by James Axler
Her left wrist felt heavy where the blood had dried and scabbed over, the scab itself restricting her movement like a hard shell. They had not replaced the stone, as far as she could tell. Domi was sure she would know, for she was sensitive, very conscious of things done on or in her body. She disliked clothes, habitually wore only those deemed most necessary to cover her modesty, and shed them when the opportunity arose. The stone was no different. These were alien things, and drew Domi away from the purity of herself.
She lay in the swirling glow of the magma light, listening to its flickering inside her head. The stone had been in her wrist for less than a minute, but she had felt the way it responded to Ullikummis, felt the way it was drawn by his hot blood, his presence. The lights and the stones were a form of control, something Ullikummis craved.
Domi lay nude in the cell, the thin carpet of sand pressing against her legs, knees up and coiled into her chest. She had not eaten in over two days.
Chapter 18
Brigid peered over the mirror, left and right, trying to find where he was. What she could see of the cavern appeared empty, except for herself, the chair and the mirror. “Where are you?” she asked, her tone demanding. “Show yourself.” She was angry with herself for being fearful, angry with herself for being scared.
But there was no response, just that infernal scraping of stone against stone. It was him. The movements, the noise he made as he walked, she realized, were as distinctive as the movements of a shackled prisoner bound in irons.
“Show yourself,” Brigid demanded again. “Show yourself, Annunaki. Show yourself, you damn coward. You damn, damn coward.” She was crying when she said the last, her voice cracking as she mumbled the words.
Immediately, Ullikummis’s voice rumbled back from the gloom of the cave. “You should not attribute to others the qualities you fear in yourself,” he said.
Suddenly, he was standing right before her, striding from the shadows of the rock wall, the fiery lava flow sparking to life in orange traceries across his body, like a light switch being flicked. “You feel fear, Brigid,” Ullikummis told her, “and so you think yourself a coward and thus tell me I must be one also.”
Brigid glared at the stone-clad Annunaki prince defiantly, her lips pressed tightly together, the hot tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Fear does not make one a coward,” Ullikummis told her calmly. “Fear is the mechanism for survival, the facet that keeps all things alive.”
Brigid continued to glare at him, this monstrosity, as the tears dried on her face.
Ullikummis took another pace closer, stepping in front of the mirror, placing himself so close to Brigid that they almost touched. “We are not different, Annunaki and humans,” he told her. “We just see the world in different ways.”
“Set me free,” Brigid said. “If we’re not so different then set me free from this chair, this cave. I read up on you, learned how you spent millennia inside a prison of rock. You know what it is to be trapped.”
“You’re not trapped,” Ullikummis said. “Not physically.”
Brigid pulled at her bonds, assuring herself that she was.
“I chose you because our minds have touched before,” Ullikummis said.
Brigid recollected when she had sent her consciousness into the sentient data stream of the Ontic Library to repel Ullikummis, of how they had conversed in a world made of knowledge. She had been guided then by perception and desire, had seen things change at her whim. Temptation had called to her, and she had struggled to resist it.
“You have the capacity to see the world as it is,” Ullikummis continued. “You need only cast aside all that you have learned up to now.”
Brigid glared at him. “How can…? Why would I?” she corrected herself, stumbling over her own words.
“Did it never strike you as strange that the moon appears exactly the same size as the sun from the surface of the Earth?” Ullikummis asked. “Didn’t the nature of an eclipse seem somehow too convenient, like some great cosmic joke?”
Brigid listened to the words, trying to make sense of them.
“When we are finished,” Ullikummis told her, “you will see the eclipse as it truly is.”
“YOU ARE THE MOTHER,” Ullikummis stated, as if from nowhere.
Brigid had been sleeping in the chair. Well, perhaps not truly sleeping, just dozing, catnaps brought on by exhaustion. She had been in the cave a long time now, so long that her time sense had faded, lost to the darkness of the gloomy shadows all around her. She looked up and saw that the mirror had gone, been taken and placed to one side of the orange-lit cave.
“I’m no one’s mother,” Brigid replied. “I have no children.”
Ullikummis looked into her eyes, the fiery orange of his own swirling with the certainty of his words. “You have one.”
“I have no children,” Brigid assured him. “I don’t understand why you’d think—”
“Tell me her name,” Ullikummis said, interrupting Brigid’s denial.
Her name, Brigid thought. Her. The girl. Abigail.
“You still fear me,” Ullikummis stated.
“No, I don’t,” Brigid began, but she knew as she said it that it was a lie. Of course she feared him, this towering monstrosity that stood before her, held her captive in a cave painted with thick shadows.
“Your world has been black and white of necessity,” Ullikummis observed. “You and your companions understand the Annunaki only in terms of good and evil. You fear us because we are different, and you attribute that difference as an indicator of malefaction, of evil.
“You apekin are so fragile,” Ullikummis continued. “If I wanted to hurt you, I could simply twist your neck where you sit, turn it until the bones snap, leave you there to suffer. You have seen my strength. You know that this is something I could do.”
It was, Brigid knew.
“I am not going to kill you,” Ullikummis stated, “nor hurt you. I will set you free.”
Brigid Baptiste looked at Ullikummis, feeling strangely that she could trust him as he uttered those words. There was a perverse kind of logic to what he said; had he wanted to hurt her he would have done so already.
“Then what…?” Brigid asked.
“Your child,” Ullikummis said, his feet kicking up sand as he paced the cavern before Brigid. “She has a name.”
Brigid drew a long, steadying breath and slowly let it out. “I had an imaginary child, a niece. It was a trick, nothing more.” The trick Brigid referred to had been played while she was trapped in a virtual reality, and her fictitious niece had been a way to hold her there, to distract her. When she had traveled to the Ontic Library and fought with and ultimately repelled Ullikummis, she had been tempted to use the vast resources there—the tools that shape reality—to make Abigail, her niece, real. It had been a momentary whim, an effect of the incredible data stream on her mind.
“Tell me her name,” Ullikummis requested, repeating his earlier statement.
Brigid looked at the monster before her, fixed his glowing eyes with her own. “Abigail,” she said. “That was her name.”
“Can you see her?” Ullikummis asked. “If you think of her, can you see her?”
Brigid nodded slowly, just once. “Yes.”
Ullikummis strode away for a moment, his head bowed in thought. “I am to give you a gift, Brigid,” he said finally, turning back to her. “The Annunaki are powerful, but your comprehension of that power remains tiny.”
Brigid watched this strange being of stone and wondered what he meant. What was he? The stonework that covered his body was like nothing she had seen before, like no other Annunaki before him. He seemed barely like a living being at all.
Ullikummis kicked at the thin layer of sand that carpeted the cavern floor, watched as it clouded and floated away on the slight breeze that spun through the cave. “Do you wish for your freedom, Brigid?” he asked.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Then you will do
something for me in order for me to grant that freedom,” Ullikummis said. “There is a story, a myth from your race’s past, about a queen who so desired a daughter that she implored the gods themselves. And the gods heard her and granted her wish, having the queen shape her daughter of clay.”
Closing her eyes, Brigid tried to place the story. But she was exhausted and hungry, and all Ullikummis’s talk had left her feeling strangely empty and dizzy and not at all there, as if she was constantly about to awaken from a dream.
When Brigid opened her eyes once more, Ullikummis was crouching beside her, his hand stroking along the arm of the chair where her wrist was tied. Suddenly, there was a click and the wrist bond retracted into the chair, sliding away with the uncomfortable scraping sound of rough-edged rock on rock. Dumbstruck, Brigid stared at her freed hand for a moment, not even moving.
“Wha—?” she began, the word stumbling out of her lips half-formed.
Ullikummis reached across, brushed his misshapen, rocky fingers against the other restraint, the one that held her right hand in place. Like one of those touch-responsive plants that so fascinate children, the rock bond twitched and split, the two halves sinking away into the arm of the chair.
Warily, Brigid raised her hand, rolling her wrist this way and that. It felt tired, aching with stiffness. Then she glanced down, and her eyes scanned the arms of the stone chair where the bonds had been. They appeared—well, not smooth, but flat, giving no indication that they had featured clasps just a handful of seconds before. There was something about Ullikummis, Brigid realized. His psionic link with rock changed its properties, made it into a malleable thing.
“Impossible,” Brigid breathed. And yet she had seen it with her own eyes. The evidence was before her right now, even as the stone god leaned down and commanded the bonds at her ankles to disappear, to return to their hidden housings, just a part of the chair.
Ullikummis looked up at Brigid, and she fancied that the expression he wore was whatever passed for a smile on that malformed, rough stone face. “Few things are truly impossible,” he told her.
“For the Annunaki?” Brigid finished, her response a query.
“A male and female creature meet,” Ullikummis said, as Brigid swung her legs free for the first time in two days, “and they feel desire. Perhaps the female feels the desire and she woos the male, or perhaps the male has need and he simply takes the female in a show of strength.”
“Or perhaps they fall in love,” Brigid said. “That’s how humans would phrase it.”
Ullikummis shrugged, the great spiked ridges that towered over his shoulders moving up and down like lancing flames in the air. “The female is fertile, becomes heavy with child. An egg grows to become a new being.
“That is your history and mine, is it not, Brigid?”
Still sitting in the chair, she nodded slowly. “To an extent.”
“The odds of those souls meeting,” Ullikummis said, “of the egg being fertile, of the fertilization taking place—these are impossible things. Yet they happen. We are proof of that. Our very existence here proves that the impossible happens, and there is a whole world beyond these walls that is full of these impossible meetings, the birth of impossible things.”
Brigid shook her head and, underfed and dehydrated, felt light-headed as she did so. She stopped herself, unsure if she was swaying in the seat or if it just felt that way. “No,” she said. “Those are just the rules of life. They happen every day. Theory makes them sound unlikely, but we know—”
“The universe is very big,” Ullikummis said, “and you are very small. The things that appear impossible appear so because your perspective is too limited. Every occurrence may be considered impossible until you witness it.” He stood before her then, a towering, misshapen thing, veins of fiery magma lining his body between dark rock plates of skin, and his hand reached out for Brigid, like a dance partner, offering to help her from the chair.
“Show me your daughter,” Ullikummis intoned, his glowing eyes fixed on Brigid’s. “Describe her face.”
Taking the proffered hand, Brigid eased herself from the chair on unsteady legs. She had been locked in the same position for so long that her muscles had become locked, and they burned like fire when she moved. She took a tentative step forward, using Ullikummis for support, shuffling forward like an elderly woman.
Three shuffling steps, then Brigid stopped, her hand still pressed in Ullikummis’s gentle grip. Over to one side, propped against the wall, she saw the mirror, its tall, oblong reflection angled to show the wall to its side. Automatically, Brigid turned, peering behind her with her own eyes for the first time, looking at the gloomy cavern she had only seen cast in the mirror’s reflection. She suspected a trick, expected to see an open door, a flat surface, a curtain made to look like rock. But no, the cavern was as she had seen it in the mirror. Ullikummis had played no trick there, had let her see the place she was in for what it was, bleak and lifeless, just a shadow-filled cave with rock walls and a smattering of sand littering its floor. She could see no exit, no obvious gap where sunlight might poke through. The solid wall reached all around, and the cave stretched a long way back, with just the lone chair placed somewhere off center, closer to the near wall.
It was possible there was an entrance hidden in the far shadows, Brigid knew, tucked there within the darkness. Was that her escape? To use it she would need to trick Ullikummis, fool him somehow into trusting her, leaving her alone, leaving her free to run. That was, of course, assuming there was an exit. The overlord had moved whole chunks of rock in the same way as he’d moved the shackles that had bound her to the chair, Brigid recalled. The reason this place appeared to have no door might be simply that it did not, that it contained a door only Ullikummis could perceive.
There were other ways to escape an impossible room, too, Brigid knew. Out in old Russia, she had been party to an experiment in opening up the higher levels of human consciousness. In that adventure, she had used a mandala—a pattern designed to induce a state of meditation—to exit her body and let her mind roam within a place dubbed Krylograd, the Astral Factory. Employing a similar trick here might grant her freedom, at least from her physical self. But to what purpose? Brigid had an eidetic memory, so she could picture things she had seen as if she were flicking through a photo album. Even now she could picture the mandala design that she had been tasked to memorize, to enter the state of transcendental meditation required to depart her body. The Astral Factory had been specifically designed by the Russian military as a place that the Annunaki could not enter, a place hidden deep within the shared experience of mankind. If this monster wanted the impossible…
“Describe her face,” Ullikummis said, his words coming back to Brigid as if from far away.
She was swaying in place, the lack of sustenance making her half-asleep. It was like a waking dream, and Brigid realized then that her mind was subject to drifting, was prone to lose focus unless she disciplined herself.
“Abigail was beautiful,” she said, turning back to face the stone thing. She remembered the girl’s cherubic face, not yet six years old, a girl programmed to exist in a reality that did not. “She had hair the color of honey, round apple cheeks, and her eyes were like mine—the green of emeralds.”
“No, Brigid,” Ullikummis said, stepping back and gently letting go of her. “Describe her face. Here. With your hands.” Ullikummis was gesturing to the rough floor at their feet, where the sand played in little eddies of wind.
“I don’t understand,” Brigid admitted, swaying a little in the gloomy cave.
“Make her for me,” Ullikummis instructed. “A child of clay, of sand, of dust.”
Poupée de son, Brigid remembered. Doll of dust.
“In the story, the queen was tasked to make her child from the earth,” Ullikummis reminded his companion. “And you shall do the same. Once this is done, I will grant you your freedom.”
Brigid stood there looking at Ullikummis, wondering
why he would ask such a thing. Abigail was a figment of her imagination, nothing more than a trick that she had learned to see past, to escape the Janus trap she had been placed within by Cerberus’s enemies, the Original Tribe. Whatever emotional bonds Brigid had felt, she had got over them, had left the child behind in her unreal world. The child had no power over her, did she? Or would Ullikummis somehow bring the sand to life, as he had the stone of the walls, the chair? Could he be making her create something with her hands that would come to life? Could hurt her? No. If he did that, she would turn Abigail, would make her her own again.
Kneeling, Brigid clenched her teeth and ran her fingers through the sand. “It’s dry,” she said.
“I will bring you water,” Ullikummis told her, his shadow looming over the floor where she knelt, “that you may make the child grow.”
And then he turned, striding across the cavern and leaving Brigid in the echoing cave. Alone, she began to picture Abigail in her mind, running her hands through the thin grains of sand.
Chapter 19
Kane waited on the far side of the cavelike cell, listening for the noises of movement. It was so well sealed that he could hear nothing other than his own breathing and, if he stood very close to it, the swirling of the magma energies in the overhead light pool. Rosalia had offered to deal him back into the game and, despite his distrust of the mercenary woman, he was reaching the seemingly inevitable conclusion that it was the only option he had left. Kane had been in bad situations before, had suffered defeat at the hands of his enemies, had placed his life in the utmost danger. But those had been temporary things, situations where one option still remained if he looked hard enough.
Here, in this completely sealed cell, he was utterly without hope. He could be left to die here and no one would even know.
And what of Grant, his partner? What of Brigid Baptiste, his anam-chara? Were they in this situation, too? Had each of them been placed in solitary confinement in a cell with no door? Kane would risk everything to free them; he would sacrifice himself to save his friends if that was what fate demanded of him.
