Then it hit him like a breaker, a great wave in human form striking Grant head-on, lashing across his body and face in a fearsome torrent. Grant opened his mouth to call out in surprise, only to find the water carom past his teeth and down his throat, causing him to choke as he lost his footing and fell back.
Standing between the arches that lined the open passage, Rosalia saw Grant fall beneath the man-wave, her left hand reaching across her body for the Ruger pistol holstered at her right hip, her right hand still struggling with the dog. Grant smashed into the hard cobblestones with a bone-jarring crunch, the swell of water washing over him in a slick sheen, drowning him where he lay. His attacker no longer looked like a man but seemed to have flattened, swelling over Grant’s form as it smothered him. Grant’s eyes met with Rosalia’s, eyes wide in fear as the water poured down his throat in a foamy gush. Rosalia watched as, desperately, Grant’s right hand punched upward and the nose of the Sin Eater burst out of the sheet of water that covered him, unleashing another burst of bullets that drilled into the portico ceiling.
Though she favored her right hand, Rosalia was schooled enough in the use of firearms to be effectively ambidextrous. Now holding the Ruger P-85 in her left, she brought the weapon around, searching for a target, some hint of the thing that drove this weird water creature on, some kind of heart or brain. The water shimmered as the moonlight played across it, looking like a hideous clear mask over Grant’s taut-mouthed face. A blurting burst of bubbles frothed from Grant’s mouth as he struggled beneath the shallow layer of water.
“Come on, Magistrate,” Rosalia muttered to herself. “Show me what to shoot.”
* * *
A
T
THAT
SAME
MOMENT
, Domi found herself leaping to avoid the swinging punch of another of the water creatures, its clear liquid lines twinkling in the moonlight. Domi had grown up in the Outlands and she was used to relying on her wits. Despite her petite form, Domi was a supreme athlete. Right now, she applied all her instincts in a graceful synergy with her firm muscles, ducking and weaving out of the way as her watery foe approached.
But as Domi ducked another brutal punch, snapping her blaster up and drilling a slug through her foe’s liquid body, she realized there was another of the watery figures at her back, just emerging from a dark pool of water there, tar-black under the moonlight. Domi turned, running headlong at the nearest wall, its rough surface looking ghostly under the moon’s glow, and the two water creatures flowed across the cobbled stones to follow.
Then Domi was kicking out, twisting her body as her feet hit the wall at roughly the height of her waist. As the twin creatures grasped for her, Domi leaped gracefully over their heads, her Detonics pistol blasting shot after shot through their bodies from above as she swooped through the air in a flip.
The albino warrior landed a moment later, taking her weight on bended knees as she brought her gun to bear on another of the watery creatures.
Beside her, Kudo was running across the cobbles to help Kishiro as he was drowned in the strange pooling water that dominated one side of the courtyard. The pool was ten feet across at its widest point, and Kishiro seemed to be sinking into it. It was impossible, Kudo felt sure—he had checked this courtyard not ten minutes ago, had seen that the area was flat and dry. Even if a pool of water had appeared here in that time, there was no way it could be deep enough to absorb a man.
Yet Kishiro seemed to be drowning, his arms flailing as he sank deeper into the impossible pool, his breath escaping from his lungs in a series of hurried, angry bubbles.
Domi whipped around, ducking the grasping arm as one of the liquid humanoids reached for her, spinning and diving at the same time. She saw Kudo reach for Kishiro as he disappeared beneath the dark water, a final rush of bubbles galloping from his mouth and nostrils to burst at the surface, frothy where his struggles had churned those waters over and over.
In that moment Kishiro was gone, his form sucked beneath the water. All that remained of him was a puddle that bulged for just a moment in the faint shape of a man’s body, beside which his discarded
katana
lay still, its burnished silver length shining with the moon’s rays.
“Stay back,” Domi commanded. “Keep away from the water.”
Kudo stopped in his tracks, his sword held ready at his side. They were one man down and there were water creatures on all sides of them now.
* * *
B
ENEATH
THE
MOONLIT
portico, her dog still held firm by its neck, Rosalia felt a growing sense of helplessness as she watched Grant drown in only inches of water. The water clung to his face in a shiny gloss, painting him silver as the moonlight struck it. The corpuscles in his eyes were growing red, turning the whites pink as he struggled to free himself from the impossible trap. His legs were kicking urgently and he reached for her with his free hand, the Sin Eater still clutched in the right where it was doing no good.
If Rosalia touched him, she suspected she would be dragged into the watery prison, too. Whatever it was, however it worked, touching it was almost certainly a bad idea. She glanced over her shoulder for a moment, semiaware of the stuttering gunshots and sounds of movement behind her where Domi and the Tigers of Heaven battled more of these strange liquid combatants. Domi was back-to-back with Kudo, a handgun’s familiar length glinting in her hand while the samurai-like warrior held his
katana
out ready. On all sides of them, four more of the water beings ebbed and flowed, swaying in place like leaves on the breeze. Rosalia heard Domi scream a savage battle cry as she hurled herself at the nearest of the water warriors, her pistol blazing as it struck the creature’s wet skin.
“Dammit, there has to be some way to…” Rosalia muttered, searching her mind for an answer as she turned back to witness Grant’s horrifying predicament.
Suddenly, Rosalia’s dog pulled free of her grip, powering itself forward and throwing her back against the upright of the nearest arch. With a snarl, the dog leaped for Grant and the glistening liquid sheen that covered him, jaws widening as its face hit the water.
“No!” Rosalia called, but it was too late.
There was a splash, a splatter as the dog’s muzzle broke the surface of the water. The clear liquid burst all around its jaw, lashing against its fur like a living thing—which, perhaps, it was. For a moment, seen only in the tricky half light of the moon, the dog seemed to expand, to become two beings or three as its head shook beneath the water.
Rosalia’s heart stopped for a moment in fear, watching but utterly helpless as the pale-eyed mongrel dunked its head in the water, shaking itself as the water hit it. Then, astonishingly, Grant gasped, the sound loud in the covered area, and he rolled onto his side, coughing and spluttering as he finally took breath once more.
“What th—?” Rosalia muttered, observing in incredulity as her dog shook its head and body, the water streaming from it in droplets that painted the walls and floor.
For a moment it appeared that the dog had somehow defeated the liquid thing, causing it to dissipate in some inexplicable manner. But even as Rosalia watched, Grant lying a few feet from her and clutching his chest as he struggled to clear his lungs of water, the droplets that had splattered against the walls began to hurry downward, re-forming into a dozen pools that knitted together in a matter of seconds.
The dog barked loudly as it returned to its mistress’s side, and they both watched as the pool—against all sense of logic—poured upward, rushing toward the portico’s ceiling and taking shape once more. In less than five seconds, the man-shape stood in front of the Cerberus exiles once more, its body dripping out of the pool around its feet, the tiny green light of the radio’s camera unit coruscating and refracting as it flickered behind the creature’s transparent body.
In that instant Rosalia knew what she had to do. With a decisive shriek, she pointed the Ruger at the floor behind the liquid creature and pulled the trigger, directing three slugs into the creature’s shins. The bullets cut through the water and out, burying themselves in the front of the radio unit where that green signal light glinted. In a fraction of a second, the front of the unit sparked into flame as the innards were pierced by the bullets, an arc of electricity flickering across its surface and zapping the pooling water on the floor in a lightninglike explosion.
Rosalia leaped back, her dog scampering out of the covered area and running off in a flurry of whirring legs. Across the portico area, Grant rolled as best he could away from the sparking figure of the water man as it shuddered in place, the electricity racing up and down its eerie, see-through body.
Then there came a colossal burst of light within the covered passage like a lightning strike, and Rosalia found herself thrown ten feet backward and down to the ground, the metal of the Ruger pistol glowing hotly in her hand so that she had to release it. As suddenly as it had begun, it was over. The light faded and, in its wake, the portico seemed draped in black.
Rosalia lay on the ground, breathing heavily, her left hand pulsing where it had tried to hold the burning-hot Ruger as the electricity fired across it. After a moment she turned, saw something glinting in the moonlight just two inches from her face—it was a
katana
blade, its point aimed straight for her left eye.
“Shit,” Rosalia yelped as she forced herself to sit up. A moment more and she realized that the lethal blade just lay there, tossed aside on the cobbled stones of the courtyard.
“You okay, miss?” Kudo asked from behind her. “You took quite a flight.”
Rosalia pushed herself up from the cold ground into a crouch, indulging the Tiger of Heaven with a look as she scanned the area. “I’m fine,” she said. The water people were gone and the ground around the courtyard was bone-dry.
Ahead of her, she and Kudo could see a figure moving in the arched area beneath the portico. Rosalia reached automatically for the nearest weapon, the discarded
katana,
as that figure stumbled around in the darkness.
As Rosalia stood, her scruffy-looking dog came skittering over, barking happily, tail wagging. “Good boy,” Rosalia encouraged quietly. “Good dog.”
Then the figure stepped from the shadows, revealing itself to be Grant, rolling his shoulders and wincing in pain as he struggled out of the covered alley on unsteady legs. “What the hell did you do?” he asked as he caught Rosalia’s dark eyes.
The long-haired mercenary smiled. “I gave your dancing partner a little jolt,” she said. “Surely even a Magistrate knows that water and electricity don’t mix.”
“All of them disappeared at the same instant,” Kudo added appreciatively. “Just winked out like they…evaporated or something. But by then we’d lost Kishiro. He was sucked into one of those pools that—” he looked around embarrassedly “—well, they were here a moment before.”
“Sure, they were,” Grant agreed, nodding slowly, a blurted cough coming past his lips as he stepped unsteadily forward. His chest ached where the lungs had filled with water, and he felt light-headed, as if his head was spinning on his neck. Without conscious thought, he commanded his Sin Eater back to its hidden holster.
Grant peered around the courtyard, looking at the chalklike facades of the buildings as the moon played across their rough surfaces. “I just got one question,” he said after a moment. “Where the heck is Domi?”
Chapter 13
“Son of a bitch, what happened to you?” Kane asked as he examined the wound in Balam’s chest.
“I was shot,” Balam said simply, his soft voice sounding too loud in the absolute stillness of the abandoned redoubt.
The two of them had moved to the Cerberus infirmary under Kane’s instruction, where the ex-Mag might be able to examine Balam’s wounds better. Like the rest of the Cerberus base, the infirmary had been overrun with stone growths, spiraling across the surfaces like creeping vines. Balam seemed able to walk at least, although he was slower than Kane recalled from the last time they had met.
Balam was one of the Archons, a race that had confirmed the pact between the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan millennia ago. Balam and his fellow Archons had lived in the shadows for their whole lives, observing and guiding humankind as it battled Annunaki interference. The last of his kind, Balam dwelled in the underground city of Agartha with his charge, the human-hybrid girl called Quav. His contacts with Cerberus had been infrequent but pivotal, each time auguring an end-of-the-world scenario involving the Annunaki. The last time that Kane had seen Balam, it had been four months ago when he had come to warn Kane and his Cerberus teammates of the destruction of the Ontic Library, an undersea storehouse holding the rules of reality. The library had been breached by Ullikummis, the rogue prince of the Annunaki. While there was little love between the two of them, Kane had never wished harm on Balam, and seeing him wounded like this disturbed him.
Balam sat across several chairs within the infirmary. He had slumped as soon as he sat, adopting a pose very unlike his usual erect manner. Kane stood, pacing across to one of the stone-daubed cupboards, trying to recall where Reba DeFore had stored her medications.
Kane snapped several finger-thin tendrils away from one of the cupboard doors and peered inside, checking three of the wall-mounted units until he found what he was looking for. Then, he turned back, producing a bottle of antiseptic, its clear liquid swilling behind a glass bottle that also had a dusting of stone growths obscuring its surface.
“I’ll clean and dress your wound,” Kane told Balam, trying to sound reassuring, “while you tell me all about it, okay?”
Balam nodded, a slow, deliberate movement of his bulbous head. “Six days ago, an intruder came to Agartha,” he explained as Kane tipped the open bottle of antiseptic onto a folded strip of gauze. “I knew the intruder, recognized her immediately, yet I also knew she was there to do harm.
“I sensed that much,” he went on. Balam was referring to his telepathic abilities, his natural facility to read and interact with another’s mind. While Balam generally refrained from delving into a human’s thoughts, he was frequently well aware of the swirling emotions that bubbled at the top of a person’s mind, though he usually deemed it politic to keep that information to himself. “The intruder was your colleague Brigid Baptiste, Kane.”
Kneeling beside Balam as he applied the antiseptic to the gross wound, Kane took a long breath.
“You’re not surprised?” Balam probed.
Kane showed no emotion as he spoke, his eyes not meeting with Balam’s. “Tell the story,” he said.
“Brigid came for Quavell’s daughter,” Balam said, “my charge—the girl you know as Little Quav. She kidnapped her, escaping Agartha via the interphase transmitter in the old storehouse.
“I endeavored to stop her, and I received this wound for my efforts,” Balam said, indicating the bloody rent in his tunic where Kane was daubing antiseptic. “I used an ASP Emitter,” he said, showing Kane the burned-out ruins of the snake-shaped weapon that had been strapped to his right wrist. “Brigid opened a quantum gateway and disappeared before I could reach her, taking Little Quav with her. But I thought myself clever, in this instance, and so I followed, presuming—though it transpired, foolishly—that Brigid would have returned to your Cerberus base here. Obviously, I am out of touch, as I did not realize the base had been evacuated.”
“We had a little trouble of our own,” Kane explained vaguely as he finished cleaning Balam’s wound. Despite himself, Kane was impressed that the shorter creature showed no hint of pain as the burning liquid played across his raw cuts.
“Naturally, I was reluctant to let Little Quav out of my sight for too long,” Balam continued, “but by the time I realized my mistake I had lost too much blood. It took all my effort just to bring myself back to consciousness and activate the beacon.”
Kane inclined his head, showing Balam a self-conscious, lopsided grin. “Well, we heard it,” he said. “Cavalry’s here.”
Balam held Kane’s gaze with his plaintive dark eyes until the ex-Mag turned back to his work of cleaning and dressing his wound. Kane felt Balam’s eyes upon him as he worked, the silence between them like a wall.
Finally, Kane lifted Balam’s tunic a little higher and wrapped a strip of gauze across his freshly cleaned wound. It had finished weeping at least, though some of the congealed blood was still tacky. “I don’t know how long that’s going to hold you together, Balam,” Kane said. “If you’re up to a jump we could phase back to where we’re holed up and get Reba to give you the once-over.”
Balam continued to look at Kane, waiting for the man to meet his eyes once more.
Kane stepped away, admiring his work. “Field dressing ain’t my speciality, but it’ll hold for now.” Then he looked Balam in the eye. “How’s it feel?” he asked.
“We have something to talk about, friend Kane,” Balam said. “I have told you my story, but that is only half of the tale, is it not? You of all people would know what Brigid Baptiste was doing, would you not?”
Reluctantly, Kane nodded. “You can see that things have got kind of messed up around here,” he said with typical understatement. “Baptiste, too. She’s not with Cerberus right now, and I really don’t know if what you saw—the person who shot you—was her.”
“She was different but she was still Brigid,” Balam said with arch simplicity.
“Yeah,” Kane agreed, tugging at his shirt and revealing the shadow suit he wore beneath. Its black skin was torn and frayed in places and the area that should cover his heart was missing, the dark hairs of his chest visible through the two-inch-wide tear that lay there. “Baptiste shooting you only makes you a part of an exclusive club,” he said.
Balam could barely believe what he was hearing. “S-s-she shot you, too?” he spluttered.
Kane nodded. “Something shot me,” he said. “Something with Brigid’s face.”
Kane paused, and Balam waited as the man struggled with what he had to say.
“She had Quav with her at the time,” Kane stated. “I couldn’t do anything. It was so fast. It was all so—” he stopped, trying to find the right word but failing “—so fast.”
“You and Brigid were friends, close friends,” Balam said.
“More than that,” Kane acknowledged, recalling their
anam-chara
bond, which linked them through eternity. “But something’s gone wrong with her, something inside. And it’s Ullikummis’s fault, just like this whole base is Ullikummis’s fault, this whole damn world and the mess it’s now in.”
“Kane,” Balam said slowly, his voice firm, “I am sorry. I know how much Brigid means to you. I see how you look at each other.”
Kane shrugged with impatience. “Well…”
The strange infirmary with its dark tendrils of stone across once immaculate surfaces, grasping like the tentacles of an octopus, was silent for almost a minute as the two figures remained in silence, each pondering his own concerns, his own losses.
“And what of you?” Balam asked finally. “The wound on your chest isn’t the only one, I can see.” Delicately, Balam brought his six-fingered hand up to his own face, brushing his long fingers along his cheek by his left eye in indication. “You have taken…a blow of some sort?”
In unconscious imitation, Kane touched at the callused area beside his blind eye. “Something hit me,” he explained. “Something alive, I think. My vision comes and goes.”
“You’re blind?” Balam asked for clarification.
“No,” Kane said. “It’s hard to see, and sometimes I don’t. But I’m seeing something else.
His
memories, those of Ullikummis. I can’t explain.”
“Kane, you are going into battle with your vision seriously impaired,” Balam stated, clearly horrified. “A human would need to harbor a death wish to do that. I understand that you have lost Brigid—”
“No, I haven’t,” Kane interrupted, anger firing his voice. “She’s out there and I’ll bring her back.”
Balam looked at the muscular figure of the ex-Mag for a long moment, studying for the first time how much Kane had changed physically. He held himself slightly stooped now, as if weary with fatigue, and his hair was ragged, unwashed and caught in tangles that reached past his collar. His chin was dark with a semigrown beard, tufts of ginger in its muddy brown.
“You are facing an enemy who has destroyed your base,” Balam realized, “and taken your friend, perverting her into something that neither of us truly recognize. But, take solace in this fact—you are not alone in your struggle.” As he spoke Balam reached up, his long arms shifting across the gulf between himself and Kane, his snakelike fingers grasping Kane’s. “I am pledged with the guardianship of Little Quav, a pledge I take seriously. We stand now together.”
Kane held Balam’s hands in his, feeling how cold the creature of the First Folk’s skin seemed compared to his own. “Two wounded soldiers, huh?” he muttered.
“I believe, as you might say, that we still have some tricks left in us,” Balam said, smiling in that slight, knowing way that only he could manage.
* * *
U
SING
HIS
C
OMMTACT
, Kane reported to Lakesh and the others at Cerberus’s temporary base, briefly reciting how Balam was present and had set off the redoubt’s distress alarm upon finding the base abandoned.
“Do you require any assistance?” Lakesh asked, surprise mixing with concern in his agitated voice.
“Not just yet,” Kane reasoned. “Balam might need a medical consort later, but the tough little bastard says he’s fine right now. Best not to press it.”
After he had reported in, Kane led Balam up to the cafeteria area of the redoubt via elevator. The elevators still worked, despite being recast in ugly stone cladding, their interior lights replaced with a dull orange glow from wall-mounted magma pods, the same magma pods that were used in so much of the refashioned redoubt.
The canteen, too, was a mess of jutting stone and wreckage, one whole section covered over with a wave of rough-hewn stonework, the walls and floor scored with more of the haphazard rock. Blisters ran along the walls as if the room was alive.
“See if you can find us a seat,” Kane said, “and I’ll grab us a bite to eat.”
With that, Kane disappeared into the familiar kitchen area, its doors heavy with dark stone plating, its once-tiled walls lumpy as a rock face. Balam watched him depart, making his slow way over to one of the rock benches that rested in front of a flat stone table where once metal and Formica had ruled.
Despite the changes, much of the canteen remained pretty well intact and Kane soon located the larder area of the kitchen, its cool walls rough now with jagged spikes of gray-black stone like a porcupine’s back. Shortly, he returned to the seating area carrying two plastic trays featuring molded compartments in which he’d placed a few items from the canned supplies: cold beans and some brittle flatbreads.
“I couldn’t get the stoves working,” Kane explained briefly as he took a seat opposite Balam, laying the trays out between them. “But the way you look just now, I figure you won’t mind so much.”
Balam nodded gratefully, plucking at the beans with a metal spoon. Tiny veins of stone arced across the spoon’s handle and bowl, making it rough on the tongue as Balam scooped up the cold beans and ate them.
“When was the last time you ate?” Kane asked as he worked his spoon into his own plate of beans.
“Six days,” Balam said through a mouthful of food, tearing at the flatbread with his incisors. Kane had never seen Balam like this; there was something almost undignified in his manner, no longer the archly refined figure he had always seemed before. Balam saw Kane watching him and he smiled. “I can manage without sustenance for a while, but not indefinitely. Your food, however, is good.”
“Thanks.” Kane nodded, tearing off a piece of his own flatbread. There was a dusting of mold on the flatbread, and Kane tore around it, casting that part aside.
Balam looked around the cafeteria area, transformed as it was, the magma pods glowing redly along the walls to cast a gloomy light on the proceedings. “Something bad happened here,” he stated. “Death.”
“A lot of things went down when Ullikummis attacked,” Kane agreed. “I wasn’t here for most of it, had to play catch-up when me and Grant and…well, when we came off mission. We literally walked into all this.”
“A lot of things have changed,” Balam said with deliberation. “Perhaps if you had warned me, I could have been better prepared to protect Quav.”
Kane shook his head. “We didn’t realize anyone would come for her. Or for you. How could we guess that?”
“Little Quav is the genetic template of an Annunaki goddess called Ninlil,” Balam mused, “as you well know. The reason she was placed in my safekeeping was to shield her from the Annunaki’s machinations.”