As she thought these things, Rosalia’s fingers idly stroked the ridges in the stonework of the water trough, her nails running along the cracks without conscious thought. Suddenly, her dark eyes widened, and she looked down to where her hand was running across the creamy white stonework. She peered at it intensely, running her slender fingers more carefully across the bumps and ridges as the moonlight painted itself across it with delicate brushstrokes.
Then Rosalia turned back to Grant where the man stood a few feet away discussing strategy with Brewster Philboyd via the Commtact link.
“Bone,” Rosalia said as Grant caught her eye. “It’s bone. I’m sitting on bone.”
Grant’s brows furrowed as he heard her, and he swiftly cut the communication with Philboyd, assuring the man he’d contact him the second he needed his help.
“What’s that you said?” Grant asked, taking a step toward Rosalia as her dog trotted over from the shadows.
Rosalia flicked her dark ponytail back over her shoulder as she indicated the troughlike structure she had perched on. “I think it’s bone,” she said.
Grant peered at her warily, still unsure whether he could really trust this mercenary whom Kane had absorbed into their group. Then he sank down on his haunches and looked more closely at the trough, running his hand along its side. “How can you tell?” he asked.
“It’s cold out here,” Rosalia said. “No real cloud cover, desert night. If this was stone, it would be colder. And look—look how the ridges work.”
Grant ran his hand over the white surface, suppressing the shudder that suddenly ran up his spine. The ridges ran parallel, curving slightly but all of them running lengthwise.
“This is something grown,” Rosalia said. “Something organic. We are standing in an ossuary, a bone palace.”
She stood then, looking about her at the buildings that towered all around them, at the way the windows and doors seemed to be boarded up with chalky brickwork or wood. Beside her, Grant stood, too, eyeing the buildings with growing concern. “You think…?” he began, and Rosalia nodded.
“We’ve assumed this whole place was built of stone,” she said, “because that’s how villes are built. Not one of us looked closely—looked properly—at these structures.
“There are gradations, of course, but the whole settlement is constructed of the same materials, all of it differing shades of cream. The moonlight lies to our eyes. This isn’t stone, it’s bone. We’re in something that’s grown. Grown and died.”
“A skeleton,” Grant said quietly, awe in his voice. “This empty ville covers over seven square miles. If it’s a skeleton, we’re talking about a heck of a beastie.”
“A dragon,” Rosalia stated bluntly.
Grant nodded unhappily, like a man who had discovered that the weight of the world was suddenly balanced on his shoulders. “A seven-mile-wide dragon? Someone would have seen it land, surely.”
Rosalia looked pensive. “What if it didn’t land? What if it…burrowed up from the surface or, I don’t know, what if someone placed it here using an interphaser or similar? Possible?”
“Anything’s possible,” Grant agreed cagily. “If working with Cerberus has taught me one thing, it’s that.”
Kudo had overheard the conversation from his post, and he looked to Grant with confusion written across his face. “What should we do, Grant? Turn back?”
“No, let’s keep moving,” Grant decided. “I’m liking this less and less, and I sure don’t want to run into whatever killed this thing and left the carcass out here for us to walk through. Let’s just find Domi and Kishiro and get the hell out of here.”
Rosalia nodded. “Agreed.”
* * *
I
N
THE
CURVED
-
WALLED
CELL
, Domi was still trying to put everything together, even while Enlil continued to tap at whatever tech was hidden just beneath the screen looking in. Far from being sentient creatures, Domi had now concluded that the water figures had been some kind of mat-trans, opening a quantum window through the ether to transport her, Kishiro and Hassood through space so that they could rematerialize within this cell, wherever it was. A walking mat-trans seemed both insane and eminently logical to Domi. Yet less than a week before, she had faced the
bruja,
a Latin American witch who had produced a magic blanket that could be used to anchor an interphaser, plucking an unwary user out of quantum space like a cross-dimensional magnet. And now, these matter-transmitters, be they interphasers or something else, could walk, tracking down and trapping their prey before zapping them to their destination. In some perverse way, it all made sense.
Though Domi could not possibly know it, Enlil had developed this system of transportation as a means to grab humans unawares, plucking them from their locations with pinpoint accuracy. The system used water because of its natural property of attraction. For example, raindrops on a cold windowpane will land separately but be drawn together, and the same is true for the remaining droplets of water in an empty bathtub. Water attracts more water, pulling together. Although limited in reach, the water-based interphaser worked via the same principle, drawn almost magnetically to the water within a person’s body to engage in the transfer of matter.
Beyond the cell, out in the room that could be seen within the ice-cold window, Domi watched as Kishiro was dragged to the farthest wall. He was pulled along against his will, almost as if he was a bug trapped in the swirling bathwater as it rushed down the drain. The warrior’s lips were pulled back and his teeth grit as he fought against that impossible force dragging him across the low-lit room.
Kishiro was drawn past Enlil where he worked at the console, tapping out a pattern with his clawlike hand, a pattern that held no meaning to Domi. She tried to make sense of it, but it just appeared random and she had the suspicion that the movement of Enlil’s fingers was just one part of the programming involved, another no doubt coming from his cerebellum. Domi watched impotently as Kishiro was pushed up against the far wall. As she watched, twin bars whipped from a lip in the wall, firing down from ceiling to floor like rockets. The bars sparkled, and Domi realized they, too, were made of some kind of liquid.
Kishiro strained against the bars, and Domi heard him spit a curse at Enlil. She added her own voice to the man’s, insisting that Enlil let him go.
Enlil turned, and Domi saw the alligator smile that carved a line across his hideous, reptilian face. “No,” he said, his eyes meeting with hers. “You shall watch this, for it is something you need to learn. The Annunaki are your masters. We have always been your masters. You Cerberus fools have had the temerity to stand against me and my siblings for too long, like termites trying to change the course of a mighty river. You have determined to be a part of this, creating conflict where the Annunaki brought harmony. So now you shall be a part of it, a part so entrenched within the system that you shall never be free again.
“Welcome to your future, Domi apekin. Welcome to the end of humanity.”
As he spoke those final words, Enlil gestured with his clawed hand to something at the control panel behind him. Domi watched as a bank of amber lights sprang into life in a sequence of rising, curving, vertical bars, each of them approximately a foot across. The lit bars illuminated the area by the wide stairwell, and Domi saw several other people locked there in similar shimmering bars, one reaching across their chest like a safety bar on an old fairground ride. These ones were strangers, but still Domi gasped, unable to stifle her horror. The strangers were three men and two women, all of them delirious or sleeping, their heads lolling at tired angles where they had been held against the wall for so long. They wore simple clothes, and one of the women looked to be well into her sixties, a tangle of gray hair spurting from her head like wire wool. Beside her, three lads in their teens, each thin with hunger, with the similar features of close relatives. They were in fact Mahmett, Yasseft and Panenk. Next to them was a Western-looking woman with long blond hair that fell past her breasts.
Domi felt a deep thrumming beneath her feet then, like a low bass note, too low to be audible, trembling through her body like an earth tremor. She felt it rise through her, rocking her rib cage, vibrating her breastbone. Beside her, a few feet from where Domi stood, Hassood finally woke, yelping in surprise as the tremor took hold of the room.
The Arab blurted something in his own language, and Domi’s Commtact automatically translated it so that she could understand, performing the task in real time:
“What is going on? Where am I?”
“Calm down,” Domi instructed, her tone brooking no argument.
“Get away from me, demon,” Hassood spit in his own tongue, clawing back to the curved wall that was just a few inches behind him, backing away from Domi with his eyes wide in fear.
“I’m not a demon,” Domi told him, holding her hands out to show she meant him no harm.
Hassood’s eyes fixed on the vicious combat blade in her pale right hand, and he screeched in fear, his body trembling. Seeing this, Domi crouched, slowly and gently, and placed the blade on the floor.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said in English.
“Ghost girl,” Hassood replied, still speaking in his own tongue, the translation sounding ludicrous to Domi’s ear.
“My name’s Domi,” Domi explained. “I’m from Cerberus. You spoke to my partner Grant. I’m not going to hurt you, just calm down.”
Hassood eyed her fearfully, his gaze twitching to take in the knife blade she had left on the floor at her feet. “Cerberus,” he repeated, emphasizing the word as though it was a question.
Domi nodded once, briefly. “Yeah. We’re in a lot of trouble just now, and I need to see what’s going on.” With that, she turned to look through the scanner or window, she still couldn’t tell which.
Hassood leaped forward, making a grab for the discarded knife by Domi’s foot. Without turning, she moved her booted heel, placing it flatly but firmly on the handle of the weapon. “The knife stays where it is,” she warned.
Things had changed in the room beyond. Domi watched in anguish as Kishiro shook behind the amber bar that held his body upright like a safety barrier. His mouth was open wide, head tilted back in silent scream as some force, some power, drilled through him. Domi could not tell what it was, there wasn’t even a hint of what had gripped the brave Tiger of Heaven. But whatever it was, it was clear that the same power was pummeling through the other people locked against the wall between those icy bars.
Domi watched, her hands pressed to that freezing cold screen, water running down her fingers as the people struggled against whatever power had them in its grip. Abruptly, there was a tearing sound from the speaker above the screen and Domi saw that the top on the older woman was ripped at the shoulder seam, tearing away even as she struggled. Then Domi saw the same thing happening to the young man beside her, his breeches ripping apart along the seams, too. Kishiro’s top strained across his pectorals, then split down the center as if he had become too big to fit in it.
The light flickered, and Domi was very aware that the thrumming was becoming more powerful, shaking her as she pushed against the screen to get a closer look at the inexplicable horror occurring there. For a long moment, the bars of amber light winked out, and all Domi could feel was the beat running through her, as well as her own heart pounding its frantic tarantella against her chest.
Like a lightning strike, the lights flickered back to life, winking again as more power shook the chamber. And then Domi saw it, saw the first hint of the change in the flickering bars of light. Kishiro’s face and body had changed, a hardness to them that Domi had never seen before. It was like staring into the face of a crocodile.
Chapter 16
The once familiar lines of the Cerberus cafeteria glowed with the audacity of the sun itself, shimmering across Kane’s vision with a vibrancy he thought reserved only for dreams. He turned his head left and right, feeling how heavy it seemed, how solid. The colors swirled in front of him, the images multiplying and splitting as his point of reference moved, leaving a stuttering trail that took a second or more to catch up to the present. He had gone from near blindness to this, and whatever
this
was, it was so different, so radically advanced from what he had come to know as vision, that it made him vertiginous.
He slumped forward in his seat, feeling the solidity of the table in front of him as he struck it with his chest. The table had a white plastic covering over its wood and, like everything else in the redoubt, it had been assaulted by the creeping rocks, their clawing tendrils spread across it as if to choke the life from its static form. Kane looked at that whiteness now, with its dark streaks of stone, and yet he saw a rainbow of color, a split-prism effect as the whiteness sprouted from the table in a blaze of furious light.
“What have you done to me?” Kane muttered, the words spilling from his mouth and bringing with them the sense that he might vomit. Kane held it back, gritting his teeth and expelling short, sharp breaths through his nostrils. “Balam? What did you do?”
“Keep breathing, Kane,” Balam advised, his voice much closer than Kane expected. “The disorientation will pass.”
“Dammit all, Balam,” Kane spat, “explain this to me, and I mean now.” As he spoke, Kane lifted his head and nauseously watched as the world careened around him. Light sparkled across his sight with all the colors of the spectrum, turning the familiar unfamiliar, making Balam in front of him appear to be wreathed in a heavenly glow. Had his world up until now been black and white? Was this color? True color? Kane narrowed his eyes, trying to filter out the brightness, but the effect was much the same. He couldn’t tolerate it much longer. The sensation of movement yanked at his innards, pulling at his stomach, pulling the beans and flatbread he had just consumed back up his gullet. Suddenly, Kane tasted the sourness of sick in the back of his throat, then it filled his mouth.
“Balam,” he said again as he spit the watery dew between dry lips, muttering the name this time.
“Breathe,” Balam said in response.
Unmoving, Kane stared down at the surface of the table, waiting for the numerous afterimages to coalesce and become one image, one straight picture that he could comprehend. He swallowed hard, pushing down the vomit that had threatened to spew from him, feeling his mouth contract at its taste. Finally the world stopped moving, the bright colors settled, poised like neon strips in front of his eyes.
“What did you do?” Kane asked, his words quiet, his eyes still fixed on the cafeteria table as if afraid to look up.
“I have formed a telepathic link,” Balam said in his careful, measured tone. “You can ‘see,’ in a manner, via the bond between us now, thus alleviating you of your blindness.”
Kane shook his head, saw the fierce colors in front of him swirl as the lines of the table became an oil-on-water blur once more. Instantly he regretted moving. “I can’t live like this,” he murmured. “I can’t operate, can’t function.”
Balam reached for Kane once more, clamping the six spindly digits of his hand reassuringly over Kane’s own. “Be patient, my friend,” he said. “Let it come to you. The link is by no means perfect. It must find its natural level.”
Kane felt his eyes widen as he looked around him, saw the rainbow swirl coalesce into the fixed image of the cafeteria once more, its stone-veined arches and dirty walls emerging again amid the racing lights. “Is this…?” he began, and stopped.
“What?” Balam asked, encouragingly.
“Is this how you see?”
The tiny trace of a smile crossed Balam’s features for a moment, indulging Kane like a doting grandparent will a child. “You have never questioned how it is that you see,” he said, “in relation to how other creatures see. The honey bee, for instance, sees far into the infrared scale, perceiving flowers far differently to the way a human’s eyes would.”
“And so this…?” Kane began, tamping down the sense of nausea swilling in his gut.
“This is a mental link,” Balam explained. “I’ll fine-tune it as best as I am able, but you cannot expect it to be the same as the sight you would receive from your own eyes. Think of it as literally a different perspective on your world.”
Kane smiled irritably. “That’s cute, but I can’t function like this, Balam. I can’t go into a combat situation if this is what I’m seeing. And you’re in no state to defend us.”
“You came here,” Balam countered, “and you were blind.”
“Partially sighted,” Kane corrected defensively.
“The Annunaki have played tricks on you from the very beginning,” Balam said, ignoring Kane’s response. “They are multidimensional beings, their wars, their grievances, fought across many levels, in many ways. And yet you saw them, these aliens to your world, like you, like actors on a stage dressed in fright masks and monster suits. Humans in everything but appearance. And yet you never questioned this.”
“What are you saying?” Kane asked.
“This is the Godwar, Kane,” Balam told him. “This is how it is fought, not with heat rays and bullets, but with the mind, with perception. Ullikummis wounded you in a way that he hadn’t intended, burying a chunk of his own self in your ocular nerve. That chunk is feeding your senses now, obliterating your vision but putting other things in its place. Special things.”
Listening to the words, Kane nodded, recalling the weird, dreamlike visions he had been having each time he accessed the interphase jump. This fleck of Ullikummis had been playing the stone god’s memories across his ocular nerve like a strip of film, firing those memories directly into the part of his brain that dealt with vision, coloring them with sounds and sensations to make them feel real. The interphaser opened a quantum window, deconstructing and reconstructing a person in a fraction of a second as it sent them blasting between two distant geographic points. Each reconstruction, Kane realized, meant the stone fleck rebonded with him, reengaged and belched its aliens memories into his mind.
“The Annunaki are beautiful beings,” Balam continued, “multifaceted, crossing dimensions you cannot hope to comprehend. Their wars are fought on many planes at once, the nature of their games intersect only tangentially with Earth and its holding pen of stars. What you have seen is only a sliver of what the battle is.”
Kane listened, thinking back to a mythical time in the distant past, a time he had visited with Brigid Baptiste via a memory trap created by the Igigi, the Annunaki’s slaves. While in that functional memory, Kane had seen the Annunaki the way the Igigi perceived them. They had seemed beautiful, just as Balam was telling him, vibrant shining things that appeared so much more real than the world around them, color things amid a landscape of gray. They had seemed every bit as vibrant there as this room was now, seen through Balam’s telepathic link. But when Kane had faced Overlords Enlil, Marduk and the others in his role as Cerberus rebel, the Annunaki had been curiously ordinary. Yes, they were stronger, faster, supremely devious, but they were—what?—the thing that Balam called them. Actors on a stage? People dressed in masks and costumes in some hokey performance designed for children? Had Kane and his companions been taken in by a performance, a show designed to entertain the feeble-minded? Was that all humans were to them—children?
Kane looked around him, studying Balam through the unnerving medium of the mental eye, watching the way the light shone around him as if emanating from his flesh. His scabbed chest wound looked vibrant, bright, the stuff of life. The walls behind him blurred and settled as Kane shifted his vision, doubling and tripling for an instant before the accordion image closed like the shutters at the Cerberus armory. Kane’s stomach lurched again, threatening to upset, for its contents to spill from his mouth. Kane breathed through his nostrils, working past the nausea. Gradually the swirling blast of lights settled, as if his eyes were becoming used to it, as if his brain was adjusting.
“I can track Ninlil,” Balam said, using the child Quav’s formal name for the first time since their meeting here. “She is my daughter now and we are linked—she cannot be hidden from me. But I cannot retrieve her alone. I shall require help.
“Your help, Kane?” he added, this last as a question.
Kane looked at the gray-skinned ambassador of the First Folk and, to his relief, the image held rigid, became something he could comprehend without wanting to vomit. “Find the girl and we’ll find Baptiste,” Kane said. “I feel sure of it.”
Balam nodded, his great bulb of a head inclining heavily atop his scrawny neck. “Are you feeling better? Yourself again?”
Swaying a little in place, Kane pushed himself up from his seat to stand. “This’ll take some getting used to,” he admitted, “but it’s starting to make sense. This is what it’s like, huh? To be you?”
Balam inclined his head delicately to the side in a noncommittal gesture of supplication. “It is what your brain translates,” he observed. “What we see depends largely on that, far more so than any physical ocular organ. Do you understand now?”
Kane nodded. “I’m beginning to,” he said.
As they spoke, Kane became aware of something else moving in the room. His damaged eyes hadn’t picked up the things before, but now, when he looked into the shadows, he could see buds of stone skittering across the walls. Balam was talking about how they could best track Little Quav when Kane pushed himself away from the table, the Sin Eater automatically materializing in his hand.
“What is it, friend Kane?” Balam asked.
“Over there,” Kane said, keeping his voice low as he indicated the wall surround over the cafeteria door.
Balam looked at the thick skin of rock that now covered the plaster. Orange light glowed dimly in thin traceries within that rock, illuminating its surface like a web of veins. And there was something moving across it, three somethings, in fact—each one perfectly camouflaged with the rock, each round and about the size of a baseball. “What are they?” Balam whispered.
“Not seen ’em before,” Kane confirmed, prowling across the room toward the wall in question. “Definitely more of this Ullikummis shit, though, can’t be any doubt about that.”
As he spoke, there came a sound like pressurized air bursting from a canister, and one of the ball-like rock things sprung from the wall. Automatically, Kane took a shot at the rock as it rushed through the air toward him, twin bullets hammering into its foremost point with unerring accuracy. They did nothing to slow or alter its trajectory, and in a second Kane felt the thing strike his left shoulder with the force of a hammer, throwing him backward in a spastic twirl of limbs.
Kane palm-slapped the floor with his open left hand, stumbled back to his feet as the spherical rock rolled away across the canteen floor. A growing sense of trepidation rose in his chest as he watched the rock turn, following a definite path as if alive.
“Kane,” Balam called, “behind you!”
Kane spun, the sense of disorientation with his newfound vision still palpable, catching a confused glimpse of movement as the next rock detached from the wall and surged toward him like something hurled. Kane was ready for it this time, bringing the barrel of his Sin Eater up and using it like a club to bat the thing away. The metal barrel clanged hollowly as it struck the rock, and Kane felt his whole arm shudder with the blow. Knocked aside, the rock flew at the nearest wall, sticking there as if glued.
Kane’s head whipped left and right, checking the floor for the rolling rock and keeping one eye on the wall where the things were emerging like bubbles on a pan of boiling water. With his sight so altered, it was hard to keep track of everything, but Kane dismissed the whirl of color, concentrating on any movements within it. The third rock pulled away from the wall like the others, and Kane watched the way it seemed to elongate like liquid before its strutlike leg kicked off from the wall and tossed the body of the rock toward him.
Kane ducked, letting the launched stone whiz past overhead before turning and blasting it with a burst from his pistol. The bullets carved burrows in the rock’s surface as it streaked across the room and disappeared in the shadows beneath a table.
Then the room fell silent, just the eerie sound of rock scraping against rock emanating distantly from all around.
“Balam?” Kane asked, scanning the walls for movement. “You okay? Anything hit you?”
“Nothing came close,” Balam said from behind him. “Whatever they are, they seem to be attracted to you, not me.”
Kane was tempted to joke that they must be female rocks, but he bit back the words. Grant or Baptiste might have appreciated his gallows humor, but he was pretty sure Balam would deem him unstable to joke at a time like this.
“They’re a trap,” Kane said instead. “Like land mines, left here to prey on the unwary. Ullikummis doesn’t like us, he made a special effort to target Cerberus once he realized the threat we posed.”
“I was here for six days,” Balam reminded him, “and I saw nothing of this sort.”
Kane glared at him. “They’re hot-wired for human DNA, I guess. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen this Ullikummis guy employ something so specific. Rosalia has a stone under her skin that can open stone doors.”