Chapter Two
Raphael hesitated.
“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom,” the stranger said, “and the man that getteth understanding.”
It had been a long time since anyone had greeted Raphael this way. It took him a moment to find the response. “For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold,” he finally said.
He took the stranger’s hand in a firm handshake.
The man raised his eyebrows politely, as if they were discussing a weather forecast, and didn’t let go of Raphael’s hand. “She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her. Length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honor.”
“Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her.” Raphael crooked one finger inside the handshake, and the stranger crooked his counterpart finger in the same way in response.
“I’m John,” he said, and released Raphael’s hand. “The Prester.”
Raphael didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
Raphael looked around the street, wondering who might be watching from cover. Yellow light spilled onto the east side of the neighborhood’s ruins, spattering over rooftops to give the crumbling structures momentary haloes.
“Mort Feldman was a Brother,” Raphael said. “That’s how long it’s been. Not long at all, really, for those of us who do not fade and die.”
“Ah, yes.” The Prester’s eyes twinkled. “And when did you meet my friend Mort?”
“Thirty years ago. We didn’t talk much, after the first. After he became my vessel.”
“Of course.”
Raphael squinted at the Prester. What did he mean, of course? “Are you a Bearer of the Word?” he asked.
John shook his head. “No. But once, a long time ago, I was vessel for one and dreamed the dream of Heaven.”
“Before you became a Son of Light?”
“After, as it happens. Does it matter?” John took Raphael by the elbow and turned him up the street. “Walk with me.”
Raphael’s thoughts raced. He had been inducted as one of the first Sons of Light centuries ago—millennia—but his exile in Dudael—his service—meant that he’d had precious little contact with other Sons for a long time.
“Is Enoch Emery a Son of Light?” Raphael asked.
“Newly inducted,” John told him. “Anointed with the Spirit of the Lord only.”
The first of the seven anointings. “But his hand isn’t marked.”
“Neither is yours.”
“Mine can’t be. I’m a Messenger, and ordinary ink will leave no mark on me.”
“His couldn’t be, either. He needed to lure in a Messenger, and we feared that ink on his skin might frighten you off.”
“A Messenger?”
“Not just any Messenger. You.”
Raphael stopped walking. Ahead of him, a lean mutt with hair falling out in patches trotted out from behind a fallen log, stared at him, and growled. He drew back his shoulders to stand as tall and proud as this vessel’s body would let him.
“What is my punishment to be?”
The Prester turned Raphael by the shoulders and looked up into his eyes. “Raphael,” he said, “I’m not here to punish you.”
Raphael looked down at Enoch Emery’s feet, noticing for the first time the brown leather work boots. “Good. I do not deserve to be punished.”
“Yes, you do. We all do. And none of us escapes a whipping. But none of us gets the whipping he really deserves.”
Raphael sighed and gestured around him with his arms. The mangy dog yelped, looked over its shoulder, and scurried away. “This is not all my fault.”
“Not all.” The Prester put his hands in his pockets and looked around at the rot and ruin. “You made choices that helped lead us here. So did many other people. That’s usually the way of things in the world.”
“In the world?”
“There is a place where only Heaven’s choices matter.”
“Of course.”
Raphael heard a heavy rattle of chain link and turned to look. The three clowns from the dumpster hopped and clambered their way over a weed-choked lot’s fence and walked in his direction. They fanned out slightly as they came, like an army that marched to encircle. The heavy one held a splintered piece of two-by-four in one hand; the thin one held a short length of lead pipe; the old one held a steak knife.
“Are these men Brothers?” Raphael asked.
“Do you plan to ask them?” John stepped back, behind Raphael.
The Bearer of the Word inside Enoch Emery considered the advancing men. Their eyes sparkled in the sunlight. They were filthy, rumpled and armed.
They had blood on their mouths.
The shots, he thought. The screams.
He Whispered.
“Calm down,” he urged the men. “Release your anger and be comforted.” Even through the body of the Son of Light Enoch Emery, he felt the warm winds of Eden blow, scented with myrrh and bdellium, tasting of frankincense, shining to his eyes like gold. The Whisper of Eden tired him, but to any son or daughter of Eve and Adam, the call to return to the natural home of the spirit was nearly irresistible. “Join with me in peace.”
The heavy man bellowed and charged.
Raphael ducked under a swing of the two-by-four; this was another reason to be happy he was in a young, fit body. He jumped upward with both feet, slamming his shoulder into the heavy man’s solar plexus and throwing him backward, staggering.
It wasn’t just that Enoch was young and fit. The indwelling presence of a Bearer of the Word made any human vessel capable of feats of great strength, if only for a little while and at the cost of great exhaustion.
The men attacking him must be mad. Even being damned didn’t necessarily make you resistant to the Whisper; if anything, a profound sense of loss and alienation from Heaven might make you more susceptible. But if your soul was broken—if you were insane, well and truly destroyed—you could be beyond the reach of Eden.
The other two men closed in on Raphael, right and left. He grabbed the half-Bible in his back pocket and hurled it like a weapon into the face of the oldest attacker. He nailed the man right between the eyes with the broken book. With Enoch’s enhanced strength, the force of the blow knocked the target over backwards.
Raphael didn’t want to shoot any of the men. He was a Bearer of the Word, not a Bearer of the Sword, and killing was not his calling. Killing was beneath him, if he could at all avoid it. Besides, something about his interrupted conversation with the Prester filled him with a feeling he couldn’t quite articulate. The Prester hadn’t come to punish him, so why had he come?
Raphael leaped over his downed attacker, stepping hard between the older man’s shoulder blades to keep him down. Raphael looked for a weapon. He didn’t find one, and hands empty, he spun around to meet the thin man with the lead pipe.
He didn’t particularly want Enoch Emery to die, either, but that was the risk he decided to take. After all, Enoch had welcomed him. He had invited Raphael to take that chance.
Raphael raised his balled fists to punch the onrushing cannibal—
“Hypno hymas deo!” the Prester called, throwing a handful of glittering sand about him in a cloud—
The man with the pipe collapsed, crumpling limp into the dry gutter at Raphael’s feet. His weapon rattled and banged twenty feet up the street. The heavy man, just beginning to clamber again to his feet, fell back flat, and the old man with the knife lay still.
All three instantly began to snore.
Raphael unwound his fists. “Thanks.”
John put his hands back in his pockets. “I’m not here for thanks,” he said. “I’m not here to rescue you. I’m also not here to punish you.”
“Okay,” Raphael said, “I’ll bite. What are you here for?”
“To bring you a vessel.”
Raphael arched a skeptical eyebrow at the Prester. “That can’t be all.”
John pulled a hand out of his pocket, and it jingled. “And to give you a car.”
Raphael reached out slowly and took the keys. The Prester turned to point out a badly battered avocado-green coupe across the street. Raphael wanted to believe that the Sons of Light, after years of no contact, had decided to simply bring him a car and a body, but he wasn’t that arrogant. “What’s the catch?” he muttered.
The Prester shrugged. “The catch is that it’s a Datsun 510. It’s old, and its maintenance has been hit and miss.”
“I’m older,” Raphael told him, “and my maintenance has been atrocious. Besides, I’m not a car guy and I can’t afford to be picky. Really, what’s the catch?”
“No catch. The car is yours, and the tank is full. You can take it and do what you want, go wherever you want.”
“But … ?”
“No but.”
“Okay … and?”
“And I also have a commission.”
“An errand.”
“You are a Messenger.”
Raphael weighed the keys in his hand and considered. “Where does this … commission come from?”
“You can refuse it. The car is yours.”
Raphael frowned, but he pocketed the car keys. “Okay. Who wants an errand done?”
“Heaven.” The Prester smiled. “Who else?”
“Do you mean … the Legate of Heaven?” The Legate had badly wanted to infiltrate the Sons of Light, and by now he just might have done it.
Dogs barked and somewhere in town a siren sounded.
“I mean Heaven.”
“Since when has Heaven used the Sons of Light to communicate with its Messengers?”
“Are you Heaven’s Messenger, then?” John looked at Raphael keenly.
Raphael felt his shoulders sag. He bowed his head. Was this a test? He had to say something, had to explain himself. “I’ve sinned.”
“Pride.”
Raphael nodded. He didn’t quite believe it, but it was what Heaven wanted to hear.
“You have will,” John said. “All beings with will sin.”
Raphael looked at him. It sounded like his wandering days were over. Heaven might admit him again. “Can all beings with will repent?”
“Yes, if they meet the condition.”
“What condition?”
“A penitent sinner must allow others to repent as well.”
“And is there atonement? Is there healing?”
“Ah.” John chuckled. “That is the issue. That is precisely the problem.”
“You didn’t answer my other question.”
“No?”
“Why does Heaven communicate to me by the Sons of Light?”
John smiled. “We have been Heaven’s from the first. We have been the watchers in secret, the runners of errands that could never be known. Now we are the redundant part of the network. The backup plan.”
“The backup plan for what?”
“As with any backup plan, for when the main plan goes awry. I am a messenger because Heaven cannot trust all of its own these days.”
“You mean the Legate,” Raphael said.
“And his third.”
“Is he right about that? A third of the Host of Heaven follows him?”
“I don’t know. If not a third, in any case there are many.”
“If you are Heaven’s second network,” Raphael asked, “why do you need me at all? Why not carry out the errand yourself?”
As soon as he had formulated the question, he knew what the answer had to be.
The Prester smiled. “You must Bear the Word.”
“A prophet is to be called?”
“A man of vision has stood in the council of the divine ones.”
“In Heaven?”
“Not that council.”
Raphael thought back to the scene of chaos and destruction in the depths of Hell a few weeks earlier. He remembered watching the Legate of Heaven and the guitar player Eddie Marlowe running deeper into the caverns together while he was forced back. “Eddie Marlowe,” he said. “You mean me to Bear the Word to Eddie Marlowe.”
“Not I. Heaven.”
Raphael was astounded. “What is he to do? Is there a king to be challenged? A president?”
The Prester shrugged. “I don’t know. All I’m doing is bringing you the Word.”
“Why me? I’m a sinner, you said so yourself.”
“We’re all sinners,” John said. “And I don’t question Heaven’s instructions. I just carry them out.”
Raphael laughed dryly. “Touché.”
“Perhaps your isolation over the last few millennia makes Heaven believe it can trust you. Perhaps Heaven believes you are prepared to repent and again Bear the Word.”
“I am prepared.”
“We’ll find out.” The Prester extended a hand, palm up. In it lay a scrap of parchment, red and black characters inked on it on both sides.
Raphael tried not to show it, but his borrowed heart raced in joyous victory. To Bear the Word again, to be the Messenger who called a prophet. He made himself hesitate modestly, and then a terrible thought struck him.
He couldn’t accept.
The Prester had identified Raphael’s sin as pride. What this Son of Light thought, Heaven must also believe. Probably Heaven told him. Raphael couldn’t accept this Word and Bear it, because—he could admit it to himself—he would do so out of pride. The Word would fail, he would again have worsened his already black name, and whatever chance he had of returning to Heaven would be gone.
He dropped his hand to his side.
“Is there a problem?” John asked.
Raphael’s ensorcelled attackers snored. A motor revved in the distance. Two men in hoodies lurched into view, shuffling through the leaves piled up on the battered sidewalk.
“I’m not worthy,” Raphael said slowly. In some sense he said the words because he knew he must, but the words shamed him, and as he heard them, he knew they were true. Without meaning to, he shed a tear.
“Great God of Heaven.” The Prester chuckled, a friendly, open sound. “Who is?”
“But I …”
“Please,” John said, his chuckle collapsing into a flat, earnest face. “I know you’re thinking of yourself and trying not to accept this Word for the wrong reasons. Stop. Accept the Word. Accept it humbly if you can; accept it from pride if you must, but at all costs, accept it. There is no one else. Accept it, for Heaven’s sake.”
He held out the parchment again.
There was no one else. The words knocked something loose for Raphael, and he sighed. He forced away from his thoughts all question about why he was doing what he did. There was no alternative. He took the Word.
Heaven needed him.
The Word was larger in his hands than he remembered. He looked down at in wonder, unable to read the mystic, secret characters that were neatly written in columns up and down the parchment.
John looked pointedly over his shoulder at the approaching men in hoodies. “Please, Bearer,” he said.
Raphael put the parchment in his mouth.
It didn’t dissolve instantly, as it would have had he not been inside the vessel Enoch Emery. Instead it slowly pulped into a mash, bitter, grainy, and thick. As it dissolved, he felt his being—his whole being, his combined with Enoch’s—fill with light. He carefully kept his mouth closed to keep the light inside, sucking at the parchment and smashing it against his palate with his tongue until it was gone.
The men with hoodies stopped. They were squinting at the Datsun and whispering to each other. They looked around and their eyes fell on John and Raphael.
“Where do I find him?” Raphael asked the Prester.
The Prester’s eyes widened in surprise. “Doesn’t the Word lead you to him?”
“It can,” Raphael agreed, “but I have eaten the Word, and I have no insight, no sense of where to go.”
“Hey!” called one of the men in hoodies. “This your car?”
The Prester ignored the question. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know that after the meeting of the Infernal Council, Eddie Marlowe returned to earth among the ruins of Ainok with three companions. They were all injured, but especially the Child of Mab.”
“Twitch,” Raphael remembered. “Who is a horse and a bird.”
“No ordinary hospital will have any ability to treat such wounds to such a person.” The Prester arched an eyebrow at Raphael.
“The Sisters of Nauvoo.”
“Hey, assholes!” The hoodies walked closer. The one in the lead gestured wildly with both arms, but the second followed behind, hands in his hoodie’s pocket. He looked like he had a gun. “I’m gonna take this car now, and we can do it one of two ways. You can be dead, or you can be alive. Either way, you stay here on this sidewalk and we drive away. Now, what say you gimme the keys?”
Raphael turned to face them. The Word was completely dissolved in his mouth, its light absorbed into his body. “Stop,” he Whispered.
The warm wind of Eden blew across the faces of the two men in hoodies. The Prester chuckled.
“I … I …” The would-be car thief’s gestures grew small and then stopped, and his eyes glazed.
“There is no car here for you,” Raphael said. “Leave, and find your car elsewhere.”
The frankincense wind of Eden blew, and the two men rolled away before it like dried-up leaves.
When Raphael turned back to say farewell to the Prester, the little man was gone.