Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(55)

Carefully folding the letter, Sharine placed it back in the envelope.

They stood in a moment of silence for the dead and the lost. When she looked up at him and said, “We’ll go north-northwest?” he didn’t tell her that there was no hope. He nodded; it was beyond him to abandon people who’d thought of others in their most dire moment.

First, however, they made a second call to his scientists and scholars, giving them this further information. One of the scientists asked Titus to take a sample of any flesh they could find, as well as some bone as a contingency against a disaster that might make the body inaccessible.

He was still speaking on the phone when Sharine moved to fulfill the request. Taking off her backpack, she took out the packet in which she’d kept the energy bars she’d given the children; she used it to scoop up a small wing bone, then set her jaw and used her throwing blade to cut off a piece of mummified skin.

Dropping it into the packet with the bone, she sealed it before thrusting it to the bottom of her backpack, then pulled the backpack on. When she looked around for something with which to clean her blade, he took it from her and wiped it on his pants. One more stain made no difference.

Accepting the blade back as he finished talking to his people, she slid it away into its thigh sheath. Two minutes later, they took flight in grim silence, their eyes searching the land for bones.

A half day’s walk wasn’t so far by the wing even at low speed and the sun was not yet high in the sky when they reached a village that appeared alive, smoke coming from the chimneys and movement in the streets. Bones aplenty they’d seen on their journey here, but none had been human.

Their landing caused fear, chill and black, to ripple through the village, the people going down with their faces pressed to the earth, but Titus was ready for it this time. “Rise!” he ordered, and once they’d done so, he held up the letter. “I come from the village of Dojah. Did any of the survivors make it here?”

A thin girl with a worn face, her skin a light brown and her hair in braids against her skull, stepped forward. “My lord Archangel.” Her voice shook. “Ten of us made it. Two died later, their injuries terrible. Of the remnants, there is one older than me but he battles a fever after our trek here, and isn’t lucid. The others are all children, saved by the courageous actions of others, but wounded in their hearts.”

“Do you know what’s written in this letter?” he asked, striving to keep his voice gentle and knowing he’d failed when she flinched.

“N-no.” A whispery response. “My grandmother is the one who wrote it, b-but she is now gone.” Tears washed her cheeks.

Sharine moved to put her hand on the young woman’s, murmuring to her until awe replaced the terror in her expression and she found her voice again. “I will tell you all that I know, Archangel Titus.” That she addressed him as he preferred told him that Sharine had said something on the point.

I thank you, Sharine. He found it infuriating to deal with these people’s blind terror even knowing it had nothing to do with him.

Sharine’s lovely eyes met his. One day, they will know you. Until then, you must be strong enough to bear their fear. I know you have the shoulders to carry this weight.

It should’ve shaken him, how much her faith in him meant to him, but it settled on his bones as if it had always existed. “Come,” he said to the young woman, “we three will speak under the tree in the distance.”

Once there, separated from the others in the village by a stretch of trampled grassland, he asked her to tell him all she knew. Everything she said dovetailed with the letter. Including that, regardless of the “harsh grate” of his voice, the angel had spoken words intelligible and rational when he first landed.

“But his skin was like a bruise almost all over,” she added, “and it was peeling away in places, shriveled in others. His fingers were hooked, his nails like claws, and it seemed as if his tongue was rotting green, his lips too plump and red.”

When Titus asked who she’d told of the angel, her eyes got very big. “Our hosts,” she whispered. “We didn’t want them surprised if it happened here.”

Titus’s blood turned to black ice: the entire village knew of the diseased angel.

The people to whom they’d given safe haven had sentenced them all to death.





27


    Sire, I thank you for allowing me to serve in your court for the past five hundred years. Though I leave now to explore other courts and lands, I will return often to challenge you to a climb—it’s my duty to ensure you maintain your strength.

Watch over my mother. I know she is your first general and tougher than I’ll ever be, but for me, she is my mother. But please never ever mention my request to her. She would strike me dead with her gaze, then revive me to sit me down and flay me alive with her words.

I will never forget all that you have taught me.

—Letter from Titus to Archangel Alexander





28


Sharine said nothing as they walked the young woman back to the village soon afterward. But once they were alone again, back at the tree, she touched her hand to Titus’s, closing her fingers around his fisted one as his wings began to glow.

“There are only two choices,” he ground out. “I steal a piece of their memory—or I end their lives.” Distant sounds of children’s voices raised in play added a painful coda to his words.