But there was something. If it was an asteroid or similar mass, it had moved awfully fast to get into the Temerario’s path, which had been carefully charted through empty space. If it was a ship... James looked at the data again and blinked... it was enormous.
“Sandhu...” He turned back to the Hypnotubes to see if the Temerario’s science officer was awake and functional yet.
Blood.
There was blood spattered on the floor of the Hypnochamber, and the rest of the crew was gone.
Except one. One of the Hypnotubes had someone in it.
“Vito?” The Tube belonged to Vittorio Moroni, the ship’s medical officer.
James stepped closer, feeling a knot of dread in his chest.
Vito looked peaceful. He might have been still in Hypnostasis but for the fact that his throat was slit and blood soaked the blue tunic of his uniform.
“Vito!” James reached for his fellow-officer’s corpse, again instinctively using his right hand—which didn’t respond.
James looked down at his own hand, biting back a curse.
The hand was red with blood.
***
“Hop to it, Doc!”
Jack Kale roared like an angry ape as he threw his heavy shoulder against the door. The howling on the other side was inarticulate, deprived of consonants, and mad. The door shuddered, nearly throwing Jack to the floor.
The frayed veteran of the Great War and sometime private man of violence threw aside his Thompson. Without a loaded drum, the gun was useless, anyway. He drew his service pistol, a battered but meticulously cleaned and oiled M1911, and jerked back the slide.
“I am hurrying.”
“I’m saving two shots for us, Professor!” Kale yelled. “No way I’m having my liver plucked out on some ginny altar!”
“They’re not Italians.”
“No? Coulda fooled me.”
“Did they seem particularly Italian to you when they were eating Carver’s intestines?”
Kale snorted. “Put garlic on it, and a wop’ll eat anything.”
Randolph Choate nodded his retreat from the argument, trying to ignore the tumult and focus. Lemurian was hard to read in the best of circumstances, with its obscure determinatives and its recursive ergative syntax. It was harder when a bloodthirsty mob of worshipers of a dead god wanted to distract you.
Or sacrifice you to their blasphemous anthropophagous deity, as they had done to so many others. The kidnappings, the newspapers’ “mob violence,” the rash of murders and the warehouse fires on the Miskatonic—all sacrifices, all feeding and summoning the god.
He blinked away a sheet of orange. The colors in Randolph’s vision were beginning to bleed into each other, fade, and sometimes shimmer. Objects telescoped closer and further away as he looked at them. He wasn’t sure how well his mind was holding together, at this point. Too many revelations. The truth was dangerous, and an open mind was a vulnerable one.
The god was emphatically not dead, he reminded himself. Remote, perhaps. Trapped, hopefully. Dangerously close to emerging. The stars pointed to it, with their conjunctions in forgotten constellations. The ancient Lemurian prophecies were emphatic, and the enthusiastic activity of the cultists certainly suggested they thought something was about to happen.
The mob hit the door again and one of the hinges burst free, pinging across the room and disappearing in darkness.
The basement of the Burroughs manor was lit only by the kerosene lamp Randolph held over the stone tablet in his hand. Kale had brought a flashlight, but, as Randolph had predicted, the electricity in the device had begun to fade as the Gate opened. Even the lamp guttered, as if an unfelt wind sucked at its flame.
The cold, dark thing on the other side drank in the power and grew. Power and blood, Randolph thought. On some level, the same thing, as the ancient Hebrews had well known.
Carver had been right; the museum had been easy to rob. Randolph only wished he’d foreseen that the Burroughs Coven would be after the same tablet. He didn’t know what he would have done differently, but something, he was sure. He would have proceeding more cunningly, and Carver would not now be dead.
Carver had made a sacrifice, Randolph thought. A choice, a hard choice, showing willingness to give life for the greater good. It was up to his friends to make the journalist’s death meaningful. Also Delilah’s, he forced himself to articulate in his mind, and he willed himself not to think of the writer hanging herself by the neck from the hotel balcony after reading a mere Latin paraphrase of the very tablet he now held in his hand.
The lamp illuminated the tablet and picked out in yellow a ragbag of details in the basement. Randolph couldn’t explain them all, or interpret them. The two chipped and eroded statues of the Egyptian crocodile deity Sebek, for instance, that squatted on either side of the black, lichen-crusted wall seemed out of place, though the Egyptian incantations scratched about their bases were appropriate enough. Niarlat live, Niarlat watch, Niarlat come, over and over. Arise thou Niarlat from thy rest was as eloquent as the graffitoes got. Between and before the statues lay a broad, low altar of stone, and the lamp cast enough light for Randolph to see the runnels carved in its surface and in the floor, leading away into dark, unpenetrated corners of the hall.
The air was damp and cold from the proximity of the Miskatonic. Randolph squeezed his fingers into fists to force blood into them and ran a chewed fingernail under a row of elusive characters.
“Blood,” he said out loud. “Blood opens the gate and awakens the monster. Enough blood, and the right incantations. Blood there has been.” He peered into the darkness between the Sebek-idols. “And if the gate opens? What closes it?”
“Toldja we shoulda brought dynamite!” Kale skidded six inches away from the door as a force on the other side pounded into it, then fought his way back, the hem of his stained trench coat flapping around his ankles. “Or a cement truck! Fill this whole damn cellar with wet cement, it’d take the ginnies twenty years just to dig it out, much less fill it with blood.”
“If only I had a time machine,” Randolph lamented. “I could have driven here in a cement truck.”
“If you had a time machine,” Kale grunted, “we coulda gone back to when this Niarlat’s ma was pregnant, and whacked her.” He pronounced the name in a way that rhymed with beer hat.
“Niarlat, you mean.”
“He and his ma got the same name? That’s messed up. No wonder he’s so pissed off.”
Randolph found the line he needed, and reread it. An incantation, a hex that would damage the gate, and maybe destroy it altogether.
As Jack Kale spewed a stream of obscenities directed at all of America’s immigrant communities, he read it again, to be sure he’d understood.
“Jack,” he said slowly. “I’m going to have to leave you for a few minutes.”
“Leave?” Jack snorted. “Where you going? There ain’t but the one door—” he grunted, slamming his full weight against the door in question, “and that way is suicide.”
“There are two exits from this place.” Randolph sighed.
Both doors might be suicide. It was a hard choice, but he had to respect Carver’s sacrifice. Whatever the cost, he had to stop the black god.
***
The sun edged towards the Akhet, and beyond the line of the horizon the darkness of the Duat, to be caressed in the sacred, penetrating embrace of the god. Almost, salvation could be called. Sa-Niarlat climbed down from Pa-Ankhi’s roan horse at the pylon giving entrance to the Forecourt. A young initiate, head shaved but the tattooing not yet begun, took the animal’s reins.
“Master,” the initiate whimpered, brown eyes liquid with despair, “we’re all doomed.”
“Child.” Sa-Niarlat smiled benevolently. “Though the time is not of my choosing, I believe I must now teach you the sacred knowledge of the Dark Chamber.”
“Will you take me into the Inner Court?” The boy’s chin trembled. He was a merchant’s son, an innocent, an i
diot, a beast. He was blood only, worthless for any other purpose.
Sa-Niarlat shook his head. “Kneel.”
The boy knelt, and Sa-Niarlat chanted a quick hymn to the god. The boy’s brow furrowed at the words he didn’t recognize, words older than Narmer, older even than Huut-Niarlat itself.
“What sacred knowledge?”
“You already possess this knowledge,” Sa-Niarlat said. “My errand is only to point it out.”
The boy frowned. “What knowledge?”
“We’re all doomed.”
The knife flashed black in the reddish glow of the sun sinking into the western desert, and the boy fell to the sand.
The horse, an animal trained for war, snorted patiently. Sa-Niarlat killed it too, mingling its blood with the boy’s. Hot red liquid spurted over Sa-Niarlat’s sandals, and he let it, reveling in the feeling of warm, sticky toes.
Below, the sound of the valley temple’s gate crashing to the ground came as a muffled, faraway tumph. One gate opened, Sa-Niarlat thought, with satisfaction and sacred, ecstatic despair. Soon he would open another. Men and horses flowed into the opening, singing a song Sa-Niarlat did not know and did not fear. His god was coming, and his god would silence the squealing of the piglets of Thebes.
The Keeper of Secrets carried the dagger openly in his hand as he strode into the Forecourt. Papyrus columns bordered a square space that was open to the sky. On the inward-facing sides of the pillars were carved and painted the stories of Sebek familiar to his worshipers.
On the reverse sides of the columns, facing into the shadowy, star-speckled passage that surrounded the court, were more surprising images.
Adepts and initiates gathered around Sa-Niarlat. The true ignorant followers of Sebek stared in awe at the weapon in his hand, no doubt imagining that he had bloodied it in defense of their blind and impotent crocodile idol.
Those who had been to the Dark Chamber merely looked at his red footprints and nodded.
“Brothers,” Sa-Niarlat addressed them. “Children. It is time.”
***
“Gabe! Sandhu!” James banged on the intercom panel, but no one answered.
Wait... were they dead? Someone was dead, he dimly thought, but he couldn’t remember who. He had heard screaming. Was it someone far away, maybe? Someone a long time ago? Someone on a hot, sandy beach?
His face itched. His heart screamed dully into his throat. Was it the Temerario’s passengers? He remembered something wrong with the ship’s Hypnostasis system. Had Chaz murdered the entire population of Wellman’s World?
Who was Chaz?
Maybe the science officer and first mate weren’t answering because they had been killed on burning sand, their blood seeping into the path of the oncoming Theban horde, a warhorse sacrificed on top of their bodies.
He shook his head, snapping the fog back into the corners of his consciousness. Nightmares. He’d never heard of the emergence cocktail having side effects like this, but then he’d never heard of anyone overdosing on it. “Tesla!”
Something had gone wrong in Nullspace. There was something... he tried to remember... outside the ship, and it had made things go wrong. He was jumpy, sick. Crazy? Overdosing. In Basic Mode, Chaz wouldn’t dispense the sedative that James desperately needed, because James couldn’t remember how to give it the right instruction. Especially not in this state; the more he tried to focus, the more vague the details of Chaz’s operation became.
But he remembered this: The bridge had an emergency kit, a physical box bolted under the captain’s chair that could be accessed without any assistance whatsoever from the computer.
He lurched into the passage outside the Hypnochamber.
Had he killed someone? How many people? He felt numb.
The passage was lit by the white emergency strip at floor level. Even the ceiling emergency strip was dead, which meant something had really leeched their power. James racked his brain, trying to think of phenomena that could have done this. Had he mischarted their course, and flown them through a star? But Gabe had checked his figures, and besides, if that had happened, they’d be dead and atomized, or in a bottomless wormhole of their own creation, or... he racked his brain, trying to remember all the nightmare scenarios the astrophysicists had played out for his Nullspace Navigation classes at the Academy. They were terrible, but they all resulted in destruction or isolation, permanent exile from physical reality. None of them led to drained batteries.
The lift didn’t respond.
Behind the lift’s tube and all along it ran an emergency ladder. Even without the lift, the entire ship was accessible. Downward lay the twenty-five hundred Tubes of the colonists, as well as the escape pods and most of the functional parts of the ship. Engines, life support, the minimal weaponry that the ship carried, mostly to deter the pirates that travelers outside of Terran space occasionally encountered. Upward lay the bridge.
James grabbed the rungs of the ladder just as the Temerario’s artificial gravity gave out and up and down ceased to exist. He didn’t really notice the sudden weightlessness, though. He was anchored to the rung, and besides, he couldn’t take his eyes off his hand.
It was covered in blood, and held a large, black flake of stone. Like a caveman, he thought. Like a caveman, slaughtering animals to eat. Or sacrificing to his ancient beast-headed gods.
He felt a warm feeling in his heart at the thought, and smelled sand again.
He flexed the limb’s muscles. His arm was strong. That seemed wrong to him, but he wasn’t sure why.
Launching himself with toes against the rungs of the ladder, James ascended towards the bridge.
***
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Jack Kale leaned away from the door with one foot jammed under it, his M1911 punching thumb-sized holes through the wood. If the door were bigger, and there were more room on the other side for the cultists to mass together and pool their efforts, Randolph guessed that they would already have trampled his brawny friend into the mud and be in the room.
As it was, Kale looked exhausted.
“I could use a hand here!” Kale shouted. “Like a magic sword! Or a big fighting wolf! Or grant me three wishes, so I can wish these freakin’ ginnies into guinea pigs!” He leaned into the door again to eject his clip, then rummaged for bullets in the pocket of his trench coat. “Ain’t you supposed to be a wizard?”
“You’re no fencer, Jack. What would you even do with a sword if you had one?” Randolph dug into the deep pockets of his coat, looking for the things he needed. A tallow made of human fat, with its wick fashioned from a grave shroud that had wrapped the same corpse. A ball of his own hair, carefully collected over weeks. A knife only ever sharpened on flint. Chalk he had dug from the earth himself. Other collected oddments he shoved aside, not needing them for the conjuring he planned.
“I’d stab me some ginnies, is what I’d do. It’s a sword, whaddya think I’d do with it?”
“Touché.”
Randolph Choate was not so naive as to believe in anything like white magic, any more than he believed in fairies, angels, happy endings, or beautiful women who were attracted to gangly professors of Hellenistic esoterica. Magic started at gray, and shaded quickly into a blackness darker than most people could imagine. Randolph tried his best to stay in the gray.
Whenever possible.
He knelt and wedged his hair under the door. The muttering on the other side didn’t sound human, but like a muffled and half-heard argument among goats.
Curiosity stopped him for a moment to listen, and he would have sworn that the sound of the chittering, howling voices on the other side was pink.
Pink soft, pink warm, pink inviting. Come join us safe join us lovely join us pink pink pink.
He tore away his attention. He was, he knew, running out of mind.
Time, blast it. He was running out of time.
He jammed the candle under the juddering door and chalked four Lemurian glyphs on the crumbling gray cement
of the floor. Then he cut himself, and bled onto the spell-contraption.
“Jiminy,” Kale muttered. Randolph ignored him.
He felt strength ebb from his body as he chanted the words of the spell. This exercise had seemed like a game, back at the University. Now, any minute he could gain in holding back the horde was a minute more he had in which to defeat their god.
Not defeat. Thwart, misdirect, close the path before. It was the gate that was his target, not the Sleeper in the Void. Anyone foolish enough to attempt to defeat the great Resting Niarlat of the Abyss deserved what he got.
A tiny part of his mind saw his flowing blood and felt there was something... mistaken... about it. An error.
The door stopped shaking. Thumps and crashes from the other side suggested that the parties that wanted entrance continued to pound on the door, but it now held firm as if it were a stone wall.
Randolph stood.
He turned and headed for the idols. “It won’t hold long.”
“Thanks. Hey, uh... you’re still bleeding.”
Randolph held up his hand and looked at the gray ichor running from his palm. He smiled, ignoring the failure of his eyes. “I’ve never known a magic spell that was ruined by the addition of a little blood.” He continued towards the gate, limping from exhaustion and pain.
“I’d feel a lot better if you’d tell me what you’re doing.”
“I’d feel a lot better if I knew.”
He knelt before the gate. Unsure what to do about the statues of Sebek, he knelt between them rather than in front of them, to face the darkness beyond rather than the idols themselves.
It was a scientific operation, he told himself. It was taking local action in ways that produced remote effect, according to known and predictable patterns, following the scientific, procedural instructions on the Lemurian tablet. You could call it magic, if you liked, but that did nothing to change its essential character.
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