Solomon's Jar

by Alex Archer

  A man, one of Highsmith’s devotees by his clothing, which looked as if it had been expensively tailored before it had been torn and yanked every which way, began hacking at the office door with a fire ax. It was a bizarre gesture. To either side the walls were mostly window and many of them had been shot out. He could have simply scrambled through with little effort. Evidently the violent frenzy had so gripped him he never even considered the possibility.

  Is he possessed? Annja wondered. Maybe he’s done it all himself, indulging himself in an ecstasy of pure destruction. It came to her to wonder, with a shock, whether the demons everyone spoke of were actual entities, possessed of any separate existence of their own, or were merely projections of human anger and fear and hatred.

  Something possessed that poor dog in Haifa, she thought. But couldn’t it have been worked into a frenzy by human rage and cruelty?

  She shook herself. There was no time for metaphysical speculation—especially since the office door gave way after no more than three good whacks. The White Tree cultist charged inside, making for half a dozen office workers cowering from him. His ax was raised and an expression of mad joy twisted what otherwise might have been a handsome young face.

  Annja raced forward. She jumped, easily clearing the office structure’s low side wall, ducking her head so as to fit through the vacant window. Her boots skidded with a crunch on the broken glass littering the floor. She had to flex her legs deeply to keep from falling over in it.

  The crazed man swung the ax at her. She jumped aside. The axhead rang on concrete, throwing up chips. With wild speed he raised it again and chopped at her.

  She ducked. The axe struck a heavy wooden table littered with drawings by the wall. The blade bit deep. It stuck.

  Annja shifted her balance, intending to disarm the man and then put him down, maybe dislocate his shoulder and take him out of the fight—or the fight out of him, in any case. But with mad strength he yanked the ax free in a shower of splinters, throwing it up and back over his head with such violence he almost overbalanced.

  It was too much. Annja concentrated. The sword was in her hand. The man screamed and started to swing at her.

  Blood gouted from his chest as she slashed horizontally through his torso, right below where his nipples must have been. He went to his knees. Blood welled up and slopped over his chin as it sprayed out to the sides from the wound. The ax fell from his hands with a clatter. His eyes rolled up and he fell forward at her feet.

  From the corner of her eye she saw someone point a weapon at her. She ducked as a shot crashed. Where the bullet went she didn’t know.

  “Keep low,” she said in Portuguese to the terrified office workers, who stared at her as if she were covered with green scales. She saw there were doors at the back of the office, apparently leading outside. “Get out of the building if you can. Lock yourselves in someplace out of sight if you can’t.”

  It was the woman who warned her. She hadn’t noticed before that there was a slender middle-aged woman in the group huddled in the office. She looked past Annja and her dark eyes went wide.

  Annja spun toward the door and uncoiled from the floor like a striking rattlesnake, thrusting the sword in a long lunge.

  26

  The sword’s tip caught a man wearing a Malkuth necklace in the center of his broad chest.

  He lowered the Jericho 941 Baby Eagle handgun he had been pointing at her as if his arm was suddenly too tired to support its two-plus pounds. For a moment Annja stood face-to-face with him. He looked no older than thirty. His eyes were blue and wide. They seemed to stare through Annja without seeing her. His mouth opened but only blood came out.

  His legs sagged. His jaw worked. Annja pushed him out into the cacophony of the smelter.

  His body jerked as a bullet struck it. The man winced and his eyes rolled up in his head. She pushed him farther away. With the last capability of his own legs he staggered back three steps. From all around the foundry’s cavernous interior the firefly lights of muzzle-flashes winked as at least twenty firearms opened up on him. The hammering noise of gunshots was like the devil’s own forge, echoing within the metal walls.

  As the already dying man performed his jerking dance of death Annja willed the sword back to the otherwhere. Taking a step out from the doorway, she jumped up. With hands reversed she caught the edge of the office space’s low roof and pulled herself up.

  The shooting suddenly stopped. As Annja had hoped, many of the gunmen had exhausted their magazines and needed to reload. She hoped to make use of the lull in the gunfight.

  “Listen to me,” she shouted in English. “You’ve got to stop this! Can’t you see you’re being used?”

  “My, my,” called an American-accented voice. Mark Peter Stern stepped into view from a side niche near the open maw of the furnace. It must have been wiltingly hot but he looked fresh, and his tropical-weight suit didn’t seem to have lost a bit from the sharpness of its creases. “You’re a woman of unusual talents for a TV archaeologist,” he said.

  “I’m a real archaeologist,” Annja declared with a defiant toss of her head.

  “You are the inconvenient young woman who came to my manor in the guise of a researcher,” a voice boomed from up high. Annja raised her head. Up on the catwalk Sir Martin Highsmith stood, his own shades-of-white suit gleaming as if spotlit in the glare of the halted crucible, whose contents had only cooled to yellow from near white. Its sides glowed red. “Enlighten us, then. Used by whom?”

  “Demons,” she said.

  The devotees of the warring sects had given off their wrestling and sniping to stare at her openmouthed. Her heart was pounding. She could see a good thirty of them still standing.

  Stern laughed. “That’s a good one. Demons.” His followers looked at each other, then voiced an uncertain laugh of their own.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Stern called out.

  “You think when you get the jar you’ll control them,” she called. She fought to keep desperation out of her voice. She was losing them, she knew. I hope this is providing enough of a diversion for Aidan, she thought. “But you’re already in mortal peril of your souls.”

  “Foolish young woman!” Highsmith declared in tones that rang like a great bronze bell. “Do you really think we have no means of protecting ourselves?”

  She looked up at him. For a moment he seemed surrounded by a nimbus of blackness.

  Suddenly she understood what was happening.

  Stern and Highsmith were willing participants in creating the frenzy. Their followers truly believed they were following a righteous path. And in the quest for power everyone had been possessed by evil.

  Up on the catwalk, surrounded by heat shimmer and flitting darkness, Sir Martin Highsmith began to laugh. It was a deep, rich, melodious laugh.

  Mark Peter Stern joined in. His laugh was harsh and rang throughout the metal sepulcher, clearly audible above the still hungry roaring of the furnace.

  One by one the men of the rival sects joined in.

  Maybe I should consider switching to a career in stand-up comedy, Annja thought.

  “Listen to me, please,” she cried, shouting to make herself heard above the foundry sounds and the roar of laughter, now showing clear manic overtones. “We can work together. We can work things out like reasonable people.”

  Sir Martin’s laugh cut off as if he’d been chopped across the throat. Instantly his face was suffused with blood. “You’re just like all of us,” he screamed, spittle flying from his mouth. “You just want the jar for yourself. Kill the meddling bitch!” he screamed.

  Annja launched herself up and out as guns spoke. A great iron hook hung from the metal ceiling girders by a chain, ten feet from the lip of the office roof and about three feet above Annja’s head. She grabbed the hook and swung on it.

  A half-dozen rival cultists stood clumped together by the foot of the stairway up to the catwalk along the far wall. They had been brutalizing one another with fists
and makeshift clubs when Annja put in her appearance. They seemed to have all been able to put their hands on firearms, though. Their aim was thrown off by Annja’s unexpected—and unexpectedly swift—movement. In fact when she let go the hook and came swooping down on them they were all too startled to track and shoot at her.

  It was the very response she’d been hoping for.

  She came down with both feet in the well-padded midsection of a blue-collar Malkuth hardman. The man staggered and sat down hard. Suitably braked, Annja landed with both feet on the concrete in the midst of the five still standing. She had hopes of preventing more bloodshed. She strongly suspected that the high-frequency emotion of combat and the actual spilling of life force were both feeding the demons in everyone.

  Taking full advantage of her skill and speed, Annja targeted two of the goons, plucking a handgun and a shotgun from surprise-slack hands before their owners could react. She pitched the weapons out into daylight through the opening yawning nearby. She kicked a second pistol from the grasp of a pasty-faced White Tree member who was pointing it at her sideways, American gangsta style. Then she spun and grabbed the flash suppressor of an FN-FAL 7.62 mm military rifle, twitched the long weapon out of its owner’s hands and hit him in the jaw with it. He went down moaning and clutching his face.

  That left two with guns in their hands. One man wearing a silver medallion fired a handgun. The noise and recoil so startled him that he immediately punched off a second shot on the light trigger, unintentionally to judge by the astonished look on his face. Both shots missed Annja, but one of the fat bullets hit a fellow Lodge member, one of the first pair Annja had disarmed on landing. He dropped to his knees and toppled on his face. His comrade dropped the big handgun as if it had turned red-hot.

  The stout Malkuth follower Annja had used to cushion her landing had gotten his feet under him. As he raised his pistol, still hunched over and clutching his gut with his other hand, Annja did a sideways stutter-step toward him and side kicked him in the groin once more. This time she put a hip thrust into it and sent him flying right out into the sunlight.

  With a wild scream a White Tree devotee cut loose from the hip with a 9 mm Franchi machine pistol, sweeping it left to right. A Malkuth enforcer and one of the gunner’s lodge mates spun down in a welter of blood. Annja turned and sprinted toward the front entrance with bullets letting in daylight in a sort of irregular sine wave behind her. She dived behind a large machine and heard bullets ring off its far side like trip-hammer blows.

  Baying like a pack of hounds, zealots of both stripes converged on her. She lay on her stomach trying to listen for footsteps. With all the noise and the echoing properties of the vast enclosed space, it wasn’t easy to sort them out.

  She saw a pair of oxblood shoes on the floor on the other side of a wheeled device that might have been a generator or portable power supply by her head. She prepared herself.

  The White Tree fanatic spun around holding a beefy SPAS riot shotgun. Annja rolled hard, flung out a leg, caught him right on his jade tie-tack with the back of her heel. Choking and flailing, he fell, losing his grip on the weapon as it blasted noisily toward the ceiling.

  Annja bounced to her feet, darted around the squat mechanism and onto the main floor as somebody else hopped out behind, spraying the oil-spotted place she’d been an instant before with bullets. Men with guns were running toward her. She summoned the sword again and charged.

  She slashed left, right, left. Two men fell, screaming and spurting blood. A third stood staring in mute horror at the blood flowing freely from his numerous wounds.

  Bullets snapped past her ears and cracked against the concrete by her flashing feet. She dived over a table laden with rusty parts, tucked her shoulder, rolled. She still hit hard enough to hurt and make her fear for a moment she had dislocated her left shoulder when she landed on it.

  She pressed against the pedestal of a grinder. Reversing at once, she rolled back against the table she had cleared. She tried to squirm beneath the bottom shelf. A hand appeared over the table’s edge, holding a Heckler & Koch MP-5K, a little stubby machine pistol with a sort of piano-leg foregrip. The gun yammered, spraying bullets at a downward angle.

  The stream was directed away from her—but right against the gray-painted cast-iron pedestal of the grinder. Annja cringed and cried out as ricochets buzzed about her like angry hornets, stinging her arms and face with concrete particles as they spanged off the floor and punched holes through cans above and to either side of her.

  The bullet storm stopped. Almost reluctantly she lowered her hands from her head, which she had covered in a futile attempt to protect herself from the ricochets. The compact but heavy German machine pistol bounced once on the floor next to her with a ringing sound.

  She looked up. The hand lay draped over the table edge like an abandoned sock puppet. Its skin looked almost bluish white in the half light; she could see blue veins through it. She raised the sword.

  Rising slightly, she found herself staring into a pair of surprised gray eyes. They showed no sign of seeing her. Nor were they likely to—they stared out from beneath an irregular hole right in the center of a high forehead, where one of the shooter’s own bullets had came tumbling back and struck him.

  Annja sprang to a hunched-over posture. Guns blared at her. Bent low she darted this way and that like a fox pursued by hounds, trying to throw off the aim of her multiple enemies by speed and sheer unpredictability. She knew that since few if any of them bothered to actually aim, whether or not she took a hit would pretty much be a matter of luck anyway. But moving made her feel better, somehow.

  A pair of Malkuth goons appeared before her as she darted toward the rear of the smelter, where the furnace roared, oblivious to the doings of mere flesh. She darted right, bowling over two more men closing in from that direction, sprinted across seven yards of open floor, threw herself into a forward roll.

  Another Malkuth man jumped out from behind a machine and into her path, firing a Glock. But he anticipated a target running at him upright. Annja skidded forward on her butt with bullets cracking right over her head. She thrust upward at an angle and skewered him right beneath the rib cage as she slid past to his left. He fell, sword still transfixing him, momentarily pinning her right hand to the floor.

  As her feet hit the wall something made her look up and left. Sir Martin Highsmith stood at the top of the stairs with the yellow glow of the still liquid metal in the hanging crucible illuminating the right side of his body and underlighting his craggy face and mane of white hair with deceptive sunset gold. He held a 9 mm Beretta out before him like his own sword of vengeance.

  “You are dead, interloper!” he declared. “You cannot reach me with that sword of yours.”

  He was right. As he began to trigger shots and bullets cracked around her, Annja willed the sword away. Then she yanked the Glock from the dead Malkuthian’s nerveless fingers, rolled onto her back, pushing the blocky handgun out before her in a two-handed isosceles grip.

  The white dot of the front sight lined up on the center of Highsmith’s chest, its black post contrasting nicely with his old-ivory waistcoat. She squeezed the trigger, hoping the Glock’s characteristic long pull wouldn’t throw her aim off too badly. The weapon roared and bucked in her hand.

  SIR MARTIN CAMDESSUS Highsmith felt a piledriver impact to the center of his chest. Instantly his gun hand ceased obeying instructions and began to drift downward. His weapon no longer fired.

  He couldn’t breathe. His vision blurred. He teetered.

  Spirit of wild nature, who have guided me so long, he prayed, help me now so that I might yet bring our shared vision to pass.

  But the voice in his head, which had always been so warm and honeyed, now dripped with scorn.

  Useless fool, it sneered. I have no use for failure. Die.

  Sir Martin reeled and fell backward over the rail.

  He screamed as he felt the heat growing on his back like a rising sun. Scre
amed louder as his hair and the backs of his coat and trouser legs took fire with a huff.

  And then the molten metal caught him, enfolded him and drew him into infinite agony. His shriek achieved a steam-whistle pitch and volume as intolerable agony was augmented by the moisture in his lungs boiling in an instant, searing throat, palate and tongue.

  The scream died.

  “WAIT,” ANNJA HEARD Mark Peter Stern command. “Take the woman alive. She may know where the jar is.”

  Transferring the Glock to her left hand and summoning the sword back into her right, Annja leaped to her feet. With their leader gone the White Tree survivors seemed as inclined to obey the Malkuth guru as his own followers were. Annja was surrounded, a dozen men closing in on her, faces grim or gleeful over leveled weapons.

  “Ah, yes,” Stern said, tipping his head to one side. “That’s a nifty sword you have there, Ms. Creed. If you hand it over, we might be persuaded to let you live.”

  Her eyes darted left and right. To surrender the sword was unthinkable. She wondered fleetingly if she willed it gone before they killed her, whether it would remain eternally sealed in its pocket universe. Probably not, she decided.

  There was no possible escape for her. Even using gun and sword simultaneously she could never get through before someone put a bullet in her, or she was dragged down by sheer weight of male muscle and bone. If I go down, she thought, I go down fighting. But winded, exhausted, disoriented by the relentless attacks of the swarming demons, she hesitated for the space of half a breath.

  That was all it took. Strong hands gripped her arms from right and left as two men closed with her. In despair she felt her strength and will drain from her. She was trapped.

  The man to her right said, “Be a love and give us the sword, then.” He was a tall, young Englishman in a dark green pin-striped suit, no tie, with curly chestnut hair. He smiled and reached for the hilt of her sword.