“Thank you, Lord Karael.”
“You don’t have to keep calling me “lord,” son. I’m not the Highest. I’m just one of his faithful servants. Please, call me Karael.”
“Okay. But can I ask a few questions?”
“Of course.” He spread his glowing arms expansively, but with the kind of grace that reminds you why angels are angels. “You’ve earned it.”
“What about my trial?”
“It will be as if it never happened. We’ve announced that the whole thing was Anaita’s deliberate attempt to confuse and mislead.”
“Wow. Thanks. That’s a huge load off my mind. And Anaita herself?”
Karael went a little bit cloudy for a moment. He might have been shaking his head in sadness, not in anger. If he’d had a head instead of just a vaguely head-shaped glow, that is. “She will be punished, don’t you worry about that.”
“Yes, but did she explain why she did some of those things? Because a lot of what happened doesn’t really make sense.”
For a moment he seemed oddly still. “Like what, son?”
“Well, I don’t want to waste your time. I know you must be very busy. Are you in charge of my part of Earth now that Anaita’s out of the picture?”
“The division of duties in the Third Sphere is a great deal more complicated than that, but I suppose the simple answer is yes.” A thin beam of sunshine. “I suppose I’m your boss now. But of course the hierarchy remains the same. You’ll still report to—”
“Temuel,” I said, cutting him off. “Right?”
“Right.” He hadn’t liked being interrupted. “So, if there’s nothing more, Doloriel, then I will send you back and get on with some of that new business waiting for me.”
“If you have another moment, sir, I didn’t finish telling you some of the things that didn’t make sense. See, it was all weird from the very beginning. Like when the souls first began disappearing—the ones we found out later went to Kainos? Edward Walker was the very first one, and I was there right after he killed himself. I was with Hell’s prosecutor, Grasswax.”
“Grasswax. The one who was butchered by Eligor over the feather.”
It was very strange sitting with a powerful angel, discussing secrets that only a few days ago had still been getting people ripped to pieces or sent to Hell—or both. “Yes, that’s the one, sir. But the weird thing was, when the first soul went missing, Grasswax and I weren’t the only folks from our two sides who showed up. In fact, it was like someone pulled a fire alarm. Almost as soon as we noticed that the soul was missing, angels and demons were all over the place.”
The airiness and light got a little roiled. “Hmmm. Interesting point. Why would Anaita do that? Why risk her entire plan by bringing in extra scrutiny and more witnesses so soon?”
“Exactly.”
“I imagine it was Eligor,” Karael said after a moment. “Just because he had a bargain with her doesn’t mean he wouldn’t try to make things difficult for her. He is a Grand Duke of Hell, after all.”
“Good point, sir. Which leads me to the next question. I spent a lot of time thinking about how the bargain worked, Anaita’s feather for Eligor’s horn, and how Anaita kept it hidden, and what she wanted to do.”
“Which was to be worshipped, to be simplistic about it.” Karael’s voice took on a tone of disapproval. “She never got past her origins. She didn’t truly appreciate the Divine Plan.”
“Clearly. But here’s a question I’ve never been able to answer. What about Eligor? What did he get out of it?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s quite simple, my Lo . . . Karael. Sir. A powerful angel and a powerful demon made a bargain and went to great lengths to keep it secret. For instance, Anaita sent Walter Sanders to Hell and brought a serial killer back from the dead—two kinds of dead—and sent him after me, all to keep the lid on what she’d done.”
“And what do you know about angels in Hell, Doloriel?” The cloudiness threatened a storm. I swallowed, or would have if I’d been on Earth.
“I think you know, sir. I think you know where I’ve been and a lot of what I’ve done. Anaita wouldn’t have a reason to keep quiet about it, not once she was really in Heaven’s power for good. And also I told Pathiel-Sa, the Angel of Conciliation, pretty much everything while I was imprisoned.”
A long silence, and it was a silence. We might have been in outer space for all the background noise that wasn’t. “Let’s assume that you’re right,” the Angel Militant said. “That I know more about what you’ve been doing than is going to be officially admitted, Doloriel. And yet I’m still willing to let you go back to your normal job and even give you a few perks.”
I had the distinct sense of a shiny lure bobbing in front of me, but I wasn’t in the mood. “I hear you. And I’ll be happy to do that once I’ve had a chance to finish talking to you about all this.”
“You really are a very determined fellow,” said Karael.
“So everyone tells me.” I took an imaginary breath, the kind you take before jumping into the deep end. “Okay, so let’s put aside the question about what was in this for Grand Duke Eligor, although I think that’s probably pretty important. Help me out with one last thing. You know all about my partner Clarence by now, right?”
“Clarence?”
“Sorry, kind of a private joke. Haraheliel. Earth-name Harrison Ely. Sent in at first to keep an eye on Advocate Sammariel on behalf of management, then he later decided Sam was getting a bum deal and sort of threw in his lot with me. He was one of the souls picked up when you guys raided Kainos, but someone’s put him back on the street again, kind of like you’re offering to do with me if I stop asking questions.”
“Ah,” he said. “That Clarence.”
“Right. Well, apparently instead of going through the normal training like Sam and I had when we joined Counterstrike, when Clarence was being prepared for his undercover assignment for the big bosses, he was sent somewhere different. Somewhere I’d never heard about before. Got schooled on guns there and all kinds of stuff.”
“Yes? So? That was Anaita’s play, son.” He really did sound like a military officer. Just his serious tone of voice made you want to get up and salute. “She needed information about the Magians and wanted a source she could control, so she could stay quiet about them—or, if things went bad, she could manufacture an excuse that she’d been investigating them all along. But I never trusted her.”
“That sounds exactly right, sir. And it makes a lot of sense. But the problem is, it’s not true.”
A very long pause this time. “What?”
“You heard me. It’s not true. Do you want to know what is true? Clarence’s training, that whole little mini-spy-camp of Anaita’s, a kind of under-the-table Counterstrike unit not answerable to the heavenly hierarchy, was arranged by an archangel named Samkiel. And Samkiel’s one of your oldest allies, I found out. Now why would he do that for Anaita? Unless you asked him to.”
“Son, this is getting dangerously close to—”
“We both know what this is getting dangerously close to, Karael. Sir. And you can silence me any one of a thousand ways. But since we’re both here, you might as well hear me out first.” Yes, I knew this was ridiculously dangerous—I’m not that kind of stupid—but I couldn’t stop now. I’d been waiting too long to put it all together. “See, the only arrangement where everything makes sense is that Anaita wasn’t working alone—that she was never working alone. Somebody else must have known exactly when the first soul-snatch was going to take place, because only the folks involved would have been able to put out the alert so quickly and have angels and demons swarming all over Edward Walker’s house like that.”
“Eligor—”
“Didn’t really have a reason to screw things up for Anaita when her plan was going to do Heaven more harm than it would Hell. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”