Of the Babel Line

Open war

In the ninth year of the Attending the war came into the open. At Matins the fifth Trumpet sounded, and fifty-four Seraphim came down together into Babel’s broken crown, dim, with six wings each, burning with no source of heat, and the front formed inside Babel, whose vault holds the cables that join Pan to the undercities of the world. Babel is glass, and a Seraph burns whatever it can see. On the first night the upper floors stood open, and a Seraph burned down through the slabs from the hundred and eightieth floor to the hundred and forty-second in four seconds. Edith had read the Host’s traffic change on the decoder’s prints at the Gleaning that opened the year, so the Line had hung the hundred and fortieth floor with keyed mesh for weeks and stood there armed at Matins. A Seraph sees nothing past mesh and cannot burn what it cannot see; to melt mesh it has to touch it, and that is arm’s length, where black steel waits. Since that night the covens hang every floor they hold. Heaven holds the upper floors from the broken crown down, and the Tares hold the vault and the floors below, which they had lined with mesh since the night of the Parousia, so that from the street the lower tower is fog to the light. Between them is the Babel Line, a few floors of burned slab between the hundred and thirty-first and the hundred and fifty-second that move up or down by the week, held there because ninety-five thousand people live and trade below it. Above the hundredth floor nothing runs, and the Line carries its mesh and its rounds up on foot. The Seraphim burn through the floors rather than use the stairs, and they come down onto the Line two at a time, since the Wheel, hungry, lights two at a time. The Tares fight in the stairwells with black steel, which is the only thing that wounds a manifested angel; against a Seraph a gun is noise, since its heat melts ordinary steel.

The stairwells they fight in are the ones the Exchange’s night cleaners walked down on the night of the Parousia, as many as a hundred and eighty floors in the dark, and they still go by the cleaners’ names for them.

The war was Heaven’s answer to three short Gleanings. The Host had lived on the store of the Harvest since it was reaped, the store had run down every year since, and by the ninth year half of it was gone, while the Gleanings of the seventh year, the eighth and the one that opened the ninth all came in short of the Notice’s reckoning. Once the Concord opened Pan to anyone who walked in, the Gleaners had somewhere to take the nearly ripe; the keyed kept their dead from the light; and Pan bought and sold all of it on the Mesh. Babel’s vault is where the Mesh begins. The Trunk’s switch there joins every relay in Pan to every other and to the eleven cables, and the Ledger’s line runs from it to the Exchange of every undercity, with the charts of the Pillar’s round beside them. Heaven went for the vault to cut Pan off and starve it up the stairs it leaves open. It came from the crown because the lower tower is fog to it, and it leaves the cable houses of the Landing alone, since they are lined and lie below the sand, and cutting the cables there would not reach the Mesh’s heart.

A Seraph cut with black steel goes out all at once, like a lamp. It had no self, so nothing of it goes on.

At Lauds the sixth Trumpet sounded, and Michael came down into the broken crown, and he has kept it since. His name is a question, Who is like God?, to which one answer is permitted, and the Edit credits him with the War in Heaven (Revelation 12:7). He came at full strength, and every eye in his light’s reach turned with it, keyed or not, as a plant turns to the sun, and was held on what he was looking at. The Seraphim go down from him two at a time, and he has not come down the stairs; Pan says he waits on the seventh Trumpet. The commonest graffiti in Old Nod is his name translated, with its reply, WHO IS LIKE GOD? I AM. At Nones the same day the Wheel dropped two hundred meters, the first time it had moved in nine years.

Every year of the Attending had made Nodus harder to read. Pan had gone deeper, the keyed had passed two million, and since the fifth year Old Nod had had no Watcher. The Tares say that the harder the Landlord stares at Nodus, the deeper Pan goes, and the Wheel’s descent was the other half of the saying. The Host had been burning more light than its Gleanings brought in, and from seven hundred meters the Wheel’s day light falls strong enough to read the eyes it meets, which from nine hundred it never was, so it came two hundred meters closer to read by day without spending more.

FIELD LOG: vesper
BABEL LINE, FLOOR 140