Hell's Maw (17 page)

The other Pretors in the post looked up. They were two women and a man. The man, Pretor de Centina, was older than the others, in his midfifties with a face that showed scarring from a cancer scare he had had two years before. He had been a Pretor for thirty years and was pretty well inured to have seen everything he could have seen on the job and not be stunned. The women, Pretors Ruiz and Bazán, were younger and had less experience between them than de Centina alone. Ruiz had short hair, close-cropped to her head like a sheen of black oil, while Bazán had tied her strawberry blond hair back into a braid that could be slipped neatly under her uniform helmet.

“My, oh, my, what do we have here?” de Centina asked rhetorically as he spied the svelte figure moving
gradually toward the guard post. She moved like liquid flowing, muscles flexing effortlessly as she crossed the empty highway, spinning in slow delight on the third step or the fourth or the fifth.

“They look like refugees,” Bazán opined, plucking her helmet from a hook on the wall of the guard post. “No shoes, no shirts. Maybe they survived something.”

“Survived what?” Ruiz asked. “I haven't heard of anything going on out there.”

“Out there's a big old world, people,” de Centina reminded them all. “Let's not let our guard down just yet.”

Pretor Cadalso checked his blaster before stepping toward the guard station's door. “I'll check it,” he announced. “Find out what their story is.”

Bazán joined him at the door. “I've got your back,” she said.

And so they exited, and walked into the path of a reborn goddess who was perfectly capable of tearing through them like a force of nature.

“May I help you?” Cadalso asked the woman and her entourage, striding over to meet them twenty yards away from the guard post.

The woman, Ereshkigal, fixed him with a look. Her eyes were a pale brown, like caramel, though at their edges they seemed to contain the red of blood. “I'm here to give you something,” she cooed, luscious full lips oozing over every word with each movement of her mouth. “A memory of beauty.”

Pretor Cadalso eyed the woman up and down appreciatively. “And what a memory it is,” he said.

Ereshkigal turned her attention on his partner, the woman called Bazán. “Do you like the things you see with your eyes?” she asked.

Bazán's lips curled in a sarcastic smile. “I'm not as easily swayed as my colleague, ma'am. Even,” she said,
glancing to the woman's shirtless assistants, “when the window dressing is finished so nicely.”

Without warning, Ereshkigal twirled on the spot, gracefully spinning before the two Pretors, twice around. When she had finished she told them in a quiet tone, “Memories of beauty are within you already, locked inside you, held close to your hearts. Release them now, and feel the joy flood your veins.”

* * *

W
ATCHING THROUGH THE
window of the guard post, de Centina shook his head. “What are they? Some kind of dance troupe?”

“They haven't asked for entry yet,” Ruiz noted, watching the performance from over the older man's shoulder. The guard post was here to vet potential entrants to the ville, checking them for threats and also for less obvious things, like disease, that could not be allowed through the gate.

“They're not traveling with anything,” de Centina pointed out. “Just the clothes on their backs, and those just barely.”

“Maybe they got rolled on the way and had their possessions stolen,” Ruiz proposed.

“They don't look like people who've been rolled,” de Centina told her. “They look more like drug types who're high on something. Take it from an old man who's seen it all before.”

The two Pretors watched a moment longer as the woman with the feather train leaned forward, standing on tiptoe and arching her whole body into the move, and beckoned their colleagues closer. Then she spoke to them in a whisper, words that neither de Centina nor Ruiz could hear. The next thing they saw, Cadalso and Bazán staggered back as if they had been shot or stabbed, walking away from the woman in the headdress in a confused
pattern. They looked as if they were standing on the deck of a boat during a fierce storm.

“What's happening out there?” de Centina muttered, grabbing for his protective helmet without bothering to look.

* * *

O
UTSIDE
, E
RESHKIGAL HAD
told the two Pretors the secret words that unlocked the thing inside them, unhinging it from its hiding place and calling it into action. The words were the same as the day she had first discovered them, over six thousand years before.

Pretor Cadalso saw it as a series of great lights, playing before his eyes in a brilliant display like the stars in a clear night sky. They were stars that seemed to swirl and dance, growing ever brighter, ever more intense. He wanted to be closer to those stars, and with each breath he felt them enter his system, budding inside him, clumping together in great chunks of deific brightness. They seemed to be replacing his fleshy organs, turning his insides—all blood and bone and gristle—into something magical, as weightless as helium. He was ascending, the breath of a goddess within him, filling his insides.

Pretor Bazán saw it as a trail of colors, fluttering through the air like a gymnast's ribbon; a streak of paint across her vision. It was just one line but its color was changing along its length as she turned her head to watch, blue replenished by purple replenished by red replenished by orange replenished by yellow—and on and on, a circular spectrum running an infinite, Ouroborus length. She felt that fluttering strip of color encompass and draw her, spinning around her so fast that she could not keep up. She reached for it, not just with her heart but with her breath, expelling everything within her just to try to snag it and draw it close.

To outside eyes—specifically those of Pretors de Centina
and Ruiz—it appeared that the two Pretors were hallucinating, for they were reaching out for things that could not be seen, staggering after them and turning this way and that as they grabbed at the air.

Stepping from the guard post, Pretor de Centina commanded his Devorador de Pecados 9 mm pistol into his hand from its forearm sheath and targeted the woman in the headdress. Behind him, Ruiz brought her own pistol to bear, carefully watching the two dark-skinned men who remained standing impassively to either side of the scantily clad woman.

“Don't move,” de Centina ordered, stepping slowly forward. “Just get your hands in the air where I can see them.”

Ereshkigal simply smiled, a thin-lipped, reptilian smile. In that moment, de Centina thought he saw something of the snake scale about her skin, a slickness and luminescence that was not strictly human.

“Didn't you hear me?” de Centina demanded. “Hands up—right now!”

Beside Ereshkigal, her two shirtless cohorts had their hands behind their backs. In a flash, their hands appeared, flicking up into the air in a heartbeat-fast parody of raising their hands in surrender. De Centina did not even see the flash of metal as the two men moved their hands, launching four throwing discs at him, one from each hand. He felt the discs impact against his chest armor, though, impact and cut through into the flesh beneath.

De Centina's legs gave out from under him, and he collided with the dirt an instant later. He tried to say something as he fell but his vocal cords wouldn't work and his tongue seemed to have swollen in his mouth so that he merely blurted out an animal sound of pain as he flopped backward. There was blood on his chest, seeping into the material where the four throwing discs protruded from their deep cuts into his body.

Ruiz fired without hesitation, pumping the trigger of her blaster and sending two shots in the direction of the two men, targeting their legs in an effort to disable rather than kill, the way she had been trained. The shots rang loud across the desolate plain outside the ville. The first shot was true, drilling into her target's right leg so that he tumbled over himself in a sprawl of limbs. The second should have hit the other man's hip—Ruiz had graduated high in her class for marksmanship—but he stepped into the shot at the last instant, drawing his body low and taking the bullet to the gut instead of the hip. The man's belly burst into a shock of blood, painting the air with red.

Ruiz moved as she blasted again, scrambling over to de Centina's fallen body and dropping to one knee as she sent another shot toward the woman who now stood between her falling colleagues. Time seemed to stand still for Ruiz in that moment, and she watched as the woman in the elaborate headdress seemed to follow the bullet with her eyes as it arrowed toward her. The 9 mm slug was rocketing through the air on a collision course with her right hip. The woman moved her right arm without effort, cutting across the bullet's path as it was about to strike her. Ruiz watched in horror as the bullet seemed to go hurtling away, glinting in the sunlight. The strangely garbed woman was still moving, her arm finishing its sweeping arc where she had—
what?
—cut the bullet from the air? No, that wasn't it, Ruiz could see the bruise budding on the side of her hand where the bullet had hit before being flicked away.

The woman strode across the hot tarmac, the smile disappearing from her ruby lips as she marched toward Ruiz. As she reached her, she stretched out her hands, grasping for the Pretor's head even as Ruiz tried to back away, squeezing her blaster's trigger again. Her shots struck the woman in the side and just below her breast, struck
and ricocheted away as if they had hit armor plate. Ruiz wondered, in that shocking instant, just what the woman's flesh was made from. Then the mysterious woman's hands were locked against Ruiz's temples, pressing hard until she had raised her from her knees up to her feet. Then she dragged the female Pretor forward, so that the toes of Ruiz's standard-issue boots slipped along the tarmac. Ruiz was trapped somehow, unable to free herself or to really move.

Seconds.

She wanted to shoot the woman again, but the angle was wrong. She couldn't seem to get the blaster up.

Holding the hapless Pretor, Ereshkigal leaned close and spoke, her words as light and warm as the Spanish sirocco.

“Círculo alrededor del cuerpo,

Guarda silencio a moverse más.

Gire vida lejos,

Gire aliento.

Abrazo fauces del infierno.”

Ruiz felt an uncanny pressure in her chest at that, like the flutter of butterflies in the earliest stages of love. It was beautiful and terrifying and curiously addictive all at once. The words, too, were beautiful, though they had already passed out of her mind. She felt the release of the struggle inside her, the struggle she had never really realized she was in, the struggle between living and just giving up.

Ruiz shifted the gun in her hand, turning it fully 180 degrees until it pressed against her own flank, twisting her wrist until she had the muzzle pushed between her second and third ribs. Hearing the whispered words of Ereshkigal, Ruiz gave up, seeing now how wrong she had been to try to live, to cling to something so fleeting and so very full of pain. She pulled the trigger, sending a continuous burst of fire into her own chest from
point-blank range, glorying as it ripped through the armor of her uniform and into her flesh.

Ereshkigal let go of the dead Pretor, watching in satisfaction as the woman slumped to the road, her blaster silenced in an instant. She remembered in those moments, the first time she had discovered this secret, the way to kill an apekin human, millennia ago.

Her two assistants—Namtar and the Edimmu called Tsanti—were sprawled on the road before Ereshkigal. As she approached, Namtar, whose body was afflicted with the black marks of the scarabae sickness and who had taken the blast to his leg, lifted himself up, moving to a standing position in an inhuman shift of muscles beneath flesh. The wound to his right leg showed where his pants had torn open. The wound did not bleed—instead it looked like a dent against metal, the skin puckered inward where the bullet had struck. He took a hesitant step forward, testing the leg and confirming he could still walk on it. Then he fell to his knees before Ereshkigal, offering himself to her.

Ereshkigal moved past him, standing over the prone form of the Edimmu Tsanti. Tsanti lay still, the bloody wound of his gut like the aftermath of surgery gone wrong, struts of bone and gobs of flesh mixed in the redness of the wound. The Edimmu were ghosts come to haunt the Earth, but they could still die.

Ereshkigal bent down, running her hands down her bare legs until they reached her ankles, holding them there and bringing her head almost in line with the dead Edimmu's. Then she formed the words of the age-old formula and whispered it into Tsanti's ear before rising and stepping back.

Beside Ereshkigal, the Edimmu called Tsanti opened his eyes, two yellow-white, featureless orbs, and drew in a breath. He had come back to life, the wound in his belly
dried and crusting over with scabs, his muscles reknitting sufficiently to let him function. Still on the ground, he bowed his head in appreciation of his mistress's favor, touching his forehead once to the hot tarmac before rising to his feet. She had turned away now to face the guard post and the wall behind it. Tsanti rose, moving awkwardly as he adjusted to the new growth of muscle around the dried wound.

Ereshkigal led the way toward the guard post through which she would enter the city of Zaragoza. Namtar and the Edimmu took up their places beside her, striding purposely along the road.

All around them, the figures of the once-dead Pretors began to rise, joining the mismatched group as they prepared to enter the city.

Nippur, Mesopotamia, Circa forty-fifth century BC

Ereshkigal was a mathematician.

She was a member of the Annunaki, the race of reptilian creatures who had arrived on Earth during humankind's prehistory, and who now lived liked gods, equally worshipped and feared by the local population of human apekin. Ereshkigal was tall and reedy, over six feet in height with a crest of spines that towered another eight inches above her head. Slender of form but muscular as was in the nature of all Annunaki, her pale skin looked almost white in the sunlight, ghostly and scaled in the manner of a snake's hide. She had eyes the color of molten caramel, black iris slits running in thick vertical lines down each eye like the eyes of a lizard.