When we are through with them, there will be no more revolts.”
While the lesson Sir Arthur taught the British soldiers was well known in Nephilistic circles—
indeed, they had been practicing such fear-generating tactics privately for many hundreds of years—it
was rarely used on such a large group. Under Sir Arthur’s deft command, the soldiers rounded up the
people of the chosen village—men, women, and children—and brought them to the market. He chose
a child, a girl with almond eyes, silken black hair, and skin the color of chestnuts. The girl gazed
curiously at the man, so tall and fair and gaunt, as if to say, Even among the peculiar-looking British,
this man is odd. Yet she followed after him, obedient.
Oblivious to the stares of the natives, Sir Arthur led the child before the prisoners of war—as the
villagers were now called—lifted her into his arms, and deposited her into the barrel of a loaded
cannon. The barrel was long and wide, and it swallowed the child entirely—only her hands were
visible as they clung tight to the iron rim, holding it as if it were the top of a well into which she might
sink.
“Light the fuse,” Sir Grigori commanded. As the young soldier, his fingers trembling, struck a
match, the girl’s mother cried out from the crowd.
The explosion was the first of many that morning. Two hundred village children—the exact number
of British killed in the Kanpur massacre—were led one by one to the cannon. The iron grew so hot
that it charred the fingers of the soldiers dropping the heavy bundles of wiggling flesh, all hair and
fingernails, into the shaft. Restrained at gunpoint, the villagers watched. Once the bloody business
was through, the soldiers turned their muskets upon the villagers, ordering them to clean the market
courtyard. Pieces of their children hung upon the tents and bushes and carts. Blood stained the earth
orange.
News of the horror soon spread to the nearby villages and from those villages to the Gangetic
Plain, to Meerut and Delhi and Kanpur and Lucknow and Jhansi and Gwalior. The Revolt, as Sir
Arthur Grigori had foretold, quieted.
Percival’s reading was interrupted by the sound of Sneja’s voice as she leaned over his shoulder.
“Ah, Sir Arthur,” she said, the shadow of her wings falling over the pages of the book. “He was one
of the finest Grigoris, my favorite of your father’s brothers. Such valor! He secured our interests
across the globe. If only his end had been as glorious as the rest of his life.”
Percival knew that his mother was referring to Uncle Arthur’s sad and pathetic demise. Sir Arthur
had been one of the first in their family to contract the illness that now afflicted Percival. His once-
glorious wings had withered to putrid, blackened nubs, and after a decade of terrible suffering his
lungs had collapsed. He had died in humiliation and pain, succumbing to the disease in the fifth
century of life, a time when he should have been enjoying his retirement. Many had believed the
illness to be the result of his exposure to various lower breeds of human life—the wretched natives in
the various colonial ports—but the truth of the matter was that the Grigoris did not know the origin of
the illness. They knew only that there may be a way to cure it.
In the 1980s Sneja had come into possession of a human scientist’s body of work devoted to the
therapeutic properties of certain varieties of music. The scientist had been named Angela Valko and
was the daughter of Gabriella Lévi-Franche Valko, one of the most renowned angelologists working
in Europe. According to Angela Valko’s theories, there was a way to restore Percival, and all their
kind, to angelic perfection.
As was her wont, Sneja appeared to be reading her son’s mind. “Despite your best efforts to
sabotage your own cure, I believe that your art historian has pointed us in the right direction.”
“You’ve found Verlaine?” Percival asked, closing The Book of Generations and turning to his
mother. He felt like a child again, wishing to win Sneja’s approval. “Did he have the drawings?”
“As soon as we hear from Otterley, we will know for certain,” Sneja said, taking The Book of
Generations from Percival and paging through it. “Clearly we overlooked something during our
raids. But make no mistake, we will find the object of our search. And you, my angel, will be the first
to benefit from its properties. After you are cured, we will be the saviors of our kind.”
“Magnificent,” Percival said, imagining his wings and how lush they would be once they had
returned. “I will go to the convent myself. If it is there, I want to be the one to find it.”