29.5

 

The sound of his wings unfolding is like a page being torn from a Bible. The cracks in the air around him cease their expansion, but they don’t heal, they merely hang there, as if waiting upon his instruction. Below his feet the pavement vanishes, erased from existence. There is nothing beneath it. No earth, no stone, no ancient Roman Wall. Not even the Void. There is just nothing, like it must have been in the Beginning, before the Word.

Roisin is close enough to the angel that she can feel the void radiating from him. Close enough that her breath fogs in the cold of his presence. Close enough that the mantle inside her flares in self‑defence. She takes the half-step back again as the absence of ground spreads.

The nearest protestor, a young man of around twenty, though for all she knows he could be fourteen or twenty-five, such is the fashion for identical haircuts and high-street chic among the younger males, spots the missing pavement and steps forward, his mobile phone held on his outstretched arm. He is less cautious than incredulous, and steps closer, filming the anomaly for content on his social platform. Roisin has no idea if his camera lens can pick up either her or the angel, although since his concentration is on the screen she assumes not, for she is certain he would be running in terror if it depicted Hasmed, in all his winged, skull-fracturing glory.

The angel lifts a hand and the absence darts toward him, the ground beneath his feet vanishing and sending his tumbling into the nothingness below. Roisin glances down, her first thought to catch him and help him to safety but he is gone. There is no-one falling; no one hanging onto the edge like an extra in Titanic; he has simply vanished, erased from existence. Without knowing even his name, Rosin can tell through the awareness of the mantle that he has been removed from the world. His parents don’t miss him, his sisters never had a brother, his school never had him on their register. He was never born, and all the deeds he did for good or ill were done by other people, In the Book of Creation, all deeds are written, but the people playing the parts are interchangeable.

Roisin gasps at the enormity of the angel’s action. There are no soul fragments to be gathered and saved, because there was never a soul there; not even a footnote in the annals of the world. Her horror of the protestor’s erasure is only compounded when she realises she is the only person who can remember his existence at all. The mantle steadies her, keeping her safe while she processes the memory, and then it is gone, for like the young man’s place in the world, even the mantle of Knowledge forgets he existed.

And then Roisin forgets him too.

The angel’s hand comes so close to her face that she can see the lines in his granite-like palm. Why would an angel have a palmprint? She had a friend called Sarah, when she was in college; a girl from the ceramics studio who produced finely crafted but disturbing glass sculptures based on illustrations in the Voynich manuscript. Sarah claimed to be of Romanov descent with the ability to reads palms and had scared the willies out of Roisin once when she said her lifeline had a huge break in it which indicated death. Or serious trauma, at the very least. She only remembers it now because Hasmed’s palm shows a similar break in his. A nursery rhyme comes to mind: There was an old angel who swallowed a fly…

Roisin does not move, even with the palm so close a bent finger would break the skin of her face. She can’t, really, while the mantle holds her so steady, for to move would be to break any truce she has with this destroying angel.

Reality flickers as Hasmed’s voice echoes forth again, in a pitch infinitesimally higher to convey the shock it feels. “You are… not… error.”

Roisin exhales the breath she didn’t realise she was holding as Hasmed lowers his hand. It doesn’t look like a surrender, but on a positive note, he doesn’t reach for the sword at his side, either. Why did angels carry swords, anyway? The first sword appeared in the third century BC, long after angels had been created. Was it because the early scribes could think of nothing deadlier? Why did Michael carry a lance when they weren’t invented until six centuries later? Would modern theologians arm their angels with modern weapons? Why, when they could simply erase history?

“You are… new.” The cracks in the air begin to close, the missing pavement begins to knit back together as if it had never been away. No sign of the erased protestor, though, not that anyone but Hasmed remembered him.

Roisin offers him a tentative smile. “…so you won’t erase me?”

Hasmed tilts his head again. It is not a no, but neither is it a yes. Best to take the reprieve, she thinks. Live to fight another day, and all that.