Yaldebaoth was the most exhausted looking and haggard demon Kate had ever seen. It was like all life had been drained from the devil’s face, her eyes gzed over. A sense of pain followed her, even overshadowing her otherwise positive devil aura.

  “You asked for me?”

  Kate nodded. “Yes. Lilith is back now and she wanted to talk to you.”

  “I am of no use to her.”

  “It’s not about being of use to anyone, it’s about healing for you both. Let’s go see her, shall we?”

  “If you insist…”

  Kate led her to the library office, where Lilith immediately jumped out of her chair to hug Yaldebaoth.

  “It is so good to see you again.”

  “…likewise…”

  “You look miserable. Are you okay?”

  Yaldebaoth didn’t answer.

  “I’ll just get to the point, maybe that will help. Right before I was imprisoned, I found out that the fault in the human tempte wasn’t your fault, it was intentional sabotage.”

  “Everyone kept saying it wasn’t my fault. I still should have caught it.”

  “No, you couldn’t have. God tampered with it right before we started implementing it. He sabotaged it intentionally.”

  “What…?”

  “God sabotaged the tempte you both worked on.”

  “I suspected something like that but could never prove it. How did you find out?”

  “Archivist Kyrea showed me a transcript of a meeting between Gabriel and the sorcerer king, overheard by one of the guards. It should be in the vaults here as well.”

  Kate nodded. “We have everything, I’ll go see if I can find it.”

  “Thank you, we’ll be here while you look for it.”

  Kate got up and hurried out of the room and down to the vaults.

  It took nearly forty minutes to gather every Atntean transcript the vault held. Kate brought them all, there was little sense in sorting through them now. If it had been easy to find, someone else would have found the passage already.

  “Alright, here is every transcript from that time we have. It’s not a lot, but it’s the complete collection.”

  Lilith nodded. “Thank you. It should be one of the newer ones, Atnteans didn’t keep many direct transcripts, protocol for meetings was usually written down in short form, and it was a discussion with the st king in a line of over a hundred.”

  “Annoyingly enough, he has the most full transcripts, these two entire tomes are filled with copies of the cy tablets. We have the tablets as well, if that is important, but I wasn’t willing to bring some twenty tons of stone here.”

  “Those books are new. We only had the proper tablets when we ran this pce.”

  “Yea, around three thousand years ago, when writing became more widespread, we updated to storing images of the tablets instead of the stones themselves. It was just logistically unfeasible otherwise.”

  “I can imagine. This pce has expanded so much. Anyway, let’s get to work then.”

  It took hours poring over the deeply convoluted ways Atnteans kept their texts. Eventually Kate turned the tome she was digging through towards Yaldebaoth.

  “Here, that’s the meeting between Gabriel and the sorcerer king. Fuck, these things need indices.”

  The old devil chuckled quietly. “They sure do. Let’s see here.” She careful read the passage. “Lilith, have you read this?”

  “I have not. Why?”

  “Just read it.”

  Kate peered over Lilith’s shoulder while she read. Within seconds, the mood in the room soured. The ex-High Inquisitor spoke first.

  “We have all just read the same thing, right? I am not hallucinating this, I am not reading things into this, this says in pin words that someone on our side coordinated the sabotage with God. Is that correct?”

  Yaldebaoth nodded slowly but didn’t say anything.

  “Any idea who that might be?”

  “It had to be done after we handed it over for distribution, besides God and his closest followers, the inquisitorium had access and so did the armed forces. That’s thousands of demons.”

  Kate spoke up. “The inquisitorium was just you, Eisheth and Naamah, right?”

  Lilith nodded. “Yes, we expanded about a thousand years ter. We should also remember that this was right after the war, some thirty-one thousand years ago. Opinions about humanity on both sides were mixed at best.”

  “Sadly, that was only the first war… I want to exclude Eisheth and Naamah, I think we can trust them. Same with Apollyon. Who else can we assume wasn’t the traitor?”

  “The high commanders would be unlikely to betray our cause like that. Yaldebaoth, I don’t want to accuse your team, but we need to be sure.”

  The devil took a moment to think. “It is not impossible. From the eight demons that worked with us, I knew only one from before we began our work. I don’t even want to exclude her, I didn’t know her that well. It is hard to entertain that one of my team betrayed us, but it is possible.”

  “Kate, I need you to discretely talk to the current High Inquisitor, I believe that’s Azazel and she is too young to have been involved there, and to Apollyon.”

  Kate nodded. “I can’t promise how fast I can get results, doing this in private right now is difficult. There are many demons frequenting this pce and our presence is needed too often.”

  “That will not be a problem. Secrecy is more important than haste. I will talk to Eisheth and Naamah, I want to trust them, but I need certainty.”

  “And I will go through all the paperwork we left behind to see if I can find any disparity or anything suspicious.” Yaldebaoth added.

  “One good thing came from this though. Yaldebaoth, this does alleviate your guilt, doesn’t it?”

  “It does and it is quite motivating to un-fuck it all. I don’t know if to be thankful or angry now.”

  “Both seem right.”

  “Okay, Kate, this is an interesting pce to talk.”

  Kate had asked Apollyon to meet her high up in the Kurian mountains, far away from civilization. A fine pce for a picnic date, but a strange spot for a meeting like this.

  “Had to be somewhere we would go for other reasons, like the cats, but also far away from literally everyone else. Polly, I have a dire question.”

  “Dire? You know I will be there for you no matter what.”

  “I am counting on that. Remember what Gabriel said when we found the needle?”

  “That Lilith must not be freed.”

  “Yes. I did wonder why he had such an interest in keeping an old demon locked away. Then Lilith told me that she knew that God sabotaged the original human tempte, we talked about that after dinner yesterday.”

  “We did, yes. There is more, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, we talked with Yaldebaoth today and took a look at that transcript that Lilith was told about. God had help. Obviously he did, doing this all on this own would be difficult.” Kate took a deep breath. “It was demon, Polly. Likely one from Yaldebaoth’s team or the armed forces.”

  Apollyon closed her eyes, sighed, rubbed her face and then smmed her fist against the mountain. “Fuck you Beleth, take a fucking dip all the way down the abyss… why do you have to be right?” She turned to Kate. “Beleth told me that she suspected sabotage, but she couldn’t prove it. She also said that the angels alone couldn’t have done it, they must have had help from our side. And I DISMISSED THAT OPTION!”

  “Polly…”

  “I feel like an idiot.”

  “Polly. Besides Beleth, no one considered it an option that one of us helped God. Still, we need to find her.”

  “We do. Who else knows about this?”

  “Lilith, Yaldebaoth, me, you, and the now likely dead Atntean archivist Kyrea.”

  “Kyrea isn’t dead. Every few centuries she comes to the library to look at a few old documents, she works with Lucifer now as an archivist for administrative paperwork here in Hell.”

  “Then we need to talk to her.”

  “Agreed, but it has to be in private as well. Do you pn to involve Azazel?”

  Kate nodded. “Yes, she is our best chance of finding the traitor and since it’s border world business, it’s her jurisdiction anyway.”

  “Yes. Do you have a list of trustworthy demons?”

  “Eisheth and Naamah, but Lilith will talk to them again, anyone younger than the tempte obviously, and the ones I listed a moment ago.”

  “And Sariel.”

  Kate tilted her head in thought. “Yes, and Sariel. Do you think she knew?”

  “No, she would have told us if she did. The information she provided about God and his deeds was thorough to say the least.”

  “Should we involve her then? She might know about some strange meetings of angels from back then that she might not have thought much about.”

  “A fair point. I will read the passage myself when we return and talk to her.”

  “Good, thank you. Besides finding our traitor, I have more questions about all this.”

  “I do not think I can provide answers.”

  “But maybe you will stumble upon them. Why did Gabriel reveal that information to the sorcerer king and why did the king want to keep it such a secret? Was imprisoning Lilith even his idea or did Gabriel direct him to that as well? And why was Gabriel so invested in keeping this information about God, his dead leader, a secret? There has to be something political behind it, at least on angelic side.”