Angel-Seeker

by Sharon Shinn

  The day she had met Rufus. Elizabeth had never seen him since, though she and Mary had been called down to more than one construction site in the past ten weeks. She wondered if he had moved on, back to Semorrah, or gone off to seek his lost Edori relatives. She wondered if he’d found another pretty girl to spend his salary on. She didn’t think about him often, of course, just now and then, when she was in this area or she passed a man who looked Edori. She really scarcely knew him at all.

  “I’m famished,” declared Ruth, who could be counted on to say those exact words at every single meal. “And it smells wonderful here!”

  “I’m going to have the fish,” Marah decided.

  “The beef for me.”

  “Anything with sauce. The richer the better.”

  Shiloh put a hand down on her stomach. “I have to be careful what I eat,” she said. “Angel babies are very delicate, you know.”

  “Oh really?” Ruth said brightly. “I never knew an angel yet who didn’t eat everything he wanted, down to the bones and gizzard.”

  “A full-grown angel, perhaps,” Shiloh snapped right back. “But when they’re this small—in the womb—”

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re doing everything you can to protect your little one,” Marah said soothingly. She was always the peacemaker of the group. “So what can you eat? Do you see anything you’d like?”

  Soon enough they had all ordered, and they sat around the table chattering with easy enthusiasm about clothes, men, upcoming social events, and the prospect of a new angel flying in from Gaza. “He’s older than Nathan, but not really old,” Ruth said. “And not as handsome as Jason, but fair, like Jason.”

  “Have you ever met him?”

  “Not to talk to. He was in Castelana a lot one summer when I was working there. They were having trouble with too much rain, and he was the one who always came to town to pray. He stayed at our inn a few times. I thought he seemed very nice.”

  Shiloh refused all wine, because of the baby. She couldn’t choke down any of her meat, because of the baby. She couldn’t have dessert, because too much sugar would alarm the baby.

  Elizabeth thought she might have to kill her.

  Still, it was clear that Shiloh was annoying everyone else as much as she was annoying Elizabeth, and that made the theatrics a little easier to bear. Ruth ordered a huge piece of creamy white cake, decorated with frosting in swirls and loops, and crammed the first bite in her mouth.

  “Thank you, Jovah, for making sure I wasn’t pregnant tonight,” Ruth said, piously turning her eyes toward the heavens. “Because this certainly is the best cake I ever had in my life.”

  Shiloh turned her head aside and had to brush away a tear of hurt or anger.

  Elizabeth caught Ruth’s eye, grinned, and had to turn her own head away to try to hide her laughter. The motion brought a few nearby tables into her view, and she idly looked over the occupants. Most of the other diners were mortal, since this was a place that featured hearty food without a lot of fancy touches, but there were two angels that she hadn’t noticed when she first came in. One was Lael, who lived at the dorm where Elizabeth used to work.

  One was David. And he was with a mortal girl.

  Elizabeth felt herself turn motionless and cold as she watched the two of them across the room. The woman was small-boned and dainty, with finely cut features and dark ringlets of silken hair. She was dressed in some kind of floating, diaphanous material of dark red, and she gestured as often as possible to cause the fabric to fold and glitter around her arms. Her face was animated, and she seemed fascinated by whatever it was that David was saying.

  Elizabeth transferred her gaze to the angel. He was talking rapidly and with great exuberance, now and then throwing his head back to laugh. But then he would quickly focus his eyes back on the woman’s face, as if unwilling to miss out on a smile or overlook a single expression. He looked attentive; no, that was not strong enough. Captivated, Elizabeth thought. As if this slip of a girl had captured his heart.

  She hadn’t thought David had a heart.

  Or perhaps he did, and the manna root had worked its magic well enough after all. It had just delayed the release of its enzymes until Elizabeth was out of the room, until his eyes had fallen on this wispy beauty instead, the next morning or sometime later in the day. And he had capitulated instantly to infatuation as he usually succumbed to alcohol. Look, he wasn’t even touching his wine. He was subject to a completely different sort of intoxication tonight.

  Elizabeth forced her eyes away and snatched up her own glass of wine, downing the contents in a swallow. So much for potions. So much for love. So much for angels, or men, or friends, or anything.

  “Can somebody pass me the wine?” she said, and Marah obligingly handed the bottle down. She didn’t care if she had the worst headache of her life in the morning. Tonight she was going to drink so much that she wouldn’t even be able to feel her feet as she made the long, dreary walk back home.

  Still, impossible as it seemed, the rest of the evening was convivial enough, and Elizabeth found herself laughing more than once at the outrageous things Ruth said. She only looked twice more in David’s direction; the second time, he was gone. That was worth another glass of wine, or at least half of one. She was actually not nearly so drunk as she’d planned to be by the time they paid their bill and headed back home. The air was sharp with a winter bite, and Marah squealed with cold when they first stepped outside.

  “I wish I’d worn a warmer coat,” Shiloh complained. “I don’t want the baby to take a chill.”

  Elizabeth, walking directly behind the new mother, eyed Shiloh’s back consideringly. It would be easy to give her a little shove, knock her into a puddle, perhaps. The air was not so cold that the muddy wheel ruts along the construction sites had entirely frozen over.

  Beside her, Ruth gave a muffled laugh. “Don’t do it,” the other girl warned. “She’s vengeful, and she’s vicious. If something causes her to lose this baby—”

  “Better that than all of us losing our minds,” Elizabeth grumbled. But she kept her hands down loosely at her sides.

  “I’m glad you came out with us,” Ruth said. “You and Faith are such good friends that the rest of us don’t see you much.”

  “I’m glad you invited me,” Elizabeth said.

  “So why didn’t Faith come? Seeing Jason?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “So I expect it’ll be one of two things by the time I get back to my room. She’ll be home already, sobbing because he’ll be gone in two days, or she’ll still be out with him, spending the night at his place.”

  “Because he’ll be gone in two days,” Ruth repeated.

  Elizabeth nodded. “And for her sake, I hope she’s still out.”

  Faith was home, though, as Elizabeth saw the instant she stepped through her own door. Home and lying quietly on her bed as if too exhausted even to lift her head when Elizabeth arrived. She was still dressed in her long black gown, which she thought was elegant and which Elizabeth thought made her look sickly, and she didn’t say a word in response to Elizabeth’s hello. But her eyes were open, and she blinked when Elizabeth crossed the room to stand beside her.

  “So? I guess it didn’t go so well if you’re back this early,” Elizabeth said in a gentle voice. “You look like you don’t feel so good. Do you want me to get you something?”

  Faith opened her mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out except a small bubble of saliva.

  Elizabeth dropped to her knees beside the bed. “Faith? Are you all right?”

  The head moved jerkily on the pillow, and the dark eyes grew wider as Faith tried again to speak. This time, a drop of spittle formed at the corner of her mouth and traced a slow line down her chin.

  “Faith?” Elizabeth said more sharply. She quickly put her hands out, checking for fever, checking for pulse. Faith’s skin was cold to the touch, her heartbeat sluggish. “Damn it, I wish you could tell me what happened.”

  A wound?
A rash? What? Elizabeth unbuttoned the front of the dress, in case Faith was having trouble breathing, then dropped her hands to the skirt to tug the whole thing off. But the skirt was damp, as if Faith had run through those same muddy pockets of water that Shiloh had not been unlucky enough to fall into. When Elizabeth lifted her hands, they came away smeared with blood.

  “Sweet Jovah singing,” Elizabeth whispered, and ripped the entire dress from Faith’s thin body. Blood everywhere, invisible on the black gown but staining the white petticoat, the white sheets. What—what? A miscarriage, an eruption of the bowels? Elizabeth could see no wound, no external sign of damage. This must be a malady grown from within, hard to locate, harder still to treat.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said fiercely to the still form on the bed, and dashed from the room, leaving red fingerprints on the wood frame of the door. “Ruth! Shiloh! Marah!” she called, running up and down the hall and pounding on doors. Heads popped out into the hallway and everyone asked the same jumbled question.

  “Somebody go get Mary,” Elizabeth panted. “Faith is dying.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  At first, the color in his Kiss was so faint that Obadiah could convince himself it was not there. A streak of sunlight, a rogue refraction in the crystal, nothing more significant. And, indeed, in some lights, the twist and flare of opal fire disappeared entirely. He was sure he was imagining it, late at night or in complete darkness, when the Kiss set its sweet and gentle glow against his arm.

  He would have liked to get somebody else’s opinion on this. Oh, he knew the tales that the young girls told, about how their Kisses would light the first time they laid eyes on their true lovers. And he knew that Gabriel and Rachel, Nathan and Maga, would admit (the women more readily than the men) that their Kisses had indeed performed pyrotechnics when they were first drawn together. Indeed, Nathan had told him once that he had begun to favor long-sleeved shirts whenever he and Maga were in formal company, because his Kiss still had a tendency to spark and glitter when his wife was nearby, and he didn’t think such a thing was quite appropriate for a man of his standing.

  But Obadiah had not heard of a Kiss turning ecstatic at random, when lover was far from beloved, when days or weeks might pass before the two were reunited. What would cause a Kiss to ignite on so little fuel, and to burn on without replenishment or renewal? That was what Obadiah would have liked to find out. But he couldn’t think of whom to ask. Maga? Rachel? Oh, no. He had not even told them he had fallen in love, and he certainly wasn’t prepared to detail for them the situation of his heart. Nathan was not much of one for confidences, and Obadiah, though friendly with all the other angels at Cedar Hills, didn’t really feel close enough to any of them to initiate this discussion.

  He thought about flying up to Mount Sinai, to pose the question to the oracle there. Why would my Kiss suddenly produce a faint light, that time does not extinguish and circumstances do not warrant? The Kiss was, of course, Jovah’s most direct link with all his subjects, and it was possible the god was trying to send a message of some sort to Obadiah. In which case the oracle, who communicated with the god on a regular basis, would be the person to ask.

  But Obadiah did not fly to Mount Sinai to make inquiries of the wise man. He didn’t even make the much shorter trip to Mount Egypt to confer with the oracle there. He was not prepared yet to ask the question aloud. He was not prepared yet to learn the answer.

  That it had something to do with Rebekah he had no doubt. Every time he saw her during the next few weeks—which was not as often as he would have liked—the flames in the Kiss grew stronger, steadier, less apt to flicker out. Not necessarily while he was in her presence, but later, as he lay solitary and miserable in Cedar Hills, he would notice that the colors of the Kiss burned at a brighter intensity. At this rate, he reflected, if he continued to see Rebekah for another year, the Kiss would eventually catch fire in his arm, explode in a frenzy of passion, and send Obadiah himself up in a tower of rapturous flame.

  He resigned himself to this fate, because he could not imagine not continuing to see Rebekah—for another year, another ten years, the rest of his life.

  Though in his heart, he knew that the affair would someday come to an end—soon, perhaps, maybe even sooner than her wedding. He could not think about it. He didn’t even like to talk about it with Rebekah, and he found himself quickly changing the subject any time she brought up the name of her betrothed or the approaching date of her marriage. He was trying to concentrate only on the joy at hand, and not the rue to follow, though he found that harder to do with each passing week. Strange. In the past it had always been so simple for him to embrace the daily pleasures and disengage from the melancholy regrets. He had found it so easy to be happy that people commented always on his good nature and his ready smile. Now, his days were so rich that at times he felt his very blood was saturated with sensation, but he would not call himself happy.

  Except for those few hours in Rebekah’s arms, and then he was as content as a man could ever be.

  Ever since their adventure on the roof, they had adopted a new system that worked extraordinarily well and that had the advantage, besides, of calming some of Obadiah’s fears for Rebekah’s safety. When he arrived in Breven, he would leave a feather on the skylight that looked into the fabric room of Hector’s house. On the days that Rebekah saw that signal in place, she would climb to the roof at night, where he would be waiting for her. He would scoop her up in his arms and fling himself into the star-spattered night, so giddy at the chance to hold her again that he felt as unsteady and euphoric as he had felt so long ago when he had first been learning how to fly.

  Rebekah loved these aerial journeys high above the shadowed architecture of Breven. Some mortals, Obadiah knew, were petrified at the great height or unexpected speed of an angel flight, and would agree to be carried through the air only if there was no other alternative, but Rebekah could not get enough of such experiences. One night, Obadiah spent hours aloft with Rebekah in his arms, flying low over the rippled, mysterious expanse of the ocean. The moonless night was lit by uncountable acres of stars, scattered across the sky by Jovah’s careless, profligate hand. The sky was so dense with stars that they seemed in danger of spilling from the heavens into the sea—and the sea itself seemed so black and so endless that it appeared it could contain every one of those surplus coins of light.

  Obadiah flew so low to the water that he could feel its scent and moisture rise up to him on tricky, salt-laced breezes, so far from the shore at last that they lost the lights of Breven entirely. This far from land, there was almost no sound at all—no lapping of waves against the rocky beaches, no cry of night birds, no interplay of human voices. It was possible to imagine that they were alone in the universe, first man, first woman, in the undifferentiated ether of space, that Jovah had not yet considered how to mold the world into continents and oceans and how to wrap its terrain with breathable air. They were suspended in some primeval fluid, the god’s unborn children, awaiting his signal to emerge into a world fashioned especially for them.

  Obadiah knew what that world would hold, if he was the one designing it. Much of what he was holding in his arms right now.

  They did not speak at all during that long, slow flight, and it was only because they could sense the unwelcome arrival of dawn that they turned back at last for the shore. They returned to the roof of Hector’s house and parted with a kiss and very few words. They had not made it to the hotel at all that night, yet there was no sense of loss or lack. What they had shared was profound enough to feed even their hungry souls.

  Besides, there was still tomorrow night. Obadiah would come back for Rebekah then.

  At times Obadiah believed his relationship with the Jansai Uriah would last as long and be, ultimately, even more frustrating than his relationship with Rebekah. Since he had resumed his regular visits with the Jansai chieftain two weeks ago, they had made no progress at all on negotiations.

  �
��Let us begin by acknowledging that we speak in good faith,” Uriah said each time they began serious discussions. He would nod to a corner of the tent, where he kept a most interesting display in a tall wooden frame: a contraband firestick. He had allowed Obadiah to handle it—finding an empty Breven alley and producing a rather frightening bolt of fire from the metal barrel—but he would not let Obadiah take the weapon back to Cedar Hills. And he would not disclose where he had gotten it or what tactics he had used to force the firestick’s owner into relinquishing it. Obadiah could not even be certain that this was the weapon that had brought him down.

  But he always responded, “Indeed, I have complete confidence in you.”

  “And I in you.”

  “So let us begin.”

  “Let us talk about the Edori,” Uriah would say next.

  “The Edori are a closed subject,” Obadiah always replied, and that would be the end of it. Wine would be called for and food would be brought in, but all negotiations would be over.

  “Can’t we start with some other concessions and work our way back to the Edori?” Obadiah asked the day after his flight over the ocean with Rebekah. “Can’t we see if there might be something we can agree on?”

  Uriah shrugged and sipped from his wine. “What’s the point? We can hammer out a contract that pleases us on every detail, but once we get to the question of the Edori, we will again fail to find agreement. And the whole of the contract will be void.”

  “You only play this game,” Obadiah said, “because winter is upon us and most of your caravans are off the road. There is no urgency for you now, for there are no crops to haul and no produce to barter in the northern markets.”

  Uriah laughed. “Yes, exactly! And you play the game for the same reason. But who will be more worried when spring comes, tell me that? The Jansai, who are lazy men who would prefer to sit around in their tents all day sleeping, or the far-flung residents of the three provinces, who are waiting for the Jansai caravans to arrive?”