by James Axler
We are in the presence of gods, Kane thought as he stared at the impossibly majestic figures poised before him, so brilliant that everything around them seemed like an unfinished sketch by comparison.
“If Nergal’s sitting down, who’s the dude hovering beside him?” Kane subvocalized as he tried to process what he was looking at.
“What are you talking about?” Grant asked, his surprise evident even in the secret communiqué.
Kane studied the figure hovering behind the Annunaki Nergal, a sinking feeling clutching at his chest. The figure had a spiny crest jutting from his long, Annunaki skull and his hand was shaped like a fan.
“Ain’t no one there, Kane,” Grant stated with utter conviction. “Not that I can see.”
Chapter 14
“You sure?” Kane asked incredulously over the Commtact link as he stared the floating figure up and down. “Big guy, Annunaki, hanging in the air and glowing colors every which way to Sunday. You don’t see him?”
“I see him, too,” Brigid confirmed even as Grant denied it. “Ninurta.”
It was a disconcerting thing, to learn that your view of reality was genuinely different to that of the people around you. Grant struggled to comprehend what his teammates were saying, that they could see a figure that he could not, like some kind of ghost hanging in the air.
For Brigid and Kane, they had the uncomfortable reassurance that at least both of them seemed to be seeing the same thing—the figure of Ninurta, Annunaki god of war, floating above the steps of the pyramid at the shoulder of his brother, Nergal. Brigid’s mind went back to a discussion she had had over a year before, when she had first fallen under the thrall of the Annunaki god-prince Ullikummis.
* * *
“YOU FOUGHT WITH my father,” Ullikummis had intoned, his voice like rocks grinding together. The voice matched the face, for it, too, was constructed from rock, carved as much as grown, as if the god-prince had been brought to life by erosion. “I saw this when I imbibed time in the Ontic Library. You fought with my father, and others of our race, of the Annunaki.”
Brigid had been strapped to a seat made of rock. She squirmed against a pain that seemed to stretch down her back like claws. Ullikummis was doing something to her; only later did she learn that he had removed the biolink transponder that she carried within her at that moment, nullifying its nanospores, which were hidden in her body.
“I saw there,” Ullikummis continued, “that you have exceptional knowledge for an apekin, a—” he stopped, as if trying to recall the word “—human. And yet you never questioned what it was you fought.”
He was talking about the Annunaki, speaking to Brigid in a way she had never spoken with the enemy before, in a manner that was both patronizing and oddly respectful.
“Tried,” Brigid replied, the single word coming out as a gasp rushing between her gnashing teeth.
“They acted like you,” Ullikummis said. “My father, Lords Marduk, Shamash, Negra, Utu, Zu. Aliens to your world, yet they behaved like you, like actors on a stage, dressed in masks and rubber suits. Humans in everything but appearance,” he mused, adding as if in afterthought, “and perhaps stamina. Yet you never questioned this.”
“They had technology,” Brigid began, her words strained, “they differed from...”
“No, they did not,” Ullikummis interrupted her. “The Annunaki are beautiful beings, multifaceted, crossing dimensions you cannot begin to comprehend. Their wars are fought on many planes at once, the rules of their games intersect only tangentially with Earth and its holding pen of stars. What you have seen is only a sliver of what the battle was, and the Annunaki have shamed themselves in portraying it thus.”
Brigid had listened, wondering what Ullikummis was telling her. In that moment, she had recalled traveling to the distant past via a memory trap and seeing the Annunaki as their slaves, the Igigi, perceived them. They had been beautiful, just as Ullikummis was telling her, shining things that seemed so much more real than the world around them, color things amid a landscape of gray. But when she had faced Enlil, Lilitu and the others in her role as a Cerberus rebel, they had been curiously ordinary. Yes, they were stronger, faster, supremely devious, but they were—what?—the thing that Ullikummis called them? Actors on a stage? Players dressed in masks and rubber suits like some hokey performance designed for children? Had Brigid and her companions been taken in by a performance, a show designed to entertain the feebleminded?
The thing that is alien, she had realized as the interrogation went on, is a thing that cannot ever be comprehended, only seen in fragments, its entirety hidden in impenetrable darkness.
The interrogation had ended in brainwashing. Brigid had been changed in those moments, her human mind retreating as something new and hateful took its place, something alien. She had taken the name Brigid Haight in those dark days, and had seen the world in the way the Annunaki saw it—nonlinear, less restrictive, bigger than the spaces her human eyes could endure. She had shifted into solid rock to take a hidden pathway into the underground city of Agartha, not through mechanical means or supernatural ones, but through a unique understanding of the world, one that ensured she was no longer fully constrained by its three dimensions. This was the way the Annunaki functioned, their presence on Earth like an iceberg’s tip, only a tenth of their actuality ever emerging.
Or at least, that was how Brigid had understood it when her mind had been possessed of Annunaki thinking. A new comprehension of reality, one entirely removed from the comprehension her companions, her fellow humans, had.
* * *
AND PERHAPS HERE it was again. Something in Nergal’s brilliance, something in the so-called Heaven’s Light, had changed her perception and Kane’s. Shifting realities. But what would do such a thing?
And just what were the people in Libya mining? It was obviously tied to all of this, the same flecks of diamond that lined the walls of Nergal’s base, which had been Lord Utu’s just a few years before, were being mined in Libya; glistering things of silver, like shards of broken glass.
* * *
MARIAH, MEANWHILE, WAS not privy to the conversation that her companions were having via Commtact. She could only tremble in fear at the thought of what was happening, and what would happen next.
As they tried to process what was going on, Nergal spoke in a voice that sounded like distant thunder booming from the darkest clouds. “War master,” he said, addressing Grant, “your sacrifices are here. Spill their blood, open the pathway for my brother to attain dominion.”
Grant may have been disconcerted but he sure as hell understood what sacrifice and spilling blood were all about. This bozo wanted him to ritually kill his partners—something he could not do.
Grant stood there, dumbstruck, as Kane, Brigid and Mariah were forced to kneel. For them, whose eyesight remained in a state of flux, neither wholly comprehensive nor entirely restricted, there seemed nothing they could do but drop to the ground and bow their heads. There were eighty people here, many of them armed and all of them devoted to Nergal—that much was clear from the blindfolds they wore as some strange mark of what had been done to them. Did they see through the blindfolds? Was what Nergal did here, with his so-called Light of Heaven, changing their perceptions so far that they no longer needed to open their eyes to see? Like the soldiers that they had discovered in Libya, where all of this madness had started, were these Congo locals blind, but seeing things in an entirely new way?
“Bow your heads in appreciation of your gods,” one of the guards instructed Kane.
Kane could see him, kind of. He was a wraith, a dark shadow in place of a man, but he had a presence in the brilliance of orange that dominated Kane’s vision.
At that moment, Mariah spoke, her voice a timid squeak. “Please don’t—”
“Silence,” one of the guards spit in French.
“Mariah, that you there?” Kane asked.
“Kane,” Mariah said with a wash of relief. “Do you know what’s happening?”
“No,” Kane admitted as he bowed his head. “Baptiste? Is your eyesight improving?”
“Somewhat,” Brigid said tentatively.
“Silence,” the guard beside Kane ordered, shoving him from behind, pushing his head down so that he sagged forward.
* * *
A FEW FEET AWAY, Grant was handed a broad-bladed sword by one of the members of the crowd, a hunched-over man of older years who seemed emaciated in comparison to the local warriors whom Grant had been forced to fight earlier. “Sword of Heaven,” the old man said in French.
Grant accepted the sword, looked at it with interest. Unlike almost everything else he saw, the sword was not a dull, washed-out gray. Instead it had a luminescence to it, a network of what appeared to be diamonds entirely covered the surface of the four-foot-long blade.
Grant realized then, instinctually, that his eyesight had been tricked, mangled and adapted by some outside force. He had not been blinded like his other companions, presumably because he had only glanced sideward at the rotting Annunaki overlord who called himself Nergal, rather than staring at his impossible face of light. Nergal was rotting, though; Grant could see that much now that he could look at the brilliant figure without flinching. Something had ruined his body, was eating away at it in dark sores that Nergal had tried to bandage. It reminded Grant of something else he had seen recently, in the Spanish city of Zaragoza. There, another Annunaki had been reborn, a female goddess of the underworld called Ereshkigal; but her body was unstable, as were those of her creations. Ereshkigal could command the living to die and the dead to walk, but she could not command the rot to leave her fragile body. In the end, she had proved too weak and, freed from the nutrient bath that sustained her, she had disintegrated to dust.
“Blood shall be shed,” Nergal instructed as Grant was ushered forward, his voice two voices, two tones, the voice of the unseen from the darkened end of a Neanderthal cave.
On the one hand, Grant felt almost compelled to obey this beautiful, rotten, wicked creature that presided on his throne. On the other, his friendship with Kane and Brigid was so strong it vied for his attention, warring inside him.
At the same moment, Kane, Brigid and Mariah saw something glowing before them, long feet pointed toward the ground just a foot away from them. Kane peered up from under his bowed head and realized it was the figure that Brigid had identified as Ninurta, the war god. Up close he wavered, insubstantial, like a pattern seen in a kaleidoscope.
“Something ain’t right here,” Kane muttered, broadcasting the observation through the medium of the linked Commtacts. “Ninurta isn’t complete.”
“Just like Ereshkigal,” Grant replied, subvocalizing the words.
“I don’t think we’re going to be much help,” Brigid pleaded. “Do you have a way to get us out of this, Grant?”
Grant took up a position behind the three kneeling Cerberus rebels and the insubstantial shade of Ninurta, raising the sword over Kane’s neck. “Oh, yeah,” Grant subvocalized. “I’ve got an ace up my sleeve.”
The emaciated old man stood before Grant on the far side of the bowed Cerberus exiles, dipping his head curtly to Nergal before addressing Grant. “Like this,” he said in French, entwining his hands and drawing them up over his shoulder. Then, as if he was holding a sword, he swept his clenched hands down in a swift arc, ending at Kane’s shoulder. “One strike, crosswise, swift and clean. You understand?”
Grant nodded, his stomach muscles clenched in anticipation. He drew the Sword of Heaven up in a two-handed grip so that it was poised above his right shoulder, staring down at Kane’s neck. Around him, the members of the crowd seemed to all draw breath, eighty people all inhaling at once, holding their collective breath in expectation.
Grant swept the blade down toward Kane’s neck.
Chapter 15
Kane fell forward as the blade of the sword struck him, dropping and then moving again, leaping forward like a runner from the starting blocks. Grant had hit him with the sword, but had turned it at the critical moment, twisting the blade as it cut toward his partner, so that only the flat of the blade had struck Kane across his shoulders. It still hurt, but that pain was momentary and, crucially, it allowed Kane to literally keep his head.
Kane scrambled forward, moving from crouch to full run in just three steps, rushing toward the steps of the black pyramid. Around him, he heard the sounds of surprise and shock as the crowd reacted to what was happening, realized that the sacrifice had somehow got free.
* * *
THE OLD MAN who had offered instruction to Grant on the fine art of beheading, gasped in surprise, his gaze sweeping from the sword to Grant in a fraction of a second. “Ça va?”
Grant stepped the two paces that divided himself from his instructor, jabbing out with his left fist to deliver a brutal blow to the man’s jaw. The old man went down like a sack of potatoes.
* * *
KANE WAS UP the steps of the pyramid in an instant, shoving grayed-out crowd members aside as he reached for Nergal and Ninurta where they waited in glowing brilliance at the tall throne. Kane reached for the hovering figure of Ninurta, grasping for the Annunaki’s ankle with the intention of pulling him back down to earth. But his grasping right hand went straight through the fantastic figure, sweeping through it with no more consequence than passing through mist.
The unexpected effect of the move unbalanced Kane and suddenly he was tipping sideways, stumbling to regain his equilibrium as he lunged against nothingness. In that moment, the mob around him surged, reaching for Kane with gray-washed limbs.
* * *
THE OLD MAN went down, and Grant spun around, tracking the circle of figures who had been watching, dumbfounded, as he had failed to behead his prostrate ally.
The tone of the audience had changed, Grant sensed. A moment ago they had held their breath in sweet anticipation of Kane’s beheading and the glorious sacrifice it would make to their sick god. Now, that breath was released in a mixture of surprise and fury, as the watchers realized that Grant had somehow shrugged off the mental hold that Nergal should have over him. Their god could not be fallible, of course, which meant instead that the man who had been granted the rank of war master was some kind of demon sent to test their faith.
They began to shift then, moving forward fearfully as Grant watched. Beside him, Brigid Baptiste was just getting to her feet, encouraging Mariah to do the same.
“You have a plan?” Mariah asked.
Grant handed Brigid the sword as the mob began to close more confidently toward the three of them. “Not really,” Grant admitted. “More a kind of hope. But we’ll wing it.” As he said this, he stepped forward to meet the first of the crowd.
“Wing it?” Mariah repeated, unable to hide the shock from her voice.
Brigid flashed Mariah a smile, one that neither of them could see with their compromised eyesight. “We do this a lot,” Brigid said in as reassuring a tone as she could muster. “Just keep behind us and try not to get hit by anything.”
“But I can’t see properly!” Mariah protested.
As Mariah spoke, the crowd surged toward Grant like a river that had finally broken its banks. Grant raised his right arm, crooked his index finger as he performed that well-practiced flinch of his wrist tendons, the one that would command his Sin Eater pistol into his hand from its hidden holster.
The foremost member of the charging mob went down an instant later, his left kneecap exploding in a burst of blood as a 9 mm bullet carved a path through it from the starting point of Grant’s hand. It seemed almost magic, that instant, as the man went down in a flurry of spurting blood, tumbling over himself as his forward momentum met with the oppo
sing trajectory of the bullet that had been fired from a gun that hadn’t been there an eye’s blink before.
To the lead runner’s right, a second man went tumbling over himself as his right knee was shattered by another bullet from the Sin Eater, arms flailing wildly as he suddenly lost all balance and went crashing into a man to his right.
To the left, another member of the mob stopped and turned in place as Grant’s third bullet found its target like a nail being pounded through his lower leg.
It had been the work of two seconds, three shots felling the lead members of an enraged, sixty-strong crowd. The crowd halted as one, stopped fearfully in their tracks as three of their own tumbled to the ground with painful wails, blood in the air where it had not been an instant before.
“Everyone had better calm the hell down,” Grant ordered, his voice as hard as it had been when he had been a Magistrate. “Next time I’ll be aiming for your heads. And I never miss.”
From behind him, Brigid translated Grant’s words into French and then the lesser-spoken Bantu of the region, ensuring that everyone in the crowd understood her partner’s meaning.
As Brigid finished the second translation, Kane’s voice shouted from the pyramid steps.
“Little help!” he yelled.
Brigid, Mariah and Grant turned, the latter slowly, making it clear to the crowd before him that his threat had not been an idle one. On the black steps of the pyramid, Kane was struggling as Nergal’s closest assistants held him by his arms and legs. They held him upright, pulling his limbs in disparate directions so that he struggled one way and then the other like a man caught on the tide. He hung there in the air, unable to get purchase to free himself.
Grant squeezed the trigger of the Sin Eater, sending a shot over the heads of the crowd on the pyramid steps.