by DD Barant
She gets the first two syllables out before I break her jaw; I don’t have the luxury of being nice. Her head snaps around and a tooth flies out of her mouth. Ouch.
That’s not gonna do it, though. She’s a threat as long as she’s conscious, which means my second strike will have to knock her out. I smack her just over the ear—
And my stick hits something a lot more solid than a human skull.
She hisses at me from a mouth full of sharp teeth. Muscles bulge under skin turning scaly and gray. Her fingernails bulk into long, curving claws. All her hair falls out as her skull elongates to form a blunt-nosed, reptilian snout. I guess she doesn’t need to talk to shape-shift.
She takes a swipe at me with a claw and I dance back, wanting to see just how fast she is. I’m pretty sure she can’t use any other spells while in another form, but I don’t intend to test that—I have to keep her busy enough that she won’t have the opportunity.
She stalks toward me, a six-foot lizard-woman complete with tail. I snap the scythe blades out and meet her attack.
She’s fast. The transformation has apparently fixed her jaw, too, because she snaps at me with a mouthful of yellowy fangs. Her breath smells like a dead pig left in the sun for a week—and I realize what form she’s shifted into.
I saw a documentary on the Komodo dragon once. Largest lizard in the world, with the habit of swallowing entire goats—up to 80 percent as large as themselves—the way a boa constrictor gulps rats. The thing that stuck in my head was the image of one particular dragon that was having a little difficulty getting the whole goat down his throat, so he was ramming it against a boulder, over and over, forcing a little more into his gullet every time. That and the fact that so many virulent microbes live in their filthy mouths that any bite will probably kill you within days through infection.
She hasn’t transformed into an actual Komodo dragon, more like a were version of it—probably drawing on the essence of the dragon through some kind of fetish. But I’m sure her claws are just as sharp and her bite just as deadly as the real thing.
I’ve got the reach on her, but she’s got more weapons than I do—she can tear me apart with her jaws while I’m busy parrying slashes from her claws. I can’t use the blades to stab, I can’t risk them getting stuck in muscle or bone. With a pire or thrope, the silver would probably let me slice right through a limb, but it’s not that hard a metal; her scales—reinforced by subdermal bony plates, if I’m remembering correctly—will be a lot harder to chop through.
She pivots, turning her back to me, and I step back in anticipation of a kick. Nope. Forgot about her tail—and there goes my reach advantage. It slams into my shoulder, knocking me sideways, but I somehow manage to stay on my feet. Selkie completes her spin and is facing me again.
I go on the offensive, slashing furiously with both blades, weaving a pattern of destruction in front of me. She hisses and retreats.
There’s no way this will end well.
I don’t want to kill her. But I don’t think I can just incapacitate her anymore, and I’m pretty sure she’s trying to kill me.
She tries the tail stunt again, but this time I’m ready for it. I step in as she spins and slash across her spine with both scythes. She screams as momentum carries her around, and the tail smashes into my belly an instant later. I double over, the breath knocked out of me, as my vision goes gray and I try to stagger backward out of range.
I force myself to straighten up. She glares at me from the ground where she’s fallen, and from the way she’s lying I can tell her legs don’t work anymore.
That doesn’t stop her.
Ever seen a crocodile run? They can move amazingly fast on land with their muscular little legs. Selkie may be down to half of hers, but she scuttles straight toward me on the remaining two, moving so much like a real lizard it’s unsettling. She gets within grabbing distance and snags my ankle with one hand, yanking hard and knocking me down to the ground with her.
At that point, I really have no options left.
The way a real Komodo dragon kills its prey is by pinning it down with its claws and tearing it apart with its teeth. As long as she’s holding on to me, Selkie can do exactly the same thing, meaning I’ll probably bleed out as soon as she rips open my femoral artery.
She latches on to my leg with both hands and drags me toward her jaws. I spread my arms as wide as they’ll go, then swing them together like a pair of mandibles closing.
The blades slam home on either side of her head, about where her ears should be. I swear I feel the ends of the blades click against each other in the middle.
She slumps to the ground between my legs. I stare at her for a long second, barely able to breathe, and then I roll over and throw up.
Waste of a perfectly good cheese sandwich.
Shut up, brain.
And now I’m trapped on one of the most isolated places on the planet, with two corpses for company and no transportation. I guess I’ll hike back to the village and try to scare up a radio or a telephone—but first I search through Selkie’s bag.
I don’t expect to find much, but I’m wrong. There’s a journal and a sheaf of notes—it looks like Stoker was having her transport his research in case he was captured, probably because she could destroy it with a prepared spell very quickly.
I glance over at Selkie’s body. I expected it to change back to human as soon as she died, but it’s been a slow, gradual process, almost like the magic is seeping out of her. I look away again, fast.
The notes are fragmentary, but I piece together what they mean fairly quickly: The object Stoker stole from the Mc-Murdo research facility is called the Shining Trapezohedron, an ancient artifact used to contact other-dimensional beings. Trapezohedron is simply a fancy name for a cube; Stoker’s trying to sketch a “deformed trigonal trapezohedron” on a global scale, with each of the murder sites representing a corner of the cube. The center corner—the one that if you stare at a drawing of a cube can appear to either be inward or outward facing—apparently represents both the seventh and eighth points simultaneously, in some sort of non-Euclidean mathematics that I can’t even begin to understand.
What I do understand is this: he’s taken the trapezohedron to that central point, and he’s going to use it to bring the eighth point into focus with our world.
That eighth point was known in ancient times as Mu. Stoker’s going to summon a continent.
FOURTEEN
I can’t figure out how to use the satellite broadcaster to do anything other than what it’s already doing, so I just turn it off. Then I trudge down to the village to find a phone.
Turns out I don’t have to bother. A seaplane buzzes overhead when I’m halfway there, and by the time I reach the dock it’s landed offshore, just about at the limit Stoker mentioned. There’s a motor launch at the dock with the keys still in it; I start it up and head out to greet my ride. I’ve got a pretty good idea who it is.
I kill the motor and let the boat drift up to the plane, bumping gently against a pontoon. The door swings open.
“Hello, Jace,” Tanaka says. “Need a lift?”
I stare at him in disbelief. “Tanaka? What are you doing here?”
“Doing a favor for a friend. You are very much—what is the saying—a nonperson, right now.”
“Persona non grata.” I climb into the plane, hoping the tide will push the boat back to its owners and not out to sea. “Yeah, I thought that might happen. Figured Cassius would send someone after me—just didn’t think it would be you.”
“Have you learned anything important?”
“You could say that.” I fill him in as he prepares the plane for takeoff. “We have to get to these coordinates,” I say, showing him a map I found in Selkie’s bag. “This is where he’s going, and he’s already got a head start.”
“I believe we can do so on my remaining fuel—this craft is equipped for extended flights.”
“Then let’s get going. If we have to,
we can stop to refuel in the Marquesas.”
I slug down some Urthbone as we get airborne, and my rising headache vanishes. My supply is almost gone—if I don’t find a way to get my prescription refilled, Stoker won’t have to worry about me as a threat.
“We should radio ahead,” I say once we’re in the air. “Cassius can probably get someone there sooner than us.”
“That is unlikely. This is a Japanese aircraft; I flew out of Tokyo Bay. The favor I am doing is not for Cassius, Jace—it is for you.”
That stops me for a second. I’d heard Tanaka went back to Japan after our little talk outside my apartment—I never would have guessed he’d go rogue out of concern for me. “So we’re both in the same boat—well, plane—now. Okay, but to misquote Bogey: the problems of two small people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this soon-to-be-post-apocalyptic world. Stopping Stoker has to be our first priority—”
He’s shaking his head. “You still do not understand. Cassius believes you have defected to Stoker’s side. Any communication from you will be viewed as disinformation at best, sabotage at worst. I have heard through my own sources that . . .”
He hesitates, then finishes. “. . . that orders have been given to kill you on sight. For some reason, Cassius now believes you to be as large a threat as Stoker himself.”
That stuns me. Not that Cassius could order my death—I think he’s ruthless enough to do almost anything, no matter what kind of price he pays personally—but because, somehow, I never thought my actions were irreversible. Some part of me always believed that I could stay cagey forever, that I didn’t truly have to commit to one side or the other.
I was wrong. And now I’m stranded in the middle, having rejected both sides. Tanaka glances at me nervously. He’s really not sure if he’s made the right choice, either.
It’s going to be a long flight.
There’s excited chatter from the radio about four hours into our trip. Seems there’s some kind of massive seismic disturbance going on in the area and everybody from Tahiti to Pago Pago is worried about a tsunami.
“He’s done it,” I say. “Or he’s in the process of doing it, right now. Can’t this crate go any faster?”
“We are still at least an hour away.”
Not much I can do about that, so I shut up and sulk. At least Tanaka brought some food with him, which means I’m no longer ready to gnaw on my own leg—though I am ready to bite someone’s head off.
The cloud of seabirds circling in the sky is my first clue that we’ve arrived. I have no idea how they knew what was happening, or where they’ve come from—there are many islands in this part of the Pacific, but the nearest one is still at least a hundred miles away—but there are thousands of them, wheeling in a dense knot like the forming eye of a hurricane. Directly below is a small, barren island with a single mountain in its center, the vegetation on it a garish explosion of reds and oranges like fall in Vermont. The water surrounding the island is an earthen brown for half a mile in every direction, like a muddy iris surrounding a fiery pupil.
Mu. And not a cow in sight.
We touch down. Unknown objects thump against the pontoons as we skim to a jolting, nerve-racking halt. Tanaka guides us right onto the beach, where we squelch to a halt in thick sludge.
I grab my gear and open the door. The smell that hits me is stomach-curdling, not just ripe but alien. The muck the pontoons are mired in has lain at the bottom of the ocean for millennia, no doubt full of organisms as bizarre as something from another planet. Now they’ve been heaved to the surface, where the change in pressure has made most of them pop like overfilled balloons. What I’m smelling isn’t just primeval underwater ooze, it’s the exploded guts of a few thousand deep-sea creatures; it must have been some of the larger ones we heard hitting the pontoons.
“Be careful.” It’s the last thing Tanaka says before morphing into were form.
We pick our way over barnacle-encrusted boulders while the seabirds wheel and cry overhead. They’re no doubt eager to consume the strange feast that lies before them, but none of them will land. The oranges and reds I saw are coral, looking more like sprawling expanses of some sort of exotic cactus in the harsh sunlight. Strands of seaweed cling to them limply, robbed of their usual swaying grace by gravity.
There’s only one artificial structure on the whole island—which is, I realize, only the exposed tip of what must be an immense underwater mountain—and it’s about halfway up the slope, set into the rock itself. A blocky gray building untouched by coral or seaweed, as if whatever was keeping the birds from landing was strong enough there to prevent any living thing from ever approaching. Tanaka and I glance at each other, then head for it without a word.
We circled the island once before landing, and I didn’t see any sign of Stoker—no other plane, nothing. Either he’s traveling by submarine or he’s been and gone. Not good.
I spot a large footprint in the remains of a squashed, jellyfish-like thing. Since I doubt Bigfoot wears boots, it’s a good bet it’s Stoker’s.
The slope is hard going. It’s not that steep, but every rocky surface is slimy and the coral either breaks off in my hand or cuts me. By the time we reach the plateau the building is set on, my palms are bleeding from a dozen gashes. Tanaka has it easier, his lupine form strong and agile enough to keep his balance while ignoring any minor wounds. He helps me more than once, pulling me up or putting a steadying hand on my back. Every time he touches me, I feel a little jolt of shame—from him, not from me. Guess he still has some issues.
The building is obviously a temple. The statuary guarding the entrance is so monumentally ugly it’s kind of awe-inspiring, but only if you don’t study it too carefully. I’ve never seen sculpture that suggests bestiality, cannibalism, and necrophilia at the same time, and I can’t say I ever want to again.
The entrance is a square, black maw big enough to taxi a 747 through. I pull out a flashlight and we walk in.
The interior seems empty, except for puddles of foul-smelling water on the floor and more intricate carvings on the walls. It’s more like the entrance to a cave, the back wall no more than rough rock. No altar, no pews, nothing at all . . . nothing except for two squat shapes in the very middle of the floor, low enough to the ground that my beam misses them on its first sweep.
We get closer, our footsteps splashing echoes off the distant walls. The first shape is a thick stone disk, around twice the diameter of a manhole cover, a plug that’s clearly been removed from the round hole right next to it. The other is a machine, maybe the size of a German shepherd, with treads on top and bottom, two articulated arms ending in clamps, and some kind of camera and spotlight array on top. Muddy boot prints leading right up to and away from the hole tell me the rest of the story.
“Whatever he came here to do, he’s done it,” I say. I stay a healthy distance from the hole but bend down and examine the device. “Some kind of remote-controlled robot, looks like. Whatever’s down there, he must have sent Rover to check it out first.”
Tanaka’s reverted to human form. “Ghatanothoa,” he murmurs. “If the stories are true, Stoker did not descend at all. If he had, he would not have returned.”
“You know about this thing?”
He shakes his head. “My superiors told me very little. Only that the being entombed here was supremely dangerous, and to avoid being in its presence at all costs. We should leave.”
“Yeah. But we’re taking that robot with us—and I think we should drag that plug back into place, too.”
He nods. It takes both of us to do it, but Tanaka doesn’t shift to were form for the extra muscle. It’s as if he doesn’t trust himself to become a beast in this place, as if his animal nature might get the better of him; better to be human and struggle than risk losing control and doing something terrible.
I get a whiff of something from the hole just as we slide the plug back into place. I back up, cursing and sneezing, rubbing my nose violently as if I could phy
sically pull the odor out. What I smelled wasn’t bad in the sense of something rotten or pungent; it was just wrong. Deeply, horribly wrong, like fingernails down a blackboard turned into a scent, like getting an ice-cream headache from eating frozen worms.
We wrestle the robot down the mountain. By the time we get to the bottom we’re both muddy, scraped, bruised, and exhausted—me more than Tanaka, of course. The screeching of the birds is like a chorus of the damned overhead. I pause to get my breath back before we load the robot onto the plane.
“Tanaka,” I wheeze. “You said something back there, about your superiors. About them knowing about Ghatanothoa. If that’s true, why did Cassius keep me in the dark? What possible harm could it do to let me know what I was actually dealing with? Not that I was going to go down that hole anyway, but a little warning would have been nice. . . .”
“He did not tell you because he did not know.” Tanaka looks away, and I can feel shame radiating from him; the Urthbone effect seems stronger with him than other thropes, maybe because of the intensity of my first exposure. Or maybe he just feels that strongly about me. “The superiors I was referring to are not the NSA, Jace—it is the Nipponese Shinto Investigative Branch. I’m afraid I misled you. I must confiscate this probe in the name of the Japanese government.”
I stare at him. Now I know why he didn’t just wolf out and cart the robot back to the beach himself—he wanted me exhausted, less likely to resist. I go for my gun, but it isn’t there.
“I took it from you while we were climbing,” he says. “You were distracted.” I remember a steadying hand on my back, the little tremor of shame pulsing from it.