Archangel (41 page)

Driven by purpose and fortified by determination, she would have passed the night almost calmly had not the wind chosen this evening of all evenings to show off the full range of its bluster.

There was never silence in Windy Point, but Rachel had never heard anything like this. A storm must have moved in and settled, lashing the stolid mountain with rain and wind and hail. Every crack and joint in Rachel’s room seethed and sobbed with air, rising first to a furious pitch of shrieking, then dropping to a low, desperate moan. The window clattered in its frame, but that jittering sound was lost beneath the almost human voice whispering through the chamber—screeching through, mewling, begging, chortling, bellowing—as its moods took it. Rachel clenched her jaw and resisted the primitive urge to wail in return.

So loud was the wind, so unremitting, that it covered the first telltale scrapings at the door. She did not realize that someone was trying to get in until she felt the shudder of the chair against her back; sudden pressure ran down the whole massed blockade of furniture and buckled her legs against the wall.

Choking back a cry, she stiffened her knees and shoved her shoulders against the rungs of the chair. She snatched up the pointed stick, holding it like a spear before her. Again she felt the scrape and shift of furniture inching forward. She braced her free
hand on the floor and strained her whole body backward, making herself a wedge, a boulder, a bulwark, a thing of bone and rock and iron.

She did not know how long she remained there, inflexibly opposing a contrary pressure that had ceased to be exerted. It felt like hours that she kept her tense, arched pose. It was not her bones but her muscles that betrayed her, becoming shaky and loose and unreliable, unknitting from her elbows and her knees and causing her head to sag down from her numb spine. She collapsed forward, waiting for the whole room to rush inward as Saul triumphantly swept all her defenses before him, but nothing happened. He was gone; he had left sometime during the night. The lightening gray outside her window told her in the most dispirited terms that she had fought her way through to another morning.

She drew her knees up and rested her head upon them, still shaking in every muscle and joint. She had survived; she was not dead or ravished or even mad. Perhaps Yovah was watching out for her after all.

And then the wind started again.

By the time they brought her breakfast, two or three hours later, she really did think she was on the verge of delirium. It was Windy Point itself which had driven Raphael insane; the wonder was not that he had turned on the god but that he had not turned on himself as well. Sleeplessness, a sort of continuing, familiar terror, and the accumulated shocks of the past week were having their effect on her, but nothing like the maddening assault of the wind.

The knock on the door caused her to leap half a foot into the air, but she did not answer the first summons, nor the steadily more urgent calls that came in through the heavy wood. She did not have the strength to clear the furniture from the doorway, and she did not care if she never ate again. She would die here sooner or later. It might as well be of starvation, if the wind’s demented music did not drive her first to fling herself into the fire—

The wind’s music. She stood absolutely still, considering that. And then she ran across the room to the pile of clothing she had left on the floor the day before. Pawing through her dresses, linens and woolen stockings, she crowed victoriously when her hand fell
on her learning pipes. Holding them up, she examined the instrument more closely to determine how it could be disassembled. She saw that the pipes were closely woven together with thin leather strips. If she had a knife, it would be easy, but—

She did have fire.

Crouching on the hearth, she held the bunched pipes against a half-dead ember. It took a long time for the leather binding to yield; her knees had given way and she had sunk to a cross-legged position long before the thin strap blackened and began to smoke. She brushed aside the coal and took up a rough piece of kindling, rubbing it along the weakened patch of leather till the last stubborn strands parted. The eight pipes rolled loose in her hand.

Sorting quickly through them, she picked three reeds—those that formed the major chord—and, after a moment’s hesitation, the pipe that played the seventh. Then she crossed to the window, where the wind was most apt to blow in, and wedged the largest pipe into a narrow slit between the casement and the wall.

It was only a few seconds’ wait before another gust surged in past the glass. And through the tube. And made a noise like a faun piping a love song to a beautiful unwary virgin.

She could make the wind play music.

Almost feverishly, she searched the casement for another convenient gap to hold the next largest pipe; nothing was quite right. But the reed that played the fifth interval against the big pipe’s dominant note fit snugly into a crack right below the window.

And when the next blast of air shook the castle, she had harmony.

Her hands were shaking violently as she crossed and recrossed the room, looking for the right finger holes for her remaining two reeds. There was a place, finally, in the far wall for the middle pipe, the major third; when the wind rushed in and set all three pipes trumpeting at once, she thought she would fall to the floor and weep. She felt her shoulders unknotting, felt her mind growing light and peaceful. Such a simple thing, such a small thing, and yet she could feel the music healing her. One more reed to place—

It took her nearly half an hour but eventually she secured it, high above her bed in a tiny crack in a crumbling line of mortar. The outer counterpart of this wall, apparently, was half-protected from the elements, for the temperamental wind only reached it sporadically, sending faint, intermittent puffs of air through the
throat of the smallest pipe. The three other reeds also sounded at random—sometimes the major third, sometimes the minor, every once in a while all three at once; when the seventh note sounded, by itself or in harmony, Rachel felt a shiver run from her shoulders to her fingertips. So must music have sounded to Yovah on the morning of the first Gloria of the world.

The longer the music played, the more lightheaded she grew. She was giddy; she began to dance around the cold prison which had suddenly become a place of grace and symphony. On a hunch, pirouetting past the blocked doorway, she paused; snaking her fingers behind the armoire, one more time she tried the stubborn, immovable deadbolt. As if oiled by a smith, it fell smoothly into place. She laughed aloud. Music had restored her, and harmony had made her safe.

The euphoria on top of her strenuous night left her exhausted and drained. She collapsed onto the bed, still smiling foolishly as the erratic lullaby played from the walls around her. She was so relaxed now that the minute she closed her eyes she was asleep, and she slept through another mealtime and repeated poundings at the door.

It was the last hour of the afternoon when she opened her eyes, as she could tell by the faint gold light limning the irregular pane of her window. She had slept deeply if not as long as she needed to; she woke clearheaded and sober, though not completely rested. Her fire had gone out and the room was freezing. She had forgotten to retrieve her quilt before she slept, and now she shivered with a deep and ineradicable chill. Her pipes still chirped sweetly at odd moments, which caused her to smile faintly, though she did not feel in the least cheerful. But she did not need to be cheerful; what she needed was to be serene, and that the harmony had accomplished.

She had awakened knowing exactly what she must do.

She had decided, the instant she had secured the door, that she would not open it again. Clearly, there was no way out for her but death, although Raphael intended to prolong her life as long as it suited his purposes. If she must die, she could at least make the sacrifice a meaningful one—and the only way her death would not be a total waste would be if it freed Gabriel of his bond to her before the Gloria.

Which meant that she must kill herself, and instantly.

And there was only one sure way.

She was numb with cold, but that was a good thing, she thought. She rose, shaky with chill but not with nerves, and glanced around the room for anything that might still need doing here. No; nothing. Slowly enough, because she was not eager, but firmly enough, because she was not afraid, she crossed the room to the single rattling window, and tried the lock that had so intractably stayed in place.

And it, too, yielded under her hand. And the window swung open, and all the icy wet mountain air poured in, swirled around her, and laid its hungry kisses on her hair.

She had to fetch the wooden chair to gain enough height to climb out, and she had to wriggle her shoulders to force them through the narrow casement, but all in all, it was not hard to escape. The fortress was built into the pitched terrain of the mountain, so that the angled, rocky ground was only a few feet below her. She jumped, landed awkwardly and fell to her shoulder, bruising her hip, thigh and elbow. This high up, outdoors at the onset of night, it was colder than she had believed possible. But none of this mattered. None of these discomforts would she have to endure for long.

Fighting the wind, which lashed at her hair and the loose ends of her skirt, she struggled uphill toward the highest point of the mountain. Twice more she fell, once knocked over by a blast of air so strong that it forced her to her knees and once twisting her ankle on a buried rock. By now, her toes, fingers and cheeks had lost all feeling. Her brain was nearly numb as well—or perhaps she was just trying not to think. Frozen foot before frozen foot, up the dark mountain she went, into the teeth of the wind.

She reached the very top of the mountain without once looking ahead or to either side for the terrible view laid out around her. She had kept her eyes doggedly on her shoes and the mealy ground through which she found her insecure footing. Now at the mountaintop it became even more important that she not look outward, not until it was too late, not until she wanted to be made so dizzy that she fell.

Here at the very peak there was a promontory that overlooked the vast ravine down which the mountain itself retreated. Slowly, with infinite determination, Rachel inched forward to the very edge of the outthrust ledge. The wind whipped around her, spinning her first to one side and then to the other, but miraculously, she kept her balance. Her unbound hair streamed wildly
about her face and shoulders; her skirt flattened against her thighs, then belled around her knees. She was so cold now that she felt, oddly enough, fevered. If she put her fingers against a frozen puddle, she thought, she would cause the ice to sizzle into steam and water.

When her feet shuffled clumsily to the rim of the outcrop, loose stones rolled away from her shoes and clattered over the edge. She heard their hollow clicks and echoes as they bounced down the mountain. It did not sound so far. Carefully, she lifted her eyes from their fixed attention on her toes and took in the scene below her.

Black emptiness at the base of a huge, angular well. The mountain she stood upon curved forward from either side to form a rough, precipitous canyon whose wicked slopes were almost vertical. Jagged boulders and spikes of wind-whittled rock offered their brittle spines to the fading light of the sun. The ravine was so immense that no sunlight fell all the way to its depths. It could easily have plunged straight through to the core of the earth itself.

Rachel drew a long, ragged breath and did not look away. She had feared this her whole life, and yet, at this moment, she embraced it—the wild tumble of rock, the vertiginous height, the pummeling wind. Overhead, she heard the harsh call and flapping wings of mountain birds—vultures, perhaps, suspecting a death in the offing, or eagles, furious at this invasion of their domain. It was all so bitter and yet so beautiful. It would bring her the release she must have; it would set her free. It had been designed for her.

She took one last, lingering look around, at the gray face of the sheer mountain, at the luminescent horizon lit by the milky sunset, at the silhouette of the giant mountain hawk winging swiftly her way, and then she closed her eyes.

“Into thy great hands, Yovah,” she murmured, and stepped off the cliff.

U
p to a point, Gabriel’s conference with the Samarian powermongers had been a success. They had all come, at any rate, and they had all been furious. Behind the fury he had sensed a
frisson
of fear, and that was exactly what he’d intended.

He had refused to see any of them until they were all assembled, another ploy designed to irritate. Hannah had shown them all to a small meeting room and offered them food, and then faithfully reported to Gabriel their various condemnations of his intelligence, his character and his methods. But they had all come, and none of them left during the two hours he made them await his pleasure.

“My lords,” he said to them all impartially upon entering the room. It was another deliberate slight, proof that he grouped them all together and did not care how they jockeyed for power or prestige in each other’s eyes. There were ten men in the room—Manadavvi, Jansai, river merchants and a lone Luminauzi official—and none of them looked pleased to see him.

The first one to speak, not surprisingly, was the patrician Elijah Harth, who seemed the most affronted. “How can you possibly defend your actions?” the Manadavvi demanded coldly. “You come to us to preach unity, and at the first chance, you try to sow discord. It’s an ill beginning for all of us, Gabriel.”

The angel nodded acknowledgment. None of the others was intelligent enough to attack first; they were still muttering
phrases like “total outrage” and “how dare he.” Elijah had gone straight to the point.

“I have acted precisely because you have proved to me that you have no interest in unity,” Gabriel responded.