Dragon City

by James Axler

  As Edwards stamped his foot back down on the ground and prepared his next attack, Shizuka twisted and leaped backward, kicking out against the topmost bar of the ornate balcony and launching herself up over his head. She flipped in the air, her body an upside-down pendulum over Edwards’s shaved head, and she clapped down with both arms, using the flat of the sword and its sheath to strike Edwards on either side of his skull.

  Edwards cried out in annoyance as much as pain, turning away as he reached for the throbbing cut beside his right ear. Behind him, Shizuka made a perfect two-point landing, both feet touching the ground just a fraction of a second apart, before spinning and turning to face her opponent once again.

  “I cannot let you leave here, Edwards,” she explained, the afternoon sunlight painting her sword like a bright slash in the air. “Please do not put yourself through any further pain.”

  Edwards narrowed his eyes as he glared at her. “I am stone,” he muttered once more.

  Then he was upon her again, a furious maelstrom of punches and kicks directed at Shizuka in a relentless attempt to knock her down. Shizuka jumped, ducked and weaved, timing each move with immaculate precision.

  Suddenly, Shizuka saw a gap in Edwards’s furious attack, and she struck out once more with the flat edge of the katana, twisting the blade just slightly as she slashed across his chest. The twisted blade caught the material of the simple surgery gown Edwards wore, cutting a four-inch horizontal line across it but not meeting the skin beneath.

  “The next time,” Shizuka warned, “I’ll cut you down.”

  Edwards’s eyes met hers, and a thin-lipped smile crossed his slash of mouth. “I am stone,” he said.

  Then Edwards was on her again, redoubling his effort to knock her down as she darted around like some crazy kangaroo. Shizuka pivoted on one leg, spinning in place and kicking Edwards in the side, but the blow felt like kicking a wall, the man was so solidly built. Edwards retaliated in a split second, driving punch after kick after punch at Shizuka, each one getting closer to striking its mark as she struggled to keep out of his path.

  The spectacle was attracting other people from the lodge and its surroundings now. Two Tigers of Heaven rushed from different directions across the vast lawn, and a third man appeared on the higher balcony that ran around the building before charging down the steps and into the sunken garden.

  Shizuka aimed her katana for Edwards’s legs, cutting through the air with a one-handed slash a little above knee height. Edwards stepped out of the sword’s arc, then back in as it passed, aiming a ram’s-head punch at Shizuka’s nose in an attempt to break it and drive the cartilage into her brain, instantly killing her. Shizuka brought her other hand up, using the hard casing of the sword’s empty sheath to block Edwards’s brutal attack.

  Standing close by in the shadow of the building, Reba DeFore watched these two warriors battle mercilessly. Again Edwards was lunging toward Shizuka, reaching for the front of her tunic in a blur of material. Shizuka pulled away, arching her back as Edwards’s hand snatched at empty air, then she kicked out, bringing her toe up to connect with the base of the man’s jaw. Edwards’s teeth clacked together and he stumbled backward, reeling from the blow.

  Shizuka pressed her attack, stepping swiftly forward and sweeping the twenty-five-inch katana blade low to Edwards’s feet. Edwards stepped aside, but as he did so he slipped on a patch of slick grass, and suddenly he was toppling toward Shizuka.

  Shizuka hadn’t expected the move—indeed, nor had Edwards—and she found herself falling back under Edwards’s weight, her elbows crashing hard against the ground and the breath blurting out of her in a rush. As Edwards floundered atop her, Shizuka shook off the impact and brought her sword up to his throat, balancing the blade there, poised to cut his jugular. As Edwards struggled, Shizuka warned him not to move unless he wanted his throat cut.

  “Live or die, it’s your choice now,” Shizuka whispered close to his ear. “But trust me when I tell you, my blade is true. If you move, it will take you, have no doubt on that.”

  From behind them, Shizuka saw Reba DeFore dart across the grass toward them.

  “Hold him still,” DeFore said.

  Edwards hissed something at DeFore, pulling against Shizuka as he tried to get free. But as the skin of his flesh touched the cool blade, he must have realized his mistake, and he stopped himself pulling any further. A thin line of blood appeared almost immediately across his throat; had the razor-sharp blade cut any deeper Edwards would have garroted himself.

  DeFore leaned close, the hypodermic needle glinting in the sunlight as she brought it down into the vein in the man’s arm. Edwards glared daggers at the physician as she pushed the plunger down, shooting the tranquilizer into his bloodstream. If he could have moved, if he had dared, she knew he would have strangled her or tossed her aside. But with any movement he threatened himself with the keen edge of Shizuka’s sword, the slightest misstep and he would slit his own throat wide-open.

  DeFore stood back as a trio of Tigers of Heaven guards came to join them, ready and waiting to support their mistress as she lay beneath the ex-Magistrate, holding that wicked blade to his throat. DeFore could see it in Edwards’s eyes; she had no doubt that right now he would kill her if he could but reach her. It sent a shiver down her spine and, for just a moment, she recalled those other eyes that were seared into her memory, the burning eyes of Ullikummis, the source of all of their current misfortunes.

  It took over a minute, ninety seconds or so in fact, before Edwards’s eyelids finally became heavy and his muscles ceased tensing. Toward the end of it, DeFore actually began to doubt that the sedative would take effect, worried that perhaps whatever alien thing was driving Edwards inside it had made him superhuman and somehow invincible. Was this the future of mankind? Was this the next step in evolution, a parasitic stone with the ability to guide men’s minds and change their physical properties? It hardly bore thinking about.

  Eventually Edwards slumped against Shizuka beneath him, his weight heavy against her body. Warily, Shizuka pulled her katana blade away from the man’s throat, watching for any signs of movement, any hint that this was a feint.

  After that, the Tigers of Heaven helped lift Edwards’s slumbering form from their mistress, and Shizuka stood and stretched, resheathing the katana in its exquisitely tooled scabbard.

  “Thank you for your help,” she told DeFore.

  The clinician shook her head. “No, thank you for yours. He would have got away otherwise. Quite how his system shook off the effects of the first sedative, I can’t guess.”

  “There are many things going on here that still need answers,” Shizuka agreed, tucking the sheathed katana into her belt, its hilt sticking out so that it might be drawn at an instant’s notice.

  With surprising gentleness, the Tigers of Heaven carted Edwards back toward the lodge via the sunken garden, and DeFore and Shizuka followed.

  “I should finish patching up his ear,” the physician said, feeling a little embarrassed by all that had happened. “And after that, we can take a look at whatever it was I scraped out of his skull.”

  Chapter 19

  It was the birth of a god. That’s what Domi was watching through the ice-cool plate, she realized, as she watched the thing that had been Kishiro vibrate and shift within Enlil’s alien apparatus. Kishiro wasn’t simply rocking; he was actually shifting dimensionally, his constitution changing to accommodate the download of an Annunaki genetic template. What started as a man, an ordinary human being, was purposefully evolved through all the stages that had led to the Annunaki rebirth, his muscular form becoming the familiar frail, birdlike shape of the hybrids before taking on a greater shape and size, great flaps of skin sluicing away to reveal the armorlike musculature that was forming from within.

  Enlil watched the process proceed, bet
raying no emotion other than the faintest hint of a smile on his reptilian face.

  “Stop it, you monster,” Domi demanded, banging her fists against the glass. “Stop it. You’re killing him.”

  Enlil looked at her dispassionately for a moment. “Your whole race should have died out years ago,” he declared as if stating a well-known fact. “You are a plague on this planet, nothing more than that.”

  “And yet you still speak to us,” Domi shouted triumphantly. “You still acknowledge us, acknowledge me. For all your talk of superiority, you’ll never be better than us and you know it. You’ll always just be a lousy, back-biting, fucking scale-face.”

  Enlil stared at her. “And soon you shall be, too,” he said as behind him Kishiro’s body trembled, finishing its ghastly cycle from man to monster.

  Where once Kishiro had stood, framed within the network of glowing piping that held his struggling body in place, now stood the dormant shell of an Annunaki, a newborn god awaiting activation. Beside him, the five other humans had suffered a similar metamorphosis, turning from man to creature in just a few minutes. Though the procedure appeared to be complete, each of those terrible alien faces held its jaws wide as though in pain, the pain of the gods.

  Enlil touched something on his control pad near the screen through which Domi watched, and the amber bars faded, their lines of light winking out in front of the thing that had been Kishiro and the other individuals in the cylinders. Domi saw now that all six had been altered, changed beyond recognition into sinister lizardlike creatures, each one standing nearly seven feet tall with sweeping crests of spines running along their heads. They were hideous yet beautiful, and Domi felt sick just thinking that thought, repelled by her attraction to them.

  After a moment it became clear that these new Annunaki were dead, stillborn gods. Enlil strode across the hard floor toward them and ran his clawed hand along the cheek of the one who had been the blond-haired woman. The reptilian thing gave no reaction. Its eyes remained closed and Domi fancied that she could detect no rise and fall of the naked breasts that would indicate breathing.

  While Enlil continued to examine the transformed human, Domi turned back to Hassood, her voice an urgent whisper.

  “We need to get out of here,” Domi urged, “or we’ll be next. You got here before us, Hassood—did you find anything resembling a door?”

  Hassood looked bemused. “I…I was asleep,” he said helplessly. “I didn’t see…”

  “Okay, cowboy, calm down,” Domi said. “We’ll look together. You go check up there—” she pointed “—and I’ll see how far this cell goes.”

  With that, the albino girl padded off into the darkness, her hands outstretched to touch the nearest wall.

  * * *

  GRANT, ROSALIA AND KUDO hurried through the dragon city, their pace never slowing to less than a jog. Rosalia’s dog scampered ahead now and again in the restless way dogs will. Nothing had changed and yet it seemed, on some level, that everything had. Now they suspected they were treading on the bones of some colossal creature, that the things they had taken to be buildings were in fact ribs or a spine or an incredible tailbone whose size dwarfed anything they had ever seen before. Grant recalled the gargantuan undersea creatures he had observed a few months ago while investigating the deep-sea Ontic Library off the West Coast of America, but he couldn’t make the math work, could not imagine how the bones around him compared to those things.

  They scrambled along the cobbled stone, hurrying up a street—or bone, or vein—that was on a steep incline. Rosalia’s scruffy dog waited at the apex, tongue hanging out as it panted for breath, peering behind now and then to check that its mistress and her friends were following.

  When they reached the top of the incline, two curving, white structures rising to either side of them like the great ribs of some mythical giant, they saw the head of the dragon looming in front of them. Previously concealed by the incline, the head was just a hundred yards ahead of them now, its wedge shape poking up at the sky on a slender, serpentine neck. Grant estimated that the head was at least twenty feet across, probably closer to thirty. Twin red eyes glowed like jewels, set far back along its tapering snout, and its mouth was locked open, wisps of steam winding between its stylized teeth. The creature seemed almost like a work of art, its sleek lines like an art deco interpretation of a dragon of myth, and it made Grant wonder whether the thing was truly alive or simply an elaborate mechanism. In actuality, it was a little of both, Annunaki organic technology wrought large.

  It was clear now that the “city” that the Cerberus rebels had been making their way across was made up of the wide-spread wings of the dragon, each jutting building a part of a latticework of bone across which the skin of its wing should have been spread. It stood like a skeleton awaiting life.

  Dark-feathered nocturnal birds swooped through the sky, blurting their ugly caws as they fluttered past the vast skull. Without warning, the dragon’s head shifted on the neck with a whirring, grating sound, and the mouth wrenched wide-open, blasting two laser bolts into the sky in quick succession, their pulses like colossal red tablets shooting into the air. Insects were lit in that terrible scarlet glow, and Grant shielded his eyes as one of the nocturnal birds was flash-fried in less than a second, feather and flesh instantly turned to ash. Rosalia’s dog whined at the blast, which though it couldn’t be heard could be felt deep in the eardrums of the humans. What it was doing to the hound’s more sensitive hearing was anyone’s guess.

  “What the hell is that?” Rosalia asked, eyeing the sleek lines of the dragon form in the center of the city.

  Grant felt sick as he looked at those familiar lines. “Tiamat,” he confirmed. “The mother of the Annunaki.”

  “You mean mothership, right?” Rosalia asked, her eyes fixed on the massive beastlike thing in front of them.

  “It’s…complicated,” Grant told her. “She’s a spaceship but she’s also kind of alive—at least that’s how I understood it. In the last great reappearance of the Annunaki she seemed to have become fed up with the internal squabbles of her children. The part of her that was alive—which is to say, sentient—seemed to rebel, causing her to blow up.”

  “And this was when? Last year?” Rosalia asked. She had not been a member of the Cerberus team then, and on occasions like this she felt a little as if she was endlessly having to play catch-up.

  “Yeah.” Grant nodded his agreement. “She looks different now, down here. Last time I saw her she was in space. But she looks broken up, spread out like this. Like you said—she’s bones.”

  Rosalia placed her hand on the dog’s head, settling it as it yearned to pull ahead. “You said this ship blew up, though.”

  “Yeah. Kane, Brigid and me watched as she exploded,” Grant confirmed. “We were getting out of there as fast as we could, and the explosion rocked the ship we’d commandeered and lit up the sky. I saw that much with my own eyes.”

  Kudo spoke up then, his hand nervously resting on the grip of his sheathed sword. “These Annunaki, they’re tricky.”

  “Their tech is like nothing you’ve ever experienced,” Grant grumbled. “The fact that Tiamat is here, assuming that really is Tiamat, comes as an unpleasant surprise, but not an altogether unexpected one. We thought as much when the satellite feed picked this place up. I just didn’t want to believe it, not until I’d seen it with my own eyes.”

  “And now that you’ve seen it?” Rosalia prompted.

  The dragon’s head turned on its gracefully arching neck, and the mouth opened once again, blasting another fiery burst of laser fire high into the sky above the Euphrates River. The sound of the blast was so high-pitched it rumbled the inner ear of the group who watched it, and Rosalia’s dog whimpered again, looking plaintively at her.

  “Brewster’s saying that Domi’s in there,” Grant confirme
d sourly, “and most likely Kishiro is with her. We’re going inside, team.”

  If anyone objected, they didn’t say.

  * * *

  BLEARY-EYED, HASSOOD checked the walls of the strange cell close to where Kishiro had disappeared in the eerie reversed waterfall. The walls were plain enough, the lines where they met ceiling and floor lightly curving as if with coving, smoothing away the hard corners.

  Domi paced swiftly down the other end of the chamber, her eyes penetrating the growing darkness there. Like Hassood, she could find no suggestion of a door, and she found herself walking further into the darkness with a growing sense of unease. “Just how large is this place?” she muttered, running her hand along the ridges of one of the walls.

  But no matter how far she walked there seemed to be no end, and without any light source penetrating this far, it was impossible to gauge how much farther she might have to walk before she found the far wall. It was more like a tunnel, Domi realized, or an artery, and she had the distinct impression those curved walls somehow played tricks on the senses.

  Domi peered behind her, checking that Hassood was still there in the light. She was uncomfortable with getting too far from him or leaving him on his own for too long, given what had happened to Kishiro. Cerberus was here to help people, not leave them to the enemy.

  She carried on, using her sense of touch to check the walls in the darkness where her eyesight could no longer adequately penetrate.

  * * *