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He made no noise as her daggers fell. If he had, perhaps she would have been able to finish the job. But when she opened her eyes, saw the flashing blades poised to pierce his throat and sever his spine, saw his face impassive…
Her hands opened and the knives clattered to the ledge. She did not retrieve them. Let him have something to defend himself from the creatures that would come for him, the ones who would not kill him as quickly as she would have, if she had been mindful of the geis. She had never broken an oath in her life, but no power on Earth or in the long dissipated Astral Realms could turn her head to look on him again or stop her as she waded into the tunnel that had brought her there.
He cried out then, when she was out of sight, but it was not to her. Probably to his One God, begging for help. But there had never been a God or Goddess in the Underground. Ayla knew she alone heard his prayer, and it haunted her all the way to the Lightworld.
Two
Malachi never understood why they fell. Mortals were so bland and pink and fleshy. So uninteresting when compared to the glory of Heaven. Why fall, just to become one of them and whither and die, growing old with each breath?
As he did now.
After the foolish Humans had split the veil with their love of chants and regressions and crystal energies, after Hell and Heaven flooded onto Earth like a great, hopeless tidal wave, after the mortals had banished the creatures they once revered to the Underground, then he understood why an Angel might be tempted to fall. Unending existence became torture when separated from the Creator. Resentment of the Humans they were meant to protect crept into them, infecting them like parasites, coiling and twisting into their minds, the way it had during the first great fall. It thrived here in the Dark, beneath the Humans. Men had once raised their eyes to the heavens. Now, they needed only to look through a sewer grate to find the dying remains of God.
Malachi cried out again, though he knew the Lord could not hear him. It seemed almost comical now, to his bitter, Human mind, that in the confusion the Almighty could have slipped away and been lost. But the connection he’d felt, the connection any of them had felt, had vanished into thin air the same day the Afterworld merged with the world of the mortals.
They’d carried on without him. After all, they were merely servants. They had no free will. If any other course of action had crossed their mind, they would have fallen instantly. But it had not, and would not. They collected the souls of the departed, storing them in the Aether Globe until God returned to claim them. One by one, they began to fall, more as of late. Malachi had puzzled over that, continued to. His fall had been accidental, but there was no reward he could imagine that would tempt him to this pain voluntarily. Blood rushed beneath his skin. Bones and muscle ached. He had never ached before. Without wanting to and with no way to stop it he died more every moment.
Time. He’d never had a concept of it before. With nothing but eternity to measure it by, it had never meant anything at all.
Somewhere in the tunnels, they moved toward him. He expected them. He’d seen so many fall, during the first war over Lucifer’s petty jealousy and since, he knew what he would endure. Soon enough, he heard the rustle of wings in the darkness, and then the darkness was no more. When the Angelic Host assembled, it was a sight to dazzle a mortal’s eyes. They gazed at him dispassionately. He thought he knew what they felt and realized they felt nothing. Now that he was Human, or something like it, he knew true emotion. It hurt. He envied them.
Warm, golden light surrounded him, and he climbed to his knees, looking to the source. Above him, the circle of light receded to a single point of sheer brilliance. He lowered his gaze, closed his eyes, but the light had already marked his vision. Red spots swam behind his eyelids.
“Broken One,” a voice intoned sternly, and then, softer, “Malachi.”
When he opened his eyes, he saw two pale feet before him, bare as they peeked from below a robe of pure golden light. Azrael, Angel of Death. Fitting it would be him.
Malachi reached with trembling hands to lift the hem of the Archangel’s garment. He kissed it, balled it in his fists. It felt like cloth under his fingers, though he knew it was an illusion, immaterial, and he wouldn’t have been able to touch it in his old form.
“Rise, Malachi,” Azrael commanded, and Malachi did. Still, he could not look at the face of this creature he’d so recently been. He could not see that face, so beautiful and genderless, full of understanding and compassion, but no mercy. Never mercy.
“You have fallen.” The voice was the same. Comforting without promising.
“It was an accident.” The words seemed so inadequate in the face of the charge. “I would never have fallen through choice.”
Azrael reached for him, lifting his hands, and Malachi did look at his face then. The Archangel’s face displayed only mild interest as he unwound a flame-red strand from Malachi’s fingers. “You touched a mortal.”
“I did not know it was mortal. It had the appearance of an immortal from the Lightworld. I thought to kill it.” He flinched at his own explanation. There was no reason to have touched her, no directive from the Creator to kill the ones that were not like them. He had made the choice to fall, and for such a foolish whim.
“The affairs of the denizens of this Underground, mortal or immortal, are not our concern.” Azrael’s sad, kind smile reflected the truth. “You have chosen. And you have fallen.”
The faces of the Host assembled around them faded. The light grew dimmer. Azrael stepped back.
“No!” Malachi looked desperately at each one, sickened to know it was the last time and certain there was some way to make them understand. “It was not my choice. I had no will of my own! Even now, my will is that of the Creator!”
The light around him flared again, and he fell to his knees, knowing what would come. Flashing whips of gold lashed his wings, his back. He’d watched this so many times, wondering why they all cried out as their wings were pierced and torn, certain that mortal pain could not be so unbearable. He’d been wrong. The agony of it stole the breath from his lungs. His fragile mortal hands clenched against the rough stone beneath him, splintering his fingernails and tearing them loose from his flesh. He screamed, not to pray to his absent God, but to release the fearful pressure in his chest, to lessen some of the pain.
And then, the spectral lashes were gone. Alone in the darkness, Malachi collapsed, unable to support his body enough to prevent crushing his ruined wings. He turned his hot face to press his cheek to the cool ledge. Sticky red oozed slowly across the stone, feathering into the thirsty pores to create a dark, wet stain.
This would kill him. The pain, the blood, the desperation. No being, mortal or immortal, could withstand such suffering. He closed his eyes, resigned and a bit relieved to know it would not be long now. He waited hopefully for the flutter of wings and the Angel who would return him to Aether. It seemed ages passed, and still they did not come. The searing pain dulled to an agonizing throb, and the wetness at his back congealed. He wondered if it was a sign of imminent death. Many of the souls he’d claimed had been victims of gruesome violence. They had not bled in torrents as he had. But it seemed to take so long.
At every noise, be it a drip of water or the click of vermin’s claws against the ledge beside him, he startled, sure it was time. His hopes soared, then crashed, and with each repetition the anticipation and disappointment magnified. He remained alone, stranded in his mortal prison, stranded on an island in a seemingly endless sea of filth. If he had the strength, he could find his way to Aether, the place in the Darkworld that the Death Angels had claimed as their fortress. But the halls would be empty to him. Another Angel would not show him their face until the moment of his death. And he did not have the strength. He would wait, for help or for death, it did not matter which.
Finally something did come along. Slogging through the fetid water, whistling a simple tune that echoed almost sinisterly off the stark walls. A light shone, not the holy white of death. Yellow, mechanical, dirty and dank as everything in this Underground. It bobbed with the movement of its bearer, and as it moved closer, Malachi saw the shape of a man, painfully thin, hair curled from the damp, wearing an odd contraption to keep the water from his garments. He waded to the ledge, took off his strange hat with the light atop it and held it away when Malachi lifted his arm to shade his eyes.
“Holy shit.” The man sniffed, wiped his nose on his forearm. He looked up and down the tunnel, as if guilty of some crime he’d not yet committed. “What the hell are you?”
Too fatigued, too ambivalent to bother answering, Malachi looked away.
“Right. Okay.” The hat clattered against the ledge, and the man muttered as he seemed to be looking for something. Malachi did not care, as long as he left him to die in peace, and soon.
The sting of something piercing his arm caught him by surprise. He looked from the syringe in the man’s hand to the slightly apologetic expression on his face.
“Listen, buddy, this is really for the best,” he said, wiping the needle on his shirt before returning it to a pocket. Malachi’s vision faded. His stomach churned. And then he knew no more.
Three
The training room of the Assassins’ Guild was deserted. No one would come to practice or spar at this hour, which was exactly why Ayla had retreated there. The night guard, a retired Assassin, grumbled when she’d roused him to open the door, but she’d not apologized. She needed time to meditate on her failure in the Darkworld, time to formulate the answers to the questions she knew she would face. A more intelligent Assassin would think of a quick lie to cover such shame, but Ayla had no talent for lies. She became tangled in and tripped over even the most simple falsehoods.
No, she would probe the root of what had gone wrong, find that answer for herself before Garret or, Gods help her, the Guild Master, sought it and she looked a fool.
Or an incompetent Assassin, which she assured herself she was not. Beneath the high cement pillars of the training room she moved across the rough floor, wielding a simple wooden staff as she moved through her forms. She would start with the easiest weapons and move to the most demanding, working all night if she had to in order to punish herself for her ineptitude and prove she was better than the weakness she’d displayed in dealing with the Darkling.
The Darkling. How was it that now, when he was almost certainly dead, victim of some insidious predator of the Darkworld, he haunted her? Her shoulder still ached from his punishing hold. She would find a healer in the morning, not Guild employed so there would be no questions. She would find time to slip away to the Strip before she was required to report to the Guild Master.
She closed her eyes, spinning the staff from hand to hand, reveling in the bite of it against her palms. It had been five years since she’d entered Guild training and first used the clumsy, cumbersome weapon. Her hands had blistered and bled, but she’d endured. Now, her calluses had faded, pampered by the leather grips of her more elegant daggers.
She was pampered. That was the root of the problem. She’d lost touch with what it was like to be an Assassin for the Queene of the Faery Quarter. Perhaps she should use a staff more often, to toughen herself up.
No, it was not just her fighting. It was her lack of opportunity to fight. Every morning she would wait hopefully on her bunk until Garret came, somber-faced and shaking his head. The Queene did not fancy Humans, he’d explained once, and Ayla should not expect many assignments to pass her way. It was whispered that Cedric, the Guild Master, was one of Mabb’s many consorts and would bend to her every whim, even if that whim prejudiced him against the Assassins in his charge.
It was with the Guild Master’s smug face in mind that Ayla whirled through the bow staff forms. But as always, she could not remain angry at him. Her rage was irrational, turning instead to Garret, her mentor. He should defend her. He should demand that his sister lift the ban against Ayla, however it may have come to pass, and procure her better and more frequent assignments. It was his responsibility, after all, and she was his only charge.
No, Garret was far more content to let Mabb do as she pleased, coddling her and venerating her as if she were a Goddess rather than a mere ruler. As he wished to coddle Ayla, turning her from a hardened Assassin into a soft and willing mate. Judging from the way she’d faltered tonight, his strategy was effective.
As if called by her venomous thoughts, Garret strode through the arched double doors. The night watchman called something after him, certainly not complimentary, but it was swallowed up by the clanging shut of the doors and Garret’s heavy boots thudding across the floors. For a moment, Ayla expected anger and had to rearrange his sharp features in her mind to resemble the anguish painted on his face.
“When did you return? I have been ill with worry!” His robes flapped behind him as he hurried to her side.
In the guise of fixing her braid, Ayla quickly unbound her hair, letting it fall over the mark on her crushed shoulder like a flame-colored veil. “I have only just returned.”
It was then he became angry, his brow creasing below the antennae that flattened against his dark curls like the ears of a maddened cat. “And you did not come straight to me? You have been gone two days longer than the assignment called for—”
“I was to abandon the trail?” she interjected, setting one end of the staff against the ground as she drew herself up straighter.
“You were to follow the instructions I gave you!” He grabbed her by the arms, dangerously close to the place where the Darkling had left his mark.
She did not fear him, though she feared his discovery of her bruises and the questions they would provoke. Glaring at him with her coldest expression, the one she’d practiced on countless victims as they’d begged her for mercy, she bit out, “I must finish my exercises.”
His expression softened and he released her. She knew it pained him to show anger. It made him unattractive. “I apologize. I am merely fatigued. Mabb sent a squadron out to search for you, but they were unable to penetrate the Darkworld border. I feared you were lost.”
She turned away, dragging the staff to the weapons rack. Mabb’s troops could have easily breached the border of the Darkworld. Unlike the heavily guarded entrances to the Lightworld, the tunnels leading into their enemies’ territory were defenseless. But she would not risk threatening the denizens of the Darkworld with her troops, possibly starting a war. Certainly not over Ayla, who Mabb strongly disliked.
Ayla reached for a broadsword, though her muscles screamed from overuse and her brain begged for sleep. More training, more time to think, that was what she needed.
“Ayla, please,” Garret soothed, his footsteps indicating his approach. “You are tired. We can train tomorrow, but now I would like you to sleep. Stay with me tonight. I can take you to Sanctuary in the morning.”
Sanctuary. The word held such a sweet promise of rest and spiritual calm. She could meditate at Sanctuary, bathe in the pools, be renewed.
Be free of the memory of the Darkling.
The very thought of him steeled her resolve to keep working. “I will go to Sanctuary in the morning. Alone.” As I will sleep alone tonight, she added silently.
Garret gave a heavy sigh. “As you wish it.”
She watched him as he left, his slender form disguised by his voluminous Guild robes. His wings lay at his back, transparent as water, swirled with gossamer color like oil polluting a puddle. He was much admired by the ladies at Court, as Ayla had seen on the occasions when she’d gone to the Palace to make her reports. To have the attention of the Queene’s brother was an envious thing, and Ayla appreciated her position even if she would not accept his love. It was no secret that her Human father had won her place in the Guild in a gambling house on the Strip, but that Garret had chosen to tutor her, that was a touch of luck she could never count on again. She was grateful to him. Most students and mentors were assigned unless prior arrangements were made, and Ayla had been in no position to buy a better one.
“But when I saw you in the assembly,” Garret often told her, “I knew I had to be near you, if only as your mentor.”
She did owe him her gratitude, but she found it difficult to parlay that debt into a lifetime bound to him. And she knew what was whispered about her. That she was proud, that she did not know how unrealistic her expectations were. It was not as if one could aspire higher than an heir to the kingdom. That the kingdom, indeed, their entire plane of being, no longer existed did not matter. Nor did their immortality. Mabb could rule for eternity, so long as she was not harmed. It seemed unlikely that the Queene would fall to injury or illness with her retinue of guards and healers. Still, for a half-breed like Ayla, a match with Garret was more than she should ever have hoped for, and she knew it.
So did Garret, and that was some of the problem.
Why could she not simply accept his affections for her own gain? She did not like living in the barracks, constantly guarding her possessions from the Pixies and Tricksters that shared the quarters. Of course, she would not have to worry about her meager possessions if she went to live with Garret in his home outside the Palace. She would have possessions worth guarding. A fine rug instead of the coarse, cold cement of the tunnels beneath her feet. Food and rich wine that she didn’t have to fight for, stolen from the Human world above, where things were clean and worth stealing. There weren’t many luxuries Underground, but Garret would give her anything he could, simply because he wished to.
She worked through defense with the broadsword, waiting until she was certain Garret had left the Guild compound. It was nearly morning by the time she stumbled from the training room. Soon, it would be the Human noon hour, and the sun that Ayla had never seen would be directly over the surface of the Earth, spilling light into the grates and gutters, illuminating the Underground with secondhand dawn.
Ayla had not been born yet when the Humans had destroyed the Astral and Etheric planes. Garret had been there, and like all of the Fae who had fought in the wars against the Humans, remembered it well, though nearly three hundred years had passed. He sang songs of it at times, strumming his harp with a look of regret so keen it seemed woven into the enchantment of the music itself. There had been a spiritual war amongst the Humans, one side wielding their sacrificial God like a sword against “nonbelievers.” Like a pendulum swinging, Human society embraced this way of life, then rejected it. It was during the last shift that the boundaries between what they believed to be real and the lands of their dreams and nightmares were severed.
Garret spoke with disgust about the behavior of the Humans who’d claimed their practices were a revival of the old ways, marketing crystals and oracles and glossy books claiming to hold the secrets to powerful magics. “Some claimed to be Druids,” he’d scoffed once, when he’d used his pipe a bit too much. “Druids. I walked with Amergin. He gave me this harp. The fools, if they had any idea of what it meant to be a true Druid…ah, but half of them don’t even eat animals. They believe it is too cruel.”
But it hadn’t mattered. With the followers of the One God calling on him in prayer for even the most mundane situations and the pretenders invoking spirits and attempting to force their consciousness onto the Astral plane, the veil rent. The Gods “Seemed to disappear as mist into the air,” as Garret described it, and the creatures the Humans had long thought of as myth had spilled onto Earth with no hope of ever leaving. They were welcomed at first, celebrated even. But when they did not show themselves to be the helpful sprites consumed with admiration for the Human race that the mortals expected, they turned on them.
It was said the war began when the Fae races drove the Humans Underground, though the story that existed outside the Lightworld was that the Humans had fled below the Earth of their own volition. They abandoned their world for the caverns they had hewn from the dirt, tunnels for sanitation and great vehicles that shook the ground as they traveled on rails. The Humans drilled passages to connect them and create the great cities of the Underground.
As more Humans fled the world above, a mortal rose as leader among his people. Uttering his name was forbidden in the Lightworld, but Ayla had not always lived there. In her childhood on the Strip, the neutral zone between the borders of Dark and Light, she’d heard him spoken of. Madaku Jah, the Prophet. Or the Traitor, depending who told the tales. No matter if he was reviled or praised, he’d raised an army against the creatures above them and forced them into the very Underground they’d made the mortals endure.
Now, the tides shifted again. Only a fool would ignore the signs. Another battle brewed, but this one was not against the Humans, the common enemy of the Light and Dark worlds. This war would be fought in the Underground. The grim thought haunted Ayla as she shuffled to the barracks, her body on the verge of collapse.
Inside, only the Pixies had begun to rouse. They always rose early, desperate for what little sunlight they could get.
One of them stopped her with a wide grin. “Ayla, you look terrible. Come with us to Sanctuary.”
“Of course I look terrible. I have been training all night. Now I need rest, while I can still have it.”
“Suit yourself.” The Pixie flashed another winning smile. Any creature with a drop of mortal blood would look terrible in comparison to the Fae races, preternaturally young and strong. And they had gotten rest. They had not been plagued with thoughts of a newly mortal creature lying helpless in the Darkworld.
Neither had she, she scolded herself. There was no reason to think on the creature. Not to pity him. That had been her first mistake. Not to revel in her victory, obviously. All she needed to think of was a good enough reason for her failure.
So, why then, did she fight for sleep on her hard bunk, ignoring the sounds of the other Assassins as they rose, unable to chase away the memory of the Darkling’s voice and anguished face?
Four
Malachi opened his eyes to a strange, mechanical whirring and a pressing weight on his back as he lay on his stomach. He remembered the man in the tunnel, the one who had stabbed him and drugged him, the shock and horror as he realized he would be defenseless against whatever would come.
Panic seized him, and it was an emotion he did not like. In fact, he did not like any of the emotions he had experienced thus far. He jerked up, bracing his hands beneath him, the bite of cold metal meeting his hands where his flesh had not warmed it.
“Don’t move, I’m almost done.” The command was most calm, considering the man had abducted him.
Malachi swallowed, his newly mortal throat as dry as parchment. “I am thirsty.”
“Sorry, nothing to drink during surgery. It’s unsanitary,” the man responded. A flare of something passed Malachi’s face, and when he peered over the rolled edge of the table he saw the withering remains of those addictive tubes of paper the mortals in the Underground despaired of finding regularly enough to feed their habit.
Mortals lived in the Underground for two reasons. They sympathized with the denizens of the Underground, or they had been banished from the Human world for practicing magics. But the man’s reason for being there did not concern Malachi so much as what he was doing. “Surgery? I do not understand.”
“Of course you don’t.” Another burst of whirring, accompanied by an acrid scent that Malachi recognized as burned flesh, punctuated the man’s words. “Your kind are ethereal. You never need patching up, or at least you’re not supposed to. But you, my friend…you were in bad shape when I found you.”
Though the man’s words were strange, his meaning was clear. Malachi cursed him silently and rested against the table once more. “You should have left me to die.”
“It was tempting. I haven’t ever gotten my hands on a pair of these beauties. Promise me if you kick off before I do, you won’t mind me keeping them?” Another burst of whirring, then, “Okay, all done.”
The man jumped down from the table—it must have been his knee causing the pressure, Malachi decided—and helped him to sit up. Malachi teetered under the weight of his wings. They’d been too heavy from the moment he’d turned mortal, but they were lopsided and unwieldy now. “What have you done to me?”
“Saved your life. And your wings.” The man touched one of them, and Malachi hissed involuntarily at the pain. “Well, they’re gonna be tender for a while.”
“Who are you? Why are you doing this?” Malachi moved to stand, but his weakened limbs would not support him. Light danced before his eyes, leaving the room darker with each starburst, and he fell onto the table again, bending the tips of his wings beneath him.
“No, no, don’t go passing out. You’re too big for me to catch if you fall.” The man steadied him, then held out one blood-crusted hand. “Name’s Keller. And I’m doing this because I hate to see perfectly healthy folk go down for things that are easily fixed. You would have bled to death out there. Don’t let me tell you how to live, but I’d much rather live a life that’s worth something than die alone in the Sewer District. Place is a hellhole.”
“Where am I?” His vision cleared, Malachi surveyed the room. Pipes made a grid of the low ceiling, and the Human had used them to hang too-bright electric lights that gave off a terrible fizzing sound. He’d covered the walls in a wide, wire mesh fence, forming crude walls around their space. Everywhere were boxes and steel cabinets, and tables strewn with mechanical parts and tools.
“You’re in my shop,” Keller said with forced pride. “In the Sewer District. But hey, the rent’s cheap, and at least I found a dry place. You wouldn’t believe some of the hovels around here—they have to sleep in hammocks to stay out of the muck.”
Malachi said nothing. He’d seen many homes in the Darkworld. Creatures mortal and immortal fought to survive in the harshest half of the Underground, and their ingenuity knew no bounds. Keller’s humble shop seemed a palace in comparison to some Darkworld dwellings, and his numerous boxes indicated he had some way of earning material possessions.
“I outfitted you with some lightweight aluminum I won in a card game. I heard it came from an airplane.” Keller tapped one of the sore spots on Malachi’s wing, and the resultant clang distracted Malachi from the pain. When the man faced him, Malachi saw one arm was completely missing from the elbow. In its place, an intricate system of metal and wires imitated the severed body part. In fact, the man’s head seemed to be fitted with metal, as well, a long, curved piece of shiny steel that scooped around his ear. Keller scratched at the metal fragment in his skull with the false hand, and sparks jumped from the contact. “So, now you know why I’m not living the life fantastic up on the surface.”
“Yes.” There was nothing else to say. The man was clearly a Bio-mech, a creature who believed the Human body an appliance with replaceable components that could outlast the ravages of time. It was not as the Lord intended, as evidenced by the high number of souls the Death Angels claimed from experiments gone awry.
“Yeah, well, I saved your life, so go to hell,” Keller snapped, and only then did Malachi realize he’d been staring.
“I did not ask for your pity. I prayed for death, and this is how I am repaid?” Malachi shook his head. The motion seemed oddly natural. “I am not meant to be here.”
“I can always put you back.” Keller sounded…insulted? Malachi had such a difficult time putting the word to the tone of voice.
“You are not pleased.” He could not summon up more empathy for the man’s reaction. Malachi’s only concern was for his mortal body, and the death that had been stolen from him.
“I’m a little pissed, yeah. I did save your life.” Keller turned to one of his worktables, moving some equipment there. “That’s worth something, whether you believe it or not.” After a long pause, he tossed something heavy onto the table with a clatter. “What were you doing in that tunnel?”
