by Sara King
‘Aqrab sighed at the blatant suspicion in her face. “I assure you my motivations are not sinister. Further, I can’t feed you until you accept my revisions. Do you accept?”
“Yes.” It was a whisper, but it was audible enough for the Law to grasp it and draw it into the weave.
‘Aqrab felt the rush as the Law boomed through him, “As agreed, so decreed, the bargain has been made.” Then, with the full power of the Fourth Lands at his disposal, he made her a good—yet clean, bite-sized, and non-greasy—meal of fruits, jerky, and nuts, and then filled the camp area with every item used in the creation of art that he could think of.
When he finished, the Fury was staring at the supplies, not even having touched her food.
Wincing at the look she was giving the easel, ‘Aqrab said, “You are unsatisfied?” The thought of her being dissatisfied, ridiculously, made his heart ache.
She just shook her head in silence and continued to stare at the mounds of tools around her.
“Is there something I missed?” he offered.
But when she looked at him, there were tears in her eyes. “Thank you.”
Her utter gratitude left ‘Aqrab flabbergasted. “Ah…you are welcome…any time you wish…just ask.”
The Fury swallowed hard and he saw her lip trembling. “I might do that.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, her gaze sliding back to the piles of supplies. She bit her lip, seeming to hold her breath. “It’s been a long time.”
He squatted beside her, curious at the emotion he saw in her face. It took him a moment to place her mixed gratitude and anxiety. “You weren’t allowed to draw, were you?” he asked.
Her sudden sob, quickly hidden, confirmed it.
As she ducked her head and tried to conceal her grief from him, ‘Aqrab gently put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. Softly, he said, “for better or worse, mon Dhi’b, you are one of the last. You make your own decisions, now, and if you decide to use my body for your art, I will be happy to oblige. If you do not, we can forego tonight’s bargain for another later.”
She just nodded and sniffled, refusing to look up at him. Gingerly, after obvious deliberation, she picked up a fine stick of charcoal and a pad of paper. “Go sit by the fire?” she whispered. “One knee up. Arm over knee.” Her face reddened. “Legs…splayed.”
Curious and oddly thrilled, ‘Aqrab did as he was bidden. Once he was situated, he watched her fingers hesitate over the pad, trembling. Her entire hand shook, and he saw the mingling of emotions cross her face as she struggled against some inner turmoil. Then, after staring at the paper beneath her charcoal for several minutes, his Fury looked up at him and began to draw.
Imelda stood before the row of screens, frowning. “That’s it?”
The technician winced. “Then it hit turbulence, Inquisidora.”
“Turbulence.” Imelda frowned at the fuzzy silver-gray image that had slid in from the corner of the screen, only a split second before the drone fell from the sky. A cloud? Or something else…? “And the rest?” she demanded. “They were lost to turbulence, as well?”
The head technician reddened and lowered her face to fiddle with a pencil upon her workdesk. Her partner, a much younger man in his thirties, cleared his throat. “One appears to have been hacked and re-routed by the government, Inquisidora, while the other hit bad weather and ran into a mountainside.”
“You lost one to hackers.” Now that was not pleasant news. Doubtless, the United States government thought they were trying to spy on Eielson Air Force Base or Fort Wainwright, up near Fairbanks. Now that was a political shitstorm she didn’t particularly want to be involved in, if the Americans managed to trace the origins of the craft.
Then she frowned. “Wait. One ran into a mountain? I told you to keep it above thirty thousand feet.” Denali, in the Alaska Range, the largest mountain in North America, was only a little over twenty thousand.
Now both of her technicians went silent, and it was the graying—and thankfully almost sober—Herr Drescher, who had been standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, who said, “It made a rapid descent into the clouds, Inquisitorin.”
“On whose orders?” Imelda growled.
The technicians glanced at each other and the woman in her fifties looked up at Imelda with mixed fear and irritation. “Yours, Inquisidora.”
Imelda froze. “Mine?”
The male technician reached out and hit a key on his computer. Immediately, Imelda heard her voice say, “We’re not getting anything up here. Take it down through the clouds.”
Herr Drescher chuckled. “And yet the Inquistorin was with me all day, holding my beard for me while I puked up my guts in my bathroom.”
“Don’t forget the whiskey,” Imelda growled. He still owed penance, for that.
“That too,” Herr Drescher agreed.
The technicians frowned at each other. “Another government hacker, then?”
Imelda considered that. “Show me the route that the compromised craft took once our control was lost.”
Nodding, it only took the woman a moment to bring up a map with a neon red line suddenly diverting from the Brooks Range towards Fairbanks, in a direct line with Eielson AFB. Seeing that, she had a momentary tingle of unease. Either their clandestine operations were being monitored by the American military…
…Or they were playing a game of chess with a creature whose mental capacity, by historical accounts of skull measurements, was vastly superior to their own.
Frowning, she said, “Send another drone. Strip it of its magic. Keep the sensors and power sources mundane—nothing that the military would not be using. Seek out the three areas where the other three drones disappeared and do full thermal scans. Our targets will already be hiding their traces from government satellites, so you probably won’t find much. I’m actually thinking we’ll find them by monitoring their prey. There are large caribou herds up there, are there not?”
The technicians gave each other a wary glance. “You truly believe we’re going to find dragons, Inquisidora?” the older one asked.
She gave the woman a long look. “You truly believe we lost three drones, in one night, to accidents?”
The woman went silent.
Imelda shook her head. “Get that drone back out there, and let me know what you find. Herr Drescher, you’re coming with me to the library.”
He gave her a look of trepidation as he followed her out of the technicians’ control room. “The library, Inquisitorin?” As if she had just told him they would be visiting a whorehouse.
Imelda sighed. “I need to do some research on angels, and I will not have Zenaida catching you with whiskey on your breath.”
The older German breathed into his hand and sniffed. Grimacing, he said, “Why are we looking up angels, Inquisidora?”
“Because I think we may be dealing with one,” Imelda said, then paused, seeing Zenaida step from the basement with a group of her thugs. Imelda felt a tingle of unease trace down her spine as she saw Jacquot amongst the group. As the woman walked away down the main hall, flanked by her faithful, she heard herself say, “Possibly more.”
The German caught her look, then frowned. “What is the fucking Frenchman—”
She cut him off with a quick gesture of her hand. Giving Herr Drescher a warning look, she continued toward the Order’s library.
The library itself was actually a row of cubicles in a side-corner of the compound, with every book that the Order had bought, found, or confiscated scanned and entered into a searchable database that was updated monthly via a diplomatic courier.
“So,” Imelda said, sitting down in a cubicle. She pulled a seat out for Drescher, who eyed with all the unease Imelda would give a horse. “Any ideas where to start?”
“I’m, uh, not a scholar, Inquisitorin.” Still not having sat down, he glanced back out the door. “I think maybe I’ll just go lie down—”
“Sit,” Imelda said. “Jacquot is preoccupied and Giuseppe is de
ad. I’m going to figure out what killed him.”
Herr Drescher winced. “I, uh…” He swallowed and glanced at the chair again, still not sitting. “I just barely passed my exams, Inquisitorin. I had to cheat on my papers. I’m not really—”
“Sit.”
Reluctantly, the graying German sat down in the chair, looking stiff and uncomfortable. “I fly helicopters,” he muttered.
“And now you help me research angels,” Imelda said distractedly. She started entering her information into the terminal.
“Why do you think the wolf is an angel?” Herr Drescher said, giving the computer terminal a wary look.
“Hunch,” Imelda said, beginning her search. “What do you know about angels, Drescher? What are they? Where did they come from?”
Herr Drescher was peering at her like he was wondering if he was fully over his drink. “God.”
“Yet the Bible never says God created the angels,” Imelda says. “So where did they come from?”
The older pilot did not reply, and she saw the beginnings of suspicion cross his Nordic face.
Imelda sighed. “You can be frank with me. Neither of us truly believes the world is only a few thousand years old. We’ve both killed things older than that, have we not?”
Drescher gave the entrance to the library an uncomfortable look. “I believe what the Church believes, Inquisitorin.”
“I’m not questioning your damn loyalty, man,” Imelda growled, frustrated that her station as an Inquisidora was once again getting in the way of an honest conversation. “I just spent a couple hours helping you vomit. Indulge me a moment.”
Herr Drescher leveled nervous blue eyes on her. He hesitated before he said, “I think that there are things that the Bible has not fully explained, Imelda.”
“Or has addressed…imperfectly?” she suggested. “Like the civilizations we know to have thrived and fallen before our own?”
He looked down at his hands. When he looked up at her, there was anxiety in his eyes. And fear. “This is not an Inquisition?” When she blinked at him, he went on, “I mean, I know I am crass and I drink overly much at times, but my heart is in the right place, Inquisitorin, and I can fly a helicopter through the tornadoes of Hell if I have to.”
She frowned at him, irritated. “Of course this is not an Inquisition. Why do you think it would be an Inquisition?”
Warily, fidgeting with his sleeve, Herr Drescher said. “Zenaida has a…history.”
Imelda’s eyes narrowed. “What kind of history?”
Still giving her a look of distrust, Herr Drescher coughed. “Since I came to Alaska, there have been twelve men who have…not met her standards.”
Imelda thought of the graves in the yard outside, in the Eklutna Cimitero di Eroe. “What happened to them?”
Herr Drescher licked his lips. “You can hide bodies in a glacier. Bodies that will never be found.”
Killing their own. A new low. She thought again of her Padre’s prophecy for her ascent to the Holy Matron and felt another surge of frustration that she wasn’t there yet. The power to fix so many problems was just two steps out of reach. First Grande Inquisidora, then Holy Matron of the Order. Once she was the Matron, she was going to make changes.
With so much passion behind her words that they came out a mere whisper, she said, “I am not Zenaida. I do not murder my comrades.”
Herr Drescher’s face continued to hold uneasiness. “But you are an Inquisitorin.”
“The office of the Inquisidora exists so that we can continue to fight the plague of outsider demons that have invaded our Realm,” she said in that low, near-whisper she gained whenever she found herself truly upset. “Without our knowledge and skills, passed from one to the next, we would have failed many centuries ago, and the flood of outside powers would have overwhelmed us. Never has it been said we are to turn our office against our own people. Against humans. That is not in our vows, and never has been.”
Herr Drescher gave her a long, considering look, before he said, “If you want my opinion, the Fotze needs one more trip out to a pretty crevasse. She has been a cancer on the Order since its inception. Some of my favorite comrades have died because of her…concerns.”
And, in that moment, Drescher had shown he trusted her.
“My gut tells me Zenaida’s time here is limited,” Imelda said. “Whether that be she moves on, or gets excommunicated, or takes my bullet to her head, she’s not going to work her evil here much longer.”
The German cleared his throat and glanced at his rough, callused hands. “While that is…a good thought…it is rumored Zenaida is…old…Inquisitorin.”
“How old?” Imelda demanded. “And call me Imelda.”
The German cleared his throat. He glanced again at the door, then his blue eyes found her and he swallowed nervously. “Like she has Bibles written in the fourth century after Christ on her shelves in her room.”
Imelda frowned. “Bibles were being written back then.”
“Commissioned by her.”
Imelda froze, remembering the deathly visage of the wolf, half-buried under moss. “You must be mistaken.”
Drescher shook his head. “She took me to her room once, when I complained to the Grand Inquisitor about my last friend she had made ‘disappear.’ She took down one of the Bibles and showed it to me. The Book had been commissioned in her name and scribes had drawn her portrait inside the front cover. She showed me three of those—I don’t know if they were as old as she said they were, but they were old, Inquisitorin—then slapped them shut and smiled and told me that those who made the laws did answer to a ‘fuckwad in a pretty cape.’ Then she showed me her collection of hearts, and after that, her trapped souls.”
Imelda fought a growing tremor of dread in her gut. “She was trying to scare you.”
Drescher laughed. “She did a good job.” The German looked almost ashamed as he said, “I’ve said no more about her dealings to the Grand Inquisitor, and I fly her wherever she wants me to go.” Then he gave Imelda a weak grin. “Well, until she assigned me to you. That was about the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Inquisitorin. I spent twenty years wondering when she was going to put me on the rack.”
Guilt washed over her then and Imelda immediately had the horrible thought of, Don’t get your hopes up. She’s not dead yet, and I’m not an immortal. She knew all-too-well who would leave the scene alive, if she and Zenaida ever came to blows. Or, for that matter, if Zenaida decided to kill her. Swallowing, Imelda glanced back at the computer, for a brief moment considering dropping the search for wolves and angels and request a transfer for both herself and Drescher. “I think,” she said slowly, looking at the little query area on the search engine before her, “I just put you in a lot more danger.”
The German shrugged. “I’m used to it, by now.”
“Still…” Imelda considered sending him back to his room, but didn’t want to take the chance that Zenaida would catch him on the way, and find a reason to be ‘displeased’ with him, if only to get back at Imelda for her impertinence in the basement. “What I’m about to do is going to be dangerous, should Zenaida find out about it. I think I’m going to unearth some information she’d rather stayed buried.”
In reply, Drescher pulled up a chair and gestured at the catalogues she had opened up with her password. “Let’s roast the Schlampe.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Imelda reluctantly began her first search through the records.
The information on angels—sightings, visions, dictations, foretellings, all purportedly given by angelic beings—was so vast that Imelda quickly found herself lost. It was by happenstance that, in her search of the histories of angels, she found an image of an angel in the Cubicolo dell'Annunziazione, in the Catacomb of Priscilla that was, while sketchy and somewhat difficult to make out, wingless.
Further, when she continued her search, she found ancient tombs, relics, and stone representations of angels, all wingless.
She leaned back, considering the screen. “Drescher,” she said, “why would angels, originally, have been wingless, only to have ‘evolved’ wings in the fourth century?”
Drescher, who had been leaned forward, absorbing the information in silence, frowned. “Someone saw one and changed the doctrine?”
“Or perhaps they have more than one form,” Imelda said softly. “But why not show that second form before the fourth century?” Her brow knotting, she began looking up Roman histories. “It wasn’t until the fourth century that Christianity was legalized by Constantine.”
“There are Jewish angels, too, Inquisitorin,” Herr Drescher said. “My brother married a Jewish girl. They made many squalling Jewish babies, to my mother’s horror.”
Imelda frowned. Judaism was older than Christianity by almost a thousand years. What if she had to look back further…? Her breath caught. She remembered seeing figures of winged women on Egyptian temples. She began a search for ‘winged humanoid,’ and immediately began getting images of ‘angels’ or avian beings inscribed or etched into stone that predated Christianity by thousands of years. Mesopotamia’s Siris; Ancient Egypt’s Horus; the dragon-slaying Garuda of India and Southeast Asia, the fravashi of Zoroastrianism, the Tengu of Japan; the Alkonost, Gamayun and Sirin of Russia; Nike, Boreas, Eros, and the Gorgon sisters and the Erinyes of Ancient Greece, the Dirae of Ancient Rome…
She hesitated. Erinyes. Dirae. Furies. She seemed to remember something odd about the Furies…
A few quick keystrokes brought her the information she sought.
In the space of a single night, around B.C. 16, an entire temple of Furies was found dead in Ostra, their hearts removed, the statues of Mars toppled. Two years later, another temple, in Acerra. Every Fury dead, every statue of Mars defiled. Then in Pompeii, then in Rome… Then the temples to Ares in Byzantion likewise fell. Then it moved outward. As Imelda delved deeper into her research, she found more and more temples to the pagans’ gods of War that had been sacked in various ways in the first four centuries A.D, the temples’ inhabitants slain to a soul. The temples of Indra, in India. The temples of Horus, of Bishamonten in Japan, Tojil of the Maya, of Wôdan of the ancient Germanic peoples, of Rudianos of the Celts… Every one of them carried mention of priestesses who had been slaughtered, with no survivors.