As the door opened, the soucouyant looked up, desperately trying to get either of them to look it in the eye, and failing. “I swear, I won’t say nothin’!” it cried out, heaving itself around with enough weight to make the chair’s fastenings screech, before realizing that was probably a little beyond your average hospital janitorial staff member’s ability, and going slack again. “Jus’ let me go, nah . . . I a poor old lady cyan have nothin’ you want, fe sure! I never harm no one!”
Blandina shrugged, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. “Those kids in Ward Eight might have something to say about that,” she suggested.
“Check me wallet, me citizenship card! Rose-of-Sharon Hopkinson from Tobago-Saint Andrew, that’s me—I ain’t kill nobody, let alone them poor child, for all they dyin’, any rate! And you ain’t no law neither, not no-how—”
“I’m fairly sure no one said we were,” Cecilia retorted, sounding offended. But Blandina waved her silent.
“Rose-of-Sharon,” she repeated, leaning in. “Pretty. That from the Bible?”
“’Course it is! Whah sort of nun ya play at bein’, girl, ya ain’t heard the name?”
Blandina smiled again. “Who said I’m a nun?”
The soucouyant’s lush curves drooped, as though deflating slightly; its complexion went almost dun, dewed with fright-sweat. “Think I don’t know where I am, nah? Everybody know whah ya do, ya crazy bitches—huntin’ an’ killin’ like it still Burnin’ Times! Listen, sister, I’m a good Christian, hear me? Just like you! So just let me go home an’ I won’t say nothin’ on you, on this place; on His sweet face, I swear it—”
“Don’t you dare take His name,” Blandina told it, evenly. “Not to me. And not to anyone else, either.”
And reached down to grab a fisted knot of “Rose-of-Sharon Hopkinson’s” plentiful braids in either hand, wrenching so hard in opposite directions that the soucouyant’s hairline stretched like dough—ripped outright, rolled back like a snapped blind, gouting jets of black stinking blood. Dipping further as she did, to whisper in one queasily unmoored ear: “Especially when we both know any claim to humanity you have is . . . skin deep at best.”
The soucouyant shrieked like a klaxon, voice soaring cartoonishly. “Oh me Jesus! I swear by Christ crucify, I don’t know whah ya mean!”
“Then this should come as quite a surprise.”
Blandina hauled again, twice as hard, ’til the thing’s whole offending face split wide open. Flame spurted up, emergency traffic flare-bright; the shriek turned roar, louder and more bestial than any human being could manage. Vaguely, Blandina realized that Cecilia was backed against the wall, crossing herself frantically. “Hold position!” she yelled without turning—and damn if the girl didn’t, surprisingly enough; her hands dropped belt-wards, feeling for the rowan-thorn extensible baton they’d both drawn one of this morning, at the armoury.
“Rose-of-Sharon” looked around, true eyes exposed in their naked sockets like little whirling blurs of fire. In the same coarse, warped voice, it groaned: “You terrible woman, whah for yah have to pick on me?”
“You eat children.”
“Goat eat grass, tiger eat goat—God make ’em both. How I can help whah He make me?”
“That’s my job,” Blandina told it, without an ounce of sympathy.
The soucouyant made a sound somewhere between a growl and a snivel, false hide bubbling like burnt bacon. When it spoke again, its voice was a hissing, curdled whisper.
“Whah yah want tah know?”
“Where the Watcher angel is. The Nephilim-maker. Penemue—”
“Don’t say, yah fool! Ain’t yah got one lick of sense?” Its tears smoked, acid, down skinless cheeks, as Blandina stood there watching. “Woman,” the thing managed, eventually, “yah killin’ me, an’ all fe nothing.”
“Don’t waste my time, creature. I’m not always this pleasant.”
But it still wouldn’t say out loud, so Cecilia passed it her phone, keyboard app already loaded. A brief spate of hunt-and-peck typing later, the soucouyant subsided, apparently too exhausted by its own daring to do anything but sit there and burn while Cecilia ran the results through MapQuest.
“It’s legitimate.”
Blandina nodded. “All right.”
If women could be invested as priests, she would have been in a position to offer extreme unction, even to a creature such as this—would have been required to, in fact. Thankfully, however, that decision was still out of her hands.
The Bestiarium again, its text cast up on her skull’s interior screen, like someone else’s memories: remove its skin so it can never return to its hiding-place, and the soucouyant will burn to ash, consumed by its own fire.
Blandina reached out, grabbed hold, hauled hard. “Rose-of-Sharon” hung slack in her grip, too beaten to even mount objection. With a final mighty pull, the creature’s remaining sausage casing tore open to its waist, lipless mouth stretched impossibly wide, vomiting an eruption of blue-white flame as the rest went up like napalm.
Mother Eulalia took Cecilia’s coordinates and went off to pray with the current Anchoress, while Blandina turned towards the mess hall, only to have Cecilia genuinely blindside her: come in nose to nose, jaw jutted pugnacious, and demand without preamble—“What would we have done if she actually hadn’t known what we wanted?”
Blandina raised one brow. “Same thing, pretty much,” she replied. “After which we’d’ve grabbed up some other variety of kid-eating creature from wherever proved handiest and done it again. But let me guess—you get how we have to kill them, you just have a problem with torturing them, first. Or with me liking it.” Then, as Cecilia stared: “Tell me what it was that happened, sister. To you.”
“When?”
“Don’t play stupid with me. What I mean is, why this? Plenty of other orders to choose from if you want not to have to pick out your own clothes the rest of your life, and if you just want to kill, there’s the Army. So. . . .”
“They thought—they said—” Cecilia paused, feeling around the words. “Police verdict was, it might’ve been some sort of . . . animal.”
“But you knew better. Right?”
“I didn’t see how any animal could’ve done that—not to that many people, not all at once. Not and got away clean, without leaving any sort of trace behind. So I did some research, and I formed some theses, and then—I armed up, went out, and tried to do something about it.”
Blandina’d heard that part of the tale previously, from Mother Eulalia—a typical stumble-across-an-op-in-progress, want-in origin story, same as her own or almost anybody else’s. Still, it showed initiative.
“And let me guess again,” she replied. “One of those dead people was somebody you cared for, which was why you couldn’t keep your nose out—family, friend. Boyfriend. Girlfriend?”
“Teacher,” Cecilia said. “Best I ever had. What happened to you?”
Blandina slid Roke’s screen-grabs free, shaking the top one out with a snap. “I think that happened.
“See that guy, near the back?” Blandina asked. “’Sides from being male and white as a sack of sheets, he looks just like a girlfriend I used to have—my best friend ever, only real friend. She came to a party my agent threw; I comped her in, ’cause she wanted to meet famous people. And I lost track of her. Thought she was having a good time. In the end, they found her when they were cleaning up, naked under a bunch of coats. She wouldn’t talk; parents took her home, wouldn’t let her do a rape-kit, wouldn’t let me call the police. When I turned up to see her a week later, her father spit on me. That was ’cause she’d hung herself the same morning, on the back of their bathroom door with a belt, from a hook.”
“You think that guy killed her?”
“Not directly. Whatever made him, though, out of her . . . that thing’s ‘father,’ that’s what I want.”
“Penemue,” Cecilia said, so
soft her lips barely moved. As though she couldn’t help wanting to weigh that ancient name a while, hold it in her mouth like something heavy, something honied.
“Whose name means ‘the Inside,’” Blandina agreed. “Curer of human stupidity. For The name of the fourth is Penemue: he discovered to the children of men bitterness and sweetness;/And pointed out to them every secret of their wisdom./He taught men to understand writing, and the use of ink and paper. . . .”
Cecilia nodded, quoting from memory: “Therefore, numerous have been those who have gone astray from every period of the world, even to this day./For men were not born for this, thus with pen and with ink to confirm their faith;/Since they were not created, except that, like the angels, they might remain righteous and pure.”
The words came easily—for Ordo members, Apocrypha like Enoch were more regularly perused than the actual Bible, if only for practicality. “Nor would death, which destroys everything, have affected them;/But by this their knowledge they perish, and by this also its power consumes them.”
“Writing as a form of black magic?”
“Why not? Runes, sigils, seals—that thing Roke showed us. Thoughts are just thoughts; words are air. Write something down, it becomes concrete.”
“But. . . .” Cecilia shook her head again, unable to move on, like disbelief was suddenly her default. “. . . Grigorim are angels, Blandina.”
“Cast-down angels in vile bodies, Origen says—bodies made of flesh, which always dies, you just hit it right. As weapons in His service, we do what we do, nomenclature regardless . . . find the source, knock it out, make sure it can’t breed more; classic pest control. Like any other nest.”
“You can’t kill angels, though.”
Blandina regarded her still-gloved hands, smeared wrist-high with hot ash from the soucouyant’s dissolution. Beneath the latex, her unpolished fingernails looked like blisters waiting to form.
“Ten years I’ve been at this, sister,” she said. “Longer than anybody else, except for Mother Eulalia, and this is what I know, for sure: I can kill anything I can get my hands on if I’m told the right way to do it.”
“But . . . oh, my Lord. I don’t know why I’m even asking this.”
“Go on.”
“. . . what if God won’t let you?”
He’s let me so far, with everything else.
“Then I want to hear Him tell me so,” Blandina said, at last. “To my face.”
And here, at last, I feel constrained to confess how I have stage-managed much of this situation. To take responsibility is not in my nature; I am made to hang back, play attendance—be acted upon, not to act. Yet in my quiet way, I am still capable of strategy.
As children of Penemue Grigorim, our mother-Maker, we all know that others are involved. For me, that was indeed Sister Blandina’s ill-fated friend Veronique Louvain, called Ronni. She avoids her name even while telling her story, which I can well understand; love is always painful for humans, especially once lost.
I have made it my business to learn Ronni Louvain by heart, tracking her through every available source. I have lain in her bed, breathing what scent remains, studying a single skin-flake like a lace pattern. I have spoken to her mother at the supermarket, changed her father’s tires. And I have followed Blandina from a distance, watching her kill her righteous way through this world. I have seen her pray in the aftermath, invoking His grace, spitting forth blessings like curses. I have seen her rage, daily, but never weep.
And now, at last, I force the issue. Bring this bitter crop we share to harvest by steering Blandina and Penemue together.
My Maker will not see her coming, not least because it simply does not think enough on me—one amongst many, only, made and thrown away over the millennia—to consider me worthy of distrust.
“A visit to the Anchoress, first,” Mother Eulalia had decided. The prospect made even Blandina wary, but she at least knew what was coming. Not so Cecilia, fumbling hopeful down through the dimness (all anchoresses took a Vow of Shadows, along with their other vows) while they followed a trail of luminescent paint—arrows on the walls, footprints on the floor—towards their destination.
“You’ve never done this before, dear.”
“No, Mother.”
“But you’re familiar with the terminology, I expect.”
“Anchorism, late 16th century: from the Old English anchor, ‘recluse, hermit,’ itself from the Mediaeval Latin anchorita or anchorite. ‘A person who, for religious reasons, withdraws from secular life entirely, choosing a prayer-filled, ascetic, Eucharist-focused mode of existence.’”
Makes it sound so simple, Blandina thought. “And our anchoresses?”
“Former members of the Order, now retired.”
“Don’t have all too many of those, do we?”
“Not that I’ve heard of, no.”
It was common practice for the bishop’s representative to say office for the dead over an anchoress as she entered her cell, to signify her rebirth to a spiritual life of solitary communion with God and His angels. Roke himself had recited at least two of those, including one for the woman they were about to consult, before affixing the bishop’s seal to the fresh-laid concrete across her door. After which the plasterers came by, white-washing over everything but a little flap-door at the bottom and a squint at the top, known as a “hagioscope”—the first for meals, such as they were, while the second provided a tiny one-way window back out into the world its occupant had left behind.
“She took the name Kentigerna on making her vows, against our usual rule,” Mother Eulalia explained, “since that particular saint was a hermit, not a martyr. But given her capacities, I believe she might have been thinking more of St. Kentigern Mungo, when she made the choice; he was noted for his miracles. As she was for hers.”
“Should I address her as Sister Kentigerna, then?”
Mother Eulalia shook her head, glancing Blandina’s way so that she would feel free to answer. And: “No,” Blandina obliged her. “She’s the Anchoress—we’ve only got the one. And you shouldn’t address her at all, if you can help it.”
One more corner, and there they were at last, outside the closet-sized room in which the best seer the Ordo ever recruited would spend the rest of her life. More paint rimmed its outline, a phantom lintel propped by two ghost-posts.
“I see you,” a rasp of a voice greeted them through a vent in the wall, making Cecilia jump. “Eulalia, Blandina—and you, newcomer, unblooded girl. Number Twenty-Three. Vic . . . toria.”
“Cecilia.”
“Not yet, you’re not. Not ’til you profess fully.”
“Excuse me, I’ve made my vows—”
“The simple ones, only. You’ve told God you love him, and isn’t that nice. But has He told you the same? Not yet . . . maybe not ever.”
The harsh words weren’t aimed at her, but Blandina shrugged anyhow and rapped her knuckles sharply against the door, making it ring. Reminding the woman inside: “She’s Mother Eulalia now, Kentigerna. You’ll give her that much respect.”
“My Mother was Apollonia, witch-seed, and she died so this one could live—you, too. You let yourself get carried away and saw her carried out in halves. Head and body.”
“I know my sins. Did my penance too, years back.”
“You should do more.”
Beside her, Blandina felt Cecilia stiffen, but Mother Eulalia simply sighed. “We need to consult,” she told the squint-hole, patiently. “On a matter of some urgency.”
“Oh yes, most honoured war-leader,” the Anchoress’s vicious whisper agreed. “Please don’t hesitate to ask if it’s ever a good idea to treat one of our Creator’s first-made children as though they were something you can throw silver, salt, or fire at, and just hope it goes away.”
“This one is Fallen,” Blandina pointed out. “Been like that since before Cain got his mark. All we want is to get
it to move on.”
“And then it’s someone else’s problem, eh?”
“You said it.”
Cecilia looked at her feet.
“If you did happen to have some sort of special knowledge,” Eulalia went on, mildly, as though the Anchoress hadn’t spoken at all, “we’d be very grateful to have it. Blandina, in particular.”
A few breaths went by, hoarsely mirrored through the grate, as the Anchoress mulled this over.
“They hurt themselves to stay here,” she said, eventually. “This is most important to remember when facing the Host.”
“Grigorim aren’t—”
“Oh, shut your mouth for one single minute, Judas Rusk’s by-blow—long enough to learn, or go ask elsewhere. At least that Mother of yours knows enough to know she knows nothing. Physics tells us everything in the universe is just energy and emptiness in some sort of combination, the only difference between ape and angel being just how close together things can get before exploding. Which means that, whenever Hostlings of any sort come to earth, they transmute themselves into the idea of flesh through molecular manipulation, and since they aren’t really corporeal to begin with, when you damage them, they fly apart and revert to the Eternal.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, all you can do to an angel is deflect it a while and hope it turns its attention elsewhere.”
“How?” Blandina asked through her teeth.
“Think, Blandina. The longer they remain enfleshed voluntarily, the more ‘earthly’ they become. They were made to be extensions of the Maker’s will, already perfected, so they can’t change; they aren’t supposed to want to change, even to improve themselves. Any personal ambition on an angel’s part is corruption—even the ambition to do good, not that that’s what Penemue’s been doing. To pursue your own ends is how you start to Fall.”
We Will All Go Down Together Page 37