“They are, O Highest of the High. The first three have already been poured and caused much grief and lamentation. Soon, the fourth shall be poured,” as soon as I think of a way to do it “And then their anguish shall be multiplied many times over.”
“Is it time for our Legions to overwhelm them?”
Are you out of your tiny little mind? Michael-Lan almost blurted the question out allowed before he managed to stop himself. In any case, he reminded himself that’s a foolish question to which the only reasonable answer is ‘of course’. “Lord of All, the time will surely come and when it does, perhaps your own son should lead them in the victorious march against the humans. The power and the glory shall forever more add lustre to your Holy Name.”
Yahweh settled back and contemplated the prospect of final victory and a triumphant procession through the conquered cities of Earth. Then, he remembered that his beloved Wuffles would not be there to share it with him and grief once more clouded his mind.
Michael looked at him and quietly slipped away. As he left the Throne Room, the Head Mason spoke quietly to him. “Michael-Lan, you’re slipping. We won’t have to replace all the wall surfaces this time. What was that you said about job security?”
“You just wait, the best is yet to come. Once the League of the Holy Court find out who is behind this stupid plot, He’ll go ballistic. Until then, drop down to the club for a drinkie, we’ve got a new angel working there. Name’s Maion, give her a try.”
“Maion eh? I’ll do that.” The mason looked grateful. “What would we do without you Michael-Lan? You’ve made Heaven worth living in.”
DIMO(N) Conference Room, The Pentagon
“So what part did the Succubae play in the Great Celestial War?”
Colonel John Baylor forked up some mushrooms from his plate and savored them. Good portobellos, sauteed with garlic, an excellent accompaniment to lunch. The trouble with being at war was that rationing was slowly creeping across the whole spread of the U.S. economy. First fuel, then vehicles, then anything that needed steel or aluminum. Then food had started to be affected, fish stocks were low and the ration of eight ounces per serving was onerous. It was lucky Indonesia and Vietnam had donated some of the product of their fish farms to the United States or shrimp would be in even shorter supply. Of course, post-war, they’d be using their generosity to lever better trade terms for themselves.
Lugasharmanaska’s teeth ripped at the raw horse’s leg with relish. As an obligate carnivore, she would have been hard-hit by meat rationing so it was fortunate that Succubus taste ran to the toughest, stringiest meat that was available. ‘Unfit for human consumption’ had acquired a whole new meaning, ‘preferred diet for Succubae’. It was an odd thing, as she’d started eating other meat, her craving for human flesh had faded. Now, it was mostly just a memory, except for the odd treat of course.
“Us? We had to find the portals. Remember, most of the fighting that took place in the Great Celestial War was here on Earth. It’s carried in your folk-memories and earliest myths. How many of your stories have scenes of towns besieged by armies of monsters? They’re us.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” Baylor looked at Luga ripping her meal apart, droplets of blood staining some of the papers in front of her. The stenographer in the corner of the room looked positively ill at the display. Then again, it was lucky that the floor ventilation ducts were working at full blast or one of the humans in the room would have offered Luga a bite out of their arms if she’d asked for one. It was rumored that more than one of Luga’s lovers had left with bite-sized pieces removed from their anatomy. Hence one of the new proverbs that were spreading through the human race. ‘Never have oral sex with a Succubus.’
“It’s near impossible to create a portal from Heaven to Hell. But, it’s easy to create portals from Heaven to Earth and Hell to Earth. So, to get from Hell to Heaven, we have to go by Earth. Or its equivalent. But, it’s quite hard to create a useful portal from Earth to Hell or Earth to Heaven. So, say, Michaellan would create a Heaven-Earth portal for one of his armies and we’d try and capture it. Or we’d create a Hell-Earth portal and he’d try to capture that. Just like you did with the portal in Iraq. That’s what all the fighting and campaigning was about.
“Our job was to find where Heaven had its portals, seduce those who were tasked with closing them and persuade them to keep them open. Heaven tended to use humans to find out where our portals were. If you read your folk myths with that in mind, you can see how the stories survived. The Garden of Eden, that was a portal and the snake who seduced its guards was one of us. That’s why Yahweh was so annoyed.”
“So, did you ever capture a portal and get to heaven?”
“Me? No.” Luga thought quickly about suggesting she had but lying to humans was dangerous. She’d learned that lesson to her bitter cost. “But we did capture portals now and then. We’d storm through them and enter Heaven, killing and looting whatever we could find. They would capture ours sometimes and they’d do the same, stealing and robbing us of what was ours, sometimes taking away slaves. That was how armies fought until you changed the rules.”
“”Wait a minute, you say Heaven took slaves from Hell?” Baylor couldn’t quite get his mind around the concept.
“Of course, they would use them to build things like fortresses and kill them when they were done. Unless they were valuable of course. We would do the same, only we had more fun killing the useless ones. Was your warfare then so different?”
“I guess not. What’s Heaven like?”
“Much like Hell except the air is clean there, and the light is white not red. Heaven’s a bit bigger than Hell. There are those who think Hell is much older than heaven but why they think that I do not know.”
Baylor leaned back in his seat and wondered what the scientists would make of all this. “Right, now about the fighting on earth…”
Chapter Twenty
Human Slums, Eternal City, Heaven
Another name crossed off a list, another contact dismissed as a meaningless acquaintance. More time wasted, more effort unproductive. Lemuel-Lan-Michael had heard that on Earth, human police were sometimes called “flat-feet” and now he understood why. His feet ached and his wings were stiff, all for nothing. And it was all the responsibility of the bottle of elixir that he’d found during the arrest of Ishmael. If he hadn’t been so attentive to his duty, he could have avoided all this. Perhaps his instincts had been wrong, perhaps the bottle was associated with the First Conspiracy. That’s what he had decided to call the network that was split up into cells.
He shook his head, every instinct he had said that the bottle wasn’t part of that group. The first few discrete arrests had confirmed his initial impressions, the First Conspiracy was all about doctrine and beliefs. After adequate ‘persuasion’, the detainees had confessed to spreading heresy and blasphemy. They had maintained their loyalty to The One Above All though, claiming that He had been led astray by misguided and corrupt advisors and if those advisors could be swept away, The Eternal Father would see how he had been mislead and everything would be made right. Lemuel was prepared to bet that the leaders intentions were quite different but that’s what the lower ranks thought and a bottle of elixir just didn’t fit with that pattern. There had to be a Second Conspiracy.
He flung the door of the slum open. Like the one he and his agents had raided earlier, this one was of better quality, made of wood rather than straw-reinforced mud. He looked down at the human female who was cowering against the wall at the opposite end of the entrance. By Inviolable Rule, all structures had to be large enough to allow the entry of Angels and that requirement diminished her apparent size still more.
“You are Almedha?” Lemuel read the name from his list. “Daughter of Brychan?”