Scylla punched in the code that unlocked the massive steel door that barred the way to her Master’s chambers, a code known to her and Brother Fist alone. Hope and fear and doubt and confusion fought for supremacy inside her, making it hard to concentrate.
It would be good to be back at her Master’s side. Back where she belonged. It felt like she had been gone for an eternity.
She knew that she had somehow been changed by being away from Ananke for the first time in her life. Just how, she could not quite say, and deep in her heart she had prayed that simply coming home again would make everthing right again.
But it only made things worse. The Eden of Ananke seemed a different place than the one she had left. Smaller. Dirtier. Oppressive and almost… ugly.
She shook her head to clear it. Deceptions. The fault lay in her eyes, not what they beheld.
Even an angel’s heaven-made flesh was weak. The doubts that continued to assail her were proof of that. What should have been a joyous homecoming had come under a pall of apprehension as she realized that she would have to go before her Master with an unclean heart.
She could not help but be afraid He would see the black stains on her soul the moment He laid eyes on her, for did He not always say that He could read her every thought? His disappointment would be deep and justified. Ever quick to anger, the way she had failed His trust might provoke Him to rage.
Even if somehow He did not see her failings at first glance, she knew she would have to confess them. To withhold would only compound her transgressions.
No matter which way her sins were revealed, she would have to be punished to atone for them. She had meted out many such punishments, and knew just how high the price of redemption might be set. Many put the sinner back in God’s hands so that He might fling them down to Hell, where they belonged.
Scylla was an angel. Still, she was close enough to human to want to run and hide from what she faced.
But her silver fingertips danced swiftly across the keypad, entering the code sequence that would open the door as if they knew that the only answer was, as always, perfect obedience.
God punishes us because He loves us. To hide from His punishment is to hide from His love. She repeated that truth over and over, but for the first time in her life she found no solace in it.
The final number was pressed. A low tone signalled acceptance. Motors hummed. The door yawned open to admit the fallen angel and her charge into the anteroom of God’s chosen one.
Soon His justice and His love would shine on them both.
“Sweet Jesus in a bank vault.” Marchey muttered as he watched the two-meter-wide, half-meter-thick armored door swing ponderously outward. It looked like a tacnuke would make about as big a dent in it as an exploding cigar.
This Brother Fist had a really deep and unshakable faith in the love of his flock, didn’t he?
Scylla gave him a look. He stepped cautiously inside, unable to guess what he might find waiting for him. The door rumbled shut behind them, closing with a massive and absolute finality. Lockbolts the size of his arm pistoned into place, sealing them in.
He sniffed the air. It was sweet and clean, the oxygen content at or slightly above normal, heady as wine after the overused fung of the tunnels.
Separate life support. Brother Fist was a cautious man. A man of the people, too.
His angelic escort took his arm and led him through an arched vestibule and into a wide rotunda under a high-vaulted ceiling. This hemispherical chamber was as beautifully wrought as the tunnels were crude. Graceful carved pillars outset from the facet-cut walls bracketed the broad mosaic floor. At the far end, a white-stone altar table and real wood pulpit on a raised dais confirmed that it was a chapel.
His gaze was drawn upward toward the source of the golden light flooding the chamber. It came from a glowing one-meter sphere at the center of the ceiling dome. The globe was a representation of the Sun. Around it smaller spheres, the planets and moons, each exquisitely rendered in translucent tinted glass, wheeled in their endless dance and painted their colors on the walls.
Scylla gave him no more than a few seconds to appreciate the loving artistry that had gone into it or the chapel. Or to try to understand the melancholy air that permeated the place, a feeling of disuse. Of misuse.
She pulled at his arm in obvious impatience. “This way.” She towed him toward a wide door between two pillars at the far right. A last glance over his shoulder gave him a closer, better look at the altar.
Cold crawled into the marrow of his bones when he saw the thick webbed straps which had been bolted to the sides of the altar table. Its top was scratched and chipped. Dark brown stains were caught in the cuts and gouges…
Scylla hauled him around to face her. “You are going to see Brother Fist now,” she warned in a low, hard voice. Her face was an unreadable mask. “If you are disrespectful, I will punish you.” Her silver fingers dug into the meat of his upper arm. “If you make the slightest hostile move toward him, I will strangle you with your own guts.”
Marchey shivered, knowing that she meant every word. But he was damned if he was going to give her the satisfaction of showing his fear. He forced a smile, even though it made his mashed lips sting and begin bleeding again. “So you’re in charge of protocol, too?”
She snatched him off the floor by his arm and shook him until his teeth rattled. “Understand me, little man!” she hissed. “Even if you are alone with him, I will know what you say and do. I am an angel! Do not forget that for a single moment. If I come after you, there will be no escaping my wrath, and no mercy once I have you in my hands.”
She shook him again, nearly wrenching his arm out of its socket, then pulled him close. So close that he could see every red-and-black line tattooed on her face, could count her red-tipped, razor-sharp teeth. Her voice dropped to a knife-edged whisper.
“If you misbehave I will send you to Hell. Slowly, infidel. Skinless and screaming to die. Do you understand me?”
“I… do,” Marchey mumbled, desperately trying to contain the cyclone of dread whirling through him. The image of that bloodstained altar burned in his mind, lending a terrible credence to her threats.
Maybe she saw through the tissue-thin remains of his self-control and knew that she had him cowed. She nodded. “Very well.”
He staggered drunkenly when she slammed him onto his feet, and would have fallen but for the iron grip she had on his arm.
A commbox had been cemented to the wall next to the door. Scylla pushed the callbar. A low, absurdly cheerful tone sounded, then from the box issued the soft, rasping voice he’d heard in the landing bay. Once again the sound of it made him shiver.
“Scylla.”
She meekly bowed her head. “Here, Master.”
“You may enter.” There was the muted clunk of lockbolts withdrawing. The door swung toward them. Marchey saw that it had been backplated with a layer of steel-wrapped, reinforced stonecrete.
Just as when he’d opened his ship’s airlock, the first thing to hit him was the smell. It came gushing out in a turgid, gut-twisting wave, so thick it seemed almost liquid. It was a smell he knew, one that could slice through the strongest hospital disinfectant like a scalpel through a rose petal.
It was the sickly-sweet, septic stench of something long diseased and dying.
Scylla froze on the threshold, nerves shrieking a warning and fight response jittering through her.