Alabaster

"What I said, I still mean every goddamn word of it," Julia says, having to raise her voice to be heard above the television and the racket that the angel's making. "You go find someone else, someone who wants whatever it is you're selling, 'cause you can't have me."

And then the angel tells her what happens to suicides, tells her for the hundredth time all about the special corner of Hell reserved for people who are that cowardly, people who think they know better than God when and where and how they ought to die. And when it's finally finished, the angel slips away, taking all the noise and the strange smells with it. And Julia sits on the edge of the bed, biting her lip so she won't start crying, and she tries hard to think about nothing but blueberry pancakes.

IV. The Soldier and the Angel

The wheels turn as the wheels have always turned, the bands of granite and basalt and fire which are this flat, revolving world, and at its dim center the hublands lie, as still as still will ever be. The fixed point about which all creation revolves, the pivot and the axle, the rod and the shaft, and the Dragon-dreaming the coming of the Weaver, the massacre at the Dog's Bridge and the routing of his armies before the Weaver's Seraphim-stirs in his ancient slumber. His dreams spark and drive the gears of half-forgotten machineries buried in the caverns and tu

"Did you hear that, beast? Did you feel it?" Selwith Tinker asks the Seraph, and it watches her with seething amber eyes, but doesn't answer the question or make any other reply. It came awake sometime during the long night, which has now almost ended, but hasn't yet spoken a word. As this thing is her rightful prize, the Keeper of Keys has permitted Selwith to stand vigil in its prison cell, the filthy hole where it was taken once the Glaistig's ministers and conjurors had concluded their examinations and the Seraph was lifted onto a pallet and carried from the noisy, crowded hall. It has been stripped and flogged and chained to the wall of the cell, its wrists and ankles bound in shackles fashioned from some melding of stone and living flesh that the vampire woman has never seen before and doesn't begin to comprehend. Its great tattletale-grey wings are spread out against the black rock and pi

Selwith wrinkles her nose, wondering how that blood might taste, how it might feel on her tongue, wondering if tasting it would kill her slowly or all at once. And then the world shudders again, and she sits down on the floor, a safe distance from the Seraph's blood.

"He's waking up," she says. "Is that what she wants, your White Lady, this Weaver? Has her year of butchery and devastation, and your nativity, has all this been merely some great fucking show to get his attention?"

Again, the Seraph doesn't deign to answer her, but it stares down at Selwith Tinker with those blazing yellow-orange eyes, eyes choked with enough pain and hate and contempt that she suspects actual words could never do its thoughts justice, anyway. She thinks they'd be mere anticlimax compared to the force of that stare.

"The cunt," Selwith says, speaking half to herself now. "Well, she's getting her wish, if all this has been only to wake the fucking Dragon. She's getting her heart's desire, and we'll all be getting it right alongside her."

Another purplish drop of the Seraph's blood falls to the floor, striking the pool with a sound like hot steel against anvils, like breaking glass. Selwith forces herself to smile and not turn away from those cruel eyes.

"Between them, beast, what do you think will be left?"

The Seraph grits its teeth and strains against its bonds with such sudden violence that, for a moment, Selwith Tinker beleives it might actually manage to tear itself free. She gets to her feet again, her own tattered wings unfurling, and braces herself against the bars of the cage in case the jailer's devices should prove inadequate after all. But they hold, the fetters and the spikes and chains, and the Seraph gasps loudly and shuts its eyes.

"Come on, you murdering bastard," Selwith growls at it. "I know you can do better than that. The Weaver put everything she's got into you, right? Yeah? So tear yourself down off that wall and let's find out what'll really happen when one of you fuckers finally dies."

The Seraph closes its eyes, and Selwith, unexpectedly freed from the blistering heat of its gaze, finds herself confused and shivering in the darkness. Somewhere beneath the floor, miles and miles below the brittle navel of the world, the Dragon stirs, fully half awake now, and the vampire sinks to her knees. It's almost over, all of it, she thinks, and none of us can change a single thing.

Dust and small shards of rock sift down on her from a fresh crack that's opened in the ceiling, and Selwith looks up at the Seraph. With its eyes shut like that, she might almost believe that it's despaired at last and nothing now remains but a beautiful, empty shell hanging from a wall.

"No," she says. "You're still in there, aren't you, beast? She made you, and the Weaver would never have found the simple mercy to give anything she'd made the capacity for surrender. She'll have seen to it that you'll still be fighting when all the world is nothing but a cinder for the stars to wonder at."

Blood leaks from the Seraph's parted lips, and in the gloom under Kearvan Weal, the silver designs worked into its ivory skin have begun to glow, whorls held within whorls, lunatic tattoo spirals forever looping back upon themselves.

"What's this?" Selwith asks it. "You go

"And she would call us monsters," the vampire woman laughs, pulling the hammer back and tightening her grip on the trigger. "Look at me, beast! Look at what your White Lady has made of me!"

The Seraph opens it eyes, twin embers that have become bottomless magma pools, and when it speaks, its voice is a hurricane without wind, a devouring inferno without heat, rolling through Selwith's memories and hopes, her loss and sorrow, through all the dead spaces behind the vampire's eyes. Selwith squeezes the trigger and tries to turn away, but its words have already begun taking her apart, dissolving her like a handful of salt in water. The flintlock pistol explodes in her hand.

"She's coming," the Seraph says. "On the heels of the cockcrow of this last day of all, she is coming."

And hearing that, the Dragon opens its eyes.