“You have to see.” He pointed. “There’s an entrance near the base on the opposite side no one seems to know about. We used to sneak there as children to watch. Come on.”
The other Chutanga had led the slaves in through the small opening, then moved a large stone over the hole, and left the way they had come, through the forest behind the building. No one was left to see us, other than an occasional Grigori arriving overhead.
“Stay under the trees as long as possible,” Zash told me, leading me across the clearing and around the end of the structure to a loose pile of rocks against the foot of the wall.
He moved aside a couple of large boulders to reveal a small crack that created an opening into the building. Checking overhead for Grigori, he dove quickly into the hole and I followed. The space beyond was nearly completely black with darkness.
“We’re between an inner and outer wall,” said Zash. “It’s a hollow space between the main structure and the pool and theater within. Stay close.”
The dark, bronze man groped ahead a few paces and then began to ascend a rough tied ladder. We went up about some forty feet and the space between the walls began to grow brighter. Fairly quickly we came to an opening in the inner wall that provided an unobstructed view of the entire interior of the temple’s amphitheater.
The lower third of the room was an enormous tank of clear water in which five or six of the hideous Grigori swam lazily around artificial islands of stone. Clusters of slaves were being forced by other Grigori out onto the tiny atolls. The humans were of various colors; red, black, brown—only the dark brown, bronze color of the Chutanga was missing.
I was most surprised to see an Angara female—something I’d never come across even back in the Grigori city of Emibi—cowering on an edge of one of the rocky islets.
“What are the slaves here for?” I asked. “Or are they slaves? Is that an Angara woman?”
“Not slaves,” Zash said. “And women only. Well… not just women…”
I looked again and noticed something that hadn’t registered before. The women were all heavy, and full-bodied, with protruding stomachs.
“Are…” I said, as realization dawned, “are they all pregnant?”
Zash looked at me with intense eyes, and was silent for quite a while.
“Zash,” I asked, desperate to break the tension. “What the hell is going on here?”
“I can’t explain,” he replied. “Wait and you’ll see. These women—and their children—the unborn babies they carry—are a part of some ceremony that the Grigori perform here. You will be thankful to be a male slave when you see what happens.”
“Zash …” I began, about to insist that he tell me now, his tone and suggestive wording making my skin crawl. But I’d barely spoken when we heard a fluttering cacophony of wings from above as a long procession of the evil master race of Pangea slowly and majestically descended through the large, central opening in the roof.
Fifteen or twenty Grigori swooped in, followed by at least as many of their awe-inspiring pterodactyl pets. Behind the flocking procession came what had to be the queen, flanked by her personal pterodactyls much as she had been when she’d entered the amphitheater at Emibi. She looked similar in coloration and size to the queen I’d encountered in Emibi, but it wasn’t her. She must be from another city, or tribe, and I wondered idly how many more Grigori cities there might be—how many groups of Grigori the Pangeans would have to fight in order to actually be rid of them.
Three times the great black swarm swirled around the upper interior of the oval chamber until they finally settled down on the damp, cold boulders fringing the outer edge of the pool. A larger, center rock had again been reserved for the queen, and she took her place on the slightly protruding perch, shaking out her wings and pulling them against her body, regally.
Everything fell silent for several minutes after she and her entourage had come to rest in their places, almost as if in silent prayer. The poor women upon the tiny islands watched the horrid creatures with wide eyes and fearful expressions. One woman wept openly, as another offered useless comfort.
Suddenly the queen flinched, and all other movement in the temple ceased. She raised her ugly head sharply, and some of the women gasped. Instinctively, Zash and I both moved lower, behind the stones shielding us, getting deeper into the shadows.
After another moment of silent stillness, the lizard monarch began looking slowly around, her long, hideous head bobbing back and forth in a rhythmic dance. At one point I thought we made eye-contact, but it was only my nerves and imagination. Slowly, very, very slowly she crawled to the edge of her throne and slipped noiselessly into the water, her body nearly submerging, but not completely, pushing off into the artificial lake, and drifting through the crystalline waters like a crocodile. Slowly, so eerily slowly, she swam up and down the long tank, turning fluidly at the ends and arcing back along a slightly different path than the one she’d just taken.
Her motion took her in front of each island, her eyes obviously focusing—first on one, then on another of the various different women. She seemed to be choosing; deciding which one she wanted, for whatever purpose. All eyes followed that glistening, black head, each woman waiting patiently for whatever was to come next, knowing it would come from this lone, swimming Grigori.
Finally, the queen seemed to decide.
Nearer and nearer to one specific island she circled, as the women on it began to realize that one or more of them had been ‘chosen’. Each of them began to back quickly away from the center toward the edges of their little precipice, one or two actually diving in and swimming away to another rock. Still the Grigori circled, ignoring those other women, its eyes intently focused on one or more of the remaining females.
Suddenly, the hideous queen-mother of the intelligent flying reptiles stopped, and raised her misshapen head from the water to fix her great, round eyes upon the center of the remaining girls. The females were heavy and soft, and I began to realize that they’d probably been intentionally bred and fattened, the way we breed and fatten cows, sheep and pigs.
It suddenly hit me that I had been brought to witness a feast.
“Zash,” I said, but he held up a stern hand to silence me. Why, I’m not sure. The Grigori can’t hear, and there were no Angara to do their listening for them.
“We have to stop this,” I whispered, and he finally turned to look at me.
“Only if you want to die,” Zash snapped, “and me, my wife, my child, and all the rest of my tribe along with you. I brought you here to see, not to act.”
I turned back to the theater, realizing that this is what the argument in the village had been about. To intervene and stop what I was about to witness, or to let sleeping lizards lie.
As I stared, helplessly, the queen fixed her gaze on a nude, plump, dark-haired young girl, her belly full to bursting. The victim tried to turn away, hiding her face in her hands, kneeling behind an older woman; but the reptile, with unblinking eyes, stared on with such furious focus that I would have thought her vision penetrated the woman in front, all the way through both her, and the selected victim’s arms, directly into the very center of the poor girl’s brain.
Slowly the Grigori’s head began to move to and fro, to and fro, her eyes never leaving their lock on the frightened young girl, until finally, surprisingly, the victim responded. She moved her arms away from her face, and turned wide, fear-haunted eyes toward the Grigori queen. Slowly, very slowly, as though dragged by some unseen power the victim rose to her feet, then moved as though in a trance straight toward the unblinking queen, glassy eyes unblinkingly fixed upon those of her captor.
To the water’s edge the naked girl came without pause, bare feet docilely stepping into the shallows before the little island and moving unhesitatingly toward the Grigori, who now slowly retreated as though leading her victim like a stage magician leads a guest from the audience. The girl’s knees slipped below the surface, and still she advanced, her mi
nd chained by those glistening, black eyes. Now the water was above her distended belly; now at her armpits; now at her neck. The other women on the various islands stared on in rapt horror, unable to prevent the poor girl’s doom, horribly aware that this would be their fate as well.
The Grigori had moved backward until only the long, bony upper bill and unblinking eyes were exposed above the surface of the water, and the girl had followed helplessly until the end of that repulsive beak was only an inch or two from her face, her horror-filled eyes riveted upon those of the commanding reptile.
The water passed above the girl’s mouth and nose—her eyes and forehead now all that could be seen above the surface—yet she did not drown, nor panic, and continued to walk on after the retreating Grigori. The queen’s head gradually disappeared beneath the surface and after it went the eyes of her victim—only a slight ripple widened toward the shores to mark where the two had vanished. They were in the far end of the pool, which was dark and hard to see into clearly, but the rippling shadows of Grigori and its victim were still visible. Suddenly the surface of the water roiled, very slightly, blood swirled outward and clouded the clarity of the false lake.
I assumed it was all over. Probably near the end of the poor girl’s breath the queen had struck, the horror of the mother-to-be was finally—mercifully—at an end, killed, and perhaps eaten by the vicious queen.
I could not have been more wrong.
For a while there was only silence within the temple. The other women were motionless with gut wrenching fear, all eyes fixed on the far end of that pool, the drifting shadows barely visible beneath the red, clouded surface. Even the Grigori watched the stillness of the water for the reappearance of their queen—until there she was. Not far from the spot where she had gone under, her head rose slowly out of the now murky waters and backed once more into view. She was moving toward the little island as if retracing her steps, her eyes fixed before her as they had been when she’d dragged the helpless girl to her doom.
And then I saw her. My skin bubbled with goose-flesh, and I gasped out loud. The forehead and eyes of the young girl rose slowly out of the depths, following the gaze of the reptile just as she had when she’d vanished beneath the surface. On and on came the girl until she stood in water that reached barely below her breasts, and that’s when the horror began.
Her stomach had been ripped open and was now empty of any child, and many of her internal organs. I felt sick—wanted to throw up. I turned away, and saw Zash had done the same. We both breathed hard, our wide-eyes avoiding one another for quite a while, until I finally stared at him, and waited.
“What the fuck, Zash?” I snarled. “Your people let this go on? Under their noses? Even helping to bring these poor women into this arena for that?”
“I want to change it, Brandon the Mack,” he said. “But I—we—can’t do it alone. You’re a smart man. A brave man. Help me find a way!”
I looked around and saw a pile of bones we’d moved through, dropped down and grabbed what must have once been the femur and shin bone of a large woman. I held up the weapons to my new friend and gave him a look that said: like this!
“How can that work,” he responded, angrily, though quietly. The Grigori couldn’t hear, but the women would. “Look what they can do! That woman should have drowned! Three times by now! She’s a walking dead woman with her guts ripped out and the Grigori is still controlling her!”
I turned and forced myself to look at the scene again. Up and out the girl came until she stood in water that reached barely to her knees. Zash was right. She’d been under the surface for what could have been half an hour, but other than her dripping hair and glistening body you couldn’t tell she’d been under at all. She was oblivious to everything, including the fact that her stomach was a hole, and she should be dead.
The Grigori curved around the tank drawing its victim along behind, eyes still boring into the dead girl’s mind, and began moving back once more into the deeper part of the pool. Blood trailed through the waters, entrails hanging from the girl’s stomach all the way to the water’s placid surface. As they began to submerge once more my imagination raced with what might be next.
“Zash, we have to…” I looked at him, and saw the helplessness in his eyes, the sadness in his now pale features.
Against all orders, against Grigori wishes, he’d shown me this to warn me so I could warn Milton. The only way to protect my friend’s wife and child suffering this same fate was to stop them ever coming here, because he had no idea how to end this horror any more than I did.
As the poor girl’s head vanished once more under the bloodying waters I turned my eyes to the ceiling and thought about blocking the hole. Filling the place with smoke; fire. Trapping the Grigori. But what then? Could we kill them? Save these women? Would Grigori mind control work on us? Stopping us before we began? And would it stop the carnage, or just delay it a bit until some other group of Grigori came for their turn in this killing pool? Would anything we tried be wasted heroics as more Grigori arrived?
I looked again at Zash, saw the anger in his eyes, and knew. Knew he’d thought of all these things. Wanted to do them himself. This had been the argument with the village elder. He had been asking for an end to this. Asking for help, an attack, support—anything—and had been given nothing.
The Grigori had once more returned to the surface, followed by the robotic girl. Her head reappeared, ruby waters flowing down her forehead, her cheeks, her neck, until we were sickened to see that one of her arms had gone—ripped off completely at the shoulder, a fragment of bone visible in the washed out flesh—and still the poor thing showed no indication of pain, only the focus of her eyes seemed intensified.
My mind raced. There had to be a way. This theater, this tomb, this crypt was filled with pregnant women. I couldn’t live with the thought that they were all about to die in this most horrifying of ways while I did nothing. No more Nalas. I had to intervene.
“What is the ritual?” I asked, swallowing hard, hoping for some clue about how to deal with this; change it; end it. “Why this way? Why not just eat them?”
“I’ve asked myself that many times,” Zash said, sadly. “I don’t know.”
“How does it all play out?”
“The Grigori will all feast like this in turn—by some sort of hierarchy, I believe—until full,” Zash said, quietly, “and the Ingonghus will finish the remains. Nothing will be left but some bones coughed up afterward. And then they will all sleep. For a long time.”
“I’ve only ever seen four Grigori sleeping the whole time I was in Emibi. It doesn’t seem like something they do very often.”
“They do a lot of things in this temple they don’t do elsewhere,” he replied. “The Grigori are not supposed to eat women or babies, for obvious reasons.”
“Because the humans would rise up against them,” I said, flatly. “Men are very protective of their mates, and heirs.”
“Humans, Angara, Chutanga,” Zash admitted, not looking at me, “all the higher creatures of Pangea—if they knew this was happening to their wives and unborn… having others you don’t know or care about being enslaved to a superior race is one thing. What goes on here is something else entirely, and would obviously bring the wrath of the entire world down upon—not only the Grigori—but the Chutanga as well.”
“So your tribe, even other Chutanga tribes, worked out a deal with the Grigori to save themselves…”
“I can’t believe the elders who worked out this deal ever imagined that this would be the result!” Zash said defensively; even angrily. “We are an honorable race, Brandon! Many still don’t know! Chutanga are not allowed to see inside this building. The break in the wall has given access the Grigori would never permit, and while some of us snuck in here as children, and the secret is slowly getting out, it’s not enough to force trouble with the Grigori.”
“Trouble with the Grigori is the least of your worries!” I snapped! “A war with all
of Pangea should be your worry! Those Chutanga men brought these women and guided them in here! And they don’t come back again to guide them out! What do they THINK is going on in here?”
He glared at me, silently, and gave no answer.
“You can pretend all you want that no one knew…” I snapped. “But on some level you all did. I don’t even want to think about how many women and their unborn babies have died here—how many ages this has gone on.”
Zash’s shoulders slumped. His eyes filled with self-loathing.
“Many of us want it to end, Brandon,” he said, gently. “You can see how it affects me. Others in our tribe feel the same way. Those that don’t feel as we do have never seen, and choose not to.”
“Out of sight, out of mind.”
“If a Nyame dies in the forest and no one is there to see, who is to say it’s actually dead?”
“And now Milton’s—my friend’s… I don’t know what to call her… woman? Is going to be fattened up for this.” I paused and thought about what Zash had done, and realized he had probably endangered himself and even his family by showing me this. “Thank you for bringing me, Zash. You’re a good man. I will need to warn my friend—at the very least.”
I looked again at the device in my hand. The little red dot had returned! The two blues were moving quickly and narrowing the distance between themselves and the lone runner—whoever it was. Probably only ten or so miles separated them. There was no way I could cross the distance between us before the dots connected. But I could intercept those dots after the red had been recaptured. They might not harm her, if it was indeed Nova, and I could rescue her on the way back to Emibi.
If I lived that long. Which didn’t seem likely based on the decision I’d just come to.
“I have to act now,” I told Zash. “I’m sorry. I know it means I’ll force your tribe to change their minds on this, by taking the decision from them, but I can’t sit by.”
Zash looked hopeful. “How?” he asked.
“Do you want to help?”
The Hollow World: (Pangea, Book 1) Page 23
