As the archers fired, others all over the house began pounding on the walls with tree limbs and shaking their rattles, making so much noise that even I lost track for a moment of where I was and what I was doing. Then a chance arrow struck Anaita right between the eyes.
If she’d been human it would have killed her, but of course she wasn’t. Still, it got her attention. She turned to look in the direction of the archers, her face contorting in a mask of fury; then the stairs leading up to the second floor simply flew apart, like an explosion without the explosion. The pieces of wood hurtled in all directions. One of the larger fragments hit Clarence in the leg and knocked him flying. Several of the Kainos pilgrims went down and didn’t get up.
But Anaita’s sudden attack on the screaming archers and other noisemakers had snapped me back into gear. Even as stair boards turned into wooden shrapnel, I dropped to my knees and crawled across the main room toward the wooden box where the Mecca cube—and something else—was hidden. This was the crucial bit, and if the thing wasn’t there waiting for me, well, Anaita would have the leisure to shred us into component molecules and spread us around her invented world like dandelion seeds in a tornado. And I would go wherever angels wind up when a very powerful, very angry higher angel decides to dispose of them.
Still on my hands and knees, with broken boards raining down all around me, I reached up and opened the doors of the cabinet, then felt along the inside, just in front of the Mecca cube. It was there.
Anaita had brushed aside the distractions of the doorway like they were cobwebs, shredding the hand-carved rattles and the rope curtains knotted full of sticks and clattering stones. She was crackling with energy that bent the air around her, and she had a look on her face that I wouldn’t have wanted to see on a five-year-old having a tantrum, let alone on one of the most powerful beings in the universe.
“Wait!” I shouted, and scrambled to my feet.
She turned to me and the anger simply vanished. She became cold as a statue. “You.” That was all she said.
I knew I had perhaps a second, maybe two, so I held up the thing I’d taken from the cabinet. “Just thought you should see this first,” I said, showing her the horn.
Cold as a statue? No, colder. Like an ice storm turning the sky black. Like the front of a glacier just before it rolled over you and ground you into the earth. “What,” she said, “is that?”
“This? Come on, you know what this is.” I hefted the bloodshot ivory thing in my hand, bounced it once or twice. It weighed a little more than I would have expected—not as much as a curved, four inch piece of ordinary horn, more like a petrified souvenir. The whole universe had come down to something the size of a paperweight. “This is Eligor’s horn. I found it. And he’s coming for it.”
And just like that, Eligor was there. No burning line in the air, no dramatic blast of light and smoke and brimstone, he was just . . . there. In his Kenneth Vald face and body, dressed as though he was going to receive the Entrepreneur of the Decade award from some grateful civic body.
“Greetings, Angel of Moisture,” he said.
Anaita looked at him, then at me, then at the horn I held cradled in my hand. “What nonsense is this? What are you doing here, Eligor?”
“Don’t I have a right to be here?” He smiled. “Didn’t I help you build this place?”
She didn’t smile back. “You and I made a bargain, Grand Duke. Would you interfere now? Are you very certain you wish to do that?”
“Who’s interfering? I’ve just come to have some of my property returned. Angel Doloriel? I believe you have something of mine.”
“Impossible.” That was all she said, but there was a lot going on behind that single stony word and that mask of chilly indifference.
“Right here.” And I flipped him the horn. I watched it spin through the air toward him. Every living creature in that big room watched it too, all the pilgrims cowering on the stairs, even Anaita herself. He caught it with the ease of a man reaching out his hand to see if it was raining. Then it dissolved into a cloud of starry light, and Eligor absorbed it.
For half a second everything seemed frozen. Anaita hadn’t moved, but it seemed like something was heating up inside her. I could feel a pressure beating out from her, a force that could devastate everything in the church-shaped house. “Impossible,” she said again, but she sounded less certain now, maybe even confused. “Conspiracy!”
I held my breath. The next few seconds would tell. If everything went right, then maybe, just maybe . . .
“Don’t, mistress! It’s a trick!”
Ed Walker half-ran, half-tumbled down the stairs from the second level. He caught the string of his bow on a newel post and instead of untangling it, simply let it go. The bow sprang back, swung hard around the post, and clattered to the steps just as he reached ground level and threw himself down on his face in front of Anaita.
“Ed, no!” someone shouted from the upper floor, a cry of genuinely astonished horror.
“Mistress, you built this place for us, not these others!” Walker’s words came fast and breathless. “Not these so-called angels who’ve brought us nothing but death and destruction.” He looked at me and glared. “Don’t fall for their tricks. Don’t take our home away because of them. It’s not true—that’s not the horn you had, that’s Eligor’s other horn. He and the angel worked this up together. It’s a trick!”
“You shit,” I said. “You treacherous little shit.”
“Shut up.” Walker didn’t even look at me now, just stared up at Anaita. She seemed even more like a statue now, something impossibly fine and rare, with supplicants appropriately arranged at her feet. One supplicant, anyway—Edward Lynes Walker, the unofficial leader of the pilgrims, the man who hadn’t liked our plan from the beginning. “Spare us, mistress. Spare us and spare Kainos.”
“Dear me,” said Eligor. “You seem to have rolled snake-eyes, Doloriel.”
I’d done everything I could. There really wasn’t anything left but to fall down on my knees. I’d wanted to do that for a while, anyway. I was exhausted, a bloody mess from the wounds the big cat had given me, and I’d kept going this long on pure adrenaline.
“Okay,” I said. “You win.”
Anaita looked at me. I swear, she had never looked more beautiful than at that moment, a frozen, perfect immortal beauty. It was hard even to look at her. If she’d been a huge rock, mariners would happily have steered right into her, foundered and drowned while singing her praises.
“Of course,” she said. “There was never any doubt. Did you really think I was foolish enough to hide the other horn here on Kainos?”
I was so very tired. “I admit it did cross my mind.”
“You must have thought you were quite clever. I can imagine your logic. Where would she keep it, this oh-so-important object? In Heaven? Of course not. In Hell or on Earth? Why make it easy for her enemies to search for it? Ah, but here on Kainos, the place that can only be reached with her permission—”
“Or mine,” said Eligor. He sounded like he was enjoying this.
“You may go away now, Horseman.” Anaita wouldn’t look right at him. I don’t know if that was because she was scared of him or because she was trying to resist the urge to blast him into sparkly cinders. “Unless you mean to challenge me. As you already conspired against me.”
Eligor laughed. “My dear, you give yourself too much credit. Challenge? Without the permission of our masters? That would violate the Tartarean Convention and several others. As for conspiracy, my little friend Doloriel asked for a favor. I granted it to him because it amused me to do so. I, of course, had no idea what he planned to do with my horn.”
“Of course.” Anaita bit the words off and spat them at him.
I couldn’t do anything. This was going all kinds of bad, and I was helpless to change it. The two of them were talking! Like they had just bumped into each other in front of the laundromat and were catching up on old times.