“Together?”
“Together.”
The word was like nectar to the creature.
It reached deeper into the Raven King’s mind, brushing aside the shallow memories of the fat man, rooting all the way down to the memories of stone that Iblis had locked away in the darkest part of his psyche — tortured memories of his centuries long imprisonment within the Kelani artifacts. “You understand.” The Mujina gloried in the fact that, amid all of this suffering, it had found a kindred soul: a true prisoner. And like it, Iblis had only recently tasted freedom for the first time in millennia. It tasted so many of the same hungers in the Goa’uld’s mind. “We are the same,” it said, truly believing it. “We are the same, you and I.”
“Come with me.” Iblis held out his hand and led the Mujina back into the shadows.
* * *
Samantha Carter lay on her back looking up at the stars. They seemed to be on fire.
She couldn’t hear anything.
She hadn’t been able to since the explosion. Her head rang with a percussion of tinnitus in her own blood. Every inch of her body hurt. The shockwave from the explosion had punched her violently from her feet, throwing her more than ten feet through the air, and she had come down hard, face first into the wet earth. She’d barely managed to crawl into the shadows and roll over onto her back. All she could think was that at least she was alive. The drums burned out of control.
She heard gunshots. Retaliatory fire. Sporadic bursts, single shots. The searchlights stopped beaming down the fire and turned on the yard. She could see people, though from the ground with the light streaming down into her face they were all featureless shadows.
The colonel and the others must have hit the gates. It was only a matter of time before one of them found her. “This sure isn’t Kansas,” she said, closing her eyes.
“Damn right it isn’t, Major. Now up you get before a tornado comes and dumps us on our asses in Oz and we’re both left feeling rather stupid.”
“Good to see you too, sir.” She reached out a hand for O’Neill to help her up, wincing as she moved.
He hauled her up to her feet. “How bad are you hurt?”
“I’ll live.”
“That’s what I like to hear. Now let’s make like a pair of shepherds and get the flock out of here.”
Teal’c came around on her other side and she walked between them. “How’s Daniel?”
“Whining like a baby,” O’Neill said. “Which I take to mean he’s doing just fine. It’s only when he shuts up that I worry.”
“O’Neill,” Teal’c said suddenly, pointing at something in the shadows. It took Sam a moment to realize that it was actually a pile of bodies slumped up against the side of the main building.
“What is it, Teal’c?”
“The Goa’uld I spoke of: Iblis,” Teal’c said. He walked across to the pile of bodies and dragged Iblis’ corpse aside. The body was a mess, its face twisted.
“He doesn’t look so good,” O’Neill said.
“He is dead, O’Neill.” Teal’c made sure by wrenching the head until the vertebrae cracked. He held on to the corpse a moment longer than he needed to.
“You sure about that?”
“I am.” He stepped away from the body, letting it slump to the ground.
“Well, that’s one less thing we need to worry about then.”
“I do not think so, O’Neill. I believe we have one more thing to worry about: the Goa’uld has abandoned this host body.”
“Well that’s just peachy.”
* * *
Jubal Kane saw his brother through the people. No, he amended silently, they weren’t people, not anymore. They were living dead, shamble-footed corpses stripped of dignity, stripped of life, stripped of everything that made them human. It made Kane sick with rage.
The rain had soaked into his layers of coats, more than doubling their weight on his shoulders. He didn’t care, he only had eyes for his brother, Zarif, or Corvus Keen, or whatever he was calling himself today. The so-called Raven King stood with his swollen knuckles planted on his ample hips, deep in conversation with one of his minions. Jubal licked his lips and started walking toward him. He kept his pace measured, almost leisurely, as he moved between the living dead. He had no eyes for them, no kind words. The rest of his men could play rescuer, Jubal Kane had a purpose — and that purpose was execution.
He stripped the first coat as he walked, leaving it in the dirt behind him, and the second and third as he sidestepped the body of a woman. Dropping the coats was like shedding skin, being reborn with each layer less, leaner, harder, more powerful. More dangerous. He shucked off the forth coat, a gray military greatcoat, and as he emerged from the ring of Kelani prisoners being held back by the Raven Guard, he threw the fifth coat into the face of a thin-faced Corvani.
Everything seemed to slow down then, each second drawing it out and out until it finally snapped into the next. The black sleeves of his fifth coat fluttered like raven’s wings as it flew into the face of the guard. The man cried out, his words unintelligible as they stretched into meaninglessness.
“Brother mine,” Jubal Kane called, twenty-five feet from the corpulent tyrant. Keen’s head came up slowly, looking over the shoulder of his lackey. Kane was surprised his brother had waddled out alone. On any other day he wouldn’t have been able to get near the bastard. There was no recognition in his too-blue eyes. That was galling. Jubal Kane took another step toward him. He held his arms down loosely at his sides, fingers wide, stretching the tension out of them. He had imagined this moment countless times, in every scenario imaginable, brother against brother, the final showdown.
But there wasn’t a single one of them in which Corvus Keen didn’t know exactly who it was striding toward him.
“We never were good enough for you, were we Zaf?” He hadn’t called him that in years. The nickname burned in his mouth. Jubal took another step, raising the revolver in his right hand. It had six shots in the cylinder. He had reloaded it when he had first caught sight of the man he had come here to kill. “But this? This is too much. These are your people, your blood, Zaf. Your blood! What happened to you? What could make you do this?” He swept his left arm out to encompass everything around them, the broken souls, the burning buildings, the guards and the liberators: all of it. “And don’t you dare blame it on mother, you worthless whoreson. She loved you every bit as much as you deserved, so I don’t want to hear any of your pitiful moans about being cast out.”
“Quite the monologue,” Corvus Keen said, his slug-like lip curling into a sneer. “Are you finished?”
Jubal Kane squeezed the trigger once, the bullet slamming into his brother’s right shoulder. The impact of the shell bullied him back a step and a blood red rose flowered where the bullet had torn through. He fired a second shot, this one into Keen’s left shoulder, matching the first. The fat man jerked back like a marionette having its strings cut one after the other. The lackey his brother had been talking to howled, trying to put himself between Jubal Kane and his target. Kane squeezed off a third shot, taking Keen through the stomach. The blood leaked down over his gut.
“Stop him!” Keen roared but his voice was lost beneath the report of Jubal’s fourth shot that blew out his left kneecap. The fat man went down, pole-axed. He walked closer. Everyone around him moved so slowly, unable to save the tyrant from his own flesh and blood. The bullets robbed Keen of the control over his own limbs. His arms spasmed as he tried to raise them, though whether to ward off a blow or strike out at the air between them Jubal Kane neither knew nor cared. This was his time. Here. Now.
Jubal raised the revolver for his fifth shot, and as he did the air between them seemed to thicken and shimmer. He took his time, drawing a bead on his brother, thumbing back the trigger for the final shot. It was all about this bullet. He weighed the gun in his hand, realizing that now, when it came right down to it, this was all his brother’s life and his people’s suffering was worth,
a few pounds of metal and a trace of gunpowder.
“This last one, this one is for me.”
Something strange was happening to his brother — an unearthly radiance seemed to burn up his eyes. Was this death? The soul arching out of the body looking for heaven?
Jubal Kane realized something profound then: he really didn’t care.
He put the sixth shot right through his brother’s heart, ending it once and for all.
He walked away, and the Raven Guard let him.
* * *
The Mujina screamed as the final bullet tore into Iblis.
It scrambled forward on its hands and knees, trying to press down on the wounds that had opened so many holes in the man’s flesh. It didn’t care about anyone or anything else. It didn’t want to be alone. Not now. Not when this one had promised to stay with it forever.
“Don’t leave me,” it begged. That was all it could think. Hands slick with blood it tried to push the life back into Iblis’ bloated gut. It reached out with its mind, and touched the twin minds of the dead man. It felt the last flicker of intelligence from the suppressed host mind fail, the motor functions of the body shutting down. The other still burned gloriously, but it could not burn forever, not now that its host was gone. “Please,” it whispered to the second mind, the one it thought of as its friend, and suddenly it knew what to do.
Leaning in close it kissed those bloody lips and welcomed the Goa’uld into its flesh, giving the greatest gift it could: life. In return Iblis fulfilled that bittersweet promise — the Mujina would never be alone again.
It shuddered as the Goa’uld wrapped itself around its cerebral cortex and sank into his mind.
Opening their lips, they — Mujina and Goa’uld — tasted the air and felt whole.
* * *
A black-feathered bird settled on the ruined gates of the Facility. It was not a raven. It was a crow, a proper crow.
Jubal Kane saw it and took it for an omen: there would be no more ravens.
* * *
The liberators counted the cost of their victory. Of the ninety-three guns Jubal Kane had commanded, twenty-seven had fallen. These would be remembered, Kane swore at their graveside. They were buried amid the bones of the other Kelani.
The Corvani fared worse. Despite O’Neill’s protestations, Nadal and Kane gathered up the men who had tortured and tormented their people and told them to beg for mercy. They begged. They got down on their hands and knees in the dirt and begged. It didn’t save a single one of them. None of the Kelani prisoners shed a tear for the Corvani dead. Some shuffled over simply to spit on their bones. It was some small psychological payback for the hell they had put them through. O’Neill understood it but he didn’t like it — but, as he kept telling the others, they weren’t here to rebuild a society, they weren’t the galaxy’s police. These people had to be allowed their own justice. It was important.
They tore down the Mujina’s nest, interring those other bones along with the new dead. “It is time for this to end, all of it,” Jubal Kane said, “the dead deserve to rest.”
All of them except for Corvus Keen. The tyrant’s corpse was dragged outside the compound, into the center of the field, and left to feed the crows.
* * *
The fires took days to burn out.
In that time Jubal Kane tried to get word back to the ghetto. The Rabelais Facility had fallen and Corvus Keen was dead, but that didn’t mean their fight was over. Far from it, there were a dozen other facilities, thousands of black and silver soldiers every bit as twisted by the bigotry of the doctrine, willing to continue the tyrant’s work in his name. But this one victory was not so small. In time thousands of survivors would march with Kane’s guns to the second facility and the third, and the Corvani would be the ones running in fear.
While Kane fought the good fight, Sam, Jack, Daniel and Teal’c searched the ruined facility. They were looking for one of three things: the point of origin glyph, the Stargate or the Goa’uld. They found none of them. Instead, what they did find were logs of the experiments the Corvani scientists had been working on. Sam poured over them with grim fascination and revulsion. So many of them seemed to be obsessed with testing the stresses that the human body was capable of withstanding — tests conducted in similar situations — tortures that offered vital clues as to the effects of G-Forces and such on the test subjects. The columns were all neatly filled out, the data recorded, including the final stresses at which the test case expired. It made gruesome reading. Sam explained what she had found.
Jack reached out and closed the log book. “Move on.”
In another part of the facility they found the treasure room — it was more like a graveyard of lost things. Wallets, purses, shoes, belts, anything that might be of value, was piled in the center of the room by the new arrivals to be sorted later. O’Neill closed the door, wanting nothing to do with this macabre horde.
And then they found the rooms where Kelkus carried out his experiments on those brought in to the facility. This was the worst of it by far and only Teal’c had the stomach to enter.
They all knew what he was looking for: the Goa’uld.
Teal’c refused to believe the creature was dead, and until he’d seen the body neither did O’Neill.
They didn’t find the Goa’uld. Somehow it had found a way out of there before the noose could close around its neck — which meant it had a way out. If they couldn’t find the creature at the very least they could find that and the hunt could continue.
What they did find, stashed away in the loot was the GDO.
* * *
Iblis had left the facility soon after taking his new host.
It was all part of his plan, allowing himself to seemingly be taken by surprise by the man with the low velocity weapon. Of course he could have raised his personal defense shield. He could have crushed the human like some insignificant ant, but Iblis was playing a long game — a shell game. It didn’t matter which shell the Goa’uld inhabited at any given time. That last one had served its very brief purpose, getting him closer to the Mujina. The creature had some very peculiar mental barriers that protected it from direct invasion: he had needed it to welcome him in, to surrender itself. In essence, to love and trust him. It had welcomed him in, and now it was his and all because it was lonely. How simple the creature was to manipulate. By the time his shield shimmered into effect the fifth bullet had undone his old host body. Nothing could have stopped the last one. Had the man shot him in the head, well then there would have been no rebirth, but he did not. He wasted his bullet stopping the pump rather than shutting down the brain. It was typical of the sentimental way the humans thought of their flesh, distilling both love and hate and placing them within the heart despite the fact that they had no place being there. Those were cerebral emotions, born in the brain. It was inevitable that the betrayed brother would aim his last shot for the heart.
This new form was more appealing, and had some rather unusual benefits that would be well worth exploring further, but for now Iblis concerned himself with the secrets locked within the creature’s head. The Mujina shared all of its memories willingly, allowing Iblis access to the thousands upon thousands of souls it had tasted, all of those dreams and fears and memories. And in those stolen pasts he found the Shol’vah. He took the traitor’s life and devoured it. Know your enemy. Know his weaknesses. Know his strengths. That was the art of war at its simplest. And through the Mujina, Iblis knew Teal’c. It knew them all: Colonel Jack O’Neill, the man who had failed his own son, Daniel Jackson, the man who could not save his wife, and Samantha Carter, the woman forever a disappointment to her own father, Jacob… the Tok’ra! Her flesh and blood had been taken as a host by the wretched queen’s spawn — that was worth knowing. It would have to stay away from this one lest she sense its presence within this false flesh. These were its enemy. These Tau’ri who failed everyone around them when they needed them most. It did not fear them. Indeed, through the Mujina, it fe
lt another emotion all together: pity. It pitied them. Iblis closed off that part of his new host. In normal circumstances it would not have allowed any trace of its host to survive, but the Mujina was different. It was more than human. Its gift was useful to the Goa’uld.
Iblis used the rings to transport himself back to the city.
They were looking for the Stargate. Of course, it wasn’t there, and without the correct glyph they would not be able to return home. Iblis wrestled with the desire to simply snuff them out as opposed to simply expediting their return home. Keep your enemies close, keep your treasures closer still. It seemed that it had much to thank them for as they waged their war on the System Lords. They could be an unwitting tool. This was a new way of thinking for Iblis. It was almost, dare he admit it, human. It was devious and cunning and lacked the god-given rightness of Goa’uld beliefs. He smiled as he delved deeper into the Mujina’s memories and understood, recalling its traumatic escape from its prison. The gate had not merely lost contact and slipped, the wormhole had failed catastrophically. This intrigued the Goa’uld. It was rare for a gate to fail, rarer still that the travelers should survive. Of course, as a result, they were stranded. This changed things. No one would be looking for the Tau’ri. They would assume they were already lost. They were already dead to their world so no one would miss them if he finished the job. Already wheels spun within mental wheels. Kill or be killed. That was the way of life. Death was not such a bad place for them to be.
But there was an alternative. The Mujina’s voice was strong inside him. It wanted to help them. He felt its loyalty to its liberators. It was quaint. The creature was so used to showing everyone their heart’s desires now it had a chance to not only show, but to give the Tau’ri everything they wanted. It could open the door that would take them home. By absorbing the Mujina and opening up his mind to it Iblis had given the creature the one thing it knew its companions wanted: the glyph that represented this world on the Stargate. It was ironic, if nothing else. The Mujina knew it was inside him, it fought Iblis for what it wanted. The creature was no simple host. It was strong in ways that Iblis was not used to. It resisted in ways Iblis was not used to countering. But the gifts it granted far outweighed the difficulty the Goa’uld had in subjugating its personality. It gave the Mujina what it wanted. It would not kill the humans unless it absolutely had to.
SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne Page 24
