“You don’t,” Sub-Zero replied cryptically, and backed across the bridge.
And then he vanished as mysteriously as he’d appeared, the shadows of the cavern seeming to rearrange themselves around him.
Scared and confused, terribly alone, Liu hurried toward the passage leading to the surface.
CHAPTER NINE
“Telos roma ula-yar inhotis…”
Nestled in the Himalayan foothills, its entrance flanked by columns that had been cut into the base of a soar, cloud-soaked mountain, the Temple had been ancient when those majestic slopes were young – as had the man who knelt within it, his head bowed in reverence, his lips whispering a prayer in a language that had not been spoken on Earth for millennium.
“Akhatis torem margatal loronu meklos…”
As Rayden completed his invocation, the hundreds of glowing candles around him bent and flickered in the soft breeze fluttering through the shrine. He rose then, moving deeper into the mountain, the breeze growing into a fierce, gusting wind that rushed over the flames and made them undulate like tiny dancers, whipping them together until the temple was washed with incandescent brightness.
Suddenly the shrine transformed, became something other, as if whole layers of reality had vaporized in the firelight, revealing a fantastic dreamlike perspective underneath.
Water seeped from the walls and pooled around Rayden’s feet, then began to fall impossibly upward from the floor, wetting neither Rayden nor the candles. Before his eyes, the mythic wall carvings of three Elder Gods – icons that Rayden knew represented faith, courage, and love – seemed to momentarily become animate, then recede into the moss-covered stone. The ceiling above blossomed open to reveal a magnificent celestial infinity that swirled with brilliant, delicately interwoven ribbons of light.
Rayden stood surrounded by three towering walls of crystalline blue water falling into the shimmering heavens. From each of the water walls emerged an ethereal, larger-than-life face. All were identical in their vaguely human, asexual appearance. Their eyes were as forceful and dazzlingly radiant as the sun.
Though this was hardly Rayden’s first visit here, his awe was that of a fresh-faced youth. The Eternal Palace was not the sort of place that ever lots its enchantment – not even for one who had seen the centuries roll by much as days on a calendar for ordinary men.
“I have come to the Eternal Palace because your sacred rules have been broken,” he said, addressing all three deities at once. “Shao Kahn has invaded Earth.”
“As always, Lord Rayden, you are granted but three questions,” one of them replied in a sonorous voice.
Rayden nodded. “Then let me begin by asking why this treachery was ever allowed?”
“We three do not control the destiny of man,” the second Elder God said.
“Everyone possesses the ability to change his fate,” the third member of the triumvirate said.
Rayden bristled. Whether coming from man or god, condescension was easy enough to recognize. He struggled to remain his respectful composure.
“So you will just stand by and watch the ruination of Earth?”
“You were correct in believing Kitana is the key to closing the Portal,” the first Elder God said.
“But if I reunite her with Sindel, how can I be certain the Portal will stay closed until the next tournament?”
“Only when Shao Kahn is destroyed will the future be safe,” the second Elder God intoned.
“Then Kahn can be defeated?”
The third countenance let its burning gaze fall upon him.
“You have no more questions, Lord Rayden. But we three have questions for you.”
His expression determined, almost challenging, Rayden simply nodded.
“After living among the humans, do you truly believe them worth saving?”
“More than anything I know.”
“Do you love them enough to sacrifice your own immortality?” the second Elder God said.”
“If that is what it takes, yes,” he replied, his voice unfaltering.
The third Elder God asked the final question. “Are you ready to fight and die for them?”
Once again, Rayden answered without hesitation.
His eyes narrowed, the warrior stood poised on the highest precipice of the vertical stone formation, watching a large red hawk ride a wind current far below, its outspread wings skimming the edge of a raftering cloud. Its cry spliced up to him, fierce, dauntless, conspicuously independent. He nodded with something more than admiration… empathy, perhaps.
Moving closer to the edge of the cliff, the warrior closed his eyes in silent meditation, focusing his concentration inward, gathering his strength. His hair was cut to his scalp. He wore a dark, tight-fitting leather tunic and pants, black cross straps, high laced boots: a battle outfit. In his hands, flapping and billowing in the wind, were the priestly robes he had so recently shed.
With a final brief prayer, Rayden opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and dove off the rarefied summit, flipping from one descending ledge to another, his body as graceful as that of the hawk he had been observing.
Three thousand feet down, his feet touched the ground at the base of the mountain.
He slapped the dust off his sleeves and smiled with the nearest hint of immodesty.
“I’m ready,” he said.
Sonya opened her eyes a crack, realized she was moving. What’s wrong with this picture? she thought muzzily. Then it came to her. She was moving, yes, but her legs weren’t, and her angle with the ground was all wrong.
Someone was carrying her.
Her eyes snapped the rest of the way open and she looked down at the metal-sheathed arm hooked around her waist.
“Jax, put me down…” she rasped, coughing dryly.
He dropped to his knees, lowering her to the earth with a gentleness one wouldn’t have expected from a man his size. She scrabbled resistantly free of his grasp and rose to her feet.”
“Chill out, girl,” he said. “Your head got in the way of a flyin’ rock, but you’re safe now.”
“I can take care of myself, in case you haven’t noticed,” she grumbled.
He knew her well enough to leave that comment alone.
Sonya took a hurried inventory of herself, running her hand over her head, wincing painfully as her fingers skimmed over a nasty bump. Her clothes were singed and torn, and one of her legs was throbbing from a bruisy cut on the knee, but that seemed the extent of the damage. She looked around, saw that they were just inside the mouth of a cave. Fissured, contorted volcanic ground spread out beyond it. In the far distance, black smoke brewed into the sky from an immense crown of flame.
“That’s the base?” she asked, pointing to the conflagration.
“Yeah. Left it back there maybe an hour, hour and a half ago. Been carrying you the whole way.”
“That was stupid. You’d have traveled faster alone.”
“What, you want me to leave my partner out there as vulture bait? With some kind of hit squad on our ass?”
Now it was her turn to ignore him. Limping slightly form her sore knee, Sonya went over the cave entrance for a better look outside.
She didn’t like what she saw. A mile away, close to a dozen surviving members of the Extermination Squad were heading toward them across the flatlands, their imposing figures silhouetted by the burning remains of the Army installation. The fire itself was spreading in an unchecked tide, igniting the tar and lava bleeding up from the cracked earth.
“All right, forget compassion,” Jax said, still unaware of the gaining posse of Outworlders. “I want some answers from you before you go and get yourself wasted. Like, for instance, where you disappeared to. I mean, we were in the middle of an operation, and you left me high and dry.”
Sonya sighed. As members of a special warfare team, they had been in China stalking an Asian crime boss when she was plucked away by Rayden to fight in the Mortal Kombat tournament. But she would need hours to explain
that – and from the look of things outside, they didn’t even have minutes.
“We’ve got bigger problems than our past,” she said, turning from the cave entrance. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
Trying not to show how much trouble her leg was giving her, she moved hurriedly past Jax toward the shadowy back exit of the cave.
“This is what really gets me about you,” Jax complained. He took a quick peek outside, then caught up with Sonya and stepped in front of her, holding out his palm in a “stop” gesture. “You’re gonna have to go through me unless you come clean.”
They faced each other a moment in tense silence.
“Have it your way,” she said at last, and shrugged extravagantly. “The world’s being invaded by Shao Kahn. Happy now?”
“Shao Kahn? What the hell country is that?”
Sonya expelled a long breath, grabbed both of Jax’s enhanced arms, and looked straight into his eyes.
“Jax, those guys out there are warriors. From another place or another time, I’m not sure which. But all you really need to know is that their job is to kill us.”
The only word Sonya could think of to describe Jax’s expression was one her grandmother had used way back when: flabbergasted.
“Goddamn, girl, what’ve you gotten us into this time?”
“Look,” she said. “It gets a little complicated, but basically me and some friends kicked Shao Kahn’s ass. And let’s just say he’s a real sore loser.”
As Jax stood there shaking his head, Sonya pushed past him into the darkness.
“We have to go now.”
“Into a dead end cave?” Jax said, stalking after her. “I’m sorry, but I don’t got a death wish like you!”
She paused several yards ahead of him, letting her eyes adjust to the deeper darkness.
“Jax,” she said, “some things you just gotta see for yourself.”
“Is this for real?” Jax asked, looking around at the arcane machinery of the velosphere’s hangar. His mouth was a perfect gaping O.
“Why don’t you ask them?” she said, and nodded toward the mouth of the cave, where the war cries of the approaching Outworlders were echoing loudly in the gloom.
Jax hopped into the waiting velosphere without another word. Sparing a glance over her shoulder before she followed him, Sonya saw that the warriors were already through the cave entrance and racing in their direction, their faces warped and ghastly in the pale green glow coming from the walls.
“I take it Amtrak’s out of the question,” Jax said, strapping himself in.
Sonya peered out through the globe’s entry port. Now the Outworlders had split into two groups – one of them pouring into the wind tunnel track and rushing for the velosphere, the other circling around to the hangar. They were about to be surrounded.
“Just do what I say! Lean hard to the right! Now!”
Jax didn’t put up an argument.
A moment later there was a rush of air, and they were swept down the track to safety.
CHAPTER TEN
Liu stood under a seamless night sky that stretched toward the horizon like a velvet cloth, the torch in his hand spilling daubs of feeble light over his features but doing little to push back the darkness.
“Go deep into the night,” the medicine man had advised him. “You will not find the Nightwolf. He will find out.”
That had been many hours ago, when there still was some light left to the day. After leaving the cave, Liu had found himself in a barren, wind-scoured desert marked only by humpbacked ranks of sand dunes trooping off into the distance, and, an eternity away, the three graduating, hornlike spires of what he believed was the Hopi Mesa. The dry air searing his skin, using the far-off mesa to guide his bearings, he had trudged through that sunbaked emptiness for a long time, his limbs growing heavier with each step he took.
An American Indian with long white hair and skin like old rawhide, the medicine man had appeared out of nowhere. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. He had, in fact, stepped from behind a clump of scrubby mesquite while Liu was resting in its pitiful shade.
“Who… how did you…?” Liu had said, snapping to his feet.
And, answering neither his spoken nor unspoken questions, the medicine man had told him about going into the night and being found by Nightwolf. And here he was.
Now he held out his torch and slowly moved it around himself in a circle, listening. He had heard something howl, some kind of animal. The sound cut through the silence like a stiletto – a high-pitched, baying cry unlike any Liu had heard before. It had seemed to come from nearby, and that made him uneasy.
He stopped, listened some more. There it was again. Closer now. Much closer. Soaring high above the dunes, lonely and passionate and savage. Liu’s muscles tensed, the hairs at the back of his neck standing out in stiff little points.
Suddenly he heard a soft rustling noise behind him, and whirled to see a huge white wolf leap from the syrupy darkness. There was the low whistle of air being cleaved by a hurtling body. Then, its monstrous jaws snapping, it landed inches away from him, reared onto its hind legs, and pounced, throwing him backward to the ground.
Liu thrashed underneath it, but his efforts to struggle free were in vain. The creature was too heavy, too powerful. He was pinned down, unable to move, certain it would sink its fangs into his flesh at any moment.
Then the impossible happened. With its snout inches away from his throat, the wolf began to waver before his eyes, its shape shifting, melting into another form – that of a young, Native American man.
“Pretty cool, huh?” he said, smiling. His face was so close their noses almost touched.
He hopped off Liu and pulled him to his feet.
Liu was stunned. “Who are you? How did you do that?”
“Ha! Wouldn’t you like to know?” the stranger said. About the same weight and height as Liu, with a shock of gleaming black hair, he wore a traditional patchwork vest over a Stone Temple Pilots T-shirt, bluejeans, and lizard skin cowboy boots. A tomahawk hung from a loop on his belt, and a pair of iridescent Oakley sunglasses hung from the collar of his tee by one of the stems.
Liu gave him an appraising look. There was something in his dark brown, almost black eyes, an unmistakable depth and strength…
“You’re Nightwolf, aren’t you? The one Rayden sent me to find?”
The mysterious young man neither confirmed nor denied this. He circled Liu, sizing him up much as Liu had just done to him.
“So you’re Rayden’s prodigy?” he said. “I’ve seen better.”
Liu blinked, indignant.
“Don’t sweat it,” the stranger said. “I’ve also seen worse.”
“If you really are Nightwolf, you know that I won the last tournament,” Liu said in a defensive tone.
The man shrugged, amusement flashing in his eyes. “The tournament had rules. This time anything goes.”
Liu frowned, tired of his flip, ambiguous replies.
“You’re no older than I am. What can you possibly teach me?”
The stranger’s face suddenly turned serious.
“The body before you may have low mileage, but my soul has been handed down through generations, dating back to the time before the Ancient tribe split,” he said.
“What does all this have to do with stopping Shao Kahn?”
“After the ice melted and the Ancient Tribe of One spread out across the globe, each people was given a battle secret to keep the playing field even, as they say. The keeper of this secret forever lives on sacred land… which is where you now stand.”
Liu remained skeptical. “You’re telling me you are the keeper of your people’s secret?”
“Something like that,” Nightwolf said. He unfastened his tomahawk from its belt loop and twirled it from hand to hand, obviously trying to impress Liu – and doing a fair job.
“Look, I don’t have time for these stupid games,” Liu said, starting away. “It was a mistake even coming here.�
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“You think you’re ready, Liu Kang. But if you were, would Kitana have been caught?”
That struck a nerve. Liu spun around him, his fists clenched at his sides.
“Can you help me get her back?”
The mischief had returned to the stranger’s eyes. “Maybe. But first you gotta put yourself in a dream state.”
“And just how am I supposed to do that?”
Nightwolf was still manipulating his tomahawk like an expert baton twirler.
“Well,” he said, “there’s a slow way, and there’s a fast way.”
Liu’s fists trembled. “We don’t have time for the slow way!”
A smirk touched the corner of the stranger’s lips. “That’s what I thought you’d say,” he said.
Liu started to launch into an angry response, but he had scarcely gotten a word out of his mouth when the young man flipped the tomahawk at him so that its blunt end crunched against his forehead.
Sparks exploded between his eyes, rapidly turned cinder-gray, then blackened.
The young Indian’s grin slanted further up his face as he watched Liu crumple to the ground, unconscious.
“Sweet dreams, champ,” he said. “See you when you wake up.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They plunged through the jungle wilderness, moving as quickly as they could, Jax’s strength-amplified arms sweeping out in front of him to clear a path through the dense clutter of vegetation. Behind him, Sonya tried not to let her bad leg slow her down as she struggled to negotiate an obstacle course of vines, stumps, root tangles, and sucking marl. A single misstep would throw her flat on her face, and with the Outworlders sticking close at their heels, even a brief setback could be calamitous.
All around them, gray streamers of mist were creeping up from the ground and killing the leaves on their branches, turning them from vibrant green to sickly yellow, wilting them before their eyes. Sonya was sure this was another thing that could be charged in full to Shao Kahn’s account – the poisonous atmosphere of Outworld was infiltrating their own like some deadly herbicide.
As if to confirm her thoughts, a coarse Outworld idol suddenly became visible through the screen of foliage ahead of them, its gruesome visage frozen in a stone-carved growl.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation Page 5