3-4
Gilead was prepared for another long day of overland travel, especially once he had stripped himself of his coat and stuffed it into his pack to account for the heat. It was August in this shard, not March like it had been in Leedsrealm. However, they only had to walk for about an hour before coming across a road with a strange stall by its side.
“This is called a bus stop. And because we’re not currently wanted for murder and insurrection in this shard, we can avail ourselves of the best that America has to offer.”
So, after an hour of walking came an hour of sitting. They were joined partway into that hour by a stranger, who gave Gilead the opportunity to examine the fashions of this shard. They were similar, he determined, to Leedsrealm, but rather lighter in both color and composition.
The stranger didn’t seem to like their presence very much, mumbling to himself in bizarrely-accented Saxon and shooting a barrage of suspicious glares, particularly aimed at Sara. Despite everything that had just happened, Sara was still his lady. Seeing her treated that way raised Gilead’s hackles.
“Have you any ado with her, Sir? Has my companion treated you poorly in the past?”
“She your girl or somethin’?” replied the stranger.
“She is my lady, and I will not have her being—”
Sara grabbed him by the back of the neck and leaned in to whisper into his ear. “Don’t. He’s just being racist. He can’t hurt me.”
“Racist?”
“You’re from medieval Europe, how do you not know what racism is?”
(Like with many things Gilead did not understand, it came down to chronology. The invention of racism was many centuries in the future when Gilead had had his second death).
The two groups promptly moved as far apart on the bench as they could, and it did not feel like much time at all had passed before the bus arrived. Fortunately for everyone involved, Sara still had some proper American currency on her, enough to pay for passage for both herself and Gilead. Gilead marveled at the wondrous artifice of the year one thousand nine hundred and forty-one, and spent a significant fraction of the journey pestering the bus driver for information as to the inner workings of his fantastical machine. Somehow, the bus driver tolerated all of this.
Plodding along at a steady forty miles per hour and with stops along the way, it was another hour and a half before Sara informed Gilead that this was their stop. On the opposite side of the dust-coated bus windows was the bustling core of what was, by Gilead’s standards, an absolutely massive city. They stepped out, Gilead drew a great deal of confused attention by waving goodbye to the driver, and they were off.
Almost immediately Gilead decided that he liked this place more than he had Carlisle. There were not nearly so many soldiers around, and the air was positively sweet-smelling. The buildings—warehouses and banks and car-repair shops—were mostly pleasantly whitewashed lumber and concrete, not dismal brick. Learning to deal with “stoplights” was an annoyance, but not nearly enough to ruin the scenery.
There were only two issues with the place. The first was a lack of horses: automobiles were good and all, but Gilead loved horses, and their absence sent a chill through him. The second was the severe unfriendliness of the townsfolk, giving both himself and Sara a great many dirty looks. Such expressions were quite easily banished, however, as soon as Gilead placed his hand anywhere in the vicinity of the cavalry saber on his hip.
“I wouldn’t draw that if I were you,” Sara said.
“I wasn’t planning on it unless we were attacked,” Gilead replied.
“Still. We’re being watched.”
Sara gestured upwards. Gilead had not been looking upwards; it was not his habit, and the brightness hurt his eyes. What he saw in the sky, perhaps thirty meters up, made his jaw drop.
It was an angel, exactly like the ones he’d met in his prior lives. Even from so far away it was unmistakable. Like a miniature sun, it glowed brilliant yellow, hovering completely still in a way that not even a hummingbird could. From the ground, he could just about barely make out the angel’s strange, angular outline, the four wings in a cross-pattern that carried it without flapping, the sword of judgement held in its hand.
“What is it doing here?” Gilead whimpered.
“Oh fuck,” Sara said, “I forgot that you didn’t already know about… It’s fine, you’re not doing anything wrong, it’ll leave you alone.”
Except that the angel had already started to move. Gilead knew exactly why: it could sense him, sense his unhallowed soul. He started to back away, knuckles white as he gripped onto the hilt of his sword.
“Don’t draw it, don’t draw it!”
Gilead’s jaw was too paralyzed to say aloud that he had no intention of doing so. To attempt to smite an angel with steel was to try killing a whale with a length of string, that much Gilead knew. But if he did not keep a hand on his sword, then his only other resort would be to fall to his knees.
The angel swooped down, coming to a stop two meters above the street. All around, people were running as quickly as they could, or else diving for cover; somebody let out a shrill scream. There was no emotion in its sharply cut, almost crystalline face, no humanity behind the glowing motes of its eyes, no mercy to be found in the careful guard of its two-meter blade.
“Knowest thou me? Am I familiar to thine sacred eye?”
For a few seconds Gilead was left to boil in his own fear. He staggered back another step, and the angel matched him exactly. It did not grant him clemency, but neither did it attack, until at last it spoke with an androgynous, musical voice.
“Gilead du Carbennic. Status: Sainted. Status: Apostate. Course of Action: Leave In Sin.”
They remembered him. Though it had been fourteen centuries, though this was an entirely different world to the one in which he had been born, the angel of the Lord who stood before Gilead still remembered his greatest sin. No human thought could withstand such knowledge. Gilead lost consciousness.
…
“He didn’t get hit by anything, did he?”
Gilead was half-conscious, too weak to open his eyes. An unfamiliar voice—male, faintly accented but not in any way he could place—spoke over him. About him. At least the voice sounded friendly.
“No, the angel just said something… something about his status,” said Sara. “Then he collapsed.”
“Then it looks like this white boy here has fainted.”
“Do you suppose the fact that he kept threatening to attack people for daring to look at me wrong means you should stop calling him that?”
“…No.”
“Agreed. Christ, look at him, he’s even fucking blonde.”
Gilead’s eyes flickered open, though it took several seconds longer for the world to un-blur enough for it to be said that he could properly see.
“So, my friend Sara here tells me that you’ve sworn an oath of protection towards her. And where do we cross paths, but when you’ve fallen asleep on the job!”
“Don’t make fun of him like that,” Sara interrupted. “He takes things like oaths of protection way too seriously.”
Gilead focused on the unfamiliar man, and slowly his image resolved. He was fit but not bulkily-built, with long, slightly wavy hair framing a broad, worn face. Gilead decided that he looked dependable. He also realized that he was not where he had fallen: someone had moved him into an alleyway between two buildings.
“You came to my aid?”
“That I did, that I did. Sara here’s good at a lot of things, but upper body strength ain’t one of them. Needed a little help getting you out of the way after that little fainting spell of yours.”
Gilead nodded, cradling his head. He did feel like someone who had just collapsed onto a hard surface, that much was for sure.
“Then I am in your debt, no matter how little. What are you called, stranger?”
“Wesley, Wesley Wall. My friends call me ‘Wes’, and a friend of Sara’s is a friend of mine.”
“Then I shall call you ‘Wes’. I am hight Gilead du Carbennic, Le Chevalier De L’Étrange Ceincture.”
Wes raised an eyebrow in Sara’s direction. “French?”
“I think he’s technically Welsh. But he’s also a Lazarius, in case everything else didn’t give it away, so he speaks a lot of French too. For some reason.”
“My father was French,” Gilead said. “And it is a common enough language in the court of Arthur; many foreign dignitaries had no wit of Brythonic.”
“Apparently King Arthur was real and he was one of the knights of the round table,” Sara added.
“Who?”
“Never mind. More importantly: what the hell happened with that angel!” Sara hushed her own voice, reducing what wanted to be a shout down to a whisper. “I’ve never seen one of them act like that before!”
“It recognized me,” said Gilead.
“That’s impossible. You just got here.”
Gilead shook his head. “Not from here. This is far from my first encounter with the angelic host. By mystic means… what one angel knows, all know. He remembered my sin.”
Sara and Wes looked at each other as though searching for encouragement to say something. It was Sara who broke the silence first.
“Gilead, they’re not…” Her expression was full of dismay. “They’re just…”
“Let’s not discuss this now. They might be listening. Come on.”
Wes, clearly a native of the city, led the rest of the way. The number of ugly looks only increased, though so too did the number of folk who gave the group friendly waves as they passed. After a few minutes, they reached the dense commercial heart of Topeka, rows of shops on either side of a broad street. There were more automobiles there, and Gilead watched every single one of them go by. They came in a bewildering variety of shapes and forms, and Wes was glad to explain each one as they went, until they arrived at their destination.
It was a tailor’s store, judging both by the needle and thread elaborately painted on the doorframe and by the rows upon rows of clothes filling the main space. Wes navigated Sara and Gilead through the main floor and past the few customers milling about, until they reached a back room. He shut the door and triple-locked it.
“There. Now we can talk,” Wes said.
“They’re not angels,” Sara said, as though no time had passed at all. “They’re… they’re machines. Very advanced machines, far more advanced than anything from my time. Machines so well-made that they can think like people and do magic all on their own. They’re meant to look like angels, but they’re not angels.”
Gilead frowned. “Then whomever built such things must have been drawing from life; for in their countenance there was nothing to distinguish that thing from a true angel of the Lord.”
Wes’s nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed and calculating. “That says some bad things about their builder… Does he know about all of that?”
Sara shook her head. “He got resurrected, what, a week and a half ago?”
“Ten days, now.”
“And he’s already sworn an oath to protect you?”
“It’s been a busy ten days, Wes. That’s kind of why I’m back here.”
“Who built these mechanical angels?” Gilead asked. “Such blasphemy cannot be tolerated.”
“They call themselves The Divine Kingdom,” Wes said. “They pretend to be the real deal, but they’re not. Just petty conquerors. Dangerous, of course; Topeka had barely been in Scrapyard for a year when they rolled through and conquered it all in a day. They’ve been keeping it under occupation ever since.”
Gilead pondered this for a short while. “Once we have your sister back, we should make ado with this false Kingdom.”
“There are so many Pretenders who have had the same idea,” Sara said. “Half the Pretenders in Scrapyard are in the Kingdom Wood fighting back, and they’ve only managed to—”
Meanwhile, Wesley’s eyes went wide. “Your sister? What happened to Zahra?!”
Sara sighed, settling down on a wooden crate labelled FABRIC. “That’s what we’re here for. Let’s at least wait for Juniper to get here. It’s not a story that I would like to tell twice.”
Wes’s expression rapidly sombered. “I’m sorry. I will remember her well.”
“She’s not dead,” Sara snapped.
“Ah. That’s what you meant by what you’re here for. Well, I for one will do whatever I can to help her.”
“Thank you, Wes.”
“What sort of man would I be if I weren’t willing to fight when it came down to it?” He turned to Gilead. “Would you like some coffee? Fresh shipment just got in from up north.”
“I nist what that is,” Gilead said.
“Which means he doesn’t know,” Sara chimed in instantly.
Wes chuckled. “I’ll make sure to get you a half-cup with plenty of cream, then.”
He was making to leave through a side door out of the storage room when the chamber was suddenly shot through by a glowing dart. Gilead, who was resting his back against the wall, startled, nearly going for his sword until he saw that Sara was totally unperturbed. The dart slowed just before hitting the floor, curled up into the air, and started speaking in a shrill voice.
“You know how I like mine, Wes. Double cinnamon!”
Wes immediately stopped in his tracks. “Juniper, we were just waiting for you. No time for serving coffee. Sara’s sister is in danger.”
There was a flicker and a subtle rushing of air, and the glowing pinprick in the center of the room was suddenly replaced by a woman, though about nine inches too high up. She fell, staggered, regained her balance, and spun around in place, observing everyone who had gathered through a pair of thick ruby-lens glasses.
“Well fuck me in the ass, just when I thought everything was going to be calm for once. To the situation room!”