by D. J. Butler
These were Qayna’s people now, and they were destroying themselves in their flight.
The towers of Eden, Mother had told her, were observatories. She and Father had climbed within them to the platforms at their heights to watch the Messengers in flight above them, when they had been Eden’s lord and lady. The spires of Ainok, for the most part, were merely spikes, but they were enormous, fingers jabbed in accusation at the sky or daggers pointed at the throat of heaven. Their heights were not platforms—other than on the one, central tower—they were the sharp points of spears.
Whether it had something to do with the spires or not, the Bearers of the Sword burned in their inexorable paths toward points outside the city.
At Ainok’s center were the Grand Plaza, the Palace and the Tower. The Plaza was a wide space where the Fallen gathered to debate and, when the Council could not reach peaceable decisions, to shed each other’s blood. The Palace sprawled along its western edge, all white stairs and green rooftop garden and blue water; the central source of Ainok’s canals were the mighty springs beneath Azazel’s home, and they burst forth from the mouths of statues of mutilated Messengers, irrigating the many acres of his private garden-like Palace before radiating out in all directions into the city. The Tower, higher, Azazel boasted, than any of the towers he had left behind, was solid inside and had an enormous staircase winding up around the outside of it to the broad circular platform at its apex.
The Plaza, the Palace, and the Tower were all made of the same gleaming white stone, not native to the hills surrounding the city. Azazel had told her once that he summoned the stone with his sorcery, from a quarry thousands of miles away. Somewhere, there was a gaping hole in a mountainside that sparkled white. The center of the city, even more than the rest of Ainok, was liberally speckled with mirrors. These were the gates of Mab’s people, who were not residents but who came and went freely, and trafficked with Ainok’s citizens. Azazel hadn’t built the city center with wizardry, though, or with the help of the fey folk; Azazel’s slaves had done the work. For himself and his own subjects, Azazel insisted on freedom. The followers of Heaven and its Messengers, he insisted, had already chosen slavery and deserved no better. Now the white stone ran red with blood, shed by slaves and citizens alike, trampled under the feet of their Fallen overlords.
Women streamed from the Palace as if its bowels also concealed a spring of concubines. Qayna drew her knife, a weapon almost long enough to call a sword, and fended the rushing women aside. Some of the women—fey or sorceresses, and in that moment Qayna envied them both—leaped into mirrors and disappeared. Those who couldn’t rushed down the avenues toward the fires.
Qayna saw Azazel standing atop his Tower. The leader of the Fallen was majestic, even though the animal parts he had grafted onto himself with his own hand, and something else, some streak of wrongness, prevented him and all his kind from being truly beautiful. His goat-like legs were crooked, but he held his back erect, and the crimson- and black-streaked fur of his lower half was clean and shone in the sun. His wings, only two of them, were now the wings of an enormous bat, but they still cloaked him with something like majesty. He stood tall and looked about him at the horizon as the Swordbearers touched down.
So he knew. But he wasn’t running.
Qayna cupped her free hand around her mouth and yelled up at him. “Azazel!”
The former Messenger looked her way instantly, and laughed a laugh like rolling thunder. He spread his wings like flexing arms, snapped them once, and sailed into the air and in her direction. He was graceful in flight despite his enormity, and when he touched down, Qayna saw that he held a child in his arms. His son, Jacob.
Azazel set the boy down between him and Qayna, and Jacob looked up at her with bright blue eyes. This boy, tousle-headed, pale and small, but with sturdy shoulders and determination in his eyes, was his heir. His father was majestic, powerful and graceful, but Jacob looked like a mere beautiful boy. He looked as human as Qayna.
And how human was that? She thought.
For all his many women, Azazel had only managed to get one living son, and that had been done with the aid of great sorceries. The seed of the Fallen, apparently, did not grow well in the furrows of Eve.
“You must take Jacob and flee,” Azazel told her.
“The Swordbearers are here!” Qayna said, waving her weapon in a big circle to indicate that they were surrounded.
Azazel smiled gently, but there was a flash of irritation in his eyes. “Must I repeat myself?” he asked. “I took you in when you had no place else to go, Qayna. Will you not repay the favor?”
Qayna nodded heavily and grabbed Jacob by his hand.
With a heavy CRACK! another of the Fallen crashed to the stones behind Azazel and all three of them turned to look.
It was Semyaz. His own beast-assumed attributes included a boar’s head and a long tail like a lizard’s, which now flicked across the white stones of the Grand Plaza. He had wings, too, like an eagle’s, feathered white and gold. The last fleeing concubines scattered, steering wide of the enormous Fallen warlord.
“Azazel!” the Fallen roared. “Your policies have failed!” With a rasp that Qayna thought must be audible outside the city, he drew a wide-bladed falchion from its scabbard at his belt and advanced on Azazel.
Suddenly, Azazel, too, was armed, his long, flaming whip appearing in his hand as if it had been there all along and Qayna had simply failed to notice it. He snapped the weapon in the space between him and the other giant, and Semyaz hesitated.
“I will happily debate the issue with you,” Azazel snarled, “the next time we meet in Council!”
Semyaz straightened his back and bellowed at the trails of smoke in the sky. “I challenge you!” he roared.
Azazel cracked his whip again, but Semyaz didn’t retreat. “You never had any patience for procedure, did you?” the ruler of Ainok laughed. “You can challenge me the next time the Council meets!”
Qayna dragged Jacob back, though the boy resisted. Around the edges of the Plaza, she now saw gathering others of the Fallen. They stood jittery, or they prowled with knees bent. She wondered if some of them had expected this contest.
“There is no Council, you fool!” Semyaz hissed, spraying slobber from his rubbery boar’s lips. “If we do not act now, there is nothing!”
The boar-headed Fallen charged. Qayna saw the upraised scimitar and thought Azazel was doomed to die with his great city, but at the last second, the leader of the fallen cracked his whip a third time. It lashed Semyaz on his shoulder and coiled around the giant’s thick, piggish neck. Then Azazel leaped aside, yanking his rival with him—
and Semyaz crashed head-first into the base of the Tower.
He sank up to his shoulders in the white stone, plowing right through a wide mirror and shattering it instantly into glass dust. The stairs above the Fallen’s head shattered into gravel, and a huge crack split the rock.
“This to your challenge!” Azazel roared, and rammed his shoulder into Semyaz’s back. He drove the other Fallen into the base of the Tower like a nail, as Semyaz squealed and wiggled but couldn’t get away. More mirrors fell.
The Fallen around the Plaza hopped up and down, hissed and stared at each other. They were agitated and uncertain. Qayna pulled Jacob’s hand and tried to leave down a colonnaded avenue, but a huge Fallen with a serpent’s head blocked her way, tongue flicking in and out of his mouth. Qayna raised her sword, but didn’t dare attack the giant creature.
“The Council is here!” boomed another of the Fallen. He was a bull-headed giant whose body was covered with scales. In his hands he hefted an enormous club, like the trunk of an entire tree with twisted metal spikes shoved entirely through it. “Semyaz has made a motion, we must vote!”
Others of the Fallen stepped forward, and Qayna jogged out of the way with the child. The serpent-headed giant kept his beady eye on her, though, and she was careful not to give the appearance of fleeing.
Arou
nd them on all sides, at the edges of the city of Ainok, smoke and fire rose in sheets. The Swordbearers were setting about their work of destruction.
Qayna’s crow circled the Tower, wings stiff.
Azazel stepped into the center of the Council, whip trailing behind him on the stones. He smiled, and Qayna was reminded how majestic he was—how powerful and moving they all were, setting aside the part-animal forms. They weren’t beautiful, but something in them stirred her soul.
“I apologize, Semyaz,” he purred. “I didn’t hear your motion. Could you repeat it for me?”
The Fallen Semyaz kicked his legs and murmmphed, his head still stuck in the base of the Tower. The crack split wider and crawled further up the stone.
“Semyaz questioned your policies,” Bull Head growled. “He’s not the only one of us who thinks you’ve been too soft on Eden.”
Azazel arched his eyebrows and nodded slightly. “What Semyaz did,” he said slowly, “was issue a challenge.” He looked around at the other members of the Council. “Does anyone else here … wish to issue me … a similar challenge?”
There was a heavy silence. The ring of fire surrounding the city of Ainok was through its gates, Qayna thought, and burnings its way closer. She could hear screams, far outside the Plaza, and smell scorched flesh.
“I thought not.”
Azazel turned in a flash and kicked his goat-like hoof into the posterior of his rival. Semyaz bellowed in anger, the sound muffled by the stone around his head, and was pounded deeper into the rock.
Semyaz could stand the blow, but the Tower couldn’t. The widening crack became a fissure, and suddenly Qayna could see daylight through the middle of the Tower. She dragged Jacob back and away at a sprint, and this time Snake Face was too busy watching out for his own skin to get in the way.
CRASH!!!
Great blocks of masonry rained down around the Grand Plaza, crashing to the ground like falling stars and smashing up the smooth white stone. Mirrors exploded into fragments and dust, forever shattering the gates they contained. Azazel stood still, eyes flashing at his rivals as they cowered in the tumult.
Qayna managed to get behind Snake Face and then several more of the Fallen, and their bodies intercepted big chunks of rock that would have flattened her and the boy. Glass shards and gravel shrapnel still tore their skin and stung them from head to toe.
Then the Tower was flat and a cloud of white dust slowly settled over them all. Several of the Fallen lay bruised and bleeding in the wreckage, but Azazel stood tall in the center. With a single flap of his wings, he snapped the dust off his own person and the ground beneath him.
“Look at that,” the founder of the city of Ainok said, glancing down at his own hoof. “You’ve made me split a nail.”
Bull Head sneezed dust and mucus onto the stone and shook his shoulders. “The city is taken, Azazel,” he rumbled, staring at his leader with yellow eyes and lowering his club. “We must do something.”
“I will.” Azazel dropped his whip. “I will do it now. And what you should do … all of you …” he didn’t look at Qayna, but she realized he was talking particularly to her, hidden as she now was back among the ranks of the Fallen, “is flee.”
Azazel, leader of the Fallen, turned and walked through the rubble of his Tower toward the main avenue of the city. In passing, he took the opportunity to kick Semyaz once more, in the belly. Semyaz grunted.
“Do not forget this day,” Azazel intoned deeply. “I am yet your leader.”
Qayna squeezed Jacob’s hand tighter and slipped away. The Fallen around her let her go, probably didn’t even notice that she was there. They hesitated only a moment, and then they turned and ran like she did, loping and scurrying and stampeding for the walls.
She didn’t mean to, but Qayna found herself following a path parallel to Azazel’s. She tried to turn left and move perpendicular to him, expecting that his course would take him into the heart of the action and the danger. Her way was blocked almost immediately, though; at the end of a short alley, she ran into one of the Swordbearers.
He was a giant, as they all were, and he wore the eyeless, visorless helmet of his office. He was wingless, because the Bearers of the Sword didn’t fly, they merely fell to earth to wreak their devastation. Flame erupted about the Swordbearer in a column, fire dripped like burning oil from his arms and sheets of flame trailed behind his enormous weapon. He swung his sword left and right, not like the blinded creature he appeared to be, but as if responding to some inner dictate that had nothing to do with the inputs of his senses. The weapon must be twelve feet long, Qayna thought—she had heard many stories of the Bearers of the Sword in her youth, told by the Bearers of the Word and repeated by her parents, but she had never before seen one and she felt awed. The weapon shattered wood and stone with equal facility, leaving smoking and shattered ruins behind with each blow.
One of the Fallen rushed to get past the Swordbearer, crab-like lower body scuttling with all its power and humanoid arms raising a shield and spear defensively. The Swordbearer’s back-handed swing sliced through shield and spear alike, melted the crab carapace merely by passing close to it, and chopped entirely through the Fallen’s torso. The Fallen burst into flame and collapsed.
The Bearer of the Sword stepped over the smoking body and moved in Qayna’s direction, weapon raised.
Qayna ran. Around another corner, she found herself on the tiled edge of a canal. To one side, the collapsed rubble of several buildings blocked her way, so she yanked Jacob’s hand and rushed in the other direction, her eternal crow flapping at her shoulder.
Ahead of her, and on the other side of the canal, she saw Azazel walking forward, his back turned to her. She wondered what he was doing, and so did the boy.
“Papa,” he said, and pointed.
“Yes,” Qayna agreed, and dragged him faster.
Azazel stopped in a broad square, surrounded not by his Fallen compatriots now but by four of the Swordbearers. He stood upon the trampled bodied of dead men and women and Fallen alike, in a sea of blood, with his city burning around him. The Bearers raised their flaming swords.
“Stop!” Azazel thundered, and the Swordbearers hesitated. “Where is your leader?”
There was no answer from the blind swordsmen of Heaven, but they didn’t attack, either.
“Raphael!” Azazel yelled. “Where is the sniveling rat?”
“I’m here, traitor!” Raphael stepped into view among the smoking buildings, and his beauty took Qayna’s breath away. It had been years since she had seen one of the Messengers, Bearers of the Word, and she had forgotten how stunning they were. The Fallen retained majesty and some of their beauty, but the tinkering they had done with their own forms marred them.
Raphael flapped his six wings and drifted forward.
Though the Bearer was the more beautiful of the two gigantic figures facing off, Qayna preferred the leader of the Fallen. The mere sight of Raphael, even after so much time, made her skin burn. She felt she was being punched to the ground again to have her sins tattooed upon the scroll of her body.
She shuddered and looked away.
Ahead of her, the way was blocked by a mob of people. Not fleeing citizens of Ainok, but men with swords and spears, coming her direction. Perhaps, she thought, she could bluff her way past them. “I may pretend you are my prisoner, boy,” she whispered to Jacob. “Don’t be frightened.”
The boy nodded.
“Have you come to spout more defiance?” Raphael demanded.
Qayna tried not to be distracted and kept marching along the canal.
“What defiance?” Azazel raised his empty palms in a shrug. “I am defeated, and I have come for punishment. Only leave the others be. They harm no one. They only wish to be free.”
Qayna knew that the leader of the Fallen couldn’t possibly care very much about whether Semyaz or Bull Head or Snake Face were hurt by the champions of Heaven. He was more than willing to hurt them himself, brutally, in
struggles for the leadership of Ainok and its people. What he must care about, she realized, was his son. He couldn’t entrust the boy to any of his rivals, so he had given him instead into Qayna’s care. He had given Qayna a place and people when her own had thrown her out, and now he counted on her to pay the debt.
Qayna gritted her teeth and ran faster.
She ignored the scene of the surrender across from her. One of the Swordbearers stood on the other side of the canal now, so there was no way she could cross it. To her left was a high wall with no entrance, other than the few unshattered mirrors that still hung on it, and they were no gate to Qayna. Her only way out was through a wall of armed and armored men, faces grim behind metal helmets.
She dragged Jacob towards them, yanking his arm to look fierce and pointing her dagger at him. Ainok had been her only place of refuge, and she owed it to Ainok’s founder to try to save his son, if she could.
“I’ve seized this boy prisoner,” she bluffed. “Where do I take him?”
Swords and spears bristled in her direction. The men’s armor was bronze and covered in swirling letters not too dissimilar to her own tattoos. Horsehair brushes rose from their helmets, and they wore white, hip-length capes. Qayna stopped, trying to keep the grim, confident look on her face.
The leader of the armed men only stared.
“Well?” Qayna demanded, shaking Jacob by the shoulder. “I think he’s someone important.”
“Do you think we don’t recognized the Marked Woman when we see her?” the leader asked. His voice sounded familiar and he poked his sword at her in a very unsubtle and threatening gesture. “Do you think all the sons and daughters of Adam don’t know to recognize the Marked Woman on sight?”
Qayna held her position, mind racing. “Do you mistake me for one of the Fallen?” she snarled.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Raphael and other Messengers wrapping enormous chains around Azazel, who knelt in the square alone with his head bowed. The Swordbearers stood motionless and alert around him.