Paul looked around, taking stock. The access hatch had delivered them to the power station end of the first tailrace tunnel, the older one. They found themselves on a narrow balcony—more of a catwalk, really—which stopped at a flimsy-looking railing a few steps away. The catwalk hung above utter darkness, the only light a dim emergency lamp above the door which did nothing to dispel the blackness below; indeed, seemed only to accentuate it. They could hear the sound of rushing water.
Something else collapsed in the chamber behind the closed door. Paul, who was still leaning against it, felt the vibration in his whole body. Things creaked and rumbled in deep shuddering bursts all around them. It was as if the Earth itself was groaning at the weight of this creature that had just been born in front of them.
Fiana looked at Jack, a touch of fear in her eyes. “Can you get us out?”
Another explosion behind them made the steel door suddenly start to look oddly fragile and precarious, and the catwalk itself shivered under their feet. All of them except Jack instinctively moved back against the bare stone wall. The taniwha reached for the railing instead, and hoisted himself on top of it.
“I’m going to try,” he said, turning back to the others. “I need to see what’s down there. Wait here.”
He paused briefly, turning to face them, hesitating as though he wanted to say something else—but then apparently decided against it. With a suddenness that made Fiana cry out and surge forward after him, he let go and fell backwards into the darkness.
“He said wait, Fiana!” Paul said urgently, grabbing her by the shoulder, none too gently. “He might stand a chance in whatever is down there, I don’t know—but you wouldn’t. Come back here!”
Sabrina had not moved since they had pushed, pulled and cajoled her into this dank hole. She stood staring listlessly out into the dark void into which Jack had disappeared. Paul had never thought of himself as someone particularly sensitive to the emotions of others – but Sabrina’s loss radiated from her as though it had been a physical thing, heavy, all-enveloping. When he could finally no longer stand it, he turned and drew her to him in a fierce embrace, holding her, helpless at the weight of her pain.
“He is gone, Sabrina. That… thing… in there—that is Gregor, too.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I know…”
Another blast behind them, and this time they felt the balcony shudder beneath their feet and give way slightly. It was a matter of time. Perhaps the very next explosion... “Please hurry,” Fiana said softly, directing her plea in no particular direction.
Paul started to reply, and then drew his breath in sharply as the darkness in front of him suddenly seemed to take shape. The solid blackness became even more solid, and then he could make out an outline of a raised wing. And then he saw a pale glow, and recognized the shape of an eye, level with his own face, and not much smaller in size.
The dragon shape of the taniwha rose in front of them, huge black wings, confined by the tunnel walls, reaching out for them. “Paul. Give me Sabrina first, then Fiana. One at a time.”
It was Jack’s voice, but larger, deeper. Paul realised he was gaping, but then he was jolted into action by something else, something echoing through the mountain itself and rising inside him. Something was breaking, something could no longer hold. They had to get out. They had to get out now.
He was still holding Sabrina, who seemed to have completely given up. She hadn’t spoken or moved after that last despairing I know, clinging to Paul as if he was the last spar in a storm-tossed ocean of a world. He put her away, at an arm’s length, his hands on her shoulders, and looked into her face. “Sabrina. Over the railing. Jump. Jack will catch you.”
She looked at him blankly, and he shook her, hard. “Sabrina, do you understand?”
Sabrina blinked, and then seemed to return from that place inside herself she had retreated to. “Jack.”
Paul nodded. “Jack will catch you,” he repeated, as if he were speaking to a small child. “Now go!”
He steered her to the railings, and she obeyed him, stiffly climbing over them and perching precariously on the other side for a moment before letting go and falling into the darkness that was Jack.
Paul clenched his jaw as he helped Fiana across, again feeling the groaning of the earth rise through him. “Hurry!”
She scrambled over, and was gone.
Paul hesitated, waiting to give Jack a chance to settle his second ‘passenger’, but they were out of time. A final explosion made the catwalk shudder heavily and then metal struts groaned as they were torn from their moorings. Paul felt the solid platform drop away from his feet, scrambled to find purchase, and finally fell, helpless, closing his eyes. The sudden flash of blue light around him told him that the steel door had been blown clear across the tunnel.
He had heard that one’s whole life flashed before one’s eyes in the instant before dying. If that was true, then he was a dead man. Images shuffled themselves rapidly in his brain, a pack of cards in the hands of a master gambler, almost too fast for him to catalogue them— small barefoot boy running on a beach of black volcanic sand, with tiny chips of quartz embedded and shimmering in the blue-black like distant stars, leaving him dizzy with the feeling of walking upon the vacuum of space… an older boy, on a hunting trip in the mountains with his father…a student bent over a book, the dimly remembered walls of his university’s library rearing around him… a beardless adolescent raising his head from his first kiss, giddy with joy, the face of the beloved shadowed and only dimly remembered, the only real handle on her identity the wealth of reddish hair that haloed her head…romping with the mutt his family had rescued from the local animal shelter, the dog was a decade dead by now…sharing a companionable cigarette in a hunting camp with a smiling, dark-eyed Mike sitting in the firelight… Sabrina’s face in the moonlight outside Uncle Bob’s ‘cottage’ in the substation…
Then he felt something touch him, and he was suddenly cradled in the leathery but oddly soft wing of the taniwha, an almost tangible sense of sanctuary in the hellfire that burned all around them, thrown against Sabrina. He grabbed for her, desperate to feel her humanity. Something hit the taniwha, throwing him back towards the tunnel wall, and then he folded his wings, pushed away against the rock, and dived into the water, allowing the current to carry him with it.
They plunged, down, into the unknown. The darkness was complete, utterly black, almost solid. Claustrophobic. Paul felt the batlike texture of the taniwha’s wing around him, protecting him from the rock face and the cold water that once in a while splashed up and quickly left him soaked to the bone and shivering. Next to him he felt the shape of Sabrina’s body, knowing it was her, the sense of her presence strong beside him even though it was impossible to see anything. He had no idea where Fiana was, or if the taniwha had managed to save her at all. The sound of rushing water echoed around them, drowning out all other sound except for muted bursts of explosions behind them. Other than for the sound of the running water and the solid sense of the wing wrapped around them, they were in total sensory deprivation; it was impossible to tell if time was passing, or how fast they were travelling. Paul knew that if he survived this he would never be able to adequately describe any of this to anybody else; he also knew that he himself would never forget it, that all of this was being written into his DNA. It was a nightmare, he thought, the stuff nightmares were made of, the thing that made a man start awake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, in terror and in sudden gratitude that he found himself in the safety of a solid and comfortable bed. Except that he wasn’t waking up from any of this. He was already awake, and it was all real.
Paul had thought of Manapouri as his, as a place that he had worked on, he had built, a place he knew. Now he was in its bowels, and he felt like Jonah in the belly of the whale. It was alien, grim, hostile. He knew nothing about Manapouri at all.
There was a drop, an enormous splash, and they were abruptly and unexpectedly submerged completely under water. Paul barely had time to gasp a mouthful of air, and then held his breath more by instinct than anything else. It must have lasted a handful of seconds, less than a minute, but he felt as though he needed to breathe or die; and just as he expelled his held breath and braced himself for inhaling water… there was a sudden jerk which made Paul grab for a more secure hold, and then he realised that it was the dragon’s claws that held them all now, as Jack’s wings had unfurled and caught the wind. Just like that, very suddenly, they were out—drenched, bedraggled, but out, in open air. Paul had time to notice, very briefly, a grate which had been wrenched free from the tunnel mouth, lying twisted in the bushes.
“Well done, Jack,” Paul wheezed, almost to himself; he had precious little breath to speak. “I had forgotten the grate.”
“Hold on a moment longer.” The voice was still the dragon’s, the taniwha’s. He had spread his dragon’s wings and now circled twice above the Sound looking for a place to land.
“Not too close!” Paul squeaked again. “This place is about to…”
The dragon wasted no time in veering away and going further into the Sound. There was light around them, bright sunshine from a clear blue sky. The place was magically beautiful but damnably impractical for their immediate purposes; in particular, it had a real dearth of good landing sites. The fiord was surrounded by steep, glacially scoured mountain-sides, full of picturesque rainforest and the occasional spectacular waterfall, but not many places for a dragon to find a foothold. Jack hovered for what seemed an inordinately long time, and finally zeroed in on a small island, no more than a rock jutting semi-horizontally over the water, circling in to land, settling himself down gently and releasing his hold on his passengers.
Paul rolled onto his feet with a modicum of grace and helped Sabrina to hers; Fiana stayed on the ground, curled up at the dragon’s side.
“I didn’t think we would make it,” Paul said frankly.
The dragon shimmered, flickered around the edges, and suddenly it was Jack standing there, a small smile playing around the corners of his mouth. He helped Fiana to her feet. “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said.
“I meant… I didn’t mean it that way…” Paul fumbled for the words. He never was good at this kind of thing.
“He means thank you,” Sabrina said.
Jack inclined his head a fraction. “You’re welcome,” he said.
Sabrina’s eyes wandered restlessly over the thickly wooded slopes, avoiding the head of the fiord for as long as she could—but, finally, she had to turn and look at what they had just left behind. At a deceptively quiet mountainside covering a devastating secret underneath its innocent birch-clad skin of rock and earth.
“We ought to be on the other side of that, the lake side, the side where civilisation is within reasonable reach,” Paul muttered, following her gaze. “That thing is about to blow apart any minute, and we’re stuck on the far side of what will very soon be a vision of hell. No way for anyone to come get us. No way for anyone to even know we’re here.”
“What about Jack?” Sabrina said.
“What about him?”
“He could get over there, he doesn’t have to walk it—he could go get help…”
“If he told anyone that the Manapouri Power Station is about to implode, they’d laugh at him,” Paul said, “and then they would probably arrest him, when it did blow up as he said it would, for planting the explosives. People are notoriously loath to believe bad news.”
“But we have to do something…” Sabrina said urgently.
“Sabrina, it’s already done,” said Paul. “We left rubble behind. It’s a matter of time before it all collapses to hell-and-gone.” His words were harsh, but his eyes were very soft as he looked at her. He knew where she was coming from—he knew her concerns were less for the station than for the entity they had left behind there.
“I could…” Jack began, but then they were all interrupted by a sudden soft exclamation from Fiana. When they all turned to look at her, she was standing very still, looking out into the waters of the Sound.
“Or maybe there could be others who could help,” she said. “Can you see them? Over there?”
It was Sabrina who first noticed what Fiana was gazing at with a curious half smile on her face. “Seals,” she said. “There, by the rocks. On the far side.”
Paul’s head whipped around. “Are they…?”
“I don’t know,” Fiana said. “We’ll soon find out. I just called to them… ah!”
One of the seals had turned its head as Fiana was speaking, and then another; and then those that had been on the rocks turned and tumbled back into the water. Several smooth heads broke surface, swimming from the far shore towards the small promontory on which the four castaways had landed.
“Five,” Sabrina said. “I think I can see five of them.”
“Seven,” said Fiana, a little complacently. “They’re on their way.”
“Selkies?” Paul said. “Here?”
“They are probably called something else here, but we are everywhere,” Fiana said. “Here they come.”
There were seven, as Fiana had said. The seals clambered up on a tumble of boulders on the waterline, one by one; and then one of them, a large male, shrugged his massive shoulders and emerged from his seal shape. The discarded seal skin folded at his feet. Three others of his kind followed, two other males and a female. The others remained in their seal shapes, wary, waiting.
They were dark, like Fiana, but built much more sturdily than she was. They stood naked on the rocks, their wet hair slicked back on their heads.
“You called us. You are one of us, but you are not of our folk,” said the first male to have changed, his voice guarded. “How is it you are here? And who are these others with you?”
“I am Fiannuala, daughter of Naoise,” Fiana said. Hers was the older of the selkie clans, her lineage longer than these New World kindreds, and she was royal here, and proud. “I come in oathkeeping, in fulfilment of a vow made to my father who is gone. I come as guardian to one born of our people and of mortal kind, my sister.” Her graceful hand indicated Sabrina, who stood silent, watching. It was all very well, being told about this, but this was the first time she had been faced with a real example of what lay behind the stories. Sabrina was aware that she was staring, but something had reached out and clutched at her heart when the first selkie had metamorphosed into his human form. This is what my mother saw once, this is what my father must have appeared to her like, this is what I was born of…
But the selkie’s only response to her presence had been a quick apprising look as Fiana had identified her. And Fiana was still speaking.
“We crossed the lake, and unknowingly broke a tapu of the taniwha of the lake,” she said, laying a hand briefly on Jack’s arm. Jack nodded at the Doubtful Sound selkie, in greeting. “The other man is Paul, one of the builders of the underground dam.”
“We felt the earth shudder,” the selkie woman said. “What has happened to the dam?”
These might have been Fiana’s distant kinfolk, but they did not know her, and they did not trust her. The dam had been a part of their world, and in some ways Fiana had just done what Paul had said Jack would find it hard to do—she was coming to strangers bearing bad news. At best she would not be easily believed and at worst she would be blamed for it.
“The dam is destroyed,” Fiana said at last, after a pause. “We came here fleeing its destruction. And if you are truly kin with my folk back home in Eire, then these words will mean something to you: he is knocking on Heaven’s Gate.”
She had spoken with knowledge, with a sure and firm comprehension, and her three erstwhile companions all turned sharply to look at her. All of them—the taniwha, the mortal who was Hunter, the lost half-selkie child—had learned of the identity of the dark angel in the power station pretty much at the bitter end of things, and none of them had known what was supposed to happen next. But Fiana had just spoken words which had sounded like the fulfilment of prophecy, as though she knew more than she had told them, as though she understood it all, had always understood it all.
With a handful of words she seemed to have crossed away from them and had taken her place with her selkie kin—on whom the effect of her words were instant, and electrifying.
A mixture of doubt and eagerness flooded the eyes of the three male selkies in human form, but there was no such pause from their companion.
“He is here?” demanded the woman selkie, her voice betraying incredulity, understanding, fierce joy. “It is time?”
“How do you know this?” demanded one of the selkie males who had not yet spoken.
“I have seen him,” Fiana said.
The male selkie who had spoken first, after what looked like a stern internal debate, finally won over his own doubts and went so far as to smile, relaxing for the first time. “At last,” he breathed. “I had not thought I would live to witness this. It was in my great-grandfather’s time that we were cast down, five hundred human years ago…” He turned his head a fraction and two of the other selkies, the ones who had stayed in their seal shape, slithered off the rocks and back into the water, swimming purposefully back towards the place where the Sound met the sea.
“They go to summon the rest of our people… I am Tane,” the spokesman selkie said, finally offering the gift of his own name, “and these are Eru, and Taiaho, and Aroha. We thank you for your news, Fiannuala of Eire. We must prepare to receive...”
Aroha, the female selkie, suddenly pointed at the sky. “Look!” she cried exultantly. “It comes!”
“What is that?” Paul said, staring.
Up in the cloud-flecked blue sky a pinpoint of very bright light had appeared, and now grew until it was a fiery disc, a small second sun in the heavens.
“That,” said Fiana calmly, “is the gate of Heaven. My people have no holy books—how could we?—but we have passed down the legends of our origins for centuries, father to daughter, mother to son. The stories of where we came from, and of the place where one day we were fated to return.”
“To Heaven?” said Paul sceptically. “I never thought I’d live to meet an angel.”
Jack cleared his throat, and Paul actually flushed.
“All right, I take your point,” he said. “All the same…”
But Sabrina was thinking back—to Marco’s voice in the stone tunnels of the doomed power station. We were one; we were broken when we were cast down; there would come a day when we will be reunited.
“…Reunited,” she whispered, more to herself than to anyone within hearing range. “Reunited, and going back to the high place from whence he fell…”
“What?” said Paul, turning on her.
“Something that Marco told me, back at the station,” she murmured.
Tane looked at her. “Who is this Marco?”
“One of the earth-bound halves of your angel,” Sabrina said, and her eyes glittered with tears.
Tane stared at her with obsidian eyes. “You spoke to…him?” he demanded. “A mortal…?”
“He always spoke to mortals, Tane,” the selkie he had identified as Eru said. “So all the stories of him tell.”
Aroha half-spoke, half-chanted something in liquid Maori syllables, her eyes still on the sky and what had appeared there. The disc of light had started, very slowly, to iris into an opening. There was an outer edge of brightness, but what poured out from the centre was brighter still, a pure blue-white light almost too painful to look upon.
Tane’s face lit up with a swift, luminous smile.
“Home,” he breathed.
“You,” said Jack, “have never seen Heaven.”
“You do not think that my memory of it is as bright if I receive it from my ancestors than if I laid my own eyes on it, taniwha?” Tane demanded. “You do not forget your own legacy!”
“I have lived it,” said Jack. There was nothing in his voice or his attitude that showed it overtly, but Sabrina suddenly caught a sharp sense of dislike.
It was mutual. Tane shot Jack a smouldering look. “From a long exile,” he said, “we are close to going home at last. You do not understand. You cannot. When they exiled the one we followed, we were expelled with him—many of us. We have never forgotten. We have always lived with the dream of returning, we have passed that dream on to those who came after us. We were immortal, then—on this plane our lives are long, longer than most are given, but we die in the end. Those who have gone, who have not seen this day, will never again know the light of Heaven. We who are here mourn for them.”
“They come,” Eru said suddenly, pointing at the water. They were far away still, but it was possible to discern a number of small swimming forms approaching the island. Tane bent to retrieve the sealskin at his feet, and then turned to look squarely at Fiana.
“You are not one of us, but you are our kin and this is our hour,” he said. “We go to make ready. Will you come?”
“No.”
“You have forgotten what it means, to be fire,” Tane said, with something that was almost accusatory in his voice. He looked up at the bright sky, and the naked hunger on his face made Paul’s hackles rise.
“No,” said Fiana again. The monosyllable was stark, and under the sudden concerted gaze of half a dozen pairs of eyes, Fiana’s smile was a thing of beauty and danger. “I do not forget fire,” she said, and the memory of it was there in her voice, her words glowing with it. “Not now, when I can see the ancient legends of my people coming alive around me. But this...” She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture which included the fiord, the thickly wooded mountainside that rose behind the small group on the bank, the lace tracery of a thin trickle of water which whispered down the sheer rock face across the width of the fiord. “This, I remember too. This is the world of my spirit. This is the world that he whom we followed has also loved well, enough to die for it again and again…”
Aroha narrowed her eyes. “He is immortal, he has always been immortal…”
“Then why do you think he stays for this world? For all the other worlds which he has walked? They should mean nothing to him—they are ephemeral, they shrivel and die in a blink of his immortal eye. What is his reason for returning to them over and over again, for teaching their people, for dreaming their people’s dreams…?”
Aroha started to reply, but found herself arguing against the leader her people had followed all the long years, decades, centuries of their existence. To her, this world had always been exile, unearned, unfair; she was here because kinsfolk in her distant past had been followers of the bright angel and who were caught up in his fall…
“I did not ask to be here,” she said at last, encapsulating her dilemma.
“But he chose to be,” Fiana said.
“He was cast down, and cast out!” Eru protested. “That was not choice!”
“Yes,” Fiana said, “it was.” She paused, looked around at Sabrina. “You have known the story in your own lifetimes. It happens that one of our kin loves a mortal, it happens that they share children together. But let me tell you of my father, of the promise that brought me here…”
<<>>
The man was deeply wrinkled, his hands gnarled as if with extreme old age, his hair thin and grey; the girl beside him, slim and dark and graceful, could have been his granddaughter. Other than the contrast between youth and age which they personified so perfectly, they were unremarkable, sitting by themselves at a small table which had once been a barrel, nursing glasses of Guinness. The pub was crowded and noisy around them, but for the two around the barrel it was as though it was empty but for themselves and for the young woman who stood behind the shiny lacquered bar, passing pints of frothy beer across the counter.
“But why…?” the girl seated beside the old man looked faintly mutinous. “What could possibly happen to her…? She could be slapped by a drunken customer? She could slip on a wet floor and crack her head on the counter? What use can I possibly be, looking out for her—what could I do? What am I supposed to do—go hit the hitter, go break the counter? What could possibly happen to her that I could have any way of preventing…?”
“It is not accidents or the irrational actions of drunks that I speak of, Fiannuala, my Fiana,” said the wrinkled man. “It is being there when she needs you.”
“When have you ever been there for her, father? Fiana said, a little nastily. “You yourself said that she has no knowledge of you. You have never told her who you were.”
“But she has never needed me, not in a way that I could help her,” said Naoise, Fiana’s father. “And I know, I know it in my bones, that she will. That she will need someone who cares about what happens to her.”
“Why me…?” asked Fiana helplessly. “I love my life. This is a horrible, crowded, smelly city… you want me to leave Eire and all the green beauty and the bright sea and you want me to come here to watch over someone I don’t even know… why me?”
“Because I love you, and I trust you,” said Naoise. “You, of all my children, I trust to protect your sister when she needs to have someone stand between her and darkness.”
“Why me…?” Fiana repeated, but with resignation.
“Love,” said Naoise.
<<>>
Tane was frowning. “You are betraying your inheritance,” he said, frowning.
“We were free to choose,” said Fiana. “Then, as now. I betray nothing. But it does not matter, Tane. My choices are few right now.” She tilted her head very slightly, allowing her eyes to drop briefly to the sealskin at Tane’s feet. “My own skin lies at the bottom of Lake Manapouri.”
She had her back to Jack in the instant that she said that, and could not possibly have seen his reaction to her words—all the same, with an unerring instinct, she whirled to face him almost before she had finished speaking, with the name of the lake still on her lips, in time to see him shift, change, his body elongating and exploding and darkening into that intense blackness that was the essence of him. He reared up, mantling the great dragon wings.
“Jack, no!”
Her cry was too late—Jack leapt into the sky, so deeply black that he seemed to suck the coruscating light right into him, and Sabrina was disconcertingly reminded of the first time that she had met him, and their obscure, seemingly irrelevant discussion on the deck of the doomed ferry, on a day that now seemed to have been a thousand years ago.
Black absorbs all things...
He circled overhead once, looking for air currents, and then he dropped into a dive, levelling off barely above the surface of the water. He kept low until he reached the edge of land, and then spiralled up, climbing the thermals, and was gone, back up the pass, the way they had come from the station where the grate still lay twisted into the underbrush. But this time he angled overland, across an earth that heaved and rumbled beneath him.
And even as he passed over it and flew out of sight behind the fold of the mountain, that gargantuan swell of rock and crumbling earth suddenly cracked open to reveal another blackness, this one so bright that Sabrina cried out and covered her eyes.
“Lord!” This was torn from Tane’s throat as he watched Lucifer rise from his womb of the earth, a black sun, rivalling the light of Heaven above him, a huge and darkly glowing shape now unfurling shadow-bright wings which stretched the breadth of the mountain. Beneath him, the ground crumbled, disintegrated, caving into a gigantic crater at his feet. He hovered above it, on thin air.
UP!
If they had thought the voice of the Dark Angel had been given its echoing resonance and power by the confines of the cavern where they had first heard it, the three who had just escaped the ruin and destruction in the wake of Lucifer’s birth were quickly disabused of that notion—out here in the open space the voice was even more thunderous than ever. It made the stone beneath their feet shudder, and the surface of the fiord shivered like a glass of water at the distant step of a monster.
The sky changed again; the opening Fiana had called Heaven’s Gate irised open even further, and poured living light down on Lucifer. The Dark Angel lifted a hand, and an invisible shield seemed to be in it as the light of Heaven hit and ricocheted off... nothingness. And Lucifer laughed. A deep, rumbling laugh that seemed to shake the earth he stood on, and made Sabrina’s blood run ice with pure raw terror. And his other hand was suddenly a blade of blinding black radiance that was the essence of him. He leapt towards the white light that streamed down at him, and where they met they left a trail of blue-white sparks which fell to the ground and touched off a tree here and there, the flames enveloping whole birches in an instant with an ominous whoosh which Sabrina and the others heard without diminution. The trees burned like torches. The air smelled of ozone.
“Lord! We come!”
Paul and Sabrina turned to Tane and his companions; already the selkies were wrapping their grey sealskins around their shoulders, changing, falling inwards into the seal shape they had worn for so many years, waddling in almost comical haste towards the water.
“Wait,” Sabrina said, flinging out a hand.
Tane had already gone, one of the first to shroud himself. There were only two remaining in human form, one already changing.
“Why do you stay us?” the last one left standing asked. “Our Lord calls...”
“But he is...”
“Sabrina.”
Fiana’s voice distracted her, and she glanced back; by the time she returned her gaze to the Sound selkie he was gone, and the last seal was falling into the cold black waters of the fiord.
“I only wanted to tell him...” Sabrina began helplessly, and then winced as Paul’s hand closed around her arm like a vise.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “Look!”
The water of the fiord had begun to froth and bubble as though it was about to boil. From this would-be cauldron rose a creature at which Sabrina and Paul stared in stunned shock. Coming out of the water it was still recognisable as a seal shape, a seal that was standing upright on its back fins, holding the two front fins out like misshapen wings—and as they watched the seal began to dissolve into something else, a shape that grew and brightened until it was dazzling white-and-golden light. The flippers blossomed into real wings, wings of fire. The being was followed by others, emerging one by one, changing; they were already many times the size of the seals from which they had arisen, and still growing. There was a hum in the air, a deep chord of something that was less vocal than subliminal, a sound felt by skin rather than heard by ear.
Sabrina realised that Fiana was gazing at the fiery angels flying towards Lucifer with tears in her eyes.
“You... were that?” Sabrina asked.
“There are wings of fire in your blood, too,” Fiana said softly.
Sabrina stared up at the sky, screwing her eyes up against the light. “So is there, really, a God?” she said, her voice level, her question almost rhetorical.
“Probably not,” Fiana said, choosing to take it literally. “Not as you might imagine one.”
Paul laughed. “So much for God and his angels,” he said abruptly.
“God,” Fiana said, “is his angels.” And then she had to laugh at the expression on Paul’s face. “I think you would find that the reality of what you might call Heaven would be a bit hard to take. It is not a place of clouds and harps and human saints. It is not even a place, not somewhere you can follow directions to…” She paused. “I had forgotten. Most of it. But now it all comes back to me, the memories of my race.”
“A state of mind?” said Paul. “The Buddhist Nirvana after all?”
“Paul, it is nothing like any of the human religions ever painted it. From the Gods on Mount Olympus to the disembodied Buddhist belief that everything living is holy—it’s all wrong—and it’s all right. And that…” Fiana gestured at the black angel sparring with the Heaven-light and frowned. “He appears to those who observe him in many different ways. Today he is the black angel. Tomorrow… you may never recognise him.”
“What’s happening up there?” Sabrina had been distracted by more flashes of light, black upon gold upon dazzling electric blue; cascades of light spilled around the Dark Angel as he climbed up steadily towards the effulgent opening in the sky.
“He has been cast down,” Fiana said, in a voice that echoed centuries of legend, “and always, always, he seeks to return... Lucifer, our doom and our saviour...” She turned to Sabrina. “The cycles come and go,” she said. “And there are cycles within cycles. Lucifer has been Cast Down many times, and many times he overcame it—only to be Cast Down again. This is not the first time that Lucifer walked a world; your people have known him before. He changes according to the age he is in—ancient legends know him as Prometheus—or the place he happens to appear in…it was not always your world on which he was cast. I told you—Heaven is not really a place. It is a dimension, a gate that opens on many different realms.”
“And Marco...” that was Sabrina, finding herself suddenly very short of breath. “Marco was…”
“I did not know him when I met him, and I knew of Lucifer,” said Fiana, understanding the words left unspoken. “How were you to know?”
“I should have!” said Sabrina, almost sobbing, her voice full of a brittle defiance that made Paul ache for her. “You said I shared that blood.”
Fiana reached out and smoothed Sabrina’s hair in an oddly motherly gesture. “Even the ones in whom that blood was not mixed with the human blood were forbidden to remember enough to know—until Lucifer returned,” she said. “I had enough hints, at least over the last day and night, to work it all out—I had all the pieces. Yet even I only knew at the end, when I first saw Lucifer reborn.”
Something bright spiralled out of the sky, falling helplessly and out of control—before it hit the water and quickly sank beneath the surface, still glowing, the three saw that it had once been an angel of fire. The shape and the form were still there. But now it was a dead ember, a dying flame, and Fiana flinched. “The price,” she whispered, “is ever high.”
“What is he trying to do?” Paul asked, his eyes riveted on the black star that was Lucifer.
“That which you see around him... that is Heaven’s Gatekeeper,” said Fiana. “In this Cycle, he has yet to succeed in getting past that. After... well, there is the Sword to face again.”
“Michael,” said Sabrina, fighting to recall her knowledge of the scriptural Lucifer, and marry it with what she had learned in recent days from Gregor and from Marco. “The Archangel.”
“What your people have called Michael,” said Fiana. “He is so much more than an Archangel. And so much less.”
“This...” Paul said, squinting sideways at the light from the heavens, now so bright that he could not look directly at all without permanent damage to eyesight, “this is just the gatekeeper?”
“We all had power up there,” Fiana said, “except that some of us had more power than others.”
“Sounds like good Marxist philosophy,” said Paul, with grim amusement.
Something exploded a long way away, and they thought they could feel the shockwave from that explosion where they stood. Sabrina staggered, feeling the stone underneath her feet shudder.
“This place is coming apart!” she cried, reaching out to Paul for balance.
Fiana smiled sadly. “Right here is probably the safest place you could possibly be,” she said, “underneath Lucifer’s own shield. All the energy up there is being... deflected. Somewhere else. The entire Pacific Rim is probably blowing up right now. Earthquakes and floods and eruptions. California, Japan. There must be things going up in smoke even as we watch this.”
“So Uncle Bob was right,” Paul said, with a grimace. “The end of the world has come. They don’t know what’s hit them; they must think it’s the wrath of God…”
He paused, bit his lip. The memory of Jack’s eloquent eyebrow shooting up at his previous blunder returned to haunt him, catching him in another verbal stumble.
But Sabrina was thinking further afield. “Cornwall? London?” She might be at odds with her father, with the man she had always known as her father, but he was the only real family she could claim, and the house in Cornwall where she had grown up was a place where she could still anchor happy memories, of a time before her mother had died.
“Elsewhere, too—even the old stable places…” said Fiana. Her eyes clouded; she had her own memories, her own family, and her mind went arrowing back to them now. “My poor Donegal... I wonder how my people are faring in my own country?”
For a moment or two they were all silent, all lost in their own thoughts, and then Sabrina looked up again, towards the mountain which had been Lucifer’s womb and which now lay blasted open to the battle in the sky. Something had moved in her line of vision... something had attracted her attention... she squinted, focused, and she had it.
“Look!” she said, pointing.
Paul squinted in the direction which she was indicating, and frowned. “What? I can’t see anything!”
“It’s Jack,” Fiana said, without looking up.
The black dot on the brightness of the sky soon resolved itself into the now familiar winged shape of the taniwha, flying erratically, as though caught by unexpected updrafts, obstacles or explosions. It took him a while to negotiate the chaos which had exploded after his departure, and for a while they lost sight of him entirely—he seemed to have flown straight into Lucifer’s gigantic shape and been swallowed by it. But then they saw him again, ducking under the sword of black light with the nimbleness and defiance of a precocious child escaping judgment and punishment, and then Lucifer was behind him and he was winging his way to them across the Sound. Lucifer didn’t seem to have even been aware of him, a mere gnat, less than a sand fly in the face of what was going on at the head of the fiord. Jack circled the island twice and then landed, too fast and a little awkwardly, blurring himself back into human form beside them almost before he had fully got his feet on the ground.
“Looks like the battle started without me,” he said laconically. He carried a limp, wet grey bundle, and Sabrina instinctively reached for Paul’s hand as she realised that it must be Fiana’s selkie skin, that part of her that could unlock the shape of the angel and open her way home. Jack now held it out to the dark girl with something almost like a scowl on his face. His words, however, were uttered in a voice completely at odds with his expression, very soft. “Choice,” he said simply.
Fiana took the skin without a word, and fingered it gently, never taking her eyes off Jack’s face. Then she lifted her gaze to where the black glow of Lucifer and the golden gleam of his escort of fiery angels were still rising into the hole in the sky which was pouring light down onto the Earth. Paul and Sabrina held their breath. Jack waited.
Fiana shook out the skin, like a cloak; Sabrina had to stop a soft whimper from rising to her lips. But then the selkie unexpectedly gave the open skin a twist and flung it up into the Heavenly light with all her strength. It spread out, began to glimmer around the edges as though it was on the brink of its fiery metamorphosis—but then, with no body within it to give it substance and form, it flashed into bright flame and incinerated itself even as they looked. A flake of fine grey ash came floating down and landed like a small black butterfly on Fiana’s outstretched hand. She closed her fingers on it, very gently, and yet with a startling savagery that made Sabrina flinch. And then Fiana turned to Jack.
“This,” she said in a lilting, storyteller voice, “is the tale of how Chu Cullin got his name...”
Jack bellowed something inarticulate, a sound caught midway between rage and pain.
“It was a promise made, te taniwha o manapouri,” Fiana said.
“I would not have held you...”
“I know,” she interrupted gently. “But in the end my father’s choice is the only one that I could make.”
“You stay... for what?” Jack demanded.
“For this place. For the world I love.” She half-turned to Sabrina. “For the sake of promises I have yet to keep.”
She smiled, and the smile was luminous; Sabrina found herself thinking that her half-sister had never looked more like an angel in the instant in which she renounced her immortality and her fiery inheritance. It was as though that act of renunciation was a redemption for her, a release from the endless cycles that she had spoken of.
“For you,” said Fiana, locking her gaze with Jack’s, “if you will have me.” She hesitated for a moment, and then said, her voice low, “It will not be forever, taniwha. I chose, and I cast away the length of the days which might have been granted to me under the selkie skin. I live as a human now. No longer than that. If you will take those terms…”
Jack took her hand, the one still closed around the ashes of her past, in both of his own, and kissed it.
Fiana’s breath came out in a deep sigh; she swayed towards Jack, closing her eyes, and he put one arm around her, folding her hand against his chest. She was no longer watching the sky, her face hidden against Jack’s shoulder; she did not even look up at another explosive exclamation from Paul and Sabrina’s sharp gasp. Only when the quality of the light around them changed abruptly, did she stir and lift her head. The sky was itself again, pale blue overlaid with streamers of cloud, the only extra light coming from the burning forest on the slopes of the mountain. There was no longer any sign of any presence other than their own.
“He made it,” Fiana said, her voice distant and full of a strange awe. “He actually made it, this time.”
Paul was still staring at the innocent blue sky. “I don’t get it,” he said.
“This place feels… so empty…” Sabrina said, shivering.
“The true wild creatures have fled from the noise and the destruction, and those who were of Heaven have returned to it,” Fiana said. “It is empty. But all will return… all except the angels. They will not be back here… not in this age.”
“Who was he,” Sabrina asked, “really? You said something about your doom and your saviour… what do you mean?”
She was clinging to the memory, to the dream. They all knew it, and the knowledge was written on their faces.
“I will tell you,” Fiana said, “but first it would be good if we left this place…”
“Where is there to go?”
“Manapouri,” Jack said, “and then beyond. The world may have changed but it is still here…”
“It isn’t tea,” said Paul unexpectedly, “and I can’t provide Uncle Bob’s fine china, but if we can find our… my… hunting camp, if it hasn’t been pulverized, I have coffee up there. And something to eat. How about it?”
“The place is pretty broken up,” Jack said. “This side took the brunt of the explosion, but the Manapouri side of the area by the power station is a mess. And anyway, walking back would take hours. I could carry you back, over the mountain, but I don’t think that you’ll find a camp left.”
Paul thought about the Wilmot Pass road, which he was very well acquainted with, and the probable state of the bridges across the handful of streams crossing the road. Jack was right about walking the road, it would be difficult and in some places probably impossible. As for the other…
“Well, we can’t stay here,” he said quietly. “We need to get back. Whether or not the camp is still there. If you are willing to carry us again, that would be a kindness.”
Jack nodded, once, and then the dragon was there again where he had been, stretching out those dark wings. From the vantage point that the taniwha gave them as they flew over what used to be the power station, the damage looked catastrophic. Raw rock covered by landslides of earth and uprooted trees marked the site where the underground cavern had given way. There were fallen trees everywhere, and some were still burning. There was a real danger of a massive forest fire.
It looked no better over the area where Paul thought his hunting camp had been—the same chaos, destruction and desolation. Jack landed them on the beach next to where the ferry jetty used to be—it had completely disappeared, leaving only stumps of wooden pillars in the water. Above and behind them, the mountain was a tragic confusion of broken trees, gaping abysses, and columns of thick grey smoke.
Sabrina stared at it all unhappily. “What happens now?” she asked.
A part of her was asking about Lucifer, but there was something inside her that was screaming at the vision of Marco’s smile on that cloud of black light, as she had last seen it. He had said he would be totally extinguished by the metamorphosis into Lucifer, and yet she could not rid her mind of those last laconic words he had uttered to her: I lied. He had lied about so many things. Yet she still thought about the Dark Angel as something with Marco’s bright spirit, and she shivered at the thought of that having to face the wrath of Heaven.
Or should she be afraid at the thought of the wrath of Heaven facing Lucifer? What exactly was it that she was afraid of…
He would have had to look long and hard for someone who fits your role in this as well as you do.
Marco had said that, but he hadn’t explained anything, not really. Now, at the end, everything should be out in the open—Sabrina tried to put the story together, fumbled at the links in her mind. What was she? What was she supposed to do now…?
She was still lost in those thoughts as Jack found a place to land in the tumbled devastation on the landward side of Manapouri. He deposited them all on the ground and changed back into his human form—and then, because he was Jack and somehow still attuned to her even without the cursed stone she had worn as Uncle Bob’s minion, gave her an encouraging smile.
“There will be,” he said, “a lot of rebuilding to do…”
“But didn’t you say it was him… Lucifer… Prometheus… the dark angel himself… that it was he who walked among us and taught us how to…”
“Yes,” said Fiana. “That was always his calling.”
“But he is gone,” Paul pointed out practically. “If he was supposed to be our guide, we’ve been rather unceremoniously dumped, I’d say.”
“But he gained Heaven,” Sabrina said. “If that means that he has regained his place there… he has come down to teach and to protect from positions of power, hasn’t he? Not ever while he was trying to fight his way back…”
Fiana was looking at her. “Yes…”
“And if he has done that… then there will be a respite… a time when we learn, by rebuilding…”
“Sabrina, you don’t have to wait for wayward angels,” Jack said abruptly. “You’re the Healer, there is so much you can do to put together the things that were broken…”
And that suddenly broke on Sabrina with the force of epiphany.
“Nobody else who fits my place in this as well as I do…” she whispered. “Oh, my God…”
“What is it?” Paul said, immediately protective.
“I did it… it was because I was here that they managed to come together in this place and make that greater being… I killed them, the two halves, to heal the whole…”
“God,” said Paul, remembering the tunnel at the station, the white flower that had healed Fiana. “I think you’re right…”
“He lied again,” Sabrina said. She tried to laugh, started sobbing, buried her face in her hands and fell to her knees.
“I didn’t mean that,” said Jack. “I meant the people out there, who could be hurt…”
“It’s the ferry, all over again,” Sabrina said. “People are hurt, people who should not be hurt, people who are hurt because of the things that I did…”
Fiana knelt gracefully at her side, slipping an arm around her shoulders. “I told you, you could not have known,” she said gently. “You are caught in the wheel. You did not do anything wrong…”
Jack looked at them, huddled together on the edge of a lake which had been made of the tears of two other sisters, long ago, so long ago.
This time, he would not waste the chance. This time, he would do it right.
“They need you,” Jack said, Taunui, the warrior child of an aged Maori chief of long ago. “They need the hand of the Healer.” He turned to Paul. “And the Hunter. The protector. They need you out there. You are the seed from which the rebirth will come. They will learn, but they need time. Go out among them, and give them that time…this is the gift, this is why the part of the angel who had the wisdom chose you, loved you, brought you here…”
Paul scowled, just a little, at the mention of the angel who had chosen and loved the woman his own choice had settled on. But Jack ignored him, reached down to raise Sabrina with one hand, laid her hand in Paul’s.
“Show them how it’s done,” he said.
“What will happen to you now?” Sabrina asked. Paul’s hand had tightened on hers, and she had returned the pressure. There were things between them that were certain now, locked. She could look out, see others, care about other things.
“I will stay here,” Jack said. “It is – ”
“ – ‘my lake’, yes, I know,” Sabrina said with a smile. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes,” said Fiana gently. “We both will.”
Paul lifted his head, scenting the air like a stag. “The wind has changed,” he said.
“Yes, Hunter,” said Jack, smiling. “I will take you across now, to the human side. You make your own way from there. But come and see us sometime. We will be here.”
“What happens now?” Sabrina asked, echoing her own question of a moment ago.
“I don’t know,” said Fiana softly, looking up to where the innocent blue sky overhead made it almost impossible to believe in the existence of what they had glimpsed beyond it. But they had all seen it, they all knew it existed, that somewhere up there a battle still raged. Would always rage. “That is for Heaven to decide.”