Jovah's Angel (48 page)

Half-a-dozen angels formed a crescent on the far end of the plateau, apparently taking complaints and offering what assistance
they could in the Archangel's absence. Caleb pushed through the crowd till he arrived at the side of a young, handsome angel with a sulky expression on his face.

“I'm looking for the Archangel,” Caleb said without preamble. “It's important that I talk to her, but I understand she is not here?”

The angel gave him a haughty, considering look and shook his head. “She left an hour ago for other duties.”

An hour ago! Caleb knew his face registered dismay. “And where did she go? Can I find her somewhere else?”

“I am not free to repeat such details,” the angel said.

“One of those men over there—I heard them say something about Gaza. Is that where she's gone?”

“The Archangel travels many places. Gaza may be one of the sites she plans to visit.”

Caleb wanted to strangle him. “Do you know—can you tell me—when she'll be back at the Eyrie?”

“It is impossible to tell when the Archangel will return. If you are having problems with weather or plague, one of the other angels will be happy to hear your complaint.”

“No, I must talk to Alleya.”

The angel gave him a sharp look when Caleb used the familiar name. “If you wish to leave a message for the Archangel—” he began stiffly, but he was suddenly interrupted by one of the older angels standing nearby.

“You're Caleb Augustus, aren't you?” the second angel asked.

Caleb turned to him eagerly. “Yes. I'm sorry, do I know you?”

The older man waved his hand. “I'm Samuel. I was the one who directed you to Alleya last time you came. To fix the machines.”

“I need to talk to her.”

Samuel nodded. The younger angel stood listening, protest written in every line of his body, but Samuel took Caleb by the arm and drew him aside. “Asher's a little protective of the Archangel, but he means well,” Samuel said with a slight smile. “She can do with a few protectors.”

“Yes,” Caleb agreed instantly. “Can you tell me where she is? I want to go to her.”

Samuel gave him a quick, appraising glance, but it was clear he had already made up his mind, or he would not have circumvented Ashen “She's in Gaza at the moment, or on her way
there,” he said. “But she plans to go to Sinai when she's through with the Manadavvi.”

“Sinai! Did she say why?”

“She can be most evasive,” was Samuel's dry response. “I believe she's looking for information.”

Caleb was frowning. “So—how long do you think she'll be gone?”

“A day there, a day to Sinai—” The angel paused. “Do you have transportation?”.

“A horse.”

“If you leave now, you could get to Sinai at about the same time she will.”

Caleb nodded. “Yes, I think I'll do that. Stop for some more provisions before I leave Velora, and ride straight for the mountains.”

“Do you know how to get there? Do you need a map?”

“Thank you, I know the route. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your help—”

Samuel smiled. “A guess only,” he replied.

“A guess?”

“I think she'll be glad to see you.”

Caleb held out his hand and was pleased when Samuel shook it firmly. “Thank you again. If she's happy to see me, I'll tell her you sent me. If not”—he laughed—“I won't mention your name.”

“Jovah guard you,” Samuel said. “Travel safely.”

A few short hours later, having taken a brief nap and restocked his supplies, Caleb and his sturdy mare were back on the road. He was chasing across the entire province after this particular woman. Not that he minded. He would cross the world for her.

The journey took him that whole day and most of the next one; and then there was the problem of the mountain. Well, the oracles expected company, so there was a path, but it was steeper than the one to Hagar's Tooth and even rockier. Caleb stood at the base of the mountain and looked up as far as he could see, sighing a little. Oh, to be an angel and merely glide to the top of the peak on the most convenient spiral of wind. And this was clearly not a road he could expect his horse to climb, so he was back to his own two feet again.

“You did so well last time, let's hope you can take care of yourself again,” he murmured to his mare as he unpacked his bags and set her free. Ground cover was sparse in this part of the
world, but adequate, he thought; she should stay content enough for a day or two. If she was gone when he returned, well, he would walk back to Velora, or wherever Alleya had flown to next.

He settled his saddlebags over his shoulders, took one more measuring glance at the trail in front of him, then resolutely took his first step forward and started the wearisome climb.

For a long moment, Alleya stared at the screen, incapable of responding, unable to believe she was correctly interpreting the words that the god had spelled out. That was it, of course; she had misunderstood. Her book would explain what Jovah was really trying to say.

But she paged through the entire slim textbook, and nowhere did it offer an alternative definition of the words “SEND HELP.”

She pursed her lips, took a deep breath, and spread her hands once more over the keyboard. “You need assistance?” she asked the god.

The reply came back with unnerving swiftness. “Yes. Send technician immediately.”

Technician? “How can a technician help you?” she queried.

The reply made no sense to her at all, though she could pick out certain words: “repair,” “circuit board,” “malfunction.” None of these words appeared in her guidebook, either.

“How can I help you?” she asked when Jovah's words came to a halt.

A one-word reply. “Teleport.”

As before, incomprehensible. She continued to ask questions as if they were reasonable, as if she were carrying on a logical conversation that she understood. “How can I teleport?”

This reply, at least, sounded sane. “Type in the word ‘teleport' at the prompt, hit Enter, and within twenty seconds move to the inscribed pentagram on the floor in the center of the room.”

She glanced over to the middle of the chamber, but from this angle she could make out no sigils on the stone floor. She pushed the chair back, crossed the room and, bending low, inspected the floor. At first she could detect nothing through centuries of wear, but then, faintly, she was able to trace a star-shaped pattern that had been cut into the rock itself. She took a few moments to mark its five points with books snatched at random from the nearby archives. Twenty seconds was not long; she did not want to waste them seeking the pentagram again.

Although what would happen at the end of the twenty seconds, she could not even begin to guess.

Returning to the interface, she stood over the keyboard and typed in a message to Jovah. “I am ready,” she said. “Is there anything else I must do?”

“Only what I told you,” he replied. “Come quickly.”

She nodded, as if he could see her, and carefully keyed in the letters one at a time. “Teleport,” she wrote, then hesitated a moment, and touched the Enter key.

She ran to the pentagram, being careful not to disturb her books, and then stood there for the longest time, waiting for something indescribable to happen. Would a door open, would a voice speak, would the world around her magically change? But nothing moved or reacted. How long had she stood here—five seconds, fifteen seconds, forty-five? She should have begun a countdown when she first touched the keyboard. Perhaps nothing would happen. Perhaps the interface was broken, perhaps even that method of communicating with Jovah had failed. She would stand here a moment longer, she would begin counting now. Once she reached one
hundred
and twenty, she would know something had gone wrong, and she would return to the interface.

She had reached the number five when two things happened at once. The air around her began to haze over with a glittering golden aura, and she heard someone shout her name. “The god is calling me!” she thought, a certain happiness cutting through the apprehension that had wrapped around her heart, and then the metallic, iridescent curtain drew taut around her.

She felt her body explode into a million tiny fragments, felt her hair and her fingertips and her toenails separately and distinctly detach from her body. She wanted to scream, but her throat had been ripped out; her heart clamped down and vanished. Something colder than ice, hotter than flame, washed over every inch of her body, and then her skin dissolved. In that instant, she once again heard a voice call out her name.

She could not tell how much time passed before she attempted to open her eyes again. She spent a good long time marveling over the fact that she was not dead, though she could not with certainty say she was alive. She seemed to be lying on some kind of cool, level surface, perhaps marble, perhaps not. She felt—odd—disembodied, as if she did not weigh as much as she should, as if
she had been hollowed out and laid aside. As if her thoughts were no longer in her head. As if she had been disconnected from her body.

But she could flex her fingers and curl her toes; and her hands, when she put them to her face, found only the smooth contours of her spare cheeks and her closed eyelids. And she was breathing, and she could feel the galloping pace of her heart. And odd little hissing and gurgling noises were skirling past her ears, so she could still hear. So if she could still see, then presumably she was more or less whole.

But when she opened her eyes, she had no idea what she was looking at. The world seemed a mishmash of white and chrome and blinking lights. She shut her eyes again quickly.

She lay there another moment or two, but she would learn nothing this way—not where she was, not what Jovah wanted from her. He was her god; surely he had not brought her here to harm her. She opened her eyes again and pushed herself to a sitting position.

She seemed to be in some kind of round room walled in white, though it was not constructed of stone or wood or even any metal that she could recognize. She was indeed on the floor, which seemed to be made of the same material used for the walls. In a near-perfect circle lining the interior of the room was a bank of screens much like the interface at Sinai, though the keyboards beneath the screens varied radically. Some were not keyboards at all, but consisted of a series of flashing lights arranged in colorful rows. Indeed, now that she examined the screens, most of them looked very little like the interface she knew: They displayed images of lines and dots in mysterious configurations, and as she watched, they altered.

She did not know where she was or how she had arrived here, but surely Jovah had sent her here for a purpose. Surely there would be a way for him to tell her what that purpose was. She made herself stand up and examine the screens more closely. And there was, as she had been sure there must be, an interface like the one she knew.

She approached it cautiously and examined the keyboard. Yes, laid out just like the one at Sinai. She breathed a soundless sigh of relief. Then Jovah was still available to her somehow. She positioned her fingers over the keyboard and typed, “Jovah, are you here?”

But the reply was not what she had expected. Sonorous,
mighty, echoing from the round walls around her, a man's deep voice replied, “Yes, Alleluia, I am.”

She shrieked and fell to her knees, weak with a primeval terror. She had wanted to touch the face of the god but she had not thought she could do it; and she had not thought his face would look like this. “Jovah!” she cried out, her hands cradling her head as if to shield herself from his sight. “Jovah, I am afraid!”

But the voice did not immediately speak again. Instead, even more terrifying, the texture of the air changed. A golden glow began to build up beside her in the chamber, a whirling luminescent cloud of ensorcelled dust. Crying out Jovah's name again, Alleya flattened herself on the floor in supplication, and waited for the god to strike.

Caleb had never been to Sinai, or, indeed, any of the retreats of the oracles, so it had taken him a little time to navigate the echoing gray halls. “Alleya?” he had called out once or twice, but he could not bring himself to raise his voice to the level of a shout; there was something about this place that discouraged violence, even violent sound.

So he made a few fruitless investigations of small waiting rooms and obviously disused passageways before the hallway abruptly widened and he sensed that he was approaching the main living quarters. He quickened his pace and forbore to call out the Archangel's name again.

When he moved into the great chamber that was clearly the heart of the maze, it took him only a few seconds to glance around and realize he had found his quarry. She was standing unnaturally still in the middle of the room, her head tilted as if she was listening to some voice inaudible to him. He took a deep breath and another step forward—and then stood frozen to the spot in horror. Alleya was enveloped in a mist of gold and topaz, and the look on her face was one of stark terror. “
Alleya
!” he screamed, bounding forward, but he did not reach her in time. “
Alleya
!”

She was gone. Where she had stood was nothing but gray, unimaginative stone, and not even a sparkle of the traitorous haze remained.

Frantic, he ran back and forth across the confines of the room, touching each wall, as if she could be lurking behind those solid stones, as if only the effect of mirrors or illusion had caused her
to disappear. He hurriedly inspected a book room off to one side, peering around each shelf, as if she had taken shelter behind one, as if she was merely hiding. But she was gone. He had seen her vanish.

Well, this was the god's waiting room, after all. Although Caleb could not even guess how she had been removed, surely Jovah's had been the hand that had taken her. And he knew of only one instrument on Samaria that anyone could use to directly question the god.