by D B Nielsen
My voice was stony and dangerously quiet. ‘If you leave now, and without further incident, I promise no harm will come to you.’
My eyes flashed a warning and the iron grip slackened momentarily, but my captors’ surprise was short-lived. A stinging slap reddened my cheek and, for the first time, a deathly hush fell upon the crowd of spectators who awkwardly shifted and looked about them in doubt and fresh uncertainty.
Strong fingers forced my chin up until the leader’s face was barely an inch from mine. His eyes were so dark that the pupil seemed to blur with the iris, lacking all distinction and making him appear the very devil.
‘And what would you do, Wise One? You are just a child!’ he mocked.
His grip was so tight that I thought it might break my jaw. And then he thrust me away with such force that my head snapped backwards with a loud crack as it connected with the helmet of the fighter holding me.
A shocked murmur froze on the lips of the bystanders. But even as this happened, a thunderous roar had them ducking for cover as the ground shook violently beneath us. An explosion of panic and distress erupted within the forecourt of the museum and the terrified visitors now sought the nearest exits. The security guards now swarmed about, desperately trying to restore order out of chaos; directing the masses towards safety.
Fissures radiated from the shockwave’s epicentre, uprooting a line of marble tiles from the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery across to where my tormentors and I still stood in the Great Court, a frozen tableaux, leaving them raised like a row of jagged teeth. The broken tiles in front of the circular centrepiece of the Great Court’s Reading Room obscured my view, but the unrelenting tremors accompanied by a piercing shriek of defiance from the other gallery were a clear signal. A warning. A challenge.
I felt the quickening of the Seed in my blood. I felt the awakening of the Lamassu. And I was no longer afraid. I could feel the fire of impending battle building in the air. I drew myself up, uncaring that the dagger bit deeper into my flesh.
‘The game has already begun,’ I stated, my tone blunt and menacing, ‘and you have made your first move. Your pieces are in play. But they are mere pawns. Tell me – how many Nephilim are you prepared to sacrifice to gain a brief advantage?’ Later I would be reminded of Prince Hamlet upon seeing Fortinbras’ army marching upon Denmark: “Two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats will not debate the question of this straw. This is th’imposthume ... that inward breaks, and shows no cause without why the man dies.” But I knew these men would never understand. I sighed inwardly and said, ‘This is just the beginning of what it will cost to settle this conflict and it will only continue to grow. This gambit is pointless. For as long as the game is ultimately won, it does not matter to the Grigori how many pieces are lost.’
Whilst I had no intention of sacrificing a life, whether that life was human or Nephilim – hadn’t the Anakim’s callous pragmatism and their disregard for the value of my sister’s life taught me anything? – these men did not know of my intentions and in the face of my logic, which was interpreted as a threat, the leader’s face beneath his helmet drained of blood and he faltered.
‘Puta! You will return the Seed to us!’ The man with the dagger growled his response. ‘It is time you realised–’
But the sentence remained unfinished.
Unthinking, I acted. My arm rose of its own volition and I placed my right palm against the back of the warrior’s hand as he held the dagger to my throat. I felt a powerful surge transfer from the Seed’s imprint directly to my fingertips, traced to the heel of my palm; a kind of fiery tingling that gathered force till I sensed that it would explode. My mind was filled with a vast roaring, as if a wild springtide were travelling through a hollow tunnel of thought within, sweeping away the detritus of my former life.
The situation was beyond mere weapons, for the power of the Seed had been unleashed. Even the warrior’s obvious strength would be of no assistance to him now. Where flesh met flesh, golden light poured forth, streaming between my fingers as I reached deep within my mind’s eye.
The sentience of the Seed joined with my own mortal awareness to form one living consciousness. I perceived it – no longer lying dormant in the place of its birth – the Word. The symbol of power. In conjoined cognisance, the mark of the Seed pulsated on my flesh. And I had the will to wield it.
The dagger fell from the soldier’s lifeless grip; falling almost in slow-motion in an arc that saw it flash brightly in the slow setting sun pouring down from the museum’s spectacular glass roof. It clattered loudly where it landed upon the marble floor in the now empty Great Court. If the man screamed, there was no sound that issued forth from his lips. The fight simply went out of him. And I had control.
I stood fearlessly facing the leader.
For what seemed an age, the huge man stood there, the pride and authority draining only slightly from his stance. His comrade, though still alive, cradled his right arm – now useless – and would bear the consequences of this conflict for an eternity to come. But the leader would not go down without a fight. He refused to be cowed by an inexperienced girl. He railed, anger and frustration reflected in his eyes.
‘Return the Seed.’ His voice was cold and cruel.
I shook my head in sorrow. ‘It is not mine to return. The Seed belongs to no man. It holds the Covenant; the Creator’s promise to the human race.’
All the mysterious force of the Seed focused in my amber coloured eyes. Our gazes locked. Dark and bright. He must have seen something in my eyes that convinced him that I was telling the truth and would not yield. The one-sided struggle was rendered suddenly futile.
Decision made for him, the leader turned abruptly on his heel and headed back towards the museum’s main entrance, his stride long and brisk. At the bottom of the marble steps, he signalled to his men. The tread of many booted footsteps could be heard marching in unison as his men surged back into the Great Court. I closed my eyes in relief. They were retreating.
But not before their leader gave one last parting shot. ‘You are mistaken, Wise One. There is no beginning and no end. The beginning is the end. And the end is the beginning. The game has always been in motion. From this world to the next.’
And with these cryptic words, accompanied by the ghost of a smile as if he alone knew of some private joke, he spun to ascend the stairs, his men falling in behind him; the brute who had held the dagger to my throat taking up the rear.
That should have been the last of it. But, of course, it wasn’t.
A stocky, middle-aged security guard appeared near the main entrance and called out, shouting for the men to stop. But the only response was a dismissive wave of the leader’s hand as he continued towards the exit leading onto Great Russell Street without even breaking his stride.
As if given a command, my tormentor with the dagger at the rear of the column stepped up to face the security guard, cradling the weapon in his left hand, ignoring his other as it now dangled uselessly by his side. With a ruthless force, lacking any hesitation, he drove the dagger into the security guard’s heart, thrusting upwards. A gurgling sound could be heard as the guard clutched at his bloodied chest, a bloom of red spreading across his uniform like an unfurling red rose. Disbelief and dread were written across his face as he momentarily looked down at his wound. His body sprawled. Blood seeped onto the marble floor.
Paralysed, I could do nothing. My instinct was to help the security guard. I wanted to move. I willed myself to move. Yet I remained frozen to the spot as if my limbs were hewn from rock like the stone sculptures in the adjoining galleries. I had never witnessed death before – neither peaceful nor, like this, brutal and violent – and so I could do nothing.
His killer stepped around the dying guard and marched past, out into the gathering light; the sight of the back of his covered head retreating, the last image I took in before I slunk down onto the cold tiles, wanting to see no more.
I closed my eyes, biting back sobs.
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The power of the Seed was ebbing; leaving me suddenly alone. Abandoned. My breath sounded ragged to my own ears. All cries and footsteps abruptly silenced. The sharpness of death stalked the Great Court of the British Museum, ironically accompanied by its ancient artefacts and ancestors – from burial ship to mummies exhibited in stagnant sleep – in every gallery, corridor and corner of the building.
I wished to close my mind to all this death. I wished to escape from all this bloodshed. But I sat motionless as if in a judgement chamber and the museum filled with what would never die because its curators hoarded it like precious gems.
I squeezed my eyes tighter, against the horror, but the image of the lifeless body of the security guard and his carpet of blood remained fixed upon my mind. And I knew that I had made a terrible, catastrophic mistake.
It mattered.
It mattered how many pieces were lost.
STONE GOD
CHAPTER TWO
The Great Court – its silence – its vast, airy emptiness, was rent in two by a savage, a sharp, a strident sound that ran the length of the British Museum, from end to end. The blood-curdling cry seemed to go on and on.
My heart stood still. My pulse stopped. The cry died between the lips from which it issued forth. It was not renewed.
And it was only then that I realised that the wild, frightful shriek had come from me, from the depths of my soul, and the initial horror and the effort to produce such a noise could not be repeated.
I was alone in the tomb-like silence of the Great Court; alone, but for the corpse of the man who had been killed in front of me. Slain without remorse. And it was my fault.
I felt something crack and break inside of me, a fragmentation of self that I knew would never fully mend like a fragile piece of porcelain that forever bore the finest of flaws, and I couldn’t hold the tears back any longer. I cried till my eyes smarted and left me exhausted. Wracking sobs gave way to uncontrollable hiccups, lungs starved for breath, and finally I succumbed to a kind of sensation like suffocation. I swallowed the air in huge gulps until even these died down to merely a whimper.
In my madness, I briefly wondered, Would my attackers have laughed at my plight? Would they have gloated that they had left me whimpering like a whipped animal?
As if compelled by a force outside myself, my eyes kept straying to the security guard whose body lay immobile, limp, sprawled across the hard ground like a puppet whose strings had been severed. I thought that if I kept checking, the shocking sight of his dead body would disappear, somehow miraculously.
But it didn’t.
In the shafts of late sunlight, the creeping shadows of seconds and minutes, the dust motes spiralled between us. This was death; glutted and swollen with a darkness, pregnant with grief and guilt and loss, pouring down like all the people of the world weeping together. I closed my eyes again to block out his broken form, for no amount of wishful thinking would resurrect the guard nor erase this terrible day. I felt stripped and crushed.
Sound finally reached me, cocooned as I was in stillness, like tearing fabric. Then came voices, shouting above the roar of waves breaking in my ears. Between one second to the next, I found myself unexpectedly surrounded by chaos – there were screams and shouts, stamping, pounding footsteps, terrified murmurs, and the piercing wail of sirens – as the Great Court quickly filled with movement and people as if a dam had burst and an immense force had swept away the barriers holding them back.
Staff members ran to and fro, though the majority crowded together, stumbling into the courtyard, clutching one another for support, sobbing. The confusion was overwhelming.
But it was mostly lost on me. There was no thought at all.
Then hands were gripping me, tugging at me urgently. Someone caught my arms and was shaking me with rough concern. I opened my eyes wide, disoriented. I felt outside myself – as if I were looking in on someone else’s life, observing like a member of the audience in a theatre.
‘... probably in shock. Robert? Hey! C’mon! She’s alive! And there doesn’t seem to be any serious injuries, thank God. But we need to keep her calm. Regulate her breathing,’ one of my father’s colleagues was saying. I knew the gruff voice, the broad face, but haziness clouded my mind and, at that moment, I couldn’t remember the man’s name.
Dad looked anxiously down at me, running a trembling hand along my livid cheek where it still smarted from the leader’s brutal blow. ‘Sage. Sage, darling, are you all right?’
I slowly straightened from where I was slumped, limbs splayed upon the cold marble floor, with an absent nod; shock and confusion ruled my thoughts. Vague pain resolved into a stinging cut at my throat and bruises on my cheek, arms, knees and the back of my head. Too shaken yet to stand, I shivered.
‘Don’t try to move her. The paramedics are on their way.’
It came to me. Ted Boyle. Fresh out of a Doctorate, he specialised in Assyriology, reconstructing Mesopotamian legends. This triggered an automatic response and, as I gained my knees, I gasped, ‘The boys! My school group! Where are they? Are they all right?’
As guilt and fogginess slowly released me, I glanced about, careful to avoid the area where the security guard’s body still lay in a pool of glistening blood – in my mind, the creamy whiteness of the marble floor was patterned with vermillion and mahogany darkenings and glossy, ruby-red congealments – but by now it was obscured by the converging crowds.
‘They’re safe. They’re okay. Over there.’ Ted Boyle pointed to somewhere beyond the museum’s entrance.
I couldn’t see them but knowing they were safe and relatively unharmed made me feel slightly better. In truth, I had barely noticed their terrified sprint towards the exit as I’d been concentrating solely on the men who had attacked me. The school kids were just part of the frightened horde trying to escape the threat – a scared stream of bodies I had hoped to clear from the Great Court before the battle began. But only I knew the truth of this.
My dad released a pent-up sigh of worry and relief as he crouched down to put an arm around me. I had a feeling that all he cared about was that I was safe and relatively unharmed. The gesture was so comforting, I just wanted to lean into his solidity and strength and continue to bawl my eyes out, like when I was a child with scraped palms and bloodied knees, having fallen off my bicycle or from climbing trees, trying to prove to myself that I could be like Fi. But such innocence was lost to be replaced with a weight that hung over my head.
My father and his colleague were patiently explaining why it had taken them so long to get to us. I knew it was a desire to apologise, to justify their lateness, but I did not blame them for it. In my mind’s eye, I saw the security guard crumple to the ground again. Dead. My doing. Blood was on my hands.
I tried to concentrate on what they were saying. Not all of it made sense. A steady pat on my shoulder recalled my thoughts; Dad following the advice of Ted Boyle to keep me calm.
They told me that when the men arrived in their warlike garb, no security alert was initially raised – it was certainly an unprecedented event, much like the storming of the Bastille, and so the staff were taken off-guard. Security protocols did not state what staff members should do when live action role-players took over the Great Court of the museum as a public venue for their improvisational theatre. And despite the large number of academics – or, as Fi would derisively call us, “nerds” or “socially-challenged” “losers” – working at the museum, no one realised that usually LARP was put on for the benefit of the players and had no audience.
Whilst the security team were monitoring the action on their screens and methodically checking whether there was supposed to be a performance that afternoon, it wasn’t until a staff member was held at knifepoint that they realised something was dreadfully wrong. Yet in a matter of moments, the security feed was cut, the cameras went dead, tremors shook the Great Court leading to widespread panic amongst the museum’s visitors, and the enormous steel gates, as if the m
useum was a medieval castle or fortress that needed to keep out marauding armies – which was closer to the truth than they knew – were activated in all its galleries as a containment security measure.
But as Dr Boyle was saying, ‘... in reality, the British Museum is not a financial institution and while the objects it houses are priceless, the curators certainly didn’t expect an attempted theft to occur in daylight hours with hundreds of visitors present to witness it.’
Theft? They thought it was an attempted theft? Of what? The Mummy of Hornedjitef? The Statue of Ramesses II? The Head of Augustus? Or did they think this was just a snatch and grab? Instantly, I felt both foolish and ashamed. What else were they supposed to think? What other explanation served? The thought of terrorism was too terrible to contemplate after the Paris attacks, and went unuttered by both men though not unthought-of.
Ted Boyle mumbled something low, pointing towards the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery, but Dad shook his head curtly and instead continued their account. ‘... tried to get to the Great Court but the tide of people ... force my way through them ... elbowing them aside ... back staircase ... continued my frantic search ... only to be met with the security guards who had sealed off the area ... held back ... heard you scream ...’ Snatches of Dad’s explanation was all I heard. Everyone seemed to be whispering and in those whispers I heard words like “brave”, “courageous”, “heroic”, but I felt none of those things.
My eyes were riveted on the shiny plastic buttons of Dad’s shirt as if they were the most interesting thing in the world. Not knowing what else to say, he gave me a pained smile. Ultimately, the museum staff were caught unprepared. They’d arrived too late. Fifteen minutes. Too late.
My eyes darted unwittingly towards the lifeless figure of the security guard once more.
My entire body went rigid.
The police and forensic team had arrived and were processing the scene. The image was macabre and profoundly strange – both eerily familiar and nothing like the crime fiction novels I liked to read. My initial revulsion and shock gave way to a sudden upwelling of anger.