They Who Fell (11 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“J
ust keep moving,” Cassie hissed. She grabbed the handle of the wagon from Jana, yanking it forward as quickly as she could. She’d intended to make a getaway, but it didn’t go as cleanly as she’d planned. The wheels squawked as she pulled, protesting against the demand to move so heavy a load so rapidly. Everyone around turned to look—including Ecanus.

“Well, what luck we have!” said Ecanus. “Look who’s come to watch your trials and tribulations! Still your heart, boy, you mustn’t get too excited. You’ll need to be calm, to make it through your punishments.”

Peter swiveled his head. He looked awful. His skin was pale, and his eyes were burdened by thick, black bags beneath them. He’d been thin before, but now he was practically emaciated. There were marks all over his face, red slashes running across his cheeks. His arm was blistered from holding it over the fire, but still he kept it there, his fear of Ecanus overwhelming his fear of the heat.

“Let’s go,” whispered Cassie, taking a few tentative steps away.

“You wouldn’t abandon us, would you? Stay,” said Ecanus, his voice dropping to a low growl.

They were trapped, and they knew it. They stood in the walkway, suddenly empty of traffic. The craftsmen had all disappeared; the locals knew when trouble was brewing and knew where to escape to. A few curious heads poked out from behind some of the heavy equipment, but only the brave ones. The smart ones didn’t deem it worth their while to risk it.

“Come closer,” said Ecanus, running his fingers along the edge of the iron sword in his hands. “You don’t want to miss things, do you? Peter here is doing a penance. He’s done something wrong, haven’t you, boy?”

“Yes, sir,” said Peter, tears welling in his eyes.

“He left a smudge on the greaves he was ordered to polish,” said Ecanus. “We can’t abide smudges, can we?”

“No, sir,” said Peter.

“No, we can’t,” said Ecanus. “They mar things. And when we mar things, we get marred ourselves, don’t we?”

“Yes, sir,” said Peter.

“We’re already down here in the dirt,” said Ecanus. “We needn’t wallow in it. Here I am, forced to live among the dregs of the tower. Sullying myself with the filth for lack of real accommodations. I’ve half a mind to strike out on my own. I suppose you’re fitting, in a way. A second-rate server for second-rate quarters.” His scowl deepened, resentment bubbling up from below.

Then he turned to Jana. “Rhamiel’s whore,” he said. “You may live up there, but you’re still just a plaything. And down here, I make the rules. Stand there and watch.” He pointed her to a spot on the ground a few feet away from Peter. She complied, keeping her eyes to the ground. But Ecanus wasn’t having any of that.

“Chin up, girl,” said Ecanus. She looked at Peter, and he looked down, filled with a mixture of shame at where he’d landed himself and guilt at where he’d landed her.

“Now, boy,” said Ecanus, “hands back in.”

Peter put his hand in closer, nearer to the flame of the forge. He winced as the heat hit him. His arm was red all over, and the skin on his hand was blackened and peeling off. The burns were getting serious, and Ecanus had obviously been toying with him for some time.

“Closer,” said Ecanus. Peter tried, but he couldn’t hold it. The pain was too great. He whipped his arm out, clutching it to his belly and whimpering a few moans of pain. Ecanus just chuckled. It was all the same to him. Either he got to watch Peter inflict miseries on himself, or he got a pretext to inflict some more of his own.

“That’s no good, no good at all,” said Ecanus. “Come over here, and take your medicine.”

He sliced the sword through the air, dealing an expert blow to Peter’s head. At first, Jana thought he must have killed him. But it was just a nick, a mere cut. On its own it would heal, with minimal damage. They were accumulating, though, rows of gashes on Peter’s face where Ecanus had punished him again and again.

“Let’s play a little game, shall we?” said Ecanus. “Everyone likes games. I should think you do, girl. You play at dangerous ones, flirting with your betters. Did you tell Peter here, about your new lover? They’ve been all over the tower together, laughing at you all the way. She’s been telling everyone she might settle for you, once Rhamiel’s done with her. Telling them you’re nothing. Just a little trash boy from down in the basement.” Peter looked hurt, even more than he had from the fire. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, from pains inside and out.

“It’s true,” said Ecanus. “She’s a dirty one. That’s a smudge you can’t ever wipe clean. She’ll never be yours now, will she? Not really.”

Jana endured the insults, but it took every bit of her strength to do it. Ecanus was all lies, but she couldn’t very well jump in and tell Peter that. The deception was all part of the torture, and he’d just come up with new ones, anyway. It still hurt. She had to stand there, watching her friend being mutilated, and listening to his image of her being distorted into something terrible. She could see from his sunken expression that he believed it, and that was more painful than anything.

“I’ll show you how much she cares, truly,” said Ecanus. “Both of you. I spent a great deal of time coming up with this diversion. I call it ‘eye for an eye.’ It’s inspired by the Maker himself.” Jana shuddered. She could feel Cassie behind her, gripping her shoulder tightly in sympathy. It wasn’t much, but it was all she could do.

“You’ve got pretty little eyes, girl,” said Ecanus, coming towards Jana. He pointed the sword at one of them, its molten-hot tip just inches away. “I was thinking of taking Peter’s in punishment, but now I think I like yours a little better. So I’ll make you a deal, an eminently equitable deal. Give me just one of your eyes, and I’ll let the boy keep both of his.” He waited, smiling deeply and letting it sink in. Jana was sweating and shaking, a cornered animal. She stared at the sword, trying as hard as she could to keep absolutely still as Ecanus slowly pushed it closer and closer to her eye. She could feel the heat drying out her tears, and was terrified to even blink. He’d left only a sliver of space between her pupil and the edge of the sword, and she knew that if she made the slightest move she’d be blinded. Her knees felt like they were about to give out, and it was everything she could do to keep them locked into place. Ecanus knew he had her. So he went and made things worse.

“If you don’t like that trade, I understand,” he said. “I’m perfectly fair and perfectly reasonable. I’ll make you an offer that’s even better. Give me your hand.” She stood, a doe in the headlights, unable to move. “Now, girl,” he snarled, and something in her made her put up her arm. He grabbed her wrist, and pressed the handle of the sword into her palm.

“Now, all you have to do to help your friend,” said Ecanus, “is to take out one of his eyes yourself. Then I’ll let him keep the other, and you and your Rhamiel can continue enjoying both of yours.”

She wanted to run him through then and there, but the sword was a product of the crafters. It probably wouldn’t even nick him. The end of it glowed orange, and it didn’t help that Peter just sat there glumly awaiting his fate. He seemed to expect her to do it, even to be begging her to, hoping for an end to his tortures. She wanted them to fight Ecanus, together, but they couldn’t. He’d just slaughter them all, so they had to choose between accepting his terms or accepting their own deaths.

“We’ve established the rules, and we’ve set up the pieces,” said Ecanus, his wings expanding to their full length, and his gruesome smile stretching as far as it could go. “Now play.”

She was terrified. She could feel painful prickles all over her skin, like the air itself was pressing against the raw nerves underneath. Her insides were a mess, her belly consumed by a tightness as if every organ had clamped together all at once. Her hands shook, and she wasn’t sure she could keep holding the sword for much longer. She had no idea what to do. She knew she couldn’t actually do something so grotesque to another person. But a lifetime of training and habit were shrieking inside her head from all sides,
obey, obey, obey
! She took a few tentative steps towards Peter. And then it happened. She didn’t believe it had come out of her, even after it had already escaped her lips.

“No,” said Jana.

Ecanus’s smile vanished, and he advanced on her, radiating an intense anger and hatred. “No?” he sputtered. “No? There isn’t any ‘no.’ There’s do as I say, bitch, and there isn’t anything else. Now poke out them both, and pray to your Maker that I’m struck with a sudden spate of mercy.”

“I won’t,” said Jana, pointing the sword at Ecanus. They all thought she was mad, even Cassie. She’d started backing away from Jana, getting behind the wagon and trying to escape notice. The crafters who’d stayed to watch were now running, abandoning even the pretense of hiding in an effort to put distance between themselves and the explosion of rage they knew was coming.

“She won’t,” said Ecanus, looking at Peter incredulously. “She won’t?” Ecanus slapped him, hitting him with a loud thud and knocking him to the ground. Peter cried out as the singed flesh of his arm touched the floor and was covered in grit and metal flakes. Ecanus’s eyes grew wider and angrier, and he grew more and more unhinged. “I’ll show you what happens to servants who can’t follow simple instructions from their betters.”

Jana’s defiance was short lived. He struck the sword from her hands before she could even attempt a swing, knocking it to the floor with a loud clatter. She tried to run, but he was quick, and he’d gotten her by the throat before she could make it a few steps away. She was choking, his grip cutting off the flow of air until she started to see black. Then he released it, grabbing her arm instead and dragging her away from the forge, away from Peter—and towards the ramp.

She saw where he was going, and what he intended to do. Inside she was pure distress. It was like a sudden alarm had gone off, blaring into her skull from all sides and telling her to do something, anything, immediately. She started screaming, kicking, clawing at him and fighting every way she could think of. She tried wriggling, tried going limp, tried anything that came to mind. All of it was hopeless. He was too strong, and he couldn’t be done in by scratches or kicks.

“You can’t,” cried Jana. “You can’t!”

“I can do whatever I like,” said Ecanus, “and so I shall.”

He hauled her through the archway and out to the edge of the ramp. Her clothes were covered in black grime from being pulled along the floor, and her hair was wildly poking everywhere from the tussle. He lifted her up and out, holding her by the throat with one hand and dangling her into the air over the long drop to the tower’s lowest floor. She kicked her legs in all directions, instinctively searching for a foothold but finding nothing.

“Look down, girl. Look down, or I drop you,” said Ecanus. This time, Jana did as she was told. All she got for her troubles was a case of vertigo. The distance was tremendous and terrifying. She could see the ramp, looping around and around as it worked its way to the bottom far, far below. Fear turned to panic, and she started crying, tears dripping down her face and sobs bursting from her lips.

“Please,” said Jana. “I looked.”

“You did,” said Ecanus. “But I’m going to drop you, anyway. I just wanted a taste of your fear before you fall.”

Jana screamed, a last death call releasing her agony and pleading for a savior. Then there was a thunk nearby, though she barely registered it. She was still scrambling and kicking when Ecanus looked away to attend to the distraction.

It was Rhamiel, alighting on the ramp a few yards away. He was in full battle regalia, dressed out in golden armor, his chest piece molded into the shape of the head of a fierce beast resembling a lion. He dwarfed Ecanus, tall and imposing in his metal plate.

“Ecanus,” said Rhamiel. “Whatever are you doing?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“T
hey’re angels, too, even if they don’t look like them,” said Dax. They were all busy loading the ATV with as much fuel as it could carry, hoping to avoid another stop. The thing seemed to have left, but Holt was working them double-time just to be sure. Dax had calmed down after they’d given him a few minutes, but he still didn’t look very happy.

“They’ve got castes,” said Dax. “Everyone agrees on that, but there’s disagreement about exactly what they are. There were a bunch of pre-Fall texts about this—some called them ‘choirs,’ some called them ‘spheres.’ They called that thing an ‘Ophan.’ They’re even in the Bible, but a lot of people thought it was some kind of drug induced hallucination.”

“It didn’t even look like an angel,” said Holt. “It looked like some kind of mutation.”

“Who knows,” said Dax. “There’ve only been a few scattered reports of them online. I don’t know whether it’s because there aren’t many of them, or because they just kill everyone who sees them.”

In fact, there had only been a handful of them among the fallen. The Ophanim were one of the older varieties of angels, created long before mankind was even a glimmer in God’s imagination. They’d initially served as guard dogs, patrolling around Hell keeping tabs on the things that slithered around its depths and making sure that none of them ever got out. After Lucifer’s army had been cast into his Pit, they’d been rolled into the heavenly host as a kind of crude intelligence service. Few of them had rebelled. The Seraphim found dealing with them to be distasteful given their odd behavior and their penchant for psychopathy, and their motives were as inscrutable to the other angels as they were to mankind.

“Why’d he kill the Cook?” asked Holt.

“Maybe they’re watching us,” said Faye. “Or were watching him. All those eyes.”

“Let’s go,” said Holt. “Now. If that thing can fly, I don’t want it trailing us. Let it stay here and lick its wounds with the tongues it’s got left.”

They finished their loading job, packing everything in tight, and headed off in a procession towards the highway. They were considerably more cautious about it than before. The Ophan had spooked them, and Holt had them stopping at regular intervals to scan the skies. He pulled them off the highway more than a few times to wait or to double-back on themselves, checking to see if it was tailing them on the ground. When darkness came and they finally struck camp, he ordered two of them to be on watch at any time. They didn’t see any signs of it, but sleep was a small sacrifice to secure their safety.

They were on the other side of Trenton when it happened. They’d had to circumvent the city itself, taking a series of back roads to the north to avoid having to enter the city proper. Doing so would have been foolhardy. Cities were beacons for angels looking for entertainment. Trenton was close enough to Philadelphia that it had been raided repeatedly, and only a few collaborators still dwelled within its borders. They’d have been viewed as enemies if they’d tried to enter, and so they made sure to keep their distance a respectable one.

They’d been making slow progress, as Holt didn’t like traveling at night. There was too much that could go wrong, from losing track of each other to blindly walking into trouble of all kinds. During the day there were frequent stops. Sometimes he’d want to take a closer look at something on the horizon with binoculars before approaching it. Others, they’d hit a particularly difficult snag of cars, or run across a fallen tree or some other obstacle. This time it was the sound of engines in the distance that made them stop.

“Listen,” said Holt. They could hear it, coming from behind them. Buzzing sounds, mixed with louder roars as engines were revved to get past obstacles, or sometimes just for show.

“There’s a lot of them,” said Faye. “Sounds pretty close.”

“Get off the road,” said Holt. “Now, and quietly. Let’s go, let’s go. Bring the bikes.” They dismounted and moved to the shoulder, pulling their vehicles into a roadside pasture and behind a small, grassy ridge that blocked them from view. Thane had to run back and help Dax with the ATV, lifting up the rusted strands of an old barbed wire fence to let it through, but eventually they got it there and got it mostly hidden. They waited, but not for long.

The vanguard came first, a few rough looking types scouting ahead of the others. They drove Harleys, heavy bikes that burped loudly for attention as they maneuvered through the road. They all had long, thick beards, and wore black shades that obscured their eyes and hid their intentions from view. In fact, they resembled the biker gangs of yore in every way but one: they’d exchanged their trademark black leather for a uniform of pure white.

“Get a gun on them, Faye,” said Holt. She crawled over to a better vantage point a few yards away, digging herself in and aiming her rifle in the direction of the bikers. “Thane, get us armed.” Thane obliged, unloading a few submachine guns from the stash in Dax’s trailer. Even Dax got one, although he looked a little too pleased about it, playing with the gun and pointing it around in all directions until Holt grabbed the barrel and aimed it at the dirt in front of them.

The bikers inched closer, following much the same path through the maze of cars as the cell had. They stopped a few times to radio behind them. They came agonizingly close, to the point that they could hear the voices barking over their radios and the crunch of asphalt beneath their wheels. Then they drove on, making their way further down the road and disappearing into the cars beyond.

“They’re gone,” said Dax. “Let’s get out of here before they get back.”

“Quiet. Stay down,” said Holt. It was good advice, for a few seconds later they heard a growing hum of engines from where the bikers had come. The loud sputters and snorts came nearer and nearer until they could see them: a convoy of Vichies on motorcycles, moving in tandem. They looked less rough than the bikers had, a motley assortment of whatever warm bodies had been allowed to sign on. Here, a thin, gangly man in a seersucker suit tried to maneuver his motorcycle around a particularly large pothole, cursing loudly as he dipped his wheel into its edges. There, an elderly gentleman puttered along with a shock of white hair to match his clothes, his bike wobbling back and forth as he struggled to maintain control. More and more of them passed by, and none of them would have seemed threatening if they hadn’t all been heavily armed.

The Vichies were just as hierarchical as their masters, and on the open road it was all about who was the biggest and the baddest. Much of the criminal element had died off after the Fall, left to starve in prisons by jailers who saw no reason to risk their own necks by freeing charges who might immediately turn on them. But the doors of prisons had always revolved, and society’s collapse had been a bonanza for the fortunate ones who’d happened to be on the outside at the time. They were predators unleashed on a herd of fattened, domesticated prey, and they took full advantage of their new position.

The bikers had no skills of their own, but then, they didn’t need to in order to lead a troupe of Vichies. All they had to do was to be meaner than the ones begging them for protection. They all had to kowtow to the angels, but they were absentee landlords who had no concern whatsoever for how their serfs chose to treat one another, so long as their tasks were completed. The servants on the outside had no particular talents, and thus had no particular value to their masters. The world had no more need for office drones, and many of those who’d survived had chosen to spend their days supplicating to anyone they thought could keep them alive. The bikers had taken full advantage of it, and a few of them were mixed in among the sheep, spurring them on and nipping at their heels if they got out of line.

As the line of bikes went past, the scene became a disturbing one. Faye was the first to notice it. “Look,” she whispered to the others. “Look at the passengers.” Some of the riders were carrying them, seated behind them on the bikes. None of them were Vichies, as their clothing made clear. The others soon saw what Faye had: the handcuffs, binding them tightly to the bikes themselves. They were ill-fed and dirty, with sunken eyes and beaten looks. They must have been traveling as prisoners for a while, and they hadn’t been well taken care of.

“We have to do something,” said Dax, too loudly and too eagerly. Holt pushed him down, keeping him low to the ground and whispering in his ear.

“Now’s not the time for this,” said Holt. “Just let it go, and let them pass.”

It was a wise choice, given the disparity in numbers. Dozens of Vichies had already passed them, and there was no end in sight. They just kept moving by, ferrying their prisoners and focusing on their journey. Everything could have been fine, and it almost was. There was just enough height to the ridge that no one could see them if they stayed behind it, and none of the Vichies were interested in the scenery. If only the four of them had managed to stay silent, they’d never have known they were there.

It started with a cough. A single one at first, a niggling irritation at the back of the throat that begged to be cleared. Then it rose to an uncontrollable fit of hacking, driven by an insistent scratching that refused any quarter. It was Faye, her eyes watering and her nose bubbling. She clamped her hands to her mouth, trying to quiet the storm from within her throat. And then it just got worse.

The words started pouring out, again, a loud and furious babbling that none of them could understand. “Sarrah hedikadorah, harikesh kuda darbedah.” Her pupils dilated, expanding until they were deep pools of black, and bubbling foam dribbled from her mouth along with the chatter. They tried to quiet her down, but it didn’t help. Her chanting grew louder and louder. “Harikesh tuka kanita rehishish!”

Then it was too late. One of the Vichies had heard, and had just started to point in their direction when the gunfire erupted.