She couldn’t escape the pain. This was the reality of the Anunnaki, eternal agony without respite, without respite, without escape. There was no comfort or refuge to be found in love, in compassion, in being what it meant to be human. They mocked this blind, deaf and dumb ape, barely upright, with its woefully microscopic understanding of its place in the universe.
These beings revealed the truth to Billi, in its whole and total sinister glory. Life and death were banal to these living, sentient stars whose thoughts contained entire galaxies, whose minds did not reflect reality, but created it across dimensions incomprehensible to a mortal mind.
Billi tried to bring up a Christian prayer, an Islamic surah, anything that would allow her to hang onto her most basic, fundamental belief: that there was a divine order to things, the universe, and something beyond the universe cared. These star gods mocked her vanity. The idea of a benevolent god was a joke, theirs. Humankind, in its desperation, had fallen for this farce in its childish naivety.
Billi’s mind retreated into itself. She couldn’t absorb anymore. What hold she had on that slim thread to sanity was beginning to fray and madness beckoned, a swirling void where she could sink and be lost forever.
She stood at the precipice of that endless darkness, tottering as her hopes and dreams fell away. She needed to just take a step and she would find the only escape that existed, abandon herself, no longer be Billi, because Billi was nothing…
“Billi!”
Give herself up to the chaos because that was all there was.
“Billi!”
No more Billi…
“BILQIS!”
She snapped her eyes open and gazed into the desperate, grimly pale face of Faustus. He hugged her, crushing her with a desperate—despairing— strength.
She clung onto him, burying her face into his chest, feeling the trembling, terrified heartbeat. His panting breath was hot upon her neck but she couldn’t stop herself from shivering.
“Stay with me, Billi. Please stay,” he said. He was as terrified as she was, perhaps even more because he understood more, but he pushed that terror aside because of her.
“I’m okay,” she said, her chest heaving with a purifying sob.
Get it out of your system, Billi, or you ain’t no good to no one. Put on your bloody war face.
Billi grinned wolfishly as she tightened her grip on her sword.
Faustus laughed, despite his fear. “That’s more like it.”
She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry with relief, so she did a little of each, smiling even as tears ran down her cheeks. She put her palm against his cheek. There wasn’t anything that needed saying. He was alive, warm to her touch, and back beside her.
He was bruised and dishevelled. His clothes were torn but there was plenty of fight in his roguish gaze. He wanted to make mischief and plenty of it.
“That tremor I felt. That was… what? Some portal between here and Hell opening up?”
Faustus nodded. “Close enough. The ancient word for the place is Kurnugi. It’s built from the dream-flesh of the Anunnaki. The asakku are preparing the way for their masters.”
Billi pointed to a corner and the moss-covered steps leading down. “It’s the only place they could be.”
Faustus nodded, and patted her on the back. “Lead on, MacDuff.”
Another tremor hit. This one came harder and faster than before and the sense of wrongness, of dimensions warping and reality itself fracturing, surrounded and penetrated Billi. She felt as if spiders were clawing inside her, scuttling through her body and under her skin. She thought she could feel them climbing up through her throat, trying to get out, of long, spindly legs prodding at her cheeks…
No. No. No.
“Billi?”
The tremor passed. She wiped the sweat off her brow. “That was bad. What’s going on?”
“The Anunnaki are coming through. They don’t belong in this universe, and the universe is being bent out of shape to suit them. This is only going to get worse.”
“I can hardly stand up, Faustus. Is the ground real? It doesn’t feel real. I don’t know what is.” She looked at her own hands. Were they hers anymore?
“Reality is perception, Billi. Don’t let them distort yours so much that you don’t trust yourself. We need to hang on, just for a while longer.”
“You don’t feel it? Blimey, Faustus, I’m being turned inside out right now.”
He took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “I’ll be right beside you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
The whole castle was shaking. The countless dimensions battled each other, expanding and collapsing with no pattern, warping reality second by second, time and space being the least significant, and thus the most malleable. Billi focused on Faustus, her one point of sanity, but from the corners of her eyes she glimpsed the uncontrollable transformations happening all around her. The house rising up, the times before it had existed, the waves of emotion rippling through from its previous inhabitants, when it had been a living entity of its own. She winced at the flares of horror that had happened within its walls, how its own spirit had been corrupted by the plague of evil that had been spread by Reginald FitzRoy.
“Erin’s the key to all this. She’s opened the door to let the Anunnaki come through,” said Faustus. His eyes hardened. “We have to stop her.”
“Whatever it takes.” Billi closed her eyes briefly to fight down the nausea, but the weight of the Templar sword anchored her to her dreadful duty.
Poor Erin. Had she ever had a chance? Any hope in her sad, broken life? What a monstrous thing she’d been forced to become through a lifetime of abuse.
“You actually killed anyone before?” asked Faustus. “Because I haven’t.”
“You do your job and I’ll do mine.”
“Hey, we may survive this,” his brow wrinkled. “Maybe?”
She kissed him fiercely, hooking her arm around his neck so she could give him all the passion she felt at the moment. There was so much to life, despite what she’d been shown. What did the Anunnaki understand about being human? We knew we were small, that our lives were over in less than a blink of an eye, our deeds minuscule compared to the galaxy-spanning schemes of the primal beings. We touched few people in our brief, fragile lives, but every single one of them counted for something.
“We have to make it, Billi,” he said, eyes twinkling with that familiar roguish charm. “A kiss like that needs to be savoured over a long, long time.”
“Will you get over yourself?” Billi laughed. “Now would be the time for you to unleash that fireball spell you’ve been saving all your life.”
“For the millionth time I am not a wizard. It wasn’t funny the first time, and it still isn’t.”
“Which way?” said Billi. “I can’t even tell which way is up.”
“We’re falling into a pan-dimensional space, spatial coordinates are meaningless. We need to go to the heart of the pain. That’s where Erin will be, or what’s left of her.”
“What does that mean?” asked Billi.
Faustus began tugging at his sleeve. “Look what’s happening around us, Billi. Now just imagine what’s going on at the epicentre of it all.” Then he ripped his shirt sleeve off, all the way down from the shoulder. He gave it another solid pull and dragged the cloth over his wrist, revealing all his tattoos. The history of magic was literally written upon Faustus’s skin.
“You’ve never explained what any of those actually mean,” said Billi.
“Sometimes you’ve got to fight darkness with darkness.”
“Ah. Maybe best I don’t know, eh?
Billi worked on steadying her breath, focusing on the intimate things, Faustus’s fingers slipping through her own, one by one taking hold, his soft skin against her callused palms. She wished she could be soft but the time for that had never existed in her life. One hand held his, the other heavy, cold steel.
; There was a howling light coming from below. It crackled along the stones and sparked upon the sword blade. They were surrounded by a deafening thunder, a heart-beat of some titanic being. Then, piercing the pandemonium, Billi heard a cry, a cry that jumped straight into her heart.
Ivan!
CHAPTER 30
Centuries of erosion had brought the catacombs to the verge of total collapse. Huge cracks ran jaggedly along the walls and the floor was torn by deep crevasses creating a jigsaw of broken islands of stone. Many of the columns had collapsed, some tumbling down the rents into the sea hidden far down below, while other columns lay like clumsy bridges from one uneven plateau to the next. None of the floor was level, Billi wasn’t sure if it was just her twisted perception or the result of the steady decline of the cliff towards the sea. Some were pitched as steep as roof gables, almost ready to slide away entirely.
Eerie starlight shone through the cracks, as if the catacomb was a shell floating through space. Then there would be another violent tremor and light blazed through these pan-dimensional openings and briefly Billi glimpsed alien, otherworldly shadows upon the tortured walls.
She and Faustus stood at the bottom of the stairs but the floor had sheared away. Right at their feet was a drop down a ragged crevasse into the hissing black waters of the sea. Waves splashed and spilled through the fractured cliff walls.
And then she saw Ivan.
He lay bound upon the floor in the centre of the catacombs, surrounded by fields of cuneiform scratched into the flagstones. The cuneiform covered his skin, all in meticulous black ink, and he squirmed as something slithered up from the cracked chasm in the floor before him.
Oily and slick, glistening in the phantasmagorical light the torso was a twisted aberration of man and serpent, swollen to grotesque proportions and from the hips below it was pure snake, but with a width of two metres or more. Staring at the distended skull, Billi recognised it.
“Reggie.”
This was what he’d become, what the Anunnaki had made him. Was it some jest of theirs? Was this his true shape in their realm, in Kurnugi? His jaws distended wider and wider and a tongue flickered in the air between him and his prey, Ivan.
Billi shook her head. “That can’t be real. He’s a giant snake.”
“He’s manifesting his spiritual form into living flesh. Reggie will consume Ivan’s soul but what’s happening in the spirit realm has become real.”
“He’s real here, that’s all I need to know.” And she took a step back.
“We can climb around,” said Faustus. “We need to work — no!”
There was no time for that, not with the snake slithering closer to Ivan, weaving its way through the columns and across the crevasses, its eyes gleaming and tongue darting back and forth, tasting the thick fear. So Billi jumped.
There wasn’t time to judge the true distance, or what would happen if she fell short. All that mattered was reaching Ivan. A savage gust of bitterly cold wind rushed up from the chasm beneath her, the rocks below grinned like a giant’s teeth longing to grind her bones as she flailed across towards the opposite slab.
She hit the slab hard, rolled to take the worst of the shock from the impact but still had the wind knocked out of her when she finally stopped. Billi winced as she got up.
“Billi!”
Faustus was edging his way across the far wall, he wasn’t getting anywhere fast and everything was a hurry. The serpent was sliding over one of the columns that linked the shattered pieces of the catacombs together. Billi ran along the slab and leapt across to the next one. She needed to keep the momentum going and even as the floor shook, she jumped up to one of the fallen columns and ran along its trembling length onto the next cracked piece of floor, dodging the new cracks opening up as the realms clashed.
The slab suddenly rose at one side, tilting towards the vertical but Billi didn’t stop, she used it to launch herself up and high, smacking down on the next slab, sword drawn.
The serpent rose up to face her.
Reginald’s face was huge, hairless and scaled. His eyes were yellow with two black slits that swelled as they focused upon her.
Billi took a side-step, watching the snake weave back and forth, both of them looking for that opportunity to strike. “What have you done with Erin?”
“Swallowed her whole.” Reggie pointed to his open mouth. “She’s inside here, Billi. Why don’t you come inside and keep her company?”
The scales rattled as they brushed across the stone. They shivered through wild colours, both beautiful and bewildering. Reggie circled around her, she couldn’t keep her eyes on his head and his tail. He was closing in like a noose.
Reggie’s spirit had risen to the surface, Erin was trapped within. That was what she was seeing, the physical manifestation of the spirit.
But how could she get Erin out? Or was she gone forever?
Reginald wove side to side, looking for that opening…
The rustle made her turn, just for a second. The tail swung down and Billi twisted aside but in that second she wasn’t looking at Reggie. He rammed into her, knocking her off her feet and through the air. Billi slammed down on her back, dropping her sword, and Reggie was on her instantly, rising above her, mouth wide and his jaw lined with rows of serrated fangs.
Billi’s hand darted to the stiletto and she jabbed it straight into Reggie’s left eye. He screamed and thrashed frantically, trying to pull it out but the dagger was in deep, right to the cross-guard. His short arms no longer reached as far as his face.
Billi flipped to her feet and ran for her sword. Reginald shot after her, hissing furiously. Billi scooped up her sword and swung even as she turned. The blade skittered along the scales uselessly.
If it doesn’t work, try something new.
Fighting was the ultimate Darwinism. Her dad had told her that while she’d been studying Biology years ago. Billi had sighed but he’d asked what Darwinism meant.
“Survival of the species,” had been her answer. It was at the front of the text-book.
And how did a species survive? It fought. And how did it win those fights?
It evolved.
A sudden side-step, bracing herself in a wide, solid stance and instead of cutting Billi let the tip find a gap under the scale. She swapped her grip, moving her right hand to cup the pommel. And then she shoved.
The tip caught on a rib, just enough to trap the blade a few centimetres in, but Billi twisted hard and rammed it upwards, piercing the muscle, organs and blood vessels with sickening ease, until buried hilt-deep. A sudden gout of black, stinking blood rushed out of the wound, drenching her arms and down her chest.
Reggie spasmed, his cry rising to a soul-shattering shriek. Billi lost her grip on the blood-slick sword and was sent tumbling from a blow from the thrashing tail. He twisted over himself, vainly trying to rid himself of the metre-and-half of steel buried deep in his trunk.
Billi groaned. She was one massive, aching bruise. She could hardly see for the sweat and blood in her eyes. The sweat, hers. The blood, not so much. The floor trembled and bricks tumbled from the ceiling as Reginald crashed through one of the few upright columns. Billi got to her feet, swaying for sure, but that fire in her guts blazing now. She spat blood as she headed toward the vast monster.
There comes a point where living doesn’t matter anymore. Dimly she saw Faustus beside Ivan, but now she didn’t care. She’d gone past heroism, she was here for the kill. Deep down she knew she was broken, that she’d been raised wrong and there wasn’t any true nobility in what she did. She’d never be like Ivan.
Reggie shook the dagger out of his eye. The blade clattered across the flagstones and down the crevasse. The sword was still buried deep within his side but she couldn’t get close enough to grab it. So Billi edged closer, within the reach of the serpent’s twisting, shivering length.
“Come on, you scaly bastard,” she snarled. “Come on!”
; Reggie was beyond cunning action or even thought now. He’d been hurt like never before and he was consumed with atavistic rage. More serpent than man, he’d retreated into the most ancient part of the brain which was pure instinct, the reptilian brain. There was only one response, to devour.
Mouth grotesquely distended he launched himself at Billi, as fast as a viper. His speed shocked her, reacting out of base instinct herself, the urge to flee. Reggie racked his serrated fangs along his body, tearing off scales and ploughing deep, bloody furrows through his own flesh. His tail thrashed in pain and he attacked it, totally consumed, totally blinded, by pain and fury.
The eternal snake was devouring itself.
The more he hurt, the more he attacked, and the more he hurt, he was in an endless cycle of mutual destruction. The stones were slippery with blood pouring from a dozen wounds, chunks of throbbing meat lay scattered in the gore and yet he continued, tearing through his own body in an all-consuming frenzy. He chewed through his own tail and it fell off, still twitching as the nerves went through their death cycle.
Billi limped over to collect her sword. It had been knocked free in the frenzy but she could barely lift it, the edge scraped along the stone as she dragged it up.
Reggie continued to tear at himself, but his own strength was fading fast. The damage was appalling. He’d bitten and torn himself apart, even chewing off his own spindly human arm in the process. Now he lay, gasping, snapping with futile rage.
Billi raised her sword over his head.
One more cut and it’s done.
Then Reggie groaned. The bloody meat fell from his jaws and he sank to the floor, curling up as the scales shivered. The flesh withered, sinking into the skeletal structure as the scales flaked off, covering Billi’s feet with their macabre, chromatic beauty.
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