Angels on Fire (12 page)

“I seek Miletus.”

The abbot nodded as if he understood everything. “This Miletus—he is the human for whom you denied the Host?”

“Yes.”

There was a shimmer of sadness in the abbot’s eyes, as if Ezrael’s plight had awakened memories. “And he fled after the Fire?”

“Yes.”

The abbot took a deep breath and raised his golden eyes skyward. “The mortal world is a rose armed with angry thorns, my friend. In the days since I came to be as mortals are, I have seen Rome fall, Muses put to the sword, and the West stained red with blood and black with ash. It is a dangerous time for creatures such as us.

“The brothers cloistered within these walls are scholars, working on illuminated manuscripts. They believe they serve the glory of God, although none know how great their service truly is. I do what I can, with my meager magick, to protect the fruits of their labor until the day the Clockwork regains ascendancy in the heart of Mankind. You are welcome to stay here with us, Ezrael, if you so desire.”

“I thank you, brother, but I must decline your offer. I am determined to find Miletus, and I will not rest until I do.”

“I wish you well, then, little brother,” the abbot replied, patting his hand. “I shall send you back into the material world with a loaf of bread and my blessings. Soon you will once again be hungry and thirsty, but at least you now know how to eat and drink!”

As Ezrael continued his journey, he came across bodies in the fields along the road, their limbs twisted by death and torn by scavengers, lying cold and nameless under a bleak and heedless sky. Weakened by fatigue and hunger, he eventually collapsed in the doorway of a house in an abandoned village that had been recently attacked by the Turks, only to come awake to find a stranger bent over him, attempting to strip him of the meager rags he was wearing. Ezrael cried out and struck out blindly in hopes of escaping. The looter, surprised to find his victim still alive, quickly scuttled away.

As Ezrael stared after the half-starved, wild-eyed fellow, he saw a halo form about the looter’s head—a halo tainted by the Machine. The Muse had been lucky that he had been assailed only by a very wretched specimen, best suited to stripping the dead of their belongings and unaccustomed to live victims. His flesh burned with fever and his limbs trembled with ague. He was ill unto death—yet he would not rest until he had found Miletus. When he grew too weak to walk, he crawled. When he could no longer crawl, he collapsed in the mire at the side of the road, near a stone marker. As he lay there trembling in the filth, he heard the hooves of an approaching horse. He struggled to raise his head to see who the rider might be, but his illness had made him all but blind.

The horse came to a halt and the rider cried out his name. Miletus was near tears as his strong arms embraced his wasted body.

“Forgive me, Ezrael!” Miletus wept. “When I returned home and found you gone I nearly lost my mind! I’ve been looking for you ever since! Praise be to God that I found you!”

Suddenly things began to speed up, the time melting before Lucy’s eyes as weeks dissolved into months, then into years, as Ezrael returned with Miletus to Constantinople and was nursed back to health. She saw how their love evolved, while Ezrael’s gender ceased to be of any importance—or hindrance—to Miletus. The artist loved Ezrael as he would a wife, at least within the privacy of their household. Upon the streets of the city was a different matter, as homosexuality was forbidden by the emperor.

Ezrael’s general physical appearance at the time was that of a comely youth in his early twenties, with the only telltale signs of his having once been of the Host being his golden eyes and lack of a belly-button. Ezrael discovered that humans did not seem to notice the color of his eyes—but was careful never to undress in the public baths, in case his smooth abdomen proved more obvious.

Ezrael lived with Miletus for twelve years, posing as his apprentice. And since Constantinople was a fairly cosmopolitan city, as such things went, nothing was said of their closeness. Miletus thrived as an artisan, turning out some of the most accomplished work of the period. He was in great demand amongst the nobles of the city, who wished to commission quality icons for their private chapels and shrines. He had his pick of clients and could name his price— an enviable position for any man to be in, especially an artist. Yet, although he was successful, part of him was dissatisfied.

While Byzantine art—especially that of the iconographers—valued technical proficiency, it considered the individual vision of the artist to be of no importance. While the work was exquisite, it consisted of the repetition of the same themes, the same poses, the same characters, again and again, with little variation.

So Miletus set to work on an triptych of his own design—a radical and dangerous thing, since the Church, both East and West, denounced all art except that which glorified its god and saints. The subject of Miletus’ masterpiece was no apostle or suffering martyr but a god born of ancient myth, depicted as a handsome youth, naked save for a carelessly draped leopard’s skin, and holding a lyre in one hand and a laurel wreath in the other. At the young god’s feet lay a docile lion, while stars arced over his head, tracing auguries in the skies. The left hand panel of the icon depicted the seraph Nisroc standing rampant, claws outstretched, like the seal of the Frankish kings. On the right hand panel stood a more orthodox angel, save that its wings gleamed with all the colors of the rainbow. The triptych stood three feet in height and was hinged so that the side panels closed tightly shut over the central image, rendering it indistinguishable from any other icon in Christendom.

It took Miletus six years to compose his masterpiece. He worked in his spare time, bringing home tiny cast-off chips of precious gems and fragments of gold leaf from his commissioned projects in order to give gradual shape to his vision. Amethyst, garnets, emeralds, rubies, mother- of-pearl and diamond chips—most no larger than the nail on a baby’s little finger—were laboriously glued into place. And then, as it was nearing completion—disaster struck.

Ezrael was away from the house when the emperor’s guard arrived. They were lead by a bureaucrat Miletus had been unwise to speak of publicly in disparaging tones. They were there to arrest the iconographer for theft. When Ezrael returned later that afternoon, it was to find his lover gone and their home sacked. None of the neighbors would open their doors to answer his frantic questions as to what had happened, so he went to Miletus’s former master, who had trained him in his craft.

The old man told Ezrael that Miletus had been charged not only with theft from the imperial person, but idolatry as well. Granted, every Orthodox Christian in the empire knelt before stylized representations of their god—but the god on display in Miletus’s triptych was certainly not Christ. The old master advised him to flee the city, for he would be considered a partner in crime and share Miletus’ fate, which was not to be a pretty one. Although the old man’s words were wise and well-meant, Ezrael could not turn his back on his love.

After disguising himself and bribing the guards, Ezrael succeeded in gaining entrance to the prison where Miletus was being held. For an extra bag of silver, he was allowed to enter his lover’s cell, which was cramped and filled with rotten straw that stank of rat piss and human shit. Miletus had been stripped of his clothes and placed in the ragged robe of a heretic. And, most horrible of all, they had taken his eyes and hands.

Ezrael hunkered down in the reeking straw and whispered his lover’s name. Miletus turned his blinded head in the direction of his voice and reached out to touch him, only to quickly yank his arm back, pressing the mangled stump to his chest.

“You shouldn’t have come here! They’ll catch you!” Miletus said fearfully.

“You know I couldn’t leave you.” It was all Ezrael could do to keep from weeping as he spoke. “I’ll get you out of here.”

Miletus laughed bitterly and shook his head. The pain and weariness in his voice was terrible to hear. “I am to be burned with the other heretics a fortnight from now—Better I die that way, than to live like this!”

“Don’t talk like that! I will bribe the guard to let you out! We can still be together! I’ll take you to this place I know—a monastery run by a fellow Muse. You’ll be safe there—”

Miletus shook his head. “What kind of life would I have to look forward to? They took my eyes! They took my hands! They were tools by which I made my living. Without them I am as good as dead. Better I should let it end in fire than continue this way! Go now—please, Ezrael, I beg of you! If you were to be captured, it would destroy me more completely than anything they have done. Go now, if you truly love me, go—! And do not look back!”

Ezrael stroked his lover’s head, now turned gray, and Miletus’s body shook, but there were no tears, for they had been burned away with his eyes.

The Muse fled the city and made his way to the monastery he had visited a dozen years before. The abbot was still in residence and welcomed Ezrael warmly, providing him with the robes of the order. In a fortnight’s time, Ezrael returned to Constantinople disguised as a monk and stood amongst the jeering crowd gathered in the central square reserved for public executions as Miletus was put to the torch.

The artist stood tall as they lashed him to the stake, despite his wretched condition. His sightless face was turned towards the sky. Whether he was praying or simply savoring the sun on his skin one last time, there was no way of knowing. The bureaucrat responsible for his arrest and mutilation was presiding over the execution. With a shock of recognition, Lucy saw that despite the period clothing and heavy beard, the face of the bureaucrat was Meresin’s. He stood on a raised platform, sweeping the crowd with glittering black eyes as if seeking out a familiar face. The author of Miletus’s destruction wore a malignant halo that made it clear he was a daemon in mortal guise.

The abbot had warned Ezrael of such creatures, and that they delighted in the capture and murder of Muses, as well as those humans Blessed by the Clockwork. This daemon was clearly searching the crowd for the face of Miletus’s god. He was looking for
him.

Once the embers of the bonfires finally died down, Ezrael stole up in the dead of night and found what remained of Miletus’s body. It was badly charred and the body was shrunken from the intense heat, pulling it into a fetal position. Ezrael snapped the skull free of its mooring and placed it in a sack, then hurried away.

Lucy was back in the kitchen, blinking at the light and feeling slightly disoriented, like she’d just walked into the heat of a summer afternoon after spending the day in an air-conditioned movie theater. She glanced at Ezrael, who was staring at his feet, a distant look in his eyes.

“Wow!” she breathed. “That really happened?”

“Yes, I’m afraid it did,” Ezrael sighed. “As I said—it was a very long time ago.”

“What happened after you stole Miletus’s skull?”

“I returned to the monastery and the abbot took Miletus’ skull and cleaned it in the prescribed manner and placed it in the reliquary, where it remained until the Second Crusade, when it was stolen by a Knight Templar and transported to France, under the belief that it was the brain-case of a child-saint. As for myself, I stayed at the monastery for many years, learning what magick the abbot had to teach me, as well more practical tricks— such as faking my death and re-emerging as my own son or nephew every twenty-five years or so. When the Crusades brought even more unrest to the land, I attached myself to a young troubadour traveling with Richard I of England...but that’s another story.”

“No disrespect or anything, but these Machinists, or whatever you call them, seem, well, a lot
smarter
than Joth and his homeys.”

“I don’t know if it’s a case of them actually being smarter or simply worldlier,” Ezrael replied. “The Infernal Horde, unlike their counterpart, the Celestial Host, operates largely in the here and now. Meresin is a tempter, a corrupter, a destroyer...but not simply of souls. It is his duty to make sure that artists slash their canvases, sculptors smash their handiwork, poets die unpublished, and libraries are burned. Granted, it doesn’t take much skill to inspire Vandals to smash mosaics. But you must be
very
clever, indeed, to provoke one of the greatest playwrights in the English language into a fatal brawl over a tavern bill, or facilitate Mozart’s demise through the jealousy of an inferior competitor. It is Meresin’s role to throttle masterpieces in their cradle, if you will, and encourage the veneration of false idols.”

“So that’s why he’s in television?”

“Precisely,” Ezrael replied, sipping his coffee.

The alarm went off at six A.M., yanking Lucy free of a dream filled with capering demons wearing crystal chandeliers on their heads dancing ring-around-the-rosy with Joth. She lay staring at the ceiling for a long moment, debating whether to hit the snooze bar or not, before finally throwing back the covers and facing the day.

By the time she had showered, put on her face and changed into what she thought of as her worker-drone skirt-suit, Lucy had almost succeeded in convincing herself that the events of the forty-eight hours had been the product of a particularly vivid dream. Then she walked into the kitchen and found Ezrael making breakfast.

“Morning!” The former angel was cheerfully preparing eggs, milk and nutmeg in one of her mixing bowls. “I thought I might as well pitch in while I was here! Hope you like French toast!”

“I love it,” she said, trying to hide the dismay in her voice as she trudged into the living room to check on Joth.

The angel was no longer perched on the corner of the sofa but standing in the middle of the floor, its hands folded over its chest and eyes rolled back in its head. As she glanced down at the angel’s bare feet she realized the toes were pointed straight down, like a ballet dancer going
en pointe,
without actually touching the floor. Somehow, this didn’t seem nearly as miraculous as it would have two days ago. Perhaps she was becoming inured to miracles.