In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
- John 1:1
I DWELL NOT IN THE SOUL OF MAN
Stagger, child -
raise up your hands.
It is already too late for omens.
Beneath blackening sun, Auguries would tell you There is nothing left, but to beg forgiveness from His fury. Neither tears and all the learning and war craft, when angels come
on top of broken earth - listen
to that thunder -
it splits the clouds
and shakes the cap of every mountain.
what every foolish man knows,
but will not believe:
no grain of hope,
nor sacrifice will crack
the messengers' faultless hearts;
your sweet music, your books,
will offer no shelter
to pour His grace over you.
Surprising, how much it hurts –
Jimmy Novak's blood: hot, burning, brightest colour in the room. The ferocious tang of metal, heavy at the back of the throat, is real like no gunshot or stab to the lung was before. His jagged, wounded-animal pain as well, as he senses what I am about to do, the paths where I am about to lead us – ones that no angel has ever taken, neither in heaven nor hell. A good and God-fearing man, he is afraid he will not survive this.
We will, I insist, beseeching. If God wishes it.
Dean stares at the gash across my forearm, a dozen half-formed questions on the tip of his tongue, his silence as much due to shock as my order for him not to speak, to curb his incessant desire for explanation, and to just trust me, for once in your life. The alarm is already sounding; Zachariah is on his way.
I draw the ritual circle from memory, not worrying about neatness, right shirt-cuff dragging a spotty trail on plaster like a lame dog on a leash. It has been millennia since I have done this. I am out of practice and Annael isn't here to put right my mistakes; but as long as the lines are unbroken, the intent clear, imperfection will suffice. I wet my fingers again and trace smears of blood representing the angelic symbols of power, creation and destruction, more ancient than any living human tongue.
Human words are clumsy toys, unfit for this kind of work. They cannot describe the exactnesses underlying this shrouded world, much less the boundless, twisting ambiguities of the worlds beyond it. The places with no clocks or rulers or compass needles. Spaces that I soar through, guard with my life. Know as well as I know my own kin – brothers and sisters I fought side by side with, across time immeasurably wide and deep –
Or thought I did.
We landed, the two of us, in the vicinity of where Israfel and Raguel had disappeared, just as the sun was rising in the east.
I stretched my toes, feeling the chill of the desert through rough and weathered soles, the lay of the land instinctively familiar, sloping gently upward until it reached a large opening in the mountainside. The vessel, an experienced tracker but no warrior, jolted wide-awake, recoiling at the faint scent of human blood carried to us by the breeze. Muscles in my arm twitched involuntarily.
The interior of the cave was empty except for a cold, scattered fire to show that humans had been there, and not long ago.
'What a whimsical collection of fossils the language of mankind is,' Annael mused, half to herself, half sharing her thoughts aloud, as she had a habit of doing whenever she took a body. 'It's no wonder they'd rather use ours.'
'No wonder,' I echoed, half listening. I had just spotted a patch of wall, deeper inside where the sunlight had not yet breached, and covered in painted markings: open curves and strokes that snaked purposefully back on themselves; short dashes like claws or the scratches of a chisel. They were arranged around a circle, with the unmistakeable imprint of a hand, lavishly red, pressed into the middle. Of all the abortive attempts at magic I had witnessed from humans and their short-lived civilisations, this was far from the most elaborate. Yet I was fascinated, and appalled at my own fascination.
This was different somehow. It felt wrong, sullied and discordant, like praise from the mouth of a blasphemer.
Annael did not follow me inside, but remained by the entrance, addressing invisible occupants. 'Does the sun rise, little human, like a loaf of leavened bread, like an eagle or a chariot? Or is it you that moves? Bones of your legs and your ankles, sawing back and forward. The ground resisting you with its own force. The earth rotating on its axis. Everything in motion perpetually, relative to everything else. When will you realise this? It's a marvellous miracle (praise God!) that humans manage to get anything done at all, given the millstone of their own backwardness they have to carry around all the time.'
'Annael,' I interrupted, glancing toward the design on the cavern wall, 'I believe... I do not know how, but I think I recognise this.'
'Of course you do, Castiel,' she said. 'Surely even youngsters like yourself still remember the last Decimation, when a full garrison of Watchers went native and decided to teach their half-human offspring the angelic language? Not that it did them any good when it came time for the purge...'
I looked more closely at the sigils. Now that I had a clue as to what they were, I found that I could read them, working backward to arrive at the original meanings, which had no earthly equivalents. Nothing with mortal flesh could transcribe the speech of angels, collapse heavenly axioms into mere length and width and breadth. But grant them with a glimpse of the universe and they might produce something like this: crude sketches of the most labyrinthine forms made by a man with only his nails and fingertips.
What it read was unthinkable.
'This is Enochian?'
'Or the contemporary version of it, undoubtedly.'
'They are using our own language against us,' I gasped at the audacity of it, the violation that crawled into me. 'How dare they pollute it with their witchery?'
Annael made an impatient sound. 'Weapons are tools of violence; they have no masters, only bearers. The spear will pierce the one that made it just as easily as it does the heron. The same goes for words once they have been written. Ignorant sinners these goat-herders might be, but you've got to admire their imagination...or dumb luck.' She crouched down as if searching the floor of the cave for a trail of passage. 'We need to find these humans right away, and any others who might have learnt how to work these sigils.'
'But whatever for?' Annael's orders were not usually so opaque.
'Well, little brother. When have you known Enochian to be used to kill an angel?' she explained, and then corrected herself. 'Two angels. It's quite simple; the humans responsible cannot be allowed to live. It would set a nasty precedent.'
'There is no evidence that Israfel and Raguel are dead,' I said, uncertain why I was suddenly defending the humans. 'This...sign is a command that invokes the name of God, an expulsion beyond the Watchtowers. Surely it is nothing more than an inconvenience. Angels have been known to return from the void – eventually, that is. These mortals must have cast it for protection, thinking that our brothers meant them harm.'
The name of God, I repeated to myself. He must be listening. There is no other explanation.
'Academic.' Annael waved it off. 'I only wonder...if it can be duplicated.'
'Used by one of us on other angels?' Immediately, I understood. 'Angels the likes of Lucifer and his followers, you mean?' The very idea – the base commingling with the angelic; the blood and spirit of the vessel fused with the knowledge of the host, to bring about something new – was shocking. And brilliant. And dangerous. 'We should investigate,' I found myself saying.
Annael inclined her head thoughtfully. 'Right now?'
'Why not?'
I was stunned at my own eagerness. Proper procedure would be to report back; we both knew that and yet we both ignored it. It was not until much, much later that I could admit to myself how acutely my mind was in tune with hers. 'What do we need? The writing can be copied. The fire – well, I doubt it was for more than keeping animals at bay, but just in case –' I motioned the campfire back into life. 'And as for the blood –'
As always, she was two steps ahead of me. Annael opened her hand and I saw what it was that she had picked up from the ground: a piece of stone about half a hand-length, one edge very narrow and sharp like a flint blade. The kind of instrument that my vessel could wield as dextrously as any natural limb. 'The blood is easy,' she said smoothly, and held the makeshift knife out to me. 'Won't you do the honours?'
'Annael, you might be harmed!'
'Nothing that I can't come back from, brother, or isn't that what you said? Also, don't let it slip your mind that I'm not the only angel here. We don't know that the dispelling won't affect you as well.' When still I hesitated, she grinned at me. 'Not scared, are you?'
I was afraid – but more than what might happen, I was afraid of what might not happen. What would it mean if something that looked so easy, practically infantile, was beyond me? If humans could do what we could not?
I took the piece of rock from Annael and held the quick edge against my palm. 'Not there,' she said, taking my hand, the one grasping the stone knife, with a steadiness that I did not share. 'Right here –' she positioned it at a spot on the inside of my arm, '– where the flow is closest to the surface of the skin.'
'You know these bodies well,' I observed.
'I've been paying attention. That is my job, after all.'
The vessel gave a silent, startled cry as the knife bit into his flesh. I was used to his protests and ignored it. I made a copy of the sigil on the opposite side of the cave, identical to the original in every respect.
'Castiel.' Annael sounded nervous now, as if she were having second thoughts. She could command me to stop, as my superior; and I did not want that. 'If this doesn't work –'
'Then that will be God's way of telling us that this is not His will,' I said quickly.
And before she could reply I brought my hand down in the centre of the circle. Annael disappeared, taken by a blinding flash of light from elsewhere, and about me, the vessel heaved all at once, like a flock of terrified birds under a net, trying to pull away in a hundred different directions.
'Castiel!'
Thin-lipped disdain, whip-like in Zachariah's voice.
Don't speak, Dean, just believe. It isn't hard, or at least it shouldn't be. Humans turn to God naturally in times of need. And an invocation, or a dispelling, is not pagan magic but an act of prayer. Without the fervency of the will behind it, the sigils are nothing – less than nothing. Mere scratchings in stone or sand. A map of the universe as seen through a pinhole.
Annael and I demonstrated that, long ago. The archangels never approved of our line of work, and now I know the reason. It is yet another sign of God's disfavour. This power, this gift, denied to us who lack free will. Who have faith not because we can, but because we must.
The vessel is essential; angels do not pray.
Now my heart is racing. Father, please... And I feel Jimmy lend me his brave and supple spirit, grounding me.
'Would you mind explaining just what the hell you're doing?'
Is it not obvious, brother? Can't you see?
God is alive. He is with us. It is His work that I am carrying out. How else could I summon the power to do this?
THE END
20 August 2010