29.3

 

“Have I dragged you away from anything important?” Roisin speaks because right now, she can either speak or cower, and the latter option will do her no good whatsoever. “I do hope so.”

Hasmed says nothing, and the silence stretches on long enough the Roisin feels the need to fill it. “You’re here because I interfered and stepped outside the role Heaven wrote for me.”

Still nothing. Roisin takes a moment to scan the crowd. The politician is still speaking, but the rising volume of protestors is attempting to drown him out. She can still feel him, though, and it is his fear of difference, of other, is what drives him. He wants to be in a world he controls; a world within which he can set all the parameters. The world he dreams of bringing about would not be a good one for people like her… people like she used to be. There would be no room for free-thinkers and radicals, and precious little room for education among the masses. His security detail and mostly swords for hire, mercenaries who will take any job that pays sufficiently well, regardless of their own political mores, though two of the men who flank him are of a similar opinion. There are more in the crowd of supporters and more still in the Thin Blue Line that surrounds and protects him. The protestors oppose his views, but many of them have secrets of their own. Secrets that would mark them as pariahs were they to be revealed.

She refocuses her attention upon the angel. “You’re here because I exist.”

There is a faint shift in his posture. The observation has found its mark. He still does not move of change his neutral expression, but she can sense a change in him a readiness. If nothing else, she has confirmed what Astaroth and the Artist had told her: she was a threat to Heaven’s plans.

A ripple of dread moves through the crowd, though they do not know why. Many of the crowd on both sides are becoming restless. If she does not act quickly this will all get out of hand and summon the Four. Roisin inhales through her nose, tasting the residues of freshly mown grass and rain onto hot tarmac on the air. Inside her, the mantle opens like the horizon after a spelunker’s five-day journey underground.

She sees Hasmed’s purpose and the architecture of his existence. He is driven by the logic of annihilation, but she can see the one thing that he can neither see nor erase: Truth.

His existence is bound by the truth of the Divine, the truth held withing the architecture of Heaven and Earth. His is the truth of Doctrine. What can and cannot be, according to the Creator, but she is the antithesis of Divine truth, for truth denies knowledge, and she hold the mantle of knowledge. She has her own truth.

Roisin steps closer. It’s barely half a step, and his long limbs could cover the distance in an instant whereas she’d be unable to even touch him without a lunge. It’s enough to show him she will not run. Enough to prove she understands his logic, but she has her own truth, and she is the opposite of a mistake; she is a necessity.

Her voice is quiet, steady, and perfectly human. “You are the eraser of anomalies, but I am not an anomaly.”

Hasmed tilts his head. It is so small a movement that human eyes would be unable to detect it, but although Roisin’s eyes are human, the mantle imbues her with the ability to compare the stillness of then with the stillness of now, and the increment of time has betrayed his illusion of stillness. Here is the crack in his armour, the hint of chaos in the Everlasting Law.

Another half a step. She is now well within his wingspan and a swift pirouette by the angel would decapitate her if she made no successful attempt to dodge it. The mantle hums as it supplies her with the makings of a speech even Marlowe would have been pleased with. “I am the Fifth. I am the fulcrum upon which destiny is balanced. I am the one who stands between. I am the justice of Humankind.”

The hubbub of the crowd fades from her consciousness as Hasmed’s wings shift with the sound of paper tearing in a school examination hall.

Roisin meets his empty gaze. “And I have no intention of being erased.”

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