Issue #154 • Aug. 14, 2014
“The Angel Azrael Delivers Justice to the People of the Dust,” by Peter Darbyshire
“Make No Promises,” by Stephen V. Ramey
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THE ANGEL AZRAEL DELIVERS JUSTICE TO THE PEOPLE OF THE DUST
by Peter Darbyshire
The angel Azrael rode through the dust storm for three days. He figured it to be three days, anyway. It was hard to tell for certain, because the storm turned what little of the world he could see into night, and then into nothing at all. He closed his eyes and let his dead horse take him where it would.
Sometimes he heard voices crying out in the storm, but he wasn’t sure if they were a trick of the wind or his conscience. He couldn’t understand what they were saying regardless, so he figured it best to pay them no heed. He wrapped himself tighter in his coat, more to protect the guns around his waist from the elements than anything else. That’s what he told himself, anyway.
He had to stop every now and then to tighten the saddle around what was left of the horse. The storm scoured chunks of its rotting flesh away, and the saddle kept slipping. Soon there’d be nothing left of the horse but bone. Sure, he could raise another horse from the dead that would be more comfortable, just like he’d raised this one. But he had been through a lot with this horse. Too much, when he thought about it. Like the events in the last town, which he’d ridden all the way out here to forget.
He’d seen the storm coming across the scrubland, but he hadn’t tried to avoid it. Azrael wanted to get lost. He wanted to put the world behind him and come out the other side of the storm somewhere else. He wanted to find a land with no more churches, no more people, no more Fallen. He was weary of it all. He was weary of himself.
But when he eventually emerged from the dust, into the burning sun of noon, he found the same old world still there.
The horse was following a worn road Azrael hadn’t seen in the storm. It went past a farmhouse off to one side and disappeared into the horizon. Azrael could make out the spire of a church shimmering at the vanishing point, like a mirage. It wasn’t what he wanted to see, but he didn’t turn around. There wasn’t anything better the way he had come.
Azrael nudged the horse toward the farmhouse. He’d spied a pump in the yard, and he was thirstier than usual after three days of drinking nothing but dust.
He studied the place as he rode. It looked to be in danger of falling in on itself, and there were two wooden crosses planted in the ground to one side.
When he got off the horse by the pump, a woman holding a shotgun stepped out onto the porch. She held it like she knew how to hold all manner of guns.
The buzzards that followed him everywhere came out of the sun then, circling overhead. He thought maybe they’d lost him in the dust storm, but it appeared they weren’t about to let a provider like him get away.
“You here to deliver us or damn us even more?” the woman asked.
Azrael hadn’t thought anybody would have been able to make out what was left of his wings under all the dirt. Hardly anything of them remained now.
“I’m not that kind of angel,” he said.
“Well, what kind are you then?” she asked.
“The thirsty kind,” he said, nodding at the pump.
She didn’t shoot him, so he took that for an invitation to drink. He pumped for a spell, until a trickle of water came out. He lowered his mouth to it and drank. It was the first time he’d had water in longer than he could remember. After all this time, it was almost as good as whiskey. Almost.
When he was done, he straightened back up and saw a man standing behind the woman. As old and weather-beaten as she was. He stared at Azrael, but his eyes were glazed white, so Azrael imagined the old man didn’t see him. If he saw anything at all.
Azrael looked around the farmyard once more. When he settled his eyes on the barn, he caught the woman raising the gun a little more, trying to take aim without alerting him to it.
“Why don’t you keep on riding,” she said.
Azrael could have drawn and shot her down before she even thought about pulling the shotgun’s trigger. In the old days, he would have blown the doors to the barn open with a gesture and razed the entire farm with a few words. But he was tired of the old days.
He got back on the horse. “I don’t have any money,” he said, nodding at the pump.
“Who does?” she said.
“I’ll say a prayer for you,” he said.
She laughed at that. “I ain’t yet seen a soul living or dead that prayer’s helped.”
Azrael rode on without saying anything else, because there was nothing to say to that.
* * *
Azrael followed the road toward the church because there was nowhere else to go. Nothing but wasteland to either side of him and damnation behind him. It was the way of the world as usual.
The church solidified out of the day as he rode, rising up into the sky. Buildings grew out of the ground around it. He couldn’t tell if it was the beginnings of a town or the end of one. There often wasn’t much difference between the two out here.
He passed a couple of wagons abandoned in the middle of the road. Both had bloody handprints smeared down the sides, as if someone had been dragged away but hadn’t been willing to let go. But then he knew from experience no one ever wanted to let go when it was time.
He didn’t see another living soul until he rode into the town. The main street was full of dancing people. Like a drunken mob, only they were throwing curtsies and bows to each other instead of punches and kicks. Men and women in their Sunday night finery. Toasting each other with bottles and glasses in their hands, and then toasting him when he reined in the horse at the edge of their party looking for a place to get a drink himself.
He didn’t understand their words. It was a tongue he’d never heard, and he knew as many tongues as the world had forgotten. It sounded as if they were talking around mouthfuls of dirt. He nodded at them anyway, and they didn’t seem offended by his silence. A man in a black suit pressed a bottle of whiskey into his hands, and a woman in a black dress ran a hand up his leg and patted his belt buckle before spinning away with a wink, into the arms of a man in a high hat and spectacles. Some things didn’t need words.
Azrael glanced up again at the sun to make sure it was still there and he hadn’t somehow ridden into the night without noticing. The middle of the day wasn’t the usual celebration time for mortals. But they were a long way from anywhere out here, and the farther people got from civilization, the more they tended to make up their own rules.
He took a long drink from the bottle. It burned in all the ways he desired. He went to hand it back, but the man had already wandered back into the crowd and rejoined the dance.
The music was supplied by a handful of folks scattered throughout the merriment. A man in clean and pressed pants and shirt played banjo while riding the shoulders of a woman wearing a purple dress. Another man sat on the front step of what looked like the general store and bashed on pots and pans with a wooden spoon. Someone Azrael couldn’t see blew on a harmonica. Together they managed some sort of dancing tune, even though none of them were watching each other as far as Azrael could tell.
And then there was the singing. At least Azrael thought it was singing. The men and women were all bellowing something that had the makings of a song, but it was just as incomprehensible as the rest of the things they said.
He took another pull from the bottle and noted that the church in the centre of the town was empty, its doors hanging open. The s
tructure occupied the only hill in sight, which should have made it a natural gathering place, but it looked as if it hadn’t been used in some time.
When he looked back down, he noticed the children in the crowd. Standing here and there, where they wouldn’t get trampled by the dancers. A couple of girls holding hands behind a watering trough, one of them clutching a doll to her chest. A boy sitting on a hitching rail. Another couple of boys on the roof of a shed beside the store. They all watched the proceedings with expressions that didn’t say anything. That in itself signified something.
Azrael nudged his horse around the edge of the crowd, trying to steer clear of their celebration. He didn’t know what cause they had for celebrating, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to find a quiet place in the town to kill the rest of the bottle and maybe acquire a few more bottles for the road.
But the townsfolk wouldn’t let him go. They pressed in around him, grabbing him and trying to pull him down to join their dance. They were packed so tight, the horse couldn’t move through them. Instead, it was pulled deeper into the crowd. They were leading him somewhere, but Azrael wasn’t sure where.
Before he could ascertain what mischief the townsfolk were up to, the skeletons attacked.
They came the same way he’d come, rushing out of the wasteland and into the town like some stray memories that had finally caught up to him. They were human in shape, but he knew from his first glance their way that they hadn’t ever been human. The bones of these creatures were thicker and longer than human bones, and they had hooks and spurs that no human had ever sported.
Moreover, none of them looked alike. Some were the same rough shape and size as regular folk, but others were stunted and hunched over. A couple were lopsided, with one leg longer than the other. Some had full ribcages while others had a jumble of misshapen bones holding them together. It was as if they’d been assembled into the shapes of humans using bones that had never belonged to anything human. But they carried the tools of humans: pitchforks and axes and shovels.
Azrael turned to watch and put his hands on his guns, one forged from the unnatural metals of Hell, the other ripped from the grasp of a particularly troublesome ghost. But he didn’t interfere. He’d learned too many times about getting involved in the quarrels of others.
The skeletons went for the children. They rampaged through the crowd, shoving the dancers out of their way, stabbing and hacking at them with their weapons or slashing and snapping at them with their unnatural claws and teeth. A couple of the dancers went down, their blood soaking into the parched ground. But the other townsfolk fought back, punching and kicking and swarming the skeletons, all the while continuing to sing their song and take long pulls from their bottles. The musicians kept on playing, although the banjo player swung his instrument down on the head of one of the skeletons like an axe. Azrael had seen stranger scenes, but not many.
The people of the town managed to keep the skeletons away from the shed with the boys on the roof, but they couldn’t stop them from grabbing the girls at the watering trough or the boy sitting on the hitching post. The skeletons dragged them free of the crowd, back toward the edge of the town and the way they’d come.
Azrael went to take another drink but found the bottle empty already. He sighed and tossed the bottle aside, using the same motion to draw the ghost gun. He just couldn’t help his nature.
He wasn’t sure what manner of entities these skeletons were, but the ghost gun had always served him well against the spectral and the things most people called undead. He fired off a couple of shots, and because he had an angel’s eye, they found their marks through the mayhem of the crowd. The skeletons dragging away the girls blew apart, showering the scene with dust. The bones lay where they fell, finally dead.
The other skeletons clustered around the boy as they dragged him away. Azrael sighted in on the mass of them but then lowered his gun. It wasn’t for fear of hitting the boy, although that was a cause for concern. The ghost gun’s shells were crafted for the spectral, and they did terrible things indeed to the living. But the real reason he didn’t shoot was because there was something wrong about this scene.
Before he disappeared into their midst, the boy hadn’t fought the skeletons. Neither had the girls. The adults and the dead seemed to be the only ones inclined toward violence here. But the girls didn’t look too relieved to be snatched from the hands of the dead by the living either. They just watched the skeletons head back out of town with their prize. They lifted their hands like they were thinking about waving, but the townsfolk holding them just slapped their hands down.
No one made any move to pursue the skeletons, including Azrael. He noted the way those bone creatures clustered around the boy as they spirited him away. Like they were protecting him.
Now the townsfolk carried the girls past Azrael, in the other direction from the way the skeletons had come. They grabbed the boys off the roof of the shed as well, who looked about as happy at their situation as the girls did at theirs. They all went the way the dancers had been trying to force Azrael.
They left Azrael alone now. A few of the townsfolk looked at him as they passed, but none of them so much as nodded a thank-you. They just kept on babbling to each other in their strange tongue as they dragged the children down the street. The only one who spoke anything comprehensible was one of the girls he’d rescued, the one holding the doll. She turned her head to look up at him as the woman who’d felt his leg carried her past, holding her under one arm.
“You should have let them take us,” the girl said.
And then the townsfolk went down the street and disappeared around the other side of the hill, leaving Azrael alone on his dead horse except for the shattered bones lying in the dust.
He considered things for a while, then got off the horse and went inside the building that looked like it had the best shot of being a bar. He needed a drink more than ever.
* * *
The day was falling into night when Azrael finally staggered out of the bar. The street was just as empty as when he’d walked inside. His horse was still there, waiting for him. It didn’t look like it had moved. It probably hadn’t. The buzzards had settled on the church steeple to wait for him.
He thought about getting back on his horse and riding out of here. It would have been the easy thing to do. But he couldn’t get the little girl’s words out of his head.
He sighed and made his way up the hill to the church. He reloaded the ghost gun as he went. He wondered what had become of the boy. He knew he’d failed him and the girl, but he didn’t know how he’d failed them.
Nothing new there.
The inside of the church was a ruin. There were only shards of wood left where there’d once been pews. He figured they’d been broken up and used for firewood, as there was a burn mark on the wall where a cross would normally hang and the floor underneath it was charred, as if someone had lit a bonfire there. The missing bibles had probably been the kindling.
It didn’t matter. He hadn’t come up here for solace. He just wanted the high ground.
He could still hear the townsfolk singing that damned song, although it was as faint as words on the wind now. He went back outside and looked around, but he couldn’t see anyone. He climbed up the side of the church and pulled himself up the spire for a better view. The buzzards took wing and disappeared into the fading sky.
The road ended around the other side of the hill, at a hole in the ground shored up with timbers and lined with torches. A mine shaft. Azrael couldn’t see anyone in the entrance, but the strange song of the townsfolk drifted up to him, along with the sounds of a girl crying. And the steady noises of pick axes striking rock.
Then the sounds of the digging stopped, as did the weeping of the girl. But the singing didn’t. It grew even louder. And then there was a sound he’d only heard once before. When he’d fallen from Heaven. The sound of him being ripped from his rightful place and cast down here.
He felt a wind on
his face, originating from inside the mine. A few seconds later, a geyser of dust erupted from its entrance, billowing out into the night. Azrael hung on to the church spire and waited to see what came out next.
But it was just the residents of the town again. They came up out of the earth singing and dancing some more. Azrael thought maybe they had done something to the children down there, perhaps spilled their blood in the mine, but the little boys and girls were dancing and singing along with the rest of them. Holding the hands of the adults and speaking in that strange tongue.
None of them looked up at Azrael on the spire. They just danced their way back to the town and continued on with their festivities. Celebrating whatever it was they were celebrating.
Azrael still didn’t move. He had all of eternity to wait. And after a time, something else came out of the mine.
More of the skeleton creatures. Four of them. They looked just as misshapen as the others, as if they had been assembled from random bones. They had the same hooks and spurs as did the ones that had attacked the town. But these bone creatures were smaller and moved more tentatively than the others. Like children. They looked at the town for a moment, and then crept out into the night. They headed across the scrub in the direction of the farm where Azrael had stopped for water.
Then he was falling once again, as the spire snapped under his weight, and darkness claimed him.
* * *
He woke to find a handful of people from the town carrying him into the mine, including the man wearing the spectacles and hat. The fall from the church would have killed an ordinary man, but Azrael was an angel, so it had only stunned him for a time. Besides, it wasn’t the first time he’d fallen.
He could have torn himself from their grasp and gone for his guns, but he wanted to see where they were taking him. There was something going on here. He’d encountered many an abomination before in underworlds but not usually right underneath a town. Then again, the people of this particular community weren’t like most townsfolk.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #154 Page 1