by Tad Williams
“Let’s talk,” I said.
Over a glass of the poisonous red wine Orban favors, I made my pitch about the Matador. That bristling brow climbed up again. He knew how I felt about my car. “Tell you what,” he said. “I give you ten for it—”
“Ten!” I was so upset I spilled Bull’s Blood in my lap. “It’s worth twice that! More!”
“Shut up. You don’t hear me out. I give you ten for it, I promise not to sell it for three months. You pay me back the ten, you can have it. You can’t, I sell it and give you ten more.”
In other words, he was going to loan me the money on the Matador for three months, interest free. Which was a pretty damn decent thing for him to do. I didn’t say that, of course, because it only would have pissed him off. And I haggled too, because if I hadn’t he would have been mortally insulted. Orban wouldn’t front me any more money, but he did up the back end two thousand bucks, which confirmed to me that the Matador must be worth about thirty big ones. He’s not stupid, even when he’s doing somebody a solid. He also threw in a couple of dozen high-velocity silver slugs for my Belgian FN automatic. If I bumped into Smyler again I wanted to be ready.
I immediately gave him back two thousand of the money for an ugly, unarmored banger, an ancient stock Datsun 510 with so much bondo on the fenders it looked like it had mange. (The Super Sport had a brand new L78 under the hood, so it wound up being a little out of my price range.) Still, the old 510s could be zippy little cars, and Orban said the engine was good. I signed the papers, left the office while he opened his safe, then took the rest of my money in cash. Orban didn’t much believe in banks. Eighty benjamins makes too thick a stack to fit in a wallet, not to mention that wallets can be dropped or lifted, so I put the money in my underwear. Yes, I did. Deal with it.
The boxy little car handled surprisingly well. People used to customize the 510s for racing, although nobody’d ever bothered with this one. I stopped to grab some takeout at a burger place in the neighborhood, then I parked the new ride around the corner from my building under a streetlight which had just come on for the evening. I was locking it up when something smashed into me from behind, cracking my head against the doorframe so hard that I saw nothing but flashing sparkles for a few seconds. Then I realized I was lying on my back and something was squatting on my chest.
“Where is feather?” my attacker whispered. “Where? Hided somewhere?” The streetlight was just above us so I couldn’t see the face beneath the shadowing hood, but I could smell its breath, smell the rot. I carefully shifted my weight to get some leverage, but then I felt something press against my lower eyelid, sharp and steady as a doctor’s needle. “It going to find out. Yes, it will.”
six
broken
I KEPT VERY still. A door opened somewhere nearby, and the thing raised its head. The small movement made the blade glint with reflected streetlight, its point only a thin width of skin from my eye and the brain behind it. The door closed again, and the street was silent. I cursed myself for having parked in a residential neighborhood instead of the busier street in front of my building, but I’d thought I was being careful. How had the little bastard spotted me in an unfamiliar car?
“Feather. Tell it.”
“What feather?”
The tip of the knife, or whatever it was, pushed down until I felt it pierce the first layer of flesh. I sucked in a breath. “It say question. You say answer.”
“I don’t have it with me.” Which was mostly a lie—I wouldn’t leave a crucial object like that sitting around unprotected—but not completely. The feather was in my jacket pocket, as it always was, but since my buddy Sam had used special angelic powers to hide it there, even I couldn’t reach it. See, it wasn’t just in the pocket, it was in a version of the pocket that had existed several weeks earlier. Yeah, it’s weird, but all you need to remember is: Feather in jacket pocket but not within reach by any normal methods. “The feather’s hidden far away,” I told the withered horror-monkey on my chest. “I have to get it.”
Smyler giggled. It was all I could do not to throw up. Knowing something that should have been dead was perched on top of me was one thing; hearing that papery chuckle again was another altogether. God in His Heaven, I’d seen this thing burn!
“Go? You not go. You tell. Then it find.”
It. Smyler called himself “it.”
“Why would I tell you the truth? You’ll just kill me anyway.”
Again the whispery laugh. “Because it see your friends. It see who you like. It very smart.”
I wanted to believe that he meant he would just do plain old physical harm to Monica and Clarence and the rest, as he’d done to Walter Sanders. Then again, Walter still hadn’t come back. This thing on top of me apparently couldn’t be killed—was it possible he also knew how to prevent the rest of us from coming back to life? Not to mention that if he was looking for the feather, he must be working for Eligor, and only the Highest and his closest servants could say what a Duke of Hell might be able to accomplish. I couldn’t take that risk.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell if you promise not to hurt anyone else . . .” And as I said it I lifted my left hand in surrender—or at least I wanted it to look that way, because I had a lead cosh zipped into the other sleeve of my jacket. There was no way I would have time to get it out, but during the instant his hidden eyes turned toward my left hand, I swung my other arm up as hard as I could and clubbed Smyler on the side of the skull with the hidden piece of metal.
I’d hoped to smash his head in, or at least knock him cold, but I wasn’t that lucky. What I did manage was to snap his head sideways and give myself a moment to kick my way free. Then he was back on me, and we were rolling on the ground. The nasty little fucker still had that long blade, which he was doing his best to stick between my ribs. I managed to get my right arm up and took part of the blow on the hidden cosh, but it was a stab, not a slice, so it bounced off the metal and went all the way through the sleeve of my jacket and raked my belly. It burned like someone had tried to tattoo me with a soldering gun; it was all I could do to roll away and dig in my pocket before the thing came after me again. I couldn’t get my gun out in time, so I shot through the pocket, three slugs right into Smyler’s middle as he lunged at me, bang-bang-bang. If I hadn’t been paying more attention to my new ride than my own safety, those slugs would have been silver, but Orban’s new rounds were still sitting in my glove compartment, and I was still pushing plain old copper-jacketed hollow-points. Still, Smyler had a physical body, so I knew they would at least knock him down if not completely eviscerate him.
Guess what? Wrong again. The little bastard almost went to his knees, which at least gave me time to roll clear, but the three rounds I put in him didn’t do much more than make him stagger. I finally got the gun all the way out of my pocket and tried to put one right in the middle of his hood, but it was like trying to throw tennis balls at a startled cat. He zigzagged as I pulled the trigger, and I don’t think I even came close, then he was on me again. I clubbed at him with the gun barrel as that long blade slid past my chest and under my arm, slicing me again, and I realized two things at the same time: The first was that he was only trying to disable me, for now, not kill me—he still wanted to know where the feather was. But if this was Smyler holding back, I was in serious trouble, because he was fast as anything I’d ever faced. My other realization was that the only advantage I had was a little bit of size and the unusual length of his blade, which meant he had to swing his arm way back to be able to drive it home. As the momentum of his next attack brought him toward me, I dodged the thrust, lowered my head so I could smash the top of my skull into his face, then wrapped my arms around him and drove forward.
I didn’t do as well at avoiding the thrust as I’d hoped. His blade went through my coat again and took a big chunk of flesh out of my arm, which hurt even more than you’re thinking it did. I was bleeding badly now from several wounds and was going to be in a world o
f pain if I survived, but I was running on pure adrenaline and could only hold on and try to carry him down to the hard pavement.
Smyler seemed to have limbs everywhere. He wrapped his legs around me and squeezed my ribs until I felt one crack, but I had to ignore the pain, because I knew if I let go of one of his arms he was going to poke that nasty long knife thing into the back of my neck and then drag my paralyzed body away somewhere to ask his questions at leisure.
He wiggled his no-knife arm out of my grip and wrapped it around my skull, then squeezed until I thought the blood was going to fountain out of the top of my head. I could hear sirens, and I prayed they were getting louder, but it was hard to tell because my brain was full of thunder and red light. I’d lost my pistol somewhere on the ground but still had the cosh in the forearm of my coat, so I started smashing it against his skinny back as hard as I could, over and over, praying that I could crush one of his vertebrae or at least rupture a kidney.
He laughed. The horrible, pinched face was right beside mine, and if I hadn’t been fighting for my very life the stink alone would have made me throw up. As it was, my eyes stung, and not just from sweat. I could feel the sinewy strength in his slender neck and that horrid, jutting jaw trying to close on my ear, my cheek, anything it could tear at, and all I could do was try to keep my head stretched as far away as possible while I crashed the metal bar against his spine.
“It like dancing!” Smyler whispered. “Oh, yes. It dance to glory!”
But now the sirens were too loud to ignore. At least one police car was coming down the street toward us fast, lights glaring and jouncing as the cruiser bounced over speed bumps. I felt my attacker go slack for just a moment, distracted, and I risked loosening my right-arm grip just long enough to swing my weighted sleeve into the back of his skull as hard as I could. I’m stronger than most normal people, and although the hoodie he was wearing muffled the blow a little it would certainly have knocked any ordinary assailant cold if not DOA. My attacker just shook his horrid head as though his ears had popped on an afternoon drive in the mountains, then shoved my skull back against the ground with a nasty, cold hand. I braced for steel in my guts.
“See you, Bobby Bad Angel,” Smyler whispered. “Soon!” Then he sprang up and was gone, over somebody’s garden hedge and away into the darkness. As I struggled and failed to sit up, I could see the lights of a half dozen open doors, and people standing at their windows looking out. Then the spot from the police cruiser fell on me, filling the world with painful white light, and that was the last thing I remembered.
interlude
I WAS LYING on my stomach, drifting in and out of sleep. Caz was curled up behind me, spooning me. At first I thought she was just moving randomly against me, but then I realized that she was slowly rubbing her pussy against my tailbone, an almost imperceptible grinding and tightening, slow as the movement of glaciers. I wasn’t even sure she was awake.
I made a joke. I wish now I hadn’t. “So, is this a dominance hump? Am I your bitch, now?”
She froze. Seriously, she went rigid, like an animal trying not to be seen. After all we’d just done with each other, I’d somehow caught her by surprise, and it was like a window had opened that looked straight backward, five hundred years into the past, to a shamed little medieval girl, a Catholic nobleman’s daughter with feelings she wasn’t supposed to have.
“I . . . I didn’t . . .”
“Hey,” I said. “Hey! It’s all right. Actually, it’s more than all right. I was just making a stupid joke. You may not have noticed, but I do it a lot.”
“I was . . . I was smelling you. It just made me . . . well, you know.”
“And what do I smell like? Napalm in the morning? A good little angel?”
“Shut up. You smell like Bobby. I need to remember.”
That gave me a moment’s pause. I knew why she was worried about remembering, but I didn’t really want to think about it. I went back to silliness, hoping to retrieve the moment when we had been alone in the Garden without care or knowledge. “So you’re saying it wasn’t a dominance thing.”
“Don’t need to hump you for that, angel boy, it’s automatic. I’m a very high-ranking demon, remember.”
“Oh, yeah. Like I could forget after you tried to beat the shit out of me earlier this evening.”
“See? That was when I established my dominance.”
“Dominance, my shiny golden halo. It seems to me that I wound up on top of you, remember?”
“Only because I let you. We females have been using that trick for thousands of years. ‘Oh, you big strong man, you’ve overwhelmed me!’ And you always fall for it. Dumb dicks.”
“Yeah, well, a wise man once said, ‘As the twig is bent, so dumbs the dick.’”
For a moment she just stared at me. “That doesn’t many any sense at all.”
I considered. “Or maybe it’s ‘A mighty fortress is our dick.’”
She hit me. Not too hard, though. “No wonder I’m having trouble sleeping. I’m sharing my bed with a dangerous winged idiot.”
seven
drummed out
YOU’D THINK getting multiple stab wounds and broken ribs from a twice-dead assassin would be enough fun for one day, but it wasn’t over yet.
After my wrestling match with Smyler, I came back to consciousness just long enough to have some momentary sense of my physical body—which felt like a large sack of broken crockery wrapped in scalded nerves—surrounded by harsh white lights and medical machinery, then I was abruptly somewhere else.
That somewhere else, as it turned out, was Heaven, and although being lifted right out of all that pain and suffering into the bodiless exaltation of my celestial form was at least as good as getting a massive shot of Demerol, the relief was undercut a bit by the sight of my boss, Archangel Temuel, and the expression on his not-quite-face.
The farther up the heavenly ladder you are, by the way, the less you look like a regular person. As best I can tell, when I’m in Heaven I look like a shimmery, vaguely blurry version of my earthly self, although it’s hard to be certain because reflecting surfaces are oddly scarce upstairs. But Temuel (or “the Mule” as his underlings call him) always looks even blurrier than that, less human. And the higher angels only occasionally look like they really have bodies underneath all that glow. More as if the bodies themselves are just another kind of glow. Hard to put into words, but if you were here you’d agree with me.
“Angel Doloriel,” said Temuel. “God loves you. Are you well?”
“Better now, yeah. But somebody did a major number on me, and it’s not going to be fun to put that body back on again.”
“Of course.” Then the Mule went quiet for a long moment. I didn’t like the implication that it was no slam-dunk I’d be getting my body back. “We are wanted in the Hall of Judgement,” he said at last. “Come.”
Which would have sent shivers up my spine if I’d been wearing my regular body, I can promise you. Probably would have hurt like hell with the broken ribs, too. I’d only been in the Hall of Judgement once, and generally the things that happened there fell into the category of Really Fucking Serious.
Temuel reached out toward me and suddenly we were traveling. Or at least, we moved directly from Place A to Place B, which is how you travel through Heaven if you’re not interested in meandering around its airy, gleaming streets. The short trip didn’t give me any chance to ask questions, which may have been what the Mule wanted. He certainly didn’t seem very happy, so I wasn’t feeling that way either.
The Hall of Judgement is about ninety times as awesome as you can imagine. The important places of Heaven always seem to have a strangely fascist scope to them, as if the main purpose of their creation was to make individual human souls feel tiny. And you know what? It works. Does it ever.
The Hall is a bit like a human cathedral, but the proportions are so extreme, it’s obvious that earthly concerns like gravity, mass, and tensile strength didn’t come into
the equation; a tower of nearly pure light, with only enough spiderweb-thin structure to let you know you’re inside something. At the center of it, surrounded by a space where literally hundreds of thousands could gather even under earthly constraints, stands a massive pillar of liquid crystal—liquid because it’s moving, crystal because it’s moving so slowly you’d never know it if you didn’t know it, if you see what I mean. This diamond waterfall with a zillion internal facets is called the Paslogion, and it’s a sort of clock, I think, or at least it represents the same kind of idea. As to how to read it, don’t ask me. I don’t know if it really even works or if it’s just some kind of big decoration like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. I do know it’s one of the most awesome things I’ve ever seen. Just looking at it, you feel that if you did understand it, you’d understand pretty much everything about how the entire cosmos works, and that infinity probably sounds like the entire catalogue of J. S. Bach all played at the same time and yet totally in harmony.
All of this grandeur might have been less daunting if something was already going on when we appeared inside the Judgement Hall. But instead the place was empty except for me, Temuel, and the awesome Paslogion.
“And here I leave you.” Without any more warning than that, Temuel vanished. I couldn’t help wondering why he was in such a hurry to get out of there, and I couldn’t come up with any happy answers.
It’s hard to think negative thoughts in Heaven. Most of the time I’m there I feel like a baby seal brutally clubbed by joy, but I confess, my thoughts about Temuel going off and leaving me by myself were less than charitable.
What about the consolation of religion for the condemned man, I wondered. Isn’t somebody supposed to at least hold my hand while I wait to be executed? But if my superiors were finally going to clean up the mess I’d always been, why bother to bring me all the way here and then not even gather an audience? It would be easy enough to switch me off; for Heaven, probably easier than flicking a light switch. Did they just want to remind me how small I was before they stepped on me?