by Mel Odom
Ratcheting sounded overhead. When Warren looked up, he saw that the hammer mechanism had allowed it to come down farther, jerking into place. Being low wasn’t going to work. He rolled to the side and barely stayed ahead of the hammer.
His torch lay against the wall twenty feet away. Darkness surrounded him. Almost effortlessly, he switched over to the night vision the arcane energy allowed him to have. Maintaining it for long gave him a headache that prevented searching the building with it. But it helped now.
The hammer ratcheted again and jerked lower. This time it slammed into the ground only a few feet from where he’d been. If he’d been faster, if he hadn’t noticed the hammer was descending, it might have gotten him then.
Drawing a deep breath, Warren stood up on shaking legs. He glanced down at his burning chest and saw that his shirt and coat had been shredded. Long scratches marred his chest, and blood stained the material of his shirt.
“Are you all right?” Naomi shone her torch over him, coming to a rest almost immediately on his wounded chest.
“Not really.” Warren mopped at the blood with his shirttail.
“You’re going to need stitches,” Naomi announced after her preliminary inspection. Her torchlight played over his chest. She’d pulled open his tattered shirt to reveal the wounds.
“Later.” Warren rummaged in the kit he’d brought. He brought out bandages and handed them to Naomi. “For the moment, bind them. We’ve got to keep moving. Whatever is down here that Lilith wants, we have to get.”
Naomi cursed as she accepted the bandages. She helped Warren take his coat off, then she ripped away the ruined shirt. After she had the gauze bandages in place, she taped them to him and tore the shirt into strips. She used those to further bind his chest.
“The bleeding’s slowed,” she told him when she stepped back, “but it hasn’t stopped.”
Carefully, Warren bent and retrieved his torch. He shone it around to make certain it still functioned properly. “There we go,” he said. “There’s a bit of luck.”
With the torch raised, they saw that the room held rotted crates and sealed jars. Ill-made wooden bowls held crude gold coins and gems. Bolts of what had at one time been fabric sat in the corner.
“What is this place?” Naomi asked.
“Treasure room.” Warren shoved his hand into a bowl of gems and drew a fistful out. He let them trickle back through his fingers. They flashed emerald, sapphire, ruby, and purple in the torchlight as they fell.
“How much do you suppose is there?” Naomi asked.
“A queen’s ransom. At the very least. By standards before the Hellgate opened, at least a considerable fortune.” Warren shrugged and found the movement almost excruciating. “Now they’re just pretty stones. Same with the gold. You can’t trade them to anyone. A man who has food or a safe place to live from the demons has all the treasure he needs.”
“It wasn’t so long ago,” Naomi said, “that men killed each other over things like this.”
“Amazing how the prospect of sudden death changes priorities, isn’t it?” Chest on fire, Warren played the torch around and examined the rest of the room.
Drawings and the strange language adorned the walls and drew his eyes. He walked close to them and brushed away the layers of dust. The cloud came back into him and he turned his face away.
The drawing beneath stood revealed in his torchlight. In it, a figure that was obviously a woman sat on a massive throne and warriors knelt before her.
“Lilith?” Naomi asked.
“Couldn’t imagine it being anyone else.”
“It would be good if we could read the inscriptions.”
Warren moved down the wall and started brushing again. He felt the same way. There was a story written into the wall, perhaps several of them, and he wanted to know them.
“Who do you think the people were that she ruled?” Naomi asked.
“I’m not that familiar with British history,” Warren admitted. “I know the Picts were here. The Angles and the Saxons. The Romans.”
“Maybe these were Roman warriors.”
Warren studied the images. “I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“The armor seems wrong.”
“You’d know about armor?”
Warren smiled a little at that. “I’m a war-gamer from way back. I know armor. The Romans used short swords, spears, and occasionally axes. If these drawings are representative, the swords are too long.”
Naomi moved away and started working on the wall on the other side of the room.
“Careful,” Warren advised. “That hammer might not have been the only trap.”
“I know, but I don’t think anyone who constructed this would want to hurt this room.”
“A treasure room? If I were building this as a dungeon for my mates to rumble through, I know I would.”
“This isn’t a game.”
Feeling the pain of the wounds across his chest, Warren silently agreed.
“There were demons here,” Naomi said.
Warren crossed the room and joined her. He added his torch beam to hers. The ghastly image on the wall tightened his stomach and dried his mouth. Looming over the warriors around him, a gigantic demon wielded a massive club and took out horses and riders, oxen and carts, and dozens of men. The image was stark and savage, violent death frozen on the wall.
“Giants,” Warren said. “A lot of mythologies always include stories of giants. Always fierce and, more often than not, cannibalistic.”
“Cannibals?”
“Jack and the Beanstalk.” Warren moved his torch farther down the wall and revealed another image of the large giant picking up men in his fists and eating them. “He warned Jack that he was going to grind his bones to make his bread.”
“I’d just thought it was something scary to say when I was a girl,” Naomi said. “I never really thought about the giant eating Jack.”
“That’s because you never saw the giant doing it. This gives a little more credence to that threat.”
Naomi moved to the next section. A woman stood in the middle of a forest. She carried a spear in one hand. A mysterious door opened in thin air behind her.
“Lilith?” Naomi asked.
Warren peered more closely, then brushed at the accumulated dust to better reveal the lines. “Maybe. Looks like a door behind her.”
“A miniature Hellgate?”
“Hard to say. But something.” Warren moved his torch and wiped the next scene clear. On it, the woman figure battled with human warriors, obviously beating them with ease.
“She fought them,” Naomi said. “The question is, did they come to see her as a friend or as a conqueror?”
“This is a room full of treasure,” Warren pointed out.
“So they revered her.”
“Or they were deathly afraid of her.”
The next image also showed the woman battling demons. She’d killed two of them and fought with the third. Her spear set poised to pierce the demon’s heart.
“If she’s one of the demons,” Naomi asked, “why would she fight them?”
“Demons fight each other,” Warren said. “Merihim had me kill demons in his name. To gain power and prestige among the demon hierarchy. Everywhere you go, it’s always about power. The Cabalists aren’t any different.”
The next image showed Lilith standing in front of a group of cheering warriors. She carried the black spear in one hand and held up a demon’s severed head by one horn.
“She became their hero,” Naomi said.
“Woman as savior. That’s another recurring theme in mythology. You have to wonder how much of this story got out and how much of it influenced so many of the cultures around the world.”
“They didn’t have telephones or the Internet back then.”
“No, but in those days traders traveled everywhere. There’s evidence that Vikings discovered the Americas long before Columbus claimed them. Some of the Eastern
steppe tribes are related to the Celts. They could have carried the story back and forth.”
“Or other demons popped up in other places,” Naomi suggested. “Stories about them are far too prevalent to be one event.”
“I agree.”
The next image made Naomi gasp. The hair on the back of Warren’s neck stood up. Captured on the wall, Lilith—or the woman figure they assumed to be Lilith—ate the heart of a man she impaled with her spear.
“She’s a cannibal,” Naomi said.
“Not a cannibal,” Warren whispered hoarsely. “A cannibal only eats the flesh of the same species. Don’t forget that she’s a demon.”
He stared at the picture and wondered again what they were supposed to do in the building. A noise scuffed the floor behind him. He turned and shone his torch ahead of him.
Lilith stood there. She no longer looked virile and self-assured. Weariness draped her and bowed her shoulders. “Come,” she said. “I have need of you.” Her eyes flicked to the wall where Naomi stood with her torch on the incriminating images. “Ah, I see that they added a history.”
“This is you?” Naomi asked.
“Who else would it be?” Lilith snapped.
“You slew the demons?” Warren said, hoping to distract her from the image with the man’s heart in her hand.
“Yes. They were sent here before I was. They weren’t pleased that I was sent to do what they could not.”
“What was that?”
“Subjugate your species if I could. Prepare the world for eventual invasion.” Lilith stared at the images. “It was far harder than the Dark Wills believed it would be. And our presence here seemed to awaken the latent ability to use the arcane energy of this world.”
“That must have been disappointing,” Naomi said.
Lilith’s dark eyes flashed. “In the end, it’s not going to matter. You’ll all be dead or in servitude.”
TWENTY-SIX
T ensely, Simon watched the operation taking place in the operating room below. A nearby monitor showed a close-up of the actual work taking place. On the operating table, Leah looked small and vulnerable. He had second thoughts about his decision to stay and observe.
She asked you to be here, he told himself. You’re going to be here.
The doctors moved with economic efficiency. First they evacuated the eye socket again, opened up the tissue at the back, and inserted a string of nanobots that wired into the brain’s appropriate visual centers. Simon wasn’t sure what those were called. The surgeon had explained the procedure to him earlier, as had Eoin Murdoch. The particulars hadn’t stuck.
While the nanobots connected the neural pathways that restored Leah’s sight, the doctors prepped the implant that the next set of nanobots would build around. The implant was a highly sophisticated camera that the nanobots would weave into the eye as they rebuilt it from flesh and blood and the camera. The finished eye wouldn’t be completely human, but the construct needed something to work with. The outer layer of tissue would remove all chances of rejection.
The head surgeon looked up. “Lord Cross.”
Simon tapped the speaker control beside the observation window. “Yes, Doctor.”
“At this point we do have the option of installing a tracking module in her eye as well,” the doctor said.
Someone’s been talking, Simon thought irritably. Not everyone at the redoubt shared his trust in Leah. Many were suspicious of the fact that she knew more about them than they did about her. The lack of knowledge was an area of concern to Simon as well.
“No,” Simon said.
“She wouldn’t know unless someone told her,” the doctor persisted. “Whoever this woman ultimately works for, they don’t have equipment sophisticated enough to find what I could install.”
“I said no, Doctor. I appreciate you telling me this.” Simon knew the man could simply have installed the module and told him after the fact. Most bothersome about the whole affair was the fact that Simon’s command of the redoubt fell into question. With the problems of food supply facing them, though, he knew he shouldn’t have been surprised. Fear of not having basic needs met divided people quickly.
The doctor turned his attention back to the eye replacement.
Simon watched the operation on the screen. The doctor used a syringe to deposit the nanobots into Leah’s eye socket. For a moment it only looked as if the space were half filled with silver.
“It will be a few minutes before you start to see results, Lord Cross,” the surgeon said.
Automatically, Simon cued the suit’s AI to let him know when five minutes had passed. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, but it still projected audibles.
The observation room door opened and Nathan entered. “Hello, mate.” He held up a cup. “Heard you were here. Thought maybe you could do with a spot of tea. Maybe a bit of company.”
“Thanks,” Simon said.
Nathan joined him at the window. They stood in companionable silence for a few minutes. “You just going to stand here the whole time?”
“The chairs weren’t built to handle the weight of the armor. Standing’s the only option.”
“Right. You and I know that, but do you think that doctor is going to feel at least a little bit intimidated?”
Simon knew his friend was right. He took a deep breath and relaxed. “I promised Leah I would be here.”
“You are. Even if you weren’t here, you’d be here. There’s nothing you can do here. She’s in good hands, mate. You knew that or you wouldn’t have brought her here.”
“I know.”
The suit’s AI chimed. “Five minutes have elapsed.”
Simon studied the monitor. He made out the new blood vessels and nerves that the nanobots created and grafted to the inside of Leah’s eye socket. The surgery team had set the program up to identify the various parts of the eye the nanobots were working on.
“That,” Nathan said, “is gross, mate.”
“You’re queasy? After all the fighting we’ve been doing for the past four years?”
“It’s eyes, mate. I’ve always had a thing about eyes.” Nathan shivered and looked away.
A twinge of queasiness settled like a rock in Simon’s stomach as well. But he couldn’t look away. The chances were good, 93 percent, that Leah would get her sight back better than before. There was no anxiety about that. But Nathan was right: there was something about eyes that invoked the gross-out factor.
“Don’t you have anything else to do?” Simon asked Nathan as he continued to stand beside him. Nathan pointedly didn’t look at the screen, though.
“Nope. I’m all yours, mate. Thought maybe I could help you through this.”
“I appreciate it.” Simon had to admit that it felt good having someone there.
Three hours later, the eye began to look like an eye. It stared, vacant and without reaction, up into the OR’s bright lights. The sight of a nonreactive eye disturbed Simon because it looked repellant and artificial, but it took on the same violet hue that he remembered Leah’s eyes had.
“How long does this take?” Nathan asked.
“I was told the eye construction would take between twelve and thirteen hours. Creating a new kidney or liver is done in less than half the time. The eye mechanisms and nerves are more complicated.”
“I heard Murdoch’s had an eye replaced.”
“Both eyes, actually.”
Nathan shook his head. “Personally, I don’t like the idea of those robots crawling around inside me. I’d be wondering all the time when they were going to try to take over.”
“It doesn’t work like that. Once the nanobots have completed whatever they’ve been tasked, they deactivate and flush out of the system.”
“Lovely. I don’t even want to know how.”
The observation door opened and Wertham stepped through. He was broad and stocky, with gray hair and a short gray beard.
“Lord Cross,” he greeted.
Simon knew nothi
ng was wrong. Otherwise he’d have been notified over the suit’s AI. He said hello to the other man and waited.
“How’s everything going?” Wertham glanced down into the OR.
“Good so far,” Simon answered. “But you didn’t just come by to inquire about Leah’s health.”
“It is a concern, of course, Lord Cross. I happen to like the young lady quite a lot. But inquiring after her health is not the reason I looked you up. Professor Macomber and Brewer would like to have a word with you. They appear to have made some breakthroughs.”
“In the Goetia manuscript?”
“Yes, my lord. And in the construction of the Node fields.”
Simon hesitated.
“The doctor will call you if there’s anything that goes on that you need to now about,” Nathan said. “Macomber and Brewer have been pushing themselves for months to get a handle on their projects. They haven’t been talking to anybody. I, for one, am curious that they’d want to see you now.”
“Let’s go see what they’ve discovered, then.”
Wertham opened the door, and Simon led the way out.
“What we’ve discovered is that the Goetia manuscript was written in eight different languages,” Professor Archibald Xavier Macomber told Simon.
“Possibly ten,” Gerald Brewer put in. Despite the quiet of the lab where they worked, his voice boomed.
Macomber waved that away. “As you can see, we’re not quite in agreement over that.”
Simon wasn’t surprised. The two men didn’t often agree on anything until they felt they had a true answer to some of the questions they had about the manuscript. Unfortunately, there were a lot of questions.
In his sixties, Macomber was a frail man with slow, thoughtful movements and a soft voice. Scars showed on his face and hands from the hardships he’d suffered while an unwilling resident of a Parisian sanitarium. There were more over the rest of his body. Simon knew the mental scars would never show, but he also knew they were there. Macomber was bald with a fringe of silver hair and a short beard.
“Luckily,” Macomber went on, “between us we’ve had the skills to decipher most of those languages.”