by Mike Wild
All of it... all of it was this thing.
Verse waded into the lake, uncaring of what it contained, sudden rage consuming him. As equally uncaring of the response it might bring, he fired off his shotgun as he moved, one cartridge after another, blasting the side of the angel until the automatic's ammo was spent and, when it was, the priest span the gun around and began to slam its butt against the wall of blackened flesh.
It took a while for him to tire, but as he did, he thought, What the hell am I doing? There was no harming this thing with shotgun shells or wood. The artefact was the only thing that could do that. The Angel Killer.
Calmer, Verse studied the thing, hands sliding almost gently over its scaly surface, the priest returning to his original intent of trying to feel if there was anything of its origin left. He felt only corruption, the effects of whatever outside force had transformed it, remade it time and again as the endless years had gone by. He'd at first thought that its changing appearance had been only telepathically induced, but now he knew it was utterly physical, too. The angel's black scales, he realised with sudden clarity, were not scales at all, but scabs - and the foul lake in which it sat much more than a simple sacrificial pit. This thing had been near to death following its divine fall, broken and ruined, but as time had gone by it had found the means to restructure its shattered self.
The lake was its own primordial soup. It was a biochemical bath filled with all the nutrient and protein and genetic material it needed to be what it would be. And...
My God.
Verse couldn't know that the lake was currently of a much lower depth than it had been even when Hannah had encountered it, but he could guess at what the reduced depth meant.
The soup was no longer needed.
The angel had reached its final form.
It was ready to leave.
The priest turned, waded quickly from the lake, intent on getting this news to Brand. Only then did he realise that during his preoccupation the cavern had become more illuminated. The torches held by the acolyths of the Centre for Celestial Truth were the cause. Only you aren't acolyths, are you? Verse thought. Only dead things out of hell sent to replace the poor souls who make up the lake behind me.
The hooded figures moved towards Verse, but the priest didn't move. He couldn't. Because the torches had illuminated more than the acolyths - they had illuminated the cavern walls. And what in the dimmer light he had mistaken for shifts or undulations of the rock were actually something else entirely. Brand had wondered why the angel had been summoning the soul-stripped down to the cavern, and as slaves or food was only partly the answer.
Verse gaped at the leathered, spidery, starved yet still puppeteered bodies filling the walls on platforms and walkways, waiting, simply waiting. There were thousands of them, who must have been drawn or become lost here through the ages. They looked almost like demons, which Verse found appropriate considering what was to come if Brand did not complete the artefact. They were the third reason the angel drew bodies down into the darkness. They were what it needed when it left. They were-
"His army," Helen Earth said.
Ness saw Verse fall beneath the creatures that peeled from the walls, but there was nothing the Scotsman could do. He had problems of his own to contend with. Reaching the point where he stood now - an entrance to the cavern opposite to where Verse had entered - had been easier than expected but the firefight had nevertheless drained a good percentage of his ammunition. Oddly enough, it hadn't been these things that had consumed it but the Brigadier's men, turned against their own one by one by the Voice as they had progressed deeper into the caves. Ness had been in enough combat situations to know when a unit had been suckered, and he didn't need what appeared about him now to ram the message home.
Surrounded by the dead, he raised his hands, a little surprised that he hadn't been felled where he stood. For a moment he considered using this mistake to unsheathe his hunting knives and slice up as many of these bastards as he could. But it was then that he saw Verse's face.
Awww crap.
Our Father Who Art In Exham was able to handle most things, but Ness knew how he ticked and this... nah. The priest's face was contorted with pain and disbelief and even horror, and the small part of the Glaswegian who actually gave a toss realised he couldn't leave him alone like this.
Because the creature on top of Verse scratching and tearing and threatening to rip out his throat more so than any of the others...
It was Hannah Chapter.
EIGHTEEN
Above the tor the storm was getting worse. Brand and Jenny Simmons picked their way along a cliff path beneath a sky so rent by lightning it seemed the heavens themselves were undergoing a terminal short-circuit. The pair had to fight against the rain and the wind that threatened to hurl them to oblivion with each step, and the precarious, thin path was becoming all the more hazardous now that night was falling.
"It has to be here somewhere," Brand shouted.
"For your sake, I hope so, lover-boy," Simmons said, her voice somehow cutting through the wind. "These boots are Louis Vuitton."
Brand ignored her, concentrating his attention on the rocks and stones that appeared before him in his slowly sweeping torchlight.
It never left the monastery, Magister had said. It remains where it has been for many hundreds of years. Somewhere between heaven and hell.
The old man's words were not so much a riddle as an exercise in logic, Brand had realised. How could the other half of the artefact remain where it had been for all that time when in the interim the monastery had fallen into utter ruin and then been rebuilt?
It had to be a part of the structure that had somehow been forgotten. Something that was not a part of the original plans.
A hiding place that over time had - by accident or design - become twice hidden.
It hadn't taken long for his recce through the monastery's grounds - once Baarish-Shammon had disposed of the acolyths, of course - to suggest one likely site. As the monastery was surrounded on three sides by barren tor, what he sought had to be here, in the looming shadow of its seaward wall, some hundred and odd feet above Saknusem's Swallow.
There, perhaps; where something blocked the path ahead.
At last. Brand and Jenny Simmons approached a tumbledown mass of large, mason-worked stones that could be nothing but part of the original monastery walls, deposited here perhaps through natural ruination and slippage, and maybe compounded by Magister's unnaturally induced earthquake back in 1944. But it was not the stones as such that Brand sought; it was what lay beyond them. The path they had followed was old, and while it was now virtually indistinguishable and difficult to negotiate, by virtue of the fact that it led from the monastery it had presumably once been trodden regularly by the monks themselves. It had to lead somewhere.
Brand crouched and shone his torch through what few gaps in the stones there were, and felt his heart skip a beat. There was a cave back there, into whose entrance had been hewn a wind of stone steps.
He stood, examining the collapsed section for a way round or through. But there was none. The stones nestled together like a three-dimensional jigsaw assembled by a titan and then abandoned in favour of another titanesque whim. Frustrated, Brand turned and shone his torch up the cliff in the hope of finding a way over. As he did, he heard a rumble and the path beneath him tremored. He turned back to see Jenny reforming following a momentary visit from Baarish-Shammon, and watched dumbfounded as a pair of the menhir-sized stones crashed away down the cliff and disappeared into the sea. Jenny blew him a kiss.
"Thanks," Brand said neutrally, and ducked into the cave. As he slowly descended the stone steps he shivered, struck by the realisation that no one had entered this place in six hundred years.
His excitement soon turned to disappointment, however. Because when he entered the small round chamber at the steps' base, there was very little to see. A few scattered remnants suggested that the chamber might once have been u
sed as a cold store cum wine cellar, but that was it. Like the monastery itself, the chamber had been thoroughly stripped by the Synod's cleaners.
"Damn it!" Brand snapped.
"Take it easy, lover-boy. It isn't the end of the world," Jenny Simmons said. She paused and chuckled to herself. "No, wait, yes it is."
Brand dropped to his haunches and sighed.
It was only after a few seconds he realised the cleaners had missed something. Something that he too would have missed had the half of the artefact held by Jenny Simmons not begun to glow slightly where she stood. Behind her. Difficult to see because the work had been done so neatly it appeared to be part of the wall. But the chamber wasn't naturally round at all. A part of it had been sealed with rocks.
"Help me," Brand said, heaving one of them away and lowering it with a gasp to the chamber floor. Jenny Simmons did so and in a few minutes the two of them had reduced the blockage to a negotiable mound. Brand shone his torch into the darkness - and promptly staggered back.
In the chamber beyond, a figure knelt all alone in utter darkness, its hands clasped together in prayer. It wore the robes of a monk though these were covered in a thick layer of cobweb and dust, and what flesh could be seen beneath their folds was a cold, ashen grey. The figure did not move, did not breathe. The poor man had been walled up here, left to die. The cobwebs' sticky strands stretched and then snapped as he turned to look at Brand.
The academic swallowed. But the aura he sensed from the figure was not malignant - the opposite, in fact. Brand had never felt such peace from an individual in his life.
"May we approach?" he said quietly, hesitantly.
The monk nodded, smiled slightly. But as Brand and Simmons stepped over the threshold he quickly held up a hand, halting Jenny in her tracks.
"No. I am a man of God and you will not stand before me in false guise. Show me first what you truly are."
In answer to his challenge, Jenny snarled. But surprisingly, she relented, and her form slipped into that of Baarish-Shammon. Her figure wavered before the monk and, as he took her measure, her razor wisp of a smile turned contemptuous at the edges.
Despite his obvious fragility, the monk was not cowed. "Abomination!" he said to her face.
Baarish-Shammon raised a hand but Brand stepped in. "She will not harm you," he said. "You have my assurance of that."
[He doesn't have mine, lover boy...]
The threat hung quite literally in the air but the looming demoness did nothing to follow it up. The monk remained where he knelt, sedate, and he kept his gaze trained on her, as she did him. It was a small stalemate between good and evil but a significant one as after a second Baarish-Shammon lowered her hand. Brand felt a swell of emotion he couldn't quite pinpoint. Maybe it was because he was witnessing true belief in something for the first time in a long while. That this man could retain such faith despite the hardship that had been done to him was more than humbling. He envied it more than anything.
"Please, who are you?"
The monk smiled. "Now, no more than a vessel. A servant of God unto whose flesh, by accident of destiny, has been left singular responsibility."
"The last of the Brotherhood of the Fallen."
The monk nodded wearily. "For greater than six hundred years, I have been the last, sustained in these walls, animated beyond my will, and bereft of fatigue or hunger, pain or pleasure, desire or despair." The monk paused. "My name is Brother Patrick."
[Six hundred years,] Baarish-Shammon said. The demoness whistled. [If I were you I'd give those knees a flex, Pat. Listen, I've got this really great DVD...]
"The other brothers imprisoned you here?" Brand cut in. "In God's name, why?"
Patrick sighed. "It had little to do with God. They were... no longer themselves."
Abaddon turned them, Brand guessed. "Patrick, please tell me what happened here."
"Hubris," the monk said simply. "The scheming of fools who believed they wore the divine armour of the Almighty, but which turned out to be only sackcloth and rag, after all. They thought they could harness the heavens."
"The angel? They tried to harness the angel?"
Patrick nodded. "It had lain here from ancient times, alone, broken and confused - wishing only to die. But it was not allowed to do so, because it was found by men. Men who worshipped it, from cave-dwellers who left it the spoils of the hunt, to tribes who slew their enemies in its name, to barbarians who drowned their own in its pit of blood. The sacrifices they made strengthened the creature, in its body but not its psyche, and in its confusion it remade itself over and again."
The Dragon, Brand realised. The Boswell Wyrm, the Kraken, whatever had come since - all of them had been the angel. Different times, differing beliefs and superstitions, different gods. What Magister had said had been correct, it had been corrupted, though not by any wyrm or visitor from space. Only by the flesh and the telepathically leeched thoughts of its believers.
"In the end, it didn't know what it was," Brand said.
"No," Brother Patrick answered. "And worse, it became alone again. The people of the caves, the tribes, the barbarians, they had all gone, and the angel slid once more into sickness and decay. Until it was found by my church. The Brotherhood of the Fallen was sent to... offer guidance."
"Guidance," Brand said incredulously. "It was a fallen angel... a demon."
Patrick nodded. "But left alone it was nothing - tabula rasa. Or so we thought. But of course we had underestimated the hunger it had developed over the years, and as we offered it our prayers, our teachings, the angel offered us its own. My brothers became... tainted."
Baarish-Shammon chuckled. [You must've made its day.]
For once, Brand was in full agreement. "Didn't you realise what you were doing? By teaching it your Bible, you told it what it was."
"My brothers meant no evil. They simply sought its hand in theirs - sought to ease its misery and its pain. They offered it the comfort of our ranks."
"Dear God," Jonathan Brand said slowly. "They tried to save its soul." He laughed out loud in disbelief. "To convert it to their faith. They tried to domesticate an angel."
Brother Patrick nodded. "Who could blame them? Tell me, which of this world's religions would have dared to stand in defiance of a church which marched alongside an actual soldier of God?"
"A fallen soldier," Brand corrected, and added, "The fools. The bloody fools."
[Old Testament hellfire and damnation,] Baarish-Shammon said, and shivered. [Ooooh, don't you just love it!]
"That's what happened," Brand said to the monk. "You provided it with the iconolatry that most closely matched its original purpose as a fallen angel - to bring about hell on Earth. Judgement Day, Patrick. Apocalypse. God's final sentence on mankind..."
[Only it isn't interested in returning anyone to the Kingdom of Heaven, only in consuming their bodies and souls to make itself stronger,] Baarish-Shammon said. [And it will continue to do that until they all belong to its army, or there is no one left.] The demoness folded her arms, smiled. [Congratulations, holy man. Your people created the ultimate doomsday-machine.]
Brother Patrick faltered. "I tried to stop it, tried to stop them. But it happened so quickly. The animal sacrifices, and then human beings; the liaisons with the villagers as my brothers broke vow after vow; the carnal pursuits that turned to rape, to torture, to mass murder. God help me, I tried to make them see what was happening, tried to make them use the artefact we had brought here in case anything went wrong."
"But instead they walled you up with one half of the only object that could destroy the angel," Brand said to the monk. He pointed out the orb Baarish-Shammon carried. "That's why it glowed, isn't it? The other half is here with you. The other brothers didn't know it would, but that's what has kept you alive these long centuries."
"The Eyes of the Angel," Patrick admitted. "It was found in Mesopotamia in the Fifth Century and was said to be have been given by God to provide release to his errant soldie
rs."
[Is there a nose of the angel?] Baarish-Shammon said facetiously.
"No nose," Brand said. But strangely, he knew the demoness had a point. "Why the Eyes, Brother Patrick?"
The monk stared, as if the answer were obvious. "Angels do not have eyes, Jonathan Brand. They are blind."
"Of course," Brand realised. "God created them blind because He could not be so cruel as to give them sight. How could even angels survive being exposed to His true glory?"
Brother Patrick bowed his head, nodded. "Such visions would have driven them mad... destroyed them."
There was a moment of silence.
"My God. The artefact is the cosmic equivalent of a cyanide capsule. A chance for fallen angels to relinquish their self, to gaze for a first and last time upon that which had always been denied them..."
"To surrender themselves to the Kingdom of Heaven," Patrick said, "renewed and purified."
Baarish-Shammon pretended to retch. [So Jesus wants them for a sunbeam,] she said. [Just how do we kill the bastard?]
"The halves need only be conjoined and brought into contact with the creature. The Eyes of the Angel will be absorbed into its mass and-"
"The rest is up to God," Brand finished.
[So are you going to hand it over or do I rip it out of you?] Baarish-Shammon asked. Brand looked at her quizzically. [Long story.]
"No," Brother Patrick said. "I have sensed the others - these Nazis? - who have reawoken the scourge, and it must be stopped." He sighed, as if in great relief. "It is time."
Brother Patrick closed his eyes. As Brand and Simmons looked on, a shape began to appear on his chest, pressing out from beneath the skin. This manifestation did not appear to harm the monk in any way; on the contrary, the aura of peace he emanated seemed to strengthen. The shape shifted through the skin, glowing as it came, and gently, Brand took the second half of the artefact in his hands.
"Divine absorption," Brand said. He looked at Patrick. "But brother, this means..."
Patrick nodded.
"I'm sorry."