Read They Who Fell for Free Online

soaring above her in the skies. She’d either hid or ran, and hadn’t stuck around to see what sort of twisted errands they’d left their nesting place for. She had more courage now than then, but it was still an unsettling sight. She’d grown up before the Fall, raised with stories of angels as loving protectors. The thing before her was a disfigured perversion of her childhood fantasies, turned from guardian into a mad butcher of its own charges.
    “Rha-karah,” said Faye, almost under her breath.
    “You know this guy?” asked Thane.
    “Rha-karah shatah-nah,” said Faye.
    “I never bothered with their names,” said Thane. “Don’t care what they’re called. Don’t need to know to kill ‘em.”
    Then Faye just started spewing words. It was as if a dam had broken, and the trickle turned into a flood of incomprehensible verbiage. “Parah nurah shatarah nurah, shata bahka.” The words burst out of her uncontrollably and without any breaks. Her face bore a look of complete panic. Her arms hung by her sides limply, as her mouth kept spouting the stream of nonsense. Thane met her eyes, seeing only terror. Then he looked up, and felt it himself.

CHAPTER SIX
    “W hat do they want?” asked Jana, as she walked alongside the woman. The two continued the upward slog along a central ramp that spiraled around the interior to the upper levels of the tower. The angels rarely used it, preferring to take to the air. But they’d made compromises in designing the place to ensure that one could make their way around on foot as well. They didn’t bother to make things easy, and it was a long, circuitous route to the top. Without it, though, the angels would be carrying their own supplies to their own chambers, and they hadn’t had much taste for labor since the Fall.
    “That’s a question for one of them,” the woman responded, and continued on in silence. She was middle-aged, with strands of her still-black hair drifting out from underneath the hood of a drab grey cloak. Snippets of purple poked out from underneath at the sleeves and the neck, signals of status that she’d chosen to mask while traveling through the lower levels of the tower.
    They were nearing the middle of the structure. Common areas and common servants were housed near the bottom, to keep the riff raff away from anything or anyone important. A few stories higher up, and you started to see the functional rooms that the angels themselves sometimes had cause to visit—armories, workspaces, and assorted recreational areas. A few of the angels were housed here as well, but only the lowest among them. The angels were all about caste, and arranged themselves according to complicated hierarchies denoting their relative status. Jana had never been able to keep track of it all, and hadn’t needed to. Humans were at the bottom, and were expected to show similar deference to every one of them. In the event the angels quarreled amongst themselves, the prudent thing to do was to simply wait quietly and see who won.
    “I’ve never been this high up,” said Jana softly, more to herself than anything. The angels had organized their servants according to hierarchies as well. Those outside the tower had the least protection and were considered mercenaries, agents of convenience who were only as valuable as what they could offer. They scavenged for goods the angels might want, bringing them to the tower as tribute in exchange for the promise of immunity from their masters’ darker instincts. Mostly they got it, but the angels could be fickle. Those inside the tower were treated as something closer to livestock. They were valuable enough to be preserved, but some were more important than others.
    As with the angels, position was everything. Those at the bottom of the tower, such as Jana, were considered useful mostly for scut work. The angels only visited the lower levels to socialize with one another, particularly when their status was unequal. The need for all