Crow Jane (6 page)

Jane called in Angelic when she could remember the Angelic words clearly, and when she couldn’t, she supplied the deficit with Adamic. The two were kissing cousins, anyway, and often shared vocabulary—though Angelic, as far as Jane knew, had no profanity at all. So much the poorer.

She touched the fragment of Azazel’s hoof and let the feel of the object drift into and seal her message with its tangibility. She spoke words of offer and negotiation in her incantation, telling the renegade that she had the thing he was looking for, that they could join forces, that together they could have what they both wanted.

They were lies, and a trick, and in her heart she planned murder.

The circle carried her words up into the heavens, soaring through and against the rain that pelted down. Lightning flashed in a chain along the horizon as she finished, and a vortex of silver in the dark clouds absorbed her false oaths, sucked them in and spun them out in all directions like meteorites slung at the far corners of the world.

When she was certain the angel would hear, Jane stopped. Her ka ached within her and her body’s wounds, still in the final stages of healing, itched and stung. She dropped her arms and stepped down to the gravel rooftop, duster rustling and hat pounding like a drum from the fat raindrops.

The crow flapped its wings as if irritated at what she had done, and glared at her balefully. If a flesh and blood bird had given her such a look, she would have cursed at it and blown all its feathers off.

A car approached on the highway now, and Jane stepped forward and crouched at the edge of the roof to watch. Light poles were few and far between on this stretch of road, but the vehicle slowed as it passed underneath one, in front of the saddler’s, and she got a clear look at it. It was a brown van, hammered as only the van of a bottom-feeding rock and roll band can be, and she knew instantly who was inside. She was impressed, though, that they’d caught up with her so quickly. The van killed its speed and then its lights, and then it disappeared in the shadow of a small copse of trees.

She needed Azazel’s hoof to bait the trap for the renegade angel, but that was surely what the band must be after. Jane considered her course of action for brief seconds, and then jogged down the stairs.

She needed to hurt them, slow them down, keep them out from under her feet. And she had no fire left in her ka.

The Mare stayed where she had hitched it, razor teeth bloodied by its contented grazing on chilled beef. She pulled the beast away, earning an irascible snort of protest, but no more—decades ago, she and the animal had had it out over which one of them was to be mistress, and they both knew that Jane was the rider and the Mare was her mount.

She left the lights in the plant on. If the band really was following the hoof, they wouldn’t believe she was still in the building. But maybe, if she left the lights on, the band would
think
she was trying to lure them into an ambush. That might at least keep them off balance.

She led the Mare out the back door of the plant and swung into the saddle easily. She kicked the beast into a canter and headed for the edge of the lot, where the boundary between the meat packing plant parking lot and a furrowed field of tall, storm-quaking sorghum was marked by a rail fence.

The Mare easily jumped the fence, plunging into the tall cultivated grass without fear or hesitation. Jane watched the road as she progressed, trying to spot the musicians’ van—trees cut across her field of vision ahead of her, shading a lane through the planted space, and she thought a creeping darker-than-dark mass under the trees might be the van. Whoever was driving, slow as they were going, must have great night vision. Jane bent low over the Mare’s neck and looked for an appropriate tool.

She found it quickly, where the crops gave way to a flat, hard aisle of dirt. There was a medium-sized tractor, and the sight of it gave her momentary pause.

It had been several millennia since she had tilled the soil, but the scent of a moist, broken clod, or the sharp, fertile promise of a gleaming agricultural tool, still pierced her to the center of her heart. For an instant she was again Qayna of the young earth, who loved plants and taught them to love her back. The tall sorghum grass could have been the barley or emmer of her youth, and under the clouds and rain the land around her could have been practically anyplace, including the valleys to the east of Eden.

A flash of lightning on the horizon, and an answering glint in the trees ahead that might have been a reflection on metal, brought her back to herself.

Jane dismounted beside the tractor, whistling to the Mare an instruction to stand in place. She unscrewed the gas cap on the tractor’s tank and soaked a spare shirt in the flammable liquid. Tearing the gas-reeking cloth in half, she stuffed one half into the open tank, letting it drape wetly down the side of the tractor. The other half she wrapped around a fist-sized rock she picked up off the ground.

Through the glass of the tractor’s cab, she saw the brown van pull to a stop under the gloom of the trees. Its door opened and men piled out.

It was then that she spotted the raptor that could only be Twitch, the silver falcon with the long, incongruous horse’s tail trailing behind it, soaring above the trees and headed in her direction. Her wards of seeming and dissembling should hide the truth from the fairy at least for a moment, but Jane knew she needed to hurry.

She repeated her
stay
whistle to the Thracian Mare, wedged Azazel’s hoof fragment firmly beneath the saddle, and retreated to the sorghum, holding in her hand the gasoline-soaked rag wrapped around a rock.

Stepping a cubit’s length into the sea of grass, she pulled out a cigarette lighter and waited.

The Mare stood calmly beside the tractor, ignoring the thick reek of gasoline and the band. That was a reflection of the Mare’s impressive discipline, and her centuries of training—her sense of smell was so acute that she had led Jane across three States on the trail of the brown Dodge van and never lost the scent. The falcon overhead cried angrily, and the Mare ignored that, too.

Jane drifted a couple of yards to one side to get a better view; at a fence on the far side of the dirt aisle, she saw the rock and rollers climbing into the field.

The men all carried weapons, and they approached the tractor with deliberate steps, fanning out like the fingers of a groping hand. Even in the storm-confused dim light of night, Jane could see that Adrian was in the middle of the line, holding some kind of machine pistol in one hand and looking down into the palm of his other. Jim walked beside him, sword drawn. Mike and Eddie came forward on the wings, holding pistols.

She knew that what they saw must be the tractor, and beyond it, a parked motorcycle. Then the wizard hissed something and they all halted. He dug into a pocket and came out with a piece of glass that he held up to one eye like a monocle.

“Son of a bitch!” he spat.

Jane raised the lighter to the gas bomb in her hand—

and the sky exploded into flame.

***

Chapter Six

Qayna raced under the spires of Ainok as the trails of flame hurtled earthward. She knew that each burning meteorite, bright despite the noon sun overhead and dragging behind it a plume of black and yellow smoke, must be a Swordbearer. She should be hurrying to get out of the city, she knew, but instead she ran toward its center.

She wanted to warn Azazel; she owed him that much.

The crow flew on ahead, just beyond her reach.

Other Ainokites heeded the more sane imperative, though, and she struggled to push through them. Women and men of her own kind—not quite her own kind, but her kin, at least—rushed in a thick and burbling stream toward the gates of the city, and she had to push fiercely to force them to part and let her upstream.

The Fallen were fewer, easier to see and avoid, but much more dangerous. They towered above their mortal subjects, and though Qayna had become accustomed to their appearance, the beast heads and limbs were still terrifying when they rushed at her at full speed. A towering Fallen with the lower body of a horse, Ezeq’el, trampled people who might have been her servants, or even her lovers; a giant with the face of an octopus or a squid dragged shrieking bodies with him as he plunged into one of Ainok’s great canals, finding it a more expedient route to the exits; a corpulent man with long yellow tusks jutting from his face and spikes growing from his back and shoulders lowered his head and charged through the crowd, leaving behind him a trail of mangled corpses and blood.

These were Qayna’s people now, and they were destroying themselves in their flight.

The towers of Eden, Mother had told her, were observatories. She and Father had climbed within them to the platforms at their heights to watch the Messengers in flight above them, when they had been Eden’s lord and lady. The spires of Ainok, for the most part, were merely spikes, but they were enormous, fingers jabbed in accusation at the sky or daggers pointed at the throat of heaven. Their heights were not platforms—other than on the one, central tower—they were the sharp points of spears.

Whether it had something to do with the spires or not, the Bearers of the Sword burned in their inexorable paths toward points outside the city.

At Ainok’s center were the Grand Plaza, the Palace and the Tower. The Plaza was a wide space where the Fallen gathered to debate and, when the Council could not reach peaceable decisions, to shed each other’s blood. The Palace sprawled along its western edge, all white stairs and green rooftop garden and blue water; the central source of Ainok’s canals were the mighty springs beneath Azazel’s home, and they burst forth from the mouths of statues of mutilated Messengers, irrigating the many acres of his private garden-like Palace before radiating out in all directions into the city. The Tower, higher, Azazel boasted, than any of the towers he had left behind, was solid inside and had an enormous staircase winding up around the outside of it to the broad circular platform at its apex.

The Plaza, the Palace, and the Tower were all made of the same gleaming white stone, not native to the hills surrounding the city. Azazel had told her once that he summoned the stone with his sorcery, from a quarry thousands of miles away. Somewhere, there was a gaping hole in a mountainside that sparkled white. The center of the city, even more than the rest of Ainok, was liberally speckled with mirrors. These were the gates of Mab’s people, who were not residents but who came and went freely, and trafficked with Ainok’s citizens. Azazel hadn’t built the city center with wizardry, though, or with the help of the fey folk; Azazel’s slaves had done the work. For himself and his own subjects, Azazel insisted on freedom. The followers of Heaven and its Messengers, he insisted, had already chosen slavery and deserved no better. Now the white stone ran red with blood, shed by slaves and citizens alike, trampled under the feet of their Fallen overlords.

Women streamed from the Palace as if its bowels also concealed a spring of concubines. Qayna drew her knife, a weapon almost long enough to call a sword, and fended the rushing women aside. Some of the women—fey or sorceresses, and in that moment Qayna envied them both—leaped into mirrors and disappeared. Those who couldn’t rushed down the avenues toward the fires.

Qayna saw Azazel standing atop his Tower. The leader of the Fallen was majestic, even though the animal parts he had grafted onto himself with his own hand, and something else, some streak of wrongness, prevented him and all his kind from being truly
beautiful
. His goat-like legs were crooked, but he held his back erect, and the crimson- and black-streaked fur of his lower half was clean and shone in the sun. His wings, only two of them, were now the wings of an enormous bat, but they still cloaked him with something like majesty. He stood tall and looked about him at the horizon as the Swordbearers touched down.

So he knew. But he wasn’t running.

Qayna cupped her free hand around her mouth and yelled up at him. “Azazel!”

The former Messenger looked her way instantly, and laughed a laugh like rolling thunder. He spread his wings like flexing arms, snapped them once, and sailed into the air and in her direction. He was graceful in flight despite his enormity, and when he touched down, Qayna saw that he held a child in his arms. His son, Jacob.

Azazel set the boy down between him and Qayna, and Jacob looked up at her with bright blue eyes. This boy, tousle-headed, pale and small, but with sturdy shoulders and determination in his eyes, was his heir. His father was majestic, powerful and graceful, but Jacob looked like a mere beautiful boy. He looked as human as Qayna.

And how human was that? She thought.

For all his many women, Azazel had only managed to get one living son, and that had been done with the aid of great sorceries. The seed of the Fallen, apparently, did not grow well in the furrows of Eve.

“You must take Jacob and flee,” Azazel told her.

“The Swordbearers are here!” Qayna said, waving her weapon in a big circle to indicate that they were surrounded.

Azazel smiled gently, but there was a flash of irritation in his eyes. “Must I repeat myself?” he asked. “I took you in when you had no place else to go, Qayna. Will you not repay the favor?”

Qayna nodded heavily and grabbed Jacob by his hand.

With a heavy
CRACK!
another of the Fallen crashed to the stones behind Azazel and all three of them turned to look.

It was Semyaz. His own beast-assumed attributes included a boar’s head and a long tail like a lizard’s, which now flicked across the white stones of the Grand Plaza. He had wings, too, like an eagle’s, feathered white and gold. The last fleeing concubines scattered, steering wide of the enormous Fallen warlord.

“Azazel!” the Fallen roared. “Your policies have failed!” With a rasp that Qayna thought must be audible outside the city, he drew a wide-bladed falchion from its scabbard at his belt and advanced on Azazel.

Suddenly, Azazel, too, was armed, his long, flaming whip appearing in his hand as if it had been there all along and Qayna had simply failed to notice it. He snapped the weapon in the space between him and the other giant, and Semyaz hesitated.

“I will happily debate the issue with you,” Azazel snarled, “the next time we meet in Council!”

Semyaz straightened his back and bellowed at the trails of smoke in the sky. “I challenge you!” he roared.

Azazel cracked his whip again, but Semyaz didn’t retreat. “You never had any patience for procedure, did you?” the ruler of Ainok laughed. “You can challenge me the next time the Council meets!”

Qayna dragged Jacob back, though the boy resisted. Around the edges of the Plaza, she now saw gathering others of the Fallen. They stood jittery, or they prowled with knees bent. She wondered if some of them had expected this contest.

“There is no Council, you fool!” Semyaz hissed, spraying slobber from his rubbery boar’s lips. “If we do not act now, there is nothing!”

The boar-headed Fallen charged. Qayna saw the upraised scimitar and thought Azazel was doomed to die with his great city, but at the last second, the leader of the fallen cracked his whip a third time. It lashed Semyaz on his shoulder and coiled around the giant’s thick, piggish neck. Then Azazel leaped aside, yanking his rival with him—

and Semyaz crashed head-first into the base of the Tower.

He sank up to his shoulders in the white stone, plowing right through a wide mirror and shattering it instantly into glass dust. The stairs above the Fallen’s head shattered into gravel, and a huge crack split the rock.

“
This
to your challenge!” Azazel roared, and rammed his shoulder into Semyaz’s back. He drove the other Fallen into the base of the Tower like a nail, as Semyaz squealed and wiggled but couldn’t get away. More mirrors fell.

The Fallen around the Plaza hopped up and down, hissed and stared at each other. They were agitated and uncertain. Qayna pulled Jacob’s hand and tried to leave down a colonnaded avenue, but a huge Fallen with a serpent’s head blocked her way, tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. Qayna raised her sword, but didn’t dare attack the giant creature.

“The Council is here!” boomed another of the Fallen. He was a bull-headed giant whose body was covered with scales. In his hands he hefted an enormous club, like the trunk of an entire tree with twisted metal spikes shoved entirely through it. “Semyaz has made a motion, we must vote!”

Others of the Fallen stepped forward, and Qayna jogged out of the way with the child. The serpent-headed giant kept his beady eye on her, though, and she was careful not to give the appearance of fleeing.

Around them on all sides, at the edges of the city of Ainok, smoke and fire rose in sheets. The Swordbearers were setting about their work of destruction.

Qayna’s crow circled the Tower, wings stiff.

Azazel stepped into the center of the Council, whip trailing behind him on the stones. He smiled, and Qayna was reminded how majestic he was—how powerful and moving they all were, setting aside the part-animal forms. They weren’t beautiful, but something in them stirred her soul.

“I apologize, Semyaz,” he purred. “I didn’t hear your motion. Could you repeat it for me?”

The Fallen Semyaz kicked his legs and
murmmphed
, his head still stuck in the base of the Tower. The crack split wider and crawled further up the stone.

“Semyaz questioned your policies,” Bull Head growled. “He’s not the only one of us who thinks you’ve been too soft on Eden.”

Azazel arched his eyebrows and nodded slightly. “What Semyaz did,” he said slowly, “was issue a challenge.” He looked around at the other members of the Council. “Does anyone else here … wish to issue me … a similar challenge?”

There was a heavy silence. The ring of fire surrounding the city of Ainok was through its gates, Qayna thought, and burnings its way closer. She could hear screams, far outside the Plaza, and smell scorched flesh.

“I thought not.”

Azazel turned in a flash and kicked his goat-like hoof into the posterior of his rival. Semyaz bellowed in anger, the sound muffled by the stone around his head, and was pounded deeper into the rock.

Semyaz could stand the blow, but the Tower couldn’t. The widening crack became a fissure, and suddenly Qayna could see daylight through the middle of the Tower. She dragged Jacob back and away at a sprint, and this time Snake Face was too busy watching out for his own skin to get in the way.

CRASH!!!

Great blocks of masonry rained down around the Grand Plaza, crashing to the ground like falling stars and smashing up the smooth white stone. Mirrors exploded into fragments and dust, forever shattering the gates they contained. Azazel stood still, eyes flashing at his rivals as they cowered in the tumult.

Qayna managed to get behind Snake Face and then several more of the Fallen, and their bodies intercepted big chunks of rock that would have flattened her and the boy. Glass shards and gravel shrapnel still tore their skin and stung them from head to toe.

Then the Tower was flat and a cloud of white dust slowly settled over them all. Several of the Fallen lay bruised and bleeding in the wreckage, but Azazel stood tall in the center. With a single flap of his wings, he snapped the dust off his own person and the ground beneath him.

“Look at that,” the founder of the city of Ainok said, glancing down at his own hoof. “You’ve made me split a nail.”

Bull Head sneezed dust and mucus onto the stone and shook his shoulders. “The city is taken, Azazel,” he rumbled, staring at his leader with yellow eyes and lowering his club. “We must do something.”

“I will.” Azazel dropped his whip. “I will do it now. And what you should do … all of you …” he didn’t look at Qayna, but she realized he was talking particularly to her, hidden as she now was back among the ranks of the Fallen, “is flee.”

Azazel, leader of the Fallen, turned and walked through the rubble of his Tower toward the main avenue of the city. In passing, he took the opportunity to kick Semyaz once more, in the belly. Semyaz grunted.

“Do not forget this day,” Azazel intoned deeply. “I am yet your leader.”

Qayna squeezed Jacob’s hand tighter and slipped away. The Fallen around her let her go, probably didn’t even notice that she was there. They hesitated only a moment, and then they turned and ran like she did, loping and scurrying and stampeding for the walls.

She didn’t mean to, but Qayna found herself following a path parallel to Azazel’s. She tried to turn left and move perpendicular to him, expecting that his course would take him into the heart of the action and the danger. Her way was blocked almost immediately, though; at the end of a short alley, she ran into one of the Swordbearers.

He was a giant, as they all were, and he wore the eyeless, visorless helmet of his office. He was wingless, because the Bearers of the Sword didn’t fly, they merely fell to earth to wreak their devastation. Flame erupted about the Swordbearer in a column, fire dripped like burning oil from his arms and sheets of flame trailed behind his enormous weapon. He swung his sword left and right, not like the blinded creature he appeared to be, but as if responding to some inner dictate that had nothing to do with the inputs of his senses. The weapon must be twelve feet long, Qayna thought—she had heard many stories of the Bearers of the Sword in her youth, told by the Bearers of the Word and repeated by her parents, but she had never before seen one and she felt awed. The weapon shattered wood and stone with equal facility, leaving smoking and shattered ruins behind with each blow.