by Rabia Gale
I stare at the golem in front of me.
I’ve never seen one like this before, not in person, not in books. The golems we fought a scant few days ago were strong, but worn and old, bulky and lumbering.
This, though. This is perfect and shining, made of some reddish-gold metal. Its lines are sleek, its limbs fluid-looking. Delicate and deadly.
Its eyes are empty. Its arms hang, useless.
“Is this your latest design? Did you build this to guard the gates? Or—?” I gasp, as a slender limb extends from the nearest spider and circles my wrist. Messages flash between us, so quickly that I cannot tell if what passed were thoughts or images or emotions or something else entirely.
But I know what these spiders are offering me. An empty metal husk, with no fuel, nothing to spark through its wires.
Nothing save me.
They’re offering me a body.
I’m cocooned and armored, protected for the first time in oh-so-long. I stretch myself atoms-thin across wires, dance and sparkle in the golem’s eyes.
I have a body again. I’m no longer just energy, no longer only flow.
After being nigh-on-insubstantial for so long, it’s strange to have so much mass. My first movements are shaky and staggering, like that of a drunkard. I feel myself indent the earth, bludgeon the very air. While my mourning cloak form was that of an assassin’s, this body is that of a warrior’s.
This will protect me long enough to get close to the salt—and the demon within it.
I know what to do. M—Jazala showed me that as she died, that last chant unspoken on her lips, as she turned her own body to energy.
I don’t need that extra step. I only need to be ready to strike.
The ground vibrates under my feet as I shuffle out of the caves. An escort of spiders accompany me down to the valley. They see me off, front legs waving in the air, as if in benediction or farewell.
I set my face toward the salt, gouging craters as I head up the ramp into Kaal Baran.
As I pass, there’s a stirring in the grove of nightwalkers, as if a breeze has gone through them.
It’s not wind. The nightwalkers are pulling themselves from the ground.
Changed, turned rocky and gritty and banded red, orange, and yellow, they’ve become part of the desert. They clip-click behind me as I shoulder my way through the gates. We cross the courtyard. I can’t be bothered to figure out how to manipulate locks and handles, so I bust the gates down.
There is something so very satisfying about the crash.
They can’t get into the glass tube. Even another smear of my blood won’t help. The Director’s tried acid and wards, blowtorches and eldritch guns. At the end, he’s screaming and banging at the tube with a wrench, like a child in the throes of a temper tantrum.
Held by soldiers, their large hands clamped on my arms, I watch in grim amusement. Daral offers occasional help, voice bland and face expressionless.
I can’t tell what game he’s playing.
The Director whirls around and faces me. The light has turned his spectacles to silver. He looks like a wide-eyed bug.
“Him!” His knotty finger jabs in my direction. “Bring him to me. Let’s see if all his blood will be enough to get through this glass.”
I can’t help a short scoffing laugh.
Daral gives me a wry, sideways look. “Only the pure of heart can wear the angel wings. Tell me, Kato, are you pure of heart?”
“No. Never have been.” My voice comes out blackly cheerful. Once I thought I was Chosen because I had the makings of greatness. I know better now.
“Ridiculous. You can’t sense or measure purity of heart.” The Director’s breathing heavily. He throws back his head and laughs. “We must approach this problem scientifically.”
He circles the glass tube, eyeing the suspended object within. It’s more than just wings—it’s breastplate, too—but that graceful sweep, the details on the feathers, that sheen which goes from milky to pearl to steel, that’s what catches the eye.
“This we know,” continues the Director, as if he’s giving a lecture to some scrubby first-year university students. “These beings you call angels fought against other beings who have come down to us known simply as demons. And if you use angels to fight demons”—he smiles and I do not like it—“you can use demon against angel, too.”
He snaps his fingers. “You,” he commands a soldier, “bring me the box.”
My muscles tighten. I have a bad feeling about this.
The soldier doesn’t need to ask which box. There’s apparently only one special one.
“You.” The Director points at Grip. “I need you.”
Grip straightens and salutes in what he imagines to be a soldierly way, grinning all the while.
The soldier presents the Director a leather-covered case. The Director spins some dials, undoes the clasps. The lid springs up on silent hinges. Inside is an array of instruments I have no names for. Daral steps forward, interest caught.
The Director removes one with a wooden handle and two short, blunt prongs. With a swift movement, he holds it to Grip’s forehead, arm held out straight and stiff.
The eerie man goes almost cross-eyed trying to look at it.
The Director’s thumb flicks a switch on the handle. Grip convulses, yelps. He tries to jerk his head back, but can’t. He’s like a fish on a hook, well and truly trapped.
“Now,” says the Director. “You were made to obey. Obey you shall.” His thumb moves the switch down even further.
Grip’s eyes are wide, and his lips peeled back from black gums and large teeth. He whimpers as he raises his hand, showing sharp claws.
He slashes, and blood splatters.
Not red blood, but blue.
The eerie man’s cut his own side open.
“What in Nine Hells are you doing?” I snarl.
The Director ignores me, smiling urbanely at Daral instead, ignoring the blood, the panting eerie man. “Highwind is not totally devoid of its own treasures. But elkiocyte particles are notoriously hard to store and transport. Metal, glass, poly—nothing worked, until we hit upon using a host organism. Come on, you.” The last was directed at Grip, and punctuated by a jab in the head.
Grip plunges his hand into his own wound. He pulls it out, smeared in his own blood, holding what looks to be a bag-shaped organ. Veins and arteries, leaking fluid, trail from it. It sizzles as the air touches it.
The soldiers holding me are slack-jawed. I hear someone retching behind me.
“Careful!” The Director grabs another instrument from his case, a scoop with a telescoping handle. He holds it out under Grip’s shaking hand. “In here, there’s a good chap.”
The organ falls into the scoop; the Director removes the prongs from Grip’s head. The eerie men collapses into a heap. Dead, poor bastard.
“What’s that?” My spiders are on alert. I swear I feel their microscopic legs pin-pricking along my nerves.
The Director gestures, and four men bring out a frosted metal canister held in a cubical framework. Mist billows from its open top.
The Director uses a long sharp stick to puncture the organ in the scoop. He tips the scoop, and a thin reddish-brown liquid dribbles into the canister.
An acrid black smoke rises as the substances combine.
“Stop it!” I throw myself toward him. Soldiers hold me back. I snarl, get my right arm free long enough to throw a punch to one’s gut, another’s jaw.
Several more soldiers pile on me. My body’s shaking, my vision’s blurry. I’m driven to my knees.
“Daral!” I yell.
Daral’s standing there, eyes wide, looking shaken.
We both feel it, the wrongness of that black liquid, threatening to bubble over the canister.
“Demon sap,” breathes Daral. “How’d you—“
The Director smirks. “We figured out how to separate it into manageable substances, then reconstitute—”
“You idiot.”
The liquid in the vial’s roiling as it warms up.
“That’s what they all say,” says the Director, sadly. “But I’m going to prove them wrong.” He turns back to the pit and the tube within. “Angel craft, eh? Let’s see how effective this demon sap is against it.”
“You’re going to blow this whole place up if you bring the two into contact,” I warn. I’m straining to get up, my spiders furiously working to increase my strength. I feel something akin to transformation happening within me.
It’s too little, too late.
The Director’s not listening to me. He puts on safety goggles and big shiny gloves, heaves the canister out of its framework.
I’m still struggling. “Like that’s going to protect you, fool!” He’s not listening, getting ready to toss demon sap onto angel craft.
We’re all going to die because of one man’s stupidity.
One last heave, and I’m free. I lunge for the Director, but someone’s ahead of me. Daral, moving fast. He cries out, “Now!” and shapes slither out of the shadows.
Suddenly I’m swathed in black veils, scratchy against my skin. Cloaks?
I see the Director reach toward the angel glass, see Daral hurtle into him.
For an instant, I think he’s made it, but then the explosion comes.
It’s soundless, this wash of bright light. I would’ve been instantly blinded if my spiders, quicker than I, hadn’t shuttered my eyes.
Cloaks evaporate as the waves of light engulf us. Without them, even my strengthened skin wouldn’t have stood against the impact. Men sag and collapse all around me. The floor shakes with tremors. I hunch, eyes screwed tight, weird lights flickering against the darkness of my eyelids, cloaks peeling off me in layers.
It’s over in moments.
Three heartbeats and everyone else is dead.
I rise slowly, creakily, as if emerging from water. The air is heavy on my shoulders, and the after-images slowly fade. There’s rubble everywhere, the noise of the rockfall having been masked by the silent explosion.
Darkness creeps back in. Within it, the banish lights flicker.
Something like ghosts swirl in the black of the walls.
I avert my gaze and, shading my eyes, look down at the pit.
The angel wings still shimmer in place, but the glass around them is gone. Two bodies sprawl at the bottom of the pit.
Daral and the Director. A shadow lays next to them. It rises into a column, crudely fashioned into the shape of a woman.
“Cloud,” I say, saddened.
Her mouth moves. I think I hear, “… change her back…”
And then she, too, is gone.
I leap into the pit, strengthened feet sinking into the soil, and bend over Daral. His face is blistered and blackened, almost unrecognizable. He peers at me out of swollen eyes. “Ka—to?” he whispers out of a lipless mouth.
I fight down my nausea. He doesn’t deserve to see that. “I’m here.” I want to tell him to rest, save his breath, but that won’t help. Let him get out what’s on his chest before he departs this world.
He wheezes, each breath a painful scouring of the lungs. “… only he can reverse… get him to… her…” Blood bubbles from his mouth; his body goes limp.
He’s gone.
Cloud also said “her”. Were they both talking about Flutter?
A few feet away, the Doctor stirs, fingers curling, chest rising in a small breath.
Curse him. Aside from a tattered hem and singed hair, he’s unscathed.
I grab the Director’s white collar with my metal hand and haul him to his feet. Behind his spectacles, his eyes are wide and fearful and very blue. His feet scuff at the ground as I twist the fabric, bring him to eye-level.
“Many good people are dead because of you. I don’t know if we’ll live through this, but your meddling with things of demons and angels ends here.”
The Director’s glance flickers sideways. At the angel wings.
I can’t bear to look directly at them. Their power is heat and pressure along my left side. “You have nothing to do with those anymore. They belong—”
All the lights go out, save for a soft, sparkling gleam emanating from the angel wings.
The Director stabs at me with a syringe. I flinch, grabbing for his wrist. My hold on his collar loosens. He wrenches away and I’m left holding his coat as he scrambles out of the pit and flings himself toward the wall.
I see a shimmer in the air, like a soap-bubble film.
“Not so fast.” I lunge for him, my joints and muscles swift and sleek.
The ground trembles, and the Director stumbles. I grab him by the shoulder as pebbles patter down from the ceiling and water trickles from myriad cracks in the walls. The whole place is falling apart.
The Director twists, looks down. Shock shudders through his body.
Stones hover in the air, at knee height. Water gushes sideways and up from one of the cracks.
The wrongness has spread from the salt.
The angel wings flare brightly. Light splinters off line and curve, breaking into small, sharp rainbows.
Banks of instrumentations are going wild, flashing a series of red and yellow lights, needles in dials spinning, some so fast they’re blurs, others in lazy sweeps.
“N-no,” stammers the Director. “No, it’s not possible.”
“You’re severely lacking in both imagination and vision,” I snarl at him. “Because it is.” The soap-bubble film—a portal to Highwind, I imagine—hanging in the air flickers, then pops.
No escape from there. I let the Director go, watch him rush to his instruments. In the lurid glare, his face is a ghastly color.
I don’t need instruments to confirm what I can see. In one part of this cavern, the wall turns to sludge and collapses. Grains of sand splash through the air in slow motion.
Only the area around the angel wings is normal. A steady light glows in a cylinder around the wings, stretching from floor to ceiling.
I have this unshakeable feeling that the light is the only thing holding this place together.
The Director jabs frantically at the buttons on his panels.
Then I hear the sounds. The rattle of metal, the squeal and squeak of chains. Voices, echoing in the cavern. The elevator crashes to the floor, the door is thrust aside.
Mehmet steps out, closely followed by Leap.
He takes one look at the angel wings, then shields his eyes and falls to his knees in the mud. He mutters something that’s both a curse and a reverence.
“There’s no time for that.” I haul him to his feet. “What’s going on up there?”
Leap answers through a grin showing all his teeth. “Jumped the softskins, didn’t we? White-robes come with the four-legged-dinners, took advantage, didn’t we? Would’ve been quick-quick with wither women, but they didn’t come here.” He looks very pleased with himself.
I’m just glad that Mehmet didn’t catch the reference to his horses as dinner.
“Where are the eilendi?”
“Dead,” Mehmet spits out. “They listened to that Highwind abomination you sent with me and went to the salt. Now the wrongness spreads, collapsing mountains and turning sand to glass. The Highwinders are in confusion; it was child’s play to take them over this time.” The old arrogance is back in his dark eyes and the twist of his thin mouth.
“And Flutter?” Something twists in my gut.
Mehemet gives an eloquent shrug. He doesn’t know and doesn’t care.
I get a hold of myself. Flutter is a cloak. She can take care of herself. Right now, there are bigger things to deal with.
Much bigger things.
“So there’s nothing standing between us and the salt demon,” I say. “Except those.”
Neither of us looks at the angel wings. We don’t need to.
“So that’s what will save the world?” The Director staggers towards us. He gives a short, bitter laugh. “This angel technology? And you’re still afraid of it.�
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Mehmet frowns. “Who is this fool” he says, “to speak so lightly of the things of Taurin?”
“I’ll show you!” The Director shouts, no longer polished and urbane. His hair’s a mess and mud coats his trousers up to the knees. He half-climbs, half-pitches into the pit. “I’ll show you!”
I wish I could let the old fool know first-hand the dangers of playing with angel craft. I feel Mehmet thinking the same thing beside me.
But there’s Flutter to think of.
“Stop,” I say. My voice is loud and tired.
Incredibly, the Director does, peering at me over his shoulder. His lips twist thinly. “Oh no. I’ve waited too long.” He stretches out his left hand to the cylinder of light. “I’ve—”
There’s a flash, followed by a thin high-pitched wail.
I stride to the pit and leap down. The Director’s huddled against one side, cradling a hand blackened to the wrist, whimpering.
“Didn’t you hear me? I told you to stop. Lucky for you, that was just a warning slap on the wrist.” I clench my own right hand, smiling blackly at the irony.
Was my loss also a warning?
He always gets you, in the end. You cannot run and you cannot hide.
“Leave this place,” I say, to both Mehmet and the Director. “These wings, this task, is for the Chosen.”
I stand at the edge of the cylinder of light, the heat of it burning through my soul. The wrongness wrought by the salt demon has become a murmur and a memory, banished from this small place of holy stillness.
This place of power.
Dimly I’m aware of Mehmet and Leap taking the Director away. I can trust them to keep their prisoner close and safe. I glance at Daral’s dead body, lying not more than a man’s length away.
What was Flutter to Daral?
I banish the mystery from my mind.
I’m about to do something very stupid. Being Taurin’s Chosen makes it so I won’t die right away, but I have no illusions about myself.
Not anymore.
I mutter prayers, weak and hollow to my own ears. The eilendi teach that faith in Taurin will save a man, but that’s something I’m severely lacking. I stop the formulaic incantations mid-chant.
Taurin, I have no right to speak your name or say your prayers. I am darkchild, lower even than Flutter. But if this is the only way to save the world, I’ll do it. Not with gladness, but with the painful dregs of bitter duty.