When he spied a faint glow emanating from deep within the tunnel, he decided that settled it. Time to head to the saloon. A day off wouldn’t make any difference.
He dropped his shovel and scrambled out into the daylight.
✽ ✽ ✽
Louis was still flush with cash from the first load, enough to take him through several hours of Faro and Texas Hold ’Em. When he wasn’t concentrating on cards, he drowned his feelings in whiskey.
As he grew drunker, he fancied he heard a rumble in the ground. He asked his fellow players about it, but they claimed to hear nothing. Just the same, he decided against going outside.
“I oughta stay in heres, night and day, till that company can take over,” he announced to no one in particular. He was so drunk he couldn’t read the cards.
The fat fellow on his left swayed in his chair. “What’re you blubbering about? You ain’t got nothing worth taking. I done took it all in the last game!” He roared with laughter before vomiting onto the floor.
Everyone stood, muttering in disgust.
Forgetting his decision, Louis pushed through the batwing doors and went outside for fresh air.
The only rumblings now were those of wagon wheels and horse hooves traveling dusty C Street. The sun was setting, making the temperature drop, but he was too drunk to feel it.
What did bother him, though, was the feeling of being watched. Most folks felt that sort of thing on the backs of their necks. With Louis, it was a tingling in his whiskers. He vowed that just as soon as he could work out a deal with the Sawtooth Mining Company, he’d leave this godforsaken place.
Until then—he again swore this to himself—he would always, always, stay around other people. Indoors, if he could help it. Otherwise, he suspected the tingling in his beard would one day turn into a great stream of darkness, flowing up from underground, ready to take him to wherever he’d cast young Sammy and his father.
For now, though, he knew he better find a whore or another card game. He couldn’t take any more thoughts of Jobe and Sammy.
Louis hurried onto one of the streets, heading lower on the mountainside from the main thoroughfare. After a several twists and turns, he found himself on Wang Street in Chinatown.
The Chinese had built their quarter to suit themselves. Their streets, too narrow to admit carriages or wagons, were lined with dingy huts that smelled of strange foods and burning Josh lights. In one, he found three Chinamen lying on mattresses arranged around a hooka. They smoked opium through long tubes and stared at him.
“What do you say, partners? Ain’t this better’n whiskey?”
They didn’t answer. Their faces remained blank but serene. Their gazes didn’t follow him as he sat down beside them.
Louis waited for someone to offer him a tube. When no one moved, he pried one from the nearest man’s grasp. The man didn’t even glance at him, although after a moment, he picked up his long, braided ponytail and stuffed it into his own mouth.
Louis ignored him and began to smoke.
A pleasant warmth suffused him. He felt like he was floating. At one point, he was sure he had a conversation with Jobe, but that wasn’t possible because Jobe was dead. Louis forgot their words as soon as they were spoken, but the conversation left him with a deep sadness.
He may have fallen asleep—he wasn’t sure. Presently, he became aware it was full night out. He was in the hut alone.
He got up and stumbled outside. Wang Street was empty and dark. A cool wind blew against his cheek.
A voice said, “Got a chaw, mister?”
The speaker’s closeness startled him, but Louis recovered quickly. He wheeled on his questioner. “No, I ain’t got a chaw, you vagrant. Now go off and—”
He screamed and fell backward, landing on his butt.
It was Jobe.
Jobe’s eyes and mouth glowed with silver light. Louis looked down and saw that the gunshot wounds he’d inflicted that morning were plugged with silver.
The head of a giant snake thrust up out of the ground and reared behind Jobe. Pointed, silver teeth lined its mouth. The opening was fully ten feet across. From the top of its head jutted a human face Louis recognized all too well. Sammy.
It dove over Jobe and swallowed Louis whole.
Afterward, it retracted back into the ground like an arm withdrawing into a coat sleeve.
Jobe smiled wide. The glowing light in his eyes and mouth faded away.
He turned and walked into the desert, headed east.
Looking Forward
Noah’s Temple
From the New Definitive Bible of Khan, as edited by Pope Luther in the eighth century After Khan (A.K.):
“When the last of the seven Cataclysms came, meteorites fell upon the Earth for forty days. The priest Noah gathered his people and livestock into a bomb shelter, then descended alone to the bottom of Grandy Canyon. There, he invoked Great Khan the Protector in the old language, saying, ‘Ack say gee Khan.’ And Khan did rise from the ground to save him.” (Book of Noah, chapter 1, verses 2-5.)
✽ ✽ ✽
The Rift, called “Crevah” and “Grandy Canyon” in ancient American English, contained millions of loose stones that the mob was only too happy to throw at Pope Petra Khan’s caravan. Armored peacekeepers wielding shields and stunsticks had erected barricades but could not stop the continuous rain of rocks upon Petra’s bodyguards and pack camels.
Cushioned within pillows and dark draperies that were too hot for the Rift’s desert climate, Petra rode in a litter carried by ten eunuchs. Across from her sat her mentor and predecessor as pope, Slova the Fourth, who was fifty years her senior. His hawkish Asian features, still unlined in his seventieth year, tightened with apprehension.
The screaming mob threatened to burst through the phalanx of peacekeepers at any second. Petra sighed as she observed herself burning in effigy.
Of course you want to kill us, she thought. We’re the last Khanites anywhere. But I wonder, who will be left for you to hate once we’re gone?
She jerked back from the open window as a rock landed in the dust nearby. Straightening her tall miter hat, she said to Slova, “I’m surprised there’s any peacekeepers here at all.” She had to shout to be heard.
Slova shook his head. “The peacekeepers are always prepared for our Hajj.”
“Yes, but I’d think the Minister of Wongod would be happy to let the public lynch us.”
Petra watched Slova for the umpteenth time check the safety of the golden chest between their feet. It contained the ceremonial halo and bracelets, which they would need to perform the sacrament once they reached Noah’s Temple.
“The Wongod Minister is just one member of the All Council,” Slova said, “and they haven’t sanctioned our lynching—yet. Until they indict us, we’ll enjoy their protection like everyone else.”
Petra watched a peacekeeper jab his stunstick into the neck of a turbaned woman, who collapsed to be trampled by her comrades. The mob reminded her of frenzied fleshdogs ready to devour prisoners at the Dallas Coliseum.
“The Council may arrest us sooner rather than later,” Petra said. “Did you see this?”
Without looking away from the crowd, she shoved today’s bulletinpaper at Slova. He glanced at it and cursed.
Since the All Council controlled the media, a negative political cartoon was as good as an impending death sentence. It depicted Pope Petra tied to a stake, staring at a grinning executioner labeled “All Council” who held a torch to the wood piled beneath her feet. The logs were labeled with the names of holocausts, inquisitions, crusades, and slave trades initiated by Khanites when they were in power. As the pile grew deeper, each stratum of wood represented another century going back for two millennia, all the way to the first century A.K. The implication was that now that the historically repressed Wongodders controlled the world government, it was time for revenge. The Wongodders had been systematically wiping out the Order of Khan for a hundred years.
The c
anvas over Petra’s head made fump! fump! sounds as rocks landed on it. A eunuch gasped, and the litter suddenly dropped on one side. Slova fell on top of her.
Shouting in Mandu, the eunuchs struggled to hold the litter upright. Slova heaved himself back into his seat and said, “Perhaps we should’ve delayed the—”
A rock flew in through the window and smashed his skull.
“Slova!”
The eunuchs dropped the litter, and the popes and their golden chest tumbled onto the ground amid a heap of pillows and canvas. Petra struggled for air as she climbed out of the mess. Around her, peacekeepers fired automatic weapons into the roaring crowd, which still overpowered them with rocks and sticks. She watched in dumb horror as two boys climbed over a dead officer to plunge daggers into a Khanite bodyguard. A peacekeeper blew their heads off with a concussion gun.
Petra had lost her hat, and blood poured down her face from a wound she didn’t remember receiving. Peacekeepers and Khanites had formed a C-shaped perimeter between her and the mob.
Dizzy, she now saw they had reached the foot of Noah’s Temple. Really just a stone altar at the foot of Cliff Sinai, the temple was the supposed place where Noah had summoned the Great Khan. It was appropriate she die here.
Drunk with pain, Petra stumbled over a fallen eunuch to the wrecked litter. She sobbed when she saw Slova partly submerged in the heap. His gaze, fixed in death, rested on the Altar of Summoning. Ignoring a rock that whizzed by an inch from her ear, Petra knelt and opened the golden chest, which lay in the dust by his body. She withdrew the ceremonial bracelets and halo, engraved with the crisscrosses of Khan’s sacred seal, and then climbed the temple steps. The battle raged on behind her.
“Put your faith in the Wongod!” a woman screamed.
Petra knew they would overwhelm her protectors in moments. So this is how it ends. The end of Khan. We were the last ones.
Turning her back on the crowd, Petra faced the Altar of Summoning. She put on the diamond-crusted halo and bracelets, raised her hands and began the invocation as Noah had two thousand years before: “Ack say gee Khan…”
A cheer rose behind her. Petra knew the mob had defeated the last of her defenders.
“Ack say meeto Khan…”
As prescribed by the sacrament, Petra nodded vigorously—“as if saying ‘yes’ to Khan’s boundless grace,” Slova had taught her in childhood—then pointed to the heavens.
“Ack tay sen. I day den…”
A heavy rock slammed into her back, and Petra collapsed. The bracelet on her left wrist scraped across the ground, breaking its delicate golden chain. Crisscross-shaped bracelet links scattered.
With the wind knocked out of her, Petra raised her head to the altar and gasped the next word of the sacrament: “Rheip…”
A woman, screaming in triumph, climbed the temple steps. Petra shut her eyes.
The whump whump whump of a levichopper suddenly echoed off the canyon walls, followed by the staccato of wing cannons firing. Petra looked up in time to see the woman disappear in a spray of blood.
Other people had reached the steps, and they too went down in splashes of red. Men and children alike flattened themselves on the ground, then ran for cover.
“THIS LYNCHING HAS NOT BEEN APPROVED BY THE ALL COUNCIL,” a voice said through the levichopper’s talkboxes. “DISPERSE AT ONCE.”
The pilot made his point with another burst of gunfire that strafed a line of impacts in front of the temple steps.
Hardly able to breathe through the pain, Petra watched the levichopper move to hover directly overhead. It bore the black crest of the All Council.
Doors fell open in the levichopper’s belly, and a mouth-shaped cargo net dropped onto her. Metal teeth snapped shut and scooped her into its cocoon. It hauled her into the air.
In minutes, Noah’s Temple was a receding battlefield hundreds of feet below.
✽ ✽ ✽
The cabinet ministers who comprised the All Council, the world’s highest governing body, were so paranoid that they lived in hiding around the globe. Governing via telewindows, they likely had never met each other in person.
The cargo net had electroshocked Petra to sleep. After an indeterminate period, she awoke in an undignified heap in the Chamber of Faces, the All Council’s fabled meeting room. An amplified, echoing voice said, “Our next order of business is criminal case forty-four dash seven thousand six. Madam bailiff, has the defendant been awakened?”
“Yes, mister chairman.”
A spotlight shone down from a distant ceiling and illuminated Petra where she lay. She was in a circular pit, and the ministers’ seats ringed the top, more than twenty feet above. The “seats” were actually telewindows that showed each minister from chin to eyebrows.
“Petra Khan,” the chairman said, “the grievous character of the Khanite religious order has required that you be subpoenaed to this hearing of the All Council, bypassing all lower bodies. On behalf of the Khanites, you are here to answer primary charges of historical war crimes and genocide, and secondary retroactive charges of sedition and blasphemy. How do you plead?”
Petra shakily stood up. Her head was fuzzy. “Charges?”
The bailiff interjected: “The defendant will enter a plea or be summarily judged guilty.”
“But that was centuries ago!” She spoke although she knew her fate was already sealed. “You can’t convict me for crimes committed by my ancestors.”
“Let the record show the defendant pleads ‘not guilty.’”
A new voice, a man, cleared his throat. “I’d like to rebut the defendant’s comment.”
“The chair recognizes the Minister of the Judiciary.”
“Thank you, mister chairman. This council does indeed have jurisdiction in matters of historical justice, Miss Khan. In State v. Common, we reinterpreted Executive Power Two of the Articles of Consolidation in order to do so. You’ve further been brought here under authority of Wongod Year oh-two resolution ten-point-oh-five-beta, the repeal of the Multicultural Tolerance Amendment. I’d further direct your attention to—”
“That will do, thank you,” the chairman said.
“Yes sir, I surrender the floor.”
“Petra Khan, do you deny these charges?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t deny them, but—”
“Let the record show the defendant has replaced her plea of ‘not guilty’ with ‘guilty,’ and that an additional charge of felony perjury is hereby entered against her.”
“Wait a minute!” Petra said.
“Mister chairman,” a new voice said, “I move the defendant be judged guilty on all counts.”
“I said wait a minute. This isn’t fair—”
Something hard hit the back of Petra’s head, and a second later she was regarding the spotlight from the floor. The bailiff’s remarkably expressionless voice came from far away: “The defendant will remain silent for the verdict.”
“The Minister of Wongod has made a motion,” the chairman said.
“I second that motion,” said the Minister of the Judiciary.
“The motion is seconded, and I add a third vote of guilty, therefore the motion is carried. The defendant will be placed under house arrest until lynching by her local magistrate.”
Petra lost consciousness.
✽ ✽ ✽
When she awoke alone in the Khan Vatican, Petra discovered that her home had been raided. The oldest surviving Khanite monastery in the NorthWest Continent, her ancestors had sited the Vatican inside a natural cave near the Rift canyon. They had built it deeply in order to be closer to Great Khan himself, who tradition said lived underground. The cave had also lent itself well to security. Until now.
Dizzy and rubbing the sore lump behind her left ear, Petra walked among the Vatican’s overturned confessionals. She found irreplaceable, five hundred year-old scrolls stuffed into fece-pots. She sobbed when she saw blood stains on the entry hall’s marble floors. At least the lynch mob had tak
en the victims elsewhere to finish them.
The defendant will be placed under house arrest…
The All Council intended for her to stay here, alone, until the mob—the “local magistrate”—lit its torches and returned.
She ran for the exit.
Just outside the door, on either side, awaited two honeycomb-shaped generators that hummed to life as she passed between them. They drove what felt like an invisible spike through her head from ear to ear.
Screaming, Petra retreated to the cave interior.
When the pain subsided, she probed the lump behind her ear. She now noticed a peculiar hardness in its center—a pain inducer to keep her inside.
✽ ✽ ✽
As Petra expected, additional generators waited outside the other exits, effectively trapping her. She had heard about these “leashes” from Slova, who’d been well acquainted with the persecution of the world’s Khanite leaders. Embedded in her skull’s temporal bone, the pain-inducer could only be removed with a surgeon’s skill. The beauty of the system’s design, at least from an All Council perspective, was that lynch mobs could come and go at will.
Petra’s first visitor entered as she was boiling water to treat the cut on her face. With two hands, she heaved the water pot off the fireplate and began to throw it at the man walking through the kitchen doorway.
“Hello?” the old man said.
Petra stopped short, nearly sloshing her wrists with hot water. Lynchers didn’t say “hello” nor come alone and during the day. She put the pot down.
“Oh, dear me!” the man said. “Your holiness! I’m sorry if I startled you.”
Petra said nothing as he placed a weathered docucase on the floor and steepled his fingers in greeting. Dressed in simple robes and moccasins, the man had a stomach that spoke of too much food and a graying beard of too little bathing.
“I’m Halio—an astronomer.” He pointed skyward, as if she didn’t know the term. “I, uh—I’m here because, well…”
Petra realized he was nervous—of course he was, being here alone, talking to a condemned prisoner. Where were her manners? She was still—or was—the pope, after all.
Dominoes in Time Page 19
