Scorn of Angels Read online

  Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

  -William Shakespeare

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Thank you for reading Scorn of Angels!

  Prologue

  At the bottom of the Lake of Fire, Nyx, Queen of Hell, writhed in silent agony. Her mouth was wide open in a scream but no sound came out. There was no air, just the cold fire of the lake filling her broken mouth and lungs, burning away her flesh from both inside and out with a fire as cold as the void. If she had been an ordinary soul, she would have been stripped to nearly nothing and left to float on the surface until she was pulled out of the lake and sent to the Palace of the Queen of Hell for judgment.

  But Nyx was not an ordinary soul. She was the Queen of the Descended Angels, the most powerful among them. Her Angelic flesh should have healed, even in the Lake of Fire. She should have been able to pull herself out. And even now, in the tiny corner of her brain that was still sane, she felt her body starting to heal, felt the broken edges of the bones knitting themselves together, the silver ichor that was her blood regenerating and repairing tissue.

  Then the new flesh and bone would come up against the jagged edges of Hellstone built into the sides of the box that Lucifer and Tribunal, the Son of God, had put her in. The flesh would tear, bones would strain, then snap; new agony would fill her body.

  And that was not the worst of it.

  Hellfire did not just destroy flesh and burn away the body. It made whoever was burned by it relive every sin, every cruelty they had ever committed, as if they were all happening at once. And given that Nyx was the Queen of Hell, and that she had rebelled against God and killed a hundred Angels and spent thousands of years torturing the souls of the damned and Descended Angels and demons alike, and given that she had spent a thousand years on Earth trying to destroy Christianity at the request of Tribunal, the level of pain that was visited upon her mind should have been enough to drive her far beyond sanity.

  And then there were the other memories.

  Of using The Word to create an Angel. Of the agony of the Angel growing to full size within Nyx’s Angelic flesh—flesh never meant to give birth. Of Persephone cutting Nyx’s body open to let Epiphenia spring forth. Of Nyx’s desperate fight against Lucifer to save Epiphenia—Nyx’s own Angel—from being dragged down to Hell and sacrificed.

  She lost that battle, and the next one. The miracle that was Epiphenia was sacrificed to the ambitions of Tribunal, God’s own son, whom the world knew as Jesus, who gave his life willingly to redeem the sins of mankind, but whom Nyx knew as an angry immortal who hated all of God’s creations and wanted them destroyed.

  Tribunal had become her lover, inspiring a devotion Nyx had never felt before. He’d made her his most trusted ally. He had promised her Paradise at his side and Nyx had worked untiringly for a millennium on his behalf. And at the same time, he had conspired with Lucifer, her ancient enemy. And when Nyx could not fulfill her promise, Tribunal gave her to Lucifer, who left her locked in a box, her body broken, on the bottom of the Lake of Fire. And as her flesh continuously burned and healed, as her mind and spirit were forced to revisit every act of suffering she had ever committed, Nyx, Queen of Hell, managed to maintain her sanity by one word alone:

  Vengeance!

  Chapter 1

  A.D. 1100

  Arcana, Angel of God and a lieutenant in his legions, stood on a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean, on the pile of rubble that had once been a temple, listening to the screams and cries of the Descended Angels trapped underneath it.

  What, she wondered, is going on?

  Arcana was tall, even for an Angel. Her eyes were blue, and her hair was long and blond, usually worn in a braid that hung halfway down her back. She was powerfully built, with wide shoulders and hips. Her breasts were neither large nor small, but sat firm and high on layers of Angelic muscle. She wore the white armor of God’s army, which protected against all but the most vicious attacks of the mortal world. She was one of three Angels whom God had declared would walk the Earth after the physical death of his son.

  Arcana had never understood why God had his son worshipped with a different name, but then, she hadn’t understood the entire process. All she knew was that God manifested himself on earth as Tribunal, who was to judge the human race and determine its fate. Tribunal was both God and not God, God’s Son and God’s Self, separate and yet part of the Divine, never entirely free. And for the length of Tribunal’s life, the only Angel to walk the earth was a Descended Angel—one of the Angels who’d been cast out of Heaven and sent to Hell for their rebellion against God. Worse, it had been Nyx, the vicious and crafty leader of the Descended, who had become Queen of Hell through a bloody and grueling war in that realm.

  Nyx and Arcana had once been friends, but that had been long, long before. Arcana would never underestimate the dark Angel, nor forgive her rebellion.

  Tribunal had finished his earthly life and judged humankind wanting. He declared them a vile species, cruel, corrupt and greedy, and wanted them wiped from the face of the Earth. God did not. Instead, God had closed the Gates of Heaven and Hell to all Angelic traffic, declaring that humanity would be left alone for 1,000 years and that three Angels would be set to watch, but not to interfere. Those three Angels were to be Caelum, Orion, and Arcana. Caelum and Orion had gone first, to tell the humans that the man they followed as Jesus was the Son of God and that he had risen and was in Heaven with his Father. Arcana had followed a half-day or so later, reckoned by mortal time.

  But when she landed, neither Caelum nor Orion was anywhere to be found. The Gates to Heaven and Hell were open, not closed, and on a small island in the middle of the Mediterranean, a half-dozen Descended Angels were in unspeakable agony.

  As Arcana had winged across the Mediterranean, a portal to Hell opened. Arcana arrived just in time to see Nyx and Persephone dive into the pit, leaving behind an immense pile of rubble with the injured Descended Angels trapped beneath it.

  Arcana turned her thoughts to Heaven, to reach out to the other Angels and to God, but there was only silence. No one was listening.

  Or no one could hear her.

  I am going to find out what is going on here, thought Arcana. And I know just who to ask.

  She transformed her sword into a short, hard shovel and drove it into the rock beneath her. In a half-dozen strikes she had cut her way down to the first of the Descended. The Angel was crushed beneath what was easily twenty tons of rock. Arcana worked carefully, cutting away the rock to reveal the Angel’s face and enough of its torso that it could draw a breath, while leaving most of its body firmly pinned.

  At first the Descended was unrecognizable, so badly had it been crushed. Arcana sat on the rock above it and waited while it cried and screamed as its crushed face and body reformed into something recognizable.

  “Casale,” said Arcana, when the face had mostly reformed. “How are you?”

  The Descended Angel blinked as its eyes, which had exploded from the force of rock on its skull, regrew inside their sockets. When it could see again, its eyes widened in surprise. “Arcana!” Casale tried to breathe deep. The pain stopped his speech. When he could talk again, he spat out, “How do you think
I am, bitch?”

  “In agony,” said Arcana. “Should I let you stay that way?”

  “You’ll set me free, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “How very cute,” said Arcana, smiling down at the Angel. “You think you can threaten me.”

  “Lucifer will come for me, bitch,” said Casale. “And when he does, he’ll drag you to Hell, gut you and stake you out for the demons to feast on your innards.”

  Arcana picked up a hundred-pound rock and dropped it onto Casale’s head. The Descended Angel yelped in surprise. “What the fuck are you doing, bitch?”

  “Reburying you,” said Arcana. “Since you don’t want my help, I’ll just put you back.”

  She was just lifting the second rock when Casale screamed, “Enough! What do you want?”

  “Where are Caelum and Orion?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  Arcana picked up the rock again.

  “I don’t know! I don’t!” Casale screamed. “I didn’t see them! Lucifer made us come to Earth to attack Nyx and her bitch friends. I didn’t see Caelum, and I didn’t see Orion!”

  “How can you have attacked them?” demanded Arcana. “You’re not even supposed to be here. No one is supposed to be here.”

  “Well, we are,” grunted Casale. “Can you get some of these rocks off me, bitch?”

  “The Gates of Hell were closed when God’s Son died,” said Arcana. “Only three Angels were to be allowed through.”

  “God’s Son?” Casale laughed, bringing up silver Descended Angel blood, which he spat to the side. It shimmered and congealed. “God’s Son has been dead for a thousand years. Where have you been?”

  “What?” Arcana nearly fell over backward in surprise and had to spread her wings wide to catch herself. “No. What?” She ran through her memory. “No. God closed the Gate. He opened it for three to go through. Caelum and Orion went first. They announced God’s Son. I followed. We were going to watch mankind for a thousand years. And only us three were to be allowed on the Earth.”

  “Looks like that didn’t work out.” Casale laughed again, then moaned at the pain of it. “Nyx has been on earth for a thousand years. With Persephone and Ishtar.”

  “It can’t…” Arcana had stepped out of Heaven and flown down to the Gate that led to Earth. She had received the blessing of God, and of Tribunal, said good-bye to her friends, and stepped off, beginning the long descent. She remembered entering the Gate, and in a blink of an eye…

  Arcana shifted back through her memories. An Angel could remember every moment down to the smallest, most insignificant-seeming detail, if he or she needed to. Arcana broke the time down smaller and smaller and smaller.

  She had not blinked her eyes.

  The world had gone black, and when it was light again, she was where she had been.

  But surely it had only been a moment, thought Arcana. It could not have been…

  “Hey!” shouted Casale. “What about me? You said you’d free me!”

  Only God has the power to do something like that. And God wouldn’t do that. Not without telling me why.

  “Hey! Bitch! Let me out!”

  Arcana looked down at Casale. “I think you’re lying to me.”

  “Why would I lie about that?” demanded Casale. “If I wanted to lie to you, I’d have said Caelum and Orion were just here.”

  “If it’s been a thousand years, what has happened?”

  “I don’t know!” screamed Casale. “I was in Hell! Ask Nyx!”

  “Nyx has gone to Hell,” said Arcana. “And Persephone. Why?”

  “I don’t fucking know! I just got told to bring her, so I tried! And now I’m stuck under these fucking rocks!”

  Arcana stood up and the shovel became a sword once more. “I need to see what has happened to God’s world.”

  “You need to let me out.”

  “I never said I’d do that,” said Arcana rising and taking a firm grip on her blade. “But I will end your pain.”

  “What? No. No, no, no, don’t. NO!”

  Arcana drove the sword down, piercing Casale’s heart. Casale exploded into a fine spray of silver dust that floated down, threatening to make Arcana’s eyes water. She stepped back so as not to inhale any of it.

  Four hours later, Arcana sat at the edge of a cliff, looking over the calm blue expanse of the Mediterranean. The air was sweet with wild thyme and the blood of Angels. She had worked her way through all the Descended left under the rock, questioning each one before dispatching him. Not a single one knew what had happened to Caelum and Orion. All of them claimed that a thousand years had passed, and all of them said that Nyx, Persephone, and Ishtar had been walking the Earth for all that time.

  Arcana closed her eyes and guided her thoughts to Heaven. This was more than just prayer. This was a direct call to God, to ask His will, and to get instruction. With the Gates of Heaven and Hell both open, her thoughts would quickly reach God.

  Hear me, o My Lord. Tell me what has happened. Tell me what I should do.

  The only answer was silence.

  Arcana tried again, and again, and again for another hour, praying and calling to Heaven. In desperation she rose from the cliff and hurled herself upward to the sky, bending every thought, every fiber of her being toward Heaven. Up, up she flew, past the clouds, past the edge of the sky, to the Gates between the worlds.

  Only they weren’t there.

  She closed her eyes and opened her mind. She could feel the open Gate between Earth and Heaven, could sense the Angels on the other side of it, but she could not find it.

  Eyes closed, she let herself wing toward the place where the Gate should be, relying on her connection to God instead of her senses. She could feel the presence of the divine, could feel herself growing closer to Him, but could not find the Gate to enter. It was as if all connection between Heaven and Earth had been deliberately severed.

  What is going on? What does this have to do with me—and with the time that passed between one blink and the next? She had no answers, nor would she soon, she suspected.

  Arcana folded her wings and fell, alone as she had never been before. The only Angel left on Earth, as far as she knew, the only guardian and messenger of God.

  She spread her wings wide while she was still high over the Mediterranean. Night had fallen as she had searched for the Gate to Heaven. The sky above spread out like a deep blue blanket of dappled magnificence, with the lights of stars, and planets, and galaxies. She could practically hear them singing as she turned her fall into a slow, easy spiral.

  All right, then. Let’s suppose that a thousand years have passed. A thousand years during which mankind was supposed to be free of the influence of Angels, able to make their own choices about whether to worship Jesus, free to make their own decisions.

  So what was Nyx doing all this time? And Persephone and Ishtar? The more Arcana thought about it, the less she liked the possibilities. The idea of those three able to run free on Earth for a thousand years with no divine hand to stay their actions made Arcana shudder.

  I’ll start in God’s city, Arcana decided, and see what has happened there. Then I’ll decide what to do.

  Arcana turned south and winged toward Jerusalem. It took a pair of hours, unlike her desperate race to the island the day before. She needed to think on what to do, if she was truly out of contact with God.

  BE MY GUARDIAN, God had told her. STAND WATCH OVER THE HUMAN RACE. DO NOT SPEAK TO THEM. DO NOT VISIT THEM. KEEP WATCH OVER THEIR DEVELOPMENT, AND LET NONE INTERFERE WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIANITY, SAVE THE HUMANS THEMSELVES, UNTIL A THOUSAND YEARS HAVE PASSED.

  Arcana wondered what that meant now, if Nyx had been given free rein to terrorize the citizens for a thousand years. For all she knew, there weren’t any humans left.

  She looked far out into the night, her Angel’s eyes seeing details that even the best owl would miss. Jerusalem was still there. There were still people in it. But that was all that wa
s good about it.

  Half the city was ruins, the smoldering remains of torched buildings sending smoke up into the air and leaving a choking cloud that made the people still in the city cough and gasp. And as for the people in the city…

  What happened here?

  War had happened, Arcana realized as she flew closer, and it had taken a large, bloody toll on the inhabitants. Everywhere Arcana looked she could see swaggering soldiers and cowering civilians—all of them women or children. There looked to be no men left in the city. Here and there one of the soldiers was taking his pleasure on one of civilians, usually in the street, whether anyone was watching or not. Arcana didn’t have to ask if the women were willing. They were subjugated, their will broken, their eyes dead. They accepted blows or rape as the price they paid for surviving or keeping their children alive. She could see no hope in them.

  The soldiers wore white tabards, most stained with blood, with black crosses, upside-down on the fronts. Arcana frowned. She had no idea what those crosses meant. She circled the city twice more, landed, and shifted her shape to that of one of the soldiers. The moment her clothes converted to the uniform she felt as if something dirty had crawled across her skin. Something is very, very wrong here.

  DO NOT SPEAK TO THEM. DO NOT VISIT THEM. That was what God had said.

  Arcana wasn’t certain she was doing what she was meant to, but she knew she was doing what she must.

  She walked through the streets, watching bored men play coarse games, from pissing contests to making a girl crawl after food while they kicked her and tore away her clothes, piece by piece. Arcana had no doubt what would happen to her once the clothes were gone.

  She stopped in a tavern, where an exhausted-looking woman with a bruise on her face was serving wine to the soldiers. She was topless. Her breasts were bruised and scratched where men had dug in their fingernails. Her skirt had been cut open up the back, and every so often as she poured a drink, a man would reach in and rub his hands over her. She stiffened but didn’t protest.

  “Hey,” said one of the men sitting at the table next to Arcana. “I don’t know you.”