The Alleluia Files (53 page)

Conran held up his hand for order. “
Chahiela
, my friends! Chahiela! If anyone is to be heard, everyone else should be silent.”

Tamar was as startled as everyone else to see Jared practically jump away from the wall. His wings swept back and he looked somehow taller, suddenly imposing. Actually, it was not at all difficult to see why some might want to name him Archangel.

“
What
did you just say?” he demanded of Conran.

The Jacobite leader lifted his eyebrow. “In the Edori tongue, I called for silence,” he said. “I did not mean to be so rude as to exclude you from the conversation.”

Jared shook his head impatiently. “No, no, not rude … The word you used—‘chahiela’? Isn’t that a place, as well as an Edori expression?”

Conran nodded. “Yes, it is a town on the very southern tip of Bethel. It was founded, oh, a century or so ago, as a school for the blind and the deaf.” He smiled. “That is why it was named Chahiela. After the Edori word for silence.”

Jared stood with his chin tilted slightly toward the ceiling, in a pose that made the skin tighten across his cheeks. Tamar was sure his stance looked like arrogance to some, but to her it looked like he was merely trying to contain excitement. Mystified as the others, she sat up straighter in her chair.

“Chahiela is where the oracle Jecoliah was raised,” the angel said slowly. “She told me so herself. She is nearly blind and she was sent to that school to receive an education.”

“Doesn’t sound like
she
was the child of a Manadavvi lord-ling,” Jani said with a little sniff.

Jared nodded absently. “You’re right. She wasn’t. And neither was the oracle before her, who was named Deborah—who also came from Chahiela. Or the oracle before
her
—who was born in Chahiela, at the school her mother founded.”

“But the oracle before Deborah—” someone said, and there was a long, strained silence, as all the untutored Jacobites struggled to recall their sketchy history lessons.

Conran was the one who remembered it first. “Was Alleluia,” he said.

After that, there was not enough
chahiela
for anyone to speak more than two sentences together before someone else interrupted. Almost before Jared could finish his next sentence (“Where better to hide something you wanted no one to find than in a place where no one can see?”) there was a babble of voices raised in speculation and excitement. Tamar felt it, too, that curious melting flutter at the center of her abdomen, but in her case it was augmented by equal parts wonder, pride, and fear.
The angel is my friend, I brought him here
, she wanted to say, shaking her finger in the faces of all those who doubted him; but in fact she did not move a muscle. He might not be correct, of course, though his solution had that seamless sense of Tightness that you would sometimes get when you fitted together two broken pieces of china after trying for half an hour to get the edges to match. Right or wrong, in any case, his was a better idea than any they had come up with in the past five years, and she felt rosy with his reflected glory.

But she was afraid, too. Afraid because, before the first person in the room yelled out the words, she knew what the next motion would be for: an immediate visit to Chahiela to look for the hidden files. Back to Samaria, back to the haunts of the angels and the lairs of the Jansai. And there was no way she could stay behind if all of her comrades were going.

“When can we set sail?” Duncan was saying. “Tomorrow? Is there a ship in port?”

“
The Wayward
,” someone replied. “But it will only hold about ten of us.”

“Ten is all we need.”

“And who will volunteer to stay behind? Not me! We need a ship big enough to carry all of us.”

“We need no such thing,” Conran said firmly enough to grab everyone’s attention. “I agree, we must get to Chahiela as quickly as possible, but there is no need to be stupid about it. Some of us must be left behind in case this mission somehow goes awry. Ten is plenty. Ten is more than enough.”

“Who will go? Shall we have a lottery?”

“We shall choose based on need,” Conran said.

“You need fighting men,” Duncan said instantly. “So you must have me.”

“And me,” Horace chimed in.

“What we must have is a translator,” Conran said. “Because
the oracles use the old language to communicate with
Jehovah
. And there’s no reason Alleluia would not have made her memoirs hard to decipher if she would make them hard to find.”

“Does anyone in your group know the old language?” Jared asked. “I thought only the oracles were taught it.”

“Many of the Augustine engineers have learned it so that they can read manuals printed in that text,” Conran said. “A few of the Jacobites have also learned it, but most of them are dead. I myself could never master the words. At the moment there is only one linguist among us.”

Somehow he had guessed, for Jared looked straight at the Jacobite he had rescued from certain death. “Who is it?” he asked.

“Tamar.”

She met the angel’s eyes as if that was the hardest thing she had ever done, as if his gaze had a weight and a pressure that she could not lift with all the strength in her body. If he only knew how much she wanted to recuperate here in Sahala, give up her place on that Edori boat, frolic here in the forgiving Ysral sunshine and let her mind graze absently over unimportant things. But. She was a Jacobite and this was the grail Jacobites had sought since before she was born. If it was within their grasp and only she had the key to decoding it, there was simply no choice.

“When do we sail?” she asked.

Jared was shaking his head. He was still staring at her as if there was no one else in the room, no one else in the world. “She can’t go,” he said.

Conran looked over at him in mild shock. “And why not?”

“She just barely escaped from Samaria a few days ago! And she was half-dead then! Her picture is in the hands of every Jansai on the continent—”

“So is mine, so is Duncan’s, so are the faces of half the people in this room,” Conran said dismissively. “Tamar is in no more danger than the rest of us. And if she is too sick to leave tomorrow, well, then we will wait until she is recovered. A week or more will not hurt us when we have waited decades.”

“She can’t go,” Jared said flatly.

Conran laughed at him. “I don’t know that you have too much to say about it,” he said genially.

“I have a lot to say about it.”

“I mean, that will do any good,” Conran added gently.

Someone laughed, and then everyone was talking at once. No one paid attention anymore to the angel or Conran, still arguing over the rising tumult of voices—and they scarcely paid attention to each other, either, so eager were they to share their own opinions and excitement. Chahiela! But of course! They should have thought of that before, but it didn’t matter now. The Alleluia Files were within their grasp, they were days away from hearing the words that would validate their lives and change the whole face of Samaria.

Tamar remembered similar times, similar epiphanies, when they had thought they had uncovered the miracle and then found that all their speculations were wrong. But that had not stopped them from trying, from hoping, from believing. And if they were wrong this time, so be it; that would not end their quest or make them lose their faith.
Till we find the Alleluia Files.
That had been their credo for so long that it was their only absolute. Nothing would keep them from Chahiela now—not angels, not Jansai, not Jovah himself, should he manifest himself before them at this very moment and claim to be a deity after all.

But Tamar was afraid to go. And although nothing—certainly not this furious angel even now engaged in a shouting match with the unyielding Conran—nothing would prevent her from boarding that ship whatever day they decided to sail, she could not shake off a cold sense of prescient dread. Whatever awaited them in Chahiela, she thought, would change them forever, unless it destroyed them utterly. And though she tried to join in the revelry of her ecstatic friends, she could not shake that conviction from her heart, and she could not truly rejoice.

Tamar successfully avoided Jared that night and the next day, but there was one angel she was anxious to say good-bye to before
The Wayward
sailed. Conran had met with the ship’s captain (Mario? Tamar could not quite remember, but then, she had been hallucinating for most of her voyage on that vessel). They had determined not only that the Edori captain was willing to make the trip but that he could accommodate eight Jacobites as passengers. “Nine if Reuben agrees to stay behind,” the captain had said with a smile. “And something tells me he’ll be more than willing.”

There was no true port at Chahiela, but there was a natural harbor not far from the town that smugglers and Edori and most ship captains in dire need knew how to find.
The Wayward
would drop anchor there, and the Jacobites would be able to find their way to Chahiela in a matter of hours.

Conran had chosen the seven Jacobites who would accompany him on this mission and high-handedly refused to listen to the petitions of those who would be left behind. Besides Tamar, he had selected Duncan, Horace, and Jani, as well as an eighteen-year-old girl named Loa and two young men named Sal and Wyman. It was clear to everyone that, except for himself, chosen for seniority, and Tamar, chosen for special abilities, his criteria had been health, strength, swiftness, and skill. If they really were overtaken by the Jansai, he wanted to give his little band a fighting chance.

As the captain had expected, Reuben had readily agreed to yield his place to a Jacobite passenger, but that ninth slot had been ferociously bespoken by Jared, and Conran had reluctantly ceded him the honor. Tamar’s reaction to the news of Jared’s inclusion was beginning to feel familiar: a mixture of elation, terror, and dread. In such cramped quarters, it would be hard to avoid the angel entirely, and she did not particularly want to hear what he had to say about the folly of young women who continually exposed themselves to danger.

On the other hand, it was hard to imagine returning to Samaria without him. Going anywhere without him. Existing without him. But of course, that day would come.

And she was finding it harder than she had imagined to leave another angel behind.

“But I have only just found you!” Lucinda wailed when she heard the news. It was the morning after the fateful meeting, and the Jacobites were engaged in a frenzy of packing. “Can’t you stay behind? Can’t someone else translate these stupid files?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Not if they’re in the old tongue.”

“I can’t bear to have you leave so soon.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I can. I promise.”

Lucinda sighed and tried to shake away her blues. “I feel like I should give you a talisman for luck,” she said. “I don’t have—I know! My necklace. The perfect thing.”

“I don’t need any good-luck charms,” Tamar said, but the
angel had already leapt up and crossed the room. They were sitting in her bedchamber in the Edori house (Tamar thought Jared was less likely to find her there), so all Lucinda’s possessions were close at hand.

Lucinda returned to Tamar’s side carrying a small silver box with a painted glass lid. “I keep the necklace here when I’m not wearing it,” she said. To Tamar’s amazement, the angel crooned a short wordless melody over the treasure box, and a tiny click sounded in her cupped hands.

“What in the world was that?”

Lucinda was holding out the silver casket. “See? The song unlocks the box. And the same song sung backward locks it again. Isn’t that clever? Reuben gave it to me.”

Tamar took it gingerly from her hand and peered inside. On the black velvet lining lay the emerald ring that Lucinda usually wore, a silver necklace coiled around a flat oval pendant, a blue wing feather from some Ysral bird, and a smooth quartz rock that looked to have been salvaged from a riverbed. A diverse array of treasures, indeed.

“That song you’ve heard me sing?” Lucinda went on. “In your head? That’s really the backward version of one of the angels’ prayers.”

Tamar looked up with a grin. “So? Does that mean I can countermand a prayer if I sing that?”

“I suppose so, but it’s not a prayer that’s ever sung, as far as I know. Instead I could teach you the reverse version of the prayer for rain, and you might have some use for it.”

“I don’t care if it rains,” Tamar said, and turned her attention back to the silver box.

“The necklace,” Lucinda instructed. “Put it on. That’s what I want you to have.”

“I don’t need your jewelry. I won’t forget you.”

With an impatient exclamation, Lucinda took the box from her sister and extracted the necklace from the pile. She looped the chain around her finger and held up her hand so the delicate woven strands glinted in the afternoon light. “The finest metal from the Luminaux silversmiths,” she said softly. “When you run your finger down the chain, it’s as if you’re touching glass. Put it on.”

Reluctantly, Tamar took it. She was not used to expensive gifts or tokens of affection; it was not something she felt she
had a right to. “Did your aunt give this to you?”