Neha locked the dark of her eyes with his. “But it appears even you cannot defeat this evil any longer and that chills my heart.”
Not answering because Neha’s words were the simple and cold truth, Raphael picked up Antonicus’s body, a body made heavier by the carpet but not so heavy that he couldn’t carry it. “I’ll need to rest at times,” he began, but Elijah frowned.
“We can all help with the passage without risk of infection. All we need are ropes. If we create a sling, no one of us has to bear the entire burden.”
Neha added, “I will ask for the rope to be brought to the room below.”
Raphael put Antonicus down while they waited. “Will you burn this building?” he asked Neha.
“Yes. I’ve ordered everyone but those bringing the rope to evacuate. I will send this fort up in flame as soon as they are clear and we rise.” Her face was half in shadow as she turned her head toward China. “Lijuan has evolved beyond us. Archangels cannot be killed by anything but another archangel, yet she is killing from a distance with this dark fog.”
“Cassandra prophesied that the Cadre alone would not be enough this time.” He took in Zanaya’s and Aegaeon’s motionless, expressionless faces; neither had said a word since Antonicus began to die. “It is why you are awake.”
“But if your wildfire has failed, Raphael, then I fear their waking will not matter.” Caliane’s hair flew back in the night breeze. “This time, our world may end.”
* * *
• • •
The explosion boiled the sky behind Raphael as Neha incinerated the fort’s roof before collapsing the building inward into a hole that Caliane had helped her create. He and the others had flown ahead, with Antonicus in a sling between them. Those with glamour used it to hide the body.
Anyone who looked up would see many archangels together, but that was an explicable thing given the deadly fog and other catastrophic incidents around the world. No one would see a body. No one would know that an archangel had died. Antonicus had gone into Sleep, that was all the world would be told.
If Antonicus’s end caused havoc with the weather, as sometimes happened when an archangel passed, it would be believed to be part of the recent chaos.
When day broke, Michaela and Astaad flew down to wild fields full of flowers and returned with bunches of them to drop on Antonicus’s body. The rope sling the Cadre had woven together was tight enough that the flowers collected around the body and by the time they left the fields, it was a flower-draped bier such as was their way and not just a makeshift coffin created to contain infection.
No one spoke as they flew. On the roof, there’d been some discussion of leaving half their number at the border with China, but in the end they’d decided that there was nothing half their number could do to stop Lijuan. Better they deal with this together, then go to their territories, to prepare in any way they could . . . and to mourn all those of their own who’d been trapped within when the fog crawled across China on a tide of death.
Gadriel, a little set in his habits but noble in a quiet way, hadn’t made it out. Raphael had no body to take home to his family. The angel wasn’t the only one who’d vanished into the murderous dark; Raphael had lost too many good people and the war hadn’t yet begun.
It was a risk to assume nothing would change during the short time they disappeared to bury Antonicus, but the risk was a considered one. The more opaque patches seen by Neha’s drones and confirmed by Alexander and Zanaya seemed to indicate that the Archangel of China was consolidating herself. How she might be doing so was a thing Raphael didn’t like thinking about.
He remembered too well the pathetic half-consumed husks he and Elena had discovered. Lijuan fed from life to make death. There’d been millions of people in China before the fog. Now, no voices penetrated the dark wall and Antonicus had said the landscape was devoid of light.
The blurry green-tinged images picked up by the camera worn by the Ancient had shown the same: an endless wall of pitch black, so murky that even technology meant to penetrate night had failed.
Raphael did not want to see what remained when the fog retreated.
Resting one another by taking turns with the sling so they had no need to stop, the eleven archangels made a direct trek to an ice island that Alexander and Charisemnon flew ahead to scout.
Conscious of her vulnerable physical state, Raphael had checked in with Michaela multiple times during the trek. I can ask for a break if you need it, he’d said. I will blame it on the output of wildfire.
A little pale under the smooth richness of her skin, she’d nonetheless demurred. We must do this if my son is to be safe. I cannot stand any delay.
So they flew on. He noticed that Caliane stayed close to Michaela, not enough for it to be remarked on, yet enough to render assistance should it be necessary. But Michaela managed to stay airborne until they landed at their destination: a small, rocky island encased in clear ice.
Together, Zanaya and Elijah created the deep hole needed for the burial, then all eleven of them joined to lower Antonicus into it using the ropes. They took it slow, none of them wishing to simply dump him. Once the sling touched the frozen soil that was his resting ground, they dropped the ropes into the hole with him.
Caliane stepped forward to the edge of the grave. “Antonicus is gone from this world, perhaps forever, but before he went, he gave us a great gift. He showed us the enemy we must be ready to fight, the evil that may defeat us all if we are not ready. For that, he will be remembered forever in our histories. I will ensure the Historian knows of this, so she can share it with angelkind when the time is right.”
Right now, Raphael understood, the knowledge of Antonicus’s passing would only spread fear and terror. Archangels were not vulnerable. That was their legend and what kept the world in balance.
“To Antonicus.” Caliane lifted a handful of shattered ice-rock.
“To Antonicus.” Together, they threw the handfuls into the grave, then Raphael, Titus, and Astaad collapsed the grave inward before filling it with the material excavated during its creation. It left a depression over which they built a cairn using rocks taken from another small and distant island.
Then, while Michaela and Caliane kept watch, the rest of them flew toward a trawler anchored about two hours from the island. Each of them had contacted their seconds while yet in India, gotten details of any ships that’d be passing through the wider Antarctic area at the correct time.
Their target flew the flag of Elijah’s land.
On it were the timbers, sheets of metal, wires, and other materials necessary to build a research station in a different area of this remote continent. Distant as the trawler was, there was no danger the crew would realize the archangels’ flight path or final destination. That crew watched goggle-eyed as archangel after archangel flew down, before flying off with materials to build a crypt that would act as a cage for the infection.