I wasn’t going to be sidetracked. “Call it whatever you want. What kind of trial am I going to get?”
“You Will Be Judged By Those Of Us In The Ephorate Already Assembled To Examine This Affair.”
Great. So now Anaita and the rest of the Fab Five were finally going to turn thumbs up or thumbs down on me for good. I was pretty sure which way the thumbs were going to point, if only because Anaita was going to be working behind the scenes like a busy little bee to make sure I got stung. But she must know I wasn’t planning to go quietly.
“What if one of the ephors is actually . . . ?” I began to say, but didn’t finish. It was strange, because I wanted to finish, but the words went crooked and slipped away from me.
“What If One Of The Ephors Is What?” Chamuel’s patience seemed a tiny bit strained, but I was desperately trying to find a way to talk about the real subject at hand—how I was being set up for something I hadn’t done.
“What if . . . ?” I began, but again it didn’t come out right. In fact, it didn’t come out at all. I decided to take another approach. “What if the angel being accused is actually being . . . being . . .” I really wanted to say “framed,” but that didn’t seem to be the right word either. Don’t get me wrong, it was the right word, I just couldn’t say it. Something was extremely wrong. Fear grabbed me, then—very big, very cold, and very, very strong. I tried just to blurt out, “Anaita is the one who made the Third Way,” but as soon as I thought it, the words (or the part of my thoughts where the words were forming) just fell apart. If I’d had a heart, if I’d had a heartbeat, it would have been rattling like a two-stroke engine with the throttle cranked. Something was wrong with me. I couldn’t even mention Anaita’s name.
“Doloriel?” the ephor asked.
“What if . . . ?” I struggled to find a work-around. “What if I wanted to say something about my guilt? Something that would . . . surprise the ephors?”
“What Might That Be?”
“That I’m . . . I’m . . .” I wanted to say being manipulated, and sidestep Anaita’s name entirely, but it still came out as “I’m . . . not sure.”
“I Don’t Understand You, Angel Doloriel.”
“I don’t understand me, either.” It was hard to keep the bitterness out of my voice. I was fairly certain I sounded crazy or worse. “I’ve been . . . I’m being . . . I can’t. . . .” I took a breath, tried to go blank. “Anaita is . . .” There! I’d finally managed to say the bitch’s name. I did my best to stay calm, to not think too carefully about words. “Anaita is . . .”
“Yes?”
“Anaita is . . . one of the ephors.”
“Yes, That Is Correct. You Have Met Them All Before.”
If I had been wearing flesh I would have been sweating like a pig and gasping for air. It had been that hard even to use Anaita’s name; trying to say anything meaningful about her was impossible. It was like pushing the wrong ends of two strong magnets together: something invisible just wouldn’t let it happen.
“Is There Anything Else You Wish To Tell Me, Doloriel?”
Yes, I wanted to shout, this whole thing is a joke, and I’m being set up by a monster who makes the Whore of Babylon seem like Marge Simpson, but even thinking of Anaita choked off my words.
Now I knew what she had done to me in the library. She hadn’t bothered to destroy me because she had a much better use for me: I was going to take the rap for her entire crime-spree. I could feel curses boiling inside me until it seemed they would blow me apart, but not a murmur came out, because Anaita’s face was at the center of it all.
So I gave up, at least for the moment. “Do I get a mouthpiece?”
“I’m Sorry, I Don’t Understand.”
“A lawyer. An advocate—the same job I do for humans? Do I get someone to argue for me?”
The coolness in the voice told me before I heard the words. “This Is Not An Adversary System, Doloriel, Such As We Have With The Opposition. The Object Is Not Victory, The Object Is Truth.” I could hear that damned capital T like it was printed ten feet high on the emptiness in front of me. If Chamuel had possessed a face at that moment, I would most likely have punched it, because Truth was clearly the one thing that was not going to play any part at all in this farce.
“And so the five of you are going to decide whether I live or die?”
“Nobody Dies, Angel Doloriel.” Chamuel’s tone told me he had finished with me for the present, and was glad of it. “That Is The Good Word We Of Heaven Know And The Good Word We Speak. No Soul Is Ever Truly Lost. It Is Only A Question Of Where—And How—You Will Spend Eternity.”
Then he left me alone in the white again.
• • •
The next time I came back, it started with points of color. At first I thought I was hallucinating. I’d been doing a lot of that, although, in that odd situation, the difference between hallucinations and regular old dreaming would be hard to define. Here and there in the vast, depthless, edgeless white, I noticed what seemed like miniature rainbows, disturbances that had color and even movement. I had been drifting, thinking about my archangel Temuel and how stupid I’d been to trust him when he had obviously planned to throw me under the heavenly bus at the first sign of trouble. But partway through an elaborate fantasy of ratting him out and letting him spend a few thousand years in his beloved Hell, singing “Kumbaya” to demons, I had begun to realize that the way Temuel had given me up didn’t quite make sense. In fact, he’d gone about it in a very complicated way that I needed to consider more carefully. Then the slow swirl of colors distracted me.
The colorful spots became brighter, first gleaming, then actually shining, and with that shine came a certain form. No, five forms. Five shining lights. My judges, my jury, and probably my executioners, the Ephorate.
As they became more substantial—although calling these ephemeral, vaguely human shapes made of light “substantial” is stretching it a bit—I could even recognize them, but only because I’d seen them all before—Terentia, the leader, Raziel, mysterious as a locked box, Chamuel, the color of a dying sun, and Karael, the only one who had ever seemed like he thought I was more than a bug to be splattered on God’s windshield. And of course my old friend, Anaita, the monster who was going to walk away clean while I flame-broiled in Hell. Oh, how I wished I’d dropped a dime on her while I still could, before she got into my mind and soul and neutered me.
“Doloriel,” said the cool but somehow benevolent glow that was Terentia. “God Loves You. You Have Had Time To Contemplate The Charges Against You, And To Consider The Health Of Your Immortal Soul. Is There Anything You Would Like To Say Before We Begin?”
Just as an experiment, with no real hope it would succeed, I tried to say “Yeah, Anaita over there is framing me,” but it only came out as “No.” Just “no.” So that was definitely how it was going to be. “Let’s get on with it,” is what I said next. That came out fine.
“Your Judgement Will Take Place Before The Assembled Hosts Of Heaven,” Terentia said.
“Sure. Wouldn’t want anyone to miss this much fun.” No problem with those words either—even the fine edge of sarcasm was left intact, because it was useless to me and harmless to Anaita, of course. I wondered how tight her control over me might be. Was it active? Was she hearing everything I was thinking before I said it? Or were there blocks in place, like some kind of automatic censorship program?
“Terentia, The Hosts Are Waiting.” If Chamuel had been a man instead of a glowing, man-shaped hole in the pearly emptiness, I would have said he seemed to be irritated that this was taking so long, but since this was Heaven and angels famously don’t give a shit about time, I must have been wrong.
“Yes, The Moment Has Come.” Terentia’s radiance widened, as though she raised her arms or spread her wings. “Come, Doloriel. And Fear Not—God Truly Does Love You.”