Even here, thousands of feet above, with the reversed trade winds blowing cold against their backs, the fire stroked them with its heat. Kolabati watched Jack hold out his hands to warm them, then turn his wet back toward the fire. The wind had an icy bite at ten thousand feet. He must have been freezing. The Asian, too, rotated his wet clothing toward the heat.
“I’ve figured out why Pele is so huhu,” Moki said, shouting above Haleakala’s roar. “She’s seen her people abandoning the old ways and becoming malihini to their own traditions. She’s sent us all a message.”
Jack was staring down into the fire. “I’d say she’s one very touchy lady.”
“Ah!” said Moki, glancing off to their right. “The other celebrants arrive. The ceremony can begin.”
He strode away toward the approaching Niihauans. Their elderly alii raised his feathered staff and they all knelt before Moki.
Kolabati felt a cold hand grip her arm: Jack.
“He’s just kidding about this human sacrifice stuff, isn’t he? I mean, I keep expecting Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour to show up.”
Kolabati could barely meet his eyes. “I wish he were, but he means it. The group over there, the ones wearing the feathers and such, they’re the last of the purebred traditional Hawaiians from the forbidden island of Niihau. Moki confronted them last night and told them he was Maui.”
Jack’s eyes widened. “He thinks he’s an island?”
“No. He’s mad but not that mad. Maui was a god who came up here ages ago, right where we’re standing, and trapped the sun and forced it to make the days longer. When Moki told them he was Maui, the Niihauans didn’t believe him. One of them stabbed him in the chest with a spear.”
Jack glanced over to where Moki stood talking with the Niihauan alii.
“You mean tried to stab him in the chest.”
“No. The spearhead sank to its full length right here.”
She reached out and touched a spot over Jack’s heart.
He gave her a quick look, then stared again at Moki.
“The necklace?”
Kolabati nodded.
“It didn’t work that way when I wore it.”
“It’s never worked that way. Something’s happened to it. It’s been activated, stimulated in some way that I don’t understand.”
“I do,” Jack said, still staring at Moki.
“You do? How can you—?”
“That’s why I’m here. I need that necklace. There’s someone back in New York who might be able to set the world right again. But he needs the necklace to do it.”
The thought of giving away the second necklace to a stranger jolted Kolabati. She turned to look at Moki and held her breath as she saw a middle-aged Niihauan rise and step toward him with a raised knife. Moki stood firm, showing no fear. In fact, he gestured the man forward. The Niihauan stepped closer, and in a blur of motion raised the knife and plunged it into Moki’s chest.
Jack cried, “Jesus Christ!” while Ba stiffened and muttered something unintelligible.
Kolabati watched the rim with fatalistic distaste as Moki staggered back a step, then straightened. He grasped the knife handle with both hands, and slowly, deliberately, his body shaking convulsively, withdrew the bloody blade from his chest. The Niihauan looked on in openmouthed amazement, then raised his face and arms toward the sky. Moki gave him a moment, then rammed the dripping blade into his heart.
As the man screamed in agony, Jack turned away, cursing under his breath. Kolabati continued to watch. Human sacrifices had been part of her childhood. When you are born to a priest and priestess of a temple where humans were regularly thrown to rakoshi, it became a matter-of-fact event. In their case, a necessity—the rakoshi had to be fed. But this was different. This was obscene, serving no useful purpose other than feeding Moki’s delusions.
As she watched Moki lift the Niihauan’s corpse and hurl it into the fire, a sacrifice to the false goddess, Pele, Jack turned to her.
“How the hell did you get involved with this maniac?”
“A long, sad story, Jack. Believe me, he was nothing like this before the sun and the earth began to betray us.”
Inside she mourned for the Moki who had been, the Moki she sensed was irretrievably lost to her.
“I’ll have to take your word for that. But right now he’s got to be stopped. And one way to stop him is to get that necklace from him.”
“More easily said than done when you’re talking about a man who heals like Moki.”
“I might have a way.” His eyes bored into hers. “Will you help?”
She nodded vigorously. “Of course.”
But don’t expect to walk out of here with Moki’s necklace when we get it back.
TUESDAY
Passages
WFPW-FM
JO: Hey, we’re back. You probably thought we jumped ship like most everybody else in town, didn’t you. Not us, man. We lost our power for a bit there. As we’re sure you already know, the whole city’s dark.
FREDDY: Yeah, but we’ve got a generator going now so we’re staying on the air, just like we promised.
JO: Trouble is, we won’t be able to bring you much news. The Internet is shaky again and the wire services are shutting down. But we’ll stay on and do the best we can.
FREDDY: Yeah. Semper fi, man.
Dinu Pass, Romania
“I think we’re lost, Nick,” Bill said.
They were tipping and grinding and scraping along what passed for a road in these parts as Bill fought the wheel of the Romanian equivalent of a Land Rover—rust-streaked, an odometer in kilometers, creaky, ratchety steering, failing brakes, and a leaky exhaust system. But it seemed damn near indestructible, and its thick glass so far had proven itself impervious to the bugs that had swarmed them in the Ploiesti area. Not too many bugs around here, though. Not many humans or animals around to feed on.
Bill squinted ahead. Sheer mountain walls towered on either side, closer on his left, but the formerly seamless blackness beyond the flickering, dancing headlights was showing some cracks. Morning was coming. Good. Although traveling east had made the night mercifully short, he was tired of the darkness. He had a blinding headache from the car’s carbon monoxide–tainted air as well as the tension growing in his neck; his left leg and right arm burned from fighting the creaky clutch and stubborn gearshift; and he was sure they’d missed a crucial turn about ten kilometers back.
And he’d begun talking to Nick. Nick hadn’t deigned to reply yet, but the sound of his own voice gave Bill the feeling that he wasn’t completely alone out here in a remote mountain pass in the heart of a benighted country where he spoke not a word of the native language.
“We’ll never find our way back home again. Unless it’s in a pine box.”
Joe Ashe had piloted them into Romania in great time, riding the jet stream all the way. The field at Ploiesti had been deserted except for one of Joe’s East European pilot buddies—apparently the Ashe brothers had a global network of kindred spirits—who had this beat-up old land rover waiting for them.
They’d assumed Bill would wait until daylight before setting out. But dawn, such as it was these days, had been nearly three hours away. And three hours seemed like a lifetime. Sure, it was 6:02 A.M. local time, but the clock in Bill’s body read only midnight. He was too wired to sleep, so why not put the time to good use? The Romanian rover looked sturdy enough—more like a converted half-track mini-tank than a car—so he’d loaded Nick into the passenger seat and headed out into the darkness.
A foolish mistake, Bill realized now. He glanced at his watch. Eight o’clock. According to the Sapir curve, the coming day would be about half an hour shorter than the shortest day of the year in the dead of all the Decembers that had preceded the celestial changes.
Bill shivered. A new kind of winter had come. A winter of the soul.
“I know what you’re going to say, Nick. You’
re going to say, ‘I told you so.’ And maybe you did, but I guess I wasn’t listening. Doesn’t matter now, though. We’re stuck out here in the middle of nowhere and we’ll just have to wait until the light comes and hope to find somebody who can tell us how to get to this keep place.”
Nick, ever polite, refrained from an I-told-you-so.
Bill scanned the terrain ahead for a level place to park and noticed the road widening. Great. He could pull to the side and wait for the light. Then he saw the white shapes ahead. As he got closer he realized they were houses. A cluster of them. A village.
“Maybe there is a God after all, Nick,” but he knew Nick didn’t believe that. Neither did he.
Bill almost wished again for the old days when he did believe. Because he’d be praying now for help, for direction, for the Lord to inspire his hands on the wheel to guide them to the right road and lead them to their destination.
But those days were gone. His god was dead. Mumbled words would not bring help from on high. He was going to have to do this just the way he’d always done things—by himself.
As he followed the road on its winding course among the houses, he felt no lessening of his sense of isolation. What had appeared to be a village was really no more than a collection of huts, and those huts looked beat up and run down. As the headlight beams raked them he saw how their white stucco walls were scarred and chipped, noted the gaps in the thatch and shakes covering their roofs. Hard times had come to this place. He didn’t have to search the huts to know the village was deserted.
“Now we’re really lost.” Fatigue settled on him like a ratty blanket. “Lost in the middle of nowhere. If there is a God, he’s forsaken this place.”
Then he saw the flames. On the far side of the village, flickering fitfully in the fading darkness. It looked like a campfire. He drove toward it, steadily picking up speed.
A fire meant people and that meant he wasn’t completely lost. Maybe he could still salvage this trip.
But suddenly he saw nothing ahead—no road, no grass, no earth, only emptiness. He stood on the brakes, tumbling Nick into the dashboard as the rover swerved and skidded to a stalling halt at the edge of a precipice. A hole, dammit! Another one of those bottomless holes!
No, wait. To his left, vague and dim, an ancient bridge of some sort, with stone supports plunging into the pit. It coursed across the emptiness—a rocky gorge, he saw now; not a hole—toward the campfire. And now that he was closer and the sky was lighter, Bill realized the campfire wasn’t outside. It was inside, glowing through a tall open gate set within a massive stone wall that seemed to spring from the mountainside. He could make out human forms standing around it. Some of them might even be staring back at him. On the structure’s leading edge, a thick, sturdy tower rose a good forty or fifty feet above the top of the wall. The whole thing looked like a small castle, a pocket fortress. He felt a smile spread over his face—how long since he’d really smiled?
He was here. He’d found it.
The keep.
Bill let out a whoop and pounded the steering wheel.
“We made it, Nick!”
He restarted the vehicle and headed for the causeway, intending to drive across. But when the headlights picked up the worn and ragged timbers, he stopped, unsure if he should risk it.
“What do you think, Nick?”
The question was rhetorical, but Bill noticed that Nick seemed more aware than he’d been a few moments ago. Had the impact with the dashboard jostled his mind? Or was it something else?
Maybe it was all the bugs swarming around the keep. He hadn’t noticed them before, but he could see now that the air was thick with them. Perhaps because the only people in the pass were clustered around that fire inside. But why were the doors open? And why weren’t the bugs running rampant through the place, chewing up the inhabitants?
One thing Bill did know was that walking across the causeway now was impossible. They’d be ground beef before they traveled twenty feet. Of course, they could wait. But Bill couldn’t wait, not another minute. He hadn’t come this far through the dark simply to sit here with his destination in sight and wait for dawn. Screw the bugs. He was going across. Now.
“All right, Nick. Here goes nothing.”
He put the rover in first gear and edged forward, fixing his gaze on the timbers directly ahead. Not so easy with the bugs batting against the vehicle with increasing frequency. A bumpy ride, but smoother than the ridge road they’d been traveling. A glance ahead showed a group of figures clustered in the gateway of the keep, watching him.
“Stop.”
Bill slammed on the brakes. Nick’s face was pressed against the side window. His voice was as lifeless as ever, but Bill sensed real emotion hidden within it—almost excitement.
“What is it, Nick? What’s wrong?”
“I see them. Down there. Little pieces of the sword.”
He was pointing down to his right, below the base of the tower, down to where its rocky foundation melted into the gorge, fifty feet below. Bill could barely make out the bottom. How could Nick see little pieces of metal?
“I don’t see a thing, Nick.”
“Right there. They glow with bright blue fire. Are you blind?”
Bill strained to see but could find only darkness below.
“I guess so. But as long as one of us can see them, we’re in business.”
Bill was congratulating himself on how smoothly this mission was going when the rear window cracked and bellied inward as one of the bigger bugs hit it like a cinder block. It held, but for how long? Because suddenly they were under full-scale attack as the bugs launched a blitzkrieg on the rover, scraping, gnawing, pounding, and slapping against every square inch of the vehicle’s surface, as if the approach of dawn had driven them into one final feeding frenzy before they’d be forced to return to their hole.
Bill hesitated to release the clutch. He couldn’t see. With all the chew wasps, belly flies, spearheads, men-of-war, and other things clustered against the windshield and the other windows, the outer world had become a squirming mass of gnashing jaws, writhing tentacles, and acid-filled sacs. He’d be driving blind. No guardrail, and fifty feet of empty air awaiting them if the rover strayed more than three feet left or right.
Then the rear window bulged farther inward with the weight of the onslaught and he knew he had no choice. Even going over the side was preferable to sitting here and being eaten alive when that window gave way.
Taking a deep breath, Bill eased up on the clutch and they started to move. He found that by looking down through the very bottom of his side window he could catch an occasional glimpse of the causeway’s edge. He used that as a guide.
As they rolled forward, he heard a noise, faint and indistinct at first, but growing steadily in volume. It sounded almost like human voices—cheering voices. It was. The sound reached into the rover and touched him, warmed him. Using it as a beacon, he increased his speed, homing in on it.
And suddenly—like driving under an overpass in the heart of a cloudburst—the bugs were gone. Swept away, every last one of them. Silence in the rover. Except for the voices. Instead of bugs the vehicle was now surrounded by cheering people. Men and women, middle aged and older with rugged peasant faces, coarse clothing, sheepskin vests, woolly hats. They pulled open the rover’s door and helped him out, all the while shaking his hand and slapping his back. Bill returned the smiles and the handshakes, then glanced back along the causeway. The bugs crowded the air outside the arch of the gateway, but not one ventured through.
He turned back to the people and saw children and goats wandering around behind them. And beyond those, on the stone block walls, crosses. Hundreds of crosses. Thousands of crosses.
What sort of place was this? And why did he feel as if somehow he’d returned home after a long journey?
With the coming of day the bugs fled back to the darkness where they lived and the peasants trooped out of the keep with their children and anima
ls, crossing the causeway to what was left of the real world, leaving Bill and Nick and their vehicle behind with the ashes of the night fire.
He knew he and Nick should head down into the gorge to search for the shards of the shattered sword, but he could not leave this place. Not just yet. The keep took him in, wrapped him in the arms of its walls, and demanded his attention.
The crosses … how could he spend two thirds of his life in the priesthood and not be taken in by a place so thoroughly studded with crosses? Not dull, dreary, run-of-the-mill Latin crosses, but strange thick ones, with brass uprights and nickel crosspieces set high, almost at the top. Like a tau cross or what was called St. Anthony’s cross.
Not all of the villagers had left. An ancient, white-bearded gent—eighty if he was a day—named Alexandru remained behind. He spoke as much English as Bill did Romanian, but they found common ground in German. Bill had studied the language in high school and college and had been fluent enough to read Faust in the original text. He found he’d retained enough to communicate with Alexandru.
The old man showed him around the structure. His father, also named Alexandru, had been the keep’s last caretaker in the days before World War Two. It could have used a caretaker now—a whole crew of them. Snow, wind, rain, drought, heat, and cold had left their marks on the keep. All the upper floors within the tower had collapsed, leaving nothing but a giant, rubble-choked stone cylinder. Yet although crumbling and in sad disrepair, it still exuded a certain power.
“It used to be a bad place,” Alexandru said. “Now it is a good place. The little monsters will not come here. All around they fly, but never in here.”
The Complete Adversary Cycle: The Keep, the Tomb, the Touch, Reborn, Reprisal, Nightworld (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack) Page 218
