James Axler - God War

“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.

“She’s not afraid,” Balam continued. “Merely...curious. She was told things here, taught things.”

“Some learning curve,” Kane muttered. “Imprisoning a three-year-old girl in a big stone fortress.”

Balam’s eyes flickered open, their dark orbs peering wistfully into Kane’s. “I do not believe she was imprisoned, Kane. This was a family reunion, mother and son.”

“Well, she ain’t here now,” Kane said, indicating the empty room.

“No,” Balam agreed. “So where is she? Where is Ullikummis?”

Kane racked his brain for a moment, trying to think in the manner of the Annunaki. They were multidimensional beings whose malice was just one aspect of their eternal boredom with their lives. So where would Ullikummis go next?

“Enlil,” Kane said slowly. “That’s the piece that’s missing from this family reunion.”

Balam’s bulbous head rocked back and forth on his spindly neck as he nodded his agreement. “The child is not ready,” he said after some consideration. “Her Ninlil aspect has yet to be teased out of her. She remains the little girl that you and I know as Quav. It will be years before that changes.”

“There’s something you should see,” Kane said, gesturing to the corridor. “Maybe you can make sense of it.” He was talking about the bowllike thing he had found, but he chose not to add that he had been unable to analyze it because his vision had failed. It wouldn’t help to remind Balam of this; the First Folk diplomat was jumpy enough as it was.

Thus, Kane led the way from the room with Balam at his side. There were no doors in the gloomy palace, so everything here was open to view now.

Three doorways along, Kane stepped into the room, encouraging Balam to follow. There, in the center of the room, lay the broken bowllike structure. Kane could see it better now with his eyes recovered, and he studied it properly for the first time. Bigger than an armchair, the bowl seemed to be made of some kind of stone and rested on a very low plinth that raised it a quarter inch above the stone floor. The top edge was jagged as if the rest of it had been snapped away and, looking at it now, Kane was reminded of an egg. There were shards of the broken remains all around, quartz within it like plates of stained glass twinkling in the light from the arrow-slit windows that lined the room on three sides.

“Any ideas?” Kane prompted.

“A chrysalis,” Balam said. There was no hint of doubt in his voice.

“You seen this before?” Kane challenged.

Balam inclined his head in a nod. “They are one of the ways that the Annunaki employed to stave off their immense boredom,” he explained as he leaned down to pick through the wreckage strewed about the cuplike object. “You will have heard of how the gods of the Annunaki wore different faces and thus appeared to different cultures in different ways. Overlord Enlil was also Kumbari. Zu was Anzu...”

“Lilitu, Lilith,” Kane added, nodding.

“On occasion this would involve a period of cosmetic change,” Balam elaborated, “a minor amusement to the Annunaki. The chrysalis was one manner by which this was achieved.”

“So, Ullikummis has been—what—changing his face?” Kane questioned. “Ugly bastard like that’s going to take a lot of work.”

“No, not Ullikummis,” Balam said, studying one of the broken fragments of the rock shell. “This pod is too small for an adult form. It was used on a child.”

Kane fixed Balam with his stare. “I think we both know what that means, right?”

Balam nodded. “Quav.”

Chapter 4

“There’s got to be a thousand of them,” Grant muttered as he watched the massing army step from the crazed pattern of colors and light that swam in the air over the banks of the Euphrates.

“More than that, Magistrate,” Rosalia corrected, indicating the center of the rift.

Grant turned to where the dark-haired woman had indicated and saw the rift in space growing larger, its hourglass shape swelling in the center to disgorge more people with increased vigor. The rift crackled with lightning against a deep nothingness, swirling colors spinning and fraying in its depths, splitting apart to form even more colors as Grant watched. He estimated that the rift was a quarter mile across now, and as it increased in size it became harder to look it, burning against the rods and cones of his retina like some grisly optical illusion. It was an interphase window, Grant knew, but one so large as to reach a scale he had never seen before. The interphaser was designed for personal transport, carrying just a few people and limited matériel at a time. This, however, was on a scale he had never imagined, like some great monument tunneling through the very air over the sun-dappled surface of the Euphrates. Grant had never seen anything like it.

“Where the fuck are they all coming from?” he muttered, shaking his head.

“I attended a few of the rallies for Ullikummis,” Rosalia spoke, her voice low. “Held in the old bombed-out sports stadiums and parking lots, they would regularly attract a thousand, fifteen hundred people at a time. It was quite something seeing that many people chanting in unison.”

Grant turned to look at Rosalia, his brow furrowed, as the army massed behind him. “‘Quite something,’” he repeated. “Huh.”

“What?” Rosalia asked, challenge in her voice.

“It’s never ‘scary’ with you, is it?” Grant observed. “Always just something that happened.”

“The world’s as scary as we choose for it to be, Grant,” Rosalia told him cryptically. “You look at things the way you choose to. No one else makes you frightened but you yourself.”

The rift continued to expel more and more people of all ages and body types. Many of them wore the familiar robes of Ullikummis’s enforcers, some with the red badge shining over their left breast like those of the old Magistrates. There were dogs there, too, Grant saw—strange dogs with long bodies and heavy, loping movements, their shapes carved from living stone.

Ullikummis himself waited at the head of the army, backing slowly away from the rift to allow his followers space to spread out, Brigid and the little girl at his side.

“We’re going to need to get closer,” Grant decided. He was still hefting Domi’s unconscious form in his arms, and despite the burden he showed no signs of tiredness.

Rosalia indicated the albino woman. “Planning on taking her?”

“No,” Grant replied. Then he turned to Kudo, the man who’d lost half his face to the acid spillage inside the bowels of Tiamat. “Kudo, you good to get home if I leave you in charge of Domi?”

Kudo nodded, bringing forth a portable communications device from its secure place in a belt pouch. “I can tap Cerberus comms and ask them to guide me,” he said without arguing. Like all Tigers of Heaven, Kudo was a fearless warrior who would never shy away from a fight. However, he also recognized the need for authority, and bowed to Grant’s decisions as squad leader.