Earth portal for one of his armies and we’d try and capture it. Or we’d create a Hell-Earth portal and he’d try to capture that. Just like you did with the portal in Iraq. That’s what all the fighting and campaigning was about.
“Our job was to find where Heaven had its portals, seduce those who were tasked with closing them and persuade them to keep them open. Heaven tended to use humans to find out where our portals were. If you read your folk myths with that in mind, you can see how the stories survived. The Garden of Eden, that was a portal and the snake who seduced its guards was one of us. That’s why Yahweh was so annoyed.”
“So, did you ever capture a portal and get to heaven?”
“Me? No.” Luga thought quickly about suggesting she had but lying to humans was dangerous. She’d learned that lesson to her bitter cost. “But we did capture portals now and then. We’d storm through them and enter Heaven, killing and looting whatever we could find. They would capture ours sometimes and they’d do the same, stealing and robbing us of what was ours, sometimes taking away slaves. That was how armies fought until you changed the rules.”
“”Wait a minute, you say Heaven took slaves from Hell?” Baylor couldn’t quite get his mind around the concept.
“Of course, they would use them to build things like fortresses and kill them when they were done. Unless they were valuable of course. We would do the same, only we had more fun killing the useless ones. Was your warfare then so different?”
“I guess not. What’s Heaven like?”
“Much like Hell except the air is clean there, and the light is white not red. Heaven’s a bit bigger than Hell. There are those who think Hell is much older than heaven but why they think that I do not know.”
Baylor leaned back in his seat and wondered what the scientists would make of all this. “Right, now about the fighting on earth…”
Chapter Twenty
Human Slums, Eternal City, Heaven
Another name crossed off a list, another contact dismissed as a meaningless acquaintance. More time wasted, more effort unproductive. Lemuel-Lan-Michael had heard that on Earth, human police were sometimes called “flat- feet” and now he understood why. His feet ached and his wings were stiff, all for nothing. And it was all the responsibility of the bottle of elixir that he’d found during the arrest of Ishmael. If he hadn’t been so attentive to his duty, he could have avoided all this. Perhaps his instincts had been wrong, perhaps the bottle was associated with the First Conspiracy. That’s what he had decided to call the network that was split up into cells.
He shook his head, every instinct he had said that the bottle wasn’t part of that group. The first few discrete arrests had confirmed his initial impressions, the First Conspiracy was all about doctrine and beliefs. After adequate ‘persuasion’, the detainees had confessed to spreading heresy and blasphemy. They had maintained their loyalty to The One Above All though, claiming that He had been led astray by misguided and corrupt advisors and if those advisors could be swept away, The Eternal Father would see how he had been mislead and everything would be made right. Lemuel was prepared to bet that the leaders intentions were quite different but that’s what the lower ranks thought and a bottle of elixir just didn’t fit with that pattern. There had to be a Second Conspiracy.
He flung the door of the slum open. Like the one he and his agents had raided earlier, this one was of better quality, made of wood rather than straw-reinforced mud. He looked down at the human female who was cowering against the wall at the opposite end of the entrance. By Inviolable Rule, all structures had to be large enough to allow the entry of Angels and that requirement diminished her apparent size still more.
“You are Almedha?” Lemuel read the name from his list. “Daughter of Brychan?”
“I am, Noble One.” Her voice was quivering, whatever the humans had expected when they were granted access to Heaven, it wasn’t what they had found. ‘Salvation’ consisted of eternal menial servitude to the Angels, a group who regarded the humans as being of little account and even less value. “How may I be of service to you?”
“I wish to discuss with you, some matters of importance. In particular, your relationship with a human called Ishmael.”
That comment struck home. The woman was still frightened of him but now there was something else in her attitude, a guardedness, a determination not to reveal anything. “I know of nobody by that name.”
“Do not lie to me, Almedha, daughter of Brychan. Lying is a sin and one that brings down punishment upon you. Do you want to experience the punishment that the League of the Holy Court deems appropriate for those who lie to it?”
“No peerless one. But I know not of any called Ishmael.”
Lemuel-Lan shook his head sadly. “Your deceit means I must caution you again and in doing so my patience with you grows thin. I must tell you, Ishmael was arrested not so long ago by agents of the League of the Holy Court and he has made a full confession. He has admitted to apostasy, blasphemy, to heresy and sacrilege and to crimes so black that they have no name.”
“No! He… ” Almedha tried to stop herself but it was too late.
“And how would you know if you had never met him?” Lemuel landed the verbal blow quietly and deftly but its effect was still shattering. Almedha slumped back against the wall, her face white. Even so, her jaw was thrust out with her determination not to say anything. Lemuel sighed quietly to himself, why were humans so obstinate? He needed to look around this house but it was obvious he couldn’t leave Almedha free to leave. There really was no choice. He took a golden set of shackles from his belt, fastened a cuff around one of her wrists and another around a convenient post. As he left her to search the house, it never even occurred to him that he’d left her with her feet barely touching the floor.
The house itself was remarkably devoid of interest. Before their deaths, ‘saved’ humans had made much of the alleged virtues of simplicity and abstinence. On reaching Heaven they found out that those ‘virtues’ were greatly overrated, especially when they lasted for eternity. The fact that the Angels didn’t share their opinions hadn’t helped much either. The fact was, that while the angels lived in unparalleled luxury, the fate of the ‘saved’ was one of eternal grinding poverty. Again, the irony there never entered Lemuel’s consciousness, nor did any thought that the situation could, in any way, be considered unjust. Lemuel methodically searched the rooms, turning up nothing other than the few paltry possessions he’d expected. Finally he checked out the kitchen and there he found what he had been looking for. A small jar, one labelled ‘McCormick Granulated Garlic’. Another Earth elixir.
“And how do you explain this?”
Almedha shook her head, she couldn’t have answered even if she’d wanted to. Her mind was concentrated on ways of taking the strain off her wrist. Lemuel shook his head sadly and released the cuff from the sconce it had been attached to and dragged her towards him. “It pains me that you should be so obstinate. You leave me no choice but to take you to the League of Holy Court.”
Interrogation Chambers, League of the Holy Court, Eternal City
Lemuel-Lan-Michael pushed Almedha into the room. The two interrogation specialists jumped to their feet as he entered. ” At ease,” he said. “We need some information from this one.”
It took slightly longer than he expected. By the time Almedha broke, the interrogators had run through three buckets of water, her face and hair were saturated and she was choking amid a barrage of deep, racking coughs. It took her some minutes to get the story out, but when she did, it would have been mundane were it not for its significance. Ishmael had brought her the garlic as a gift. She had found the plain, bland food available to humans in Heaven dull to the point of being unpalatable and the garlic had seasoned it to provide a touch of interest. Lemuel shook his head, humans didn’t even have to eat, let alone want anything more than plain gruel. Why would seasoning be so important to them?
“Are you finished with her?” One of the interrogators nodded towards the sobbing woman secured to the table.
“For the moment, yes. We’ll keep her detained for a while.” The interrogators nodded at each other and Lemuel caught a glimpse of their eyes. There was something there, something that reminded him of a sight long, long ago. It took him time to place it but when he did, the memory shook him. The look in the interrogators’ eyes had been the same as that in the eyes of daemons taken prisoner in the war so many millennia before. That caused him to
