gone. But I’m here now, and you may converse with me to your heart’s content.”
“Gladly,” she said, remaining on her feet. “But I wish to do so in private.”
“Oho!” he said softly, smirking a little. “You wish to tell me secrets. I am flattered to be your confidant.”
“I wish to hear the truth from you,” she replied, “which, if I judge you correctly, you rarely speak before an audience. And I refuse to sit for even a minute in the presence of that—” She waved a hand at Saul. She would not acknowledge him either with name or epithet.
Saul laughed. One of the other angels said, in a slurred, uncertain voice, “Don’t want to leave. Want to talk to the pretty lady.”
Rachel waited. Raphael smiled. “Oh, very well, my dear. But remember, when the talk turns dangerous, that you asked for this little assignation, not I. Saul, take the others away. Leave the candles, that’s a good boy.
And
the wine, please. You can get more at another table.”
When the others had protestingly vacated the table, Rachel finally sat, perching on the very edge of her chair. Raphael lounged across from her, studying her through the amber candlelight.
“You know, I do think we must be related,” he said musingly, as if it was a puzzle to which he had given a great deal of thought. “Surely you cannot be my daughter, though I admit my progeny must be scattered across half of Jordana. Or could I be wrong? Was your mother the type who would seek to ensnare an angel lover so she could boast of her conquests to her friends?”
“My mother died when I was a child, as you know,” Rachel replied in a level voice. “But I think she was a virtuous woman.”
“Your grandmother, then. Perhaps she dallied with my sire
or one of my uncles. It’s no disgrace, really, none at all, to be an angel-seeker’s offspring. It’s one of the reasons, no doubt, Jov ah has kept such good track of you through all your amazing changes of fortune.”
“Yovah is not the only one who has tracked me,” she said.
“True—very true. I have been interested in you for quite some time. And I have, as you may have guessed, authored one or two of your misfortunes. But you’re such a resourceful girl. You survive everything. Truly you are an example to us all.”
“And now you have brought me here,” she said, still in that tight, controlled voice. “For no purpose that I can guess at. What do you want with me? Why do you want to kill me? What have I ever done to you?”