“Oh,” Daniel said. “The Scale can be fearsome. They relish causing pain, and they may cause our friends some temporary discomfort. But they won’t hurt them in any permanent way. They don’t kill. That’s not their style.”
“What is their style, then?” Luce crossed her legs under her on the hard damp surface of the roof. “You still haven’t told me who they are or what we’re up against.”
“The Scale came into being after the Fall. They’re a small group of . . . lesser angels. They were the first to be asked in the Roll Call which side they would stand by, and they chose the Throne.”
“There was a roll call?” Luce asked, not sure she’d heard correctly. It sounded more like homeroom than Heaven.
“After the schism in Heaven, all of us were made to choose sides. So, starting with the angels with the small-est dominions, each of us was to be called upon to make an oath of fealty to the Throne.” He stared at the mist, and it was as though he could see it all again. “It took ages to call out the angels’ names, starting at the lowest ranked and working up. It probably took as long to say our names as it did for Rome to rise and fall. But they didn’t make it all the way through the Roll Call before—” Daniel took a ragged breath.
“Before what?”
“Before something happened to make the Throne lose faith in its host of angels . . .” By now Luce realized that when Daniel’s voice trailed off like that, it wasn’t because he didn’t trust her or because she wouldn’t understand, but because despite all the things she’d seen and learned, it still might be too soon for her to know the truth. So she didn’t ask—though she was desperate to—what had made the Throne abandon the Roll Call when its highest angels had not yet chosen sides. She let Daniel speak again when he was ready.
“Heaven cast out everyone who had not sided with it. Remember how I told you a few angels never got to choose? They were among the last in the Roll Call, the highest. After the Fall, Heaven was bereft of most of its Archangels.” He closed his eyes. “The Scale, who had lucked into seeming loyal, stepped into the breach.”
“So because the Scale swore fealty to Heaven first—” Luce said.
“They felt they had a superior amount of honor,” Daniel said, finishing her thought. “Since then, they have self-righteously claimed to serve Heaven by acting as celestial parole officers. But the position is self-invented, not ordained. With the Archangels gone after the Fall, the Scale took advantage of a vacuum of power. They carved out a role for themselves, and they convinced the Throne of their importance.”
“They lobbied God?”
“More or less. They pledged to restore the fallen to Heaven, to gather back those angels who had strayed, to return them to the fold. They spent a handful of millennia urging us to recommit ourselves to the ‘right’ side, but somewhere along the way, they gave up trying to change our points of view. Now they mostly just try to prevent us from accomplishing anything.” His steely gaze looked enraged and it made Luce wonder what could be so bad in Heaven that it kept Daniel in self-exile. Wasn’t the peace of Heaven prefer-able to where he was now, with everyone waiting for him to choose?
Daniel laughed bitterly. “But the angels worth their wings who have returned to Heaven don’t need the Scale to get there. Ask Gabbe, ask Arriane. The Scale is a joke.
Still, they’ve had one or two successes.”
“But not you?” she asked. “You haven’t chosen one side or the other. And so they’re after you, aren’t they?” A crowded red tram wound around the paved circle below, then forked up a narrow street.
“They’ve been after me for years,” Daniel said, “planting lies, manufacturing scandals.”
“And yet you haven’t declared for the Throne. Why haven’t you?”
“I’ve told you. It’s not as simple as that,” he said.
“But you’re clearly not going to side with Lucifer.”
“Right, but . . . I can’t explain thousands of years’
worth of argument in the space of a few minutes. It is complicated by factors beyond my control.” He looked away again, out over the city, then down at his hands.
“And it’s an insult to be asked to choose, an insult for your creator to demand that you reduce the vastness of your love to the tiny, petty confines of a gesture during a Roll Call.” He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m too sincere.”
“No—” Luce started.
“Anyway, the Scale. They’re Heavenly bureaucrats. I think of them as high school principals. Pushing papers and punishing minor transgressions of rules no one cares about or believes in, all in the name of ‘morality.’” Again Luce stared out at the city, which was drawing a dark coat around its shoulders. She thought of the sour-breathed vice-principal at Dover, whose name she couldn’t remember, who never had any interest in her side of any story, who had signed her expulsion papers after the fire that killed Trevor. “I’ve been burned by people like that.”
“We all have. They’re sticklers for frivolous rules of their own invention, which they deem righteous. None of us like them, but unfortunately the Throne has given them the power to monitor us, to detain us without cause, to convict us of crimes by a jury of their choosing.”
Luce shuddered again, this time not because of the cold. “And you think they have Arriane and Roland and Annabelle? Why? Why hold them?”
Daniel sighed. “I know they have Arriane and Roland and Annabelle. Their hatred blinds them to the fact that delaying us helps Lucifer.” He swallowed hard. “What I fear most is that they also have the relic.” In the distance, four pairs of tattered wings material-ized in the fog. Outcasts. As they neared the palace roof, Luce and Daniel rose to greet them.
The Outcasts landed next to Luce, their wings crackling like paper umbrellas as they drew them to their sides. Their faces betrayed no emotion; nothing in their demeanor suggested that their trip had been suc-cessful.