A Rosary of Stones and Thorns

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  “But all we ended with was a mound of corpses. And nothing brought back their souls... and when I turned around with my sword, he was dying on this cross, and I ran... but I was too late.” Lucifer’s forehead slowly sank to the cross-guard of the sword, hair falling in a black sheet on either side of his face. His wings followed, easing to the ground and draping across it and over Asrial’s back.

  “This war will solve nothing,” Lucifer rasped, his voice gone hoarse. “It will offer us nothing save the chance for more regrets, more grief. More souls to reap and lose.”

  Asrial stood and pried his fingers from the hilt of the sword. Lifting it away from his grasp, she let it drop onto the barren earth as he watched. Then she took his open hands and slid them onto her waist, around to her back.

  “There is no comfort in steel if you have no love of death,” Asrial said softly. “No comfort in crosses if you have no love of suffering. No comfort in anything, my lord... save His love.”

  “He has forgotten us,” Lucifer whispered, his hands tense on her back.

  Asrial smiled, a serenity in her golden eyes that matched the slow spin of her halo. “Has he? Am I not here?”

  Lucifer stared up at her, and then gripped her so tightly she bit back a gasp. He pressed his head against her belly, holding to her as if to keep from drowning.

  Asrial wrapped her arms around his dark head as he wept. Her white and battered wings encircled him and his black ones, and the shadow of the cross faded from her back as Hell’s sun turned away its face.

  “This is taking too long,” Stephen said. His fists clenched Death’s mane so tightly the skin over his knuckles stretched white.

  “Where are all the sentries?” Mephistopheles muttered. He pulled the horse’s head back and surveyed Shehaqim from the Gate ledge. They’d passed through the First and Second Heavens unchallenged; no guards remained at the Gates leading deeper into Heaven, just as no angels plied the skies, male or female. “Can they really all be gone to Earth?”

  “Maybe it’s just the outer edges that are empty,” Brad said.

  The grackle sailed past and Stephen followed his flight down into the shadowed wells of Shehaqim. “Come on. We’re wasting time.”

  “Do you realize how many angels are on Earth, if Michael has emptied all three of the outer Heavens?” Mephistopheles called after Stephen before urging Famine after him.

  “No doubt you’ll tell me.”

  “More than Hell has, twice over.”

  “It’ll be noon soon,” Stephen said, ignoring the fear the demon's statement incited. He leaned over Death’s arched neck as the horse plowed across the deserted fields, passing under the vast shadows cast by the clumped fists of gray clouds. “When will we find them? Where are they, Mephistopheles?”

  “Closer. We need to be closer to Him.”

  Stephen gritted his teeth and silently urged the horse on.

  They were not challenged until the gate to Ma’on, the Fifth Heaven; Machanon, the Fourth Heaven and Michael’s realm, had been as bleakly empty as the Third.

  Seeing the figure at the gate, Mephistopheles freed his sword from its scabbard, holding it away from the horse's side as they galloped nigh. His wings he kept tightly furled behind him. “Hail the gate!”

  “Hail the riders!” The guard sounded perplexed, staring at them as they drew closer. “What is your busin—who are you!”

  “Let us pass,” Stephen said. Death slowed to a halt; War drew up alongside, dancing irritably on flame-feathered hooves. Even Brad looked grim, one hand on the arm Marie had looped around his waist.

  “Who are you?” the guard said, dropping his spear to face them. “What are you doing here? Human souls aren’t allowed so far.”

  Mephistopheles allowed Famine to carry him in front of them both and said in a low voice, “Let us pass, guard.” The sword glinted in his left hand.

  The guard hesitated, the tip of the spear dipping. When Mephistopheles advanced, he lifted it again and frowned. “Stay back!”

  Mephistopheles flattened one hand on Famine’s withers to steady himself, then spread both dark wings, cupped Heaven’s light air in their sensitive feathers. The left one threaded fire down his bones, reminder of the wound only lately closed on his back.

  The angel stared, then scrambled back toward the gate. “Fallen!”

  “Yah!” Mephistopheles said, and the horse leaped forward. War and Death followed on his heels as the angel fled, but it was the demon who grabbed the back of the angel’s tunic before he could leap from the ledge into Ma’on. “Oh, no. No, you don’t.”

  The guard twisted around and slammed the edge of his spear into the demon’s side. “Fallen scum!”

  Mephistopheles grunted, then bowled the man over with his good wing and jumped off Famine’s back. He leaned down and pinned the angel on the ground, hands trapped behind his back and over his wing-arms to keep them from flailing. Black wings stretched and mantled in the light of the Fifth Heaven. “We don’t want you going anywhere and talking, in case Michael left any of the Ninth Choir in Heaven, my friend... or else I wouldn’t be treating you so unkindly. Granted, if you hadn’t waved a spear at my gut, I might have been gentler.”

  Famine huffed.

  “I don’t suppose any of you have any rope?”

  "None," Stephen said wryly, “I seem to have forgotten to pack my camping kit.”

  Mephistopheles shrugged and bent over the struggling angel. “I’m sorry then, my friend.” He chose a spot behind the man’s head and struck it neatly with the pommel of his sword; the body slumped and he dropped it to the ground. He tossed the spear to the priest. “Onward, then. We should expect more people.”

  Stephen caught the spear and looked up at the sun, so much closer... and so much farther along the arc of the sky. The grackle was circling overhead.

  They rode. The fastest route to the next gate was across open plains, and they shunned the covert route in favor of speed. Mephistopheles glanced up more than once to see dark motes in the sky, angels with colored wings.

  “We should be ready,” he said to the rest, voice gravelly with the strain. Being in Heaven so long made the hunger to stay nearly unbearable. “They’re warned... they’ll meet us at the gate.”

  “I don’t care as long as they let us through,” Stephen growled.

  “Maybe there’ll be women there, too,” said Marie.

  “I’d love to have a sword about now,” was Brad’s only comment.

  An hour later the gate to Zebul rose from the surrounding crags, and the horses charged up its slope and onto the plateau. There they stopped, leaving their riders to face the score of angels standing in iron-clad determination before the gate.

  Stephen rolled the spear in his fingers, chafing the wood with his thumb; his other hand tightened on a fistful of Death’s black mane. “The odds aren’t looking very good, Mephistopheles.”

  “When have the odds been good throughout this entire venture, my friend?” Mephistopheles asked dryly. The grackle drifted down to perch on his shoulder.

  “I am really wanting a sword about now,” Brad said. “Or a machine gun.”

  The horses remained still, the fitful breeze tangling their tails. The angels facing them at the gate were likewise unmoving.

  Marie sighed and slipped off of War’s broad back. “You people!” She brushed off her jeans and strode toward the cluster of belligerent angels. Stopping some twenty feet away from them, she folded her arms over her breasts and said, “Let us through.”

  One of the guards stepped forth, spear held before him. “We cannot. You have penetrated too far into Heaven as it is. You do not belong here.”

  “How do you know? The horses carried us here.”

  The angel glanced at the three. War stamped a foot and rolled its eyes, tiny flames curveting tightly above its flared nostrils. Famine stood, as always, with hung head, ribs pressing against its sides with every labored breath. Death was a statue, unbreathing.

  The g
uard looked back at Marie. “We guard God, girl. Even if you did belong here, you are an abomination and a pain to Him.” His eyes drifted to Mephistopheles, mantling black wings on the white horse, sword biting pale sunlight from the sky.

  “You are not God’s father,” Marie said.

  Every angel stopped breathing and stared at her. She pointed at the one speaking for them and said, “God doesn’t need to be protected, like a kid with a fussy, smothering parent. God isn’t an innocent who doesn’t know about what’s out there. You’re His children, not the other way around... so what’s the deal with you trying to come off like God’s dad?”

  “Wow,” Brad said sotto voce to the priest and demon. “That’s my girlfriend.”

  “She’s got quite a tongue on her,” Mephistopheles replied.

  The angel recovered himself and grabbed Marie by the front of her shirt. “Blasphemer!”

  “Hey!” Brad jumped off War’s back, Stephen only a few heart-beats behind him.

  Marie wrapped her hand around the angel’s forearm and dug her fingernails into it. “Let me go, you brute. Show me to your women, so I can talk to someone with sense!”

  “You are in no position to argue,” the angel said, thrusting his spear at the oncoming boy. Brad jerked to a halt.

  Marie bit the hand on her shirt. The angel yelped and dropped her. “Move out of the way... or kill us,” she said. “Go ahead! Spill the blood of innocent humans on the stones of Heaven.”

  The angel wavered, eyes flicking from Brad to Stephen and back to Marie.

  Famine carried Mephistopheles noiselessly up behind the humans, each hoof falling after a pause. When the horse stopped, Mephistopheles spread his sooty wings, larger than those belonging to any of the guards, and framed his companions with their leading edges.

  “If it were just the three of you,” the angel said at last, “I would let you through. But I must kill him.” His spear point stabbed in Mephistopheles’s direction. “He abandoned God. For that there is no forgiveness, no absolution... no excuse.”

  Mephistopheles’s voice from behind the humans startled them so much that only Stephen could resist the urge to look back, to connect the colorless, rocky baritone with the demon. “I am already dead, Guardian. Driving a spear through my heart would be a meaningless formality.”

  “Let us through,” Stephen said into the ensuing quiet.

  “Did someone ask for us?” A voice cut through the crowd, its owner pushing past the shoulders of the angels before the gate: a slender, tall woman, her saturnine face lined with years and hair bleached from the spin of her mellow gold halo. White wings banded with dusty blue scythed the guards apart for two other female angels, drifting in her wake.

  The angel guard frowned, his spear still pointed at Mephistopheles’s heart. “Beware, sister, lest his lack of Grace poison you.”

  “His lack of Grace will no more poison me than your posturing will you. Move, please.”

  Reluctant, the guard backed a few steps away.

  The female angel studied the three humans first, her gaze falling and lingering on each for several minutes before moving to the next. From Marie in her beat-up jeans, hastily dragged on beneath the t-shirt she slept in, her hair messily braided and her face screwed into a determined mask, to Brad, similarly attired but smudged with the dirt of Hell. Stephen stood a pace behind them both, arms folded, the sweatshirt neck framing the clerical collar; the circles under his eyes gave evidence of his fitful sleep, and the wrinkles framing them the years that gave those worries the substance of experience.

  She looked up then at the dark figure, wings spread as if to shelter, at the one with the gaze that shielded with a hunger no angel in Grace could understand.

  “Why are you here?” she asked at last, folding her hands into the sleeves of her robe.

  “Please, lady, we must talk to you,” Stephen said. He paused, glancing at the angels blockading the gate. “Alone, if we may.”

  “No!” the guard said. “They will hurt you!”

  The female ignored him pointedly. She studied Stephen’s face, then nodded and said, “Walk down the hill with me.” Turning to look at the humans and the demon, “All of you.”

  “I will be watching,” the guard said, wings bristling as he planted the spear against the ground.

  “I would be surprised if you weren’t,” the woman said, then turned her back on him and began walking calmly down the slope. The other two female angels followed her at a discreet distance. Stephen glanced once at the guard, then set off after her, the others in his wake.

  “So,” the woman said. The wan sunlight barely lit the dusty blue traced across her coverts and primaries. “Why have you come?”

  Stephen clasped his hands behind his back to keep from making nervous gestures. “Ma'am... Michael seeks to bring about the final battle.”

  She nodded slowly. “It has been very quiet.”

  “We would like to stop him. We believe that God doesn’t want this war.”

  “Oh?”

  “The halos,” Brad interjected. “They’re all saved. In Shamayim.”

  “The halos of the Fallen,” Stephen repeated. “They’re still alive. What good are halos without their angels? He must love them still, else why would He keep them?”

  She lifted her chin, brows rising above the deep hollows of her eyes. “I see. So you have decided that it is your duty to stop Michael from following the wrong path.”

  “Yes. Yes, that’s it exactly.”

  “And why were you seeking me?”

  Stephen looked down, concentrating on the placement of his feet as they navigated the rocky soil. “We’re very close to too late as it is, ma'am. We thought if we brought Lucifer to Heaven, he could speak to God and ask Him if it was time for the Apocalypse... but there’s no time, and now I wonder if anyone would have listened to Lucifer anyway. We’re on our last idea... and we need help. Your help.”

  “And what would you have me do?”

  Stephen stopped and waited for her to turn to face him, her wings arched ever-so-slightly to cup the hesitant wind. “I’d like to take the halos back to the Fallen.”

  Her regard remained steady, unblinking. She twisted around and said to Mephistopheles, “And what do you think of this?”

  The demon stood a few feet away, his wings brushing his sides, the ground, feathers surreptitiously lifting and spreading to let in the soft air of Heaven. He looked up slowly. “I think the priest is mad. I dare not think anything else. It would hurt too much.”

  She nodded slowly. “So you came asking for female angels... why? You know we are ill-equipped for long stays away from the heart of Heaven.”

  “You’re the only ones with sense enough to do it,” Marie said. “The men are too busy doing the ‘noble war’ thing. Seems they’re the same everywhere, winged or not.”

  “Hey,” Brad said, elbowing her.

  “Earth seems to be the site of Armageddon,” Stephen said quietly. “They’re already there, ma'am. Please... I don’t think even Michael could make war after a display of that much power. That much... that much symbolism.”

  “I can make decisions for only myself,” the woman said, wings spreading and folding like a butterfly’s drying. “But I will go and ask, and see if there are not people for the task at hand.”

  “Lady... quickly, please. It will take us hours to travel back out of Heaven....”

  “I will go as swiftly as I can, but I will not rush answers on an issue of such import. You ask us to defy Michael. That is no small thing... even if he is wrong,” she said.

  Stephen opened his mouth to protest, but Mephistopheles laid a hand on his shoulder. “That is all we ask, lady.”

  The female nodded once, then took wing, her two attendants following.

  Stephen watched them go, hands twitching at his sides. “Oh, God, Mephistopheles. We can’t wait long!”

  “We’ll leave when we must and trust in God to supply the rest. If it really is His will that
Earth dies and humanity with her, that my liege-lord be slain and all his people with him... do you think we could honestly stop it?”

  “No,” Stephen said hoarsely. “But the business about free will living happily with an already defined course of events never sat well with me. I have to believe we can live or die by our own hands, Mephistopheles.”

  “Then say a prayer, Father. Make yourself a rosary of the bones of Heaven’s soil and the slivers of wood that crucified an angel. Either way nothing will ever be the same again.”

  The demon walked away. Stephen stared after him, then sat on a nearby rock; when the grackle flew down to perch on the ground before him, he said, “I could use a sign about now.”

  It trained its beady yellow eye on him. He sighed and watched Marie and Brad talking together, then shook his head. To keep his fingers from trembling, he bent down and began gathering stones, and whispered his prayers with each he collected.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Gabriel ran off the momentum of his glide onto the ledge of the birthing place in Raquia, the one the newborn had died in. His brow had set in a furrow above blue eyes; he strode through the mists of Heaven’s pastel morning into the umber-darkness of the cavern, the bag in his hand slapping against his leg.

  The amber incense hung in heavy veils as he ascended the steps to the topmost chamber, torch-light chasing away the intimate dark of the brown stone womb. With white wings scraping against the ceiling, Gabriel ducked beneath the low lintel and walked toward the nests.

  The figure crouching beside the one with the broken shell looked up as he approached. “Gabriel?”