And then they came to the final hazmat tent, off by itself on the far side of the pit. “This one was buried alone,” said Dr. Amhali, lifting the flap for them. “In a shallow grave.”
Eliza entered, and at the sight of this final “exhibit” in the dead menagerie, sadness sang in her brighter than ever. This was the one without marks on his palms. He’d been buried with some suggestion of care—not flung into the stinking pit, but laid out and covered with dirt and gravel. A grayish residue of dust clung to his flesh, making him seem like a sculpture.
Maybe that was why she was able to think, right away, that he was beautiful. Because he didn’t look real. He looked like art. She could almost have wept for him, which made no sense. If the others were variously “monstrous,” he was the most “demonic” or “devilish”: mostly humanoid, with the addition of long black horns and cloven hooves, and bat wings stretched out on the ground on either side of him, at least a dozen feet in span, their edges curling up against the sides of the tent.
But he didn’t strike her as demonic. As the angels hadn’t struck her as “angelic.”
What happened here?she wondered in silence. It wasn’t her job to figure that out, but she couldn’t help herself. Questions rose in a stir, like startled birds. Who killed these creatures, and why? And what were they doing in the Moroccan wilderness? And… what were their names?
A part of her mind told her this was the wrong response to seeing dead monsters—to wonder at their names—but this last body especially, with its fine features, made her want to know. The tip of one horn was snapped off, a simple detail, and she wondered how it had happened, and from there it was an easy trajectory to wondering everything else. What had his life been like, and why was he dead?
The men were talking, and she heard Dr. Amhali telling Dr. Chaudhary that the creatures seemed to have been living in the kasbah for some time, and had vacated it only the day before yesterday.
“Some nomads witnessed their departure,” said Dr. Amhali.
“Wait,” Eliza said. “There were some seen alive? How many?”
“We don’t know. The witnesses were hysterical. Dozens, they said.”
Dozens. Eliza wanted to see them. She wanted to see them living and breathing. “Well, where did they go? Have you found them?”
Dr. Amhali’s voice was wry. “They went that way,” he said, pointing… up. “And no, we have not.”
According to the witnesses, the “demons” had flown toward the Atlas Mountains, though no evidence had been found to back this up. If it weren’t for the proof of the story in the form of liquefying monster corpses, it would have been dismissed as ludicrous. As it was, helicopters continued to scour the mountains, and agents had gone by jeep and camel to track down any Berber tribes and herdsmen who might have seen anything.
Eliza stepped out of the tent with the doctors. They won’t find them, she thought, looking at the mountains, the vision of snow-capped peaks so incongruous in the heat. There is another universe, and that’s where they’ve gone.
THRICE-FALLEN
“Get. Off.”
As soon as the door closed behind him, Jael, emperor of the seraphim, gave a savage lurch and twist of his shoulders to dislodge the invisible creature riding on his back.
If Razgut had wanted to stay put, such a maneuver would never have knocked him loose. His grip was strong, and so was his will, and—after a long life of unimaginable torment—so was his pain tolerance. “Make me,” he might have snapped, and laughed his mad laugh while the emperor did his worst.
Usually he found it worth the pain to cause others misery, but, as it happened, Jael’s foulness superseded even the pleasure of torturing him, and Razgut was happy to oblige. He let go of him and flailed to the marble floor with a thud and gasp, becoming visible at the moment of impact. He pushed himself upright, his atrophied legs splayed to one side. “You’re welcome,” he said, a parody of dignity.
“You think I should thank you?” Jael removed his helmet and thrust it at a guard. Only in privacy could the ruin of his face be revealed: the hideous scar that slashed from hairline to chin, obliterating his nose and leaving a lisping, slurping wreckage of a mouth. “For what?” he demanded, spittle flying.
A grimace teased Razgut’s own hideous face—a bloated sack of purple, his skin stretched blister-tight. He replied peevishly and in Latin, which the emperor could of course not understand: “For not snapping your neck while I had the chance. It would have been so very easy.”
“Enough of your human tongues,” said Jael, imperious and impatient. “What are you saying?”
They were in an opulent suite of rooms in the Papal Palace adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica, and had just come from a meeting of world leaders at which Jael had presented his demands. Had presented them, that is, by way of repeating every syllable Razgut whispered in his ear.
“For words,” said Razgut, in Seraphic this time, and sweetly. “Without my words, my lord, what are you but a pretty face?” He snickered, and Jael kicked him.
It wasn’t a dramatic kick. There was no showmanship in it, only brutal efficiency. A quick, hard jerk, and the steel-enforced toe of his slipper spiked into Razgut’s side, deep into the misshapen bloat of flesh. Razgut cried out. The pain was sharp and bright, precise. He curled around it.
Laughing.
There was a crack in the shell of Razgut’s mind. It had been, once, a very fine mind, and the crack was as a flaw in a diamond, a seam in a crystal globe. It spidered. It snaked. It subverted every ordinary feeling into some mutant cousin of itself: recognizable, but gone oh so very wrong. When he looked back up at Jael, hatred mingled with mirth in his eyes.
It was his eyes that marked him as what he was. To stand back and look at him in the company of his kin, it seemed impossible that they were of the same race. Seraphim were all symmetry and grace, power and magnificence—even Jael, as long as the center margin of his face stayed covered—where Razgut was a blighted, crawling thing, a corruption of flesh more goblin than angel. He had been beautiful once, oh yes, but now only his eyes told that tale. The almond shape of them stood out as fine in his swollen, bruise-colored face.
The other tell of his ancestry was more dreadfuclass="underline" the spikes of splintered bone that jutted from his shoulder blades. His wings had been torn off. Not even cut, but ripped away. The pain was a thousand years old, but he would never forget it.
“When there are weapons in my soldiers’ hands,” said Jael, looming over him, “when humanity is on its knees before me, then perhaps I’ll value your words.”
Razgut knew better. He knew that he was destined to become a bloodstain the instant Jael got his weapons, which put him in an interesting position, being the one charged with getting them for him.
If he was to become a bloodstain whether he failed or succeeded, the question was: Would he prefer to be a quivering and obedient bloodstain, or a willful and infuriating bloodstain who brought an emperor’s ambitions crashing down around him?
It seemed an easy decision on the face of it. How simple it would be to humiliate and destroy Jael. It had amused Razgut, in the meeting of great gravity and importance they’d just come from, to think up absurd lines he might feed him. The fool was so certain of Razgut’s groveling servility that he would repeat anything. It was a rich temptation, and several times Razgut had chuckled, imagining it.
There is no god, you fools, he might have made him say . There are only monsters, and I am the worst of them.