CHAPTER 22
HEAVEN’S GATE
Thunder and the flash of distant lightning mingled with the tumult and fire of guns as Muzugara’s men forced Cassandra and me to make the long march to Phanamhara. The Cielcin army went ahead of us, clearing the way. Many times a small number of them would hurry into the darkness at one side, charging some desperate knot of defenders.
The great tent of the motor pool was burning—everywhere burning. Cielcin towers had smashed the longhouses where the local garrison and dig teams made their homes. In the shadow of one I saw several dozen men and women—mainly women—kneeling under guard as some ichakta like Ramanthanu assessed the captives.
Meat. Meat. Slave. Meat. Slave. Slave. Sport.
“What are they going to do with us?” Cassandra whispered in her native Jaddian.
“They want to use me to draw the Watcher to them,” I said, peering back over my shoulder at the device that Muzugara’s servants had brought from the vayadan-general’s landing craft. It was like a coffin floating, like an elongated egg, and wrought of the same polished white ceramic that had gone into the construction of Muzugara’s arms—the imprimatur of MINOS manufacture.
“You think they mean to capture it?” Cassandra whispered.
Transport, Kybalion had said, looking back at the sarcophagus-palanquin once more. Two MINOS technicians accompanied it, bland-faced men in smocks of drab gray with the chevrons of their order in bronze over the heart. “They mean to take it from here, at least.”
“Onnannaa!” One of Ramanthanu’s men clubbed Cassandra across the head in retribution.
Bellowing, I launched myself at the xenobite, not caring my hands were bound. I crashed bodily into the creature before three of its fellows could pull me off. One had its hand wound in my shaggy mane, and yanked my head back, baring my throat in forced submission to their general and captain. Muzugara and Ramanthanu both looked on, inhuman faces unreadable.
“If you’ve hurt her!” I said through clenched teeth.
“Shahaga-kih!” said Captain Ramanthanu. “Leave the whelp!”
“Nietamda, Ichakta-doh!”
“Onnanna!” Ramanthanu said. “Nietono ni!”
Let them talk.
The one called Shahaga had regained its feet, lifted its chin in what seemed defiance to my human eyes. It was surrender. Ramanthanu turned away, saying, “They can do nothing. The battle is good as won.”
We came in time to the mouth of Phanamhara, and descended the sloping dunes along the road that ran between the twin ramparts of greenish stone. The air was stale and still down in the dig. With the floodlights dead, and only the stars and the light of distant fires to light it, the Vaiartu ruins—the ruins of the Enar—became the shadowed vestibule of some long-abandoned hell.
“I had them open a path!” Kybalion said, going out ahead. “This way!”
The painted man had moved to stand to one side of the main avenue. There the ancient builders had built a tunnel such that the projecting arm of the city’s rampart buildings ran overhead.
“Abba, the poison,” Cassandra whispered.
“There’s nothing for it now,” I said, straining the silken cords that bound my wrists. I couldn’t find the knot. “Are you all right?”
“I got worse in school.”
I could not help but smile, despite my fears. They’d not knocked the fight from her. Still, I wished that she had stayed on Jadd then. I could not have guaranteed her safety, from HAPSIS or whatever Imperial agency might have sought to use her as the lever to move me—even as the Cielcin used her in that moment. She would not have been safe, but she was less safe then.
Kybalion assumed the role of guide, seizing a torch from atop a supply crate left against the face of one cyclopean wall. Its beam showed the way to the pit. Cranes overshadowed it, and the red hulks of excavators and of grading equipment stood nearby. Valeriev’s men had been at work widening the narrow passage, opening the steeply slanting shaft the Vaiartu had made, that once had run from the surface all the way down to the place we called the pantheon.
I’d walked it a time or two. The descent was steep, and must in its day have been smooth, though the plascrete had cracked and crumbled badly. Valeriev had reinforced the tunnel, but there were sections where it was possible for only two or three to walk abreast.
Often I have seen false pictures of war. Holograph operas—such as those my mother painted in her studio at Haspida—stage performances, paintings . . . written accounts. Almost none of them have captured what is to me war’s great, defining feature.
Panic.
Small wonder the Achaeans of old had fashioned a god in its image. Deimos, the thunderer, the companion of Discord, the brother of Fear. War, I have found—and heard many a soldier say—is composed of long stretches of relative calm punctuated by instants of abject terror. That terror, that panic, that Deimos had come in the first instants of the attack. In the discovery of the knife-missile. In the cutting of the power. In the descent of the Cielcin from the night sky.
Deimos returned—not as thunder, but as lightning.
That lightning struck the earth around us, and I lurched to Cassandra’s side. Two of the Cielcin ahead of us and to either side fell dead, and in the dark I saw the telltale flicker of shields as Ramanthanu itself was struck but did not fall.
The Cielcin captains rallied their men, hurled nahute into the air.
“Eijana! Eijana!” shouted one of the xenobites.
Above!
I looked up, hope blossoming in me.
Above.
It was not lightning that had fallen on the Cielcin.
The Cielcin had no word for birds.
The Irchtani had found us.
Looking up, I saw the shape of one falling against the stars. It picked its shots with rapid care, and I heard more than saw the flap of wings opening. Then the flier was gone, rising back to regain altitude for another drop. I scrabbled at my bonds with desperate fingers. If I could just find the knot—understand its shape—I could use my power to break it. But there was nothing, though the cords seemed to be of some rougher cousin to irinyr. Growling in frustration, I looked round, watched as one of the bird men dove out of the blackness, his long-bladed zitraa flashing. The blade swept the head from one of the Cielcin defenders, and one taloned foot caught another by the horns. Both Irchtani and Cielcin vanished an instant later, the former dragging the latter up into the night.
Only the Cielcin returned, its body broken on the sand-swept stones.
Moments later another of the Irchtani fell.
The four chimeras of Muzugara’s personal guard had each leaped into battle. They carried not the scimitars and throwing snakes of their still-organic compatriots, but were armed with missile launchers and beam weapons. They fired up into the night.
“Ishaan Irchtani!” I bellowed, unable to wave my arms. “It’s Marlowe! Here! Here!”
Ramanthanu itself wheeled about and clouted me across the face with a closed fist. I sprawled, ears ringing.
A sharp cry resounded from above, and an instant later one of the fliers emerged, wings billowing into view of the lamps. It hovered over Cassandra and myself, sword in hand.
“Marlowe-man!” the Irchtani said. “We fly now!”
A shot caromed off the bird man’s shield. The chimeras concentrated fire on it. Before the smoke had cleared, Captain Ramanthanu leaped at the hovering warrior, its scimitar in its hand. The Irchtani flapped its pinions in such a way as to bring its cutlass round to parry, somehow managing to stay airborne.
“We go now!” the bird man shouted, vanishing up into the dark a moment as the chimeras picked their shots.
Muzugara’s voice boomed out. “Get the prisoners underground! Rijah! Izamani! Kill these eijana!”
The Irchtani returned, accompanied by two more of its kind. Plasma fire rained from above as more of our unseen soldiers plummeted from the night. I’d regained my feet by then, crouched near Cassandra, unshielded and still surrounded by the enemy.
Still, hope flowered in that lowest place.
“Take the girl first!” I shouted. “The kajeema-bashanda!”
One of the chimeric soldiers leaped clean over me, five hundred pounds of titanium and adamant—its arms outstretched to snatch one of the Irchtani from the air. The iron beast succeeded, and seizing the one that had shouted to me by its ankle, the chimera slammed the flying soldier into the stone floor as a fisher beats his catch against the pier.
The bird man’s delicate bones shattered with the first impact. He was surely dead by the second. After the third, the Cielcin machine rounded on them, claws extended.
Still one of the Irchtani stooped in an effort to save Cassandra. Talons gripped her by the shoulder, wings stretched to lift her into the air.
The chimera hurled the limp corpse of the dead Irchtani at its brother, the one trying to save Cassandra. Both living and dead Irchtani fell away, and at once cold, clawed hands fell on me. Four. Six. Eight. I was lifted bodily—thrashing—by four or five Cielcin screamers. Somewhere in the night, Cassandra screamed.
“Fly!” I shouted to the two Irchtani near at hand. “Fly away!”
One Cielcin wrapped its arm under my jaw as they dragged me bodily from the field. I saw one at least vanish into the night even as his brothers rained fire upon us.
Muzugara was still barking orders, Ramanthanu by its side with the chimeras. I had a disorienting view of the green ramparts of Phanamhara as I twisted in the Cielcin grasp, saw the night and the stars and the flash of beam weapons as the survivors of the Troglita’s Manticore Flight still turned in the dark overhead. Had the governor-general’s Orbital Defense Force engaged the Cielcin? Were they holding their own?
And what of Neema? Of young Edouard Albé? What of the fate of the Ascalon?
I could be sure of nothing at all—unless it was at least that our few defenders knew what had become of me, and of Cassandra.
The roof closed overhead. Green plascrete. Brown earth. The gray steel of reinforcing pylons. We were in Valeriev’s tunnel, and the noise of the fighting became muffled. I had hardly noticed our descent into those portions of the pit open to the sky, where the surface team had toiled to meet the men digging from below.
Cassandra’s own screaming, her Jaddian cursing, echoed off the suddenly close roof.
Her mother would have been proud of her . . .
They carried us until we reached a spot where the path narrowed, and metal stanchions held back the earth.
“Gennaa wegasur!” came Ramanthanu’s rough voice, and I was hurled to the earth like a sack of unruly grain.
The Cielcin captain had emerged from the fighting outside, leading a dozen of its men in close guard about Muzugara and Gaizka. The chimeras had remained in the world above, with the bulk of the force. A rearguard followed, three dozen scaharimn at least, and the pair of human magi that accompanied the palanquin. The machine itself required the most careful maneuvering to negotiate the tighter parts of Valeriev’s tunnel.
Before long the noise of the fighting above had faded to a distant drumming, indistinguishable from the thunder.
“Make them walk!” Ramanthanu shouted once again, stooping to drag me to my feet.
The Cielcin carrying Cassandra let her fall. She grunted as she hit the ground, landing on her back and her bound hands. One of the Pale stooped to snatch her up, and she kicked it fully in its flat face. The stooping creature staggered back, and one of its brethren kicked her hard in the flank.
In a flash, the captain was on its subordinate, snarling words barely discernable to me. “Enough from you, Thnaga! Get back!”
The one called Thnaga turned its head aside, raised its hands as it retreated.
“Suja wo!” said General Muzugara, bracing itself against one of the stanchions with iron fingers. “We have made it, at last, my slaves.” It looked round in reverence at the cracked green walls, thick with Vaiartu sineoform. “This is holy ground.”
The Cielcin stood in rapt silence.
Master Gaizka broke it, his suit chiming to announce his heavy speech. “The battle is not done, my general,” he said. “We should move swiftly if we are to secure the asset.”
“The asset?” Muzugara struggled to pronounce the human word, failed to manage the terminal plosive, so the word emerged as asseta. “You speak of a god, you foul creature!”
Wordless, Gaizka bowed.
Eager to salvage the moment for its true master, the painted man spoke up, saying, “It is this way!”
Cassandra had risen again and leaned against me. “What are they saying? Are they fighting?”
“The Extrasolarians don’t believe the Cielcin religion,” I said. “They are arguing about respect.”
“Respect?” she whispered the word in Jaddian. “Seiasmo?”
“The Cielcin need the Extras, but the Extras have their own designs,” I said, certain in that moment that the palanquin was not what the magi had advertised. Urbaine had spoken of his desire to become like gods, to usher in a new age of progress, of human evolution—and of breaking the Imperial yoke. Doubtless they sought to steal the Watcher from their Cielcin accomplices, to wield its power for their own.
“Muzugara!” I said, drawing the once-prince’s eye. “Your sorcerers will betray you; you know that.”
The vayadan’s four-slit nostrils flared.
“Raka’ta ba-Utannash,” I said. They are of the Lie. It was not precisely what I meant, but the Cielcin tongue had no simple means of separating the simple fact that the sorcerers could not be trusted from the Cielcin religious frame.
“I know!” Muzugara bared its fangs in an alien smile. “So are you!”
“They will take your god from you!” I said.
“Gods are gods,” Muzugara responded. “Raka yukajjimn, yukajjimn suh.”
Vermin are vermin.
“Yukajjimn!” The Cielcin gathered round all howled the word, acting as though their general had scored some vast rhetorical point. “Yukajjimn! Yukajjimn!”
I could only shake my head. Muzugara was not Dorayaica. If I could not drive a wedge between the Cielcin and their human allies, I would let what must come come.
Ramanthanu shoved me forward. “Move!”
Ours was a long descent, awkward and slow, but in time we passed the last of the obstructions, and came to a place where the hall widened until it was hundreds of feet wide and paved entirely in the polymerized stone—so like marble in apparent texture—that defined Enar architecture.
The way was straight and broad, as is every road to perdition.
The pantheon awaited, the pandaemonium of the Vaiartu.
Its dark galleries were lit by our glowspheres. They hung everywhere like fat stars, too close, too cold, too impermanent. The relief carvings of Vaiartu conquest flickered in the light as we entered, and looking up I saw the clustered wings of the Watcher, Masutemu, stretched above, directly across from the opening.
Muzugara lifted its face in reverence. Leaving its men behind, the vayadan-general approached the central dais and the titanic bones that rested upon it. The former prince knelt, pressed its horned brow to the white floor, and—rising—kissed the deathless bones, lipless mouth chattering some private prayer.
The other Cielcin—save those that held Cassandra and myself—followed one by one.
“Dō Anscurhae,” Muzugara began, and I was a moment discerning its meaning. Anscurhae did not sound like a Cielcin word. The transition from the trill to the fricative, the R to the H, was not a Cielcin sound. “Yehelnub.”
A short breath escaped me. It was the language of Elu, the Cielcin of ten thousand years ago. Yehelnub was Yelnubei. We have come. And Anscurhae was Anasaka.
Serpent.
“Dō Anscurhae, yehelnub!” exclaimed the other Cielcin, echoing their master.
O Serpent, we have come.
“Dō Gennarush, yehelnub!” Muzugara intoned.
“Dō Gennarush, yehelnub!” the others proclaimed.
O Maker, we have come!
“Dō Caeharush, yehelnub!” the vayadan said.
“Dō Caeharush, yehelnub!”
Through the crowd of Cielcin, I caught Kybalion’s eye. The painted man looked away.
“Abba.” Cassandra was yet near at hand. “What are they saying?”
I did not look at her, but leaned as near as I was able. “O Watcher, we have come.”
Half-remembered images stirred in my mind. The memories of visions, of lives I was certain—almost certain—I had never lived. Memories of a Cielcin—prince or priest—offering its own blood upon a mound of its dead sister-brothers, of tendrils snaking from the dark. Had I heard the chanted words before? Had some other Hadrian—his memories embedded deep beneath my own—come to this place, or some place like it? With Dorayaica? With Otiolo? With Valka? Or alone?
I had seen Elu kneel, and sacrifice Avarra, its mate, before the very skull of Miudanar.
“We are servants of the Great One!” Muzugara said, spreading its hands where it stood upon the topmost step of the dais. “Our Prophet! Our King!”
“Yaiya toh!” the Cielcin replied. “Yaiya toh!”
By your will.
They were the words Elu had spoken to its god before the sacrifice, the words that had echoed throughout Cielcin history, defining their mad war against life, the universe . . . against being itself. Like the Enar before them, like Sunamasra-Tehanu and Aravte-Teäplu and all the Kings of the Vaiartu, the Cielcin had sold their souls in the service of unlife.
I edged forward a step, placing myself between Cassandra and the dais, my eyes on the looming fingerbones. I knew what they wanted, what surely must come.
But I was wrong.
“Ramanthanu-kih!” The vayadan took one step down toward its men. “Psaqattaa.”
Choose.
What choice was there for the lop-horned captain to make?
Ramanthanu surveyed its men with the same speculative intensity it had employed inspecting its human captives. It eyed the one called Thnaga a long moment. The junior xenobite quailed. After a moment, the captain twitched its head in the negative, toward the left shoulder. Nictitating membranes swept the ink-dark lenses of its eyes, and after another moment, it turned to one of its lieutenants. “Gurazi!”
“O . . . O-koarin, Ichakta-doh?” the lieutenant balked. Was it afraid? “I am . . . not worthy.”
“You are the best I have!” Ramanthanu pressed its forehead to that of its lieutenant, and reaching up seized the other by the horns.
Gurazi reciprocated the gesture—it had to grip one of the lesser horns on Ramanthanu’s left side. After a moment, the lieutenant drew back. The Cielcin nearest it all reached out their hands that they might touch the one that would become their sacrifice.
“Gurazi-kih!” said General Muzugara from the steps, and gestured that the younger Cielcin should join it there. “You will be our Avarra. You shall be the bridge that binds this place to the Iazyr Kulah!”
There was no Cielcin word for yes, only a breathy exhalation.
Gurazi made it, and reaching up undid the seals that clamped its armor to its second skin. The black cuirass fell to the Enari marble, and two of its sister-brothers advanced to stretch the polymeric fabric of the suit from the lieutenant’s narrow shoulders.
“They’re going to kill him, aren’t they?” Cassandra asked.
I could only nod.
Before long, Gurazi was naked, and mounted the first steps to the dais. The Cielcin had no navel, no nipples, no body hair. The six toes were long, and bent, and clawed like the shaven paws of some feline thing, vestigial compared to the taloned fingers. It was totally sexless, lacking both the soft geometries of the female and the hanging sex of the male, and yet it seemed to me the most human a Cielcin had seemed since Uvanari had died under my knife.
Muzugara raised one iron hand and seized Gurazi by the horn, and—forcing it to stoop—led it to the center of the slab. Ramanthanu remained just at the edge of the dais, and the other Cielcin circled round, filling in as much of the chamber as they could. There must have been a hundred of them, all told.
Pausing a moment, Muzugara raised its voice to address the magi. “Are you prepared?”
Elect-Master Gaizka bowed—bending more like a serpent himself than a man. “We are prepared, my general.”
“Open the palanquin!” the vayadan ordered.
The two Minoan technicians did as they were commanded. A moment later, a gleaming crack slit the front of the floating egg-shape, and it hinged open, revealing an object rather like an urn. It was carbon black and wired into a series of occult components whose functions I did not dare guess. The urn did not touch the sides of the palanquin in any place, was secured by buttresses of black plastic.
I stared at it a moment, until Muzugara spoke again. “U ba-Shiomu-Elusha!” it roared, and raised a hand as Dorayaica had. The monster’s metal arm hinged open, and a contrivance of jointed steel emerged and slid a knife into the vayadan’s hand. Whirling, Muzugara punched the weapon into the lieutenant’s thorax, cut sharply upward from groin to ribs.
Gurazi’s mouth opened, but shock stopped any inhuman scream.
Cassandra screamed instead, and turned her head away.
Black blood stained Muzugara’s robes and metal hand, and flowed down Gurazi’s legs like sheeting oil. Gurazi’s bowels and the torn sac of its womb spilled upon the floor. The dying xenobite’s knees struck the slab a moment later, and it fell, twitching on the white stone.
All the while, the Cielcin had not ceased their chanting.
“Yaiya toh! Yaiya toh!” they sang, and “Teke! Teke! Tekeli!”
Gurazi’s heat was rising into the cool air as steam. I thought I could see it, the unmapped turbulence of coiling vapor like the soul rising from its dying body.
“They just killed him,” Cassandra said. She sounded like she was going to be sick.
What could I say?
“They did,” was all I could manage. I was thinking about the Atropos expedition, about the documents I’d been shown. The men of Atropos had slaughtered one another and themselves to feed the Beast of Nairi. The Watcher there had surely put those instincts in the minds of its human prey, turning them against one another to feed itself, to sap what strength it could from the bodies of the dead and dying.
But how much energy could a body hold?
Not much. Surely, the beast would have done better to sap the heat at the core of the world, rather than prey upon life. Was there perhaps something more? Something special about flesh and blood?
The inhuman chanting had stopped.
I could sense confusion in the ranks, hear muttered words.
“Kasamnte ne?” said one, confused.
“Kasamnte,” another agreed. Nothing.
“There’s nothing!”
“Where is the god?”
“Ti-saem gi? Ti-saem gi?
Where?
“Gurazi was unworthy!” said a voice I recognized as that of Shahaga, the one who had struck Cassandra. “We must find a better sacrifice!”
That tightened every fiber in me, and again I shifted to put myself between Cassandra and the vayadan-general.
“We must offer more!” said another.
Still yet another shouted, “Ramanthanu! We must offer the captain!”
The captain drew its scimitar, thrust the point at the speaker. “You are welcome to try me, Bagita, you worm!”
The one called Bagita snarled, and drawing its own sword, it advanced.
“You dare approach me?” Ramanthanu sneered. “You?”
Bagita leaped, sword held high. Ramanthanu caught its subordinate by the wrist with its free hand and buried its blade in the crook between Bagita’s neck and shoulder. Bagita’s sword fell to the stones at the base of the steps, but Ramanthanu shoved the body onto the dais, its blood mingling with that of Gurazi.
Several of the others had drawn their swords, were eying one another with suspicion, with anger and fear.
“Why are they fighting?” Cassandra asked, drawing as near to me as she could.
“They are not men,” I said, and raising my voice, added, “This is how the great Muzugara commands? It is no wonder you broke so easily at Thagura!”
The iron-handed general snarled at me, and took two steps toward the edge of the dais. “You know nothing, Utannashi!”
Gaizka raised his sonorous, deep voice. “Look!”
It took me a moment to see what it was the magus had seen, to cut through the confusion and panic that filled the pantheon then like nerve gas.
The blood spilt upon the dais was moving. Not spreading out as it ought upon so flat a surface, but flowing, running toward the hand.
As I watched, a droplet formed, fell upward, vanished in the dark air.
A second followed. A third. A rain of black drops rising.
Muzugara—its fury abandoned—turned to look down at the bodies of its clansmen with religious awe. The others all drew back, or knelt, or pressed their faces to the floor. The ones that held Cassandra and myself averted their eyes, claws tightening on my arm.
The bodies of Gurazi and Bagita both began to rise, lifted as if on chains by some unseen mechanism above our world’s stage. Into the sudden silence, Muzugara raised its voice. “Dō Anscurhae!” it shouted, speaking in that archaic Cielcin mode. “We keep the old ways! We honor you! We serve you! We have come to carry you to the stars, that you might escape the circles of this prison!” The vayadan spread its arms wide, white hand still clutching the blade of sacrifice as it sank to its knees.
This prison? I wondered at that. I looked to the palanquin, to the urn with its plastic buttresses and exterior metal cage.
The Cielcin shifted about us, whispered in awe.
A static charge filled the air about us, and one of the Cielcin—I think it was Thnaga—shouted, “Retattaa!”
Look!
Gurazi’s body was shrinking, just as Mann’s had done. Shrinking and growing transparent, as though it were some fading holograph. Beside it, Bagita’s appeared to undergo a species of mitosis, becoming two like the image seen in a child’s kaleidoscope. One grew, another diminished, as all three bodies then floated toward the dome high above.
All three vanished at once, Bagita growing so large and diffuse it vanished from our plane entire, the other images reduced to mere specks. What blood remained continued to drip upward, but here and there was caught midair and floated like water in null gravity.
For an instant, all was still. The blood drifting on the air hung like so many black and distant stars. No one moved and nothing.
Nothing, save the hand.
Those vast, black bones shifted, and for a moment I thought that they must fall.
Then I realized what was happening.
The fingers were closing, curling, without sinew or ligament to animate them, their motion accompanied by a dry, cracking sound, as of wood splintering. Muzugara leaped backward, off-balance, staggering to the floor beneath the dais. The Cielcin forced me to my knees, Cassandra beside me. All the Cielcin present—save the vayadan and our captors only—hurled themselves to the floor in supplication. The Minoans remained on their feet, Gaizka and Kybalion and the two magi that manned the palanquin.
I could taste the charge on the air, felt my skin crawl, my hairs stand on end.
“That’s . . . impossible,” Cassandra said.
And yet it was. The huge fingers stretched, scraped across the white face of the marble, whole hand curling into a fist. The very air grew dark, as if the black thing drank the light of our lamps, and a shadow hung on the air. I felt my breath catch.
It was shrinking.
The hand was shrinking.
It had been the size of a shuttle, was scarcely larger then than a groundcar. A man. A child.
Then it was gone, vanished along with the bodies of the Cielcin slain upon the marble slab.
Upon the altar stone.
But we were not alone in the pantheon. An oppressive weight hung upon the air—the sense that we were all of us watched by unseen, malicious eyes. Almost I felt a breath upon my neck, the touch of fingers cold and strong as iron. Then a voice, black as ink and soft, filled my head like laudanum—like wine.
Ol zir am.
Pain flowered behind my eyes, and I screwed them shut, but it was no good.
Ollori Cordnan, Aldon ollori Iadan, ol zir am.
It seemed a black shadow floated over all my senses, an image pressed upon my mind. Though my eyes were closed, and my knees reported cold stone beneath them, and talons on my arm, I felt at once the desert beneath my feet, the noonday sky above. A figure tall and slim and clad in a smoking veil of black moved toward me, advancing over the dunes.
Go. Away. I thought. A child’s thought. Stupid and simple.
We were standing in the hold of the Rhea then, the Perseus weapon quiescent, safe in its launch cradle.
Am gelar am na quansba ol?
The figure turned its head, the music of its voice lilting.
I did not answer.
Ul talammād?
The vision shifted, and we were standing in the hypostyle, alone. It was night, and no light streamed in through the pillared entryway. No lamp or sign of human presence hung in the vaults above. I could tell the language had changed, though still its sound was strange to me. It sounded like the tongue Miudanar had used to try and speak with me upon Eue.
“Abba!”
The sound of Cassandra’s voice slashed across the vision, and despite the pain in my head, I opened my eyes.
It had been no vision.
A figure in black stood before Muzugara upon the center of the slab.
“Dō Anscurhae!” exclaimed Muzugara, “Dō Caeharush! My god! You bless us with your presence!”
“That was what you saw in the desert?” Cassandra asked.
I nodded.
If anything, it was taller. Taller than any man. Taller than any Cielcin. It was like a pillar looming, a finger towering over all. I sensed—though how I knew it was so I cannot say—that the beast was somehow more present in that moment than it had been in the desert. As if what I had seen had been only a vision, a waking dream.
This was the thing itself.
The Cielcin had all pressed their faces to the earth, save Muzugara and the ones that held Cassandra and myself—though these averted their eyes. Only the vayadan and the Minoans dared to look upon the Watcher. And Cassandra. And myself—and I looked with the eyes the Quiet had given me, and saw the creature standing athwart every branch of potential, and seeing it, I knew that I was not seeing different variations of the beast echoing across time, but the same creature in every aspect. Broad though my vision was, it was broader still. As Mann’s bodies were linked across some higher manifold of space—three bodies and one at the same time—every iteration of the towering thing that I perceived was linked, so that as it cocked its head to study the tableau before it, every refracted version of it moved in unison.
Across every possible present, it moved at once. It stood astride time itself like a colossus, its unseen feet anchored beyond the horizon of my sight.
Never had I seen a thing so huge, or so terrifying.
Still speaking in that archaic Cielcin mode, the vayadan said, “I am Prince Inumjazi Muzugara, Lord of the Twenty-Ninth Branching of the Line of Atumanu, Beloved of Elu, Servant of Miudanar, your kin!” It gestured at the palanquin. “I have brought a vessel for you! That you might pass the storms that encircle this world and be free again to drink of the stars! Therefore I beg you, grant me power! Make me your champion, as Miudanar made Elu, and Elusha after him!”
Despite my horror, I laughed.
It was Prince Muzugara again, not vayadan, not general. For who would call himself general who might claim the title prince? The once-prince aggrandized itself, and hoped to become greater still. Muzugara had not come to Sabratha on the orders of its prince, had not come to retrieve their lost and fallen god, to deliver into the Prophet’s hand the greatest weapon in existence.
It had come to cheat.
Muzugara hoped to make of itself what Dorayaica was, what Elu had been.
The Watcher took a step toward the bloody-handed prince, and as it moved it seemed to shrink, to grow nearer Cielcin size. Muzugara stood transfixed. The black cloak rippled in a wind that was not there. I saw the flash of a white foot beneath the hem of that robe, discerned the glint of gold.
Something snaked from within the black robe. A tendril of some substance white as snow. It slithered upward, caressed the Cielcin, twined about one horn. The Watcher did not speak, but turned Muzugara’s face to look up into its own veiled one.
Muzugara screamed.
I had never heard a Cielcin scream like that, not even in the dungeons of Dharan-Tun. So loud it was, a sound to pierce my very soul, and terrible—more terrible because it issued from the lips of a creature I ought not to have pitied, but did.
“Activate the siphon!” Gaizka roared.
More white tendrils emerged from the black robe and wrapped themselves around the prince. Muzugara was still screaming. The two magi who manned the palanquin stirred the machine to life. There was a whining hum, and though the figure holding Muzugara in its grip did not move, the same black figure appeared before the machine. The palanquin resonated as the beast approached, sparked, and fell from the air with a crash. The two Minoans started, threw themselves to the poisoned stone.
The second Watcher vanished, but the first—the one holding Muzugara, stooped to pin the one-time prince to the altar slab. As I watched, transfixed, the tendrils shifted, became countless long and slender arms. Hands grasped Muzugara everywhere: its horns, its wrists, its ankles. Then all at once, they tore, pulling every which way.
I expected Muzugara to be torn to pieces—and in a sense, it was. But rather than a rending of limb from limb, the Watcher hurled a dozen refracted Muzugaras about the pantheon, all of them with smashed and broken limbs. The creature’s shroud had slipped in the violence of its motion, revealing a slit of alabaster flesh.
Surprising me then with his personal courage, Master Gaizka fired on the creature with his sidearm. The maser beam swept the black-robed demon, but it seemed to do no harm.
The Watcher vanished.
The Cielcin who had thrown themselves to the arsenite looked uncertainly around.
“Is it gone?” asked one.
“Muzugara is gone,” whispered another.
“Muzugara was unworthy,” said Ramanthanu, finding its feet.
“The Faraday Box is destroyed,” said Gaizka. “We have no means to transport the creature.”
Faraday Box? I looked at the silver-masked sorcerer in surprise, understanding coming in an instant. The palanquin was little more than a battery designed to house and shield the Watcher’s energies. Muzugara had said the machine would help the Watcher pass the storms that encircled the world.
The ionosphere. The planet’s magnetic field served as bars on the Watcher’s cage. I thought of Horizon, trapped in the iron bowels of the Great Library.
Daimons and demons.
“We must retreat!” Gaizka urged. “If the Imperials send reinforcements, we may be cut off.”
Ramanthanu jerked its head to the left. “The prince is dead,” it said. “The god killed it.”
“Then you must take command now!” Gaizka said.
“It meant to betray the Prophet.” Ramanthanu sounded lost, again jerked its head in the negative.
“The mission has failed!” the Elect-Master decreed. “We must go!”
Many things happened then at once.
Far above, the glowspheres that Valeriev’s men had set to light the pantheon began to burst, their light extinguished, replaced by the sound of breaking glass.
Ramanthanu bellowed orders.
Gaizka shouted to his magi.
Cassandra cried out, “Look!”
The bodies that had all been Muzugara vanished, each of them shrinking and fading away, as though they were debris some mighty hand were brushing from the table. A shadow vast as empires filled the pantheon, a shadow not flat against the walls, but voluminous. The shadow in three-dimensions of something far, far larger.
Then one of the Cielcin fell off the ground. Like the blood of Muzugara’s sacrifices, it hurtled into the air, screaming the while. The shadow in the air tore the xenobite apart. Blood that should have rained upon the altar slab vanished instead. Then another of the Pale fell upward and was gone.
Panic beset the rest, and the ones that held Cassandra and myself broke ranks. Many fled up the tunnel, forgetting us and their duties. Bagita’s sword lay on the floor not twenty paces from me. Seeing my chance, I made for it, pain yet flaring behind my eyes. I dropped to the ground beside it and slit my bonds, scratching my wrist and the heel of my left hand in the process.
Where had Kybalion gone?
Scimitar in hand, I shouted for Cassandra. She ran for me, but one of the Cielcin recalled its place and hurled itself at her ankles. They both hit the ground with a thud. As I dashed to join them, two more of the Cielcin flew upward, their bodies slammed against one of the graven pillars that upheld the higher galleries.
The Cielcin atop Cassandra drew its knife, a hooked thing white as milk. I slashed at its head, ceramic blade striking the xenobite just above the hole of its ear. The blade caught on all that bone, and I had to plant a foot upon the dead creature’s neck to wrench it free. I helped Cassandra to stand, and cut her bonds.
“Our swords!” she said. “Where’s Lascaris?”
I looked round. The painted man and its master were both gone. The two magi that had accompanied them cowered by the wreck of the palanquin.
“There!” In the vanishing lights, I saw a smear of red. Gaizka’s cloak. He’d made it onto the upper gallery.
“They’re going out the long way!” said Cassandra, confused. She rubbed her wrists, following me as I made for the alien stairs.
“They must not want to risk the fighting up above!” I said. “They’ll slip out the back way, if they can, and find a way to broadcast their minds offworld.”
“Broadcast?” Cassandra was two paces behind.
It occurred to me then that Sabratha’s magnetic field was as much a trap for Gaizka and Kybalion as it was for the Watcher itself. The magi of MINOS were each little more than phantoms, daimon programs that bounced from one body to another. Even if they could not make it offworld in the flesh, the Minoan master’s mind and that of his changeling familiar might escape, might return to the Cielcin worldship with tidings of all that had happened on the surface.
But they could not do so without a way to boost their signal. They would need an antenna powerful enough to cut through the magnetosphere, or even a high-altitude flier.
One of the camp’s spottercraft would do.
I gritted my teeth as we reached the first gallery, and saw that flash of red above.
I could not let that happen.