by Vivian Shaw
“What are we supposed to do?” the angel almost screamed. “God’s not answering, what are we supposed to do?”
Samael’s hands closed in his hair, tight, for a long moment: when he let go and opened his eyes again, he seemed to have regained some control over himself.
“What you’re going to do is fight back,” he said. “For as long as you can. Where’s Michael?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know where anyone is!” There was a crash in the background, and the angel’s terrified face vanished briefly in a cloud of dust, the whole picture shaking. “They’ve broken into the administrative center!” it managed between coughs. “Samael, help!”
“I’m going to,” said Samael, and a moment later the screen went blank white and then fizzing with static, the idiot noise of an open carrier wave. He turned to see the crowd massed at the room’s entrance, and Grisaille saw with a kind of dim, sick-feeling shock that his eyes had gone blank scarlet from lid to lid and were giving off visible light.
“Right,” he said. “Things are about as bad as they can possibly be. A foreign force of angels has broken through from the neighboring universe and is laying waste to Heaven, and it’s anybody’s guess whether we’re going to be able to stabilize reality before our erstwhile colleagues get slaughtered. We can’t rely on help from this universe’s Most High, who as far as any of us can tell, seems to have gone on an eighty-year sabbatical, so we’re all there is, and we’ll have to do. Fass, you’re on monitoring and intelligence; deputize whoever you need to and run the simulations in real time, I want to know what that rift is doing. Ahriman, you’re communications—set up a direct line and give me visual to Heaven as soon as possible; send out a mass announcement through all broadcast structures that combat volunteers are urgently needed. Meph, I want you to get in touch with Faust and tell the hospital to prepare to receive evacuated casualties; you’re my liaison to the medical center. Beelzebub, Mammon, you’re with me; get started immediately preparing volunteers as soon as they arrive. Ozymandias, you’re infrastructure, you have the best supply-chain management capabilities; get started sourcing equipment and weaponry right away. Any questions?”
Grisaille was still just drunk enough to give in to the urge to raise a finger. “Is this the end of the world?” he asked. Heads turned to look at him and Ruthven at the back of the crowd.
“We’re going to find out,” said the Devil. “Okay, people, go.”
The first real intimation Greta had of things going very badly wrong was the earthquake.
It was the first earthquake she had ever experienced, and she hadn’t known the south of France even had them. That it had chosen to occur right when Greta was finishing up her interrupted work on Maanakhtef’s foot was, she thought, a clear and present proof of Sod’s Law.
She managed not to hurt him, at least—she had snatched her instruments away as soon as it began—but the sterile tray with all her other instruments had slid to the floor in a musical crash, along with several of the jars on the counter. Greta cursed; the nurse let out a yelp, and Maanakhtef made a surprised creaky noise.
She couldn’t help thinking of him falling and shattering, of how much work she’d had to do to repair the damage Van Dorne had caused by proxy, and got up to page the nurses’ ready room, picking her way through broken glass and scattered instruments. It only took a moment to order a wellness check on every single patient, but actually doing it would take more time.
“What happened?” Maanakhtef asked, drowsy and confused.
“That was an earthquake, and I have no idea why. And now I need a new set of instruments out of the sterilizer, Sister, and call the janitor to clean up this mess.” She was going to finish this surgery, no matter what. And as long as she was working, she didn’t have room to think about the larger, looming problem of what the hell to do about the stela and the woman from New York.
The nurse hurried to obey.
Ruthven had been down here long enough to be utterly unsurprised at the efficiency with which Samael’s conference room was transformed into a command center. Banks of monitors were being set up at the ends of the table, some of them already scrolling data. The main screen was showing standby blue as of yet, but the peculiar grey glass ring Fastitocalon had set in the middle of the table was clearly the source of the slowly turning model of the inter-universe rift made out of cyan light hovering above it.
He and Grisaille had made themselves scarce, getting out of the way while the other members of Samael’s Council of Nine sped off to do his bidding, and had then simply made themselves unnoticeable, standing in a corner and watching as demons hurried in and out with equipment. Impenetrable IT jargon in Hell sounded a lot like impenetrable IT jargon on Earth, it turned out.
Samael had been busy directing the team on where he wanted which monitor, and then had had a brief talk with Fastitocalon when the latter arrived with the grey glass projector, looking exhausted. Neither of them had looked particularly happy about whatever conclusion they had reached, especially when Fass tapped the glass thing in a specific pattern and the blue-light projection sprang into being. The rift, modeled in cyan-blue 3-D wireframe, looked to Ruthven like any other tear in any other fabric, and that somehow made it worse. It was the—mismatch thing again. Too ordinary to be as vast and cosmically significant as it was.
Fastitocalon had done something to the projector, and the image changed; the rift began to heal, its edges drawing together seamlessly until there was nothing left, just faintly glowing air above the table; he tapped it again and the rift reappeared, tearing open much faster than it had closed. He ran through the simulation several more times at Samael’s request, slower or faster, stopping here or there to enlarge a point.
Ruthven wished he knew the beginnings of any of the mathematics necessary to understand what was going on, but was not about to interrupt them to ask. Eventually Samael had seemed satisfied, and Fastitocalon had hurried out again, back to his own office, leaving the Devil briefly alone.
He was standing with his back to them, tapping his fingers on the table, which appeared to be made out of a single vast cultured pearl, thirty feet long. “You might as well stop being invisible,” he said without turning around. “I know perfectly well you’re there.”
Ruthven felt his face go briefly warm, but he and Grisaille stepped away from the wall, dropping the don’t notice me influence all at once. “Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t mention it.” Samael turned, looked at the pair of them. “I can’t imagine any of this is particularly pleasant or entertaining, and I do apologize for the inconvenience; if I were you, I’d just go back to the café and get quietly bombed out of my mind and let us worry about this war.”
Ruthven and Grisaille looked at one another. “Actually,” Ruthven said, in the same tone he’d often used to tell Fastitocalon to stop apologizing for being unwell, “I was going to ask if there’s anything at all we could do to be of assistance.”
“No,” said the Devil, and passed a hand over his face. The weary, resigned expression was incongruous on those exquisite features, Ruthven thought. “There’s not a—damn. Wait. Yes. There is. Go over to the hospital, report to Faust, see if he can use a couple of spare pairs of hands—I’m betting he’ll need them when the casualties start coming in.”
Ruthven shared another look with Grisaille, but just nodded. “Of course,” he said, and managed to squash the urge to salute.
The short journey over to Tower Three took them several minutes longer than it usually might, simply because of the volume of traffic: demons hurrying in all directions, most carrying equipment and supplies. The plaza was thronged with what had to be volunteer reinforcements, and as Ruthven and Grisaille went past, skirting the edge of the wide expanse, a couple of rather larger demons started shouting them into some semblance of order and rank. It was a relief to get inside away from the noise, but as soon as they reached the hospital itself, more chaos became evident.
“Gets things
done fast, doesn’t he, that Sam,” said Grisaille, in an undertone, as they stood to one side to let nurses roll enormous, presumably medical machinery past. “Not a person for whom one would wish to dillydally in the course of one’s duty.”
“Dillying or dallying would seem to be ill-advised,” Ruthven agreed. “It’s the most efficiently run small country I’ve ever encountered, and the majority of citizens seem to like it. There’s malcontents, there’s always malcontents, but they’re pretty rare. Did you notice the one item of social architecture this place doesn’t have?”
“A monorail?”
“I speak metaphorically. And I missed it, too, at first. There’s no police force.”
Grisaille blinked at him. “Really?”
“They don’t need one. Roll that around in your head for a bit.”
One of the nurses who’d been pushing the machine came back over to them suspiciously. “What are you doing here? You’re the vampire, aren’t you, the one with the curse.”
“Vampires plural,” said Grisaille. “Sorry for the lack of notice, it’s très poorly bred of us, I know, but we’ve been dispatched on the direct order of the Adversary to lend a helping hand with the wounded warriors. Mop a brow or two. Roll the odd bandage, sort of thing.”
The nurse’s eyes, which were slit-pupiled and green, narrowed. “Stay there,” she said. “I’m going to get Dr. Faust.”
“Splendid,” said Grisaille, and the eyes narrowed further before she turned and strode off. Ruthven elbowed him. “Ow!”
“Do you have to be intensely witty at inopportune times?”
“I can’t help it, it’s in my nature,” said Grisaille, and fluttered his eyelashes. “To thine own self be true.”
Ruthven knew the facetious byplay varied directly with Grisaille’s levels of stress, and sighed, slipping an arm around his waist. “I know. It’s all—a lot.”
Grisaille leaned his head against Ruthven’s shoulder. “It’s a lot a lot. Maybe we should’ve taken his first suggestion.”
“No,” said Ruthven, “not having something to do would make it worse. You know that.”
“I hate it when you’re right.”
“I know.”
Leonora Van Dorne could not clearly remember a time when being what and who she was had not possessed a single ounce of weight. Even her earliest memories were tinted with the awareness that, if she simply complained to her father, whoever was thwarting her desire would stop doing so, and it only grew more and more clear as she got older: she was meant to be in charge. Other people were for doing what she wanted them to do, the way small furry squeaky things are meant to be eaten, and sleek sharp-toothed things are meant to take their meal at ease.
As a young woman, she had been aware of being beautiful, and used it like a calculated battering ram, triangulating her approach for the most effective attack. She had been the kind of beautiful that starts with good bone and is heightened with exquisite, deliberate skill: expensive skin care, the best stylists, the only clothes; expertly applied makeup, the catalyst of just the correct piece of jewelry to bring it all together in a collective well-aimed blow. Her appearance had always been her foremost weapon, with her intellect coming next, and the enormous expanse of her wealth backing the first two up with endless, endless ammunition.
And so when she had begun to see the first horrible hints of aging—when she had seen a faint shadow in sidelight under her eye, a place where the skin had begun to lose its elasticity, and far, far worse, when she had seen the hint of wrinkles in the skin of her throat, the beginning of crepe—she had thrown everything she had at the problem to make it go away. Surgery, more expensive skin care, facials. It had worked for a while.
The moment when she first saw the sagging in skin that had been artificially pulled taut by sutures and firmed by chemicals, when she knew it was no longer her battle to win, had been terrible. The knowledge that she had lost the thing she valued most, and that attempting to carry on as if it had not gone would only invite ridicule, was a blow that saw her barred up in her house for a week, ignoring phone calls, pacing through her lovely rooms in black despair.
But she was a Van Dorne, and Van Dornes did not give up: they regrouped. She had spent the latter half of that week intently focused on creating a new Leonora Van Dorne, one that had crow’s-feet, one whose jawline was not that of a twenty-year-old coed, one whose hands were no longer smooth with the taut skin of youth but showed the veins and tendons underneath. This version dared the world to tell her she was old, because old did not matter when you were brilliantly rich and also the classier sort of eccentric.
She’d always loved Egyptian art, but now she threw herself wholesale into the study of it. Taught herself Egyptian, slowly and painfully, from the books written by the people who’d worked it out themselves and changed the world. Traveled, collected, wrote articles. Learned to think of people dead for two thousand years as something quite like friends. Became an unofficial-yet-recognized authority. That authority, and the wealth to back it up, had settled into the place where her beauty had once been, as her sword and shield against the world. All the determination that had been her driving force for her entire life had been focused on this one pursuit. It had worked. For decades, it had worked.
But then she’d found the spell. And the spell had really worked.
And just like that, those decades of self-creation crumbled under a desperate drive to regain what she had lost, to see again in the mirror the self she still secretly felt she was, coupled with a gnawing, growing need for the rush of energy and euphoria the spell brought; and so she had used it, again and again, so many times she didn’t remember them all, each time destroying a small and irreplaceable piece of the past. Each time destroying—she knew now—a piece of a person.
How mummies could be, could exist, Van Dorne didn’t understand, any more than she understood how magic words could make her young again; but sitting very still in a chair in the room she’d been locked in, she thought now that there wasn’t any difference at all.
Helsing—was that really her name, a ludicrous name, and that hair, had she had it cut with garden shears, and whoever had told her she didn’t need to wear makeup had been lying—had taken her to see four other mummies after she’d—well. After the first one. All of them had been people, in a way Van Dorne didn’t see many humans as being. All of them had lived in the world she’d spent so long studying and imagining. They had seen the faces that inspired her own statuettes. They had been there. They had been part of it. And now they were here, desperately fragile, needing to be repaired all the time to stay functioning, and—she barely recognized empathy, it wasn’t an emotion she’d had much cause to explore, but she thought she understood a little of what that might feel like.
She was thinking about this when the first earthquake struck, rolling the chair she sat in a little way across the floor. Van Dorne had been to California more times than she could count, and had been through a few earthquakes in her time; she recognized the sensation at once. Through the locked door she could hear running feet, voices raised in sharp concern, and thought unbidden, One of them fell, when I—when I did it that time—and the doctor had to rebuild half his side—
Van Dorne had had a lot of plastic surgery. She knew about rebuilding oneself. I hope no one broke this time, even if it’s not my fault, I hope, I hope, I hope.
It was only about twenty minutes later that the second earthquake arrived, much worse than the first: she scrambled under the desk as it went on and on and on, sending cracks through the walls and plaster dust pluming down from the ceiling. The window cracked with a single sharp note but did not shatter—
—and the door frame, into which the lock’s tongue fitted, first bent and then broke. Van Dorne watched, staring, as the bright metal of the still-engaged lock caught the light, swinging free.
The second earthquake frightened Greta in a way the first had not. They were sitting in the conference room when it hit, trying to co
me up with something, anything, to deal with the current situation vis-à-vis stolen art objects and magic spells, and one of the light fixtures fell and shattered on the table, making her scream a little despite herself. “Get under the table,” said Tefnakhte sharply.
“What the fuck is going on?” Cranswell said over the rattle and clatter, eyes wide, as he pushed his chair back and climbed under the table’s edge. “What’s happening?”
Another musical crash told them the second light fixture had followed the first, and a moment later the window joined them. Glass scattered; huddled under the table next to Varney, Greta was glad of its protection. The jagged, unsteady motion was making her feel slightly sick. “I don’t know,” said Tefnakhte, “but it’s not normal—”
The shaking stopped. She stayed perfectly still for a long moment, waiting to see if it would start up again, but the ground seemed to have settled.
When she did crawl out, the room was noticeably dimmer: too dim, even without the overhead lights, and Greta looked at the shattered window. The sky outside was darkening rapidly; a rising wind stirred her hair.
“It’s going to rain,” she said, sounding inane even to herself. “It hasn’t rained the whole time I’ve been here—”
“That’s not ordinary rain,” said Varney behind her, and she’d heard that leaden heaviness in his voice only once or twice before, in very bad moments. She turned to look at him; his pupils had shrunk to tiny dots, the metallic dark grey of the irises like twin mirrors. She could see herself reflected in them, small and distorted but present, and behind her the gathering darkness as the storm approached.
“What do you mean, not ordinary rain?” Cranswell came to join them.
“I can smell it,” said Varney, and a moment later so could Greta, faintly: not the wild sweetness of petrichor, but something much sharper, coppery and unmistakable.