“Oh, let’s get on with it, for pity’s sake. How much longer are we going to wait? Everything depends on how quickly we move, how quickly we find it and use it. Surely we all can see that.”
Lily froze as she entered the close, wood-paneled room. There were no windows, and the room itself had a curious quality, as if it were alive, as if the walls themselves heaved in and out with a ragged breath. As if she was in the belly of some large animal.
Rex sniffed the air. He whined.
“Everyone loves a dog, do they?” an amused voice—not the same as the first that spoke—said from the center of the reddish-brown gloom.
Lily blinked. Her eyes began their adjustment to the light. This was difficult after the brilliance of the stars and the Silver Bridge outside, let alone the light of the Moon Itself. But she managed. A person always manages in these circumstances. What is more difficult is to see the stars and the Silver Bridge and the Moon Itself after getting used to the dark.
This was not a difficulty that Lily would escape.
For now, though, she concentrated on the scene in front of her. Four figures, aside from the arrogant one of Livia, sprawled in wide chairs at the room’s heart.
Lily blinked again. Rex growled low in his throat. In an instant, Phoebe was beside them, her hand resting warningly on the dog’s head. He was suddenly quiet.
“I’ve never seen him do that before,” Lily said to Phoebe, startled. Then, remembering where she was, she turned, with a gasp, back to the men.
It didn’t matter though. They hadn’t heard what she’d said.
“I found out later,” she would say to Death on that last long climb of theirs, “that they never heard anything they didn’t expect to. Never. And that this was true all over Megalopolis.”
“It’s true many places in the many worlds,” Death would say.
“But not where we’re heading?” Lily would say tentatively.
“Not where we’re heading,” Death would reassure her, and taking her hand, would pull her along in a race up the next little steep bit of the road. When they got to the tree at the top, they would fall, laughing together, onto the grass beneath it, where they would eat a small lunch that Death had brought, give Rex some water, and look out over the deep valley to the opposite side.
That day, Lily would see that valley with so much gladness that her heart would swell in her chest. Somehow she would know that once they had started down, she would begin to forget everything that had gone before.
But except for Conor—always except for Conor—there was no reason any longer to remember.
As she walked down the road past the willow trees, she said, “No, not Conor. Sophia. That’s why I want to remember. I have to remember Sophia.”
And Death smiled.
So she told me later.
“You know where you are, Lily,” Livia said, smirking with pride through the red-brown gloom. The walls breathed in. The walls breathed out. It was a labored breath. If this room was alive, it was holding on to that life…just.
Lily stood, waiting.
“This is the Council of Four,” Livia said. “The rulers of all there is to be ruled in all the lands. The Ministers of Truth. The Highest. The—”
“All right, Livia, all right,” said the second voice that had spoken, still in its amused way. Lily saw now it came from a man seated a little behind the others. He was stocky, with black eyebrows that cut a straight line across his forehead, and he looked like a large garden gnome. “We don’t need all our titles here, do we? Among—as it were—friends.”
Lily felt Rex tense. But Phoebe’s hand was on his head, and he fell still again.
“Can we get on with it, Alastair?” the first voice complained again. Lily could see that it came from the man closest to her, a round, flabby figure, looking older than his fellow, though he was probably younger. He had a peevish face, and Lily disliked him on sight.
“Sorry, Anthony,” Alastair said, but so mockingly that you knew it was meant as a joke.
“Well, that’s enough of that,” said a third man briskly. This one was blond and slim and freckled, with a translucent skin. He wore a blue coat with brass buttons, and his name was Auberon. “The question is, shall we waste time telling her why she’s here?”
“Or shall we just show her? I agree,” said the fourth man, off to the side in the shadows so that Lily couldn’t make out his face. This man now laboriously lifted himself from his chair. Livia rushed to help him, and Phoebe moved quickly to support his other side. Lily could see that he was enormously fat, with a tiny queer-looking head, bald except for three long lank strands of greasy hair that lay across a mottled scalp.
“The Book first?” Anthony said in his whiny voice. Lily caught herself wondering how such a wheedling, nervous specimen could have become one of the rulers of the great empire that was Megalopolis.
“It certainly never could have happened that way in Arcadia,” she thought. And this was a sign that Megalopolis had infected her with its poisons. For not only was the spiteful malice of that thought alien there, but if she had been closer in spirit to the land of her birth, she never could have had the thought at all. In Arcadia, it would be impossible to imagine the fates of all people being controlled by just four men.
“Or the prisoner?” Auberon said briskly.
“Oh, the prisoner, I think, don’t you?” said the enormously fat man from the depths of his deep yellow-gray wattles as he waddled between Livia and Phoebe toward a door at the rear of the pulsating room.
“Dramatic illustration, of course, why not?” Alastair murmured urbanely, as he indicated with an elegant gesture that Lily and Rex should follow.
Lily hesitated, then stepped forward. The tiny door at the rear of the room opened, as if from the other side. For a moment, the fat man wheezed in its frame, huffing, as Phoebe and Livia pushed at him from behind. He was almost too big to fit through, but by various judicious pushings and proddings the thing was done. He popped out the door with a faint whoosh.
With that, a blue and gold light streamed in from the room beyond, as if in protest at the mean color of the windowless chamber where Lily stood. The light trembled as if it were in pain. There was something awful about it. Awful and strange.
Lily walked toward it. The light grew brighter, and softer, too, at the same time. A rose color lay underneath it, like the early part of dawn. “It’s beautiful,” Lily thought. Rex silently agreed. “Beautiful and frightening at the same time.” But even though she was frightened, she found she yearned to see the source of the light. So she walked on through the door and saw what was on the other side.
It was an angel. A real angel. There was no mistaking it, though Lily—so far as she could remember—had never seen an angel before. It would be many years before angels reappeared in Arcadia. Still, she recognized it immediately.
And it was trapped.
It was hanging upside down from a silver hook, in the middle of a round crystal room through whose walls all of space could be seen, including the False Moon. The Angel stretched, breathing painfully. In…out…in…out…in…out… With labored breath it moved its enormous wings (these wings reached out, silver-white, to touch the crystal enclosure on either side, brushing it, bruising their tips painfully on its hard unyielding surface), and those wings went slowly up and down, up and down, up and down.
“The Angel’s breath is what made the room move,” Lily thought. “An angel’s breath must be powerful, then. Even the breath of an angel as weak and trapped as this one is.”
(And how do I know this part of the story? The Angel told me. Much later, when we worked to have her made a counselor of the Arcadian state, a premature move that caused many problems for my reign.)
“Go closer, Lily,” Livia’s voice said in an unfamiliar, coaxing tone that Lily had up till now never heard her use.
Lily obeyed. She could hear a faint rattle from the Angel’s chest as her breath—Lily could see the Angel was a she, now—rose harshly and then fell. She could see the Angel’s face, contorted with a kind of suffering Lily had never known. It was serene; there was endurance in it. But with that, almost, not quite, despair.
IT WAS AN ANGEL. A REAL ANGEL. THERE WAS NO MISTAKING IT.
“Do angels despair, then?” Lily wondered. This was not what she had been taught in Arcadia. In Arcadia, it was thought that angels passed through, from time to time, benevolent and strong, drawn to the villages by the strength of their happiness, joining in their joys, invisibly supporting their revelries, their celebrations, and their feasts. You could never see an angel, Lily had been taught. But you could feel them.
Lily had often felt the angels. She was sure of it. She was sure, in fact, that she had often felt one angel in particular. How this was, she didn’t know. Neither had she ever, before now, cared. It was just the way it was, in Arcadia.
It was not, however, the way it was in Megalopolis.
“I didn’t know,” Lily said carefully, her eyes never leaving the Angel’s (and the Angel’s eyes were and are dark brown and deep as the deepest canyon in the highest mountain in the sacred range of the Donatees). “I had never heard that Megalopolis believed in angels.”
At this, Alastair gave a crack of laughter. Anthony shuffled his feet, annoyed.
“Well, we had to, didn’t we?” he said in his peevish way. “When this one forced herself on us.”
“Seeing is believing,” Auberon said, smiling faintly over Lily’s head at Livia. Lily felt approval of her behavior in his smile, and this approval made her feel cravenly pleased. She didn’t like this feeling of pleasure. It marred her spirit as if a dirty hand had rubbed against it. And this made her uneasy. It gave her pain.
The Angel breathed another deep, ratchety breath, and Lily knew, somehow, that it had given her pain as well. Lily caught her own breath and tried to control it.
Her head was spinning. “What does it mean? What does it mean?” an inner voice whispered in her ear.
The Angel twisted on her hook. Her wings flapped slowly and painfully.
“What is she here for?” Lily cried out. She couldn’t help herself. “What has she come for?”
“Why have you come?” she asked the Angel silently, trying to keep the pain she was feeling from her face. “Why didn’t you stay away from here?”
“What has she come for?” she repeated out loud, looking around at the adults who stood, silent, at the edges of the crystal room. And again, “What has she come for?”
“My dear child,” Auberon drawled. “Ask her yourself.”
Lily, tears now spilling unheeded down her face, squatted impetuously by the upturned head of the straining Angel. “Do I dare touch her?” she thought. But without a pause, her hand reached out of its own accord, through a long gap in the crystal wall. Lily touched the Angel’s streaming black hair.
“What have you come for?” she asked softly.
And a voice rose up from the heart of that room, a voice that belied the tethered feet, the labored breath, the flailing wings. This voice was the sound of the mountains themselves. Lily, who had often heard the mountains’ voice, recognized it at once.
“I’ve come for you,” the voice said.
At this, the wings gave one last helpless heave. And the Angel, under Lily’s hand, gave one last painful breath and died.
At this, there was an uproar.
“What? What? Impossible!” barked the fat bald man. “She can’t be dead.”
“Oh, shut up, Peter,” Alastair said as he swung open the crystal walls, and bent down to feel the Angel’s throat. There was no pulse. He looked at Lily. She could see the Angel’s dead eyes roll up in her head.
“Angels don’t die, I tell you. They don’t die!” The fat man was agitated now. The flaps of flesh around his chin wiggled and heaved with emotion.
“Well,” Auberon said dryly from his place by the door, where he leaned with his arms folded, “either she isn’t a real angel, then, or she isn’t dead. Take your pick.”
“Oh, she’s definitely dead,” Alastair reassured them, getting up now and wiping his hands with a white handkerchief.
“I always said she wasn’t a real angel,” Anthony said peevishly. “Didn’t I? I said…”
“Yes, yes, yes, we know what you said. You said whatever you had to say to be sure you were eventually right. You said she was an angel. You said she wasn’t an angel.”
“In fact, you said both of those twice,” Auberon interrupted Alastair. They exchanged an amused look.
“How can they be talking like this?” Lily wondered to herself. Her spirit was in great pain, as was to be expected from having been in the presence of the suffering and death of a noble creature. “How can they not feel it?”
Looking around the room, she saw they did not feel it. None of them showed the slightest trace of pain or sorrow at all. Livia, in fact, quite the opposite, looked like she was holding some kind of delightful secret to herself. Lily found her expression the most repugnant of all.
Phoebe felt it, though. Phoebe’s face, much as she tried to control herself, was cut across by traces of a sharp grief. Lily saw this, and it lightened her own suffering a little.
“I never said she was an angel,” Anthony fumed. “I said all along what everyone in Megalopolis knows. Angels don’t exist. They’re a fairy tale, a fable. A story for children.”
“Then what was that?” Auberon said, pointing at the Angel, who twisted in a breeze that seemed to come from nowhere.
They were all silent. The only sound was the breeze that blew from nowhere and to nowhere, around and around the crystal chamber walls.
“The Book, then?” Alastair said to the others, one eyebrow raised.
The fat man, Peter, didn’t answer. He gazed at the Angel’s corpse with a kind of fascinated horror. Something had upset him deeply about her death, Lily could see. “And yet,” she thought, creasing her forehead with the intensity of her attempt to understand, “he isn’t sad, and he isn’t sorry.”
“Oh yes,” Auberon said clinically, as he reached up and untied the silken rope that had bound the Angel to the silver hook. Her body slumped lightly to the floor without a sound.
Peter’s face took on another look. Lily recognized this: it was a look of fear.
For a moment, she almost grasped what he felt. For a moment, she held it, horrified, in her hand. But then, frightened herself, she let it go. And she couldn’t have gotten it back again even if she had wanted.
But it was so horrible, she didn’t want to feel it ever again.
“I wish she’d lived,” Anthony complained. “Then we could have forced her to tell us who she really was.”
Peter shook himself, and his wattles moved ponderously from side to side. Returning to himself, he gave Tony a bleary-eyed look of contempt. “You wouldn’t have wanted to know who she was.”
“What?” Anthony bleated angrily. “I…”
“You couldn’t have stood it. Not for a single moment,” Peter said, and, waddling back toward the small door, waited for Livia and Phoebe to help him through.
Behind him, the Angel’s body slowly dissolved. It shimmered, shrank, and then completely disappeared. But no one except Lily and Rex saw.
