Solomon’s Jar

by Rogue Angel

  They strolled out of the brush as casually as if they came this way every day about this time. Some royal-blue-and-orange birds flew up, squalling indignantly. Annja and Aidan walked at a matter-of-fact pace toward the structure, feeling the heat on their faces grow with every step.

  “Think they have surveillance cameras?” he asked.

  “The place looks as if they’re in there listening to an old radio with vacuum tubes,” she said. “But we can’t take anything for granted. Not with surveillance equipment so cheap these days. Still, does it really make a difference?”

  “I suppose not.”

  They approached the open front of the building. From inside came a roar of noise. Ignoring a door covered in flaking green paint, they walked to the big opening. Annja leaned forward and peered around the wall.

  Furnace heat and the stench of hot metal hit her in the face. Even after the heat of the tropical sunlight it was almost staggering.

  “Inferno,” Aidan whispered by her shoulder. He sounded truly horror-struck.

  Through eyes watering from heat and the chemical smell she got an impression of a vast dark face shot through the glow of fires. Great tangled machines loomed and catwalks strung back and forth like a steel spiderweb above. Vast black cauldrons emerged from an enormous yellow furnace mouth, drooling liquid metal; streams of living flame like lava fell into molds, sparks showering and skittering on the floor as they reddened, faded, winked out. A continuous roar of noise sounded, the whoosh of gas jets, the rush of molten metal being poured, hissing and sizzling, and ruling all the ceaseless bellow of the flame.

  Black men, bare to the waist, moved through the hellish tumult with almost desperate purpose, carrying long poles with hooks, and outsized tongs. Wiry torsos ran with sweat. The glare reflected and skittered over their safety helmets. The display might have stirred a favorable response inside Annja, who liked looking at well-muscled scantily-clad men as much as the next woman. Instead she found it somewhat frightening and sad.

  “How can anybody work in that?” Aidan asked.

  “Necessity.” Annja said. “I guess if archaeology teaches us anything, it’s just how much humans can learn to tolerate if they have to.”

  “Poor bastards,” Aidan said.

  “Amen. Let’s get in there,” Annja replied.

  The brightness of the furnace seemed to make the shadows darker, defeating the lights hanging from the ceiling high overhead. There were ample hiding places, even had anyone been looking around. But no one was.

  They moved toward the back, keeping close to the left wall. Exhausted crucibles, suspended from a track overhead, were conveyed out another wide opening of the far wall into daylight. Before them an enclosed space intruded onto the main floor, its lone story far below the cavernous ceiling. It appeared to contain an office with windows in its flank showing desks and computer monitors with men in shirtsleeves sitting at them. It struck Annja as being way too close for either comfort or safety to where the fuming cauldrons tipped their cargo into the waiting molds. Seven or eight yards beyond the far side of the structure yawned the mouth of the furnace itself.

  Annja stopped, heart in throat.

  She ducked behind some kind of great rounded gray-painted metal casing. Aidan duckwalked up next to her. “What is it?” He had to put his mouth to her ear and still practically shout to make himself heard over the tumult.

  She pointed. A dozen or more men in dark suits stood confronting office workers in shirtsleeves in front of the office area. All of them wore large silver medallions on chains around their necks. One man wore a suit all of white and cream rather than dark fabric. He loomed above the others and appeared thin as a flagpole.

  “It’s Highsmith,” she said.

  “My God,” Aidan said. “Those men have guns.”

  It was true. Sir Martin’s followers, at least a dozen in view, held a variety of firearms, some handguns, some long arms—machine pistols, shotguns, assault rifles. Looking around, Annja saw more armed men moving around the work floor. The foundry workers themselves paid scant attention to them. They were probably not unaccustomed to seeing heavily armed men. Houses of the wealthy and even exclusive apartment complexes routinely sported guards carrying submachine guns in Brazil. Or maybe in comparison to the tons of two-thousand-degree liquid metal swaying over their heads and pouring out in great glaring streams like lava, the firearms just didn’t seem dangerous.

  “What now?” Aidan asked.

  “We get in closer.”

  His expression told her what he thought of that idea. With a flip of his hand he gave her a mock-courtly “you first” gesture.

  The White Tree Lodge members seemed preoccupied with keeping an eye on the foundry employees. They weren’t looking around to spot people sneaking through the heavy metal machinery on the floor.

  Annja and Aidan got within thirty feet of the two groups in front of the door to the office. A burly young Englishman was shouting at a short, dark man with bulging eyes, hair like Brillo pads flanking a sweat-shiny spire of skull, and his tie askew.

  “Não, não,” the Brazilian was saying. Annja guessed he was the foundry manager. “I do not know what the foreign gentlemen are talking about—”

  “Dennis,” Sir Martin said. Though he did not seem to raise his voice the name rang clearly audible above all the volcanic noise.

  Without warning a short cultist with a shock of unruly dark hair shot the tall and gawky young Brazilian to the manager’s left through the knee. The young man fell down howling and thrashing and clutching his leg.

  Blood sprayed the immaculate ivory shins of Sir Martin’s trousers. The knobbed face showed no reaction. A slight young cultist quickly knelt before his master and began dabbing at the blood spatter with a handkerchief. It only had the effect of broadening the droplets into dark smears.

  Aidan tensed as if to lunge. Annja put a restraining hand on his arm.

  “We can’t just watch,” he hissed.

  “What do you suggest we do? They’ve got us out-manned and outgunned.”

  Aidan frowned furiously at her. “You’ve got that magical sword!”

  “I can’t knock bullets out of the air,” she said. She looked around nervously. Though it seemed unlikely anybody could have heard their soft-voiced but intense conversation the odds against them were too high for her to take anything for granted.

  “But surely you don’t mean to do nothing?” Pascoe said.

  “We’ll do something,” she said, wanting to keep things as simple as possible. “But we need to wait for an opportunity.”

  “But we can’t just stand by—”

  Annja grabbed him by the arm and put her finger to his lips. His eyes widened in outrage.

  “Wait,” she said. “The equation just changed.”

  She tipped her head toward the large front door. After a scowling moment his eyes followed her lead.

  More men were striding in out of the brightness of the morning. They were thick-necked men, white, obviously foreigners, though their garb was mostly rough. Their posture suggested arrogance.

  They too openly carried guns. Green braided leather thongs circled their thick necks.

  Among them walked Mark Peter Stern in a tropical-weight tan suit, a yarmulke on his gleaming gold hair.

  25

  A White Tree cultist who had worked his way toward the large opening shouted and raised a handgun. One of Stern’s followers fired a burst from his hip with an Uzi. The Englishman spun and fell, his weapon unfired.

  Annja crouched lower, drawing Aidan down with her. She expected an instant eruption of answering gunfire. Instead the White Tree cultists seemed thunder-struck by the arrival of their rivals and the sudden death of one of their comrades.

  “Sir Martin,” Stern called out as he strode past Annja and Aidan’s hiding place with his burly henchmen spreading out to either side of him. “What a pleasure to find you here. I wish I could say it’s unexpected.”

  Highsmith stared
at him with his dramatic white eye-brows flared in fury. “What are you doing here, you mountebank?”

  “You mean your divinations didn’t tell you that? Any more than it warned you to expect my visitation? Gee, it’s too bad. Obviously you’re too inept to possess an artifact of the power and majesty of King Solomon’s Jar. Jumping naked over fires and hugging trees is more your speed, eh, wot.” The last appeared to be a cartoonish attempt at parodying an English accent, and Stern had said it with a nasty sneer on his face.

  “How typically American,” Highsmith said. “Your feeble attempts at humor are of a kind with your so-called mystic teachings—base humbuggery fit to pull the wool over the eyes of self-besotted simpletons.”

  “Are they going to try to talk each other to death?” Aidan demanded. The color had dropped from his face at the murder of his countryman. His cheeks were regaining their usual hue, and his insouciance seemed to be springing back.

  Annja was relieved. “I’m afraid not,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

  “I see your point. I deplore bloodshed. But it couldn’t happen to a nicer—”

  She gripped his arm and put a finger to her lips. She had begun to sense a change in the atmosphere—over the hot-metal stink and booming noise of the foundry.

  Another crucible came to a stop and poured its contents in an arc of liquid fire into a mold, where it ran in rivulets into the depressions awaiting it. Now looking somewhat nervously at the invaders, with sparks cascading unnoticed around them and dancing by their feet, the workmen plied the flow with their long tools, seemingly more to make sure it behaved as expected than because they needed actively to push the process along.

  By reflex Stern and his men glanced toward the fire fountain. “Take them!” Highsmith shouted.

  The White Tree cultists opened fire. Two of Stern’s men fell. Another backed away, firing an Uzi machine pistol from the hip. He screamed as bullets hit him but kept firing until he tripped backward over the edge of the molds and fell into the stream of molten metal cascading from the crucible. His scream rose in a crescendo, impossibly shrill. Steam gouted from his body as his flesh became fluid and sluiced from his bones. His body, half-skeletonized, sprawled across the glowing molds.

  Annja ducked as random bullets cracked overhead and whined in ricochets off the machinery around them. She wished she had ducked when the shooting first began, and not seen what she had just seen. Aidan hunkered beside her, looking sick.

  “What now?” he mouthed over the crackle of gunfire and shouts and screams.

  “We can’t just hide,” she shouted back to him. “They’ll find us if we do.”

  He nodded, swallowing spasmodically as if trying to control his emotions. Her stomach was churning. She turned away. She knew she could not afford to be incapacitated by a fit of nausea, however briefly.

  Without any dignified course coming to mind, Annja crawled on all fours toward the office where it protruded onto the shop floor. Coming within ten feet of it, with what she thought might be a lathe shielding her from the interior of the building where most of the action was, and a big red toolbox on wheels between her and the office, she cautiously reared up and peered over.

  Throughout the smelter, men fought furiously. Some fired at each other from behind cover. No one was having much success. Much of the equipment and even general clutter inside the vast building was steel or iron, massive enough to stop bullets. Other men whaled at each other with wrenches, metal rods, bits of scrap as far as Annja could tell. Some simply pummeled each other, wrestled, shrieked, gouged eyes and tore at throats with their teeth.

  “My God,” Aidan gasped from her side. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  They both ducked as a burst of gunfire raked across the top of the lathe table, bullets howling like lost souls as they tumbled to rip irregular holes in the thin sheet-metal wall above their heads.

  “The rage and passion—they’re increasing it, trying to use it to manipulate them. But at the same time all that emotion is working on them, too. They’re getting themselves into a frenzy, losing control,” Annja said.

  A figure loomed up at the other end of the lathe. It was one of Stern’s men in a torn tan shirt with epaulettes. His forehead had been cut open, turning his face to a mask of blood, making the green-dyed braid around his neck a brown-and-purplish mess. He aimed an Uzi at them, pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. He had fired his magazine dry. Screaming with frustration, he raised the Uzi above his head as if to smash them with it. His eyes rolled in pits of blood.

  From his crouch Aidan lashed out with his boot and caught the man squarely in the groin. The kick lifted the soles of the Malkuth devotee’s heavy work shoes an inch off the greasy concrete floor.

  Annja’s close-combat instructors had warned her the famous crotch-kick did not always work. Whether he was too adrenalized for the neural overload associated with a blow to the testicles to have much effect, or just wasn’t susceptible, the kick did no more than stagger the man. He came on again growling incoherently.

  “Bloody stay down, will you?” Aidan said. He jumped up and smashed an overhand right into the man’s face. Annja heard the buckling crunch as the cartilage in the man’s nose broke. He went over backward with blood pulsing from his nostrils, slammed the back of his head hard on the pavement and lay moaning and moving feebly.

  “Good shot,” Annja said. Aidan waved his hand in the air, grimacing. “You didn’t break it?” she asked.

  He flexed his fingers. “No. No thanks to myself. Stupid bloody stunt to pull.”

  “It worked,” Annja pointed out.

  A violent heave of shadow caught Annja’s eye in the gloom. Another figure appeared twenty feet behind them, back toward the entrance. It leveled a long-barreled weapon at them. Annja threw her arms around Aidan and half vaulted, half rolled with him over the top of the lathe. A shotgun boomed, yellow muzzle-flare blooming. Lead pellets skittered across the floor and against the lathe’s metal pedestal where the two had crouched an eyeblink before.

  Annja landed hard and Aidan’s weight came down on top of her and squashed the breath from her body.

  By force of will alone she sucked air back into her lungs with a great convulsive inhalation. She shoved Aidan aside, rolled to her feet, gathered herself and sprang.

  She heard the shotgun slide being racked as she jumped over some kind of waist-high mechanism covered in black plastic and curling duct tape. She steeled herself to receive the next charge of shot at contact range. Instead she cleared the plastic-wrapped machine unopposed and the sole of her boot caught the gunman in the chest in a flying kick. He windmilled backward, the shotgun flying from his hand.

  Annja did a graceless three-point landing. Pain shot from her knee where it struck the concrete floor. The impact was so savage that white lightning seemed to thread through her brain. Across the main floor someone shouted and opened up on her with an automatic weapon of some sort. To her intense relief her knee did not lock or give way when she came up on hands and feet and scrambled like a four-legged spider back to cover.

  Aidan awaited her, crouched down in a narrow aisle, hair and eyes wild. With a white-knuckled hand he brandished a crescent wrench he’d found somewhere. Unfortunately the tool was no more than ten inches long and did not make a threatening weapon.

  “Listen,” she told him, breathing hard and massaging her right knee, which throbbed. “You just stay here until everybody’s distracted. Then try to find the jar.”

  “What are you going to do?” Pascoe asked.

  “Something showy and stupid enough to make sure everybody’s looking at me,” she said.

  “Wait—”

  She didn’t. She couldn’t. Bent low she scrambled several feet deeper into the foundry, back toward the office, and peered over a steel table with a shelf beneath it piled thick with rusty junk.

  The fight raged unabated. She guessed both the White Tree and the Malkuth contingent
s had called in reinforcements. At least eight bodies were lying in her field of vision, on the floor, draped over equipment, sprawled at the base of a metal stair up to the catwalk. Meanwhile pairs and groups still shot and screamed and fought. She wasn’t even sure they were paying attention to whether the person they raged and raved and struggled to destroy was on their own side or not.

  Men brandishing firearms had made little impression on the foundry workers. Men firing firearms made quite the impression indeed. Wisely the wiry-muscled men in the hard hats had vanished. The white-collar types had retreated within the office and locked the door, leaving two of their number lying unmoving outside. One was the skinny youngster who had been shot in the knee. He had apparently bled out or been finished off somehow. Possibly he’d just stopped a stray round; it was clearly not his day, Annja thought.

  Wreathed in pink ghostly flames a new crucible swung out of the furnace, white-hot metal slopping over the sides. It was an alarming sight. It would have dumped its load across the already filled mold pallet, which had not been removed out the side door along the steel track laid into the concrete floor when the last crucible had emptied itself into it. But instead of flooding the shop floor with liquid metal the vessel stopped to swing perilously midway between furnace and mold. Someone out of Annja’s sight must have thrown a cutoff switch.

  A man, one of Highsmith’s devotees by his clothing, which looked as if it had been expensively tailored before it had been torn and yanked every which way, began hacking at the office door with a fire ax. It was a bizarre gesture. To either side the walls were mostly window and many of them had been shot out. He could have simply scrambled through with little effort. Evidently the violent frenzy had so gripped him he never even considered the possibility.

  Is he possessed? Annja wondered. Maybe he’s done it all himself, indulging himself in an ecstasy of pure destruction. It came to her to wonder, with a shock, whether the demons everyone spoke of were actual entities, possessed of any separate existence of their own, or were merely projections of human anger and fear and hatred.