Not "save" in the sense of salvation, manumission, or ascension to heavenly estate, although he could and would offer true salvation to any he found deserving-it was part of his job. But, among the Dissidents, before the cleansing fire of the air strike, he'd found none ready for salvation.
He had, however, found many ready for mercy, many who might feel the hand of God if it touched them, even here. So he had gone into the camp in full awareness of the napalm soon to come, of the cluster bombs and area denial munitions which were among the Devil's favorite tools. And he had denied, as was his mandate, Satan's will.
For the sake of the souls here who were worth tempering, of those on the path toward redemption, he had spread a warning in the camp and urged the Dissidents down into their ubiquitous tunnels. Many had heeded him, and many had been saved from the Devil's crucible of fire. Temporarily, of course.
Now, walking along a wooden path toward the marsh by which the refugee Dissidents were encamped. Altos contemplated the meaning of salvation, when applied to the damned. The salvation he could offer the Dissidents was not complete because they were not ready. They were not yet good. Some of them, however, were increasingly less bad. Thus, he had managed to keep them from the Undertaker's table, from disbandment and Reassignments.
Reassignments, more than any other bureau among Hell's proliferate bureacracy, was Altos' antagonist. The Reassignments computer and the souls who manned it strove to keep the damned lonely, bitter, venal, and horrid. Altos strove to teach them community, hope, sacrifice, and generosity.
When Satan dispatched his Children with their fighter-bombers full of hellfire. Altos had been among the Dissidents to shepherd them out of harm's way. He had even confronted one of the Devil's Children, an agent named Welch, face to face.
And that had been wrenching, because Altos was an angel and thus subject to the occasional unsolicited Revelation. Looking into Welch's eyes, he had had one: the Devil's agent was not committed to evil; this man who did Satan's will was closer to salvation than Che Guevara, than many of the Dissidents.
Welch thought of himself as a soldier in the service of order, and of order as an ameliorating factor in the suffering of the damned.
It had been disconcerting to meet the pragmatic gaze of a man who had made an accommodation with his fate that allowed him to serve the Devil-well-without becoming Satanized. In those eyes for the angel to see was a life spent on earth in similar circumstances.
Welch had personal standards to which he adhered and a perception of the evil around him that made the man, in his own mind, almost a comrade in arms of the angel.
Only Welch, being human, took the failings of his fellows more personally. Not only did the agent believe that he himself belonged here, but that everyone he met did. In fact. Altos had learned in that cataclysmic locking of eyes, Welch didn't believe that there were any better men in heaven. It was his catechism that real men went to hell.
The member of die Devil's Children had no designs on a pass to heaven. The Child merely did his job. When Altos had gone back into the camp to save the Dissidents in the face of the air strike, Welch's pity had followed after the angel like a balm.
Pity from a damned soul? An irredeemable? For Welch was surely that, as an agent of Satanic will. It troubled the angel still, so long after.
It had troubled him while he hustled the Dissidents down into the tunnels. It had troubled him when Che had refused to run, hesitated to hide, dug in his rebellious heels and kept a score of men with him on the surface.
All of those were back, now: the Devil's Reassignments bureau knew its job.
Che and his staunchest followers had been returned to the Undertakers, debriefed, their hearts and souls gleaned of all they knew and planned and schemed. Then they'd been returned to their band, having betrayed everyone and everything that supported them.
Che Guevara knew this, and he sulked in his tent, weakened in mind and body.
He had betrayed Mithridates and Tigellinus and even the hired mercenaries who served him as bug as the Pentagram faction's gold held out. Che couldn't help it. He'd been through the System, taken the Trip.
The Devil was impressing the fruitlessness of revolution on Guevara, the hopelessness of hope itself. And it was working. Che was nearly broken. He was listless and uncommunicative. His lieutenants covered The change in Their leader as best They could, but Altos knew: Guevara, The leader who inspired
The Dissidents, was drained of inspiration, merely going through The motions.
And so. Altos could not leave the band of rebels: if Che did not recover and no new leader took his place, the entire Dissident movement would dissolve. At such a moment, the volunteer angel must witness Satan's victory and The final damnation of These many souls.
You're not truly damned until you accept it. You're not lost until you lose hope. You're not irredeemable until you lose faith in redemption. Like Welch.
The angel shook his head and hiked up his robe as his sandals squished, sinking into boggy ground, pushing thoughts of the Devil's Child away. Here the cattails were as high a his blond head and the smell of putrefaction was like that which blurts from a man's rectum; the marsh was near at hand. AH around was white gas rising, opaque and cloudlike, making it hard to see your hand before your face.
The gas eddied and hung low in the air, in patches and whirls and swirls.
Somewhere out Acre, creatures lived: he could hear insect-like cluttering and froglike croaking and the calls of murderous owls and hawks and gulls. And then he heard another sound, and stopped. It was a moan of pain, a human moan, from a throat in torture. Altos hiked his robes above his knees and headed toward the sound.
His ankles sank into the mud. Fetid water swirled about his knees, scummy and dotted with algae, larvae, and worse. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds dove at him, veering at the last instant: he was an angel; the smell of his flesh, sweet and clean, repelled the suckers of impure blood.
On he struggled, stumbling so That his white robe soaked up mud and became an impediment He tore it at the knee and cast away the lower part of his garment, pressing on toward the moans, which were fainter, though he knew he approached The moaner.
A soul in torment could draw the angel like filings to a magnet, if it were the right sort of soul. Altos could not fail to find this roan if the whole of Upper Hell were in between them, for the man was calling on God for help.
The words were garbled, but the intent was clear. The man was delirious-The damned did not call on God in Hell. Not if they were in their right minds. But this one was in such pain that he didn't know what he was saying.
When Altos broke through a stand of reeds and saw The distant battered body in its pool of blood-stained mud and scum, There were already predators about, waiting with slavering jaws and open beaks: Jackals and ospreys and wolves and vultures.
'Shoo!" called Altos, his arms waving. "Get away!"
The carrion-eaters scattered, but did not disappear. They retreated and reformed, lurking, curious, their nostrils fall of the odor of an incipient feast.
This man might be eaten alive, a particularly unpleasant fate here, where death would not come early, and memory would linger through resurrection and beyond. Might be, if Altos couldn't help him.
The angel paused, thinking as he did so that he was out of earshot of the camp. He would have to drag or carry this roan to The Dissidents, if he could be moved. Or simply sit with him until his soul bled out, until sleep came if he could not.
More, Altos had no power to do. Preparing a soul for heaven wasn't something one could do in minutes. Everyone here was here for a reason. Altos could not commute a sentence out of hand, no matter the heart-wrenching plight of the sufferer.