Excerpt

Excerpt from

Chapter Two: The Celestial Corridor

In fabulous Gelethel, we citizens of the Angelic City operated on a fortnightly calendar: fourteen being the perfect number. Each day was a feast day named after one of the fourteen angels. Each feast day had its own bespoke rituals and miracles.

And then there was the fifteenth day.

Officially, it didn't exist. But everyone observed it anyway. Gelthic citizens reserved fifteenth days for our most distasteful chores—in memory of Nirwen the Forsaker, the Fifteenth Angel. She'd abandoned Gelethel about a century ago, ascending the impenetrable blue serac that surrounded and protected our city, and shaking our dust from her feet.

This royally pissed off the other angels, who proclaimed Nirwen's memory disgraced forever. They scorched her face out of every wall mural, scratched it off every bust and statue. All references to Nirwen the Artificer (as she'd once been known) in the Hagiological Archives received a black slash through it.

Not that Nirwen cared. As far as we knew, she'd picked up and left the day her last saint died, and she'd never looked back.

Petition days in the Celestial Corridor were always on the fifteenth day.

My earliest memories of petition days were of pilgrims coming from outside Gelethel to beg the boon of citizenship from the angels. The Holy Host would lower a long bridge from the ramparts of the serac, and then a small group of pilgrims—chosen by lottery in Cherubtown—would ascend and enter Gelethel.

It used to be, they'd bring gifts with them. Something precious and particular. Something that meant a great deal to the pilgrim personally, which they would then offer to the angels in hopes of winning their favor. That was how my dad gained his citizenship—as well as Quicksilver Cinema, Gelethel's only movie palace, which he ran for many years.

I'd practically grown up in the Quick, and now I owned it. I'd also grown up with a soft spot for pilgrims, because, well … Dad. That was not true for most citizens of Gelethel.

These days, petitions were less about gifts and more about sacrifice. They'd become sort of a spectator sport for Gelthic citizens—with pilgrims acting as unwitting gladiators and angels playing the dual roles of monsters and referees.

Dad had stopped attending petition days years ago, when the war in the Bellisaar Theatre had grown so bad that Cherubtown, once a small shrine outside the serac for pilgrims seeking congress with the angels, swelled into a refugee camp with a population double the size of Gelethel.

They came to be safe. Everyone knew that the Angelic City, protected by its fourteen Invisible Wonders, was the only haven left in this part of the world. Dispossessed families came by the thousands wanting in.

Impregnable Gelethel! Immaculate, untouchable. Where the war could not hurt them anymore.

They came with very little to offer, these new pilgrims. Some offered nothing but themselves, in exchange for citizenship for their children. Some offered the lives of their aged parents, or superfluous orphans, or an enemy they'd made in Cherubtown.

And the angels, who rarely refused a sacrifice, were hooked.

It was like nothing they'd ever tasted before, the death offering of a human being. Oh, the jolt of it! The juice! The effervescent intoxication! No longer could the Invisible Wonders who ruled Gelethel rest content with a steady snack of life-long worship from their long-lived worshippers. And why should they, when they could just mainline pilgrims instead?

So bright, so foul. Such meat to feed on.

Thus, every fifteenth day, we let the bridge down. We invited the pilgrims, in groups of fourteen, into Gelethel. Seven of these were hand-picked by the self-designated sheriffs of Cherubtown—officials on the take from our Holy Host, willing to do us favors in exchange for goods passed to them over the serac. Those chosen seven were quietly given to know that the angels were happy to hear their petition for citizenship, but would require a sacrifice—of the human variety. Cherubtown's sheriffs left it up to the pilgrims to choose whom they would bring over, usually by force. The unlucky seven never saw what hit them.

Alizar the Eleven-Eyed, alone among the fourteen angels, did not partake of the sacrifices. He attended petition days, but recused himself of the feast. Some of his colleagues looked at him askance, some scoffed, but in the end, they allowed him this eccentricity; after all, it meant more for them.

Every time I asked him why he refused his sup, Alizar gave me a different answer:

I do not want to be beholden to strangers. Or, I'm saving myself for my true love. Or, Some habits reward one with diminishing returns.

The Seventh Angel may have been gentle and vain, may have liked pretty, silly things—but he was not a liar, and he was not stupid. His reasons for abstention, vague though they may have seemed to me, made sense to him—and, I have to admit, it was a relief to be spared sharing the feast. Bad enough for me to catch the ricochet when the other angels fed. But if I had to experience it directly, through him? I wouldn't have remained his secret saint for long.

I knew this much: angelic politics were vicious. Alizar had been out of favor with the other thirteen angels ever since Nirwen the Forsaker left Gelethel. The two of them had been the fastest of friends. Her disgrace had also been his, and Alizar bore it proudly, holding himself aloof and lonely. A few of his former allies among the angels tried coaxing him back to the fold from time to time. Others, like Zerat and Rathanana, thought him weak.

Alizar longed for Nirwen—but he took comfort in me. I, in turn, had Alizar and my family and that was it. It wasn't that saints couldn't make friends. It was just, as I got older, I found our secret too burdensome for intimacy. Alizar saw how it weighed on me, kept me isolated, disinclined to engage with my peers. To make up for it, he did his utmost to be all things to me: friend, confidante, beloved. He rarely asked me for favors.

Except, that morning, he had.

Like Dad, I tried to stay away from petition days whenever possible. But today, the Seventh Angel let me know—even before my eyes came unstuck from sleep—that my presence in the Celestial Corridor was requested.

Something is about to happen, he'd told me in his inimitable way, humming behind my eyelids and in the pits of my teeth.

Something is coming from beyond the serac, he said. Something I was promised a long time ago. And, Ish—he'd added outrageously—I am going to need an extra pair of eyes.

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