Templar Chronicles: Judgment Day Part 17

He is mentioned several times in the Christian Apocrypha, particularly the books of Enoch and Esdras, as one of the seven hosts who guarded the throne of heaven. Tradition held that he was the angel that had checked the doors of the Jews for lamb's blood during the Pa.s.sover plague in Egypt and the one that carried John the Baptist and his mother, Elizabeth, to join the holy family after their flight out of Egypt. Uriel was noted as being as pitiless as a demon in the Apocalypse of Peter, another extra-biblical text, and in the Life of Adam and Eve he is listed as the angel that helped to bury both Adam and Abel in Paradise.

Perhaps more importantly, given Cade's current needs, Uriel was historically regarded as the angel of wisdom, the one who shines the light of G.o.d's truth into the darkness. All that he had seen, all that he had witnessed, both the sublime and the horrendous, had been recorded on his flesh and transformed into a living collection of knowledge. It was from that collection that the angel drew the endless supply of wisdom that the angel was traditionally believed to dispense.

But Uriel was not the angel he had once been, that was clear. An angel's power rested in his wings and Uriel had been stripped of those, either purposely or through an injury. As a result he had been reduced from a being of almost limitless power to something much less. He was still vastly more powerful than Cade, as he had so aptly ill.u.s.trated already, but he was far from what he had once been.

All this flashed through Cade's mind in an instant and he realized that he did, in fact, understand.

At some point in the distant past, Uriel had retreated from the fight. He'd left the battle between good and evil to those still equipped to carry it forth and had retreated into the shadows, to bear witness and record the conflict for future generations.

But what got Cade excited was the understanding that Uriel was a senior member of the heavenly host and by his own admission had been around since before the Fall. He had called the Adversary by name, which meant he had most likely known the fallen angel personally. There probably wasn't anyone else on the planet aside from the Adversary himself who could tell Cade what he needed to know to rescue his wife.

And you've gone and p.i.s.sed Uriel off.

Nice job, Williams.

Cade bowed his head briefly in a gesture of respect and then looked up again, meeting the angel's stare.

"My apologies; I meant no disrespect. Perhaps we could start over?"

Uriel sighed and turned away, walking over to the nearest window to stare out into the night. Over his shoulder, he said, "You cannot save Gabrielle; you can only set her free."

Set her free?

Cade didn't like the sound of that.

"What does that mean?" he asked, a bit more harshly than he intended as his heart rate kicked up.

Get a grip, man.

Uriel either didn't notice or chose to ignore his tone.

"Asharael began altering your wife's body the moment he took control of it, bending and morphing it to his will. That kind of physical change comes at a terrible price. It is only his presence within her flesh that is keeping the damage he has caused from crippling her or killing her outright. He can keep her body alive indefinitely in this fashion. If you remove that protection, however..."

Cade stared at him, unhappy with what he was hearing.

"Let me get this straight," he said, pointing a finger in Uriel's direction, "you're telling me that if I succeed in freeing Gabrielle from the Adversary's control, she'll die?"

Uriel nodded. "Yes. Probably within seconds and in a very grisly fashion."

Cade shook his head. "No. No, that can't be right. There has to be a way!"

"Believe me when I tell you that there is not."

All the fear and pain and despair that he'd been harboring for the last few weeks came pouring up from deep inside and Cade suddenly lost it. Within moments he was hollering at the angel standing in front of him.

"f.u.c.k you!" he yelled as he paced back and forth in front of Uriel. "Just f.u.c.k you! What the h.e.l.l do you know, anyway? You're just some sorry sack of s.h.i.t with his wings ripped off! I know there's a way; there has to be!"

Uriel didn't say anything; he just stood there and calmly watched Cade pace back and forth while shaking his fist in the angel's direction.

"No, you're wrong. You have to be wrong. There's no way I'm letting that b.a.s.t.a.r.d do this. No f.u.c.king way!"

"You have to."

The declaration brought Cade up short. He spun around to face the crippled angel, anger on his face.

"What did you just say?"

Uriel met his gaze calmly. "You have to let Asharael win. He must remain in possession of your wife's body."

"Like h.e.l.l he will!"

Cade was quickly becoming convinced that this was a complete waste of time. Uriel had clearly spent too much time locked away from the world in this tower to know what needed to be done. Cade had to get out of here, get back to the mainland, and from there he could...

"This is not a question of choice," Uriel said to him, capturing Cade's attention with the hard, relentless tone in his voice. "You let the Adversary escape twice before but you cannot do so a third time. He has been preparing to return his entire scream of angels to this plane and if that happens if he is united with his former allies there will be no end to the suffering they will cause."

It took everything Cade had not to laugh. "You don't seem to get it," he said. "The world can go to h.e.l.l for all I care. I'm done with trying to do the right thing. All I want to do is rescue my wife; she's been suffering at that b.a.s.t.a.r.d's hands long enough!"

Uriel stepped closer. "No," he said, with a tang of steel in his voice, "it is you who do not seem to get it."

Without warning, he reached out and grabbed Cade's arm.

One moment Cade was standing in the clock tower arguing with the injured angel, the next the two of them were standing on an ash-strewn plain staring out at the remains of a bombed-out city in the distance. Most of the buildings had been reduced to nothing more than piles of rubble, but a single tower with a large clock on it rose defiantly through the twisting, churning smoke that seemed to be drifting everywhere. Something about the tower looked familiar, but it took Cade several minutes of staring at it before he recognized it as Big Ben.

If that is Big Ben, he thought, that meant the city he was looking at, the one that looked more like an apocalyptic wasteland than a city, was London.

Cade gazed around in disbelief.

What the h.e.l.l had happened here?

Before he could ask, his attention was drawn to a ragtag group of survivors making their way across the plain before them. They were picking their way through the rubble, occasionally glancing upward into the haze-filled sky above. Cade counted two men, three women, and a small child. He turned a questioning look in Uriel's direction, but the angel kept watching the tableau before them and Cade turned back to do the same.

He was just in time.

One minute the group before them was fine and the next a shadow swept over them from the clouds above, so fast that Cade nearly missed it, and when it was gone the bodies of the two men lay in the dust, blood spurting from the stumps of their necks where their heads used to be.

The women scattered, running pell-mell away from the bodies of their companions as fast as their feet would carry them across the broken terrain. They ran in silence, though Cade could feel the screams that threatened to burst from their lips as if they were his own. Not once did they look up, which Cade found odd, until he realized that if they did they risked breaking an ankle or falling due to the uneven ground beneath their feet.

Cade wasn't sure if he'd have the discipline to do that, knowing that death rode the air currents somewhere above them.

The child? Where's the child? he thought suddenly.

He scanned the landscape before him. At first he thought she must have fallen in the initial attack, like the two men, but then he saw her, crouched in the shadows between two large pieces of cement near one of the bodies, like a rabbit trying to hide in a shallow bundle.

She was a sitting duck. If that thing came back it would s.n.a.t.c.h her from her hidey-hole in an instant.

He started forward, intending to pull her free and protect her if it came to that, only to find he couldn't move; Uriel's iron grip on his arm prevented him from moving.

"Let go! I've got to help her!"

Uriel didn't even look at him as he said, "You are not really here; there is nothing you can do but bear witness to what is to come. Besides, she is not the one in danger. Watch and learn!"

Confused, Cade turned back to the scene before him and was just in time to see a large, hulking shape land in front of one of the women, its large leathery wings stirring up dust as they pounded the air around it. It stood on backward jointed legs that seemed too thin to support its enormous weight and it towered over the woman, at least eight feet tall if it was an inch. An enormous mouth filled most of its face and large, batlike ears jutted from the sides of its head.

The woman screamed at the sight and turned to go, but the creature's hands shot out and grabbed her around her upper arms, dragging her closer. The hideous head dipped and Cade could only stand and watch in horror as the creature bit into the flesh of the woman's forehead and then yanked it's head downward, tearing the flesh right off its victim's skull.

The creature dropped the woman's twitching form at its feet as it stared directly at Cade and sucked that hanging flap of skin up into its mouth like a candied treat. Then it bent to take another bite.

Cade opened his mouth to scream in defiance but the world tipped sideways before he could give voice to his cry and he found himself standing back in the small room at the top of the bell tower next to Uriel.

He yanked his arm free from the other's grip and stepped away from the wingless angel, visibly shaken. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to rid them of the sight of that freak-show escapee tearing the flesh from that woman's face.

After a moment, when he'd swallowed the rising tide of gore in his throat and had calmed down enough to speak, he asked, "What the h.e.l.l was that?"

Uriel was silent for a moment and then said, "That was Kabaiel, one of the seven in Asharael's scream, in the reworked body of the human host selected for him."

"Selected? By whom?"

"Asharael. The one you know as the Adversary."

"Is that what he'll do to Gabrielle?" Cade asked.

Uriel didn't even try to soften the blow.

"Yes. She is strong and might last longer than most, but eventually Asharael's nature will surface and her flesh will be permanently remade in his image."

Cade shuddered at the thought. After seeing what he'd just seen, he wouldn't wish that on his worst enemy.

"And London? What happened to the city?"

"If Asharael succeeds in bringing his scream back into bodily form, it won't be long before they will regain the full scope of their former powers. They will turn man against man, nation against nation, until civilization as we know it will destroy itself and from the ashes seven new kingdoms will rise, kingdoms ruled by the Fallen. The scene you witnessed will repeat itself thousands of times over until the human race is all but decimated."

Uriel paused for a moment, and then said, "Unless, of course, you do what needs to done."

"You said Asharael must remain in possession of Gabrielle's body. Why in heaven's name would I let him do that if that's what's going to happen?"

"Because Asharael is vulnerable while he is trapped inside her form."

"Vulnerable?"

"Yes. With the right weapons he can be killed. Permanently. Not just banished and driven back to the Infernal Realm, the way he was when you confronted him on the Isle of Sorrows, but actually destroyed."

Cade could read between the lines as well as anyone else.

"But doing so would kill Gabrielle."

"Yes," Uriel said, without hesitation, "it would."

Cade's thoughts reeled and he felt like he was teetering on the brink of a long fall. What Uriel was asking was...madness. There was no other way to describe it. He'd spent years trying to save his wife and now, when he thought he was closer than he had ever been, he learned that it had all been an illusion? That he had waited too long to act and that the chance had been missed? It couldn't be!

And yet...and yet deep in his soul he knew that it was. He didn't doubt for a moment that the angel was telling him the truth. Uriel was suggesting that what he had witnessed would play itself out again over and over in every nation across the globe. He couldn't bear the responsibility for that any more than he could take up that knife and slay his wife.

What the h.e.l.l was he going to do?

Uriel went on.

"When the fallen have possessed a human form, there is a period when they haven't gained complete control and the possession grounds it to this material plane, making it vulnerable to destruction.

"Ordinary weapons will not do the trick, though, as your brethren discovered when they tried to kill the Adversary that night on the bridge. Earthly weapons will wound it, but not destroy it outright. To do that, you need a soul blade."

"A what?"

"A soul blade."

Cade had had enough. "What the f.u.c.k is a soul blade?"

Uriel sighed; Cade didn't know if it was over his language or his ignorance.

Probably both.

"In the early days of the Great War, shortly after the Son of the Morning had rebelled and my brethren were forced to choose sides in the conflict, there was a mighty battle unlike any that has been seen since. Waves of angels ranged back and forth across the sky and the damage they wrought was terrible to behold as the battle raged for many days and nights.

"In the midst of that battle my brother, Gabriel, was terribly wounded and fell, tumbling out of the sky to land amidst a group of humans. He did not fall alone, however; four of his enemies pursued him, searching the area where he had fallen in an attempt to find and finish him off."

Uriel's gaze turned distant, as if he were reliving it all over again.

"To Gabriel's surprise, the humans among whom he'd fallen did not leave him to the mercy of his enemies, who were far stronger and more powerful than they, but instead stood shoulder to shoulder before him, fighting on his behalf."

"Understand, they did not need to do so. This was not their battle, not their fight. They owed him nothing if anything, they had reason to fear him for he had slain many of their number when the Almighty demanded it but they stood anyway."

Uriel snapped out of his reverie and looked at Cade with fire in his eyes.

"Stood and died. One after another, until not a single one of them remained standing. But their sacrifice was not in vain; it gave my brother the time he needed to gather his strength anew. When he stood to face his enemies, he had the strength he needed to vanquish them and emerge victorious."

Cade shifted impatiently, but Uriel didn't appear to notice.

"Gabriel refused to let their bravery go unrewarded. He lived among them, teaching them, loving them. As his dedication to them grew, he came to understand a terrible truth. The enemy would never forgive the humans he had befriended for interfering in a fight that was not their own. He had, in fact, made things worse by staying among them. They would become p.a.w.ns in the battle between good and evil, hounded and hunted, and the realization filled him with sorrow. He could not leave them unprotected.

"His sword had been damaged in that original battle and so, when he thought they were ready, he gave the shards to them, showed them how to melt them down into weapons unlike any they had ever seen before. Seven blades of power forged in the heart of an angel's sorrow.

"Over time those blades would pa.s.s from culture to culture and be known by many names. But I have always known them by their original name, Gabriel's Tears."

"Three have been lost to history. Two are controlled by the demon Abromolech in his warrens deep beneath the city of Moscow. One rests in the hands of an enigmatic individual known as the Preacher, but why he wants it or what he intends to do with it, I don't know."

Cade frowned. "That's only six. I thought you said there were seven."

Uriel looked over at him with a smirk. "Will wonders never cease? A Templar who can count."

Cade was still trying to figure out if the dour angel had just made a joke when Uriel launched himself upward into the darkness above them with one powerful thrust of his legs. Cade rushed to the center of the room, looking upward, afraid that Uriel was about to disappear out the roof or something, and was relieved when he saw the angel rummaging about on a platform built at the apex of the tower, where the church's bell had once been suspended. After a moment, the angel found what he was looking for and dropped gently back down beside Cade.