Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Robert Liparulo

  Gheronda cracked it open a few inches and peered in from the side. He thumbed down through the pages, then hinged it all the way over until both covers lay flat. The book was open to a page about three-fourths to the end. It was the color of creamed coffee, appeared water-stained on one side, and had a slightly bumpy texture, like onionskin paper. Mounted to it, at odds with the book’s apparent antiquity, were color photographs, two columns of three.

  Jagger pointed. “That’s the handsome one. He just stood there, watching the others.”

  “Bale,” Gheronda said, and made a disgusted sound with his mouth. “This makes two times in less than half a year,” he said. “First the Tribe attacked the monastery, this place of God and a supposed Haven for any Immortal who needs it. Now Bale and his ruffians.”

  Not long ago Jagger had whittled Gheronda’s face into a piece of wood, looking for something to challenge the new skill a physical therapist had suggested he learn to get used to his hook. While doing so, he’d realized the old man had a cartoonish mug—bulbous nose, pronounced cheekbones, deep-set eyes, sloppy gray beard. He’d made the mistake of telling Beth that within Tyler’s earshot.

  “Grumpy!” the boy had exclaimed. “You know, one of the seven dwarfs.” And he had pegged it perfectly. Gheronda’s disposition was far from grumpy, but you’d never know it looking at him. Now that cartoon-character face became a thing of utter ferocity.

  Gheronda slammed his fist on the desk.

  Jagger had never seen him this riled. In fact, he’d been such a model of even temperament that whenever Jagger felt himself backsliding into his hate-everything mood he’d think about Gheronda, just taking everything in stride, believing everything would be all right. And if it weren’t, well, that was all right too. All in God’s plan.

  “Hold on,” Jagger said, remembering. “Bale. Owen said something about him. Leader of a group of Immortals who broke away from the Tribe?”

  “They were never a part of the Tribe, not really. They became immortal at the golden calf, like the others, but they never cared about redemption. They embraced immortality, and since they’d never answer for their sins—their thinking, anyway—why not rack up as many as possible? Nasty bunch. All they want to do is destroy and kill, and they don’t care who: men, women, children. Call themselves the Clan.” He said the word as though it tasted bad in his mouth. “Sort of a jab at the Tribe.”

  As an Immortal himself, Jagger should have had personal knowledge of Bale and his Clan, but they were simply more memories that had slipped between the cracks.

  He returned his attention to the photographs. Each bore the image of a single person, four men and two women. They all appeared to be angled marginally away from the camera, as though they were unaware of the photographer.

  “These are candid shots?” he asked.

  “The Clan doesn’t pose for pictures,” Gheronda said. “In fact, they don’t like their photos taken at all. But as host of a Haven, one of three sanctuaries around the world where any of the Immortals can go for protection—or used to be able to go—we need to know whom to allow in and whom to keep out, if they pose a threat to someone we’re protecting. He waved a hand over the page. “Owen took these for us a few years ago.”

  “Owen?” Jagger said. Owen had left the Tribe when he became one of Christ’s apostles. Since then he’d been trying to convince the Tribe that their goal of regaining God’s favor by killing sinners would never work. He believed his purpose on earth, the reason for his continued immortality, was to help others. When Jagger had met him six months ago, he’d just come from a war zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, working with Médecins Sans Frontières—Doctors Without Borders. And had he not shown up with his medical skills and helicopter when he did—a few minutes after Nevaeh shot Tyler—his son would be dead now. He loved Owen for that, but he believed that had they met under less trying circumstances they still would have become dear friends. Owen was just that way; it was hard not to appreciate him. Jagger had spoken with him only once since then.

  He looked down at the photographs. Where had he seen Bale before? Then it dawned on him. “That’s Bale,” he said, pointing at a painting on the twin doors of a wooden cabinet across the aisle from where they stood. Tyler had described it as a zombie coming out of a grave. In it a man—Bale—was pushing himself out of the earth, dirt falling from his hair and face and mouth. Strokes of black paint, almost imperceptible against the blackness of the painted sky, radiated out from behind him. They could have represented the faintest of mist—or huge bat-like wings. Jagger felt his skin grow cold.

  “Nevaeh painted that,” Gheronda said. “In 1609.”

  “That’s the triptych you showed Beth and Tyler, isn’t it?” he asked. “Inside is a painting of the Israelites worshiping the golden calf, right? I’d like to see it.”

  Gheronda smiled and laid his hand on Jagger’s shoulder. “Perhaps another time,” he said. “Do you recognize any of the others on this page?”

  There was the muscular guy, complete with raccoon eyes. “Him,” Jagger said.

  “Therion,” Gheronda said.

  “And him.” The tall commando who’d lugged the .50-cal machine gun, sans war paint in the photo.

  “Artimus.”

  And there was the rock’n’roll girl.

  “Lilit.”

  Jagger leaned closer to inspect the photos of the other man and woman. “Not these two,” he said.

  “The woman is Hester,” Gheronda said. “The studious-looking man with the glasses, that’s Cillian.”

  “I didn’t see him tonight.”

  “He’s their pilot.”

  “He must have stayed in the helicopter.” He remembered the way the copter had maneuvered to avoid Leo’s missile. The guy had chops.

  They looked at all the photos together. The Clan. It was clear Gheronda regarded them as worse than the Tribe, and yes, they had just killed three monks and severely wounded Ollie. But the Tribe had kidnapped Beth, shot Tyler, and tried to destroy a major city—killing 312, the news said, before Owen stopped them. He shook his head.

  How could the Clan be worse?

  [ 17 ]

  The helicopter zipped low over the Sinai’s Colored Canyon on its way to Taba Airport, one hundred miles northeast of St. Catherine’s. The airport was perfect for the Clan’s needs: its one runway was long enough to accommodate their big Bombardier Global 7000 jet, small enough that its officials could be bribed into losing records of their landing and takeoff, and only forty minutes to the monastery by helicopter, which they’d been able to rent from a tour operator. Cillian was at the controls.

  From his backward-facing seat behind the unoccupied copilot’s chair, Bale struggled to get his jacket off. His black T-shirt was torn near the sleeve seam and glistened with blood. He inserted his fingers, ripped the material away.

  Beside him, Lilit leaned over a tackle box on the floor between her feet. She rummaged through an assortment of medical supplies. “How bad?” she asked without looking up.

  “Tore a chunk of meat away,” Bale said. “No bone. Nothing to worry about.”

  She handed him a plastic bottle with a bent tube on top. He aimed the tip of the tube at the wound and squeezed the bottle. A stream of saline washed the blood away. He watched her fill a syringe from a rubber-topped vial, then took it from her and jabbed the needle into the wound. The local analgesic would dull the pain without affecting his mind; he wanted to stay clearheaded at least until they were on the jet heading out of the country. No telling how the Egyptians would respond to their attack on the monastery or how quickly they’d move to apprehend the perpetrators. He dressed his shoulder with gauze, taped it down, and leaned back. He glanced out the window, but it was too dark to see any of the landscape’s famously contorted and colorful rock formations, canyons, and plateaus.

  The others were laughing it up and congratulating themselves on a successful mission, like high school football players after winning a big game.
At least they’d waited until he reported on his injury.

  Lilit closed the tackle box and picked up something from her lap: the controller she’d used to operate the Cobra that had taken out the first two monks. Normally Bale would have operated a drone himself, but they’d had only three, and sometimes being leader meant letting others have all the fun. Therion—facing Lilit across the aisle that separated the cabin’s two bench seats—said something nasty about her letting them drop her Cobra down a well, and she hurled the controller at him.

  “They all got thrown in the well,” she reminded them.

  “Only after you showed them it could be done,” Therion said. He ripped the controller in half and tossed the pieces on the floor among their machine guns, rifles, and swords. As if the man’s layers of bulging muscles weren’t intimidating enough, he got off on tearing things apart that seemed impossible to tear apart with bare hands: furniture, trees, the human body. Bale had once seen him dismantle a 1968 Cadillac with nothing but brawn and fury.

  Waving his bulky arms around, Therion elbowed Artimus, seated beside him. Artimus promptly punched him in the face, making a sound like a baseball bat striking a tree. Therion gave him a wild look, his crazy eyes seeming that much crazier set in the black raccoon stripe tattooed across his face. Both men started laughing, then Artimus pulled a knife from his boot—a nine-inch blade, wide as a cowboy’s belt, with a serrated spine—and flicked it over one of Therion’s pectorals.

  Therion looked down at his bleeding chest and scowled at Artimus. “Keep the cutting to yourself,” he warned, and Artimus did, dragging the tip along the length of his own forearm, as he’d done a thousand times, watching it bleed.

  Bale eyed the person seated directly opposite him, still clad in a leather mask with opaque black-lensed goggles, brass-framed, and a gas mask tube in place of a mouth. One arm was draped over a knee, gloved fingers dangling. He watched as a drop of blood grew fat on the tip of a finger and fell, plopping into a small pool on the floor.

  “You’re injured,” he said.

  The unbloodied hand came up, found a zipper in the back of the mask, and ran it up to the crown. Watching it come off was like witnessing someone peeling off his face. Hester dropped the mask into her lap and ran the gloved fingertips of one hand over her close-cropped blond hair, scratching the scalp. She raised her wounded hand and inspected both sides.

  “More damage to the glove than to me,” she said. She shrugged and said, “Flesh wound.”

  “We were both lucky tonight.”

  They gazed at each other for a few moments, unable to hold eye contact with the way the helicopter jostled them.

  Bale said, “Well?”

  Hester smiled and reached into an inside pocket of her leather duster. She produced a shard of stone, roughly the length of a railroad spike and twice as thick. One end was broken into a blunt point. It could have been a heavy stone-aged spearhead, but Bale knew better.

  He held out his hand, and Hester dropped the shard into it. A flash of white consumed his vision. A second later he could see again. Oh, could he see. In the cabin with them were creatures, the most majestic and gorgeous beings imaginable, a variety of them, but all powerful in form, with claws and fangs; quivering, ragged, and veinous wings; sheathed blades; fidgety arms; gaping grins. Black eyes that darted around as though expecting an assault at any moment from any direction, but always coming back to him, watching him. One with a scaly black hide stood in front of Artimus, looking from Bale to Artimus, using a finger to push the tip of the knife along the man’s forearm. Another, as small as a child, sat on Therion’s lap. It boasted a chest nearly as muscular as Therion’s, but the rest of its body was right out of the Holocaust: from the rib cage its stomach collapsed in, seemingly to its spine; sharp, protruding hip bones; limbs like cloth-covered bones. It rested its misshapen head on Therion’s chest and caressed Therion’s face with twig-like fingers. As solid and substantial as the creature appeared to Bale, Therion’s waving arms passed through it, neither of them noticing.

  Beautiful.

  A monkey-looking thing with a human face and tiny flapping wings leapt from Hester’s head to Therion’s to Artimus’s and back again, making a game of it.

  A large creature occupied the empty seat next to Lilit, who was between Bale and it. Bale leaned forward to get a good look. Its body bore human proportions, more or less—its arms were longer, each hinged with an extra elbow—but its face was that of a dragon’s, long snout under which its jaw opened and closed like an alligator’s; almond eyes, solid red.

  Beyond it, a face peered in through the window. The beast seemed to be clinging to the outside of the helicopter.

  Bale turned to look out his own window, focusing beyond his reflection. More creatures were flying through the night sky—he counted five, eight, twelve of them. They were twisting, weaving, soaring up and dipping down, like dolphins in the wake of a ship; all of them pretty much staying with the helicopter.

  And what’s this . . . ?

  In the distance, lights ran in perfectly vertical lines from the earth into the heavens. They were scattered around a vast area, no beginning or end in either direction, some thicker and brighter than others, a single beam here, a cluster of them there. He wondered about them, then something poked his side and he turned.

  Hester was leaning out from her seat, a crossbow arrow in hand, ready to jab him again. She said, “You there?”

  He grinned. “Better than ever.”

  “Have you heard a word I said?” The monkey thing appeared to be picking something out of her hair.

  “About what?”

  “I asked what you were doing, glaring around like a druggie, talking to yourself.”

  Ignoring her, he scanned the cabin, making eye contact with each grinning creature, then looked at the stone shard in his hand. When he looked up again, the Clan had fallen silent, all eyes on him. As he had done with the creatures, he stared at each of his human companions in turn, stopping on Lilit. He said, “Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  He addressed all of them. “Are you ready?”

  Therion yelled, “Yeah!”

  “Good,” Bale said, “because I have a feeling things are about to get a whole lot more exciting.”

  [ 18 ]

  Gheronda started to close the book, but Jagger stopped him.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. He was leaning in to examine the picture of the woman Gheronda called Hester. She was striding along a crowded sidewalk. “That slicker . . . and those boots. Steampunk was wearing—” He turned to Gheronda. “Steampunk’s a woman.”

  “She’s Clan,” the old man said, as if that’s all that mattered. He flipped the page, then another, moving toward the front of the book. “It’s in chronological order,” he said. As he continued back in time, the photos became faded, then black-and-white . . . then sepia, tiny cracks forming. A few more pages and the photos gave way to drawings, rendered in exquisite detail. Hairstyles and fashions changed. People coming and going, but a core remained the same: Bale, Therion, Lilit, the one called Cillian. He stopped on a drawing of a boy. Dressed in a toga, the child looked about twelve. As drawn, nothing about his face differentiated him from any other boy that age, no scowl or wicked smile, just a boy.

  “So young,” Jagger said. There were children in the Tribe and that was difficult enough to think about, but in the Clan—Jagger couldn’t believe it.

  Gheronda said, “He’s on a few pages, so he might have been with the Clan twenty or fifty years, maybe longer. Then he disappeared. No word of what happened.”

  “They ate him.” The voice came from behind them, and they both jumped. Father Leo stood there, a slight smile, hands on hips.

  “They did what?” Jagger said.

  Leo shrugged. “I don’t know that they did. I’m just saying they’re the type who would.”

  “Did you come just to give us a scare?” Gheronda asked.

  Leo nodded toward Jagger.
“I stopped by your apartment. Beth and Tyler are wondering about Ollie’s condition . . . and where you are. They’re pretty upset. I said I’d hunt you down.”

  “Thank you. I’ll head over in a few minutes.” He nodded at the book and said to Gheronda, “Turn to the first page.” When the old man did, Jagger’s heart leapt into his throat. Attached to the page was a swath of animal skin. On it was the etching of a single man, Bale. He was on his knees, arms and face raised, mouth open, as if screaming at God. He wore something like a skirt, his upper body bare. Faint wings stretched out behind him. From the side of his face another face emerged, twisted and hideous, with bulging eyes and a nose so short and so dominated by nostrils it appeared almost nonexistent, like the sinus cavities on a skull. Fat lips stretched over a mouthful of fangs. Arms—corded with veins and muscles—branched out of Bale’s forearms, also straining toward the sky, clawed fingers splayed.

  Jagger realized he had raised RoboHand and was holding it between the etching and his face, as if protecting himself from the image. He scratched his cheek with the hook.

  “Nevaeh etched this one too,” Gheronda said. “Pre-Christ.”

  Jagger snapped his head toward him. “Nevaeh? Where did she come up with the idea?”

  The old man sighed. “You don’t have to know Bale long to think of him as demonic.”

  “Demonic?”

  “Oh, he’s human enough. Immortal, but human.”

  “And evil,” Leo said, and Jagger and Gheronda looked at him. “Owen says Bale was the instigator of what happened at the golden calf. He threw the first rock at Hur, and everyone joined in. He called for a human sacrifice, a baby.”

  Jagger felt sick. No way he could have been part of that. He’d say not in a million years, but it had been only 3,500.

  Gheronda reached across Jagger’s field of vision and closed the book. Jagger watched him put it away and lock the drawer. “So we know it was the Clan who attacked,” Jagger said. “Now what?”