“Heel, Tomas,” she said. One huge bound brought him halfway out into the hallway, another one and he was rigidly attached, six inches from her left leg, his nose seeking her hand. She allowed him to have it, to snuffle her palm and lick her, even let him nibble at her fingers, the pleasure of the contact overcoming the sharp twinges of pain that shot up to her shoulder. He stayed at her side, holding perfect obedience down the awkward stairway, out the door, adjusting his eagerness to her slow gait with tight jerks, down three stone steps that were wet with half-melted snow, on which her leg failed and she would have collapsed but for Margaret’s arm, out into the mushy parkland grass of the hidden garden. Finally she stood still and looked down at him, at his bristly face and open mouth, eagerly pricked ears, the blatant joy of the dog at his heart’s return. She grinned back at him through a tight throat, stepped back, and swept her arm out in a broad, all-encompassing wave that freed his bonds.
The dog shot out across the stunted, half-frozen winter grass and a hundred yards away dove into a stand of rhododendrons, which heaved violently and spewed hunks of sodden snow in all directions to record his passage. At their end he erupted out again into a mad racing turn, skidded and recovered and turned to cover the ground between himself and Dian in two score of ground-hugging, overlapping, spine-flexing bounds. Twelve feet from her he launched himself into the air. As Margaret exclaimed and reached out belatedly for Dian’s right shoulder, he soared at chest level an inch from her left one, landed in a huge spray of gravel behind her, and raced past them to circle around the rhododendrons and do it all over again. Half a dozen times he raced and circled and flew, but on the seventh time, instead of pelting up to them and launching himself, he slowed to a trot and came to stand in front of his beloved mistress, heaving and blowing clouds of steam and looking up at her through bushy eyebrows with eyes that held no reproach, no question, only love and joy at her return. Her heart went out to him then, in a way it had not in the Valley or on the road, in a way she had never given of herself to anyone but Culum. She dropped painfully to her knees, hardly noticing Margaret’s hand on her elbow, and when he came forward to butt his head against her chest, she draped her arms around him, sinking her face into the thick, foul-smelling hair over his shoulders. His solid presence and utter faithfulness were infinitely comforting, and despite the pain in her knees and breast and the cold and the wet that was seeping into the legs of her trousers, she remained bent over him for a full minute before she put up her arm for Margaret to help her rise. In her affection for this woman who had risked befriending her, she took Margaret’s hand, wrapped it gently as far as it would go around the dog’s heavy muzzle, and nodded his head with it.
“Friend, Tomas,” she told him. “This is a friend. Margaret. Margaret, meet Tomas.” She turned to look into Margaret’s eyes and abruptly realized that she had made a bad mistake. Revealing her vulnerable spot, her love for this dog, to Margaret might not be a problem—somehow she knew that Margaret was to be trusted that far—but the windows that opened onto the garden . . . Nothing to be done now—and the worst thing that she could do would be to ignore or try to hide this, her one weakness. She tried for a smile.
“You’re safe around him now. He would probably even take something to eat from you. He’ll regard you as a friend.”
“I’m very glad he’s not an enemy,” said Margaret, eyeing the animal whose shoulders came to her hip, who outweighed her by a good thirty pounds. “I thought he was going to knock you into the next building. Can we go inside now? I’m not dressed for this, and you’re turning blue.”
Dian deferred to Tomas. “Are you finished, Tomas? Yes, I think he’s finished for the moment. Would you like some food, Tomas? Food? I’d say he was distinctly interested, wouldn’t you? Yes, let’s go in. On you go, Tomas,” and he leapt gaily up the steps, tail high and flailing furiously, waiting as his new Friend helped his Dian up the stairs. His mistress was back in her heaven; all was right with the world.
Dian was granted thirty-six hours of peace. She ate, began cautiously to chew, took three more pink-gel baths, had a haircut, and slept twelve hours at a stretch. Tomas ate, was bathed, combed, and exercised by the increasingly infatuated Margaret, and slept in profound satisfaction on the floor beside Dian’s bed. Dian’s headache faded, her ears stopped ringing, the bruised flesh turned yellow and her eyes returned to normal, bandages and one set of stitches were removed, her fingers regained their skill and a portion of their strength, she met two of her neighbors and the D who cleaned and brought her supplies, she was measured for clothing, and on the morning of the fifth day, four and a half days after she had first entered Ashtown’s gates, the midwife came and Dian heard for the first time the amplified heart sounds of the being that lay in her womb, a breathless bird-beat that shook her more profoundly than anything that had happened since Robin’s abduction.
The midwife had no sooner left than another knock came at the door and Dian, thinking it was Margaret, called out her permission to enter. It was not Margaret, but another Angel, whose face was familiar but whose name Dian did not know. She wore a handgun at her hip and spoke with a military formality that did not mask her underlying scorn.
“The Captain will see you now,” she said. “You are to bring the dog.”
Dian did not say anything but went for her cloth shoes—a pair of boots had arrived, but their laces were difficult unaided and they pinched her still-swollen feet. She sat on the bed and pulled them on, slowly, of necessity as well as to gather her thoughts, which had scattered unreasonably at the sound of the rapid thuppa thuppa given out by the midwife’s Artifact machine pressed to her belly. There was no more time for disability or woolly-headedness, no time at all for weakness. She was, for better or for worse (in sickness and in health, her mind threw in, all the days of my life) an Angel, and her Captain was summoning her. An Angel among Angels, as brutal as was required to do the job. She would find Robin, and she would get them both out, but in the meantime she was her Captain’s Angel. She had a hard moment with her jacket, half on and her arm awkwardly stuck, but she forced it up at the price of awakening her shoulder, took a deep breath, and went out to join the guard.
“Tomas, heel,” she said as she passed through the room and walked briskly away in what she hoped was the direction of the Captain’s rooms, so that the other Angel was forced first to close the door and then to scurry in order to shoulder Dian aside and take over the place in front.
“Your name?” Dian asked the back, but the woman walked directly on. Dian followed but deliberately slowed, exaggerating her limp and smiling now, and the woman would have lost her had she not waited at the next corner. Dian sauntered along with a hand resting on Tomas’s back, and spoke to him in a casual but carrying voice.
“You know, Tomas, one of the difficulties of coming into a system like this is, you don’t have any way of learning the ins and outs of how things work unless someone tells you or you see it in action. Take official duty, for example,” she went on, and grinned wickedly at a startled D pushing a cart of cleaning supplies. “Some places, guards on duty aren’t allowed to talk outside of transmitting orders. That’s fine. That’s how it works. Other places, now, guards running orders from higher up start to feeling that the orders are theirs, that they’re every bit as big as those who actually gave the orders.” Dian was strolling now, baring her teeth in mock cheer at any passing Angel, even at her guide, whose back was becoming increasingly rigid. “Now, that’s just plain foolish, wouldn’t you say, Tomas? Yes, I thought you’d agree. You’re very sensible, ‘cause you know, once that happens, once a guard starts imagining rules that aren’t there and other people find out about her attitude, well, now, it’s not too long before someone comes down on that guard like a ton of bricks. Sometimes it’s someone from above, sometimes from her own level; either way, that guard is pretty flat. All because of making up some rule that isn’t there, in order to feel important. ‘Course, if it is a rule, nobody’s offended. But
if it’s not, and people find out it’s not, well—”
“Delia,” the guard hissed at Dian over her shoulder. “The name is Delia. Now, would you get moving?” Dian agreeably sped up her stride to a fast crawl, smiled widely, and shut up. It was good to know that word of her actions outside the gate had spread and survived the night’s beating. Perhaps, come to think of it, even been fed by it—certainly this guard seemed hesitant to cross Dian openly. However, she might be a lowly messenger. Have to find out Delia’s rank, thought Dian, and then they stopped in front of a door. The Angel knocked twice, and at a brief mutter from within she opened the door, then shut it after Dian and Tomas.
The Captain sat in a soft chair with her feet stretched out to a wood fire. Next to her sat the woman whom Dian had seen the night of the beating, who resembled the Captain although her eyes were closer to brown—sisters according to Margaret, or by blood, maybe cousins. Between them rested an ornately carved low table with a silver tray and coffee service, two translucent cups and saucers, and a plate of small cakes. The two women studied Dian with their similar eyes, those of the strange woman analytical rather than compelling, and cold where the Captain’s hinted of passion. Dian held her hand out, the fingers gesturing down, and Tomas sat. The gazes of both women went to him.
“He’s very obedient,” the other woman commented at last. Her voice was slightly nasal, as if the resonators had been blocked or crushed, and the effect was slightly creepy. It was not a voice to obey, but definitely one to avoid crossing.
“He’s young, but he’s intelligent and wants to please,” Dian agreed, and waited for further sign of what was demanded of her. Finally, the strange woman turned back to the Captain and leaned forward with her hands on the arms of the chair.
“Must go. I’ll let you know what they decide, shall I?” Something about the thought seemed to cause her secret amusement, as if the offer were a joke shared by two adults over the actions of infants. The Captain seemed to agree with the attitude, if not the humor.
“It’s hardly necessary, but I’ll see you tonight anyway,” she said from the depths of her chair. The other woman stood up and walked past Dian as if she were not there, and Dian stood alone, an Angel awaiting orders from her Captain.
THEN SHE TOOK UP HER SWORD WITH BOTH HANDS AND WENT TO ATTACK HIM FULL OF RAGE.
TWENTY-SIX
SPRING CAME, EVEN TO ASHTOWN. TO DIAN, THOUGH, the fragrant sweet-pea blossoms that splashed up the walls and tumbled from window boxes, the birdsong and the kites in the clear blue sky, the rich smell of new-mown grass and freshly turned earth and the voices of children playing out of doors all had an air of unreality, of stage dressing—like, she thought in one of her blacker moments, some diseased whore in skillfully youthful makeup.
Her mood that gentle late-March morning was black indeed, and she stalked the streets, savage and short-tempered and every bit as dangerous as the person she had, for two and a half endless months, been pretending to be.
There were a number of reasons for her blind and savage march through Ashtown’s gleaming roads. For one thing, she’d been inside this putrid, cheerful little town for nine godforsaken weeks and two days, while the time left to inform the Valley of what was on its way built, crested, and passed: Miriam’s people would be packed and on the road south, with nothing but the briefest of greetings from Dian to give them pause. She had not confronted them that snowy evening, she had not returned from Robin’s cabin; she had failed, and Judith would pay the consequences.
It might not have been so unbearable if she had been able to relax occasionally, but for every hour of every one of her sixty-five days here, she’d had to be on her guard against softness, friendship, self-revelation. Every person she encountered hated and feared her for what her uniform meant. The only exceptions were themselves clothed in black: Angels inside the Center, where the camaraderie of soldiers provided a veneer of friendship; Margaret, who remained an enigma despite daily familiarity and physical intimacy; and Captain Breaker, whose emotions, often unfathomable to Dian, most emphatically did not include fear—or even, Dian suspected, its corollary, hate. In all that time she had not seen Robin once; she was no closer to seeing him than the day she’d arrived. Nor had she seen a trader with bright blond hair, although she hadn’t expected to: anyone who would Destroy books would scorn to live in a city that cherished its amenities as Ashtown did.
Added to those frustrations was this pregnancy, nearly two thirds of the way through now, which meant she had to piss every ten minutes, couldn’t eat anything interesting without suffering the most ungodly heartburn, had to see the midwife every two weeks (and was finding it increasingly difficult not to murder that good woman, to wrap her own stethoscope around her neck until she gagged on her platitudes about proper diet and positive attitude and exercise and breathing and goddamned nipple preparation, for shit’s sake), and was nudging toward the time when she would be forced into maternity leave, lest her soft outline make an Angel an object of amusement in the streets.
But the final straw, the panic that pressed in on her and was about to drive her off the edge into desperation, was the sure knowledge that she was losing Tomas.
Breaker was clever, Dian gave her that, as clever with dogs as she was with people. Four weeks of seeing Dian regularly, always with Tomas present, developing a simple friendship with the big, unsuspecting animal. Then a month of gradually increasing independence with him, of reason and absolute authority saying, “He has to learn to obey me, Dian,” and “It’s not a good precedent, Dian, for an Angel to have a weapon her Captain can’t handle,” working up to “He handles better when you’re not looking over his shoulder, Dian, why don’t you leave us alone for an hour?” Then last week the arrival of a very large but exceedingly stupid smooth-haired bitch, some kind of Great Dane mix brought south through Portland from Idaho, all this culminating in that morning’s command—not request, command—that in six weeks Tomas would accompany Breaker on her four-day trip north to meet and escort Queen Bess to Ashtown for her annual visit. Without Dian.
Savage and ugly as an ink smear across a watercolor of spring, she prowled the tidy streets and alleys of her self-imposed prison; poor Tomas, pacing beside her with her fingers brushing his shoulders, had no idea what had put his mistress into this foul mood. She barely noticed the alacrity with which the road in front of her opened up, or the way children were snatched from her path, or the sudden gulping silence that eddied through the streets as the citizens became aware of this black Angel bearing down on them. Dian: the embodiment of uncontrollable fury and irrational death that they put up with, and turned very blind eyes to, as the price one had to pay for security; one of the Vampires (whisper it!) who occasionally snatched up a citizen (but surely only those who deserved it, and not one of mine, not my family, not today).
Dian took no notice of the averted eyes, tight lips, and rigid shoulders. She was entirely taken up with her own impotent rage, with fury at the delay and at the visibly rounding belly pushing out the front of her black tunic under the jacket, with the maddening, never-ending burn in her left breast, like some small, sharp-toothed animal that always gnawed harder on bad days, and the throb in her apparently healed leg that on cold days and depressing ones demanded that she consciously suppress a limp. She ached with the frustration of suppressed violence, she longed to let go and do something truly vicious, to anyone, but she held herself in, feeling herself a maniac under tight but marginal control, and continued her patrol.
Halfway through the morning, she dropped by the Angel station located next to the smaller of the town’s two movie theaters, quiet still. She lodged a report and used the station toilet, then came out and turned down the street to the stall that sold cups of thick, sweet coffee, the kind the midwife forbade her. She took the cup, put her coin down, and walked away, so the woman could take the money without trepidation. Most of the Angels just took—and often considerably more than cups of coffee—but from her first patrol Dian ha
d made it clear that she accepted no gifts. Word had spread fast, and by the end of the day the shopkeepers were all aware that the new Angel with the dog paid her way, that she was polite, but that when she put on that smile, you’d better back off, fast.
The morning was uneventful, perhaps because her mood preceded her in the street and instantly doused any potential hot spots. The closest she came to action was when she approached a pair of furious merchants, so deeply immersed in their argument they did not notice the nervous silence that fell over their neighbors. She had tapped them each once on the shoulder with her unpowered wand; two red and irritable faces turned in her direction, then went abruptly pale, and the two frightened women faded away with identical sick smiles, in opposite directions. Dian slid the wand back into its clasp on her arm, and went on, even more infuriated now at this reminder of the daily intimidation she practiced, and at the spineless acceptance of her black-clad presence by the people of Ashtown.
There was no violence all that morning, not even any graffiti. No one came to her for help, but then that was hardly out of the ordinary. Angels were not there for helping, except under the very direst of straits; as for settling disagreements, one might as well submit to the judgment of a venomous snake. Angels were for repression, pure and simple, to carve away troublemakers with swift efficiency and thereby smooth the lives of decent, law-abiding citizens. At any rate, so the law-abiding citizens reassured themselves, and the town lawmakers always voted for the continuance of the Ashtown Guard, for their salaries and equipment and steady increase in numbers. Some of the more sensitive might have difficulties sleeping occasionally, as they recalled the smirk on the face of Captain Breaker’s sister during the discussions on these matters, and in the still, dark hours they might wonder if the town Council controlled the Guard, or the Guard controlled the town. Come morning, however, their worries seemed silly. Hard times called for hard measures, and the Angels were an important tool for the preservation of order. A sharp tool, granted, and one with no apparent safe handle, a tool that could slice the unwary. Best to avoid Angels, at all times. But they were only a tool.
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