“Ubaid era?” asked Docker.
He nodded slightly in Roman’s direction, and she strode over, already assembling the telescopic struts of an Argon-L scanner in her hands.
“We thought so, too,” said Subara. “But judging from the weathering of the base rock, compared to the rock exposed by the inscription, and from the mineral traces in the depressions themselves, our tests suggest a date of a hundred and fifty thousand BC.”
Docker shot a look towards Subara that could have knocked a bird from the sky at ten thousand feet, and he quickly calculated the odds that Subara was deliberately wasting their time. Roman hefted the scanner onto her shoulder, aligning the eyepiece to her face. A scattering of red lights swirled over the surface of the carving.
“I trust that’s with a very large margin of error,” said Docker.
Subara raised his palms in a shrug.
“We’re not experts,” said Subara. “We just thought our good friends at SinaCorp might be interested in some archaeological finds.”
“Where?” asked Docker.
“There’s a canyon, about five hundred kilometres west,” said Subara. “Follow a north-west bearing after the road ends at Bihr’el.”
Roman’s scanner stopped humming, and she quickly folded the device back into its travel configuration. She gave Docker a subtle nod, and Docker flicked his gaze towards Bale. Bale’s camera was completely noiseless as he snapped several careful photographs of the weathered rock, his gaze already drinking in the inscriptions.
“We’ll have someone pick it up tomorrow,” said Docker. “Thank you for keeping us in mind.”
“Always,” said Subara. “We remember those who remember us.”
If only life really worked that way
, thought Emir as they strode back through the ostentatiously mirrored corridors. In reality, people only remembered you when they wanted something. The rest of the time, you weren’t even a passing thought.
Emir had slowly been awakening to the fact that people were essentially the same everywhere—life was about what you could get, what would make you happy, what you wanted. Almost everywhere he went, he could see the growing reach of the consumer cult, spruiking the worship of me, me, me.
Life was all about transactions and gratification.
If you weren’t useful to them, they didn’t need you, and they certainly wouldn’t be there when you needed them.
Emir had always resisted believing Docker was right about people, because frankly, Docker was not the model of a well-adjusted individual. However, the more Emir saw of the world, the fainter his memories became of hope and affection, compassion and connection. And when those things had been thrown back in his face by the person who had first helped him find them, there was very little left except the path he supposed he had chosen.
Just get the job done, and keep moving.
* * *
Iron bolts slid across the door with a clang, leaving the dark concrete room empty aside from two wooden chairs, a very large covered cage, and their respective occupants.
“Maybe this’ll backfire on them,” said Chris. “Maybe it’s a disgruntled animal, and we can convince it to join us.”
“And how do you plan on befriending this animal while tied to a chair?” asked Luke.
“Don’t you have some kind of spiritual ‘talk-to-the-animals’ knack?”
“I’m a priest. I can bless water and absolve sins. I cannot heal major wounds, turn snakes into sticks, or talk to animals in any kind of meaningful way.”
Luke’s communication skills with animals were about as underwhelming as his skills with people. He had once gotten into an argument with a parrot at an Indian bazaar, after the Lutino ringneck made several fairly offensive comments. When Luke responded in kind, it had bitten him on the finger. It was rather undignified. For some reason, animals did not warm to Luke, except for very old dogs, who seemed to take pity on him.
“Well, can you—” Chris stopped at the sound of something moving.
In fact, it was the sound of something realising that its cage door had been left open. It was similar to the sound of gravel being poured down the side of a very tall mountain. Both Luke and Chris stared transfixed at the end of the cage, where something was emerging from beneath the burlap.
“I hope it’s not a saltwater crocodile. They freak me out,” said Chris.
Luke had a brief internal montage of all the things that would freak him out. He felt dizzy.
The burlap shifted, and a head the size of a cradle emerged, with bright yellow, slitted eyes.
“We already had one of those!” said Chris.
Luke did not remember having one of these.
“And it’s not ironic,” complained Chris. “Ironic would be getting crushed by a giant apple. This is repetitious.”
Luke did not think this was either ironic or repetitious. Luke thought this was the biggest frickin’ snake head he had ever seen, and if the body was proportionate, then he had no idea how they had managed to fit the snake into that cage. Clearly, the snake was wondering something similar, and began to glide sluggishly from the cage.
To be fair, it
was
magnificent. It had a long, smooth head the colour of beach sand, and black lines crossed intricately across its back. Its body was coloured in waves of dark yellow and tan, dotted with brown diamonds containing a single stroke of white. It was patterned like an ornate Persian carpet, and it was instantly clear why so much human art had been inspired by the animal world.
A forked tongue the length of a man’s forearm slid in and out of its mouth.
“Is now the time to set ourselves on fire?” asked Luke.
The snake’s head swayed as its tongue flicked through the air, trying to decide whether the bleating monkeys were worth eating. It slithered languidly towards them, its body rippling slowly from the cage, length after length after length. As the tip of its tail slid from beneath the cloth, the snake lay in coils around the room. It must have been forty feet long and as thick as a telegraph pole.
Chris suddenly had a vivid flashback to a video she had been forced to watch during high school biology, in which a snake slowly asphyxiated a hamster and swallowed it whole. She remembered how the hamster had struggled as it was slowly choked, its little pink mouth screaming in doomed desperation as the cameras rolled.
Chris started to hop her chair painstakingly towards the door, the wooden legs scraping loudly across the concrete. The snake hissed and slid menacingly towards her.
“Chris!” called Luke.
Luke twisted helplessly at the ropes, then leaned hard towards the door, swinging his chair off-balance. He landed on the ground with a crack, somewhat disappointed that his chair didn’t shatter into countless small pieces. The snake hissed at the noise and turned towards Luke. It stared unblinkingly at the sweet-smelling morsel, and something about the woolly outer coating stirred memories of something delicious. It slithered hungrily towards Luke.
“Snakes to sticks!” yelled Luke desperately, realising that he would have to omit this from his biography if he survived.
There was the sound of metal scraping.
“Kiwali!” called a voice.
Luke looked up to see Thena standing in the doorway, staring firmly at the snake. Its jaws hovered above Luke, and he could see dozens of backwards-pointing, shark-like teeth filling its mouth. It hissed at Thena, opening its jaws wider. Thena closed the door gently behind her, still holding the snake’s gaze.
“Kiwali,” Thena repeated, more softly, pulling a large, wicker basket from behind her back.
It appeared to be full of chicken eggs.
The snake’s head moved from side to side, as though assessing this interesting turn of events. Thena made her way calmly across the room, keeping her movements slow and smooth as she stepped carefully over the coils. The snake watched her progress, its unblinking eyes shifting between her and the basket.
Thena reached the cage, and she gently placed several eggs inside the front entrance. She shook the basket slightly, and the sound of eggshells rustled invitingly through the room. The snake shifted forward hesitantly.
Thena opened a hatch at the far end of the long cage and placed the basket of eggs inside, quickly hooking the hatch closed again. The snake’s head jerked in staccato motions, looking from Luke to Chris to Thena to the eggs.
It seemed to be considering the possibility that it could eat at least one monkey as well as the eggs.
“Kiwali,” said Thena softly, coaxing. “You know bones give you indigestion these days. Nice, soft eggshells, just like when you were little. Come on…”
Thena reached through the bars of the cage and rattled the basket of eggs again. The snake’s head waved from side to side, its bright yellow eyes giving nothing away. Reluctantly, it slid towards the opening of the cage, with the air of someone who’d had enough excitement for today, but would be back once they’d had a nap. Slowly, the coils unlooped as the snake slid back into its cage, carefully eating the eggs as it went. As the tip of the tail cleared the entrance, Thena gently locked the cage door.
She turned to face Chris and Luke, uncertain of what was supposed to happen next.
“I don’t agree with you,” said Thena. “You don’t understand the good we’ve done. You haven’t seen some of the things I have, the incomprehensibly grotesque, monstrous things a human can do to another living thing. We’ve done necessary things, to protect a world you don’t even know about. But after Niyoh…”
Red and black skin, spattered on the floor of the crypt. Blood on her fingers, blood on her hands… She had quit the assignment that night. Tate could follow them himself…
“There are casualties in a war,” said Thena. “But not like this, not some—”
Thena gave a small gasp, her eyes turning glassy as she crumpled to the floor, motionless.
Chris and Luke stared at each other.
“Narcolepsy?” whispered Chris.
“Heart attack?” asked Luke.
“Some kind of loyalty microchip self-destruct?”
“Guess again,” came a voice from the shadows overhead.
A figure dressed in black dropped from the rafters, a tranquilliser gun gripped in a leather-gloved hand. For the briefest moment, Chris’s heart leapt into her throat—maybe he’d changed his mind, maybe he’d—
But the contoured black bodysuit was definitely not Emir’s style or shape, and as the balaclava was peeled off, a glossy black ponytail swished sinuously.
“You can’t do anything like normal people,” said Lien, looking in disgust at the giant snake.
“Normal?”
asked Chris. “You’re hiding in rafters shooting people with tranquilliser darts!”
“Hey, I just do this to pay my way through postgrad,” said Lien. “This is my casual job. I have a degree in nanotechnology.”
Lien walked over to Chris and started patting her down.
“Hey!” Chris struggled angrily in her chair, and succeeded only in tipping herself over.
Lien strode across to Luke and rummaged through his pockets. She reached into his coat and smiled, pulling out a rumpled photocopy.
“The missing page, I presume,” said Lien, glancing at the single line of Hebrew calligraphy.
Lien tucked the page into her zip-up vest and slid the tranquilliser gun into a strap on her calf. She pulled a different, more familiar-looking gun from a holster at her hip. She checked the slide and looked coolly at the trussed up pair.
“Aren’t you just supposed to follow us?” said Chris.
“I have different instructions now,” said Lien.
She flicked off the safety.
“Do you really think it’s that easy?” said Luke. “You just pull the trigger and that’s it? You don’t think it follows you, the sound of flesh bursting open, waking in the night with the smell of blood thick in the air. The constant fear stalking you, as sin piles on sin, trying to bury a past that won’t stay dead. The sound of screaming chasing you no matter how far you run, no matter how often you beg for forgiveness…”
His voice trailed into a snarl, his eyes unfocused and burning with some kind of inarticulate private torment.
Okay
, thought Lien, quite certain that if Luke were capable of returning as an angry spirit, he damn well would.
Lien didn’t actually believe in the supernatural or the afterlife. However, she did believe that there was a distinction between killing for scientific research, killing for “scientific research,” and killing because you may have misheard your instructions.
Lien considered Docker’s last comments to her and decided there might be some room for interpretation. He had sounded rather cranky that day, and his last transmission to her had ended with a rather snarky “Do I have to send you illustrations?” Illustrations would, in fact, have helped.
Lien holstered her gun with an air of great disinterest.
“Killing people isn’t my style anyway,” said Lien. “Remember the favour.”
“Favour?” exclaimed Chris. “You just stole our stuff!”
“But I saved you from a really boring speech,” said Lien, gesturing towards the unconscious figure of Thena.
Chris and Luke did not look overly impressed.
Lien rolled her eyes and flicked a hunting knife from her sleeve. She laid it on the concrete floor in front of them. As she sashayed through the door and into the shadows, she raised a hand in a lazy wave.
“That’s a three-hundred dollar knife,” called Lien. “So I want it back.”
* * *
The whir of the rotor thrummed noisily through the bay of the transport chopper. Through the tinted windows, Emir could see the desert rushing far beneath them, the shadow of the assault helicopter skimming like a beetle across the sand.
Docker sat in the cockpit, his hands flicking switches and pulling levers with practised ease. Bale was in the copilot’s seat, aviator glasses reflecting the solar glare from below. Roman sat on the metal bench opposite Emir, still tapping away at her touchscreen.
“Far too old for Mehrgarh era,” said Roman. “There’s no evidence that the pre-Ubaid civilisations were nearly this sophisticated.”
“Any language?” called Docker.
“Not on this one,” said Roman. “Just pictograms, but not as refined as the Sumerians’.”