Daughter to Demons

by Jeffrey M. Mahr and Levanah

Chapter Twenty-One:
The Gazelle

Extolled above women be Yael
― Judges 5:23

“In Africa, a gazelle wakes up and knows
that it has to be smarter than the lions
or it will die. In Africa, a lion wakes up
and knows that it has to outwit the gazelles
or it will starve. Whether you’re a lion
or a gazelle, when the sun comes up,
you’d better start thinking.”
 — African Proverb

 

Much later, Frank was fast asleep — some things never change, even for immortals — and Jackie decided to go down to her atelier to see what could be done with the mess the angels had left behind them. She didn’t feel like spending any more time than necessary, so just flitted in. Looking the situation over, she decided it wasn’t as bad as she thought it might have been, since most of the damage was accidental, not deliberate, more like a tornado than vandalism. Things were broken, but as often as not merely walls and furniture instead of valuable records, so she wasn’t terribly worried. She’d have to get a structural engineer in to look at the walls and framework carefully, but it would probably be fairly simple. Maybe Frank could help; she’d have to ask him. She started taking pictures of the damage using one of her hand-held cameras, and decided not to ask Frank after all, somewhere between shots, since the extent of the damage would be sure to scare him.

She looked around and said to herself, ‘Oh, well. I can hire a few more of the local men to sort it out at least, so some good will come of this.’ Then she went out to find her purse and took out her cellphone. She flicked through the list to find Semangelaf’s listing and opened it. It rang, a voice answered. She said, “I’d like to speak to Father Semangelaf, please. Tell him it’s Jackie Renfrew, and it’s very important.”

It took a few minutes before he answered, “Hello, Jackie. Is there some emergency?”

“Not at the moment, but I just had a visit from Sanvi and then some of his angelic pals. They seemed upset.”

“What did he… they… do?”

“Other than trashing my place of business and trying to kill me, not much, but you might want to investigate to see who’s agitating your friends, if you have any left.”

There was a long pause. “I take it that Sanvi is no longer your concern?”

“I’m actually not sure. The last I saw him, he was trying to pull his sword out of a galaxy-sized black hole, and was caught in a time dilation as he fell past the event horizon, so I’m not exactly sure when it might enter his head to come home, if ever. I never took the math classes that Frank did, that’s for sure, but I’m not sure that either classical physics or quantum mechanics addresses the issue of supernatural beings in regions of infinite tidal stress, nor what would happen if he entered the singularity on the other side of the event horizon. Most of the other seven were eventually chucked down the same hole with similar swords, so at least they’re handy if I ever figure out how to get them out, or what to do with them. If he does come back on his own, or if any of the others do without a drastic change of heart, I suppose I ought to warn you that they’d go the way of Sansanvi in any case, but I might be tempted toward more drastic measures if they, or any like them, show up again, since he and his pals destroyed a lot of my business records and a fair chunk of my building. You don’t happen to know if he carried malpractice insurance, do you?”

“His sword?” Father Sam was sounding dazed again, as if his ability to adapt to changing situations were compromised by severe stress. Jackie supposed that this wasn’t surprising, since his background was absolutist and strictly hierarchical; without a rudder to steer him, he tended to drift off course.

“Well, he was trying to chop me up with it at the time. He and his former friends made a hell of a mess, if you’ll pardon the reference, but I think they’re lost to you as angels, at very least. Feel free to come by my shop and take a look if you don’t believe me, but I think I’m going to go back home and curl up to the fire with a good book right now.”

“I apologize on his behalf, Jackie, and I will look into this. One angel turning toward the dark side is very troubling, two is… something else entirely, and nine, if I heard you rightly, is far too many by half.”

“Yeah, well, see ya ’round, Father Sam.” She took a last look around at the shambles the angels had left behind and then flitted back home, where Sal at least was very glad to see her. Frank was still sleeping, and she didn’t have the heart to wake him after all his… efforts. She smiled at the thought of him; at least some good had come out of all this. She thought of Dross, now healed and powerful, then of Frank, whose life had been changed almost as much as her own, all down to what might have been tragedy, and then Sal leapt into her lap and nuzzled her. She wrapped her arms around him, buried her face in his fiery essence, and began to cry.

Lilith was very much less than pleased when she discovered the aftermath of the night’s events and appeared in Jackie’s living room about six o’clock the next morning, where Jackie was reading the latest issue of WWD online after recovering her composure with Sal — in dog form now — for company. Frank was still asleep.

“I’m very glad to see you, Daughter.” She sat down on the couch on the other side of Sal, reaching out to pet him with one hand. “Hello, Sal. How do you like your new home with my daughter?”

Sal wagged his tail, but said nothing.

Jackie gave him a pat as well. “It’s okay, Sal. This is Lilith, my Mom, and she likes you.”

“Zzz-ang-oo,” he said.

“I hope you’re warm here. It’s been a very long time since I met a Salamander, but I well remember how much your people loved fires.”

“Ooo knoowh Zzzalamanderr?,” he looked at her hopefully.

“Not recently, I’m afraid, but if I do hear of one, I’ll see if I can introduce you.”

“Zzz-ang-oo,” he said, but he looked a little disappointed.

“Don’t worry, Sal,” Lilith said kindly. “I have contacts all over the Earth. If there are any others of your people still living in this world, I’ll find them eventually. The Middle East Convention is coming up in Istanbul just a few months from now, and Salamanders used to be fairly common in Persia.”

Sal wagged his tail twice and then seemed to go to sleep, moving his head only slightly to lean against Jackie’s leg, evidently content to let someone else worry about the details of his love life, a facility Jackie envied, since her own life was so complex, and she still didn’t know why the angels had her in their sights, since none of those she’d seen seemed all that capable of coherent thought.

“There were giants in the Earth in those days,” Lilith said, looking at Sal somewhat wistfully. “Sometimes I regret the Compact and all the secrecy it brought with it. The world has become a drab and dreary place since it was put into effect. In the youth of this world, the very air once sparkled with magic and possibilities, and fantastic adventures lay around every bend in the road.”

“Well, it looks like someone’s nostalgic for the golden olden days,” Jackie said, gazing at her with no little fond regard. “I wish I’d known you then.”

Lilith looked at her with some amusement. “But you wouldn’t be you, then, would you? It sounds like someone’s nostalgic for something that never existed. We’re each of us a product of our times. You’re from an age in which the notion of innate human rights and dignity, of mutual courtesy and kindness without ulterior motive or coercion, indeed the notion of ‘humanity’ as a kind of whole, was part of the air you breathed. I’m from an era in which might very definitely made right, and the tribe — a sort of exoskeleton which supported the self only as an almost insignificant part of the larger group — was all there was. Think of a population made up exclusively of roving gangs of two-year-olds and almost every mystery of human history becomes transparent.” She paused for a long moment, looking at her, then added sadly, “I wish I’d first known you now.”

“Mother,” Jackie said, reaching out….

“But if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Lilith ‘moved on’ as inexorably and abruptly as a waterfall over the edge of a precipice. “From the state of the vault and studio, I had a moment’s qualm until I reached out to find your aura still brilliant on the ætherial plane. That makes a gaggle of your special ‘friends,’ the angels, and two demons who’ve attacked you, an interesting pattern, to say the least.”

“Two demons?”

“I think we can fairly count Zalambur as an attack — although his contract didn’t include any sort of mayhem — his spying was simply more subtle than those of the two crêtins, and I now think may have been more about reconnoitering the physical layout than getting an early look at your fashion designs. Sansanvi, Sanvi, and their little pack of thugs were escalations, but surely also a response to the failure of the first crude assassination attempt in Merlin’s antechamber, which was definitely demonic, but ordered by someone else. It may have been meant to test your defenses before a more concerted assault, or was simply the first in a series in which more and greater resources were committed. You have a powerful enemy, Daughter, one with fingers in two realms, which unfortunately doesn’t narrow the field of suspects overmuch.”

“But why would I have enemies?”

Lilith looked at her with some of her habitual irritation. “Because you’re my daughter, of course, and because I’ve taken a special interest in you. Whoever it is must have seen you as a tempting target, since you’re so very young, but our opponent obviously underestimated you, because you’re much more powerful than you look, as Sansanvi and Sanvi have discovered to their personal cost, as well as a squad of their friends.”

Jackie was taken aback. “But why would some personal grudge against you affect their attitude toward me?”

Her irritation was by now very plain. “Because you’re dealing with an insanely powerful two-year-old, of course. Don’t you ever listen? You have a better toy, or a pretty ribbon, and to a petulant spirit that’s more than enough reason to wish you dead, dead, dead. Perhaps one of them dropped their lollipop on the ground and now it’s all dirty; how the Hell would I know? Read the Bible sometime, and then think of it being played out on the set of Romper Room, but with knives and swords instead of building blocks and rubber balls, with a cast of characters who would have frightened the Addams Family half to death, with exactly zero ‘adult’ supervision, because almost everyone with any real power was and is a homicidal megalomaniac. In those benighted times there were no kind-hearted women trained to understand and guide children toward their ‘better selves’ while looking very pretty for the camera, so the ‘kind and gentle’ option has rarely been possible through most of history, and the world is half worn out from the lingering echoes of ancient enmities.” By the end of her impassioned rant, she looked more sick and tired than angry, but was still proud and unbending.

Jackie was finally beginning to understand the reality of her mother’s early life, but didn’t think her mother realized where she was coming from either. “Look, I’m sorry, Mom. I’m very new to all this; most of my memories are fuzzy confabulations with no objective connection to reality other than that they present a plausible ‘backstory’ for the life I’m living now. I remember being a fabulous jump rope champion and having a wicked skill with jacks, but for the life of me I couldn’t even begin to actually do either. I know that I look like a grown woman, but I’m not, because almost everything I think I know I also know is false. Other than the lies I’ve learned by heart, I’m essentially an amnesiac, so give me a break, okay? I’ll try not to be a jerk, but sometimes I’m really just ignorant, not really mad at all.”

Lilith looked at her, really looked, and said, “I’m sorry, Jackie. I’ve been remiss, but you should know that what happened to you is very odd. Believe it or not, I’ve had very little experience with women like you, and none so intimate. Please forgive me, and allow me to help you.”

Jackie stared at her suspiciously. “What do you mean, ‘help’ me?”

“I can connect you to the worldline you now inhabit, so that the skills you remember are real, without doing violence to your curiously mixed heritage. What you remember, as far as I can tell, is simply part of the worldline that brought you into being as you are now, so none of it’s a ‘lie,’ or not exactly; it’s simply not as real as it could be, because your soul is something of a pastiche, loosely stitched together from two separate lives, so your memories feel like déjà vu instead of true remembrance. I can tidy up the needlework, if you please, and weave the threads of those two lives together more thoroughly. To use your example, I can give you ‘jacks’ without removing ‘baseball.’ Would you like that?”

Put that way, what Lilith proposed sounded very strange, but no stranger than her own reality. She could feel the muscle memory of a fastball pitch, now that Lilith had mentioned baseball, so knew that there ought to be a memory there, except there wasn’t. She could remember playing jacks, but couldn’t possibly imagine what it felt like to do what she remembered. Taking a leap of faith, she answered, “Yes,” and was suddenly plunged into the metaphysical reality of her body, her real body, and her real past, without losing the dim memories of the other Jack, the one she’d left behind. Her real memories came flooding in like a torrent, as if a dam had burst from somewhere deep inside her, releasing the feelings and sensations that had always been there so they could rush into the empty places prepared for them and settle, filling them to the very brim, then overflowing into joy, the warm familiarity of them as precious as bright sunshine after a night of freezing rain, and then she fainted, briefly surprised by the knowledge that she remembered what fainting felt like, even though she’d never done it before.

Jackie woke to the sound of music, Lilith crooning what Jackie somehow understood to be an Ursprache lullaby last sung, as far as she knew, much more than two hundred thousand years ago, though how she knew that she had no clue. She felt different — other than the fact that she was lying sprawled on the couch — and when she looked up she saw Lilith looking down at her, because her head was on her lap, and Lilith was smoothing the hair on her head with one hand while the other cradled her shoulder, partially supporting her as she sang. It was an entirely new perspective, but Jackie didn’t particularly want to change it.

Lilith, of course, wasn’t quite as sentimental as Jackie seemed to be. “Oh, good, you’re awake,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Different… happy… connected….” She made no effort to rise. “And I know that I can play a mean game of jacks now. What happened?”

“You fainted.”

“But how was that possible?”

She raised one imperious eyebrow — Jackie may have changed, but Lilith hadn’t, or at least not much. “The answer will come to you directly. I’ll leave you the fun of figuring it out.”

Jackie thought for a moment puzzling out her new feelings and sensations. “I have a real body now.”

“Yes and no,” her mother said, “but definitely much more real than before, because now you have the physical memory of having grown up in a body very similar to that one, so know the workings of it intimately. It’s still an ætheric manifestation, but just a hair’s breadth away from reality, so it will take a bit more effort to change it — a survival skill I encourage you to practice assiduously — but with a bit more effort than that you can make it as real and functional as you want it to be for as long as you need it.”

Understanding dawned as she explored her new awareness. “It means that I can carry a child to term.”

Lilith smiled briefly, a quick tension in her lips, an uplift of the corners of her mouth, but then it was gone. “Trust you to ‘cut to the chase,’ as the modern saying goes. It means exactly that, although unsettled times are not the best milieu. You’ll find, however, that being pregnant creates an instinctive state of hypervigilance that can make ‘interesting times’ more survivable.”

“Perhaps, but I’d want to do my best to avoid risk, I think. I’ll have to think about it carefully, and then talk it over with Frank.”

Lilith nodded, a bit reluctantly. “You don’t necessarily have to take the long path, however, although it makes for better integration with the soul, as you can now testify.”

“Then I’ll have to do my best to ensure a boring period of utter calm.” She rose gracefully from the couch and strode to the fireplace, staring into the flames as Sal used this excuse to follow her, leaping toward the blaze and transforming back into his real form in mid-air, gliding into the glowing oak fire bed as smoothly as if it had been a limpid pool of water. She smiled, then she turned back to her mother. “We know that Sansanvi attacked at least Jane among your other children. Do you know of any others?”

“Several, but those particular assaults targeted either random individuals not part of my own line or retinue, or else they failed. The only successful attack on those near to me was that which felled Jane. As far as I know, all of these outrages were perpetrated by Sansanvi, until these latest assaults by Sanvi and a gang of his fellow thugs.”

“Since we’ve had Sansanvi in hand, so to speak, and Sanvi is lost to the Universe, why don’t we think about the former first, then? I think he must have been ‘encouraged’ in his assault, so it would seem logical for there have been meetings somewhere at which both Sansanvi and Sanvi were coöpted by person or persons unknown. After Sansanvi’s failure, Sanvi’s only precaution was to carry a sword, but he had no obvious skill in the martial arts, which tells me that whomever was pulling Sanvi’s strings was careless of his resources, so may either have many ‘troops’ in reserve or is so confident of his ability to replace them at need that the loss of one or two doesn’t concern him, so callous as well as cavalier.”

Lilith arched a brow. “And what, exactly, does this tell us that we don’t already know? As I’ve already pointed out, that describes most of the guests at the last Convention.”

“Not much of anything just yet, but I’m pretty sure that the answer is buried in excess data, and having a psychological profile of the entity behind this couldn’t hurt. I think we can assume that the initial attacks were ‘dry runs’ against victims who weren’t well-enough ‘connected’ to provoke a fatal response, so we’re dealing with a strategist, but one who relies upon improvisation as well, perhaps impatient of what he would think of as ‘over-planning,’ and someone supremely confident of his ability to hide his own presence behind the scenes, so arrogant, perhaps even contemptuous of those he feels are beneath him.”

“Why are you assuming that it’s a ‘he?’ ”

“Because both Sansanvi and Sanvi used almost identical misogynistic hate speech, which would seem to imply some sort of indoctrination, and I don’t think most women would gravitate toward exactly that pattern of attitudes. It’s the sort of crude contempt that tends to arise in all-male environments, like armies or prisons, and the overall approach of the ‘criminal mastermind’ behind all this feels somehow masculine to me, although I may be grasping at straws. Of the people I know best at the convention, there were many capable of mischief, like Colleen, for example, but she wouldn’t spend much time at it, because an elaborate revenge would bore her, and she likes the victims of her pranks to remain among the living, so she can have a little laugh at their expense. Emrys might be capable of intricate planning, but he doesn’t seem likely to put his own ass on the line, as it were, by chancing a lengthy feud, nor would he involve anyone other than himself, because he wouldn’t trust anyone to be as clever as he is. He doesn’t seem to dislike females as a class, either, and the crude vulgarities used by the ‘henchmen’ seem impossible to fit into his upper-class patterns of speech and thought.”

Lilith looked intrigued, evidently having never encountered the equivalent of a detective novel sleuth: a Sherlock Holmes or a Hercule Poirot, much less a serious academic researcher. Not even the fictional Jules Maigret could out-think Jackie in teasing out coherent clues from disconnected hints. “Go on. I’m fascinated.”

“I’d like to contact Semangelaf. I think he’s been isolated from the other two of the original ‘Gang of Three’ for quite some time, and it would be interesting to know why. I think that I can trust him enough to tell me straight if he’s heard of anything recently suspicious that might involve those two. He’s aware of the ‘absence’ of both of the two now gone missing, because I told him about them, and he knows that I was responsible. His response — to the first, at least — was that I had an obligation to ‘save’ the ‘rodef’ from his own sin at any cost, even his own life, which I imagine means more to you than it did to me, and he didn’t seem either surprised or terribly upset with me when I told him about the second of his former pals, whom I suspect is dead, or as near to it as an ‘immortal’ spirit can be. I had the impression that he approved of my actions, although he had a stick up his butt about it for a while, at least in regard to Sansanvi.”

Lilith laughed at that. “What a delightful phrase! And how perfectly apt in his case!”

“Well, sorry. I know it’s not very ladylike, but even girl orphans tend to run toward the rough and tumble, if slightly more subtle than the boys.”

“No, no, it’s perfect. I was something of a hoyden myself, in today’s context something of a ‘biker chick,’ but it was always my ride once I’d finally achieved the power needed to free myself from external domination.”

Jackie had a thought, but carefully repressed it before saying, “Speaking of rides, wanna go for one?”

Lilith looked at her curiously before saying, “Whyever not, but where?”

Taking Lilith’s hand, Jackie said, “Second star to the right, then straight on till morning,” and flashed back along a now familiar path, offsetting the angle slightly so she could see herself as she arrived, followed closely by Sanvi and his fatal choice of sword.

The two women followed after, unseen by any of them as ur-Jackie and her pursuer rushed past, swooping through the turn to chase them as while Jackie pointed out tactical points of interest. “This is where I knew my plan would work, since he had difficulty moving the sword onto a different vector. Ahead of us is the central black hole of this galaxy, but don’t get too close. I read an article about them in one of Frank’s Scientific American magazines and recognized it from an ‘artist’s conception’ accompanying the text. It’s an object that doesn’t obey the normal rules of physics and has collapsed under its own weight through ‘degenerate matter’ into what they call a ‘singularity,’ an area of the Universe so dense and heavy that even light can’t escape, so I’d suggest we keep our distance. The fatal point of all this is that time slows to a standstill as one comes near, while acceleration speeds one toward the event horizon at speeds approaching that of light, so that even if Sanvi could escape, it would take a very long time for him to do it.”

They both watched as her former self side-stepped the pursuing Sanvi, and then stopped to watch him falling toward and through the belt of Cherenkov radiation, vainly trying to lift the sword against the ever-increasing gravitational acceleration imposed by the curvature of space itself. “He might have been able to save himself, even at this point, except that he wouldn’t let go of the stupid sword,” Jackie said.

“I don’t imagine that the owner was happy about the loss,” Lilith said dryly. “That was Cortana, originally known as Durendal, one of the great treasures of antiquity, which narrows the list of suspects enormously.”

“Durendal?”

“An enchanted sword originally forged by Weyland the Smith, Völundr, to whom I was once married. It was made of what they used to call ‘Star Metal,’ meteoric nickel-iron, a much stronger alloy than anything commonly available in the Sixth Century. I have no idea how a lesser angel got hold of it, other than that someone must have given it to him. From the looks of the vault and your studio, Sanvi was using it like a fly swatter, which was just as well for you, because any more powerful being, especially one actually skilled in the use of arms might have been able to do you harm.”

“I’m sorry to have destroyed the sword, Mother, if it held any memories for you.”

Lilith looked askance at her. “Memories? It was just a thing and I’ve left many things behind, dear. Völundr, as was not uncommon in those violent times, began our wedded life by abducting and then raping me repeatedly, after which fait accompli my putative father, King Niðhad of Nerike, agreed to the ‘marriage’ because I was pregnant by the time he heard of it, and Völundr had managed to kill my two brothers, the King’s heirs, in a particularly gruesome manner, so that baby was a lot more valuable than I was, and had to be ‘legitimate,’ of course. Völundr had been extremely angry with the King because dear old Dad had hamstrung him — crippled him by cutting the five tendons behind each knee so he could barely drag himself along on crutches — and then imprisoned him on the island of Sævarstöð as a slave, to ensure that his skills as an ironsmith and armorer were available only to him, so I can understand his vicious hatred, but I personally have no fond memories of either man. The destruction of that particular sword saved your life, which was a far better use than it had ever been put to before.”

Jackie was shocked, but began to see exactly why her mother had ‘anger issues.’ “I’m so sorry, Mother. I had no idea.”

“Daughter, if that had been the extent of my problems over the years, I’d count myself very lucky indeed. Living, however you go about it, is a struggle, and the most important thing is to keep on struggling until you win, and you can win, with just a tiny bit of brains and luck.”

“But I don’t understand why you didn’t just re-manifest a new body in another location? Why did you have to stay in such a terrible situation?”

“Because, Dear, being immortal isn’t the same as being an immortal spirit. I was stuck in one perfect body for hundreds of thousands of years, evolving as humanity evolved, forever young, forever healthy, forever beautiful, so I’ve pretty much lived the lives I was stuck with in the context of the times. I could be hurt, but I couldn’t be killed, so I’ve healed from many, many injuries over the years, both serious damage and minor.”

“But how did you take on new identities.”

“Through trickery, mostly. They didn’t have death certificates or picture IDs in those days, so it was mainly just a matter of showing up in town and buying a shop if I had the money. If I didn’t have any money, then I’d work as a servant, or prostitute, or Temple priestess — all pretty much the same job in those times — and keep an ear to the ground until I found a way to make money, or stumble across someone’s life that I could just slip into, whether they’d died on a journey, succumbed to an illness, or whatever. If anyone said that I didn’t look quite the same as the woman who lived there before, I’d claim to be her sister, or the man’s second wife, or whatever. Being able to read minds made the whole operation easier, of course. Sometimes, I’d run across someone dead or dying from far away, and simply complete their journey for them.”

“I still don’t understand, though. If you were a normal woman, why were the three angels sent to kill your demonic children?”

“I really prefer to call them ‘spirit children,’ since so many shared the supernatural essence of their fathers, and were of course immortal on both sides of the family, but it was mostly to punish me, and partly an attempt to coerce me to return. In the very early days, until the human population had grown over thousands of years, there weren’t enough human men outside the immediate neighborhood of Eve and Adam’s to make a home with, so the only households where a single woman might find shelter and protection were those of the Djinni and other supernatural beings who were active in the world in those days, long before the Compact. I might have been immortal, but I could still be very hungry and very cold, and because of those three baby-killers I sought out the most powerful protectors I could find.”

“So that’s how you wound up with Samael?”

“Yes. My first real home away from Eden was with Samael, the extremely powerful Angel of Death, and our children were many and varied. Some of them weren’t very nice, but some were very nice indeed, just like any real family, but those three stooges didn’t dare come near him, so it was only when one of our children wandered off that they felt brave enough to kidnap and murder them. The ‘demon’ thing was all about me though, a ‘rebellious’ and relatively independent woman, the stuff that male nightmares of the time were made of, obviously ‘possessed’ by some sort of ‘evil spirit.’ As you ought to know, however, it actually didn’t start out as a term of vilification, but rather referred simply to a lesser divinity or supernatural being whose nature lay somewhere between the Gods and human beings, just as we might say ‘diva,’ Goddess, for a woman of outstanding beauty, talent, and imposing presence in the performing arts.” She smiled. “A rather accurate description of me in any age, but especially so after Eve and Adam got themselves tossed out on their asses in the snow. But because the daimon thing was all about me, it naturally took on scandalous and evil connotations very quickly. I’m not surprised. There are still a boatload of vile names reserved more-or-less exclusively for women, termagant, harridan, whore, shrew, harlot, crone, strumpet, hag, virago, doxy, trull — the list goes on and on, and all of them have been applied to me — but any word which refers to females will take on nasty overtones in much of male discourse. Try to think of the word ‘woman’ or ‘girl’ in almost any sentence that couldn’t be — and often is — spun into contempt with just a slight shift in tone or emphasis.”

Jackie couldn’t think of anything to say. She recognized it as a feminist critique — she hadn’t been an idiot, even as a man — but it didn’t have all that much reality for her, because she’d never really experienced being impinged upon by male rules, or male infringements on her privacy or sense of self-worth, having been dropped as an adult into a sheltered academic environment with non-discrimination policies and committees to ensure fairness lurking around every corner. She’d sprung ‘fully-formed,’ as a woman into her world, like Athena from the brow of Zeus, ever-virgin, with no real women friends, no real history to draw upon, except the fictive memories of her faux life before…. “So are Samael and his ilk what the quote you mentioned earlier, ‘There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown’ refers to?”

“Yes and no. Yes, it’s meant to distinguish ordinary humans from those who were not, and partly metaphorical, but it’s also merely descriptive from the human point of view. The earliest humans were fairly short for the most part, averaging about four to maybe five feet high. The Djinni, and the Angels, were closer to the ideal size of modern humans, the ‘natural’ height and weight we grow to with decent nutrition and medical care. Adam and I were both ‘normal’ in size, about six feet tall in his case, two inches less in mine, but Eve was a good four inches shorter than I was — doubtless to make a political point — and once they began trying to make a living outside of Eden and social inequality grew more pronounced every new generation became a tiny bit more badly nourished on average, and a little bit shorter. The ‘giants’ the passage describes averaged around six feet tall, maybe a bit taller, but not tall enough to make a decent basketball player today, and the ‘mighty men of reknown’ were what strong men looked like before steroids and designer drugs pumped up athletes until they look like the Michelin Tire Man. The angels as a rule were nicely fit, but not grotesque. Samael was — and is — beautiful in a way that humans rarely approach, with an adamantine masculinity that was both enticing and exciting.” She sighed. “I’ll have to introduce you to him sometime. He might give you second thoughts about your tiresome particularity.”

Jackie couldn’t help but be amused by Lilith’s current fixation. Here they were lingering in the midst of stupendous immensity, at an interior edge of the Universe, with in-falling matter being destroyed by the gigaton, converted into great jets of charged particles streaming out into the void, with no one around within billions of miles, and Lilith was giving her dating advice. Next, she’d probably suggest a nice doctor she just happened to know. “I’m sure that he’s very nice, Mother, but I’m happy with Frank, and he’s looking very fit these days.” Her mother’s description of Samael more-or-less fit in, though, with Jackie’s cursory experience of the two who’d tried to kill her, and a slightly longer acquaintance with Semangelaf. They were all three of them good-looking guys, but none of them did anything for her at all, although she supposed that Samael’s ‘bad boy’ job lent him a certain piquancy in her mother’s appraisal of him. “What about the wings, though? They usually show them that way, but that particular detail rarely shows up in the stories.”

“They were mostly an artistic convention, and a late invention, a shameless imitation of Babylonian and Egyptian portrayals of the Gods and Goddesses designed to ensure that it was easy to tell the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’ in an illiterate society using pictures, like the black and white hats on cinematic cowboys. The angels had bird wings, as a rule, while the demons usually had bat wings. Other than that, they were manifestations, so almost any creature capable of manifesting a body could add wings… although they make it very difficult to fit a coat or bodice.”

Jackie laughed, astonished and amused by her mother’s unrelenting practicality, despite having gone where no man had gone before, despite the cosmic fireworks going on right before their eyes. She gestured toward the maelstrom before them. “So, do you think that it’s an effective prison? It’s certainly a spectacular memorial, if nothing else.”

“It is indeed, Daughter. If molecular bonds are sufficient to keep an angel confined in a diamond, the pressure of degenerate matter is surely overkill. I fully expect this particular durance to outlast the Universe. Ask me again in a few billion years and I might update my opinion.”

“Good. I was particularly offended by his disrespectful language, and can’t help but think that it’s richly deserved, and ‘degenerate matter’ sounds so appropriate for the both of them.”

Lilith smiled. “It does, doesn’t it? I’ve never heard of a black hole being used for the purpose before, but in a long life, we’ll all undoubtedly see many surprises.”

“Do you have any idea who could be behind this, Mother? It would be nice to put a name and face to this amorphous being.”

“Surprisingly enough, I don’t have an immediate suspect, but as I said, whoever it was had possession of the sword and I suspect that we can trace it, since it was enspelled by Merlin, and we know where to find him. I summoned Zalambur to force him to reveal the full details of his contract, but it turns out that he was gulled. The blood with which it was signed turned out to be that of a chicken, long since dead — so he’s now a laughingstock among his fellows — and that trail leads nowhere. Likewise, I prevailed upon Merlin to reveal the True Name of the demon who attacked you as well, but he too was the victim of a confidence trick, and so that trail too led to nowhere, and I rebaptized the stupid thing with an even better trick than Merlin’s, because his new name is one he can’t pronounce, nor can anyone other than a Harpy, all of whom are extinct as far as I know — although the reappearance of Tiamat suggests that nothing is certain in a tumultuous Universe — so he should be safe enough, all things considered. I even interrogated Sansanvi at great length, but his mind — if I could possibly dignify it with the name — has been corrupted to the point that he’s utterly incapable of coherent thought, and he has no memory of whoever did it to him. If he were human, I’d suspect that his symptoms were typical results of having suffered severe lesions to his hippocampus and frontal cortex, but of course the spiritual analogues to these are not well understood. In any case, his value as a witness is severely compromised.”

“Well, Sanvi was acting exactly the same as Sansanvi, right down to the monolog, so my first guess would be that the same problems would turn up if we could still question him, which we can’t.”

“No matter. In the first place, I agree that little or no purpose would have been served, and in the second, an angel with an enchanted blade is rather difficult to subdue, since it’s very hazardous to grapple with him. You did very well to defeat him at all, and I doubt that I could have done very much better myself, although I could surely have escaped unharmed, just as you did, especially against such a puny opponent as Sanvi.”

“That was more or less my reasoning. I captured Sansanvi by trapping him within my power, but it seemed suicidal to try the same tactic when my target had a deadly weapon in hand.”

“Exactly. Very wise of you. But the fact that he was carrying that particular weapon is telling, since he’d have no ready access to an ancient blade of worth without some sort of collusion or conspiracy, which means that either an angelic Prince or God was undoubtedly involved, since it’s survived far longer than its normal lifetime would allow, even with Merlin’s thaumaturgic intervention, because an ensorcelled weapon like that is a magnet for adventurers of all sorts, so it will likely have changed hands many times, and the last owner was either powerful enough to wrest it from the then apex of a line of them, or had been powerful enough to keep it safe from the same general line of thieves and vagabonds. Samael had an enchanted sword, but it wasn’t that one, nor do I think that anyone would be fool enough to tangle with him. Even Gods and angels can die, so all fall under Samael’s dominion.”

Jackie was puzzled. “Not a Goddess then?”

“Not impossible, but rare. Straight swords tend to be phallic symbols, so most Goddesses carry a bow, a fatal shield, or a scimitar or other curved blade, something reminiscent of the Moon, or sometimes a spear, like Athena or the Valkyries. The few examples of Goddesses with straight swords tend to be handmaidens to masculine power, such as Dike or Justicia, the Greek and Roman feminine personifications of an overwhelmingly masculine judicial authority.”

“The other seven angels all carried swords as well, so I suppose the same problems arise about where they came from, and I was able to dispose of all but one of the swords with the same trick as I’d used with Sanvi. My friend Dross helped me with the last remaining sword, so I was able to destroy the last three angels — those who hadn’t been sucked down to join Sanvi — on my own.” She thought about that for a moment. “Unfortunately, I didn’t save them for interrogation, but it doesn’t sound like it would have done much good anyway.”

Lilith looked puzzled. “Dross helped you? Why would he do that?”

“What can I say? He likes me, and taught me the trick of making swords explode, since he knows all about metals of all sorts, so I won’t be caught with my pants down again. I’ll teach you, if you like; it’s quite simple once you’ve seen how it’s done.”

“But how did you destroy the angels without capturing them?”

She looked a little embarrassed, but not very much. “I sucked them dry. It turns out that angels — at least those three angels — thought of themselves as ‘manly,’ which was enough of a weakness to let me grab hold of them. If we hang out here for a bit, they’ll be along directly, so you can see it for yourself.”

Lilith looked at her with what seemed like pride. “I thought your aura had seemed more powerful! You fed upon three angels?”

“More like devoured them, and sucked the marrow from their bones, because there was nothing left but dust once I was through with them.”

“Oh, my. You are a big girl now, Jackie.” Her eyes were shining. “I wouldn’t mind tarrying for a while at all, if I could see the last of those two cowards receive their just deserts. You’re sure it’s no trouble?”

“Not at all. We can always catch up to where and when we left. That’s another trick Dross showed me.”

“Why don’t we, then?” she said, then, oddly, with no particular show, she took Jackie’s hand and placed the diamond Jackie’d used to trap Sansanvi in it.

“Before we go, I thought that you might want to take care of this. With their addled brains,” she said, “ I suspect that it would be a kindness for both of them. Would you like to send Sansanvi, his fellow thug, after Sanvi for company?”

Jackie looked at it, then nodded. “I would, and I agree; it would be a kindness to slow their thoughts to match their long sentence.” She hurled it down into the galactic gyre and followed it with her eyes for a while, then turned back toward Lilith, her spiritual mother, flying close to her side, and said, I think it’s off this way….” She led the way to where and when her encounter with the pursuing angels had come to its conclusion and they stood aside incorporeally to observe as an ur-Jackie led the gang of angels into the same trap that had caught Sansanvi, and then turned to face down the three ravening angels who escaped the trap, saw ur-Dross arrive and destroy the sword, watched how prettily it flowered into brilliant sparks, and how ruthlessly that earlier Jackie had embraced her essential nature as a Succubus, had faced them naked and unafraid, and had destroyed them all. Then they saw her gather up the wounded Dross and wing through space and time to save her friend’s life, and how the Salamander had transformed Dross into the primal Goddess that she’d always been once upon a time. It didn’t seem to take as long watching everything transpire as it had seemed to take when it happened, but strong emotions tend to slow down one’s perceptions of duration. Jackie made them leave once Tiamat had left the scene, unwilling to have her mother as an invisible observer of her intimate relations with Frank, however dispassionate or proud.

“So Dross was Tiamat!” Lilith said as they flitted back toward the bar, or the boutique, in that general direction anyway. “Imagine that! I’d never met her, and I can see why now.”

“True. If she was really involved in the creation of the Universe, she would have been a little before anyone’s time on Earth. Even Dross seems to predate the formation of the Solar System, which boggled my mind at least. I have the impression that the whole pantheon thing is solipsistic in any case, judging from Jumbe and Dross at least, and even you told me once that you’d been many Goddesses over the ages. It seems to me that people create the Gods and Goddesses as much as the Gods and Goddesses create people, since it’s their belief that gives divinity its power.”

“Of course they do, dear,” Lilith said dismissively. “Haven’t you noticed the increase in your own power since you became a celebrity? Your friend Jumbe Mungu is looking much better since your own exploitation of popular notoriety on his behalf, so I thought you realized it more explicitly than you seem to now.”

“I didn’t, not really, because it seems to work contrary to ‘common sense,’ spilling down the timeline by contagion, affecting both past and future, just as my own transformation has ‘side-stepped’ the original progress of my life, and melded my personal history with the history of the woman, and the girl, I was in another timeline from the one I’d formerly inhabited.”

“Exactly! It’s a paradox, in its original meaning, something contrary to what was always true, but is no longer really true, having been replaced by a new orthodoxy, a new reality that we all agree upon, even if it was ludicrous fantasy five minutes before. When I first became a Goddess, it changed my past, all my pasts, and infected them with divinity by contagion. Just wait a bit and it will happen to you; you’ll see. In a very long life, everything is possible. Look how well Frank has done for himself, just through knowing you and sticking by you when things got dicey.” She gave her a suggestive glance. “A thousand years from now, or perhaps two hundred years ago, they’ll unearth an ancient temple dedicated to his service as the First Architect, or something, and you’ll have a nice bedtime story to tell Jane as she’s falling asleep.”

“You’re kidding me!”

“Moi? My dear, you cut me to the quick! I was, after all, the Oracle at Delphi for many years, a strange and drunken gig in which one prophesies from one’s perch upon a tripod suspended above a crevice leaking poisonous subterranean gasses into the atmosphere. It helps a lot to be immortal in a job like that, because the priestesses went through a number of Oracles every year who succumbed to the gas, and fell down on the job. Eventually, the Priests of Apollo took over the Temple and replaced the worship of Gaia and her female descendants with that of Apollo, by claiming that he’d slain am enormous snake or dragon there, and that the gasses emanated from the monster’s decaying body, which was laughable, of course, but people rarely laugh about religion. Before that, the post was held in turn by Sibyl — who gave her name to countless Sibyls after, so that ‘Sibyl’ is now synonymous with prophetess in the ancient tradition — then Themis and Phoebe, the last two both Titanesses, daughters of Gaia, the Goddesses who ruled before the Olympians overthrew their brothers, the Titans, but Goddesses tend to be more durable, or at least more adaptable, than Gods, so they lingered as respectable Deities for thousands of years after their rowdy brothers were imprisoned in Tartarus or wandered off, depending on who’s telling the story, the curse of coöperative solipsism.”

Jackie looked hard at her with growing comprehension. “Wait a minute! You’re the Goddess of Death yourself! When you spoke of Samael as having dominion over all, you were talking about yourself as well, weren’t you?”

Lilith looked just slightly startled, but then said, “Well, it’s complicated….”

“Oh great!” Jackie flew into a perfect rage. “Not only am I the world’s second greatest ball-buster, a girl who can suck the hard out of a basalt boulder, I seem to be the daughter of Death himself as well! If Frank ever leaves me — and who wouldn’t, with a family tree like mine? — I can see my future dates will have to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or something worse!”

Lilith didn’t move, but somehow invisibly grabbed Jackie by the throat and shook her, just the once, but hard. “Jackie,” she said kindly. “These childish histrionics do yourself an injustice. You yourself have dominion over all aspects of love and lust, not just one or two. It’s true that you, and I, can feed off any sort of sexual or emotional energy, but we create it as well, because we represent the relentless process of life itself, which is the mirror image of the equally-inevitable process of death. Every living thing on Earth, in all the worlds that circle all the stars in this or any other galaxy, feeds off death and creates life. The life-giving rays of our Sun are the waste products of its rotting body, that solar entity in turn is the condensed and fertilized remains of other suns that lived in glory and died in spectacular cataclysms, and ultimately of Creation itself, the paradoxical and explosive state of zero entropy, the ultimate crystal from which we’re all of us running down, our clock springs slowly unwinding on the way to the ultimate death of the starry Universe. Even protons decay, and there is nothing that is impervious to death, which is a kindness always. Plants take that solar energy and turn it into their bodies, and those bodies feed other bodies, all of them in turn eaten by other bodies in an endless pavane of death and decay that sustains a standing wave of life, a seiche of volition, extending into all that’s left of the finite future.”

“But….”

“But nothing, Jackie dear. You boast of being a cupid, a spirit whose particular task and skill it is to promote love between individuals, but the natural order of these things leads from love to marriage, and then to the baby with the baby carriage, as the old song goes. On whom or what does that baby feed and thrive but living creatures, living flesh? How many lives will be snuffed out to perpetuate that single life? How many bright and hopeful calves turned into meat to allow a breeding cow to be robbed of the milk meant for the bloody corpses of her offspring?

It’s not for nothing that orgasm, le petit mort, is called the little death, the life-kindling death of thought that makes us careless of incredible risks, even our own survival, if only they end in sexual congress and the possibility of life engendered from our union. The fact is, Daughter, that we all embody our opposites, and well you know it, having recently embraced your own ability to murder with the very same hands that have kindled a deep and abiding love between two wounded people, that may yet cradle a child to your breasts to take life and nourishment from your own willing body.”

“But I had to….”

“Exactly, Jackie, daughter, child, to be alive, but especially to be a mother, is to be capable of murder, to encompass any action that might keep your baby safe from deadly peril or death, that would ensure your own survival, lest your child perish for want of a mother’s care, or even to preserve the life or safety of someone you see as somehow ‘worthy’ over another someone who doesn’t seem quite as deserving, the rodef, as your friend the angel said. You throw up your hands, dismayed at my ferocity, but the only real difference between us is that I have seen my children murdered before my eyes and am as pragmatic about death as I am about life, and determined to surmount all obstacles that might impair my own survival, or the survival of my many children.” She looked her up and down, but with some small measure of compassion. “And you, Jackie, you… have not had the same experiences. You fought fiercely for your own life; now think about how ruthless you could be if those angels had murdered your own children, or even tried to kill them.”

Jackie had an angry retort in her mouth before she even stopped to think. “But you don’t…,” she started to say, and then suddenly stopped as the force of intelligence behind her words evaporated. She couldn’t even remember what it was she’d started to say, because it was her anger talking, and because she felt stupid after finally hearing what her mother had just said. “I don’t know what I’m saying, Mother,” she said, after a long pause that Lilith didn’t try to fill. “I’d go crazy, I think, with grief and rage. I’m sorry I’m such an ass sometimes.”

“It comes with being young, Jackie. Believe me when I tell you that I’d envy you your youth, were it not for the fact that I’d have to relinquish many hard-won skills and lessons. Your heart is still relatively light, where mine is often heavy with many thousands of years of grief and rage, as you put it.”

“Mother….” Jackie began.

“Still and all,” she noted complacently, “there’s much to be said for the satisfaction of watching so many of my enemies come to grief, and especially so when I didn’t have to lift a finger to accomplish it, for which boon I’m in your debt, Jackie.”

“Yeah, well. I suppose it’s a little different from waking up on Mother’s Day to breakfast in bed and a pink rose.”

Lilith laughed. “I would’t know. I’d given up making babies the old-fashioned way before the modern holiday was invented by Anna Jarvis and taken over by commercial interests, and a pink rose doesn’t make nearly the statement that Attis made.”

Jackie understood, of course, and smiled. “True, but it saves having to launder the pillow case.”

“That it does, dear.” She grinned mischievously. “But true devotion requires real self-sacrifice. A five-dollar rose, however sweetly presented, is just a rose, unless it means much more then just a rose. Attis, and the priests of Cybele who followed, on the other hand, were demonstrably committed.”

It was two fifty-four in the wee small hours and Jackie was duplicating some of the photographs lost to the angels, sending off digital copies to an off-site secure storage outfit as she worked, having learned one lesson, at least, when it suddenly struck her that she’d already almost forgotten another lesson, the peculiar slantwise method Dross had shown her to skip through space and time to almost anywhere she could imagine. She hadn’t had time to think about all the implications at the time, but now realized, in a sudden flash of insight, that it might represent the key to their problem. If she could stand aside from her own timeline, as she and her mother had done when they followed her encounter with the angels, she couldn’t see any reason that she couldn’t follow the angels backwards and find out where they came from to begin with.

In fact, she was just about to do just that when she managed to think about the consequences if she followed the trail right back to something bigger then she could handle on her own. She’d been lucky twice with variations of a single trick, but it might be pushing her luck to try the same trick three times in a row. She tried to think about what her mother might do, and the first thing that came to mind was to make a plan. ‘Jackie, my girl, now you’re getting smart,’ she thought to herself.

“So, Mother, what do you think?”

“It seems reasonable to me, although this slantwise travel is new to me as well. Never get too smug, Jackie dear. There’s always a hard lesson lurking round one corner or another. The problem is we rarely know which one.”

“That, plus we don’t know who to trust. There seem to be a passel of angels involved, for whatever reason, but not, I think, all of them. The whole operation is too disjointed, as if whoever’s in charge is either scatter-brained or is working levers from such a distance that his control of the operation is sloppy and inept.”

She shrugged. “As I said, it seems plausible, the way you put it, but it seems like a strange way to do things.”

“Strange to think about, maybe, but a lot of large projects wind up being run that way. Frank says that overall project management is one of the most difficult things to manage, especially as the scope of the project grows, and requires special skills. Not everyone has those skills. In a clandestine project, such as this must be, Frank says that organization usually goes all to hell in a handbasket rather quickly.”

Lilith thought about that for a second before she said, “I think this one must be run by men, or males anyway.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because if what you say is true, and it certainly seems to be, it’s not the way women tend to do things.”

“How so?” Jackie was honestly curious, never having thought about there being any difference.

“Because men like to create linear hierarchies in which every decision has to work its way up and down a chain of command, so if a guy runs out of assigned things to do, he’ll stand around doing nothing until someone in authority comes along and tells him what to do next. Women tend to agree on an overall goal, and then everyone works more or less independently toward that goal. If a woman runs out of things to do, she’ll look around and find another task that doesn’t seem to have been done, and either start doing that on her own or check with someone — not necessarily anyone ‘in charge’ — to see if the task is being done by someone else and if it isn’t then just do it in a more-or-less self-directed manner. ”

“Like a beehive!” Jackie exclaimed. “In the social insects, all of which center around a queen, the hive or nest acts almost like a brain, with chemical signaling going on that tells everyone the sorts of tasks that are available, and the individual bees just pick up on those cues whenever they have nothing to do otherwise. Everyone stays busy, but there’s no central authority, really, just chemicals that communicate the needs and moods of the hive as a whole.”

“I suppose. Why would it matter, though? A conspiracy is a conspiracy, as far as I know. Why would the organisation matter when it comes to rooting it out?”

“Because it gives me an idea. How many of my sisters use cellphones?”

“Practically all of them, I think, except perhaps the oldest. I’ve never seen the need for one, but then I’ve never been particularly chatty. It probably comes from being created in a world in which there was no one around to talk with.” She paused, then added, “Well, at least anyone actually worth listening to.”

“Can’t be helped. I’ve known a lot of guys like that myself. Anyway, I’m guessing that someone pays the bills for all these phones, or has contact information, possibly one of your lawyer’s offices. I’d like you to have them set up what they call a self-healing peer-to-peer network based on Facebook and Twitter for all my systers, and anyone else who might be supportive.”

Lilith looked puzzled. “What’s that?”

“Don’t worry about it. Those that know about it will use it, and we don’t need everyone, just a lot.”

“Alright, but what is this supposed to do?”

“It’s what they call ‘social media’ these days, but it’s essentially a loosely-connected network of people with common interests, and those have been around forever. These networks are just electronic instead of person-to-person or sent through the mail. We’re going use them to spread misinformation, like an old-fashioned whisper campaign, but lots quicker.”

Lilith smiled. “Whispers I understand. So this twitter facebook thing is like whispering rumors and lies?”

“Yes, but performed at the speed of light over telephone and computer networks, so you can start a rumor in Brooklyn and have it show up in Hongkong a few seconds later.”

Her smile turned into smug calculation. “Show me how to use one of these new things.”

Jackie pulled out her phone and thumbed it on, then accessed the tweets on a comparative religions channel she followed. “Here’s an example, as an introduction, an announcement from someone at Harvard Divinity School of a lecture series on medieval monastic manuscripts starting on the seventeenth. As you can see, the texts are very short by design, because they’re meant to be read on a cellphone screen, and typed in with your thumbs. In fact, there’s a hundred and forty character limit on the length, a bit more than thirty words on average, though you won’t find too many opportunities to use a word like ‘incomprehensibilities,’ so the medium encourages brevity and abbreviations, like using the characters ‘B4’ instead of ‘before,’ or ‘IDK’ for ‘I don’t know.’ Users can pick and choose what sort of tweets they see by means of ‘following’ particular topics or people, and can further select by means of what they call ‘hashtags,’ which are keywords added to the message preceded by a pound sign or octothorpe. So if you’re fascinated by all things related to Lady Gaga, an entertainer, you can search for the #ladygaga hashtag. If you’re worried about human trafficking for prostitution, you can look for the #humantrafficking hashtag, and so on. It’s sort of like wandering through an enormous cocktail party, during which one overhears snippets of conversations depending on one’s interests, so a scientist and an opera singer might attend exactly the same party, yet overhear and remember wildly different conversations, depending on whatever one paid attention to as one wandered around.”

“I presume that this ‘cocktail party’ will have claque as well as propaganda, whining sycophants and pompous know-it-alls.”

“You have it in a nutshell. There are companies paid to keep an eye on Twitter, and also to inject comments into the discussion on behalf of the people paying their salaries, the claquers you mentioned. Because the medium can be used anonymously, or under multiple pseudonyms, it attracts what they call ‘trolls’ of various sorts, your list covered most of them, except trolls with axes to grind, thieves, and beggars with their hands out.”

Lilith shrugged, unfascinated by mere details. “So what are we going to do with your modern fifth column? I still can’t see how it’s going to help us to discover the identity of the group behind these two-bit thugs they keep sending.”

“I thought that the most enticing bait would be a rumor that you’re off to foreign parts, leaving me in charge of the shop and the bar. I believe you mentioned that the Middle Eastern Convention was coming up, so that might be a good excuse.”

“Why me? Why not you off on vacation?”

“Because I think I’m far the more tempting target. Thus far, their emissaries have disappeared, so they don’t know what the situation is like on the ground, nor exactly how they were defeated, so they seem more likely to be convinced that you helped me than imagine that I could have done this on my own. They’re probably afraid of confronting you directly, so it seems more immediately profitable to have you lurking somewhere as backup for me than viceversa. If they thought I were going somewhere, they’d just follow me.”

“Leaving you as the sacrificial lamb?”

“Not exactly,” Jackie said. “In the first place, I'm more powerful than they can possibly expect, and become more dangerous with each attack on me, just as you do, by taking the life force of my assailants. In the second, I fondly hope that you'll help me to arrange a clever ambush. I’m not suicidal, but too many innocents will be harmed if they grow too desperate, since they've already killed just for practice, so it seems worth the risk — which I think is very slight — if we have a good chance of catching them with their pants down.”

Lilith nodded, then said, “Agreed. I'd like to enlist the help of Merlin as well. He's been a good friend over the years, and is powerful in his own right.”

“Okay. There's always room for one more. I think we should contact Semangelaf as well, since he may have some insight about their original orders which could explain how they might have been so easily ‘twisted’ toward evil.”

Lilith frowned. “I'll let you handle that, dear. I have no particular desire to see him, even without his churlish accomplices.”

“None-the-less, I think we both should talk to him,” Jackie said.

“You don’t actually believe that Semangelaf himself had anything to do with it, do you?” Lilith asked her, with more uncertainty than Jackie had ever seen her display.

Jackie gave the matter some thought. “No,” she said. “He was much too surprised and incredulous for it to have been an act, because he sounded stupid, and he normally takes pains to appear wise. You know how guys are…. Plus, I think he’s like Emrys/Merlin, a loner who doesn’t play well with others. Heading any sort of organization would be distasteful for him, and being a part of one nauseating, especially one whose purpose was murder. I get the impression that he sits alone in a little cell in his monastery contemplating his navel, or whatever it is monastics do.”

“Indeed.”

“In the end, he approved of my actions, and he didn’t seem to have a clue about either’s involvement, but it stretches credulity to imagine that two of the assassins just happened to be minor angels with a particular axe to grind against you, Mother. I think that they were chosen because their putative ‘mission’ was to destroy your demonic children, so it was easy to subvert them into murder, although I don't know anything about the others.”

“Well, I recognized only a few of them, but those were minor angels of about the same status as the three ‘messenger boys,’ and I imagine the others were as well, since I know most of the truly powerful. The fact that I don't know them can probably be relied on, at least as far as it goes to indicate non-celebrity, at least in the Americas and non-tropical regions. I met Maui once, and of course Pele, but stayed away from the tropics for the most part, so there are many in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, and tropical Africa whom I don't know.”

Jackie shook her head, wondering to herself what it must be like to have memories stretching back so far, and felt compeled to ask, “You must have known an awful lot of people over the years, Mother, and know where an awful lot of figurative ‘bodies’ are buried. Would it be a violation of the Compact if I were to ‘discover’ previously ‘unknown’ documents that might shed some light on some historical mysteries? I wouldn't even need to take credit, since I'm not actively involved in the academic world any more, but I can't help wishing to leave behind some record for future researchers.”

She looked at her and half reached out, almost as she had when Jackie had fainted, but then shook herself slightly and said, “I don't see why not. I take it you're referring to incunabula, Wiegendrucke, and other documentary evidence more than archæological sites.”

“Yes. Ancient sites are being discovered all the time these days, with the aid of satellite imaging from space, but ancient documents are as often as not looted and snipped into attractive bits for sale to ‘collectors’ who destroy the parts they can't sell, and of course leave all provenance that might put them into jail behind.”

“Like the utterly charming and eponymous Arsinoë by that dear young girl murdered by Marc Antony on the very steps of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, for example, the works of Pythagoras the Samian, the poems of Sappho of Lesbos, Mani's Arzhang, Aristotle's second book of Poetics, about comedy, things like that?”

Jackie felt a surge of excitement that she tried to control. “Yes, things like that.”

Lilith laughed. “I might have copies of a few of them. There were many opportunities to squirrel them away over the years, and so many were going to burn when that idiot Julius Cæsar set fire to the Royal Library in Alexandria, that it didn't seem right not to rescue a few.” She paused for a little bit, then added, “Of course, with this new ‘slantwise’ travel trick you learned from your friend Dross, you must realize that you could do the same thing yourself, since the physical location of many writings was either known at the time of their destruction or can be inferred.”

Jackie's eyes went wide.

 

Copyright © 1998, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2009 by Jeffrey M. Mahr

Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Levanah