06 - Siren Song (22 page)

Brenneka’s thin body relaxed, and she exhaled a sour curse into Sam’s neck
before pushing away. They set out again into the rain, following in the Jaffa’s
steps and then ducking down a side alley. While Brenneka could walk comfortably
upright under the makeshift roof that ran the length of the passageway, Sam had
to bow her head and turn her shoulders sideways to avoid catching herself on the
rafters or the walls.

“There were a lot of people in that house who saw us,” Sam said, lagging
behind. “How do I know that they won’t sell us out to the Jaffa?”

“Because they are members of the Order. They won’t betray you. Unless…”

Sam stopped. “Unless what?”

“Unless I tell them to,” Brenneka answered, without looking back.

Sam was about to protest more, but they suddenly stepped out into a tiny courtyard. Her hair snaking across her forehead and stuck to her
cheek, Brenneka tilted her head back and pointed up at a small square of sky.
Sam blinked up into the rain and followed the line of her finger to the tip of a
silvery spire that leaned at a precarious angle against the clouds. It was
impossible to judge distances in the Byzantine space of the town, but Sam
guessed that the tower wasn’t far away and was quite tall, at least a couple of
hundred feet. She could remember seeing it from the ridge above the city when
they’d left Aris’ ship, one of the few spires still standing in the ruins. She
had her bearings now, could place them within the tumbled geography of the city.

“It’s part of one of the great ships that brought us here,” Brenneka
explained. “It never gets old. It will outlast the Goa’uld, I think.”

It certainly didn’t look like Goa’uld technology. Before Brenneka could
continue on through the gate at the far side of the courtyard, Sam put a hand on
her arm. “Wait. You mean the Goa’uld didn’t bring you here?”

This time, the smile wasn’t bitter, but brightened by pride. “We brought
ourselves. With help from the gods.”

“The gods?”

“The Nitori.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard of them.”

Brenneka pulled her arm free and ushered Sam ahead of her through the gate.
“When the Goa’uld took the Homeworld, we fled. The legend says that the Nitori
left us knowledge and chose one of our people—the Inspired—to entrust with
the knowledge. He learned how to make the ships.” Glancing back, Sam saw her
make a brief gesture with her hands, like she was setting a bird free. She
remembered seeing Aadi do the same when they’d crossed the mosaic face. “The
ships brought us here. This was a beautiful place, once. And a long time later,
the Goa’uld found us again.” Her mouth was a grim line broken by the end of the
scar. “The Inspired was gone, and there were no more ships.” Pushing past Sam,
she pointed ahead. “It’s here.”

Brenneka reached into the pocket of her trousers and pulled out a key on a
fob. She slipped it into a tiny gap in the wall. It turned with a click, and a door Sam hadn’t even been able to see opened a crack.
Brenneka pushed it open and stooped to enter, Sam close behind. They found
themselves at the top of a spiral staircase, all but the first few steps lost in
darkness. Reaching into a small niche near Sam’s head, Brenneka pulled out a
baton of about the length of her forearm. She rapped it sharply on the brick,
then shook it until it began to emit a cool, blue light.

“This way.”

Sam had to walk fast to keep within the small illuminated circle. Made of
worn stone, the stairs were uneven triangles set into the wall and winding
tightly downward around a central point like the steps inside a lighthouse.
Brenneka’s bare feet were sure, but Sam’s boots felt clumsy and too large and
she had to hang onto the rough brick to keep her balance. There was no way of
gauging how far they went, except by counting steps. Sam had counted two hundred
and four when the stairs ended on a landing in front of another narrow door.
Again the key came out, and the door opened silently on oiled hinges.

She couldn’t see to tell for sure, but the room they entered seemed cavernous
and the cool, slick, green-smelling breath of air that washed over them as they
moved deeper into the clammy chamber suggested an underground river nearby. Sam
listened carefully but couldn’t hear any running water, only her own breathing
and the echoing of her boots on the stone floor. Her skin was crawling with
uneasiness. She hovered near the door, one hand groping for the wall and guiding
her backward until her shoulders were leaning against brick. Brenneka looked
over her shoulder, a ghost in her halo of blue light, then continued on to the
left. After a few steps, she reached into another tiny alcove in the wall and a
soft, yellow glow bloomed from sconces high up near the vaulted ceiling. With a
shake, Brenneka extinguished her torch.

Sam looked up at the gilded ceiling, a good three or four stories above their
heads, and thought of medieval churches. The walls were a mixture of brick and
the black native stone. The floor was another detailed mosaic, faces and waves,
stylized stars and solar systems, massive fish and featherless birds in a
kaleidoscope of color. At the far end of the room a dais stood in front of a wall that seemed
to be made of the same silvery metal as the spire outside, pitted and scored,
blackened around the edges. The skin of a ship, Sam figured.

Brenneka regarded her through narrowed eyes. “Why are you here?”

A bit taken aback by the question, Sam blinked a few times while she looked
for an answer other than the obvious. “Because your brother kidnapped us.”

Brenneka’s face fell into sharp lines of impatience. “You travel through the
Stargates. Why are you out here?”

“Well, because we’re explorers.”

“Exploring.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“No?” Stepping closer, Sam looked at the remains of the ship. It seemed like
that whole wall, all three stories of it, was of a piece. She couldn’t see any
seams under the scarring. “Okay. Not just exploring. We’re looking for ways to
fight the Goa’uld.”

“To save yourselves.”

“To save everyone the Goa’uld oppress.”

The sharp bark of Brenneka’s laugh clattered around in the rafters and was
swallowed by the room. “A whole galaxy of worlds.”

“Nobody pretends it’s easy. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.” Sam held
a hand out toward the other woman, thinking of Teal’c back at the pest house,
held safe only by the strength of Brenneka’s word. “And we need allies. All the
friends we can get.”

“We have nothing we can afford to give you. You see the way we live. Even if
the Goa’uld were gone tomorrow, in a hundred lifetimes we’d never be what we
were.” Brenneka gestured toward the remains of the ship behind her. Against the
backdrop of the metal skin of the wall, her eyes were colorless.

“We could help you.”

“The mine is spent. We work twice as hard and bring out half as much. There’s
nothing for you there.”

It was all Sam could do not to sigh, so she closed her eyes instead. “Maybe
we’d help you because you’re people. Just because you’re people. And we’re all
the same to the Goa’uld.”

When she opened her eyes again, Brenneka was at the dais, leaning her elbows
on it with her hands clasped together, watching her. “But you’re wrong, aren’t
you. We’re not all the same. We’re different from you.” She touched the back of
her neck, then her throat. “They can’t use us like they use you, like puppets.”

Hooking her fingers on the edge of the dais, Sam looked up at her. “See,
that’s it. We can learn from each other. This immunity you have. You must know
what that means.”

Brenneka flattened her hands down on the dais and carefully smoothed dust
from its surface. “When we left the Homeworld, there were eighty thousand of us.
We came in three ships, sleeping, and when we arrived, each ship became a city.
We weren’t fighters. We wanted to make beautiful things. With the knowledge of
the Nitori, we were given a chance. We changed ourselves, the story says, as the
Inspired taught us before he was absorbed by the Nitori, became one of them.”
Her smoothing hands slowed to a stop. “By the time the Goa’uld found us again,
we were almost a million, and we were different, in the blood, but still the
same. We still weren’t fighters.” When she met Sam’s eyes, her gaze was
piercing. “Now there are six thousand of us.
Six thousand.”
She leaned
lower so that her face loomed over Sam’s. “That’s what it means. The Goa’uld
destroy what they can’t have. And when we learned to kneel, and to beg—” She cut
herself off and turned to look up at the fragment of the ship. “Who can blame
the Nitori for leaving us?”

Sam thought of the mosaic eye, watching the sky, waiting, all in pieces.

“But,” Brenneka continued after awhile, “we
never
knelt to worship a
worm. And maybe that will redeem us.”

“I’m sure it will. That’s a beginning.”

“Maybe your friend, Dr. Jackson, will help us,” Brenneka said as she turned
the key in a lock and raised the lid of the dais.

The mention of Daniel sent a sliver of pain through Sam’s chest, and she
grimaced. “He’s… compromised. I wouldn’t count on him now.”

After lowering the lid and placing a stone tablet flat on it, Brenneka
crooked a finger at Sara, inviting her to join her on the raised platform.
“Sebek will use what he knows and they will open the door. It doesn’t matter if
Dr. Jackson helps willingly. It’ll still be help, won’t it?”

Revulsion ran through Sam at the way Brenneka casually dismissed Daniel’s
life, but she said nothing. Instead, she leaned over Brenneka’s shoulder to run
her fingers across the tablet. About the size of a dictionary, it was black like
the stone of the mountain and deeply carved with familiar blocky shapes. “This
is the same form of writing that’s on the door.” Pieces fell together in her
mind and the Nitori took on a familiar shape: Ancients.

Brenneka’s cheek rounded with a smile.

Trying to keep her excitement out of her voice, Sam asked, “Can you read it?”

When she shook her head, water droplets scattered from Brenneka’s hair onto
the tablet. “No. But I know what it means.” She laid her hand reverently on the
stone and wiped the water away. “This is the sacred writing of the Nitori.
They’ve left us a message in the mountain. They’ve left us something there that
will save us, as they did before.”

“Brenneka, I don’t think—”

She turned on Sam, her eyes alight. “Sebek, Dr. Jackson, they will open the
door and my brother will find what the Nitori have left us, and he’ll destroy
Sebek and prove that we’re not worthless. We’re not cringing vermin.”

Sam’s mouth was dry. “Destroy Sebek.”

“Yes!”

“And what about Daniel?”

“He is a vessel of the gods now. He has his part to play. We can’t
interfere.”

“You know,” Sam said, barely controlling her anger, “we would have helped
you. We didn’t have to be coerced. Daniel didn’t have to be—” She almost said
“lost” but she snapped her teeth down on the word. “—put at risk.” When
Brenneka’s hard expression didn’t change, Sam sighed and ran her fingers over the raised shapes on the tablet.
“Why did you bring me here?”

“To show you that this is all much bigger than you, or your friend, or the
worm, Sebek. What you
want
is irrelevant. Your friend has been brought
here to serve the ends of the Nitori.”

“And you think that the Nitori want him to die?”

“We can’t know what the
Nitori want. We can only see what they put in our path.” Now her face did soften
with compassion, but only for a moment, as her hand covered Sam’s and then
slipped away. “He’ll be free. Freedom has its price. I’m sure if you could ask
him, he would agree.”

Daniel’s body—if he could even call it his own anymore—was numb. But it
wasn’t numbness, not really, because he recognized sensation, the way he would
know that the punching throb against his eardrums on a crowded dance floor was
music even if he couldn’t hear it. It was as if the world was too loud, so loud
that his body was full to the point of being empty, overloaded to the point of
white noise and nonsense, and all he had in his head to name it was “numb”.

He was too small for all that feeling.

Sebek thrashed inside him, and Daniel saw the floor close to his face, black
stone with a blue sheen from some light source he couldn’t place. He saw his own
hand splayed a few inches from his eyes, the fingers stiffly straining, the pads
of each one white, and the nails white, too, except with a rim of red at the
quick because of the way the hand was pressing hard against the stone. Sebek was
trying to lever himself upright, but Daniel’s body was heavy and numb and full
of noise, and he fell again—the floor right next to Daniel’s eye now, his face
pressed against stone. Sebek made a sound with Daniel’s throat, a growl of
frustration that Daniel felt inside his head and not in the body at all, but it
was some kind of coherence to cling to, and so he did. The noise and numbness
started to resolve again into thought and feeling, distantly: the cool stone
against his cheek, a cold ache inside the globe of his knee, and the jutting
bone of his hip where he’d fallen. Flares of color in the whited-out landscape
of his being.

He could hear Aris’ voice, Jack’s, and a moment later, a heavy hand fell on
the back of his neck, squeezing and then shifting to his shoulder. A wall loomed
in front of him, with shadowed etchings, dancing figures, then skewed away into
the blankness of ceiling. He was on his back now. Aris’ face came into view,
wearing an expression of unconvincing concern, or so it seemed to Daniel. Those
pale eyes held a distinct glimmer of satisfaction as he looked down at his Goa’uld master.

“My lord,” Aris said, the honorific colored by barely suppressed mockery.

Sebek was not in the mood for amusing ironies, it seemed, and his anger
scraped a livid path through the static inside Daniel’s head. Daniel’s hand, the
one without the ribbon device, passed through his field of vision as Sebek
raised it. Aris gripped his hand and leaned back against his weight to pull him
up; the walls angled around him, and Jack was suddenly there, on his ass with
his legs askew and his fists pressed to his temples, broken finger sticking out
with incongruous daintiness.