Jovah's Angel (36 page)

Alleya headed toward the rendezvous in Semorrah with no clear idea what she would say to the merchants and Manadavvi who awaited her there. She and Jerusha and Micah had agreed that their best course was to stress the importance of the Gloria, coming up in three short months, and the opportunities for disaster that it offered.
If we do not present a harmonious front to the god, will he not punish us with thunderbolt and destruction? Did it not happen in the time of Gabriel
? Her adversaries did not seem to have looked that far ahead; they appeared to be interested only in the profit potential of the present.

In her free moments, Alleya had continued reading her purloined history books, looking for more clues to catastrophes in the past. She had found very little that was weather-related once she got past the founding of Samaria, but one odd little story held her interest long enough to keep her up late one night, reading. It was the tale of an oracle named David who claimed to have come face to face with the god, having been whisked by Jovah's hand to a floating tower somewhere in the heavens over Samaria. David was generally considered mad, and his stories had been rigorously repressed even at the time. In fact, Alleya read the account in the old language because the translator had omitted it from his version, as if to keep the story from spreading down through the centuries.

But that did not help her solve the mystery of Jovah's inattentiveness now.

With a sigh, Alleya closed her books and went to look out her small window at the night panorama before her. It was late; she had been reading far too long for someone who planned to take
off early the next morning. She had hoped for a comforting glimpse of the glittering night sky, but clouds shut out all light overhead, even the moon. Instead she gazed down at Velora, illuminated even at this hour by a multicolored mix of torchlight, gaslight and the new electrical light that burned with such a cool, unwavering fire. The world was changing even as she watched; no way to avert those changes.

She rested an elbow on the sill and pillowed her cheek in her hand. What was she going to say to Gideon Fairwen and Emmanuel Garone and Aaron Lesh? She had come close to begging Delilah for help, but none of her pleading had moved the dark angel. In fact, that night in the Edori tent, as they endlessly shifted and rearranged themselves in an attempt to get comfortable, they had come close to a shouting match that would have roused the whole camp.

“I understand! You feel hurt and angry and abandoned—I understand all that!” Alleya had exclaimed in what must have seemed like the most unsympathetic of voices. “But this is more important than you, and
you
must understand
that
! If the merchants and the Manadavvi choose to desert us, what happens to Samaria? What happens to the cities and the trade patterns and the lives of the farmers? How can we keep our society functioning at all if the most powerful members withdraw their support? It is not merely a problem of flooding across the eastern plains, Delilah—we are looking at the disintegration of the life we know.
Help
me. Tell me how to deal with them, what to say to them—”

“I don't have any idea!” Delilah had cried. “Even if I were whole, even if I were Archangel, what could I say to these people that you cannot? You think I don't see what is happening, what could happen, to all of us? Of course I do! I don't know how to stop it! Only Jovah can stop it, Alleya, only Jovah can hold us all together—and he can do that only if he listens to us, if he holds back the storms, if he proves to the merchants that he trusts the angels so that they should trust us as well. Does Jovah listen to you, Alleluia? Because he has not listened to me for a long time. How can I make the merchants believe in me if the god does not? How can you?”

But that had not helped at all. Alleya sighed again, propped her other elbow on the windowsill and leaned her other cheek on that hand. What would she say to the merchants, the Manadavvi, the Jansai, the angels?
Jovah listens to me, but only sometimes, and you should listen to me now
. That was sure to hold their
attention. That was certain to keep them faithful. She closed her eyes once, tightly, then opened them again, and continued to watch the lights below as if they could flash her some kind of secret message.

She took off for Semorrah at first light—or what would have been first light if the early morning rains hadn't turned everything gray. It didn't seem worth the effort to pause and pray for sunshine, so she just endured the wet, feeling her hair, her clothes, the feathers of her wings, grow slick and sodden within the first five minutes of flight.

She had assumed the rain would clear up within ten or fifteen miles, but in fact, the farther she flew from the Eyrie, the more tempestuous the storm became. Once or twice she was caught by an unexpected gust of wind that tossed her above her course the way a playful father might toss his infant over his head, and she found this most unnerving. She was used to riding the currents, taking advantage of their dips and swirls; she was not used to having them treat her like a snowflake or an autumn leaf to be flung about at random.

Still, she had flown in worse, so she kept going. It was hard to gauge her progress, because the rain made every wingbeat heavier and slower; she thought it might take her half again as long to make it to Semorrah as it usually did. Which meant, if Samuel and her other angels followed her at noon as they planned, they might not make the river city till nightfall. She had told Samuel she wished to arrive alone and separately so the merchants did not feel threatened by a sudden eruption of angels into their city; in fact, she had just wanted a few extra hours of solitude, to think about her strategy and clear her head. As the storm worsened, she was beginning to regret her decision. This was not the sort of weather she liked to be caught in alone.

Another blast of wind shoved her sideways, temporarily causing her to lose her rhythm and her altitude. Alleya drove her wings hard, climbing higher, trying to peer through the curtain of rain below her to get a better sense of her bearings. She almost felt as if she could take her two hands and push aside the misty veil before her, it was that thick and substantial. Hard to see anything, really, not the ground below or the horizon ahead; it would be easy to miss her way. Another snarl of wind spun her
backwards, made her dizzy. She fought to right herself and was amazed at how much strength it took.

Perhaps it was time for a weather intervention after all. She began to sing, tilting her head back to aid the prayer in its ascent to Jovah. She felt the words leave her mouth and disintegrate about her head in the sullen air. Hard to believe Jovah would heed that. She must go higher.

She increased the sweep of her wings, aiming for higher elevation, but the air around her was so thick that she felt herself tiring even as she started to climb. So thick that she felt her breath clog in her chest. She could not see, she almost could not move; for a moment she was suspended in a great, gluey web of clouds, wings extended and mouth sucking for air.

And then suddenly the wind shifted, roiled over her, shook her like dice in a cup. It lifted her feet over her head, dropped them back toward the earth as she was wheeled in a sickening circle. Now air currents pummeled her from two directions, rushing in on her, then jetting away. Her wings almost tore from her body. Instinctively she folded them forward, wrapped herself in their cocoon, and immediately felt herself plummeting toward the earth. A cry of panic ripped from her throat; she heard it unravel above her as she fell backward toward death.

Desperately, she unfurled her wings, beat them against the treacherous air. Like a skidding mountain climber grasping at a protruding root, she managed to catch herself, safe for the moment. She hovered briefly, panting for breath, trying to get a sense of the currents around her. Everything was wild, helter-skelter, malevolent; she could not read the pattern of the air.

Sudden small flurries caught her from below, from the left, but she was able to ride them out, coast back to relative calm. What was happening here? This was no ordered movement of winds, no comprehensible mix of cold air and warm air doing a sinuous but predictable dance. She had tracked wind her whole life; she knew how it was supposed to behave. This was utterly random, mindlessly vicious. This was not wind under anyone's control—not hers, not Jovah's.

Even as the thought crossed her mind, she was rammed from behind by a solid wall of racing air; she was pushed before it like debris brushed away by a hand. Again, she cried out in terror; again, she lost the sound as the wind swept her back and forth, scrubbing her across the empty countertop of air. She tumbled over and back, like a child rolling down a hill. Again, she clamped
her wings to her body to keep them from tearing from her back; and she felt herself plunging earthward with no way to halt her fall.

She slammed into a rocky soup of mud, and spun three times before she fetched up hard against a broad tree trunk. She couldn't breathe, she couldn't think, she couldn't see. Everything was pain and darkness and terror. Around her, the rain poured down in a fierce, defiant onslaught. It took her a long time to realize that the surface below her was stable ground, and would not betray her with sudden motion.

Shakily, she forced herself to sit up and check her damages. She was alive, that was one thing; and if she tried, she really could breathe. She could even open her eyes and look around her. The first thing she spotted was blood on her feathers, and the sight made her frantic. Dear Jovah, she had broken her wings. She was a cripple like Delilah. But a few seconds of experimentation brought a flood of relief. Her wings were sore, but functional; she was essentially whole.

But the blood had come from somewhere. Touching her face, her hands came away covered with a watery red liquid, so she must have cut her cheek or her lip or her forehead. Since she could see and could purse her lips, she supposed the injury was not profound. Of course, she might have split her head open, or even suffered a concussion; at the moment, she was too woozy to judge. But that could be dealt with later.

Next, she tentatively moved her arms, her legs. She thought she had probably sprained her left ankle and she might have broken one or two of her left ribs; that half of her body burned with an excruciating fire. But every muscle responded and nothing appeared to be fixed at an awkward angle, so she didn't think she'd snapped a bone.

“Good news,” she whispered, trying to cheer herself up. “The god was watching out for you after all.”

And that was so patently untrue that it did her in. She started crying, and it seemed like hours before she was able to stop.

The storm cleared up about an hour later. Alleya had stayed that whole time under the shelter she had been flung to: a great, overhanging beech tree whose weeping branches created a makeshift, somewhat leaky chamber. She had managed to compose herself enough to administer rudimentary first aid, binding her ankle and
her visible cuts with strips torn from the clothing in her backpack. Night was falling and the air was growing decidedly cooler. As a rule, angels had no fear of cold weather—their bodies were built to withstand the icy temperatures at flying altitudes—but Alleya felt weak enough to dread the thought of spending a night outside in the cold and the wet.

So she forced herself to her feet and limped her way clear of the clinging tree, and cast a long, considering look at the limpid sky overhead. She would have given anything to not have to take flight again, now, this evening. She was afraid her wings would not hold her suddenly tremendous weight; she was afraid the perfidious wind would rise again and wrench her from the sky. She knew that this was a fear that would never leave her, a fear that would grow stronger and blacker the longer it was left unattended. So she spread her great, damp wings, fluffed them twice, and took off on a slow flight as low to the ground as possible.

She had covered maybe fifteen miles when she saw the lights of a house below her. It had been clear to her from the first mile that she did not have the strength to make Semorrah tonight. Either she had lost more blood than she thought or adrenaline had sapped her body of all its reserves, but she was weak and dizzy and incapable of sustained effort. When she saw the lights, she banked immediately, and came down in a somewhat less than graceful landing in the center of a small assortment of buildings. One of the modern farming conglomerates, no doubt; she'd swear that the exterior lights were electrically powered. Good. That meant whoever ran the place was probably sophisticated enough to hold a rational conversation with an angel—might even know which angel she was.

She staggered to what appeared to be the main entrance, almost sobbing every time her weight came down on her injured ankle, and wondered what she would say to whoever answered her summons. At the door, she pulled the chain that activated the interior chimes, leaning her head against the solid stone of the wall.
I am the Archangel Alleluia, I am in need of shelter for the night
. The words circled in her head, but she had no chance to utter them. As the door opened and light spilled festively out, onto her ragged clothes and her bloodstained wings, she crumpled silently into a dead faint at the feet of total strangers.

So she was a day late making her rendezvous in Semorrah. But all in all, she had to feel lucky. Her hosts did in fact recognize her—they had been petitioners at the Eyrie not more than three months back—and they instantly sent servants and children running for the proper medical supplies. Once Alleya revived and told her story, they insisted that she spend the night, maybe the next two nights, watching her wounds and recovering her strength.

Once she saw herself in a mirror, she had to agree.

She had a gash in the top of her head, half a dozen smaller slices around her cheeks and chin, and a spectacular bruise forming all around her left eye. Her hands and arms were a crisscross of scratches, and her left leg was purple from thigh to heel. She looked like the angel of death, she thought, smiling a little grimly. She would frighten anyone who laid eyes on her.