“It is killing me anyway.” Antonicus coughed and what came out was a thick black slime—his insides being liquefied in front of them.
Raphael thrust two more bolts of wildfire into the Ancient. The second surge crackled all over him in a violence of white-gold and electric blue, clearing his eyes and putting a shine back in his skin, and for a moment, Raphael thought they had defeated Lijuan’s brand of death.
Then the signs of Lijuan’s poisonous power surged back faster and more virulent than ever. It covered his irises, ran through his skin, blazed across his wings. Further jolts of wildfire had no effect.
Titus crouched by Antonicus’s head and put a hand on his shoulder in a grip that told the archangel he wasn’t alone. Raphael held on to Antonicus’s left hand as Neha held on to his right. The others all crouched down, their wings trailing on the dusty roof, and together, they watched the final breaths of an archangel who had lived millennia, only to be brought down by a death that was beyond anything this world had ever seen.
“He is gone,” Caliane murmured when Antonicus’s breath had ended, no sign of a heart beating in his chest, and his skin holding a putrid greenish cast. It was a decaying corpse that lay before them in place of a powerful Ancient who had blazed with life and arrogance only an hour ago.
“We must burn him—we do not know what he carries in his blood.” Neha’s words might’ve been harsh, but it was with a gentle touch that she reached out to close the Ancient’s staring eyes.
“Are we sure?” A soft question from Michaela, who had understandably kept her distance. “We do not need to breathe or have beating hearts to live.”
They all considered that. In front of them, the liquefaction process seemed to have stopped at the moment of Antonicus’s final breath. His wings were shreds of rotted tendon and blackened feathers, his chest sunken inward, but nothing new had been lost since his apparent death. Either the process had halted now there was no living flesh on which the infection could feast, or the archangel was somehow fighting back.
“We cannot have this body in any of our territories,” Titus said. “It pains me to reject a warrior so courageous, but we must care for our people. We cannot bring in a source of infection where it may leach from his body to poison the soil.”
Raphael thought of Naasir, of the ice and snow where he’d been born. “There are islands in the Antarctic ice that are peopled by no one. They are also small enough that we can erect high fences around and above our chosen island to stop animals from coming in and spreading any infection.”
“We will bury him deep,” Elijah murmured. “We have enough power to dig a hole so far into the earth that only a living archangel will be able to force his way out.”
Raphael and Titus began to roll Antonicus’s body up in the rug on which he’d died, their faces solemn and their actions as respectful as they could make them.
“I will contact one of my generals to find large plastic sheeting and tape,” Neha said, and went down to pick up the items herself, not wanting anyone less powerful than an archangel near the corpse. On her return, they sealed the rolled-up carpet in the sheeting, then locked it tight with the tape.
Three times.
No one argued or stated it was overkill. “I will carry him,” Raphael said afterward. “I am the only one who has any kind of an immunity.” That Neha and Titus had touched Antonicus in his dying moments was a testament to their heart and courage.
Neha locked the dark of her eyes with his. “But it appears even you cannot defeat this evil any longer and that chills my heart.”
Not answering because Neha’s words were the simple and cold truth, Raphael picked up Antonicus’s body, a body made heavier by the carpet but not so heavy that he couldn’t carry it. “I’ll need to rest at times,” he began, but Elijah frowned.
“We can all help with the passage without risk of infection. All we need are ropes. If we create a sling, no one of us has to bear the entire burden.”
Neha added, “I will ask for the rope to be brought to the room below.”
Raphael put Antonicus down while they waited. “Will you burn this building?” he asked Neha.
“Yes. I’ve ordered everyone but those bringing the rope to evacuate. I will send this fort up in flame as soon as they are clear and we rise.” Her face was half in shadow as she turned her head toward China. “Lijuan has evolved beyond us. Archangels cannot be killed by anything but another archangel, yet she is killing from a distance with this dark fog.”
“Cassandra prophesied that the Cadre alone would not be enough this time.” He took in Zanaya’s and Aegaeon’s motionless, expressionless faces; neither had said a word since Antonicus began to die. “It is why you are awake.”
“But if your wildfire has failed, Raphael, then I fear their waking will not matter.” Caliane’s hair flew back in the night breeze. “This time, our world may end.”
The explosion boiled the sky behind Raphael as Neha incinerated the fort’s roof before collapsing the building inward into a hole that Caliane had helped her create. He and the others had flown ahead, with Antonicus in a sling between them. Those with glamour used it to hide the body.
Anyone who looked up would see many archangels together, but that was an explicable thing given the deadly fog and other catastrophic incidents around the world. No one would see a body. No one would know that an archangel had died. Antonicus had gone into Sleep, that was all the world would be told.
If Antonicus’s end caused havoc with the weather, as sometimes happened when an archangel passed, it would be believed to be part of the recent chaos.
When day broke, Michaela and Astaad flew down to wild fields full of flowers and returned with bunches of them to drop on Antonicus’s body. The rope sling the Cadre had woven together was tight enough that the flowers collected around the body and by the time they left the fields, it was a flower-draped bier such as was their way and not just a makeshift coffin created to contain infection.
No one spoke as they flew. On the roof, there’d been some discussion of leaving half their number at the border with China, but in the end they’d decided that there was nothing half their number could do to stop Lijuan. Better they deal with this together, then go to their territories, to prepare in any way they could . . . and to mourn all those of their own who’d been trapped within when the fog crawled across China on a tide of death.
Gadriel, a little set in his habits but noble in a quiet way, hadn’t made it out. Raphael had no body to take home to his family. The angel wasn’t the only one who’d vanished into the murderous dark; Raphael had lost too many good people and the war hadn’t yet begun.
It was a risk to assume nothing would change during the short time they disappeared to bury Antonicus, but the risk was a considered one. The more opaque patches seen by Neha’s drones and confirmed by Alexander and Zanaya seemed to indicate that the Archangel of China was consolidating herself. How she might be doing so was a thing Raphael didn’t like thinking about.
He remembered too well the pathetic half-consumed husks he and Elena had discovered. Lijuan fed from life to make death. There’d been millions of people in China before the fog. Now, no voices penetrated the dark wall and Antonicus had said the landscape was devoid of light.
The blurry green-tinged images picked up by the camera worn by the Ancient had shown the same: an endless wall of pitch black, so murky that even technology meant to penetrate night had failed.
Raphael did not want to see what remained when the fog retreated.