Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘You can shoot as many of them as you wish after we have captured the creature,’ he said sternly, ‘but for now, stealth is our most potent ally.’ He then turned to the rest of the troops. ‘Ropes out!’ he ordered. ‘We rappel down into the beast’s lair … we are almost there, gentlemen, we are almost there!’

  As the men uncoiled their ropes and sought out suitable anchor points, Higgins marched over to the prisoner.

  ‘Tie her up,’ he said to the man guarding her. ‘We’re not taking any chances at all with this thing now. We’ll lower her down into the valley like a sack of grain.’ Without waiting for a response from either the soldier or the prisoner, Higgins strode briskly back to the edge of the cliff. ‘We stand on the brink of our destiny, Vasilevsky,’ he said to his compatriot, with a subtle smile of triumph brightening his craggy features. ‘We are on the very cusp of success, a mere step away from winning one of the greatest Huntsmen victories against the beastwalkers in all of recorded history.’

  ‘Don’t celebrate yet, Englishman, don’t celebrate just yet,’ Vasilevsky muttered. ‘We still have to take the creature alive – or kill it if we can’t … and that will be no easy task, even with the firepower we have at hand.’

  Higgins clapped his hand on Vasilevsky’s shoulder and gave this muscular protuberance a cheerful, reassuring squeeze.

  ‘We have science and technology on our side, and the most wondrously advanced weaponry in all of human history, my good man. I am quite confident that success will be ours, yes, quite confident indeed.’

  Rappelling down the sheer cliffs took the best part of an hour, and the sun was high in the rich blue sky by the time everyone had made it safely to the valley floor, including the scientists and the prisoner, who had all been lowered down like baggage. The men noticed that the vegetation here was a little different; there seemed to be a greater range of species of trees and plants populating this valley than were to be seen elsewhere across the vast Siberian taiga. Indeed, it was as if this ravine had its own microclimate. The air was humid, owing to the mist generated by the thundering waterfall, the droning roar of which boomed with muted ceaselessness through the valley, providing a deep baritone rumble, over which the trills and whistles of thousands of birds soared. Insects too shrieked and buzzed and screeched in their millions here, the sound waves woven together like an array of multicoloured thread, creating a rich aural tapestry that spanned the entirety of the valley.

  Higgins and Vasilevsky led the men into the forest, using their sabres to hack a path through the dense foliage. A steady backdrop to the near-deafening symphony of bird and insect song, the constant thrum of some sort of incomprehensibly immense energy source was at its most potent here, and even the steel blades of the officers’ swords seemed to be vibrating with it now. A buzzing of collective unease rippled through the ranks as the realisation of just how vastly powerful a being they were approaching began to dawn on them.

  ‘Steady, gentlemen, steady,’ Higgins said, sensing the mood of apprehension. ‘We carry the mighty torch of technology with us; its bright, blazing light will burn away all of this primordial darkness and crude superstition, and the denizens of shadow will shrink in helpless terror and confusion before its unrelenting illumination! Do not fear them, men, do not fear what lies ahead! We are the standard-bearers of civilisation itself, and we will not fail!’

  They crossed a knee-deep stream that spanned a mere five or six yards across. The icy, gurgling water was as clear as the finest crystalware, and was filled with darting fish that zipped and drifted alternately in shimmering, silvery schools, their sides flashing in dazzling flares as they turned and spun in haphazard patterns.

  After crossing the stream, the men trekked uphill for a while, and then headed down a slope, the gradient of which grew increasingly steep. Here a cool mist thickened steadily between the trees, its density linked to the loudening roar of the valley’s main waterfall, which they were evidently approaching. Finally, they emerged from the dense forest into a large clearing, where they came across a spectacular and unexpected sight: an ancient building, which appeared to be a ruined temple of sorts. The structure itself was not enormous, but it certainly was large and imposing enough, and constructed of what appeared to be massive stone blocks, like those used at Stonehenge in Higgins’ native Britain. These stones, though, had been worked into smoother, more geometric shapes, and into them had been carved many animal forms, done in a primitive style that had an almost childlike element to it. What was more, the stone itself had a curious sparkle to it, indicating that it was rich in metal ore.

  Dr Khan and the other scientist, a chubby middle-aged Brazilian researcher, charged headlong into the water, dashing around the outskirts of the sinkhole and releasing exuberant exclamations of awe and wonder, for this type of stone, they immediately deduced, was to be found nowhere else on earth. The large, square building had once supported a heavy stone roof, but this had long ago collapsed, as had the entire front of the temple, which had once sealed its interior off from the outside world by means of a pair of gigantic stone doors, which had also crumbled.

  All of this had, at some stage over the last few centuries or even millennia, tumbled into the gaping maw of the huge sinkhole that had opened up in the ground beneath it. Now the streams that ran through this valley, all of which converged at this place, flowed into the roughly circular sinkhole, which was perhaps forty or forty-five metres in diameter. What was truly impressive about it, though, was not simply its depth – it was easily a hundred and fifty metres down to the bottom, where a pool of iridescent blue water, infused with high concentrations of rare minerals, glowed dazzlingly – but also the fact that the opening widened out into a vast underground cavern.

  The interior of the grotto brought to mind images of some of the most glorious cathedrals, temples and mosques crafted by the hands of artistic and architectural geniuses throughout the various ages of humankind, but in terms of sheer, awe-striking beauty it outshone any of the aforementioned structures. The walls of this place, thick with stalactites and stalagmites in a near-infinite array of shapes, sizes and textures, were aglow with hues of every colour. The rainbow-coloured light was generated by bioluminescent fungi and mushrooms, which seemed to grow in proliferous abundance all over the cavern, and they illuminated it as brightly as if the entire place had been rigged with a thousand electric bulbs. Bats and birds and insects swooped and dived and soared in chaotic patterns of flight throughout the underground sky, their chirps and hoots and shrieks bouncing madly off the walls in a million echoing ricochets.

  ‘We’ve found it,’ Higgins murmured, overwhelmed with wonder as he walked cautiously up to the lip of the sinkhole and stared down into it. ‘My God, we’ve actually found it!’

  Vasilevsky pulled a small telescope from his belt, stepped up to the edge alongside Higgins, and peered through the lens into the depths of the cavern. At the very far end of it, he saw a sight that sent a thrill coursing through his veins – the same thrill that any hunter of the most dangerous game on the planet knew well. Coming out of the edge of the bright blue pool onto the earth floor of the cavern were two parallel rows of statues, all carved from the same stone as that of the outer shell of the temple. Each statue, perhaps a metre tall, was of a different type of animal; fairly crudely carved but recognisable enough. A few hundred of these statues formed an avenue along the grotto floor, leading to a huge, throne-like chair hewn of stone at the very back of the cavern. Seated in the lotus position on this throne was the one for whom they had come all this way.

  Only her face was visible: an impossibly old, heavily-weathered visage, near skull-like, with only the most paper-thin, translucent skin draped over the bone; the rest of her was completely covered in a living cloak made up of tree roots, wound tight around her limbs and torso like interwoven fibres. Indeed, their tips pierced her ancient skin in a thousand places and burrowed deep into her veins and internal organs – but they were not feeding on her body, they w
ere feeding her body with pure life energy, photosynthesised from the rays of the sun. Her hair was immensely long; her snow-white strands snaked between the gnarled mesh of roots, giving the whole tangle a silvery glow until the hair emerged onto the floor below the root-cloak and covered the floor around her for many metres, like a fine carpet of spider silk.

  The root-cloak that encapsulated her form was alive not merely in the long sense of tree life, with its imperceptibly slow movements, but also in the sense that it was actually moving; hundreds of insects, reptiles, amphibians and small mammals crawled and scuttled and slithered all over the root-cloak that covered her, each bringing a droplet of water, or a seed, or small nut, or a morsel of fruit or tuber or edible vegetation, chewed and regurgitated, as an offering to the being nestled beneath.

  Up at the top of the sinkhole, Shanakdakhete – the prisoner – felt a jolt of electrical energy sizzling its prickly, invisible fire all along the surface of her skin. It was a sensation she knew well, for she felt it when she was close to any member of her kind. But this, feeling it here and now, with the being down there in that holy cavern, was by far the most intense she had ever experienced it. Indeed, it was so overwhelming in its relentless ferocity that it was nearly debilitating, but not in a manner that was crushing at all; no, indeed, it was like the most potent orgasm she had ever had, multiplied by a factor of ten and purified from that base experience, and imbued with an element she could only think to call supremely sacred.

  Inside the darkness of her hood, Shanakdakhete’s bright eyes darted across to Higgins and Vasilevsky. She watched them passing the telescope between them and discussing their plan. Straining her ears – which could hear things that human beings could not, for she was not quite human; no, like the being down there in the root-cloak, she was beyond human – she did her best to pick up the words passing between the two men.

  ‘The foul temple is already destroyed,’ Higgins whispered to Vasilevsky. ‘So we do not need her to get us inside. The forces of time and geology have already done for us what the beastwalker would have.’

  ‘I’ll give my man the signal to end its miserable life then,’ Vasilevsky murmured. ‘And then we’ll release the black pigeon. After that we send the men into the sinkhole to capture the thing down there.’

  ‘Throttle the life out of the prisoner, quietly,’ Higgins suggested. ‘We cannot risk spilling her blood here, lest it awakes what sleeps.’

  ‘But just in case that vile thing does open its eyes … then we go with Plan B,’ Vasilevsky said. ‘Get our sharpshooter over here and get him to line the thing’s ugly face up in his sights. Any hint of it awakening, and we blow its brains all over the back of that cave wall.’

  Higgins nodded grimly and called one of the troops, a thin young American man who carried a different rifle to all the others: it had a longer barrel, and there was a telescopic sight mounted on it. Higgins then whispered some instructions into the young man’s ear. The soldier saluted crisply and then got into position on a flat rock just above the stream and got the ancient woman’s forehead lined up in his crosshairs.

  Shanakdakhete realised that she had to act, and she had to act immediately. Her life would end in a matter of seconds; this was an inevitability that could not be changed. The only choice she had now was what to do with these final moments.

  She had never planned, of course, to help her captors anyway. She knew all too well that regardless of what choice she made when the moment to act came, they would kill her as soon as her usefulness to them expired, and that they would release the black pigeon – the one that would carry word to their masters to slowly torture her friends to death – into the sky.

  There was no room now for doubt, no space for hesitation, and not a second more could be spent on contemplation. The future of not only her kind, but indeed of everything rested on the choice she had to make in this moment, this atomic, slivered intersection of time and space. Should the Mother fall into the hands of these monsters and their demonic masters … no, no, it was too horrific a scenario to even begin to contemplate. She had to act, and she had to act this very instant.

  Even as her super-senses – enhanced by the near-immortal blood that flowed through her veins, and the quarks in it that had well over fifteen hundred years ago so utterly altered her DNA and genetic material – detected the subtle flutter in the air behind that was the precursor to motion, as a soldier prepared to move in for the kill, she threw her heavy hood off with a toss of her head; she would at least die with the sun on her face.

  Higgins saw what was about to happen, and with a howl he charged in her direction. His roar, however, was not directed at Shanakdakhete, but at the soldier standing in front of her with his bayonet-equipped rifle, oblivious to what was unfolding just behind him.

  Everything from that snick in the endless reel of time onward seemed to happen in slow motion. The rays of the late morning sun struck the surface of Shanakdakhete’s proud, square-shaped face, immortalising in a beautiful moment her prominent cheekbones, her broad nose with its flared nostrils and her full, dark lips. The light gave her teak-coloured skin the dazzling glow of burnished copper, and her hair, a dense, spherical mane of springy black streaked with licks of grey, exploded from the hood like a three-dimensional halo, and as she threw her head back and opened her jaws wide, the golden sunlight lit up with blinding brightness the whites of her teeth and her large, intelligent eyes, protruding from their sockets with vengeful fury.

  Expelling every last cubic ounce of air from her lungs in a great cry that resounded through the valley and boomed through the cavern below, she screamed out a sacred warning in an arcane language that had been forgotten by most of humanity over ten thousand years ago. And as she howled out this cry, she lunged forward and swung her chains in a clumsy attack at the soldier in front of her.

  The man was, like his compatriots, an elite fighter, and his martial skills had been honed to perfection over many years of rigorous training; indeed, they had been worked to the point that actions and reactions to various attacks were encoded in his muscle memory, and he did not even have to think to counter her move with brutal precision and deadly speed.

  And it was because of this very fact that Shanakdakhete attacked with just enough clumsiness to give him warning of her swinging of her heavy chains.

  ‘No!’ Higgins screamed as he sprinted toward the pair of them, his hands outstretched with futile impotence. ‘Don’t spill her blood, stop you fool, stop!’

  But his words fell on deaf ears, for even as he was roaring them out the soldier was reacting instinctively to Shanakdakhete’s crude attack. With swift hands he used the butt of his rifle to deflect the blow, and then with a lightning-fast spinning of the weapon he whipped the rifle around and slashed the bayonet across her throat, opening it up from ear to ear.

  ‘NOOOO!’ Higgins howled, his voice shrill with both purple rage and utter horror as he saw the flash of sharp steel and then watched, helpless, as Shanakdakhete’s half-severed head tipped grotesquely back, unleashing a gushing torrent of bright red blood as she stumbled forward on suddenly jelly-like legs.

  Spraying out blood like a smashed-open fountain in her death throes, Shanakdakhete used the very last reserve of her strength to stagger forward and hurl herself in a spectacular leap into the sinkhole, the trajectory of her diving body traced with a trail of blood droplets suspended in the cool air as she hurtled towards the sacred pool.

  With a deep, plosive splash she hit the water and disappeared into the iridescent blue, and the last remaining trace of her body’s presence was a billowing cloud of crimson darkening the waters. Up above, Higgins drew his revolver from its holster with a rage-trembling hand, and without another word put a bullet through the soldier’s head, the booming report of the shot echoing with ominous resonance through the valley.

  As the man dropped dead, the back of his skull blown out, splattering the river rocks behind him with a chunky, wet mess of blood and brains, Higgins
spun around on his heels, his eyes wild with implacable wrath, his jaw quivering and veins bulging.

  ‘Kill the fucking thing,’ he snarled to the sniper. ‘Just fucking kill it then! Everything’s fucking well ruined now anyway!’

  The soldier nodded and drew in a deep breath, which he held in his lungs as he prepared to take his shot.

  ‘Hurry you half-wit!’ Vasilevsky snapped from the other side of the sniper, his voice low and harsh with dire urgency. ‘Fire! Kill it, kill it now!’

  The crosshairs of the soldier’s scope were locked with unmoving steadiness on the ancient woman’s forehead, so without further ado he released the air from his lungs and applied gradual pressure to the trigger.

  But even as the firing pin within the rifle struck the primer of the bullet in the barrel, detonating an explosion that ignited the rapid-burning gunpowder inside the brass casing, which in turn propelled the bullet out of the barrel at murderous speed, the woman’s eyes flickered open. Brought back to the immediacy of the physical present from ten thousand years of deep meditation, of spiritual travel to the farthest reaches of infinitely distant galaxies, of melding her soul to the singular collective life-force of everything alive in the past, present and future, this ancient being – the quarks of whose mind and soul were connected as if via a trillion spiderweb strands to the very energy streams of the universe – took it all in within the tiniest fraction of a sliver of millisecond; the vastness of the spread of history, the tragedy of the past and the nightmarish precognition of the future that these men – and others like them – were determined, perhaps irrevocably destined, to usher in.