Wings of Fire, page 19
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…”
