Stargate SG-1: Trial by Fire: SG1-1 (35 page)

"Hang on, goddammit! If you let go, I swear I'll come after you
and break your other nose."

Silhouetted by the black and red glare beneath, an arm flew up,
fingers locking with Jack's at last.

Dr. Kelly relieved a passing acolyte of his torch, and it proved a
very useful weapon. She brandished it at two Temple Guards and
some bewildered Tyreans and finally managed to escape from the
maelstrom that funnelled towards the archway.

Good God! They'd dragged her halfway across the courtyard.

As soon as this glowy-eyed Baal impersonator had fallen over,
people had started to panic, scared witless of the divine retribution.
Entirely absurd of course. Proper deities didn't end up looking like
hedgehogs when confronted with a few arrows. At the most, the
retribution could have amounted to a raised forefinger. Naughtynaughty, children!

But he hadn't even tried that, had he? Those ring thingies had whisked him and his remaining minions out of harm's way.
Pathetic!

She stumbled back from the throng and took stock, not because
she necessarily would have known what to make of things, but
because she had a vague notion that this was what one did in these
circumstances. Across the teeming multitudes she saw the Carter
girl and the alien and some of the archers rappel into the courtyard
and disappear under the colonnade. Probably to evacuate the
children. The fighting had more or less ceased now. The Tyrean
combatants looked numb, wounded, or plain dead. Their Roman
- Phrygian - counterparts were more proactive and disarmed them
where they found them. Quite courteously, though.

"Lady Siobhan!" Ayzebel, over on the other side of the pits,
semaphoring wildly. What now?

Then Kelly saw them. Several members of the Synod had crept
from the sanctuary and were beginning to close the huge bronze
gates.

"Oh no, you don't!" She couldn't believe it. After all this, they
still were trying to prevent her from getting inside.

Less than twenty yards away from her the pigheaded Irish and
Jackson had finished hauling that Roman lad to safety and were
dusting him off. Well, that could wait, couldn't it?

She trotted over as fast as she could. "Stop playing silly-buggers,
Jackson! I need a hand!"

"Vow I know what I've been missing..." muttered O'Neill,
glancing up briefly. Earlier on he'd had that haunted, lifeless look
she recalled, but he seemed in fine fettle now - if rather dirty.
"Daniel, go with the Professor and put a foot in that door. Mind
your toes!"

With Kelly puffing along in his wake, Jackson sprinted around
the edge of the pit and straight for the closing gates. They arrived
at the same time as Ayzebel and her cohorts.

The panels were still gaping, hands reaching from within to
draw them shut completely. Kelly decided that this was precisely
what the Lord had created torches for. A couple of swipes, two
murderous howls, and the hands jerked back. Ayzebel's women
prised the panels apart and swung the gate open again. Inside, dwarfed by that hateful golden bull, huddled eight irate priests; two
sucking their fingers. A ninth was injured in a very delicate part of
his body and lay face-down on the floor. They were one High Priest
short. Where had he got to?

"How dare you desecrate this sanctuary!" One of the eight, that
dyspeptic misery, Fuano, stepped forward. "You are not permitted
in the Lord Meleq's presence!"

Several women flinched, decades of indoctrination threatening
to diffuse adrenaline and outrage. But they held their ground. Good
for them.

"Poppycock!" snorted Kelly. "From what I saw out there, I'd
say it's the other way round!"

"Be silent, woman! Be silent and leave, or bring down the wrath
of Meleq upon yourselfl"

"Oh shut up!"

Kelly pushed him aside. The other priests made way voluntarily,
and she slowly approached the idol, took in the ramp, the hatch, the
heat radiating from it. Jackson had been right, in every detail. She
really resented that about him.

"Initiation?" More livid than she'd ever been in her life, Kelly
wheeled around. "Initiation to what? Death? How long does it take
for a child to -"

A piercing, keening noise stopped her. Past the priest she saw
the faces of mothers, pale and stricken with shock. Some of them
were crying. Most of them had had sons `initiated'.

"Your sons entered the service of the Lord Meleq through his
likeness." Having spotted his chance, Fuano used it. "Would you
rather believe the heretics? It is they who wish to cause you pain."

"Oh yeah?" Jackson ambled over to one of the countless niches
in the wall and picked up the urn inside. "Then how do you explain
this, Fuano?"

"Set it down!" the priest shrieked. "Touching them is forbidden!
They are sacred!"

"Yeah. I bet they are..."

The lid came off, and Jackson gently turned the urn upside
down. Its contents whispered to the floor, raining into a downy
grey heap on white tiles. Then something more substantial fell out, scaring up a small plume of ashes as it landed. A stone amulet, fireblackened but whole.

From among the women's keening rose a single, shrill wail.

Ayzebel crouched and picked up the small piece of stone. "It is
a talisman. Sophonisba gave it to her son when he was chosen. He
was five years old... Whom would you have us believe now, Lord
Priest?"

At that moment a massive explosion rocked the tower and made
the idol tremble. Quite a fitting simile, Dr. Kelly thought. Jackson
seemed to disagree. He went a little green around the gills.

"Get out! All of you! You've got to go now!"

Another brilliant shaft of light lanced through the night sky and
slammed into the upper reaches of the tower, scattering chunks of
stone and mortar over the courtyard. Thank God it was mostly clear
by now! She should have anticipated this as soon as she'd seen the
ring transporter. Where there's rings, there's a mothership (or at the
very least a teltac), and where there's a ship, there's artillery.

Sam was pushing upstream against a flow of terrified stragglers
who shoved and jostled through the archway. Among the fugitives
she spotted Teal'c and Flavius, between them the last of the
children.

"Don't stay on the road, Teal'c! Make for the forest," she yelled
over groans and screams. "The other kids are waiting for you
there."

"Where is O'Neill?" Teal'c hollered back.

"Downstairs to get the other prisoners out. He and Tertius found
Hamilgart. He's showing them the way."

"And Daniel Jackson?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out!"

At last the bottleneck spat her out into the courtyard and to a
sight that made her gasp with relief. They'd made it. Kelly and
Ayzebel and the rest of the women came zigzagging around debris
and bodies, shooed on by Daniel. With them were one priest
under his own steam and a pair of Guards carrying another who
complained loudly and incessantly. Tendao, by the -

An energy beam went wide and detonated somewhere in the hills north of the temple. The Stargate! If they hit the `gate... If
they hit the `gate there'd be nothing anyone could do, it was as
simple as that.

"Sorry it took so long," Daniel panted. "The priests didn't want
to come. Where's Jack?"

"I'm going to get him. See you outside."

"Sam -

"Move!"

He'd seen it the same moment as she. The next blast was
incoming, and its trajectory didn't look like it'd miss this time.
Daniel and his group piled into the archway at a dead run. Sam
shot under the arcade and leaped into a cell, hoping the walls would
hold. The discharge smashed into one of the pits, sending globs of
lava flying like missiles. Moments after the explosions had died
down, she cautiously ventured outside. Where the pits had been
gaped a crater. The ground was littered with lumps of molten stone,
simmering angrily.

Now or never. The stairs to the dungeon were a hundred meters
away, straight across the yard.

Twenty seconds later, she raced down the steps and into a dim
corridor lit by two torches. Somewhere at the back echoed voices
and footsteps, growing louder, and then a shadowy figure tore
around the comer and cantered up the hallway.

"Colonel!"

He skidded to a stop. "Carter! Why the hell didn't you clear
out?"

"Somebody had to make sure you didn't go AWOL again," she
said and added, "Sir."

"AWOL? Major, I -" His nose crinkled. "Carter, no offense, but
you stink!"

"Guano, sir."

"That's one of the priests, right?"

"Bird doo." Sam tried to keep a straight face. "And with all due
respect, sir, so do you."

The ground rocked with another impact, and they both groped
the walls for support.

"Is it just me, or is Baal pissed?"

A small grin tugged at the corners of his mouth, like he'd won
some kind of private victory, and perhaps he had. She'd seen what
had happened when Baal went down.

"Sounds pissed to me." She smiled back at him.

"Good. Let's get them out of here."

They waited until a line of thirty-odd prisoners, men and women
had filed up the stairs. Last among them were Tertius and a bear
of a man who carried an old warrior in his arms. Behind them
skittered Hamilgart, dusty and confused and hopping with panic
when another blast struck the buildings above.

"Those are the last ones," he rasped. "We should make haste."

"Ya think?"

Dawn was breaking, all rosy-gray skies and rambunctious birds.
He'd come full circle. Kinda...

By the time they'd made it into the courtyard, an entire section
of the building had collapsed over the archway. Hamilgart had led
them out through the hidden side door. That would be gone too.
The bombardment had continued until the temple was reduced to
rubble. Why Baal had stopped there was anybody's guess, but the
bastard probably had other plans for the city. Yeah, well. They'd
see about that.

One hand propped on a rock furry with moss, Jack bent over the
well and splashed water in his face. In lieu of sleep, coffee, and a
shave. Then he flopped into the grass, leaning back against more
moss-gloved rocks, and watched normality reassert itself.

SG-1, Kelly, and a mixed bag of escapees had ended up in the
same glade where he'd caught Miss Marple one fine night, oh,
about two decades ago. Now she was giving Caius the third degree
on Mithraic initiation rites and getting nowhere if her scowl was
anything to go by. Across the clearing, Beefcake the Blushing Bride
was performing magician's tricks for Luli. Pulling coins out of the
kids ears, that sort of thing. Next to them sat the busty Phrygian
lady with the poppy potion, bursting into applause at every trick.
Hamilgart was holding Ayzebel's hand, which didn't stop him from
earnestly discussing God knew what with Flavius.

Maybe a new normality. Goggle-Eyes the Priest had suffered an attack of conscience. Jack wasn't so sure about the old guy, Tendao.
Likely as not he'd suffered nothing more than pain in the ass. But
both had volunteered to set the Tyreans straight. No more Meleq or
Moloch or Baal. No more child sacrifices. No more Synod. Tertius
would keep an eye on things, and time would tell.

"We should like to help them." Speak of the devil... Somehow
Tertius had managed to sneak up on him and dropped cross-legged
on the ground. "But it will be difficult. The Tyreans are reluctant
to trust us."

Dipping his fingers into the clear, cold water of the well, Jack
grinned. "How about chucking them into a freezing river and wait
till they do?"

"We didn't... how did you say?... chuck you into the river. You
jumped."

"You did too."

"Yes... Yes, I did." Tertius cocked his head. "You could have
killed him, Deodatus."

"I know. He wasn't worth it. If I'd let a good man die for the
sake of killing him, he'd have won."

Jack's team came drifting across the clearing, packed up and
ready to go. They'd extracted some very enlightening bits of
information from a crew of rattled Temple Guards. Phrygian piracy,
Colonel O'Neill's foot! He should have seen it, really... and he
wished he'd got his hands on that son of a bitch, Kandaulo.

Tertius studied him for a moment, read the signs. "You're
leaving."

"Yeah."

"Desiderabo, tribune."

"I'll come back to visit... check on your nose and see how
you're doing with the Tyreans."

"Is that a possibility or a probability?"

"It's a fact. Trust me."

"I do."

With a brief nod, Tertius scrambled to his feet and went in
search of lost Tyrean sheep. Teal'c stared after him and gave a nod
of his own. Then he turned and gravely regarded his friend and
commander.

"O'Neill, we have discussed the issue and arrived at a
decision."

Issue? Decision?

Carter and Daniel were no help. Usually you could tell with at
least one of them. This time their faces were nearly as impassive as
Teal'c's, which basically meant he didn't wanna hear it.

"What?"

"You've got the most experience, Jack."

Dr. Daniel Jackson bowing to Jack O'Neill's expertise? Without
a prior exchange of insults? This was bad. Very bad.

Carter pointed across the glade. "You go and get her, sir.
Please..."

Jack connected the dots. Carter's very grubby finger pointed at
Kelly. Okay, so he had intended to grovel, but there was a limit.

"Uh-uh. No way! I'm... I'm convalescent."

"Enjoy, sir."

On cue, they performed a slightly hasty turn and hared off in the
direction of the road.

"Thanks a bunch!"