by James Axler
Now he knew part of the reason why, but it didn't erase the sin.
"You unified us, all right," Kane said grimly. "You gave us a purpose — to reclaim our world from those who carry your blood."
Balam whispered, "And yours."
Kane felt the anger build in him again, but it was a weary kind of anger, an afterthought to the bleak realization that the so-called Archon Directorate hadn't really conquered humanity — it had tempted humanity with the tools to conquer itself.
Naked greed, ambition, the thirst for power over others, those were the carrots snapped up gleefully by the decision makers. Yes, in order to survive Balam and his people had tricked mankind into living down to its most base impulses, but always the choice of whether to do so had been man's.
"Kane?" Brigid stared at him keenly, quizzically.
Kane shook himself mentally and said to Balam, "You want our help?"
"Must help," Balam corrected.
"We apekin have done enough of your dirty work over the centuries," he declared flatly "So, whatever must be done, you'd better roll up your sleeves. You're going to be right on the firing line with us."
21
Nausea and a blinding headache kept Kane on his back. He was aware of nothing for a long time, except for the blanket of pain and weakness that covered him.
Just how long it was before he opened his eyes he couldn't say. He forced himself to roll over, gathered himself and rose on shaking hands and knees. He squinted at the purple-tinted armaglass walls, feeling the pins-and-needles static discharge from the metal floor plates even through his gloves.
Brigid groaned and stirred.
"Lie still. Sickness go away soon."
The scratchy, whispery voice carried no tones of friendliness, only an appreciation of reality. Kane looked up at Balam standing near the chamber door, his small form swathed by a fleece-lined, hooded parka. The light from the ceiling fixture struck yellow pinpoints in his ebony eyes.
Brigid pushed herself to a sitting position, briefly sinking her teeth into her underlip. "Rough transit," she murmured. "The matter-stream phase lines must not have been in perfect sync."
Kane forced himself erect, stumbling slightly as he stepped on the hem of his coat. "Piece of Russian shit. Should have known what to expect after our jump to Perdelinko."
Brigid smiled wanly and took Kane's proffered hand, allowing him to hoist her to her feet. The mat-trans jump to Russia was always held up as a standard for bad transits, especially by Grant. So, in a way, it was good that he had been physically unable to accompany them.
Kane and Brigid were dressed similarly to when they had jumped to Russia. She wore a long, fur-collared leather coat over a high-necked sweater, whipcord trousers and heavy-treaded boots. The mini-Uzi hung by a strap around her shoulder.
Kane had decided against wearing the armor since their destination was a cold one. He had borrowed Grant's Magistrate-issue coat, since its Kevlar weave not only offered protection from weapons, but was also insulated against all weathers. However, it was a bit too big for him, and the coattails fell nearly to his heels.
The Sin Eater was snugged in its forearm holster beneath the right sleeve, and he wore a gren- and ammo-laden combat harness over his sweater.
Brigid picked up the pack containing emergency medical supplies, concentrated foodstuffs and bottled water. She started to shoulder into it, but Kane said, "Give it to Balam. Let him do his share."
Brigid glanced quickly at the creature. He gazed placidly at her, then extended his hands. She gave him the pack, and he struggled to slip it on. Bending over him, she adjusted the straps, feeling foolishly like a mother helping a child get dressed for school.
She had to forcibly remind herself Balam was as far from a child as it was possible for even a semihuman to be. After Kane had recounted the details of Balam's telepathic history lesson, she speculated that he might be as old as fifteen hundred years, born around the time the tales of Agartha began circulating throughout Asia.
After snugging the pack straps, she turned on the motion detector and swept it toward the door. No readings registered, so she nodded tersely to Kane.
Stepping to the door, Kane grasped the handle, lifting and turning it. Lock solenoids clicked open loudly, and he toed open the door, a few inches at a time. Through the armaglass, he saw dimly what lay beyond.
The jump chamber nestled inside an alcove with a bank of electronic equipment curving in a horseshoe shape along the stone walls. Like Kane had expected, lights flashed on consoles and he heard the faint hum of power units.
Past the bank of electronics, he saw what he didn't expect. Two life-size statues faced each other, one with ten arms and a demonic face, and the other a likeness of a cherubic man squatting cross-legged on a stone block.
Blended with a musty, dusty odor, another stench permeated the rock-walled vault, one Kane had smelled many times in his life but never grown accustomed to. He saw a humped shape covered by a black cloth behind the ten-armed statue. Striding over to it, he snatched the fabric away.
The bearded face of a man gaped up at him. His face was layered by a thin crusting of blood that had stiffened and discolored his beard. A brownish puddle surrounded his head. His eyes possessed the opaque film of a corpse in the first stages of decomposition. Brigid and Balam came closer, although Balam seemed disinterested.
"Shot through the mouth at close range," Kane said quietly. "Three, maybe four days ago."
Balam padded over to a stone pillar nearly as tall as he was. He fingered the pedestal topping it. The surface bore a vague square outline, as if something that had rested there for many years had been removed.
"Here was stone," he said.
Kane glanced toward him, noting how the pillar was covered on each side with crudely incised faces. The eight faces were humanoid, but with oversize hairless craniums, huge, upslanting, pupil-less eyes and tiny slits for mouths. They were stylized representations of Balam's own face.
Kane looked around at the vault, sensing its vast age. Only the gateway unit and its control systems struck a discordant note in the overall atmosphere of antiquity. "Why is there a mat-trans unit here?"
Brigid shrugged. "Any number of reasons. If this is a Szvezda unit, then it may have been installed here so Russian intelligence could keep their eye on Red China. If Szvezda was anything like Cerberus, then all military or government officials had to do was say they needed a unit for security reasons."
"I have a feeling there was more to it than that," Kane replied, glancing sharply at Balam. "Am I right?"
Balam didn't answer. He moved toward the shadowy, far end of the bowl-shaped vault. After a moment, Kane and Brigid followed him. In the eight hours since his communication with Balam, Kane's natural suspicion had risen. Despite the information Balam had imparted, Kane wasn't convinced that he had been given the truth, or if he had, that he'd been given the whole truth.
When he presented his uncertainties to Lakesh, the old man had said sadly, "As a species, perhaps we can retain a semblance of sanity only by not understanding our frightfully shaky position in the scheme of things."
Kane grudgingly admitted that possibility, but he also didn't believe that Balam had withheld certain truths simply to spare his fragile human brain.
They followed Balam up a flight of stone steps and into a passageway with walls covered by silken, hand-painted tapestries. They came out into a corridor, through an open door crafted from granite. Kane barely glanced at the ornate dragon bas-relief carved over it. His pointman's instincts rang an alert, and the Sin Eater filled his hand.
Balam turned to the left. The corridor narrowed, turning and bending sharply several times. They passed several closed doors, but Kane heard no sound from behind any of them, so he didn't bother to see where they might lead.
Turning a corner, he heard a faint humming from behind him. He whirled and saw a shaved-headed, black-faced man spinning a key-shaped cudgel over his head by a leather thong. Bef
ore he could press the trigger of the Sin Eater, the heavy metal bludgeon snapped out.
Kane shifted position, slamming into Brigid with a shoulder, and the key crashed loudly against the wall, passing through the space that had, a microsecond before, been occupied by his head. The cudgel struck sparks from the stone, chipping out a finger-sized splinter.
As Kane aligned his red-robed form with the bore of the Sin Eater, Brigid shouted, "Don't!"
The man yanked back on the thong, the key clattering on the flagstoned floor. Kane lunged in the same direction. He stamped down on the cudgel, and the man stumbled, the length of rawhide slithering from his grasp. Kane swept the barrel of the blaster across the base of his skull.
Kane didn't put all of his strength into the blow, assuming Brigid not only wanted him alive but conscious so he could be questioned. With a grunt, the shaved-headed man fell to his hands and knees.
Gathering a fistful of soiled robe in his left hand, Kane wrestled him to his feet. The man's small eyes blinked back tears of pain, and he looked at Kane dazedly. Brigid came forward, putting questions to him in a halting, singsong language that sounded like utter gibberish to Kane.
The man didn't reply, his soot-smeared features settling into a stubborn mask. Annoyed, Brigid said, "I don't know if I speak Tibetan with such an accent he doesn't understand or if he's just being uncooperative."
Kane shoved him against the wall. "Is he a priest?"
"A warrior monk, a Dob-Dob. The lamasery's version of a sec man. Traditionally, Dob-Dobs are drawn from the ranks of condemned criminals."
"Slaggers with religion," muttered Kane, planting the bore of his Sin Eater under the monk's chin and forcing his head back. "Tell him we offer him the chance to join a new religion — the Holy Order of Talk or Die."
"That's pretty much the first thing I said to him," Brigid retorted. "He doesn't fear death."
At the periphery of her vision, she noticed Balam edging closer. He pulled back the hood of his parka. The Dob-Dob's eyes darted toward him, then widened as far as the epicanthic folds would allow. A high-pitched yammering burst from his lips, and a jet of urine streamed down and collected in a noxious pool at his feet. His body was consumed with shudders, then seemed to turn to melted wax and flow down to the floor.
Mystified, Kane allowed him to sink down, watching him press his forehead against the flagstones, hearing him speak rapidly in an aspirated voice. Then he realized the Dob-Dob's reaction to the sight of Balam didn't stem necessarily from terror, but from an awe so intense it was almost ecstasy.
Kane stepped to Brigid's side. "What the hell is he saying?"
She narrowed her eyes in concentration. "It's a dialect, Sanskrit words mixed with Tibetan. A prayer language, I think. He believes Balam is one of the eight immortals."
Bleakly Kane thought that Balam very well could be.
Balam dammed the flood of words by interjecting questions in the same babbling tongue.
The Dob-Dob responded quickly, face still pressed against the flagstones. Kane experienced a wave of disgust at the way the man abased himself, wallowing in his own waste. He saw him as a symbol of what Balam's folk had been trying to achieve with humanity for thousands of years. In place of knowledge, they implanted superstition, and in place of truth, fear.
Balam spoke again, and the Dob-Dob ceased gibbering. Turning to Kane and Brigid, he said, "The thief we seek departed this place at dawn."
Kane demanded suspiciously, "That's all he said?"
"He prayed to the eight kings who walk in the sky and thanked me for leaving the illuminated abode of Agartha to speak to him. He also begged forgiveness for failing to protect the stone as this sect had been charged with doing."
Balam's voice grew strained, and his last words were so faint and hoarse they had difficulty understanding him.
"How did the thief leave here?" Brigid asked.
Balam tapped the prostrate Dob-Dob on the top of his head until he reluctantly lifted his face. Tears cut runnels through the black soot smeared over his cheeks. Balam pointed to Brigid and whispered a few words.
The monk slowly climbed to his feet and bowed deeply, respectfully toward her. Brigid asked him questions in Tibetan, and the man responded promptly.
After a couple of minutes, she said to Kane, "They left on horseback. Tsyansis Khan-po, as he calls Zakat, carried a metal box. Gyatso, the girl and another Dob-Dob by the name of Yal went with him. He claims he was corrupted."
Recalling how he used the term to describe Beth-Li Rouch, Kane echoed, "Corrupted? How?"
"Leng — that's his name — wasn't really clear on that. He calls Zakat and Gyatso dugpas, or black magicians who can reflect their images on weaklings. I take that to mean they have the ability to impose their wills on others."
"Since Gyatso is hybrid, I'm not surprised. But what about Zakat? Is he a psi-mutie?"
The only breed of human mutant that had increased dramatically since skydark was the so-called psi-mutie — otherwise normal in appearance, they possessed advanced extrasensory and precognitive mind powers.
"It's possible," she admitted. "But not everybody in the lamasery was corrupted. My guess is that Zakat and Gyatso, working in tandem, were able to zero in on the most impressionable minds. Maybe their powers were augmented by the stone."
Kane glanced toward Balam. "Is that likely?"
Balam nodded once.
"Do you know where they're going?"
Balam nodded again, evidently wishing to save his voice.
"And can it be reached overland?"
Balam nodded once more, then turned away. To Brigid, Kane said, "Ask Leng if he can provide transportation for the immortal and his party so the thieves can be caught." Brigid did as he directed and after Leng replied, she said, "Yes, and we're more than welcome to them."
They followed Leng along the hallway, through several large chambers and out into a courtyard. A bitter wind whistled over the walls. The sun sank behind far-off mountain peaks that looked like gray shadows. The cold, rarefied air made their lungs ache with the effort of breathing.
"We're going to have to wait until sunrise," Kane said. "Ask Leng to show us around."
Other than Leng, there appeared to be only a few people in the lamasery. Most of the monks and other Dob-Dobs had fled after the murder of the high lama, whom Zakat had not only killed but whose title, the king of fear, he had appropriated. They had left his body where it fell, too frightened to enter the vault of the stone.
Leng showed them around the monastery and to its library, which was underneath the main building. The majority of the manuscripts were scrolls as much as fifty feet long; others were sheets of ancient parchment tied between wooden blocks.
Brigid looked at the shelves, entranced. "There are enough ancient manuscripts here to keep a hundred translators busy for a lifetime — but there's probably not five people alive who could read the script."
Kane nodded toward Balam. "I'll bet he could."
Balam didn't confirm or deny the observation.
Leng led them back upstairs and served them an unsatisfactory meal of yak butter, grain porridge and a bitter green tea. Both Kane and Brigid were a bit surprised to see Balam consume it, apparently with relish as if he considered it a delicacy.
Unaccustomed to the thin air, Brigid and Kane tired quickly. After eating, they both did their best to stifle yawns. Leng escorted all three of them to a cell. Kane glanced out the solitary window and saw a view of snowclad peaks. Looking down, he saw a sheer drop of at least a thousand feet.
Leng built a fire in the stone hearth in the middle of the floor, and since there was no chimney, they had to keep the wooden shutters of the window open to allow the smoke to escape.
The temperature dropped quickly after the sun went down, and they tried to find a balance between asphyxiating and freezing. The cell came furnished with only one cot, and Leng made it obvious that it was reserved for Balam. He did fetch piles of quilts and fur robes for Kane and
Brigid to burrow in. To conserve body heat, they lay together. In order to breathe, they lay near the window. Balam simply draped himself in a number of blankets and quilts and apparently dropped off to sleep as soon as he lay down.
Quietly, Kane asked Brigid, "What was the word Leng used for Zakat and Gyatso? Dugpas?"
"Yes," she replied. "Gyatso is a practitioner of the old Bon religion. They're thought to cultivate evil for evil's sake. Supposedly, they're hypnotists and just as keen on getting control of humanity as, for instance, Balam's people were."
Kane shivered. He was too cold and tired to listen to another history lesson. The acrid smoke of tamarisk roots smoldering in the hearth made his throat feel raw and abraded.
"If Gyatso truly considers himself the Agarthan ambassador," Brigid continued drowsily, "he's in one deep psychological quandary."
"How so?"
"As a Bon-po shaman, he is as much Agartha's enemy as the law of gravity is the enemy of people who think they can fly."
Kane found the simile funny due to his oxygen-starved brain. He couldn't help but laugh. Brigid's teeth chattered, and she snuggled close to him, resting her head on his shoulder. "I'm glad somebody finds something amusing about this."
"An hour from now, after I suffocate, I probably won't."
He briefly wondered how she would react if he kissed her, but decided not to risk it. Balam's presence in the room was a definite ardor-squasher. He drifted off into a surprisingly deep and thankfully dreamless sleep.
He awoke at dawn, when the first rays of daybreak shafted in through the window. He felt stiff and sticky, as he always did after sleeping in his clothes. He was also very cold and thirsty. Brigid awoke when he pushed himself up, and groaning, she hiked herself to a sitting position.
Balam perched on the foot of the cot, gazing out the window, the golden light of the sun casting amber shadows over his pale flesh, his eyes half-closed. He paid them no attention as they stumbled to their feet, kicking away the quilts and robes.
