‘We are fairly certain that everyone new who enters the gate is followed,’ he told me, when we were finally crouched in the dank and odorous sewer drain of Glory. Peering out through the grille, we were waiting for the street to be empty long enough for me to get out unnoticed.
‘The other agents went too casually,’ Jack Rose said. ‘The one advantage of entering this way is that, because it is so apparently easy to get into the city, no one would bother watching the drains. Remember . . .’
‘Be invisible,’ I finished, quoting his creed and grinning despite the jitter of my heart against my chestbones.
He squeezed my arm, ever unsmiling. ‘Stay only long enough to find out what goes on, Rian. In and out.’
I nodded, believing it would be that easy; truly imagining I was well prepared for what lay ahead. Secreted weaponry, stun pills and gases, a rudimentary training in the amalgamated martial art of Taiche.
‘One last thing,’ Jack Rose said. He took my hand and pushed a ring onto my finger. ‘If you need help, activate the first setting on the red seeker ring. I will find you if I can. But only do it if you are desperate.’
I stared at him, because agents always went in without anything that would prove they were agents. Always. He had told me that himself. I stared into his fierce wild eyes, trying to frame a question, but he prodded me unceremoniously and said the way was clear, so I climbed out into the empty street throwing off the grey coverall that had kept the drain muck from my pale tunic. He pulled the grating back in place and hissed at me to get away from the duct before vanishing into the fetid darkness of the caverns. I walked away without looking back.
Of course, what lay at the heart of Glory was Sorrow, and I was defenceless as a babe against that.
Glory was not much different to Serenity in its layout: utilitarian, and constructed along a squared grid. A mentor had taken me there once to show me that anything could be taken to excess, even the desire for peace. But what was bare and grim in mind-numb Serenity was in Glory gentle simplicity. Glory was clean and pale as the mountain city of Winter which had been the first city growing out of us, and shared many of Freedom’s laws and customs. As in Winter, most constructions in Glory were of white softstone, though they were not the tall pale towers of our sister city, but low flat-roofed dwellings for the most part, all unadorned. The clean, bare, bonelike whiteness of Glory gave off a radiance in the solar rays that hurt my eyes, and I was glad the day was near to ending.
We knew the ceremonies conducted by the Angel occurred at sunset, hence my entry to the city at that time. We had agreed that any mistakes would be less likely to be noticed if people had their minds elsewhere, and besides, I could attend the ceremony and observe what went on there.
In and out, I promised myself.
A stooped man stepped from a doorway ahead, and I followed. He led me into the broad avenue I later learned was the main street, and suddenly we were only two in a whole stream of people. I was startled to see how many of them looked ill and frail in their spotless white tunics. Many bore savage burn scars, though they looked content enough. I was uncomfortably aware that I was too healthy looking, but no one paid the slightest attention to me.
Ahead, I could see the thickening crowd stream up a set of broad steps and go under a stone arch. This must be the Chantry Jack had told me about.
‘We know there is a place called the Chantry where the populace meets to hear the Angel speak each day. That will be as good a place to start as any. All the children live in communal carehouses dotted about, so you can follow some of them back to a carehouse. None of them have names and I doubt you will be noticed for they do not seem much for lists and order in Glory.’
Passing from the pink-stained dusty street and into the shadowy interior of the Chantry, I could hear the susurrus of hundreds of voices.
After a moment, my eyes adjusted with relief to the dimness. People were pressed in close and stood staring up at a raised dais. A plain wooden seat was set atop the dais and sitting on it was the Angel. Dressed in a white shift, and barefoot, his feet not quite touching the floor, fingers clasped loosely together in his lap, he looked like a child at its lessons. Though he did not wear a crown, his hair was yellow and rose up in fine down to float about his head, catching the sunlight in a nimbus.
Behind him, in shocking contrast, the outermost wall of the city lay open and showed the black ruinous lands. The wall surrounding Glory literally ran along the edge of the frontier beyond which no one could walk and live for long.
Jack had told me the Angel was young, but the light behind made it impossible to see his age. I felt uneasy at this face of shadows crowned by light, surrounded by darkness. I told myself the effect was deliberate, aimed at binding awe and mystery.
Then the Angel shifted and light fell onto his features.
I gasped but fortunately it was lost in the cries of the people pressed around me. I felt as if someone had kicked the breath out of me; the Angel was beautiful.
Even as I write that word I am seeking another, but I am defeated, for there is no word made on this earth that can describe the solemn glory of the Angel’s features. No wonder he called himself Angel. To look into a mirror at that incredible luminous perfection, and think himself anything less would be a blasphemy.
I was stunned, for surely the other agents who had managed to get some information out of the city to Jack Rose would have mentioned this. And if so, why hadn’t he told me? Then a second later I realised that the appearance of the Angel would not be thought important to adult agents searching for power and corruption. They would not see that such incandescent beauty was power, for anyone seeing truly must know that no corruption had ever touched that face. Here was goodness personified. Here was an Angel.
And I knew then that Erasemus had been right to send me. An adult would see a child in the Angel’s face, and search for a manipulator. Indeed Jack had spoken often of the boy’s controller. But I saw a beauty so pure it must inflame those who looked on it with a kind of madness of adoration that might be shaped or honed to any purpose; and, in its midst, eyes with the sad wisdom of the ancients.
I missed quite a lot of what he was saying that night in my shock at his appearance, but I visited the Chantry every day from then on with the rest of the populace, and heard him say these words again and again. Before long, I knew them well enough to chant with him, as the rest did.
‘There was a sickening of the spirit of heaven.’
He always began without preamble, his voice sweet and low pitched, shaped to the story, so that his words became a sort of wind that breathed itself into you.
‘Therefore, heaven separated this sickening spirit, lest it infect the rest, imprisoning it in a cage of flesh. Sent forth upon the earth, that flesh which called itself humankind, multiplied, as is its nature. Far from transcending the flesh, purified by its ordeal, as heaven had hoped, the spirit became further corrupted, wholly absorbed by its physical prison.’
Here his beauty became a sort of reproach, and his voice shaded into an implacable subtone. ‘In grace and infinite mercy, heaven sought to undo this binding of flesh to spirit. But heaven erred, misjudging the virulence of flesh, for some survived the wars. Thus did heaven bind pure and uncorrupted spirit into flesh. I am that spirit and that flesh sent to bring about Geddon – the end of all flesh and of the spirit that clings to it and worships it.
‘I tell you now that these are the Geddon days; the days of Glory during which you may prepare for the end of flesh. That spirit in you which does not rise above the flesh will perish with it. This is the judgement of heaven. I am the Angel, descended by heaven’s grace, to offer, to those who will seek it, the twofold High Path – the Harrowing of the flesh and the Anguishing of the spirit – that will loosen your spirit from the flesh which binds it to the earth, so that when Geddon comes it may fly free.’
Then He asked who aspired to the High Path and a lot of people lifted their arms and streamed through doors to
the left and right of the dais at the front of the Chantry. After a few visits I realised most of the sick and ailing and scarred went to the right, while the others went to the left.
I watched them go curiously, thinking to myself that this High Path and the whole story of being an Angel was pretty much a mish-mash of the old religions – mostly standard Christianity straight out of the Bible.
Jack Rose had predicted as much.
‘All religions run along pretty much the same lines. God or heaven made humans, didn’t like how they came out, and wanted to be rid of them,’ he had said one day as we travelled. ‘This Angel is using tried and true dogma, but that hardly explains how he has amassed so much power by it. Nor does it explain the weapons he has his followers collect. If it were only weapons we might disarm them stealthily and let them keep their toys, but there is more to it than that, and this Angel is at the centre of it. To find out anything, we have to get to him, and to whoever controls him. That is where you come in, because it seems the Angel needs playmates.’
He meant this literally. The Angel spent some of each day in a garden playing with the children of Glory. I learned how easy it would be to get to him the first day I woke in a carehouse, when the attendants asked over a simple breakfast who would like to visit the Angel. There was a great clamour of delight, and ten were chosen. This happened every day, and I saw it would not be too difficult to get myself chosen, but first I was determined to learn a little more about this twofold path advocated by the Angel.
I learned that the Harrowing of the flesh was literally that: people letting themselves be physically tortured. I learned it by lifting my hand and following those people ushered to the left door in the Chantry. I had discovered that the two doors literally represented the twofold path. I went with the awareness that I would be forced to undergo some sort of physical torture, certain I would be equal to it. I had seen several of the people who went through the doors afterwards. Those who went in healthy came out battered and thin and pale, but they were alive.
I have spoken of those days of pain in detail, and I will not revisit them again now save to say that when I began to remember, those days of Harrowing came to me first in nightmares; and I was again swimming and swimming desperately in a vat of water, pushed by poles from the edges until, utterly exhausted, I could swim no more. I would sink screaming for Jack Rose and Erasemus, cursing them, and I would breathe in the oily water. There would be agony, then unconsciousness. Then I would be revived to undergo the same thing. The pain of drowning was dreadful, and drove me to the edge of madness. Only the mental disciplines of the Taiche training enabled me to endure.
Some died on this first brutal step on the High Path, and the Angel gave praise that heaven had accepted their spirit before Geddon. Many more went mad, but all who survived were eligible to go on to the final step – the Anguishing – which was supposed to enable their spirit to rise to heaven spontaneously when Geddon came. I had not managed to find out much about the Anguishing of the spirit. I was on the verge of offering myself for the second door, thinking it could not be worse than the Harrowing of the flesh, when I was selected to visit the Angel.
Unable to refuse, I went with trepidation and a little excited flock of children, expecting rituals and brainwashing, or maybe some sort of sexual interference disguised as play, but all the Angel did was to play with them. The children loved it. They squealed and giggled and begged for more. He tickled them and crawled after them, growling and pretending to gobble them up. He laughed and told them stories of heaven and he sang to them. I hovered on the fringes, wondering how one who so obviously adored children could allow them to be tortured, and preach of death. I was not the only child who had undergone the Harrowing.
As if he felt the intensity of my scrutiny, the Angel looked over the children’s heads at me.
In that moment, I learned that there truly is love at first glance: a mingling of souls that surpasses all sense, all words, all flesh, all life. That first single look we exchanged wakened in me a voracious longing. But the most shattering thing of all was my awareness that the Angel experienced the same jolt of recognition and shudder of longing.
I saw his lips part to half shape some word, perhaps a curse or prayer, then he beckoned. If he had called me to him at the heart of an inferno, I would have gone. The doomed children of Glory parted to let me pass and I came to him as smoothly and inevitably as a blade sliding into its sheath.
‘Welcome, my dearest love,’ he whispered, taking my hands. ‘I have been wondering when you would come to me.’
I was completely bewildered. I opened my mouth but somehow I found the lies I had created would not shape themselves into words. Dearest love, my heart sang.
‘I am Rian,’ I said at last.
He smiled and it seemed to me there was something new in his face. ‘Yes.’ He released one of my hands and reached out to stroke a finger along my cheek. ‘I am Sorrow and as an Angel, I am beyond Harrowing. Even Anguishing is near beyond me, yet how else shall my spirit transcend flesh at the end, except by its grace? Therefore heaven swore that I would find Anguish ere Geddon came, in the face and flesh of a girl called Rian. My name was given me as a seal for that promise – Sorrow – for it was said I would know its truest meaning only when I saw you die, and with that pain would come the release of my soul.’
I swallowed a dry hard lump of terror, trying to still the panicky madness that skittered around the edges of my mind, gibbering of love and Angels and death.
‘I . . . I don’t understand. You are saying you knew I would come here today?’
‘I knew you would come from beyond this city to stand before me. I have left you to wander freely throughout Glory where other agents sent before you were taken at once.’
Now I felt cold to the bone. ‘I . . . other agents?’
He sighed. ‘You are sent by the denizens of the city of Freedom who fear Glory will attack and attempt to convert the other cities to Angel worshipping. You came through the drainage caverns led by a man who, even now, waits for you outside Glory, his fear of losing you gnawing at him with the teeth of a rabid rat.’
I blinked at that, remembered the look on Jack’s face as he pushed the ring onto my finger.
‘You have undergone the Harrowing of your own choosing,’ the Angel went on. ‘This I foresaw. You have seen all of the city in your wanderings. You have asked questions and have been given true answers. You know my face and my name, and you have spoken to me. In this last, you have surpassed those who came before you. But only because heaven bid me give you the freedom of this city. I know that you have yet to be touched by the Highest Path – but we shall find that path in one another, for only by love can the soul find its highest Anguishing.’
I gave up all pretence of confusion. I had been trained to accept and prepare for death when it was inevitable. I, who understood that I had been sleeping until the Angel’s Janus face of death and love wakened me to womanhood, let the fear of death his words generated mingle with the terrifying madness that was love. Then I let my emotions fuse into a shield for the inner stillness that was the core of Taiche, and waited.
‘An opportunity will always come to turn the tide, even in the darkest moments. There will inevitably be one split second when you might act and alter the course of events. Miss it, and you die,’ Jack Rose had told me, and showed me how to be still at my core, and watchful.
‘What are you going to do with me?’ I asked the Angel.
‘First, I will show you what you have not been allowed to find,’ Sorrow said, and he led me out of the enclosed garden. The children followed in a subdued train as he brought me through the city to the silos where the weapons were kept. Ancient missiles which, when activated, would rain acid chemicals to poison the earth and sear the flesh.
‘How did you find them?’ I asked, aghast. Surely this was enough to destroy twenty cities.
I froze, seeing what I had not seen before. Not twenty cities, but all citi
es – Geddon.
‘Heaven guided me,’ Sorrow said, his fingers caressing my arm.
‘Why?’ I breathed. But I knew. Had I not shaped the words a dozen times with my own lips? As if reading my mind, he said them for me.
‘These are the Geddon days – the end days – in which the spirit that is not prepared to abandon the flesh will perish with it. This is the judgement of heaven.’ He touched one of the missiles as gently as if it were an animal that might startle. ‘In a sense, my Rian, I am an agent as you are, sent to infiltrate. Expendable but with one chance for redemption. Just as your Jack Rose gave you a ring to summon aid, so I have you.’
He smiled and led me back to the garden. Strange though it seems, we sat and he held me and stroked my hair and whispered words of love into my ears. He went for a while to deliver his usual sermon, but he returned. I did not try to run, nor he to bind me, because he was an Angel with all the omniscience of heaven, and knew I was snared by love.
‘You have seen the people here, Rian,’ he told me when he returned. ‘They know that Geddon casts its shadow over them but they are not afraid. They know what will come once the flesh has gone, and they will welcome its loss.’
‘Will you kill me so easily?’ I whispered.
And then he wept and I wept too. He reached out and pulled me into his arms. I was surprised at the strength of him under his soft, white flesh. His hands trembled as they rested on my bare arms, and he leaned towards me and put his lips on mine. I pulled away; I froze. I meant to, but my lips were not mine any more. They flowed forward and seemed to fuse with his. I did not know where I ended and he began.
‘Flesh keeps our spirits from heaven,’ he said, without taking his mouth away from me. ‘When Geddon comes, we will never be parted. Not in all eternity.’
‘But we will not be ourselves in your heaven.’ I shivered with a desire for him to kiss me again so powerful it was like a knife in me.