Jovah's Angel

by Sharon Shinn

  “Really,” she interrupted. “I don’t have much interest. Talk to Joseph, see exactly what he wants.”

  He watched her a minute, trying to see behind the perfect skin that lay so luminously over the bones of her face. “And why ask me?” he said.

  “You’re supposed to be the resident genius.”

  “I mean, as opposed to Noah. His reputation equals mine.”

  “Ah, well, Noah,” she said, casting her eyes toward the ceiling with a small smile. “I think perhaps Joseph might be a little jealous if Noah spent all his days and all his nights at Seraph. He thinks that Noah distracts me, you see.”

  It had been a subject of much speculation between Caleb and his far more interested Edori friend: Exactly what was the relationship between the angel and the owner of the bar? She could not be attracted to him; Joseph was the sort of man who grew only less appetizing on greater acquaintance. Noah favored the dark idea that Joseph had some kind of malevolent hold on Lilah, refusing to release her from unwary promises given in the past. Caleb’s own theory was that she was seeking a life as wretched as she could stand, to divert her from an interior pain that he would guess was nearly unbearable. He had chosen not to voice this opinion to Noah.

  “And does Noah distract you?” he asked pleasantly.

  She smiled. “I find him quite endearing. So sweet, you know. I didn’t believe such purity really existed.”

  Caleb snorted. “He’s not quite an innocent, you know. The Edori—”

  She waved a hand impatiently. “Oh, spare me the tales of Edori promiscuity. That’s not what I’m talking about. He has an un-corrupted heart. So few people do. And they’re never men.”

  “Thank you on behalf of my sex.”

  She laughed at him. “I don’t think you’re corrupt, exactly,” she said. “But you’re not pure-hearted. You’re a little cynical about people in general. The worst never surprises you, though you’re always delighted by the best. You take what comes, enjoy what you can and shrug off the rest.”

  It was an eerily accurate reading from someone who was virtually a stranger—and a self-absorbed stranger at that. But he remembered hearing, somewhere, in some forgotten conversation, that Delilah had been the best ever at reading other people, identifying their motives and using their foibles against them. The new Archangel apparently did not have this skill.

  “And won’t Joseph be jealous of me if I’m there all day and all night?” he asked abruptly. “I come to hear you almost as often as Noah.”

  “Oh, no. You don’t worry him. I told him you don’t like me.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Did you? For the sake of expediency, or because you think it’s true?”

  She was smiling that covert smile again. “Oh, it’s true. You think I’m—untrustworthy. You think I’m merely flirting with your friend. You think I have a capacity for wounding people—and that I like to do it.”

  He replied just as candidly. “I think you’ve been hurt enough to figure other people deserve a little pain. Spread it around a little.”

  “You see what I mean? Noah would never say a thing like that to me. He’s not cruel enough.”

  “Would Joseph?”

  “He’s not clever enough.”

  “I don’t pretend to be clever and don’t wish to be cruel. I don’t dislike you. I don’t entirely trust you. I do wonder how you deal with all that misery unless you can find ways to channel it someplace.”

  Her dark eyes mocked him. “Misery?” she repeated.

  “If my hands and eyes failed me and I could no longer do the work I love—yet my mind remained active, inventing things I could never actually put together—I think it might make me a wretched man. I know who you are, Delilah. Noah knows. I would imagine everyone who sees you knows. It’s a hard secret to keep.”

  She sat up straighter, a little flare of anger washing color across her face. “If I had wanted to be secretive, I would have hidden myself in Hagar’s retreat and shunned the company of mortals,” she said haughtily. “I would not have climbed on stage to sing with a voice that everyone in Samaria recognizes. Naturally people know me. But few of them choose to taunt me with my past.”

  “I wasn’t taunting you,” he said softly. “And you know it. You read me right, but I believe I understand you well enough. I have no wish to make my best friend jealous merely to provide you diversion. If Joseph is so interested in having me wire up something in his place, tell him I’ll see what I can do—as long as Noah does the job with me. Would that satisfy him, do you think? Would it satisfy you?”

  She stared at him a long moment, flags of fury flying across her cheeks. But, give her credit, she did not refute the accusation. He thought that, as a change from Joseph’s oiliness and Noah’s purity, she might find his forthright astringency a refreshing change. He couldn’t help it; a warm smile escaped him, and he shook his head.

  “Come on,” he said, rising to his feet and holding his hand out to her. “I will buy you dinner. I’m hungry after all.”

  She waited a mutinous moment. “If you think you’re safe with me,” she said. “If you’re sure you won’t succumb to my wiles.”

  “I’m sure,” he said, earning another quick look of resentment. But then, surprising him, she laughed gracefully and acquiesced. She allowed him to pull her upright and usher her from the apartment. Caleb paused to lock the door behind them, wondering what in the god’s name he was going to tell Noah about this evening.

  Later, Caleb would date his friendship with the fallen Archangel from that evening—not the dinner itself, though he enjoyed it immensely, but from that swift, honest conversation in his apartment beforehand. Over the meal, they laughed and talked like old friends, Delilah favoring him with her wicked and dead-on views of the most prominent civil leaders of Luminaux and, when he knew them, the men and women who dominated the rest of Samarian society. Reviewing the conversation later, he was surprised to remember that he had done more than his share of talking, mostly under her gentle ironic prodding. So that she had learned more of him than he had of her, except that she was exceedingly pleasant company when she chose to be.

  Though it was hard to imagine falling in love with her. She could dazzle anyone, he had no doubt, but love was a different matter. It would be like attempting to embrace a star, dizzyingly above you in a winter sky. He did not aspire so high.

  Noah, he was convinced, had no such trouble imagining that fate, though he never spoke of the state of his heart. When the two men talked of Delilah, which was often, they spoke in more general terms.

  “I wonder if she finds it strange, the company she keeps these days,” Noah once said. They were, of course, at the back table in Seraph, nursing their third or fourth glass of wine. Delilah had just finished her last set and had been called to a table of Semorran visitors—wealthy young women, or so it appeared, vacationing here on their parents’ money. “She used to be first among angels. She arranged dinner parties for the Manadavvi, and the river merchants bribed her with expensive presents. Now, the shopkeepers and the wine sellers call her by name, and the little girls who would have been afraid to touch her hem insist that she sit with them and taste their wine.”

  “And those she has chosen as friends don’t seem too promising, either,” Caleb responded. “Me, a rootless inventor, and you, one of the godless Edori.”

  “Hardly godless,” Noah murmured.

  “By the angels’ criteria you are. An Archangel and an Edori—now, that’s a strange pairing.”

  “Not so strange,” Noah said. “There was just such a pairing not so long ago.”

  True enough; though the marriage of the Archangel Gabriel and the Edori slave woman Rachel was hardly the ordinary fabric of divine life. “Well, a hundred and fifty years,” Caleb drawled. “I don’t believe the two races have even spoken since.”

  Noah smiled faintly and lifted his glass. “Here’s to improving harmony between the mortal and the angelic,” he said. “I stand ready to do my pa
rt.”

  But that was as far as the talk went; Caleb wondered how deep the dreams had gone. It didn’t help matters that he and Noah had accepted Joseph’s job offer (which had nothing to do with sound, in fact, and everything to do with improved lighting), which took them to Seraph on a daily basis. Delilah was never there during the days (apparently she was a late riser; they never once saw her before the sun went down). Still, her presence informed the place like a perfume, and all the modifications they were doing were specifically designed to focus more attention on her while she stood upon the stage.

  Delilah was never there, but Joseph was never absent, and the two men grew heartily sick of him before the first day was over. He liked to watch them work, offered ridiculous suggestions, and shared with them details of some of the shrewd business deals he had made in the past. More than once he offered to set them up with “a nice girl, she’s friendly, she likes Edori” or “a beautiful brunette, a Jansai princess. Her mother and father guarded her too long, as the Jansai do with their women, and now she wants to learn about what she missed.”

  “Do you think Delilah knows?” Noah asked once after they had declined the offers with enough force to send their employer from the room. “I think he’s actually housing prostitutes, maybe in this building. Do you think we should tell her?”

  Caleb thought again of the expression that always crossed Delilah’s face when Joseph came anywhere near her—a mixture of revulsion, relief and mental obliteration. As if she were thinking, This is as bad as it gets. No worse. “She knows,” he said.

  “I think we should tell her.”

  Caleb shrugged. “You do it, then.”

  “Well, she’d leave him then, don’t you think?”

  And Caleb thought, as he often did, You may love her, but you don’t know her nearly as well as I do. Then again, perhaps that was why Noah loved her.

  It was impossible to tell how Delilah viewed Noah. She seemed to treat him as she would any infatuated schoolboy, with a mixture of affection and mockery. She was never unkind to him, but she was never particularly genuine with him, either. But something—his devotion, that innocence she found so attractive—drew her to him night after night when she could have been pleasing Joseph much better by mingling with the wealthy and powerful patrons of the establishment. If Noah was at Seraph, sooner or later she would come to his table, if only briefly, and exchange a few words and a smile. Caleb had observed no one else to whom she paid the same degree of attention.

  One night in particular stood out as typical of the strange, troubled relationship. It was several hours past midnight and Caleb was longing for his bed. But Noah had insisted they stay just another five minutes, just another ten, till Delilah made her ritual appearance. When she finally made her circuitous way to their table, she refused to sit, but stood with her hands folded on a chair back, chatting idly.

  “I hate this time of year, don’t you?” she asked. “It’s dark and it’s cold. By the time I wake up, it seems there are only two or three hours of sunlight left.”

  “You should try getting out and enjoying the beauties of the season,” Noah suggested. “I’ll take you walking some day. We’ll look for the birds that have come south for the winter, and watch for ice on the river.”

  She laughed and flicked her gaze to Caleb. “Now, that’s a proposition I haven’t heard since my teenage years,” she said. “I never believed in any of that let’s-look-for-baby-deer routine, but somehow I think our good-hearted Edori would really take me on a nature walk.”

  “Probably do you good,” Caleb responded. “Noah can identify trees and shrubs for you, too. He knows everything about plant life—what’ll cure you, what’ll kill you. He’d probably even find the herb that would sweeten your disposition.”

  “Ah, I don’t want sweetening, I want amnesia,” Delilah said. “I’d be the nicest girl you ever could imagine if only you could”—she paused and lifted one hand to give it an indeterminate wave—“clean out some of these dreary thoughts in my head.”

  “For that you need science, not medicine,” Caleb told her. “You must have heard how dangerous electricity is. A stray current can lance right through you, erase everything in your brain.” He glanced around. “We’ve got a few loose wires here. Would you like to try it?”

  “Caleb!” Noah exclaimed, but Delilah merely laughed.

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” she promised. “If things ever get too grim.”

  “I would hope, before they got that bad, that you’d try a few other remedies first,” Noah said.

  Now she gave him her attention, and a smile that was genuinely sweet. “Don’t worry about me, kind Edori,” she said. “Suffering is the only true gauge we have.”

  “Of what?” Noah demanded, but she did not answer. Joseph, who had been exchanging pleasantries with three men at a nearby table, had just then appeared at Delilah’s side.

  “And what did you think of the concert tonight?” he asked, lacing his massive fingers through Delilah’s small ones. Her hand, lost in his, looked like a doll’s. “Lilah’s voice pleased you?”

  “As always,” Caleb replied. “We are both addicted.”

  “We are all addicted,” Joseph said. He tucked his free hand under the angel’s chin and gave her a quick kiss on the mouth. Caleb felt Noah go rigid beside him; his own muscles tensed, though it was hardly the first time they had seen the Jansai kiss Delilah. She, as usual, made no move to draw away, showed no expression that could be read without liberal speculation. Casually, when Joseph dropped his hand, she turned away and picked up Noah’s wineglass from the table.

  “I’m so thirsty,” she murmured. “Thank you, of course.”

  And she took one swallow and set the glass back down. But Caleb could not help thinking that she wanted the drink to wash away the kiss, and sipped from Noah’s glass because his touch had alchemized the wine into something purer. Fanciful, of course, but Delilah inspired fanciful thoughts. There was nothing about her that was mundane.

  That Noah had seen the gesture as something entirely different was evident by the smile on his face; he thought she honored him by drinking from his goblet, setting her lips to the rim where he had placed his own mouth. A kiss across glass, so he read it—and who was to say that he was not right instead, or in addition? She was as complex as the mysterious flame that ran through their wires and switches. They would always be guessing with mistresses such as these.

  And so they spent their days and most of their nights at Seraph, although Caleb simply had to break away from time to time. For one thing, he had other jobs in the city to complete; for another, he was not by nature happy to be pinned to one place.

  “You should have been born Edori—you’re wanderer enough for it,” Noah told him one night when, for a change of scene, they had decided to have their evening meal at the Edori campsite west of town. Caleb recognized only two or three of the ten people seated on mats and rough stools around their cooking fire, though Noah seemed in some vague way to be related to them all. That was the Edori way; anyone was welcome at any tent, at any campfire, and young boys Noah had never once mentioned would approach him casually and call him “brother.” If it didn’t get too suffocating, Caleb supposed, such intimacy might have a certain appeal.

  “And getting itchy feet—itchier by the day,” he agreed. He hitched his stool closer to the fire. Even in the warm southern provinces, winter made the night chilly. “When is that trip we’re supposed to take in your machine? What have you been calling it—the Beast? That would break up the dull routine very nicely.”

  One of the older Edori men looked up from his stew. “Is that the trip to Breven?” he asked. “To meet with Marco?”

  Noah nodded, not seeming to mind this intrusion into a private conversation. “Yes, Thomas, but not for another two or three weeks,” he said. “That’s when all the other Edori will be arriving in Breven, and we’ll get a better idea of numbers.”

  Caleb was bewildered. “But what ar
e you saying?”

  “I told you—I have a client interested in motorized boats.”

  “Edori clients? But where are they going? Edori don’t travel by water.”

  Thomas laid aside his plate with the air of one preparing to enter a deep philosophical discussion. “Only way to get where they’re going is by boat,” he said softly.

  “But—” Caleb began, and then stopped. “Oh, surely not,” he said. “They can’t believe you can build a motorboat that will take them all the way to Ysral.”

  “If not Ysral, where?” the old man said. “If not now, when? The hills and valleys of Samaria are closing against the Edori. Once there was not a mountain, not a river, not a desert that we could not cross, not a stone we did not recognize, for we had been to the place where it was chipped from the ground. The Edori lived everywhere. And now—”

  “Now,” a much younger man joined in passionately, “we are herded together in sanctuaries that no farmer and no Jansai would think it worth his time to spit on. Are we expected to farm these havens? Mine them? Merely to camp there, living off the rocky land that cannot even sustain its wildlife? These are not sanctuaries, my friend, no matter what the allali call them. They are living cemeteries. The Edori have been sent there to die.”

  “But Ysral—” Caleb started.

  “It is far,” Thomas conceded. “We do not know how far. But the Edori have traveled great distances before, and endured hardship to get there, and with Yovah’s guidance arrived safely. We can make it to Ysral and our new life.”

  “But no one has ever been to Ysral—or at least, returned to tell of it!” Caleb exclaimed. “There are no maps—you have no idea what hazards lie in your path as you cross the ocean, what storms may beset you, or how many days you will be on the journey. You do not even have any proof the place exists—you could sail on for eternity, till your sailors die and your food runs out and your boat rots beneath your feet.”