But Mar-Ti-Ku knew of their coming. Among them, he suspected, there might be one who would serve as a suitable vessel for him, a body he could inhabit upon crossing between the planes. For his own physical form had been destroyed millenia earlier. “Of fifty thousand,” he said to me, “surely one of them must be powerful enough to contain my essence.”
When the army was but miles from the oasis, I followed Mar-Ti-Ku’s instructions, and called the storm. A sandstorm as had never been seen before, nor since. Until today, of course. The day when Mar-Ti-Ku will finally return.
The army of Cambyses was utterly destroyed, save for seventeen men, who made it to the oasis and survived. These hearty souls became a part of our tribe, and their descendants are still with us today. All but the strongest among them, who was my master’s intended host.
Unfortunately, when it came time for Mar-Ti-Ku to enter the host, the man did not survive the ritual. Thus, Mar-Ti-Ku has waited. We, his acolytes, have waited. Our half-brothers of the shadows wait in the tunnels, and we become less human with every century that passes. But Mar-Ti-Ku shall heal us all and lead us to grace and glory, to master the world.
Now the storm has returned. The army rises at my command. Just as their bones have been in the unyielding clutch of the desert sands for all these two and one-half thousand years, so have I held their souls in my own fierce grasp. They are enslaved, a powerful weapon, yet forever they suffer the punishment for Cambyses’ audacity.
Weeks ago, when the first humans discovered the entrance to our underground village, where we fled at Mar-Ti-Ku’s instruction after Cambyses’ failed attack, we captured them, hoping one of them might be powerful enough to contain my master’s essence. They were not. Thus, they were slaughtered as a warning, or a lure. We assumed only the truly powerful and courageous would ignore the warning. We were correct.
The sorceror finally reached the bottom of the stone stairs. He paused a moment in his tale, and smiled once more, amiably, at Hellboy and Anastasia. He did not even look at Arun.
Hellboy stared at Hazred’s mouth. Could not look away. Though the man’s robes were majestic, his beard pointed to perfection, his flesh like the finest marble and his eyes clear and cold, his mouth . . . Hellboy turned away. Hazred was regal, magnificently evil, commanding in every way. Almost beautiful. But his mouth reflected his true nature. When he smiled, he instilled only pure revulsion. Most of his teeth were green and crumbling with rot, save for six or seven which had been replaced with sharply pointed bronze fangs, embedded in his gums.
When Hazred approached, the guards parting before him as if polarized, Hellboy could not suppress a shiver. He was not afraid of Hazred, unless it was for Anastasia’s safety. Rather, he was profoundly disturbed that such a man could live for so long and be so unrepentantly evil.
Mar-Ti-Ku will rejoice, Hellboy, Hazred said, and stopped before him. The man was taller even than he had first appeared, as tall as Hellboy almost. He reached out a hand and lightly stroked Hellboy’s cheek with his fingers. Hellboy slapped the hand away and offered a silent snarl in return.
Hazred stopped smiling, his expression murderous. He glanced down and his eyes widened slightly. He had noticed Hellboy’s stone hand, of course, perhaps for the first time.
“Can it be?” Hazred said, in that guttural tongue he could not have known that Hellboy understood. “The master will be more powerful even than he dreamed. He will unmake the world with the clenching of his fist.”
Hellboy’s eyes narrowed.
“What kind of crap is that?” he said. “What the hell are you babbling about?”
Hazred’s eyes widened. Hellboy could almost see his mind working, considering whether he had understood the sorceror’s words, or simply objected to his lack of understanding.
We wanted to lure the best specimen we could for Mar-Ti-Ku’s vessel of return, Hellboy. But I would never have hoped that one so powerful, so perfectly indestructible as you, would happen upon our home. Mar-Ti-Ku is ecstatic. As we are, in anticipation of his return. Even now, he is the storm, drives the storm, makes war on the army on the desert sands, with the desert sands. And I have raised the Persian dead to aid him.
“Hellboy, are you paying attention?” Anastasia asked behind him. “He wants to . . .”
“Wait!” Hellboy said, stepping forward and glaring at Hazred. “Let me get this straight. You want to evict me from my body so this Marty guy can have a place to live when he comes home?”
Indeed.
“And you talk to him pretty regularly?”
Yes.
“Then give him a message for me, will you?” Hellboy asked. “Tell him I said, ‘No vacancy!’”
Hellboy struck out at Hazred with his left hand, momentarily forgetting his circumstances, forgetting the danger to Anastasia and Arun. Not that it mattered, for his blow never fell. Hazred lifted his hands, palms flat, and Hellboy’s fist slammed into some kind of invisible wall, or force shield that protected the sorceror. It returned the force of the punch to Hellboy, and under the pressure of his own attack, he stumbled back three steps, and nearly fell to his knees.
He felt his temper rising, felt the edges of his resistance crumbling, giving way to the rage and the frustration. Hellboy prepared to attack again. His tail curled behind him in an unconscious expression of his fury.
Anastasia screamed.
Hellboy spun, his hooves clicking on the stone cavern floor, and then he froze. One of the tall, thin, mutant men held her left arm, a more normal but muscular woman held her right arm, and a third figure stood behind her with a curved, gleaming iron blade snug against her throat.
The anger drained from him instantly.
You are guests as long as you behave like guests, Hazred said in his mind, all of their minds, Hellboy figured.
For a moment, he considered going after the guards, taking the risk. But he couldn’t. Hellboy relaxed and stepped back slightly.
“What about him?” Hellboy asked, and gestured toward Arun, who was still trapped beneath the weight of several guards. At second glance, the professor appeared to be sleeping.
He is beyond our control. Your companion has begun a journey he must yet complete. But I will gladly help him.
Hazred approached Arun and without being told, the guards lifted the professor into a standing position. Angry and bleary-eyed, Arun growled at the sorceror and strained against his captors’ hold.
With a sudden thrust, Hazred dug his fist into Arun’s pants pocket, and withdrew some kind of medallion on a chain that Hellboy had never seen before. He glanced at Anastasia. She caught his look and shrugged, raised her eyebrows, to tell him she did not recognize it either.
Foolish man, Hazred told Arun, and they all heard his mental communication. The Primal Heart is a powerful charm, one of my own creation. It was left very purposefully to be found. But I credited modern man with too much sense. I expected its discoverer to wear it as such a medallion must be worn — around the neck. Already your darkest desires and emotions have surged forth, but without wearing the medallion properly, your physical form cannot comply with those desires.
Arun seemed disoriented. Hazred dangled the medallion in front of him, then slowly slid the chain down over the professor’s head. The air was charged with crackling menace, and Hellboy knew their situation was about to get worse. What was the medallion, he wondered? What did it mean?
The medallion hung against Arun’s chest, harmless. Then Hazred snaked out a long, bony finger and tapped it twice, almost as if he were trying gently to wake a sleeper.
Screeching wildly and clawing at his face, Arun fell to his knees. The professor wailed in great, heaving sobs like a terrified child and began to hyperventilate. He lay on the ground, rolling back and forth over the cold stone. There was the sudden stench of urine and a stain spread across the small man’s pants.
“What the hell did you do to him?” Hellboy demanded.
I have done nothing. Your friend is altering himself.
“Altering . . .”
“Hellboy?” Anastasia said. Her tone drew his immediate attention. He glanced at her, then down at Arun.
Who was changing.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
—
The tanks had bulldozed a path through the oasis forest and were quickly fortunate enough to come upon a large clearing. The trees looked odd, but hell, Colonel Shapiro had thought, what didn’t in this godforsaken storm?
Once within that clearing, they were safely ensconced within the trees around the oasis and down as far as they could get from the desert floor above. The Colonel ordered all the vehicles that had survived the treacherous journey over shattered trees to form a circle, “Like in old John Wayne westerns,” he’d explained.
Fifteen minutes later, the storm raging around them where the soldiers clung to one another, to the ground, to trees and to their vehicles, the Colonel called his aide to his side.
“How many did we lose?” he asked, forced to shout to be heard over the wind. Unable to look at the man more than a moment or risk losing his retinas to the driving sand.
“We won’t know ’til it’s over, sir,” the aide said. “But I’d guess about three hundred, maybe more.”
The Colonel swore. Then he paused in contemplation.
“How many Americans?” he asked, and it was clear to both of them that this was the real question, the only one that mattered.
“Near a hundred, sir,” the aide admitted.
“Goddamn!” Colonel Shapiro roared. “How the hell can I write condolence letters to the parents of a hundred men?”
He glanced up quickly, searching for answers in the eyes of his aide, a man who’d been with him for fifteen years, loyal all the way. The aide looked back, squinting against the sand.
“Frankly, Jack,” he said, “I just pray we live to write them.”
Captain Creaghan had the first watch, and it was wearing on him. He could only poke his head out of the cave every couple of minutes in order to avoid the direct impact of the storm. Even then, there was very little he could see. It was hell, though; he knew that much. He could barely see the oasis itself.
Well, perhaps that was a bit of an exaggeration. He couldn’t see details, but he had seen the tanks crashing through the forest. Knew that there were hundreds of men down there, trying to hide from the storm by ducking their heads and hoping it wouldn’t see them.
But that wasn’t going to work, Creaghan knew. It wasn’t going to work because the storm could see. The storm had eyes. Every time he glanced out of the cave, he looked up to make sure they were still there. They’d never gone away. Like burning embers, comets at the center of the storm, the eyes stared down upon the oasis, searching for the most vulnerable spots, Creaghan imagined. Every so often, a weird and terrible thunder boomed, rolling across the sky.
It sounded like laughter. He wondered if sandstorms actually had thunder, and then realized he didn’t want to know the answer. As far as he was concerned, it was thunder. He also vowed that, should he and his men survive the storm, and whatever hid within it, preying on the soldiers in the oasis, he would never come within a thousand miles of Hellboy again.
Never again. This shit followed him, and Creaghan didn’t want any part of it.
When Culpepper came forward to relieve him, Creaghan couldn’t have been happier. He didn’t know if he would be able to sleep without seeing the sandstorm’s eyes glaring down at him, but he wanted to try. Anything to escape the manic howling of the wind outside, and the horrible scream that it seemed to become as it whipped down the tunnel behind them.
“Second watch, sir!” Culpepper shouted in his ear, sand whipping into the cave entrance and piling up on the floor of the tunnel.
“About bloody time!” Creaghan replied. “I’ll send Rickman up in an hour! That’s about all anyone could take!”
Creaghan half-stumbled down the tunnel toward the larger cave at the end where the rest of his men were sprawled on the ground, doing their best to rest. Probably trying not to think about how they were going to survive until a search-and-rescue team showed up looking for them tomorrow. Or the next day.
“Captain!” Culpepper cried from the cave mouth.
Creaghan stopped in his tracks.
“What the hell is it now?” he called back.
“You’d better have a look at this, sir!” Culpepper shouted. “And hurry!”
Normally, Creaghan would have bristled at Culpepper, a man in his command, and a newer agent at that, telling him to hurry. But there was some indefinable quality in the man’s tone, fear verging on outright panic, that brought him running. Several of the others must have had the same reaction, because Creaghan could hear them shouting and pounding up the tunnel after him.
He reached the cave mouth a second before Rickman and two others. Culpepper was wide-eyed with barely suppressed terror. Rickman had promised to warn all the men about the eyes in the storm, so Creaghan knew that wasn’t what had so frightened Will Culpepper.
“Well, what is it, man?” Creaghan asked. “What do you see?”
“People, sir,” he answered. “A lot of people. What are they doing here, Captain? How can they stand it out there?”
Creaghan shoved past him and poked his head from the cave. He scanned the oasis, assuming Culpepper had seen straggling soldiers come tumbling in, barely alive. He realized they would have to help those men if possible, bring them to the cave, whatever it . . .
He saw no one.
“What are you talking about Will?” Creaghan asked. “I don’t see any . . .”
“Up there, sir. On the rim.”
Culpepper pointed up, toward the nearest visible edge of the oasis. But he didn’t stop there. His hand swept a horizontal arc across the mouth of the cave, showing Creaghan that he meant not merely the hillside closest to them, but the entire circumference of the oasis.
Creaghan peered into the storm, squinting, trying his best to see what Culpepper was talking about. He wondered if the man had simply lost his senses, and realized he wouldn’t have blamed the lad if he did.
Then he did see something. Some indefinable shape, up on the rim. Maybe some of Colonel Shapiro’s men had survived, against all odds, the erosive power of the storm. If so, they would need help, and fast.
Creaghan took several steps out of the cave, peering up at the rim, trying to get a better look. There was a sudden lull, and a shape began to assert itself on the edge. Not just one shape, but several. A dozen.
More.
They stood still, straight and tall on the edge of the oasis basin. They were side by side, and it was clear, squinting through the painful, flying sand, that many of these figures carried weapons. They did not sway in the gale. They did not move at all.
More than a dozen. The lull continued, as if the storm incarnate, whatever it was that stared down at them even now from the homicidal skies, had taken a breath.
More than a dozen. Or two. More than one hundred.
Or two. More than one thousand.
Or two.
Side by side they stood, as far as the eye could see. Creaghan expected it was for the entire circumference of the oasis basin, several miles at his guess, all the way around.
Thousands upon thousands of warriors, unharmed by the sandstorm, standing as if paralyzed, weapons drawn, at the edge of the oasis. Waiting. Creaghan recalled the melee on the beach, Hellboy under attack by soldiers dead more than two thousand years. A handful of dead men fighting as if they had never died.
He looked back at the line of warriors surrounding the oasis. Then, without even being aware of it, he did something he had not done since he was six years old in a pew in the Church of England. Captain Michael Creaghan crossed himself.
Thunder rolled across the desert. Or more than thunder. A command, perhaps?
The lost army began its descent into the oasis.
“Oh my God,” Anastasia gasped.
Hellboy said nothing, merely stood
and stared at Arun’s metamorphosis. Hazred smiled his awful, rotting grin and stepped away, the circle of guards closing behind him.
Arun changed.
His nose and mouth grew closer together, the nose shrinking, blackening. As if it had been crushed in a vise, his head fell in on itself. His forehead came down and his chin disappeared as his face thrust forward into a long, razor-toothed snout.
When his ears disappeared, only to be replaced by two pointed, brown-furred things, pink inside, which thrust up out of his hair, Anastasia screamed. It had taken several moments for her to realize that it was all real. She was terrified for Arun and for herself, disgusted and fascinated simultaneously.
Anastasia was still captive, her arms pinioned behind her back by two guards, while a third held a curved blade to her throat. She didn’t want to die, but that wasn’t their plan, she knew. They merely wanted to use her to control Hellboy. She wasn’t going to let that happen, but first things first.
“Hellboy, can’t you do something for him?” she asked.
He turned toward her, the green glow of the pool reflecting eerily off his scarlet flesh. Then he turned his head slightly to the left and gave her a small, apologetic shrug.
Arun began to howl. A terrible, mournful cry that erupted from his snapping jaws the way brown fur seemed to erupt from his body. It was that horrible cry more than his appearance which made her realize what he had become.
The jackal. Just as Lady Catherine had warned. The Egyptians called it “the howler” because of its cry. For the most part, jackals were scavengers, eating dead animals they found. But wild? Rabid? It was a vicious beast, almost a cross between fox and hound, but sleeker. More dangerous.
The jackal-man glared at Hellboy with yellow eyes. It yapped angrily, then used its powerful hind legs to launch itself across the cavern toward him.
The Lost Army Page 17