Planet Hate, page 17
The circular pit itself had been known in legend as the Cauldron of Bran, or the Chalice of Rebirth, and it had been said to have the property to revive the dead, bringing fallen warriors back to life. Brigid had theorized that the cauldron’s mistlike contents actually contained nanomachines, introducing them to a bather and thus employed to heal wounds.
Finding this particular Chalice of Rebirth so far away from the Tuatha de Danaan’s traditional stomping grounds did not surprise Kane. These alien infiltrators, be they Annunaki or Danaan, seemed to have seeded the face of the Earth with their technology, often misinterpreted as magic by the primitive locals.
A network of caverns splayed out from the main chamber here, ill-lit in the flickering fires of the three candles, and Kane realized that this might once have been a major meeting point for the secret races that hid in Earth’s shadows. For whatever reason, the chambers had remained hidden for perhaps a thousand years, but the recent artificial earthquakes generated by the subterrene had opened a rent in the earth, uncovering this Chalice of Rebirth for the first time in a millennium.
The woman stepped into the pool then, its glistening essence playing across her legs, rippling reflections shimmering on her near naked body. Kane watched as the woman reached for something that had been contained in her discarded dress, pulling free a tiny bird’s egg, no bigger than a silver dollar. Standing knee-deep in the Chalice of Rebirth, the woman ran her hand over the egg in the sweeping gesture of a conjurer, sprinkling some powder on the egg’s oval shell. Then, to Kane’s bafflement, she leaned down and placed the egg in the mists of the pit, muttering words that he could not hear. The egg seemed to spark with energy as it sunk out of sight.
“What th—?” Kane muttered.
He was still watching as the woman strode across the circle of the pit and reached for her cloth bag where it lay on the colorful blanket. She searched there for a moment, those eerie blood tears dribbling slowly down her face, before pulling out a small glass vial. The vial fit neatly into the palm of her small hand, just two inches in height. As Kane watched, the woman twisted the cork free and sniffed at the contents of the vial, closing her eyes in delight, the trace of a smile crossing her features for just a moment. Then, to Kane’s surprise, the woman tipped the bottle until a single drop of liquid fell from its mouth, disappearing beneath the amber mist that curled around the surface of the pit. When the drop of liquid hit, a fiery spume of red shot from the hidden pool, blasting up toward the roof of the cavern.
“This ain’t getting any better,” Kane muttered as the dog beside him yelped loudly and leaped to its feet.
At the sound of the dog’s bark, the blood-teared woman turned, fixing Kane and the dog with her piercing gaze. “Welcome, my darlings,” she whispered.
They’d been rumbled.
Chapter 13
In the simple stone shack in the hidden city of Agartha, the black-garbed figure of Brigid Haight stared at the golden weapon that Balam pointed uncomfortably at her, his six long fingers poised to pull the trigger. The device, called an ASP emitter, was the favored weapon of the Nephilim—the muscle of the Annunaki and, according to myth, the wandering souls of fallen angels. The weapon was shaped like a coiling snake that reached down to the wrist, an open viper’s head forming the muzzle from which a fearsome beam of plasma could be emitted. That beam was powerful enough to cut a human being in two, Brigid knew, for she had faced the weapons before, when they were in use by the Nephilim themselves. To see the normally peaceable Balam using such a weapon, however, surprised Brigid.
“What are you doing, Balam?” she asked innocently. “What’s the joke?”
Balam stared at Brigid with baleful eyes, their dark pools shaped like great ovals on his bulbous head. “I think that perhaps you should explain how you got here and just what brings you to Agartha.”
“I came to see you,” Brigid explained, “and Little Quav, of course.”
“For what reason, Brigid Baptiste?” Balam probed, the ASP emitter never wavering in his hand. It seemed incongruous, seeing such a weapon in the environs of this ordinary dwelling, with its simple wooden dining table and chairs, its potted plant and scattering of children’s playthings in one corner of the floor. “You made a pact, Cerberus and the Annunaki, that you would not endeavor to impinge upon the child’s development, that you would allow us our privacy until such time as she came of age. The child is not yet three annums old. So I ask again, why have you come?”
Brigid’s emerald eyes narrowed as she watched the strange-looking creature of the First Folk, studied the ASP emitter in his hand. Although not averse to the reality of his world, Balam was a pacifist at heart, content to advise rather than sully his hands in combat. Brigid wondered where he had obtained the ASP emitter, presumed he had acquired it among other treasures that remained ensconced in the vast underground city. Even so, it was remarkable that Balam had armed himself like this, storing such a dangerous device in the home he shared with the hybrid child. “You’re not yourself,” Brigid said solicitously. “Put the weapon down, Balam. No good can come of its use.”
Balam’s pale six-fingered hand held steady, the gleaming blaster aimed at his visitor’s belly. From behind him, Little Quav’s light voice spoke up, a tremble in her tone. “Unca Bal-bal? What’s happening?”
“Stay behind me, precious one,” Balam instructed, not turning his head as he spoke to his ward.
“But hasn’t Briggly come to play?” Quav asked in a sorrowful tone, taking a step closer to reach for the carved wooden building blocks that sat on a table beside Brigid’s hip.
“I don’t think this person we see before us is Brigid,” Balam opined. “Not entirely.
“Well, Miss Baptiste? You’ve closed your mind up but still you read differently—I can sense that much merely standing this close to you.”
“You’ve been down here too long, Balam,” Brigid responded, taking a step to her left, then another. “You’re jumping at shadows.”
Balam shook his head ever so slightly. “I am not entirely unaware of what has been occurring on the surface,” he told her. “When I approached Cerberus to check into disruptions in the Ontic Library, I was aware that there had been a fundamental shift in the nature of the war. The very rules themselves were rewritten that day, and I realized at that moment that hiding was not enough. I knew that someone would come for the child Ninlil,” he said, referring to Little Quav by her formal Annunaki name, “and that she would be a key player in the final war of the gods. But I did not expect that caller to be you, Brigid Baptiste.”
Brigid’s eyes were fixed on the ASP emitter, a timer ticking down in her brain like a metronome. “You talk too much,” she growled.
And then Brigid moved, her left arm jabbing out and knocking over the stack of child’s building blocks, sweeping them toward Balam even as he flinched his trigger finger and unleashed a screaming blast of plasma from the nozzle of the ASP. The pale green burst of light zapped from the weapon’s snakelike head, vaporizing one of the wooden blocks as it lanced across the room toward Balam and the child. Brigid ducked as the tail of the beam shot by overhead, her hand grasping for the TP-9 semiautomatic secured at her hip. Her quick-thinking maneuver had worked—but only just—as the blocks had distracted the untrained Balam, throwing his aim barely enough that she could evade the path of the lethal beam of energy.
Then Brigid was leaping aside as Balam fired a second blast from the ASP emitter, this one more carefully aimed as her fur cloak splayed out behind her. Brigid cartwheeled across the small interior of the stone shack, snagging the grip of her TP-9 and pulling it free from her hip holster. The compact semiautomatic was a bulky hand pistol with a covered targeting scope across the top and was finished in molded, matte black. The grip was set just off-center beneath the barrel and, in the user’s hand, the unit seemed to form a lopsided square, hand and wrist making the final side and corner.
Behind Balam, Little Quav began wailing, terrified by the shrieking sounds and bright light cast by the ASP emitter.
“Quav,” Balam instructed swiftly, “stay behind me.”
Little Quav nodded, placing both hands over her ears as Balam unleashed another plasma blast from the snakelike weapon’s mouth.
Diving aside as the plasma beam cut through the air, the smell of ozone filling her nostrils, Brigid lifted her semiautomatic and snapped off a burst of bullets. Three shots fired from the weapon’s barrel, 9 mm bullets racing toward their target.
Balam clipped off another blast from his plasma weapon and the pale green beam emanated like a sudden wall of light in the confines of the stone-walled room.
Brigid watched incredulously as the beam cut her bullets from the air, melting them within the ferocity of its hard light. Then her leather-clad form was vaulting over the simple dining table, legs swinging around to kick aside the chair waiting at its far side. The chair fell, crashing to the floor just a foot from where Balam stood protecting the girl. Quav screamed then turned away, running from the room into the back part of the simple stone dwelling. Balam took no notice, concentrating on getting a bead on this interloper who had presented herself as his old ally.
Something behind Brigid caught light, a set of drapes catching fire as Balam’s plasma blast went wide. Brigid rolled across the floor as another burst of plasma cut through the room, bringing herself up into a crouch and whipping the TP-9 around once more, training it on Balam. Despite his actions, Balam’s face remained impassive, conveying no sense of anger or animosity. He was simply doing a job, defending the hybrid child as he had promised to do. He bore Brigid no malice.
Squeezing the trigger of her blaster, Brigid sent a stream of bullets at the pale-skinned, slender alien. Balam dipped his head as if praying, and Brigid’s bullets cut through the air above him, pounding against the wall behind him with a triple burst of ruined masonry. Then Balam took a step forward, blocking the doorway through which the girl had disappeared. “Leave us, Brigid,” he pleaded. “Before someone is hurt.”
Brigid bit back a curse, kicking over the table and ducking behind it as Balam reeled off another plasma blast. “I’m just here for the girl,” she shouted over the sound of the flames licking the other side of the table. “I mean her no harm.”
Balam leveled the ASP at the table that Brigid had chosen for a shield. “She’s safe here, Brigid,” he advised her. “You must leave. Whatever it is you think you’re doing, it’s wrong—wrong for you and of no benefit to Cerberus or to Little Quav.”
“No, it’s not,” Brigid snapped. “Quav won’t be hurt. It’s time the child met with her destiny.”
“Whatever that destiny may be,” Balam said evenly, “it’s at least a decade from now. Depart while you still can, Brigid. Truly, I would not wish to hurt you.”
Hurt as in kill, Brigid realized. The ASP emitter would cause a lot of damage if just one bolt hit her. Even as she thought it, the ASP shrieked again and Brigid saw a glowing circle begin to form on the underside of the table she crouched behind. Balam was burning through it, focusing his plasma beam at the one obstruction in his path to ejecting Brigid Haight from his home. The circle glowed brighter and brighter, turning from red to orange to yellow in a matter of moments, an intense whiteness growing at its center.
ON THE ISLE of Bensalem, the faithful trudged into the castle of their master, hunkering down as the harsh sea breeze whipped all around the castle walls. The castle itself was made up of many smaller structures, and as they came closer Ullikummis’s devotees saw that it followed a familiar pattern, the towering central pillar surrounded by lower buildings, each one contained within a roughly hewn wall of rock. The structures, too, were carved from rock—no, not so much carved as bashed, broken, assaulted by the elements until they had taken their present configuration.
Ullikummis strode onward on his powerful legs, their rock surface dark in the silvery light from the overcast sky. Fifty-nine people followed this stone-shod god, determined to show him that their devotion was absolute.
The main arm of the building tapered high into the air, ending in that spike that dominated the structure’s center. The faithful looked around them, admiring the bleakness, the austerity of the building outside and in. It was a conglomeration of rock, rough walls on all sides, low barricades pitted along the main arteries like some perverted hurdling course. There were irregular hollows in the rock like doorways, opening out into rooms like warrens, big and small, each as harsh and unforgiving as the one before it. Besides the sound of Ullikummis’s stone stumps slamming against the rock floor as he walked, there came no sound from the castlelike dwelling, only the light sounds of the faithful as they followed their master to imagined salvation.
Within, it was hard to tell quite where they were in that sprawling castle. The floor was uneven, inclines here and there like little hillocks on the floor, twists in the main artery that turned them around like a man gripped by fever dream, his bedclothes wrapping around him as he slept.
As they paced through the vast castle, one of the faithful stopped, mouth agog. “It’s massive,” he said. “Just…massive.”
Suddenly Ullikummis halted, and the legion of the faithful stopped behind him, waiting for him to address them. They had walked through the whole of that central spear, and just ten paces ahead they could see a grand window overlooking the stormy ocean. The window towered twenty feet into the air, its sides spiked as if with thorns made of rock, reminding a few of the group of the inside of an iron maiden. Outside, the waves crashed against one another in furious battle as they fought for supremacy.
With the window and its angry ocean vista behind him, Ullikummis turned, his magma-bright eyes burning as he looked at the recruits who had entered his self-made home, until he found the one who had spoken. “My house has many rooms,” Ullikummis said in a voice that sounded like two slabs of granite crashing together.
Then with softly spoken words, Ullikummis commanded those people who had become entranced with him to prepare themselves. “What follows will alter you forever, and only the strongest will survive,” he rumbled.
“Wh-what will it be?” one of the group of pilgrims asked, a woman in her forties with white streaks appearing in her wavy chestnut hair.
“The future needs your strength,” Ullikummis explained, “if it is to be kept on the correct path. Even a god cannot be everywhere, and there comes a time when I must rely on my most loyal subjects to help usher in paradise.”
The group of almost sixty people seemed to take in a single breath, astounded that their god would trust them to bring heaven to Earth.
“When the world looks back on these dark times,” Ullikummis said as he lined them against one of the walls, “they will remember this moment, speak of it with reverence, pen songs in your name, as well as mine. You will be my Nephilim, my angels, my will incarnate.”
Then Ullikummis raised one of his powerful arms, stretching the stony fingers of his hand out in front of him, his lava eyes and veins glowing more fiercely than before as his power welled. There came a rumbling all around him, shaking the walls of the castle like the passage of a supersonic jet plane. The shaking emanated from below as something burrowed up from the ground beneath the castle, drilling through the rocky structure of Bensalem. And, for just a moment, the acolytes of the new tomorrow felt fear.
“Now is the time to make peace with yourselves,” Ullikummis told them, “for not all of you will survive the necessary process.
“Close your eyes.”
As instructed, Ullikummis’s devotees closed their eyes and waited for the future to take hold. One such devotee—a six-foot-tall, ruddy-faced cobbler by the name of Gregory Samms who had turned fifty just a few weeks before and was tiring of his hard life toiling over leather night and day—felt the change in air pressure within the chamber of the oppressive castle. Samms’s feet seemed to tremble beneath him, a quaking feeling rumbling through the bones of his legs and up into his chest. Samms had given himself over to the burgeoning belief that had taken hold in pockets across North America, walking away from his life of toil and hardship to go on this fabled pilgrimage, to meet the one true future god. Now, as he stood with eyes closed, the floor rumbling beneath his exquisitely clad feet, Gregory Samms felt the pounding of his heart in his chest, drumming faster and faster, thumping louder and louder against his rib cage.
Gregory Samms tried to relax, willing the tension away from his body as he stood in the dark cocoon behind his own eyelids. In that instant, something pushed against the heel of his shoe, brushed along the length of the sole that Samms had spent many hours working on so that it would give him the most comfort for the long walk to the coast and to Alfredo’s fishing boat, which in turn had brought him here. The hard thing brushed against his left sole again, pressing against the ball of his foot.
Beside him, Gregory Samms heard someone cry out in surprise—or perhaps it was pain?—and he fought back the urge to open his eyes, to find out what it was that had made his fellow pilgrim scream.
And then it had him, drilling through his shoe, splitting the hard leather as it pushed itself up into his foot. Gregory yelped with pain, but before he had finished his cry he felt a second spike, this one drilling up through the base of his right foot like a lance, driving through shoe and flesh and bone.
