5

NEXT TIME, SKIP THE WAKE

I knew she was trouble the minute I saw her, but damned if flametop didn’t prove it in record time. She barely had time to kick off her shoes and wiggle her piggies before the gunnies came for her. She’d rubbed somebody the wrong way. Hadn’t even bothered to cobble together a decent Magisterium before she did it, either. But never let it be said Bayliss turns a cold, hard heart to a dame in distress. Even if it was distress of her own making.

The sooner I knew what she’d done, the sooner I could smooth the ruffled feathers and wipe my hands of the whole affair. For good this time.

Problem was, getting a bead on that meant making a visit to the old homestead. It’d been a good long while since I’d been back. I barely knew my way around any longer. And if too many people knew I’d returned, it was apt to get awkward. Last thing I needed was to have every joe and jane in the Choir ribbing me for not having the courage of my convictions. I’d made a big point of making myself scarce.

I escaped Notre Dame through the Portal of the Last Judgment (domine, domine, pater noster, and all that jazz), took a seat alongside a hedge, lit a pill, and considered my next move. The steel-gray smoke of my contemplations mingled with the scent of incense-laden guilt leaking from the cathedral and the humid stink of the Seine. A light rain fell on me, dusted the flower gardens, pattered on the river. I listened to the Babel hubbub of tourists, mostly German, English, and Japanese, and the ticker-tape clatter of cameras. Old ones, too. Actual film cameras. From back when the monkeys used chemistry to capture their holiday memories. (All possible courtesy of the Mantle of Ontological Consistency.) Those cameras predated flametop’s conception by decades. I wondered whose memory she’d lifted. My money was on a shutterbug grandparent with a photo album. Had to hand it to her: she had a good eye for detail. She’d build a crackerjack Magisterium someday. Assuming she survived long enough to do so, and assuming she didn’t get me killed before I could see it.

A gargoyle funneled the rain into a steady drip on the crown of my hat. Now that brought me back. My one and only gig as a model happened back when they were sculpting all those gargoyles. Had to do it through dreams, though, so I never made any folding from it. The monkeys are a superstitious lot, but never more so than when they’re building a cathedral. A few centuries later I could have taken the master artisan to dip the beak, and convinced him to blame the hallucinations on the green fairy. The artsy crowd was mad for that hooch even after it drove them a little loony. But Paris was a different place then. A few francs could buy you a bottle of wine and some willing company.

I squinted at the gargoyle. It wore a big, wide frown on its puss. I said, “Long time, no see, pal.” It spit in my eye.

Another puff sent tar swirling through my wet and glistening simulacra of monkey lungs. It set my thoughts in motion.

Someone had a real beef with flametop. Why? And what did this mean for me?

Who wasn’t the issue. Not really. Even I could take a decent shot in the dark on that one. The way I figured it, any notoriety she had stemmed from coming along just after Gabby punched out. That was her only claim to fame, but it was a lulu. So whatever had the loogans’ dander up was probably connected to the stiff. And that pointed to whoever tapped me for their fishy little errand down on Earth. And, by extension, whoever rubbed the Seraph.

I thought I’d sidestepped that whole flop after seeing which way the winds of the Pleroma blew. The currents hinted at something too big, too ambitious, too dangerous. I figured the scheme was destined to blow up in the conspirators’ faces like a novelty cigar, but not before it rained trouble on everybody in the Choir. So I ducked the guilt by association by lamming to Earth. Or so I thought.

It was too good to last. I’d barely been among the monkeys a few centuries—hardly enough time to pick up decent vices—when the first of the anonymous telegrams arrived. Messages sculpted in the swirl of cigarette smoke; implied in the sleep-murmur of a dozing street-corner wino; outlined in an improbable roll of dice in a back-alley parlor; writ across the sky in the hiss and flare of burning space debris. I ignored them long as I could but the deck was stacked against me. My attempt to steer clear of the trouble made me the perfect stooge. So perfect that my unwillingness to cooperate didn’t enter the math.

Once that came clear, I kept my head down. Didn’t ask any questions. Didn’t try to get clever. But above all I made it a point to not know who they were. All I knew was I’d been tagged by some faction in the Choir with deep pockets and an ax to grind. We had an implicit agreement: I’d run their errand—using my familiarity with the monkeys to plug a hole in the MOC—and then they’d go climb a tree. Forever.

And besides. I gave long odds to their grudge. A cork isn’t useful unless you have a place to put it, and that told me they were fixing to scratch somebody. But who ever heard of bumping off an angel? Everyone knew that was impossible. We can’t die. Even nickel-grabbers like me.

But then Gabriel’s demise lit the night sky.

So I whittled a cork and beat a hasty retreat. Because the faction that had twisted my arm threw a lot of weight in the Pleroma. More than I thought possible. Enough to rub a Seraph. Enough to send a pair of Cherubim to brace flametop.

Didn’t know the why of their beef with Molly, but I did know it was bad news for me. Accident or no, I’d tagged her, but they didn’t like her. I sighed. Dames.

I dragged her into this mess. She’d been having a rough time of it thanks to me. As much as I hated to admit it, I did feel like a prize heel. Guess I owed her for the train thing. But if I were to make good on my words to flametop, I’d have to know what got Gabby croaked.

Plan in hand, I flicked my pill into a flower bed overflowing with bedraggled snapdragons and wilted daisies. I tipped my hat at the gargoyle. “Don’t be a stranger.” It spat again.

A fat American pointed his Kodak at the flower beds, and me, just as I shifted into the Pleroma. If he ever bothered to develop that film, he’d find a ghostly wisp of vapor making an obscene gesture. Back home I went.

Gabriel had been one of the oldest and most powerful of us. Rumor said he’d even interceded with METATRON on behalf of the Choir once or twice. Don’t know if I believe that. But I did know he’d been a load-bearing member of the MOC.

So much so, in fact, that I hadn’t needed to worry about anybody ribbing me over my reluctant return to the Pleroma. Nobody noticed. Gabby’s death had kicked a hell of a dent in the MOC. Flametop’s ascension was the equivalent of cramming a matchbook under the wobbly table leg—it fixed the worst of the problem, but this didn’t mean the table was good as new. Likewise, mortal physics and mathematics still chugged along with the monkeys blissfully unaware of the chaos behind the scenes. Because while the twist and I had managed to shore up the MOC just enough to prevent it from toppling over completely, an impossible murder had produced a steep conceptual gradient. Gabby’s absence caused a certain lack of intellectual pressure; it created ideational lacunae that had the MOC listing to port like a waterlogged cruise liner.

I’d never seen so many members of the Choir together. Well, together and not bickering like the Council of Nicaea. Everyone had turned out to put things right: Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubim … I even glimpsed a few flaming swords in the mix, meaning the remaining Seraphim had lent a paw. The monkeys like to believe the best part of their nature comes out in times of crisis. But never underestimate the power of enlightened self-interest: the Choir had rolled up its sleeves because Gabby’s death threatened to upset the whole damn apple cart. And that would have been the end of pie for everybody.

Speaking of which, a Dominion brushed past me carrying the final digits to a half-dozen transcendental numbers. It passed them along to a whirling Throne who appeared to be acting as an impromptu sub-foreman, who passed them up the chain to where they could do some good. A cloud of Powers surveyed the damage and orchestrated the repair effort with a thousand-dimensional bird’s-eye view. Somebody had built scaffolding out of a mathematics both consistent and complete (chew on that, Gödel) and now the spackle went on one axiom at a time.

A pretty picture of cooperation. But I wasn’t about to forget that crowd contained Gabby’s killer, or killers. I steered clear. And besides, they seemed to have the whole mess under control. My clumsy mitts weren’t likely to make a difference. I had an errand to run.

Even money said Gabby’s Magisterium wasn’t likely to decay any time soon. In fact, if I knew the Choir, and unfortunately I did, they’d freeze it in place as a memorial to our fallen colleague. So, assuming I could find them, a once-over of his digs might tell me what he’d been up to these last few eons. If I was lucky, it might tell me what had gotten him pinked. If I was unlucky, it might tell me who had done the job, and how—the kinds of things I didn’t want to know. Things that make a target of a guy. And if I was cursed, the trigger boys would know I knew. If that happened, I figured my and flametop’s lives weren’t worth a plugged nickel. Anybody hard enough to croak a Seraph should get a wide berth. Berth? They get their own private car, meals courtesy of Mr. Pullman.

But first things first. I needed to find somebody who could point me to Gabby’s Magisterium. But I figured I’d let the rubes come to me. Once the hard work was done, the sappier members of the Choir would drift off to gnash their teeth and weep.

The raw Pleroma, outside a Magisterium, isn’t all clouds and pearly gates. Even that would have been something. The real Pleroma is dull. Not quite a flat featureless plain, but on a cosmic scale, it’s close. It’s the raw material for our Magisteria, the sand that makes the concrete. It’s the liminal space in the corner of the eye; the darkened shadows at the edges of the stage. It’s the crawl spaces, the plumbing and pneumatic tubes, behind the MOC. Nobody ever oohs and aahs over wiring conduits and sewer lines. The view from the high window ain’t terrible: universe above, Earth below. But it does get boring.

I’ll say this for the celestial spheres, though: great acoustics. We’re talking Platonic ideals here. Pythagoras would have smashed his corny little harp across his knee if he’d heard it. And it just so happens that if you exist near the proper event locus, manifesting the concept of sound in just the right way—something akin to hitting E below middle C, give or take ten thousand octaves—the tingle isn’t all that unpleasant. Which makes this spot the closest thing the Pleroma has to a watering hole or a corner newsstand. Everybody passes through here, eventually. All I needed to do was stake it out and wait.

So I racked out behind a thicket of zodiacal light and waited. It took longer than I’d thought it would. I dozed off until a cosmic four-part harmony rattled my dreams.

“Holy, holy, holy!”

I peeked out from my blind. The racket came from the celestial equivalent of a barbershop quartet: two Principalities, an Archangel, and one little hanger-on Angel like me and flametop, its heiligenschein barely bright enough to out-twinkle the dimmest star. But damn if that kid didn’t have some pipes; no wonder it sang with the varsity team.

The Principalities stood on the hooves of oxen but had the visages of lions, and each wore four wings that gleamed like brass. The humaniform Archangel had on its pan a third eye that constantly wept tears of blood, for it had been pierced with the shrapnel of Creation. The Angel looked as though it had taken fashion advice from a Botticelli painting. Each wore a cowl darker than a starless expanse. Mourning rags. At least they hadn’t smeared themselves with ash, the mopes.

“You kids ever think about trying out for the talent show? I think you’ve got a shot at a ribbon this year.”

As one, they turned to regard me. And then they scrammed like their lives depended on it.

“Aw, you lousy lollipops!” I called after them.

They must not have recognized me. Gabby’s death had everyone on edge; they weren’t taking chances with some fresh face they didn’t know. Even a clean piece of beef like mine.

I fished out a pocketknife and cleaned my nails while waiting for them to return. They sidled back a few astronomical units at a time. I kept to myself, making no sudden moves, until they decided I was on the level. Eventually, they started crooning again.

Over the racket, I said, “I missed Gabriel’s funeral. Guess I need to start reading the obits more regularly. Any of you birds know where I can go to pay my respects?”

The Angel sang, in a voice like the ringing of a golden tuning fork, “Gabriel is gone, gone, gone. Oh, holy of holies, the Pleroma is bereft—”

“Yeah, yeah. I got that postcard. But thanks, kid. Anybody else?”

One of the Principalities stretched its wings; they clanged together like church bells. Its voice sent lightning storms across the Pacific. “The Pleroma mourns for Gabriel. Our sorrow is boundless. All is sackcloth, the fairest starlight naught but the bitterest ash. Do as thou wouldst.”

I recognized its voice. We’d met a long time ago. It didn’t recognize me. I chose not to complicate things.

“Look,” I said. “Gabby was a pal. I’d like a chance to say a private good-bye.” I made a show of lighting another pill. Took my time with it. Only after the smoke wreathed the heavens, tarnishing wings and stinging bleeding eyeballs, did I continue. “’Course, without knowing where to go, I’m stuck hanging around here.”

That sent the Ps and the Archangel into a huddle. Seemed nobody wanted to talk about the poor guy. How annoying would I have to get before they coughed up some answers? My next course of action was to sing along with them. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

The heavens wheeled. A star died while I waited; its cobalt corona sent a gamma-ray shimmer cascading across the MOC. I occupied myself by writing blue words in the rain of neutrinos sleeting through the Earth. Too bad none of the monkey wise-heads would ever pick up on it.

Finally, the Archangel spoke up. “Gabriel’s Magisterium exists inside the teleological conundrum of unbeing. It is the tremor of awe begat by contemplation of perfect, empty eternity.”

As a rule I don’t talk to Archangels unless I can’t avoid it. They speak by projecting thought through that extra peeper. Imagine shaking hands with a midwife right after an emergency C-section. And then imagine it’s not your hand smeared with gore but the inside of your mind.

But I had what I needed, so I let it ride.

“Thanks. This is real ducky of you.”

They went back to their glee club antics almost before the sentiment crossed my lips. “Holy, holy, holy!” they sang. I didn’t stick around for the rest. I already knew the lyrics to this ditty. It wasn’t a favorite.

In the Pleroma, the shortest distance between two points is to contemplate a reality where that distance is zero. And so I did. Teleology? Sounded to me like Gabby had been spending too much time with the navel-gazing crowd. I was sorry to hear it. Always thought he was smarter than that. But I followed little Redeye’s instructions, thought long and hard about primal and final causes in a universe perpetually empty both forward and backward, and before I knew it I was speeding like an arrow toward a foreign Magisterium.

And then I bounced off.

The impact spent me spinning into distant corners of the Pleroma. But I hurried back before I got slapped with a trespassing rap.

Having learned my lesson, I didn’t go diving headfirst the second time around. Instead, I decided to use my brain and my peepers. Even so it took a bit of effort before I could perceive a faint fuzziness rippling through the ontological boundary to Gabby’s digs. That was a sign of recent alterations. By then I had a fairly good idea what I’d find, but still I looked more closely.

Yeah. Somebody had barricaded the door.

They’d constructed a bevy of razor-thin micro-Magisteria, laid down willy-nilly like the scales on a snake who’d overslept and didn’t have time to groom himself before slithering off to work. They fit together nice and tight, leaving just enough room between them for a whisper of Pleroma. No interpenetration; nothing to offend the consensual basis of reality. I knew there had to be seams, but I couldn’t find ’em without squinting. It was fine work. Green-label juju.

Each magisterial sliver held a different arrow of time. Some didn’t keep to a single arrow; some had a whole damn quiver. Some used thermodynamic entropy to define it. Some used the passage of time as perceived by the beings that might have evolved on Earth had the amino acids ferried on the comets been right-handed rather than left-handed. Some used the expansion/contraction cycle of a two-pronged Carnot multiverse for a metronome. One dispensed with the arrow altogether for a zero-dimensional dot of time; another replaced the linear arrow with something that looked like the offspring of an octopus and a Klein bottle.

No wonder I bounced. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to ensure nobody swiped Gabby’s silverware.

But I’d been around the block a couple of times. I had a few tricks of my own.

I shaved off a sliver of my consciousness, folded it over, and gave one end a few kinks. Then I wedged the thin end of my new hairpin into the first seam, sat back, and let it go about its business. It inched along, wiggling and limboing, until the view from inside the seams gave me what I needed. The lock popped. The scales, as the poets say, fell from my eyes. I was in.

Funny thing about Gabby: you wouldn’t know it from looking at him, with his golden halo and platonic beauty, but the guy was something of a pack rat. He’d been collecting little odds and ends since at least the double-digit redshifts. The interior reality of Gabriel’s Magisterium burbled and shifted like convection currents in a star on the zaftig end of the main sequence. Because, I realized, that’s what they were. Dull dim light, from IR to X-ray, oozed past me like the wax in a million-mile lava lamp while carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen nuclei did little do-si-dos about my toes. Every bubble, every sizzle, every new nucleus, every photodissociation tagged something of interest to Gabriel. The heart of this star smelled of roses and musty libraries. Nuclear reactions unfolded with the calm susurration of solar wind upon Earth’s atmosphere, seeding cloud formation and rain. Convective cells furled about me with the low, slow, sonorous peal of cathedral bells mourning a monarch’s death. X-rays fizzed on my tongue like champagne bubbles; I loosened my tie, and felt the silky play of elemental gradients across my skin. Somewhere far below me, and just for a moment, the jangle of clashing nuclei became the faint chiming of a single silver bell.

I wandered around, getting the layout of the joint. Gabby’s flaming sword leaned point-down in one corner. A work of art, that thing: the hilt of silvered starlight; the edge sharp as the now that separates past and future; each tongue of flame bright as the embers of Creation. It was dusty. Strange that he hadn’t been packing when he fell; whoever did him in must have been counting on that. Just for grins I took the hilt and gave the star a stir. But I put the sword down just as quickly. A few centuries hence, assuming the monkeys managed to fix their little junk problem and get working satellites back in orbit by then, the X-ray flare from the attendant coronal mass ejection would knock high-energy electrons screaming through the electronics. But probably not enough to cause more than a coverage brownout in geostationary orbit.

From a wisp of magnesium (itself a sentimental remnant of an older star), Gabriel had hung fragments of conflicting realities like pearls on a string. Slivers of might-have-beens, universes with different fine structure constants, different electroweak coupling constants, different causality, no causality. Universes susceptible to mortal volition, universes impervious to it. Universes fine-tuned for complex life. Universes inimical to it. A reality where popcorn tasted like bitter wheatgrass and people sold brussels sprouts at the talkies. He’d also been thinking quite a bit about the monkeys. There was some speculation about different evolutionary paths within the MOC, but most of his interest seemed to focus on the fuzzy edges of life in those never-were universes. Looking to see where life had been possible, where intelligent life had been likely. He’d been charting the ontological boundaries of mortal existence.

But amongst all the big picture meaning-of-life stuff, he’d been tailing one individual monkey through the mundane realm. He’d clipped a few forgotten seconds from the memories of a priest and set them playing on an infinite loop like the houseflies in my diner:

The priest lays a wafer on a parishioner’s tongue while trying not to recoil from a puff of rancid breath. Poor Bill Fredricks has another rotten tooth. It’s cold in the church, a wintery draft gusting through the corner of a broken window, but pride in a good sermon is a golden warmth in the priest’s belly; so, too, is the pride in overcoming a recent temptation. But doesn’t pride go before the fall? He’s nervous, too, consumed by a low-level anxiety. Guilt over a deception, fear of being caught. The vestments itch; his dog collar chafes against his Adam’s apple; he has gas. The extra-dry communion wine makes his tongue feel as though it had been flensed with sandpaper …

Such were the things Gabriel had lifted from the padre. Nothing of meaning or import. Just a snippet from one of countless meaningless, unremarkable mortal lives. But enough to know the man, and find him again. I tucked the memory fragment into my wallet.

Along with a few others. These memories hadn’t been lifted with quite the same attention. A few janes, a few joes, each as unremarkable as little flametop had been before I put the whammy on her. But again: why Gabriel’s interest? I snatched these for later study, too.

The silver bell chimed again. Louder this time. From my trousers. I fished through lint, my comb, the few bits of spare change in my pockets until I found the source of the music. Gabby’s feather hummed like a tuning fork, its fine silvered edges vibrating fast enough to dice my fingers. I set it adrift, wrapped my hand in a handkerchief, then picked it up again. The vibration sent a tingle through my thoughts, and the crystalline chiming resonated through my perceptions. It tasted like clover honey, smelled like a smooth single malt, and felt like the flat of an electric carving knife pressed against my brow.

I drifted on a convection current of thermal nonequilibrium, trying to make sense of the feather. The current took me through the attic, past the shadow of a photodissociation zone. Gabby’s feather cranked up the volume and sliced my handkerchief to ribbons. The shadow passed. The feather took a breather.

It wasn’t a tuning fork. It was a dousing rod.

Didn’t take long to find the stash once I realized what I had. Gabby had hidden a few more mementos in a little pocket of fragile negative hydrogen ions in the photosphere, a delicate lacework supported by a curlicued nuance of atomic opacity, the kind of quirky consequence of the MOC that nobody ever bothers to notice. If Gabriel’s Magisterium had been a high-rise apartment, this spot would have been the wall safe behind the oil painting in the den. He’d squirreled away the impressions of another monkey where he didn’t want anybody to find them. I opened the bubble. The memory belonged to a little girl:

She huddles beside a bedroom door, listening while her parents speak to each other in husky stage whispers. The girl has just learned a new four-letter word. She wants to hold it in, but she giggles, and the whispering stops, and the bedroom door flies open. The girl’s mother stands over her, angry and naked. She grabs the girl by the arm and hauls her off to bed.…

That’s where the lost memory looped back on itself. But not before I got a good squint at the kid.

It was Molly. I kicked the walls. The star burped.

I knew there was something off about that dame. Who was she? The whole lousy thing stank of a setup. But who was the target? Me or her? I’d watched most of flametop’s life while the highlight reel flickered through her embryonic Magisterium in the wake of her death; she wasn’t a knowing part of this. She was innocent as an Easter lamb. Yet there was a connection between flametop and Gabriel.…

I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation. I just hoped the screwball cluck didn’t come at me with another baseball bat. Bad habit of blaming the messenger, that one. So maybe I’d hold on to this a little while and take a flutter at it when I wasn’t tired and sober. Why Molly? What had Gabriel found so important? Something about her, or her family?

A crack like the first thawing of an ice age ricocheted through Gabriel’s Magisterium, louder than lightning. There came another crash, and then a sharp-edged jangle. I had company. Sounded like somebody had come to root through Gabby’s phonograph records and raid the icebox. I tucked Molly’s stolen memory into my wallet, alongside the priest’s. Then I drifted low, pushing upstream against escaping gamma rays, to investigate the racket coming from under the convective zone.

The newcomers were rummaging Gabby’s collection of sonnets; he’d liked to carve them into the crusts of neutron stars. Next they’d be cutting the mattress apart and pouring out the coffee cans.

There were two of them. Each girded the heavens with diaphanous wings more transparent than a rich widow’s grief. The heat from their faces washed through the joint. Even there, in the heart of the inferno, the shadows of their contemplation drew beads of sweat from my furrowed, hardworking brow.

Cherubim. I hate Cherubim.

“Hey, I know you bums.”

They noticed me. My sweat turned to vapor. Didn’t care for it. But I kept to my script. I said, “I’ve been looking for you.”

They ignored me. They set about ripping down the wallpaper and tearing up the carpet. I shifted, just enough to feel the reassuring weight of the wallet and feather in my pockets.

I said, “Yeah. Word on the street says two fellas matching your descriptions tossed the place of a friend of mine. Left it in a real state. Her, too. What’s the big idea?”

LEAVE.

“Nuts to you, fella,” I said. “Nuts to both of you.”

Last thing I needed was a snarling match with a pair of Cherubim. But flametop had needed it even less, yet this wrecking crew had left her with nothing but a handful of dust where the foundations of her being had been. And I’m the one who tossed her into the duck pond.

But if this was a setup—and it swam and quacked like one—they’d want to give me the once-over, too. So I took my natural form. Been a spell since I’d done that. Didn’t seem to fit anymore. I remembered it being roomier. It wasn’t. Not that it made any difference to the loogans. They weren’t impressed. Compared to them I was so small-time I could do the backstroke in a pony glass. But I guess I had a reputation of sorts, too. I’m the guy who skipped town. They had my number. They saw the mud on my neck.

“For the record,” I said, before things got awkward, “I go by Bayliss now.”

YOUR PRESENCE IS UNNECESSARY. YOUR PRESENCE IS UNDESIRED. DEPART.

I couldn’t tell which of them was doing the talking. It was like a ventriloquist act with two dummies.

“I know your type,” I said, “tough guys like you. You put on a show, a bit of the flash, but you’re not independent operators. Nah. You’re just errand boys. So I figure somebody else is calling the shots.”

DEPART. INSTANTLY.

It got a little warmer in the churning heart of Gabriel’s Magisterium. All around us, squalling newborn babes of atoms crumbled into a cloud of hydrogen ash. I knew it was no use trying to get the connection to flametop. These muggs were just the muscle. If I wanted to connect the dots to Molly, I needed a line on their boss.

“Who’s writing your checks? Who put the bee on my client?”

They say persistence is a virtue. But they’ve never been worked over by a pair of Cherubim. The loogans’ disdain became irritation. They unfurled their wings, flexing and bending until I existed at the center of a cage of shadow and thought. I wondered how long it would take to put myself back together after they finished. But how I hate to stop when I’m on a roll.

“The other thing I can’t quite figure,” I said, “is the harvest. You ran roughshod over my client’s Magisterium, and now you’re desecrating Gabriel’s memorial. Must be one big payday in your future to put you on the outs with the bulls like that.”

That’s when they turned the full inferno of their contemplation upon me. I shriveled like a moth in a blast furnace. One hovered behind to anchor me in place. The other went to work with knuckle dusters and holy fire. The searing heat of angelic rage burned hotter than a blowtorch on butter. Somebody cried. Not me, though; I’m the strong, silent type.

A few shots to the kidneys later, they traded places. “Somebody fed you boys a plate of spaghetti,” I groaned. “Whatever they told you about my client, it’s nothing but chewing gum.”

No soap. These lugs enjoyed their work.

Time passed. I wished whoever it was would quit his bawling. What a sad sack. It got on my nerves. And the Cherubim had my nerves a little raw. At least I’d have matching shiners. I tried to split off a piece of myself and send it ahead to my Magisterium to make sure Flo had a raw steak waiting for me in the fridge, but the Cherubim caught it before it could slither away. They shoved it back into place, and none too gently. I guess they got bored, because one of them, either Tweedledee or Tweedledum, said,

THIS ONE DOES NOT POSSESS THE TRUMPET. IT DOES NOT EXIST HERE.

Trumpet?… Son of a gun.

Oh Bayliss, you smart little egg. Some shamus you are. You couldn’t find a virgin in a convent.

Gabriel had been the guardian of the Jericho Trumpet. But if I understood my new pals, it went missing when Gabby kicked it. And flametop, being the cork sent to fill the hole he left behind, was the natural place to start looking for it. Tossing her place came up short. So they came here on the theory maybe he hadn’t had time to hide it before he met his fate. But that wasn’t going so well, either. Good thing I came along to cheer them up.

This was bad news all around. Gabriel’s Trumpet wasn’t chicken feed. No wonder the whole Choir had turned out to throw a blanket over the damage caused by his death. We were looking down the barrel of another—

A searing white light, the purest light possible, the light of Creation, scorched away everything but the fact of my existence. The Cherubim dropped me. They wrapped themselves in their wings; the sheeting flames of their faces shrank to feeble candle embers. I had just enough time to hit the deck before the thunder of a thousand Creations, a thousand Let There Be Lights, shook Gabriel’s Magisterium.

And then the Pleroma was formless and empty, and a darkness was over the surface of the world. And then there was light, and I saw that the light hurt like a son of a bitch.

Someone had awoken METATRON: the Voice of God.

I knew that dame was trouble the minute I saw her.