so many words
Aziraphale was treating Crowley’s sofa in ways it was never meant to be treated[1]. Crowley watched glumly as he hugged a cushion, and wiggled into a different cushion, and generally made himself completely and utterly at home. Though it was quite gratifying to see him jump when he discovered part of what he was lying on was not, in fact, sofa, but a web of fibers, with small white flowers interspersed.
“The thing is,” Crowley said aloud, “it could’ve been so much worse.”
“What,” said Aziraphale.
“How things turned out for us,” said Crowley. “Our fates. Etcetetetera.”
Aziraphale squinted at him through the bowl of his glass.
“Potato liquor doesn’t refract half so much as wine,” he confided, in what he possibly thought was an indoors voice.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Crowley told him.
“You are deliberately obtuse, my dear,” said Aziraphale, “and always have been.”
“Hey,” said Crowley, and fell silent, searching for something to add to this. As a comeback, he had to admit, it lacked a certain something. But there didn’t seem to be much else to say.
“’S’true,” said Aziraphale. “You pretend not to see.”
“You,” said Crowley, “aren’t even pretending to listen to me.”
Aziraphale looked faintly guilty. He reached over and refilled his glass.
“Go on, dear boy. I got a little distracted, but I’m listening.”
“Hmph,” said Crowley. He’d just about managed to undo the knot in his midsection, except for the last twist, and so was disposed to let Aziraphale’s blatant falsehoods pass with only an eyeroll or three. “Well. We’re all right, aren’t we? This isn’t so bad.”
“We’ve no purpose in being here,” said Aziraphale. “Your car’s burned up and my bookshop’s burned down. The world’s a jungle that doesn’t like me and as soon as we take one misstep, it’s home for us, so we’re not going to be able to enjoy existence half so much.”
“How d’you figure?” Crowley interjected.
“We’ll have to leave off doing all sorts of things,” Aziraphale said. “Like flying when there are cannonballs about. And feeding the ducks.”
Crowley yanked himself straight, once and for all.
“How could feeding the ducks get us discorporated?” he asked.
“Oh. It couldn’t, probably,” said Aziraphale. “But there are no more ducks.”
He paused. Crowley looked as expectant as a snake can.
“And that’s not bad?” he finished, less conclusively than he could have liked.
Crowley gave a noncommittal flick of his tail. “Honestly,” he said, “I can’t think how it could have turned out better.”
“Not even if we’d been at all competent?” said Aziraphale, with the ghost of a smile.
Crowley snorted into his saucer, streaming bubbles. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
Aziraphale put his hands together.
“You may have a point,” he said, low and unhappy.
“Cheer up,” Crowley told him. “We can still miracle up more alcohol. They didn’t take that away.”
Aziraphale nodded. Then, confusingly, he tried to shake his head mid-nod, leading to a kind of circular movement that reminded Crowley of nothing so much as a snake being charmed.
“I think we should go to Tadfield now,” he said. “If we’re going to go.”
“What?”
“After that we can drink properly, y’see?”
“But-- but-- what about the missiles?” said Crowley, conscious of how flimsy it sounded even as he said it.
Aziraphale sniffed. “Missiles,” he said. “What do we care for missiles?”
Crowley examined this from several angles.
“…quite a lot?” he said.
“Sober up,” said Aziraphale, slurring a little, but slurring it briskly and determinedly. “We’ve put it off long enough. And I’m tired of specul-- speckle-- of talking about what could have been.”
Crowley made a wordless noise of protest, but he sobered up.
Aziraphale did likewise and gave him a wary once-over. In fairness, it was much harder to distinguish a sober snake from a drunk one than it is to distinguish a sober demon from a drunk one. Crowley was, nevertheless, annoyed.
“Believe me, I’m dry as your books,” he said. Then he cringed. “Er. That is, I--”
Aziraphale sighed and draped Crowley over his shoulders like a particularly unflattering scarf.
“Shush,” he said.
Crowley shushed.
Aziraphale went to the window and said a word. The glass still in the window shattered and fell away in a spray of aquamarine crystals.
Aziraphale pushed the frame out of the way.
“If you strangle me,” he said to Crowley, “you will make things very difficult for both of us.”
Crowley heard the seams on Aziraphale’s coat split, but at least he didn’t have to look at the wings, this time. “Sure,” he said, wrapping closer around Aziraphale’s neck. “No strangulation happening here, is there?”
“Try to relax, dear,” said Aziraphale, his tone inappropriately mirthful.
Then he jumped out the window.
Crowley tried, very hard, to relax.
[1] The ways it was meant to be treated were as follows: a) with the kind of terrified reverence more usually reserved for commanding officers who’re pretending, just now, to be unconscious, b) with the kind of totally unwarranted suspicion more usually reserved for commanding officers who are, in fact, unconscious, or c) with moisturising, chemical-free soap.
The forest began to thin near Norton. It ended outright at the borders of the residential area of Lower Tadfield, where the shade and the complexity of leaves overhead gave way to pure sky.
Humans adjust quickly, and Newt, edging onto tarmac, felt more than a little nervous to be back out in the open. He hadn’t been all that fond of the woods, but in the woods he didn’t have to look very far before him and he could always occupy himself with not tripping over anything, if he had unwelcome thoughts to ward off. Here there was sky, and rooftops, and the light got everywhere, so that the hot empty streets seemed to glow.
The only things he was tripping over here were his words.
“So, what,” he said. “What, you want to kill the-- the Antichrist?”
“The indirect approach failed,” said Anathema.
“But how will you find him?”
“I have tools,” said Anathema. “Back at the cottage. Which should, if all this is any indication, still be there…”
“You said yourself that he might not be around at all, what good will your tools--”
“He’s around,” said Anathema. “I wasn’t sure before, but this--” her arm swept up to include the length of the whole, unaltered avenue “--this clinches it. ”
“Why?”
“This is being preserved,” said Anathema. “Don’t you see? Everything else he did was just… setting processes into motion. Spontaneous reforestation, as you put it. But keeping Tadfield the same is an ongoing effort.”
Newt stared at her.
“It makes sense,” she told him.
“Are you sure those were the kind of mushroom you wanted?” said Newt.
“Positive,” said Anathema, with a glittering glance over her shoulder. She walked on.
It occurred to Newt, hastening after her, that that could mean almost anything. He decided not to press the issue. Some things even silence was preferable to. And if he focused on her straight back, he could almost ignore the feeling of attentiveness, coming off the pretty houses, rising up from the tarmac that was sticking to his feet.
It wasn’t really all that different from the forest, when you got right down to it, he thought. More exposed, and with more fences: but the same alien will ran through it, like a vein, pulsing with life.
“It’s loved, you know,” said Aziraphale, as he glided down low over a dense sheet of cloud.
“What is?” said Crowley.
“London,” said Aziraphale. Then: “And everywhere else, too.”
“The same as what you felt in Tadfield?” said Crowley.
“Yes.”
Crowley huddled against the vertebrae at the base of Aziraphale’s neck. “Oh,” he said hopelessly.
“Yes.”
“I guess we didn’t need to worry about anything getting destroyed, after all,” Crowley said, with false good cheer.
Aziraphale looked curiously back at him, over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, “considering.”
“Yes, all right, but the planet’s perfectly safe. It’s loved.”
“Oh. Yes. Yes, it certainly is.”
“The trees, too. And the dirt, and the seas, and most of the dolphins, and so on.”
“The gorillas,” said Aziraphale.
“Yeah. With nests.”
The angel tilted one wing up, curving west.
“Do you suppose we’ll know Tadfield when we see it?” he asked, abruptly.
“Sure,” said Crowley. “That is, unless we’re very lucky.”
“You suggested this course first, if I recall,” said Aziraphale mildly. A blue sheen of reflected sky waxed and waned on his feathers as his wings beat the thin air.
Crowley, who ranked the shifting of tweed over overdeveloped metaphorical shoulder muscles somewhere between thumbscrews and horses, when it came to uncomfortable sensations, was not inclined to be reasonable. “I hadn’t thought things through. Let’s go back and finish off the rest of my wine cabinet first.”
“My dear, you designed that cabinet to be impossible to finish,” Aziraphale said. “I distinctly remember you telling me all about it in 1183. You were quite pleased with yourself.”
“I’d forgotten about that!” said Crowley, truthfully[1]. “But I don’t see how that’s a flaw in my plan, anyhow. If anything it makes it even better.”
“Pleasant as the thought is,” said Aziraphale, “we are doing this first. You want to see for yourself, don’t you?”
“I’ve seen plenty,” said Crowley.
“Then one more thing can’t hurt,” said Aziraphale, cheerfully.
He punched through the cloud layer and out the other side.
When Crowley had warmed up enough to talk, he hissed, “That wasn’t very nice.”
“On the contrary,” said Aziraphale, speaking loudly to make himself heard over the noise of the wind rattling through his feathers as he dropped. “I was within miles of our destination, which is quite precise, I think you’ll agree. Look.”
Crowley looked where he indicated.
There was a hole, in the canopy, the size of a plate and growing as they descended. It gleamed like an open eye, staring out of the face of the earth.
“Yeah,” he said. “Precise. Yeah.”
They hurtled towards Tadfield. Crowley slithered into Aziraphale’s collar, leeching warmth from flesh and bone.
[1] Testing out his little masterpiece had not only erased his memories of making it, but also his memories of the preceding decade, which fact Aziraphale knew very well, and had milked to the very limit for centuries after when it came time to decide who would pay for dinner.
It was getting on toward evening in what had been the grasslands, and the shadows the trees threw reached into the next country over.
Brian sat propped up against the light side of one. He was watching the sun lower over the river.
“Hey, boy,” said a woman’s voice, somewhere to the left of him.
Brian twisted around.
She was standing a few metres from where he sat, her hands on her hips, her feet planted far apart. She was very short and quite wide, and she was wearing a uniform that suggested she worked in some kind of pharmacy, with an apron and a nametag. Brian couldn’t read the handwriting on the nametag, though. At least, he didn’t think what he was reading on the nametag could possibly be right. There seemed to be altogether too many consonants, for one.
“You don’t look so good,” she informed him.
“I don’t feel so good,” he said, absently. It was an understatement, but then what wasn’t, today?
She came closer.
She was old, he saw, with almost as much surprise as he’d felt at seeing anyone at all here. Her short bristly hair was mostly white, and while it was hard to tell exactly how wrinkly she was, because her face was shaded and her skin was very dark to start with, he got the sense that her features had collapsed in a little, like his great-aunt Lily’s, only this woman’d had more face to start with so it made a different kind of outline.
“I have aspirin,” she said, fishing around in her breast pocket, so that the nametag tipped up and flashed white. He got a better glimpse of the name written there. Yes, there really were that many consonants, as far as he could tell.
“You don’t have to--” he began, sudden guilt washing through him just like all his other bodily fluids had at various points over the course of the day.
“It’s nothing,” she said, so forcefully that he shut up.
After a little more rummaging, she produced a bottle. “Here we go. No water, but it’ll do. Eh?”
Brian took the pill she gave him and gulped it down without further protest. “Thanks,” he said.
The woman nodded. Then she plumped down in front of him, blocking out the trail of light on the water in his view.
“First person I’ve found, you are,” she said.
“You’re the first person who’s found me,” said Brian, smiling shakily.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
Brian wondered how he could explain. He wondered what he would explain if he were going to try. About the young man with the white jacket and the terrified face, or about Adam, or--
“I dunno, exactly,” he said. “It just happened. Everythin’ just happened.”
“You think that pill will help?” she asked.
“I…” said Brian. He thought about it. “Prob’ly not,” he said, and added, “Sorry.”
“They’ll expire in another day or so,” she said, shrugging. “It was you or no one.”
Brian looked at his scuffed trainers.
“I was thinking of taking more from the shelves, when I ran out of the shop,” she said. “Shame I didn’t. I was in such a rush.”
“I don’t think there’s many pills that’d help me,” said Brian, with perfect accuracy.
“That right?” said the woman. “Well.”
She leaned back, folding her hands over her knees.
“Someone do that to you?” she said, nodding to his faintly greenish face.
Brian opened his mouth to deny this, and found himself saying, “Yes. In a sort of way.”
“Then someone can undo it,” she said.
“…yes,” said Brian.
She looked at him like his great-aunt had, once, after going off her medications for a day. Her eyes were clear and hard.
“You should probably find them,” she said. “You’re sick, boy.”
Brian put a hand on his stomach, and pressed down.
“I could go with you, maybe,” said the woman. “I don’t know what went on last night but my grandchildren haven’t called and I saw my daughter wink out like an old lightbulb. I don’t mind helping you find a doctor. Or whoever it is you think can help.”
Brian said, “Would you really?”
“Sure,” said the woman.
“I…” said Brian.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. Brian had never wanted anything so much as he wanted to tell her yes, please, come with me. But he remembered the emptiness in Lower Tadfield. How Adam had hollowed it out.
“I think… I think I might have to go to him alone,” he said, quietly.
The woman pursed her lips.
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
She hunched forward and rested her chin on her knee. “Is that right,” she said. “That’s quite an age.”
Brian replied, barely knowing what he was saying, “I guess it’s just my age.”
“Do you want to go to this man?” she asked.
“If he makes me better,” he said, and stopped. He covered his lips.
“Fixing is a tricky business,” said the woman.
“Not for him, it isn’t,” said Brian, bleakly.
The woman gave him a sharp look. “How’s that pill taking,” she said.
Brian shook his head. Then he had to turn away to dry retch, water dribbling out of his mouth.
He heard her say, “Well. Maybe a good fixing isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a body.”
A shudder ran through him, as if every cell in him was seconding the sentiment. They’d know, after all.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You do what you got to,” she said. The sun was behind her head, by then, and she was a silhouette, but he could feel her gaze on him. He could just about make out the pale gleam of the whites of her eyes. “I’ve done it. I guess in times like these there’s a lot of doing, or none.”
Brian wanted, very badly, for her to tell him it was okay. What he’d already done. He began to say something.
Then he saw over her shoulder to where a familiar figure was taking form in the shallows at the shore of the river.
“Wensley!” he shouted, shocked and even delighted.
The woman looked around.
“That your man?” she said.
“Wha-- no,” Brian said. “No. He’s just a friend.”
“You aren’t so unlucky as I thought you were, then,” she said, gently.
She helped him to his feet.
Brian said, “Thank you,” as Wensleydale waded up onto grass. “For the pill, an’ for… clearin’ me up.”
She wasn’t looking at him, though. She was gazing at Wensleydale, and she looked afraid.
Brian looked, too. And Wensleydale, he realised, was different. Was maybe something where he could see why someone would be afraid of him.
“Hullo, Brian,” Wensleydale said. His voice, normally reedy, had strange echoes. There were gurgles there, and groans, in the smallness of the space between his words.
“Hi,” said Brian. “How’d you get here?”
“I walked,” said Wensleydale. “We can go anywhere. I worked it out, d’you see? We can go anywhere we like now.”
He lifted his hand. In it he held the scales, and they swung, gently, on the ends of the bar.
“You’ve got your crown, don’t you?” said Wensleydale.
Brian became aware that the woman was shaking.
“This is a bad business,” she said, her voice cold.
Brian took the crown out of his pocket. It glistened blackly.
“I’ve got to,” he said to her.
“I guess you do,” she said, and:
“You should go. You should go now.”
“Okay,” mumbled Brian. “Okay. I will. Sorry. I’m sorry.”
Wensleydale looked as if he’d have liked to ask the woman something, but she made a sign with her fingers, and he flinched.
“C’mon,” he said to Brian. “This way.”
The woman watched them go. The lines in her face were deeply drawn, now.
After a while she went back into the copse of trees that should not have been there, and smelled the gum, and tried to slow the beating of her heart. She did not see the sun begin to set. Which was a pity, because it was going to be a very beautiful sunset, if not, perhaps, so brilliant as it had been when this part of the river was a heavily industrialised trading center, yesterday afternoon. But the sky shimmered like the edge of an oil spill and the sun was like a thing shining through a layer of rust, for a few minutes there, as two boys walked off that corner of the Earth.
Anathema was weaving together string, and leaves, and lint, and a slice of hardboiled egg[1]. Newt watched in morbid fascination as her fingers flew through the… materials, pulling a kind of structure out of nonsense. It was, he thought, almost exactly the inverse of what happened when he put his hands on a keyboard and tried to write some code.
“What’s that supposed to be?” he inquired, tentatively.
“It’s a shambles,” she said. “It tells me what I want to know. In theory. Normally I’d use more technically reliable methods, but…”
Newt said, “Under the circumstances.”
“Exactly.”
He wandered away from the kitchen table and into the bedroom.
Everything looked… as they’d left it, he thought, with a thrill. The unmade bed, the dent in the wall where his head had made high-velocity contact, the crumbling plaster. It was almost like looking at a life. It was as though this stranger’s house he moved uneasily around in was part of his story, or like he was part of its.
“Fuck,” said Anathema, audible through the wall.
Newt hurried out. “What is it?”
“The shambles broke,” she said, holding up the snapped threads demonstratively.
“Oh,” he said. “What does that mean?”
“I--”
She shook the tattered nest. It seemed to tighten, snarling around her slim fingers.
[1] Actually, what she did to the hard-boiled egg had much the same relationship to weaving as corsets did to choreography. But close enough.
“Okay,” said Crowley, “we’re here. We’ve seen. We’re all caught up. Let’s get out now, shall we? While we can?”
Aziraphale didn’t seem to be listening. He was strolling down the country lane as though he was just out for a bit of fresh air and perhaps a chat with the neighbors. He’d winched his wings in, though there were still long tears running up and down the back of his jacket.
“What is it you’re hoping to accomplish?” Crowley asked.
Aziraphale stopped.
“Crowley,” he said, “if you like, I can put you down, now. You don’t have to accompany me.”
“Oh, for-- don’t be like that,” Crowley hissed. “I told you, didn’t I? The Arrangement’s working just fine. Excuse me if I’m curious about your motives, angel, but that doesn’t mean…”
“I’d like to talk to the other children,” said Aziraphale.
Crowley blinked. Fortunately, Aziraphale was staring straight ahead when it happened, and Crowley recovered quickly.
“I saw them,” he said. “Two boys and a girl…?”
“Crown, scales, sword,” murmured Aziraphale.
“He would have needed them,” said Crowley, thoughtfully. “To do all this. That’s why you think they’re around somewhere. Makes sense, but-- he’s the Antichrist.”
“The Horsepersons are essential to any major reshaping of the Earth,” said Aziraphale. “No matter who’s technically responsible.”
Crowley considered this.
“So what you’re saying is,” he said, “these human children-- did this. As much as he did. And if we talk to them--”
“Perhaps we could come to some more acceptable arrangement,” finished Aziraphale. He favoured Crowley with a nervous grin.
“You must be insane,” said Crowley, slowly. “I must be insane.”
“I believe our respective superiors came to that conclusion long ago,” said Aziraphale, blandly.
Crowley laughed aloud.
“What the hell,” he said. He was feeling more than a little manic. “Who knows. It might even be fun. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, since we tried to persuade people of things directly?”
“Oh, yes,” said Aziraphale; “ages.”
His shoulders loosened. Crowley hadn’t noticed how tense he’d been up to then, but he noticed the relaxing of muscle, and took it as his cue to curl in.
“Where are we going?” he asked, because Aziraphale was moving again, in a determined sort of way.
“With the love,” said Aziraphale, shrugging. “It’s like--” he fumbled for some suitable comparison “--like you and heat. I know where the hot spots are. The hot spot, really.”
Crowley gave a sceptical huff, but the complaints ceased to flow, which Aziraphale counted as a small and important victory[1]. He went on, feeling the love.
[1] Up there with such subtle moments of triumph for divine good sense as floss, umbrellas, and C.S. Lewis.
“Give me your pin,” Anathema said.
“Sorry?”
“Your witchfinder’s pin,” Anathema said, enunciating.
Newt handed it to her and watched her begin to reconstruct her work.
The witch wielding the pin. Shadwell was probably rolling in his--
“Oh,” he said.
“What?”
“I just… my sergeant,” said Newt. “I didn’t even. He’s probably dead. He’s this extraordinary man, and he was in London when it all went to hell, and--[1]”
He broke off.
“I’m sorry,” said Anathema, and for a moment her expression was soft, and Newt felt a horrible numbness creeping in, as though his old life-- his old life, before he was a private, or an anything-- was rushing back.
Then the pin she’d inserted in the center of the egg popped out like a silvery, pointed, superheated champagne cork, and the numbness was gone, all right.
“He’s here,” said Anathema, knocking her chair over in her haste.
“Here?” Newt yelped.
Anathema nodded to the window, where there was, blurrily visible through thick glass, a boy leaning his bike against the fence.
Newt said, “Oh, my god.”
“Not exactly,” said Anathema.
She picked up the gun. In her hand it shone like a star.
[1] It might have comforted Newt to know that Shadwell was not, by any conventional measure, dead. He was with the rest of the unwanted human race, in a place that lies outside the purview of this story, and at that very moment he was thinking, in perfect sync with a lot of other Shadwells across the multiverse, We could hide. And it’d be the witches’ turn to find us.
Then again, it might not have.
The girl was the only one in the quarry when they arrived. She was sitting on an old milk crate, and the sword was in her lap.
Aziraphale, standing over her, remembered Eve after Abel’s death. How she had hacked apart wood as she wept. The girl was dripping wet, and shivering, and there was violence in every quake that ran through her small frame, though she did not shift from her seat.
“Who’re you?” she said, staring at him with red-rimmed eyes.
Aziraphale searched for something to say.
“I used to own that sword of yours,” he said, eventually.
The girl frowned.
“No, you din’t,” she said. “I know who owned it before me. You’re not her.”
Aziraphale carefully shut out the quiet, snaky sniggering in his ear.
“No,” he agreed. “I owned it before she did, even. I was its first owner, you could say.”
“She had it for a long time,” argued the girl.
“It was a long time ago,” said Aziraphale.
The girl’s eyes narrowed.
“So?” she said. “What d’you want with it now, then?”
“Want with it?” said Aziraphale. “Nothing, my dear. But I think you should know about what it can do.”
The girl’s face closed off.
“I already do,” she muttered, her hair falling like a copper visor down over her eyes.
“May I see it?” said Aziraphale, patiently.
“I’m so impressed by your people skills,” Crowley whispered.
“I promise I have no interest in taking the sword from you,” continued Aziraphale, raising his voice a little. “I will give it back as soon as I’ve shown you something.”
“I don’t care,” said the girl. “Huh. You couldn’t take it from me if I didn’t want you to, anyhow.”
“Assuredly not,” Aziraphale agreed.
She held it out, point-first.
Aziraphale took it by the blade, gingerly, and swapped his grip down to the handle as soon as she let go. He lifted it to eye level, and--
“Well?” she said.
He concentrated. There was a whoomph, and the sword flamed white, as though a door in the wall of reality had been pulled ajar, and light was pouring through.
“Once you’ve learned how to do it, you never forget,” said the angel.
The girl said, weakly:
“Gosh.”
“Take it,” said Crowley, in Aziraphale’s voice, because Aziraphale seemed transfixed, though he did at least have the presence of mind to allow the girl to slip it out of his hold.
She wrapped both her grubby hands around the hilt, and held it up, her expression reverent and far too old for her. “Wowie,” she said, slashing downwards and leaving a flaming afterimage like the tail of a comet scrawled across Aziraphale’s sight.
He cringed. “Do be careful with that,” he said.
“Oh, def’nitely,” said the girl, carving a figure eight of fire out of the chalky air.
“Maybe you should have talked first and given presents second,” Crowley said, as she practised.
“It’s possible,” admitted Aziraphale. “But I think--”
She froze. She’d been lunging, her sword arm extended, the sword run straight through some imagined foe, and her stillness, new and awful, yanked the eye toward it. She’d dried off.
“What is it, then?” she said. “This sword. I thought it was… somethin’ else. It din’t feel like this, before. It’s-- it’s--”
Aziraphale exchanged glances with Crowley.
“It’s been many things,” he said. “It has done everything a sword can do.”
“So you’re sayin’,” said Pepper, with the care of a polar bear easing out onto thin, thin ice, “you’re sayin’, I can choose. What it is, an’ what it does.”
Aziraphale breathed out.
“Yeah,” said Crowley, emerging from inside his shirt. “That’s the idea.”
Pepper glared at him. “Snakes can’t talk.”
Aziraphale had a sudden fit of coughing into the crook of his elbow. Crowley, helpfully, thwacked him on the back a few times with his tail.
“Girls don’t generally fight with flaming swords,” he said, coldly. “But today’s an unusual day.”
“That’s sexism,” said Pepper, raising the sword.
“And yours was speciesism.”
“Really, my dear,” murmured Aziraphale.
“She started it!” Crowley said.
Pepper scoffed.
“Which is the other thing,” Crowley said, softly, his voice turning sleek. “You were part of how this started, too.”
“Huh?”
“The new Earth. With its kingdoms, and none of its people? You may have noticed.”
The girl took a step back, until the corner of the milk crate was biting into the undersides of her knees.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That wasn’t me. That was all Adam.”
“If that were true it would make matters much simpler,” muttered Aziraphale. “But I’m afraid that it was you, my dear. Some of it. That sword was a tool, and you, my dear… wielded it.”
“They’re right, Pepper,” said Wensleydale, rippling in[1].
Brian followed, at a slight delay. Pepper turned to them.
“Hallo,” she said, blankly. “Wasn’t expectin’ you back so soon.”
“Hi,” said Brian.
“We did this,” said Wensleydale, urgently. “To ourselves.”
She stared at his serious face.
Crowley hissed, “Is that…?”
“Scales,” said Aziraphale, absently.
“Yes, I know, but what I mean is… he hasn’t… The old Famine?”
Aziraphale squinted.
“Oh. Yes.”
“Was that supposed to happen?” Crowley said.
Aziraphale looked at him.
“I’ve no idea.”
“Wonderful,” said Crowley. He began to shift in agitation. Aziraphale put a quelling hand on his tail.
“My dear fellow, settle down.”
Crowley settled down, and turned his attention back to the children. Pepper’s expression was decidedly mulish; Brian’s had a sheepish air.
Wensleydale’s had probably never been seen in any barnyard, ever[2].
“So we can take it back,” he was saying. “There was a plan, a real plan. Grown-ups made it. We can go back to that, instead of-- of--”
His eyes burned with starved light. Flames crackled down Pepper’s sword.
“Followin’ Adam any longer,” she finished for him.
“Wait,” said Brian, his face white and clean and uncertain. Without the layer of dirt obscuring detail, his features looked very naked in the late afternoon sun. “We can’t-- we’re… Adam’s….”
He trailed off.
“Not anymore, we aren’t,” said Pepper.
“But he’s our friend. He’s more our side than some grownup,” said Brian. “An’-- an’ he gave us the world, the whole world, I mean…”
“Do you want it?” Wensleydale said.
Brian flinched. “Of course not!”
“Well?” said Wensleydale.
“The little bastard,” murmured Crowley, admiringly.
Aziraphale didn’t answer. He was standing very still, watching, and Crowley was reminded of how he’d looked in the pits of the Globe, when Crowley’d finally convinced him to check out this new kind of theatre; how utterly preoccupied he’d seemed, because of a few humans on a platform. Crowley, for his part, preferred films.
“Couldn’t we just try talking to him?” Brian said.
“Talking to him?” said Pepper. Her mouth stretched into a sort of smile. “You try. It’s a waste of breathing, talking to him.”
Brian was beginning to get angry.
“So what, then,” he said. “What is it you want to do? Are we goin’ to ambush him? Are we Johnsonites, now, or what?”
“Johnsonites?” Crowley whispered.
“Early breakaway sect, I think,” said the angel. “Sort of Gnostics. Like the Ophites.” His forehead creased. “Or were they the Sethites? No, I'm thinking of the Collyridians. Oh dear. I'm sorry, there were hundreds of them, it's so hard to keep track.”
“All those people,” said Crowley.
“Greasy Johnson’s gone,” Pepper said.
“And we’re us,” said Wensleydale, though his tone had lost some of its imperious echoes. “We’re us and we’ll do what we ought to, that’s all.”
“How’ll we know when we’ve done it?” said Brian. “It’s all right for you two-- you’re not all messed up inside, an’ I guess you can do what you like. But I’ve got to… I need--”
Wensleydale appeared to be listening.
“If we deal with Adam,” he said at last, slowly, “that’ll get better.”
Pepper gave him a sharp look. Brian, though, took a deep shuddery breath and closed his eyes.
“Well?” said Wensleydale.
“You got me, I guess,” Brian said, in a voice that creaked like a rusting hinge. It was an old voice. “Let’s do it, then. Let’s just do it.”
[1] If you took a video of a boy’s reflection on the surface of some still body of water, being disturbed and then dissolved by falling rain, and played that in reverse, it would give a good idea of how Wensleydale and Brian looked when they walked in. It is not recommended that you draw any conclusions from this, since the physical processes involved were entirely unrelated in every possible respect and several impossible ones.
[2] Though it might have shown up in a chicken coop during particularly bad winters.
“Let me out,” said Anathema.
“No,” said Newt.
The door pressed into his shoulderblades. The doorknob, for its part, got overfriendly with his hip. But he was resolute, he thought. There was no way he was moving. Not even to reposition his belt.
“You’re not being very sensible,” said Anathema. “Don’t you agree that someone needs to do the job?”
“I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”
“You said you were a pacifist.”
“You said you were a vegetarian!”
“Believe me, I’m not going to eat him.”
“Anathema,” Newt began, “while I--”
“That’s my name,” she said, smiling brilliantly. “Don’t wear it out.”
“--respect that you are an adult woman and perfectly capable of, um, making your own choices, and-- and so on, I really don’t think you’ve thought this through, first, and second, you’re going to die!”
“Yesterday I was going to die,” said Anathema. “There are more important things today.”
There was a knocking on the door.
“That’s him,” said Anathema. “I think you should get out of the way.”
Newt gaped at her.
Several things occurred after that in rapid succession.
First, the door opened in a way that suggested it would not be closing again soon, and Newt, who’d been leaning his full weight on it, stumbled backwards over the doorstep. Adam stepped neatly out of his way, so he toppled gracefully down onto the lawn uninterrupted.
He did not witness the details of what happened next. They happened anyway.
Second, Anathema’s hand swung up, and she pulled the trigger.
Third, Adam stopped smiling.
The bullet exploded into shards of hot metal an inch from his nose. Haloed by flying lead, he looked like an angel with an agenda.
Anathema pulled the trigger again, but nothing came out.
Adam looked at her, his eyes the solid blue of the sky, which men once imagined, more correctly than they could ever know, to be just another kind of ceiling. “What was that for?” he said, sounding as injured as he wasn’t.
Anathema’s throat worked.
“I came here to ask if you’d seen what I did,” said Adam, louder. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
He stepped forward. The broken bullet clattered to the floor.
“I put rainforests in,” he said, slowly. “An’ whales, for you.”
Pain flashed across her face, sudden as a summer storm. She lowered the gun. Adam took another step.
“An’ I got rid of the rubbish,” he continued.
“You got rid of the people, Adam,” said Anathema, with some effort.
“But you wanted that, too,” said Adam.
“I did not want--”
She stopped, as memories of what she had, in fact, said came flooding back to her. White South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of everywhere, but especially here…
“But I didn’t mean I wanted them to die,” she said.
“They didn’t die!” said Adam, indignantly. “Well, mostly. I just took ‘em out. They were messin’ everything up, so I took ’em out. They should leave, you said.”
“Where did you put them?”
Adam shrugged.
“Where they’d fit,” he said.
“That’s awful,” she said, surprised by how much she meant it.
Adam crossed his arms.
“I don’t see how. I’m lookin’ out for you, and for my friends. I’m takin’ care of the Earth. An’ for the rest, well, what I did to them was better than what they’d have gotten otherwise.”
“That’s not an excuse,” said Anathema.
“No,” said Adam calmly, “it’s a reason.”
He set his chin. He seemed to have grown, and probably he had, Anathema thought, with some viciousness. He would have wanted to.
He was very beautiful. He looked like a future no one had ever seen.
As if of its own accord, her empty hand went up. She wanted, she thought, to see that warm calm go. She felt angry enough for an entire species. She’d felt it all day, and--
She saw Newt, clinging to the doorframe.
She lowered her arm. She could have shot the Antichrist easily, but hit him? There were limits. He was, after all, just a kid.
Probably no one had ever laid a hand on Adam in his whole life. His mother didn’t believe in corporal punishment, and his father thought the elbow grease was more usefully spent on his car. So perhaps he didn’t realise what had taken place. But his mother and his father were gone, too, and he had seen things on the telly, and in Anathema’s head; so perhaps he did. Either way, his face went, if anything, calmer. She’d thought when she’d first seen him that he should have been the model for some long-dead sculptor, and now she could see what that would look like, only with more colour in his skin and something nameless and old stirring in his gaze.
“I guess you didn’t like it,” he said. “It was s’posed to be a present, for you and for everyone. I kept him jus’ for you,” he added, jerking a thumb at Newt, who froze in the act of approaching. “I was awfully nice, I thought. But I don’t need you, anyhow. You’re jus’ like the rest of them, reelly. You’re boring.”
Anathema did not speak.
Adam slouched out, his hands in his pockets. Newt reached out a trembling hand when he passed, as if to grab his arm, or hold him back, and Anathema thought, distractedly, that she had never seen a braver inch of gawky wrist, extending from his too-short sleeve.
His fingers, though, slid off Adam’s T-shirt like it was marble, not cloth. And Adam left.
Anathema fired five bullets into the ceiling, in a rough ring. A cloud of plaster floated down, and she coughed. She coughed and coughed and Newt eased the gun out of her hand and she laughed, a little, and coughed as though her breath had turned against her.
“He’s coming,” said Crowley, into the quiet.
The Them’s shadows lengthened. Brian, gently, set the crown on his matted hair. Without further discussion, they scrambled up the far side of the quarry and disappeared into the thicket beyond, quick as snakes before a saint whose breakfast had been interrupted.
“Are we sticking around?” said Crowley, gazing at the empty quarry. “We’ve only got these bodies, remember? And--”
“We only have these bodies,” said Aziraphale. “That’s not much to lose, considering.”
“These bodies and quite a lot thousand-year-old mead still to go, then,” Crowley said, irritated.
Aziraphale wrinkled his nose. “I never did like the honey-based ones,” he said.
This comment struck Crowley as being so infuriatingly obstructive that he began laughing, and could not, once he’d started, stop. He flapped against Aziraphale’s shoulders, helplessly.
“Do try to be careful,” said Aziraphale, managing a decent impression of sincere concern. “You don’t actually have the vocal cords for that sort of thing, my dear. Or at all.”
“Really?” said Crowley. “None? Huh. That explains a lot, actually. Doesn’t seem very well thought out, but then--”
The rest of whatever he was going to say was lost to posterity[1], because then they heard the clank of a bike being propped up against a tree.
Aziraphale crossed briskly over to the milk crate. He rolled up his sleeves and sat down.
“Oo,” he said, “comfy.”
He smiled at Crowley.
“You,” said Crowley, not without a hint of grudging admiration, “are a bit of a bastard.”
“I always knew you had a spark of goodness in you,” Aziraphale.
Crowley supposed he’d deserved it, at that. And it wasn’t as if there was anyone to hear.
He slithered down to the angel’s forearm and wormed between the soft fingers, like ambitious rope. He didn’t, after all, want to fall off.
[1] It almost certainly involved the phrase “unintelligent design” and some scathing reference to the Ornithorhynchus genus, though. Some aspects of Crowley’s rhetorical strategy never changed.
Adam got off his bike.
He felt a bit odd. The viscera of his wounded innocence had trailed behind him all down the lane, and though he’d almost forgotten his encounter with Anathema now, his nerves were still jangling like a particularly badly-paid orchestra.
But his friends were in the quarry; he could hear them. He’d come up with more plans, when he was running after Dog. They’d never be short of plans again, he thought. No more long listless afternoons.
He went through the thorn trees, which parted for him, just a little; and he hopped down into the hole to join the Them.
Which would’ve been great, except everything was wrong. There were strangers in the hole, sitting on the milk crate like they owned the place, and his friends were nowhere to be seen. The indignation, which had receded so rapidly on the road, came rushing back.
“Put your hands up,” he told the intruders roughly, in the way he imagined a respectable gangster would, on discovering police in his den.
The man stood, and raised his hands. The effect was a little marred by the fact that in one of his hands he was holding a snake. He didn’t look like the sort of fellow who was supposed to go around holding snakes, not when Adam himself had never held a snake, ever, because the titchy garden ones didn’t count. It wasn’t fair. The man looked about as boring as was possible while still moving about, and he got big black an’ red snake that Adam hadn’t even seen in the zoo.
Of course, the man wasn’t really a man, and the snake wasn’t really a snake, and Adam could have just made himself a snake, and would as soon as he’d dealt with this, but he still spent a moment wallowing in resentful envy.
“What’re you doing here?” he said. A thought struck him. “Did you do something to my friends?”
He raised his hands, too, and forked tongues of electricity lapped at his palms.
“Not exactly,” said the angel, sidling back around the crate. “That is, er, your friends? Haven’t seen any--”
“Don’t you try an’ lie to me,” Adam said, shaking with fury. “Where’d they go?”
“A good question,” said the snake, its tongue flickering out as if in answer to the sparks dancing along Adam’s nails.
Adam raised one hand.
“Here goes,” said Brian.
The Them crept forward.
“One,” said Wensleydale. “Two--”
“On the three or right after?” said Brian.
“On,” snapped Wensleydale.
“Only checking.”
“Three.”
The three children sprang.
One, though, was yanked back.
“Hey!” hissed Pepper. It would have been a shriek, but the breath had been knocked out of her.
A red grin glistened in the gloom.
“Hey,” said War.
Adam closed the raised hand into a fist.
There was a crack. He looked up, just in time to see Wensleydale and Brian leap down from the trees, their arms raised and full of silver. For a moment they seemed to hang suspended in the air, their shadows like the shadows of birds.
They hit the ground, and stumbled, and Adam said their names. And then Wensleydale was pushing him to the ground and Brian was sitting on his knees and it was all, all wrong.
“Ah,” said the snake, “there they are.”
Not very far above, Pepper squirmed free of War. War flipped her around and slammed her against the gnarled trunk of a thorn tree, pinning her at the shoulders.
Pepper kicked out, with the incredible anatomical precision conferred on her by seven years of association with males. War’s grin widened like a waxing moon. When Pepper’s foot fell back, she stepped delicately onto Pepper’s toes.
“You never let me finish, little girl,” she said.
“I’ve got other things to do,” Pepper growled, scrabbling at the smooth backs of War’s hands.
“Best time, don’t you think?” said War, leaning in. Pepper, caught, smelled nail polish remover, and blood under the skin.
Under the cliff, three small boys grappled with one another.
Aziraphale made as if to lend a hand a few times, darting forward and skipping back at the last second, when he realised that whatever plan he’d come up with this time depended on that trainer right there belonging to an entirely different boy. Crowley didn’t know why he bothered: the rising dust made it almost impossible to distinguish them, masking the flash of Wensleydale’s glasses and Brian’s crown and Adam’s hands as it did, and there’d be no miracles in that fight.
For his part, he stared at the lip of the cliff. If the girl came now, things could still be salvaged. Adam obviously wasn’t used to being attacked by his lieutenants. Adam wouldn’t have partaken much in the scuffling of the Them, over the years. Adam--
Adam said their names again.
“Brian and Wensley--” Pepper said.
“You little fool,” said War, “I’m trying to help you. And them. Your leader is stronger than mine. Yes. But together we can be stronger than either of them. Think.”
Pepper spat. Her saliva sizzled in the dirt. “What about?” she hissed.
“Your friends,” said War, dripping disdain. “Their plan’s not going to work without me, you see. Famine’s too slow. Pollution isn’t on offer. This-- this is my work. Our work.”
Pepper opened her mouth, and closed it again.
She thought about her friends, and especially about her friend Adam, who was gone.
“What is it you want?” she said, quietly.
“Stop,” said Adam. “I command you.”
And, like that, it stopped.
At least, the movement stopped. The rage, though: that moved through him. And it wasn’t his rage.
“I don’t understand,” he said, the words forming like mountains of sound, forced into being by the rearrangement of tectonic plates.
Aziraphale put his hands over his ears. Crowley, handless and earless, absorbed the vibrations.
“I fixed it,” Adam said.
“I fixed the whole world,” he said. “And now everyone’s fussin’. Always fussin’. What is it you all want?”
He heard them think,
You didn’t fix Lower Tadfield.
The inaccuracy of this-- the unfairness-- was such that for a while he could not speak.
“I spent my whole life fixin’ Tadfield for us,” he nearly shouted, when he managed to say anything. “They would’ve filled in this quarry when we were in second grade if it wasn’t for me. They would have put a nasty old highway through, if it wasn’t for me. They would have made us learn to read with putty. They would’ve messed it up. They always mess it up!”
He was shaking, now. His fingers jerked and his face twisted and it was like watching the collapse of a tower, slowed down almost, but not quite, to an act of photography. He tore out of the skinny arms of the other boys one limb at a time. They didn’t want to let him go. He rose anyway.
“An’ you,” he said, glaring at the angel and the snake. “I know all about you two. You were goin’ to have a little bet, you were. You were goin’ to give me tutors.”
“That’s not quite fair,” said the angel, lifting his head, slowly. He paused, and added, “In any case, don’t you think perhaps you might have needed them?”
“I’ve learned my lesson,” said Adam, coldly. “A lot better than some people. I know better’n to let the enemy get in the way.”
“Ouch,” said the snake, which was wrapping itself around the angel’s wrist. “You got us.”
Its eyes were very yellow and Adam could see the fear in them.
“We’re really bad about letting enemies get in the way,” it went on, levelly. “Sometimes we even work with them, because otherwise things get broken. Forever.”
Its pupils widened a little as it spoke, until they looked for all the world like the slots in an arcade machine, where the coin goes, after the game is over.
“Just let me in,” said the woman, tilting her head up. A shaft of sun, penetrating the density of thorns, caught the edge of her brown eye and fired it a strange raw gold.
“What?” said Pepper.
War looked back down at Pepper.
“Into your head, that is,” she said, “if you feel up to it. That’s what, what did you call him?-- your Wensley did. You must have felt it.”
Pepper said, “How?”
“Shake on it,” said War. “He gave you some power, didn’t he? A little power and some blood would do it. Mine and yours.”
She hunkered down until Pepper could see the traces of old lipstick in the creases of her mouth.
“Quickly.”
Pepper nodded, and rocked forward without warning, a rolling kind of shove. War, whose weight had been unevenly distributed, to put it politely, was sent tripping sideways.
Pepper walked past her to the edge.
She saw the tableau: Wensleydale and Brian frozen in attitudes of violence. The former owner of her sword, backing away. Adam.
“You need me, now,” War croaked. “Or you’ll just run away. You think I can’t see?”
Pepper was silent. She could picture, very clearly, how angry she would have gotten at such an accusation, a day ago. Now she just felt tired.
“Get me out of this damn body,” War said. “Get me out and I’ll do the rest.”
Very slowly, Pepper lowered the sword.
Its point came to rest a metre from the fallen Horseperson, and War’s hand shot out and wrapped around the its tip like a striking cobra, if a striking cobra had no survival instinct whatsoever.
The blood welled, between her knuckles. The blade’s pale fire retreated from her flesh like water does from wind.
War let out a happy sigh.
“Now you,” she said.
Pepper brought the flame-lined edge up on her palm. There was no heat at all.
Crouching down beside the woman, she shook on it. And felt War’s body go limp, under the stiff red leather. It took perhaps a minute; it left a little blood on Pepper’s fingers and a shadow on Pepper’s sight.
“I’ve only got one friend now,” she heard Adam say, as if from far off.
She descended.
“Not when I do it,” the boy who still called himself Adam said. “Nothing has to break.”
Aziraphale said, “Except your friends?”
Adam made a gesture. The ground surged under Aziraphale; he reeled sideways and hit the chalk cliff hard before sliding down in a heap.
Crowley, who’d been caught between the angel’s arm and the wall, almost lost consciousness.
He heard Adam say, as if from very far off, “I’ve only got one friend now.”
And then there were Pepper and Adam.
“One friend’s enough,” said Adam, his smile tentative and hopeful and sweet as he ended his circling in front of her. He had more control, now. He could move like his old self. Brian and Wensley were only currents in the seas of his mind, even if they pushed out on the sides of his head.
“Yeah,” said Pepper, stretching an unmarked hand towards him.
He went to her. She touched his cheek, curiously, her fingers more probing than tender.
Then she took the sword out from behind her back and ran him through. There was some resistance, but what the hell; there always was.
Adam screamed.
It was a sound that maybe only a mortal throat could have uttered, and it did not last very long.
Long enough, though.
“Ah,” said the Metatron, looking up from his paperwork.
Brian and Wensleydale came running over, silver whirling. They needn’t have bothered. By then he was well and truly alight. The sword’s fire, which had left War unscathed and the thorn trees cold and which did not jump to Pepper’s T-shirt in all the time she stood there, holding Adam up-- it caressed him as a mother does her son. It started from his heart and worked outward, until he was outlined in white, and it did not move more than an inch past his edge.
The blood got everywhere, though. So did the ash, once there was ash. It spattered Brian and Wensleydale with black; Pepper it soaked all down her front, until the brightly-coloured cartoon logo on her T-shirt was entirely unidentifiable, as was her face.
She pulled the sword out, eventually. It was just a sword. The flame, by then, had found a better home.
go back to part two
go on to part four
“The thing is,” Crowley said aloud, “it could’ve been so much worse.”
“What,” said Aziraphale.
“How things turned out for us,” said Crowley. “Our fates. Etcetetetera.”
Aziraphale squinted at him through the bowl of his glass.
“Potato liquor doesn’t refract half so much as wine,” he confided, in what he possibly thought was an indoors voice.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Crowley told him.
“You are deliberately obtuse, my dear,” said Aziraphale, “and always have been.”
“Hey,” said Crowley, and fell silent, searching for something to add to this. As a comeback, he had to admit, it lacked a certain something. But there didn’t seem to be much else to say.
“’S’true,” said Aziraphale. “You pretend not to see.”
“You,” said Crowley, “aren’t even pretending to listen to me.”
Aziraphale looked faintly guilty. He reached over and refilled his glass.
“Go on, dear boy. I got a little distracted, but I’m listening.”
“Hmph,” said Crowley. He’d just about managed to undo the knot in his midsection, except for the last twist, and so was disposed to let Aziraphale’s blatant falsehoods pass with only an eyeroll or three. “Well. We’re all right, aren’t we? This isn’t so bad.”
“We’ve no purpose in being here,” said Aziraphale. “Your car’s burned up and my bookshop’s burned down. The world’s a jungle that doesn’t like me and as soon as we take one misstep, it’s home for us, so we’re not going to be able to enjoy existence half so much.”
“How d’you figure?” Crowley interjected.
“We’ll have to leave off doing all sorts of things,” Aziraphale said. “Like flying when there are cannonballs about. And feeding the ducks.”
Crowley yanked himself straight, once and for all.
“How could feeding the ducks get us discorporated?” he asked.
“Oh. It couldn’t, probably,” said Aziraphale. “But there are no more ducks.”
He paused. Crowley looked as expectant as a snake can.
“And that’s not bad?” he finished, less conclusively than he could have liked.
Crowley gave a noncommittal flick of his tail. “Honestly,” he said, “I can’t think how it could have turned out better.”
“Not even if we’d been at all competent?” said Aziraphale, with the ghost of a smile.
Crowley snorted into his saucer, streaming bubbles. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
Aziraphale put his hands together.
“You may have a point,” he said, low and unhappy.
“Cheer up,” Crowley told him. “We can still miracle up more alcohol. They didn’t take that away.”
Aziraphale nodded. Then, confusingly, he tried to shake his head mid-nod, leading to a kind of circular movement that reminded Crowley of nothing so much as a snake being charmed.
“I think we should go to Tadfield now,” he said. “If we’re going to go.”
“What?”
“After that we can drink properly, y’see?”
“But-- but-- what about the missiles?” said Crowley, conscious of how flimsy it sounded even as he said it.
Aziraphale sniffed. “Missiles,” he said. “What do we care for missiles?”
Crowley examined this from several angles.
“…quite a lot?” he said.
“Sober up,” said Aziraphale, slurring a little, but slurring it briskly and determinedly. “We’ve put it off long enough. And I’m tired of specul-- speckle-- of talking about what could have been.”
Crowley made a wordless noise of protest, but he sobered up.
Aziraphale did likewise and gave him a wary once-over. In fairness, it was much harder to distinguish a sober snake from a drunk one than it is to distinguish a sober demon from a drunk one. Crowley was, nevertheless, annoyed.
“Believe me, I’m dry as your books,” he said. Then he cringed. “Er. That is, I--”
Aziraphale sighed and draped Crowley over his shoulders like a particularly unflattering scarf.
“Shush,” he said.
Crowley shushed.
Aziraphale went to the window and said a word. The glass still in the window shattered and fell away in a spray of aquamarine crystals.
Aziraphale pushed the frame out of the way.
“If you strangle me,” he said to Crowley, “you will make things very difficult for both of us.”
Crowley heard the seams on Aziraphale’s coat split, but at least he didn’t have to look at the wings, this time. “Sure,” he said, wrapping closer around Aziraphale’s neck. “No strangulation happening here, is there?”
“Try to relax, dear,” said Aziraphale, his tone inappropriately mirthful.
Then he jumped out the window.
Crowley tried, very hard, to relax.
[1] The ways it was meant to be treated were as follows: a) with the kind of terrified reverence more usually reserved for commanding officers who’re pretending, just now, to be unconscious, b) with the kind of totally unwarranted suspicion more usually reserved for commanding officers who are, in fact, unconscious, or c) with moisturising, chemical-free soap.
The forest began to thin near Norton. It ended outright at the borders of the residential area of Lower Tadfield, where the shade and the complexity of leaves overhead gave way to pure sky.
Humans adjust quickly, and Newt, edging onto tarmac, felt more than a little nervous to be back out in the open. He hadn’t been all that fond of the woods, but in the woods he didn’t have to look very far before him and he could always occupy himself with not tripping over anything, if he had unwelcome thoughts to ward off. Here there was sky, and rooftops, and the light got everywhere, so that the hot empty streets seemed to glow.
The only things he was tripping over here were his words.
“So, what,” he said. “What, you want to kill the-- the Antichrist?”
“The indirect approach failed,” said Anathema.
“But how will you find him?”
“I have tools,” said Anathema. “Back at the cottage. Which should, if all this is any indication, still be there…”
“You said yourself that he might not be around at all, what good will your tools--”
“He’s around,” said Anathema. “I wasn’t sure before, but this--” her arm swept up to include the length of the whole, unaltered avenue “--this clinches it. ”
“Why?”
“This is being preserved,” said Anathema. “Don’t you see? Everything else he did was just… setting processes into motion. Spontaneous reforestation, as you put it. But keeping Tadfield the same is an ongoing effort.”
Newt stared at her.
“It makes sense,” she told him.
“Are you sure those were the kind of mushroom you wanted?” said Newt.
“Positive,” said Anathema, with a glittering glance over her shoulder. She walked on.
It occurred to Newt, hastening after her, that that could mean almost anything. He decided not to press the issue. Some things even silence was preferable to. And if he focused on her straight back, he could almost ignore the feeling of attentiveness, coming off the pretty houses, rising up from the tarmac that was sticking to his feet.
It wasn’t really all that different from the forest, when you got right down to it, he thought. More exposed, and with more fences: but the same alien will ran through it, like a vein, pulsing with life.
“It’s loved, you know,” said Aziraphale, as he glided down low over a dense sheet of cloud.
“What is?” said Crowley.
“London,” said Aziraphale. Then: “And everywhere else, too.”
“The same as what you felt in Tadfield?” said Crowley.
“Yes.”
Crowley huddled against the vertebrae at the base of Aziraphale’s neck. “Oh,” he said hopelessly.
“Yes.”
“I guess we didn’t need to worry about anything getting destroyed, after all,” Crowley said, with false good cheer.
Aziraphale looked curiously back at him, over his shoulder. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, “considering.”
“Yes, all right, but the planet’s perfectly safe. It’s loved.”
“Oh. Yes. Yes, it certainly is.”
“The trees, too. And the dirt, and the seas, and most of the dolphins, and so on.”
“The gorillas,” said Aziraphale.
“Yeah. With nests.”
The angel tilted one wing up, curving west.
“Do you suppose we’ll know Tadfield when we see it?” he asked, abruptly.
“Sure,” said Crowley. “That is, unless we’re very lucky.”
“You suggested this course first, if I recall,” said Aziraphale mildly. A blue sheen of reflected sky waxed and waned on his feathers as his wings beat the thin air.
Crowley, who ranked the shifting of tweed over overdeveloped metaphorical shoulder muscles somewhere between thumbscrews and horses, when it came to uncomfortable sensations, was not inclined to be reasonable. “I hadn’t thought things through. Let’s go back and finish off the rest of my wine cabinet first.”
“My dear, you designed that cabinet to be impossible to finish,” Aziraphale said. “I distinctly remember you telling me all about it in 1183. You were quite pleased with yourself.”
“I’d forgotten about that!” said Crowley, truthfully[1]. “But I don’t see how that’s a flaw in my plan, anyhow. If anything it makes it even better.”
“Pleasant as the thought is,” said Aziraphale, “we are doing this first. You want to see for yourself, don’t you?”
“I’ve seen plenty,” said Crowley.
“Then one more thing can’t hurt,” said Aziraphale, cheerfully.
He punched through the cloud layer and out the other side.
When Crowley had warmed up enough to talk, he hissed, “That wasn’t very nice.”
“On the contrary,” said Aziraphale, speaking loudly to make himself heard over the noise of the wind rattling through his feathers as he dropped. “I was within miles of our destination, which is quite precise, I think you’ll agree. Look.”
Crowley looked where he indicated.
There was a hole, in the canopy, the size of a plate and growing as they descended. It gleamed like an open eye, staring out of the face of the earth.
“Yeah,” he said. “Precise. Yeah.”
They hurtled towards Tadfield. Crowley slithered into Aziraphale’s collar, leeching warmth from flesh and bone.
[1] Testing out his little masterpiece had not only erased his memories of making it, but also his memories of the preceding decade, which fact Aziraphale knew very well, and had milked to the very limit for centuries after when it came time to decide who would pay for dinner.
It was getting on toward evening in what had been the grasslands, and the shadows the trees threw reached into the next country over.
Brian sat propped up against the light side of one. He was watching the sun lower over the river.
“Hey, boy,” said a woman’s voice, somewhere to the left of him.
Brian twisted around.
She was standing a few metres from where he sat, her hands on her hips, her feet planted far apart. She was very short and quite wide, and she was wearing a uniform that suggested she worked in some kind of pharmacy, with an apron and a nametag. Brian couldn’t read the handwriting on the nametag, though. At least, he didn’t think what he was reading on the nametag could possibly be right. There seemed to be altogether too many consonants, for one.
“You don’t look so good,” she informed him.
“I don’t feel so good,” he said, absently. It was an understatement, but then what wasn’t, today?
She came closer.
She was old, he saw, with almost as much surprise as he’d felt at seeing anyone at all here. Her short bristly hair was mostly white, and while it was hard to tell exactly how wrinkly she was, because her face was shaded and her skin was very dark to start with, he got the sense that her features had collapsed in a little, like his great-aunt Lily’s, only this woman’d had more face to start with so it made a different kind of outline.
“I have aspirin,” she said, fishing around in her breast pocket, so that the nametag tipped up and flashed white. He got a better glimpse of the name written there. Yes, there really were that many consonants, as far as he could tell.
“You don’t have to--” he began, sudden guilt washing through him just like all his other bodily fluids had at various points over the course of the day.
“It’s nothing,” she said, so forcefully that he shut up.
After a little more rummaging, she produced a bottle. “Here we go. No water, but it’ll do. Eh?”
Brian took the pill she gave him and gulped it down without further protest. “Thanks,” he said.
The woman nodded. Then she plumped down in front of him, blocking out the trail of light on the water in his view.
“First person I’ve found, you are,” she said.
“You’re the first person who’s found me,” said Brian, smiling shakily.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
Brian wondered how he could explain. He wondered what he would explain if he were going to try. About the young man with the white jacket and the terrified face, or about Adam, or--
“I dunno, exactly,” he said. “It just happened. Everythin’ just happened.”
“You think that pill will help?” she asked.
“I…” said Brian. He thought about it. “Prob’ly not,” he said, and added, “Sorry.”
“They’ll expire in another day or so,” she said, shrugging. “It was you or no one.”
Brian looked at his scuffed trainers.
“I was thinking of taking more from the shelves, when I ran out of the shop,” she said. “Shame I didn’t. I was in such a rush.”
“I don’t think there’s many pills that’d help me,” said Brian, with perfect accuracy.
“That right?” said the woman. “Well.”
She leaned back, folding her hands over her knees.
“Someone do that to you?” she said, nodding to his faintly greenish face.
Brian opened his mouth to deny this, and found himself saying, “Yes. In a sort of way.”
“Then someone can undo it,” she said.
“…yes,” said Brian.
She looked at him like his great-aunt had, once, after going off her medications for a day. Her eyes were clear and hard.
“You should probably find them,” she said. “You’re sick, boy.”
Brian put a hand on his stomach, and pressed down.
“I could go with you, maybe,” said the woman. “I don’t know what went on last night but my grandchildren haven’t called and I saw my daughter wink out like an old lightbulb. I don’t mind helping you find a doctor. Or whoever it is you think can help.”
Brian said, “Would you really?”
“Sure,” said the woman.
“I…” said Brian.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. Brian had never wanted anything so much as he wanted to tell her yes, please, come with me. But he remembered the emptiness in Lower Tadfield. How Adam had hollowed it out.
“I think… I think I might have to go to him alone,” he said, quietly.
The woman pursed her lips.
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
She hunched forward and rested her chin on her knee. “Is that right,” she said. “That’s quite an age.”
Brian replied, barely knowing what he was saying, “I guess it’s just my age.”
“Do you want to go to this man?” she asked.
“If he makes me better,” he said, and stopped. He covered his lips.
“Fixing is a tricky business,” said the woman.
“Not for him, it isn’t,” said Brian, bleakly.
The woman gave him a sharp look. “How’s that pill taking,” she said.
Brian shook his head. Then he had to turn away to dry retch, water dribbling out of his mouth.
He heard her say, “Well. Maybe a good fixing isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a body.”
A shudder ran through him, as if every cell in him was seconding the sentiment. They’d know, after all.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You do what you got to,” she said. The sun was behind her head, by then, and she was a silhouette, but he could feel her gaze on him. He could just about make out the pale gleam of the whites of her eyes. “I’ve done it. I guess in times like these there’s a lot of doing, or none.”
Brian wanted, very badly, for her to tell him it was okay. What he’d already done. He began to say something.
Then he saw over her shoulder to where a familiar figure was taking form in the shallows at the shore of the river.
“Wensley!” he shouted, shocked and even delighted.
The woman looked around.
“That your man?” she said.
“Wha-- no,” Brian said. “No. He’s just a friend.”
“You aren’t so unlucky as I thought you were, then,” she said, gently.
She helped him to his feet.
Brian said, “Thank you,” as Wensleydale waded up onto grass. “For the pill, an’ for… clearin’ me up.”
She wasn’t looking at him, though. She was gazing at Wensleydale, and she looked afraid.
Brian looked, too. And Wensleydale, he realised, was different. Was maybe something where he could see why someone would be afraid of him.
“Hullo, Brian,” Wensleydale said. His voice, normally reedy, had strange echoes. There were gurgles there, and groans, in the smallness of the space between his words.
“Hi,” said Brian. “How’d you get here?”
“I walked,” said Wensleydale. “We can go anywhere. I worked it out, d’you see? We can go anywhere we like now.”
He lifted his hand. In it he held the scales, and they swung, gently, on the ends of the bar.
“You’ve got your crown, don’t you?” said Wensleydale.
Brian became aware that the woman was shaking.
“This is a bad business,” she said, her voice cold.
Brian took the crown out of his pocket. It glistened blackly.
“I’ve got to,” he said to her.
“I guess you do,” she said, and:
“You should go. You should go now.”
“Okay,” mumbled Brian. “Okay. I will. Sorry. I’m sorry.”
Wensleydale looked as if he’d have liked to ask the woman something, but she made a sign with her fingers, and he flinched.
“C’mon,” he said to Brian. “This way.”
The woman watched them go. The lines in her face were deeply drawn, now.
After a while she went back into the copse of trees that should not have been there, and smelled the gum, and tried to slow the beating of her heart. She did not see the sun begin to set. Which was a pity, because it was going to be a very beautiful sunset, if not, perhaps, so brilliant as it had been when this part of the river was a heavily industrialised trading center, yesterday afternoon. But the sky shimmered like the edge of an oil spill and the sun was like a thing shining through a layer of rust, for a few minutes there, as two boys walked off that corner of the Earth.
Anathema was weaving together string, and leaves, and lint, and a slice of hardboiled egg[1]. Newt watched in morbid fascination as her fingers flew through the… materials, pulling a kind of structure out of nonsense. It was, he thought, almost exactly the inverse of what happened when he put his hands on a keyboard and tried to write some code.
“What’s that supposed to be?” he inquired, tentatively.
“It’s a shambles,” she said. “It tells me what I want to know. In theory. Normally I’d use more technically reliable methods, but…”
Newt said, “Under the circumstances.”
“Exactly.”
He wandered away from the kitchen table and into the bedroom.
Everything looked… as they’d left it, he thought, with a thrill. The unmade bed, the dent in the wall where his head had made high-velocity contact, the crumbling plaster. It was almost like looking at a life. It was as though this stranger’s house he moved uneasily around in was part of his story, or like he was part of its.
“Fuck,” said Anathema, audible through the wall.
Newt hurried out. “What is it?”
“The shambles broke,” she said, holding up the snapped threads demonstratively.
“Oh,” he said. “What does that mean?”
“I--”
She shook the tattered nest. It seemed to tighten, snarling around her slim fingers.
[1] Actually, what she did to the hard-boiled egg had much the same relationship to weaving as corsets did to choreography. But close enough.
“Okay,” said Crowley, “we’re here. We’ve seen. We’re all caught up. Let’s get out now, shall we? While we can?”
Aziraphale didn’t seem to be listening. He was strolling down the country lane as though he was just out for a bit of fresh air and perhaps a chat with the neighbors. He’d winched his wings in, though there were still long tears running up and down the back of his jacket.
“What is it you’re hoping to accomplish?” Crowley asked.
Aziraphale stopped.
“Crowley,” he said, “if you like, I can put you down, now. You don’t have to accompany me.”
“Oh, for-- don’t be like that,” Crowley hissed. “I told you, didn’t I? The Arrangement’s working just fine. Excuse me if I’m curious about your motives, angel, but that doesn’t mean…”
“I’d like to talk to the other children,” said Aziraphale.
Crowley blinked. Fortunately, Aziraphale was staring straight ahead when it happened, and Crowley recovered quickly.
“I saw them,” he said. “Two boys and a girl…?”
“Crown, scales, sword,” murmured Aziraphale.
“He would have needed them,” said Crowley, thoughtfully. “To do all this. That’s why you think they’re around somewhere. Makes sense, but-- he’s the Antichrist.”
“The Horsepersons are essential to any major reshaping of the Earth,” said Aziraphale. “No matter who’s technically responsible.”
Crowley considered this.
“So what you’re saying is,” he said, “these human children-- did this. As much as he did. And if we talk to them--”
“Perhaps we could come to some more acceptable arrangement,” finished Aziraphale. He favoured Crowley with a nervous grin.
“You must be insane,” said Crowley, slowly. “I must be insane.”
“I believe our respective superiors came to that conclusion long ago,” said Aziraphale, blandly.
Crowley laughed aloud.
“What the hell,” he said. He was feeling more than a little manic. “Who knows. It might even be fun. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, since we tried to persuade people of things directly?”
“Oh, yes,” said Aziraphale; “ages.”
His shoulders loosened. Crowley hadn’t noticed how tense he’d been up to then, but he noticed the relaxing of muscle, and took it as his cue to curl in.
“Where are we going?” he asked, because Aziraphale was moving again, in a determined sort of way.
“With the love,” said Aziraphale, shrugging. “It’s like--” he fumbled for some suitable comparison “--like you and heat. I know where the hot spots are. The hot spot, really.”
Crowley gave a sceptical huff, but the complaints ceased to flow, which Aziraphale counted as a small and important victory[1]. He went on, feeling the love.
[1] Up there with such subtle moments of triumph for divine good sense as floss, umbrellas, and C.S. Lewis.
“Give me your pin,” Anathema said.
“Sorry?”
“Your witchfinder’s pin,” Anathema said, enunciating.
Newt handed it to her and watched her begin to reconstruct her work.
The witch wielding the pin. Shadwell was probably rolling in his--
“Oh,” he said.
“What?”
“I just… my sergeant,” said Newt. “I didn’t even. He’s probably dead. He’s this extraordinary man, and he was in London when it all went to hell, and--[1]”
He broke off.
“I’m sorry,” said Anathema, and for a moment her expression was soft, and Newt felt a horrible numbness creeping in, as though his old life-- his old life, before he was a private, or an anything-- was rushing back.
Then the pin she’d inserted in the center of the egg popped out like a silvery, pointed, superheated champagne cork, and the numbness was gone, all right.
“He’s here,” said Anathema, knocking her chair over in her haste.
“Here?” Newt yelped.
Anathema nodded to the window, where there was, blurrily visible through thick glass, a boy leaning his bike against the fence.
Newt said, “Oh, my god.”
“Not exactly,” said Anathema.
She picked up the gun. In her hand it shone like a star.
[1] It might have comforted Newt to know that Shadwell was not, by any conventional measure, dead. He was with the rest of the unwanted human race, in a place that lies outside the purview of this story, and at that very moment he was thinking, in perfect sync with a lot of other Shadwells across the multiverse, We could hide. And it’d be the witches’ turn to find us.
Then again, it might not have.
The girl was the only one in the quarry when they arrived. She was sitting on an old milk crate, and the sword was in her lap.
Aziraphale, standing over her, remembered Eve after Abel’s death. How she had hacked apart wood as she wept. The girl was dripping wet, and shivering, and there was violence in every quake that ran through her small frame, though she did not shift from her seat.
“Who’re you?” she said, staring at him with red-rimmed eyes.
Aziraphale searched for something to say.
“I used to own that sword of yours,” he said, eventually.
The girl frowned.
“No, you din’t,” she said. “I know who owned it before me. You’re not her.”
Aziraphale carefully shut out the quiet, snaky sniggering in his ear.
“No,” he agreed. “I owned it before she did, even. I was its first owner, you could say.”
“She had it for a long time,” argued the girl.
“It was a long time ago,” said Aziraphale.
The girl’s eyes narrowed.
“So?” she said. “What d’you want with it now, then?”
“Want with it?” said Aziraphale. “Nothing, my dear. But I think you should know about what it can do.”
The girl’s face closed off.
“I already do,” she muttered, her hair falling like a copper visor down over her eyes.
“May I see it?” said Aziraphale, patiently.
“I’m so impressed by your people skills,” Crowley whispered.
“I promise I have no interest in taking the sword from you,” continued Aziraphale, raising his voice a little. “I will give it back as soon as I’ve shown you something.”
“I don’t care,” said the girl. “Huh. You couldn’t take it from me if I didn’t want you to, anyhow.”
“Assuredly not,” Aziraphale agreed.
She held it out, point-first.
Aziraphale took it by the blade, gingerly, and swapped his grip down to the handle as soon as she let go. He lifted it to eye level, and--
“Well?” she said.
He concentrated. There was a whoomph, and the sword flamed white, as though a door in the wall of reality had been pulled ajar, and light was pouring through.
“Once you’ve learned how to do it, you never forget,” said the angel.
The girl said, weakly:
“Gosh.”
“Take it,” said Crowley, in Aziraphale’s voice, because Aziraphale seemed transfixed, though he did at least have the presence of mind to allow the girl to slip it out of his hold.
She wrapped both her grubby hands around the hilt, and held it up, her expression reverent and far too old for her. “Wowie,” she said, slashing downwards and leaving a flaming afterimage like the tail of a comet scrawled across Aziraphale’s sight.
He cringed. “Do be careful with that,” he said.
“Oh, def’nitely,” said the girl, carving a figure eight of fire out of the chalky air.
“Maybe you should have talked first and given presents second,” Crowley said, as she practised.
“It’s possible,” admitted Aziraphale. “But I think--”
She froze. She’d been lunging, her sword arm extended, the sword run straight through some imagined foe, and her stillness, new and awful, yanked the eye toward it. She’d dried off.
“What is it, then?” she said. “This sword. I thought it was… somethin’ else. It din’t feel like this, before. It’s-- it’s--”
Aziraphale exchanged glances with Crowley.
“It’s been many things,” he said. “It has done everything a sword can do.”
“So you’re sayin’,” said Pepper, with the care of a polar bear easing out onto thin, thin ice, “you’re sayin’, I can choose. What it is, an’ what it does.”
Aziraphale breathed out.
“Yeah,” said Crowley, emerging from inside his shirt. “That’s the idea.”
Pepper glared at him. “Snakes can’t talk.”
Aziraphale had a sudden fit of coughing into the crook of his elbow. Crowley, helpfully, thwacked him on the back a few times with his tail.
“Girls don’t generally fight with flaming swords,” he said, coldly. “But today’s an unusual day.”
“That’s sexism,” said Pepper, raising the sword.
“And yours was speciesism.”
“Really, my dear,” murmured Aziraphale.
“She started it!” Crowley said.
Pepper scoffed.
“Which is the other thing,” Crowley said, softly, his voice turning sleek. “You were part of how this started, too.”
“Huh?”
“The new Earth. With its kingdoms, and none of its people? You may have noticed.”
The girl took a step back, until the corner of the milk crate was biting into the undersides of her knees.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “That wasn’t me. That was all Adam.”
“If that were true it would make matters much simpler,” muttered Aziraphale. “But I’m afraid that it was you, my dear. Some of it. That sword was a tool, and you, my dear… wielded it.”
“They’re right, Pepper,” said Wensleydale, rippling in[1].
Brian followed, at a slight delay. Pepper turned to them.
“Hallo,” she said, blankly. “Wasn’t expectin’ you back so soon.”
“Hi,” said Brian.
“We did this,” said Wensleydale, urgently. “To ourselves.”
She stared at his serious face.
Crowley hissed, “Is that…?”
“Scales,” said Aziraphale, absently.
“Yes, I know, but what I mean is… he hasn’t… The old Famine?”
Aziraphale squinted.
“Oh. Yes.”
“Was that supposed to happen?” Crowley said.
Aziraphale looked at him.
“I’ve no idea.”
“Wonderful,” said Crowley. He began to shift in agitation. Aziraphale put a quelling hand on his tail.
“My dear fellow, settle down.”
Crowley settled down, and turned his attention back to the children. Pepper’s expression was decidedly mulish; Brian’s had a sheepish air.
Wensleydale’s had probably never been seen in any barnyard, ever[2].
“So we can take it back,” he was saying. “There was a plan, a real plan. Grown-ups made it. We can go back to that, instead of-- of--”
His eyes burned with starved light. Flames crackled down Pepper’s sword.
“Followin’ Adam any longer,” she finished for him.
“Wait,” said Brian, his face white and clean and uncertain. Without the layer of dirt obscuring detail, his features looked very naked in the late afternoon sun. “We can’t-- we’re… Adam’s….”
He trailed off.
“Not anymore, we aren’t,” said Pepper.
“But he’s our friend. He’s more our side than some grownup,” said Brian. “An’-- an’ he gave us the world, the whole world, I mean…”
“Do you want it?” Wensleydale said.
Brian flinched. “Of course not!”
“Well?” said Wensleydale.
“The little bastard,” murmured Crowley, admiringly.
Aziraphale didn’t answer. He was standing very still, watching, and Crowley was reminded of how he’d looked in the pits of the Globe, when Crowley’d finally convinced him to check out this new kind of theatre; how utterly preoccupied he’d seemed, because of a few humans on a platform. Crowley, for his part, preferred films.
“Couldn’t we just try talking to him?” Brian said.
“Talking to him?” said Pepper. Her mouth stretched into a sort of smile. “You try. It’s a waste of breathing, talking to him.”
Brian was beginning to get angry.
“So what, then,” he said. “What is it you want to do? Are we goin’ to ambush him? Are we Johnsonites, now, or what?”
“Johnsonites?” Crowley whispered.
“Early breakaway sect, I think,” said the angel. “Sort of Gnostics. Like the Ophites.” His forehead creased. “Or were they the Sethites? No, I'm thinking of the Collyridians. Oh dear. I'm sorry, there were hundreds of them, it's so hard to keep track.”
“All those people,” said Crowley.
“Greasy Johnson’s gone,” Pepper said.
“And we’re us,” said Wensleydale, though his tone had lost some of its imperious echoes. “We’re us and we’ll do what we ought to, that’s all.”
“How’ll we know when we’ve done it?” said Brian. “It’s all right for you two-- you’re not all messed up inside, an’ I guess you can do what you like. But I’ve got to… I need--”
Wensleydale appeared to be listening.
“If we deal with Adam,” he said at last, slowly, “that’ll get better.”
Pepper gave him a sharp look. Brian, though, took a deep shuddery breath and closed his eyes.
“Well?” said Wensleydale.
“You got me, I guess,” Brian said, in a voice that creaked like a rusting hinge. It was an old voice. “Let’s do it, then. Let’s just do it.”
[1] If you took a video of a boy’s reflection on the surface of some still body of water, being disturbed and then dissolved by falling rain, and played that in reverse, it would give a good idea of how Wensleydale and Brian looked when they walked in. It is not recommended that you draw any conclusions from this, since the physical processes involved were entirely unrelated in every possible respect and several impossible ones.
[2] Though it might have shown up in a chicken coop during particularly bad winters.
“Let me out,” said Anathema.
“No,” said Newt.
The door pressed into his shoulderblades. The doorknob, for its part, got overfriendly with his hip. But he was resolute, he thought. There was no way he was moving. Not even to reposition his belt.
“You’re not being very sensible,” said Anathema. “Don’t you agree that someone needs to do the job?”
“I said I’d do it, didn’t I?”
“You said you were a pacifist.”
“You said you were a vegetarian!”
“Believe me, I’m not going to eat him.”
“Anathema,” Newt began, “while I--”
“That’s my name,” she said, smiling brilliantly. “Don’t wear it out.”
“--respect that you are an adult woman and perfectly capable of, um, making your own choices, and-- and so on, I really don’t think you’ve thought this through, first, and second, you’re going to die!”
“Yesterday I was going to die,” said Anathema. “There are more important things today.”
There was a knocking on the door.
“That’s him,” said Anathema. “I think you should get out of the way.”
Newt gaped at her.
Several things occurred after that in rapid succession.
First, the door opened in a way that suggested it would not be closing again soon, and Newt, who’d been leaning his full weight on it, stumbled backwards over the doorstep. Adam stepped neatly out of his way, so he toppled gracefully down onto the lawn uninterrupted.
He did not witness the details of what happened next. They happened anyway.
Second, Anathema’s hand swung up, and she pulled the trigger.
Third, Adam stopped smiling.
The bullet exploded into shards of hot metal an inch from his nose. Haloed by flying lead, he looked like an angel with an agenda.
Anathema pulled the trigger again, but nothing came out.
Adam looked at her, his eyes the solid blue of the sky, which men once imagined, more correctly than they could ever know, to be just another kind of ceiling. “What was that for?” he said, sounding as injured as he wasn’t.
Anathema’s throat worked.
“I came here to ask if you’d seen what I did,” said Adam, louder. “I thought you’d be pleased.”
He stepped forward. The broken bullet clattered to the floor.
“I put rainforests in,” he said, slowly. “An’ whales, for you.”
Pain flashed across her face, sudden as a summer storm. She lowered the gun. Adam took another step.
“An’ I got rid of the rubbish,” he continued.
“You got rid of the people, Adam,” said Anathema, with some effort.
“But you wanted that, too,” said Adam.
“I did not want--”
She stopped, as memories of what she had, in fact, said came flooding back to her. White South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of everywhere, but especially here…
“But I didn’t mean I wanted them to die,” she said.
“They didn’t die!” said Adam, indignantly. “Well, mostly. I just took ‘em out. They were messin’ everything up, so I took ’em out. They should leave, you said.”
“Where did you put them?”
Adam shrugged.
“Where they’d fit,” he said.
“That’s awful,” she said, surprised by how much she meant it.
Adam crossed his arms.
“I don’t see how. I’m lookin’ out for you, and for my friends. I’m takin’ care of the Earth. An’ for the rest, well, what I did to them was better than what they’d have gotten otherwise.”
“That’s not an excuse,” said Anathema.
“No,” said Adam calmly, “it’s a reason.”
He set his chin. He seemed to have grown, and probably he had, Anathema thought, with some viciousness. He would have wanted to.
He was very beautiful. He looked like a future no one had ever seen.
As if of its own accord, her empty hand went up. She wanted, she thought, to see that warm calm go. She felt angry enough for an entire species. She’d felt it all day, and--
She saw Newt, clinging to the doorframe.
She lowered her arm. She could have shot the Antichrist easily, but hit him? There were limits. He was, after all, just a kid.
Probably no one had ever laid a hand on Adam in his whole life. His mother didn’t believe in corporal punishment, and his father thought the elbow grease was more usefully spent on his car. So perhaps he didn’t realise what had taken place. But his mother and his father were gone, too, and he had seen things on the telly, and in Anathema’s head; so perhaps he did. Either way, his face went, if anything, calmer. She’d thought when she’d first seen him that he should have been the model for some long-dead sculptor, and now she could see what that would look like, only with more colour in his skin and something nameless and old stirring in his gaze.
“I guess you didn’t like it,” he said. “It was s’posed to be a present, for you and for everyone. I kept him jus’ for you,” he added, jerking a thumb at Newt, who froze in the act of approaching. “I was awfully nice, I thought. But I don’t need you, anyhow. You’re jus’ like the rest of them, reelly. You’re boring.”
Anathema did not speak.
Adam slouched out, his hands in his pockets. Newt reached out a trembling hand when he passed, as if to grab his arm, or hold him back, and Anathema thought, distractedly, that she had never seen a braver inch of gawky wrist, extending from his too-short sleeve.
His fingers, though, slid off Adam’s T-shirt like it was marble, not cloth. And Adam left.
Anathema fired five bullets into the ceiling, in a rough ring. A cloud of plaster floated down, and she coughed. She coughed and coughed and Newt eased the gun out of her hand and she laughed, a little, and coughed as though her breath had turned against her.
“He’s coming,” said Crowley, into the quiet.
The Them’s shadows lengthened. Brian, gently, set the crown on his matted hair. Without further discussion, they scrambled up the far side of the quarry and disappeared into the thicket beyond, quick as snakes before a saint whose breakfast had been interrupted.
“Are we sticking around?” said Crowley, gazing at the empty quarry. “We’ve only got these bodies, remember? And--”
“We only have these bodies,” said Aziraphale. “That’s not much to lose, considering.”
“These bodies and quite a lot thousand-year-old mead still to go, then,” Crowley said, irritated.
Aziraphale wrinkled his nose. “I never did like the honey-based ones,” he said.
This comment struck Crowley as being so infuriatingly obstructive that he began laughing, and could not, once he’d started, stop. He flapped against Aziraphale’s shoulders, helplessly.
“Do try to be careful,” said Aziraphale, managing a decent impression of sincere concern. “You don’t actually have the vocal cords for that sort of thing, my dear. Or at all.”
“Really?” said Crowley. “None? Huh. That explains a lot, actually. Doesn’t seem very well thought out, but then--”
The rest of whatever he was going to say was lost to posterity[1], because then they heard the clank of a bike being propped up against a tree.
Aziraphale crossed briskly over to the milk crate. He rolled up his sleeves and sat down.
“Oo,” he said, “comfy.”
He smiled at Crowley.
“You,” said Crowley, not without a hint of grudging admiration, “are a bit of a bastard.”
“I always knew you had a spark of goodness in you,” Aziraphale.
Crowley supposed he’d deserved it, at that. And it wasn’t as if there was anyone to hear.
He slithered down to the angel’s forearm and wormed between the soft fingers, like ambitious rope. He didn’t, after all, want to fall off.
[1] It almost certainly involved the phrase “unintelligent design” and some scathing reference to the Ornithorhynchus genus, though. Some aspects of Crowley’s rhetorical strategy never changed.
Adam got off his bike.
He felt a bit odd. The viscera of his wounded innocence had trailed behind him all down the lane, and though he’d almost forgotten his encounter with Anathema now, his nerves were still jangling like a particularly badly-paid orchestra.
But his friends were in the quarry; he could hear them. He’d come up with more plans, when he was running after Dog. They’d never be short of plans again, he thought. No more long listless afternoons.
He went through the thorn trees, which parted for him, just a little; and he hopped down into the hole to join the Them.
Which would’ve been great, except everything was wrong. There were strangers in the hole, sitting on the milk crate like they owned the place, and his friends were nowhere to be seen. The indignation, which had receded so rapidly on the road, came rushing back.
“Put your hands up,” he told the intruders roughly, in the way he imagined a respectable gangster would, on discovering police in his den.
The man stood, and raised his hands. The effect was a little marred by the fact that in one of his hands he was holding a snake. He didn’t look like the sort of fellow who was supposed to go around holding snakes, not when Adam himself had never held a snake, ever, because the titchy garden ones didn’t count. It wasn’t fair. The man looked about as boring as was possible while still moving about, and he got big black an’ red snake that Adam hadn’t even seen in the zoo.
Of course, the man wasn’t really a man, and the snake wasn’t really a snake, and Adam could have just made himself a snake, and would as soon as he’d dealt with this, but he still spent a moment wallowing in resentful envy.
“What’re you doing here?” he said. A thought struck him. “Did you do something to my friends?”
He raised his hands, too, and forked tongues of electricity lapped at his palms.
“Not exactly,” said the angel, sidling back around the crate. “That is, er, your friends? Haven’t seen any--”
“Don’t you try an’ lie to me,” Adam said, shaking with fury. “Where’d they go?”
“A good question,” said the snake, its tongue flickering out as if in answer to the sparks dancing along Adam’s nails.
Adam raised one hand.
“Here goes,” said Brian.
The Them crept forward.
“One,” said Wensleydale. “Two--”
“On the three or right after?” said Brian.
“On,” snapped Wensleydale.
“Only checking.”
“Three.”
The three children sprang.
One, though, was yanked back.
“Hey!” hissed Pepper. It would have been a shriek, but the breath had been knocked out of her.
A red grin glistened in the gloom.
“Hey,” said War.
Adam closed the raised hand into a fist.
There was a crack. He looked up, just in time to see Wensleydale and Brian leap down from the trees, their arms raised and full of silver. For a moment they seemed to hang suspended in the air, their shadows like the shadows of birds.
They hit the ground, and stumbled, and Adam said their names. And then Wensleydale was pushing him to the ground and Brian was sitting on his knees and it was all, all wrong.
“Ah,” said the snake, “there they are.”
Not very far above, Pepper squirmed free of War. War flipped her around and slammed her against the gnarled trunk of a thorn tree, pinning her at the shoulders.
Pepper kicked out, with the incredible anatomical precision conferred on her by seven years of association with males. War’s grin widened like a waxing moon. When Pepper’s foot fell back, she stepped delicately onto Pepper’s toes.
“You never let me finish, little girl,” she said.
“I’ve got other things to do,” Pepper growled, scrabbling at the smooth backs of War’s hands.
“Best time, don’t you think?” said War, leaning in. Pepper, caught, smelled nail polish remover, and blood under the skin.
Under the cliff, three small boys grappled with one another.
Aziraphale made as if to lend a hand a few times, darting forward and skipping back at the last second, when he realised that whatever plan he’d come up with this time depended on that trainer right there belonging to an entirely different boy. Crowley didn’t know why he bothered: the rising dust made it almost impossible to distinguish them, masking the flash of Wensleydale’s glasses and Brian’s crown and Adam’s hands as it did, and there’d be no miracles in that fight.
For his part, he stared at the lip of the cliff. If the girl came now, things could still be salvaged. Adam obviously wasn’t used to being attacked by his lieutenants. Adam wouldn’t have partaken much in the scuffling of the Them, over the years. Adam--
Adam said their names again.
“Brian and Wensley--” Pepper said.
“You little fool,” said War, “I’m trying to help you. And them. Your leader is stronger than mine. Yes. But together we can be stronger than either of them. Think.”
Pepper spat. Her saliva sizzled in the dirt. “What about?” she hissed.
“Your friends,” said War, dripping disdain. “Their plan’s not going to work without me, you see. Famine’s too slow. Pollution isn’t on offer. This-- this is my work. Our work.”
Pepper opened her mouth, and closed it again.
She thought about her friends, and especially about her friend Adam, who was gone.
“What is it you want?” she said, quietly.
“Stop,” said Adam. “I command you.”
And, like that, it stopped.
At least, the movement stopped. The rage, though: that moved through him. And it wasn’t his rage.
“I don’t understand,” he said, the words forming like mountains of sound, forced into being by the rearrangement of tectonic plates.
Aziraphale put his hands over his ears. Crowley, handless and earless, absorbed the vibrations.
“I fixed it,” Adam said.
“I fixed the whole world,” he said. “And now everyone’s fussin’. Always fussin’. What is it you all want?”
He heard them think,
You didn’t fix Lower Tadfield.
The inaccuracy of this-- the unfairness-- was such that for a while he could not speak.
“I spent my whole life fixin’ Tadfield for us,” he nearly shouted, when he managed to say anything. “They would’ve filled in this quarry when we were in second grade if it wasn’t for me. They would have put a nasty old highway through, if it wasn’t for me. They would have made us learn to read with putty. They would’ve messed it up. They always mess it up!”
He was shaking, now. His fingers jerked and his face twisted and it was like watching the collapse of a tower, slowed down almost, but not quite, to an act of photography. He tore out of the skinny arms of the other boys one limb at a time. They didn’t want to let him go. He rose anyway.
“An’ you,” he said, glaring at the angel and the snake. “I know all about you two. You were goin’ to have a little bet, you were. You were goin’ to give me tutors.”
“That’s not quite fair,” said the angel, lifting his head, slowly. He paused, and added, “In any case, don’t you think perhaps you might have needed them?”
“I’ve learned my lesson,” said Adam, coldly. “A lot better than some people. I know better’n to let the enemy get in the way.”
“Ouch,” said the snake, which was wrapping itself around the angel’s wrist. “You got us.”
Its eyes were very yellow and Adam could see the fear in them.
“We’re really bad about letting enemies get in the way,” it went on, levelly. “Sometimes we even work with them, because otherwise things get broken. Forever.”
Its pupils widened a little as it spoke, until they looked for all the world like the slots in an arcade machine, where the coin goes, after the game is over.
“Just let me in,” said the woman, tilting her head up. A shaft of sun, penetrating the density of thorns, caught the edge of her brown eye and fired it a strange raw gold.
“What?” said Pepper.
War looked back down at Pepper.
“Into your head, that is,” she said, “if you feel up to it. That’s what, what did you call him?-- your Wensley did. You must have felt it.”
Pepper said, “How?”
“Shake on it,” said War. “He gave you some power, didn’t he? A little power and some blood would do it. Mine and yours.”
She hunkered down until Pepper could see the traces of old lipstick in the creases of her mouth.
“Quickly.”
Pepper nodded, and rocked forward without warning, a rolling kind of shove. War, whose weight had been unevenly distributed, to put it politely, was sent tripping sideways.
Pepper walked past her to the edge.
She saw the tableau: Wensleydale and Brian frozen in attitudes of violence. The former owner of her sword, backing away. Adam.
“You need me, now,” War croaked. “Or you’ll just run away. You think I can’t see?”
Pepper was silent. She could picture, very clearly, how angry she would have gotten at such an accusation, a day ago. Now she just felt tired.
“Get me out of this damn body,” War said. “Get me out and I’ll do the rest.”
Very slowly, Pepper lowered the sword.
Its point came to rest a metre from the fallen Horseperson, and War’s hand shot out and wrapped around the its tip like a striking cobra, if a striking cobra had no survival instinct whatsoever.
The blood welled, between her knuckles. The blade’s pale fire retreated from her flesh like water does from wind.
War let out a happy sigh.
“Now you,” she said.
Pepper brought the flame-lined edge up on her palm. There was no heat at all.
Crouching down beside the woman, she shook on it. And felt War’s body go limp, under the stiff red leather. It took perhaps a minute; it left a little blood on Pepper’s fingers and a shadow on Pepper’s sight.
“I’ve only got one friend now,” she heard Adam say, as if from far off.
She descended.
“Not when I do it,” the boy who still called himself Adam said. “Nothing has to break.”
Aziraphale said, “Except your friends?”
Adam made a gesture. The ground surged under Aziraphale; he reeled sideways and hit the chalk cliff hard before sliding down in a heap.
Crowley, who’d been caught between the angel’s arm and the wall, almost lost consciousness.
He heard Adam say, as if from very far off, “I’ve only got one friend now.”
And then there were Pepper and Adam.
“One friend’s enough,” said Adam, his smile tentative and hopeful and sweet as he ended his circling in front of her. He had more control, now. He could move like his old self. Brian and Wensley were only currents in the seas of his mind, even if they pushed out on the sides of his head.
“Yeah,” said Pepper, stretching an unmarked hand towards him.
He went to her. She touched his cheek, curiously, her fingers more probing than tender.
Then she took the sword out from behind her back and ran him through. There was some resistance, but what the hell; there always was.
Adam screamed.
It was a sound that maybe only a mortal throat could have uttered, and it did not last very long.
Long enough, though.
“Ah,” said the Metatron, looking up from his paperwork.
Brian and Wensleydale came running over, silver whirling. They needn’t have bothered. By then he was well and truly alight. The sword’s fire, which had left War unscathed and the thorn trees cold and which did not jump to Pepper’s T-shirt in all the time she stood there, holding Adam up-- it caressed him as a mother does her son. It started from his heart and worked outward, until he was outlined in white, and it did not move more than an inch past his edge.
The blood got everywhere, though. So did the ash, once there was ash. It spattered Brian and Wensleydale with black; Pepper it soaked all down her front, until the brightly-coloured cartoon logo on her T-shirt was entirely unidentifiable, as was her face.
She pulled the sword out, eventually. It was just a sword. The flame, by then, had found a better home.
go back to part two
go on to part four