First Angels Read online

  She stepped back, and Ada shuffled after her. “Trust me, I understand. On both counts. The Mayor…” Ada’s tone implied some familiarity. “Yeah, he seems like trouble.”

  “He is.” Isavel kept her voice low. The music was loud, so she pulled Ada in a bit closer as they danced, hoping to avoid being overheard. “He’s dangerous, Ada. I think he cares more about his own power than about the ghosts. It’s going to make life difficult for me. Well, you know, for all of us.”

  “What’s he doing to you?”

  Ada’s question was more concern for Isavel’s struggle with the Mayor than anyone else had expressed so far. It was a nice feeling, and so she couldn’t help but smile back. Ada’s angular eyes flashed with something like mischief, sly and hinting at something.

  Isavel glanced aside. “Well, he’s a jealous guardian of this city. Everyone who came down from Glass Peaks - he’s playing games with us, for fear of not being in control. I wish he would just... disappear.” It felt like a confession. “There’s a war going on against the ghosts, and he’s wasting our time instead of helping.”

  Ada fell silent for a moment, and Isavel wondered if she was piecing together just what Isavel’s own role in this all was. She didn’t want to say too much, though; Ada didn’t need to know that she was dancing with the Saint Herald of the Gods. If she did, she might stop dancing.

  Dancing poorly, though, as she stepped on Isavel’s toes. Isavel jerked her foot back, and Ada apologized. “Sorry! I wasn’t looking.”

  Isavel smirked. “You’re not supposed to look.”

  Ada sighed. “I’m just better with my hands than my feet, that’s all.”

  “You’re right. You haven’t punched me yet.”

  Ada grinned, and her eyes darted away again, past Isavel’s shoulders. She seemed to be taking in the sights of the room - the dancers, the lights, the high ceiling and curved archways. Everything she looked at, her eyes took in with hunger.

  “Have you ever been in a place like this before?”

  Ada shook her head. “No. It’s different. I’m trying to get my bearings.”

  Isavel saw another of the mayor’s lieutenants watching her, a pale woman with a tussle of blue hair and an unpleasantly neutral facial expression. She wished she could keep doing this all night; she didn’t doubt they’d approach her as soon as Ada left. And beyond that, there was something comfortingly familiar in Ada’s presence, a tingling excitement at not having to be the Herald for a few moments. Maybe she could get Ada to stay.

  “How have you been?”

  “Me? Um, well, I recently ran into a former… travelling companion. I left him because - well - I had better things to do. But he’s followed me, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. I’m normally good at letting people go, but it doesn’t work so well when they come back.”

  Travelling companion - she said the words with more weight than they implied alone. “Do you like him?”

  “Not like that. He’s fine, but I’d rather he wasn’t here. I’m busy.”

  Isavel found that oddly amusing. “I’m honoured you’ve taken time out of your schedule for me, then. But maybe you should appreciate the fact that he cared enough to come back.” As they turned on the dance floor, she looked over to the edges of the room, and spotted Sorn and Marea chatting with another of the guards. “People who stay by your side can he hard to come by.”

  “You’re dropping hints, Isavel. Who’s pulling away? I thought your problem was that people wanted too much from you.”

  “Maybe they just want the wrong things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Wisdom; leadership; I don’t know. More than I can give.”

  “Who wants that from you? ” Ada exclaimed with a sudden frown.

  Isavel gaped at Ada in surprise, but her pride wasn’t injured - it was tickled. It was a mock display, but Ada suddenly blanched and rushed to correct herself, eyes flicking down to the ground again.

  “Well, no offense! I just wouldn’t have pegged you as the wise leader type. You’re a bit, uh, wistful for that, aren’t you?”

  Isavel smirked. It was refreshing to talk to someone who didn’t revere her in the slightest. She leaned in, whispering. “You’re right, though. It’s ridiculous. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  Ada grinned, all trace of regret gone. She was quick to recover from metaphorical missteps, at least, if not literal ones. “You’re doing fine at this… dancing thing.”

  She chuckled, and suddenly a thought occurred to her. “Ada - why do you think we ran into each other here, of all places? I’m not sure I believe in meaningless coincidences.”

  Ada bit her lip. She was looking to the back of the ballroom again, and adjusted her hand behind Isavel’s shoulder as they danced. “I don’t know, but I need to leave soon. I have something to take care of.”

  Isavel felt a sudden pang of abandonment. She knew it was childish, but she wasn’t keen on facing whoever came to talk to her next - the Mayor’s people had been eyeing her like vultures. But if Ada had business to attend to, Isavel couldn’t well expect her to drop everything just for a dance.

  Ada seemed to notice. “Maybe we’ll meet again. After all, it’s happened twice so far.”

  Maybe they would. “Maybe it’s the will of the gods.”

  Ada shrugged, but didn’t sound so certain. “I doubt it.”

  “Well, third time’s a charm. Maybe I can teach you to dance properly next time.”

  “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into with that promise, Isavel.”

  “I don’t need to. You like like you can manage just about anything.”

  A gentle look of surprise crossed Ada’s face, but she quickly covered them up with another smirk. “Thanks, Isavel. I see an exit, so I’ll need to take it. Best of luck avoiding your pursuit.”

  Isavel let go. “I hope you find what you’re looking for, Ada. May we meet again.”

  Ada pulled away slowly, took a step back, and turned away with a nod. Isavel watched her cross the dance floor and move towards one of the servants’ entrances at the back of the room. Isavel just now noticed Ada’s strange black suit, ribbed and textured with shapes fashioned after ancient artifacts. She had to wonder who this mysterious woman was, she who claimed to have called a shooting star down from the sky just for Isavel. Isavel had been told she had a whiff of destiny about herself, but it was only now, with Ada, that she began to understand what that might mean.

  But Ada Liu was gone again, vanished into the back of the fall, and Isavel was left alone with the Herald of the Gods herself. She turned around to survey her surroundings, and found two people approaching already; in a clean white poncho again, it seemed she was all too easy to spot.

  She stood as tall as she could, straightened out her shoulders, and looked on the man and woman who were getting close to her.

  “Hello.” She barely let them get within earshot. “I assume you’re here on the Mayor’s behalf? I’ve been wondering where he is.”

  “He’ll be on his way shortly.” The woman bit her lip. “But we wanted to raise some of his concerns beforehand, so that you might consider them.”

  The man next to her nodded. “After all, this is not just an occasion to dance.”

  Isavel nodded. “Spit it out, then.”

  The woman kept avoiding her gaze, but pressed on. “The Mayor is concerned that you spoke to the people directly, without consulting with him, and invited them to join your crusade.”

  “I’ve been told this already.” Isavel crossed her arms. “I think this is the third time I hear that particular concern.”

  “It is most pressing to him. Beyond that, the Mayor understands that you have demanded information from him that is costly to acquire; he is interested in a trade.”

  Isavel nodded again. That was the diplomatic way for them to tell her that he didn’t want to just tell her where the shrine was. Fair enough, but she wasn’t interested in doing him any favours. “I assume
he’ll come to me with his terms, then?”

  “He will be down shortly; he has some matters to attend to.”

  “So why are you talking to me?”

  “We would like to make sure that you are available for him; his time is very valuable, and -”

  Isavel was already looking for another way to escape. She looked around to see Zoa and Ren, off to the side, looking at her and chatting frantically. She frowned; what were they up to?

  “I’ll make time for him when he shows up, of course.” She turned away from them. “I’m not interested in entertaining you , though, so - if you’ll excuse me.”

  She walked off, leaving the two servants unsure of how to proceed. She got the sense she wasn’t treating the Mayor with the reverence he or his servants were used to, and smiled at the thought.

  “Zoa, Ren.” She drew closer, and the two young coders froze up. “I can tell you’re talking about me. What’s going on?”

  Ren’s lips were sealed, but Zoa blurted it out. “That woman you just danced with. Do you know who that was? ”

  Isavel’s eyes widened. There was a mixture of fear and anger in Zoa’s voice, and suddenly Isavel was all too eager to hear more. The gods had clearly sent Ada to her, that much was undoubtable, but she wanted to know why . “I know her name is Ada.”

  They nodded in unison, and Zoa started gesticulating. “We know her. Personally. She’s a piece of work. She was exiled from the Institute not too long ago, for heresy.”

  Isavel’s eyes flickered across their faces, trying to tell what exactly that implied. “Heresy? Against the gods?”

  “Against the ancient lore, and the teachings of the elder coders.” Ren glanced in the direction Ada had gone. “She disrespected the elders on… just about every level you could think of. She was dangerous.”

  “So basically against the gods, yes.” Zoa sighed. “She broke the code constantly, thinking she could make it better. She put people’s lives at risk with her experiments. She thought she could do better than the ancients themselves.”

  “She thought the other apprentices and even the elders didn’t know what they were doing. She would start arguments and fights, and she never listened to anyone.”

  “She basically thought she knew better than everyone else.”

  Isavel frowned, and looked back to the doorway where Ada had left through. Something about that description matched - she remembered Ada boasting about knowing just what to do. But something about it didn’t quite fit, either. “Were you friends with her?”

  “Friends?” Zoa made the word sound ridiculous. “Ada didn’t really have… anybody, really. Not since her parents were killed in a coding accident. That was when she really started to go off the trail. Her parents… tempered her, somehow. After that, there was one girl, but that ended badly too.”

  Isavel paused for a moment, trying to process all the information. So Ada was an orphan, like she was. And as for the rest… “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand how a coding accident could kill anyone.”

  Ren shrugged. “When you don’t code a sigil correctly, it can crash. It, er, explodes. Violently.”

  Zoa looked at Ren as though for help. “She was - fourteen? Fifteen? I don’t know, but after the accident she spent a long time doing nothing but redrawing the sigil they had been etching. It was a complicated, master-level sigil, but she managed to memorize it before she even reached a junior level. And after that, she started… breaking it.”

  “On purpose.” Ren said that as though that added to the horror.

  Isavel still wasn’t entirely sure what all this meant. She didn’t know much about Ada, but there was certainly an air of brashness about her. She wondered whether Ada was more dangerous than she suspected - or, perhaps, whether the coders were not as enlightened as they liked to think. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll keep an eye out if I meet her again.”

  “We didn’t expect her to do very well after her exile.” Zoa looked puzzled. “She was never very… worldly. We thought she might die, honestly.”

  The flatness with which Zoa said that almost made Isavel recoil. She tried to conceal her shock. Zoa and Ren seemed perfectly nice otherwise, so how could they be so callous about exiling someone to die? “Be that as it may, the gods have led us to one another twice already.”

  They both gaped at her. “The gods? Ada?”

  “Yes. I think -”

  Somebody tapped Isavel on the shoulder. She spun around to see that a space had cleared in the dance floor behind her, and the Mayor’s two servants were standing in front of her as well, flanking a pale, hard-faced man with swept-back hair and a three-piece, green-and-gold suit. She looked him up and down and found him rather unimpressive; she hoped this wasn’t the Mayor. Or, alternatively, she hoped this was all the Mayor really was.

  “Yes?” She tried to sound polite, but it came off impatient. She wanted to know more about Ada, not palaver with this obstacle of a man.

  “Saint Isavel, Herald of the Gods.” He stepped forward to hold out his hand, bearing the look of someone forcing himself to smile. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  She extended a hand. “Mayor Artov Essel, I presume?”

  “You presume correctly. Care for a dance?”

  She noticed he was still holding her hand. She didn’t like him, but perhaps this was necessary to get him to listen to her. “Of course.”

  They stepped back onto the dance room floor, and she could immediately tell he knew what he was doing. There was no tripping or foot-gazing here, yet she wanted nothing to do with his dancing.

  “I’m sorry for the delay.” The Mayor did not sound sorry. “I was attending to some business upstairs, but it’s a pleasure to finally meet you in the flesh.”

  “I’m glad we finally have the opportunity to talk.” She was not. “Finding the ghost shrine is my top priority right now. We have an opportunity to seal the ghosts away from this world permanently, and I can use all the help I can get in getting there faster.”

  The Mayor smiled, as though he hadn’t heard her. “Herald, do you know why the role of Mayor has been maintained throughout the centuries?”

  “Have you been keeping the city safe for the gods?”

  His gaze faltered a bit, but he ignored the question. “Do you see those images on the walls?”

  She glanced around the hall at the images she had seen earlier - still images, visions frozen in time, of people in a strange variety of clothes, dancing and drinking and eating. “I do. Were they your family?”

  Artov laughed. “I don’t actually know. But I know they were ancients, living in times when civilisation was vibrant. And closer to the gods, of course, much more so than now. It has been our duty, as Mayors, to try and uphold and maintain the few traditions we have been left with, even if only in the form of still images such as these, or the music you’re hearing - which, I was told by my father, has been in the Mayor’s shrine storage since the Fall.”

  Isavel wasn’t sure how to respond to that. The music was loud and less melodic than what she was used to, but the people in those images seemed happy. She could see why one might want to recreate that. Nevertheless, there were more important things to worry about, and she wasn’t enjoying this dance enough to let him go so far off track.

  “And how is that working out, now that there are ghosts threatening your city? This is, after all, why we’re talking.”

  The Mayor’s face twitched. “Yes, indeed. You’ve brought an entire army to Hive to hunt them down. This kind of action is… unprecedented.”

  “I’m sure something similar happened five centuries ago, during the Ghost War. It’s warranted, believe me.”

  “Oh, I do. The ghosts are the obvious threat.”

  She paused, considered his wording as they arced in a circle. “ The obvious threat? What is the non-obvious threat?”

  Artov moved his head in closer to whisper, an entirely unwelcome gesture. “Panic and disorder.”

  She notice
d that his servants and guards seemed to be keeping everyone a few meters away from them as they moved.

  “The ghosts have people upset, worried. I’ve managed to keep them safe in Hive, and while I understand that that kind of security isn’t possible in Glass Peaks -”

  “Glass Peaks is perfectly safe. They attacked, we threw them back, and now they’re on the run.” A well of defensiveness built up in Isavel’s spine. Who was he to question her success?

  “Yes, but there was fighting involved, and no doubt many people died. We’ve managed to keep casualties to a minimum, and life continues as normal. I’m concerned that people will feel… unsafe, if you beat the drums of war too loudly in the heart of this city.”

  “I’m not beating the drums of war. That beating is the footsteps of ghosts running wild in the forests around your city.”

  “That may be, but -”

  She held up a hand for him to stop, and took a deep breath, cutting the pointless dance short. “I understand your concerns; you don’t need to explain them to me.”

  He looked on, face impassive.

  “The people living here will feel safest if the army moves away into the forests and takes care of its own business, and the ghosts are never heard of again. Which is why I’m here in the first place.”

  He didn’t look sad to stop dancing either.

  “Mayor, we know that you, with your... unique resources, have access to a great deal of information about the area and the things going on around here. We need you to help us find the ghost shrine, so that we can destroy it and put an end to the threat. Can you help us? Do you already know where it is?”

  He fidgeted, and looked to the side. “I would have to review my records. I’m not entirely sure, to be honest.”

  “Please do.” He had been asked this before by envoys, apparently to no effect. She felt herself scowling.

  Artov looked annoyed. “In the meantime, though, I would appreciate it if you helped calm my people. If you could go out to them and tell them their Mayor taking care of everything - and that they don’t need to worry - I think they would appreciate that.”