Paternus: Wrath of Gods (The Paternus Trilogy Book 2)
Page 7
Peter continues. “That was bound to attract attention, and all attention is unwanted at this point. Let’s get moving.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CHINATOWN
SLIP
Akhu, a.k.a. Miss Zhang Li Jing, Kabir and Cù Sìth appear from their slip in mid-air. Continuing on the same trajectory as their leap from the roof, they let go of each other’s hands as they fall four stories in an arc and land firmly on their feet with a thudding crunch of ice and poof of light swirling snow. This is the same dead, glaciated world to which Akhu slipped to escape the arrow that sped toward her heart in the alley. Behind them is the high outcropping of ice and stone she climbed to slip onto the roof and confront her would-be assassin.
Without a pause, she runs in the direction of her friend’s gym. Kabir and Cù Sìth match her pace.
“What did Mac tell you?” Kabir asks.
“Very little, but he was under no small amount of duress,” Akhu replies.
“Another assault by the Asura, timed to coincide with your demise so you would not be able to warn him.”
“Or he me.”
“All the attacks we know of happened over the weekend. Why did they wait so long?”
“I’m assuming the human assassin had to wait until I left the building. With my meditation, I hadn’t done so when I normally would.”
Though there’s no reading of thoughts through Akhu’s telepathic link, Kabir can sense her worry for her friend. “He’ll be all right,” he says in her mind. “The Rooster is a worthy combatant.” Then something occurs to Kabir. “Cù Sìth.”
Cù claps a hand to his temple and nearly stumbles. He’d given his consent to Akhu to slip him to other worlds with her, and also open a channel between their minds for communication. He’s “heard” all of Akhu and Kabir’s conversation, allowed by Akhu to passively travel to him, but to hear Kabir address him directly in his head startles him. He attempts a telepathic reply for the first time. “I... I am here.”
“Who’s been sent after Mac Gallus?”
“That I do know, though I am not supposed to. There are four. Adramelech, Taesan, Cernunnos, and The Hands.”
Akhu’s eyes snap to Cù Sìth. “I’m not glad to hear Adramelech and Taesan are still alive, but not surprised. Cernunnos and The Hands, however, have been dead for millennia.”
Through the link, Kabir tells Akhu about the appearance of Mahisha The Buffalo Demon and Tengu-Andrealphus The Peafowl at Peter’s home. Then he asks Cù Sìth, “How is Kleron performing this profane sorcery? He could never do it before.”
“I have no idea. I did not know of it until I saw them the same time you did. I know next to nothing about Kleron’s actions or plans. I’ve simply been following orders, as I always have.”
Akhu says, “Except now you are not.”
A moment passes before Cù Sìth replies. “Except now I am not.”
Akhu’s thoughts return to Mac Gallus. She reaches out to him, but he doesn’t answer. The Rooster has never asked her for help before, so he must be in serious trouble. He’s always been the one to help her, comfort her, cheer her up, and fight for her when needed—and sometimes when it wasn’t. Mac does enjoy a good fight.
It has been just the two of them for a long time, choosing to live amongst the watoto, supporting each other. They’ve kept in contact with few other Deva. But now the Asura Master has returned and set evil plans in motion once again.
When Akhu last saw Kleron, she and Mac had sailed with Horus, known as Tuan mac Cairill at the time, Myrddin Wyllt, calling himself Amergin, and a few of her other siblings, in support of the Sons of Milesius and their campaign to free Ireland from Kleron and his progeny, the bloodthirsty Tuatha Dé Danann. She’d heard Kleron had later been banished by Father for murdering Bóruma mac Cennétig, King Brian Boru. Not banished far enough, it seems.
After traveling the equivalent of about thirty city blocks, Akhu skids to a halt and takes Kabir and Cù Sìth’s hands. Eyes closed, she feels out for a populated earth similar to the one in which she and Mac live, one that was formed in a split not so long ago, with a New York City of its own. She explains her plan to Kabir and Cù. They’ll slip to this alternate New York, make their way to the double of the building where Mac has his boxing gym, then slip once inside and see what kind of trouble he’s in.
She opens her eyes, takes three steps sideways and one back, Kabir and Cù shuffling with her, then steps forward and they disappear.
* * *
Slipping between worlds is always an odd sensation, but the sudden loss of gravity and atmosphere is a shock none of them expect. They find themselves floating in space on a piece of an earth that no longer exists—a chunk of ground, a fragment of obliterated city—in complete silence.
Rubble, cars and bodies spin slowly around them. Demolished skyscrapers, hunks of them suspended in space, and shattered windows glaring sunlight. The sun blasts them with raw unfiltered rays. Only their preternatural Firstborn physiology protects them.
Then they see the moon. Very close, cracked apart, and quickly growing closer.
“Akhu?” Even in her mind, Kabir’s voice is possibly the highest it has ever been.
“I don’t understand,” is Akhu’s bewildered reply.
“We should go,” is Cù Sìth’s pragmatic response, watching the pieces of moon barreling toward them.
Akhu gathers her wits, reaches out with her senses. “There is another. Not far. Hold on.” Kabir and Cù squeeze her hands tighter as she leaps and kicks off a slab of concrete.
A wedge of the moon slams into the wreckage, obliterating it in a silent celestial collision.
* * *
The three Firstborn bounce off the side of a delivery truck as they fall at an angle, then tumble across the sidewalk into the recessed doorway of a building. Kabir, having let go of Akhu, pushes to his feet. Akhu, still holding Cù Sìth’s hand, stands and pulls him up with her. He’s uncomfortable with her help and takes his hand away.
“That world...” Kabir says out loud.
“Destroyed,” says Akhu. “And quite recently.”
“It couldn’t be Kleron’s doing,” says Kabir. “No Firstborn is capable of such a thing.” He looks to Cù Sìth. “Are they?”
Cù is as puzzled as they are. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“It must have been a natural disaster. A meteor or comet,” Kabir attempts to explain. “Worlds have suffered similar fates before, I’ve heard.”
But none of them are convinced. The timing, and the odd way the planet was broken up, and the moon...
Cù Sìth has stepped from the doorway to peer up and down the street. “This is not much better.”
Kabir and Akhu follow. He’s right.
“This is not our world,” says Kabir, hoping for it to be true.
“No, thanks be to Élan,” Akhu responds.
The entire block is demolished, as is the rest of the city from what they can see. Cars tossed haphazardly, crumpled and smashed. Broken hydrants gushing, electrical lines snapping and sizzling. Bodies lie mangled in the streets. “There’s been a war,” Akhu comments.
A lurid buzz, rising and falling. The surfaces of the ruined buildings shudder and crawl, mottled with countless fluttering shadows. The sky teems with blurry black figures, flecked with glints of silver and bronze, accompanied by a cacophony of clattering and chittering.
Kabir speaks. “I didn’t understand what they were talking about at the time, but during the battle at Father’s home, I recall him speaking with Galahad, the young knight calling himself Edgar, after their travels to other worlds. They spoke of plagues of locusts. But not ordinary locusts.”
“And before the fighting began,” Cù Sìth adds, his voice uncharacteristically somber, “Kleron said to Pater, ‘We have might like you have never seen, an army, nay, armies, unprecedented in all the history of the worlds.’”
Kabir adds, “He also said, ‘You will see with your own eyes, and despair.’”
“You had no knowledge of this, Cù Sìth?” Kabir asks.
“I did not. My brothers and I have always been but soldiers. Pawns in the masters’ games.”
“The dreaded Cerberi,” says Akhu. “Murderers. Slavers. Rapists. Committers of genocide, of Firstborn and watoto alike.”
“Yes,” Cù Sìth answers. “And I cannot say I have not taken pleasure in it.”
“And what of your littermates,” Akhu asks, “Surma and Wepwawet?”
Kabir eyes Cù’s rucksack. Akhu sniffs at the air, and realization dawns on her features. “You did this?”
Cù is silent. Kabir answers for him. “He did. Saving my life in the process.”
Cù Sìth’s mirrored sunglasses provide no obstruction to Akhu’s gaze. “I see.”
They start at the popping report of gunfire. A mob of civilians come running around a corner at the end of the next block, bloodied and screaming. A group of police officers in torn uniforms and S.W.A.T team members in full assault regalia follow, shouting in alarm, firing back around the corner and into the air. Lastly comes an armored urban assault vehicle, swerving and firing a mounted machine gun at the sky.
An airborne horde swarms around the building and swoops on the hapless watoto, obliterating them from sight. The gunfire and screams are cut short.
A woman comes crashing through a door in the building behind them and barrels into Cù Sìth. She bounces off him, spins and stumbles, barely keeping her feet. She’s naked above her ripped jeans, except for the inked flames on her neck, sleeves of tattoos on her muscular arms, and a shining .357 Magnum in her right hand. Wild-eyed with panic, she whips around and fires blind—right at Akhu’s sternum. But before the bullet reaches Akhu, she’s raised her hand and it stops, spinning but suspended, inches from her palm.
The woman realizes her mistake, waves her hands frantically in front of her. “I’m sorry!”
Akhu takes the bullet out of the air and holds it up, as if to say, “It’s all right.”
But the woman isn’t paying attention. She’s staring over their heads, her face distorted in terror. She raises the gun and fires twice as she stumbles backward.
In the racket made by the swarm, Akhu, Kabir and Cù Sìth barely hear the buzz and chitter behind them before something catches Cù Sìth’s upper arm, gashing his Firstborn flesh. Akhu and Kabir jump away as Cù leaps and rolls to his feet, growling and grasping his bleeding arm. The thing that wounded him pounces on the tattooed woman and bites her face, crunching into bone and brain with serrated mandibles.
The creature finishes its kill then whirls back on them, rising on skinny spiked legs with back-bending knees. It folds its four translucent wings down along its back and segmented abdomen, hunching forward. Antennae jerk and its insectile head tilts mechanically as it inspects them with large, oval, multi-lensed eyes.
Akhu has seen many things in the myria upon myria of her life, but never such a beast as this. It looks like an orthopteran, a member of the grasshopper, cricket and katydid family. But this is not natural, and though it injured Cù Sìth easily—something only an elder Firstborn or Astra weapon should be capable of—Akhu can tell it’s not Firstborn either. It appears part biological, part synthetic, with a long thin thorax and abdomen, organically armored in shining black and green, four jointed arms with saw-toothed claws of gleaming bronze, and a smooth, ingrown helmet that shines like silver chrome. This thing may not be Firstborn, but it’s no mere animal, nor a machine, either. And there’s a sinister intelligence in its eyes.
Locusts of the most hellish kind, she thinks. And there are thousands of them in this city. Tens of thousands.
The locust runs its antennae over the blood and bit of fur from Cù Sìth’s arm that remain on one of its claws, holds the claw to its mouth full of black saliva to taste it with wriggling maxillary palps, then thrusts the claw between its mandible pincers to suck on it.
It removes its dripping claw and stares at them, works its multiple mouth parts deliberately, and shrieks, sending black spittle flying. Its voice sounds like a deeper version of the extended chirp of a cricket, the utterance barely recognizable as speech, but it is indeed a language—one Akhu hasn’t heard since the abhorrent spells cast by Kleron’s master, the Unmentionable One, in the First Holocaust. Then it chirrs again, this time in English, “D-e-e-e-v-v-v-a-a-a!”
The locust stands erect to nearly six feet tall and spreads its four jointed arms. It puffs out its long, shell-like wing covers at its back and the fore-wings vibrate. The noise they generate is akin to the shrill call of a natural cicada, but much louder and far more alarming.
There’s a change in the pitch of the swarms above as the creatures slow their frenetic roiling, reacting together like a singular organism. The group down the block becomes silent as all their heads turn toward the three Firstborn. They scuttle over shredded bodies and the ruined assault vehicle, then jump straight at them. Halfway through their leap the locusts open their wings in unison to bear down upon them with startling speed.
Akhu snatches Kabir and Cù Sìth’s arms as she stumbles backward and slips them away, leaving the locusts to claw at empty air.
* * *
Akhu had no time to prepare for the slip and her immediate reaction is one of relief to not be trapped inside a wall or have splattered an mtoto by slipping to where he or she stood. She’s also exceedingly glad to be away from the horrific swarm on the other world. Then she and the others see they are in another metropolis, of different design and architecture than the last, but equally as ruined and also infested with locusts from hell.
The creatures scamper through broken windows and over facades of wrecked buildings from street level to the highest stories. They creep out of manholes, sewer grates and subway entrances. Streets are crawling and the sky is black with them. Their dung spread and clumped everywhere. The only sign of watoto are smears of blood, shards of bone and shredded clothing.
Akhu presses herself into the shadow of a recessed corner doorway, pulling the others with her. How many worlds have been affected by this plague?
She hears a deep voice speaking an ancient tongue, distinct from the clamor of the locusts, and they venture to peek around the corner.
A block up, a bonfire burns in the intersection. A dozen feral-looking human men sit around it, laughing and joking as they eat. They wear furs and bone armor, but have modern assault rifles slung on their backs. The locusts ignore them, staying clear in a wide perimeter. Two other figures converse nearby, facing the fire. Asura Firstborn. Akhu knows them by name. One is Andras, a Firstborn with head and wings like a great horned owl and the hairless naked body of a man. The other is Gusion, dressed in the finery of 15th century French royalty, in stark contrast to his baboon-like features and stance. During the Second Holocaust, Kleron had given Gusion command of forty legions of human soldiers and Asura warriors and allowed him to call himself a duke, of all things.
Stalking around the men and fire is an Ammit, an extinct, semi-sapient species of ill repute and even more ill temper. It’s the size of a hippopotamus and of similar body shape, but with head and mouth like a crocodile, clawed feet and mane akin to a lion. One of them served Anubis and Sekhmet millennia ago, but turned on them during the Second Holocaust. It had been killed, but the Asura apparently found another.
One of the men tosses a piece of what they’re eating to the Ammit. Before it disappears down the beast’s gullet, Akhu recognizes it as a human leg.
Craning around the corner, towering above Akhu, Cù Sìth growls.
Facing away from them, and without moving his shoulders, Andras spins his owl-like head in their direction. A human hand, stripped of flesh and dripping blood, dangles from his beak. He gulps it down, his feathered neck bulging to accommodate its size. He blinks his round orange eyes then shouts, “Who?!”
Cù growls again and moves to enter the street, but Kabir catc
hes his arm. “Don’t, Cù Sìth. The damage is done here. We must get to Mac Gallus.”
Gusion has turned and walks in an arc to see into the shadows where they hide. The feral men get to their feet, unslinging their rifles. The Ammit snuffs at the air, then charges, its roar more like a deep shriek, rattling broken windows along the block.
“Come,” says Akhu, taking their hands. She leads them around the corner and they slip.
CHAPTER FIVE
HIGHLANDS
BOX CANYON
On the northern shore of Scotland, Fi and Zeke lean against one of the many tall stones near the cliffs that line the rocky beach. Mrs. Mirskaya, a few yards away, speaks to the sky. The base of the clouds bubbles, growing closer, oozing mist that reaches down to meet more rolling in off the sea, blanketing the area in a heavy fog.
Out on the beach, Dimmi and Baphomet finish piling parachutes and what pieces of the ruined fighter jet they’ve gathered onto the skid that held the truck. Pratha looks on while Myrddin mumbles words, waving a hand over the rocks and sand. The ground moves, swallowing the pile. He continues to speak and the surface smooths until it shows no sign of disturbance.
“You’ve still got it, I believe they say,” says Pratha.
Myrddin smiles, but sadly, while he removes the strips of cloth that bound his robe for his flight with Fintán. “I could do more if I had my gambanteinn.” He looks to Pratha. “It was never recovered?”
Pratha gazes at him with her judicious golden eyes. “It was not,” she answers.
Myrddin’s voice quavers. “Nyneve did this to me, you know. Took my necklace, the one you made me. My scrolls as well. All you had taught me. All we had learned together, you and I.”
“And you gave her the secret to reading them, I suppose. After swearing an oath to me you would never divulge them to anyone.”
Myrddin hangs his head. “I did.” He can’t meet her eyes. “Did anyone speak to her, after I was gone?”