Land Of The Gods

by Abhishek .

“Tie up the rest. We shall keep them as mementoes. Meanwhile,” Migdur commanded calmly, “fix the teleporter. We need to get this shipment going. And by the way,” he added, with a hint of a smile, pointing to the Technician, who was holding onto the Chiemsee cauldron. “Keep the old man intact. I need to understand how much of leverage he will bring when we present him to his kinsmen, the Asurians!”

  * * *

  Mathias’s story

  Alexandria, Egypt

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 1025 hours EET

  The car rumbled to a stop near an old, dilapidated house. Daniel rolled down the window and first felt the void, the stillness of the air around him. The soldier licked his index finger and held it up in the open. “Not a little breeze out there.”

  “What’s that in the distance?” I pointed out into the desert.

  Far out into the ocean of sand, a gargantuan rippling curtain of ochre blotched out the sky in the horizon. It spanned the entire edge of the world, like a wall that seemed to close in on us.

  “That’s a sandstorm right out of darned hell, boy,” the soldier said in a deep guttural voice. “I’ve never seen a sandstorm of that sort. It’s presumably a super-massive one at that too. I don’t reckon that anything naked in its path will be able to live long,” he turned to look at me. “You better cover your pretty little face with this,” he threw me a scarf. “Lucky that I brought a spare one.”

  Together, the two of us left the car and walked into the desert. The sandstorm had cleansed their path off all the patrol units. Nobody, bar anyone with motives like those of the twosome, dared to walk straight into the path of a super- massive sandstorm.

  I led Daniel up large hillocks of sand and slid down many. I assured the man that we were headed the correct way while his eyes searched desperately for the large hole bored into the sand by the ark. Surely, a hole that big wouldn’t have been covered up so quickly. I looked back at the line of Alexandrian houses, trying to remember any landmark that Vivek, I and Lifana had spotted, but nothing sprung up in my mind. A corner of my eye was fixed on the storm coming at us. Our search needed more time and time was something we did not have.

  Kapittel 63

  Ram’s story

  Asr-Gawa, Lok Vve controlled Soffut sector

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 1028 hours Earth EET

  Ram walked right up to the edge of the city and knew that what he was about to do was quite ludicrous in his dimension. Here in Asr-Gawa, the rotating city, generating false gravity for all the inhabitants living on the inside of the city’s bowl, Ram looked downwards from the bowl’s edge and smiled when he saw the setting sun. Ram watched as the last few rays of sunlight disappeared into a numinous indigo glow over the city as the sun was pulled down into the unfathomable depths of the ferocious ocean. Soon, the city would be consumed by all-pervading darkness.

  As he walked back, Ram wondered whether the ocean would be any different from the seas of his planet, Earth. From here, the ocean looked rather pristine with waves lapping against the shore in the most normal manner ever. Yet, the Asurians seemed to be scared of the waters, judging from the way they had encapsulated their 4.6 billion strong population in one colossal city.

  In a while, Ram found himself back in the centre of the province controlled by Lok Vve. He looked at the glowing holographic tube, reminiscing the moment when his father and his uncle and aunt left him under the protection of this mysterious yet powerful institution. For just a second, he felt like his younger self, when he had been left at the orphanage to grow up without the love of parents.

  As darkness befell the city, Ram’s eyes fell on the shadows growing out of the niches and encompassing a larger and larger area. The sky grew blacker and thoroughfares emptier. A chill ran down Ram’s spine as he noticed he was alone on the street, left as food for the monsters lurking in the burgeoning dark. As he stood rooted to his spot in the street, something clicked behind him and his heart stopped for a second. His teeth were chattering partly because of the cold and partly because of the fear of the unknown. He mustered his courage and turned.

  Ram squinted his eyes as he was bathed in pure white light. He spotted a silhouette standing on the doorway, as if the creator himself stood at the gates to heaven. Instinctively, Ram walked towards him. With every step the man’s face became clearer and the red light of a translator glowed on his neck like a third eye.

  “Come on in! You’ll freeze to death like the poor homeless. Come in!” The man shoved Ram into the building. Temporarily blinded by the light, Ram opened his eyes slowly and savoured the warmth inside the building. He rubbed his hands, but he knew he won’t need to do that anymore.

  “Recruits come into our organisation all the time,” the man spoke to him without turning, closing the door leading into the dark streets, “But the news of a Mandaa recruit spreads like wildfire. You are the one, correct my boy?”

  “Yes.” That was all Ram could say. For a moment, he couldn’t help but study the man. He had a narrow and gaunt face. He didn’t look very old, but his hair had thinned and matted his round skill while a coarse beard shrouded his jowls. His light blue watery eyes made him look approachable, compared to the general Asurian. He had donned a simple beige jacket and black overalls made of the same queer cloth he had observed everywhere.

  “Rumour has it that you are the Mandaa nephew of the head of internal security and intelligence.”

  Ram looked at him with confusion. “Nanna nu? Yes, I’m her nephew.” Pictures of her green eyes and thoughts of his mother flashed across his mind.

  “I am sorry if you feel insecure. I didn’t mean to be an interrogator,” the man walked to Ram and squeezed his shoulders with his hands. As they walked together up the flights of stairs, the man seemed to get warmer, reminding Ram of Vivek. “This place can get very cold. What is your name?”

  “Ram.”

  “Glad to meet you, Ram. My name is Garm Lu. I work in the Soffut sector of Lok Vve.”

  A pause ensued between them as a door was opened and Ram was once again overwhelmed by the commotion spilling out of the hall.

  “It is a little strange, making friends with a Mandaa. Never had a Mandaa visit Asr-Gawa before,” he chuckled nervously. “May I ask you how you came here?”

  Ram remained silent, finding it hard to confide in a stranger so quickly.

  “It’s completely alright. Forgive me for making you uncomfortable. Come along. Now that you are already present in the entrails of Lok Vve, let me show you around myself.”

  Garm and Ram dived into the deafening body of noise that filled the room. Out of the seemingly chaotic noise, Ram first noticed how the noise of people talking was constant, like a drone, almost as if the workers worked synchronously to fill in the gaps of silence. This led Ram to notice something even deeper – out of the cacophony, he detected a certain hidden harmony.

  “When you met the Supreme Teacher, the Grand Läro, you must have passed one of our workstations?”

  Ram nodded slowly, extremely observant. “Everybody seems to be so motivated. Team work is extremely essential here, is it not?”

  “Team work is precisely one of the pillars that hold us together. The fact that we find something common between us all separates us from the rest of the Asurians and causes us to strive towards something better together. We are the free men.” He bent his neck and pointed towards the pointed ‘B’ scar on the small of his neck. “Other than seeing this here, you must have noticed this symbol on your dimension too.”

  “I reckon. Now that I see it behind every Lok Vve member’s neck, it seems awfully familiar. It is the Nordic rune Berkhanan, isn’t it? The powerful symbol of Loki, the Scandinavian god of mischief?” Ram asked him excitedly.

  “I should have paid more attention in our history class,” Garm shook his head, a little reddened. “But I think you are correct. This scar serves as a strong symbol in your dimension, although our representation as the god of mischief is a little... superficial and ridiculous,�
� Garm and Ram chuckled simultaneously. “Move!” He shoved Ram away from the path of a hurrying worker who carried four black cubic chests to a section of the hall that housed many thin displays, holographic projections of data and documents, machinery of all sizes and one big projection of the city with many pointers littered everywhere.

  “That is one of the most vital sections of any workstation. That is where large amounts of data, numbers, classified information and other sensitive documents are taken care of; either encrypted or decrypted for public release and... sensationalism. Each of those black containers that you saw,” Garm leaned closer to Ram and pointed at the flustered worker opening the chests ever so cautiously, “contain one exceedingly powerful orb the size of a tsikudd.”

  Ram looked at him uncertainly.

  “Umm... it is like a small compressed sphere of nutrients citizens are supplied with when we have food shortages.”

  The man picked up the orbs with mechanical tweezers. Ram was finally able to compare them with something more familiar: they were pea-sized spheres with glowing stripes of different shades of grey. Even from afar, Ram could notice the intricate work that had gone into it. He shivered slightly, watching the spheres adjust their shapes, wriggling around the tweezers, almost as if the orbs had lives of their own. He wondered how much computing power they contained.

  “The rest of the workstation carries out a variety of different functions like preparing arms and munitions, supplies, propaganda, runner training, fixing our budget, gathering resources and managing our contacts for infiltration in government schemes.”

  “How do you get your resources? Do you acquire funds or goods or what?”

  “Funds? No, no, nothing like that. In Asr-Gawa, we trade raw materials and commodity. We do not have any currency as you have in Mandagaar. Our resource management team will be able to explain better, though. In a nutshell, since we have Lok Vve sympathisers and members in high places, we have many benefactors who donate large quantities of resources to us. We use some resources and the rest is sold through several businesses that we clandestinely control and some giant firms that we control only partly. Through this, we manage to amass a veritable amount of resources.”

  “But if you don’t have currency, how do you control your shares in these businesses?” Ram looked at him quizzically.

  “Whenever we strike a deal with a market, we control that portion of the market—manufacturing and supplying or trading—while paying a tribute to the owners of the market. It’s quite complicated and a large workstation has been assigned for this alone. We are a state within a state, Ram, and as sinister as it sounds, we plan to consume the larger state within us one day to usher in a new era of enlightenment and development,” Garm looked ahead like a beaming captain sailing into a storm he knows he can conquer.

  Ram was then led out of the brightly lit room into a dimmer corridor and then a rigid bridge that spanned the gap between two buildings.

  “It’s getting quite late now. I think you have had enough for one day. Let me show you our quarter before I show you to your quarter.”

  “I will get personal quarters? All to myself?” Ram asked him. He had partly expected to find himself in a small bed among hundreds cramped into a tight room, but he knew that the beds must be comfortable as everything in Asr-Gawa was futuristic and moulded around the user.

  “Yes you will! You are our special guest from Mandagaar. You deserve special treatment!” Garm smiled. Now that they were in the space between the buildings, the eerie darkness poured all over them.

  They entered the well-lit lobby of the adjacent building and climbed downwards. As they reached the floor below, a different set of sounds came from the other end of the lobby. Ram noted that the door was not like the folding doors he had seen here before; instead, they were made of something extremely robust and hard, like metal, as if they concealed something dangerous and volatile.

  Through the door radiated a symphony of wretched cries and wails, interspersed with a couple of guttural or high- pitched howls and shrill screams. The light of the lobby flickered slightly and Ram fought an extremely strong feeling of running away.

  “What’s in there?” Ram asked Garm with a worried expression.

  “Sometimes, while removing the lattice from our brain through the suction process, certain parts of our brain can get damaged or torn away by the suction power. Those screaming inside that asylum are the ones who lost their humanity and sense of ethics because of a failed procedure. Let us go to the living quarters. It’s not good to stay here for long.” Garm pulled Ram politely away but Ram resisted.

  “Please. There is a transparent porthole on that door. I won’t go inside. I just want to peer inside. Please.”

  “But...!”

  “I’ll be fine! Trust me Garm.” Ram wrenched his arm out of Garm’s grip, who stood there helplessly, just watching Ram intently as he walked towards the door to hell.

  As Ram walked towards the door, his ears were besieged by an increasingly potent curtain of cries and shouts. He did not know what, but something lured him to the door. Was it his curiosity to witness true madness or something even deeper?

  Ram reached the porthole and wiped the thin layer of frost over it. For the first second, he spotted a room bathed in dim yellow light and whitewashed walls with scratches all over. Immediately afterwards, his eyes widened at the sight of at least a dozen men running around, and bouncing about the room in a completely aimless manner. A man in tattered rags was lying on the floor and screaming while drooling profusely. On a broken bed, a woman was wailing while plucking her once beautiful blonde hair. Some of them looked at him and advanced towards him, almost like children who had found a new toy. Ram backed away from the glass cautiously, horrified at the bloodshot eyes of the deranged and psychotic. He only went back to the porthole when they had turned away and resumed their spots on their beds or the floor.

  This time, however, Ram noticed three bald men sitting abreast on the opposite end of the room. They sat in an identical robotic posture: straight legs, palms faced downwards on their thighs and heads bent downwards. They had sinewy but thin bodies with a strange sign on their chest. Even in the yellow light, their skin seemed as pale as the Jargantaans who had chased Ram and Mathias in Meerut.

  Suddenly, all the three men shot up their heads and looked Ram straight in the eye. Ram winced at the sight of their sunken cheeks, stony faces and vacant, icy eyes. They all looked liked clones of each other.

  The man in the middle stood up and walked slowly towards the door. Ram felt an unimaginable sense of dread and fear well up inside him. As the man walked casually towards him among the band of the mentally insane, he seemed to stand out. His thin muscles knotted with each step, his gait somehow combining the robotic rigidity with the graceful and ethereal. He seemed to be in the throes of a trance, and yet, mystically, the seething sea of the insane had paved out a way for the man like Moses parting the Dead Sea. Before Ram knew, the man had reached the door and was nose to nose with Ram. Or rather their noses would have touched, had it not been for the transparent sheet in between them.

  Almost instantaneously, Ram was yanked out of the hypnosis when the man started banging the door repeatedly, yelling, “De Komme! De Komme! DE KOMME!”

  “Ram!” Garm exclaimed when he held Ram, preventing him from falling. “Come on! Now! You cannot stay here anymore! I told you! I told you, Ram!”

  Ram was almost dragged away from the cold man who was still banging on the door and yelling, “De Komme!”

  The rest of the tour passed almost completely in silence. Ram didn’t even know when he was taken through the living quarters of the Lok Vve workers or when and how he reached his room. He only remembered Garm speaking occasionally about the sleeping hours and practices of the workers, probably to console him after his frightful experience, but his efforts were futile. Ram lay in his bed at night, staring at the inky darkness. He was far from sleeping, imagining the pale man’s face starin
g at him and wondering what he could have meant. After all, mad men did not always lack sense.

  Kapittel 64

  Mathias’s story

  Outskirts of Alexandria, Egypt

  March 16, 2017, Thursday, 1055 hours EET

  “I think I was a fool to believe you. Time to get this done with.” The soldier whipped out his pistol and swiveled right in front of me, the barrel trained on my forehead. “Why don’t you believe me? The ark was right here....”

  “And so was the almighty holy grail and the ten commandments! This was all your plan, wasn’t it? Luring me out into the middle of a desert with a hellish sandstorm coming right at us?” The man’s face became redder as he spoke and walked backwards, his eyes like an eagle’s on its prey. “You have no clue about what’s going to happen! If the mass transfer is complete, the Earth will lose a massive quantity of mass and spin out of orbit! We will die if we don’t work fast! But you are misleading me!” He lifted his arm and prepared to fire when suddenly his legs wobbled. His arms flailed as he sought to maintain his balance and suddenly, he disappeared under the layer of sand.

  Mathias ran to where the man had been standing and stopped short of the hole that the ark had bored earlier. It had been slyly hiding behind a mound of sand, and now that Mathias had finally found it! With the irate Daniel rolling down the slope, he could only smile.

  “You found it, Major! Shoot me now, for misleading you!” Mathias sniggered at him from above. The man regained his balance from below the tube of sand and stone. His eyes were wide and he was breathing heavily.

  I caught up with him inside the tunnel, limping slightly while clutching at my wounded left leg. As the sky was itself getting darker, an inky blackness filled the tunnel. From afar, some of the lights on the outside of the ark were lit, illuminating only the sleek frame and the deck behind. The ark, presumably our mystical saviour, was comfortably wedged into the tight tube of the rocky sandstone tunnel. The ark looked like an animal in waiting, a lot of power still left in it. I gave a sigh of relief.