by James Axler
‘They should be here. It is their duty to protect him,’ Cyran said softly, an edge to her voice that made Lemur look at her strangely.
There was, however, no time for him to question her on this, as Jak stayed them with a gesture and a harshly whispered, ‘Stop—someone in chamber.’ He indicated the closed door about twenty feet away and to their left. At first it was hard to detect the sound, as the closed door was of thick stone, and it seemed that that silence stretched along the endless, torch-lit corridor, with nothing more than the fluttering of the tapestries in the through breeze to disturb the peace. But as they focused, they were able to pick out the slightest of sounds. It was the muted chanting of one man, rhythmic and with a keening edge.
‘What the hell is he doing?’ Mildred asked.
‘More to the point, how come we can only hear one—where are Doc and Krysty?’ J.B. asked.
Ryan’s sole blue orb glittered hard as he spoke. ‘Only one way to find out.’ Without pause, he strode forward the few yards to the stone door and could see that the lock had been set in a pattern he had come to recognize. This door, too, was unlocked, so either Odyssey wanted them to enter, or someone else requested the pleasure. Either way, Ryan was in no mood to deny them.
The entire war party carried their handblasters—apart from J.B., who as ever eschewed a smaller weapon in favor of the mini-Uzi—and Ryan indicated that they should be ready to use them. Mentally counting to three, he took the door and then stopped dead. He found it hard to believe what he could see in front of him. At his back, the others, entering the room, also found themselves stunned to momentary inaction. They had been expecting sec men, a firefight, the sound of one man to conceal others in wait: the trap that they thought had been laid for them.
Perhaps now they were beginning to realize that a trap had been prepared, but it wasn’t merely for them.
‘Fireblast and fuck. What’s going on?’ Ryan asked rhetorically—for it was plain to see what was occurring, if not to understand why.
The sight that greeted them was one that, in any circumstances, would seem bizarre: Krysty, in a white robe that was slashed open down to her waist, lay on a slab. Her face was impassive, her eyes blank, and she was silent. To one side, amid the hangings and decorations depicting ancient rituals, Doc was squatting, hunkered down. He was immobile and as silent as Krysty.
And overseeing the scene was the potbellied figure of Odyssey, chanting a prayer to ancient gods as he purified an ornate, curved knife in a flame on the altar. Clearly, Krysty was about to be sacrificed.
There was very little that could still the reflexes of the companions. Endless combat situations had prepared them for most things. But this was something so bizarre that they were all momentarily frozen in inaction. It was the Memphis people who were the first to recover their wits.
‘You defiler,’ Lemur yelled angrily, brushing past Ryan and stepping up to the slab, pushing the Atlantean leader away from Krysty. Odyssey fell from the altar, crashing to the floor.
‘You poltroon,’ he yelled, suddenly coming out of the trance into which he had placed himself for the ceremony.
‘Is it not enough that you have perverted and ruined the ideals on which this city was built?’ Lemur rasped, striding around the slab so that he was standing over the prone Atlantean leader, his blaster a few feet away from the terrified Odyssey’s face.
It occurred to Ryan that Odyssey was only following in a long line of fellow oppressors, but he thought it politic not to mention this to Lemur. The Memphis leader was angry and taking direct action. He had the Atlantean right where they wanted him. Still keeping his eye firmly on the scene in front of him, he indicated that J.B. and Mildred should attend to Krysty, while Jak saw to Doc.
Lemur continued, unnoticing. ‘To build a vessel with which we are reunited with those who have gone before us, that is a noble aim. Not to treat those who should be reunited as though they were nothing more than disposable slaves.’
‘It is for the greater good of the cause,’ Odyssey yelled.
‘This? This sacrifice?’ Lemur shouted in reply. ‘I recognize none of these things—’ with which he waved his blaster around the chamber before bringing it back to rest on Odyssey ‘—with which you do little more than justify sating your own twisted beliefs. I should kill you now and end this, I—’
A shot rang out around the chamber, freezing everyone where they stood. It came from behind Ryan and he could almost feel the hot blast against the back of his head.
Lemur dropped his blaster and pitched forward, landing on Odyssey as the Atlanetan desperately struggled to escape the falling corpse. A head shot had spread the majority of the Memphis man’s skull over an old pagan hanging of a green man in congress with a goat. The decoration seemed somehow appropriate.
But Ryan hardly noticed that. It had to be Affinity who fired the blast. Unless… In a sense, he was less than surprised when Cyran stepped past him, turning so that she had the rest of the chamber covered.
‘Good, I thought you would never fire on that madman,’ Odyssey said without the slightest trace of irony as he hauled himself to his feet and stood beside her, brushing himself off. ‘And that will not be necessary,’ he added in an offhand manner, gesturing to her blaster and then sweeping a gaze around the room.
Ryan realized what he was doing a fraction of a second too late. He could see J.B. had the same idea, as he stopped with the mini-Uzi half off his shoulder, where he had slung it while trying to help Mildred lift the prone Krysty from the slab. For his own part, Ryan had the SIG-Sauer half directed, but couldn’t move muscles immobilized by one hypnotic glance. It had to be some kind of mutie in-bred ability handed down genetically to the leaders. There was no other explanation. Not that this thought was of any comfort right now.
‘You realize that I could have been killed if you had delayed any longer? No matter, you did as you had to in the end,’ Odyssey purred. He looked over the frozen group. ‘Not many of you, although I feel you must have done tremendously well to get this far. I shall have to have words with Xerxes, as there should have been a better guard to stop you intruding on my ceremony. I must admit, I am a little surprised to see my little Cyran here…’ He turned to the woman and touched her cheek. She kept her eyes, and her blaster, firmly on the group and away from Odyssey.
He, on the other hand, now seemed to be back in control.
‘A little conceit of mine, to have the wife of the opposition leader as my chief spy in the camp. She was mine before she was his, of course—that was the reason for her searching him out. And after all, even though they all knew there were spies, who would suspect the faithful wife, the one who seemed to be so against my regime. Convenient. She could send back reports and do my work. Memphis has long been a thorn in my side, and in truth they are so inept that it would be easy to crush them if I could be bothered to devote the manpower to such a task. But the time it would take, and men better employed on the vessel. The time of alignment was too close, and I needed to keep them occupied with their own follies.
‘But you had to come along and alter that. I curse you, even though you gave me the woman with powers that would help me in the ceremony. Because even with that, you had to interfere before I could conclude. No matter. You cannot move. You shall watch me as I conclude the ceremony. It is unfortunate that one so beautiful must be sacrificed upon this altar, but the time is almost nigh and the deed must be done.”
Odyssey took the frozen Krysty from the equally powerless grip of J.B. and Mildred, pulling her back onto the altar.
‘That should be me.’ Cyran’s voice was harsh, grating in the silence. Odyssey turned to her, amusement writ large on his face.
‘You? You would dare to tell me what I should do?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, almost unable to keep the tremor from her voice. ‘I was the one who loved you, who believed in you. You think that Xerxes does? You think that there were no guards on your temple by accident? He has been waiting for a
long time to depose you. Yet still he underestimates you. He knew of my status as a spy, but not that I loved you. I wanted to be the one who partook of the ritual with you, who sacrificed all for you, not this bitch from the outside world.’
‘Xerxes is a fool, and he will pay. You will have your reward. But this woman has gifts that you cannot even imagine. She is special. You? You are just one of many.’
‘Get away from her.’ Cyran leveled her blaster at Odyssey. His mouth quirked in a cynical grin.
‘You think I am afraid of you? I know how you feel—you killed your husband for me. I have nothing to fear from you.’
‘You’re wrong,’ she replied, her voice suddenly cold and low. ‘I killed him because he was about to kill you, yes. But not for the reason that you may think. I killed him because you have betrayed me, and I wanted the pleasure of taking you out for myself.’
Odyssey gave a guttural, barking laugh. ‘You couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t let you—’ With which he focused his gaze upon her.
From his vantage point across the room, Ryan could almost see the muscles in Cyran’s body tighten as the hypnotic glare of Odyssey hit her. But there was something, a willpower born of anger, a last rage of defiance. Almost as he could see the paralysis grip her, he could see the impulse to squeeze the trigger travel down her arm, just that fraction of a second ahead of the hypnosis.
The shot reverberated around the chamber. As with her first, it seemed to fill the whole room.
Odyssey looked down in surprise rather than pain and anger. There was a neat hole in the middle of his chest, with just a trickle of blood surrounding it. A larger wound had been torn in his back by the exit hole, although he couldn’t see the ripped flesh that disfigured his noble being. He could, however, feel that he was drowning in his own blood as his shattered lungs filled with arterial blood and his ruptured heart, bombarded by bone splinters, pumped one—twice—erratically before finally giving out.
The once leader of Atlantis fell backward, off the stone altar and onto the hard ground. He was beyond feeling any impact.
As he bought the farm, so he reached out, with the willpower of a dying man who wished revenge, and triggered a mechanism in the side of the stone altar. The door to the chamber shut, the lock smoothly falling into place, just a fraction too soon for Ryan to reach it, his limbs still like jelly as the hypnotic effect wore off.
Another round of blasterfire, higher and of a different caliber, exploded in the room and Cyran was thrown backward, chilled by a shell between the eyes.
‘Bitch. I trusted you. We all did,’ Affinity said into the silence behind the roar.
Ryan tried the door, not looking back until he had ascertained, with loud cursing, that it was locked. Everyone in the room still living was beginning to move. Krysty hugged the tunic to her body, awkward and unsure what to do, not knowing where to begin in putting together what had happened to her.
‘Affinity, what the fuck’s going on here?’ Ryan barked.
The young man tore his eyes away from his handiwork. ‘Ah, self-destruct. Odyssey had many triggers built into the temple. I worked on some of them myself,’ he said quickly, his mind racing. ‘The doors are sealed for those who don’t know the code. Then the foundations are undermined by a series of old explosives that were kept from predark for just such purposes. We have about ten minutes before the complete mechanism runs its course.’
‘Fireblast,’ Ryan yelled, punching the wall. ‘The bastard can’t win now. Do you know the code?’
Affinity shook his head. ‘Only Odyssey and temple sec know how the codes work.’
‘I know,’ Doc interrupted in a shaky voice. ‘I worked it out. I can get us out.’
‘Then why—’ Ryan began, before shaking his head. ‘No matter. Let’s get the fuck out of here.’
With shaking hands, Doc fumbled the stones until they were in position, and the lock sprang back.
‘Come on. J.B., help Mildred with Krysty. Jak, come ahead with Doc and me. Affinity, cover our asses.’
Ryan moved out, pulling the stumbling Doc with him, Jak at their side. He had to hand it to the old man. He was shaken, and had every right to be in a state of shock, yet when it came to each lock he was completely focused. Gibbering slightly and trembling as they traversed the passageways between doors, when he came to the locks Doc managed to control his shaking fingers and hit the combinations of stones with a surprising fluency.
There was no opposition on the way out. Their only enemy seemed to be the building itself, which began to tremble as the old explosives went off with a muffled thud in the bowels of the temple. Disturbed stone moved against disturbed stone, and it seemed that the building was poised to tumble around their ears.
They were moving downward as fast as was possible, but would that be fast enough?
Chapter Twenty-One
‘Hurry, Doc. I don’t think we’ve got a lot of time left…’ Ryan muttered the second half of the sentence, speaking almost to himself as another rumble started in the bowels of the building. The entire structure began to move slowly, as though the balance of the entire edifice was shifting slightly. Dust and particles of stone, chipped by the coming together of the blocks, fell on them in a silent, dry rain.
Doc ignored Ryan, his fingers feverishly twisting the colored stones to release the lock. He was only too well aware of the urgency of the situation. There were two main considerations. First, he had to get them out before the whole temple came crashing down on their heads. Second, he had to get them out before the shifting of the temple walls jammed the stone doors, rendering any attempt to release the locks as useless. The first was a precursor to the second, and if nothing else he was determined that he would do his damnedest to fulfil his function.
He didn’t turn to look at those behind him. He had to focus on his task.
The stones formed a pattern, the lock released, inaudible over the grinding and moaning of the shifting stonework. Doc pushed at the door and it opened. He went through while Ryan hustled the remainder of the party through without delay before joining Doc at the vanguard once more.
‘We might just do it, Doc,’ he said grimly, trying to keep the old man’s spirits raised but being betrayed by his tone.
Doc didn’t reply. It took all his concentration to keep moving. His body was racked by fits of shaking, and it was only by a supreme effort of will that he could control his fingers when dealing with the locks. Otherwise, it was all he could do to put one foot in front of another.
‘How far down are we now?’ Ryan yelled at Affinity, having lost track of where they were in the interminable corridors. They were sloping down as they moved, but that was all the bearing he could find in these long, winding stone passages with no windows, and little else to mark their differences now that the shuddering building had thrown the hangings, lamps and candles from the walls. In some parts, the corridors had been plunged into darkness and the companions were forced to use their precious flashlights. It was only with some reservations that they did: better if they could preserve the batteries for renegotiating the maze.
Affinity stopped momentarily, as though this would help him better to get his bearings, before answering.
‘Near the entrance. One door more before the exit. The corridors start to curve differently as you approach the exit passage.’
The last thing Ryan had time for was an appraisal of the architectural values of the temple, so he took the young man’s word on trust. Though, on reflection, it did seem as though the passages in this last section of the temple took them longer to traverse.
Even with the building beginning to fall around their ears, Ryan knew that they would have to exercise caution as they neared the exit. Whatever plan the Nightcrawlers had been putting into operation by allowing them to enter the temple unhindered, it had to have hinged on attacking them at some point. Either when they were inside or when they attempted to leave. The fact that they had encountered no opposition thus far, and that the build
ing was about to crumble, left the enemy with little option other than to attack on their exit.
So they would have to tackle the seemingly contradictory task of getting out quickly with exercising the caution needed to avoid being caught in an ambush.
Ryan cursed as he dodged a sharpened sliver of stone that sheered off a ceiling block and dropped down as the stones clashed, bowing under the pressure of the walls closing on them in another shift. The floor was becoming uneven as stones were thrust upward, potential hazards to trip and injure them.
How could he successfully evacuate his people and also avoid the ambush he knew must be waiting? The only way he could see this happening was if he took an immense risk upon himself. He would have to blindly charge, hoping he could draw any fire while J.B. and Jak assessed the opposition forces. They had no time for anything else.
A noble sacrifice? A triple stupe one at any other time, but right now he had to play the odds. And the odds were that better one chilled and the others have a chance of escape than everyone buy the farm under several tons of rubble.
Doc was only a couple of paces behind the one-eyed man as they hit the final sec door before the exit. The old man looked up at the bowing ceiling, the stones grumbling and protesting under the pressure. He took a deep breath and started to manipulate the lock, twisting the red, black and white stones until they were in the right coded combination. He held that breath while he listened for the mechanism, almost inaudible under the noise that was growing around them. To his immense relief, he could pick out the sliding of the lock mechanism. It was hesitant, but it went all the way. With the distortion of the shape of the walls and ceiling that resulted from the shaking foundations, he had feared that the lock mechanism would jam.
The closer they came to ground level and the final exit door, the more likely such an occurrence became: the closer to the explosives beneath the foundations, the more likely for the shock to have taken effect. So far they had been lucky. He only hoped that their luck would hold for the exit door to the outside world.