The Prison of the Angels

by Janine Ashbless

  I didn’t scream. The noise died in my throat. I couldn’t even breathe until the silence returned.

  “Rocks fall,” said Egan faintly. “Everyone dies.”

  ‘Everybody dies. Everybody.’ Azazel had said that to me a long time ago. Oh God, Uriel—you are not allowed to do that! You are Loyal, old-school Loyal—You can’t kill, not without permission! You’ve just killed them all. Haven’t you?

  All of them.

  “We are not livestock!” Uriel snarled. “We are Sons of Heaven, not battery hens for your filthy gratifications! How dare you? HOW DARE YOU?” His voice boomed around the valley heads like thunder. He was shaking as he drew himself up, trying to uncrook his fingers, and it was hard to tell if he was talking to us, or himself, or some unseen audience. “And now the Serpent will starve and die. But that’s better. Better that he perish forever than be used for such sins. I will stand by that. We were not made for such wretched degradations. That was not part of the Plan. It was not. I have made my judgement.”

  Oh my God. Azazel.

  I saw myself as if from a distance, launching myself out of Egan’s arms and at Uriel. My nails clawed at his face without making any more impression than gaining his perplexed attention. I swung my fist back and punched him in the eye as hard as I could—but it was like punching a brick wall. The shock of the blow traveled all the way up to my elbow and nearly knocked my shoulder out of its socket. I screamed, knowing that the terrible numbness in my hand and wrist was going to be pain any second now.

  Uriel put a palm on my face and pushed me over into the snow. I stopped screaming because I had no breath for it; the pain had caught up and was too enormous.

  “What is wrong with you?” he demanded, sounding hurt. “I saved you, didn’t I? It’s what you wanted! Where’s your gratitude?”

  I felt Egan grab me, cradling me there in the snow. “Ah, Milja,” he muttered. “What the hell d’you do that for? You’ve broken your hand there!”

  “He’s won,” I gasped. “He doesn’t even know it, the bastard. Oh fuck, Egan. Oh. Oh. He’s won. It’s over.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “Won?” Uriel asked suspiciously.

  I suppose I should have kept him in ignorance, but I didn’t care anymore. “You buried them all!”

  “Yes…?”

  “All three. Azazel. Samyaza. Penemuel.”

  “…Penemuel?” he echoed, all the thunder and the wrath vanished from his voice.

  “That’s it. It’s over, isn’t it? You got what you wanted, you shits.”

  Uriel took a few steps sideways, then turned and paced back, his tweed overcoat swirling restlessly. “You’re saying the Fallen were there too?”

  “The ravens, you eejit,” Egan snapped, trying to pad my hand with only a woolen hat for bandaging.

  I saw Uriel’s face drop, and thought that the Fall from Heaven itself could not have been longer, or crushed an angel so completely. He went gray as a corpse. “No,” he whispered. “Penemuel…”

  In the midst of my pain and my rage, I saw. Uriel was never any good at masking his feelings, let’s face it. Suddenly a whole lot of things made sense: the treasure-trail to Lalibela; the unholy bargain with Roshana.

  Oh. I had no idea!

  As Uriel shook his head and vanished, Egan hauled me to my feet. “Time to go,” he said firmly, but then stared over my head. “What the—?”

  Uriel hadn’t gone far; not even out of sight. He was stooped over the avalanche debris where the buildings had stood, digging with his bare hands. And because he wasn’t human-sized anymore—he was maybe thirty, forty feet tall now—his desperation was only too obvious.

  “It was always about Penemuel,” I said weakly. “He wants her. He arranged for me to free her. Now he’s trying to get her back.”

  “What? What for?”

  “I think…he likes her.”

  “You have to be pulling my chain.”

  “Uh-uh.” I’d seen it in Uriel’s face. I could see it now, writ large on his colossal features.

  “Ah grand.” Egan hitched an arm around my ribs to support me.

  Azazel’s down there too. I licked my dry lips. “We have to go over there.”

  Egan let out a breath, but he didn’t argue. “Sure we do.”

  He marched me across the shattered landscape, through the smashed fences, wading drifts of snow and broken rock. It was hard, hard going. I clutched my injured arm to my side and tried to make the pain go away by ignoring it. At every step my wrist throbbed with heat, swelling.

  Azazel. We’re coming.

  By the time we got there Uriel had dug half a dozen craters and abandoned each. As we drew to a halt, panting with exertion, and I slid out of Egan’s grasp onto my knees and plunged my broken hand into a snowdrift to numb it, Uriel looked over at us wildly. “I can’t tell where they are!” he cried, his eyes midnight blue and his long coat billowing with darkness. “I can’t see any of them!”

  Well I can’t either! Maybe if I slept I could dream them…

  I looked down at the snow. Blood from my split knuckles had soaked through the makeshift bandage, leaving a red mitten-shaped print. I remembered my vision.

  “Here,” I said, pointing at the snow in front of my knees. “Right here.”

  Uriel stomped up, towering over us. Even looking up at him made me feel dizzy. There is no difference between gods and giants, I thought, as if I hadn’t known that already.

  “Here?” he demanded, but didn’t wait for confirmation. Egan had to haul me bodily to a safe distance, my heels furrowing the snow. As the archangel started digging, that ‘safe’ distance kept growing bigger. With more haste than precision he scooped snow and rocks to either side, and as the hole got deeper other things emerged too, flung aside as trash—lengths of girder and fragments of wood cladding and then, ugh, crushed and floppy rags of humanity. All discarded.

  “You don’t have to look,” Egan muttered as I buried my face in his chest.

  By the time Uriel paused he’d excavated what looked like a quarry. He scrabbled around among the rocks at the bottom, searching the gaps between slabs the size of cars. Then he leapt out with a triumphant cry.

  My heart turned over. He had a net in each hand, and inside each was a crumpled black bird that looked far too small for the swathes of ugly brown thonging. Those were nets designed to hold something human-sized. The strands looked like leather. He thrust them both out at me, and I saw avian eyes flicker open.

  They’re alive! Why can’t they—Oh. The nets. Like Samyaza’s bonds. Like the ones that held Azazel for so many years. Nephilim skin and flesh. I thought of Roshana’s body, which I’d last seen carried off by Michael, but by this point I was already too nauseous to feel anything more.

  Raphael had warned me, of course. He’d told me it was a trap, in almost those words. The Norwegians had been forewarned and forearmed and we’d walked straight into it.

  “Which one?” Uriel demanded. “Which one’s her?”

  He can’t tell. Shaking, I peered at their eyes, searching for a glimpse of silver or gold. “That one,” I said, pointing at the raven on the left.

  Uriel smiled, and not in a kindly manner. “Do you think I can’t smell your lies?” he said, and lobbed the other one into the snow at our feet. “Open it.”

  Bastard, I thought, but I was in no position to argue. I saw the other raven, the one still in Uriel’s grasp, try to peck him through the mesh, and my heart clenched. I looked at Egan, who had the advantage of two functional hands. Surely Penemuel free was better than no one free at all?

  The raven at our toes croaked weakly, its beak open to pant.

  “Why do you want her?” Egan asked grimly.

  “Open it,” Uriel growled, and the ground trembled under our feet as if another avalanche were on its way.

  Egan looked at me and I nodded, so he stooped and began to pull at the big knot. I put my good hand on his shoulder, and Uriel backed off several giant paces—I gues
s he wasn’t as confident as he pretended to be.

  The rawhide thonging was horrible stuff, but Egan had strong hands; eventually he forced the knots free and threw back the net, and we both lurched back as the raven fluttered, tumbled, then flapped up into the air. Egan threw me down flat in the snow, as if the bird were a grenade with the pin out.

  Poor raven. It must have let the angel inside voluntarily, but I don’t imagine it had expected things to end this way. Penemuel exploded out of its body in a shower of feather-fragments and bloody rain, stretching to match Uriel for size; a raging goddess of flame with pinions of molten bronze, hands outstretched at the archangel, lips drawn back from savage teeth.

  “Wait, Penemuel, we have to talk,” said Uriel, falling back.

  “GIVE HIM TO ME!” she howled, lunging at him.

  “Wait! Just listen!” Uriel stumbled backward, dodging the slash of her claws. “Penemuel!”

  “GIVE HIM!”

  It would almost have looked comical; the way he was trying to run backward, flinching from her reach; the way she’d completely lost all restraint and transformed into a ravening fury barely holding to human shape; fighting over a mere bird. If they hadn’t been forty feet tall, that is, and both splattered in the blood of their victims. If they hadn’t between them been responsible for so many, many deaths.

  Then Penemuel drew a sword of golden flame out of the air and I think Uriel finally realized that she wasn’t willing to negotiate.

  So he stuffed the net holding Azazel into his mouth, swallowed hard and vanished as he fell backward.

  Penemuel launched herself after him and disappeared too.

  In a microsecond, silence had reclaimed the landscape.

  Actually, I think I may have lost the power of hearing. I could see Egan’s lips moving; he was speaking to me urgently, but I couldn’t hear a word and he seemed to be receding from me as darkness crowded in from the edges of my vision.

  Is this what death is like? I wondered. I couldn’t even feel horror anymore; my anguish was so vast that I’d lost sight of its margins. Or maybe I was shrinking instead, dwindling like a candle about to be snuffed out.

  “Milja! Milja!”

  I was face-down in the snow and it was the chill that brought me back, I think, as much as Egan’s voice. For a moment it felt burning cold against my cheek. Then Egan plucked me up, pulling me against him. He kissed my face, my lips—and his mouth felt like fire; my senses were all over the place.

  It took me a long moment to catch my breath and focus my eyes.

  “Feckssake. You alright, Milja? You okay?” He shook me rather less gently than I’d have liked. “Stay awake!”

  “I’m…” I’m not all right. How can I be? “Azazel’s dead.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Uriel ate him.”

  “Azazel threatened to eat him, remember? And it didn’t sound like that would be the end of it. I don’t think you can kill an angel that easily.”

  Yes, I remembered. Back in the monastery, Azazel had promised to tear Uriel into pieces and devour him. ‘Is that how you want to spend eternity?’ he’d asked.

  I nodded, dumbly. So far as we knew, the only sure ways to kill an angel were isolation, or—and we were largely guessing this from Penemuel’s near-miss with the spear of Saint George—a blooded relic through the heart. “Samyaza,” I mumbled.

  “What about him?”

  “He might still be alive, if that’s true.”

  Egan sucked his dry lips. “Look, I don’t know what was going on in there…but I think Samyaza might have betrayed us.”

  “That’s why I’m going to make him help us.”

  Egan held my gaze for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay. He can’t be far away from where the ravens were. Aslaug was standing right next to him, wasn’t she?”

  I couldn’t remember, to be honest. But that wasn’t going to stop me. The land of the frost-giants wasn’t going to stop me; a broken hand wasn’t going to stop me. Heaven itself would have to stop me.

  Slowly, carefully, we climbed down into the pit Uriel had dug, through the layers of death, into the jumble of boulders and clefts at the bottom. We searched for bodies, and found more than we ever wanted. It was Egan, face down beneath an overhang, who discovered Samyaza at last. His bound ankles, anyway.

  He pulled out his own hunting knife and slithered most of his upper body into the darkness, while I held on to his ankle to make sure he didn’t freeze to death. When he inched out again, he was pulling Samyaza’s body after him. It took both of us to heave him free of the rocks; lucky for us the angel was such a slender man.

  He didn’t seem to have been physically damaged by the rock-fall, but he wasn’t conscious even though he’d been cut completely free now. The winter sunshine touched his pale skin for the first time in millennia, and he looked damn near as white as the snow.

  The only thing that mattered to me was that he was breathing. “Still alive,” I said. “He missed his heart.”

  Egan grasped the bloody spike still jutting from beneath his ribcage and pulled it out. He slapped Samyaza’s face, but it provoked no response.

  “What the hell is that thing?” I asked, leaning against a rock.

  “A mistletoe dart, I imagine.”

  “Right. Okay.” My words sounded slurred; I was at the limits of exhaustion, I realized, and my arm hurt so much that I could feel it lighting up the world like a beacon.

  What if Raphael drops back to see how things went? Oh God.

  “What do you want us to do with him?” Egan panted, prodding the body with his boot. “I’m sorry, Milja, I don’t think I can get us all out of here. Not over the mountains. We’re a bit screwed really.”

  I slithered down onto my knees, staring into Samyaza’s slack face. It was love that roused angels, in my experience, but I had no love to give him. Just a stone-cold determination that he would not die on me. You’re not dead, I told him. You’re not dead until you’ve been forgotten. You’re not dead until nobody cares about you anymore. You might try to kill yourself, but there’s no escape that way, not while your heart beats and cries out for love. Not while you have your cultists and your online fans and your scholars. Not while I’m holding you here. You might have withered down to almost nothing, you might have fled as far as you can from all the pain and the humiliation, but there is no escape. That’s the punishment God decreed. You are immortal.

  I bent over his still face and covered his mouth with mine.

  I knew what it was to have a Watcher spirit possess me. I knew how it felt to open up and be entered.

  This time I deliberately drew Samyaza in. Deep into my lungs, into my heart, into the darkness of my core.

  And this time, I did black out.

  11

  ACHILL

  He is the only thing visible in the darkness; a serpent thicker than my own leg, glowing like heated gold. He’s between my thighs and knotted about my calves; he circles my torso and nestles between my bare breasts. My spine is arched and my ribs compressed, but I clasp his neck between my hands and stare into his malachite eyes. His smooth scales rub my bare skin, and I feel the waves of muscle flowing beneath. I am the staff bearing aloft the brazen snake Nehushtan. I am the World Tree, Yggdrasil, holding the universe aloft. I am an ape crushed in a python’s embrace.

  I relish the pressure. It feels good between my legs.

  “What happened, Samyaza? Tell me!”

  “Let me go. Let me go.” He writhes, his every motion squeezing me. “Let me die!”

  “What did you do? We were trying to free you!”

  “And I told you, you must not. I told you!”

  “Because Ragnarok?” I am near breathless because of his coils constricting me as we wrestle, but I’m not afraid of him.

  “Ragnarok. Armageddon. Call it what you like. The end.”

  “So you thought you’d kill yourself instead? Coward!”

  “Let me die!”

  “You don�
��t want to be free?”

  “Leave me in darkness!”

  “Did you like what they were doing to you under that mountain? You flake—you’re the one who started all this. You led the Fall of the angels. You can’t give up! You will fight!”

  “Do not mock me! I knew. I saw. From the beginning. It is all necessary. If we are freed there is a second War in Heaven.”

  “I don’t believe that’s inevitable. You’re the smart one—the one with vision, Azazel said that. So find a goddamn solution! You have to help us!”

  “There cannot be peace between the Host and the Fallen.”

  “Yes there can. Make them. If humans can learn to keep the peace, then you lot can too.”

  “You expect Heaven to compromise?”

  “It’s done nothing but compromise for the entire history of humanity. Every evil left unstopped; every atrocity unpunished. So, yes, it’ll compromise.”

  “Daughter of Earth, you don’t understand. You think you want peace? But if we are free then you become slaves. To us and to our children.”

  Slaves, concubines, pets.

  I guess I’m slow on the uptake. “But what about your brother Watchers? Are you just going to abandon them in prison?”

  “It is the sacrifice we make for your sake. For all Mankind.”

  “What?” I force his head down. “Did they get the memo? When did they agree to that?”

  “It is necessary.”

  “Says who?”

  “I knew.”

  “That’s not your choice! You don’t get to drag other people down when you sacrifice yourself!”

  “It was my choice. I made it a long time ago.”

  “For God’s sake, Samyaza!”

  “For your sake.”

  I catch my breath. “Oh, no. Please don’t. You can’t mean it…” The horrible truth finally dawns on me. “Azazel; Penemuel. You really did sell them out.” I didn’t just mean the things with the ravens and the nets. “You utter piece of shit. You sold them out seventy thousand years ago!”