by James Axler
Grant, meanwhile, had dived and rolled, yanking the chain free of its user as he fell, still scanning for attackers. There were two of them on their feet, still armed. The third, who had used the chain, was lying on his back with his hands on his chest where the hammer had knocked the wind out of him and maybe cracked a rib in the process, while the fourth—the disarmed knife wielder—was just pushing himself up from the dirt, wiping blood from his nose—gray blood, like everything else Grant saw.
Hammer man pulled his weapon back by a short leather thong attached to its handle, before whipping it around his head in an arc. The sound of the hammer whirling was like the blades of a helicopter, a deep vibration that carried through the air.
“You ever hear of someone called Ninurta?” Grant muttered, subvocalizing into his Commtact pick up.
Kane and Brigid replied in unison, repeating the name. “Ninurta?”
“The Annunaki god of war,” Brigid summarized. “Where did you hear that name?”
There was no time for Grant to reply. Right now, all of his concentration was fixed on timing that hammer as it cut through the air in a lethal rotation.
The hammer bearer launched it as it reached the apex of its spin, and the hammer came hurtling toward Grant with a howl of parting air. Grant’s left arm snaked out, sending the chain whip he had just acquired out to meet the hammer, wrapping around it in an instant with a clash of metal links. A fraction of a second was all Grant had to pull the chain taut, altering the direction of the hammer by a few degrees as he ducked out of its path.
The hammer raced over Grant’s shoulder, missing him by the smallest of margins and almost pulling his arm from its socket in the process—before he let go of the chain.
Hammer man was on him in an instant, chasing after his weapon with arms stretched out to his sides, throwing a haymaker at Grant’s face.
Grant blocked with his right arm, the knife he held flashing momentarily as the sunlight caught it like a streak of silver on the miasma of gray.
“I think Ninurta is behind this,” Grant huffed as he crossed his forearms to block a second blow. “Something about my being a tribute to him...?”
Grant’s opponent drove down with both arms, using his superior height to try to overwhelm his foe. Grant wove backward, pulling himself just fractionally out of the line of fire.
At the same moment, the remaining combatant joined the fray, two thick metal gloves on his hands with a long length of chain between them.
“I told you I saw one of the snake faces before everything went white,” Kane growled over the shared Commtact frequency.
There was no time for Grant to respond. Death came hurtling toward him at an astonishing rate.
Chapter 13
Brigid began recounting the story of Ninurta as she checked the room she was in, running her hands blindly over the walls to try to discover where she was.
“Ninurta was the Annunaki god of war,” she recited over the shared Commtact link, “whose city was Lagash in ancient Babylon. His parents were Enlil and Ninlil, so he came from pretty tough stock.”
Kane sighed as he heard this. The Cerberus warriors had suffered seemingly endless trouble from Enlil. Enlil was the cruelest of the Annunaki and had been reborn from the genetic material of Baron Cobalt, once Kane and Grant’s ultimate superior in the city of Cobaltville back when they had been Magistrates. The Cerberus rebels had rallied to turn back Enlil after he and his brethren, the royal family of the Annunaki, had reemerged on Earth with a plan to subjugate humanity. But Enlil had proved particularly tough—and had reappeared in the Middle East where he had attempted to regrow the organic spaceship, Tiamat, from a single seed. Eight months ago, in their most recent clash, Enlil had almost died after losing a leg during the fight. Where he was now, if he was indeed still alive, nobody knew.
“Ninurta,” Brigid continued, “was an incredible warrior who used a mace called Sharur in battle. Some descriptions of Sharur suggest that it could talk with its master and take the form of a winged lion. From what we know of the Annunaki, that implies there was some kind of technology involved—perhaps it was a computer-aided weapon or vehicle of some sort.”
“You said this guy was a superwarrior,” Grant said, his words staggered, his voice breathless. “Can you tell me more? ’Cause—”
* * *
“—I’M WORRIED I’M about to face him.” As he spoke, Grant kicked out at the warrior in the arena with the chain-mail mittens, driving him back toward the watching crowds.
There was no time to catch his breath, however. Even as the gloved warrior stumbled backward, the now-disarmed hammer wielder lunged for him, grabbing his arm and pulling him off balance. Grant danced uncomfortably to his right before bringing his left arm around in a swift punch to the man’s face. His opponent went backward with the blow, but still managed to cling on as he stumbled, drawing Grant with him to the ground.
“Ninurta defeated a cycle of beasts named the Slain Heroes—presumably after he had killed them—to reach a monster called Anzu,” Brigid elaborated over the Commtact. “These Slain Heroes included the Warrior Dragon, the Mermaid, the Six-Headed Ram and the Seven-Headed Snake, among others. Anzu himself was some kind of massive bird who could breathe fire and water and had stolen the tablets of destiny from Ninurta’s father, Enlil.”
A shadow loomed over Grant, heavy footsteps getting rapidly closer. Kane’s voice piped over the linked Commtacts with a query then, while Grant tried to extricate himself from the other warrior’s grip. “You have an interpretation for all that?” Kane asked.
“Most probably Anzu was an aircraft of some sort,” Brigid reasoned, “and the description of its breathing fire and water could be a primitive understanding of its weaponry.”
“Great,” Grant deadpanned as he pulled free of the other warrior’s grip. At the same moment, the warrior’s colleague with the metal gloves reached around Grant’s throat from behind and cinched the chain tight. Suddenly Grant was pulled backward, the chain locked around his throat.
Grant still held the dagger he had taken from his first opponent, and he twisted it in his hand as he was pulled back by his enemy. The length of chain pressed painfully against his neck, choking him as he fought against it. Grant stabbed backward, driving the knife into his opponent’s leg with as much strength as he could muster.
The man behind him yelped as the knife buried itself in the tendons of his upper leg. His grip faltered momentarily, and Grant used that instant to thread his fingers between the chain and his throat, grabbing it and tugging it away.
The moment’s slack in the chain gave Grant enough leeway to drive his head backward, striking his opponent in the nose with the back of his head.
Grant’s opponent yelped again as his nose cracked, blood pouring almost instantly from his right nostril. The strength seemed to drain out of him in that moment, and Grant dropped down out of the clutch of the chain, pulling the knife free from his opponent’s leg.
Grant’s opponent keeled backward, blood spurting from his leg wound and lines of blood emerging from both nostrils now. Grant kicked out, sending his booted foot into the man as he fell backward, driving him hard into the gray-colored grass. The man lay there, eyes shut tight in agony, blood oozing over the grass and dirt.
Up above, sitting on his throne on the pyramid steps, the glowing Annunaki clapped his hands together thrice in brief applause—or at least it seemed like applause, but it was accompanied by no sound.
There was no time to celebrate the victory. Already the two remaining warriors were circling Grant, looking for an opening. Grant stepped back, watching sharply as both men circled toward him. They were scared now, scared of him—for they had seen Grant in action, seen all those years of Magistrate training put to swift, violent use.
The man to Grant’s right—whose knife Grant had taken
at the start of the bout—saw his opening and hurried forward in a jog. He incorporated his momentum into a swinging punch, one which Grant blocked and pushed aside. The man’s other fist came up with a follow through, rabbit fast and aimed to strike Grant hard in the gut. Grant twisted, taking the blow in a glancing strike against his flank before pounding his own fist forward at his attacker’s face.
Behind Grant, his second attacker was approaching now, having picked up the hammer that his colleague had lost. One part of Grant’s agile brain tracked the man’s movements, even as he tackled the first attacker.
Grant’s opponent tried to block, taking his punch on his forearm. But Grant struck with such force that the blocking arm was knocked backward, causing his opponent to strike himself across the face.
Grant followed up, bringing one bent knee up into the man’s groin, striking there with bone-breaking force. His opponent gasped in pain as he was lifted three inches off the ground before staggering back toward the waiting crowd. Grant let him go, turning to face his other attacker.
As Grant turned, the head of the long-handled hammer came sweeping through the air toward him, its wielder clutching it by the end of its handle for the mightiest swing. Grant ducked instinctively, missing the hammer by an infinitesimal margin, stepping in again during the follow-through as the hammer arced away.
Grant shoved forward, striking his mallet-wielding opponent with a powerful blow that wrong-footed him and forced him backward. The weight of the whirling hammer contributed to the man’s stumble, and suddenly he found himself dragged to the left and anticlockwise in a kind of half step, half jump dance, clinging to the hammer’s shaft. Out of control, the hammer slammed against the ground, drawing its user with it so that he rolled across the dirt, tucking his body for protection.
Grant chased after the warrior’s retreating form. Three long strides and Grant was delivering a hard kick to his opponent’s torso, flipping him over onto his back. The man lay sprawled before him, dark gray blood washing across the teeth in his open mouth, eyes still hidden by the now dirt-smeared ribbon. The man’s hand eased on the shaft of the hammer, dropping it as he struggled to remain conscious. Grant pressed his foot against the man’s neck as he stood over him, watching his colorless face. Then Grant turned, facing the figure on the pyramid for whom this bout had clearly been organized.
The figure on the pyramid shone with brilliance against the grayness around, pressing his bandaged hands together. “You are war master,” he said in a voice that seemed to emanate from the distant end of a long, echoing tunnel. “The blood you shed shall appease my brother. Be proud, apekin warrior, for you are the chosen of Nergal.”
Nergal? Grant thought, bowing automatically to this mysterious, dazzling figure. “Lord Nergal?” he pressed, his head still bowed in supplication. “I am your loyal servant. What do you wish of me?”
The figure in the throne took a moment to consider—everything it did seemed slow and very conscious, in fact, as though it struggled with some great burden. Then it answered, tangentially confirming who it was to Grant. “Blood sacrifice is needed to spill the materials required for my brother,” Nergal said. “Bring forward the blood sacrifice,” he commanded.
Grant swallowed hard. Sacrifices? Unless they were chickens—and he suspected they wouldn’t be—then things had just taken a very unpleasant turn.
* * *
WAITING IN HIS CELL, Kane had adopted a position beside the door. He could not be certain which way the door opened, nor whether or not he was being watched, but he at least could try to stay ahead of his enemy.
When the door pulled back, outward from the cell, without a moment’s warning, Kane moved immediately, lunging toward the entrant with a ram’s-head punch, aiming it by the sound of the man’s breath, the smell of his sweat.
Framed in the doorway, the guard was momentarily surprised, and then Kane’s fist struck him in the center of his chest. The man sagged backward, dropping onto his butt with a loud thump.
“Where am I?” Kane muttered, maneuvering through the doorway by touch alone. “What have you done with my friends?”
Though Kane could not see it, the guard on the floor smiled, a broad slash of white teeth appearing in his face. “You still have some life in you,” the man said with a chuckle, speaking in French. As he spoke, he reached for the pistol that he had shoved into his waistband, pulling it free.
Kane pressed his advantage, if he could call it that, kicking out hard at the location of the noise. Incredibly, his toe struck the man’s hand as he pulled his pistol from its holster, and, with an “ouch,” he almost let the weapon go. He clung on, again more surprised than hurt by Kane’s blow—it had been poorly aimed and had struck in a glancing manner, nothing that the guard could not endure.
“I have a gun trained on you, monsieur,” the man explained in heavily accented English. “You try anything else and I will shoot you.”
Still standing in the doorway, Kane considered his options rapidly, running through his scant choices as a blind man. There were none worth trying, the odds were too heavily stacked against him—unless he could bluff his way...
“I warn you,” the fallen guard added, “I have no compunctions about shooting a blind man. None at all.”
So he knows, Kane realized. Knows I’m blind.
Reluctantly, Kane raised his hands above his head, looking straight ahead with eyes that could not see. “You got me,” he admitted. “But I have to warn you—if we’re going anywhere, you’re going to have to guide me.”
“Don’t worry about that,” the guard said in accented English. “Your eyesight will improve soon enough.” Kane did not like the way he emphasized the word improve, as if he meant something more than it implied.
SIGHTLESS, KANE WAS led through a long, cool corridor with stone walls that were cold to the touch. He knew that it was long by the echo his footsteps made, felt the coolness of the stones when he brushed against them with his outstretched hands. “Where are we going?” Kane asked.
His companion said nothing, merely tsked between gritted teeth.
They soon reached a flight of steps. Kane knocked his foot against the first and tripped, reaching for the wall before he fell. “A little help, man,” he said to his guard in a harsh tone.
The guard only laughed sadistically.
“Kane?” Brigid Baptiste’s voice came from somewhere behind him.
Kane turned automatically, but his vision was no better. He still only saw that haze of brilliant orange, changing a little as if it were something organic. “It’s me,” he said. “You okay?”
There was no point disguising that they had entered here together—they had been brought through the interphase pane together and been incarcerated at the same time. However, Kane chose not to give his ally’s name freely—if they needed it, they could ask, and maybe beg, for it.
“I’m all right,” Brigid said uncertainly. “Do you know where we’re being taken?”
“Shut up!” a rough male voice demanded harshly from the same location Brigid’s voice was emanating from. So, Kane thought, she’s got a guard, too. Just one?
“You brought company, I hear,” Kane encouraged.
Suddenly something cold pressed against his temple, accompanied by the sound of a safety being cocked. He figured it for a gun.
“Enough chitchat,” his guard warned, his breath hot on the side of Kane’s face. “Get up those steps.”
Feeling the gun pull away from his head, Kane stepped warily forward, toeing for each step as he ascended. As he did, Kane heard more movements behind him, two sets of footsteps emerging from a side passage—he guessed it was Mariah Falk and her guard.
Five steps later and Kane was out of the corridor and could feel the sun’s rays on his face. Feel, but not see.
“Keep walking,” Kane’s captor instructe
d from behind him, pushing him between his shoulder blades.
* * *
GRANT WATCHED THE six figures emerge from the steps that ran down below the pyramid, recognizing his companions, Kane, Brigid and finally Mariah, as they stumbled up into the light along with three guards. Like everyone and everything else here, they looked gray and washed out, as if in a photograph that had spent too long in the sun.
“It’s okay, guys,” Grant said. “I’m here.”
“Yeah?” Kane replied. “And where is here? I’m having a little trouble with my eyesight just now on account of being blind.”
At the same time as this exchange was occurring, Brigid subvocalized a query to both men via their linked Commtacts. “Grant, is Ninurta here now?”
“Annunaki sitting behind you,” Grant subvocalized, covering the subtle movement of his lips by pretending to study the blood on his hand. “Calls himself Nergal, not Ninurta. Maybe an alias?”
“No, Nergal is another child of Enlil and Ninlil,” Brigid confirmed. “Ninurta’s brother.”
Kane, Brigid and Mariah were now in the center of the roughly marked circle, and as Brigid spoke, they were forced to turn around until they faced the pyramid. As they turned, they became aware of something that could only be described as miraculous. Despite their ruined eyesight—for Mariah had been blinded, too—they could all see the figure sitting before them, glowing with a brilliant, ever-changing rainbow of churning colors, his head exuding a brilliant whiteness. That burning whiteness seemed to purify their vision, eating away at the damage that had obscured their sight, pushing it back from its center in an expanding, circular wave. As it did so, Kane, Brigid and Mariah discovered, to their surprise, that they could see again—after a fashion.
Now they saw Nergal, the glowing figure they had first spied, where he sat atop his throne on the steps of the pyramid. A wash of bland figures, as insignificant as shadows, stood about him, their blindfolded eyes fixed on the three strangers who had entered the circle of combat and execution. And there was another figure, not standing but hovering, legs together, arms outstretched, floating behind and to the right of Nergal, over his left shoulder.
