The warmth had been degrading for an hour before they reached the gate.
Elham wasn't able to prepare them for what happened at the gate.
He pressed his hand to his chest and read it and what he got back was not information but interference, the pointing was still present, still in him, but the resolution dropping, the clean reading he had been relying on since the stream in Aram losing its precision the way a fire lost its heat from a distance. He had been moving in the last two's direction. But, now those presences were still faintly there, underneath a layer of noise, he couldn't read where they were or what they were doing.
They were four steps through when the warmth went silent.
Not degraded. Not noisy. Silent. Complete. The way a room went silent when something that had been making sound in it for so long you had stopped hearing it suddenly stopped, the silence was deafening.
He stopped walking.
The others stopped around him. He pressed his hand harder against his chest the way you pressed harder against something that was not responding hoping that more pressure would produce a different result. It did not produce a different result. He pressed with both hands. His chest. The place where the warmth had lived since he was ten years old, since the stream in Aram, since Gabriel's commission arrived before it arrived as sound. The place that had pointed and warned and read and commanded and been the primary instrument of everything he was for on this road for seven years.
Nothing.
"Elham," Asher said. He was reading Elham's face and the face was telling him something was wrong at a level the sword's register could not account for.
"The warmth is gone," Elham said.
The words landed in the city street the way significant words landed, flat, immediate, the cord receiving them without yet having the framework to process them.
"Gone," Yael said.
"Not degraded. Not noisy. Gone. I press my hand to my chest and I get nothing." He pressed again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. "I have never had nothing before..."
John was looking at him with Uriel's full attention. The expression on his face was not the collected assessment he brought to everything. It was something more urgent than that, the expression of a man who had been on this road long enough to understand the specific significance of what Elham had just described and was moving through the implications of it very quickly. "This is not the interference," he said. "The interference I felt approaching the city was noise, Malchiel's corrupted gift producing static in the channel. This is different. This is not noise." He looked at the gate behind them. At the city around them. "Something in this city or something operating from this city has done something I have not encountered before."
"Can he do that," Mara said. "Malchiel. Can he silence the warmth completely."
"I don't know," John said. "I did not know he could do what he has been doing since we entered the region. His gifting has been corrupted for decades. What a corrupted prophetic gift is capable of at its furthest extent—" He stopped. "I don't know."
Standing in the street of Beersheba with both hands clutched to his chest, Elham realized that the silence was the most frightening thing he had encountered on the road so far. The primary way he understood his function, his calling, his direction, gone like he lost his purpose again. He was in a city he did not know, in a city that contained two archangel vessels he could no longer locate and an operation he could no longer read and possessed men he could no longer identify, and the thing that had always told him where to go and what he was looking at and how close the threat was had simply stopped.
He was standing in the correct city and he was blind in it.
"Elham."
Mara. Her voice had the specific quality it had when Saraqael was showing her something she needed to pass on immediately. He looked at her.
She was looking at the crowd at the gate behind them. The ordinary press of people moving in and out of the city, traders, travelers, locals finishing the day's business. Her eyes had fixed on a specific point in the crowd and by the time Elham followed her gaze to the point the point was empty. A gap in the crowd where someone had been standing and was no longer standing.
"Someone was watching us," she said. "From the moment we entered the gate. Not the ordinary watching of a crowd noticing travelers. Intentional watching. The specific attention of someone who was told to look for something and was looking for it and found it." She looked at the gap in the crowd. "They saw us come through. They saw you stop. And then they left."
"Which direction," Asher said.
"Into the city," Mara said. "Fast but not running. The pace of someone who has what they came for and is going to deliver it."
Nobody spoke for a moment. The city around them going about itself, indifferent to the five people standing in the street just inside the gate with the specific quality of people who had just understood something about their situation that changed everything about their situation.
Malchiel had not just felt them approaching.
He had posted someone at the gate to watch for them. He had known they were coming, known what they looked like, the white robe, the glowing sword and shield, the bow, and had been preparing. The moment they crossed the threshold of the city the warmth had gone silent, as if the crossing of the gate was a mechanism, as if Malchiel had built something in this city specifically for the moment a prophet carrying Gabriel walked through its gate.
"He was ready for us," Elham said.
"Yes," John said.
"And the warmth going silent the moment we crossed the gate, it can't be a coincidence."
"No," John said. "That is not coincidence."
"We can't leave, not until we find them" he said. "The two archangel vessels are in this city. The operation is in this city. The cord came here because this is where the road pointed and the road did not stop pointing because Malchiel prepared for our arrival." He looked at the cord. At Asher with the shield and the sword. At Mara with the bow. At Yael with his hands loose at his sides and Raphael fully awake in his chest. At John with Uriel's full attention doing what it could without the warmth to coordinate with. "We work the city the way we have always worked cities. We find the wound. We address the operation. We trust that the two presences the warmth was reading before the gate will eventually become visible."
He paused.
"And someone just told Malchiel we're here," he said.
Without another word, he stepped into Beersheba.