The silence in the cathedral was a hoax. It was that type of silence that lingered upon spots, after the screaming had been accomplished, oppressive, almost like a shroud. Against one side of a baptismal font, his back broken down the middle like a rotted tooth, sat Sebastian Dreadmourne, in what remained of the nave. Air was not smelling of incense or wax any more. It was now cordite, old blood and the damp smell of a world that had been neglected to go out in the rain and die.
He was cleaning his guns. He called them the Benedictions. Twin crucifix revolvers, worn dull and gritty and desperate hands. It was an empty prayer to a dead god, which he was quite certain had perished long before the falling of the angels. Every turn of the cylinder, every stroke of the oily rag was a recollection. The chilly marble halls of the Vatican. The mumbled commands of the men stinking of wine and of secret fear. The very noise that the skull of a child makes when split open by the blade of a seraph--a damp, dreadful crunch he could never clean out of his head.
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, he swore, The Latin bitter in my mouth. Yeah, right.
A ray of incongruous light, too perfect to this mutilated world, passed through a slit in the vaulted roof. It was the only warning.
With a heartbeat he was up, his Benedictions a cold, recitative burden in his hands. It was not a glorious herald which fell through the roof. It was... efficient. It was a low-grade Angelic Scout, with a form that was a blur of alabaster flesh and articulated light, and whose face was a smooth, blank oval which mirrored the wreckage all around it. It didn't speak. It was simply so, a cold final judgment of Heaven.
The fight wasn't epic. It was ugly. And wild a-dancing behind broken pews as rays of searing light reduced wood to splinters and slag to stone. Severian walked in an inconsiderate, melodramatic fashion that was half-insult, half-hymn. "Missed me!" he sneered, scrambling out of a burst that had blown a hole in the floor on which he had been standing but half an hour ago. And as bad as your Father, is your aim!
His shots at himself were right, blessed bursts, each one smacking bits of pearlescent, glass-like meat off. However, the scout was quick with its armor being able to deflect anything save a perfect hit. They were attempting to shoot a falling star. Fatigue, his invariable companion, had broughing teeth to his eyes. Here was the good war with Heaven, in the mud, running short of ammunition, and getting out of breath.
The scout leaped and one of his blades of solidified light came out of his wrist. It was done playing.
Severian had no shot on. Cursing all the saints he could think of, he did the best he could. He pulled the Ash Rosary out of his belt--a strand of knuckle-sized black beads. And he tore one, with a groan and a tug, off. There was some pungent psychical agony; the price of breaking the tie. He rubbed the bead between his thumb and index finger, and made it hot, and flicked it away with his index finger.
It was no fire and brimstone. It was an explosion of naught--a burst of noisylessness, a sphere of nullification, that engulfed the light-blade of the angel, and a half of his arm. The scout tippled, its flawless shape wavering.
Severian discharged in that half a second of exposure. The featureless face was shot square in the bullet. It didn't scream. It simply disintegrated, breaking down into the mote of darkening light, and a wonderful, holy dust, which whitened the ruins like the snow of blasphemy.
Silence returned, deeper now.
Severian leaned forward against the font and his breath was sawing in his lungs. He stared into the dying light in which the scout had last been seen, and then to the rosary in his hand, which had lost a bead. A trick, a cheat. Part of his own spirit, expended in the purchase of an hour of life. He was a little emptier, more hollow. This wasn't victory. This was merely not being dead. It is of a man who bailed water in a thimble out of a sinking vessel, and the sea was, as was, infinite.
He holstered the Benedictions. The hymn of lead was over. The falsehoods, he was aerial, were only starting.