Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series

by Catherine Webb

  It took a stranger’s eyes to see through the web of illusion the city had woven around itself. As foreign journalists reported on the rat problem, and the spirits denounced the lack of greenery in these dense streets, so Sam’s black eyes saw the lengthening shadows, the bins that hadn’t been emptied and the falseness of the smiles. It brought back the phrase that had sprung to his mind when this business had started.

  ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be.’

  Sam had once heard Shakespeare performed in America, but had never repeated the experience. He’d seen the Bard himself appear in his works, and hearing Hamlet sigh of his misfortune with an American accent had jarred the part of him still haunted by the relief of living in the sixteenth century. As far as he was concerned, that had been the best century of the lot: after the Renaissance had begun, things could only get better. The dark and middle ages had lasted far too long for his taste.

  ‘What crude, primitive fools,’ he repeated under his breath.

  And turned south again. The street plan was growing more complicated, roads lancing off at diagonals and even the occasional tree springing up through the tight pavement, fenced off from the public. Washington Square now, where cars and trees cast shadows in the never-dying lights around. Into the smaller, quieter residential streets with their airy penthouses, and small newsagents selling papers in half a dozen different languages, predominantly Spanish and English. A man and a woman, delighted with their perfect life in this perfect world, were walking a large grey dog that stopped at the sight of every stranger and won each heart by fondly licking the coldest hands. Uriel was nearby. Sam could sense her like a fire in the corner of his eye. Close enough so that he started shielding his own signal, as Uriel had not.

  Turning on to another street, he stopped, craning his neck to stare up at a glass penthouse resting on the top of a white triangular building. A light was on, and his probe could sense only Uriel inside. Sam had walked miles, but hadn’t felt it. He was going to find answers.

  Marching across the street, he peered at the single door. There was an intercom, but he wasn’t foolish enough to try and disguise his voice. He checked for wards, but there were none. Pressing his hand against the door and checking instinctively for pursuers with both eyes and mind, he triggered the locking mechanism on the other side and pushed it open.

  Inside was a lift and a stairway. Sam took the stairs, watching every corner for the same attackers he’d encountered in Kaluga but knowing in his heart that they weren’t there. He paused on a shadowed corner away from both window and doors, and took out his sword, wiping the sweat off his hand before taking a firm grip on the hilt. He continued up as far as a small landing with only one door. There was a skylight above, and a spherical light shone down on a deep, very clean carpet.

  Sam knocked on the door, standing aside from the spyhole and keeping up his shields, projecting with studied ease the mental illusion of just another mortal. The door opened. Uriel, her red hair wet, and wearing nothing more than a dressing gown and pair of slippers, peered at him.

  ‘I do apologise,’ he said, ramming the butt of his sword up and into her chin. She fell back, and he swiftly delivered two more blows that sent her crumpling to the floor.

  The apartment was just three large rooms – a bedroom and a bathroom, with a sitting room, dining room and kitchen blended into one. There were large sliding doors and a balcony on which well-tended flowers grew unnaturally well for the time of year. It was a matter of moments to turn out the cupboards and find some masking tape. With another apology to the stunned and helpless Uriel, Sam tied her to a nearby radiator and blindfolded her. He didn’t want even the lesser power of an archangel employed against him. Meanwhile Uriel was recovering consciousness, turning her head this way and that and moaning.

  Sam didn’t bother with hitting; he didn’t bother with yelling. He knew he couldn’t read an archangel’s mind as simply as he had Maria’s. Not without aid. He turned his back on her and raised his cupped hands to his face, squeezing his eyes shut.

  His fingers began to tremble, then he began to shake all over. Tears sprang to his eyes, and his mouth opened in a silent scream as white light surrounded him, expanded, rushed towards Uriel, filling the room, and stopped inches from her quaking form. Then it collapsed and Sam staggered against the kitchen table, eyes streaming, hands trembling as he clasped them to his ears.

  ‘Lucifer!’ pleaded Uriel. ‘What are you doing?’ She had felt the barely controlled discharge, known it for what it was.

  White-eyed, Sam turned on her and his face was twisted in pain. ‘I can hear your thoughts,’ he said softly. ‘And you are now going to tell me where Andrew is. Where I can find Gail. What’s really going on.’

  He could hear her mind, feel her fantasies, all her many fantasies, about what he might do to her. Her fear was his fear, and he trembled as it rushed through him. Her hatred was his hatred and he bit his lip to try and fight it down. Her thoughts were his thoughts

  ‘Where’s Andrew?’

  And even as she replied, ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he heard her thoughts.

  ‘Then where is the other accomplice? Gail.’

  ‘Lucifer – no, look —’

  ‘Make this easier for me. Where roughly is she?’

  Images flooded his mind, and he focused on Gail, refused to listen to the thoughts of the many, many other people around, focused on Uriel. Images of a map, a circle drawn around a small collection of towns.

  ‘Traitor? What do you mean a traitor?’

  Helpless, Uriel grunted her futile rage and struggled against her bonds, but she could not silence her thoughts.

  ‘Who are her “powerful friends”? Who are Gail’s… Gabriel’s “friends”?’

 

  ‘How many people are searching that area?’

  ‘Get out of my head!’ she screamed. ‘Get out!’

  ‘The Portals are guarded? You mean spirits watch them?’ His eyes were burning, his ears ringing. He could feel something flowing through him like fire, but it made his head swim and his heart pump and the whole world burned in the darkest colours of the soul.

  ‘You’re going to die, Lucifer!’ She was struggling ineffectively, trying to beat him by sheer willpower and fury alone. He ignored her, and kept on listening. He had no choice but to listen.

  ‘Jehovah is looking for the Pandora keys, yes? He and Odin and Seth?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How many keys have been found?’

  ‘None!’

  ‘Is Seth really planning to defeat Time? He wasn’t lying to me? Out of envy? Or disdain? Or for whatever other reason that he can’t be trusted?’

  ‘Of course he was lying. You know it’s in his nature!’

  Sam’s mind was filling with furious, burning images. Human thoughts, mortal thoughts were tearing through him, back-noise from the streets below. He groped blindly for the sword, but he could hardly see. Everything was etched in fire, blinding him. His head felt as though it were going to burst.
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br />   ‘Lucifer!’ Uriel screamed after him as he staggered towards the door. He was vaguely aware that he’d managed to sling his bag on to his back.

  He was receiving images from Uriel that he didn’t want to see. Images of his own death a thousand times over in a thousand different ways. Others, too, of Jehovah, smiling, talking of high things.

  He found the door.

  ‘Lucifer! You can see my thoughts, and they are bloody for this!’

  He whirled around, one hand flying out. ‘Be silent!’ he roared. Something that made the air ripple and the glasses shake on their shelf tore through the air and smashed into her, and he could sense Uriel’s thoughts no more. Yet the fire in his eyes promised him that she was alive. Mortal thoughts, mortal ideas were tearing through him, suggesting things so profane and immoral that he wept to hear them.

  Going down in the lift, he slipped to the floor, burying his tightly shut eyes against his knees and pressing his hands over his ears as the roar of the world assailed him. A couple were waiting for the lift on the ground floor. He heard their thoughts as the door opened to reveal him cowering inside it. If discharging the Light was power, it also brought him to this.

 

  Somehow he managed to stagger from the lift and into the street, and now the noises hit him even harder, a thousand deafening voices, all whispering the one, predominant word.

  He ran, not knowing his final destination but wanting to run, wanting to put distance between himself and the wall of human noise that threatened to drown him. People scattered before him, afraid. He wondered if they were looking at the drawn sword, or the whiteness of his eyes. Or the fear on his face. He was afraid of mortals, mortals were afraid of him. They were afraid of the lies put abroad, he was afraid of the truths now open to his ears. He wanted to turn to the lady in the street and warn her, ‘He’s cheating on you, thinking of another woman.’ He wanted to hit the old man who saw him and thought, He wanted to comfort the terrified child who saw his nightmare rush towards him through the street. He wanted to slap the spiteful woman who saw in him another weak-willed failure who’d brought his own downfall on himself. But he didn’t.

  Sam ran on, into the deepening shadows.

  He took a bus out to a Portal in New Jersey, keeping his eyes closed all the way and humming under his breath any tune that came to mind as the roaring, raging voices slowly faded. Painfully slow. He could still hear the distant whispering of the humans on the bus as they stared at him over their newspapers and briefcases, their little ignorant thoughts turning him into a monster. Or sometimes he caught their incidental thoughts – a man lusting over his secretary, a woman fuming in silence over the incompetence of hers and looking forward immensely to sacking the unfortunate menial, an old man thinking of the bloody kids next door and a pair of boys thinking of how they could next impress their friends with dirty anecdotes and reports of false conquests.

  But gradually all this faded with the whiteness in his eyes and he was left clutching his bag on his knees and feeling nothing worse than ordinary revulsion at the thoughts that had briefly been his own.

  Sam let the bus carry him right to the end of the route, missing at least two Portals. He did not feel up to a Waywalk, not yet. When the bus reached its final stop and he was the last passenger left, the driver had to come and shake his arm. ‘Hey, sleepy-head,’ he said, ‘end of the line.’

  Sam opened his eyes and yawned. His eyes were still light grey and he could see in a second the colour of the man’s soul. To his relief, the darkness on the outside was just an illusion, a projection of aggression crafted to hide a warm heart. Sam smiled despite himself.

  ‘What’s funny?’ demanded the driver.

  ‘I’m smiling at you.’

  ‘So let me in on the joke, why don’t you?’ The man’s voice was raised, but Sam could see that his abruptness was a fake.

  ‘You’re trying to hide the fact that you’re a good man, for fear you’ll get hurt again.’

  The driver recoiled as if slapped, and Sam could hear his thoughts clearly.

  Sam pushed past him, staggered down to the front of the bus and got off. It had probably been foolery to speak. But after a journey of listening to other people’s voices, it was good to hear himself speak too.

  Out here it was blissfully quiet – a small scattering of houses in leafy New Jersey, with clean cars on immaculate driveways. The roaring voices of the city seemed distant; most thoughts here were silenced, displaced by mindless evening television and brief flashes of dreams from sleeping children.

  ‘Hey!’ The bus driver again, calling after him. ‘You need a hand?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Sam called, half turning. His voice seemed very loud and as he plodded down the empty pavement he began to sing again under his breath, focusing all his attention on the words to try and keep out the few thoughts that did crawl into his mind. ‘Are you going to Scarborough fair?’ A cat mewed piteously and brushed against his legs, sensing in Sam a fellow night-dweller. He stroked it absently and passed by. ‘Remember me to one who lives there.’

  A girl gang, giggling uproariously, bottles clutched in their hands, passed down the road. Sam heard their thoughts. He kept on walking, looking away as they passed and refusing to see their souls, for fear that even in children so young there might be something black.

  ‘She once was a true love of mine,’ he sang to himself.

  He could sense a Portal nearby. But his grey eyes swerved beyond the side street where the Portal lay to a small church, little more than a hall with a small wooden spire, and his feet began moving that way of their own accord. Outside the door he hesitated, glancing at the picture of Christ on the cross and the huge words around it – ‘He died for us, brothers’ – before knocking on the door. It moved under his touch and when no one answered he pushed it open, slipping into the cold, empty church. The only light came from a stand of candles, nearly burnt down, and the altar was plain and the stained-glass windows crude, compared to the old cathedrals of Europe. But it was quiet, with even the thoughts from the houses muffled. And there were no souls for the Light to examine.

  He found a pew and pressed his hand against the armrest, leaving behind a faint silver glow that would warn him if danger approached. Pillowing his head on a hassock from the floor, he curled up on the bench and closed his eyes. It was blissful. No burning fire before him, no roaring voices inside. He would let his eyes drift shut for a few minutes, and then he would Waywalk. Waywalking was a dangerous business at all times, and he was going to do it with every safety precaution he could find.

  And in the holy church of Jesus Christ, he slept.

  When he woke, Sam no longer heard the voices. Weary, his bones clicking uncomfortably, he pulled himself up and opened his eyes. The world was no longer burning – after hours of fire the worst was past.

  He could risk a Waywalk. Find Gabriel. End this battle once and for all.

  TWENTY

  Traitors and Archangels

  H

  e used the images he’d gleaned from Uriel’s mind to set the destination. Striding through the Hell Portal he fancied he saw the face of the Wayspirit he’d enlisted to his aid in finding Seth. Scrying for Gabriel would have been futile – Uriel had made it clear that the archangel’s shielding was something remarkable. Nor did he care who saw him emerge from the Portal. He was on the warpath now, ready to fight as he’d never been ready before.

  For all he was tired, muscles and mind both aching from strain, he heard Uriel’s voice again in his mind. Whoever goes through the Portals is seen. To be seen is to become a target.

  That suited him. He wanted Gabriel to know where
he was. He wanted to be a target.

  He broke through the Earth Portal and looked around, searching for a clue as to where he was. It was dark. The Portal had come out in a backyard full of old crates and smelling of beer. He heard the sound of movement inside the large whitewashed house in front of him and clambered quickly over the back wall to avoid discovery.

  There were houses with shutters. There was the smell after rain. There were old corrugated iron rooftops, rusting a little. Sam felt eyes watching him, felt alert minds stirring all around and wondered who or what had noticed his arrival. He climbed over a few more walls until he landed in a muddy road, and looked up and down it.