Faith Hunter - Host

The voices rose higher in pitch as if following the lifting lights, and I covered my head with my arms to block out the light and the noise, which was wondrous and splendid, so grand that no words I knew could define or explain it. My eardrums thudded like drums from the decibels. Dizzy with the sound, I fell, resting on the lip of the wheels, bruising the undersides of my arms. I was crying, tears drenching my cheeks. The volume finally fell and the descant changed key as the hymn changed. “Holy, holy, holy,” the throng sang, pianissimo.

I knew where I was. I knew. I was in a Realm of Light. Or worse. I was in heaven.

The song faded away to the final strains, the notes so pure even the air shivered with the beauty of them. Amethyst swiveled in her ornate chair, bringing her human face around. She saw me. Her eyes opened in shock. For a long moment, we stared at one another.

A tremor ran through her, and all the eyes on her many wings opened and focused on me.

Holy Amethyst lifted her head and screamed. Her screech ripped into the tapestry of music. The voices faded away. The scream echoed from the four corners of paradise.

A t the sound of her shriek, the wheels dipped and spun, throwing me flat. I landed hard and my training took over. Instinctively, I rolled to my hands and knees, but the ship dipped again and one shoulder rammed the wall. My right arm was instantly numb; pain bit in at my elbow and along my gauntlet-covered hand. The wheels steadied and I looked up to see Holy Amethyst standing at her chair, keening like a banshee, her eagle face lifted to the dome overhead, her beak open in a warning cry. Anger lit her narrow, feathered face and crackled into the air.

Demon bones. This can’t be good.

The singing stopped and Amethyst’s cry fell away. Her wings unfurled, two sets shaped like butterfly wings, a third set sweeping away from her body to reveal a downy, many-breasted torso and hips swathed in white linen. I caught a glimpse of her feet, which were rounded and hooved, like horses’, but shining like gold.

Above the railing, faces appeared. Faces of seraphs. I was in trouble.

Flames zipped into the ship and past me, trailing blue plasma so bright I closed my eyes, blinking hard. I rocked back on my heels and cradled my injured arm, my elbow brushing across my blades. The tanto sizzled with power, burning my flesh through the chain mail of my right arm, the blade issuing a high-pitched hum, a sensation like bees buzzing, crawling over me.

Rise, my mage visa said.

Not entirely certain that was a good idea, but not having any other ones, I stood. I had an instant to remember the serpent and the venom and wondered if it was still pumping into me. I no longer heard my heart beat. Perhaps I was dying. That seemed to happen a lot when I was in the otherness, the here-not-here. Hysterical laughter bubbled up between my lips and I swallowed it down hard, wiping away my tears.

Malashe-el, moving with the speed of its kind, was suddenly in front of me and caught me up in a hug that bruised my ribs. It smelled of brandy and lilacs, and its arms seemed to offer a measure of safety. Though we had once been mortal enemies, I clung to it.

The daywalker withdrew and brushed its fingers over the chain mail at my forehead, its labradorite eyes like blue-gray opals. It had been made of evil and holy matter, mixed and formed to follow its master’s call, shaped and bred to be a killer. I had wondered in past days if it had been built to destroy a cherub, yet the daywalker, the being of legend, had decided against the Dark. Light brightened its odd eyes. Behind it, Amethyst screamed again, but when Malashe-el didn’t flinch, neither did I.

“You are a warrior like your Raziel,” it said, acknowledging the significance of the scarlet armor. That thought had been in the back of my mind, and I agreed, touching my breastplate with a clink of metal. The scarlet steel was the same shade as Raziel’s flight feathers.

As seraphs gathered and hovered just beyond the rotating gyroscopic bands of the lavender wheels, the former daywalker lifted the seraph stone on my chest. Purple light played within, muted, but growing brighter. “Yet Zadkiel has placed you under his protection. He plays a dangerous game with divisive politics.”

Malashe-el’s tone made the words sound felonious and Holy Amethyst, Zadkiel’s mate, screamed again, this time in agony. She fell again to the gilt chair and covered herself with her wings, rocking like a grieving child hiding from a painful world.

The seraphs beyond the wheel walls swept hard with their wings, maintaining position, but several had drawn swords and more were congregating by the second. Emotions were gathering like an electric charge on the air and I had a feeling my window of safety was closing. I had so much to ask, and no time at all. “How did I get to a Realm of Light?” I asked, voicing the most useless question of all. “Mages are mortal. And soulless.”

“As am I. Yet, my place is here. And here there is no time.”

“Give her to me!” Amethyst begged, her voice like an owl’s. I had no idea who she spoke to, but whoever it was, it couldn’t be good. “Though I did much for her, the little mage has defied the sanctity of my wheel. This is blasphemy.”

I wondered what she had done for me, except ask dangerous favors that put my life at risk. At my thought, the cherub hissed and swiveled her lion face toward me. Exposing long fangs, she lifted black lips and growled like a jungle cat.

Mortal and soulless, mages can’t call on the One True God, God the Victorious, for help. Prayer doesn’t work for us. Theologians insist that the Most High doesn’t hear us. Other theologians contend that if he doesn’t hear an intelligent creature, it proves he isn’t real and never was, but that was a theological argument for passionate believers and heretics. I was just in trouble, so I said a silent prayer, in case the One True God heard me. Just in case—the excuse for prayer when uttered by atheists and agnostics for millennia.

Malashe-el cocked its head almost as if hearing my prayer. “It’s not safe here,” it thought at me, arms tightening like steel bands around my waist. As if he’d been invoked by a magical charm, her seraph now stood beside Amethyst, holding her human-looking arm, his deep purple wings half-furled, his beautiful face expressionless as a block of marble.

“Go,” Malashe-el said. Ducking a shoulder, it rammed into my chest. Hard.

Not expecting the shove, my feet in improper position, I rocked back, hitting the wheel wall. Stunned, I plummeted over.

A moment of shock immobilized me and I tumbled past the hull in open air, buffeted by the strong turbulence whipping off the rotors. I had a single jumbled glimpse of the wheels rotating at sickening speed. The city spread out below me. Empty. The streets were all empty.

My heart beat. Far away. And again as fear slammed into me. My right arm and ankle impacted the nearest wheel with quick, hard cracks, spinning me toward the next wheel. Pain shivered through me. Heart ramming my chest wall, I fell.

Crack the stone of ages, I’m going to die. Desperate, I drew on stone, on all my amulets.

Instantly I was back in my body. Vertigo knocked me backward. My head banged hard, nausea rose in my throat as the world spun about me. Light flashed overhead. I was sprawled on the floor in the stockroom. On my chest was a two-handed fist of amethyst. It was looking at me, which was way weird, and it was humming, a faint vibration through my palms. I had drawn on stone. This stone. I had drawn on the wheel, using it to—what? — save me from itself? Themselves? Scripture used “wheels” and “wheel” interchangeably, and no one knew if the living ships were singular or plural. Either way, Amethyst would kill me for that. Another blasphemy.