Vellum (62 page)

Metatron crouches down so that his eyes are on a level with the bound man's. He's surprised to hear the sadness in his own quiet voice.

“Are you so happy to stay here, then?”

“Happy? I could wish such happiness upon my dearest enemies. And don't leave yerself out of my blessings.”

Metatron lays his hand on the meat hook in Finnan's chest and whether it's to pull it out or to twist it deeper he himself doesn't know. He feels the prickle of bitmites whispering over his hand.

“You blame me for your pains?” he says.

“I blame all those that I once served, that have betrayed me.”

Metatron looks deep into the eyes of Seamus Finnan and at what's behind them. The link is established now, the graving complete. It doesn't matter that this little Irish unkin was born only a hundred and something years ago in some Dublin slum or country bog, that the man in front of him he met for the first time in a trailer park in the middle of the Mojave only a few years ago; that's only the physical truth and it's the metaphysical that counts here. Metatron looks into his eyes and feels a tear in his own because he recognizes an old friend, an old comrade, buried so deep in the Vellum these last millennia that he's there under everything, in everything, in everyone. And he always was an idealist. A glorious foolish idealist that Metatron could never truly hate. No, he could never hate him. Not Seamus. Not Shamash. Not Sammael.

Let Them Come

“You rant and rave like any madman,” says Metatron, “sick in the head.”

“Aye, sick and mad,” says Seamus. “Sick with hatred, mad with rage. Sure and ye maybe have a cure for me, old friend, eh?”

Metatron shakes his head. The same as ever. The once-shining unkin avatar of sunlight, Seamus Shamash, god of Sumer's summer, now so poisoned and so bitter.

“If you weren't suffering, you'd be insufferable.”

“Have mercy,” Seamus snarls. “Or does the Covenant not know that word? In time you'll learn it well, I promise you.”

“You still can't keep your mouth shut.”

“True, or I'd have never spoken to a slave. Who's running the show now, Enoch? 'Cause it's sure as hell not the same man who loved justice so much, aye, and the whole idea of it, of justice and wisdom and mercy—fookin mercy too—that he carved it into his own soul, took his self apart and put it back together again so's he could try, just
try
and do the same to the world. What happened to you, Enoch? What happened to the Covenant? Sure and isn't it exactly as I said?”

“No!”

Metatron realizes that he's shaking. He always knew this was a risky enterprise, and that in some ways it was fated not to work. They can't help but be the archetypes graved into them, the new selves that he shaped for them the same as all the unkin of the Covenant. From the lowest sebitti to the highest seraphim. And Metatron and Sammael were never any different, so he knew from the start that he would never get an answer to his questions, not from the Covenant's first sworn enemy, the one who took the word
shaitan
and gave it a whole new meaning. Enemy. Satan.

It's just that…he's a man of logic, of reason, of intellect, and he's never understood why Sammael turned, and if he doesn't understand it, if he can't grasp that, can't fit it into place in his systematic model of reality and humanity, then…

“So you'll not give us, then, what we are asking of you?”

“I will repay you everything I owe. You can be sure of that.”

“Don't talk to me as if I was a child.”

“O, and yer not a child?” says Seamus, his voice rising. “And more fookin naïve than a child if ye expect to learn the things I know like
this
?”

He twists in the wire, grimacing with pain, pushing up and out at Metatron so that the meat hook digs in deeper—and Metatron snatches his hand away from it in horror.

“There is no torture or torment,” Seamus says, “that any deus can devise to force me to show what will be until ye break me free of
these.
Send Gabriel. Let him hurl his flaming fire. Or send Michael, Uriel, Azazel as well. Let them come, with their white furled clouds of hail, and thunders in the earth, make chaos and confusion of the world. But none of ye will twist me to yer will, and none of ye will loosen up my tongue to tell by whom yer bound by fate itself to fall from power.”

Metatron whirls and stalks out of the circle, stands with one hand up and resting on a frozen carcass. The bitmites crawl across it and he looks at them. He should get on with it. They should have everything he needs now; all he has to do now is…download it, as they used to say. But if he could hear it from the horse's mouth. If he could only bring the rebel back into the fold.

He walks slowly back toward the chair, steps into the circle of salt.

“Consider carefully,” he says, “if this improves your fate.”

The bound man actually smiles, a sudden gentleness in his voice.

“Enoch,” he says, “my fate was considered and resolved a long, long time ago.”

Metatron's exasperation spills into a wordless
gaaah
that's made through gritted teeth.

“Just try. You stubborn. Proud. Fool. Just try, for once, to look at your present pain and be even just a little wise.”

Seamus snorts.

“Ye urge and aggravate me pointlessly, old man. Don't think for a second that I'm going to become all girlish in the face of anger; don't think that I will ever beg the fookers that I hate, down on me knees with hands held up and clasped together sure like a wee girl praying to a god of wrath, O, let me loose of this terrible punishment, please. Far from it. Yer just another wave, sure, washing over me and away, away.”

“It seems like all I say to you means nothing.”

Metatron looks at the fallen angel, still champing at the bit like an unbroken horse, still struggling against the reins, fighting at every turn. If anyone's a god of wrath, he thinks, it's this one. It's him that can't be softened or appeased with prayers.

“But, believe me, your anger is misdirected and that makes it…unwise, weak. Pride on its own, without wisdom, isn't strong, it's…less than nothing. Think. If my words cannot persuade you, if you won't let me help you…think of the storm and trials upon trials upon trials that will break over you.”

He doesn't mean it as a threat. Truly, he doesn't. But he can hear the menace in his own voice. Standing back at the doorway, Henderson, trying not to look as if he's listening, gives a noticeable approving nod. A miniature Michael, an angel of ice like the one now standing behind Gabriel in his seat at the head of the table, supporting him in his every act. They moved into China yesterday, taking out the nukes and bioweapons not with a bang but with the whisper of a thousand sebitti, canting in the night, scattered all across the country, from a tourist standing on the Great Wall to a businessman in Beijing, all to clear the way for a search-and-destroy mission on a dribbling fool who used to be Jade Emperor, once, long ago. It's not that it wasn't necessary—a senile unkin with four thousand years of the Cant inside him is more dangerous than any hatchling—but the humans are in utter panic now, as the unkin rip their whole reality apart. And the Michaels, the Gabriels, the Hendersons are not the kind of strong arms that you need in the rebuilding.

Metatron lowers his voice.

“No shelter, no escape,” he says. “The…gods you hate will rip this face of rock with thunder and with lightning, rake your body with their flames, and they will
bury
you. You'd spend eternity like this, before you ever see the light?”

“Ah, send yer winged dogs of the Dukes—bloodthirsty eagles, every fookin one of them. Let them tear my body into rags and feast on it, 'cause sure and they can banquet on me liver, cut me heart out and I'll grow a new one every fookin day. I'd rather suffer in the sunless depths of terraces of tar and hates. I don't expect an end to any of this suffering until some god—as if there's any that deserve the name—until one cocky fooker comes along to finish what I've started.”

“Who?”

“Ask yer wee beasties,” Seamus says. “That's what ye fookin put them on me for, isn't it? So ask away, old friend. See what they have to say.”

“I'm giving you a chance. Just think about it. This is not…it's not an idle threat. Just listen to me, understand that I'm speaking with sincerity. The voice of God does not know how to lie. No, every word I ever gave I kept—”

“I told ye. Ask yer bitmites.”

There's a strange look on his face, something that Metatron can't read.

“Look about you, and consider…do you really think it's better to be proud than to be prudent?”

“Ask them.”

“To us indeed,” the bitmites hiss in black words made of sound and vision furling up like smoke in air, “the things the hermit seems to say are not unfair.”

Metatron steps back out of the circle and they follow him. They rise from the bound unkin like tendrils of seaweed underwater. Or more guided, more purposeful, like tentacles. He takes another step back, looking around for the access route, whatever vent or duct or sewer these damned mycelia of infected bitmites used to get here, but there's nothing. He looks at the circle of salt that should have held them out as much as it holds the rebel's power within. The tendrils drift across it as if it's not even there.

“He advises you to seek wise words,” they say, “to put aside your willful pride. You should obey. It would be foolish for a man as wise as Foresight not to listen to the voice of God.”

The sarcasm is unmistakable.

Metatron snaps out of the shock and reaches out to gather the bitmites in. His fingers craft the bitmites in the air, making a graving on them, in them, with the glove transmitting his commands. It shouldn't have happened but it doesn't matter as long as they have the information that he needs. These tainted things are still his creatures and he can deal with them here as he's dealt with them out there (more and more each passing day, he thinks). They're just automatons with a little AI in them, just the semblance of a self. Whatever Eresh had, whatever is infecting them, it's no match for this craftsman of the soul. He gestures with his hand to draw them in, a sharp move like a hand wrapping around a rope and tugging.

The tendrils twist together in the air above the rebel and they come to him in winding weightless wafts, but when they reach his hand they only stop to touch it. The shadows stretch from Seamus Finnan's bloody chest to Metatron's gloved hand now and they touch him, they move back and to the side, drifting around and then returning like they are examining him, like they're damned well studying him. Tiny trails of black dart out to quiver through his hair, tongues of smoke tasting his face. He makes another tug, firing a basic command at them. They ignore it, drifting across the leather of his jacket sleeve, forming a pattern there, a sort of spinning four-armed spiral swirl, a swastika with limbs too long.

“Sure and I knew he'd say all that,” says Finnan, talking to the bitmites, making a point of it. “But, remember,” he says, “there's nothing shameful for a man to suffer torture from his enemy.”

The bitmites drift back to the unkin smiling in his wires and pain, a grimace grin of gritted teeth. They swirl around him now and Metatron looks down to see the circle of salt scattered into another pattern, white iron filings in a magnet's field.

“So let them hurl forked lightning,” says the rebel. “Let their fires curl against me. Let the air be torn with thunder and the wild winds whirl. Rip the whole earth from its foundations, from its very roots, and let the sea surge till its waves crash over the stars in heaven. Let them cast my body down to terraces of tar, to destiny's deep tides. He will not kill me and I'll keep my fookin pride.”

A FIRE IN THE NIGHT

They put him on trial, a court-martial where his defending officer is a lieutenant in the Tercio, the Spanish Fascist Foreign Legion. The charge is revolution, of all things. The fookin irony of it, Seamus thinks. Here he's defending the Republic from the fookin fascist rebels rising in revolt against the actual and legitimate authority, here we've got Franco and his fookin bastard Falangists out to crush even the small things that do harm to no one, shooting poets even like that Lorca fellow, and it's them, the fookin Internationals, that are the
revolutionaries.

The lieutenant says nothing in Seamus's defense, of course, and Seamus himself is not allowed to speak, and so the show trial goes until the sentences are handed out, two men to die, four men to be sent down to life in solitary confinement and the rest of them all thirty years' hard labor. But Seamus sits there listening to them and he's not afraid. It's them that are on trial in his way of thinking, history the jury. Sure and the War in Spain won't be forgot and even if he's left to rot in some dark cell, he's sure his brothers will be here one day to free him.

As it is, as it turns out, late summer of 1937 they get word that they're to be repatriated. An exchange of prisoners. And so they get released from the prison—San Sebastian, it's called—and Seamus enjoys his first scrub in three and a half months, his first shave in all that time. Sure and they only have three razor blades between the fookin twenty-seven of them and they have to toss a coin to see who goes first, but it's still a shave, so it is. It's still something. He ends up ninth, of course, as fookin unlucky as ye can fookin get.

So he gets back to Britain, back to Glasgow and he goes round various Party meetings, speaking about Franco's Spain, and thinking about it himself. He gets a letter from the foreign office asking him to reimburse them for the fookin money that it cost to ship him home, the fookers. And all the time he's thinking about it, about whether they can win, about whether they can even give a damn about that, like it fookin matters if they just sit back and watch Hitler and Mussolini march across the whole of Europe. And he thinks, to hell with it. To hell with Hitler and Mussolini and Chamberlain and Franco and all the rest of them, every fookin last one of them.