Red Athens, Chapter 18, of a fantasy novel by Jacob Malewitz

Red Athens, on Transformers Armored Fleet

BOOK 2, Angels Among, Demons Below

Ch. 18

Janus looked down toward the demon who happened to be sitting with a blade trying to cut through a small wound on his arm, finding a piece of metal, he pulled out the shrapnel and looked up. The two faces, you see, can be one you see and one you don’t. Janus looked down at the battle. What was wrong with this whole picture?

“Why the hell did you stop … and you’re not even a damn corpse. I saw the life--“

“Stop, Pericles.”

“Stop! That’s the whole problem!”

Janus looked down to the see the king of the Yamato Imperial Court, which held a small piece of the heaven before the angels took root in the sand, questioning God and creating a hell—a war at the same time as well. Yamatos, to Janus, be like the first builders of the lands. They were the Jews of the east, but, for some time, had lost their way, and might never find it again. But this—

--This Yamato longbow remembered, for he had lived longer than most angels could. He gained his wings, once, long ago. ‘I had been walking, an apple in my hand, and I heard a scream in the distance near my village. Raiders. Shangs. I killed them all. They called me a god, then a samurai, then no mere samurai, but a full blood Yamato king. I ran.’

The rest of the story, to Janus, had been lost. But, as in any war, you have recruitment. And Yamato, so close to taking the site of Satan, The Hand, and Hammurabi, turned away from the darkness and is said to have said something to the Hebrew Y god. Something … forgotten.

Janus laughed. “What would do, Pericles? Kill the whole world? There are no giants anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“Old story,” said Yamato.

“Shut your mouth, demon.” And Pericles pushed him away. Janus saw the eyes of the Yamato, bordering on tears. Yet he said nothing, merely looking up the sky as though he had a question, and a second later, an answer. Proper: he loved to toy with men, and for a moment Janus felt for him. The Western gods did the same. Even the Y did. And his angels.

“Rude, Pericles.”

“Just another angel, Janus. And who the hell are you to say what’s rude? You are an affront to this damned god.”

“Damned?”

“He can’t hold on.”

“So you intend.”

“I will, is a better way. I will destroy both, for he side with both.”

“Both?”

“God and Satan, Janus … God and Satan. For, its magik. One is needed for the other.”

“I disagree.”

“As you should.” Yamato pulled Pericles back, looking him right in the eye. “Listen to me, hero. I tried the same route, killing two birds, Pericles-san, with one stone. It not work like that. Nothing work right that wokrs on paper. There is something else at play. You kill them, it do nothing but give Hammurabi more.”

“I don’t—“

“It’s not the same anymore. Once, maybe. When the worlds were young. Do you see those stars? Do you? Can you stop the light? This is the way of the world, Pericles-san, it only get bigger.”

Janus rose into the air. “They say, if an angel could fly at the speed of light, the speed of sound, he could cross over into the next world.”

“What’s out there?”

“Things. More evil. More good. Yet none like you, no one quite like you in all of it. Can you believe, at least, in that? 

“You have to make another choice, Pericles, for this is far from over. And the things you had nightmares of at night. Do you remember? They were real. Everything was real.”

2

Pericles Knight stood down at his mother’s body, his eyes searching hers, hearing the yells of his father, and something else, maybe the scream of a killer. And looking down, he saw nothing, as though the spirit had already left. ‘I didn’t believe, until then,’ he would write. ‘I didn’t believe we had something within us that no blade could cut out, no torture could show … a small piece of light making sure, making sure such endings never happened.’

He took a small piece of paper, placing it over his mother face after closing her eyes, only to see it blow away, her hand to shoot up, and the spirit return to her for a moment. “Forget the last card.” She fell back, he started screaming. 

“Father. Father! She’s not dead. She just came back. She must have cast a spell.”

And Pericles Opti came running out, a legion of shields following him … assassins could be anywhere, everywhere. 

“What did you say, son?”

“She came back. She came back!”

Pericles Opti placed his finger over her mouth. “My young man, you can see things sometimes.”

“It must have been magik. It must!”

“No magik. The spirit has left.”

“She said something.”

“Son, forget that. You are wishing for things which can’t be done.”

“Anything … anything can be done. She came back. She told me something, but it didn’t make sense.”

“I shouldn’t have left—“

“What’s the last card?”

They met in a hug, and he started crying. “Am I mad father?”

“No more than usual, Pericles Knyght, no more than usual, son.”

“I want her back. I want her back …” and he began to walk away. “I will find a way. The time spell. Or maybe the chaos logic.”

“Don’t say such blasphemy in this court!”

Pericles Opti put his hand to his temple, motioning for the guards to remove her body. He had, according the records, hoped for something to happen. He couldn’t let her go anymore than her prized young son could. He wanted something else to have happened. It is said, by his chroniclers, that he thought of magik too.

“The magik,” Pericles Knyght said, putting his arms around his father. “The magik will bring her back.”

“Soon you will learn why the dead should never be turned back. It’s necromancy, a dark art created—“ he stopped. “Let us go talk.”

And they walked away, the light beaming down on them. For a moment, Knyght thought he saw his mother standing at the head of her temple, her robe blowing in the wind and revealing her some of her stomach, blowing as though she were still alive, moving, acting, thinking. She wasn’t. She was dead. 

“You will have to accept it first, my son.”

“I accept nothing!” And Pericles Opti held him tighter.

“As I expected.” They made there way up the steps of the temple of healing. “I have something to show you, a means of ending these vicious games.”

“I don’t want to do anything but kill and kill more. Why aren’t you sad.”

“In time, son, in time.”

They walked the marble steps taking each step a bit slower; both were somewhat afraid of this temple, which any eye on them would have noticed. It be a temple for the women of Red Athens, those vessels who were looked down on by the senators as too open, as too curious. Pericles Opti went to the door, his eyes, then, fell back to his son who was pulling out a a small dagger. “You caught him! You caught him!”

“No, they did.”

And he opened the door, only to see a rage of women in battle garbs; the reds of Red Athens; the blues of Blue Babylonian; the oddly black of Green Sparta. Pericles Knyght charged right into the malestorm of weapons and bodies, yelling “kill” at the top of his lungs. Opti reached to stop him, only to catch a grazing blow from his son, who went past the women, amazons or be what they be, and charged straight into the place as though he knew where he was going, as though he knew something else …

“Pericles Knyght! Stop. You don’t.” He put his hand to his eyes, letting go.

Knyght saw the killer as a monster, devoid of the light of the world, the light that was Red Athens. “Just tell me.”

“What? There is nothing to say or do. There is only beginnings and ending.” This was said by an aging Red Athenian woman, who Knyght recognized as one of mother’s original teachers—at the temple … at the place of light … before hell came. She looked quite distraught, her eyes focusing on the young prince, as though she hoped to see some of her star pupil in him. The actions that followed proved that.

“Just tell me where from.”

“It doesn’t—“

“It does matter! I send one chaos spell to the city—I have power—and they all die burning and burning and filling the air with ashes.”

“You would end a people because of one?”

“I would!”

“Then you may go.”

“I am not—“ she grabbed him by the ear, like a child, her white hair falling in front of her face … but she saw more than ever in those moments.

“You are no better than any of them.”

“Ha!” The killer began to crack up. “Is this how the women treat the princes? As school boys too stupid too know a Green—“ She sent the blast quickly, it arced, it fell on his face, it burned off the eye lashes of the killer, and, oddly, he made no noise, just fell back grabbing his eyes in pain and taking a sharp kick from one of the clerics of the temple.

“Green Sparta,” Knyght said, and he twisted away. “Green Sparta.”

“Wouldn’t do this.”

“They did; how do you explain that?”

“Trouble.”

“Trouble.”

“In the heavens.” She put her arm to his shoulder; picked him up with one hand, raising him high into the air. “And you have already seen it, no?”

“Seen—“

“It. The card.”

“I don’t know—“

“But you lie. But you always lied, when they asked you, who you were.”

“I am Pericles Knyght, son of the great Opti.”

“And the fallen sword of Athena.”

“What?” Pericles, even later in his letters, had no idea what this or the next words meant.

“The keeper of the cards will meet you, one will betray you, and you will return to your rightful seat.”

“I don’t—“

“You will.” She put a small lance in front of him. “For it’s not in the light that we see most, but in the darkness where our eyes truly open. Beware the final card, the one telling you the fate of the world. It lies. It shows you the light. Look to the darkest places for the answers to the end of days.”

Ch. 19

Pericles looked quite like the wolf of Sky Rome, the vicious creature upon which Romulus built a city, to tame the barbarians, to be the light of the west. For in the west, there be many wolves.

He smelled of magik, burnt wood; he saw more than any other man ever could, making out little of it; he wished for something to take away all this, a hope.

“What am I to do?”

“The odds are impossible.”

“I just have to kill one Blue Babylonian.”

“Quite wrong,” said Yamato. “Quite incorrect.”

“Who are you to all this? It’s not even in the same land. Where are you, the other side of the galaxy?”

“Japan, Pericles, Japan.”

“Oh, the land of the samurai. Prob’ be a bunch of bowmen who drink all day and tell stories. I’m a Red Athenian! My people are important! And they deserve better than all this.”

“Am I supposed to disagree?” Yamato said, touching one of his black wings.

“You’re just a jew angel.”

“You would persecute, would label me by an entire people?”

“You, a Yamato longbow, wouldn’t?”

“I suppose not.”

Pericles pulled out the card. “The cards, and all these warnings.” Then, for a moment, it came back to him. He saw the gods falling to the earth, resting the last of their powers in the hands of a small girl, who in turn set upon making sure a boy would have all the power.

“The Athena Blade.”

“Yamato don’t—“

“Long story.”

“A search?”

“I believe I already have the blade, if that’s what you mean.”

“I meant a search for you.”

2

Calli pulled Verce out of the boat, pushed him down toward the oddly built fortress around Ionia, a beacon of light, the Babylon of the western cities, the light …

It be the last bastion, the place where the armies of angels and gods, for a moment, stood together again, as they had at the beginning, at the very beginning of it all. But, the battle hadn’t quite turned out well. Many bodies, the blood an odd hue of black, littered the grounds. And chaos magik filled the air, making it a struggle to take in a full breath without feeling it take hold, like a disease that wouldn’t let go.

“Ah, but it’s so much more than that.”

“Ah, it’s boring. You forget the monsters of the woods; they have a purpose, ah’ think.” Verce tugged on Calli’s shoulder, making a small mark on the wound from the great battle.. “Where do you suppose we be?”

“Well.” He pulled out a small Sky Roman scope, pretending to know something he didn’t. “It’s not quite Ionia anymore.”

Verce grabbed the scope, looking far, seeing too much. “How could it be?”

“Hammurabi.”

“Is mad.”

“And who isn’t? We just fought a battle with angels and gods!”

“For nothing?”

“For something, Verce, for something.”

For some time, they walked toward the burning wreckage of the city. They entered it, smelling like Red Athens as it did, finding bodies, some alive, and gods, many dead … all around this place was the stink of mages. Verce cursed to Thorn many times, hoping to see no more reasons to cut the throat of Hammurabi. 

“I don’t understand anymore.”

“Some never did.”

Calli pulled out a small dagger, holding it out to an angel whose legs had been chopped quite badly. He said something, in a language defeaning to all languages, in the first language of the stars. Like poetry with a beat or a Sky Roman bard smiling. He said something and it meant more to Calli than any other word before it. He looked at the angel, realizing this angel be a She, a woman of the clouds. “My name is Calli.”

She took the blade. “Gabriel.”

“Gabriel! I had a wife named Gabriel; stole her from a Sky Roman prince.” 

She laughed at Verce’s joke. “Gabriel is the language we speak, the blood through my veins; no name; it’s what it is.”

“Can angels die?”

“Angels have always died; some days more than others; some dark nights even more.” She said something in her language, and the dagger became enchanted, a spark dotting off it and sending a small beam of light into Calli’s left eye; he looked right into it, with no blinking, and understood. 

He took the blade back, pulled up one of her wings, and slowly cut out a small piece. She groaned for a moment, then he took a small feather, long, a foot long, and sat next to her. “And I thought angels didn’t die; I thought  they were; for I am; and they should be.”

“Poetry?” Said Gabriel.

“Poor excuse. Free Celt poetry the very best; said in hushed tones, quiet, but everyone always hears.”

“Free Celt still believe in Thorn?”

“Thorn my true god.”

“I see,” Gabriel took the dagger, sat up a bit, the smell of her blood oddly pleasant as it moved down her chest and arms, and she grabbed Verce by the arm. He didn’t struggle. “There was a spirit to this city that died.” She made a mark, a small star. “It will burn, the star of Ionia. Burn. When you are ready, use it.” 

And she took the blade, pushing it into her chest; blackness came out; her form changed; her eyes closed … but no longer eyes. She changed into a dark creature, the sword of Y, perhaps. “I don’t …” and Verce stopped, his eyes mesmorized by all the different forms she was tooking. He closed his eyes, putting his hand to hers’, and closed them. At the very last moment, he saw something that looked quite like the warrior Thorn, the first great Free Celt man. Just for a moment.

“And they came, the warriors of night.” She turned into blackness, for in this laymen’s guess, we were all born of the blackness of the night. Some day, far away, they would go into spaces of complete black, where the absence of light made you understand space and time beyond earth is all black. All black.

“Where you go, Gabriel?” . 

“To heaven.” A cloud of black went to the skies, trailing her were many small little demons, which, oddly enough, seemed to be attached to her in such a way. They had red skins, horns, devils?

“Sometimes I wish I saw less than I did, understood more of what I saw.”

“Because, Verce, you saw too much.”

“Aye.” He walked toward Ionia, leading the way with the feather of the angel Gabriel whose mortal body fell downward, falling, to hell.

3

They walked, and Pericles wanted more. Verce looked quite pleased: his shoulders a bit wider, his mouth letting out Free Celt poetic verses, for everything had a beat in nature to the Free Celts, always, always a beat to the way of things, the walking, the running, the beginnings and endings. They never stopped.

“It ke nuck,” Yamato said, his wings shielding much of his face from Pericles. “It all bad.”

“Little is right anymore.”

“We can’t just walk in, Pericles-san, we can’t just expect an entire people to change.”

“They changed when Hammurabi came. He was once a man.” Pericles had a thought. “I think we can save them.”

“Save a land built over a hell, with demons below by the millions? It would be impossible.”

“But we have a chance.”

“A chance?”

“That’s how I like it.” 

The flying ship that came toward them had the wrogn insignias too it: Green Spartan. It shot through the air, propelled by the gods, or maybe just enough mana to power an entire civilization. It came when the god of day was still strong, shining the insignia, glittering off the blades of the Green Spartans coming, war on their minds. It came toward them until Yamato rose into the air, calling a fire spell.

He sent a blast toward it, his eyes focusing like a good bowmen, and it did nothing, glancing off the massive beast machine and coming right back at him. The blast overwhelmed what power he had reserved, causing him to fall to the ground faster than he rose from it. 

“Verce!”

“I be—“ and he darted with the deft speed of a Free Celt, catching Yamato, or being knocked over by the thrust of the air, and he fell himself, cushioning the samurai angel, while he just about cracked a rib. He groaned—

--But there was no time for any of it. The battle commenced. Pericles pulled out what mana he had left, forming an ice shield, until a mage who happened to be on this beast machine sent a simple fire smell and melted it, the water dripping down on them, cooling them like a dip in the ocean. But they still had fire left.

A stream of angels fell from the sky, under the flag of Red Athens, put with an interesting addition. The star of David: it came down the fastest, cutting through the shower of arrows coming from the Green Spartans. The angels sent out battle cries.

“Save a land over hell they told me,” Verce said, his eyees watching as the angels did all the real fighting, “except I fight with an axe! Who can fight flying Green Spartans,” the arrow knocked into his blade in unision with his words, and he charged with a rage in his heart and a few Green Spartan heads on his mind. He met the first one-eyed Green Spartan after he struck down on the sands. “So they do have some honor left, ha!” And the blow, which took off a piece of skin underneath Verce’s chest armor, felt like fire. “Or not.”

He jumped on top of the Green Spartan, pummeling him, while also pulling a short dagger from his boot. He put it in the best spot he could, the eye exploding in a sense, the magik unleashing and sending him flying in an odd way. “That’s one, you damned Sky Roman!” He had no time to see where his unlikely acquaintance Calli be, for he just smelled blood: the smell of battle. He took off the head of another Green Spartan, eyeing him oddly as the head, using magik, reformed. “Ugh.” And he sent another blow, only to have it deflect by a beam of light. He looked up. Demons. Thousands of demons. They had made their play, their play was here—and with the angels here too, the battle took on a new level.

“Hey you—“ he stopped when the man beast came out of the ground, its eyes shooting off something rather blue, the color of the great city. It had the eyes of something quite wooden: brown eyes as it was an earth beast. Stories of ancient lands told of them: the demons of the earth who possessed men. It looked somewhat pleased to have opened Verce’s eyes, the Free Celt having only seen the creatures, ten feet high, made of decadent trees and bloodied bodies of men sucked into the earth—he had only seen them as sketches on walls by the earliest of the Free Celts. “Ne Sumaria!” It screamed through many tongues of its man heads. The Hebrews had, in creating the anti Christ monsters, considered these beasts. It took on a new shape, just an arrow from Yamato went through one its many eyes. Verce charged the changeling beast, hoping to take advantage of the arrow wound. It did nothing but send a blast of earth into him, sending him back a hundred feet, and, after a few ribs were cracked, he pulled up his sleeve, wetted his dagger with blood, and called on his own magik, his own hell: thorn.

#

Calli pulled out a Sky Roman shortsword from the head of a Green Spartan. Something seemed to be missing from these dark creatures other than their souls, and he couldn’t quite see why they fought so poorly against any civilized warrior. But there numbers …

Ten more charged him, slaves, he could tell by the marks of their arms—slaves brought out of the fields and taken over by demons, bent on making a hell here. Calli stepped back, feigning a retreat, his eyes looking around for Verce, the one Free Celt he could joke with; for Pericles, the only Red Athenian other than Pericles Opti who could actually match wits with a Sky Roman; be it the mysterious Yamato, the samurai angel, and he could see the eyes of a king, the mind of a true politician, but the quest for right that he liked to think Sky Romans had.

The time for thinking was over when an angel, bloodied, its eyes gone, fell on the ground in front of him. A Hebrew mage sent a spell into the mass of Green Spartans slowly surrounding Calli, only to see it turned against him; Calli smelled fire, burning flash, and he couldn’t let that pass, just like he couldn’t escape this envelopment. More Green Spartans came. Why? He couldn’t understand. “Just another pleb,” he said, charging into the thinnest part of the line slowly making the encirclement.

“Surrender!” One yelled. “Surr—end—er,” it echoed in a place where it shouldn’t have. The bodies surrounding him, then the smaller, different forms slowly advancing on him: the Hammurabi bows. 

“Don’t like it one bit,” and he, not knowing magik, called out with his mind for Pericles. It was about all he could do, but something shot back in his mind, telling him No, a big no, and you will live this day, but not for long. It told him more: it showed him the darkness within each of these creatures, and it made him sick, and he fell over his eyes squinting shut as sand, or what he thought was sand, enterered. Like a cold bath, his system took a shock; his hands shaking and his grip on the short sword gone. All he could do was send one last plea to Pericles.

#

Pericles heard it, those sounds of destruction and the screaming. An old poem, For when the angels scream, we all scream with them. And for a long time he couldn’t understand those words: who would make an angel scream? There were those who would. He saw the proof in front of him: war.

He heard then, the next stage of the battle coming to a bloody end as the sides regathered, the tiniest of rushes to his mind telling him something at first he couldn’t make out, the call of a Sky Roman. It didn’t matter. 

“Thorn!” And Verce charged into a group of flying Green Spartans, arrows from Hammurabi bows filling his chest. It didn’t matter; no Free Celt could be stopped at such bloodlust. There was no true explanation except it showed the anger of the one god. It showed him at his most carnal.

Pericles pushed toward a pack of Green Spartans; heads were falling; screams came; laughing, the laughs of a man gone mad. But Calli? Then it came to him. The small moment, he remembered, lost as all small moments are: it came to him. “It is getting dark, Pericles.” The words hit him: why? He couldn’t help but charge toward the mass of bodies surrounding the heavy breathing Verce. His eyes, darkened by hate. And his body, red.

“We must find Calli!”

“Ash Guth.”

“What?”

“Sure!”

And Verce jabbed a flying Green Spartan with a bow. “Hammurabi save,” Verce let out. “Hammurabi be saving the true Green Spartans.”

“These aren’t.”

And Verce held his head, his eyes opening, looking down to the many arrow wounds; he preceded to pull them out, the wounds healing, slowly, but forming into bruises and small marks. “It come slow; I am getting to be an old—“ and he grabbed his head again. “Damned! The Sky Roman got—“ and the arrow, which went into his eye, came out the back and blood flinging out in a chaotic way. Pericles took no chances: he immediately pulled out the last of the mana, his eyes, his eyes seeing something more than he should have; his hands, his hands calling the spells of poetry the Red Athenians had been taught. Simple healing spells, for even Thorn couldn’t protect the eyes. It’s the part of our souls nothing can protect, except more magik, and Pericles hoped, thinking that magik could defeat magik.

It mattered not. Verce pulled the arrow out of his head and preceded to fall over, the wound slowly healing, the blood seeming to trail back into him on the hundreds of woudnss and the one death blow. It all came back.

They made a stand. Yamato, samurai angel, put his back to Pericles, as the angels and demons fought above. A legion of doomed slaves charged right into them, and wings were being put to the test just as the magik of this small band of heroes was. Pericles remembered the days before all this, for only a second, to be reminded there were day before this, and there might be days after this. Might …

#

Yamato pulled an arrow from his waist, the odd angel black blood coming out, reminding him of his wings, only to see he couldn’t leave Pericles here and just fly away, nor could he leave all the warrior angels. They only needed the gods; they needed their power; more than Janus; more than just gods; they needed something else.

Angels screamed out in unision for a moment, when a darkness approached. And, the Green Spartans, hoping to fall back, saw a small beam of light and disappered into the black. “IT END.”

A demon from the deep, or I should say, the demon of the deep, came out like the ground was an ocean and it was the monster they had all been warned about. For it was. Then, everything went black again, and Yamato, seeing the world crossed, saw a being of light, and all the angels left. His wings went back; he knew it wasn’t his time to leave, for much was to be done. 

“They say a man makes a stand, once.”

“Sometimes duce,” Yamato replied to Pericles.

“Ugh.” And Verce fell down to the side of the two, a pool of blood, his eyes still open.