Quetti discarded the grin and dropped his voice. “About time! He’s too old, Roo—past it! You’ve been propping him up too long.”
Me, propping…? Then Quetti tactfully strode off, heading for the other four. I watched the handshakes and smiles of satisfaction. Uriel, Sariel, Gabriel, Raphael—they had voted me an angel, and now they would depose Michael for violating the Compact. Here was one conspiracy I had not been able to warn him of in time.
Then Michael came to a halt in front of me, and the cheering and chattering died away as everyone waited for speeches. But he spoke too softly for any ears but mine, and the real message was the reproach and hurt in the watery blue-blue eyes.
“You never told me you wanted to be an angel! You could have asked, couldn’t you? At least you might have asked!”
“I don’t want that! Quetti misunderstood something I said.”
He blinked in surprise, and then his familiar smile returned. He chuckled with relief. “Then how do we get out of this mess, son?”
Why should he ask me? He was the wizard, wasn’t he? But I had not realized how he had aged. Maybe Quetti was right. Maybe I had been propping him up—advising, informing, troubleshooting. I was the loner, the all-rounder, the man nobody questioned.
“I just wanted to go,” I said unhappily. “To slip away unseen.”
He recoiled as if I had struck him. “Leave me?”
“Go home to the grasslands.”
He shook his head angrily “And who do I get to do my reading for me? Huh? Tell me that! Who can I trust when I want to talk out a problem?” He glared at me.
I had no answer for him. The audience had gone very quiet, seeing that something was wrong, but not knowing what.
Michael’s eyes narrowed. I could read him now. I saw the sly calculations underway. “You never did tell me why you wanted to go back there, son…?”
“It’s my homeland.”
He shook his head. “I think there’s more to it than that! I don’t remember you ever taking the oath, Knobil, do I?”
I should have known he’d have a few tricks left. “No. I never did.”
Scanty yellow teeth showed in a leer. “And they won’t let you be an angel unless you do! Probably they won’t even let you leave! What happens if I tell them that you haven’t taken the oath, huh?”
Knowledge is dangerous. Every man swore the oath against violence when he was admitted to Heaven, even a pimply new seraph. I had never been formally admitted, so I never had—and Michael alone had remembered. He had guessed that I still yearned for revenge, and he must have been close to guessing how I planned to achieve it. The angel oath would make it impossible.
He saw my hesitation, and triumph flickered in those bright blue eyes, the eyes of my earliest memories.
But there were no gods in Heaven. The oath was sworn “by my soul, by my honor, by my worth and self-respect.” I, of all men, should have no trouble with those words. “I’ll swear,” I said with a shrug. Was I bluffing? I’m not sure.
“You’ll leave me?” he said. Tears welled up. “I saved you from Uriel when you first arrived, remember? You’ll leave your own father? They’ll haul me down now, son. The wolves will tear me down. I need you!”
I glanced over at Quetti and the other four archangels—obviously concerned now, and impatient. The sunlight was fading; the onlookers becoming restless, shuffling feet. With Michael deposed, the other four would elect Uriel in his stead. He was the obvious choice.
“Go back and live among those stinking savages?” Michael said.
It is amazing how easily a man can convince himself of something he really wants to believe. Uriel would be a much better leader than this decrepit old ruin, I decided. And perhaps Quetti was right—I had been propping Michael up, meddling in Heaven’s affairs and thereby only increasing its usual inefficiency.
“Give me the damned jacket!” I said, and I grabbed it.
The awful cheering broke out again at once, louder than ever. If Michael tried to tell them that I’d never taken the oath, then no one noticed, for he was swept aside in the rush of people surging forward to congratulate me. That was a horrible ordeal, but better than watching the old man’s distress.
Add that to my list of crimes, then. I betrayed my mother and, when I got the chance, I betrayed my father also.
—3—
THE HARDEST PARTS OF ANY JOURNEY were always the beginning and the end, because Dusk is full of deadfall. Three-blue told me the best route out, but he insisted that I drive. When we stopped for our first camp he let me do all the work, and I began to suspect more knavery. Yet to lounge by a campfire with Quetti was a reminder of long ago, of our trek together and of a certain lost innocence. We slipped back into calling each other by our real names, and we reminisced until our eyelids drooped.
Not far into the second leg of our journey we came to a long slope with little snow. I spilled wind from the sails and we glided to a halt. “Time for the wheels,” I said cautiously.
Quetti was picking his teeth with a porcuroo needle. “Go ahead.”
“You are a traditional, first-class, iron-shod bastard!”
“It’s your chariot, Three-red.”
“Slug!”
He smirked.
“Creep!”
He yawned and reached for a book he had brought along, which was strictly against regulations.
“What exactly are you trying to prove?” I asked.
He closed the book and blinked his pale eyes at me.
“You should be an angel. You’re the best. Heaven needs you! But you have a strange inability to appreciate your own accompl—”
“You got that sludge from Michael!”
Quetti grinned. “Long, long ago! In fact, I think it was when he gave me my wheels. He thinks—”
“I know what he thinks! I’ve heard it a hundred times. Michael, you see, could not tolerate the thought that the only son he can ever know is a dumb herdman, a cripple, a coward, and a total failure! So he invented that absurd—”
“Failure?” Quetti lowered his downy eyebrows. “Coward? Spell that! Careless of me not to have noticed!”
“Coward!” I insisted.
“And a failure? You think—”
“YES!” I could shout even louder than he could. Afterward I was to wonder what lived in those woods and what it thought of this argument. At the time I was too furious to think of anything.
“You’re an angel. You’re on your sixth mission, and it will probably kill you. What have I ever done—”
“You saved my life!” Quetti bellowed. He was turning red.
“Then show a little gratitude and shut up!” I said.
And I scrambled down to change skis to wheels.
Quetti smirked again and went back to his book,
Very soon after that we discovered bog—the hard way. That meant winching, a detestable, backbreaking torment. Quetti read his book. I did what was necessary to haul us out of the bog. Muddy, sweaty and weary, I then settled into my seat and glared hard at my companion. He gazed back at me with the same bland wistful innocence that always made girls want to drag him off to bed.
“Explain,” I said through clenched teeth, “in small words, just what you are trying to prove.”
“That you are capable of being as good an angel as anyone.”
“I know that.”
He blinked in surprise. What Quetti would never understand was that it was not the amount of good in a man that matters—for we all have some of that—but the quantity of evil. I have always had more than my share of that.
“I don’t want to be an angel.” I ripped the three red stripes one by one from my sleeve and dropped them overboard. “I never swore the angel’s oath. I never will. I asked you for a ride back to the grasslands, and that’s all I want now.”