Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (45 page)

“Damn, man, stop cheering me up so much.”

 • • • 

The Kainos pilgrims started getting spooked even before we reached the great field of bare, devastated ground. I can't really say I blamed them, since I was feeling that way myself. I suppose I should have been thinking about my life, reviewing my failings and my (very occasional) successes, thinking about my friends and loved ones, but except for a simmering bitterness that I probably wasn't ever going to see Caz again, I could only focus on what was in front of me. It's a protective mechanism. Just do your job. Just put one foot in front of the other. When you see the enemy, pull the trigger—although there were no actual triggers to pull in this case. Boil everything down to staying alive, think about the other stuff later, that was my plan.

Except there was one other thing. I'd thought I hated Eligor, the archdemon, the all-time nasty fucker of the millennium, but it was nothing to what I'd come to feel about Anaita. Eligor, bad as he was, was my enemy. He was just doing his job, even if he enjoyed it way too much. In the Highest's scheme of things, at least as far as I could tell, he was doing exactly what he was supposed to. But Anaita, she was supposed to be like me, defender of the helpless, protector of the innocent, instead of what she was: an astonishing, gigantic, fucked-up pile of evil.

Whatever happened, I was praying I'd at least get to hurt her somehow. That alone might be enough to make it worthwhile. I wanted to be the mosquito that gave her a big ugly bite just before she was throwing a chic party for the other VIPs. I wanted to be her pimple on prom night.

 • • • 

We reached the charred ground shortly before the house itself rose into view above us. Considering it sat on a hill in the middle of nothing, you'll have an idea of how much territory Anaita's snit-fit had destroyed. We crunched across the cinders. Faint, windblown drifts of snow were accumulating, but not enough to cover the destruction, only to stripe the burned ground with undulating streaks of white, like lines of cocaine on a black light poster. We hiked across this great circle of ruination, the pilgrims scattered and trailing behind us, and I couldn't help thinking about some of humanity's other death marches—Bataan, the Trail of Tears. The chill, the lifelessness of the terrain, the faces of the people we'd brought here, all worked to drag me down into hopelessness. Sam hated seeing those expressions more than I did, I'm sure, since he had personally recruited dozens of the pilgrims.

We got to the house and gave it a quick inspection, but it was just as we'd left it, empty as a bill collector's heart. A sifting of snow had accumulated beneath windows blown out by Anaita's attack. We found what we needed, then got to work inside and outside, toiling in the cold like medieval peasants, digging and chopping and tying knots. Mostly digging. We stopped to drink water occasionally, more for the feel of stopping than any real need for a break. Sam was right—the pilgrims were a hardy lot, and the grim but determined mood seemed to have infected nearly everyone. Only Ed Walker seemed opaque to me, doing his part but always as though in his mind he was somewhere else. But where? That was a question that worried me. He'd overheard us the night before, when we thought we were alone, and he'd heard enough of my plan to angrily demand answers. He'd never seemed very satisfied with them, but to tell the truth, I wouldn't have been either. It was a pretty damned desperate plan, and that was being charitable. Walker had reluctantly agreed, but he'd hardly met my eye since, which added to my feeling that the whole thing was too precarious to work, too crazy. And this was me, the guy who made crazy plans like clouds make rain.

At last, about an hour before sunset, we had done all we could. Sam called together Ed and Mayor Weng and Farber, her deputy. “It's time,” Sam said. “Get your people out of here. I want all the noncombatants as far away as they can get in the next thirty minutes or so.”

“Thirty minutes,” said Farber. “Well, we'd better synchronize our watches.” We all turned to stare at him. “It was a joke,” he said, a little sheepishly. “Because, obviously, we don't have watches.”

“I've actually been to Hell,” I said. “And you know what? All the comedians there were German.”

He gave me a look of mock recrimination that made me smile. It didn't last long, but it was a nice two seconds of humanity. I hoped it wasn't my last.

“So is it go?” I said.

Sam looked around. “Looks like it.”

“God loves you,” I said to Mayor Weng and her pilgrims. “And all of us, I hope. Now get out of here.”

As they hurried away across the snow and drifting black grit, we sent Walker and his volunteers to get into position, then after a last check, Sam and Clarence and I went into the house. I let Sam open the Go-To-Mecca Box, which he did only after pulling on the brilliantly glowing second-skin that was the God Glove. It looked like the end of his wrist was one big sparkler, but I knew it was only a birthday candle compared to what Anaita could muster, and we didn't dare use it against her anyway.

“I think the cube is ready,” said Sam. “But she may have noticed that I flipped channels, if you know what I mean, so make it fast.”

I did. I kept my call brief and to the point.
“It's time,”
I said—just that.

When I'd finished, Sam hung up the cosmic phone and adjusted it back to its original setting, which was a hotline right to Anaita, Angel of Moisture and goddess of our personal ruin, then he opened the channel. I held my finger to my lips for silence until we crept a little farther away, then Clarence and Sam and I began to talk normally, as if we didn't even know our words were flying right to Heaven and directly to our deadliest enemy. We didn't have to wait long to get results.

It started when my ears popped, a sudden change in pressure like a cupped blow on both sides of my head. I looked at Sam, and he nodded then hurried over to adjust the Mecca cube one last time. No need to speak. The pressure increased, and with it came a definite tang of ozone and an electrical crackle that I could feel on the hairs of my arms and neck. We all took a breath and stepped outside.

She stood there in snow flurries that turned the depth of the background into flat black and white static, like a television transmitting only the last whisper of the Big Bang. No glass or potsherds now: she looked like something out of a classical painting, like Juno or Minerva stepped out of a frame and into the world of men, bigger than life size and unutterably, astoundingly beautiful. She had two cats on leashes, tiny compared to what they'd been when I last saw them, not lions this time but something long-eared and tawny. If it hadn't been for Anaita being more than seven feet tall, and the shimmering ripple of her garment, which was more light than fabric, she could have been a rich and gorgeous actress walking her exotic pets. Except we weren't in Beverly Hills, but at the end of an entirely different world.

“Doloriel.” Her voice was honey, love, and regret. The anger of our last meeting was gone as if it had never been. “Why do you fight me? Why didn't you just do as you were told?” She turned to Sam. “All your friend had to do was bring you back, and we would have been merciful.”

“We?” Sam asked. “You mean you and the person you pretended to be?”

She looked amused, almost. “Pretended? Do you mean the guise I wore to recruit you? There was no pretense, only secrecy. Didn't I do what I said? Isn't this world beautiful? Didn't I make it just as I promised, and give it to the ones you brought to me?”

“Then burned the shit out of it and killed a bunch of them,” I said. “Not exactly what one expects from an angel. Not what usually happens in paradise.”

“Yeah,” said Clarence, but he didn't say it very loud. Still, he was standing in there. He hadn't faced her the first time, of course. Maybe that helped.

“Why are you such a troublemaker, Doloriel?” Anaita didn't sound angry. In fact she sounded exactly like a mother worried by a foolish child who won't learn. “You have been a thorn in my side since the beginning. So unnecessary.”

“I didn't do anything to you. You sent that stabby maniac after me. You've done nothing but try to destroy me.”

“And you've tried just as hard to destroy my work,” she said, but still calm, still more in sadness than in anger. “You and that report you made. We should have had months more to build here, years of Earth time before the others found out about this place. Instead you upset everything, you silly little creature, ruined a plan whose glory and beauty you can't even conceive. You dare to complain to me about what I did? I should have incinerated you the first time you interfered with my project. In fact, I should have done it earlier. At the very start.”

Which made no sense, since other than the report, which I had to make because of the heat I was getting from my superiors when I found out about Ed Walker's missing soul, I'd done nothing to her. Seemed to me that my involvement had caused trouble for Sam, who'd been the one to recruit Walker, far more than it had Anaita.

Or did she mean something else by that?
At the very start . . . ?
Not that it mattered now. I could think about it later, if I was still alive and my thinking parts hadn't burned up. “Look, just leave these people alone, leave this place and Sam alone, and I'll go back with you.”

She looked at me for a long time—it seemed long, anyway, as we stood in the fluttering snow—then let out a laugh like a bird's song, haunting, sweet, and very, very brief. “Imagine! You're going to offer me a bargain. You, Doloriel, who have done so much to spoil triumphs you are too ill-formed to appreciate.”

I suddenly remembered something Heinrich Himmler had once said in an address to his SS men, who were weary and horrified by implementing the Final Solution.
“That we should have to do such things and still remain decent men,
” he told them,
“that is true heroism.”
Anaita really was insane. I had never thought an angel could be, but she was. She believed herself to be so obviously right that everything else no longer mattered. In fact, everything else barely registered.

“Fine,” I said. “No deal. So come and get me.”

“As you wish, Doloriel. But I will not dirty myself again with you. I don't want your filthy blood staining my raiment.” She dropped the leashes.

The cats leaped forward. By the time they had taken a couple of steps they were growing, and as they raced toward us across the snow and ash they kept on doing it. Eyes like glowing amber, big as lions, then bigger, they sprang across the ground so quickly I could scarcely have counted to three, even if I had enough air in my lungs and spit in my mouth to do it. The nearest one leaped, a huge, gray-brown shadow, even as I took my first stumbling steps backward. It crashed to the ground in front of me, skidding through ash. Then it was gone into the black, rectangular hole we had dug. As it fell onto the sharpened stakes at the bottom of the pit, the cat's initial snarl of surprise exploded into a maddened howl of agony.

The second cat was already in midair. It jumped easily over the exposed trap, but when it landed it was slightly off to the side, so instead of the second trap swallowing it, the covering of boards stolen from the house, along with scavenged branches, fell inward as planned, but the monstrous cat still had enough solid ground under its paws to scramble to safety. Safety for
it
, of course. Not so safe for me.

Those were the only two pits we'd had time to dig.

I wasn't thinking much about pits or digging at that moment, though, because the second cat leaped again as soon as it found its footing, something like a thousand pounds of claws, teeth, and rock-hard muscle flying through the air toward me. I couldn't even get my spear into the dirt to brace it before the thing hit me. We rolled over and over, and although my head hit the ground so hard that, for a moment, I didn't quite know where I was, I could definitely tell that a mouth full of sharp teeth was about to tear my face off, and that I no longer had a spear in my hand. Then the massive jaws snapped down, and the world disappeared into a deep, foul, and extremely slobbery darkness.

O
KAY, BEFORE
I explain to you what happened while my face was being chewed off by
felis mythicus giganticus
, let me tell you the good news: I was certain now that Anaita's power really did have limits.

Knowing that wasn't a lot of help right then, what with the fangs and the drool and the huge jaws crushing my skull, but it meant that we actually had a chance. Not a good one. Not even a statistically significant one. But a chance.

See, nobody (at least nobody like me) actually knows where the high angels get their power. “Direct from the Highest” is what we're told, and that may well be true, but I'm pretty sure there's more to the story. The power is rationed, apparently by rank, and the higher up the ladder you go, the more pure force the angels in question can bring to the dance. Someone like Anaita, one of the chief powers of the Third Sphere, could bring a great deal of it to bear where she wanted, on Heaven, on Earth, or even here on Kainos. In fact, she had a great deal more freedom to use power on Kainos because the place pretty much belonged to her. But this was the kicker: she didn't have the
right
to that power.

So Anaita could call on far greater resources than she needed, far more than Sam, Clarence, and I could ever hope to match: if angelic power were water, she had a fire hose the size of the Holland Tunnel, and we had squirt guns. But just like someone using a fire hose, the water had to come from somewhere, and so did whatever heavenly reserves she was drawing on. More important, she had to disguise the fact that she was using it, because any massive deployment of angelic force was going to attract notice Upstairs.

I'd been suspicious that she destroyed such a small portion of Kainos during her scorched earth hissy fit. Yes, she wanted to preserve the place, but she never really found out whether I was there or not, and she hadn't managed to capture Sam either, who was at least as much of a threat to her secrets as I was. That suggested that she didn't dare use that level of force for very long. Yeah, she could come down and rain destruction like a helicopter gunship, but only for so long before someone back in Heaven was going to start wondering what she was doing.

Which explained why she'd mostly worked through others, sending Smyler after me instead of just obliterating me with a snap of her fingers, and using Sam and the other renegade angels to do the groundwork of populating Kainos.

The big cats were the final giveaway. The monsters were the manifestations of Anaita's power, yes, but she was using them because they were a comparatively thrifty way to get rid of us. Create something with hunting instincts, muscles, talons, and fangs, then turn it loose, and you get much more bang for your buck than just vaporizing everything in front of you. The fang-toothed kitty tasting my face at that moment might have been nasty, but it was actually a sign of weakness. Anaita was trying to take us down on the cheap, because she needed to keep what she was doing hidden from Heaven.

I promise you, I didn't spend as much time thinking about all that at the time as I just did describing it.

The cat-beast had me down, but it hadn't yet found a way to get its jaws squarely around my skull, and I was doing my best to hang onto my facial features, hitting, kicking, squirming, rolling. Still, several seconds of that hadn't done me any good, and I was already running out of strength. I pulled the knife I'd stashed in my boot, wishing really hard that it could be something longer, stronger, and sharper than a leaf of flint with string wrapped around one end to make a handle. I knew I wasn't going to make any major puncture wounds with it, so I just started slashing at everything I could reach, trying to cause pain. This might have been the imaginary sort of giant cat, but until I learned otherwise, I was going to assume that its nose and mouth and eyes were its weak spots, like almost any other predator.

Sadly, I seemed to be learning otherwise, or else I was just pissing it off. It bit down on my hand hard enough to make me drop the stone knife, and when I punched its nose with my other hand it only reared back, mouth wide and teeth very obvious, ready to go for my throat. Then something hit it.

Crock!
That's the noise it made, like someone throwing a large rock against the side of a concrete building. The cat reeled and stumbled back a step, one half of its face suddenly a different shape and oozing gray stuff that might have been blood. Clarence swung his club again, a stone the size of a volleyball tied into the fork of a thick branch, but only managed to hit the beast on the shoulder this time. It shook its head and snarled.

One of its eyes was gone, or at least lost in torn tissue and broken bone, but the cat was nowhere near dead. Clarence tried to yank me away by my collar and only yanked me onto my ass instead, but I'd found my spear, and just managed to lift it high enough to pierce the creature's throat as it came at me. The force of its leap knocked me over again, but the spear had struck home. The cat twisted and contorted itself, trying to get a paw on the stick wagging in its neck.

I grabbed at the spear, got lucky, then braced myself and tried to force the beast toward the second pit, but even with half its head crushed and a spurting hole in its windpipe, Godzilla-Garfield was still intent on killing me.

One rear paw slid over the edge of the pit into empty space, but the thing began to push back hard against the spear, as if it knew what I planned. So I let go of the spear and threw myself at the giant cat, hitting the creature low in its body, right in the ribs. My weight and momentum pushed it flailing and snarling over the edge. I went with it, but most of my body landed on the rim of the pit, and Clarence caught my leg.

It may not have been a real cat, it may have bled gray, but it died just like any desperate, angry living thing on those sharpened stakes at the bottom of the hole. Not that I spent long watching it.

“Where's Sam?” I gasped as I used Clarence's arm to pull myself back to safety.

“In the house.” Clarence had reached some kind of battle clarity, exhaustion and fear canceling each other. His voice was like a robot's.

“Then let's fucking run,” I suggested.

I stole one look back at Anaita, who did not appear too upset by the destruction of her pets. Made sense if they were things she'd just made, but it didn't help my plan any: I wanted her angry. Not to the point of burning down the house and all the rest of us with one pissed-off gesture, but close to it. Clarence and I dug across the drifting snow and black ash toward the building. Luckily for us, Anaita felt no need to hurry.

“Duck!” I shouted at Clarence as we burst through the door. I grabbed his head and bent him down to keep him from getting tangled. “She's coming!” I shouted to everyone else. Not that they needed to be told. The door we had dragged shut behind us simply flew apart, with a
snap-snap-snap
chorus of broken timbers and a
whuff
of displaced air, then the Angel of Moisture glided through—right into the web of ropes and rattles the pilgrims of Kainos had strung in the entranceway. As she thrashed her way angrily through this minor distraction, several Kainos men and women stood up from their hiding places on the second floor landing, screaming wordless battle cries (okay, shrieks of pent-up terror) and letting their arrows fly. None of them had been living in this place long enough to become marksmen, but enough of the wooden arrows struck Anaita to make her cry out in rage. She ripped loose those that pierced her, flinging them away as though they were no more than burrs and stickers from a walk in the country.

As the archers fired, others all over the house began pounding on the walls with tree limbs and shaking their rattles, making so much noise that even I lost track for a moment of where I was and what I was doing. Then a chance arrow struck Anaita right between the eyes.

If she'd been human it would have killed her, but of course she wasn't. Still, it got her attention. She turned to look in the direction of the archers, her face contorting in a mask of fury; then the stairs leading up to the second floor simply flew apart, like an explosion without the explosion. The pieces of wood hurtled in all directions. One of the larger fragments hit Clarence in the leg and knocked him flying. Several of the Kainos pilgrims went down and didn't get up.

But Anaita's sudden attack on the screaming archers and other noisemakers had snapped me back into gear. Even as stair boards turned into wooden shrapnel, I dropped to my knees and crawled across the main room toward the wooden box where the Mecca cube—and something else—was hidden. This was the crucial bit, and if the thing wasn't there waiting for me, well, Anaita would have the leisure to shred us into component molecules and spread us around her invented world like dandelion seeds in a tornado. And I would go wherever angels wind up when a very powerful, very angry higher angel decides to dispose of them.

Still on my hands and knees, with broken boards raining down all around me, I reached up and opened the doors of the cabinet, then felt along the inside, just in front of the Mecca cube. It was there.

Anaita had brushed aside the distractions of the doorway like they were cobwebs, shredding the hand-carved rattles and the rope curtains knotted full of sticks and clattering stones. She was crackling with energy that bent the air around her, and she had a look on her face that I wouldn't have wanted to see on a five-year-old having a tantrum, let alone on one of the most powerful beings in the universe.

“Wait!”
I shouted, and scrambled to my feet.

She turned to me and the anger simply vanished. She became cold as a statue. “You.” That was all she said.

I knew I had perhaps a second, maybe two, so I held up the thing I'd taken from the cabinet. “Just thought you should see this first,” I said, showing her the horn.

Cold as a statue? No, colder. Like an ice storm turning the sky black. Like the front of a glacier just before it rolled over you and ground you into the earth. “What,” she said, “is
that?
”

“This? Come on, you know what this is.” I hefted the bloodshot ivory thing in my hand, bounced it once or twice. It weighed a little more than I would have expected—not as much as a curved, four inch piece of ordinary horn, more like a petrified souvenir. The whole universe had come down to something the size of a paperweight. “This is Eligor's horn. I found it. And he's coming for it.”

And just like that, Eligor was there. No burning line in the air, no dramatic blast of light and smoke and brimstone, he was just . . . there. In his Kenneth Vald face and body, dressed as though he was going to receive the Entrepreneur of the Decade award from some grateful civic body.

“Greetings, Angel of Moisture,” he said.

Anaita looked at him, then at me, then at the horn I held cradled in my hand. “What nonsense is this? What are you doing here, Eligor?”

“Don't I have a right to be here?” He smiled. “Didn't I help you build this place?”

She didn't smile back. “You and I made a bargain, Grand Duke. Would you interfere now? Are you very certain you wish to do that?”

“Who's interfering? I've just come to have some of my property returned. Angel Doloriel? I believe you have something of mine.”

“Impossible.” That was all she said, but there was a lot going on behind that single stony word and that mask of chilly indifference.

“Right here.” And I flipped him the horn. I watched it spin through the air toward him. Every living creature in that big room watched it too, all the pilgrims cowering on the stairs, even Anaita herself. He caught it with the ease of a man reaching out his hand to see if it was raining. Then it dissolved into a cloud of starry light, and Eligor absorbed it.

For half a second everything seemed frozen. Anaita hadn't moved, but it seemed like something was heating up inside her. I could feel a pressure beating out from her, a force that could devastate everything in the church-shaped house. “Impossible,” she said again, but she sounded less certain now, maybe even confused. “Conspiracy!”

I held my breath. The next few seconds would tell. If everything went right, then maybe, just maybe . . .

“Don't, mistress! It's a trick!”

Ed Walker half-ran, half-tumbled down the stairs from the second level. He caught the string of his bow on a newel post and instead of untangling it, simply let it go. The bow sprang back, swung hard around the post, and clattered to the steps just as he reached ground level and threw himself down on his face in front of Anaita.

“Ed, no!” someone shouted from the upper floor, a cry of genuinely astonished horror.

“Mistress,
you
built this place for us, not these others!” Walker's words came fast and breathless. “Not these so-called angels who've brought us nothing but death and destruction.” He looked at me and glared. “Don't fall for their tricks. Don't take our home away because of them. It's not true—that's not the horn you had, that's Eligor's
other
horn. He and the angel worked this up together. It's a trick!”