Angelopolis (29 page)

“Silphium,” Azov said.

“There were two seeds in the cache you gave me in 1985,” Valko said. “I gave one of them to Godwin in exchange for Lucien.”

“But why?” Azov said, his voice rising. “How could you do something so irresponsible?”

“First of all, if Lucien had remained in Siberia, he would have eventually been used by Godwin—and by extension the Grigoris—in some fashion or another. This is most certain. Second, and more important, I knew that they didn’t have a clue about the formula. It was recorded in one place and one place only.”

“Rasputin’s Book of Flowers,” Vera said. “Buried in an old lady’s antique shop, right under the Grigoris’ noses.”

“Until now, evidently,” Valko replied, glancing at Vera’s satchel, as if verifying that she was bringing it along. “But really, even if Godwin were lucky enough to get the silphium seed to grow, he couldn’t use it.”

“And so you took Lucien from Russia,” Azov said.

“I came here, to these mountains, with Lucien. I hoped to study him, to listen to him, to understand his nature. It is no small thing, having a seraph’s descendant at one’s disposal—our discipline is the classification of angelic systems. Lucien is derived from the highest order.”

“Is he here, in these mountains?” Vera asked, fixing Valko in her gaze, noting the determination with which he spoke about Lucien, the ambition that burned in his eyes. It had been only days since she had revisited the photographs Seraphina Valko had taken of the Watcher. That she might actually see such a creature in the flesh, might touch it and speak to it, was hard to believe.

Valko nodded, an air of pride in his manner. “I gave him a room here, in my cabin, but he was never able to stay there. He would leave to wander through the Rhodopes, spending days and then weeks in the canyons. I would find him at the summit of a mountain, luminescent as a ray of sunshine, singing praises to the heavens, and then I would find him in the caves, in a trance of introspection. And so I took him down into the Devil’s Throat, where he has stayed for many years. Perhaps it is the proximity of his fellow angels, but he finds comfort there, close to the Watchers. There is something in his soul that finds peace in this circle of hell.”

The Seventh Circle

VIOLENCE

Smolyan, Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria

V
alko stepped into his hiking boots, bent over, and tied the laces. Spring in the mountains was cold, and they would need heavy jackets and gloves to keep warm. He went into the greenhouse and found a number of Gore-Tex parkas. He went to a metal cabinet, unlocked the doors, and began pulling out tiny lacquered boxes, spoons fashioned of different metals, a mortar and pestle, and a number of glass jars and put them carefully in his backpack. He wrapped a portable gas burner in a cloth and added it to his supplies. Everything necessary had to be brought into the cavern.

As he zipped his jacket, he turned to the others, sizing them up. He distributed the parkas, and gave everyone a cap and a pair of gloves. Both Sveti and Vera were potentially worrisome. Although trim and tanned from her work on the Black Sea, Sveti was a linguist, whose greatest physical exertion was the moving of books from one shelf to another, and—if he was a good judge of character—Vera wasn’t much different. Neither of them had the training or the strength for a real expedition.

He tried to remember that he’d been a novice himself once too, and that he needed to be patient with his younger colleagues. His first expeditions were in the Pyrenees Mountains, where he and his first wife, Seraphina, had fallen in love. They continued to find remains of the Nephilim in mountain sites in the years following their marriage. Her work in the Rhodopes had changed everything for them both. The discovery of Valkine, contact with the Watchers, the series of photographs Seraphina had taken of a dead angel, and—their greatest achievement—the recovery of the lyre: Such advances had never been made before, and although nearly seventy years had passed, he’d never reached such heights again. He had remarried twice, but he’d never forgotten his brilliant Seraphina. Maybe it was nostalgia for their time together, but he felt closer to her in the mountains than anywhere else.

They set off toward the peaks above Smolyan, walking within the thick forest. They would avoid the village roads near Trigrad and descend to the Devil’s Throat from behind. He’d done it many times over the past years, filling his backpack with a video camera so that he could record his observations about the site. Only now he didn’t pack his notebooks or his camera. He knew that this was his last trip into the cave.

The snow had melted in March, and they climbed over a bed of pine needles and rock, safe under the cover of enormous evergreens. A patch of sunlight appeared overhead, sliding between the barren branches of a linden tree and casting a golden gleam over the forest floor. He glanced over his shoulder as they ascended, noting the smoke rising from the chimney of his stone house—the smoke grew fainter and fainter, until it dissolved away completely.

The sun had climbed into the sky by the time they reached the Devil’s Throat. The rocky surface of the mountain seemed silver in the brightness. Valko led the way up the steep rise of the mountain and through a dense patch of forest. Beyond the overgrown bramble stood the large, dark cave. Once, many years before, this had been a much revered entrance to the Devil’s Throat. Thracians had created shrines here; myths and legends grew around the site. The local people believed that Orpheus descended to the underworld from the cave and that devils lived in the labryinthian structures deep below it. Anyone who entered would be cursed, lost to life aboveground, forever mired in darkness.

Approaching the entrance, Valko remembered the first time he had seen it. It had seemed to him to be just a hole gaping in the side of the mountain like so many other caves he’d seen in his travels, but of course it had been so much more. He would never forget the smile of triumph on Seraphina’s face when she returned to Paris after the Second Angelic Expedition. She had found the opening to the underworld, and she had brought back its most precious treasure. Of course, everything had changed since her death. He’d stayed in Paris, remarried, raised a daughter, divorced, buried a daughter. Only then, after Angela’s death, when the last of his connections to Paris was gone, had he made the trek to the Devil’s Throat Cavern himself. For twenty-five years Valko had climbed the sheer rock face, the sound of the waterfall crashing in his ears, and spied on the Watchers, waiting for the day when he would return. For years his life had been in that secluded valley. He’d disguised himself so well that nobody knew who he was or what he was doing. He’d married a Bulgarian woman, spoke Bulgarian like a native, mixed with local men in the village bars, and done everything he could to fit in. If the Nephilim had discovered his identity, he would be dead. But they hadn’t.

Leaning against the entrance of the cavern, he looked past his young comrades and through the tangle of birch trees beyond, letting his mind drift to the hours ahead. He threw a rope ladder over the ledge. Vera stepped to it, grabbed the first rung, and lowered herself down. The descent would be painstaking and dangerous. The familiar sound of water bounced through the gorge, echoing, filling the space with a deafening noise, and he wondered why Vera and Azov hadn’t asked for more specific information about the layout of the Devil’s Throat, why they had trusted him about Lucien, why they didn’t verify his story. It used to be that agents trusted no one.

Valko knew the mythology behind the cavern, but he also knew the cave as a geological formation. He knew the depth and the general perimeters as precisely as the contour lines on a topographical map; he recognized the sound of water that came from the river and the water that came from the waterfall. Quickly he went, letting gravity take him downward. He counted each step, positioning his feet carefully, delicately on the ladder rungs, adding them up. He looked over his shoulder, straining to see in the swirling, infinite darkness. He knew that the noise would grow louder and louder as he descended. As the shaft deepened, the darkness would become thick. He could see no farther than the whites of his knuckles wrapped upon the ladder’s rungs, and yet he knew that soon he would reach the bottom.

The Devil’s Throat Cavern, Smolyan, Bulgaria

A
s Vera followed Valko through the darkness, she saw a skeletal figure stretched out on the rock, its pale arms crossed upon its chest. Seraphina Valko’s photographs of the dead Watcher had taken Vera’s breath away when she’d first seen them a year earlier in Paris, and now here was the actual angel, in the flesh, its skin giving the illusion of life, its golden hair curling in tendrils to its shoulders. As they stood over its body, taking in its unearthly beauty, Vera felt a sense that she was following a path created long before her birth.

“It looks alive,” Vera said, lifting the white metallic gown and rubbing the fabric between her fingers.

“I wouldn’t touch it,” Valko said. “The bodies of angels weren’t meant to be touched. The level of radioactivity may still be very high.”

Azov bent over the body. “But I thought that they couldn’t die.”

“Immortality is a gift that can be taken as easily as it is bequeathed,” Valko said. “Clematis believed that the Lord struck the angel down as vengeance. It may be that angels live the way humans do—in the shadow of their Creator, wholly dependent upon the whims of divinity.”

Valko, who had clearly seen the dead Watcher many times before, headed off into the cavern. Vera followed the trembling glow of his flashlight into the cold, wet space. He stopped before a declivity in the wall that, upon closer inspection, was a chiseled corridor that opened into a large room. In the depths of the space, removed from the roar of water, there was light and movement, the soft scraping of a pen on paper. A figure stood and walked toward them, his thin body barely discernible.

“Lucien?” Valko said, in little more than a whisper.

“What is it?” a soft voice said.

“Lucien, there are some people I’d like you to meet,” Valko said. “Do you mind if we come in?”

The angel hesitated, and then, as if realizing that he couldn’t refuse, stepped aside and let them pass into his chamber.

A candle burned on a table in the corner, throwing a flickering weak light over loose pages and an inkwell. The cave had little in it—a bookshelf packed with books, a tattered carpet, a small table and a matching wooden chair—and Vera had the feeling that she was walking into the spare, severe, cloistered space of a hermit. Vera knew that angels could exist without the comforts of the material world, their bodies made of fire and air. Lucien had an aura of tranquility, of a being that existed outside of time. Vera felt fear and awe and reverence at once. She wanted to fall on her knees and behold the angel’s beauty.

Slowly Lucien opened his wings and, in what seemed to be a gesture of protection, as if he were too fragile to be seen by human eyes, folded them over his body. Vera tried to see the creature clearly, but his skin had the fluid consistency of candlelight. Even as her eyes moved over him, he seemed to melt away, his arms dissipating into his wings, his wings disappearing in the darkness. Vera was sure that if she placed her hand on his shoulder, her fingers would simply pass through.

She stole a glance at Azov and Sveti. It was clear that neither of them had ever seen such a magnificent creature before, either. For all their research and all their training, they were out of their element.

Lucien said, “Have you brought me more ink?”

“Of course,” Valko said, pulling a jar from his pocket and placing it on the wooden table. “You have enough paper?”

“For the moment, yes,” Lucien said.

Valko turned to Azov. “He is part seraph, and so it is his nature to sing praises to the Lord. He learned musical notation with Katya and has been writing his psalms down ever since.”

“You haven’t come here to hear my songs,” Lucien said, fixing Vera, Sveti, and Azov with his gaze.

“Not today,” Valko said. “I’ve come because I need the alembic.” Vera could see a complicity between them, as if they were embarking upon a plan they had conceived long ago.

Lucien went to his bed and pulled a beat-up suitcase from underneath. Opening the buckles, he lifted the top and removed a wooden case. A Fabergé egg was inside, a golden egg set with diamonds and rubies, and with a large cabochon diamond on top. Lucien presented it to Valko, who, looking it over, nodded in approval. Vera watched as he inserted a fingernail under the cabochon and pressed the egg open. A mechanism popped and the top sprung, revealing a number of gold toiletry utensils. He removed these items and lifted the interior lining from its casement. The vessel was smooth and transparent rock crystal.

“It’s the Nécessaire Egg,” Vera said, almost to herself. “The real one, the one that Tatiana must have copied in her aquarelle.”

“Well done,” Valko said, taking two of the toiletry utensils and holding them up for her to see. They were long, thin pipes dusted with brilliants. He fitted them into tiny holes in the egg and the crystal vessel, screwing them in place.