by Jon Kiln
The herbalist stopped, her steps faltering. “You said that you were trying to save my girl, not hand her over to Ruthiel!”
“Ruthiel. So. You know, then,” Aladameda said flatly. It wasn’t a question.
She doesn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed at lying to me. Meghan shirked her shoulder away from the older woman’s supporting hand. “Stay away from us!”
“I can’t.” Aldameda was adamant. “This is bigger than what you or I want. This is about the fate of the world.”
Meghan was about to tell her just what Aldameda could do with the whole world, when the corridor was split by a sudden scream, and a shape rolled down the steps ahead of them that led up to the deck, and thudded to the decks.
“Talon!” Aldameda screamed.
It was the boy. Her boy, Meghan saw. There was blood on his head, but he was still moving as, behind him, another shape started to walk ponderously down the steps. Meghan saw in awful slowness the large, tan leather of the Quartermaster’s boots, and then his stubby, tree-trunk-like legs, and then his rounded belly, and the wooden cudgel that was in his hands.
But it wasn’t the Quartermaster Heg, was it? Something else glittered behind his eyes. Gone was any trace of humanity, and in it’s place was something else staring out from the man’s small eyes.
“Give me the girl,” the Quartermaster pointed the cudgel at Meghan.
Meghan started to stumble backwards down the corridor, back towards the mess hall.
“Give her to me or I’ll kill this brat here.” The devil that wore the Quartermaster’s face snarled, taking the last step to the decks of the wood below. Meghan froze as he saw Heg raise the cudgel menacingly over the boy, who moaned weakly.
“Run…” Talon said, kicking at the Quartermaster’s shins weakly, earning a booming laugh in return.
“Heg! We need you!” Another shout from someone at the top of the stairs, and Meghan recognized the voice of the First Mate Fatim, running down the steps. “Heg, the crew are going mad! They’re fighting each other, they’re…” the woman paused when she saw the boy lying on the floor in front of the Quartermaster, and looked puzzled at the large man who had been her friend for many years.
“Heg?” she managed to say, just as the giant of a man smashed his cudgel down on her legs.
Fatim screamed, falling down the steps at Heg’s feet, who raised his cudgel once more.
“Talon – no!” Aldameda said, just as she watched Talon lean forward and sink a knife into the Quartermaster’s thigh before the blow could hit home.
The man didn’t even grunt in pain, as he turned – but the boy must have hit some vital inner mechanism of his leg, as the man who had once been Heg suddenly lurched backwards against the steps.
“Boy, flee!” Aldameda was running down the corridor and seizing Talon’s shoulders, dragging him back as the already injured Fatim grappled and struggled with the devil-possessed Heg. More screams and shouts of rage and pain were coming from above them on the top decks.
Shaken from her panic, Meghan continued to stumble backwards, just as she heard a cough of laughter behind her. Two more sailors had appeared at the end of the corridor, one holding a hook of iron, and the other holding a short cutlass. And they both had that same, fierce intensity that told her that they were no longer the humans that they had once been.
They were devils.
The devils must have been in the storm. The one that Kariss had tried to warn us about… She paused, walking back the way she had come, bumping into Aldameda carrying the injured Talon halfway down the corridor.
“Heg, you’ve lost your mind!” Fatim was snarling, scrabbling at the much larger man’s face and shoulders, trying to restrain him even despite the pain of her ruined knee.
“Or maybe I’ve just gained a better one,” he snarled back, shoving her hard against the steps, her head rebounding against the wood – and she fell limp. The watching Meghan didn’t know if she was dead or merely unconscious, but either way, it meant the exact same thing for her, Kariss, Aldameda and Talon.
They were surrounded. The Quartermaster Heg pushing himself down the rocking corridor towards them, having to hold himself upright on one broken knee, and the other two possessed pirates coming from the other direction.
“Just give us the girl, and we’ll let you go,” Heg snapped.
“Try your lies elsewhere, devil!” Aldameda breathed, pulling a knife. “Back against the wall,” she hissed at Meghan, attempting to keep an eye on both sides of attackers.
“Out!” A voice like thunder broke into their terror, as a shape smaller than Heg leapt down the steps behind him, and Meghan saw a flash of blinding light.
A hissing, wheedling scream came from the Quartermaster as hands that burned with light seized the sides of his head, and appeared to burn the flesh it touched. Heg bubbled, hissed, and thrashed as he died in a burning ball of agony, and Meghan found herself looking at the glowing eyes of the pirate angel Ruthiel-Oberra.
“Get down!” he snapped in a command that was impossible to disobey, and Meghan found herself sliding to the floor beside Talon, still holding her sleeping little girl protectively to her chest. In front of her, the Mother Aldameda looked shocked as she did the same.
“You’ve had your fun, fiends. But this boat and crew are under the protection of Heaven!” the pirate angel roared, his eyes flashing brighter as he stalked forward towards the two remaining pirates. Meghan saw him raise one burning hand, and start to point it at them.
“Angel-dung!” the pirate he was pointing at hissed.
“I am no ordinary angel, worm. I am a Captain of Heaven. Out!” Ruthiel-Oberra intoned, and Meghan gasped as a shockwave of burning light seared over their heads, slamming into the cussing pirate-devil, and hitting him like a ball of flame.
He was flung up against the back of the wall, his chest and face a smoking ruin. His fellow devil turned and fled backwards, with the Captain of Heaven bursting into a run after him.
“Holy crap,” Talon breathed in pain at their side. “Mother? Did you know about this?” he asked weakly, in what Meghan thought was a considerably more mature tone than his young years should allow. The boy clearly did have a touch of something fey about him, and whitened scars, as well, faded with time, but showed that he was no stranger to war and violence.
“Ruthiel approached me just yesterday, Talon,” Aldameda said, her tone changed from her usual cackle and snip, instead to be something approaching caring around the boy.
She does have a heart, then, Meghan thought.
“But…” Talon looked in alarm. “Oberra?”
“I think that they are like us, Talon,” Aldameda said. “What we do.”
Like you, what? Meghan looked from one to the other, barely breathing for fear of breaking their disclosure, but the moment was over anyway, as there was the sound of booted feet returning to the corridor. They all tensed, hands reaching for what daggers they might have – but it was the striding form of the captain, clapping his hands together as if to shake the dust and grime of a hard day from his skin.
“The storm has stilled,” Meghan realized in wonder. The boat had stopped rocking, and the sounds of the laughing, scornful storm-voices had stopped, to be replaced by the more natural sounds of growling winds. There were still shouts of pain and misery, but there were no more clashes of weapons, or the screams of people dying.
“The devils have gone,” the captain said with certainty. “Either jumped overboard or dead.” He cocked his head to one side. “Shame to lose the crew, of course, but I guess that cannot be helped.”
“What was that?” Talon whispered, looking at the man. The captain’s hands no longer burned, and his eyes no longer shone, but power radiated from him like heat from a stove.
“It was a direct incursion into the Garden,” Ruthiel-Oberra said distractedly, looking into the middle distance as if he were fathoming the mystery himself. “Whenever any spirit crosses the threshold between the Unlivi
ng and this world, be it angel or devil, it weakens the veils between them. Before, it would take a lifetime of contemplation and prayer to be rewarded with an angel passenger.”
An angel parasite…? Meghan narrowed her eyes.
“But now, it is easy for us to move into this world. But it appears that it is even easier for the devils to do so. They inhabited that storm, forcing it towards us.”
“And they took Heg, and the others?” a voice croaked from the steps at the far end, and they turned to see that it was the First Mate Fatim, pushing herself up from the deck, breathing in short gasps as she examined her ruined knee. “Useless.” She spat at it.
“Healer, see to her.” The captain nodded at Aldameda, who blinked in consternation at the sudden order, but still stood up slowly and hurried to Fatim’s aid. Behind her, the boy Talon looked worried and uncertain, as uncertain about this new creature that inhabited the captain, as he had been about the one inhabiting Heg. Meghan reached out with a hand to his shoulder.
“Are you all right,” she said softly, nodding to his head. The blood had stopped, but he had a nasty graze under his hair line, and a swelling the size of a duck egg.
“Yes, I think so. Thank you,” the boy breathed.
“And so, you must see now, Meghan,” the pirate angel appeared nonchalant over their injuries, as he stepped over the boy and continued walking as he called out at the herbalist behind him, “that your girl really is important, and why it really is imperative that she stays under my care.”
His words did not offer Meghan any comfort whatsoever.
13
‘Well, I guess that you can be pleased with yourself, at least?’ The words of the devil burned in the back of the Sin Eater’s mind.
“What? Why would I be?” Vekal snapped back. Ever since the incident in the sea when the devil had apparently attempted to swap sides, their relationship could be described as far less than cordial.
They stood on the railings of the Avantis trireme, looking down at the destruction below them. It was a day later – although Vekal couldn’t be sure if that meant that it was night or day, as the skies were strange and heavy with storm clouds, and the seas were a constantly shifting froth of white water, mixed with soot and burnt timbre.
It feels like the end of the world, the priest thought, and for once – he realized that the thought did not bring him joy.
‘Probably because it IS the end of the world, paper-fiddler,’ Ikrit sneered at him. ‘Your world is ending. The Hordes of Hell will do battle with the Hosts of Heaven, and no stone will be left unturned, no tree left standing, no sky will ever be normal again.’
“Don’t sound so pleased,” Vekal muttered.
‘I’m not!’ the fiend inside of him assured him hotly. ‘I may have been intent on getting into heaven, but you know why that was.’
“To find your lost love?” The Sin Eater couldn’t refrain from keeping a little skepticism from his voice. There was a sullen pause before the creature answered.
‘Yes. As well you know. You remember Telset.’ The devil sounded subdued.
The priest did. Telset, the ancient, forgotten city deep in the wilds of the Shattering Coasts where he had found out that Ikrit had really once been a human soul named Gehin, entangled in an impossible love with the princess, Eiver.
‘Well, as much as I care little for this world anymore - not for me, anyway, that does not mean that I would see it burning and destroyed,’ the devil cried out. ‘That is what separates us two, priest.’ The creature’s words were suddenly sibilantly close. ‘You are one of the Unliving. The Morshanti. The priests dedicated to death. You would rather the entire Garden gets destroyed, because it will mean more souls given over to the Heavens or Hells.’
“It is… it is where we all come from.” Vekal thought of what he had been taught, and now what he had seen. That the Halls of the Undying, the home of the gods, the heavens, ruled over by Lord Ilyira and Lord Annwn, was his real home, and yet his soul had to crawl through incarnation to painful incarnation, until he was deemed worthy to return.
‘Bah! You know nothing, priest,’ the devil scolded him. ‘Whomever wins, whether Heaven or Hell, both sides will just destroy the Garden that you knew, and they will control who goes where. The Lockless Gate was your one free pass, your one escape route unless you wanted to be judged by cruel gods.’
Vekal was going to raise his voice to argue. The Lady Iliya was not like that, after all – he had met her. She wasn’t called the Merciful for no reason. She had let him come back, to save Meghan and Kariss.
‘But save them for what? So that they might die and go to heaven?’ the devil reasoned.
Which seemed a bit rich, the priest thought, considering that was exactly what the devil cared about. Just getting to heaven so that he could spend eternity with Eiver.
‘It’s different for me, you know. Are all of your priest’s brains thick with horse dung? My Eiver is already dead. Many centuries dead. I’m already dead. We’ve had our time in the Garden – and yes, I royally messed it up. But your two? That warm-bodied Meghan?’
“Shut up,” Vekal said, not wanting to admit that the devil was right. What was it that the Lady Iliya said? That she was allowing him to return to the Garden – this mortal world – in order to save those he loved, but then he would return. She had even told him that he didn’t have long down here.
So, what was my plan – carry Meghan and Kariss up to heaven with me? The priest felt his world whirl underneath him, and not just from the currents of the wind. It was with the horror of his previous convictions.
How could he do that to them? The devil – as much as he had lying and treachery sown into the very fabric of his soul – was right about that one thing, at least. Vekal didn’t want Meghan and Kariss to have an untimely death, even if it did mean going to heaven. There was something about that logic that felt cruel, calculating, horrific.
‘And a halle-lu-jah,’ Ikrit sighed. ‘And there we have it, priest. That is why you cannot trust the uptight feathery bastards.’
“The Hosts of Heaven?” Vekal murmured, looking around him.
The trireme of Avantis was really a giant triangle, with three gallery platforms rising in its middle, topped with a small wooden tower with peaked roofs. Thick roped stretched from its corners and galleries to hold the massive cloud-like canvas balloons in place over it, with canvas sails and wooden rudders extending from the sides. The Sin Eater had never seen anything like it. He had never heard that such a thing was even possible.
‘That’s what you get for consorting with angels,’ Ikrit said dryly. ‘Devil’s have their own gifts of course, but generally all our cultists just want women, a good time, and enough wine to kill a horse, not to control the skies…’
The priest turned his troubled thoughts back to the sight below him. What did this mean, now? If he wanted to stay down here, in the Garden, against his goddess’s orders, with Meghan and Kariss?
‘And you know that you can’t let the Hosts take over the Garden, either,’ Ikrit said.
“It looks too late for that.” Vekal peered over the side, where the seas around the Isle of Gaunt – and its Lockless Gate shrine that it contained – was now devoid of devil-possessed navies. Instead, it was a blanket of misery; of burned and floating bodies beside pieces of wrecked boats, some still smoking. The priest wondered if you could walk clear from the jagged cliffs and rocks of the Shattering Coasts to Gaunt now, if you didn’t care about stepping on bodies.
The Isle hadn’t fared much better. It was little more than a spear of rock in a jumble of its own cracked foundations, but it smoked, and some parts where a scrub of tree or bit of old flotsam had once sat still glowed.
“Heaven’s won,” Vekal said, wondering why that didn’t fill him with hope.
‘Not yet they haven’t,’ Ikrit replied suddenly, sickening in his excitement. ‘The walls between the worlds are down, and there are more devils pouring into the Garden than ever before. It t
ook me hundreds of years to crawl out of hell. Now any sprite can find a human to pour himself into. Heaven needs to secure the Lockless Gate, and that means finding a way to close it for good. And they will need to either take the Garden from Hell, or leave the world to burn.’
“Which they won’t do, of course.” Vekal remembered Saphiel-Oulia’s words. The Hosts wanted the devils destroyed. They wanted all of hell destroyed now.
Around them, Vekal could see more of the ponderous and heavy triremes of angel-Avantis moving into position around the Isle of Gaunt. The sky was dark and thick with them, and they looked like a gathering storm.
***
Vekal could tell which of the Avantis ‘sailors’ were angels; mostly because of the disapproving hiss and the snide statements of the demon hiding in his breast every time that he passed one. ‘Arrogant bastards’ and ‘feathery gits’ became a common refrain echoing inside his head.
But there were other signs of the heavenly invasion, as well. The ones that were – occupied, the priest thought of it as – were all, without exception, superior or senior officers in the culture of the Fire People. Each one wore a large gold amulet around their necks, had finer linen clothes, and were generally treated with severe respect by any of the other humans that encountered them.
They also move differently, Vekal noticed, watching how one stood for hours on the middle gallery of the trireme, watching out to sea for heaven knew what. When they walked the edge of the gunwale, they did so with a grace and a confidence that few humans possessed.
‘It’s all that assumed privilege,’ sneered Ikrit inside of him. ‘That’s another difference. They HATE the Garden, thinking that they’re better. Us devils? We LOVE it, full of lust and love and want and need, all balled up together…’
“Okay, imp. I get the idea. No more of your infernal ministries, please…” Vekal muttered under his breath.
But the devil was right, the priest saw. The angel officers would stalk through conversations or through crowds, calmly assuming that any lesser mortal would get out of their way. And because the Avantis were so given over to their service, and so in awe of these beings, they did.