The Prison of the Angels (The Book of the Watchers 3)

by Janine Ashbless

  I cringed inwardly, my inculcated reverence flaring in helpless protest. There was a pointed and deliberate cruelty, I suddenly recognized, in surrounding Gabriel with crucifixes bearing the tortured figure of Our Lord—pious reminders of the brutal consequences of his Fall.

  And plastic flowers, I thought bitterly. To look nice.

  Screw this.

  I slipped my hand under Gabriel’s bearded chin and tried to lift his head, but his frame might as well have been made of welded steel. I swept thick ropes of hair aside to reveal his handsome profile and one closed eye. He looked a little older than Azazel too, though not so old as Uriel.

  “Please,” I whispered in vain. “It’s me, Milja.”

  I wondered if I would get a reaction if I stuck a fingertip in that eye, but the thought was unconscionable. He’d already suffered beyond any human limits.

  “Can he hear me?” I asked Egan, despairingly.

  “Ah, this is a problem. Arse. I was hoping he’d respond to you. You said you’d spoken in your dreams.”

  “What?” I said suspiciously.

  He sighed. “So far as I know, there’s no record of him saying anything in the last four years, despite some fairly strenuous attempts to get him talking. In fact I might be the last person he spoke to.” Egan groaned then; “Aaah…”

  “What did he say?”

  “‘You will cut me free.’” There was a peculiar look on Egan’s face. “At the time I thought he was just trying to psych me out.”

  I wondered what would happen if we did cut him free—surely that would wake him? But then it would be too late to make demands. He might well join the fight against Azazel, and all would be lost.

  I took a deep breath. “Egan, you need to knock me unconscious.”

  “Say again?”

  “I can get through to him in my dreams. I’ve done it before, haven’t I? I need to be out cold, though. You’ll have to smack me on the back of the head or something.”

  “Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?” he asked. “It’s not like they show it in the movies, you know! I’d have as much chance of fracturing your skull or giving you brain-damage as of knocking you cold.”

  “What about what you did to that policeman, at the station?”

  “No,” he said flatly. “Less violent, still too dangerous. I will not risk your life, Milja.”

  “You risk it more by doing nothing! You risk thousands of people every second we waste!”

  His mouth twisted.

  “Egan, please!”

  “Okay.” He turned grim and closed-down. “Stand up.”

  When I did so he spun me so that I had my back to his chest. He crooked his right arm around my neck. I hoped that he couldn’t feel my racing pulse. Did I trust his skill?

  At least I’ll be in his arms.

  “Take five slow breaths,” he said low in my ear. “Exhale all the way out each time; empty your lungs of carbon dioxide.”

  I obeyed and felt his hard arm tighten against both sides of my neck. There was no sensation of having my airway cut off, just a sudden dark dizziness.

  And then…

  I am standing in the desert of dust; the place of things condemned to be forgotten. At my bare feet is a half-buried book with worn, illegible leather binding. Above me the huge form of the sphinx is slumped in the drifts, his head bowed and his wings sprawled crookedly.

  “Gabriel? Gabriel, wake up!”

  Slowly, slowly, he lifts his face and shakes dust from his hair and his eyelashes. I am showered in the detritus of the eons. His voice is like the roar of great waters.

  “Daughter of Earth? Have you come to free me?”

  “Yes,” I say softly. “Maybe.”

  His eyes are smoldering golden suns, lifted blindly to the sky that is not a sky. “Have the archangels agreed then?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But you have spoken to them?”

  “Yes.” That much is true; I’ve spoken to all of them individually. Michael is a bully, Uriel is a creep, and Raphael—whom first impressions suggested was the least hostile of the three—is a prevaricator we’ve left for dead in a pool of blood. And here is the last of the four archangels; the Pillar of the South. I can feel gooseflesh prickling all over my bare skin, though I’m not cold. It is impossible not to be awed by his sheer size and his unearthly grandeur. All the other archangels have only appeared to me disguised as men, but here is an angel in all his inhuman majesty. Even bound and broken, there is a numinous splendor about him that makes my knees want to bow.

  “You must tell them again! Tell them that I will promise to keep their secret, in exchange for free air under my wings once more, for sun on my skin, for limbs unbound.”

  “Gabriel,” I say, my throat furred with the wasteland’s dust, “what is their secret?”

  He makes a moaning noise that sounds like a sandstorm. “Do you truly wish to know?”

  “I think I must.” I don’t want to, not really. I am filled with a premonition, as you sometimes are in dreams, that it is something terrible. It is the black despair I have seen in Egan’s eyes sometimes, the fear glimpsed through the chinks in Uriel’s armor of righteousness, the source of Michael’s nihilistic anger.

  But if it gives me an edge, any weapon to save Azazel…

  “The secret is my story.” He bows his head. If his face were not forty feet high I’d feel moved to brush the sand from his parched lips.

  “Tell me.”

  His words are as slow and massive as tumbling rocks. “When on high, before I was bound here, the Adversary came to test me, as he does each of us. He spoke to me on my own and then took me into the Presence, as close as we ever dare go, to the point of bliss where every particle of me loosened, yearning to dance free and return to the light of its Source. And he asked me about my work on Earth.

  “I had been obedient, without fault or hesitation. I had followed every Divine Command. I had saved and I had slain. But there was no passion in my slaughter, and the Adversary saw that. Why, he asked me, did I punish without righteous wrath?

  “I told him that I did not feel it fair to despise those whom I executed. Not for one moment did I think that they did not deserve their fate, for the Laws are clear and the disobedience of the condemned was blatant. They were creatures given over to evil. But I felt it unjust of me, I said, to strike with personal ire, when I did not—could not—know what it was to be mortal. When I did not know what it meant to feel fear, or rage, or sorrow, or helplessness. When I could not truly understand what it was to resist the instincts of the flesh, or to be granted power over others without the Clear Voice to guide my actions. I told the Adversary that it was wrong of us to think ourselves better than Men, when we had not walked in their shoes nor known for ourselves their manifold limitations. I said that I had seen how easy it is for a rich man to condemn a poor man for stealing bread, and that in truth I felt I had no right to judge any one of them.

  “Then the Adversary said to me, ‘You think that we cannot be just in our condemnation? By that argument would you not accuse even Our Father of injustice?’

  “The scales fell from my eyes and I saw then that I had erred, and was flawed. I turned to walk into the Light of the Presence and be unmade, willingly.”

  Gabriel rumbles deep in his chest.

  “That was when a Still Small Voice spoke to both of us, and said, “No.”

  For a long moment the only sound in the desert is the hiss of sliding grit.

  “I do not know whether my unguarded words moved Him, or He was waiting all along for us to understand. It was not for us to know such things. But the Divine Plan was revealed to us, the four archangels; the Most High would descend into the world and become a child, the most helpless and weak of creatures. To know pain and fear, and hunger and thirst. To crave His mother’s comfort and His father’s approval. To feel a terror of death and a desire for carnal intercourse. To be tempted by both evil and good, by both powerlessness and power. T
o experience everything as mortals experienced it, and so to show them the way to the light of righteousness. And for such a thing to happen He must forget His true Nature, or else it would be nothing more than a game of make-believe. And a body must be created that could sustain such a Nature without going mad. This was our task. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was to be the pivotal moment of all Creation and all Time. Such a thing had not been done, nor could have been imagined before. The whole Host of Heaven was ordered into the Earthly realm, and bore witness to the Incarnation in awe and terror.

  “For thirty years Our Father lived in ignorance of His Nature; a passing moment in the span of eternity but a life sentence for a man. Then he was baptized into the Truth and for three more He was knowing, but still thinking as the man He had become in that time and place, imagining Satan to be His great enemy, seeing the world around Him as a man, bounded by His flesh and culture and all the ignorance of mortality. It was the Divine Test.

  “And it failed, Daughter of Earth. It failed spectacularly, and to the ruin of us all.”

  I stare, my questions frozen on my numb lips.

  “Humanity, with all its flawed potential and its contradictions and its endless pitiful suffering, drove Him half out of His mind. Every child broken by want, every innocent ruined by chance, or malice, or error. A world without Truth or Light, where every creature must fight for life, taking it from others, and therefore only cruelty could prosper. Yet He was certain there must be some way to make Mankind good, if only the punishments were clear and the rewards great enough. He railed against His followers, He promised Heaven and He threatened Hell. He swore to return after His mortal term and cleanse the Earth of all evil. He offered moral transfiguration through mere faith in Him, to burn out all sin upon request. Nothing was enough to turn the lost sheep to the Light. Nothing. He died in despair, and in the extremity of His torment doubted even Himself.”

  I rub at my burning eyes.

  “It is what happened after that that is our secret, Daughter of Earth. How we had waited for that moment, that death, that glorious resurrection into the Spirit! How we had longed to return to a Heaven filled anew with His Presence! How we yearned to see Creation redeemed! Yet that is not what happened.”

  “What did happen?” I ask.

  “Nothing.” He shakes his vast head. “Or almost nothing. Our Father did not return to the Host waiting to receive Him. And alone amongst all the angels and archangels only I heard the Still Small Voice. Do you want to know what It said to me?”

  I can’t even nod.

  “It said, ‘I am ashamed.’ And nothing more.”

  “God…said that?” My legs give way and I slide down onto the grit. “You’re going to have to explain to me using very short words, Gabriel.”

  “This is the secret that must not be spoken: Our Father saw what He had done and unmade Himself, in contrition for all that His Creation had been forced to suffer. He died and did not rise again. So I believe.”

  “Right. Okay. Okay then.” I can’t even begin to wrap my head around this. “So who knows this?”

  “Only my brothers in whom I first confided; the three archangels. And they took it badly, as you might expect. They did not want to believe me. They raged and called me a liar. They panicked and then they despaired.”

  “What about the rest of the Host?” I croak.

  “No. I wanted to tell them. Is it not our task to serve the Truth, after all? I wanted to tell, but my brothers would not permit me.”

  “You mean the Host haven’t noticed?”

  “When He became incarnate, Our Father left His Light suffused throughout Creation to sustain it, like the ghost-light of an exploded galaxy. As the Christ-cult grew, the Adversary accepted the mantle of blame, for what else was he to do? The Pillar of the West ordered the Host to stay on Earth in their guardian positions. The three chose amongst themselves to hide what they knew and officially accept the story you read in the Gospels, and to bury all evidence to the contrary. I am the evidence they buried.”

  He sighs, a tornado that could flatten nations. “And since that day only the humans who call themselves Vidimus have heard the truth I have to tell.”

  Vidimus. ‘We have seen.’

  “But why? Why hide the truth?”

  “My brothers are afraid, and rightly so. I understand their fear. What do you think the Host will do if they find out? If they know this despair? There will be war in Heaven and on Earth. I understand this. I have had centuries to think upon it. So I swear now that if they will free me, I will keep my silence.”

  I stare at my hands, sifting the dust through my open fingers. I realize now why Michael has sloughed off his responsibility for the Watchers in his domain—why should he bother to keep them alive for a final Judgement that will never happen? I comprehend Uriel’s barely-veiled contempt for Christianity. I understand why they have all held publicly to the old codes of angelic conduct, and why they have secretly broken them.

  “I don’t care,” I say, which is a lie. I do care; the revelation gnaws upon my guts like a cancer. But I do not have time to grieve, not if I am going to save Azazel—or anyone. “Okay. Big secret. All that can wait. We have something else to deal with right now. The world is burning. We are about to destroy ourselves for good. And you have to stop it. You are the last chance we have.”

  Gabriel blinks at me, focusing on me properly for the first time, and suddenly his tone changes. “Who are you, Daughter of Earth? Are you Vidimus?”

  “No, I’m not.” Do they even admit women to their conspiracy of silence?

  “I see flames on your lips. I see you encompassed by darkness and fire.”

  “My name is Milja Petak,” I say, “and I am the beloved of the Scapegoat.”

  Gabriel growls—or perhaps groans—and the sound booming through his huge leonine chest makes the desert shake. “Is he free?”

  “Yes. I freed him, and that’s how I want him to stay.”

  His bared teeth loom over me. “Have you come here to torment me?”

  “No. I’ve come because he’s fighting the Pillar of the West one last time, and the world cannot survive. How much do you want your own freedom, Gabriel? I’ll let you go right now, if you swear you will save the Scapegoat and stop the carnage. And I don’t care how, to be honest. Fight at his side. Kill the Pillar of the West if you have to. Stop the end of the world.”

  “Save him?”

  “From defeat. From being imprisoned again. He would rather die than be recaptured. You understand that, I guess. Don’t you feel the same way?”

  He pulls at the titanic chains binding his forepaws, stretching his jaws in a soundless snarl that could swallow suns.

  “There, yes. You know what it is to be a prisoner.” My voice is as thin as a knife-blade in the dusty air. “You know why he would rather pull the world down around himself. Save him.”

  “You don’t know what you ask!”

  “I know what I offer. I will cut you free right now, Gabriel. I will let you go. But only if you promise.”

  “What if I cannot?” he demands. “What if I cannot save both your Master and the world? Which would you have me pick?”

  “If that is the case,” I say in a voice I do not recognize, “then you must do what you think right. And I will take all the revenge in my power.”

  He stares at me, until I feel I will burst into flames and be consumed. “Free me,” he says at last.

  “Promise to save him.”

  “I promise I will try.”

  I struggled back into consciousness to find Egan crouched near me with one hand in my hair, his gun out and his eye on the door. How long I’d been unconscious I couldn’t tell, except that he’d had enough time to lay me down in the recovery position and strip off his cassock to make a pillow for beneath my head.

  He started as I stirred and groaned. “Are you okay?” he asked, setting down the weapon.

  I pulled myself
up, clinging to his arms. Clinging, too, to the cold fire of my purpose. It was all I had left. “I’m alright. How long was I out for? It felt like ages.”

  “Sure, it was only a minute. Did you speak to him?”

  “Yes.” I glanced around at the bound angel, who had not moved.

  Egan swallowed. “Did you ask about…?”

  “Yes.”

  His gaze slipped away like a shamed and wounded animal.

  “So you’re, what?” I wondered. “A Catholic atheist?”

  “Agnostic. Technically we don’t know if God’s dead or has just…logged out.”

  “And Vidimus? Your whole organization is built on a lie?”

  “We are just trying to hold the world together, Milja. We’re doing what we can.” His focus pinned me again, demanding answers. “What now?”

  “Cut him free.”

  “He’s going to help?”

  “He says he’ll try.”

  “Well. That’s something, I guess.” He moved across to holster the gun in the back of his belt and pull out a serrated knife from the bag. I made space for him, watching him work, my hand to my mouth. Trying not to think about what it was he was cutting.

  As Egan sawed through the bonds at his ankles, Gabriel began to groan. As his left hand came free, his shoulders heaved. When the last of those awful fetters fell away he pitched onto the floor, stretching muscles that had been cramped for centuries and gasping with pain. Watching the heave of his bare ass was like seeing the Atlas Mountains pushed skywards by the tectonic forces of the earth; I was transfixed in awe before I could stop myself staring. And when he rolled onto his back to straighten his spine I had to turn my shoulder and step away, wide-eyed.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Egan scoop up his abandoned cassock and sling it over Gabriel’s exposed crotch. Then he came to stand over me. I rested my head against his chest, sliding an arm around his waist.

  Oh Egan. Are we doing the right thing? What will happen to us?

  It was as if he'd heard my unspoken words. “Milja,” he murmured into my hair, “whatever happens from here on… You must know, you are the light of my life. I love you. I have never loved like this.”