The Alleluia Files (57 page)

And there was no time. Despite Caley’s wild assurances— “There is no one else in this house, I swear to you!”—booted feet were pounding up the stairway so quickly that Conran whirled to face his attackers before he had pushed Tamar all the way under the bed. She immediately sprang to her feet and so they all were standing there, stupid, empty-handed, when four Jansai burst through the door and yowled with triumph.

“Her! That’s her!” cried one of them, his vest spattered with the blue crescent moon that was Bael’s emblem. “And by the god’s own grace, that’s Atwell! Grab them—damn it, out of my way!”

Conran and Tamar closed with their enemies, fighting in fierce silence. Jared sprang toward Tamar, but two of the Jansai were upon him, muscling him back against the wall, pummeling him in the stomach, blinding him with blows to the head. He kicked out at them and writhed in their hold till he felt the cool, wicked tip of a knifepoint jammed under his right wing. He could help no one if he was crippled by a slashing blade. Violent despair washed through him, but he could not save her, could not save anyone, not trapped in this small room in this little house. He paused in his struggles, panting for breath, wildly trying to guess what he should try next.

And then a fifth man entered the room.

Jared stared, too breathless and too outraged to speak. It was the Archangel’s son. He sauntered up to where Conran stood, his hands bound cruelly behind his back, and smiled in the Jacobite’s face.

“That was really very stupid,” Omar said in his rich voice, wearing his customary satiric smile. “We have been watching this place for five years at least. We have always had guards outside of Chahiela. You were dead the minute you crossed the town border.”

“Kill me, then, and stop gloating about it,” Conran said bluntly. Omar laughed.

“Oh, no, I think my father has something a little more—exemplary—planned for you. All of you. Something that will discourage the rest of the Jacobites from ever spouting their dreary doctrines again.”

“Think again,” Conran said. “We have seen death and betrayal before this, and it hasn’t held us back. The more you try to destroy us, the stronger we will become.”

Omar shrugged. “Boring doomed theatrics,” he murmured, and turned his back on Conran. He stood for a long time gazing at Tamar, running his eyes with insolent familiarity over the contours of her face. “Well, well, well. So you are the missing child so long believed dead. You have no idea of the trouble you have caused us, my father and me, but it scarcely matters now.”

Tamar said nothing, but stared stonily back at him. There was a bruise forming on her left cheek, and a trickle of blood pooling at the corner of her mouth. Like Conran, she had her hands tied behind her back. Jared could see her muscles working as if she was trying to free her wrists.

“You look very like your sister,” Omar went on. “Although you do not quite have her sweetness of expression. She is very fond of me, you know.”

“That’s interesting,” Tamar replied in a hard, steady voice. “She has told me about all her friends and lovers, and I don’t believe your name ever once came up.”

Omar laughed lightly. “Good try, my dear, but I would wager a great deal on the bet that you have never met your sister. You do not—forgive me—run in the same circles.”

Not intending to, Jared let out a soft, amazed laugh. This piece of the puzzle, at least, had suddenly fallen into place. He said, quoting, “The day has come when the twinned destinies of angel and mortal are one.”

Slowly, infinitely disdainful, Omar finally turned to confront Jared. With the same thoroughness he had used to examine Tamar, he let his glance wander over the angel, taking in his two assailants, the knife to his wing, the travel-weariness in his face and the defiance in his eyes.

“Jared,” he said at last. “I hardly dare ask why I find you here.”

“I couldn’t figure out,” Jared said, ignoring the question, “why it was so important to you to find Tamar. She was no
more and no less valuable than any other Jacobite, yet she had somehow moved to the head of your list. Why could that be? Why did you want her?”

“Tamar,” Omar repeated. “We didn’t have a name for her before. I hate to do an anonymous execution.”

“The prophecy,” Jared said. “Jovah told you. Jehovah—whoever. He said the knowledge would be revealed when the angel and mortal twins were reunited. And they have been. And if I know anything of Jovah’s ways, once he has made a pronouncement like that, there’s nothing any mortal or angel can do to change the course of events.”

Omar took a step closer to Jared, and in his eyes was the glittering conviction of madness so like his father’s. “Jovah is not a god,” he purred in the angel’s ear. “Jovah is a machine, and he makes calculations based on the best available data. He may have foreseen the existence of your friend Tamar and her twin angelic sister, but he could not foresee what circumstances would separate them or what fate might await them. I am not afraid of a machine’s proclamations. I know how to circumvent a prophecy. And this young woman—and all her friends—will die on the Plain of Sharon in two days’ time.”

“No,” Jared said.

“Oh, yes.”

“No.”

“And neither you, nor your heathen friends in Semorrah, nor any of the stupid Jacobites we have not yet managed to catch in our nets will be able to prevent that death.”

“Set her free,” Jared said, offering a rash, unworkable bargain: “Set her free—put her in my care. Take the others. I will watch over her. She will not trouble you or your father again.”

Omar actually laughed. What Conran and Tamar, tensely listening, might be thinking, Jared could not guess and had no time to wonder. “She is dead, Jared, and no pleading on your part will change that fact. But you can still walk away. I am not overeager to send angels to their annihilation—and you, I think, could still have some value to us, if you wished. Your choice. Walk away now—or die with your questionable friends on the Plain of Sharon.”

There was a long moment of silence while Jared stared at Omar’s handsome, fanatic face. If he left now, flew straight for Semorrah, he could rouse a force of merchants and angels, storm
the Plain of Sharon, and prevent Bael’s bloodthirsty demonstration. If he arrived in time, if the Jacobites weren’t all murdered en route, if he and Christian and Mercy and the others could stop whatever dreadful vengeance Bael intended to put in motion …

He raised his eyes and looked straight at Tamar. Her unreadable gaze was fixed on him, but there was no emotion to be deciphered in her face. Not fear for her life, not contempt for him, not hope, not surrender. But her eyes did not waver and her body did not in the slightest degree tremble. He had never seen anyone so brave, so proud. Even Conran, growling beside her, could not compare to her. Nothing else in the whole world held an ounce of worth.

“Tell your man to withdraw his dagger,” Jared said coolly, and Omar jerked his head. Reluctantly, the Jansai lowered his knife hand and retreated. Jared shook his wings back as a vain girl might toss back her gorgeous golden hair. Tamar’s eyes dropped to the floor as if she could not bear to watch him defect.

Jared took two long strides to Conran’s side, pushing aside the Jansai holding him. He felt Tamar’s eyes follow him but he did not spare her a glance.

“I stand with the Jacobites,” he said.

“Then you will die with the Jacobites.”

Jared nodded. “So be it,” he said, adding very softly Alleluia’s benediction: “Amen.”

A
s delighted as Lucinda was to have Reuben to herself for as long as
The Wayward
was gone, she learned quickly enough that these next few weeks would not be simply a blissful lover’s holiday. For one thing, she couldn’t help fretting about Tamar, nearly every minute of the day—ridiculous, of course, to worry about a sister she had never even known she had until a few days ago, but the concern was there nonetheless. She kept her promise, and when no one else was around, she sang cheerful, hopeful melodies that might make a weary traveler smile as she pressed on in her uncertain adventure. And she watched the gliding colors in her Kiss, hoping to see—as Tamar had seen—evidence of her twin’s existence in its capricious depths. But it yielded very few secrets. And she listened to the cadences of her own heart, and watched the pantomimes of her dreams, for by these signs if no others she was convinced she would be able to determine the state of Tamar’s well-being.

So that was a preoccupation; and she was not the only one left behind who kept her attention focused on the voyage to Samaria. The Jacobites could talk of nothing else, and even the calm Edori seemed excited about the news that the travelers might bring back. Well, not excited. Interested. Intrigued. Willing to hear the details.

But all this might have been bearable if Reuben had not been so restless. Sleeping beside Lucinda in the stone Edori house, he tossed and turned and called out names every night, balling up the covers into one hopeless knot on the nights he did not throw them all to the floor. During the days he paced along the seashore, watching the incessant billowing of the waves, or
begged his Edori brethren and Jacobite neighbors for some chore. He was, it turned out, a skilled enough mechanic to fix most anything that was broken—the axle of one of those small, sleek cars; the wires in some discarded piece of recording equipment; transmitters; receivers; unidentifiable objects. He had been trained at the Augustine school, he admitted to Lucinda, but wanderlust and a desire to see the world had lured him away before he had completed two years of study.

“And I was good! That’s what they all told me,” he said with a brief self-deprecating grin. “One of my professors said to me, ‘If you stay two more years, I swear to you you’ll be building boats instead of sailing them,’ but that was hardly an incentive to me. Who wanted to stay behind building boats? I wanted to be out on the ocean, sailing from port to port, seeing everything. I still want to be.”

Lucinda wondered if he had ever been on shore more than a week since the day he had first set sail. Clearly he could not stand the inactivity for long. She would remember this, if ever it crossed her mind to try to convince him to live with her, on Angel Rock or wherever she eventually made her home; she would remember that this man could not stay in one place for long without driving himself and everyone around him to the verge of lunacy.

Those first three days, she tried to come up with diversions, so they explored the nearby countryside and visited all the notable landmarks. It was breathtaking country, alive with color and scent, and Reuben was a knowledgeable and entertaining guide. But that palled on him quickly enough, and Lucinda had to admit that there were only so many lovely vistas and fields of exotic vegetation that she could admire with any sincerity, and so she racked her brains to come up with other excursions.

“You could take me traveling through Ysral,” she suggested at the end of that third day. “We could meet up with your clan and I could see how Edori live on the road.”

“Too far,” he said briefly. “Take too long to get there and back.”

He did not want to be a yard away from the harbor when
The Wayward
hove back into view, Lucinda knew. He was not going to let that ship set sail without him again. But: “If we fly,” she said persuasively, “we could cross Ysral in a couple of days,
don’t you think? We wouldn’t be gone more than five or six days.”

“Some other time,” he said. “When it’s less risky.”

She spread her hands, sighed softly, and turned aside, wondering what else she could suggest. She had never seen the sanguine Reuben so edgy—had never, as far as she could remember, seen any Edori out of temper. But even as she was frowning over her options, Reuben let out a small laugh and took her hand.

“Ah, and I should be apologizing for being such a crabby old bear,” he said, smiling down at her, albeit with an effort. “It was I who volunteered to stay behind, not you who volunteered to entertain me, and I should be happy for the free days I have with you. And I
am
happy. It is just that I am not used to so many days of uncontested happiness in a row.”

She could not help smiling at that. A sweet apology. “But I had an idea,” she said. “Couldn’t we go to this Augustine school? It’s not too far, is it? Boyce said it took a day each way in one of those little cars. Or we could fly—it would take almost the same amount of time.”

On the instant he brightened; the prospect of action always cheered him. “Yes, excellent thought!” he exclaimed. “I could introduce you to some of my old teachers, and you could see the campus. You won’t believe some of the things they have there! Motors smaller than my hand and bigger than this house! And the whole building set aside for electrical experimentation-it’s extraordinary, the lights and colors they produce in some of those rooms—”

He went on in this fashion for a few more minutes. Lucinda, glad to have hit on something that lit his enthusiasm, only listened closely enough to know when it was appropriate to nod or murmur her amazement. She was thinking about how much lunch she should pack and calculating exactly how long the trip would take and wondering what she should bring for a change of clothes.

“Let’s leave first thing in the morning, then,” she said, when Reuben finally paused for breath. “I think it will be fun.”

And it was an enjoyable journey on one of those golden, serene days for which Ysral was famous. Reuben had elected to drive, which was fine with Lucinda since she thought he would enjoy
the journey even more if he actually got a chance to feel each mile as it passed beneath him. They had borrowed a car from one of his Edori friends—a racy little two-seater with three wheels and incredible power—and Lucinda found herself wondering if she could, in fact, have kept pace with this vehicle. Technology would soon outdistance the angels, she realized, whether or not the god was revealed to be a machine. The thought made her a little frightened and a little sad.

As so much did these days.

They arrived at the Augustine school in early evening. It was not, Lucinda thought, the most beautiful collection of buildings she had ever seen. What appeared to be the main structure of the campus was a huge, two-story building that covered five acres at least and offered no interesting detail to break up the flat, honey-beige expanse of its stone exterior. Surrounding it in a somewhat haphazard array were a collection of smaller buildings, some of them sporting all manner of antennas, transmitting towers, and other odd features from their roofs and windows. One building was constructed entirely of some black, volcanic stone, and offered no windows and (from what Lucinda could see) only one door. At first she thought it was the burned hulk of some classroom destroyed by fire, but no, it was meant to look that way; she saw a handful of students exiting by that single door, talking and gesturing in great excitement.