by James Axler
“First one’s a warning,” Grant said. “After that, I start picking targets.”
For a moment, everything seemed to fall silent. Then the group holding Kane resumed yanking him this way and that, straining as if to pull his body apart. Kane howled with the strain, struggling in their grip.
Grant fired again, delivering a 9 mm bullet to the shoulder of the man holding Kane’s right arm. The man dropped back with a cry of pain, his shoulder erupting in what seemed to be a gray wash of blood.
Kane lurched as the man let go of his arm, reached across to one of the figures to his left and dragged the man off his feet so that he fell to his knees.
Grant had his next target lined up, blasted again, taking down the man pulling at Kane’s left arm.
Boom!
The man fell back with an agonized gasp, and suddenly both of Kane’s arms were free. Kane swung there a moment, arms flailing as more of the mob descended upon him. There were about twenty people on the steps of the pyramid surrounding Nergal, twenty people all poised to attack him.
As Grant’s hand gun blasted a third shot, Mariah called out another warning: “Guys, the locals are getting a mite restless!”
Brigid turned, glancing to the place Mariah was indicating. The crowd that had been waiting at the edge of the rough arena were beginning to move again, the braver of their number stepping forward, their altered eyes fixed on the Cerberus group.
Grant turned once more, firing a triple burst of bullets at the approaching locals as Brigid charged their ranks with the sword. Gray silhouettes of men fell before the assault.
* * *
MEANWHILE, KANE FOUGHT with the last of his captors on the pyramid steps. He drove a kick at the man who held his left leg, clipping his jaw with his other foot so that the man’s head tipped back like something from a fairground game. The man’s grip faltered, and suddenly Kane found himself dropping to the steps, arms outstretched to halt his fall.
Nergal spoke again in a voice that seemed pulled from the grave. “War master!” he intoned. “My brother. Blood.”
Kane shrugged off another attacker, moving forward once more and this time grasping for Nergal’s arm. As with Ninurta, Kane’s hand went straight through the Annunaki figure. “What the hell is going on here?” he muttered as he reached again for Nergal.
At that moment, one of Nergal’s human servants grabbed Kane from behind, pulling him away from the throne.
Kane threw the man, shifting his balance and tossing him over his shoulder. The man sailed over Kane’s shoulder and went crashing into Nergal’s throne, landing precisely where Nergal himself appeared to be seated.
For one eerie moment, both figures—one human and one reptilian—occupied that same spot in a way that defied Kane’s vision to comprehend.
Then, the strange image resolved itself, and it was the human and not the alien who sat in the throne, solid and real where the other had been a ghost or—
“A hologram!” Kane realized, spitting the words as if they were a curse.
* * *
TWENTY FEET BEHIND KANE, Grant and Brigid were doing their utmost to hold back the surging mob while Mariah cowered behind them. The mob were trying to coordinate themselves now, realizing that they were facing just two—or maybe three—people and that Grant’s blaster could not hold an infinite number of bullets. Added to this, Brigid’s severely restricted vision—from her point of view she was swinging a sword at shadows with substance, fighting in the dark—and Grant’s slightly better but still hampered sight, was making it seem that the Cerberus warriors could not hope to hold out for long.
Grant was still choosing targets as charitably as he could, shooting at legs and shoulders, knocking people back without killing them. He didn’t know the full story behind the mob, couldn’t know if they were devoted to Nergal or simply captured in his thrall, and he did not want to kill unarmed innocents on principle.
As Grant drew a bead on his next target and Brigid delivered the flat of her blade to another man who was rushing at them, the whole mob seemed suddenly to freeze. Murmurs were running through them, hurried proclamations in French and Bantu.
“Overlord Nergal has died?”
“Lord Nergal is gone!”
“The overlord has left us all!”
Shoving away the man with whom she had been dueling, Brigid turned and peered up the pyramid steps. In Nergal’s throne she saw the man whom Kane had thrown there, saw Kane standing before that throne with a look of disbelief on his face. Nergal still glowed there, but the glow faltered, like a weak television signal failing to tune in. Beside Nergal, still hanging in the air, Ninurta seemed to watch all from his hovering perch of brilliance—to watch, but not to react, not to respond or act. Even as Brigid watched, Ninurta shimmered and glitched, his smooth form turning jagged as if seen in some strange, fun-house mirror.
At the same time, something else happened, something even more remarkable. Brigid’s eyesight, along with that of her companions and everyone else clustered around the pyramid, reverted to normal.
Chapter 16
The effect was humbling.
Around the pyramid, voices were speaking hurriedly in bewilderment.
To the people outside the black pyramid, the sky was suddenly blue where it had been silver-gray before. The shadows were shadows still, but they were edged by things of color, browns and greens and sandy yellows. The black pyramid was not black at all, more a slate-gray with highlights and abrasions, patches where the light caught, adding depth to its surface.
But even as the Cerberus team watched, the figure of Nergal became complete once more as the man Kane had thrust into his throne pulled himself up. Hanging in the air above, Ninurta shimmered back, too, a final glitch running through his body, bottom to top.
Something else happened then, too. Kane’s eyesight, along with that of his teammates and Nergal’s faithful all around them, reverted back to that strangely dimmed view of the world, painting the pyramid, sky and ground in muted shades of gray and black.
“Sacrifice,” Nergal said in his eerily distant voice. “You are the chosen of Nergal.”
Kane didn’t like the sound of that, and he could sense the mood of the crowd as they fell back under the thrall of their sun-bright god.
“Run!” Kane shouted to his companions, shoving aside one of the warriors who stood in his path. Surprised, the man fell, tumbling down the black steps of the pyramid. Kane ran, clambering up the pyramid steps, arms pumping as he scrambled away from Nergal’s throne.
* * *
ON THE GROUND, Grant, Brigid and Mariah were still surrounded on three sides by the massing audience. Their mood had changed as if a switch had been turned back on—going from bewildered surprise at the strange way that their god had reacted, to anger at the dangerous interlopers in their midst.
“Get moving,” Grant instructed, sweeping his Sin Eater over the crowd’s heads with a burst of expelled bullets. “We’ll regroup on the far side, yeah?” He asked this last via Commtact as well, and heard Kane’s grunted acknowledgment over the sound of his firing Sin Eater.
Brigid swung the blade before her in a wide arc, forcing three approaching crowd members to step back or be cut. With her free hand she snagged Mariah by the wrist. “With me, on three,” she said.
Mariah’s mind was awhirl. After its momentary repair, her eyesight had reverted back to the foggy gloom she had suffered ever since seeing the brilliant visage of the Annunaki Nergal. She wasn’t like Brigid and the others; she had received only rudimentary training and she was uncomfortable around weapons. She gasped as something hot and liquid splashed against her face, realized it was a man’s blood as Brigid hacked the Sword of Heaven across his grasping hand. The man fell back with a howl of pain, and Brigid kicked him hard, driving him in an awkward stumble into his mate.
Then Brigid pulled at Mariah’s wrist. “Three already!” Brigid shouted. “Come on, Mariah!”
Mariah realized she had been so horrified by the chaos around her that she had not even heard Brigid do the count. She ran, legs scrambling as Brigid found a path through the confused mob, batting people aside with the flat of her sword.
* * *
THE LEVELS OF the pyramid were tall. They were not designed for climbing like this—there were shallower steps for that—but they were guarded. Each level needed Kane to lift his knees high to get over it. Still he scrambled, outpacing the few members of Nergal’s entourage who tried to chase him. Kane kept himself in the prime of physical fitness, had done so ever since his days as a Magistrate—he was a survivor; he figured you never knew when you might have to run for your life.
Twelve steps up, twelve of thirty, Kane turned and began to run along the level. He glanced back, already sensing that he had outpaced his would-be killers. The closest of them was four levels below Kane, and he looked weary as he clambered up the next tall step.
Kane bolted, taking fast breaths, sprinting along the level of the square pyramid to the corner, slowing only momentarily to take the corner before he shot around it and picked up his pace once more.
Behind him, the devotees of Nergal seemed to be giving up the chase. After all, what was one sacrifice when there was a whole world of them out there?
* * *
DOWN ON THE GROUND, Grant blasted another shot over the heads of the crowd. He was getting dangerously close to running out of ammunition here, and while his captors had failed to find the pistol hidden beside his wrist, they had removed his spare ammo along with his Copperhead, knife and other items from his field kit.
Two of the mob were closing in on Grant and so he made a decision. Grant commanded the Sin Eater back to its hiding place against his wrist, and lashed out with his left elbow, belting one man hard in the face so that his jaw cracked. The man went down, and Grant was already moving, driving his now empty right hand at the second attacker, the hand now clenched in a pile-driver fist.
Grant was a big man, and his strength was like something from a legend. His second blow knocked back his attacker before the man could even get a punch in, then Grant moved on to the next and the next, grabbing two men by the sides of their heads before smashing their skulls together with a resounding thump.
Grant was a whirling dervish then, despite the overwhelming odds. He kicked, he punched, he leaped and rolled, each carefully coordinated movement sliding into the next, each punch or kick delivered with precision, dropping man after man as he created a path out of the angry mob.
Two men came at Grant with weapons, a long knife that was about two inches short of being a full-on sword and a long baton that the user wielded like a nightstick.
Grant bounded at the first man, delivering a sweeping roundhouse kick at his chest, his foot slipping through the gap in the knife man’s defenses and striking a mighty blow. The knife man staggered back, stumbled, regained his footing.
Grant was already onto his ally, ducking and weaving as the man swung the baton at his head. With the third swing, Grant lurched back while thrusting his right hand forward, grabbing the baton as it whooshed past his brow. The man on the other end was suitably surprised, and he stumbled in a weird two-step before collecting himself and trying to pull the baton free. Grant pulled harder, snatching the staff with both hands and wrenching the man who had wielded it off his feet. He fell toward Grant as the Cerberus warrior pulled, and Grant kneed him hard in the groin with enough force that the man sank to the ground, relinquishing his grip on the baton.
Grant turned to face the knife man who was only just recovering from the roundhouse kick he had endured. “You want to rethink this?” Grant taunted. “No?”
The man came at him with a battle cry, swishing the knife through the air as he tried to drive it at the hulking Cerberus man. Grant swept the baton in a low arc, clipping the knife man by the legs so that he was suddenly in the air, toppling over himself.
Grant jumped the man as he fell, saw his opening and ran for the cover of the trees. In a moment, he had disappeared.
Behind him, the ghostly voice of Nergal intoned: “Sacrifice! Blood is required!”
* * *
THE CERBERUS WARRIORS regrouped on the far side of the pyramid, hiding in the lush foliage there in the shadow of the towering structure. Grant was the last to join them, using a series of recognized bird calls to discover where Kane and company had entrenched themselves.
“Everyone okay?” Grant asked breathlessly as he emerged from the cover of green.
“Our eyesight is still messed up,” Kane explained, and Brigid and Mariah agreed. “How about you?”
“I can see,” Grant said, “kinda. Same as before, not much color but the shapes are clear. What happened back there? To Nergal?”
“I threw someone into his throne,” Kane said. “It seemed to make him flinch out of existence for a moment. We figure he’s a hologram!”
“You’ve been discussing this, I take it?” Grant asked as he adopted a crouch amid the greenery, hunkering beside Brigid and Mariah.
“The way Nergal was disrupted,” Brigid said, “seems to suggest it’s a signal of some kind, either a projection or a broadcast.”
“Or both,” Grant said, remembering something that Kane had said earlier about their current location. The Cerberus warriors had been here before, under very different circumstances, and they had discovered ancient Annunaki technology still in use here then.
“Maybe there’s something in the throne,” Kane proposed. “A projector maybe.” He had his hand pressed against a leaf as large as his skull, pushing it back to watch for enemies approaching. It would not be easy to spot them with his eyesight, but, if nothing else, Kane knew his foes were struggling under the same restrictions.
Brigid shook her head with uncertainty at Kane’s proposal. “Could be,” she said, “but it wouldn’t explain how we also saw Nergal inside the mirror room.”
“Mirror room?” Mariah asked, evidently confused by the term.
“We’ve been here before,” Kane said, picking up the story. “About three years ago we got involved with a local mess concerning a mystical item called the Mirror of Prester John. It turned out to be an Annunaki device—”
“No surprise,” Grant opined bitterly.
“—predating the Christian reference,” Kane concluded.
“So where are we?” Mariah asked. “Prester John would be—what?—India?”
“The Congo,” Brigid corrected. “Although you’re right. That part of the locals’ story never really made sense. Prester John was a Christian patriarch said to be active in India, Asia or perhaps Ethiopia, depending on the telling.”
“But you say this is the Congo,” Mariah confirmed. “We’re a long way from any of those places, even the closest of them, Ethiopia, is still—what?—sixteen hundred miles away.”
“Legends get muddled in the retelling,” Brigid reminded her. “Probably someone made a mistake and the mistake stuck.”
Mariah nodded thoughtfully as they sat among the teeming plant life, the buzz of insects a steady drone in her ears. “This mirror,” she asked. “What was it? I mean, I take it that it wasn’t just a mirror—Annunaki materials are usually something else, right?”
“Right,” Grant agreed.
“It was a remote viewer,” Kane explained. “Kind of like closed-circuit television for Annunaki. It was used by Anu to spy on his fellow Annunaki.
“He had a little paranoia thing going on,” Kane added after a moment.
“Didn’t they all,” Brigid said. “The Annunaki were viciously competitive and they thrived on their opponents’ weaknesses.”
Mariah rubbed at her eyes, trying to ignore the way they s
eemed unable to process color once again. At least she had some sight, albeit restricted. “Where’s the mirror?” she asked.
“Overlord Utu tried to gain control of it when the Annunaki reappeared on Earth a few years ago,” Kane answered, “but we intervened.”
“I blasted it to dust with the cannon of my Manta,” Grant elaborated, unable to hide his smile at the memory. “Utu got hit with the debris and it burned out his eye sockets.”
“Sounds gross,” Mariah said, making a face.
“It wasn’t dust,” Brigid corrected thoughtfully. “It shattered. They were shards—small shards but still shards.”
“So Utu got hit with superheated shards of metal,” Kane confirmed. “Doesn’t matter now; he’s gone.”
Had any of the Cerberus team been able to see properly at that moment, they would have seen the sudden expression of realization on Brigid’s face. “They’re not mining for diamonds,” she said. “They’re mining for bits of the mirror—the Mirror of Prester John.”
“Meaning?” Kane asked.
“Meaning,” Brigid said, drawing out the word as she assembled her thoughts, “that a remote viewer would also very likely be a recording device.”
“No point spying on your enemies if you can’t check back what they said,” Grant reasoned.
“Nergal doesn’t exist here,” Brigid said. “Nor does Ninurta. What we’re seeing is old data, transmitted or projected by whatever is left of the mirror.”
Kane was shaking his head. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “How could it interact with—”
“Did Nergal really interact?” Brigid asked. “Did Ninurta? Maybe they appeared to respond, maybe Nergal displayed some rudimentary independence, but it was mostly down to interpretation, wasn’t it?”
“Nergal spoke,” Grant said.
“About worship and sacrifice and slavery,” Brigid said. “All pretty normal stuff for the Annunaki. Old data. His people added the context, his followers.”
“Followers of an old recording?” Mariah asked, horrified.