Her second realization was that her destruction was not a part of their designated task. She didn’t doubt Fenrior had instructed Gallowglass to dispose of her without hesitation if she presented any kind of obstacle, but these were not her own specific assassins. If they had meant to finish her, they would have done it by now. Renquist was their target, and that’s why they were standing in her drawing room, all stink and broad shoulders, waiting for him like gormless oafs. The knowledge was a gift of instant power. She took the moment to light a cigarette and then turned and faced the invaders. “Should I offer you all a drink or something?”
The Highlanders looked for direction to Gallowglass, but he shook his head. “We’re fine as we are, Mistress Dashwood.”
“Then perhaps I could suggest a more practical offer?”
“I’m one who favors practicality.”
“How would you respond, Gallowglass, if I were to offer you Renquist?”
“Master Renquist is hardly yorn t’ offer, mistress.”
“He could be taken with far greater ease if you had my cooperation.”
“And wha’ might ye be wantin’ in return, lassie?”
“I asked you not to call me lassie.”
“But y’r th’ one who’s trying t’ save her head.”
“All I want is my companions and me left in peace.”
Gallowglass thought about this, taking his time; he had no reason to hurry. “It’s certainly a practical solution, but wi’out much honor.”
“The superior combatant is the one who regards honor as dictated by circumstance.”
“Did th’ wee Chinagirl teach ye that?”
“She did, as a matter of fact.”
Destry was the first to think of it. “Does anyone have a sense of time?”
Renquist had been so absorbed, first with the momentous discovery, and then explaining just how momentous
it was to Marieko and Destry, that he had lost touch with whole idea of time passing. The dousing in the flood of psychic energy had thrown a number of his unconscious abilities out of harmony. “I have to admit I don’t have a clue.”
Marieko also shook her head, apparently shocked at her lapse. “I, too, am at a loss.”
Destry took the initiative. “I had better go back up the passageway and take a look at the sky.”
The last thing Renquist wanted was to leave the place. “Even if the sun was to rise, we’d be safe here.”
Marieko shuddered. “I don’t believe I’d want to stay the day here.”
“And there’s Campion’s people.”
Renquist sighed. They were right. “Campion’s people? Yes, to dispose of them would be inconvenient, messy, and very noticeable.”
Destry had no time for wishing or debate. She was a female of action. “You two stay where you are. I’ll be right back.”
She ducked into the dark mouth of the entry passage. Renquist and Marieko heard her riding boots retreating down its rubble-strewn length.
“Did you ever see one of the Urshu?” Marieko tried to make the question as offhand as possible, but Renquist knew she was attempting to visualize what was inside the cocoon. She was as excited as he was about the discovery, but also a little afraid.
“Never one I recognized as such, although, like I said, they’re reputed to have the power of absolute disguise.”
“And in dreams? You can’t tell me your DNA dreams don’t go back to the Original Beings. I know better than that, now, don’t I?”
For a long time, the furthest Renquist had been able to venture back in a DNA dream had been to the time know as the Flight. He opened his memory to Marieko, showing how he had occupied bodies of those Original Beings who had survived the Nephilim eradication.
Through their eyes he showed her the refugees attempting to escape after the sunbomb attack on Baalbeck. He let her enter their primitive minds as they struggled across white burning sand, already subject to the weakening effect of direct sunlight. She went to ground with them as the Nephilim saucers silently passed overhead, raking the desert with their hunter-seeker deathrays, and she felt their hate-filled fury and black desperation at their Nephilim masters who had created them only to then decide to wipe them out as defective. He also showed her how, much later, they had been accepted as gods by the clusters of humans in the upper valleys of the Indus, who had paid them tribute in blood.
“For a long time, even with the help of Dietrich, my old mentor, I found myself unable to penetrate any further into our collective past. I was starting to believe some kind of barrier existed, preventing me from reaching any vision of how it was when the Nephilim walked the Earth. It was only recently that I ever found myself in a DNA vision of the time before the uprising, and that came only when I badly needed it.”
“When you confronted Cthulhu?”
Renquist laughed. Marieko’s eagerness to experience the past had a seductive charm all of its own. “I didn’t confront Cthulhu. No one confronts Cthulhu, not even a nosferatu. I merely discouraged a very small part of him from entering this dimension, and even that wasn’t totally successful. A darklost called Philipa De Reske is somewhere in this world with a tiny piece of the living Cthulhu preserved in the disembodied head of her exhusband’s mistress. I fear I have not seen the last of her.”
“You live a complicated life, Victor-san.”
“Let me show you.”
Again he opened his mind, this time giving a first panorama of Great Nephilim Spaceport of Baalbeck in all its glory. He showed her the obelisks and trilithons, the central Baalbeck landing ziggurat. The relentless sun beat down on the massive, precision-hewn granite
power-stones that were the primary construction material, reflecting from their marble, titanium, and gold facings. Flags and banners, with strange devices and unreadable designs, streamed and fluttered in the breeze, while imposing gushers of brightly colored vapor jetted up from vents in the lower levels of the ziggurat, and huge iron wind chimes clashed and clanged. Overhead, the perfect blue sky was alive with a formidable air show that began with a flight of five white disks maintaining a perfect V. As they approached the airspace over the landing ziggurat, they finally broke formation and spread out, positioning themselves like the five points of an extended stylized star. Once the disks were in position, flotillas of vimanas rose from the ground and clustered around them like schools of lesser aerial fish. Other aircraft, flying too high to be seen in detail, inscribed white cross-hatchings of contrails. At the climax of the display, a disturbance started in the sky itself. Spiral clouds began to form where no clouds had been before, with flashes of shuddering, violet and white static electricity at their epicenter. As the ancient air show reached this meteorological climax, the humans fully prostrated themselves, knees bent, arms spread, fearful faces pressed to the ground. The moment for which they had all been assembled was close at hand. What could only be a space vehicle appeared in the center of the whirling celestial vortex.
“That was Baalbeck?” Marieko’s voice was strained, as though a form of ecstasy had been contained in the vision.
“That was Baalbeck.”
“And you were contained in the mind of an Original Being?”
“He was very different to the ones in the Flight—arrogant, warrior proud, self-assured, and contemptuous of his creators—but he followed a distinct if unregimented structure. I could also feel the restless resentment that would eventually erupt in that doomed uprising.”
In the dream, Renquist’s host had stood, eyes heavily hooded against the glare, awaiting the arrival of the God King Marduk Ra from the Great Orbiting Mothership. He’d watched the craft bearing Marduk Ra in the final stages of its descent. It had dropped slowly and ponderously on a cushion of energy only visible as a violent shimmer in the air. It required no burning jets or flaming, smoking retro rockets either to impress or to slow its drop down the gravity well. The humans were already on their knees in worshipful abasement. In addition to the Original Beings and the humans, other things were also present in the highly stratified and segregated throng. Small grey bio-entities, humanoid but hardly human, scarcely more than three feet tall, with overlarge infantile heads and huge black eyes, milled around in another section of the landing area, chattering in highpitched voices, beyond the range of human hearing but fully audible to the Original Beings. On a raised platform, beneath the largest of the trilithons, the Urshu were gathered—the courtiers—and the primary target of the Original Beings’ resentment. The Urshu were much closer to human in form, but as tall as the Original Beings and dazzling in the magnificence of their shining robes and tall gold headpieces. They seemed to be an exquisite and wholly complete summation of how the groveling men and women might have imagined a tribe of glorious demigods, something that had made Renquist reluctant to accept them completely for what they appeared to be.
“The problem with this kind of dream perception is seeing everything through the eyes and, indirectly, the subjective prejudices and misconceptions of the host.”
“So you think the Urshu can be anything they want to be?”
“That would seem to be the indication of both dream and history.”
“And if the cocoon splits, what will emerge?”
“I’d be hard-pressed to imagine.”
Destry crawled from the tunnel. “First, you’d better imagine this. We’ve lingered longer than was healthy.”
“What?”
“If we get out of here right now, we might just make it back to the Priory before the dawn fries us.”
“It’s that late?”
“It’s that late.”
Renquist looked around helplessly. So much remained to examine and admire. He knew how the humans Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon must have felt when they entered the tomb of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings, except, in their case, they didn’t have the added excitement of knowing Tut might very well wake and start walking around before very long. “I hate to leave it all for Campion. He shouldn’t so much as know about this. No human should.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“If it wasn’t for the sun—”
“How many of our kind have said that?”
“I’m wondering”—he gestured to the cocoon—“if we should take it with us. The weight would be no problem.”
“But maneuvering it down that low passage would take about twice as much time as we have. Not to mention the problems those damned spikes could cause.”
“You’re right.”
Marieko also agreed with Destry. “I shudder to think what might happen if we cracked it.”
“Or stabbed ourselves with one of the spines.”
Renquist was hard-pressed to control the frustration that threatened to overwhelm him. “The first thing Campion will do is crack it open.”
Marieko shook her head. “He won’t do that.”
“You don’t think so?”
“I know he won’t. I’ve been inside his mind. He’s afraid of this place already. The mica fragment set him off balance. All this, as they used to say, will blow his mind. I guarantee he’ll be extremely circumspect. He’ll
want to keep it secret while he searches vainly for an acceptable theory.”
Renquist was adamant. “We must return at sunset and take the cocoon out of here.”
Destry was now more nervous than impatient. “If we agree to that, can we get out of here?”
“Yes, we have to. We can’t fight the sun.”
Had Gallowglass’s character made him prone to pacing, he would have paced. It didn’t, however. He was the kind to remain motionless except when actually doing something. He was also the kind who asked questions and expected them to be answered. Thus, he glared balefully at Columbine. “Ha’ ye been deceiving me, woman?”
“Don’t be a fool, I’ve too much to lose.”
The skeletal Highlander’s stress was compounded by having the men under him look on as he waited, so far fruitlessly, for other denizens of Ravenkeep to return. “So where are Master Renquist an’ y’ two pretty cohabitants?”
Columbine shifted constantly between fear and fury. “You think I’m not wondering that myself?”
“They couldna’ ha’ gone t’ some other place?”
The pointless interrogation didn’t help. “They’d have no reason to.”
“Maybe ye warned them?”
“You know I haven’t done that. You’ve been watching me like a hawk.”
“Aye, tha’ I have.”
“So?”
“So if they din’a come rollin’ up th’ drive i’ a matter o’ minutes, they’re fried i’ th’ sun. No mistake about tha’.”
Columbine could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t be stating the obvious, so she simply kept quiet. Gallowglass, on the other hand, needed to talk. Hadn’t he heard the Scots were supposed to be taciturn? “M’ lord no
ordered me t’ bring back Master Renquist’s ashes. He wanted him up an’ walkin’.”
“I expect Master Renquist would also prefer to be up and walking.”
Marieko drove fast, foot hard down on the gas pedal, and talked with a clipped rapidity. The Range Rover bounced over open hillside, the sky at the eastern horizon showed a faint paling, and the three nosferatu were gripped by an all-pervading urgency, not to say anxiety. “Are you certain we need to remove the cocoon?”