“A Tear for the Sinner" or: The Destroyer and the Firebird go to church
Diamond and Fortran are priniciple characters in a much larger work titled Darkatana: A Black Tale that is still in preparation. The author encourages them to come out and play in other contexts, hence the current short story. Please enjoy. —c@, May 20, 2011
It was after dark, nearing midnight, on a weekday and the church was nearly empty. A few flickering candles, burnt to their bases with the steady hours, cast faintly flickering shadows on the walls and into the rafters of the high, vaulted ceiling.
The church was nearly empty save for one man sitting in the second row of seats, in the wings near the furthest aisle, his elbows on his knees and his head hung between his shoulders.
He was praying in the kind of unsteady manner that suggested lack of practice. His voice rising and falling. Entreating and then angry. His hands in fists one moment, and then held against his face in the next. The signs of one approaching the vertical edge of a great personal cataclysm.
In his misery he had completely failed to notice that there was an angel standing near the edge of the raised dais in the center of which stood the pulpit, her great wings raised and her halo glowing steadily in the gloom of the church. She was watching him patiently – or perhaps it might be said carefully – waiting to be noticed.
The man stood up suddenly as if he had come to some decision. As soon as he lifted his head he caught sight of her standing there, and let out a yell.
“My God!” he exclaimed.
“Could be,” she said. “Remains to be seen actually.”
He stood rooted to the floor, staring at her.
She was not large, being on the small side for a woman, but was generously curved with slender arms and a child-like face. Her hair was perfectly white like her gown, the latter might have been no more than a bed sheet pinned at the shoulders and gathered in at the waist. Her halo burned white near the top of her head with a cool intensity that seemed to waver slightly at times like a bulb operating at the lower limit of a dimmer switch. Her face though quite beautiful displayed no emotion at all and might have been carved of marble.
She was an angel in every possible detail save for two important deviations.
First she was entirely blue, the color of an autumn sky in the late afternoon, with large luminous blue eyes like cut sapphires.
Second, her wings were not bird-like but rather bat-like. Wide inky dark folds of leathery membrane spanning thin but capable looking spars that originated at the small of her back rather than at the shoulders. Unlike some of the caricatures of angels one sees in paintings, floating effortlessly with tiny vestigial wings, this angel looked perfectly capable of powered flight.
As he looked at her in a kind of startled awe she raised her wings slightly and shifted her weight from one foot to another.
“I believe you were pouring out your heart in confession,” she said pleasantly, her high female voice echoing sweetly from the walls. “Please continue.”
His mouth worked as he tried to speak. It took a few tries before he finally managed it. “Are you – an angel?”
“I am,” she said.
He gaped at her, his mouth falling open again.
The angel sighed down at him and a slight frown made its way across her face. She walked to the edge of the dais and stepped off. Her wings kited behind her breaking her fall so that she landed as gently as a bird on a lawn, her robe lifting slightly at the hem to reveal bare feet with tiny blue toes. As she landed a gust swept outwards from her scented somehow of trees and purity.
The angel adjusted her robe at the shoulder and then walked towards him. She studied him closely as she walked as one might study a complicated painting in a museum, tilting her slightly head one way and then another, her blue eyes scanning him methodically from head to foot like part of a weapons control system locking to a target.
He stepped out into the aisle and actually took another step backwards, away from her.
She stopped.
“Did you or did you not cry out to God for guidance?” she asked.
He blinked down at her as if trying to recall if he had or he hadn't.
“I -- did,” he finally admitted.
She smiled, perfect white teeth behind full kissable lips. “Then have a seat and we'll see what can be done.”
Without his eyes ever leaving her, he groped behind himself to find the raised back of the bench, and sat down. She did the same on the other side of the aisle, sitting sideways with her wings lifted into the air behind her. She lay her arm over the back of the bench, and lay her head on her arm. She looked like a child waiting to be told a story.
“What seems to be the problem?” she asked.
He looked around the church interior, up into the vaulted ceiling and then over at the altar above which a carved, golden figure of Christ hung in lasting crucification.
“I – I've been accused of financial fraud,” he said to the figure on the cross.
“Or rather,” she replied without lifting her head, “You have engaged in fraud and have been recently caught.”
He nodded his head reluctantly, and looked down at his hands in his lap.
She watched him a while before adding, “You know, it's not a confession unless you really confess. Now tell me everything.”
He looked up at her sharply. “But being an angel you already know everything about it.”
Nothing in her face changed except her eyes, where suddenly burned a faint fire.
“The sin at the root of fraud is the lie,” she said. “You have been artful with the truth, now the truth is all that will save you. Your salvation begins when you tell me the truth.”
He drew in a breath, nodded once, and said, “I have operated an investment trust, accepting money from investors and placing it into commodity and equities plays to generate a return. That's all I did.”
“Fraudulently, apparently,” she amended dryly.
“No!” he retorted. “All the investments were honest ones, they simply did not generate returns in the current market.”
“There is no sin in that,” the angel said. “The problems come from you having kept most of other peoples' money for your own uses.”
“Fees!” he shot back.
“Exorbitant fees then,” she suggested.
“I am allowed to make a living,” he retorted defiantly.
There was a pause in which she might have run a quick mental calculation against this information, or consulted a cosmic ledger of some kind. Or she might have scanned financial news headllines for recent allegations, or broke into a Securities and Exchange Commission secured server she had not previously bothered with in order to pull up a subpoena or several to cross-reference these back to arrest warrants currently pending in the police secured dispatch server, which she had rooted previously since her sister was usually in there somewhere, implicated in some recent act of homicide or other, and so the angel had to regularly straighten things up a bit to keep the other out of prison, the ditz. You'd think she'd learn someday to clean up after herself on hunting days -- but no of course not. Ungrateful thing.
Or something. Whatever it is angels actually do given a few seconds of thoughtful silence.
“You did not even invest all the money,” she observed. “Most of it is simply unaccounted for. Tell me what did you do with it?”
“I already told the SEC, I don't have it.”
“But you know who does, don't you?”
He opened his mouth with a retort, but then fell still. He looked at her shrewdly and asked, “Are you really an angel? You sound more like an auditor.”
“When I'm not otherwise occupied – ” she began, sitting up finally. “ – running 72-dimensional models of future history in reverse matrix algebra, I do squeeze in some trades. So I have some skin in the game, as they say. Now how do you intend to make this right with your investors?”
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed in frustration. “I cannot. It is simply impossible. And because I cannot they are coming after me. I'm not religious I ducked into this church to lose the investigators. Now they'll be waiting at my penthouse. I don't know what to do.”
As if realizing this might hurt his case with an actual angel he quickly added, “But I really do feel badly about the entire affair.”
She sniffed, and cleared her throat. “You have an equities portfolio?”
“Currently short in a long market,” he confessed. “No thanks to the Fed.”
“You have my sympathies, but the ChairSatan is a different department. Commodities?”
“I was on the wrong side of the trade,” he said miserably.
She made a sour face. “You actually kind of suck at this. What is your cash on hand?”
“Holding cash? During an inflationary period?” he asked as if the question were absurd.
“Agreed, just covering the bases. Then you certainly hold a precious metals position. You could liquidate and raise funds that way. PM are consistently up you could probably clear yourself easily.”
“But that's my own money!” he cried in apparent pain at the very thought. “I'd be penniless!”
“It's not yours if you attained it via fraudulent means. You must repay your investors first and then with anything left – and after serving a suitable sentence – you can start over somehow.”
“But that's just what I want to avoid!” he protested, half rising from his seat. “This is ridiculous, repaying those people. They are nobody important and I am an investment manager.”
“They will become or are already penniless themselves, due to your practices,” she shot back. “Their suffering is no less important than your own – if anything, they are due additional compensation because of the breach of trust. Liquidate your precious metals and hand over your cash position, pay them back in full or nearly so, and seek forgiveness.”
His eyes became hardened and he frowned. “They knew what they were getting into, they knew they could lose everything. It said so on the prospectus.”
“They did not know then that you were a fraud,” she said evenly.
“They are small investors!” he shouted. “They have no God-given right to profit!”
“And what does that make you, then?” she asked.
“A successful investor in myself,” he replied with an aloof air. “They could do the same thing for themselves if they only had the intelligence and market connections. But they do not. And that's the difference.”
“And if they are ruined?” she pressed on. “If they then hurtle themselves from bridges, or into self-abuse, or their families are destroyed, is none of this your doing?”
“I cannot be held to account for the behavior of people who got in over their head,” he answered with practiced ease. “They should not invest what they cannot afford to lose.”
He crossed his arms and sat staring toward the front of the church. As if he suddenly remembered who it was exactly that he was disputing, he turned his head slightly and glanced over at her.
The angel had grown thoughtful. “You win,” she said without emotion.
The man uncrossed his arms.
“Win?” he repeated vaguely. “Am I – forgiven?”
The angel took a deep breath. “I suppose so.” She stood and brushed down the front of her robe, adjusting it again at the shoulder. “I can put you on the path but I cannot make you walk it. For lack of a better outcome I am willing to forgive you. It really is getting late and I have other matters to attend to. And so, to my fee.”
The man had been smiling but on hearing this, became serious. “You did not mention a fee earlier.”
“There is always a sacrifice of some kind,” she began in a businesslike manner. “You either confess in good faith accepting your sins for what they were and pledging to live another way and so be redeemed. Or failing that you have to pay an actual fee. It's called an indulgence and dates to the Middle Ages. Think of me as a modern quaestores. I said you are forgiven, and you shall be. Now pay me.”
He looked at her with grave suspicions. “How much?”
“You look ready to bargain,” she observed with a twisted smile. “But you are not dealing with the devil this time. You will pay my fee and all of it without a fuss, whatever it is.”
“Then what is it you require for this — indulgence.”
She started across the wide aisle toward him, her hands laced behind her back. “Oh just a few pints.”
He looked confused. “A few pints of gold? Don't you measure it in ounces?”
“You do not pay me in gold, you silly man,” she said just as she had walked to within arm's reach. “You pay in blood.”
She leaned forward and ran a delicate blue finger along the curve of his neck, and her face split into a radiant smile.
The man looked up at her, his face growing pale. “Whose blood?” he asked faintly as if it were not obvious whose blood it would have to be.
“You could still change your mind,” she cooed softly as she knelt to bring her face close to his own. “Liquidate your gold and silver positions, pay your creditors, do your time. That whole thing. What do you say?”
Her voice had become sultry and seductive. And her robe had fallen open slightly at the neck revealing the true extent of her feminine charms, which it turned out were considerable. Though like the rest of her, unaccountably blue.
He swallowed against a dry throat. “Just a few pints, you said.”
“Oh yes, just a few,” she repeated sweetly seeming not in the least disappointed. “But it must be given freely, of your own will.”
He licked his lips, rubbed at a stubble cheek with a shaking hand, and finally said, “Granted.”
She smiled and exhaled with what might have been exquisite pleasure. An eager, hungry light kindled in her eyes, and his own eyes went wide with terror at her sudden transformation.
“Wait!” he began. “Maybe we should –“
But swift as a hawk she was upon him, her mouth pressed against the side of his neck where his blood pulsed. He cried out with surprise and pain and tried to push her off but she instantly grappled his arms under her own, restraining him. He struggled against her grip but it was like struggling against tight chains. He tried to stand but her own suddenly incredible weight held him against the bench.
He was as helpless as if he had been bound to a rooted oak.
“Just a little,” he said as he finally gave up struggling. “Oh God it hurts. Please just a little.”
She said nothing but kept her mouth against his neck. Sweat emerged on his brow and with every passing second his face grew more drawn with pain and fear and blood loss.
“It is surely enough,” he said again. “Please, I feel ill.”
She neither moved nor relented, but remained wrapped around him as immovable as stone.
“Listen to me,” he continued, his voice weakening. “I was wrong I see that now. I'll – I'll repay them. With everything I have. I'll – oh God please it is so hot. My neck – so hot – I feel faint. I cannot give any more. You've – it's all I have. You've taken all I have. Killing me – ”
He fell silent and all his muscles slowly relaxed. His face grew flaccid and his breathing slowed. He spoke his last words in a whisper.
“You are – killing me – “
And then he was still. Nothing changed at all for a minute more. Then slowly she unwound herself from him and taking him by the shirt front lowered him to the floor in the aisle. She stood over him, her wings moving gently in agitation in the still and quiet, and using a corner of her robe wiped blood from her chin.
“You know,” she began conversationally, “According to the police that's exactly what his widow reported one of your former investors as having said, just before he blew his own brains out with a shotgun. You've taken it all and now you've killed me.” She stood looking down at him silently before she turned and facing the statue of Christ on the wall said, “Receive this man's soul and may he know the same charity in death as he extended to others while yet he lived.”
“If you had thought he possessed a functional soul,” came the reply. “You would not have killed him.”
The angel burst into a smile and turned in place with a broad, majestic sweep of her wings to face the darkened rear of the church. “Sister!” she called out happily. “When did you sneak in?”
“Somewhere around just a few pints,” another replied invisibly from shadow.
Further down the aisle, in darkness where the light of the votive candles did not reach, a tall column of a greater darkness was moving slowly forward, as stately as Hell's bride. She was tall as a man and as broad-shouldered, but having distinctive female curves. Wide hips tapered into long, powerful legs and she walked with the easy rolling gait of a predator.
A long, bushy black tail with coppery rings moved slowly like a python behind her legs as she came forward into the remaining light. Here was the last tiger in all the world. She had been translated somewhat by men for their own purposes, but remained as casually predatory and efficiently murderous as any tiger of old had ever been.
She gave only a cursory glance down at the bloodless corpse laying across the aisle as she stepped over it.
“Shouldn't you be off hunting?” the angel asked her sister pleasantly.
“The hunting grounds are here, it seems,” the tigress replied huskily.
The angel looked up at the much taller woman. “Allow me my needs. You know I've been running a quart low. And besides would he have faired any differently had he wandered into one of your dark alleys?”
“I would have gutted him like a pig,” the tigress said as if it happened every day, which it did. “But I would not have first lied to him.”
The angel blinked up at her. “Are you – angry with me?”
“I just witnessed something I don't think I've ever seen you do,” the tigress observed. “I'm not sure what to make of it. Perhaps being among people as much as we have been lately has begun to alter your thinking.”
The angel bristled. “Or just perhaps that guy was a useless little fucker! Parasites like that should be --”
But she didn't finish her thought about parasites, her sister having placed the tips of her fingers on the other's lips.
“Enough,” said the tigress. “You are in no position to rail against the excesses of parasites.”
The angel stood in wide-eyed shock as the tigress lowered her hand.
“That is a terrible thing to say,” she pleaded, her face stricken. “Why are you suddenly so angry with me? Why?”
The tigress looked away as if considering what she might say. When she looked up her eyes were hard.
“I am not angry. I may be frightened. Listen to me carefully. I will not be able to say this again in a way you will understand. You are my entire world right now, the only family I have, and your friendship means more to me than anything else I possess. But understand also that you are very nearly the single most powerful creature the life of this planet has ever known. Because you are innocent I fear you do not fully appreciate the extent of your own power and this leaves you vulnerable to deceptions, even and especially self-deception. Men who seek dominion over all things greatly covet the kind of power you possess. I see now there are already forces at work to subvert your gentle nature, to ensnare you in a labyrinth of deceits. It would not do for you to succumb to the same unending frauds that now threaten the human world, and so doing become as one of them.”
“What a crock!” the angel cried back. “You would pick a fight with your own sister over the insignificant death of this pathetic man?”
“I said I was afraid,” the tigress replied calmly. “At the bottom of all these small frauds and lies sleeps the greater lie, of greed and calous disregard. Greed killed me twice already and made you what you are -- a machine -- and it will be greed if anything that might awake in you a great tyrant, and a terrible enemy.”
The angel on hearing this lowered her eyes and looked at the floor. Then she spoke. “You have never been this angry,” she said miserably. “I don't know what has suddenly come between us but I greatly fear it. I am chastened and know not what to say.”
The tigress ran a gentle hand over the other's white hair and then down under her chin, lifting the angel's face again just as a pair of black tears ran from the corners of her blue eyes and down her cheeks.
“Such a serious face,” the tigress said fondly even as the angel swallowed a sob. “I only meant that you should remain a creature of the light, and to veer mostly toward your strength which is charity and kindness. And if in the end you must kill them then remember to take a moment and shed a tear for the sinner.”
“Even if they are black tears?” the angel asked, struggling to work up a smile against crushing remorse.
“Even if,” the tigress replied reassuringly.
The angel nodded mutely, then sniffed and smiled and said, “Okay. I'll remember. I will.”
They gazed at each other lovingly before the angel suddenly placed her hands on the sides of her face and said with surprise, “And in a holy place no less!”
The tigress cleared her throat and looked around as if just then realizing where they were.
“The nuns would have my hide if they knew what I was doing!” the angel fussed, bringing up a part of her robe (which really was just a bed sheet after all) to wipe her face. “Lying and killing in God's house. You'd think I was a barbarian. I'll for sure be cast bodily into Hell before morning. Or worse, Sister Margaret will descend from Heaven special to lecture me at length.”
Then rising to her toes she planted a firm kiss on the larger woman's cheek before spinning around on the spot. The tigress had to duck quickly to avoid being knocked from her feet by the huge wing that then pass over her. The angel walked swiftly to the base of the dais, came to her knees, and fell into earnest prayer.
The tigress watched her sister adoringly before the smile melted away and she turned. Her attention fell on the corpse in the aisle, seeming forgotten up to then. Her eyes narrowed as she approached it warily the way one might approach a dead snake. She knelt down next to it and with one hand tilted the head up to look into the eyes. They were glassy and uneven with death but she looked into them as if seeking some life there. With a quick glance over her shoulder at the angel praying in Latin at the front of the church the tigress brought her face close to that of the dead man.
She sniffed him, and then bared her fangs silently as if she might fall upon and savage the body. But instead she brought her lips near the ear and there said in a soft whisper, “You know what I am. You know what I can do. Leave her alone.”
She said nothing more but waited tensely. The corpse of course did not reply. Removing the support of her hand she allowed the head to roll to the side. She glanced over her shoulder again to see if she had been observed, then slowly rose and stood for a thoughtful minute looking down at the body.
In the wings of the church the small votive candles, up to then struggling to shed their hopeful light, had all gone out. Thin tendrils of gray smoke rising into the high rafters were all that remained of their prior existence. The shadows grew deeper around the tigress, and the rear of the church was cast into utter blackness against the golden contrast of the faintly illuminated figure of Jesus on the cross mounted on the opposite wall.
She smiled with some inner satisfaction, and crossed her arms.
“So you are supposed to be the fabled smartest guy in the room,” she said with obvious skepticism. “Clever perhaps, but not very smart. If you had been smart you would have recognized that there are things in life far worse that poverty or imprisonment. In fact – “
She leaned down, grabbed the shirt front, and hauled the body up onto her shoulder as easily as she would a bag of laundry.
“In fact, there are things far worse than death. You sir are coming with me.”
She turned part way around to look at her sister again, who had not changed position in the least. Then without a word the tigress faced the darkness and, bearing on her shoulder what was less a burden of fated destiny and more precisely a meal, began walking down the aisle back into the shadows that only a few minutes before had produced her.
The angel at prayer fell silent, lifted her head slowly, and opened her eyes. She listened before she smiled and said, “You may have noticed, this is a Christian church.”
“I did,” came the reply from the shadows, faintly as if issued by someone already far away.
The angel chewed a lip with passing indecision before saying, “The ones who worship here, they believe that the all powerful God in heaven sacrificed his only-begotten son on earth, in suffering and humiliation, that mortal men may have a beacon to help them find meekness and moral clarity, and to live in righteousness before God. Or at least that was the plan. Do you think it's working?”
“No,” the tigress said.
The angel smiled sadly before she continued. “Nor do I, some days. It helps me sometimes to imagine that the same God would have then taken an entirely different approach with his only-begotten daughter.”
Distant but bright laughter echoed around the church, and the angel smiled broadly to herself where she sat before the altar. The laughter trailed off and was followed by “Good night, my dearest firebird.”
The angel nodded and without turning replied happily, “Good night, gentle destroyer.”
The angel sat in silent contemplation, smiling gently. Then she lifted her hands together in prayer and closed her eyes. But before she could begin her eyes shot open and her face clouded with anger.
“Very nearly!?” she exclaimed, her hands falling back into her lap in tiny fists. She pivoted around at the waist and peered under one wing into the inky gloom behind her. “And what is that meant to imply? Very nearly the most powerful when compared to whom?”
The vacant shadows offered no ready opinion on the matter. The angel turned back around, fuming hotly. “Very nearly. Well I'll have you know I could very nearly level a city block and not even – oh. Wait.”
She opened her hands and looked down at them, then placed them against her own face. “That's wrong. I would never do that.”
She ran the hands over her face and hair as if trying to rediscover herself. “What's happened to me? Why am I thinking these terrible thoughts?” She returned her hands to her own lap, and sat still as a stone for a long while. Finally she sighed and said, “Well she is very nearly incomprehensible.”
She shook her head as if to clear it before she glanced up at the figure of Christ glowing faintly golden and said, “But I suppose it must run in the family.”
Not all cultural traditions explicitly posit that the world as we know it must end. The Christians are among those that do. They give an account of how four terrifying horsemen will appear at the end of the age of men and trample our civilization into dust. Of the four, one is a banker who arrives with his own scales calling out the price of barley futures, and instructing the damned to not harm the wine on their way to Hell. Maybe the ancient seers were onto something.
A different account of how the modern world ends has it being quietly, slowly unwound by a she-beast and her many offspring, who do not trample the works and dreams of men but rather ruthlessly subvert them, making of men a different kind of animal altogether, one less prone to easy frauds. But as we all know nobody ever changes and universal salvation remains a quaint notion from a simpler age and an affront to personal freedom.
Though we might wonder. When all is done. Would the destroyer then heed her own admonition, at the end of the world to shed a tear for the sinners.