The Armies of Heaven (15 page)

Downing the rest of her tea, she stood and dropped a few rubles on the table. “It’s been nice seeing you.”

“Where do you think you’re going? Why is it always some big drama with you?”

“Good-bye, Nadja.” Love left her sister staring after her.

Outside, she turned toward Cafemax to check her e-mail again and bumped into a man standing in the middle of the busy sidewalk. He wore the robes of an Orthodox monk and for an instant she thought it was Kirill, but of course that was impossible.

“Excuse me, Brother.” She moved to step around him.

He smiled when she glanced up and there was something odd about his eyes. “You must be Lyubov.” He held out his hand. His speech was lightly accented.

“I’m sorry?” Love took an unconscious step back. “How do you know me?”

“There you are.” Nadja exited the café behind her. “Micah, this is my sister. The one I told you about.”

Micah took Love’s hand, though she hadn’t offered it. “Your sister has told me so much about you. I would have known you anywhere.” He raised his other hand toward the street as if hailing a cab while continuing to hold hers with more force than a greeting warranted. “Come, now, Lyubov. Let’s get acquainted.” She recognized his accent as British.

A black sedan pulled forward from somewhere and Micah drew her toward it.

“Let go of me.” Love jerked against his hold, but he opened the door to the backseat and pushed her into it.

“Stop being so difficult, Lyubov.” Nadja lit a cigarette while she watched from the sidewalk. “He just wants to talk to you.”

“No!” Love struggled, and Micah’s eyes flashed solid black for an instant before returning to their cerulean blue. She fell back into the seat. She’d seen eyes like that only once before—on a Nephil named Zeus.

Micah climbed in beside her and closed the door, and the driver pulled away from the curb into the busy traffic of Nevsky Prospekt.

§

Love hadn’t returned from the Internet café.

Belphagor had let the morning get away from him, training Loquel. The angel had asked Belphagor to help him toughen up, mortified by how quickly he’d broken under Kae’s
pleti
at Gehenna, and he’d been all too happy to oblige. He’d begun by teaching the angel to bear humiliation. Personal experience had taught him almost any amount of pain could be borne if one were inured to humiliation, and it didn’t take much to humiliate a Virtue.

He left Loquel kneeling naked in the corner of his room and went down to the café to find out what was taking Love so long, but found no sign of her. It wasn’t like her to go off on her own without telling anyone, particularly when they were waiting for such an important message. She’d created an account for Belphagor and he remembered possessed85’s address from looking over her shoulder, so he decided to contact the gypsy himself.

As soon as he’d sent his message, he received a reply saying it was an honor to communicate directly with the Prince of Tricks. His reputation had preceded him. Possessed85 had sent word to “lovelygirl” this morning, he said, but had heard nothing from her all day.

He repeated the message for Belphagor:
The Night Travelers will meet you in Lazarev Cemetery at Alexander Nevsky Lavra at full dark. If you can persuade them to reassess their alliances, I can pass that desire along to various favorable contacts among the terrestrial Fallen. Good luck, Belphagor. There are many of us already behind you.

He wasn’t certain exactly when full dark was this time of year, but getting into a cemetery at that hour wouldn’t be an easy matter. He only hoped he’d be able to find Love before then.

§

“You’re not a Malak.” Love regarded Micah with disgust as she rode beside him. “You’re one of the
Angliski
Nephilim.”

“And you’re not half as stupid as Zeus said you were.”

Love’s stomach, already churning, clenched with foreboding.

“Oh, don’t worry, Lyubov. He hasn’t resurrected. Nephilim can do a lot of things, but we can’t do that. You and your companions killed him good and dead.”

“What do you want with me?” She tried not to show her relief at the stilling of that irrational fear. “What have you been doing with my family?”

“Just keeping an eye on them.” Micah smiled. “We figured you’d get in touch with them sooner or later. They’ve also been very useful in spreading the cult of Aeval among your people.”

“The cult of Aeval? I thought you were part of the revolution.”

“Ah, but what better way to keep the terrestrial forces ineffective than to sow discord between the
tsigane
and the Fallen? As long as your people side with the queen and her Malakim, the ties between the two sides remain severed, and the Fallen are driven even further toward the cause of freedom.” Micah loosened the buttons at the top of his
podryasnik
as if the high collar were irritating him. “As for you—” The smile on his face disappeared. “We want to know where the children are.”

“The children?” Love was starting to feel flushed and her stomach gave an unpleasant lurch. Perhaps the sweet, hot tea hadn’t agreed with her.

“Don’t play stupid, Lyubov. They disappeared from under Helga’s nose just as you and Belphagor left Heaven. Obviously, you didn’t bring them with you, but you know where they are, and you’ll tell us, one way or the other.”

Ola and Azel were missing?
Love hoped Vasily had found them. She leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes, willing the hot flash and nausea to subside, and murmured to herself. “Why does everyone insist on calling me Lyubov?”

Micah laughed. “All right, then—
Love
. If it will make you more cooperative, I’ll call you whatever you like. But you must realize the Nephilim researched you before you were ever taken to Solovetsky.”

She opened her eyes and it felt like an effort. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Your friend Zeus knew precisely why the name bothered you.”

Love’s skin had gone from flushed to cold and clammy. Besides her family’s insistence on using it to belittle her choice of a name for herself, there was one real reason she hated it.

Micah leaned close to her ear and whispered intimately. “The only thing we couldn’t be certain of was whether it was hearing it on the lips of one stepfather or two.”

Love clutched her leaping stomach and grasped for the door handle, but Micah grabbed her wrist. When she tried to pull away from him, her head swam and her eyelids fluttered as if they were too heavy to stay open.

“What’d’you do?” The words slurred together as she tried to get them out.

Micah laughed softly. “Shouldn’t drink hot tea on an empty stomach, Lyubov. It isn’t good for you.”

Odinnadtsataya
: Charms

from the memoirs of the Grand Duchess Anazakia Helisonovna of the House of Arkhangel’sk

Nothing of me remained in this room. Though the built-in shelves and mantel, the double-paned awning windows, and the carved ceiling were as familiar to me as my own skin, the rest was alien. Of course, anything that might have remained from before Aeval’s time would have been damaged in the fire, but our belongings she’d probably tossed out along with our bodies before they were cold.

And yet two of us still lived. Two who ought not to have escaped my cousin’s hand—two who had, in fact, died in a very real sense—still breathed the sweet air of Heaven. Since we’d reached Iriy, I hadn’t had a chance to dwell on what Misha had told me in the Unseen World beneath Lake Superna, but there was plenty of time to think about it now.

After first fleeing Heaven, I’d carried a desperate hope that my brother Azel might have survived. I hadn’t seen his body among the others. Believing he was alive gave me the will to go on, but Helga dashed my hope when I returned to Raqia, telling me she’d seen him lying dead in his bed. I was devastated at the loss of the last connection to my former life; the hope of finding Azel had been the one thing keeping me from despair. But Azel had survived after all.

That the child lived at all was incredible to me. I tried to remember the little blond-framed face that had looked up at me from the stairs in my dream, but I’d been too focused on getting to Ola. Had my brother’s shade within him recognized me in the dream? Did he remember himself at all? It seemed awful to think he might. How must it have been to experience such a terrible death and then to draw breath once more within an unfamiliar body, much less that of a small child? I recalled the moment in the tiny bathroom of a speeding train in the world of Man when I’d been reunited with my shade and experienced the pain of my own death. Had it been this way for Azel?

And now he and Ola were lost somewhere. I went to the window and looked down into the garden as if I might find them there. My head swam with contradictions, glad Ola was no longer trapped within the terrible oubliette, but terrified something worse might have befallen her. But they were together, at least, and if Helga didn’t have them, it could mean Vasily had somehow gotten them to safety.

Dusk settled over Heaven in a scattering of bluish light, like a soft blanket dropped upon the edges of the sky. The color deepened and permeated the space between objects as if it occupied space itself, like a moving, blue-grey shade. My Ola was lost in it, and so was I.

Lively hadn’t come at suppertime and my tray had been taken already, but she’d said she might be able to work her spell again tonight. I had little faith in her word, but I wasn’t about to sleep and miss the opportunity. I sat on the window seat and continued to stare out, watching lamplight begin to sparkle in the windows of the city, wondering where Ola was in that star-like canopy.

Near the Gulf of the Firmament, an unfamiliar series of even squares of light were visible, and I realized it must be the complex of Aeval’s most notorious Relocation Camp, for which the House of Correction where she’d once imprisoned me had been a prototype. These camps, established across the Firmament and within its neighboring principalities, Aeval billed as a kind of intermediate step for demon integration into angelic society. She claimed communities like Raqia only ghettoized the Fallen, but the camps amounted to nothing more than prison workhouses. “Undesirables”—those who managed to make a living outside the bounds of celestial law—were moved out of Raqia and into the camp to be retrained as productive citizens, but no one ever seemed to leave it once they entered.

With the palace occupied by Helga’s forces, I wondered if the camp had been opened. If so, there would be twice as many demons ready to fight against our Virtues when they arrived.

Lively appeared at last about an hour after dark. With her finger to her lips as she closed the door, she set a lamp on the table and beckoned me to the bedside. “I haven’t done it yet,” she whispered. “The guards are still awake. I just told them I was bringing you some light.”

“And are you going to do it at all?” I whispered back. “Or are you just miserable with your own company?”

Lively glared as she raised the wick. “If I wanted company, I wouldn’t come to you for it. I came to tell you I’ve put together enough sleeping powder to give you and Rita a good four-hour window. But it has to look like you did this on your own. If Helga knew…” Her voice trailed off for a moment, and she looked over her shoulder as if she thought Helga might be standing behind her. “At any rate, that’s what the lamps are for.” She took a pouch from her pocket and handed it to me. “Sprinkle it on the flame, but not too much at once. You don’t want to put the lamp out. Leave one burning here in the room and take the other with you. That way it will put anyone to sleep along your path. And like I said, it should give you about four hours before it starts to lose potency.”

“And how does it keep from putting Margarita and me to sleep as well? Is there actually a charm against it or was that entirely fabricated?”

Lively blushed. “It works by will. You can’t will yourself to sleep.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, I suppose you can, but why would you? At any rate, anyone you
do
will to sleep…will.”

“So it wasn’t just the warding charms you lied about. You specifically willed us all to be affected.”

“I had no choice. I told you.”

“No, actually you didn’t tell me.” I gripped the pouch tightly in my hand as a surrogate for her throat. “You said nothing about choice. You simply betrayed us.
That
was your choice.”

Lively’s face twisted as if she wanted to say something else. “You don’t understand. You’ve always been free to do as you please.”

“Nobody owns you anymore, Lively. You left the apothecary and Helga abandoned you.”

“Yes.” Her olivine eyes flashed with anger. “And then you took over where they left off.”

My mouth dropped open. “
I
took over? What do you mean? That I treated you like a slave? I never forced you to do anything. You said you wanted to help.”

“Oh, yes, and you gave me such a choice, didn’t you,
Your Supernal Highness
? ‘I’m going to put you to use,’ you said.” Lively’s face twisted again, but this time she seemed to be in pain. She put her hands on her stomach and regarded me with eyes rimmed with red. “Did you think I really wanted to march nearly four hundred leagues with this baby in my belly? To be waddling about with child in the middle of a war?” She moved for the door, but I caught her arm.

“
Lively
.” The sharp tone of admonishment was prompted by my own guilty conscience. “Are the pains still coming?”

“Don’t you touch me!” She pulled her arm away and stumbled back into the door from the force of her resistance, a protective hand over her stomach and tears springing to her eyes. “What is it to you? Just leave me alone!” She took a sharp breath and caught herself as if stifling a cry, and went out and slammed the door.

As I’d done so many times in the unsuspecting, carefree days of my youth, I waited for the clock on the mantel to strike midnight before beginning my clandestine venture beyond the palace walls. Thinking of my distant cousin Ysael who had been Vasily’s mother, I wondered that I’d been so incognizant of danger then. If Helga’s story was true, it had been Ysael’s own seraphic guard who’d assaulted her, but the opportunity for a similar misfortune to befall me had been all too real and I’d never given it a thought.

The clock struck twelve. I took the pouch and sprinkled some of the scarlet powder into the flame of the oil lamp. A sweet-smelling, pale smoke curled into the air, like the perfume of violets and roses rising from the garden on a hot summer night. I sat on the bed a moment, willing the guards outside our doors to slumber and hoping Lively hadn’t failed to tell me some special incantation. I slipped on the jacket to my uniform and put on my boots before climbing through the passage to Margarita’s room, where she sat waiting with the shackles lying unlocked on the bed beside her.

I nodded to her. “Well, this is it. We should take your lamp with us. I’ve left mine burning with the powder Lively gave me.”

Margarita raised her head, her auburn hair gleaming like garnet in the lamplight. The look on her face told me I wasn’t going to like what she had to say. “I’m worried about Lively.”

“Margarita—”

“I know, but her pains. I don’t think they’re false labor.”

“Lively has made her bed. There’s nothing we can do for her.”

“She thinks the performance you put her up to in order to get into the palace brought it on. A sort of karmic retribution.”

“She’s blaming me for her labor?”

“You
have
had her on the march for four weeks.” Margarita’s tone was heavy with reproach. “She’s done a great deal for you. More than you know.”

“She murdered every Virtue in our party!”

“She had no idea the demons were going to do that. She was following Helga’s orders.”

“Yes, Margarita. That’s the point. She is following Helga’s orders. She’s aiding our enemy.”

Margarita frowned at me. “I think Helga is forcing her somehow.”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake!” My outburst was a bit too loud, and I lowered my voice. “That’s the same sob story she gave me and I don’t believe a word of it. She plays her loyalties in whatever direction she thinks will be to her advantage, no matter whom it hurts. She’s playing upon your sympathy.”

Margarita said nothing and I paced toward the window, staring out at the dark world waiting for a ruler. How could I be its queen if I couldn’t even govern my second-in-command when a clever demoness playing damsel in distress turned her head?

I tucked my arms inside each other. “Sometimes I wonder if she hasn’t put some kind of charm on you. She has you twisted around her little finger, imagining she’s some delicate, misused thing.”

“I’m not a fool, Nazkia. I know she isn’t helpless, and I know she’s manipulative. But there’s more to it than that. She seems to want to do the right thing. She kept them from murdering us in our sleep and she’s helping us escape. When she speaks to me, I see her struggling as if the charm is on her own tongue, keeping her from saying what she pleases.”

I’d entertained the same thoughts, but not with quite as much passion and admiration as Margarita seemed to be, like a youth with a crush. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were infatuated with her.”

Her face reddened and I was afraid I’d gone too far. “It’s not infatuation,” she burst out. “I’m in love with her.” The flush in her skin was nearly as red as her hair in the glow of the oil lamp.

“I see.” So Love had been only partially right. I moved the shackles to sit beside her. “Does she know you feel this way about her? Because I don’t mean to be hurtful, Margarita, but don’t you think it’s possible that’s what she’s trying to exploit?”

Margarita focused on her lap and sighed heavily. “Of course I’ve thought of it. And of course you’re right—she probably is exploiting it. I haven’t told her how I feel, but I can’t have been all that subtle.”

“No,” I said with a rueful smile.

“
Bozhe moi
.” She pressed her hands to her face with a groan. “Am I that obvious?”

“To be honest, I might not have noticed it myself until Love pointed it out. But once she did…”

Margarita groaned again.

“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.” I put a hand on hers. “There’s no logic when it comes to love. But I’m afraid it’s likely she’s been taking advantage of it.”

“I know. And I’m sorry. I’ve allowed my feelings to compromise the mission.” She pressed her hands to her thighs with a look of resolve. “But I can’t leave her. I’m sorry, Nazkia. Manipulating me or not, she’s in trouble and she’s frightened. I can’t just abandon her.”

Whether magical or simply the caprice of nature, I’d hoped a little bit of Lively’s spell on her might break by getting it out into the open. I acquiesced with a sigh of my own, seeing no alternative while the timing of the sleeping spell was wasting. “All right, Margarita.” I stood and buttoned the top of my uniform and held out my hand to her. “I understand. But I’m sorry we’re parting ways. If we don’t see each other again I want to thank you for everything you’ve taught me. I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.”

Margarita shook my hand, looking up in surprise.

I took the pouch from my pocket. “If I can just put some of the powder into your lamp so I can take the other with me…”

She nodded and I sprinkled some into the flame.

“Good luck,” we said together.

Margarita stood to salute me and my eyes filled with tears. “It’s been an honor to serve you, Your Supernal Highness.”

“Well, that does it.” I pressed my palm against the corner of my eye to keep the tears from falling. “Now you have to hug me.”

She laughed and we embraced, and as we stepped apart, the door flew open.

Lively stood on the threshold, one hand cupped beneath her heavy belly and her face twisted with pain. Her mousy hair was wild as if she’d been grabbing at it, and her olive skin was pale and dotted with sweat.

“Rita,” she gasped. “Please help me.” She took a step forward, and a gush of fluid rushed from beneath her skirt and splattered onto the floor.