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    Pulling the Wings Off Angels
    Pulling the Wings Off Angels
    Pulling the Wings Off Angels
    Ebook109 pages2 hours

    Pulling the Wings Off Angels

    By K. J. Parker

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    About this ebook

    Pulling the Wings Off Angels is a madcap adventure brimming with the ethical quandaries and sardonic wit of The Good Place by World Fantasy Award-winning author K. J. Parker

    Long ago, a wealthy man stole an angel and hid her in a chapel, where she remains imprisoned to this day.

    That’s the legend, anyway.

    A clerical student who’s racked up gambling debts to a local gangster is given an ultimatum—deliver the angel his grandfather kidnapped, or forfeit various body parts in payment.

    And so begins a whirlwind theological paradox—with the student at its center—in which the stakes are the necessity of God, the existence of destiny—and the nature of angels.

    Also by K. J. Parker
    Inside Man
    Prosper's Demon
    The Devil You Know
    The Last Witness

    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 15, 2022
    ISBN9781250835772
    Pulling the Wings Off Angels
    Author

    K. J. Parker

    Having worked in journalism, numismatics and the law, K. J. Parker now writes for a precarious living. He is the author of Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Devil You Know, and other novels, and has won the World Fantasy Award twice. Parker also writes under the name Tom Holt.

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      Book preview

      Pulling the Wings Off Angels - K. J. Parker

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      About the Author

      Copyright Page

      The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

      Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

      He’s just another bully, when he pushes folks around

      He’s a bigger, badder bully; I don’t want him in my town

      —Leslie Fish

      First, said Florio the gangster, I’m going to cut off your nose and make you eat it. Then I’m going to cut off your ears and make you eat them. Then I’m going to gouge out your eyes and make you eat them. Then I’m going to cut off your balls, fry them in a bit of your own fat, and make you eat them. Unless—

      Yes?

      Florio is about forty, fair-haired, stocky, just under medium height. If he says something, he means it; that’s his gimmick, in a world where everybody’s got to have one to stand out from the crowd. Florio keeps his promises, like God. Personally, though, I think the reason for Florio’s outstanding success in his profession is his imagination, which is vivid, lurid, and just quirky enough to make you piss yourself, as I’d just done.

      Unless, Florio said, with a smile, you do a job for me.

      Consider it done, I said quickly. Really. I mean it.

      His goons had nailed me to a door. Other gangsters tie people up. Florio has big dome-headed roofing nails hammered through the web of your palms, taking care to miss the major veins. The religious imagery is quite deliberate; under that rough exterior, Florio is a devout templegoer, well versed in the scriptures.

      That’s the ticket, Florio said, and nodded to one of the goons, who passed him a claw hammer. It’s the only way to get a nail out of a door, but it means they had to use my wrist as a fulcrum. I think I may have screamed, but Florio and his people were very kind and pretended not to notice.

      (In case you’re wondering, I owed Florio a quarter of a million staurata. That’s an awful lot of money; enough to pay for a warship, or keep a regiment in the field for three months, or build a large temple; the annual tax revenue of the entire Mesoge is eighty thousand staurata. Moral: Never play cards with notorious underground figures. If you do, and you get dealt a hand with four aces, fold immediately.)

      Get some bandages and a basin of warm water, Florio said, and some of that plantain extract. There’s bound to be a scar, he told me, but in your line of work that’s probably no bad thing. What’s the technical term? Stigmata?

      I managed a feeble grin. Actually, believe it or not, some of my fellow seminary students pay money to have the same thing done, albeit in a rather more humane fashion. Anything to get an edge in the cutthroat world of ecclesiastical preferment.

      Thanks, I said.

      All part of the service. Florio nodded to his pet doctor, who started fussing about with swabs and tweezers. He always has a qualified medic around on these occasions, to tell the goons where the nerves and arteries are, with the proper medical names for them. That’s class, if you ask me. Now then, this job you’re going to do.

      I’d reached the point where the dead chill was starting to thaw into pain and nausea, so my voice wobbled a bit. Fire away, I said.

      I want you, Florio said, to get me an angel.

      Oh for crying out loud.

      * * *

      This nonsense about my family. It’s got to stop.

      There are two versions of it; the one everybody seems to know, and the truth. If I tell you both, you can choose between them. Piece of cake.

      There’s absolutely nothing to say about my family on my father’s side until you go right back to the original Maenomai met’Auzen. He was one of the fifty companions who followed Scaevola to Issecuivo, crossing the vast ocean to look for a country nobody really believed in. After Scaevola found and conquered the New World, Maenomai was given a province to govern. As luck would have it (they drew lots) it wasn’t one of the really valuable ones. It had gold mines, but they were mostly worked out, and Maenomai spent what little he was able to grind out of them trying to improve the agriculture on his new estates and plantations, because all the peasants were poor as rats, and prosperous tenants can afford to pay higher rents than starving ones. That didn’t work very well; he tried to introduce Old World crops and livestock, and of course they shrivelled away and died in the blistering heat, so he had to let the natives go back to doing what they’d always done. He ruled his share of the empire for twenty years, ending up with rather less than he’d started with when he and the others crowded round an old hat to see who’d get what; then he sold the lot to his surviving partners and went home. He was still fabulously rich, by Western standards, and everyone agreed it wasn’t bad going for the fourth son of a minor country squire. His descendants gradually reverted to type, whittling down Maenomai’s inconceivable wealth by means of bad luck and bad management until they were once again obscure provincial gentry; at which point, my father married my mother, for her money.

      Which brings us to my grandfather, on my mother’s side. Everything is, of course, always about him. He died before I was born so the following is all hearsay, rumour, and legend. For example, there are no surviving records to verify his claim that he was born in prison, or that his mother got pregnant by one of the warders to save her neck from the noose. Fair enough. Paper costs money and so does clerks’ time; people like that don’t tend to get written about. If that part of the story is true, he grew up in the slate quarries—son of a serial offender, three guesses how he was going to turn out, no point letting him go since he’d only find his way back into custody sooner or later.

      According to family legend he had a blissfully happy childhood—the only kid in the camp, spoiled and cossetted by five hundred convicts and a hundred guards, entirely unaware that his surroundings were in any way unusual. His mother was dead by the time he was ten, but it hardly seemed to matter to a boy with six hundred devoted aunts and uncles. He went to work on the slate as soon as he was old enough to push a cart—the guards made him a little toy one out of scraps of packing cases—and since nobody ever got round to telling him that quarrying slate isn’t supposed to be fun, he spent all day doing what he loved best, without boring aunts and uncles or stupid lessons getting in the way. Everybody saved a few bits and pieces from their rations for the poor orphan boy and he worked from sunrise to sunset, pushing carts and then swinging a pick, so by the time he was fourteen he was enormous; nearly six feet tall and still growing, broad as an ox and strong as a bear. At which point, one of the guards took it into his head to teach the kid how to box.

      He turned out to be good; so good that the guards pooled their savings, bought him a free pardon from the provincial governor (awkward, since he’d done nothing to pardon, but I imagine they found a way round that) and sold him on indentures to one of the leading trainers in Auxentia City.

      The indentures were for ten years, but the trainer let him off after eight. He was a good boxer, but not quite good enough; he stopped

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