Jovah's Angel (11 page)

It took only a few hours of easy flying to cover the 150 miles to the mountainous slopes that housed the oracle's retreat. As she stepped inside the cool, gray tunnel that led to the interior of Mount Sinai, Alleya was filled with a sense of absolute calm. Her heartbeat slowed; she felt the blood flow more contentedly in her veins. Her mind cleared, washing away debris and static she had not even been aware of. Even her wings felt lighter.

As she stepped—tiptoed—through the wide tunnels, the only sounds were the whisper of her wings across the stone and the tiny tap of her careful footfalls. Like the Eyrie, Mount Sinai was perpetually lit with muted gaslight, but here the effect was of
silver coolness, witchlight against a lifting mist. Alleya liked the dreamy effect, remote and soothing, in keeping with everything else about this place.

She passed quickly through the first rooms she came to, the public foyers and the smaller conference rooms. She had spent a few days here when she was quite young, and she'd never come back, but she remembered the layout fairly well. Down that hallway, the sleeping rooms and the kitchens; down that one, the oracle's private chambers. But here, at the center of the maze, were the rooms where the mystic's true work was done: the archives, where all knowledge was kept, and the central chamber where the glowing blue plate provided an interface with the god.

Alleya had meant to go directly to the archives, but the eerie blue light on that glass screen drew her across the room almost against her will. Not touching anything, she spread her fingers and suspended her open hands over the knobs and buttons that the oracles pressed when they wished to communicate with Jovah. Job, she remembered, had called it a keyboard. He had touched his fingers to three of its symbols, and the lights and letters on the screen had instantly rippled and rearranged themselves. It was the most awesome thing Alleya had ever seen.

The pictures on the screen now were unmoving, unreadable, navy-colored hieroglyphics against the celestial background. If she could memorize them, Alleya thought, and if she could indeed find some grammar book to teach her the old tongue, she might be able to decipher whatever message the god was sending now to an empty room. She smiled at the thought. Jovah knew better than to communicate with someone who wasn't there.

And better than to try to communicate with someone who could not reply. Resolutely she turned her back on the mesmerizing display and slipped into the huge room that opened off the central one. This one was darker than all the others, and bigger, so that it took her eyes a moment to adjust. It was just as she remembered: piles of leatherbound books lining every wall, additional volumes more coherently arranged on wood shelves that reached almost to the high, sloped ceiling, maps attached by hooks to the stone walls, and locked metal cases holding who knew what treasures or secrets.

She remembered the last time she had been here, nearly twenty years ago, holding her mother's hand and too fascinated to be frightened (as she should have been). “What's that place? What's that map? Is it Samaria? Can I go look at it?” she had asked, and
her mother told her to be quiet just as the oracle Rebekah told her No. (No what? No, it was not Samaria? No, she could not look at it? In any case, she did not go any closer. Rebekah found what she was rummaging for in that back room, and they had all returned to the god's chamber.)

Now she could go as close as she liked and examine the pictures on the wall. For there were three maps, she saw as she went deeper into the room—one she could see from the doorway and two that came into view only after she stepped inside. She went to the far wall to examine the one that had first caught her eye.

It was not Samaria, that was certain—it did not look like any place at all. It was merely a series of dots, and clusters of dots, with white lines hand-drawn at various locations connecting dots so that they formed fanciful faces and shapes. Alleya traced the designs with her finger. This one looked like a horse; this one like a flower in full bloom. A broken red line made an erratic path from one corner of the map diagonally to the other, almost as if someone were laying a course between the dots and faces. She could not even begin to guess what such a map might be recording; perhaps it was something else entirely. In any case, it was so old that the paper was brown and the red of the pathway had faded to a muddy color.

The hangings on the other wall looked more like maps to her—and one might even be Samaria. It was oddly proportioned, though, as if the continent had been laid across a globe and stretched and pulled to make it fit some unfamiliar contours. The Galilee River was sketched in, as were some of the major mountain ranges, but the land was not divided into the three provinces as it was in every modern map. So! Perhaps these were the rough dimensions of Samaria as the settlers had first seen it, hastily outlined and inaccurately represented, but essentially a plot of the homeland they would create. It must be as old as the history of the angels. It made Alleya shiver to look at it.

The other was far more detailed, a map of continents and oceans with every river, lake, mountain, desert and city shaded in and named. Idly reading over the foreign words, Alleya was startled to find, here and there, names she partially recognized: Jordan, Galilee, Bethlehem. Could this be a depiction of the place the settlers had come from? Alleya brushed her finger across the faded coastlines, the gray seas, and felt another chill spider walk down her back.

But she was not here to look at pictures hundreds of years old,
maps that could tell her nothing. Books—now, books could tell stories with morals she needed to learn. If she could find the right books.

She sorted through the shelves and piles for a good hour, opening dusty covers and scanning incomprehensible pages, looking for names or phrases that sounded familiar. At first she made a stack of possibilities—anything that mentioned Hagar or Uriel, the first Archangel, often enough to seem like a record of their time period—but these began piling up so quickly she realized she would need another qualifier. And the task was beginning to look hopeless, for, as Alleya scanned the pages, she saw that almost none of the words were in current usage; she would have to look up each one, laboriously, individually—assuming she could actually find a dictionary. It could take years to translate a single chapter, and she did not think she had anywhere near that much time.

Until what
? she thought, for the idea that there was a deadline approaching made her uneasy.
Don't have much time until what
?

So it looked hopeless, but a certain stubbornness made her keep combing the shelves, anyway. Chance and her random browsing brought her a most fortunate find just as she was about to give up completely. It was a massive leatherbound book that she found on the floor, lying on top of two smaller books. The flyleaf of the biggest volume was inscribed by hand and signed by the oracle Josiah:

“I, Josiah, in the fifth year of the glorious reign of the Archangel Gabriel, have, at the direction of the Archangel, begun a translation of the earliest accounts of the settlers' arrival in Samaria. It is the Archangel's fear that we will lose the ability to read those early records as we lose all touch with that ancient language and as we forget the stories that have been told to us by our fathers and their fathers. Thus I set down in the modern tongue the words written in the lost language, choosing for my text the first volume of the historian Paul, known for his keenness in observation as well as his accuracy…”

There was more in the same vein, but Alleya skipped it to skim through the handwritten manuscript itself. Josiah had laid out the book in an unusual style, with a page of the old language facing a page of the modern version, so that the knowledgeable reader could interpret controversial passages of the original text for himself. Indeed, in several places he had inscribed question marks and possible alternative definitions in brackets next to a vague
word in his translation. Just in flipping through the pages, Alleya found two instances where he had written yet another word in the margin, attributing it to “Ezekiel” or “Jezebel.” The other two oracles of his time, Alleya presumed; who else would know the ancient writing?

It couldn't have been better. It was as if Gabriel had anticipated her need and fulfilled it; no wonder they said he had been the greatest Archangel of all time. Alleya was filled with equal parts excitement and awe, but she took a moment to glance at the other two books in Josiah's little pile. One was completely unreadable—possibly the original text from which Josiah had been translating. The other—ah, another discovery, as good as the first.

This was not exactly a dictionary but a book of phrases written in the original language and translated to one that seemed very close to the modern Samarian version. It too was handwritten, with an inscription on the opening page from someone identified only as the oracle of Gaza during the reign of Michael. Well, there had been more than one Archangel named Michael, so it was impossible to place the oracle in a specific time frame, but it scarcely mattered when the seer had lived as long as he or she had taken the time to set down important knowledge in writing.

Alleya looked more closely at the lines of text and their explanations. Even the quasi-modern interpretations, though put in familiar words, made very little sense to her. “Is the genealogical program loaded?” “Is there sufficient memory left?” “Are there records that need to be purged?” Paging back to the introduction, Alleya received yet another jolt, for here the oracle had written, “Instructions for the novice upon first beginning to interface with the god.” These were the words and phrases used by the oracles when they spoke to Jovah through the glowing screen. These were words only the holy people should see, and Alleya closed the book quickly.

And then, after a moment's thought, she opened it again. She was Archangel; she was desperate; and in her own way she communicated with the god all the time. This had been left to her, almost deliberately, it seemed, by the great men and women of the past. She would be foolish to leave it behind if it could help her learn what she needed to know. It was a bequest, and she would not forgo or abuse it.

She took another minute or two to look around, but she knew she had found what she came for. So she slipped the books into her leather carrying sack and slung the strap over her shoulder.

Entering the main chamber as she left the archives, Alleya could not resist one more glance at the interface. The next time she was here, perhaps, she would be able to read the dark words on the glowing screen, though she would not do anything so intemperate as to respond.

She turned to go, paused, and turned back, narrowing her eyes against the distance that separated her from the blue screen. She could not be sure, but she thought the hieroglyphics on the interface now were different from those that had appeared when she first stepped into the chamber. She crossed the room to stand once more before the screen, trying to remember exactly what those other letters had looked like. Well, there had been fewer of them, that much she remembered; the screen was now crowded with symbols, numbers, a pattern of pinpoints. That was not what had been displayed when she first walked in.

And then, causing her backbone to melt into her knees, the screen dissolved and shifted even as she watched it. She gasped; her hand flew to her mouth, but she stayed frozen in place as the letters wriggled and re-formed. Two short words only, but invested with a silent urgency, for each letter was several inches high and each word filled half the screen. It must mean something, something tremendous or terrible, but Alleya had no idea what.

Who was the god addressing and what was he asking? What was so pressing that he must offer his thoughts to an empty room, or did he hope that some learned stranger would happen through and see the message on his screen?

Or did he somehow know Alleya was standing there watching—and was he directing his message at her?

Leaving Mount Sinai, Alleya was in a state of some perturbation, so she was not paying complete attention during the early stages of her flight southeast toward Luminaux. She therefore barely noticed the sudden drop in temperature as she crossed the Galilee River, and the first strong gust of wind caught her almost totally off-guard. She had been flying lower than usual, out of sheer laziness, and the force of the wind knocked her sideways and dangerously low to the ground before she pumped her wings furiously enough to regain the necessary altitude—

Where she began to be more alert. The icy currents swirling into the warmer southern air were sure signs of trouble, and she was not surprised, a few miles later, to find herself heading
directly into a pelting rainstorm. The central regions of Samaria had received more than their share of rain in past months, although recent reports had indicated the weather was under control. But even from her vantage point far above, Alleya could see the ground was marshy; stands of trees stood drooping in unnatural pools of water, and fresh rivulets made rippling patterns around rocks and boulders that used to rest idly on dry ground. Clearly, rain was not welcome again here today. No one had asked her for a weather intercession—but she was here, and it was one of the few things she was truly good at.

She increased the pace of her wingbeats, angling upward through the dense wet masses of clouds. She was aiming for the still sun-drenched sky above the storm, but she climbed and climbed through the heavy air and never broke free to daylight. The clouds were thicker than she had ever seen them, piled on top of each other in impenetrable profusion.

Very well; she could sing in the storm. She slowed the sweeping rhythm of her wings, feeling the feathers curl and drag as they passed through the sodden air. All she needed was enough motion to hold her in place, although the air itself was so liquid she almost felt she could float in it as she could in a river. She lifted her arms above her head in a gesture of supplication; then, closing her eyes, she began to sing.