Serpent's Kiss

by Alex Archer

  Annja hated watching the destruction taking place. The docks were potentially an archaeological prize. Please don’t destroy everything, she thought desperately. With her arm under the unconscious man’s chin, she kicked for the dock’s edge.

  36

  The inflatables butted expertly up against the docks and rebounded gently before a man in each boat tied the mooring ropes to cleats. The mercenaries were firmly entrenched at the main archway and were holding their positions with ease.

  Annja saw a spherical object sail through the air just as she grabbed hold of the pier. She didn’t realize what the object was until it exploded and tossed the bodies of dead men in all directions.

  A section of the archway toppled to the flagstones and shattered.

  Annja nearly wept at the sight of everything that had been lost in just that split second. Even from her distance she could see that the archway had been carved with figures and symbols. There was no way of knowing what had been destroyed.

  “Here. Let me have him.”

  Dazed, Annja looked up and saw Fleet squatting on the pier in front of her. He reached down and caught hold of the unconscious man’s Kevlar vest and pulled him out of the water. Annja helped push him onto the pier behind a jumble of rocks that had probably been used as ballast in years gone by.

  Patel’s shock troops moved forward in covering positions as Annja pulled herself onto the pier. She knelt beside the fallen man and checked the jagged tear along his temple.

  “He’s still alive,” Fleet growled. “He should stay that way if he doesn’t bleed out.”

  Annja retreated to one of the boats and grabbed a med kit. Bullets chased her, but Patel’s men took down at least two of the mercenaries. Annja saw their bodies fall.

  Back at the wounded man, Annja knelt and pulled out a pressure bandage. The ballast rocks covered them for the most part.

  Fleet put his assault rifle aside and lifted the man’s head.

  Annja wrapped a pressure bandage around the head to slow and, she hoped, stop the bleeding.

  “I’ve known men like this nearly my whole life,” Fleet said. “Even though I’ve never met this man and he’s from a different country, we’re brothers.”

  Annja saw the fierceness in the man’s gaze. She knew that he cared enough to save, as well as to kill to protect. Those two things didn’t always go together. She finished the bandage and gave the man a shot of morphine. If they didn’t hold their own against Rajiv’s mercenaries, he wouldn’t stand a chance, but she didn’t know what kind of damage the man had sustained.

  “Has anyone called in air support?” Annja asked as she washed her hands in the river.

  Fleet grinned. “Small arms and air support. Are you sure you’re an archaeologist?”

  “First and foremost,” Annja said. “Last, too. It’s the times in between that give me trouble.”

  “Well, let’s see if we can get out of here and I’ll stand you to a dinner,” Fleet said.

  Annja couldn’t believe he was asking something so innocuous in the middle of a running gun battle. Even more, she couldn’t believe it when she said, “All right.”

  Fleet nodded forward. “Looks like we’re going in.”

  When Annja looked up, she saw that Patel’s men had stepped through the arches. She followed Fleet. Seconds later, they saw the first of the albino men and women mixed in with the dead and wounded mercenaries.

  Fleet cursed. “Look at their hands,” he said.

  Each of the dead men’s hands was festooned with fingers. There were as many as eight and nine jutting off in all directions. Most of them would have had problems doing anything that involved fine motor skills. Other men showed burn scarring where they’d probably amputated fingers that had offended them most.

  “Postaxial polydactyly,” Annja said.

  “Greek to me,” Fleet said.

  She knelt and picked up one of the dead men’s hands. She touched the fingers and felt for the bone within. Most of them were pliable.

  “Boneless,” she said. She let the hand drop. “Postaxial polydactyly is a genetic disorder caused most prevalently by inbreeding. Several members of the royal families in Europe exhibited similar problems.”

  “None of the women have the extra fingers,” one of the paratroopers said.

  Annja shook her head. “They won’t. Polydactyly is tied to the male sex. The albinism can be a trait caused by inbreeding, too, but not necessarily. That genetic defect also occurs all on its own.”

  “These people look like savages,” one of the paratroopers said. “They don’t even clothe themselves.”

  “Diminished mental capacity can be another problem of inbreeding in closed societies,” Annja agreed. It made her sad to think the people that had escaped Kumari Kandam had come to this. But they had chosen to exile themselves from the world.

  They were cannibals, Annja reminded herself. That’ll exclude you from a lot of people.

  “They move like animals,” another paratrooper said. “They have a gait, not a walk.”

  “They may not be far removed from animals at this point,” Annja said. She tried not to think about the possibility of children among these people, but she knew it existed. “There may be children.”

  Another sporadic burst of gunfire sounded ahead of them. Without a word, they gathered their gear and headed deeper into the lost city.

  HEAD STILL POUNDING from the blow he’d received, Goraksh reloaded his machine pistol and breathed in great draughts of air that tasted like blood and cordite. He didn’t know how many of the snake people he had shot down. He didn’t want to think about it.

  “The army is pursuing us,” one of his father’s mercenaries said.

  Rajiv drank from a canteen, then hung it once more at his hip. “Then we should not be here when they arrive.” He started forward again. “Hopefully those animals will attack them, as well.”

  The men fell in line behind him. Goraksh followed, but he doubted their only thoughts were of gold.

  Only a short distance on, they came to a large amphitheater carved from solid rock. Flashlight beams bounced around the room in crazy arcs. There was enough seating, carved in elliptical rings around the floor at the bottom, for thousands of people.

  The room smelled like an animal’s lair. The thick scent coiled in Goraksh’s nostrils and mired his lungs. He had to work hard to breathe. He turned as the feeling of being watched plagued him again.

  His flashlight beam skidded across the stone walls and revealed glimpses of the beautiful mosaics that had been laid across the surfaces. Chief among the images were the nagas, half people and half snakes with savage faces and weapons. Here and there, skulls mounted in the wall glared at Goraksh with hollow eyes.

  Something moved beside him.

  Panicked, Goraksh swiveled to the right and played his beam in that direction. A section of the wall spun open and two of the beast-men stood there with swords. They attacked without warning.

  Goraksh managed to scream—once—then he was drawn into the blackness.

  FLEET KEPT abreast of Patel as they jogged through the passage and followed the two scouts. The men kept a running dialogue through the headsets, but it was all in Hindu and he didn’t understand a word of it.

  Three doorways took shape in the tunnel ahead of them, all of them brought out of the darkness by light coming from inside the room. The light jumped and moved, then gunfire erupted.

  Patel barked an order and followed it immediately in English. “Down!”

  The paratrooper team went down on their bellies at once and shouldered their rifles. Fleet did the same, but glanced back to check on Annja. He was pleased to see that she had gone to ground, as well. She even had her pistol in hand.

  Good girl, Fleet thought automatically. He was just as sure a heartbeat later that she would have taken offense if he’d made the mistake of saying that aloud. She didn’t seem the type to need praise—or condescension.

  Hoarse screams and frighte
ned yells reverberated in the room ahead of them. Slowly the lights winked out.

  Fleet glanced at Patel. He knew from experience that the man was thinking that the mercenaries weren’t his men and he wasn’t responsible for them, but all the same it was hard to stay there and listen to them dying.

  Patel spoke again and waved his fist. Fleet was already on his feet before the English order came to advance. The paratroopers went forward and fell into three groups spread along the doors. Other men watched both ends of the tunnel.

  At Patel’s order, the men threw flares into the room. Bright ruby light exploded to life with hollow bangs inside the room. They waited only a moment, then moved inside the way they’d been trained. They fanned out and took up covering positions.

  Fleet knew automatically that there weren’t as many mercenaries in the room as there should have been. Only a small knot of them were trying to fight back from the center of the room. They huddled there among a morass of rocks and skeletons. Blood slicked the floor in several places.

  Annja dropped down beside him and scanned the room. Before the first flares had time to die out, Patel ordered his men to throw more. A moment later, they tossed grenades into the pile of men at the bottom of the amphitheater. The explosions blew the remaining fight out of the rest of them.

  After the surviving mercenaries—six of them in all—threw down their arms and surrendered, Patel’s men went down and secured them. Fleet went down, as well, but the whole time he felt as if he was being watched.

  Rajiv Shivaji wasn’t among the mercenaries.

  Patel questioned the men quickly and roughly. “Shivaji isn’t here,” he told Fleet. “They say the beast-men got him.”

  Fleet regarded the several albino bodies lying on the ground. “Then where is he?”

  “These men say Shivaji and some of the others went into the walls after the beast-men. They captured Shivaji’s son.”

  “The walls?” Annja said. She swung her light onto the walls immediately.

  Fleet caught sight of the images set in the stone. He played his own light over the pictures of snakes wrapping opponents in battle.

  “These…things we’ve seen couldn’t have made these,” Fleet said.

  “Not them,” Annja agreed. “Their ancestors. Before the inbreeding became so severe. Until that time, they were probably pretty normal.” She moved the flashlight and hesitated over the places where bullets had scarred the pictures.

  “This place is a really big deal, isn’t it?” Fleet couldn’t help asking.

  Annja nodded. Her tone was reverent. “It is.” A moment later, she moved toward a statue near the wall.

  The statue showed a naga warrior curled up on his tail while holding a spear and a shield. His inhuman face looked almost demonic, an eerie mix between snake and human that left the finished product with a forked tongue and long fangs.

  “Obviously they had a thing about warriors,” Fleet said.

  “Most cultures do,” Annja said. “It’s all about prowess. About being able to take what you want and the ability to protect yourself. Those are the same components behind most sports competitions.”

  “You’re probably never at a loss for conversation, are you, Professor?” Fleet asked.

  Annja smiled at Fleet then, and he thought the effort was dazzling despite the wet hair and dirt stains on her face. “Depends on the listener. Some people think I’m boring and I’m not a professor, I just talk like one.”

  Fleet laughed. “So what is this place?”

  “The amphitheater?”

  Fleet nodded.

  “Probably where they came to discuss community issues. I’m pretty certain that’s a sacrificial altar under the debris. That’s why there are so many skeletons here. Even after their minds started clouding, they still returned here to follow the old ways to the best of their ability. If you sort through those bones, you’ll find that a lot of them belong to animals.”

  “No, thanks. I’ve seen quite enough of that.”

  Annja stepped forward and examined the floor. Patterns of disturbance showed in the dust. “I think there’s a door here.” She pressed against the wall.

  A click sounded that carried in the hollow silence. Almost immediately a section of the wall spun out at a ninety-degree angle and presented an opening into a well of darkness beyond.

  “Charming,” Fleet said sarcastically.

  “They went this way, though,” Annja said.

  “How do you know?”

  Annja shone her flashlight on the blood trail that led inside. “Someone dragged a body through here.” She followed the light through the opening before Fleet knew she was going into it.

  The wall section slammed shut behind her.

  Fleet stepped forward and tried to operate the wall. It would not budge. He shouted Annja’s name. There was no answer.

  Feeling desperate, he turned to Patel. “We need to take this wall down.”

  37

  On the other side of the wall, Annja heard the movement above her too late to do anything more than duck. Something whistled by her head. She turned and dropped into a fighting crouch. After she shifted hands with the flashlight, she reached for the sword and pulled it into the passage with her.

  The flashlight beam showed enough of her immediate surroundings to let her know that she was standing in a tunnel. Dust, inches thick, coated the floor and softened her footprints and those of her attackers.

  The beast-men advanced on her from another doorway that opened in the wall behind the first one. Annja guessed that the mountain was honeycombed with tunnels, all of them running in different directions and serving different purposes.

  Some of the tunnels had doubtlessly allowed leaders of the ceremonial gatherings inside the amphitheater to enter and depart the assembly without walking through the main halls. Others might have been there for escape or to ferry food and drink on festive occasions.

  No city, not even Rome in all its antiquity by present standards, ran without its subterranean, other self.

  As the beast-men advanced, Annja realized that light came from inside the other room. They probably couldn’t see in the dark, either. That inability made her feel better about her situation. Even the narrow confines of the tunnel worked in her favor.

  “Stay back,” she warned as she gave ground slowly. She kept the sword lifted and ready beside her.

  Instead of backing off, the beast-men kept approaching. They growled and barked guttural noises that didn’t sound remotely human.

  Primitive terror settled into the back of Annja’s mind. During her travels, she’d sometimes come across individuals who lacked mental skills to get by without the kindness of others. But she’d seldom met any of them with violent tendencies. However, she knew that madhouses past and present had been full of such people.

  Unable to return to the wall section that had flipped and allowed her access to the hidden passageway, Annja turned and fled along the corridor. Her flashlight beam bounced and jerked as she ran with the beast-men on her tail.

  FLEET HEARD the animalistic grunting and roars on the other side of the wall as Patel’s demolitions expert wired the door section with shaped plastic explosives. He feared for Annja’s life, but there was nothing he could do but wait.

  Finally it was done and the demolitions man backed away after sticking radio-controlled detonators into the plastic explosives.

  Patel turned to face Fleet. “If she’s on the other side of that wall, the flying debris could kill her.”

  Fleet shook his head and desperately wanted to believe what he said. “She won’t be there.”

  “I hope that you’re right.” Patel covered his ears, nodded to the demolitions man and turned away.

  Fleet plugged his own ears.

  A quick series of explosions raced through the amphitheater. Vibrations and the concussive force of the sound filled the large room.

  When Fleet looked back at the wall, he saw that a large section of it had been shat
tered into ruin. She’s not going to be happy about that, he thought grimly. But he hoisted himself up and led Patel’s men through the opening.

  Several bodies of the beast-men blocked the hallway. Thankfully Annja Creed’s wasn’t one of them. Although his hearing was uncertain and still rang with the sound of the explosions, Fleet heard the sounds of pursuit off to the right.

  He picked up the chase and plunged through the darkness.

  IN A MATTER OF SECONDS, Annja realized she’d entered a deadly maze of tunnels. Not only that, but the beast-men were herding her in the direction they wanted her to go. Sporadic gunfire blasted through the tunnels. None of it was as loud as the explosion that had taken place behind her.

  When she was met by another group of men ahead of her, she entered the tunnel on her left and kept running. Her breath came raggedly, but it was more from the choking dust filling the passageways than because of physical effort.

  Only a quick glimpse of the yawning abyss on the other side of the pit in the center of the next room prevented her from plunging over the edge. She came to a stop only inches short of the lip.

  Her flashlight beam pushed through most of the darkness. Below, at the bottom of the pit, sharpened wooden stakes, most of them petrified with age and some of them broken from other victims falling and impaling themselves on them, stood more or less upright.

  Rajiv Shivaji and his men lay impaled, dead or wounded, among bodies of men and beasts that had fallen prey to the trap over the years. Their flashlights illuminated the gruesome scene.

  A few of them still moved. Rajiv was among the living. He stood next to his son, who was impaled through the midsection but still alive.

  Annja wouldn’t have wished any of them that kind of harm, but she also couldn’t erase from her mind the images of the men opening fire on the Casablanca Moon only a few days ago.

  The surviving men who were able to move were trying to scale the pit wall. Spears in the bodies of other men showed they hadn’t been successful and the beast-men had been unmerciful in killing them. Several corpses of the beast-men testified to the fact that the pirates weren’t completely helpless.