Tale of the Thunderbolt (24 page)

“I do feed, off vital aura, as you call it. Though you might say I just wet my lips, rather than drinking great drafts as my cousins do.”

“You kill only once a month, I imagine. I'll write the Vatican and nominate you for sainthood.”

“Your letter would be laughed at. There is still a powerful figure at Saint Peter's, true, but he comes from Kur, and his cardinals are to be feared. I will show you how I feed. No one dies. No one is hurt. I shall give you a tour, starting with the Door to Kur. Then you'll see me feed.”

Valentine took his hands from his weapons. “You have me curious. ‘Curiosity killed the cat' is another saying we have up North, though I hope it won't prove out today.”

 

A pair of Haitian servants — “Voudou priests,” Victo whispered in his ear — emerged at a wave of Papa Legba's hand. One had a small chair, like something a child might be carried in, on his back. The Kurian slid into it and crossed a seat belt across his chest.

“I have a litter for going outside, but this works better on some of the stairs, as you will see.”

The priests led the way, through narrow corridors and down shoulder-width stairs. Valentine's sensitive nose noticed a change in the quality of the air, and he knew himself to be underground. The priests lit and took up oil lamps. They came to a wider corridor. A heavy door stood at the end, and Valentine startled when he saw two pinched-looking Reapers slumbering in alcoves to either side. The skin was stretched tight over their bony faces, and lips were rolled back from black pointed teeth.

“They sleep,” the old Kurian said. “Have no fear.”

Valentine found his heart beating in the vicinity of his Adam's apple as he passed the motionless robed figures. If they came around, they would make a quick end of him and Victo.

“I wake them once or twice a month, when sacrifices of goats and cattle are brought to Baron Samedi,” Legba said in English, winking at Valentine. “I'm not the only one using that convenient charade. I would suspect there are a dozen or so Baron Samedis on the other side of the island, though the ceremonies may be a little more gruesome. Religion is useful. Don't think it applies just to ignorant Haitians. When we took your country in the days of your father and grandfathers, many of my cousins appeared as Jesus, and his supplicants were taken to Rapture in the embrace of the avatars. Dressed in white they look like tall, thin angels, and their serene eyes held many a Christian spellbound.”

Beyond the doors was a well-room, less finished than the rest of the fortress, built around a pit, perhaps two and a half meters across. The stones lining the walls were not cut and shaped, but irregular, larger at the bottom and growing smaller as they neared the curved ceiling. The priests lit two more torches standing in brackets, and the room quickly filled with an oily reek. The Kurian slid off his chair-backpack. Thanks to the torchlight, Valentine could see that the wall stones formed a vaguely unsettling mosaic of light and dark rock, rather like tentacles reaching from the dark well.

“That leads to what is purportedly a cistern, Valentine. Care to climb down?”

Valentine looked down the granite-walled well. A series of metal rungs descended into the bottom. Only a single row of bricks acted as a warning of the depths beneath. Valentine's sharp eyes picked out a bottom lit by a dim red glow. He looked at Victo. The spy shrugged, wide-eyed — and kept clear of the pit.

Valentine felt a curious pull from the depths. “Why not? I've always wanted to see one of these Doors.”

“If you hear anything on the way down, or while you are there, climb up quickly,” Legba advised

“You can count on it.”

Suppressing a shudder, Valentine clambered down the ancient metal rungs, testing each with a foot before resting his full weight on it. As he neared the bottom of the cistern, he felt it grow a good deal warmer.
Appropriate enough for a descent into hell.
The rungs gave way to handholds carved into the stone, placed closer together than the rungs on a regular ladder. Feeling for the holes with his feet, he descended until he stood inside the cistern.

Clammy sweat coursed down his back, but its source was not the heat. He loosened the machete in the sheath strapped to his thigh and touched the automatic at his hip. Three rings of characters resembling Chinese ideograms surrounded him, melted into the rock and lit from within. Curious, he probed one with his foot. His eyes adjusted, and he peered at the walls. Several tunnels, also circled with the ideograms, emptied into the room, the letters glowed red, like the heating coils on an electric burner. He walked over to one and looked more closely. It gave off no heat, and reminded him of an old present from the Lifeweaver who oversaw his training as a Cat. He walked back to the ladder and looked up.

“There are different doors down here. Do they all go to Kur?” he whispered up the shaft.

“In a way, Valentine. You're looking at me from Kur itself. The gate is in the middle of the well.”

With two hands and two feet again on the ladder, Valentine looked around. “You must be joking. How can that be? I didn't feel anything when I descended. It just got warmer.”

“The Doors work just like that. They are literally doors, joining one world to another. When you pass from a dining room to a kitchen, you do not feel anything save the heat of the stove. You haven't crossed thousands of light-years, you've just gone a few feet. I'm not a scientist who can explain it, but two pieces of space have been joined like a button joins two pieces of material in a garment.”

Valentine sniffed the air, tasted it. It seemed drier than the air of Haiti, and it had a metallic tang like a blacksmith's shop when the forge is working. A whisper sounded from deep within one of the tunnels, and he heard a dry scrape like a snake shedding its skin on a rock. Valentine heard the shuffling gait grow nearer. He did not bother with a last look around, and shot up the ladder. A sudden, not-so-irrational fear of things reaching for him, grabbing him to pull him away from Earth forever spurred him in his climb. He sprang from the mouth of the well.

He was trembling.

“I thought I might skip the grand tour for now. Just out of curiosity, what does come up that ladder?”

“No one for thirty or more of your years, Valentine. And before that for a long march of years, much more disappeared down it than came back up. Remember, there were hungry minds on Kur for centuries before we seized your planet.”

Valentine's imagination, always too eager to supply visions at the wrong moment, visited him with images of bound Haitians being thrown down the well to blood-smeared shapes below. The torchlight's dancing shadows turned to a magic-lantern show of human souls in torment.

Valentine's eyes met the Kurian's, and he felt that sinking sensation again, not unpleasant this time, for it calmed his pounding heart.

“You're a sensitive man, young Valentine,” the Kurian observed. “What leaps your mind makes.”

“I've seen enough,” he said, sniffing at the substance clinging to his clothing. It smelled like flour. The procession capped the torches and took up lanterns and the aged Kurian and left the well-room. From his seat on the bearer's back, the Kurian smiled at Valentine's relief.

“We leave the Citadelle tomorrow morning, and I shall take you to my true home, the palace ruins. I invite you to share my hospitality under these austere roofs, but somehow I think you will prefer to sleep outside the walls tonight.”

“You read my mind,” Valentine said.

“What I could. Your father was — what is the expression — an ‘open book.' You keep more of yourself under lock and key. Afraid of what's in there?”

Valentine backed out of the room before the Kurian could say more.

 

They strung mosquito netting between wrecked trucks. Valentine and Ahn-Kha bedded down inside a defunct taptap, still brightly painted where the encroaching rust had not yet touched. Faces, slogans, depictions of food, and animals adorned the old shell.

Ahn-Kha gnawed on the leg of something Valentine guessed to be a dog.

“My David, you saw a Door?”

“Yes.”

“My father told me they were simple-looking things. Just an arch of stone, no different from the gate we used to go into the courtyard.”

“This one was in a well. It couldn't have been one of the original Doors of the Interworld Tree — those were supposed to be huge. They were built by the race that came before the Lifeweavers.”

“I did not know this. I thought the Kurians built the network between worlds.”

“Yes, but it's built on an older one, or they learned how to do it from an older race. Some kind of creatures made out of pure energy. The man who told me about it called them the Pre-Entities. They go back hundreds of millions of years. They were the original beings that existed on vital aura. They left behind their science when they finally died out, and the Lifeweavers found it. There was some kind of schism, and a bunch of Lifeweavers on a planet called Kur learned how to live off vital auras, becoming vampires, in effect.”

“This word,
Lifeweavers.
In my tongue, they were called the ‘prime movers,' I think it would be in English. Some of them use you, yes?”

“Help us.”

“And the Gray Ones and other creatures who fight you, are they being ‘helped' by the Kur?”

“Okay, use us. Change us even. You've heard people say they bred the Grogs. Maybe they did the same with us. Once a Lifeweaver told me that my species ‘exceeded their expectations. ' It makes me wonder. Lately I've felt like a pawn in a game of chess, but I can't see the rest of the board.”

“Paw in chest?”

“A pawn. Chess — an old strategy game. Remember the Big Man's office in Omaha? You've seen the board. Eight squares by eight squares. The pieces are figures meant to represent different medieval icons. They move into an opposing piece's square, and it is removed from the game. The pieces are supposed to be kings and queens and knights and things. The pawns, well, they're the — ”

“Cannon fodder,” Ahn-Kha said, ears dancing, as they tended to do when he was pleased with himself.

“Yes. They tend to get taken off the board by the more powerful pieces.”

Ahn-Kha crunched the bone between his teeth, like a ruminant with its cud. “Tell me, my David. In chess, can a pawn kill an enemy king?”

“Yes.”

“Then be that pawn.”

 

The next day, Valentine's party grew. A throng of voudou priests, porters, guerrillas, Grogs, and Valentine all shared a breakfast of rice porridge, ladled into wooden bowls from a larger pot. The unknown chef added texture by throwing in chunks of sweet potato, making three straight days he'd eaten it in one form or another. He had already grown tired of the endless parade of sweet potatoes and rice.

Papa Legba bobbed out the gate in a litter carried by four strong porter-priests. It reminded Valentine of pictures he had seen of Oriental monarchs being toted around in curtain-draped chairs. They left the walls of the massive Citadelle atop its mountain and made the descent northward on the landslide-broken road.

Valentine watched the sweating, straining back muscles of the porter-priests as they negotiated the trail. “You'd think a voodoo spirit could find a better way to get around,” he muttered to Ahn-Kha.

On the way down, he had time to admire the view. Scattered clouds fled the coming sun. To the west, the Chaine de Belance and the Massif du Nord joined at the heart of the guerrilla country. To the north, partly hidden in morning mists, the old plantation plains stretched to Cape Haitian and the Caribbean, with further lower mountains to the east. New forests fought to make a comeback against soil weakened by erosion. He looked up at the fortress behind and above and tried to guess where the door to Kur was buried.
Odd to think that another world can be so close
, he thought.
As if you could climb the mountains to the moon by joining it at the horizon.

Ahn-Kha glared at the sun, his ears drooping. “Too hot here, my David. It drains. The sun fixes itself to you like a leech.”

“We won't be in it all day. They said it is only a few miles.”

Valentine halted and let the men and Grogs walk by. The mixed forces had a sprightly step, though the Grogs panted in the heat. The new acquaintances, the feeling of being among friends — or in the Haitians' case, having allies off the island — formed a bond between the diverse groups.

The column plunged into new forest, vigorous young trees shooting upward, racing each other for the sun. As the land flattened out, they emerged into a field of palmetto, which in turn gave way to better-tended lands. Food crops and orchards surrounded them. In the distance, Valentine picked out the ruins of a mansionlike palace. A newer roof had been grafted onto old walls, though smaller wings of the old building still languished in disrepair.

Glorious gardens surrounded the hilltop half-ruin. Valentine had seen small decorative gardens before, but never anything on such a scale. Flowers representing each color of the spectrum stood in well-tended rows, clipped paths running around and between them, for a mile all around. A lake, shade trees, even a small fountain stood about the earthquake-ravaged walls.

Haitians in their eternal straw hats worked the fields and gardens. They had a sleek vitality to them: the healthy look that an ample diet and activity brings. Valentine had seen many farms and camps under Kurian rule, but never one where the occupants looked so hale.

Papa Legba, as Valentine was now willing to call him with grudging interest, descended from his litter. Valentine watched rib bones like oversize fingers spread and then close as the Kurian drank in the air.