And the wheels turn as the wheels have always turned, the alternating bands of granite and basalt and fire which are this flat, revolving world, and at its dim center the hublands lie, as still as still will ever be. The fixed point about which all creation revolves, the pivot and the axle, the rod and the shaft, and the Dragon lies coiled in its fiery abscess, long miles below Kearvan Weal. He's awake now, fully and truly awake for the first time in more than a hundred millennia, and he listens to the witch's horses, rough hoof beats against lava flats and the lonely roads of the blistered back country. He listens to the Weaver's forces somewhere out beyond the conflagration forever dividing the hublands from the rest of the world. Ten-thousand marching soldiers, twice that many cavalry, twenty-thousand horses, the wagons and battering rams and siege engines, and the Dragon is beginning to understand why, with victory within her grasp, the Weaver has chosen to flee.
As her Seraphim were banished by the magic of the red witches, he easily snagged the soul of one exorcised angel, mere moments before it winked out of this existence and into another-hooked it snug and screaming on a mountainous thumb claw. Now the Dragon lies in its bed of fire, considering this frail creature of light and hate, this simple device which has brought so much pain and suffering and fear, this deadly toy the Weaver has stitched together from memory and nightmare and her own insanity. It would be such a simple undertaking, the fabrication of an angel, the Dragon thinks…
The wheels turn.
And far out on the Serpent's Road, atop a barren hill, the Weaver licks her wounds. She keenly felt the moment when her Seraphim were ripped from the disc of the world and strewn across the cosmos. She felt it like a knife driven through her skull and can only begin to guess at the power that might have ever accomplished such an exile. Beneath the rising sun, her white hair hangs about her face, tinged pink-orange, and the gem set deeply into the flesh between her pale eyes glows a bitter crimson. The sulfurous mists shrouding the stays and towers of the Dog's Bridge are underlit by the wide sea of fire between this innermost wheel and the hublands, and the Weaver begins to doubt she'll ever lead another charge across the bridge.
And the Dragon picks her angel apart to see what makes it tick.
The Glaistig's hooves stamp restlessly against the flagstones, and the alchemist lowers the telescope.
"Now that they are no longer in the world, these angels," she asks him, "do you think she'll try again?"
Kypre Alundshaw considers the question, then considers his reply twice as long. "The Weaver," he says, "like her Seraphim, is an alien to our lands. We have undone one weapon, but we must begin to consider what other infernal beings she might spin. We cannot know her mind, any more than we can know the mind of the Dragon, your Grace."
For a moment they stand together atop the barbican, listening to the wind roaring through the Gash, through the mountains and around the jagged edges of the Weal, and then the Glaistig shivers, and the alchemist leads her back down to the courtyards.
And, blind to wars and the sacrifices that may end them, if only for a time, the wheels turn as the wheels have always turned…
XIV. The End of the Beginning
Dancy sits on one of the old marble headstones in the overgrown cemetery and watches the church burn down. She didn't start the fire; she isn't exactly sure what started the fire, but she knows that it's probably for the best. Fire will make the earth here pure again, her mother's ghost whispers from beneath a tangle of blackberry briars. Fire will burn out all the evil, and good green things will live here again.
Dancy keeps waiting for her mother's ghost to evaporate and the angel to show up and take her place. It usually happens that way, first her mother and then the angel. Sometimes, she actually prefers the angel. There's a loud crack, and Dancy looks up to see that the roof has collapsed completely. The sky is lit with a flurry of red-orange cinders as the last of the shadows, freed from the inferno, escape into the night. That's okay. She didn't come for them. Where they go and what they do, that's none of her concern. Someone might almost mistake them for smoke, streaming up and out of the flames. One passes directly over her head and vanishes into the thick wall of live oaks and magnolia behind the little cemetery. The shadow's screaming, so maybe it believes it could die in the fire. Maybe it's even afraid, Dancy thinks, and then she thinks about all the places a shadow can hide.
Those are the souls of bad people, Julia Flammarion assures her daughter. They were never baptized or they died without making confession, so they can never go to Heaven. Some of them were pagan Indians, and some of them were murderers and thieves and drug addicts.
Dancy glowers at the blackberry thicket where her mother's hiding, not so sure she believes that God would turn an Indian into one of those shadows just because it never got the chance to be baptized. That sounds even less fair than most things seem to her, but she knows there's no point arguing with her mother.
Dancy glances up at the eastern sky above the tops of the trees, and there's the faintest pink and purple hint of dawn. The heat from the fire is keeping the air around her warm, so at least she doesn't have to worry about the dew or the morning chill. Then she remembers her knife, that she hasn't even cleaned the blade the way the angel has told her she should always do. She looks down at the monster's dark blood already gone to a crust on the steel and frowns. She'll have to find a stream or a pond somewhere to wash it clean, as clean as it's ever going to get. She wipes it once against the leg of her jeans, but hardly any of Elandrion's blood comes off the carving knife.
"Is it over?" Dancy asks her mother. "Do you think that was the last one?"
I ain't the one you ought to be asking that question, her mother replies, then rustles about in the briars like a raccoon or a possum or something.
"Sometimes I think I'm crazy," Dancy says.
You fight those thoughts, her mother says, sounding angry now. That ain't nothing but the demons trying to slow you down, trying to confuse you and slow you down.
"Is that what she was?" Dancy asks her mother. "Elandrion. Was she a demon?"
There's a long silence from the ghost of Julia Flammarion, then, and Dancy sits on the headstone listening to the roar and crackle of the burning church, to the screams of fleeing shadows and the uncomfortable, rustling sounds the trees are making, as if the fire frightens them.
No, her mother says. You remember what I taught you about the Watchers, the Nephilim? And Dancy says that yes, she remembers, even though she really only half remembers.
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children unto them.