And I, thought Dian, I am an Angel. That smirk is on my face too, because I can see who controls this town. We do. I do. It was a thought as sour as her stomach, and it wormed its way into her more deeply with every snatched-up child and averted pair of eyes.
The woman with the mule did not see Dian until it was too late. Dian came around a corner from a shadowed alleyway into the afternoon sun and was greeted by the sound of thick blows on flesh and one voice raised over a confusion of others. Above the crowd of perhaps two dozen heads an arm emerged, grasping the light end of a heavy-handled crop. The stubby butt end flew through its arc and disappeared, landing on some unseen but solid body at about shoulder level. A burst of voices, most raised in protest but a few in encouragement, nearly covered the bray of the victim, and Dian did not wait for more. With Tomas at her knee, she snapped the wand down into her hand, thumbed it to a mild charge, and slapped it indiscriminately against anything in her way. With a series of singing cracks followed instantly by stifled curses and outraged gasps, her path cleared miraculously, to open on a tableau consisting of: a mule with blood running down its unkempt neck, ears back and four feet planted in an implacable refusal to carry a load larger than it was; the broad back of its infuriated owner, flaying those ears with slurred but blistering imprecations and the upraised crop; and the half-circle of onlookers, backing away rapidly at the unheralded but not unexpected irruption of this dark harbinger of violence. Dian ignored them and reached forward to lay the heavy hand of authority on the sweaty, muscular shoulder in front of her.
Perhaps what followed was Dian’s fault. Her failure to take normal precautions, or even to duck more quickly, may have arisen from her secret hunger for something, anything, to happen. Perhaps it was only an awful mistake on the part of this trader, a relative stranger to Ashtown who had not been here often enough to develop the automatic caution of the native, a Traveler whose small voices of warning were swept away by her drink-fueled fury at being crossed by the stubborn animal, by the power of bending the dumb beast to her will, and by the glory she felt at the scene she was creating among these rustic Ashtowners. She, too, was someone who liked a good fight, and she felt the hand on her shoulder as the opportunity to indulge in something more exciting than beating a mule (which she’d have to stop doing in a minute anyway before she killed it and had to carry the load herself). In either case, the result was the same: the woman’s instinctive response to the interfering hand was a sharp backward jerk of her upcoming elbow. It connected, hard, with Dian’s mouth.
The woman turned with the crop raised, filled with the anticipation of a spot of dirty fighting, and then she froze in horror at the sight before her: a tall Angel in black, blood on her teeth, wand at the ready, murder in her icy blue eyes. The woman barely noticed the huge and angry dog at the Angel’s knee, crouched quivering beneath the restraint of his mistress’s outstretched fingers, the circle of rustics held rigid as if by the same gesture, their apprehension giving way now to open fear. The onlookers’ collective gasp that had accompanied the impact of elbow and mouth had cut off into silence, instantaneous and absolute. A leaf could have been heard dropping to the street, had it dared move. Certainly the only sound was the slobbering breath of the injured pack mule and the macabre strains of an accordion from the next street over. Dian began slowly to smile, and the trader’s befuddled brain finally recognized what she was facing. The bloodied crop fell to the ground, and she would have moaned had her throat been capable of it.
Without taking her eyes from the woman’s, Dian deliberately rotated her head, spat a gob of blood into the street, licked her split lip with a contemplative tongue, and allowed the grin to come back onto her mouth. She reinforced her command to Tomas with a tiny push of her hand toward the paving stones, then reached over with her free hand to click the wand back into place on her forearm. Thus unarmed, she crouched slightly, her hands at waist level; the fingertips of both hands twitched inward, inviting the stranger to come at her. To the onlookers she looked like a cat with a mouse. Or, with the blood trickling from her lips, like a Vampire at midnight.
The artificial stone-cold sobriety that results when alcohol is converted by terror had hold of the trader now and, knowing she was a dead thing, she answered the invitation in the only way possible. There was a knife in her hand moving toward Dian’s belly, and the blade might easily have gutted the pregnant Angel had its wielder been more sober and less afraid. Dian turned it easily on the guard built into her left sleeve and stepped forward so that her rigid right hand could deliver a straight-fingered thrust directly into the woman’s stomach. The fight was over before it began. With the trader retching at her feet, Dian turned her back and picked up the woman’s two weapons. The crop she tucked under her arm. The knife she used to slice through the pack’s belly bands, then she drove it deep into the load and tugged. The animal skittered away from the sliding packs, stepping on its owner’s hand and kicking her leg before it came near enough to the onlookers for a woman to reach out reflexively and grab its halter. The trader had regained her breath and squealed at these additional blows. She snatched her trampled hand to her chest and sat hunched up, cradling the cracked bones and squinting up at her attacker. Dian contemplated the knife, testing her thumb against the wicked point; she stood over the woman for a long moment, then flipped the knife over in her palm and threw it hard and deep into the woman’s packs.
A brief wince at the damage being done to her property gave way to disbelief and the faint beginnings of hope as the woman realized that she was not about to have her own knife turned on her. She began uncertainly to answer Dian’s unfailing smile with one of her own.
“Get up,” Dian invited her. The woman climbed up from the street and swayed, confused but willing to be wrong about the murderous tendencies of Angels. The Ashtown onlookers had their doubts.
“I’m sorry about the—” the trader began, and with that the cutting end of her own crop hit her full on the face and knocked her stunned to the street. Dian, jiggling the crop in her hand and waiting for the woman to push herself up from the street, felt more alive than she had in months, filled with an exultation that soared and swooped with her, restoring to life the parts she had thought were dead and gone, carrying with it a surge of strength and joy and power, feelings that were right and good and as heady as strong drink, more satisfying than sex. Angelic rapture held her, the ecstasy of action after close confinement, of clear purpose after the indecisive days and months, the joy and craving for blood and the surge of hatred given a rightful target. She loved this ugly, drunken woman, loved what she, Dian, was about to do to her. The woman staggered to her feet.
“We don’t like it when strangers beat their animals in our city,” Dian told her politely. “It disturbs the children and leaves a mess on the streets.” Then she belted her again. This time the woman decided that anything beyond the sitting position was a dangerous occupation. Dian, however, was not finished, was, in fact, only beginning to give herself over to this mad, glorious, and instantly addictive sensation of being the wielder of complete and uncurbed power.
“We also do not consider it polite to sit in the presence of a guard unless invited. On your feet.” The woman peered through her good eye at the crop, and at Dian, and staggered despairingly to her feet.
“Now you may sit,” said Dian, and hit her. The woman put her arm up against the blow, and for some obscure reason this weak attempt at self-preservation—tardy, ineffectual, and not even from one of Ashtown’s own—was the straw that nudged Dian over the edge into madness, and she hit the woman again where she lay, and then again, and again, and yet again. At first her small grunts of effort were lost in the trader’s noises, but in a short time the woman fell silent, and Dian’s rage fell on this inanimate lump at her feet.
She almost killed her. She would have killed her, would have flailed away until something vital was broken, had it not been for the gentle interruption of a man’s husky and sardonic voice from the
crowd of unwilling witnesses.
“Mother of God,” said the voice, “imagine having an Angel for a mother.”
Ice and fire tingled down Dian’s veins and froze her where she stood, right arm raised. A collective sound came from the people around her, equal parts strangled gasp and moan—if they had been frightened into immobility before, when Dian had an object for her Angelic wrath, they were now in the grip of sheer terror, for God only knew what she might do at this. A pinless grenade dropping into a locked room was no more sure to cause destruction than an Angel crossed, and by a male, who could not (could he?) be harmed, even (surely!) by an Angel. Paralyzed by horror and an unspeakable anticipation, the crowd cringed, and waited.
Dian’s face must have held all the shock she was feeling, although none of the women could have guessed the true cause. She straightened. Her arm went down, and she slowly pivoted. Two very unhappy private guards edged reluctantly aside from their charge—this was one thing they could not protect him from, and both of the women knew that they would be lucky to keep their heads, much less their jobs, for their failure to protect him from his own insanity. They each took one step away, and there he stood, chin raised, face calm, brown of skin and eyes, perfumed and pampered and effete of dress, wearing an almost parental expression of withering disapproval: censuring, disappointed, devastating.
Robin.
SHE WAS SHOCKED TO SEE HOW HANDSOME HE WAS.
TWENTY-SEVEN
DIAN TURNED AWAY FROM THAT EXPRESSION, BACK TO the bloody, welted, half-naked trader. She let the gory crop fall to the ground and deliberately pulled a clean handkerchief from her pocket, wiping her face and hands with it, then discarding it onto the woman’s body. She looked around and chose with her eyes two women who had made encouraging noises while the mule was receiving its beating.
“You, and you. Clean this mess off the street. Get a stretcher if you want, take it to a clinic if you like, just have it out of here in ten minutes.”
They left at a near run. Dian surveyed the other faces, and as an Angel was satisfied with their state.
“The rest of you, clear out. You,” she said to the woman still holding the mule. “The mule is yours. Sell what’s in the pack, everything but the rifle, the food, and one change of clothes. Pay whatever bills that creature adds up in the clinic,” she pointed her chin at the unconscious trader, “and if it survives give it the gun and clothes. The rest is yours.” She turned her back on the woman’s stunned thanks to make sure Tomas would stay put. He had spotted Robin, and it would be disastrous if he were to greet his lost friend as enthusiastically as he so obviously wished to.
“Tomas, stay. You can’t have him,” she said for the sake of the retreating ears. “He’s mine,” and she bared her teeth evilly as she stalked up to Robin.
“Go,” she dismissed the two guards. One of them opened her mouth, snapped it shut at Dian’s glance, and backed away several steps before turning to walk down the street. The two women stopped uncertainly at the next corner, and Dian allowed them to stay there, within sight but not earshot. The two stretcher bearers returned, spilled the body onto the stretcher, and hesitated.
“Pardon me, ma’am, do you want us to . . . ?” She waved her hand at the stains on the cobblestones.
“No, the street cleaners will get it later. Take the crop and the rubbish.” They gathered up the soggy bits with profound distaste, piled them onto the stretcher next to the trader, and scuttled away with their burden.
Dian stood for a long moment looking at the stains on the street, still wet and bright in the center, browning rapidly at the edges, and was visited by the same sick sobriety that had hit the trader a short time before. Mother of God, she thought, what have I become? She felt a trembling start deep inside her, and the desire to vomit, and with a great wrench pulled herself up into the top of her mind, checked on Tomas, and turned at last to Robin.
“I’m sorry,” she started to say, but he cut her off with a flash of his eyes.
“You must not look like you’re apologizing. Forget it.”
“Yes. You’re right. Oh, Robin, my God. I thought I’d never find you.”
“You thought I would slit my throat before you found me,” he corrected her.
“I—well, yes. I’ve been here nearly three months.”
“A bit less than that, isn’t it?”
“You knew I was here! But how—”
“The Men’s Quarter knows all the gossip. Some of it does get a bit distorted, I admit. The first rumors had you killing three Angels, wounding the Captain, and entering the city with either a mountain lion or a timber wolf at your side. Don’t laugh, they’re watching. I am very glad you already had Tomas down. I’ve taken to wearing perfume, but I don’t know if that would put him off.”
She showed him her teeth, for the benefit of other eyes.
“Probably not. Oh, God, it’s good to see you, Robin. I was going crazy.” She stopped, and said in a different voice, “I really was going crazy, wasn’t I? Christ, another month and I’d have turned into an Angel for true. I feel like hugging you and dancing through the streets.”
“Not a good idea.”
“Oh, hell, nobody expects rational behavior from an Angel.”
“Except another Angel.”
“Do you see one?” She tensed, but did not turn her head.
“No, not yet. You do not look well, my friend.” He searched her eyes, and her own gaze slid to the side.
“It has been a long three months,” she told him. “I feel considerably better now. Robin, we must meet.”
“We’ve met.”
“I mean to talk. We have to get out of here, there isn’t much time left.”
“Isn’t it better to wait until the child is born?”
“I will not have my child born in this place.” She spoke with the flat intensity born of desperation, and after a moment he nodded, and asked an odd question.
“Have you been initiated?”
“What, as an Angel? Of course. Why?”
“Later. Just don’t make your Captain angry.”
“I try not to. Have you met her?”
“I have met her,” he said, and there were unpleasant connotations lurking behind his even words. “Dian, I mean it. Neither of us will leave this place if you make that woman angry.”
“Right. Okay, I won’t, but we must talk. How can I get to you?”
“As I said, we’ve met. Now you can ask for me next time you come to the Men’s House. I’m on duty all next week.” His voice was light but sharpened abruptly at Dian’s reaction. “Don’t touch me, and for God’s sake don’t look like that. That’s better. Ask for me; they call me Robby.”
“Robin, if I ask for you, after what happened today, they’ll expect me to take you to pieces.”
“Not necessarily. ‘Nobody expects rational behavior from an Angel.’”
She began to laugh, saw Tomas ooze forward another half-foot, and ordered him back.
“Angels coming,” Robin murmured. “Two of them.”
She looked into his sweet, wise, weary face.
“Be strong, Robin. I’ll get you out of here. See you Monday evening.” She put up her hand to pat his cheek, then with the footsteps behind her she slid her hand caressingly down and dug her thumb and fingers into the pressure points of his neck. Before his hands could pry her fingers away, before the surprise on his face could change to alarm, he was unconscious. She winced inwardly at the thud he made hitting the ground, but outwardly she smiled down at him as her two colleagues came up to her.
“Looks like I got me a new playmate,” she told them happily, whistled Tomas to her side, nodded her permission to the two private guards to approach what their appalled expressions said they thought would be a dead male, and continued her patrol through the warm spring afternoon, humming under her breath. Perhaps Ashtown was not so very hideous, after all. If one could leave.
In the bewitching hours, long after midnight, Dian came awake
in her room, knowing something was wrong, not sure what it was. Margaret slept quietly beside her. Tomas snored in his place on the floor; there was no intruder. Her ears held no echo of a noise, from inside or out. She could smell nothing out of the ordinary. An overactive imagination, she told herself, go back to sleep.
The tadpole-baby stirred within her body, a weak surge but already stronger than the feather-tickle of a month ago. In the darkness she allowed herself to explore the unfamiliar shape of her belly, to lay both hands on the mound and feel the motions of the person she and Isaac had created in their pleasure, almost half a year ago. It stirred again. A small knob (a foot?) pressed against the palm of her right hand, and she smiled a private smile and felt the sting of tears in her eyes, tears of great tenderness and ferocity and sadness. She had meant what she said to Robin, although she had not voiced it to herself before: she would not have a baby born into Ashtown, not this baby, not to survive. Even a girl she would rather kill with her own hands than have it, a child of Isaac’s, trapped here. Yet if she left, the hard journey south would very probably be the death of the child. This was not one of her “feelings”—those had faded into vague uneasinesses, a process that made her feel like a victim of cataracts, going slowly blind. It was merely a feeling, and an observation.
And now she knew what was wrong this night, because she had felt it three times before. Both times since she came to Ashtown she had managed to keep it from the midwife, but this time—she had an appointment with the woman tomorrow, and even that stupid individual could hardly miss the symptoms. Dian lay in the night and ground her teeth in silent rage at her body’s betrayal, but there was no way around it—she well knew how the Guard worked, and had no doubt that suspicions would be raised if she tried to avoid the midwife. She would eventually be found out, and the fact that she had tried to hide the problem would make life very difficult for her, would certainly lose her the freedoms she had so laboriously gained, the freedom of movement she must have in order to get Robin and herself out. After a while Dian reached over and switched on the electric light, and as Margaret roused in sleepy confusion Dian pushed the sheets aside and looked down at the brilliant red blood splashed across the white cotton. It wasn’t that much—considerably less than what had spilled from the trader (Dian’s little grunts of effort)—but it was too much to hide. Margaret came awake, and saw, and with exclamations of distress went to summon help while Dian lay back on the pillows and put her arm across her eyes.
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