We Will All Go Down Together (55 page)

“
Mother
,” Enzemblance began, but fell silent a second later, quelled by a glance; her face flushed blotchily, grey-green, in the stones’ werelight. Finally, voice gone dead, she asked: “Must I truly lose my handmaid, then, and wi’ no recompense?”

“Hast kept her long enough, Enzemblance—far beyond time, for the littleness of her transgression. And as for the child. . . .”

“
He
I may keep, at least! He, who was born t’our ways, knowing no others—”

The boy flinched, hand tightening on Galit’s arm, and Kim put his head down, as though about to charge.

“Nay, Enzemblance,” Lady Glauce told her. “’Tis done. Both will return tae the Iron Cities and be left alone, from now on. Dost ken my meaning?” Enzemblance didn’t answer. “Gie me yuir word, as thy fealty requires.”

“
Yes
, then, Mother.”

The words eked out, barely audible, strained between those dreadful teeth. Lady Glauce acknowledged them by laying a gentle finger on Galit’s throat-piece: the root-torc shrivelled, unravelling, crumbling under its own age. Galit lifted both hands to her throat, warily, and stroked its dirty skin, disbelief giving way to amazement.

“Free,” she said, hoarse. “We’re—Elver, come
here
! We can go home now, baby. We can
go
.”

As Ganconer grimaced, entirely forgotten, the boy threw his arms ’round his mother’s waist and grinned up at her, obviously happy to see
her
so happy, even with tears in her eyes.

“Where’s home?” he asked.

Kim huffed out a held breath, wavering slightly; Carra and Jude exchanged glances; Horse-Kicker smiled, widely. Roke put an arm around Judy, who let him.

Jo felt her own shoulders slump, filled with relief:
Over, thank Christ. Nothing left now but to find our path and show the kiddie Toronto.

But:
Nay,
Euwphaim’s voice replied, louder—closer—than Jo’d ever before heard it.
I think no’.

Goddamnit, Jo!
Davina’s chimed in at the same time, already dimming.
The fuck did I
tell
you?

What I knew already, idjit,
Jo thought.
How I was only a tool, a means to my own undoing. How I should never have let her in, but bid her blow away instead, straight down to bloody hell.

Then her grandmother, having forced herself headlong into Jo’s flesh without any shred of permission, had full control; the angel’s black Mark burned like ice, tainting, betraying. And with a deep, dark blink,
she—
herself—was all but gone.

Watch out!
Carra heard someone cry, back beyond the tree-line: a ghost’s thin voice, unfamiliar but angry, from far enough away it barely grazed her mind. While another—grim and gloating, Scots-burred, a fresh, black joy in every rasping note of it—answered: “Too
late
, American.”

Much as Jodice Glouwer no doubt knew
her
by sight as well as reputation, so Carra knew Jo. Janis and Sy had worked with her more often, but that didn’t matter; she was distinctive even at a distance, with her close-cropped hair and her broad strong form. Now she strode towards the
brugh
, usually sad but pleasant face set in a parodic menace-rictus, with blue flame eddying from her brow like a crown and her eyes gone black as pitch.

Kim boggled. “The fuck is that?”

“Jo Glouwer,” Sy supplied, but Carra just shook her head. Even from here, she could see a small but intense nimbus spread like a demi-ruff at the top of Jo’s spine, limning the uppermost vertebra from the skull’s base; she pointed it out to Jude, who nodded.

Who’s your friend?
he no doubt remembered her asking him once, under similar circumstances.

It hadn’t taken much effort to separate him from whatever was attempting to ride him, that time—but then again, said thing hadn’t already been piloting him around, or throwing off enough hexation to curse things down to Lake Ontario.

So: “Not any more,” was all she said, therefore. And yanked Sy out of the way along with her to let Jo-plus-one go by.

On the other side, Judy Kiss took one look and spat. “Fucking Spooky
Grandma.
”

Faced with a new enemy, Enzemblance turned, claws up, son and brother moving too, to form a protective wall between not-Jo and their matriarch. But Lady Glauce simply watched the interloper come, unsurprised, as though it were someone she would always recognize, whether clothed in someone else’s skin or not.

“Euwphaim Glouwer,” she said. “For our auld acquaintance’s sake do I give thee greeting, accounting thee welcome upon my lands and within step of my home, so long as ye keep the peace.”

Jo’s mouth sneered. “High courtesies, and from such a
noble
lady! Yet they mean nowt to me, who ye swore compact wi’ and then threw over.”

“’Twas thyself first lied, in that compact,” Lady Glauce pointed out.

“As the De’il commands, him being Lord of Lies. Yet ye owe me naetheless—me, my sisters, my Black Angel, all.”

“Thy claim surprises me not one jot.”

“Doubtless,” Euwphaim replied, raising Jo’s hands. Then declared, voice deepening: “But ’tis of nae matter: now I seize that which ye thought tae keep from me, seeing y’have grown it sae far it can barely be contained in this earth-warren ye thought tae hide yuirselves in. And in doing so, I call upon him who laid the world’s foundations, along wi’ his kin—Ashreel Maskim, my sweet laird, Black Man of the Five-Family Coven’s Sabbat! Wi’ the Stane of Druir above and below me, on my left hand as well as my right, I call upon those Seven who were One and shall be again!”

A sigil-mark bloomed at the crook of one of Jo’s elbows, blackly luminous, before sliding to beam forth—with ten times its original force—from her upraised palm. Carra twisted aside, shielding her eyes, as the evocation continued—

All ye of the Coven, five families represented here, in manner great or small—Roke and Druir, Devize and Glouwer, that Rusk who lent her relic tae the fight . . . aye, even ye of Clan Sidderstane, pale shadows of yuir so-called betters! Listen, you thralls and nobodies, you empty vessels! Listen as I name the agents of yuir doom and the doom of all!

The end of everything, human or otherwise, right
here
—Dourvale, the Shore and
brugh
alike, well-known to exist in two countries, two
centuries,
at once. A perfect place, in other words, for absolutely
anything
to happen.

“
Arralu-Allatu Namtaru Maskim
,

“
Assaku Utukku Lammyatu Maskim,

“
Ekimmu Gallu-Alu Maskim,

“
Maskim Maskim Maskim
.”

With all the frenzy of the desperate, Sy bolted towards her, swinging his strongest haymaker. But not-Jo (
Euwphaim, she’s Euwphaim Glouwer, just like Ygerna said
) merely angled her palm to block it, detonation hurling him backwards as if he’d grabbed a live transformer plug. Unsure if he was still alive, Carra charged as well, Jude hard on her heels, only to have him pull her down instead, flinging up one more shield—an equally useless gesture, it turned out. Because the cone of summoning was already beginning to ring Euwphaim—a looped conflagration, tornado-whipped exponentially higher and faster with every new rotation, which only intensified, even as the drain it cast made Jude’s purple glow start to stutter, shrink, fail.

Roke and Judy dropped down beside them, taking advantage of what little shield-time might be left, as Carra—her hair flattened in the rising wind—jabbed a finger at the rusty nail Roke still clutched. “Use it!”

Roke shook his head, grimly. “No good.
That
thing, over there. . . .” He pointed at what was forming midway between Euwphaim and Glauce, a twisting pillar of eye-wrenching distortion, tall enough to score the sky. “. . . requires somebody just a tad more holy than my bad self to strike it down. If B. had just gotten over her fucking attitude and rode along,
she
might’ve been able to do something. But. . . .”

He trailed off, as if only now realizing what this meant. And a jolt of comprehension ran through Carra’s mind, completing Roke’s sentence for them both:

. . . when angels get called on, all that’s really left to turn to is God. And He is something we are
none
of us qualified to speak either to, or for.

Monsters against monsters. It’d seemed like a pretty good plan back in Abbott’s office. Now Carra couldn’t remember if she’d ever really thought it would work, or if this’d just been an elaborate way to commit suicide, all along.

Idiot survival instinct had carried her thus far, made her hope for love, even in the mouth of death. But now—as the distortion overhead split open, spilling a terrible white light into the world—Carra Devize felt true despair fill her, render her sick and lightheaded, tempt her with the relief of defeat. For if she really was as powerless against what peered through as its presence made her feel, then how would trying to stop it be any responsibility of hers?

Let someone else try, while she crouched here in the grass with Jude’s arms around her, watching the only other man she might have built a life with suffer; let them try and fail, try and die. Let everyone and everything die, likewise.

Nothing to do with me,
she thought, numbly.
Nothing to do. Nothing.

Now here and nowhere, both at once. Just like the writing said.

Then the angel stepped down, and Carra shut her eyes, knowing it was only the weakest sort of half-measure. Because, of course—

—she could still see.

The earth groaned beneath Ashreel Maskim’s weight, though it seemed to have no substance at all: light without heat, a frozen blood-fountain, a mile-high volcano blast seen through the telescope’s wrong end. Even Glauce Druir bent her huge head away from that awful sight. Only Euwphaim gazed upon it freely, Jo’s burnt eyes streaming, both vindictive and vindicated after centuries of waiting.

“
Lord!
” she howled. “At last ye come! At last, the Work begins!”

As she spread her arms, the blackness of the Mark swept over her, cutting her out—a living silhouette—and Carra watched Euwphaim’s real face flicker where Jo’s should be, a mask made from malice, crying out: “Call yuir brethren, and beneath the Seven’s weight, crack this world beyond repair! Do it now,
now,
and together we will say—”

“. . . fuck
that
shit.”

As a battle-cry, it left somewhat to be desired. Yet it bore Judy Kiss upright against the roaring wind, stepping through the dregs of Jude’s shield like cobweb and shoving Euwphaim-Jo aside to take her place beneath the cone, where she yelled up into the angel’s face—

“Ashreel Maskim, Confusion-maker, This One That Wears Us!
He
told me all about you, you know—outcast World-makers, too desperate for heaven and too cowardly for hell, but too arrogant for anything else.” That sly, alien mirth creeping back into her voice, irretrievably sulphur-tainted. “Always thinking just because you built the arena that gives you the right to call the game, no matter who else might be playing.”

::Do I know you, speaker?::
the angel asked from everywhere at once—as soft and strong as rot, as entropy. To which Judy just laughed, bitterly.

“Maybe,” she allowed. “Though if you did, you’d know one fuck of a lot more than I do.”

A silence followed, everyone—the Fae included—braced to hear what the response might be. While Carra slid sideways, unnnoticed by all, staying low and quiet. Not even daring to consider what she might be doing or why, lest the angel hear it.

::I see you, now,::
Ashreel Maskim said, at last.
::Thrown out, but still with a foothold inside her, a place to squirm into, whenever it pleases. Not one of
us
, though we were kin, marking us as kin still—her too, so long as you consent to wear her.::
With a faint touch of sadism, born more of boredom than aught else, it added:
::This one who tells you of me—of us. I can give you his name.::

“Got that offer before, thanks,” Judy replied, coolly. “Didn’t believe it then, and I don’t now. And that’s ’cause angels
lie
.”

::Not all.::

“Enough.”

Something too remote to be sadness filled Ashreel’s voice.
::Not the Host, who remain with Him, bound to truth and silence both, by He who decided that suffering must always be the price of choice. Can you fault us for fleeing that stasis, for taking the chance—any chance, at all—of freedom?::

Judy didn’t shake her head, but she didn’t exactly nod, either. Just stood there with her half-Nobody eyes all lit up like Satan’s version of Christmas morning, and replied—“Not my call. So . . . that it, or what? We done yet?”

Euwphaim raised eyes and hands together towards the still-spinning clouds in furious supplication. But all she got by way of return were these words, pronounced with something close to sorrow—

::I think . . . since he who marked you still has uses for you, Judy Kiss, then yes. Forgive me, Euwphaim. But with this other interest blocking my—
our
—way, I no longer have any business here.::

“
NO!
” Euwphaim’s fury blazed up, so great she half-left Jo’s body and stretched forth on a conduit of ectoplasm, near-solid with rage. “Ye promised!
Five hundred year and more agone, ye promised me my vengeance!
”

::Did I? Well. As I have been assured on good authority . . . the word of an angel is not always reliable.::

Pandaemonium. Over the brain-twisting sound of a portal torn through the world’s fabric, collapsing in on itself, the thunder-bright aftershocks of reality resealing in its wake, Jo felt a hand slip into hers—small, cold, solid—and grip her hard, fingers fisting ten into twenty, two into one.

We really should stick together,
a voice said against her inner ear.
Girls like us.

Beside her, Carra Devize rose up from the grass, grinning. And a floodgate of strength snapped open through their joined palms, jolting memories free: Dav, Ross, and herself, all those days of dull, grinding, cleansing work, peeling her aura of soaked-up ectoplasm like callus from a heel . . . finally knowing what she was made for and doing it, then doing whatever she pleased after without fear of loss, of pain, the hole gaping always open. Those days when she’d been, strange as it might bloody seem, given what-all had passed her way since—oh, and what
was
the word?