by James Axler
Zakat's forearms trembled with the strain of resisting the irresistible drag of gravity. His wild eyes followed the pendulum-like movement of the Khlysty cross dangling from Kane's hand.
"You need me!" His scream slashed through the darkness, echoing repeatedly.
Kane dropped the wood-and-crystal emblem between Zakat's hands. "And you need this," he said quietly, flatly. "Use it as a key."
Zakat made a frantic grab for it. After an instant of mad clawing, he snatched it up and then disappeared over the edge of the shelf. He pitched down into the impenetrable blackness, and Kane heard his body slithering against the rock wall, then nothing, not even a scream.
He kneeled at the rim of the ledge, waiting for the faint sound of Grigori Zakat's body striking the floor of Hell. When it didn't come, he slowly pushed himself to his feet. Tension drained out of him, leaving him weak and trembling.
Hefting the fragments of stone in his hand, he tried to sense something special in the way they felt or looked. They appeared to have properties no different from the rocks that surrounded him.
"Doesn't that just figure," he muttered to the abyss. He slipped the rocks into a pocket, then turned and shuffled into the tunnel.
26
The first thing Kane heard upon returning to the gallery beneath the tower was a woman weeping piteously. Trai sat on one of the paving stones at the rim of the depression, huddled in a little ball of grief, hugging herself, rocking back and forth. To his surprise, Brigid sat beside her, patting her back, speaking to her soothingly in her own language. They were alone, the bodies of Gyatso and the slain triplet nowhere in sight.
"What's with Zakat's bitch, Baptiste?" he demanded. "She'll have more to cry about once she hears about where he ended up."
Brigid glanced at him reproachfully. "She knows already, somehow. She felt the link she shared with him disappear."
"Good. I wasn't sure if the son of a bitch was dead or not."
"What about you?" she asked.
He rubbed the back of his neck. "Just don't ask me to stand on my head for the next couple of days."
Brigid got to her feet, a hand on Trai's shoulders. "She's just a child, not really to blame. She was a servant in the monastery, and the monks, particularly the high lama, treated her badly. Zakat seduced her with kindness — and probably his psi-abilities."
Kane shrugged disinterestedly. "Where's Balam?"
"Attending to the body of his son."
"His son?" Kane echoed, startled.
"The triplets are his children, born of a human woman nearly four hundred years ago. Like he said, they are the last of their particular breed."
Kane shook his head and covered his eyes for a moment. He tried to loathe Balam again, even tried to pity him, but he could find neither emotion within him.
"Kane."
At the hoarse whisper, he dropped his hand and saw Balam, flanked by the drooling twins, stepping down into the depression. "You recovered the facets of the trapezohedron."
Balam wasn't asking; he was stating. Kane removed them from his pocket and held them out. Balam made no indication he even noticed. He inclined his head toward the ebony cube laced within Lam's fingers.
"Take it and go."
Kane's blood ran cold and his flesh prickled. "And end up like Gyatso? Offhand, Balam, I can think of a hundred easier ways to check out."
"The new human was responsible for his fate. The energy he directed into the stone was strong, but it was of an incompatible frequency. It was deflected, turned inward and it destroyed him. Take the trapezohedron, Kane."
He looked into the face of Lam, eyes closed again in placid contemplation. He stepped down into the depression.
"Kane!" Brigid spoke warningly fearfully. "What if…?" She bit off the rest of her question.
He replied, "If the 'what if happens, you know what to do."
He heard the clicking of the overhung firing bolt on her Uzi being drawn back, and he threw Balam a cold, ironic smile. It wasn't returned.
Reaching out, he touched the black rock in Lam's hands, feeling his pulse pound with fear. He tugged gently, experimentally. The trapezohedron came away easily, and without resistance it nestled in Kane's hands.
Almost as soon as it did, the flesh on Lam's face and limbs dried, browned and withered. His eyes collapsed into their sockets, and his body fell, his robe belling up briefly as he joined the skeletal remains around the altar.
Kane froze, the hair lifting from his scalp, his mind filling with primal, nameless terror. He gaped wild-eyed at Balam.
"His vigil is complete. Yours begins."
Kane despised the tremor in his hands and voice. "My vigil for what?"
"To find a way for your people to survive, as mine did."
Kane swallowed with painful effort. His throat felt as if it were lined with sandpaper. "The only way is to displace the barons — you know that."
Balam nodded.
"What do you want in return?"
"Nothing in return. I have returned to the old, old ways of our forebears when we passed on truth rather than burning it."
"But you did burn it," Brigid spoke up accusingly.
"To preserve ourselves," Balam replied. "A sacrifice made for an appointed period of time. That time is over. Our blood prevails."
Kane shook his head in frustration. "I don't… Are you betraying the barons, blood of your blood?"
"They are blood of your blood, too, Kane. I no more betray them than you do."
"A state of war will exist between our two cultures again," Brigid noted. "Rivers of that mixed blood will be spilled."
"If that is the road chosen," Balam said faintly, "then that is the road chosen. Blood is like a river. It flows through tributaries, channels, streams, refreshing and purifying itself during its journey. But sometimes it freezes, and no longer flows. A glacier forms, containing detritus, impurities. The glacier must be dislodged to allow the purifying journey to begin anew"
Quietly, Brigid asked, "And what of you? What will you do?"
Balam stood, swaying slightly, his huge, fathomless and passionless eyes fixed on them. Then he flung up one long, thin arm in an unmistakable gesture, pointing to the entrance to the gallery. "I will do nothing, and you must do what you can. Go."
Then he turned and walked away, trailed by his sons.
For an instant, Kane grappled with the desire to go after him, but he knew there was no point to it. Taking Balam back to Cerberus served no purpose. What Balam actually was, Kane could not know, but a strange, aching sadness came over him as he watched the creature stride gracefully away.
He didn't know why he felt such a vacuum within him; then he realized he was reacting to an absence of hate.
Kane turned toward Brigid, and she saw the confusion, the uncertainty in his eyes. Softly, he asked, "Now what do we do?"
Brigid looked from Kane to Trai and to the black stone nestled between his hands. "We wait for tomorrow."
