A Plague of Angels

by Sheri S. Tepper

  She shook her head, unable or unwilling to remember, stubbornly going on with her train of thought. “I had not thought there were so many monsters abroad upon the earth.”

  “There were caverns full of them in the deep,” said Tom. “Werra’s creatures from the time of legend His Wisdom tells me such things are not allowed to die or become extinct The pattern for them remains Werra had freed some of them before he died, to build their numbers upon earth, but before Olly left, she must have decided to turn them all loose.”

  “You say they were Werra’s creatures?”

  “Werra’s,” confirmed old Seoca. “All the legendary creatures, part beast, part demon, part divine. Designed to illustrate the unity of life and destiny And man started with them well enough. He had man stones and women stories and animal stones, man gods and woman gods and beast gods. But, over time, only the rutting rooster gods survived.”

  “Cock-a-doodle,” whispered Oracle sadly. “Crouch, you hens.”

  “Speaking of creatures,” said Drowned Woman in a surprised voice, “I think one of them is coming here.” She pointed out across the parapet, over the canyons, where a great winged thing, so distant it looked no larger than an eagle, was approaching them from the east.

  “Griffin,” said Tom needlessly, for there was no mistaking that lion-legged, heavily maned form.

  They watched silently as it flew toward them, as it rose above them and folded its wings to drop down upon the parapet, holding its wings high, the long ribs vertically together behind its head so all they could see of it was its head, mane, and frontquarters, like some great heraldic escutcheon. It regarded them severally, then individually, peering at them one by one as though taking roll. Only His Wisdom seemed totally at ease before this scrutiny.

  “Not eating you,” said the Griffin at last, as it had said to Olly in the long ago, when she was only a child.

  “I know,” said the old man. “You have fought a good fight today, great one.”

  “A forced alliance, but necessary,” said the Griffin, leaning sidewise to whet its beak against the parapet, one edge, then the other, with a sound like steel on a grindstone. “There will be other battles in future times, for me and my kin, both close and distant Now is our time come again.”

  “Yes,” intoned the old man, as though it were ritual. “Now are sent monsters and heroes abroad upon the earth; now are sent the inhabitants of faery and the beings of fable; now a new age of legends is ushered in.”

  “Now have the thrones brought balance once more,” said Griffin, as in response. “Now they may rest.”

  The old man gave the Griffin a thoughtful look. “I wonder if perhaps you have brought us a gift?”

  “A gift, yes,” said the Griffin. “In part payment for one little gift returned to me long ago.” Slowly, it lowered its wings to disclose the man who sat dazedly within the glistening mane Drowned Woman cried out, and Farmwife Suttle. Burned Man and old Cermit added to the babble, along with Qualary and Tom. Only the old man and Oracle were quiet as Abasio slid from the Griffin’s shoulders onto the parapet.

  “I saw you slain!” cried Tom to Abasio. “Struck down!”

  “They said you were dead, boy!” cried Cermit.

  “I got pulled out,” muttered Abasio, looking around him with searching eyes “At the last possible moment.” He stared into old Seoca’s face, fixing him with his gaze “Where’s Olly?”

  The old man shook his head, said softly, “You know where she is, Abasio Cermit.”

  “No!” He denied it “No, that was just a bit-part player. Dressed in Olly’s clothes. Saying Olly’s words in her voice. Olly didn’t—didn’t—you wouldn’t have let her go!”

  Silence. All of them still, waiting for the reply.

  The old man sighed. “Abasio. If the price of a gem is a golden crow, can you buy it for a black-penny? Is all life upon this world so shoddy a thing that it may be bought for a worthless automaton?”

  “She didn’t!” Abasio cried “She wouldn’t have left me! She couldn’t have!” And then, seeing the old man’s face, “But she’s coming back!”

  No answer. Abasio backed up until he was pressed tight against the parapet, feeling his knees buckle. He huddled against the parapet wall, his head moving from side to side in constant negation, saying over and over again, “No. No No.”

  Arakny went to Abasio, put her arms around him, and held him. Drowned Woman looked at him sorrowfully, thinking how familiar he looked. Was he indeed her son, as some said?

  “Where did they go?” demanded Originee Suttle, tears of anger and pity in the corners of her eyes. “Really?”

  Oracle answered, “I prophesied for them. I always tell the truth. Those who hear must interpret, of course.” She looked down, her mouth twisting “People always believe what they want to believe.”

  Arakny held out her hand, invoking silence “But what of that prophecy? Olly’s seven questions. Did she answer them?”

  It was Tom who spoke “She said you would want to know, Arakny. She told me to tell you. Yes, she answered the questions Hunagor and Werra asked her. Who she was, and who they two were What the three thrones are, and who the four families are who chewed at them. She foresaw the five armies of champions; she knew of the six set upon salvation, and from both champions and earth-menders she took her hope and her resolution.”

  “And the seventh question?” Oracle demanded.

  Abasio raised his head, his face haggard and drained of all emotion.

  Tom paused, his voice doubtful, “She said—the thrones wanted to know … if she considered her life well spent. She told them yes, she did.”

  From Abasio, a wordless howl of rejection.

  “We spoke of that once,” the Farmwife mused, tears in her eyes. “We spoke of people finding out who they are. And was she only for this, then? What was the purpose of it all?”

  The old man said softly, “The purpose of it all was to reverse the chain of events that began when Jark the Third uncovered a cavern full of bionic warriors, made by man during the Age of Great Wars. With that discovery, a chain of probability was rejoined, a chain we Gaddirs were seeking to disrupt, a chain begun by man that would have ended all life on earth.”

  “We are only just saving it from the time before,” Arakny said “We’re just getting it growing again!”

  “Ellel was that dangerous?” asked the Farmwife. “One woman?”

  His Wisdom nodded slowly. “Had she returned from her voyage with weapons from the space station, yes. Had she sent someone else to get them, yes. Had she remained here even without them, yes. To interrupt the chain of events, she had to leave her army and take with her all the Ellels who might rise up in her place. Yes, she was very dangerous.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill her!” cried Abasio.

  The old man sighed. “Natural law, my boy. When a tyrant is simply killed, another rises up. The very act of violence causes them to copse, like trees. Quietly, quietly, one has to dig out the root.”

  “Did you know all this?” Qualary asked Tom “Did you?”

  “Only bits and pieces of it,” he said, with a flush and a shrug “His Wisdom knew all of it.”

  “Is that why we were friends? Just so—” “Just so nothing,” said His Wisdom, firmly “Tom was assigned to get to know you, yes He was not assigned to lie to you or mislead you His feelings for you, whatever they may be, are his own, and I know him to be a sincere and honest man.”

  Qualary flushed in turn “And now?” asked the Griffin.

  “And now what?” Abasio cried in an anguished voice. “What’s left!”

  “And now, I have an errand down below,” said His Wisdom. “Because you are a collector of information, Arakny, you should come.”

  Slowly, unwillingly, she nodded “I, too,” said the Griffin. “Yes,” said His Wisdom “And you, Abasio.” Abasio shook his head. He wanted nothing more to do with these people who had let Olly go, or this place that had swallowed her up.

>   “Olly asked me to take you,” said the old man, his eyes fixed on Abasio’s huddled form. “Gome, now.”

  Abasio rose, unable to resist the adamantine will in the old man’s voice, unwilling to resist any request Olly had made.

  Tom rose to accompany them, but His Wisdom smiled. “No, Tom You don’t need to come along. You and Qualary see to our other guests. We won’t be long.”

  The old man’s chair whirred out into the corridor, and then went swiftly, by ways wide enough and ramps easy enough for the Griffin’s wings and claws, to an enormous lift that Abasio knew he had never seen before, thence downward, arriving in mere moments near to the vaultlike door Abasio so well remembered.

  The old man opened it, taking far less time than Tom had done. The pillars stood as they had stood before. The tracks leading among them showed faintly in the dust, winding as before. When they came at last to the open space before the dais, Abasio and Arakny saw that the light was dimmer than it had been. The thrones should have been harder to see, except that they glowed with a pale light of their own. The woman who sat on the left-hand throne smiled a slow welcome as they arrived, as did the man on the center throne.

  “Hunagor,” said the old man, nodding to the left-hand figure. “Werra,” as he nodded to the center figure. “Some friends have come to see me off.”

  “Librarian,” the thrones said, a word that took forever, nodding in their turn, a nod that took even longer. “Great One,” and a nod to the Griffin. And then, while both of them looked at Abasio, Hunagor spoke alone: “Great- grandson.”

  Abasio shuddered, started to speak, stopped, unable to form words. He stood paralyzed as all the creatures on the stone, in the stone, making up the stone, seemed to greet him, to nod and smile or speak, though Abasio could not tell whether they had actually done so or merely intimated it in some fashion.

  “Well,” sighed the old man. “It’s done.”

  “Old friend,” they said. “Welcome.”

  All the creatures on the thrones echoed welcome.

  Seoca leaned forward, struggling to get his legs under him and rise from the chair that had carried him so long. Arakny came to help him, and at a commanding glance from her, Abasio supported his other side. There was sweat on her forehead, and her hands were clammy when he touched them. They half-lifted the old man onto the low dais and helped him walk to the right-hand throne, where he sat down with a sigh that seemed to breathe throughout the hall for long moments after it was done, a little wind, a dying wind.

  “Look at us,” the old man whispered. “Don’t turn your head away. Hunagor is your great-grandmother. Werra is Olly’s father. She wanted you to know about us. Look at us!”

  Reluctantly, backing away slow step by slow step, Abasio forced himself to look at them. From the backs and arms and bases of the thrones, the carved creatures returned his gaze. Tentacled creatures and winged ones. Creatures with many legs. Bloblike things with no discernible features. Lizardlike beings. All of them watching him as he watched them, each of them seeming to say, “Look at me. See me. Understand me. You are of our kindred. She you loved understood me. Now you too.”

  “So you begin again,” chanted His Wisdom softly.

  The Griffin quoted: “ ‘Now are sent monsters and heroes abroad upon the earth, now are sent the inhabitants of faery and the beings of fable, now a new age of legends is ushered in. Now may the thrones depart.’ ”

  Abasio barely heard, for the creatures on the thrones still held his eyes, willing him to understand. Understand what?

  He met Hunagor’s eyes She looked up, lifting his gaze to the back of the throne, above her head, where her name was carved Hunagor And above the man’s, Werra And above the old man’s, Seoca.

  Hunagor Werra. Seoca. The words writhed and twisted like snakes, re-forming before his eyes.

  Hunagor Werra Seoca.

  Visions came to him, rising out of those words: Forests become deserts, the bloated bellies of starvation, the scorched earth of bombed cities, the hideous faces of IDDIs Famine. Death. Plague Earth itself endangered by man Man himself a plague, to be attacked like a plague, to be killed by whatever means the thrones could find. Hunagor. Werra Seoca.

  Hunger!

  War!

  Sickness!

  His breath caught in his throat He felt himself grow cold.

  “Go, now,” said the old man, looking from Abasio to Arakny and the Griffin and back again to Abasio “Go, my boy.”

  Abasio’s breath left him explosively.

  Arakny took him by the shoulder and drew him back toward the pillars. Before them, the Griffin was bent into a profound obeisance The thrones hummed. The Griffin turned and came after them, a wild amber light burning in its eyes. A wavering effulgence gathered around the thrones, and those sitting there began to melt into the stone, joining that throng of others who had melted into those thrones throughout aeons of time.

  Abasio was chill and rigid with protest. He did not believe. He would not believe. He was not thinking. He had willfully turned his mind off. He did not wish to think of anything, particularly not of this.

  They fled, following the Griffin out among the pillars, out into the corridor. Behind them the low humming intensified, a sound growing slowly and steadily in volume. The Griffin thrust the great door closed with one push of a mighty wing.

  “We are friends, Abasio Cermit,” said the Griffin. “For her sake.”

  Abasio choked on the words. “For her sake.”

  “Go that way, swiftly! I have my own way out.” The Griffin pointed with one wingtip, then went away itself, down the long corridor to the right, striding like a lion, wings folded behind it.

  The great engine noise had abated, though not the vibration they could feel through the soles of their feet They ran in the direction the Griffin had indicated, coming to the open lift they had used to descend. They leaped inside it, felt it lunge upward, fidgeted impatiently as it rose up and up and up into the more familiar purlieus of Gaddi House.

  “What’s happening?” mumbled Abasio.

  “I’m not certain,” Arakny muttered as the engine noise from below increased, grew to a steady mutter, then to a subdued roar that made the walls shake “But the librarian in me says we’ve probably reached the end of one book and the beginning of another.”

  The doors opened, and they staggered together along the familiar corridor to His Wisdom’s quarters, where they found the others crouched along walls or clinging to doorframes, trying to stand or sit while the entire structure shuddered around them. The tremors went on and on, a constant vibration that made their teeth chatter and their muscles rebel, ripping them away from their holdfasts and tumbling them about on the floor like rocks in an avalanche among a clutter of furniture and broken crockery.

  Until all at once, without diminution or aftershock, the noise and shaking simply stopped, absolutely and utterly. They lay in an enormous silence, for a moment without even the sound of breathing, then gasped as they realized they’d been holding their breaths.

  Tom Fuelry heaved air into his lungs and demanded, “Where is His Wisdom?”

  “Where?” cried Nimwes, sounding both angry and afraid, her question echoed by others of the Gaddirs “Below,” said Abasio “With his friends.” “I’ll go,” said Tom, rushing out. “You shouldn’t have left him.”

  Nimwes ran after him. Arakny started to follow, but Oracle caught at her shoulder, shaking her head. “Let them see They’ll need to see for themselves.”

  Arakny turned, patting her pockets, muttering “What is it?” Oracle asked.

  “I just remembered! Olly took my library. I forgot to get it back from her. I wanted to record, to make note, to—”

  Outside the room, Tom ran toward one of the secret lifts, one he had used a thousand times He bumped himself against an unfamiliar panel and stood back, rubbing his head. Where the self-opening door should have been was only blank wall He shook his head, baffled, angry, frightened, while Nimwes cried from b
ehind him. Well, there was another one not far away, where this corridor crossed another beside a ramp.

  He ran. She ran The crossing was there. The ramp was there. The door wasn’t. The lift wasn’t.

  There was a door, one of the big doors, down two levels! He flung himself at the ramp, Nimwes still pursuing, stumbling two levels down, almost falling in his haste The door was gone. The whole door, the entire, huge, complicated door. Where it had stood was only blank wall! Wall! Everywhere walls!

  All the ways were closed. All the routes he had used all the years of his life were gone. The ways his father had shown him. Portals he had opened time after time were gone, nothing remaining to show where they had been. Lifts he had ridden in were gone. Corridors he had traversed to get from this point to that ended now in different places, against different barriers. Gaddi House was no longer as it had been.

  When they returned, there was blood upon their fingertips where they had pressed again and again at unyielding stone. From the adjacent room, the others heard their voices raised in a long, confused lament, while Nimwes cried heartbrokenly. “He didn’t tell me good-bye!”

  Qualary, not understanding anything that had happened, cried, “When Ellel gets back—when she gets back, she’ll find all her walkers gone She’ll find things changed. She hates that. She’ll be so angry.”

  Oracle put her arm around the woman. “Don’t worry about that, Qualary. Really, you don’t have to worry about that.”

  Qualary sniffed, dried her eyes. “She told me you said the stars were Ellel’s Two Families, you said.”

  Oracle only patted her shoulder and did not reply Her eyes were fixed upon Berkli’s, and his upon hers with dawning awareness.

  Tom’s sorrow had reminded Abasio of his own. “I think of her out there!” he cried to Oracle. “Going on and on, forever Hungry Tired. Maybe in pain.”

  “No,” said Oracle “Believe me, Abasio, my Orphan’s not in pain She’ll never be hungry, or tired, or in pain.” She looked away from him, her face set and grim.

  He would not let the subject alone. “Do you think Olly’s life well spent?” he demanded angrily. “You sent her here. Was it right?”