Twenty-eight
She was in her sleeping pod, the aching fruit within its dark enfolding confinement, when whatever happened, happened.
She had been slowly stretching herself, extending one wing and then the other – creakingly, with much joint-grumbling and tendon-grating and what felt like even the leathery fabric of her wings protesting – then rotating her neck as best she could, against what felt like the gravel filling her vertebrae, then flexing first one leg and then the other, hanging by a single clawed talon each time.
Then, without warning, there was a sort of shiver in the air, as though the shock wave of a great explosion far away had just passed by.
The pod around her started to shake. Then it froze, somehow, as though the blow that had struck it had been cancelled from reality rather than allowed to ring on through the fabric of her great dark roost.
She knew immediately there was something odd and unprecedented about it, something that hinted at outside, at an existential change to her surroundings, maybe even to the Hell itself. She thought of the glitch, the silver mirror-barrier, the patch where the landscape had been deleted, smoothed over.
She had lost count of how many thousands she had dispatched since she had been brought back here. She had meant to keep count, but had baulked at scratching a mark for each death on the interior surface of her roost – she had considered this – because it just seemed so cold. She’d attempted to keep count in her head, but then lost it a few times, and then for a long time had thought that it didn’t matter. The last figure she remembered was three thousand eight hundred and eighty-five, but that had been a long time ago. She had probably killed at least that number again since.
The pain grew each time, after each killing, each release, every day. She existed in a sort of continual haze of aching limbs and over-sensitive skin and grinding sinew and ever-cramping internal organs. She liked to think that she ignored it, but she couldn’t really. It was there all the time, from when she woke to when she fell, moaning, grumbling, asleep. It was there in her dreams, too. She dreamed of bits of her body falling off or developing their own lives, tearing themselves off her and flying or falling or walking or slithering away, leaving her screaming, bereft, bleeding and raw.
Every day it was a struggle to let go of the upside-down perch, quit her roost pod and scour the blackened, pox-addled lands beneath for a fresh soul to release. She was getting later and later, these days.
Once she had flown for the joy of it; because flight was still flight, even in Hell, and felt like freedom for somebody who had grown up a devoutly ground-dwelling quadruped. Providing one got over one’s fear of heights, of course, which somehow – since the long-ago days when she’d grown old within a convent perched on a rock – she had.
Once she had loved to go exploring, fascinated to find the parts of Hell she hadn’t discovered before. She was almost invariably horrified by what she found, no matter where she looked, but she was fascinated nevertheless. Just the geography, then the logistics, then the hatefully sadistic inventiveness of it all was enough to captivate the inquiring mind, and she had made full use of her ability to fly over the ground that lesser unfortunates had to crawl, limp, stagger and fight over.
No longer. She rarely flew far from her roost to find somebody to kill and eat, and usually waited until she felt such pangs of hunger that she no longer had any real choice in the matter. It was a delicate balance and a tricky choice, trying to decide whether her grumbling, empty guts were causing her more discomfort as the day went on than the ever-present shoals and flocks of aches and pains that seemed to squall through her like some bizarre parasitic infection.
Her status as a soul-releasing angel had slipped, she suspected. People came from all around to be blessed by her, but there was not the same level of worship she had enjoyed before; she no longer appeared almost anywhere, to anyone. Now you had to be able to make your way to near where she lived. That changed things. She had become a localised service.
She suspected the demons had finally got wise and were arranging for certain individuals to be more or less presented to her for death and release. She did not want to think what unlikely favours or perverse rewards the demons exacted for this. And, frankly, she no longer cared. She was glad that it really did seem to release this or that particular soul from its suffering, but all the same, it was just what she did, what she had no choice but to do.
The last interesting thing had been when she’d gone to see the uber-demon. She’d been wondering about the glitch she’d discovered, the patch of hill and cliff and factory that had simply disappeared, and – after what had felt like weeks of mulling it over – had finally summoned up the strength to fly to where the vast demon sat and ask it what had happened.