God War

“What has happened?” Lakesh asked, having heard the raised voices as he approached from the corridor outside.

“It’s Kane,” Bry explained.

“Put him on speaker,” Lakesh instructed. Though he seemed outwardly calm, a range of conflicting emotions vied for attention in Lakesh’s mind. Kane was a long-trusted member of the Cerberus team, one of the most gifted field operatives Lakesh had ever known. However, he was suffering some kind of infection that created a paralysis of his face and was affecting his vision, causing him agonizing moments of blindness. Right now Kane should be restricted to bed rest, but with personnel so thinly spread the brave ex-Magistrate had volunteered to check out an alert beacon detected coming from their old headquarters roughly six hours earlier. It was there that Kane had found their old ally Balam, with whom he now traveled.

“Kane?” Lakesh said, clipping a portable microphone pickup over one ear. The pickup angled before his mouth like a hard plastic straw, capturing his every utterance and relaying it to Kane. “This is Lakesh. Donald is just bringing me up to speed now.”

Hidden speakers on Donald Bry’s computer terminal resounded with Kane’s calm voice as the field agent replied, “Just tell me when you can see it,” he said.

There was a momentary discussion while Donald Bry explained to his mentor what was going on, and then the satellite feed on Brewster’s terminal screen centered on an overhead view of a vast island of slate-gray rock. The island was like an insect dropped into the ocean, hard, jutting planes reaching out at nightmarish angles, hooks and narrow channels dotting its brutal lines. Lakesh guessed that those channels would be almost impossible to navigate by boat.

“What is it?” Lakesh breathed, his words just about audible. “What have they found?”

“Do you see it?” Kane asked over the speakers, ignoring or not hearing Lakesh’s query.

“Yes,” Lakesh replied instantly, “but what is it?”

“Ullikummis’s home,” Kane stated matter-of-factly, his words somehow lacking the impossible gravity with which Lakesh expected they would be expressed.

Lakesh stared at the image from the satellite feed for a long moment, unaware that he was holding his breath. “Are you there now?” he asked finally.

* * *

SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES away, just off the coast of what had once been New England, two figures skulked through the throne room of Ullikummis. Crouching together in the shadows of the stone castle, the two figures could not have been more different.

The first was Kane, a powerfully built man in his early thirties, battle hardened with a tension in his body that came from years of combat readiness. A dark beard shaded his chin and jowls, while his dark hair had grown long, reaching past his collar in trailing curlicues like snakes’ tails. Kane was an ex-Magistrate turned warrior for the rebellious operation known as Cerberus. His clothes looked worn and dirty, and his denim jacket was frayed at the edges where the cuffs and hem had begun to unravel. There was something else about him, too, a bony protrusion that stabbed out from his left eye like a half-buried seashell on the beach, arcing down his cheek and marring his otherwise handsome features.

“Yeah, we’re here,” Kane said quietly, his voice picked up by the hidden Commtact implant he wore. He checked the open window as he spoke, peering out into the dark, uninviting waves that crashed through the narrow channels that cut their labyrinthine way through the island from the sea. Those would be hell to navigate, he realized.

Crouching beside Kane was the shorter figure of Balam, humanoid but not human, with a bulbous head and black eyes like limpid pools of water. Hairless, Balam’s skin was a pallid gray-white, the color a human might associate with seasickness. In contrast to Kane’s tattered combat clothes, Balam wore a long, shapeless robe that reached almost to his ankles. The robe was woven of a soft material and dyed the indigo color of a summer night’s sky. It had no pattern beyond the weave itself, but close to the collar, a darker patch showed around a frayed section where the robe had been torn during a scuffle. The dark stain was blood; Balam had been shot in the chest six days before when his charge, the foster girl known as Little Quav, had been taken from his protection by Brigid Haight.

Now Balam had joined Kane in his quest to find Quav and Brigid. The two of them had discovered this place utilizing an alien artifact in Balam’s possession, a chair that could navigate through space.

Balam watched Kane as the taller man walked warily through the empty throne room, discussing with his colleagues over the Commtact.

“We’re going to do a recon,” Kane explained to Lakesh. “I’ll have to get back to you.”

With that, he cut off the communication link, and Balam was suddenly aware that Kane was staring at him, blue-gray eyes piercing into his.

“How is your sight, friend Kane?” Balam asked, his voice reedy and eerily alien in pitch and delivery.

The thing that lay in Kane’s flesh seemed to have disrupted his vision, throwing him into bouts of temporary blindness, often accompanied by vivid hallucinations of another life—the life of his foe, Ullikummis. These problems were exacerbated by teleportation travel, be it through interphaser or the more traditional mat-trans, and Balam had speculated it was linked to the breakdown and re-forming of Kane’s molecules at a quantum level, that shock event somehow triggering the stone fleck that had become embedded in Kane’s face. The problem was so serious that, when they had met up earlier that day, Balam had proposed a mind-link that would grant Kane a clarity of vision, albeit one that was alien to his normal perception. The mind-link operated by proximity, which meant it would fail if Kane and Balam became too far separated. Even now, Kane was utilizing Balam’s link to see more clearly, to overcome the effects that the shard of rock was generating in his own vision. However, how well that was working was anyone’s guess—Kane tended to play these things close to his chest.

“I’m okay for now,” Kane replied noncommittally. “Let’s just keep moving.”

Without waiting for Balam to answer, Kane led the way through the chilly throne room, commanding the Sin Eater automatic pistol he had hidden in a wrist holster into his hand. The Sin Eater had once been the official side arm of the Magistrate Division, an automatic handblaster that folded in on itself so that it could be stored in a bulky holster strapped just above the user’s wrist. Unfolding to its full extension, the automatic pistol was a little under fourteen inches in length and equipped with 9 mm rounds. Kane’s holster reacted to a specific flinch movement of his wrist tendons, powering the pistol automatically into his hand. The trigger had no guard; the necessity had never been foreseen that any kind of safety features would ever be required since the Magistrates were considered infallible. Thus, if the user’s index finger was crooked at the time it reached his hand, the pistol would begin firing automatically. Though no longer a Magistrate himself, Kane had retained his weapon from his days in Cobaltville, and he still felt at his most comfortable with the weapon in his hand. It was an extension to his body that seemed second nature now, like the comforting weight of a wristwatch. By contrast, Balam was unarmed, his brief use of a blaster indirectly causing him to get shot.

The cold throne room was empty, and despite the sounds of the crashing waves and the caws of gulls from its open window, it seemed somehow abandoned to Kane. He had taken the lead because of his experience in the field—Kane was a soldier while Balam was, if push came to shove, nothing more than a glorified negotiator. Furthermore, going back to his days as a hard-contact Magistrate, Kane had been infamous for his so-called point-man sense, a near-psychic ability to detect danger before it happened. While that perhaps seemed superhuman to many casual observers, it was in fact a combination of Kane’s finely tuned five senses, creating an awareness of his surroundings that was almost Zenlike in its comprehension.

Right now, Kane didn’t detect anything much in the room, and he swiftly made his way out through the open doorway and into the corridor that lay beyond. Like the throne room, the corridor was empty, the stone walls cold and echoing the nearby waves as they crashed against the rough sides of the fortress island.

It was a strange feeling, walking through that corridor. On the one hand it was recognizably a corridor to Kane’s eyes. And yet, on the other hand, it also had the properties of something eroded through the ages, weathered rock ripped through by shearing winds or surging water, cutting pathways through it over the aeons. It felt cold, lifeless, charmless. Whatever had crafted this, it lacked any sense of artistry, any desire for anything beyond function. The floor was hard and rough and

unstable, the coolness of the stone so cold that it penetrated the soles of Kane’s scuffed leather boots. Window slits were hacked into the walls here and there, haphazard and open to the elements, green moss growing along their sills where the seawater had pooled.

Kane continued down the corridor on silent tread, efficiently peering left and right into open doorways that led off the tunnellike passageway. Balam kept ten paces behind him, trotting along as lightly as possible to keep his own steps quiet. Kane peered over his shoulder, checking that the diminutive alien was keeping pace.

“Don’t get too far behind,” Kane instructed in a whisper. “If I have to shoot something, I’m going to want you close by. Or something bad will happen.”

Balam looked at Kane apologetically. “I’m sorry, Kane,” he whispered. “I’m unused to the application of stealth in this manner.”

Kane nodded. “Just don’t get shot if it kicks off,” he warned, and then he continued on his way, hurrying down the corridor at a jog.

Following the ex-Magistrate, Balam was searching the vast fortress in his own way. A telepath, Balam had nurtured an especially close bond with his foster child, the missing Quav. He had sensed her essence here the very moment that they arrived, feeling it like some vibrant tapestry hanging on the stone walls. Little Quav was the culmination of the Annunaki experiments with rebirth, and she had been placed in Balam’s care shortly after her birth to protect her from forces that might use her for ill. In that way, Balam had acted as a neutral party, siding neither with the Annunaki nor humanity but rather shielding the child from the dark destiny contained within her genetic code. Losing the child had hurt Balam, and he knew he had been played for a fool by the wily Ullikummis, tricked by the familiar face of Brigid Baptiste when she had appeared in Agartha. Balam had swiftly realized that Brigid was an agent for an antagonistic party, but with supreme irony, his very seclusion to protect Quav had also meant he was out of touch with developments in the wider world.

Whether foreknowledge of the rise of Ullikummis would have changed things, Balam could not say. As things stood, Balam felt Quav’s loss like a scar, a wound on his own body that had cut far deeper than the bullet he had taken to the chest from Brigid Haight’s gun during the kidnapping. In this, Balam and Kane had shared a tragedy, for Kane had also been shot by Brigid in her new guise as Ullikummis’s hand in darkness. For Kane, that blow had cut even deeper. Physically, the bullet had left merely a bruise on Kane’s chest, failing to pierce his armor and hence his flesh. But he and the woman now calling herself Haight were linked, a spiritual bond that entwined both of them through time immemorial. They shared the bond of anam charas, or “soul friends,” and it seemed to carry over to different incarnations of the two of them, despite where they found themselves. To many, it sounded like mumbo jumbo, but Kane’s bond to Brigid was deep and semimystical, despite his own eminently practical nature.

Kane moved through the arching doorway of a room, stepping quietly over the threshold. He could tell immediately that this room had a presence, something indefinable in the air that seemed to act as a warning. It stank of meat and burning, an almost physical wall of stench that made a person’s nose wrinkle and eyes sting. Kane had encountered numerous incredible situations in his life, from ghostly hauntings to alien possession, and he had developed something of an instinct for the unusual. Wary now, he scanned the room, the Sin Eater poised before him, tracking the movements of his eyes. This room was large—more than fifty feet in length—and square, with a high ceiling that added to the sense of space. Like the rest of the fortress isle, the walls, ceiling and floor were carved from the same slatelike rock, roughly finished with bumps and chips all around, everything left unadorned by decoration.

There was a pit in the center of the floor, Kane saw, and it dominated the room with its unspoken sense of purpose. Kane stepped toward it without hesitation, still scanning the room for signs of anyone else. Balam hurried along behind him, stepping just inside the doorway and feeling the chill of the room immediately.

Turning to Balam, Kane raised his empty hand, signaling that he should wait where he was. Then the Cerberus warrior continued on, remaining on high alert as he approached the pit. Twenty feet across, the pit was shallow and it was darker around its edges than the surrounding rock where something had charred it.

Kane peered into the pit, already suspecting what he would see there. A deep pile of ashes was spread across the circular indentation, and amid them Kane could see a few bones, several of which were broken, viciously snapped in two. He had seen this before, months earlier when Ullikummis had first arrived on Earth and set up Tenth City, his first attempt at indoctrinating the peoples of the world. There Ullikummis had forced his recruits into brutal bouts of combat to determine both their physical prowess and their loyalty to him. A vast chimney dominated the skyline of that primitive settlement, and those who failed him had been cremated within its eerie confines. Here, once again, Ullikummis had burned those who had failed him, Kane realized, pilgrims who had risked the arduous journey through the narrow, chasmlike channels weaving through the sea fortress to meet their god.

As he looked at the hard, pebblelike flecks among the ashes, something caught Kane’s eye. It was a bone, covered in ashes that rested along its length in a little mound. Leaning down, Kane poked at the bone with the nose of his pistol, pushing the worst of the dirt aside. The ashes fell away in silence. It was a bone, all right, no question of that. But when Kane looked at it more closely, he was surprised by the length of it. It looked like a leg bone, maybe a femur, but it was incredibly long. Furthermore, it bulged and featured a subtle twist. Kane had seen many skeletons in his days with Cerberus, but this was unlike anything he had seen before.

“Balam?” Kane called quietly. “What do you make of this?”

Balam shuffled over to join Kane, peering down into the pit where Kane nudged his pistol against his grisly find. “Leg bone?” Balam asked.

“Yeah, but from what?”

Unblinking, Balam looked at it and considered, recalling what he knew of human anatomy. “It looks human in the first instance, but there is something...untoward to its nature. As if it has been...”

Kane glanced up at him. “Changed?” he prompted when Balam left the sentence hanging.

“‘Changed’ is as adequate a word as any,” Balam agreed.

“But how, and by what?” Kane asked, voicing his thoughts.

“The Annunaki are masters of genetic manipulation,” Balam reminded him. “Ullikummis himself is a

horror by their standards, but only because of the

genetic changes wrought upon him at his father’s insistence.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Kane said, nodding. That was not simply old information to Kane; his senses had been assaulted with flashes of Ullikummis’s memories each time he had made a teleportation jump over the past weeks—and so, in some sense, he had experienced much of the nightmarish surgery that had featured in the Annunaki prince’s earliest years. If nothing else, it had given Kane an insight into why the son hated his father with such fury.

“Something’s changed these people,” Balam proposed. “Something altered them—”

“Or tried to. Look at this junk,” he said, riffling through the ash with the muzzle of his blaster. “Someone’s been cooking up a storm, and I’ll bet you it was someone who wanted to destroy the evidence of his failures.”

“The Annunaki do not have failures,” Balam stated wistfully. “They suffer disappointments, nothing more.”

“Well,” Kane said, drawing his Sin Eater out of the sifting sands of ash, “someone’s had a shitload of disappointments in here.

“And we should keep moving,” he added.

With that, Kane stood and led the way through the huge room with Balam trotting along at his heels. Balam looked back a moment, staring at the black smudge of the pit that dominated the room. Death seemed to follow Kane, lying in wait wherever he went.

* * *

IN THE WEST COAST operations room, Lakesh studied the satellite view of the island of Bensalem and consulted several reference documents.

“This island did not exist a year ago,” he stated, shaking his head.

Brewster Philboyd looked at the map that Lakesh had brought up on his own computer screen. “This Ullikummis has pulled things out of thin air before now,” he said miserably.

“No, not thin air, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh corrected. “Rock. He has an affinity to rock, it seems, and is able to employ a form of telekinesis to call on such to do his bidding. That was, by our best guess, how he created his Tenth City. The rock itself was pulled up from beneath the soil—bedrock.”

“So, this island—he’s pulled it from the sea?” Philboyd theorized.

“It seems probable.”

Philboyd shrugged. “I guess even monsters need somewhere to live,” he said, nervously pushing the spectacles back up the bridge of his nose.

“No,” Lakesh said, “there’s more to it than that. Look at the design. Almost circular, with the highest towers based in its center. This is the same design that the nine villes followed.”

Brewster moved his face a little closer to the screen, watching the live feed from the satellite as the dark blurs of gulls passed through the overhead image. “That’s been cropping up a lot lately, huh?”

“It is the open secret we never noticed,” Lakesh said cryptically. Seeing Brewster’s quizzical look, Lakesh smiled apologetically and cleared his throat. “This design, the circular pattern of lower buildings rising to a peak in the center—this is the form that every city in the history of humankind has taken. After Brigid’s experience of attempted mind control in Tenth City, she theorized that there was something in the architectural design itself that focused a person’s thoughts in specific ways, perhaps making them more susceptible to instruction. As such, it is a way of controlling people, a sigil that traverses time. This is the same design of the cities that you and I inhabited in the twentieth century. We may presume that the subtle control of humanity by the Annunaki is long-lived, Mr. Philboyd.”

While it seemed fanciful, the use of sigils—or magical symbols—that Lakesh referred to was prevalent throughout human history. Most infamous among these was the Nazi swastika, a reversed symbol for peace that, in its mirrored form, was believed to have wrought conflict.

Lakesh and Brewster stared at the image on the latter’s terminal screen in silence while, across the room, Donald Bry became more animated in his conversation with Grant about the mysteriously appearing parallax point. At the same time, one of the Tigers of Heaven, the modern-day samurai warriors whose property the Cerberus base had temporarily commandeered, took two paces into the room before subtly attracting Lakesh’s attention.

“Dr. Singh,” the squat, broad-shouldered warrior urged, “your presence is required outside by Mistress Shizuka.”

Lakesh nodded. “Keep an eye on the situation here,” he told Brewster Philboyd, glancing across to Donald Bry as he did so. “If anything changes, I want to know.”

“Sir,” Brewster acknowledged with a curt nod.

* * *

THOUGH FULL OF OMINOUS shadows, the fortress of Ullikummis appeared to be empty, and after a while Kane stated that conclusion out loud. “If we haven’t bumped into anyone by now, my guess is we ain’t gonna.”

The fortress had several levels, connected by rough, uneven staircases or spiraling ramps. While its passageways were wide, the rooms felt haphazard and cramped, like things that had budded from the main walkways rather than been intentionally connected. That was disquieting to Kane, who felt there was something almost living about the structure itself despite its lack of movement. It felt grown, formed organically. In some way, walking through the fortress felt a little like walking through a body.

They found rooms that contained possessions, obviously human. One room had a bunch of letters on the hard stone cot that stretched against one wall, tied with a ribbon and inexpertly hidden in the folds of a fur blanket. Another room, this one featuring two stone bunks, had a simple game board carved of wood, a jointed hinge along its center so that the pieces could be cleverly stored within. None of the rooms had doors, and Kane recalled how the cells had worked in Life Camp Zero, the prison that Ullikummis had used to hold the Cerberus exiles. Those cells had seemed to be hollows in the rock like honeycombs, and their doors only appeared when necessary, a shifting of a rock wall that seemed almost to have the properties of a liquid and a solid in one item.

Balam stopped as they walked past another open doorway, turning and walking to the room as if in a trance. Kane continued on, peering in each open doorway in turn, glancing across the shadow-dappled interiors before moving to the next. Three rooms along, he saw something odd resting on the floor. Clearly broken, it looked like a bucket seat or a gigantic vase, the top torn free to leave a jagged line. As Kane stepped closer, something fluttered across his vision and he found his sight turning dark. Kane looked around, realizing for the first time that Balam was no longer with him. He hadn’t noticed his silent companion had stopped some doors away from him, and it only dawned on him now when his vision started to fade, the colors ebbing away to be replaced by grayness, the subtle edges of the stone walls and the shattered bowllike object diminished to a blur.

“Balam?” Kane called, turning.

The two were linked, and it was in this way that Kane could see, using their telepathic tie to overcome his own blindness. Proximity affected the bond, lessening its effectiveness as Kane well knew from a similar event while they had been searching the old Cerberus redoubt. So many new limitations to remember and to juggle, Kane cursed as he stepped out of the room. So many hazards to navigate at each turn.

“Balam? Where did you go?”

The weight of the Sin Eater still in his hand, Kane marched back down the corridor where he had just been. One advantage of their link was that he couldn’t lose Balam for long, he thought cheerlessly; he just had to walk around until his vision became clear again.

When Kane found Balam, the smaller humanoid was standing in the middle of a small room. The room contained a simple bed, a stone base with a little padding from several furs, a blanket made of the same. There was a narrow window on one wall that was little bigger than a letter slot, but the room was otherwise unremarkable. Balam was poised silently in the center of the room, his hands clasped together before him, his eyes closed.

“Balam? Everything okay?” Kane urged.

“She was here,” the gray-skinned creature said. He spoke quietly, and his eyes remained closed in meditation.

“Who?” Kane asked and stopped himself, realizing that the question was redundant. Balam meant Little Quav, of course.