The angel stared at him as if he had begun speaking in tongues. “You are here at Brother Fist’s command.”
“Then I’m supposed to treat him first?” Marchey told himself that this Brother Fist character had better be in goddamned rough shape if he was putting himself in line before these poor bastards.
She scowled. “Brother Fist is God’s Chosen One. Through Him we know that secular medicine is a cheat and a deception, a blasphemous affront to God’s Will. He needs nothing you can offer.” She glanced indifferently around at the cringing wretches on either side of them. “These ones will be healed if their faith is strong and their obedience perfect enough.”
She had led him along this rue of misery to draw even with a black-haired boy of perhaps twelve. Both his hands were crudely bandaged with dirty rags. One of his eyes was gone, the socket black-crusted and badly infected. The boy’s face was flushed with fever and beaded with sweat in spite of the cold. The whole area around his eye was an angry red, and so swollen that the tight and shiny skin looked ready to burst. Under it was a glistening tear track of pus. The sickly-sweet smell of gangrene filled the air. His other eye, dulled by pain and filled with mute appeal, sought Marchey’s face.
The boy tried to smile.
Marchey tried to smile back, but could not. For a moment it was as if every cell in his body had stopped motion and function. Then he shivered, feeling fury ignite in a place where there had only been cold ash for a very long time.
He shucked free of Scylla’s arm and glared at her. “Listen,” he spat through clenched teeth, his voice dripping anger and contempt. “This boy’s eye is badly infected. Necrotic. He is going to fucking die unless he gets proper care. This Brother Fist character is full of shit if he says—”
He never saw it coming. Silver lightning struck him, blasting him off his feet. He pinweeled sideways, narrowly missing the boy and slamming back first into one of the orbital containers. He hung there as if glued to its cold steel side with the wind knocked out of him, dazed and desperately gasping for breath.
Ananke’s feeble gravity never had a chance to claim him.
Scylla swept down on him like a chrome harpy. She grabbed him by the front of his tunic, her ceramyl claws raking across his chest like a fistful of knives. She peeled him off and jerked him close. Wrath turned her tattooed face into that of a Chinese dragon. Her breath steamed like smoke in the frigid air.
“Never dare speak of Brother Fist like that again,” she hissed, black-webbed lips peeling back from her serried teeth. “My punishment will not kill you.” Her one human eye narrowed to a glittering slit. The blank lens that replaced the other gleamed with machine-cold menace. “Because death would be a mercy, and there will be none for you.”
She slammed him onto his feet. Marchey staggered, but somehow managed to keep from falling. Blood from his slashed chest already stained the pristine white of his mangled tunic. He was at last able to breathe again and sucked the foul air in greedily. It tasted almost sweet.
He was hurt and scared, but his outrage still outweighed his fear. He stood up straight, gathering the shreds of his dignity about him, and stared Scylla straight in her eye.
“Your objection is noted,” he panted, “but mine still remains.”
Scylla’s mouth twisted, her lips drawing back from her mouthful of knives. She raised her hand, talons all the way out now, her next blow a killing blow. Somehow Marchey managed to stand his ground on legs that had turned to jelly under him.
But before she could strike again, a voice rang through the cavernous bay.
“Scylla! Bring the infidel to me now.” The voice was a clotted, rasping whisper amplified to the volume of thunder. It raised the hackles on the back of Marchey’s neck and sent cold crawling down his spine.
The crippled people fell to their knees. Scylla went rigid as a statue, her armored, blade-tipped hand and arm cocked over Marchey like a scythe. Anger and something Marchey could not name warred across the nightmare landscape of her face. For five endless, awful seconds he was certain that she was going to disobey and he to die.
But in the end she shuddered, let out a strangled, inarticulate sound, and let her arm fall. She bowed her head.
“I hear and obey, Brother Fist.” Her voice was low and meek. Fearful.
“Of course you do. Come to me now. I wait.”
Her head came up. She eyed Marchey coldly, pointing to the door at the far end of the bay. “Move.”
Marchey decided not to press his luck, silently obeying her order. He stumbled into clumsy motion on rubbery legs.
He kept his head high, doing his best to hide the sense of dread that made him feel as if his insides had been filled with chilled formalin.
That awful voice still rang in his head. That its owner could cow Scylla so easily did not bode well.
Nor did this place. If what he’d seen of Ananke so far was any indication of what was to come, then he’d just been brought into the first circle of hell.
There was no way for him to guess what horrors might wait in the inner circles. Humanity—and wasn’t that an ironic descriptive?—had long ago proved that when it came to the practices of cruelty and oppression, especially in the name of religion, its inventiveness was nearly infinite.
Caught between Scylla and Charybdis. That was the original rock and a hard place. There was no mistaking the danger Scylla represented. And as for the Charybdis of this Fist person and Ananke—
The door at the back of the bay opened, revealing a gloomy tunnel ahead.
—He’d know more than he wanted to sooner than he wanted.
The door closed behind him. Scylla gave him a push.
Once thing was for certain. He was no longer trapped on the old, endless treadmill where he had plodded for so long.
Once he would have said that any change would have been an improvement. Now he was getting an inkling of just how wrong he would have been.
—Scylla’s metal-shod feet made a sound like the relentless ticking of a bomb against the mesh-covered stone floor of the tunnel. Her face was as set and grim, a bulwark against the furious hellbroth of conflicts and pressures boiling inside her.
Thinking about how close she had come to killing the infidel Marchey made her head pound and her insides roil uneasily. It was not that killing bothered her. After all, God’s terrible swift sword was edged so that it might draw blood. All life was His to give or cut short.
But Brother Fist had laid on her the task of delivering her prisoner unharmed. She had come within one furious heartbeat of failing Him.
Of disobeying Him. The sin of disobedience was cardinal and unforgivable. That he had provoked her with blackest blasphemy would mean less than nothing in this case. She was an angel, and her obedience was expected to be more perfect than that of intrinsically corrupt human flesh.
She stared at her captive’s broad back, watching him shuffle cautiously along the uneven floor in the oversized magnetic slippers she had made him put on. For all the time she had spent with him, she had to admit that she could come nowhere near being able to predict his actions or reactions.
She was sure he had known full well how close he was to death back in the bay, yet he had only reacted with a quiet defiance that seemed to have been half courage and half his usual unbreakable indifference. Still his anger over the state of sinners who meant less than nothing to him had been real enough, if completely inexplicable.
There was anger in him after all, perhaps even in measure to equal her own. This was good to know. Yet as with so many things about him, the how and why of it remained a baffling mystery.