by D K Girl
Eron was not deemed worthy to enter the circle formed around the petrified trunk at the heart of the shrine, and so crouched behind his brothers. But the continued slight did not dampen his fervour this morning. He was in attendance on this momentous day. It was enough.
Eron lifted his head. The goddess’s totem was carved into the far wall in such a way that the wolf’s enormous eyes followed wherever one might stand in the shrine. The glass creature’s stare did not suggest the goddess wished to disembowel him, as it had a week ago when he’d fallen asleep beneath her.
Much had changed this week. Azrael’s successful Meld had lifted spirits. The approach of their end goal after so much time spent waiting had buoyed Captain Nex into gracing Eron with a brief, but very discernible, nod when they passed in the halls now. And of far greater significance, the captain had ordered Eron’s immediate inclusion in group training sessions with Azrael and the mea stones. Not that he’d been fully excluded to begin with. With only seven Syranians surviving the journey across the vastness of space, there had been little chance Eron would be totally ostracised, no matter what he’d done with a human woman. But until now he’d endured training with the captain alone. And Captain Nex was consistently in a foul and demanding mood. Eron’s technique, his level of telekinetic control over the gallu, was never satisfactory.
Eron shifted, trying to ease the pinch of the hard surface against his knees. Right at that exact moment, the singing ceased and the group fell into reflective silence. He recoiled at the coarse sound his pants made against the smooth glass. Seder threw a sharp sideways glance, his thin lips curling with displeasure. Eron dipped his head in supplication, but even Seder’s sourness could not disturb him.
It was a momentous day. Which made Captain Nex’s absence all the more disquieting.
Gren tilted his head, catching Eron’s eye and mouthing something at him.
The captain? Gren shrugged his narrow but muscled shoulders, strands of his loosened black hair shifting with the movement.
Eron shrugged in return. Cym?
Gren shook his head and returned to silent prayer, confusion edging thin lines into his smooth dark skin.
Cym’s absence might be accounted for, with the preparations of the carapaces, but the captain’s was far more curious. Though, truthfully, Eron did not find himself entirely disappointed. He returned his concentration to the floor, where the emerald Waters streamed beneath them.
In this very shrine, two days past, the goddess’s Messenger, the stuttering and awkward human Tamas, had received the Word they’d waited on. Azrael had proved the stability of the carapaces and the ability of the artificial shells to sustain the gallu on Earth. At Azrael’s expense, the Syranians had mastered the mea stones – the reins, as it were, that would enable them to control the immensely powerful gallu soon to arrive.
Today, these divine hunters would step foot again in this world. Absent for millennia, the Four would search for Dumuzi, the immortal soul bound inside a fragile human shell.
Eron stared into the shadows dancing within the light in the Waters. He liked to imagine what appearance Dumuzi’s mortal shell might take. Robust, or frail? Indeed, male or female? What did a demigod wrapped in a human look like? Dumuzi was the last remnant of a different time here on Earth. The demigod husband of a great goddess who had long since departed these corporeal worlds, abandoning her lover to a fate that should have been hers. Inanna and Ereshkigal might be divine sisters, but their relationship was as fraught with difficulty as the one that existed between Kira and Blake Beckworth. Mere mortals.
Eron closed his eyes, attempting to shut out the image of Kira that rose. He pressed his fingertips to the glass, focusing on the energy emanating there. Perhaps it was ludicrous to compare the humans to the goddesses. An argument between Kira and Blake did not threaten worlds, or universes. Their contempt for one another did not continue unabated for time immemorial. It did not drive them to grasp at any opportunity, however miniscule, to humiliate and hinder the other, as it did for Ereshkigal and Inanna. But what fuelled the ferocity of the relationship was not so different. Blood.
A connection that could not be undone. Whatever might be the desire.
But where grief fed the flames between Kira and Blake, it was a lust for power that burned between Ereshkigal and Inanna.
After Inanna’s failed attempt to take her sister’s throne and rule the underworld, Ereshkigal had imprisoned Inanna’s divine soul in the pathetic shroud of a human body and sentenced her to an eternity on Earth. But Inanna was not so unlike Kira.
Eron smothered a wry smile. Inanna was a master manipulator and wily negotiator. When Ereshkigal sent the Four to imprison her, Innana offered up her husband Dumuzi’s soul instead and fled the corporeal worlds for the next realm. But grudges between the deities lasted eternally. And so, here Eron knelt, thrust into the ongoing conflict by the will of his god Lahar. One of the last Living Gods – a meagre group of three – who battled to ascend from the mortal worlds to the next realm. Lahar had chosen a side, hoping to be granted favour by a far more powerful god of the realm. He’d allied himself with Ereshkigal, providing the Waters, the Syranian god-soldiers, and the mea stones, all required to enable the Four to find the human shell holding Dumuzi and destroy the demigod’s soul. If so done, Inanna would be forced to take Dumuzi’s place.
Rules were rules, no matter how ancient or rusty they had become. Innana would be forced into a human prison.
The goddess of war, locked in a foreign, unwanted body.
No. Kira was not so different to Inanna in many ways. Eron leaned his full weight upon his fingertips, and the minute muscles within his fingers protested. Who knew what would remain of this world with Inanna imprisoned within? Subtle coils of guilt rose, cool and unpleasant, through Eron’s core, as they often did when considering the strife he and his Lord brought with their mission. He rubbed at the mea stone embedded in his forearm, a sudden ache pulsing through the muscles surrounding it.
The stone’s hue resembled that of the desert surrounding them. Its rough edges were now buried beneath his own flesh. A week before he’d left Syrana, it had been embedded just below the prominent veins in Eron’s wrist, deep enough to attach to bone. The woman who had conducted the procedure was likely deceased now. Eron’s parents would have passed long before her. It had taken twenty-seven Earth years to propel them from Syrana to the blue planet. Most of those years had been spent in the unmemorable blackness of stasis, and as Eron and his brethren had glided through the emptiness of space, sixty years had passed by on Syrana. Time widened the gap between Eron and home until it was stretched beyond all repair. His life there, the people he cared for, all now gone.
‘Eron.’ The whisper, so close by, caused him to start. Parator stood at his side, glaring in the baleful way he was so adept at. ‘Service has been suspended. Rise.’
Eron did so at the expense of grace, his haste rocking him on his feet in much the way it had after several glasses of what Kira referred to as ‘cat’s piss’. The captain hastened across the greater Orientation Room at a quick pace. Bel moved down the short flight of steps out of the shrine to meet their leader, the others close behind.
‘Captain.’ Bel pressed a balled fist to his left shoulder and bowed low enough to ensure that his head dipped below the captain’s heart line, as was protocol. Not a difficult task for Bel, considering his relatively short stature. For Eron, being taller than his captain, it was a more dramatic gesture. Eron bowed, stomach muscles engaging with the low tilt of his body.
‘Rise.’ Captain Nex always held a suggestion of robustness and coiled intensity. He was narrow of face and sharp of facial structure, and his nose and chin were equal in their cuspidate definition. The captain’s eyes were set beneath thick dark eyebrows, while silver-white hair hung in two bound separations framing his face, their lengths reaching midchest. ‘Pigtails’, Kira called the style. Something she found amusing for reasons Eron had never understood. Warmth fil
led his face. Truly he must be mad. To think of her in this moment.
‘There is an issue. One that requires a quick resolution.’ Captain Nex was not a demonstrative communicator. It was rare, if not impossible, to glean any sense of context through his tone, delivering good and bad news alike in an impassive way. ‘We have received word that the gallu . . . Azrael . . . has been removed from the Facility by the Lesser.’
Eron kept his gaze indirect, an expected protocol for anyone being addressed by the captain, but his thoughts were calamitous. Nex referred to Kira as the Lesser of the two sisters, ever begrudging the resources used to save the girl’s life.
‘How is that possible?’ Gren said.
Eron felt the pressure of his brothers’ gazes upon him, Seder’s the most pointed of all. Eron pulled back his shoulders, refusing to meet their accusatory stares. Aside from the brief encounter on level eleven a week ago, he’d not been in Kira’s company. And by the grace of Lahar, that encounter remained unknown to his brethren. He had no clue how Kira had actually removed Azrael, but if it had been similar to his own breach, she had simply driven him out the front gates. Her Telteriun body parts distracted the Lucentshield from the gallu’s energy signature, the same way they’d concealed that of his mea stone.
The captain’s eyes fixed on him with an intensity that could crack glass. Eron lowered his head.
‘Yet again I find myself regretting the day the Lesser was allowed to live,’ Nex growled. ‘But we have located the vehicle they are traveling in.’ The captain stopped in front of Eron. Heavy black boots, polished to perfection, reflected the emerald Waters. ‘You are to take assistance and retrieve Azrael.’
Eron continued to stare at his leader’s boots, fervently hoping it was not Seder who had received the order. His sullen-faced brother would not make things pleasant for Kira. So far as Seder was concerned, god-soldiers did not soil themselves with something as base as physical contact with humans. His disgust at Eron’s indiscretion ran deep, likely because Seder’s own irascible temperament rendered him so intensely unattractive. To any living being.
‘Eron.’
Eron jerked upright, a flush of heat filling his body. ‘Sir? I am to retrieve the gallu?’ He stuttered over the words, and the captain’s eyes narrowed.
‘It is our lord’s will.’ And Captain Nex sounded none too pleased about it. ‘Lahar bids me to send you.’ He tilted his head towards the shrine. Eron turned to find the Precon beast, Lahar’s totem, had shifted from its place inside the structure. Now the fanged and clawed creature’s image was cut into the glass wall nearest to Eron. One huge paw lifted, as though reaching for him. Eron fell to his knees, crossing his arms across his chest in supplication. A thrill rang through his body; nerve endings buzzed.
‘Lord Lahar, your spirit be ever uplifted.’ Eron touched his forehead to the coolness of the concrete. ‘I do your bidding. Evermore. Thank you for your generosity. Your forgiveness.’
By the time he’d settled back onto his haunches, the Precon glass etching had disappeared, returning to its place alongside Ereshkigal’s wolf inside the shrine. The wall in front of Eron was smooth again.
‘Do not disappoint, Eron. Lahar has given you an opportunity to redeem yourself and show your true commitment to our task. But do not overassume your importance. Your god-soldier brothers cannot be expended; their time to Bind with the Four fast approaches, and they cannot be sent on trivial missions such as this. A Syranian must be in attendance should the gallu attempt to protest recapture, and you are the only one I can spare. Return the gallu to his rightful place, and bring in the Lesser so that we might punish her, as she should have been punished before now.’
Eron fought to keep his expression neutral. The captain was Lahar’s Messenger, but Eron sensed this directive had not come from the god himself at all. Despite the spectacle of the Precon beast’s movement within the shrine, he suspected Lahar was busy with far greater complications than a once-disobedient god-soldier and a human girl who strove to drive people to distraction.
This was the captain’s own test. An offered opportunity for Eron to redeem himself fully in the eyes of his brethren. And, dare he imagine it, an opportunity to Bind with one of the Four?
‘Sir.’ Eron nodded. ‘Be assured, I will not fail. I will leave immediately.’
Twenty minutes later, eyes stinging and itchy with the contact lenses he wore, Eron was strapped into the helicopter and on his way to Lorhurst, the town Kira’s vehicle had been tracked to. The first time aboveground in several months and it was difficult to keep the smile from his face. He pushed down the access window, letting the warm air blast his face, taking long, slow breaths of it. He relished the different scents upon the breeze. Seated at the back of the craft, behind the accompanying guards – two women and a man – Eron tugged his hair from its bind, and it tumbled down around his face. The strands whipped chaotically as the helicopter lifted off. Bliss.
It was early morning, barely after eight, and the desert beneath them was already fully lit by the glowing morning sun. Eron craned his neck to take in everything that passed below them. The signs of life that had been closed off to him for many long months. Lorhurst. Something about the name niggled at him. The helicopter skirted around Pryden and headed east.
‘Sir,’ the pilot interrupted Eron’s attempt to source his unease, ‘I’m getting information that there’s been an incident in Pryden. At the Wheel and Barrow.’ He hesitated. ‘Kira Beckworth owns the –’
‘I’m aware.’ Eron pressed the mouthpiece closer. ‘What is the issue?’
‘Patching you through to a secure frequency. Stand by.’
A click, a hum, and then a new and unfamiliar voice. ‘Sir, information relay. Dwayne Rossiter was intercepted at the Wheel and Barrow while attempting to extract a man who has sustained significant life-threatening injuries. You are advised that evidence suggests utukku are involved. You are to be aware of the increased presence of supermundanes. End secure transmission.’
Another click, two this time, and a high-pitched buzz as the radio reconnected him with the pilot.
‘Sir, advising we will reach destination in ten minutes.’
‘Very good,’ Eron said absently.
Supermundanes were commonplace on Syrana due to Lahar’s divine presence. Utukku, possession spirits, certainly caused issues every now and then. But this was Earth, a world devoid of its deities for thousands of years. The preternatural survivors here would have been in hibernation all that time and weakened to the very edge of existence. Certainly, with the arrival of the Waters, and the Four, on Earth, it was expected that any entities that had survived in this godless world might stir. But for an uttuku to be strong enough already to cause near-fatal injuries was perplexing. Azrael was no god. It could not be his presence alone that had fuelled such a rise.
The helicopter descended, and as Eron stared down at the layout of the small town, the niggle returned. A sense of familiarity gripped him at the sight of the clock tower at the town’s heart. The pilot lowered them a mile from the tower in an industrial area. Touching down, the others waited for Eron’s directive, placing themselves at a discreet distance, using protocol, he suspected, as an excuse to keep from his immediate vicinity.
He stood in the middle of the road, a patchwork of asphalt and faded line markings. The disused lot they had landed in was one of several on this stretch of road, peppered with old warehouses that clearly had not been frequented in some time, weeds growing high in cracks in the parking lots, and unrepaired holes dotting roofs.
Now he understood what it was that had disquieted him. He had been to this place. Lorhurst. With Kira. She had declared it a shithole, and they had driven through it at a speed that had alarmed him, heading for somewhere brighter and bigger. Full of those crowded, loud places she loved to frequent.
‘Bore-hurst’. Was the name Kira had bestowed on this town. Refusing to stop even when he professed a desire to view the clock tower more closely.
‘Sir, the vehicle is just over there.’ A guard pointed to a great pile of old tyres.
But Eron did not move.
Kira was not here. She had never been here. The Lesser had played her denigrators as masterfully as the goddess Inanna herself. And Eron could not suppress the smile that rose to his lips.
Kira - 14
Wheels hit runway just after eight in the morning. The bumpy landing jerked Kira awake. Bankston Regional Airport, a glorious stark-white tin shed in the middle of a field. Kira stepped out of the aircraft.
‘Doesn’t get more glam than this.’ She stretched her arms over her head, the armadillo hidden beneath the dreaded sheath, and waited till Az joined her before she headed down the stairs. She was bleary-eyed, and definitely had bad breath but surprisingly chipper despite the number of whiskies consumed. There was an advantage to buying the good stuff to knock yourself unconscious. She wore a baseball cap, a pair of rose-gold-coloured shades that probably cost as much as a small country, and a bob-cut blonde wig.
Blake had gone full super spy. And it was kind of awesome. Though it would have been nice if she’d also packed a toothbrush and deodorant, clean knickers. Instead it was a disguise and cash. Lots and lots of green notes. Kira herded a docile Azrael into a taxi and threw the duffel bag in alongside him. Their driver looked as though he wanted to kiss her when Kira asked for the ride. Business was slow apparently. He was old enough to be her grandfather, wore the proverbial Coke-bottle glasses, and clearly had no clue who she was, so he was perfect. They were invisible.