Read Something More Than Night Online
Authors: Ian Tregillis
Something More Than Night
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.
To Mark Lopez, Mary Lopez,
and Mark Falzini:
for a birthday
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Daniel Abraham, S. C. Butler, Adrienne Crezo, Elena Giorgi, Vic Milán, John Miller, Matt Reiten, Melinda M. Snodgrass, Steve Stirling, Sage Walker, and Walter Jon Williams for smart feedback and helpful suggestions. Thanks also to Edwin Chapman, for copyedits; Dr. Corry L. Lee, for Feynman diagrams and discussions of quantum angeldynamics; and Linda Piper, the real-world model for Ria’s tattoo. I’m also grateful to my agent, Kay McCauley, who found a home for this book, and my editor, Claire Eddy, who made it a great one. Finally, I’ll never be able to thank Sara Gmitter enough for her love, enthusiasm, persistence, and patience.
Contents
1. You Should Hear the Funeral Choir
2. Mistakes Were Made, Now Let’s Move On
4. The Most Popular Girl at the Debutantes’ Ball
7. Don’t Get Up, I’ll Let Myself Out
8. Just Be Glad It Wasn’t a Tuba
11. The Simple Art of Interrogation
18. This Isn’t Covered in the Enchiridion
1
YOU SHOULD HEAR THE FUNERAL CHOIR
They murdered one of the Seraphim tonight.
Gabriel streaked across the heavens like a tumbling meteor, his corpse a fireball of sublimated perfection. He had been a creature of peerless majesty, but now the throes of his death etched the firmament.
His wings, all six, shed embers of incandescent grace as he skidded across the night sky. And when he opened his mouths to scream, the Earth could do naught but shudder. The roar of his lion’s visage registered a 5.2 on the Richter, six hundred miles east of Kyoto. The bellow of his ox’s muzzle roused a dormant volcano in Hawaii. The shriek of his eagle aspect crumbled chimneys in Seattle. The inaudible cry from his human face left people from Melbourne to Perth weeping in troubled slumber, dreaming of colors that no longer existed and sounds that hadn’t been heard since the Earth was just magma and poison. Meanwhile, turbulence roiled a cloud of dark matter sleeting through the solar system.
But that was Gabriel for you. Platonically perfect, blindingly beautiful. He wasn’t just lovely, he was the kind of lovely that could make a bishop stomp his miter and curse a long blue streak on Easter Sunday.
Don’t believe me? I saw him do it once. On a bet.
Fun guy, Gabby.
Gabriel had been there when the sun emitted its first feeble glow, flapping his wings like a bellows to fan the coals of Creation. After the planets congealed from hot primordial soot, Gabriel’s gentle breath cooled the Earth’s crust. And when the onion-skin atmosphere needed protection, it was Gabriel who stirred the Earth’s molten core with his flaming sword to impel the dynamo that would deflect the ravaging solar wind. He’d serenaded the cyanobacteria that pumped oxygen into the primeval atmosphere and sang a dirge for the dinosaurs.
He had a real fondness for this place. And he never begrudged the monkeys.
Yet for all that, if any of the monkeys had bothered to notice, Gabriel’s death would have looked to them like fragments of space junk entering the atmosphere. Yeah. That’s how they perceive the violent death of an immortal being: unremarkable junk. Was he a spent rocket booster skimming through the ionosphere? Or maybe the shredded remains of a kinetic harpoon cleaving the aurora?
But nobody looks up anymore. That stopped soon after the last satellites died. In the minds of most monkeys, thirty years of meteor showers was weak tea compared to the loss of decent long-term weather forecasts. Hard to blame them. This joint could have used some decent climate monitoring.
A chill wind whipped the Bass Strait into a froth, driving the weight of melted ice shelves to thunder against the floodwalls a few miles to my south. I tightened the collar of my overcoat, pulled the fedora lower over my brow, and retreated into the meager shelter of a laneway. A trio of Australasian businessmen shuffled past me, their guilty downcast eyes reflecting the neon glow from a topless bar. (Looked like real neon, too. Don’t see that much anymore. It’s been all OLEDs for decades.) None of these men was the poor sap I’d come to find, so I lit another pill and watched the light show overhead.
The heat of unbeing, the friction of conflicting Magisteria, crumbled Gabriel’s wings to ash. The ash sparkled on the way down like a rain of silver moondust.
It became snow.
The flakes sparkled in the dim, inconstant light of the laneway. And wasn’t that fitting: his wings, those glorious divine pinions, eternally aglow with the echoes of Creation—more luminous than sunrise on burnished platinum, more delicate than starlight washing against a dewy cobweb—reduced in their final moments to parroting the epileptic flicker of antique signs advertising fifty-dollar joy girls.
Some might shrug and say, that’s the monkeys for you. That there’s nothing so sublime they can’t find a way to defile it. But I prefer to think they just don’t know any better. So did Gabriel.
I caught a whiff of rose attar and old books. That was his scent. One of them. It was clear and sharp for a second, but then it mixed with the odor of overflowing rubbish from the dim sum place across the lane. The garbage won. Gabriel was fading.
Wind muffled the double
ding
of a street tram. The rattle and buzz of the tram dopplered up the laneway while overhead the disintegration of Gabriel’s halo momentarily outshone the full moon. The noise receded with the tram and resolved into the staccato clatter of footsteps.
Time was running short. I studied the newcomers: a mugg with a bit of high-class fluff on his arm.
Ink on his neck, and his heavy coat swayed against the wind. Something solid in his pocket. Was he rodded? Maybe the twist at his elbow liked the thrill of running with a wrong gee.
As for her … She stood a thumb shorter than he in high-heeled boots, a tall thin statue wrapped in a wasp-waisted black coat that might have been cashmere. When the wind whipped the hem of her coat, I glimpsed smooth leather hugging her calves. Nice gams. Curls like brushed copper fluttered beneath the brim of her cloche. Her stride was firm and purposeful, like that of a CEO or dominatrix, moving without hesitation on the slick snow-dusted paving stones. She walked like the world was made of red carpet.
They headed for a gin mill across the street and a few paces down from my alcove. He grabbed the door. She paused, tugged his elbow, turned a porcelain face to the sliver of night above the lane.
“Hey, look,” she said. “Up there.”
Okay.
Almost
nobody looks up anymore.
He took all of two seconds to glance at the sky and witness an angel’s murder. “It’s just junk.”
See what I mean?
“No…” A flicker of doubt tugged her brows together. “This is different. Can’t you see?”
“C’mon. It’s cold out here, Moll.”
Moll? Go figure. Another gust swirled ash into my eye. I flicked my cigarette aside and reassessed the flametop.
Her eyes were a little too close together, but they sparkled in the light of Gabriel’s death. Her lips parted in a posture of wonder. It wasn’t junk. She didn’t know what she was seeing—no human could—but she knew damn well it wasn’t junk.
She was no good for me. There was something going on behind her eyes. But her steady … now
he
had promise. His lack of initiative gave me high hopes.
The wind had extinguished my cigarette before it hit the ground. I fished out another. Overhead, Gabriel’s debris tore the night. I approached the couple. Slowly.
“Got a light, Jack?” The mugg frowned. I gestured with the unlit pill in my hand. “The damn wind, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said. He dug into his free pocket, the one without the iron. The twist released his arm and gave me a quick once-over, eyes narrowed with a suspicion she probably reserved for unwelcome suitors and hard-luck swells. She retreated into the laneway for a better view of the light show above. When she turned her face to the sky, her neck assumed the pale graceful curve of a swan’s back. A burgundy scarf fluttered against a pendant sheltered in the hollow of her throat. Red ice sparkled on her ears and neck. It matched the scarf. She knew how to put herself together. Gabby would have liked her.
I put the pill to my lips, leaned into the flame of his lighter. The sharp smell of butane briefly washed away the smells of rotting dim sum and dying angel. I puffed, wondering if the dame could smell the latter.
“Thanks,” I said, and made fleeting eye contact. Nothing provocative. Didn’t want him to think I was sly on him. Didn’t want him to ape out, either, especially with the iron he carried. I hate getting shot, and tonight of all nights I was plenty low already. But I wanted to read him, and get a sense of the human behind those eyes. I kept my glamour dialed down—what I had left of it, anyway—so as not to send him into a wing-ding. I needed him lucid. Couldn’t have him drooling on the fluff. Up close, that coat did look like cashmere.
Now the fixers, the sharp shooters with the industrial-grade glamours—like Gabriel, Rafael, Uriel, and the rest—they could lobotomize a monkey with less than a wink. Which is one reason they don’t come down here much anymore. Too messy. (That, and on account of Gabby’s being dead.) In addition, I think they tired of spawning a new religion every time they took a stroll on Earth no matter how carefully they soft-footed the natives. It got stale.
The tension went out of the mugg’s shoulders. A low frown creased his face, but it was loose and slack like a diaper tied by a drunken bachelor uncle. Then he shook his head, realized he still held the lighter, and clicked it shut. The whole thing was over before his girl deigned to look at us again.
I got what I needed. I was looking for somebody who wouldn’t rock the boat in a time of crisis. Somebody inclined to go with the flow, who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions. A dull little trooper, in other words. Such were my marching orders. This guy was perfect. He wasn’t burning with curiosity about anything.
Not that I had a lot of precedent to guide me. Nobody had ever done this before, far as I knew.
So that was me. Good old Bayliss: charting new ground. And none too thrilled about it. I’d been strong-armed into a dirty job and couldn’t wait to leave it behind. I’d pretend tonight never happened, pretend Gabriel was still up there carving graffiti into the celestial spheres.
So I settled on the loogan. Yeah. He’d do. He’d do just fine, the poor sap. Also, I didn’t have much choice. Gabriel was just about gone.
“What’s got you so worked up, sister? Sky falling?”