Rook & Izzy

By Cary Attwell

An ancient artefact, backed up by a prophecy that's as vague as it is irritating, unearths itself in the hopes of being accidentally put together and getting a good, old-fashioned apocalypse going. It's up to Ezechias, an earnest angel undergoing Authority training, to hunt it down and destroy it before the whole world blows to bits.

Well, that, or it's up to Rook, an insouciant demon with business cards more stylish than he actually warrants, to hunt down the angel and use any means necessary to ensure his failure.

Either way, the apocalypse may be nigh, with Rook and Ezechias at the centre of it all, and if they get a little distracted by each other... well, humankind's had a good run, hasn't it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cary Attwell
• Release date: May 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311505620

Cary Attwell

Cary Attwell lives in Seattle, Washington, where it rains and rains like the dickens, except when it doesn't. Fretting occurs on a daily basis, and small acts of idiocy are perpetrated with stunning proficiency much more often.

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ROOK & IZZY

By Cary Attwell

Copyright © 2016 Cary Attwell

All rights reserved.

Distributed by Smashwords

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Rook & Izzy

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Rook & Izzy

I didn't think people inherited stuff like this anymore, Sunny said, looking around the manor from its open foyer. It ticked every box for potentially haunted, overgrown ivy all up its stone sides, a front gate that wailed every time the wind so much as tiptoed within a five-mile radius, trippy electrical wiring from before alternating current was even invented. It was amazing. You sure the will didn't say you had to be able to spend a night here before the inheritance takes effect?

Bea snorted. I've spent several nights here; all my summers growing up, actually. It's not that bad. My great-uncle kept it in good shape before he had to move to the nursing home. It just needs a bit of a cleaning, is all. Which you're helping me with, by the way.

"That was your whole plan, wasn't it? Drive us all the way out here and then drop that bomb on me, Sunny said, throwing disapproval everywhere with every shake of her head, which Bea would probably make her clean up, too. She put her guitar case down on the creaky floorboards. You're a bad friend."

Who is letting you stay here rent-free while we write this next album, Bea pointed out, as she tried out one of the light switches. The light hanging overhead flickered for a second, then popped on, shining bright and giving Bea's coal black hair the hint of an orange tint. Bea beamed up at it.

Sunny chucked her on the shoulder to show her appreciation, but still said, Not sure it's worth it if a ghost comes to kill me in my sleep.

Don't be stupid, Bea said, leading the way through to the sitting room, still furnished but with dust covers over everything. She stripped a brocade sofa of its cover and sat on it, bouncing up and down slightly, testing its usability. The ghosts here are harmless. They just like to bang a couple of cupboards and sit on your bed to watch you sleep, that's all.

You're joking, right? Sunny said, feeling her charitable thoughts towards the house edge away from amazing with their hands up. Bea.

Bea shrugged, and got up to pat her cheek. You'll find out tonight, won't you?

"Say you're joking," Sunny persisted.

If I'd known it was this easy to scare you, I'd have done it ages ago. So many missed opportunities, Bea sighed, now moving on to pat Sunny on the head. Or are you just this gullible because all this bleach has finally seeped into your brain?

You're the worst friend I've ever had.

Bea rolled her eyes, half-exasperated, half-fond. I told you, I came to Bury practically every summer when I was a kid. It's fine. I've never been menaced by supernatural beings. She clapped a hand to Sunny's shoulder, looking her straight in the eye for reassurance, which made Sunny feel better, until Bea added, Though I did hear my great-uncle dabbled in necromancy in his later years, so who knows what evil he might have unleashed since then?

I hate you; I'm going solo, Sunny said.

Oh, baby, say it ain't so, Bea crooned. She cocked her head, put a conciliatory grin on her face. Come on, let's unload our stuff from the van, and I promise I won't say more than three haunted house-related things for the next week.

Sunny sighed noisily. One.

Two, Bea countered.

One and a half, and I won't shave off your eyebrows when you fall asleep tonight.

Deal, Bea said, sticking out her hand to seal it. And here's the half now, so we can get it out the way. Whatever you do, don't go in the.

"You are such a shit," Sunny said, and she meant every word of it but still had to laugh anyway.

Jostling each other all the way out to the van, they lugged their suitcases and other personal debris into the house, then set about to removing all the dust covers from the furniture and trying not to inhale and choke on the dust they displaced. Bea vacuumed like a woman possessed (which was not a phrasing Sunny appreciated from her brain), and eventually ran out with the van keys to pick up more cleaning supplies.

Feeling better with the windows thrown open and a hint of cloudy daylight peeking in, Sunny decided to be brave and not ask to go along; she'd have to get used to the house at some point anyway, might as well start now. She fiddled around on her guitar for a few minutes, then, hearing birds chirp happily outside and the steady stream of traffic trundling by, got an extra shot of braveness and went exploring, taking her guitar along to announce her entrance into every room.

Some of the furniture was seriously ancient but surprisingly sturdy. In the study, Sunny's focus drew towards an antique roll-top desk, hand-carved with painstaking detail and smoothed to a shine from years of wear. It took her several tries to budge the tambour door, but her efforts were rewarded as she unveiled the desk face with a dozen cubby holes, a couple of them missing their drawers. She peeked into each of them, finding loose change, a half-used matchbook from the Angel Hotel, a shopping list in faded, spidery cursive. Cool, she said, holding up a coin under the light at the window, reading the markings that dated it to the early 1900s.

The last drawer was sealed shut. Sunny nearly ripped her fingers off trying to dislodge it, and the harder it was to pull out, the more it became a reasonable life's mission to do so. Sunny abandoned it for a few minutes to rifle through Bea's backpack in the living room, where she knew Bea kept a Swiss Army knife for just such situations.

Ha, she said to the drawer as she bared a glittering blade. I'm comin' for ya.

She worked up a legitimate sweat working the blade into a tiny crack, sawing up and down, feeling frustration burn the length of her spine. Sunny kept at it, not even caring what was inside anymore, just wanting to get the better of the drawer. She didn't know how much time had passed when she finally felt the knife snick something into place, and she slid the drawer out with a triumphant yell that echoed across the room.

Its contents clinked softly as she tugged the drawer out of the cubby hole. Sunny tipped the pieces onto the desktop, her brow furrowed as she contemplated each of the small, long metal blocks, about twenty in all, each one with an intricate design, some of it looking like indecipherable text, and with ends and joins that didn't match up.

She heard a footstep behind her. "Suuunnyyy…" came a thin whisper.

Shut up, arseface, Sunny said, not even bothering to turn around. I heard you pull up to the house. Slam the door louder next time, so the neighbouring counties can hear it, too.

Oh, Bea said, disappointed. I guess I just wasted my quota of things to scare you for the week. What've you got there?

Sunny held up one of the metal pieces. Dunno. Just found it in the desk. What do you think?

Coming over to inspect Sunny's discoveries, Bea's eyebrows pulled together. Not a clue. Weird Victorian Jenga? Leftover bits from an Ikea chair?

I don't know, Sunny said, holding two pieces together that looked like they belonged joined at the seams. Kind of like a 3D jigsaw puzzle or summat, maybe… Wonder if there's an instruction booklet?

***

Somewhere, high above the clouds, a rumble of activity translated into a lone thunderclap that startled a dozing fisherman off his folding stool on the bank of the Boddington Reservoir. Somewhere, far below, much farther than any determined, China-bound runaway child could burrow, a rush of delight set off a minor earthquake in Arequipa, Peru, that nobody but an attendant seismologist noticed. Somewhere in between, straddling the fence with the precision of a highwire artist, an interested party perked up his ears, listened in, and set up shop.

***

IT HAS BEEN FOUND.

Putting down his spade, Ezechias stood and brushed newly turned dirt off his knees. He looked heavenwards, at the laserbeam of sunshine slicing through a chink in the clouds and directly into his corneas. Oh, hi. What's been found? he asked, shading his eyes, and wished, as he had wished several times before, that Raguel wasn't such a fan of dramatic entrances. Would it kill him to start off these interactions with a hello once in a while? As soon as the thought crossed his mind, Ezechias felt sorry about it and pencilled in five minutes of penance for later.

THE GUR-KIMAH.

Oh, said Ezechias. Not what he was expecting. He racked his brain for why this might be important, the word pinging only very softly in the recesses of past lessons long ago about ancient artefacts; could he really help it if Ancient Sumerian was not his strong suit? Besides, it was universally acknowledged that if you didn't regularly use a foreign language, you lost it. Nobody spoke Sumerian anymore, he checked. Even the more linguistically accomplished of his cohort preferred using Old Norse for their inside jokes. Ezechias waited for further instructions, but finding none forthcoming, prompted, Er, did you want me to do something about it?

A breath of wind sussurated past his ears like an extended sigh. Not for the first time, Ezechias got the feeling Raguel wasn't all that keen on him either. It wasn't Ezechias's fault; he was still in training, and his mentor Ioleth got really busy with all the other trainees to pay proper attention to him. He'd once considered writing up a proposal on how to increase efficiency among the angelic ranks, but he was pretty sure it would not be received in the spirit intended. For one thing, Raguel still needed some of the younger angels to show him how to open email attachments.

RETRIEVE IT, BEFORE THE PROPHECY CAN COME TO PASS.

It could be his imagination, but Raguel sounded just the slightest bit tetchy at having to produce this explanation. Ezechias also thought it might be pushing it to ask what, exactly, the prophecy said, or what kind of timeframe he was looking at, or even where said object had been found, so he just said, cheerfully, Okay!

He held his grin and thumbs-up pose until the beam of sunlight switched off and the sky went back to its regularly programmed dirty-white wash of early springtime in England. Picking up his tools and gloves with a sigh, Ezechias gave the garden bed a forlorn look. Sorry, he said to the dirt. His gladioli would have to wait for next spring.

The first thing he did when he got inside his house was to head to the nook he liked to call a library and pull from the bookshelf his Angels' Big Book of Prophecies, Plagues, and Things With Scary Teeth, which was not its actual title but was way more apt. Even the cover art thought so.

His finger ran down the table of contents, in a categorisation system that he had yet to figure out, as it appeared that the editor of the book thought an alphabetical order too radical an idea. It took Ezechias a full five minutes to locate the page on the Gur-Kimah. One day he would actually make good on his mental promise to index this and all the other books bestowed on him in Excel, but not today, because today he had to thwart— something.

Ezechias flipped to the page in question and found himself face to face with a woodcut drawing of what looked like a fiendish and horrible and actually kind of pretty puzzle box. The text description leaned resolutely away from pretty and much harder towards horrible, though, what with its dire proclamations of unleashing demons from Hell and raining fire from the sky and rivers running red with the blood and entrails of all humankind, and all right, Ezechias got the picture. It was basically like every other apocalyptic event he'd ever heard of. Just for once, it would be nice for an ancient artefact to rain cherry blossoms or unleash a horde of chubby corgis.

But he wasn't the one in charge of these things, he just got sent to sort them out occasionally. He wasn't even entirely clear what his job fully entailed; just a couple of centuries ago he was perfectly content being one of the regular angels, hanging round in the back of the choir and once in a while called on to strum a harp or save a hapless human from oncoming traffic. And then someone, he still wasn't sure who it was, thought they saw some spark in him enough to recommend him for Authority training, and he was grateful to be noticed, he really was, but it would've been nice if someone had asked him his opinion on it. He'd liked being a plain angel, spreading bits of cheer to humans' everyday lives with little acts of kindness. He'd liked that, seeing people smile, lifting weights off their shoulders, even if just for a little while. He could still do that — he did, made a point of it — but now he also had to worry about the balance of power across nations and the realms above and below, and honestly, Ezechias just didn't think he was cut out for that sort of responsibility. It gave him hives.

What made it worse was that sometimes this also meant he had to work out archaic forecasts from the period in time when talking in riddles was highly fashionable, and that was how he'd ended up with this to decipher, of the Gur-Kimah: Come a golden champion of the sky with blade unsheathed, there shall it be. Despair it shall bring to the fortress of the martyr king, lain in the see. Join its hands ere adversaries joinèd be, in darkness and light so they fly free. Despair it shall bring, and night reign over all.

Ezechias felt the beginnings of a whine rumble deep inside him. Ohh, you were doing so well with the rhyming, he said to the book, dissatisfaction prodding at his fingers as he read the clunky last line again; he had half a mind to scratch out the last bit to fix the rhyme scheme. He was sure it wouldn't change much of anything, editing it to his preferences; if it did, he'd have made the skies rain banana cupcakes by now.

No time, no time, he said sternly to himself, and skimmed over the rest of the chapter before he could swerve back into fix-it mode. He had more important things to do, like figuring out what the prophecy was actually trying to say. Or what one might do with the Gur-Kimah after locating it.

Scanning down the page, skipping over more foretold calamities, Ezechias found a section on the Gur-Kimah's origins. It was no particular surprise that it had been forged Below, by someone with enough hubris to think there'd be nothing to pay for it. And, as was popular fashion among ancient, accursed curios, it seemed the only way to destroy it was to undo it in the place it had come from. Ezechias was glad he had been told only to recover it; he shuddered to think about descending into the depths of Below.

Still, he was getting ahead of himself. The important thing was that he had to find the artefact first, and then he could have all the fits of horror he wanted.

Digging around his top desk drawer, Ezechias fished out his dowsing crystal, which he hadn't used in a good long while. The last time, he seemed to recall, was when he'd had to go and sort out that kerfuffle in Winnipeg, and he'd got towed into an endless, relentless circle of apologising for things that were clearly not his fault. He'd barely made it out alive.

He would have phoned, but he didn't own one, which was like telling people he didn't own a television, except ten times more alarming. But he was an angel, and he didn't have anyone he needed to keep in contact with on a regular basis. Also, Upstairs didn't like to cover expenses for things like data plans. Anyway, he still got results with the traditional way; it just took a little longer. Ezechias cleared his throat and his mind, and let the pendulum swing.

Is he in the UK? he asked, and got a yes swing, which was a nice start.

Is he in England?

Is he in Northern England?

Half an hour later, Ezechias blinked himself back to reality, his throat dry, feeling like he'd turned another few hundred years older. But more importantly, he'd divined that his regular source for decrypting all things mystical and incredibly old was, happily, kicking about nearby. Relatively speaking. A three-hour drive east was considerably better than that time he'd had to hunt Zion down in the middle of the Amazon, and that had been before all the heinous deforestation and before everyone realised moss did not only grow on the north sides of trees.

Ezechias pocketed the crystal, stuffed the book into a satchel, and sidled out his house with his car keys, a few changes of clothes, and a map. His Leaf purred on, and Ezechias traced a finger along the map, the route glowing as he marked it all the way from Chester to Bury St. Edmunds. He'd prefer a sat nav with Patrick Stewart's voice telling him what to do, if he was being honest, but somehow he didn't think Upstairs would allow him to expense it.

He hadn't had a chance to shift gears yet, when a beam of light cut through the roof of his car, startling him into a tiny yelp.

Ezechias.

Oh! Ioleth, Ezechias said, startled to hear his mentor's mellifluous voice after a couple of decades left to sort things out on his own. I wasn't expecting you. How are you?

I am… well. Raguel has asked me to call on you to see how you progress.

Oh, said Ezechias again, stymied by the need for such close observation, especially as he'd only just got off