and also to prove that I really was doing something this November.
Near the southern border of Mongolia, a woman sat in the long grass of the steppe, raking her fingers aimlessly through cold dirt. She had on a rather nice suit and beside her a briefcase lay open. Occasionally a particularly low-blowing gust of wind tore a paper out of it, but neither the woman nor the briefcase seemed very concerned about this. Later that afternoon she was supposed to be helping set up an exciting new branch of her company that would have direct access to the budding markets of Mongolian tech-geeks, but this no longer appeared to be on her agenda, or on anyone’s.
There was nothing very interesting going through the woman’s head. Currently she was wondering vaguely whether she’d left the gas on[1]. She’d spent a while panicking, earlier, but ever since she’d convinced herself she was hallucinating she’d been very composed. She did wish she could remember why she was hallucinating twenty years after she’d sworn off her youthful dabbling in narcotics in favour of such safe, adult activities as week-long benders and not sleeping, but she figured she’d work that one out eventually. In the meantime, why worry?
She watched in polite bewilderment, therefore, as fifty-foot high men in combat gear loped across the plain, periodically ducking down as if the grass, which just barely went up to their bootlaces, would be anything like sufficient cover for their faintly translucent bulk.
Their bullets, though, were impressively realistic. So were their intestines.
The woman, consideringly, lay back and waited for them to go away.
Her name was Yoon Sun, and she did not have much significance in the grand scheme of things. In fact she did not have much significance in any smaller schemes; even her significance in her own personal scheme varied depending on the time of month and whether there was anything that sloshed pleasantly in glass bottles at hand.
But she was not dead. And after a while, the soldiers went away.
In their wake came wind, the smell of imagined blood, and what Yoon Sun believed to be another woman.
She was picking her way through the web of cracks in the earth left by one enormous shoe’s tread, her hair streaming out from her bent head like a flag. Yoon thought she was American; she looked very glamorous, even with goosebumps all down her long bronze legs and guts staining her boots.
When she came close enough for Yoon to hear what she was muttering, though, she spoke in an accent that Yoon recognised as English, because she had watched sitcoms with English people in them.
The part of Yoon’s brain that she did not use for watching sitcoms recognised that the woman spoke the dialect of danger, which comes in all pitches and volumes and has nothing to do with the rounding of vowels but which is, nevertheless, distinct.
Yoon found herself growing less enamored of the smart black of her specially tailored jacket, which stood out stark against the frost-pale leaves of grass. She tried to flatten down against the dry soil and resemble a rock. It didn’t work very well; the woman, as it turned out, had extremely sharp eyes[2]. Among other things.
“Hullo,” she said, crouching down beside Yoon. “I didn’t think there were many of you lot left.”
Yoon stared at the woman’s extremely sharp boots. She hadn’t understood more than a few of the words-- her command of English had never been good, even at the outset of her career, when she was still taking night classes for it. But she understood that she was not expected to make a contribution.
The woman then switched to fluent Korean.
“Where did they go?”
Trembling, Yoon Sun pointed after the soldiers. She was horribly aware, as she did it, that she was still… not expected to make a contribution. That she was a curiosity, perhaps, and a signpost, and that was all.
“Thanks,” said the woman, low and husky. The hairs stood up on the back of Yoon’s neck.
The woman strolled off.
Yoon stared after her. Then she rolled over onto her side, hugging herself. Her subconscious had nothing like that in it, she thought, very coherently, and smelled blood again: but realer, this time, and older, blood that had been spilled in sand long before there were calendars to mark the date of death.
She dragged her briefcase toward her. It was almost empty. She closed it against her chest, and held it there.
The soldiers would come back soon, she thought. And then she would leave, and look for-- look for--
She would look.
Yes.
[1] She had. But then, she’d also left her apartment complex still standing and her husband sleeping peacefully. Things change.
[2] It didn’t help that there are not all that many rocks out there that wear colourful ties and dangly earrings to show that yes, they are free-spirited, innovative individuals working creatively within the apparently rigid frame of the management structure.
War stepped into snow, and met Death, coming the other way.
“Hi,” she said.
He inclined his skull. YOU HAVE A LITTLE SOMETHING ON YOUR LIP, he said, tapping the corresponding area of bone on his own chin.
War made no move to wipe away the gore. “Toys,” she said, disdainfully. “They play with toys and call it Me.”
THEY ARE NOT WRONG, said Death.
War’s lips curled, under clinging blood.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But I could have had the Hosts of Heaven and Hell doing my work. I could be rending the sky, right now, if it weren’t for that boy. And you!”
She paused, less for breath than drama.
I HELPED HIM. YES. I ALLOWED THIS TO PROCEED.
War’s head snapped up at that.
“And for what?” she demanded. “That’s what I’ve been trying to understand. What on Earth is in it for you, lord?”
She was looking somewhat the worse for wear, under the artistic application of viscera. Her lips were chapped and dark rings showed under her vivid eyes. Her arm swung jerkily at her side as she talked: its movements had an amputated quality to them.
“No mortals,” she said, as if counting off a mental list. “No--”
YES, THERE ARE, said Death. Things glittered in his sockets that might have been stars, or, then again, might not have.
War looked away.
“Pollution’s gone, then?” she said, brittle as cheap steel. “I thought so.”
WELL SPOTTED, said Death. His grin was not unkind. It glistened, the same clean white the snow was, all around.
“All right,” she said. “All right. But the humans.”
ARE NOT HERE. THAT IS ALL. EVEN HIS POWER HAS AN END.
“Here, though.”
Death tilted his scythe at waist-level, idly. In the metal, War could make out a piece of a sky reflected from some other hour or place. It had clouds in it, and promises.
HE MISSED A FEW, he said, shrugging.
“Yes, I noticed. But the rest?” said War, impatiently. “You can’t get to the rest.”
THAT IS NOT, said Death, MY PRIMARY CONCERN.
“Then what is?”
I DO THE JOB THAT IS IN FRONT OF ME.
“What’s that, old chap,” sneered War, and for as long as it takes for a shell to burst, recaptured her old unnatural loveliness. “Me?”
I THOUGHT I MIGHT MAKE A SNOWMAN, said Death, mildly.
There was a silence.
War began to laugh.
Laughing, she bent down, and picked up a handful of snow, which blushed in her palm like Pepper caught in the act of flipping through a new issue of Seventeen. Death watched with interest and concern as she hefted the lump.
“I have a better idea,” she said, with her back still to him; and then a sphere of bloody snow was hurtling towards his nose holes.
OH, B--
“--ugger,” said Aziraphale, wheeling right just in time to avoid being decapitated by an oversized shuriken.
“I miss the cannonballs,” said Crowley, contemplatively.
It was noon. Objects had been hurtling past them from somewhere east of Europe for about twenty minutes now, and in that brief time the boy-- because who else would it be, after all-- had cycled through most of the major styles of weaponised projectile that had ever been favoured by a human civilisation in all of history, and several that hadn’t been favoured by any[1].
“I miss not having my wings out,” said Aziraphale. “They make me a much larger target.”
“Some angel you are,” said Crowley. His heart wasn’t in it. He was busy keeping an eye out for UFOs.
“Sorry? Did I just hear you say you’d like to fly on your own a bit?” said Aziraphale.
“Don’t get your feathers in a twist,” said Crowley. “I was only joking.”
“You and your jokes,” said Aziraphale.
“Yes, well. I’m a bit tense. It’s this body. It’s afraid of dying. Also, heights.”
Aziraphale gave him an incredulous look.
“It is!” said Crowley defensively. “Snakes aren’t naturally airborne creatures[2], you know.”
“Some demon you are,” said Aziraphale.
“A body is a body,” Crowley snapped. “You of all people ought to know that.”
Aziraphale was briefly distracted by the need to dodge a stray katana.
“Oh come on,” Crowley shouted at Russia, with the reckless abandon and wild courage that comes with knowing one is safely out of earshot, “that’s not even aerodynamically feasible!”
“Neither are bees,” Aziraphale observed.
“What?”
“Bees,” said Aziraphale. “They’re not aerodynamically feasible. I never liked them. Gabriel said they demonstrated the power of faith,” he added, inconsequentially.
“What didn’t Gabriel say that about, though?”
“Demons,” said Aziraphale, promptly, and went on, before Crowley could respond: “It’s true, I suppose, about bodies. Mine’s exhausted.”
Crowley rolled his eyes. There was no way Aziraphale could have seen this, under the circumstances, but he detected it regardless, the stubborn git.
“Not from flying,” he said sharply. “From being in this world. With him in it. He doesn’t want humans here.”
“He hasn’t got humans here,” Crowley objected.
“Not many,” said Aziraphale. The light poured off his wings like white smoke.
“And that’s not a proper human body, is it,” said Crowley.
“I don’t know about that,” said Aziraphale. “After all, my dear, the wings are just a metaphor.”
“Please don’t say things like that,” Crowley groaned, “or I might just squeeze your foot off.”
“A substantial, airworthy metaphor,” Aziraphale corrected himself.
“Not. Helping.”
Aziraphale covered his smile with his hand. And was almost knocked out of the sky by a small meteor.
“We’re landing,” he told Crowley, when he’d recovered.
“Great,” said Crowley, somewhat indistinctly; his nose was jammed up against the back of Aziraphale’s knee, because anything was better than watching the horizon swing this way and that like the sword of an amateur fencer practising alone, in his room, late at night, with a frilly shirt on[4].
Aziraphale asked, “My dear fellow, would you say we’ve gone far enough south for that suspicious bulge in the canopy to be London?”
Crowley risked an eyeful. It was, indeed, a suspicious bulge. He quite approved, on general principles: the island looked rather like a snake itself, green-scaled and sinuous and busily digesting something small and furry.
“…yes, actually,” he said. “There’s the Tower, see?” He poked his tail at the visible turret.
“So it is,” said Aziraphale. He frowned. “But there are lots of buildings taller than the Tower in London, and I don’t see any of them showing…”
“Perhaps he didn’t find those so interesting,” suggested Crowley.
Aziraphale shivered.
“Perhaps,” he said, angling his wings to the left and down.
[1] The flaming chicken, the ludicrously oversized baseball, Wensleydale, etc.
[2] And didn’t like it when they were unnaturally airborne either, as Crowley had discovered in Mexico circa 400 BC, while orchestrating the rise[3] of the false idol Quetzalcoatl.
[3] All the way through the temple roof, at which point he was distracted by the need to shut up Aziraphale, who’d been sniggering helplessly in a corner.
[4] Or worse, none at all.
The light dappled Anathema’s upper back and arms. Divided up by green shade, standing utterly still, she looked less like a quite possibly insane young woman and more like a collection of parts that belonged precisely where they were. The short bright hairs on her long forearm; the deeper well of shadow where her cheek was lowered against her shoulder for sighting-- they seemed to have blossomed out of the damp wood.
Even the gleam of the barrel could easily have been the twinkle in the eye of some lurking carnivore, Newt considered.
The illusion fell apart when she pulled the trigger, though. Moving, her body separated from its backdrop.
“I think I hit it,” she said, peering into the vines. “Can you go--?”
“Thanks,” said Newt, but he went.
The makeshift target[1] was indeed lying there, heaped ungracefully on mossy stones. It flopped sadly in his hands.
“Well done,” he said, returning. “We’ll eat tonight.”
“Yes,” said Anathema. “Mushrooms.”
Newt sagged. She took pity on him, and also the target. The target she held up to the light, to no immediately obvious effect.
She moved it a little to the left.
Nothing.
She moved it a little to the right.
Newt examined his watch. It wasn’t working, but this, at least, was a familiar phenomenon.
Anathema was about to try flipping the doll over when, at last, gold flared through the round hole in its twiggy center, as it was at last brought into alignment with a shaft of sun.
Newt clapped, dutifully. Anathema gave him his jacket back.
[1] Newt’s jacket, filled with twigs: this sophisticated mannequin’s structural integrity secured by one (1) Witchfinder Private’s regulation pin.
How to describe the First Battle, which raged through lunchtime and out the other side without interruption by parent, teacher, or aged aunt? Which, accordingly, altered the coastlines of several major continents, and opened up new bays and capes at the edges of the minds of the Them, where the power poured in?
Adam’s mind, now more open to power than a minimalist kind of archipelago is to sea, considered this pressing question as he pedalled back towards Tadfield.
His wheels squeaked quietly over the choppy waves of the North Sea.
Clackclackclackclack, went Pepper’s bike beside him. A mile or so off, the smudged figures of Brian and Wensleydale were discernable, racing along parallel currents.
“What happened to Dog?” Pepper said.
“Oh,” said Adam, “he’s havin’ adventures in Australia, an’ such.”
Pepper leaned low over her handlebars and pedalled harder. The ocean blurred past at the same rate no matter what gear she was in, or how hard she braked, but she did it anyway.
“We could call it the Battle of Mongolia Bowl,” Adam speculated.
“Mongolia’s not a bowl.”
“But it’s barely one, so if we nipped back quick--”
“’s not much of a name,” said Pepper, hastily.
Adam’s brows drew together.
“We could call it the Battle of the Amazin’ly Clever ‘Munition,” he said.
“We could,” said Pepper, witheringly.
“Well, what do you want to call it, then,” Adam said, with a flicker of irritation.
“I don’t see why we’ve got to call it anything,” said Pepper. “We never used to.”
“Yes,” said Adam, “but this time we won.”
Pepper rode up the slope of a breaker and off the crest, carving a faceted furrow of green into the blue.
“We could call it the One We Won,” she said sarcastically.
“But we’re going to win all of them, so that doesn’t work,” said Adam, seriously. He turned eyes on her that glowed like mirrors.
Pepper closed her eyes. Fast-flying foam needled the lids.
“What, all of them?” she said.
“Of course, all of ‘em,” said Adam. “We’re better.”
“Oh,” said Pepper, exhaling. “Right.”
“And if they look like they’re winning I’ll just make us a whole ‘nother army or two,” said Adam, in what he probably thought was a reassuring manner. He smiled at her.
Pepper thought, in rapid succession: Poor Brian. Poor Wensley.
Better them than me.
St. James’ Park, at least, was almost its old self, minus the tourists and, for some reason, the ducks.
Aziraphale gazed disconsolately at the calm pond.
“Cheer up,” said Crowley, “they’re probably migrating.”
“Where to, exactly?”
“Funny you should say that,” said Crowley. “I was just about to ask the same question. Only about, you know, us. Not that this wasn’t a nice landing spot, but it doesn’t have much in the way of refreshments.”
“Does alcohol even have an effect on you in that form?” said Aziraphale. He sounded fascinated.
“It will if it knows what’s good for it,” Crowley said darkly.
Aziraphale nodded.
“My shop, then,” he said.
Crowley’s head snapped up. He’d been peering hopefully into the still depths of the water, but some issues were evidently more pressing than the possibility of fish.
“Um,” he said. “About that.”
Aziraphale listened.
“And you didn’t tell me this before… because?” he asked, when Crowley had finished explaining[1].
“I thought you knew,” Crowley said, wretchedly. “Besides, I had other things on my mind. My car exploded.”
Aziraphale covered his eyes. After a moment, his wings collapsed soundlessly into his shoulders. He sat like that, human even with regard to his metaphors, naked and unseeing, for quite some while.
“So,” said Crowley. “My place?”
“Certainly,” said Aziraphale, his eyes opening, behind the cage of his fingers.
He dropped his hand, and glanced down at his knees as if seeing them for the first time. With a snap, he materialised a suit. It was tweed. Crowley pulled back as far as was possible while leaving most of his body piled in a comfortable pyramid of loops, but the next thing he knew, Aziraphale was scooping him into his pocket.
“I’ll shed,” threatened Crowley. “Tweed always makes me peel, it made me peel when I was human, I’m going to shed like anything and you’ll be sorry you--”
“My dear,” said Aziraphale, “I don’t give a damn.”
“So you did watch that movie,” said Crowley, diverted briefly. “I always thought so.”
“I read the book,” Aziraphale replied.
“Hah,” said Crowley, “you did not, even you don’t have the stomach--”
They crossed the lawn and went down into what had once been a street, talking. And a human bystander, after overcoming their shock at seeing a man holding a conversation with the snake in his pocket[2], might have observed that it had the feel of an old and comfortable difference of opinion, draped over a new, shared uncertainty like a worn hunting jacket put on for the express purpose of concealing the new shirt that one’s wife bought one and told one in no uncertain terms one would be wearing, and also, it’s salmon, dear, not pink, so do stop fussing.
There were no such bystanders. Aziraphale and Crowley moved on, talking, into the twilight of the trees.
[1] Through an eloquent combination of words, gestures, embarrassed hissing, and what might or might not have been a brief snatch of interpretive dance.
[2] Or, depending on the observer, after leaping to the conclusion that the snake was a communications device by which the man was contacting the KGB headquarters and trying to convince a passing copper of the same.
And Tadfield was itself, minus everything.
Adam led her on foot down the road; they’d left their bikes at the quarry. “Who’s hungry?” he’d said to them, when they were gathered around the milk crate, and Brian’d shook his head and clutched his belly in mute protest, and Wensleydale’d stared at his shiny shoes and muttered, “I’m fine, thanks,” and Pepper-- Pepper had admitted that yes; yes she was. It had been a long time since lunch the day before.
So it was just them.
“There,” said Adam, near the end of the row, where there was a walled garden that had once belonged to Mr. R. P. Tyler and now, Pepper supposed, belonged to Adam.
They climbed the wall together. Halfway up, Adam started to scrabble, and Pepper helped him find purchase in the mortar. His wrist pushed bony into her palm.
When they got to the top, he said, “Apples,” with the flourish of a conjuror.
“I have got eyes, you know,” retorted Pepper, shortly. The tree was weighed down with unripe fruit: its limbs curved so far that her hair was at risk of getting tangled in the splay of twigs at the end of one.
Adam tore the apple hanging from where the twigs forked. It sat in the hollow of his hand, small and green and shining.
“D’you want to cut it?” he asked.
Pepper looked blank.
“With your sword,” Adam clarified, patiently.
“It’s at the quarry,” she said.
He drew it out of the rough stone beside him, and passed it to her. He set the apple spinning in the thin air.
She lifted the sword above her head, and brought it down with a snick through the apple's stem and then through the apple. When the cut was made a white seam of juice welled up on the smooth skin. But the halves did not part.
“Which side would you like?” said Adam.
Pepper heard him as if from a distance. She hesitated.
It had been a long time since lunch the day before, though. So she took the one nearest her, and bit down.
It was very sour and very cold and it tasted like the promise of winter. Juice trickling down her chin, she ate it all, even the core.
When she looked up Adam was still chewing on the edge of his half in a leisurely way and she had to fight the urge to tear it out of his mouth.
Instead, she stretched out her right arm, and lopped off the whole branch.
"You can put the sword back now," she said.
Adam looked shocked. "Oh, no," he said. "What d'you want to go and do that for? You can't go putting swords back. That never happens in stories. That ol' king di'n't put his sword back in the stone, did he?""
Pepper broke the stem of a second fruit. "This a story?"
"The best one ever," said Adam.
Pepper nodded, once, and chewed. She’d finished off another three by the time he was licking his fingers of the pulpy remains of the first.
“That was good,” he said. Light flashed in the curve of his wet lower lip when his mouth moved. It made the skin around it look fragile and heavy, all at once.
“Yeah,” said Pepper. “We ought to bring some back for Brian and Wensley, just in case they--”
“Don’t you worry,” said Adam. “They had their chance.”
Pepper said, slowly:
“Yes.”
She ate the last apple attached to the branch she’d cut off. It was good, and she felt obscurely ashamed to know it. But she didn’t stop.
“Here we are,” Crowley said, in the middle of Aziraphale’s detailed refutation of Crowley’s theory that Aziraphale had watched the entirety of Gone with the Wind during the two years that he, Crowley, spent bringing about Starbucks, and probably cried, too.
Aziraphale glanced at the riot[1] of vegetable matter surrounding them and said, “How can you tell?”
But in fact the building containing Crowley’s flat was in far better condition than any of its neighboring structures; the rainforest had given it a berth of several feet all around, especially at the upper level, and so whole patches of the front were clear and visible, including one with the address plate on it.
It was Aziraphale who spotted the reason.
“Oh,” he said, laughing, “oh, goodness.”
“What?” said Crowley, annoyed. “What is it?”
Aziraphale bent over, putting his hands on his knees. “Your houseplants,” he gasped, eventually.
Crowley slipped out of his pocket and out to Aziraphale’s wrist. Then he shinned up Aziraphale’s sleeve to the stiff cloth of the coat’s shoulder, where he could get a better look.
“Gosh,” he said.
“Quite,” said Aziraphale, wiping his eyes.
It was, indeed, Crowley’s houseplants. In his absence they’d burst out of their pots, and out of their sills, and out of the glass panes for good measure. They spilled, now, from the windows and from wide cracks in the walls, trailing down over the slick paint in waterfalls of green.
And they were, he saw, with affection welling undeniably in his twisted and demonic heart, scaring off the encroaching wildlife through such low and underhanded tactics as mimicking the behavior of mistletoe.
“Well,” said Aziraphale, “I suppose I should apologise for ever having mocked your choice of hobbies, my boy. This is really rather marvelous.”
“I know,” said Crowley, gleefully. It was just as well that he didn’t have tear ducts, or he’d have embarrassed them both. "The little monsters did me proud."
"That's one word for it," murmured Aziraphale, touching the door. It opened smoothly for him, despite the ivy that was tangled up in its hinges.
"One word? It's the--"
But the angel wasn't paying attention. “Hallo?” he called, and then seemed to realise what he'd said. He winced.
“No,” said Crowley, more subduedly, “there wouldn’t be anyone. The old lady downstairs got in Hastur’s way, and besides…”
Aziraphale’s mouth tightened. Crowley, who was busy tucking himself under the starched collar of his shirt for security, pretended not to notice.
He did notice, however, that when inside the angel climbed the stairs in rather a hurry. He didn’t fumble for a light switch until he was in Crowley’s living room, and then it was to no noticeable effect.
“Let there be light,” Aziraphale said. Crowley wished he hadn’t; it meant Crowley could see how his newly manifested shoes left smudges of rich red mud on the carpet, and also the rich red smear that had been Ligur, not very long ago[2]. On the other hand, it did make locating the drinks cabinet[3] go a little faster.
“Here we are,” said Aziraphale, pouring them each a glass. He set the cups down on the coffee table and added several bottles, for good measure, pulled from the back of the shelf.
“I was saving those,” commented Crowley.
“Yes?” said Aziraphale. “You did a good job. They seem thoroughly saved to me. And I would know.”
His eyes twinkled horribly.
Crowley hissed, and hauled himself up over the rim of the tumbler, and submerged his head whole into the wine. At first try it tasted extremely unpleasant. But he concentrated, and was rewarded, not much later, by the world beginning to blur pleasantly at the edges. Though that might have been the oxygen deprivation, he conceded, when he had pulled out again and was lying on his side in a pool of red liquid, panting.
He heard the clink as Aziraphale set the saucer down on the tabletop, and the slosh as Aziraphale emptied his glass into it. He rolled a little, as is easy to do, when you are a relatively light tube lying on a greased surface.
“I hate you,” he said.
“Don’t be foolish,” said Aziraphale placidly. “We’re in this together, after all.”
Crowley hissed, long and low.
Then he inched a little closer to the saucer.
[1] Unless it was a fracas. It can be hard to tell, with vegetable matter.
[2] Which was ringed all round by fat roots. It was... probably quite nutritious, Crowley decided, after he'd had a good shudder.
[3] It was buried behind the lattice of tendrils that had once been Crowley's prize Sansevieria trifasciata, and took some locating.
Mushrooms, Newt was discovering, were a serious business.
He’d finally dug up a likely-looking little cluster of flat caps that reminded him of one of his more successful circuit boards[1], which he thought might be a good omen, and he was getting ready to collect them when Anathema, padding up to look over his shoulder, snapped, “Not those,” and yanked him to his feet.
“You said to look for big flat orange ones!” Newt protested.
“With forking gills,” said Anathema, flatly.
“I thought you were joking about that bit,” said Newt, lamely.
She frowned. “I wouldn’t joke about that kind of thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I,” Newt snapped. “I mean, we’ve known each other for how long? Two days?”
“That’s a day longer than I ever thought we would,” said Anathema, coolly.
Newt found he didn't have any retort to this.
“So, uh,” he asked, after an awkward pause, “what would have happened to me if I’d sampled those… unforkingly gilled ones?”
Anathema shrugged. “Nothing irreversible. But we’d probably have to have found you a new pair of trousers.”
“Oh,” said Newt. He decided not to ask what constituted ‘irreversible’; he suspected he knew. “Er. Thanks for saving my trousers.”
“Any time,” said Anathema.
Newt swallowed hard.
Hitching up her skirt, Anathema stepped neatly over the offending fungi and ushered him gently around. “This way. I found a good patch-- that was why I came to get you in the first place.”
It was a patch, all right. He couldn’t see any gills, but he trusted her.
“I trust you,” he said.
“Chanterelles aren’t very good raw,” she said, sounding faintly apologetic. “Making a fire seems like a bad plan, though.”
“I’m sure they’ll be delicious,” he told her, and was amazed to find that he meant it. His mother had thought his stomach was too sensitive for mushrooms, especially ones with French names, once, but that had been another life.
Anathema’s lips quirked. She tucked her hair behind her ear, and then suddenly her clever fingers were undoing the fastenings of his jacket.
Newt gaped at her.
“I need something to hold them in,” she said briskly.
“Right, right,” he said. “Of course. Right. You do that.”
She slid the jacket off, and did that.
“Should I, uh--”
“No,” she said, snapping a stalk. “Just don’t go anywhere.”
“Right,” said Newt.
He watched his jacket fill with gold.
“I, uh… I’m glad we got another day,” he said.
“Yes,” said Anathema, matter-of-factly.
Newt was almost ready to elaborate when she added, “I just wish I knew why.”
“Maybe it’s not… as bad as all that,” he said, and cringed at the look she gave him. “I’m just saying, I haven’t actually seen anything that suggested the world was, you know. Ended. Maybe we just… witnessed the first ever case of spontaneous reforestation, or something. You don’t know.”
Anathema’s hands stilled for a moment.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. She did not look up. The side of her face was pale under the wing of her dark hair.
“Beautiful,” Newt agreed.
“I do know,” she said. She looked at him, and her green eyes were dry and bright. “It’s my business to know.”
She resumed gathering mushrooms, a little violently.
“Besides,” she said, “what exactly do you think happened to all the people? I felt it. I felt them go.”
Newt’s jaw worked.
“Listen,” he said, “all I’m saying is, maybe Agnes got some things wrong.”
Anathema unbent.
“Have a mushroom,” she said, sticking the sagging jacket and its bright load under his nose.
Nervously, he had one.
“It’s very… unusual,” he said at last.
“Agnes got everything right, up to a point,” said Anathema, ignoring this. “And she stopped there for a reason.”
“You’re not a descendent anymore,” said Newt. He felt like someone else was talking with his voice, but he believed what he was saying, which was what counted, he thought.
“You’re right there,” said Anathema. She gave a short laugh, and opened her purse, which had had index cards in it, and now held something else entirely.
Newt helped himself to another mushroom.
“So if all that target practice wasn’t to bring down wild deer,” he began, eyeing the glint of gunmetal in the open purse, “what…?”
“The Antichrist might still be out there,” said Anathema. “I have to be more prepared, now. That’s what not descending means.”
“Right,” said Newt. It was a good word, Right. It didn’t give anything away.
[1] That is, a circuit board belonging to that select subset of his creations which did not cause major property damage.
“You can go an’ explore your territory now,” Adam announced, generously, when he and Pepper returned. “I expect you’ll want to set up your base proper.”
Wensleydale looked at Pepper. She was dripping with juice, and she wore an unnameable expression. She mouthed: Sorry, and he felt cold, sitting in his ray of sunlight with Brian resting warmly against his shoulder, and he looked away again.
“What about you?” said Brian. “What’ll you do?”
“Oh,” said Adam, “I’ve got to think a bit. Got to plan. It’s not easy, you know, arrangin’ everything just so.”
He smiled encouragingly at them. “You all go,” he said. “Don’t you worry about me.”
He waited.
“You’ve got to send us, I think,” said Wensleydale.
Adam looked thoughtfully at a spot on the solid chalk cliff behind the gathered Them. He clapped his hands, and it was just the cliff. He clapped them again, and now there was a hole in the cliff that had always been there.
Dog came scrambling through, his tail wagging like the planchette on a schizophrenic Ouija board. He leapt up on Adam and began licking everything he could reach.
Adam extricated himself with some difficulty, laughing. “Good Dog,” he said. He patted the matted fur, and kissed the wet nose, and scratched the ear that was right side out. “You like Australia, I bet.”
Dog, who’d only just escaped the maw of a jellyfish[1] and was therefore feeling as benign as is possible for a hellhound, decided not to disabuse his master of the notion.
Not that he could have, anyway. Adam believed what he liked.
He burrowed further into Adam’s arms. For a few minutes, there was just a boy and his dog, rolling happily around in the dusty bottom of the quarry. Adam’s eyes were screwed up in laughter; his face had gone red from a thorough bathing by a rough beast’s tongue. There was dust smudging his t-shirt.
It could have been last Thursday. It could have been Sunday somewhere else, far away.
It wasn’t. The minutes passed, and Adam said, sternly, “All right, that’s enough. I can’t spoil you, you know. I’ve got to keep up your training.”
Dog whined.
Adam carried him back to the hole, and crouched down. Dog began to squirm, to no avail.
“Run,” Adam whispered.
Dog gave up. He ran.
“Good boy,” Adam shouted after him.
Then he gave chase.
[1] Jellyfish do not have maws, but what the ones common in Australia do have is worse. In any case, semantic precision was low on Dog’s list of concerns[2].
[2] Something of an accomplishment, this, given how short Dog’s list of concerns was.
This time it really was cold, arriving. But whatever he’d done to her meant she could make more things than just soldiers, so instead Pepper made the fur coat her grandmother wore to church and the theatre, which smelled of lavender water and her grandmother’s favourite cigarettes. It took her a while, the smell, but she sort of thought it was worth it, being wrapped up in its soft stinking folds.
She tramped south, for want of any better options. There was an awful lot of Russia. She had exploring to do.
It was hard, though, to enjoy the crunch of snow underfoot like the crunch of apples, with Wensleydale staring at her whenever she closed her eyes.
“Everyone has to pick a side,” Pepper said, aloud, into the wind.
“An interesting observation,” said War, moving out of Pepper’s peripheral vision in a sudden blossoming of red. “I quite agree.”
Without thinking, Pepper reached for the sword.
This wasn’t as effective a gesture as it might have been, because she’d jammed the sword through a belt loop and it was, accordingly, rendered inaccessible by a thick layer of fur between her hand and it. But the woman flinched anyway. It was good to see her flinch.
“There was no call for that,” War said, her hands raised, her eyes tightly shut. “I just want to talk.”
Her knuckles were red from frostbite. “Okay,” said Pepper, curiosity outweighing remembered rage. “Talk.”
War’s eyes opened. She attempted a smile, through peeling lipstick.
“Really,” she said, “I just wanted to look.”
Pepper folded her arms. “You’re looking right now, aren‘t you?”
War came closer.
“You’re not really what I would have expected,” she remarked.
“Don’t tell me you expected this,” Pepper said, scornfully.
War’s eyes were a rather ordinary pale brown, by then. But they glimmered like the campfires of an army.
“Not this,” she said, “no. I didn’t think I’d be replaced at all. But if I had, I would have thought it’d be by someone…”
Pepper glared at her.
“…someone strong,” said War, more distantly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pepper demanded. “I’m stronger’n you. You let go first.”
War grimaced, as if she’d bitten into something that disagreed with her.
“Yes, yes,” she said, “you took that sword, all right. But who made me let go? You, or that boy?”
Pepper said nothing.
War looked triumphant. “Just so. You’re, what-- ten?”
“Eleven,” said Pepper.
“Eleven, then. You’re not strong, little girl. You have a strong leader, but you’re just a human who knows how to go with the flow. You’ve someone else’s idea burning a hole in your head and a weapon you don’t know how to use. That’s not strength,” said War. “I know about strength.”
Pepper pulled the sword out through the coat, which disintegrated. It was only something she’d made, she thought, feeling the wind blow in where the fur had been. The smell’d not even lasted past the first ten minutes.
“You sure of that?” she asked.
“Very good,” said War, sounding delighted even as she stepped back. “You’re adorable.”
“I am not,” Pepper shouted, and lunged.
War leapt out of the way.
“You might even grow up to be quite something. If you grow up, that is,” she continued, as if to herself. “I can almost understand why the boy wants you. He’s young, after all. And there’s the hair.”
“Don’t talk about Adam like that,” Pepper snarled.
She slashed desperately at War’s mad grin, but War was dancing, now, like a man waving a banner before a bull.
“Does he still go by that name?” she inquired. She sounded amused. “What a charming affectation.”
“’S’not an affectation,” Pepper said. “It’s his name.”
The sword guided her arms to the left, and snapped around at the last possible second to slice upwards. War hissed between clenched teeth, and almost lost her balance, but still there was no contact.
Pepper screamed her frustration. War rolled her eyes.
“Humans,” she said. “The ones who only think they’re human are the worst of all. Like lemmings, you are.”
The sword’s tip lowered.
Pepper took a few deep breaths. War breathed, too, short and eager, and only her exhalation hung pale in the air.
“Maybe I’m just followin’,” Pepper said. “Like you said. But you were, too, back at the airbase. And that means,” she said, with growing assurance, “that means my leader’s stronger’n yours.”
She raised the sword again, and brought it around in a broad arc of white.
At least, that was what she meant to do, and very impressive it would probably have looked. Unfortunately, the nature of the move was such that it left her side wide open, and War took the opportunity to tackle her.
They went down in a tangle of limbs and orange hair. War had longer both; she ended up pinning Pepper face-down in the snow. Pepper sank, and--
--then there was the burn of the snow through her wet clothes and the burn of War’s skin through her fashionable couture. And Pepper heard the blood pounding in her ears like the scrape of a rough cloth on a blade; and she felt like a sword being heated for the forge.
She didn’t know that was what she felt like, of course; she registered heat, and pressure beyond what could be explained away by physics, not from War but from something inside her; and that was all. But she did.
She said, intelligently:
“Mmf.”
“You’re unfortunately correct,” War whispered. “Your leader is stronger than mine. But you’ll notice that I’m alone, now. My leader is pretending to be a snowman somewhere out there--”
Pepper contemplated this mental image, and then, very deliberately, stopped contemplating it.
“--and I’m here.”
Her grip on Pepper’s shoulder tightened.
“Do you see? Do you see, little girl?”
“Everyone has to pick a side,” Pepper repeated.
She fumbled, blindly, for what she had let go of when she was falling.
“Yes. But you can make your own bloody side,” War said, softly. “You can at least do that.”
She stood up just as Pepper closed her fingers around the handle, and ran for it.
Pepper rolled up into a sitting position. She watched her go. The sword’s hilt tugged at her hand, but that was all right; she’d had a little sister, once, and she’d learned how to resist tugging[1].
She sat in the snow for what felt like a hundred years. The sun did not move, in the blue dome of the sky.
[1] Even if she was more used to it being a tug in the direction of ice cream, rather than, say, gruesome retribution for words like knives that'd been under the skin.
Two saucers later, Crowley was in something of a knot.
Aziraphale mumbled, “Do you need a hand?”
“I think I need more than one,” said Crowley.
“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Sorry, can’t help you there.”
He drained his wineglass. Crowley glared.
“That reminds me,” he went on, wiping his lips on the back of his hand. “I meant to ask you-- why is it that you can’t transform?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” said Crowley. “But I suspect it’s Hastur’s idea of a good joke, sending the human-lover back to earth legless. Permanently.”
“Ah,” said Aziraphale.
He rolled up his trouser cuff to examine his ankle.
“You left bruises,” he said, after a while.
“Yes?” said Crowley. “You threatened to kick me off.”
“Hmmm,” said Aziraphale, noncommittally. He waved a hand over the bruises. Nothing happened.
“I do believe you’re not the only one whose superiors have developed a sense of humor,” he said.
“Took them long enough,” Crowley said.
“I could have stood for it to take them a little longer,” said Aziraphale. He unrolled the cuff, and slumped back on the white leather of the sofa.
Crowley began to untie his tail. Very carefully.
“So, what,” he said, after a while. “You think we’ve just got… these bodies? One chance? We screw up, and it’s back to the…”
“Cutting board,” said the angel helpfully.
Crowley winced. “Yeah. That.”
Aziraphale swirled his wine around a little. It turned clear. He had an experimental sip, and smiled in a manner that suggested to Crowley that whatever he’d miracled it into, it wasn’t water.
“So it seems,” he said.
Crowley flickered his tongue along the rim of the saucer, catching spots he’d missed.
“We’ll just have to be careful, then,” he said, brightly.
“Do you think the… atmospheric activity has died down?” Aziraphale asked.
Crowley looked at the level of the remaining wine in the bottles.
“Nah,” he said. “Not just yet, I shouldn’t think.”
There was a tree in the rainforest that rose above the rest.
Jaime Hernez would have liked to have his lunch under it. He was quite hungry, and he was getting a little worried, up there on his branch. It was a good branch-- a big flattish one with sunlight filtering down to it through the broad leaves-- but it was some way away from his children, and the ground. His children would be very afraid of the trees, he thought, and he drew the liana taut between his hands as he thought it.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been there. Sometimes it seemed as if no time at all had passed since the rain had stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. Sometimes it seemed as if it had been a hundred years of sitting and trying not to see how far the canopy extended in every direction.
In any case he was high up, and safe from the growling things, and sometimes it was difficult not to laugh.
The hunger made it easier, though. It was a pain in his middle, and it made him uncomfortably conscious of how out of place his body was, with its edges rubbing wrong against the air and the wood and the light, and its insides warring among themselves.
It got very bad just around when his lunch break would have been if he’d still had his job, or if his job had still been there to have. He clung to the branch and tried not to fall off, and he said to the tree, “Please,” and he felt the tree move. He had never in all his life known a tree like this one for moving.
The strange thing was--
There were so many strange things that he started laughing again at the thought. But the thing that seemed strange to him was that the tree, rather than closing up over him, brought its boughs closer together under him, so as to shield him from the dark below.
It was not exactly enough. But he kept his grip, and the tree was very solid, even through the loneliness of the pain. And after a while the hunger faded again.
He heard something that might have been footsteps, moving off. He shrugged.
“Thanks,” he said to the tree.
It rustled smugly.
So much for leaving, he thought. But then-- a little longer with green all around, that couldn’t hurt.
The boy was conjuring a tea set when Famine finally tracked him down in a flat dry place that had been called many things, including Arizona.
He had a napkin tucked into his shirt, and he was sitting cross-legged on a flat dry rock in front of a hunk of wood draped with stiff white cloth. The scales squatted in the middle. Around it, cutlery sprang up in rows, and there was china, too, forming from firmament.
But no food. Famine smiled.
“How’s it going, if I may ask?” he said.
Wensleydale looked up from behind fogged glasses.
“Oh,” he said, drearily. “You.”
This wasn’t quite the reception Famine had been hoping for, but he ploughed on.
“I’m here to make you an offer,” he said, looking the boy firmly in the lens, since the eye was obscured. “I think it’ll be of interest to you.”
Wensleydale said, “Then make it.”
Famine cast a longing glance at the scales and said, “You’re a smart boy. I can tell. So you probably know that what happened last night was… not what was scheduled to happen, hm?”
Wensleydale folded his arms. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “Adam scheduled it. Not very long beforehand, but he did.”
Famine developed the blank expression common to professionally genial adults upon encountering Wensleydale for the first time.
“It was not,” he said, “written.”
“Maybe not yet,” said Wensleydale. “Adam’s a great one for writin’ books, though. He wrote one about a pirate who was also a detective.”
Famine picked up a fork and fingered it.
“What I’m trying to say is… you can put things right,” he said, eventually, as if repeating words he had heard spoken many times but never before uttered himself.
Wensleydale stood up. He was not a tall boy, but the sun glinted on his glasses like a witty retort.
“Seems to me,” he said, “this is as right as anything.”
“You don’t believe that,” said Famine, and his face went hollow when he spoke, gaining strange depths under the skin.
“Who says?” Wensleydale demanded.
“Anyone could see it,” said Famine, brusquely.
“There’s not anyone,” said Wensleydale. “There’s you. Are you sayin’ I’m a liar?”
Famine straightened his tie.
“I understand,” he said, “that you are upset. That’s why I’m proposing this deal. Because I think I can help you, and you can help me. It may seem to you that this is as right as anything. But how long until that changes like everything else did?”
Wensleydale pivoted on his heel and stared stiffly towards the red of the horizon. Around him, the cacti bloomed.
Famine continued, quietly, “How long until he says, ‘I can make myself friends. Good enough for playing with, anyway’?”
“No,” said Wensleydale. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh?”
“No. He’d just make us do what he wanted. He’d make us what he wanted. And we’d be good enough.”
“Is that right?” said Famine.
Wensleydale’s fist clenched against his thigh. He was removing his glasses, Famine saw, and wiping them furiously on his shirt.
“Your pal,” Famine coaxed. “The one who took Pollution’s crown. How’s he doing? He’ll need fixing soon. Adam will do it, won’t he.”
“Stop,” said Wensleydale. He turned back, and Famine saw clear trails of mucus on the boy’s upper lip. His features were puffed up with the suddenness of his grief, and Famine felt a twinge of what he assumed was distaste for the sight of all that flesh, crowding forward.
“What’s your deal, then?”
“I want you to let me into your head. Literally. That’s all. It won’t take much. Spit and a handshake and a little concentration on your part. But that way I’ll be able to help you every step of the way, and you can save them.”
“An’ what’s in it for you?” said Wensleydale.
“Me?” said Famine. “I… have a few complaints to register, myself.”
His smile was incredibly thin.
Wensleydale stared at him with pale, myopic eyes, and Famine wondered, idly, what he saw; what unfocused and horribly ordinary thing stood there. He decided he was glad he didn’t know.
“Spit?” the boy said.
“Yes,” said Famine. “I on your hand, you on mine.”
“Fine,” said Wensleydale, after the tiniest of hesitations.
Famine presented his palm. Wensleydale, after working at it for about a minute, produced an acceptable gobbet. It felt like acid, but Famine didn’t mind. He wouldn’t be feeling anything for long.
He spat into Wensleydale’s half-closed hand, with great precision, though not much actual liquid. He’d always had something of a dry mouth.
“Now,” said Famine, “when we shake, use what… he gave you.”
Wensleydale’s face was a mask. They shook.
“That tingles,” said the man who had been Famine, and then he slumped like a marionette with the strings snipped, or possibly blown up.
“It does,” Wensleydale agreed. The heap of businessman at his feet did not respond, but something inside him was faintly amused.
go back to part one
go on to part three
There was nothing very interesting going through the woman’s head. Currently she was wondering vaguely whether she’d left the gas on[1]. She’d spent a while panicking, earlier, but ever since she’d convinced herself she was hallucinating she’d been very composed. She did wish she could remember why she was hallucinating twenty years after she’d sworn off her youthful dabbling in narcotics in favour of such safe, adult activities as week-long benders and not sleeping, but she figured she’d work that one out eventually. In the meantime, why worry?
She watched in polite bewilderment, therefore, as fifty-foot high men in combat gear loped across the plain, periodically ducking down as if the grass, which just barely went up to their bootlaces, would be anything like sufficient cover for their faintly translucent bulk.
Their bullets, though, were impressively realistic. So were their intestines.
The woman, consideringly, lay back and waited for them to go away.
Her name was Yoon Sun, and she did not have much significance in the grand scheme of things. In fact she did not have much significance in any smaller schemes; even her significance in her own personal scheme varied depending on the time of month and whether there was anything that sloshed pleasantly in glass bottles at hand.
But she was not dead. And after a while, the soldiers went away.
In their wake came wind, the smell of imagined blood, and what Yoon Sun believed to be another woman.
She was picking her way through the web of cracks in the earth left by one enormous shoe’s tread, her hair streaming out from her bent head like a flag. Yoon thought she was American; she looked very glamorous, even with goosebumps all down her long bronze legs and guts staining her boots.
When she came close enough for Yoon to hear what she was muttering, though, she spoke in an accent that Yoon recognised as English, because she had watched sitcoms with English people in them.
The part of Yoon’s brain that she did not use for watching sitcoms recognised that the woman spoke the dialect of danger, which comes in all pitches and volumes and has nothing to do with the rounding of vowels but which is, nevertheless, distinct.
Yoon found herself growing less enamored of the smart black of her specially tailored jacket, which stood out stark against the frost-pale leaves of grass. She tried to flatten down against the dry soil and resemble a rock. It didn’t work very well; the woman, as it turned out, had extremely sharp eyes[2]. Among other things.
“Hullo,” she said, crouching down beside Yoon. “I didn’t think there were many of you lot left.”
Yoon stared at the woman’s extremely sharp boots. She hadn’t understood more than a few of the words-- her command of English had never been good, even at the outset of her career, when she was still taking night classes for it. But she understood that she was not expected to make a contribution.
The woman then switched to fluent Korean.
“Where did they go?”
Trembling, Yoon Sun pointed after the soldiers. She was horribly aware, as she did it, that she was still… not expected to make a contribution. That she was a curiosity, perhaps, and a signpost, and that was all.
“Thanks,” said the woman, low and husky. The hairs stood up on the back of Yoon’s neck.
The woman strolled off.
Yoon stared after her. Then she rolled over onto her side, hugging herself. Her subconscious had nothing like that in it, she thought, very coherently, and smelled blood again: but realer, this time, and older, blood that had been spilled in sand long before there were calendars to mark the date of death.
She dragged her briefcase toward her. It was almost empty. She closed it against her chest, and held it there.
The soldiers would come back soon, she thought. And then she would leave, and look for-- look for--
She would look.
Yes.
[1] She had. But then, she’d also left her apartment complex still standing and her husband sleeping peacefully. Things change.
[2] It didn’t help that there are not all that many rocks out there that wear colourful ties and dangly earrings to show that yes, they are free-spirited, innovative individuals working creatively within the apparently rigid frame of the management structure.
War stepped into snow, and met Death, coming the other way.
“Hi,” she said.
He inclined his skull. YOU HAVE A LITTLE SOMETHING ON YOUR LIP, he said, tapping the corresponding area of bone on his own chin.
War made no move to wipe away the gore. “Toys,” she said, disdainfully. “They play with toys and call it Me.”
THEY ARE NOT WRONG, said Death.
War’s lips curled, under clinging blood.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But I could have had the Hosts of Heaven and Hell doing my work. I could be rending the sky, right now, if it weren’t for that boy. And you!”
She paused, less for breath than drama.
I HELPED HIM. YES. I ALLOWED THIS TO PROCEED.
War’s head snapped up at that.
“And for what?” she demanded. “That’s what I’ve been trying to understand. What on Earth is in it for you, lord?”
She was looking somewhat the worse for wear, under the artistic application of viscera. Her lips were chapped and dark rings showed under her vivid eyes. Her arm swung jerkily at her side as she talked: its movements had an amputated quality to them.
“No mortals,” she said, as if counting off a mental list. “No--”
YES, THERE ARE, said Death. Things glittered in his sockets that might have been stars, or, then again, might not have.
War looked away.
“Pollution’s gone, then?” she said, brittle as cheap steel. “I thought so.”
WELL SPOTTED, said Death. His grin was not unkind. It glistened, the same clean white the snow was, all around.
“All right,” she said. “All right. But the humans.”
ARE NOT HERE. THAT IS ALL. EVEN HIS POWER HAS AN END.
“Here, though.”
Death tilted his scythe at waist-level, idly. In the metal, War could make out a piece of a sky reflected from some other hour or place. It had clouds in it, and promises.
HE MISSED A FEW, he said, shrugging.
“Yes, I noticed. But the rest?” said War, impatiently. “You can’t get to the rest.”
THAT IS NOT, said Death, MY PRIMARY CONCERN.
“Then what is?”
I DO THE JOB THAT IS IN FRONT OF ME.
“What’s that, old chap,” sneered War, and for as long as it takes for a shell to burst, recaptured her old unnatural loveliness. “Me?”
I THOUGHT I MIGHT MAKE A SNOWMAN, said Death, mildly.
There was a silence.
War began to laugh.
Laughing, she bent down, and picked up a handful of snow, which blushed in her palm like Pepper caught in the act of flipping through a new issue of Seventeen. Death watched with interest and concern as she hefted the lump.
“I have a better idea,” she said, with her back still to him; and then a sphere of bloody snow was hurtling towards his nose holes.
OH, B--
“--ugger,” said Aziraphale, wheeling right just in time to avoid being decapitated by an oversized shuriken.
“I miss the cannonballs,” said Crowley, contemplatively.
It was noon. Objects had been hurtling past them from somewhere east of Europe for about twenty minutes now, and in that brief time the boy-- because who else would it be, after all-- had cycled through most of the major styles of weaponised projectile that had ever been favoured by a human civilisation in all of history, and several that hadn’t been favoured by any[1].
“I miss not having my wings out,” said Aziraphale. “They make me a much larger target.”
“Some angel you are,” said Crowley. His heart wasn’t in it. He was busy keeping an eye out for UFOs.
“Sorry? Did I just hear you say you’d like to fly on your own a bit?” said Aziraphale.
“Don’t get your feathers in a twist,” said Crowley. “I was only joking.”
“You and your jokes,” said Aziraphale.
“Yes, well. I’m a bit tense. It’s this body. It’s afraid of dying. Also, heights.”
Aziraphale gave him an incredulous look.
“It is!” said Crowley defensively. “Snakes aren’t naturally airborne creatures[2], you know.”
“Some demon you are,” said Aziraphale.
“A body is a body,” Crowley snapped. “You of all people ought to know that.”
Aziraphale was briefly distracted by the need to dodge a stray katana.
“Oh come on,” Crowley shouted at Russia, with the reckless abandon and wild courage that comes with knowing one is safely out of earshot, “that’s not even aerodynamically feasible!”
“Neither are bees,” Aziraphale observed.
“What?”
“Bees,” said Aziraphale. “They’re not aerodynamically feasible. I never liked them. Gabriel said they demonstrated the power of faith,” he added, inconsequentially.
“What didn’t Gabriel say that about, though?”
“Demons,” said Aziraphale, promptly, and went on, before Crowley could respond: “It’s true, I suppose, about bodies. Mine’s exhausted.”
Crowley rolled his eyes. There was no way Aziraphale could have seen this, under the circumstances, but he detected it regardless, the stubborn git.
“Not from flying,” he said sharply. “From being in this world. With him in it. He doesn’t want humans here.”
“He hasn’t got humans here,” Crowley objected.
“Not many,” said Aziraphale. The light poured off his wings like white smoke.
“And that’s not a proper human body, is it,” said Crowley.
“I don’t know about that,” said Aziraphale. “After all, my dear, the wings are just a metaphor.”
“Please don’t say things like that,” Crowley groaned, “or I might just squeeze your foot off.”
“A substantial, airworthy metaphor,” Aziraphale corrected himself.
“Not. Helping.”
Aziraphale covered his smile with his hand. And was almost knocked out of the sky by a small meteor.
“We’re landing,” he told Crowley, when he’d recovered.
“Great,” said Crowley, somewhat indistinctly; his nose was jammed up against the back of Aziraphale’s knee, because anything was better than watching the horizon swing this way and that like the sword of an amateur fencer practising alone, in his room, late at night, with a frilly shirt on[4].
Aziraphale asked, “My dear fellow, would you say we’ve gone far enough south for that suspicious bulge in the canopy to be London?”
Crowley risked an eyeful. It was, indeed, a suspicious bulge. He quite approved, on general principles: the island looked rather like a snake itself, green-scaled and sinuous and busily digesting something small and furry.
“…yes, actually,” he said. “There’s the Tower, see?” He poked his tail at the visible turret.
“So it is,” said Aziraphale. He frowned. “But there are lots of buildings taller than the Tower in London, and I don’t see any of them showing…”
“Perhaps he didn’t find those so interesting,” suggested Crowley.
Aziraphale shivered.
“Perhaps,” he said, angling his wings to the left and down.
[1] The flaming chicken, the ludicrously oversized baseball, Wensleydale, etc.
[2] And didn’t like it when they were unnaturally airborne either, as Crowley had discovered in Mexico circa 400 BC, while orchestrating the rise[3] of the false idol Quetzalcoatl.
[3] All the way through the temple roof, at which point he was distracted by the need to shut up Aziraphale, who’d been sniggering helplessly in a corner.
[4] Or worse, none at all.
The light dappled Anathema’s upper back and arms. Divided up by green shade, standing utterly still, she looked less like a quite possibly insane young woman and more like a collection of parts that belonged precisely where they were. The short bright hairs on her long forearm; the deeper well of shadow where her cheek was lowered against her shoulder for sighting-- they seemed to have blossomed out of the damp wood.
Even the gleam of the barrel could easily have been the twinkle in the eye of some lurking carnivore, Newt considered.
The illusion fell apart when she pulled the trigger, though. Moving, her body separated from its backdrop.
“I think I hit it,” she said, peering into the vines. “Can you go--?”
“Thanks,” said Newt, but he went.
The makeshift target[1] was indeed lying there, heaped ungracefully on mossy stones. It flopped sadly in his hands.
“Well done,” he said, returning. “We’ll eat tonight.”
“Yes,” said Anathema. “Mushrooms.”
Newt sagged. She took pity on him, and also the target. The target she held up to the light, to no immediately obvious effect.
She moved it a little to the left.
Nothing.
She moved it a little to the right.
Newt examined his watch. It wasn’t working, but this, at least, was a familiar phenomenon.
Anathema was about to try flipping the doll over when, at last, gold flared through the round hole in its twiggy center, as it was at last brought into alignment with a shaft of sun.
Newt clapped, dutifully. Anathema gave him his jacket back.
[1] Newt’s jacket, filled with twigs: this sophisticated mannequin’s structural integrity secured by one (1) Witchfinder Private’s regulation pin.
How to describe the First Battle, which raged through lunchtime and out the other side without interruption by parent, teacher, or aged aunt? Which, accordingly, altered the coastlines of several major continents, and opened up new bays and capes at the edges of the minds of the Them, where the power poured in?
Adam’s mind, now more open to power than a minimalist kind of archipelago is to sea, considered this pressing question as he pedalled back towards Tadfield.
His wheels squeaked quietly over the choppy waves of the North Sea.
Clackclackclackclack, went Pepper’s bike beside him. A mile or so off, the smudged figures of Brian and Wensleydale were discernable, racing along parallel currents.
“What happened to Dog?” Pepper said.
“Oh,” said Adam, “he’s havin’ adventures in Australia, an’ such.”
Pepper leaned low over her handlebars and pedalled harder. The ocean blurred past at the same rate no matter what gear she was in, or how hard she braked, but she did it anyway.
“We could call it the Battle of Mongolia Bowl,” Adam speculated.
“Mongolia’s not a bowl.”
“But it’s barely one, so if we nipped back quick--”
“’s not much of a name,” said Pepper, hastily.
Adam’s brows drew together.
“We could call it the Battle of the Amazin’ly Clever ‘Munition,” he said.
“We could,” said Pepper, witheringly.
“Well, what do you want to call it, then,” Adam said, with a flicker of irritation.
“I don’t see why we’ve got to call it anything,” said Pepper. “We never used to.”
“Yes,” said Adam, “but this time we won.”
Pepper rode up the slope of a breaker and off the crest, carving a faceted furrow of green into the blue.
“We could call it the One We Won,” she said sarcastically.
“But we’re going to win all of them, so that doesn’t work,” said Adam, seriously. He turned eyes on her that glowed like mirrors.
Pepper closed her eyes. Fast-flying foam needled the lids.
“What, all of them?” she said.
“Of course, all of ‘em,” said Adam. “We’re better.”
“Oh,” said Pepper, exhaling. “Right.”
“And if they look like they’re winning I’ll just make us a whole ‘nother army or two,” said Adam, in what he probably thought was a reassuring manner. He smiled at her.
Pepper thought, in rapid succession: Poor Brian. Poor Wensley.
Better them than me.
St. James’ Park, at least, was almost its old self, minus the tourists and, for some reason, the ducks.
Aziraphale gazed disconsolately at the calm pond.
“Cheer up,” said Crowley, “they’re probably migrating.”
“Where to, exactly?”
“Funny you should say that,” said Crowley. “I was just about to ask the same question. Only about, you know, us. Not that this wasn’t a nice landing spot, but it doesn’t have much in the way of refreshments.”
“Does alcohol even have an effect on you in that form?” said Aziraphale. He sounded fascinated.
“It will if it knows what’s good for it,” Crowley said darkly.
Aziraphale nodded.
“My shop, then,” he said.
Crowley’s head snapped up. He’d been peering hopefully into the still depths of the water, but some issues were evidently more pressing than the possibility of fish.
“Um,” he said. “About that.”
Aziraphale listened.
“And you didn’t tell me this before… because?” he asked, when Crowley had finished explaining[1].
“I thought you knew,” Crowley said, wretchedly. “Besides, I had other things on my mind. My car exploded.”
Aziraphale covered his eyes. After a moment, his wings collapsed soundlessly into his shoulders. He sat like that, human even with regard to his metaphors, naked and unseeing, for quite some while.
“So,” said Crowley. “My place?”
“Certainly,” said Aziraphale, his eyes opening, behind the cage of his fingers.
He dropped his hand, and glanced down at his knees as if seeing them for the first time. With a snap, he materialised a suit. It was tweed. Crowley pulled back as far as was possible while leaving most of his body piled in a comfortable pyramid of loops, but the next thing he knew, Aziraphale was scooping him into his pocket.
“I’ll shed,” threatened Crowley. “Tweed always makes me peel, it made me peel when I was human, I’m going to shed like anything and you’ll be sorry you--”
“My dear,” said Aziraphale, “I don’t give a damn.”
“So you did watch that movie,” said Crowley, diverted briefly. “I always thought so.”
“I read the book,” Aziraphale replied.
“Hah,” said Crowley, “you did not, even you don’t have the stomach--”
They crossed the lawn and went down into what had once been a street, talking. And a human bystander, after overcoming their shock at seeing a man holding a conversation with the snake in his pocket[2], might have observed that it had the feel of an old and comfortable difference of opinion, draped over a new, shared uncertainty like a worn hunting jacket put on for the express purpose of concealing the new shirt that one’s wife bought one and told one in no uncertain terms one would be wearing, and also, it’s salmon, dear, not pink, so do stop fussing.
There were no such bystanders. Aziraphale and Crowley moved on, talking, into the twilight of the trees.
[1] Through an eloquent combination of words, gestures, embarrassed hissing, and what might or might not have been a brief snatch of interpretive dance.
[2] Or, depending on the observer, after leaping to the conclusion that the snake was a communications device by which the man was contacting the KGB headquarters and trying to convince a passing copper of the same.
And Tadfield was itself, minus everything.
Adam led her on foot down the road; they’d left their bikes at the quarry. “Who’s hungry?” he’d said to them, when they were gathered around the milk crate, and Brian’d shook his head and clutched his belly in mute protest, and Wensleydale’d stared at his shiny shoes and muttered, “I’m fine, thanks,” and Pepper-- Pepper had admitted that yes; yes she was. It had been a long time since lunch the day before.
So it was just them.
“There,” said Adam, near the end of the row, where there was a walled garden that had once belonged to Mr. R. P. Tyler and now, Pepper supposed, belonged to Adam.
They climbed the wall together. Halfway up, Adam started to scrabble, and Pepper helped him find purchase in the mortar. His wrist pushed bony into her palm.
When they got to the top, he said, “Apples,” with the flourish of a conjuror.
“I have got eyes, you know,” retorted Pepper, shortly. The tree was weighed down with unripe fruit: its limbs curved so far that her hair was at risk of getting tangled in the splay of twigs at the end of one.
Adam tore the apple hanging from where the twigs forked. It sat in the hollow of his hand, small and green and shining.
“D’you want to cut it?” he asked.
Pepper looked blank.
“With your sword,” Adam clarified, patiently.
“It’s at the quarry,” she said.
He drew it out of the rough stone beside him, and passed it to her. He set the apple spinning in the thin air.
She lifted the sword above her head, and brought it down with a snick through the apple's stem and then through the apple. When the cut was made a white seam of juice welled up on the smooth skin. But the halves did not part.
“Which side would you like?” said Adam.
Pepper heard him as if from a distance. She hesitated.
It had been a long time since lunch the day before, though. So she took the one nearest her, and bit down.
It was very sour and very cold and it tasted like the promise of winter. Juice trickling down her chin, she ate it all, even the core.
When she looked up Adam was still chewing on the edge of his half in a leisurely way and she had to fight the urge to tear it out of his mouth.
Instead, she stretched out her right arm, and lopped off the whole branch.
"You can put the sword back now," she said.
Adam looked shocked. "Oh, no," he said. "What d'you want to go and do that for? You can't go putting swords back. That never happens in stories. That ol' king di'n't put his sword back in the stone, did he?""
Pepper broke the stem of a second fruit. "This a story?"
"The best one ever," said Adam.
Pepper nodded, once, and chewed. She’d finished off another three by the time he was licking his fingers of the pulpy remains of the first.
“That was good,” he said. Light flashed in the curve of his wet lower lip when his mouth moved. It made the skin around it look fragile and heavy, all at once.
“Yeah,” said Pepper. “We ought to bring some back for Brian and Wensley, just in case they--”
“Don’t you worry,” said Adam. “They had their chance.”
Pepper said, slowly:
“Yes.”
She ate the last apple attached to the branch she’d cut off. It was good, and she felt obscurely ashamed to know it. But she didn’t stop.
“Here we are,” Crowley said, in the middle of Aziraphale’s detailed refutation of Crowley’s theory that Aziraphale had watched the entirety of Gone with the Wind during the two years that he, Crowley, spent bringing about Starbucks, and probably cried, too.
Aziraphale glanced at the riot[1] of vegetable matter surrounding them and said, “How can you tell?”
But in fact the building containing Crowley’s flat was in far better condition than any of its neighboring structures; the rainforest had given it a berth of several feet all around, especially at the upper level, and so whole patches of the front were clear and visible, including one with the address plate on it.
It was Aziraphale who spotted the reason.
“Oh,” he said, laughing, “oh, goodness.”
“What?” said Crowley, annoyed. “What is it?”
Aziraphale bent over, putting his hands on his knees. “Your houseplants,” he gasped, eventually.
Crowley slipped out of his pocket and out to Aziraphale’s wrist. Then he shinned up Aziraphale’s sleeve to the stiff cloth of the coat’s shoulder, where he could get a better look.
“Gosh,” he said.
“Quite,” said Aziraphale, wiping his eyes.
It was, indeed, Crowley’s houseplants. In his absence they’d burst out of their pots, and out of their sills, and out of the glass panes for good measure. They spilled, now, from the windows and from wide cracks in the walls, trailing down over the slick paint in waterfalls of green.
And they were, he saw, with affection welling undeniably in his twisted and demonic heart, scaring off the encroaching wildlife through such low and underhanded tactics as mimicking the behavior of mistletoe.
“Well,” said Aziraphale, “I suppose I should apologise for ever having mocked your choice of hobbies, my boy. This is really rather marvelous.”
“I know,” said Crowley, gleefully. It was just as well that he didn’t have tear ducts, or he’d have embarrassed them both. "The little monsters did me proud."
"That's one word for it," murmured Aziraphale, touching the door. It opened smoothly for him, despite the ivy that was tangled up in its hinges.
"One word? It's the--"
But the angel wasn't paying attention. “Hallo?” he called, and then seemed to realise what he'd said. He winced.
“No,” said Crowley, more subduedly, “there wouldn’t be anyone. The old lady downstairs got in Hastur’s way, and besides…”
Aziraphale’s mouth tightened. Crowley, who was busy tucking himself under the starched collar of his shirt for security, pretended not to notice.
He did notice, however, that when inside the angel climbed the stairs in rather a hurry. He didn’t fumble for a light switch until he was in Crowley’s living room, and then it was to no noticeable effect.
“Let there be light,” Aziraphale said. Crowley wished he hadn’t; it meant Crowley could see how his newly manifested shoes left smudges of rich red mud on the carpet, and also the rich red smear that had been Ligur, not very long ago[2]. On the other hand, it did make locating the drinks cabinet[3] go a little faster.
“Here we are,” said Aziraphale, pouring them each a glass. He set the cups down on the coffee table and added several bottles, for good measure, pulled from the back of the shelf.
“I was saving those,” commented Crowley.
“Yes?” said Aziraphale. “You did a good job. They seem thoroughly saved to me. And I would know.”
His eyes twinkled horribly.
Crowley hissed, and hauled himself up over the rim of the tumbler, and submerged his head whole into the wine. At first try it tasted extremely unpleasant. But he concentrated, and was rewarded, not much later, by the world beginning to blur pleasantly at the edges. Though that might have been the oxygen deprivation, he conceded, when he had pulled out again and was lying on his side in a pool of red liquid, panting.
He heard the clink as Aziraphale set the saucer down on the tabletop, and the slosh as Aziraphale emptied his glass into it. He rolled a little, as is easy to do, when you are a relatively light tube lying on a greased surface.
“I hate you,” he said.
“Don’t be foolish,” said Aziraphale placidly. “We’re in this together, after all.”
Crowley hissed, long and low.
Then he inched a little closer to the saucer.
[1] Unless it was a fracas. It can be hard to tell, with vegetable matter.
[2] Which was ringed all round by fat roots. It was... probably quite nutritious, Crowley decided, after he'd had a good shudder.
[3] It was buried behind the lattice of tendrils that had once been Crowley's prize Sansevieria trifasciata, and took some locating.
Mushrooms, Newt was discovering, were a serious business.
He’d finally dug up a likely-looking little cluster of flat caps that reminded him of one of his more successful circuit boards[1], which he thought might be a good omen, and he was getting ready to collect them when Anathema, padding up to look over his shoulder, snapped, “Not those,” and yanked him to his feet.
“You said to look for big flat orange ones!” Newt protested.
“With forking gills,” said Anathema, flatly.
“I thought you were joking about that bit,” said Newt, lamely.
She frowned. “I wouldn’t joke about that kind of thing.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know, would I,” Newt snapped. “I mean, we’ve known each other for how long? Two days?”
“That’s a day longer than I ever thought we would,” said Anathema, coolly.
Newt found he didn't have any retort to this.
“So, uh,” he asked, after an awkward pause, “what would have happened to me if I’d sampled those… unforkingly gilled ones?”
Anathema shrugged. “Nothing irreversible. But we’d probably have to have found you a new pair of trousers.”
“Oh,” said Newt. He decided not to ask what constituted ‘irreversible’; he suspected he knew. “Er. Thanks for saving my trousers.”
“Any time,” said Anathema.
Newt swallowed hard.
Hitching up her skirt, Anathema stepped neatly over the offending fungi and ushered him gently around. “This way. I found a good patch-- that was why I came to get you in the first place.”
It was a patch, all right. He couldn’t see any gills, but he trusted her.
“I trust you,” he said.
“Chanterelles aren’t very good raw,” she said, sounding faintly apologetic. “Making a fire seems like a bad plan, though.”
“I’m sure they’ll be delicious,” he told her, and was amazed to find that he meant it. His mother had thought his stomach was too sensitive for mushrooms, especially ones with French names, once, but that had been another life.
Anathema’s lips quirked. She tucked her hair behind her ear, and then suddenly her clever fingers were undoing the fastenings of his jacket.
Newt gaped at her.
“I need something to hold them in,” she said briskly.
“Right, right,” he said. “Of course. Right. You do that.”
She slid the jacket off, and did that.
“Should I, uh--”
“No,” she said, snapping a stalk. “Just don’t go anywhere.”
“Right,” said Newt.
He watched his jacket fill with gold.
“I, uh… I’m glad we got another day,” he said.
“Yes,” said Anathema, matter-of-factly.
Newt was almost ready to elaborate when she added, “I just wish I knew why.”
“Maybe it’s not… as bad as all that,” he said, and cringed at the look she gave him. “I’m just saying, I haven’t actually seen anything that suggested the world was, you know. Ended. Maybe we just… witnessed the first ever case of spontaneous reforestation, or something. You don’t know.”
Anathema’s hands stilled for a moment.
“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. She did not look up. The side of her face was pale under the wing of her dark hair.
“Beautiful,” Newt agreed.
“I do know,” she said. She looked at him, and her green eyes were dry and bright. “It’s my business to know.”
She resumed gathering mushrooms, a little violently.
“Besides,” she said, “what exactly do you think happened to all the people? I felt it. I felt them go.”
Newt’s jaw worked.
“Listen,” he said, “all I’m saying is, maybe Agnes got some things wrong.”
Anathema unbent.
“Have a mushroom,” she said, sticking the sagging jacket and its bright load under his nose.
Nervously, he had one.
“It’s very… unusual,” he said at last.
“Agnes got everything right, up to a point,” said Anathema, ignoring this. “And she stopped there for a reason.”
“You’re not a descendent anymore,” said Newt. He felt like someone else was talking with his voice, but he believed what he was saying, which was what counted, he thought.
“You’re right there,” said Anathema. She gave a short laugh, and opened her purse, which had had index cards in it, and now held something else entirely.
Newt helped himself to another mushroom.
“So if all that target practice wasn’t to bring down wild deer,” he began, eyeing the glint of gunmetal in the open purse, “what…?”
“The Antichrist might still be out there,” said Anathema. “I have to be more prepared, now. That’s what not descending means.”
“Right,” said Newt. It was a good word, Right. It didn’t give anything away.
[1] That is, a circuit board belonging to that select subset of his creations which did not cause major property damage.
“You can go an’ explore your territory now,” Adam announced, generously, when he and Pepper returned. “I expect you’ll want to set up your base proper.”
Wensleydale looked at Pepper. She was dripping with juice, and she wore an unnameable expression. She mouthed: Sorry, and he felt cold, sitting in his ray of sunlight with Brian resting warmly against his shoulder, and he looked away again.
“What about you?” said Brian. “What’ll you do?”
“Oh,” said Adam, “I’ve got to think a bit. Got to plan. It’s not easy, you know, arrangin’ everything just so.”
He smiled encouragingly at them. “You all go,” he said. “Don’t you worry about me.”
He waited.
“You’ve got to send us, I think,” said Wensleydale.
Adam looked thoughtfully at a spot on the solid chalk cliff behind the gathered Them. He clapped his hands, and it was just the cliff. He clapped them again, and now there was a hole in the cliff that had always been there.
Dog came scrambling through, his tail wagging like the planchette on a schizophrenic Ouija board. He leapt up on Adam and began licking everything he could reach.
Adam extricated himself with some difficulty, laughing. “Good Dog,” he said. He patted the matted fur, and kissed the wet nose, and scratched the ear that was right side out. “You like Australia, I bet.”
Dog, who’d only just escaped the maw of a jellyfish[1] and was therefore feeling as benign as is possible for a hellhound, decided not to disabuse his master of the notion.
Not that he could have, anyway. Adam believed what he liked.
He burrowed further into Adam’s arms. For a few minutes, there was just a boy and his dog, rolling happily around in the dusty bottom of the quarry. Adam’s eyes were screwed up in laughter; his face had gone red from a thorough bathing by a rough beast’s tongue. There was dust smudging his t-shirt.
It could have been last Thursday. It could have been Sunday somewhere else, far away.
It wasn’t. The minutes passed, and Adam said, sternly, “All right, that’s enough. I can’t spoil you, you know. I’ve got to keep up your training.”
Dog whined.
Adam carried him back to the hole, and crouched down. Dog began to squirm, to no avail.
“Run,” Adam whispered.
Dog gave up. He ran.
“Good boy,” Adam shouted after him.
Then he gave chase.
[1] Jellyfish do not have maws, but what the ones common in Australia do have is worse. In any case, semantic precision was low on Dog’s list of concerns[2].
[2] Something of an accomplishment, this, given how short Dog’s list of concerns was.
This time it really was cold, arriving. But whatever he’d done to her meant she could make more things than just soldiers, so instead Pepper made the fur coat her grandmother wore to church and the theatre, which smelled of lavender water and her grandmother’s favourite cigarettes. It took her a while, the smell, but she sort of thought it was worth it, being wrapped up in its soft stinking folds.
She tramped south, for want of any better options. There was an awful lot of Russia. She had exploring to do.
It was hard, though, to enjoy the crunch of snow underfoot like the crunch of apples, with Wensleydale staring at her whenever she closed her eyes.
“Everyone has to pick a side,” Pepper said, aloud, into the wind.
“An interesting observation,” said War, moving out of Pepper’s peripheral vision in a sudden blossoming of red. “I quite agree.”
Without thinking, Pepper reached for the sword.
This wasn’t as effective a gesture as it might have been, because she’d jammed the sword through a belt loop and it was, accordingly, rendered inaccessible by a thick layer of fur between her hand and it. But the woman flinched anyway. It was good to see her flinch.
“There was no call for that,” War said, her hands raised, her eyes tightly shut. “I just want to talk.”
Her knuckles were red from frostbite. “Okay,” said Pepper, curiosity outweighing remembered rage. “Talk.”
War’s eyes opened. She attempted a smile, through peeling lipstick.
“Really,” she said, “I just wanted to look.”
Pepper folded her arms. “You’re looking right now, aren‘t you?”
War came closer.
“You’re not really what I would have expected,” she remarked.
“Don’t tell me you expected this,” Pepper said, scornfully.
War’s eyes were a rather ordinary pale brown, by then. But they glimmered like the campfires of an army.
“Not this,” she said, “no. I didn’t think I’d be replaced at all. But if I had, I would have thought it’d be by someone…”
Pepper glared at her.
“…someone strong,” said War, more distantly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pepper demanded. “I’m stronger’n you. You let go first.”
War grimaced, as if she’d bitten into something that disagreed with her.
“Yes, yes,” she said, “you took that sword, all right. But who made me let go? You, or that boy?”
Pepper said nothing.
War looked triumphant. “Just so. You’re, what-- ten?”
“Eleven,” said Pepper.
“Eleven, then. You’re not strong, little girl. You have a strong leader, but you’re just a human who knows how to go with the flow. You’ve someone else’s idea burning a hole in your head and a weapon you don’t know how to use. That’s not strength,” said War. “I know about strength.”
Pepper pulled the sword out through the coat, which disintegrated. It was only something she’d made, she thought, feeling the wind blow in where the fur had been. The smell’d not even lasted past the first ten minutes.
“You sure of that?” she asked.
“Very good,” said War, sounding delighted even as she stepped back. “You’re adorable.”
“I am not,” Pepper shouted, and lunged.
War leapt out of the way.
“You might even grow up to be quite something. If you grow up, that is,” she continued, as if to herself. “I can almost understand why the boy wants you. He’s young, after all. And there’s the hair.”
“Don’t talk about Adam like that,” Pepper snarled.
She slashed desperately at War’s mad grin, but War was dancing, now, like a man waving a banner before a bull.
“Does he still go by that name?” she inquired. She sounded amused. “What a charming affectation.”
“’S’not an affectation,” Pepper said. “It’s his name.”
The sword guided her arms to the left, and snapped around at the last possible second to slice upwards. War hissed between clenched teeth, and almost lost her balance, but still there was no contact.
Pepper screamed her frustration. War rolled her eyes.
“Humans,” she said. “The ones who only think they’re human are the worst of all. Like lemmings, you are.”
The sword’s tip lowered.
Pepper took a few deep breaths. War breathed, too, short and eager, and only her exhalation hung pale in the air.
“Maybe I’m just followin’,” Pepper said. “Like you said. But you were, too, back at the airbase. And that means,” she said, with growing assurance, “that means my leader’s stronger’n yours.”
She raised the sword again, and brought it around in a broad arc of white.
At least, that was what she meant to do, and very impressive it would probably have looked. Unfortunately, the nature of the move was such that it left her side wide open, and War took the opportunity to tackle her.
They went down in a tangle of limbs and orange hair. War had longer both; she ended up pinning Pepper face-down in the snow. Pepper sank, and--
--then there was the burn of the snow through her wet clothes and the burn of War’s skin through her fashionable couture. And Pepper heard the blood pounding in her ears like the scrape of a rough cloth on a blade; and she felt like a sword being heated for the forge.
She didn’t know that was what she felt like, of course; she registered heat, and pressure beyond what could be explained away by physics, not from War but from something inside her; and that was all. But she did.
She said, intelligently:
“Mmf.”
“You’re unfortunately correct,” War whispered. “Your leader is stronger than mine. But you’ll notice that I’m alone, now. My leader is pretending to be a snowman somewhere out there--”
Pepper contemplated this mental image, and then, very deliberately, stopped contemplating it.
“--and I’m here.”
Her grip on Pepper’s shoulder tightened.
“Do you see? Do you see, little girl?”
“Everyone has to pick a side,” Pepper repeated.
She fumbled, blindly, for what she had let go of when she was falling.
“Yes. But you can make your own bloody side,” War said, softly. “You can at least do that.”
She stood up just as Pepper closed her fingers around the handle, and ran for it.
Pepper rolled up into a sitting position. She watched her go. The sword’s hilt tugged at her hand, but that was all right; she’d had a little sister, once, and she’d learned how to resist tugging[1].
She sat in the snow for what felt like a hundred years. The sun did not move, in the blue dome of the sky.
[1] Even if she was more used to it being a tug in the direction of ice cream, rather than, say, gruesome retribution for words like knives that'd been under the skin.
Two saucers later, Crowley was in something of a knot.
Aziraphale mumbled, “Do you need a hand?”
“I think I need more than one,” said Crowley.
“Oh,” said Aziraphale. “Sorry, can’t help you there.”
He drained his wineglass. Crowley glared.
“That reminds me,” he went on, wiping his lips on the back of his hand. “I meant to ask you-- why is it that you can’t transform?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” said Crowley. “But I suspect it’s Hastur’s idea of a good joke, sending the human-lover back to earth legless. Permanently.”
“Ah,” said Aziraphale.
He rolled up his trouser cuff to examine his ankle.
“You left bruises,” he said, after a while.
“Yes?” said Crowley. “You threatened to kick me off.”
“Hmmm,” said Aziraphale, noncommittally. He waved a hand over the bruises. Nothing happened.
“I do believe you’re not the only one whose superiors have developed a sense of humor,” he said.
“Took them long enough,” Crowley said.
“I could have stood for it to take them a little longer,” said Aziraphale. He unrolled the cuff, and slumped back on the white leather of the sofa.
Crowley began to untie his tail. Very carefully.
“So, what,” he said, after a while. “You think we’ve just got… these bodies? One chance? We screw up, and it’s back to the…”
“Cutting board,” said the angel helpfully.
Crowley winced. “Yeah. That.”
Aziraphale swirled his wine around a little. It turned clear. He had an experimental sip, and smiled in a manner that suggested to Crowley that whatever he’d miracled it into, it wasn’t water.
“So it seems,” he said.
Crowley flickered his tongue along the rim of the saucer, catching spots he’d missed.
“We’ll just have to be careful, then,” he said, brightly.
“Do you think the… atmospheric activity has died down?” Aziraphale asked.
Crowley looked at the level of the remaining wine in the bottles.
“Nah,” he said. “Not just yet, I shouldn’t think.”
There was a tree in the rainforest that rose above the rest.
Jaime Hernez would have liked to have his lunch under it. He was quite hungry, and he was getting a little worried, up there on his branch. It was a good branch-- a big flattish one with sunlight filtering down to it through the broad leaves-- but it was some way away from his children, and the ground. His children would be very afraid of the trees, he thought, and he drew the liana taut between his hands as he thought it.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been there. Sometimes it seemed as if no time at all had passed since the rain had stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. Sometimes it seemed as if it had been a hundred years of sitting and trying not to see how far the canopy extended in every direction.
In any case he was high up, and safe from the growling things, and sometimes it was difficult not to laugh.
The hunger made it easier, though. It was a pain in his middle, and it made him uncomfortably conscious of how out of place his body was, with its edges rubbing wrong against the air and the wood and the light, and its insides warring among themselves.
It got very bad just around when his lunch break would have been if he’d still had his job, or if his job had still been there to have. He clung to the branch and tried not to fall off, and he said to the tree, “Please,” and he felt the tree move. He had never in all his life known a tree like this one for moving.
The strange thing was--
There were so many strange things that he started laughing again at the thought. But the thing that seemed strange to him was that the tree, rather than closing up over him, brought its boughs closer together under him, so as to shield him from the dark below.
It was not exactly enough. But he kept his grip, and the tree was very solid, even through the loneliness of the pain. And after a while the hunger faded again.
He heard something that might have been footsteps, moving off. He shrugged.
“Thanks,” he said to the tree.
It rustled smugly.
So much for leaving, he thought. But then-- a little longer with green all around, that couldn’t hurt.
The boy was conjuring a tea set when Famine finally tracked him down in a flat dry place that had been called many things, including Arizona.
He had a napkin tucked into his shirt, and he was sitting cross-legged on a flat dry rock in front of a hunk of wood draped with stiff white cloth. The scales squatted in the middle. Around it, cutlery sprang up in rows, and there was china, too, forming from firmament.
But no food. Famine smiled.
“How’s it going, if I may ask?” he said.
Wensleydale looked up from behind fogged glasses.
“Oh,” he said, drearily. “You.”
This wasn’t quite the reception Famine had been hoping for, but he ploughed on.
“I’m here to make you an offer,” he said, looking the boy firmly in the lens, since the eye was obscured. “I think it’ll be of interest to you.”
Wensleydale said, “Then make it.”
Famine cast a longing glance at the scales and said, “You’re a smart boy. I can tell. So you probably know that what happened last night was… not what was scheduled to happen, hm?”
Wensleydale folded his arms. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “Adam scheduled it. Not very long beforehand, but he did.”
Famine developed the blank expression common to professionally genial adults upon encountering Wensleydale for the first time.
“It was not,” he said, “written.”
“Maybe not yet,” said Wensleydale. “Adam’s a great one for writin’ books, though. He wrote one about a pirate who was also a detective.”
Famine picked up a fork and fingered it.
“What I’m trying to say is… you can put things right,” he said, eventually, as if repeating words he had heard spoken many times but never before uttered himself.
Wensleydale stood up. He was not a tall boy, but the sun glinted on his glasses like a witty retort.
“Seems to me,” he said, “this is as right as anything.”
“You don’t believe that,” said Famine, and his face went hollow when he spoke, gaining strange depths under the skin.
“Who says?” Wensleydale demanded.
“Anyone could see it,” said Famine, brusquely.
“There’s not anyone,” said Wensleydale. “There’s you. Are you sayin’ I’m a liar?”
Famine straightened his tie.
“I understand,” he said, “that you are upset. That’s why I’m proposing this deal. Because I think I can help you, and you can help me. It may seem to you that this is as right as anything. But how long until that changes like everything else did?”
Wensleydale pivoted on his heel and stared stiffly towards the red of the horizon. Around him, the cacti bloomed.
Famine continued, quietly, “How long until he says, ‘I can make myself friends. Good enough for playing with, anyway’?”
“No,” said Wensleydale. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“Oh?”
“No. He’d just make us do what he wanted. He’d make us what he wanted. And we’d be good enough.”
“Is that right?” said Famine.
Wensleydale’s fist clenched against his thigh. He was removing his glasses, Famine saw, and wiping them furiously on his shirt.
“Your pal,” Famine coaxed. “The one who took Pollution’s crown. How’s he doing? He’ll need fixing soon. Adam will do it, won’t he.”
“Stop,” said Wensleydale. He turned back, and Famine saw clear trails of mucus on the boy’s upper lip. His features were puffed up with the suddenness of his grief, and Famine felt a twinge of what he assumed was distaste for the sight of all that flesh, crowding forward.
“What’s your deal, then?”
“I want you to let me into your head. Literally. That’s all. It won’t take much. Spit and a handshake and a little concentration on your part. But that way I’ll be able to help you every step of the way, and you can save them.”
“An’ what’s in it for you?” said Wensleydale.
“Me?” said Famine. “I… have a few complaints to register, myself.”
His smile was incredibly thin.
Wensleydale stared at him with pale, myopic eyes, and Famine wondered, idly, what he saw; what unfocused and horribly ordinary thing stood there. He decided he was glad he didn’t know.
“Spit?” the boy said.
“Yes,” said Famine. “I on your hand, you on mine.”
“Fine,” said Wensleydale, after the tiniest of hesitations.
Famine presented his palm. Wensleydale, after working at it for about a minute, produced an acceptable gobbet. It felt like acid, but Famine didn’t mind. He wouldn’t be feeling anything for long.
He spat into Wensleydale’s half-closed hand, with great precision, though not much actual liquid. He’d always had something of a dry mouth.
“Now,” said Famine, “when we shake, use what… he gave you.”
Wensleydale’s face was a mask. They shook.
“That tingles,” said the man who had been Famine, and then he slumped like a marionette with the strings snipped, or possibly blown up.
“It does,” Wensleydale agreed. The heap of businessman at his feet did not respond, but something inside him was faintly amused.
go back to part one
go on to part three