Page 6 of The Simurgh

He lay in a glass coffin of the same ilk that had held Edward and Charlie.

The crack above parted wider and blazed brighter. Brighter still until his eyes were forced to close against the monstrous glare.

A glare not unknown to him.

Memory of the flash of ice blue came to him, the one glimpsed just after Sybilla fell…and he’d been struck out cold. The looming figure had stood with their wings of ravens, their mask of feathers concealing them but their power betraying them. Of course that had not been Iblis, that piss-weak shadow of an angel with his pieced-together halo.

‘Oh fuck.’ Pitch gasped through Scarlet’s fingers. He had a sickening sense of what approached…not who, just yet…but what. ‘Hide, quickly.’

The will-o’-the-wisp scrambled into the tangled mess of his hair, burrowing in at the curve of his neck. Pitch tried to peer through narrow-slitted eyes, but the brightness struck deep into his skull. He turned away, rolling his head to one side, eyes shut fast. There was no sound to accompany the brightness, nothing to betray the approach of any living creature. But a short time later, the rap of something hard against the glass came from right overhead.

‘Piss off,’ he snarled, refusing to look. Both for simple defiance’s sake, and for fear of what he would see.

‘Open your eyes, little daemon. Let me see what all this fuss is about.’

Pitch steeled himself against the command, for a command it was. Uttered with undercurrents of authority as powerful as the swell of an ocean wave.

‘Open your eyes,’ they said steadily, pointedly, and with a rush of compulsion that had him gasping.

Pitch felt the sharp nails of angelic command dig into his mind. A takeover he might have resisted far better were he at full capacity, but he was being overridden once more. As he’d been, too many times this journey. He despised this angel, almost as much as the Alp.

Pitch opened his eyes, blinking at the sudden shift in light once more. For a moment the shape standing over him was all but a blur, but then his vision righted. Cleared.

The Archangel Gabriel smiled down at him, with eyes of warm hazel and cold as pole ice, his white teeth like snow-capped peaks.

‘Hello, Vassago. What a fine mess you are in, pretty prince.’

CHAPTER THREE

CUMBERLAND HOUSEwas straightforward in its three levels, each held one long hallway with a staircase at its end. This was not a maze to be lost in like Harvington Hall. Silas moved, like the ghost he almost was, down the corridor, grateful when he heard no one follow him from the room with its especially long table and air of quiet desperation. He reached the landing and moved with heavy footfalls down to the second level.

‘Mercer. You trying to stomp some ’oles in these floors?’ He paused upon the next landing to find Tyvain leaning out of a doorway farther down the hall. ‘’Ow you doin’? If I can ask a stupid question.’

‘I’d be better if I were doing something more constructive than stomping about. Do you know where Lucifer is speaking with Weatherby?’

The soothsayer snorted. ‘Speakin’? Yeah, that’s what Reginald will be doin’.’ She jerked her head, hair ever wildly strewn, the red honed with a tinge of green from the gaslamp on the wall beside her.

‘Interrogating, then. Either way, I still wish to join him.’

‘Doubt it will be pleasant.’

‘I’m quite familiar with unpleasant situations.’

Tyvain made a sound, one of agreement and sympathy both. ‘Let me take ya, then. Been wantin’ some time alone with ya, anyways.’

Silas nodded and they descended the stairs, reaching the ground floor and heading along the hallway. The narrowness of the corridor saw them walk so close that at times the sleeve of his coat, an uninteresting brown shade he did not like at all, brushed against Tyvain’s bare arm. She wore what appeared to be her nightshirt, short-sleeved and tucked into a pair of moleskin trousers, which were rolled above her ankle. The fabric was damp and her feet were bare and dirty, as though she’d gone strolling along the pier and dipped her feet in the water. Her limp seemed more pronounced today, or perhaps Silas was just too intent on it, for how it reminded him of Pitch’s uneasy gait.

They took another set of stairs at the end of the hallway, hidden until Tyvain revealed them by pressing at a precise point upon one of the wall panels. The wall clicked and swung out into the hall. The interior wavered as the inflow of air disturbed candles in their sconces, which lit the top of a flight of wooden stairs. The Order had a taste for these hidden staircases it seemed.

They headed down, and the panel closed behind them, giving Silas the unwelcome sense of being as enclosed, as he’d been at the Fulbourn. At least the lighting was decent, not candles here but more gaslamps to highlight the way.

‘How is Sybilla doing? I’ve not been to visit her in a few hours.’ He filled the shadowy passageway with his voice.

‘Seen better days, but I’m certain she’ll come round. Time, that’s all.’ Tyvain was remarkably bad at concealing her true emotions. Quite like Pitch in that regard.

‘Tyvain, what is it? Has she taken a turn?’

The soothsayer sighed. ‘No, no. But it don’t look like them wings of ’ers will be fixing themselves anytime soon.’ She paused, flicking her fingers against a tear in the drab wallpaper. ‘Syb won’t fly again.’