James Axler - God War

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.