The Alleluia Files (32 page)

“You’ll have to give me a demonstration,” he said. “Saddle and unsaddle, hitch and unhitch, show me you can ride, pour a measure of grain, show me how you’d wrap a sprain. Don’t mean to doubt you, but there’s plenty say they know horses that don’t know horses.”

She wasn’t offended in the least. She was always glad to have a chance to prove herself, because she knew she was good enough to win over anyone but a confirmed misogynist. And, despite her intentions of maintaining her distance from her next employer, she could not help liking him. He was a bluff, weathered, middle-aged man who seemed both powerful and at ease. Then again, she had liked most the people she had met who worked with horses.

“Tell me what you want done,” she said.

He put her through her paces with three separate horses, one a skittish filly who seemed to resent any handling at all, and nodded wordlessly each time she finished a task. She knew she was doing well; she felt confident and in control. So she was not surprised, though pleased and grateful, when he shepherded her out of the stables and offered her his hand.

“I’m Gene,” he said. “I’ll be your boss. Can you start today or will you need a few days to get settled?”

“I’ve got to return my horse to Shepherd’s Pass,” she said. “I can be back in the morning.”

“Good enough.”

“I take it there’s a bunk here for me?”

“Dorm,” he said. “Small room, but all to yourself. Food’s good. Not much entertainment.”

She smiled. “I don’t require much.”

“People in trouble rarely do.”

Her smile faded and she gave him a swift, arrested look. He shrugged. “Not my concern,” he said. “You do your work, that’s all I want. I’ll go tell Isabella you’re on the payroll.”

She nodded and turned away without another word. But during the whole ride back to the city, and during much of the night while she lay awake in her hotel room, she wondered. Was that why Jasper had been so kind to her—and Arthur and Gena, and even Jenny? Had it been so obvious, so stark on her face, that she was running from terror or persecution? She had thought she was solitary and self-sufficient, hiding her troubles and relying on no one but herself, and all along, people had been extending their helping hands. She was not sure she would be willing to take in a fugitive, offer her a job, and ask no questions. Why had these people been so ready to give her a chance?

The speculation, which should have comforted her, made her shiver instead. She did not want to rely on the goodness of strangers; that would lessen her own strength, dull her wits, lull her to security. She was not safe here, would be safe nowhere that she could imagine, even once she was with the Jacobites again. It would not do to let down her guard. She would take this job, because she needed it, but she would not stay for long.

S
pring in Bethel was lovelier than spring in Gaza, because it came sooner and more rapturously. In Gaza, the landscape altered overnight, it seemed, from winter brown to summer green, without the exotic riot of flowers that changed the Bethel terrain to a pastel candyland during this most playful of seasons.

Still, Jared would have preferred being anywhere in Bethel but the Eyrie. And even the Eyrie wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t had to spend his time there with Bael and Mariah.

It was entirely his fault, of course, since he had come here of his own free will, but he had not expected to be stuck for three days or more. Mariah had practically greeted him with the news that they were planning a dinner party that he simply
must
stay for, and while he was here he could renew his friendship with Annalee Stephalo, surely he remembered her? He almost felt as if Mariah had been lying in wait for him anytime these past three months, plotting how she could enmesh him in her social schemes and force him to make an extended visit. He had not thought quickly enough to manufacture an important engagement back home, so he agreed to stay till the party, and then cursed himself roundly every hour for the next seventy-two.

It was not that the Eyrie was a bad place. On the contrary, it was quite the most beautiful of the angel holds, and the one gorged with the most history. Built atop the steep Velo range, it was carved from the glowing rosy stone of the Velo Mountains and therefore possessed a warm, eerie incandescence even in the deepest tunnel. It was a labyrinth of levels and corridors that only the residents were required to navigate; the main public area was a broad plateau that anyone could reach by
climbing a massive, serried stairway cut from the mountain itself. This stairway was lined with shops and vendors’ booths and was always crowded with noisy, excited visitors, and Jared found it a little tedious anytime he had to use it. Mostly, of course, he just used the public landing spot at the top of the compound and made his way inside from there.

The most distinctive feature of the Eyrie was its constant music. At all hours of the night and day, rotating shifts of singers gathered in a small chamber in the uppermost reaches of the hold and offered harmonious prayers to the god. The singing could be heard from any point in the Eyrie, and it could, Jared knew from experience, calm a man in a rage or cheer an angel in despair.

Although, on this trip, not even music was enough to improve his spirits.

Truth to tell, he had been in a fairly black mood when he arrived here, though such a humor was alien to one usually so sunny-tempered. He could not believe he had lost the Jacobite woman. He had not been entirely surprised to find her missing from Ileah when he returned from Stockton, but he couldn’t imagine how she had escaped him so completely. She could not have gotten far on foot, and he had scoured the area nearby, looking for likely hiding places: cliffs hanging over the river, dense stands of trees. But he could not locate her. It seemed likely someone had picked her up as she hurried along the road, but he could hardly stop all the trucks and transports traveling the routes fanning out from Ileah. And he had no idea in which direction she might have run.

So he had left Ileah in a pretty foul temper indeed—although he wasn’t sure why he should be so angry. It was not as if she had been at all cooperative. It was not as if she had supplied him with any good ideas for continuing his search. Still, she was a Jacobite and he had thought he could make use of her, and now she had disappeared. And he wasn’t entirely certain where he should next turn his efforts at finding the Alleluia Files.

So he had come to the Eyrie, not because he really expected to find the files there, but because he had promised himself he would search all the possible hiding places. He had expected to stay half a day, maybe overnight if courtesy demanded it; he had not expected to be roped into Mariah’s entertainment plans.

“Once a year, we plan a dinner for the, shall we say, upper
echelon of Bethel society,” she told him. “As the highest taxpayers in the province, it’s only fair that they get some recognition for the wealth they have poured into the Eyrie’s coffers. And of course there is no higher honor than being invited to sit at a table among angels as among equals.”

Jared thought perhaps some mortals would be less impressed by that equation than others, but he preserved his silence. Despite the fact that she had been married to Bael for nearly thirty years and lived at the Eyrie most of her adult life, Mariah still seemed to possess the sort of blind hero worship for angels that Jared expected to find only in the very young and the very unsophisticated. In his experience, angels had at least the same number of flaws and vices as the average mean-spirited mortal, and Bael could probably multiply that figure by a factor of one hundred. But still, Mariah seemed besotted; and that was probably just as well for her. Better to adore your husband than to despise him.

Bael had greeted the news of Jared’s extended visit with hearty approval. “Always glad to see you here, my boy, always a pleasure to talk with you!” he declared in his booming voice. “And how were things in Monteverde when you left? All well, I trust?”

It seemed like years since he had left Monteverde. “All well,” Jared replied pleasantly. “It is colder there than it is here, of course.”

“Ah, but spring will not lag long, even in northern Gaza,” Bael said. As always, the very tenor of his voice made everything seem like a divine pronouncement; Jared half expected his command to make the flowers open a month sooner and the ground to amaze itself with greenery. “But you are welcome to enjoy our spring while you are here. We must find other ways to entertain you as well.”

“I thought I’d take a look around your archives, if you didn’t mind,” Jared said boldly. He’d had a moment to give this some thought; he believed he could pull it off without arousing suspicion. “One of Ben Harth’s daughters was at Monteverde a few weeks back, doing research for some school paper. Some history class. She was asking about the Archangel Delilah, about whom I found myself surprisingly ignorant. I know that she ruled from the Eyrie, and that there was some short interruption of her tenure, but I couldn’t tell her the whole story. I thought
you might have some biographies of her here?”

“Yes, we do, I’m sure we must,” Bael said. “The archives would be the place to look. Make yourself free of them. Myself, I’ve never been able to locate a single thing I wanted there. The place has not been organized as well as it could have been. But look all you want.”

So that was dangerous ground lightly skated over; he had not even mentioned Alleluia’s name. He spent some time that afternoon poking through the bookshelves and boxes of the archives, but it wasn’t like his hopes were high. As Bael had said, the place was so badly organized that it scarcely had any logic at all. He would be lucky to find a couple of volumes about the flamboyant and much-beloved Delilah, let alone any information about the reclusive Alleluia of the brief period of glory.

In fact, he did find two histories on Delilah, both of which devoted entire chapters to the temporary Archangel, but did not heap her with praise.

“During Alleluia’s reign,” said one, “the storms and the tempests grew in frequency and fury. While it was true that Alleluia herself was able to fly to any site and calm the storm, no matter how violent, she was not able to successfully mobilize the other angels, which was perceived as a distinct failing on her part. Not until Delilah regained her ability to fly and was once again on the seat of power did the storms abate and the god again choose to listen to the voices of all the angels.”

Well, that didn’t make it sound as if Alleluia had transported herself to the deck of the spaceship
Jehovah
and conversed with the machine who controlled the weather and the fate of Samaria.

Jared laid the biographies aside and continued to search through the mayhem, but since he had no idea what he was looking for, his search was hardly systematic. Merely, he picked up books, glanced through them, put them down, opened cartons, poked inside, shut them again. He was looking for anything that looked like it might hold sound. In his experience, recordings were always put on small silver disks or larger black disks that could be inserted in specialized machines; but in Alleluia’s day, perhaps, other mediums had existed. Still, a random search through the cabinets and cupboards of the archives yielded nothing promising. And he had not thought it would.

Sighing with frustration, Jared swept his wings behind him and sat on the dusty stone floor. If he had been the Archangel
Alleluia, possessed of a dangerous but important secret, where would he have hidden evidence? If he had been married to an engineer of some genius, he thought he might have recorded his memoir on some highly customized equipment and kept it close to his side. After her brief stint as Archangel, Alleluia had been the oracle at Mount Sinai for nearly forty years (according to this unsympathetic chapter on her life, which also noted that such a quiet, regulated existence had seemed more suited to her temperament and her talents than a great role in the public eye). True, the oracles, like the angels, received a steady stream of visitors looking to offer petitions to the god; but the oracles’ retreats were much more inaccessible and sternly guarded than the angel holds. And the Augustine school had been built at the very foot of Mount Sinai, so Caleb Augustus’s equipment would have been easily available to her. And she would have felt safe there; the oracles’ retreats were famous for creating auras of shelter and haven. All in all, it seemed like a good bet for a hiding place. Sometime in the next few weeks he must go to Mount Sinai.

He had barely reached this conclusion when he heard delicate footsteps cross the stone floor and a sweet, hesitant voice call out his name. “Jared? Are you in here? Jared?”

He came to his feet just as Annalee Stephalo drifted into his line of vision. She was a small, frail blond girl, who dressed always in diaphanous pinks and melons and wore her hair in a wild cloud of curls. She had the tiniest hands and the biggest eyes Jared had ever seen. Her father owned a mining concern in southwestern Bethel, and she had been living at the Eyrie for more than a year.

Jared couldn’t stand her.

“Oh! There you are!” she said in her breathy voice as she rounded the corner and saw him waiting there. “My! In these shadows you look so tall.”

“Are you looking for me, Annalee?” he said coolly. A stupid question since she obviously was.

“Yes, it’s nearly time for dinner and Mariah thought you might need to be reminded,” she said. She was looking around the room with a small frown on her dainty face, as if trying to comprehend where she was. “There are certainly a lot of books here, aren’t there?” she said at last.

“Indeed, there are. History books, mostly. Accounts of the
hold. Tales of past angels and Archangels. Are you interested in history?” he added maliciously.

“Oh, no! Reading gives me a headache.” She paused for a moment, her eyes trained on the floor, then lifted her face to give him a single, soulful look. It was a trick she repeated often, and it was generally effective; her eyes were so enormous and so blue that every time you saw them again, full force, you were shocked at their depth and brilliance. Even if you didn’t like her. “I’m sure you’re a great reader, Jared. You’re so clever.”