My head spun. I was on the plateau, still impaled by that arrow, feeling a weird mix of relief and guilt for willing myself back. But what else could I do? I couldn’t be in two places at once.
Karla needed me now more than the girls. Ellen and Urszula had firepower and hostages enough to give Wendell pause, to delay him. But a gimpy Karla had no chance against the Horus. Particularly since she seemed to be chasing it when she should have been fleeing.
I lay my head down in the dust and luxuriated in the absence of pain. The way the cold sank deep into my bones felt almost cozy now. There was something exciting about its absoluteness, how thoroughly it penetrated. One could get used to the Deeps, comfortably numb no matter what, never thirsty, hungry or tired.
Once the transitional fuzz cleared out of my head and I spotted the Horus looming on the next plateau, anxiety filled the void. My mind flooded with worry and urgency. Mental anguish was one thing a soul could never escape.
I looked around, trying to get my bearings, searching for Olivier’s dust-shrouded pyramid. But the hilltop was bare, the fortification razed down to a ragged heap of rubble. Fighters rushed through orphaned swirls of blowing dust, voices raised, some retreating all frantic and desperate, others cocky and triumphant. One side had prevailed, but I couldn’t tell who was who.
There were two bright dots high in the sky now, higher than before and soaring even higher, retreating from the scene. Between me and what was left of the hillock a crumpled mass of something pale and floppy was draped over a boulder. A Seraph had fallen. Big things had gone down while I was away.
I tried rolling over on my side, but the shaft of the arrow wedged against a seam in the bedrock. I pushed harder, making it flex. All that torque against my wound should have been excruciating but all I felt was a little pressure, like a dentist’s drill under Novocain.
I threw my full weight against it. It bent almost in two and snapped. I picked up the broken end and got to my feet, the splintered stub still sticking out of my back. The tail was fletched with tufts of what looked like human hair, glued together in flat, glassy fins to mimic feathers. The shaft itself was made from slivers of laminated bone.
A group of fighters gathered around the fallen Seraph to gawk at the remains. I hung back, unsure of who they were, until their distinctive scaly armor told me they were infidels not Protectors. I was a bit nervous they might treat me like the deserter I was, but curiosity got the better of me. I came up behind them and did some of my own gawking.
I nudged one of the Seraph’s broken wings with my toe. It was a fascinating creature. Four of its wings, fore and aft, were rounded like a butterfly’s, with a translucent whitish-green membrane stretched between cells framed by tubular elements as thick as soda straws. The middle wings, long and pointy, were jointed like a gull’s.
But then I realized that this collection of wings was not physically part of the Seraph but rather a mechanism fastened via straps and a harness, powered by an elaborate system of coils and springs that amplified the movements of his actual limbs.
The Seraph embedded in the wreckage was just a man. A broken one. He had multiple fractures with bones protruding. His blood spattered the wings and had frozen immediately on contact with the frigid, arid atmosphere.
Real flesh … and blood. Not a mummified replica of a human like the rest of us souls here, whether pink or gray. This was a real man who had eaten and breathed in these afterlands and had probably felt pain.
Traces of the air bubble that had sustained him still lingered, trapped beneath the membranes of his wings. He cradled some kind of weapon in his broken arms, a cross between a blunderbuss and a broom, its fluted business end ending in a cluster of bristles and tubes. The intricately carved stock had multiple triggers and bulges that seem to be removable canisters.
