I took Eddie's hand and led him down into the forgotten place.
We were instantly consumed, as if the earth had heaved on top of us. This time I could feel his assent. It was like slipping through regions draped with cobwebs. I could feel the return of my own oath's affirmations. Maybe John wasn't that far off. Gawain's robes flapped against my belly exactly as they had when we'd stood around the covene tree. Even then he had no self-doubt or fractures of fear or buried half-stifled desires. Before the wedge of his purity the black curtain flinched aside, parted for him, and let us pass.
Dad chortled in the shadows. In a space not large enough for even one broken man we walked for miles. Self said, Damn, my feet hurt! I could hear him and my father tickling each other and tittering in turns. I kept a firm grip on Eddie's wrist and prayed that when this was all over they could make him whole once more.
He whispered, "I forget. I keep forgetting."
Let it be true, I thought. Forget everything, even in your dreams and your most awful nightmares, cleave yourself from your visit here. Do what the rest of us can't.
Chapter Twelve
MountArmon welcomed us into the belly of its granite keep, where the crags trickled shreds of a hopeless heaven.
Hearth fires burned and stoked altars lit our way. Millennia thinned. My pledge didn't matter here and my back straightened with relief. Promises dried up and flaked off like dead skin.
Two hundred angels who willfully turned away from God had given up divinity in order to put on the shackles of mortality. On this spot they had sworn their testimony before shedding eternity and taking their wives.
Gawain's lavender robes held the firelight and cast a purple glow against the rock. Water lapped in the distance, and the air turned much colder. We came to Jakin and Boas-the names of the two pillars originally erected in Solomon's Temple. They were supposed to be black and white, symbolizing good and evil, but both were so dirty with grime that it was impossible to tell which was which.
My father crept forward and waved a friendly greeting. Dust flew upward as an immense weight shifted. The stone grumbled and the ground swayed.
So, this was their sired legacy.
I beheld the Heir of the Mount, the offspring of Armon.
It lived upon a heap of ash and bone.
The mammoth mutant, a human-Seraph hybrid-child called a Nephilim, laid on its back rubbing its colossal feet together. It drooled down its massive silken neck. More unborn than born, without umbilicus or navel or fully formed digits, its murky eyes never settled anywhere too long and they fathomed nothing. It had no genitalia. Not only would it be sterile, but even an imitation of the act of procreation would have been intolerable to the universe.
That mouth had been opened in a perpetual silent cry for centuries. The hybrid seemed carved from shale and marble. The skin was even paler than my father's white-face. It had needs but didn't know them.
A grotto yawned open beside it. Currents of the twin rivers dragged corpses in from the bottom of JamesLake, depositing bodies here where the Nephilim could dip in a hand and sup on the suicides. Heir of Armon swallowed their despondency and licked out the marrow.
In one fashion the gargantuan Nephilim resembled Gawain-separate, unique, removed, and altogether abstract. It stared blindly at him, and he stared blindly back.
Uriel's idolatry ran around my legs and he stepped free from the dark to stand proudly in front of the hearth fires. Nip sat curled, hiding his face in shame and vainly attempting to stifle his sobs.
"Glory of God be unto you," Uriel said. "Oh boy."
Is there any myth that isn't real? I asked.
No.
Abbot John had been more right in his tenets than I'd given him credit for, and also more mistaken than he'd ever accept. Maybe the two hundred fallen angels had become men no uglier or noble than any other, but their progeny had devolved into parasites sponging off the penance of others. Those angels who'd torn off their own wings had given up too much in becoming men, and yet they hadn't gained enough to make the cost worthwhile for the rest of us.
Mankind found immortality in the thread of their blood.
Armers, Ramuel, Sanyasa, Saneveel, Batraal, and all the others-from their own ashes-must have found only remorse in the irony of their woeful living child.
It had the reverence of rock.
The Nephilim had no soul.
"I don't want to kill you," Uriel said.
"Why not?" I asked, genuinely curious. "Where is Catherine's child?"
"Hidden," I told him.
"You can't contain the holy prophet of God."
"Uriel, I'm telling you, the reincarnate is not the prophet Elijah."
He didn't believe me. He could not distinguish between piety and fixation. For that, at least, I couldn't completely blame him. The prophet Elijah had taunted the four hundred and fifty priests of Baal into a battle of burnt offerings they could not win. When they finally admitted defeat the prophet Elijah personally beheaded them all in the name of Yahweh.
My former coven brother had dreamed of doing the same. The wrath that had been loosed from Cathy's womb would once again become the man who tried to steal my love and castrate me in the moonlight. He would be a pawn that Jebediah would use as the harbinger of a hell to come.
Uriel had no rage, but his deranged passion added up to the same. He thrust his spells into my face. They were filled more with devotion than aggression, majiks of arrogant sincerity rather than applied arcana. My fists burned black with my hexes, and I swiped aside his ridiculous sanctity and watched it skitter and pop against the walls. His plastic saints started chewing on my ankles.
My father, always the fool even when he wasn't a clown, wanted to entertain and play with the offspring of the mount. The Nephilim, sensing his damnation, reached down and plucked my dad up in one of its monolithic hands. My father gave a strange painful cry that was still tinged with his laughter.
Uriel found strength in his dedication to stone and the stone's love for him. I grimaced and tried to put an end to this encounter by letting my angry instincts take over, but the bedrock of his faith scattered my spells.
To hell with it. I brought a roundhouse left all the way up from my knees and aimed for his jaw. Nip let out another groan and flung himself away. Uriel merely frowned at me, disappointed and appalled, and dropped back into shadow. I wheeled through the gloom and ran to save my father.
If the hybrid found flavor in damnation, then my dad would be a cuisine for discriminating tastes. He didn't thrash or cry out as the mutant offspring lifted him in its tremendous fist. I dug in and rushed across the banks of bones, arcana discharging from my eyes and mouth, but the Nephilim completely ignored me.
Nip blundered into Self and Eddie, who both went over backward and lay sprawled on the cave floor.
I heard the unmistakable sound of tearing flesh and turned.
Oh, you-
Hey now…
You maniac!
Hey now, you wanted her to be safe.
Two buttons on Eddie's shirt had popped open and his flayed flesh had flopped aside to reveal the pink infant with her thick brown head of hair. Self had nestled the sleeping child within Eddie's emptied chest cavity.
Fane's daughter began to slide free as if being born a second time within a few hours, her tiny lips quivering as she screwed up her face. Covered with blood and mucus, her matted hair stood up in rusty clumps. Eddie's heart might have burst if he'd still had one, as the utter horror hammered him. The kid's eyes bulged out so far I thought he might have a seizure. I hoped he'd faint but he merely watched the grisliness of his own violated body.