Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,22
her what to do. “I put down some mad dogs for the State of Nevada last week and then I hit it big on the Cockroach Road. What do you want, a hundred grand?” Money didn’t matter to her, so Jane either had it in buckets or had none at all. She couldn’t starve to death and paid no utility bills and the Mare could catch her own provender, so when Jane got money, she spent it. Eat, drink and be merry, might have been her motto, for tomorrow you will certainly not die.
“An eye for an eye,” the Legate intoned. “A tooth for a tooth.”
“A death for a death,” Jane shot at him, and now she did feel bitter. “So why not kill me and get it over with?” Suddenly, she felt the full weight of the millennia at her back, and her heart filled with the pangs of the hundred cities that had burned around her and the thousands of men who had died on her blades. She was tired, she was unspeakably old, and she just … kept … going.
“You lost your death when you took your brother’s life from him,” the Legate said dryly, as if she didn’t remember. He picked up the candle and tucked it into some hidden pocket beneath his mantelletta.
“What, then?” Jane asked, but in her heart she knew where the conversation was going. She willed herself not to look to the side at the Calamity Horn.
“You can have your death back,” the Legate finished, shaking the letter gently like it was a birthday present and he was weighing it to guess what might be inside, “in exchange for the death of another.”
“Why don’t you do it yourselves?” Jane asked. “You guys aren’t exactly averse to smiting, when you get the idea you’d like to do it. Ainok, Sodom and Gomorrah, Atlantis, Pompeii, San Francisco, New Orleans … why not strike this guy with a good old-fashioned thunderbolt, or a plague?”
She knew the answer, but she wanted the Legate to say it.
“This is a case where discretion will be necessary,” the Legate said slowly. “Heaven would rather not attract any attention.”
Jane shook soap off her hand. “And you came to me,” she said, picking up the FN Model 1910, “because of my reputation for great discretion. Also, because I carry the Calamity Horn, a gun that is capable of wounding and striking down even the children of Heaven. And also because you have something you can hold over me. Here I am in Las Vegas, and Heaven is making me an offer I can’t refuse.”
The Legate nodded. “All true. And also, we came to you because the target in question is an old friend of yours.”
* * *
On the rooftop of the meat packing plant, standing on top of the lightning bolt-bearing case, Jane raised her arms to the roiling sky and called the Messenger. Angels didn’t have true names, not in the way humans did, because the ka, the ba, and the body of an angel were not separate things, needing a name to bind them together and casting a shadow over the space among them. An angel was a unitary creation, a spiritual point rather than a cluster, and it had no secret name. Therefore, she couldn’t compel it; so instead, she invited it.
Jane called in Angelic when she could remember the Angelic words clearly, and when she couldn’t, she supplied the deficit with Adamic. The two were kissing cousins, anyway, and often shared vocabulary—though Angelic, as far as Jane knew, had no profanity at all. So much the poorer.
She touched the fragment of Azazel’s hoof and let the feel of the object drift into and seal her message with its tangibility. She spoke words of offer and negotiation in her incantation, telling the renegade that she had the thing he was looking for, that they could join forces, that together they could have what they both wanted.
They were lies, and a trick, and in her heart she planned murder.
The circle carried her words up into the heavens, soaring through and against the rain that pelted down. Lightning flashed in a chain along the horizon as she finished, and a vortex of silver in the dark clouds absorbed her false oaths, sucked them in and spun them out in all directions like meteorites slung at the far corners of the world.
When she was certain the angel would hear, Jane stopped. Her ka ached within her and her body’s wounds, still