The Tenth Order

by Nic Widhalm

  “No,” Hunter said. “Why?”

  “Your parents, maybe?”

  “Father, my parents never left town, much less the country.”

  Valdis stared at Hunter a moment, then turned and thrust the ancient flashlight against the wall, spilling light across the stone and revealing thousands of cramped lines of archaic-looking script. Hunter squinted his eyes, leaning forward. “What is it?”

  “It doesn’t look familiar?”

  Hunter eyed Valdis. “Why the hell would it look…” But his words trailed off as his eyes turned back to the wall. He took a step forward and lifted a shaking finger to trace the foreign words etched into the cold, stone wall. Suddenly he turned and shouted at Valdis: “Where did you get this!”

  His eyes were black pits.

  Valdis stepped back, mouth hanging open. “What? I don’t…”

  “Where did you get this!” Hunter’s arm shot forward and yanked on the priest’s collar, pulling him close.

  “It was here already. When…when I first got here,” Valdis stammered.

  Hunter’s eyes faded back to their original gray and he let go of the priest’s collar. “Father, I…” He took a deep breath. “Jesus. I’m sorry. I just…” he shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  Valdis, his hands shaking fiercely, took a deep breath and felt his pulse slow. “It was the wall, wasn’t it?”

  “Maybe. What language is it?” Hunter turned back to the wall, carefully avoiding Valdis’ eyes.

  Lord, remind me never to argue with him, thought Valdis. Out loud, he said, “It’s the celestial language, I think.”

  Hunter continued to stare at the wall, Valdis watching him carefully. The large man hadn’t registered any surprise at the priest’s words. “Celestial?” He finally asked, his voice pinched.

  “Yes. It’s said to have originated from Sanskrit and a primitive form of Arabic. Or, perhaps it was the other way around…” Valdis mused. “Regardless, it is extremely difficult to translate. You see these swoops here?” Valdis pointed at one of the lines of text. “The way it twists and connects with that downward slash?” Hunter nodded. “That’s the glyph for ‘Seraphim.’”

  A shadowed look came over Hunter’s face, and he moved from the wall to examine one of the silver cups behind them. Valdis, his suspicions all but confirmed, watched Hunter’s eyes roam restlessly over the table. He’s heard the name before.

  “Seraphim are the highest order of angels,” Valdis walked carefully over to Hunter who had put down the cup and was ideally running his hand along a tightly rolled scroll of papyrus. For once, Valdis wasn’t concerned with the objects on the table. “Have you heard of them?” He asked.

  “Once,” Hunter said absently, eyes roaming the table.

  “Where, might I ask? A book? A movie?”

  Hunter sighed and put down the scroll, meeting Valdis’ eyes. “About six hours ago, actually. I was holed up in some rich guy’s mountain getaway, talking with an angel who told me I was something called an ‘Apkallu,’ and there’s a war in heaven centered around a pair of ‘Seraphim.’” Hunter’s mouth tightened, daring Valdis to laugh. But the priest only nodded and motioned for Hunter to continue.

  “When I came here earlier—in that fight I mean—I wasn’t just taking a midnight stroll,” he took a deep breath. “I was running from the cops. I’d just escaped the hospital, and I…I killed someone on my way out. I didn’t mean to,” He said quickly. “It was an accident, I swear. I wasn’t even awake when it happened. It’s just, sometimes these visions I told you about can get pretty crazy…” Hunter trailed off, watching Valdis warily.

  The priest shook his head. “If you say it was an accident I believe you. Maybe the police—”

  “The police? Are you nuts? They’ll slap me behind bars before I have a chance to—”

  “—should be kept out of it. For the time being,” Valdis finished.

  Hunter’s eyes rose, and he looked at Valdis like he’d never seen the old priest before. “Come again?”

  “There’s man’s law and there’s God’s law. Sometimes you have to sacrifice one to serve the other. In this case, I think it’s wise we follow God’s.”

  “So what I said about the Seraphim…?”

  Valdis sighed and shook his head. “I owe you an apology, I haven’t been honest with you since the moment you first woke. Your birthmark,” the priest gestured at Hunter’s arm. “I saw it when I was tending your wounds.”

  “Oh. What about it?”

  “It’s not a birthmark.”

  “You could have fooled me.”

  “Hunter, birthmarks don’t perfectly mimic one of the four basic symbols of the celestial language.”

  Hunter laughed. “God, I don’t know why I’m even surprised anymore.”

  Valdis turned back to the wall and shined the flashlight on the ancient writing. He pointed at one of the small figures. “There. You see that?”

  Hunter came over and leaned down. “Yeah.”

  “That matches your birthmark almost exactly.”

  “So?” Hunter said with a petulant frown.

  “So, it’s the symbol for the Grigori—the Watchers.”

  Hunter shook his head. “Those guys at the mansion said I was something called an ‘Apkallu.’”

  Valdis nodded. “Yes, I believe you are. Which means the first part of your glyph would match theirs. The Grigori were the ones who figured how to encapsulate an angelic soul in a human body.”

  “Why in the hell would they do that?”

  Valdis pursed his lips. “That is a fine question, my boy. One that I’ve been studying for quite some time.”

  “And?” asked Hunter.

  “And, well…it’s like this: let’s say you’re cooking dinner and you accidentally cut your finger. How would you treat it?”

  Hunter frowned. “A Band-Aide? I don’t know, peroxide? What does that have to do with Apkallu?”

  “Everything,” Valdis’ eyes lit up, and it was all he could do not to rub his hands together. “Angels don’t have band-aides. What good would they do without physical bodies? So, when an angel is injured, when he is on the verge of death, what would they do—just let him die?”

  Hunter’s frown faded. “I’m the band-aide,” he said softly.

  Valdis nodded vigorously, his body practically vibrating. “Yes! An Apkallu is a band-aide, as you would say. It takes many lifetimes, but incarnated as a human being an angel can heal his wounds.”

  “So, Earth is just…what? A big MASH unit?” Hunter stepped back from the wall. “We’re just a pit stop in their stupid war.”

  Valdis patted Hunter’s arm. “My son, not they. You.”

  Hunter pulled back, face twisted, eyes dark as a thunderstorm. Valdis let him go, unsure of how to comfort him. Finally, after a quiet moment, the priest cleared his throat. “What about these symbols here? Do they mean anything to you?”

  Hunter didn’t respond at first, then, after another silent moment, turned back to the wall and focused on the section Valdis was motioning too. His eyes narrowed, and he moved closer, pointing at one of the symbols near the bottom. “I’ve seen these words before.”

  “I’m not surprised,” the priest said excitedly. “The two angelic armies: the Adonai and the Elohim.”

  Hunter’s hands were clenched and it looked like he was having trouble breathing. “How…” he forced through grit teeth, “do you know so much about this?”

  “I’ve been studying this writing for years,” Valdis said, squinting at the wall. “Ever since the day I discovered this room and its treasures. At first, I planned on telling the bishop, alerting Mother Church and having her send her investigators and archaeologists. But when I saw this language,” Valdis shrugged. “I was selfish. I wanted to decipher it on my own. Twenty years later I finally created a rough key that would let me translate at least part of it. And now, thirty years from the initial discovery, I’ve been able to decipher close to twenty-five percent of what you
see here.” Valdis swept his hand across the circular room. “Each quadrant holds a different passage, each passage containing roughly 300,000 lines of script.”

  “What does it say?” Hunter whispered, eyes fixed once again on the flickering, candle-lit wall.

  Valdis grinned. Once again he felt that rush of being in Hunter’s presence, an overwhelming ache in his guts, his bones, all the way from his feet to his crown. “It talks about the war in heaven,” he said.

  Hunter rubbed his eyes and sighed. “Those people at the mansion said the same thing. ‘The War in Heaven,’ like it’s some kind of Saturday-morning cartoon. They had the same stupid grin, too.” He pointed at Valdis. “If someone doesn’t tell me what the hell is going on, I think I really will turn myself over to the cops.

  Valdis’ smile faded. “No need to be rash. Look here,” the priest walked a few feet to his left and brought the flashlight to another similar patch of script. “You want to know about the war? As far as I can tell, this is the beginning”

  Hunter gave the text a cursory glance. “I can’t read celestial.”

  “Well, I should hope not,” Valdis chuckled. “Not yet. Took me thirty years. Anyway,” his chuckle faded under Hunter’s gaze, “You have to understand, this is only loosely chronological. This section begins with the opening thrusts of the war. Whomever wrote it must have assumed the reader already had an understanding of why the war began, because the details are sparse. However, despite what we have been told from the Bible—or Milton—our mysterious author suggests the war in heaven had nothing to do with the Morning Star.”

  “Morning Star?”

  “Lucifer. Satan. You know.”

  “But I thought—”

  Valdis held up a finger. The digit was quivering with excitement. He had been waiting years to share his discoveries with another person, and now that the time had come, the priest was about to burst from holding back the big reveal. “I know,” Valdis said. “So did I, at first. But this passage says the war was between two groups of angels called the Adonai and the Elohim.” Hunter flinched as Valdis said this last part. The priest barely noticed. “What’s interesting is there doesn’t seem to be anything differing them. On a biological level, that is.” Valdis grinned, “As much as angels can be considered ‘biological,’ right?”

  Hunter didn’t respond.

  “At any rate, there was a rather large disagreement that kicked the whole thing off. The author isn’t clear about what, though that might be in a passage I have yet to decipher. That’s what I was saying about the chronological bit. But regardless, the war has continued to the present. Right now, as we speak, they rage in the heavens.”

  “That’s what they said,” Hunter whispered, staring at the script.

  Valdis, still a little spooked from Hunter’s earlier outburst, timidly asked, “These people who took you, who—”

  “The war, Father?”

  “Right, sorry. Well, the…uh…disagreement turned into a full on battle, gaining supporters until the entire chorus had taken up with one side or the other. Now, here’s where it gets interesting: Lucifer, the last of the three Seraphim, the only angel who hadn’t attached himself to either group, looked at all these angels picking sides and got to thinking.” Valdis moved further down the wall, shining his feeble light further down the rough, gray wall.

  “Here,” Valdis pointed at another section, “it tells about Lucifer—”

  “Wait,” Hunter interrupted. “I thought you said he wasn’t involved?”

  “No, no,” Valdis waved dismissively. “Silly boy, that’s not what I said. I said he didn’t start it. Or, at least, he wasn’t involved in the beginning. No, where Lucifer comes in is after all these angels are caught in the conflict, and the Morning Star decides he would like a piece of the pie. Or, in his case, the entire thing. But instead of trying to get another faction of angels to fight for him, he looks to humans.”

  “So how long ago are we talking here?” Hunter asked.

  “Oh, several million years at least,” Valdis replied. “Before written records. Probably before there were proper Homo sapiens. I’m not an anthropologist.” He raised an eyebrow. “You mind if I continue?”

  Hunter held up his hands. “By all means.”

  “As I was saying, around this time Lucifer starts to convince humans it would be in their best interests to join with him.” Valdis’ voice began to rise, and he had to force himself to calm down before he started talking too quickly. It was hard to do; he always got excited during this part. “He spends years tutoring the fragile creatures in the methods of angelic war, and—here’s the important part—he arms them.”

  “I’m guessing we’re not talking assault rifles.”

  Valdis chuckled. “You guess right, my friend. The text mentions a ‘flaming sword’ several times, which, I can only assume, was the weapon of choice for the celestial chorus. However, at this point the writing gets a bit—cloudy,” the priest brought the light to a section of wall more worn and pitted than the others. “The ravages of time and water, I’m afraid. If I had come sooner I could have preserved it, but now—” Valdis shook his head sadly.

  “So what happened?” Hunter asked. “Did Lucifer win?”

  “Hardly. This part here,” Valdis moved down the wall. “Says the truce was broken once they stopped the ‘invading force.’ The war began anew, with Adonai and Elohim on either side, and the casualties finding their way to Earth over the encompassing years.” Valdis reached the end of the script, near their original entrance.

  “So, you believe all this?” Hunter peered through the murky light at the tangled script. “All this stuff about angels and war, and—what did you call them?“

  “Adonai and Elohim. And, yes, to answer your question, I do. I’ve spent too much time down here, too many years putting together this rough sketch that I’ve shown you. Too many things that don’t add up.”

  “I don’t know,” Hunter shook his head. “The whole thing sounds crazy.”

  Valdis eyed the large man. This was the crucial part. Would the boy run, or was his curiosity strong enough? The priest nodded, almost imperceptibly, and looked at the last pit of crumbled text. “Would you like to know what made me sure beyond a doubt?”

  Hunter nodded.

  “You, Hunter. Your arrival yesterday finally convinced me that every bit of text I’ve deciphered is true.”

  “Me?” Hunter frowned.

  Valdis pointed to one of the small symbols in the last line on the wall. “This is the same mark on your shoulder. I haven’t found the exact meaning yet; it’s a strange mix between the mark of the Grigori and something else. Something I’ve never seen.”

  “But, you said this writing’s been here for hundreds of years?”

  Valdis smiled. “Exactly. I’ve yet to translate this part—too many variables so far—but, Hunter…I think this next bit is all about you.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Riese, you done with that report?” Jackie’s boss hollered across the station. She turned, her hands paused over her keyboard, and yelled, “Just a few more hours, Captain. Promise.”

  “That’s what you said three hours ago.” Captain Christopher Stohl marched from his office, across the crowded floor and leaned his balled fists onto Jackie’s table. “Please,” he said quietly. “Tell me you’re not working on the Friskin case?”

  “There’s more to it than Donaldson…”

  Stohl sighed. “Riese, we’re not doing this again. This is not your case anymore. Donaldson’s got more experience, and he was first on scene at the cathedral. If he needs help—and that’s a pretty big if—he’ll talk to me and I’ll talk to you. Got it?”

  “Captain—”

  “Got it?” Stohl’s heavy face was growing an angry red—he looked like a pimple about to explode. Jackie lowered her eyes and nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “Now, tell me the truth, are you going to have the Heathberg write-up done anytime soon?”

 
“One hour.”

  Captain Stohl nodded curtly and marched back to his office. Jackie watched him walk away, her lips tight. In the four years she’d been working this station she had never seen the captain just walk from one place to another. She had also never seen him show an inch of respect to her, or any other female officer in their precinct. It bothered Jackie at first, but she’d grown used to it. The boy’s club that Stohl and the other department heads belonged to might be offensive and outdated, but it usually allowed for the kind of disinterest that allowed Jackie to run the kind of investigations she wanted.

  Until now.

  Opposite her desk, Russ typed leisurely on his keyboard, a smirk on his face. “Alright,” said Jackie. “Just get it out.”

  “How many times do I have to say ‘I told you so’ before we can assume it’s implied?”

  Jackie rolled her eyes. “Hah.”

  “Seriously, Riese, when’re you going to let this go?”

  “When someone starts listening to me,” Jackie threw down her keyboard. “I’ve sent Donaldson three voicemails, seven emails, and dropped a dozen different files on his desk. Do I get a return call, an email? No. The only thing I get is the captain telling me to ‘focus on my own damn case.’ Fucking unbelievable.”

  Russ shrugged. “I’ve been here awhile. I’ll believe pretty much anything.”

  Jackie bit her under-lip and studied Russ. She had been working with him since she moved to Denver four years ago, and he had never been anything but supportive, friendly, and, for a very brief, regrettable night, something more. The “something more,” was a thing they never broached in conversation, and Jackie was content to leave it that way. The only problem was the last few days her partner had been…different. She didn’t know if it was related to work, “something more,” or just in her head. And to make it worse, the last twenty-four hours it wasn’t just Russ giving her the vibe, it was the whole damn department. Jackie had been working the job long enough to know that coincidences happen. It’s not magic, it’s not God, sometimes things just coincide and you chalk it up to chance. But this coincidence didn’t feel like that. For the last three days, ever since she’d shown up at the station the morning following the Friskin investigation, she had been getting the run-around from the whole department. The captain handing her case to Donaldson—Donaldson! The man hasn’t been able to find his ass with either hand for fifty years—Donaldson refusing to take her leads, and every lab-tech and forensic analyst refusing to talk about anything having to do with the Friskin case. If she was a paranoid woman she would’ve been shouting “conspiracy” right about now.