Sentinel of Heaven (41 page)

“No!  I won't
let them hurt you!”

“Spoken like
my valkyrie,” he chuckled, “but if I am due a punishment for the action of my
love I will bow my head and take it.  That is the example I must set for all
the Host.  It may be onerous, even painful, but it is my responsibility to
bear.  One thing the High Provenance will not do is sunder me from you or sever
our bond.  God may be stern, but they are fair in the end.”

“'God is not
here', you've always said.”

“They are not,
but we are – you and I together.”

“Together
always.  You are the god of my idolatry.”  She rose up on her palms to kiss him
from above, to glory in the tenderness of his gaze.

“And... your
husband?” he whispered.

Moira smiled
softly, touching the pendant at her throat.  His eyes followed her fingertips.

“Give me a
year,” she told him, her tone gentle.  “Give me a year and a day with you, so
that my foolish mortal heart will know you in all seasons.  So that your poor
human lover can gain some assurance that her great celestial Lord Commander of
a man won't get bored and turn away and leave her alone.  Your kind may love
forever in seconds; humans aren't so gifted.  It might arrive in an instant...
and for me I think it did... but I won't trust it truly until it's proven
itself in time.”

“A year and a
day,” he repeated; it had the ring of a vow.

“And a war,
besides.  And should we both survive and we still love each other, I'll wear
your torc and you mine.  My mate, my lover, my angel, my lion!  My Leo!”

“Should we
survive...” His eyes gathered sorrow at their corners again and he pulled her
down to him for the comfort of her touch.  “Yes, that is the question.”

“We have
broken the back of Molon Labe, you and I together!  What could possibly stand
against us?”

Ithuriel
kissed her then with controlled passion, with channeled yearning, with a
finesse that sheathed a raw craving.  He kissed her like a drowning man would
chase the open air.  Served by the deliberate art of eight thousand years of
love-making he enthralled and enchanted his mortal lady of sixteen hundred
questions so that she would lose this last one to their passion – made as it
was in airy confident thoughtlessness – and forget that he refused to answer
it.

Moira dreamed
again that night, as the susurration of the waves guided both angel and mortal
to sleep.  She dreamed of what had once been a raw pit in a great mountain
range, a spiral descent like Dante's into Hell, down and down. 
Strip
mining,
part of her thought.  Tainted earth and torn rock, turned to new
and dire purpose.

Prisons built
on prisons.  An oubliette.  A place of dark forgetting, and of power.  She
strolled the empty path between empty dungeon cells on insubstantial feet,
naked and alone.

I will
have to tell this to Leo tomorrow,
she thought.

She instantly
forgot that decision.

Down and down
to the very bottom of the spiral, to an old elevator, a small open cage that
descended on a chain through hundreds of feet of solid bedrock.  The weight of
the earth over her was oppressive in her mind.

At the end of
the shaft there was a wooden footbridge, down where light and water and insect
dare not intrude, dry and solid with a sleek black-stained grain.  It crossed a
chasm that dropped even further into the center of the earth, carved by
tormented hands.  She could not see the bottom.

Nine circles
of runes lined the floor of the tunnel ahead.  The numbers and words and
symbols there flowed through her sleep-complacent brain.

At the end of
the tunnel was a small door and fresh air generated from it in a steady stream,
clean and clear as the wind from the ocean.

Moira brought
her ghostly eye to the grate in the door.

A being sat on
the floor of the cell; cross-legged, eyes closed, serene.

Moira had little in the cell as a size
comparison but if the femur the red-scaled creature dangled forgotten from one
slender and gracefully-clawed hand was a human's, he could not have been any
taller than herself. 

And it was in
fact male; he sat resplendently naked in the one overhead light of the round
room, his tiny ruby scales his only covering.  His maroon-colored hair was
roached in a thick crest like a mohawk that swept away from the delicate
features of his human-looking face.

Human-looking,
until he smiled.  His lips parted all the way to the pointed ear on either side
of his head, displaying rows of sharp white teeth.

He opened his
eyes.  They were faceted green emeralds, bewitching.

“The little
sparrows have all flown,” he purred in a deep voice that seemed too large to
originate in his slender chest.  “I feel the difference.  They no longer lay
over my head and they no longer walk the earth, therefore they must be flying. 
That must have bloodied your nose, somewhat.”

He chuckled
sensuously.

“Your power is
on the wane, keepers; I have seen it!  The game I have long tired of nears its
end gambit.  I may be buried here but still I see...”

His scaly lips pursed with surprising
facility, mobile as flesh despite their reptilian appearance.

“You called
down the lightning upon yourself with your tawdry strategies; your little
scuffles and your dreams of control.  You called down the Spear – the Spear of
Heaven!  But more than this, oh, more...”

His laugh was
like razors and roses; she felt her sanity warping under the sweet-shadow
pressure of it.

“You've
unearthed the Javelin.  The Javelin, the Earth-light, the motive Spear,
Heaven's mate – the Spear Who Is Thrown.  She throws herself!  And who knows
where she will land?

“I do, for
it's my purpose to know, my purpose and my will.”

He let his
eyes drift closed and with an expression of anticipation and of bliss spoke
only one word.

“Moira...”

She backed
away from the door, wanting to turn to run but didn't seem to be able; wanting
to wake herself but was caught in the claws of the creature whose mind ventured
far from where his body was held – the creature that somehow knew her name!

And as she
cast her eyes desperately from the door she saw the walls of the tunnel were
covered in names, carved by hundreds of thousands of hands in almost as many
languages.  Apophis, Jormungandr, Quetzalcoatl, Ananta Shesha, Lotan, Typhon,
Bahamut, Demiurge, Amatsu-Mikaboshi – and more she couldn't read, but the one
above the door was clearest and deepest-gouged and seemed to engender all the
rest.  She remembered the atavistic fear that reading it gave her, even when
everything else including the name itself erased from her mind upon waking:

LEVIATHAN

Chapter 1 –
"I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes"
is from Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing'.

Chapter 2 –
"Flashing eyes and floating hair... for he on honey-dew hath fed and drunk
the milk of Paradise" reference Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'.

Chapter 3 –
Moira here quotes lines from John Donne's 'To His Mistress Going To Bed'.

Chapter 5 –
Leo is reading Edgar Allan Poe's 'Evening Star'.

Chapter 9 –
Moira's sonnet book contains lots of work by John Barlas under the pseudonym
Evelyn Douglas; this one is Sonnet 11 from 'Love Sonnets'

Chapter 13 – Leo
and Moira trade more of John Barlas's 'Love Sonnets'; Sonnet 15 and Sonnet 35,
respectively.

Chapter 15 – A
sonnet called "The Renegade" by Vox Mortuum, © 2013, used here with
permission.

Chapter 17 –
Leo quotes from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", for Moira's
delight.

Chapter 23 –
Leo reads Moira the last stanza of Algernon Charles Swinburne's "A
Match".

Chapter 30 –
Leo's talk of gathering up the winds and swimming against the maelstrom is a
nod to Arnaut Daniel, a 12th century troubadour.

Mera Trishos Lee is a thirty-four year old craftswoman
living in Atlanta, Georgia.   When not chasing her dreams or her two black
cats, she spends a good deal of her "free time" making soft
sculptures and various other fiber-art.  During the week-days she works as a
web-designer for a multi-national company who is probably happiest not knowing
that she also writes sci-fi/fantasy horror smut for the discerning
intellectual.

For a full list of her currently available catalog of work,
please visit http://www.MeraTrishosLee.com