Planet Hate, page 25
But before Kane could finish his exclamation, Brigid moved her body and he saw that she had released her TP-9 semiautomatic from its hip holster, shifting her body to reveal it. Kane could only watch as Brigid raised the weapon in one slender, black-gloved hand, pointing it directly at him. She had to be confused, he realized. The trip here, the attack by the bruja—all of it had messed up her mind; she was probably still half delirious just as he had been.
“Baptiste,” Kane began softly, “it’s me. It’s Kane. Everything’s okay now. It’s okay. The good guys won.”
Brigid’s emerald eyes fixed on his and Kane saw them narrow infinitesimally just before she pulled the trigger of her blaster, unleashing a stream of 9 mm bullets at his chest. Kane cried out as the bullets struck him, and he staggered backward and slipped into the Chalice of Rebirth as Brigid emptied the clip in his chest.
“Didn’t you get the memo, Kane?” Brigid snarled as her gun clicked on empty. “All the heroes are dead.”
Kane felt himself sink into unconsciousness as the amber mists of the Chalice of Rebirth wafted around him, obscuring his vision even as Brigid Haight fired up her interphaser and made ready to depart with Little Quav at her side.
Chapter 20
“Kane, wake up.”
“—is going on? Please exp—”
There were two voices in Kane’s head now, and he struggled to make out which was which. After a moment he realized one—deep as rumbling thunder—was urging him to wake up, even as hands pulled at him, dragging him up. The second voice was higher and it sounded more urgent, if such was possible, as it asked if Brigid was still with them. That was Lakesh, talking over the Commtact, piping his request to all of the field team.
“I can’t see,” Kane muttered, the words coming loosely, half formed as if he had not quite woken up. His mouth seemed sore, not responding to his instructions, and his head felt heavy. The buzzing of the Commtact wasn’t helping his temperament, either. Kane put a hand up to his ear, urging everyone to stop talking at once.
“Come on, Kane.” Grant’s rumbling thunder voice accompanied the sensation of being lifted. “We should get moving.”
“What’s going on?” Kane muttered through thick, swollen lips. He could smell burned flesh, and it made him feel suddenly hungry and nauseous at the same time.
“I don’t know,” Grant told his partner as he pulled him from the Chalice of Rebirth, tendrils of amber mist playing across Kane’s face and aching body. “I was out of it.”
“Everyone was,” Domi elaborated, her harsh voice grating on Kane’s ears.
Kane felt something brush at his chest, pushing at the fabric that covered him. “You look like you took a few shots, buddy,” Grant said. “I guess the shadow suit took the worst of it.”
“Yeah,” Kane said, nodding his heavy head. For some reason he still couldn’t make his eyes open. “Everyone else okay?”
Grant didn’t answer, just stood there looking at Kane’s hunched form. There was something on Kane’s face, a spiny protrusion that began at his left brow and wended down across his face, circling and encrusting his eye before swelling over his cheek. Whatever it was, it made Kane’s mouth sneer, the left side of his top lip pulling up and away from his teeth.
“I said is everyone else okay?” Kane repeated, his words not quite forming with the placement of his lip.
“I think so,” Grant began, “but we probably need to get you medical attention. You look li—”
Abruptly, Kane cut him off. “How’s Baptiste?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Grant admitted. “She ain’t here, but the place got pretty wrecked. Rosie’s checking what’s left of the passageways now. We were all out of it. No one saw whether—”
“No,” Kane mumbled, remembering as he spoke. “She bugged out, I saw her leave.”
“Say again.”
“Baptiste left,” Kane explained. “Used the interphaser, took the kid with her. She was different, not thinking straight. I don’t know…”
“You sure it was her?” Grant asked. The pair of them had had a few meetings with clones and doppelgangers over the years, so bumping into another was not beyond the realms of credibility.
“It was her all right,” Kane rumbled. “When Maria pulled that stunt with the gem, I felt our…connection. The anam-chara bond. It was like a physical thing.”
“Okay, man,” Grant urged. “Just take it easy, we’ll be out of here in a minute. Then we can get Reba—” Grant stopped, correcting himself as he recalled that the Cerberus physician was incommunicado along with most of their usual personnel. “We’ll get someone to look at you,” he finished lamely.
As Kane sat there on the ground, locked in his personal darkness, waiting for the team to regroup, he wondered just what had happened to Brigid Baptiste.
Standing a little way from the metal-flanged pit, Domi urged Grant over to her side with a wave of a milk-white hand. When Grant was close, Domi encouraged him to lean down so that she could whisper without Kane hearing. “What’s happened to his face?” she asked.
Grant shook his head. “I don’t know and I don’t plan to speculate,” he admitted.
“It looks like bone,” Domi said, glancing across the cavern to where Kane was sitting. “Like his skull is trying to get free.”
“He was in that gunk for a while,” Grant reasoned, referring to the Chalice of Rebirth. “There’s nanomachines in that goop, and it looks like someone’s poisoned it. If Kane had a wound…” His words trailed off and he shrugged.
“You think he got infected?” Domi whispered.
“I think we’ll wait for a medical opinion,” was all Grant would say in reply, “and the sooner we get it, the sooner we’ll know.”
Domi nodded solemnly in agreement.
Three minutes later Rosalia returned, the blackened sword resheathed at her hip, the scruffy mongrel dog trotting along at her side looking none the worse for wear despite its ordeal.
One minute later, unable to climb out of the now sealed underground lair, the Cerberus team utilized the parallax point to leave via interphaser. The four of them disappeared in a burst of color as the interphaser opened up a gateway into the quantum ether, transporting them instantaneously to their intended destination.
Nobody noticed the fleck of ash drifting through the air of the cavern. Nobody saw it fall into the Chalice of Rebirth. And even if they had, they most likely would not have given it a second thought. Why should they?
BRIGID HAIGHT reappeared with the child Quavell in a fractured burst of multicolored light, arriving on the isle of Bensalem. Ullikummis stood in front of them, his magma eyes glowing faintly in the twilit darkness of his keep’s throne room, trunklike arms folded across his huge chest. Brigid knew from looking at him that he had been standing just like that for hours, never bothering to move as he waited patiently beside the parallax point for her return. Beside him, two menacing stone dogs peered up from the ground, hulking animated statues with eyes like a man’s.
Taking the blond girl’s hand, Brigid led the way from the platform that served as a parallax point, walking her toward the stone giant who stood in the shadows of the room. The girl was scared, but Balam had taught her to remain self-possessed and so she did not cry or scream, just let out a tiny gasp as she walked closer to the monstrous rock figure, the two dog things eyeing her suspiciously.
“The child Ninlil,” Brigid said, presenting Little Quav to her master.
Eight feet tall, Ullikummis stared down at the little girl who barely came up to his knee. The girl looked fearful of this looming presence in front of her yet she stood wide-eyed looking up at him, still meeting his gaze without flinching.
After a moment Ullikummis knelt in front of the girl, his body like a tumbling avalanche as he brought his head to approximately the level of hers. There, face-to-face, he studied the blond-haired girl, admiring her cerulean eyes, her feathery long hair that tumbled in wisps across her tiny shoulders. She looked nothing like he expected. Very slowly, the merest hint of a smile appeared on that rock-hewn face, making it all the more ugly and unreal in its appearance.
“Mother,” Ullikummis said in a voice that sounded like two cliffs of eroded chalk finally giving up their battle with the elements and plunging into the ocean.
The girl looked up at him, fear etched on her face. She did not understand what the monster had said, could not possibly comprehend why he called her mother. In time she would learn.
Standing behind the hybrid girl, the leather-clad form of Brigid Haight smiled, too, pleased that the completion of her task had brought her master joy. She was his hand in darkness, his tool of hate, nothing more.
Gently, Ullikummis took the girl’s tiny hand in his great stone mitt and together they strode across the rocky floor and off through the winding corridors of Bensalem Keep, making their way to the room that Ullikummis had set aside for the child who was his mother. “Young girl, one day you will be old,” he explained as they exited the eerily characterless chamber that housed the parallax point.
Alone in the throne room, Brigid Haight listened to the thumping echo of Ullikummis’s feet as he was lost to her in the shadows of the keep, reunited with his mother after four thousand years. They were two Annunaki together, Ullikummis and the child. Being reunited brought a sense of completion—they belonged together.
THE INTERPHASER brought the four-strong Cerberus field team back to the familiar gardens of Shizuka’s winter retreat. Once there, Grant carried Kane back to the lodge while Domi and Rosalia followed, the dog jogging along at Rosalia’s heels. The dark-haired woman was sullen, and she made it clear to Domi that she had no interest in talking as they made the short walk up to the lodge itself.
As they approached the building, Shizuka and Lakesh were waiting on the wooden balcony to greet them alongside several of Shizuka’s faithful Tigers of Heaven. Domi had filed a brief report with Lakesh before they had returned, and an on-site physician named Kazuko was waiting to examine Kane the second that the field team arrived.
Lakesh himself looked concerned, but he retained a polite distance from Grant as the hulking ex-Mag was greeted by Shizuka with the briefest of hugs. Then Lakesh coughed politely and asked what had happened.
“Can’t know for sure,” Grant explained. “We were all out of it by the time Kane took on the wicked witch of the west. From what I can tell, he was unconscious by the time he landed himself in that previously hidden Chalice of Rebirth. What happened after that, I’m not sure but he came out looking like this.”
Lakesh nodded. He saw Kane’s head was masked with a bony growth that covered the left side of his face. His eye was entirely hidden beneath a bony ridge, and while his right eye could still open he had told them that he could no longer see anything.
In a quiet, well-lit room in the back of the huge lodge, Kazuko checked over Kane’s condition, but the prognosis wasn’t good. After a thorough examination, the doctor came out of the room and spoke to Lakesh and the others, leaving Kane himself to try to sleep.
“It is a form of ossification,” the doctor explained, “and it appears to be spreading from a point somewhere close to Kane’s left eye socket. I’ll need to monitor its progress for a few days before I can say anything more definite than that.”
“He’d been having trouble with his eyesight,” Grant confirmed irritably, “and he’d mentioned something about visions, but I didn’t realize…”
Still wearing her torn dress, Domi reached up from where she sat on the wooden floor, placing her hand gently against Grant’s arm. “You didn’t know, Grant,” she confirmed. “None of us did.”
Sitting beside Grant on a soft couch, Shizuka added her own words of reassurance. “I have no doubt that you will do everything you can to help your friend, Grant,” she said. “We all will.”
“For now,” Lakesh summarized, “all we can do is wait.”
Before the elderly cyberneticist had finished, Rosalia turned from her position standing beside the door and left the room without a word, her dog trotting along obediently at her heels. The group of friends watched her go, and once she was out of earshot Domi spoke up.
“Yeesh, what’s her problem?”
Grant looked thoughtfully down the corridor that Rosalia had exited by and he wondered what Kane would say. After a moment he stood, excusing himself from the group before hurrying after the dark-haired swordswoman.
“Be back in a minute,” he assured them, which was probably something like what Kane would have said.
GRANT FOUND Rosalia standing by the external wall of the little herb garden, tossing a stick out onto the immaculate lawn for her dog to retrieve. The dog seemed to be enjoying itself, but Rosalia was clearly miserable.
“Everything okay?” Grant asked, immediately cursing himself for such a lack of subtlety.
Rosalia didn’t look at him as she answered. “I’m fine.”
Grant nodded, muttering her words back to himself under his breath. He turned back to the lodge where the door waited, still open as he had left it, leading into the main lounge of the impressive holiday home. But he didn’t take a step. Instead he turned back once more and spoke to the outsider to their group without getting too close.
“Look, Rosie, I don’t know why you’re here. I don’t think any of us really do,” Grant said, “but Kane trusts you and that’s plenty good enough for me. You did real good out there, saved my ass, maybe more than once. But then I probably saved yours, too—I didn’t keep count. What I’m saying is, you’re in this with us right now. If you’re worried about Kane—that’s cute. And if you’re worried about what happens if Kane gets left on the bench, well, you don’t need him to vouch for you no more. Okay?”
Grant watched as Rosalia’s shoulders heaved up and down and then he heard the tremor in her voice as she spoke. “Stupid Magistrate men, always making speeches.” To Grant, it sounded an awful lot like she was crying.
“You’re welcome,” Grant said as he made his way back to the lodge and his companions.
WHEN GRANT RETURNED to the lodge, he found Lakesh sitting with Domi catching up on the events that had happened around Luilekkerville. Domi was explaining about the birds that had seemed to guard the entrance to the subterranean grotto where they had ultimately encountered Maria Halloween and Brigid Baptiste.
“They sound an awful lot like the rocs of Arabic lore,” Lakesh observed.
“It’s what Rosie said, too,” Grant chipped in as he took a seat opposite the conversing couple. “They seemed to be acting as guards and we encountered some other weird animals down there, too, crocodiles the size of dinosaurs. Any ideas where all this shit originated?”
“With a Chalice of Rebirth hidden in the cavern you encountered,” Lakesh mused, “it’s likely that its nanotech was being employed to enhance the genetic makeup of local fauna, maybe alter it, as well.”
“I looked in the pit before we left,” Grant said. “It wasn’t just amber like the one that got used on Shizuka. There was other stuff in there, streaks of red and green and I don’t know what else.”
Lakesh nodded. “Your witch woman sounds like she may have had some esoteric knowledge of such things,” he speculated. “A lot of what has been characterized as arcane knowledge over the centuries is in fact a rudimentary understanding—or misunderstanding—of the artifacts left by the Annunaki and the Tuatha de Danaan. If this woman had amassed knowledge of the supernatural arts over time, it’s likely she came upon the chalice with some idea of how it functioned.”
“You mean, she corrupted it,” Domi said.
“Perhaps,” Lakesh reasoned with infinite diplomacy, “or perhaps she discovered another use for it. The chalice is basically a medical repair facility, after all, and a lot of what we comprehend as disease is in fact the body’s overproduction or overreaction to disease. Mucus, for example, is a necessary lubricant for the human body, yet once it becomes overproduced it can be irritating and even exacerbate a precondition, as in the case of the asthmatic.
“Which, I’m afraid, brings us to Kane’s current dilemma,” Lakesh continued heavily.
As Lakesh spoke, Rosalia reappeared at the doorway, her head held low as she slipped unobtrusively into the room. Grant nodded to her once in acknowledgment.
“One possibility is that, having fallen into the doctored Chalice of Rebirth,” Lakesh outlined, “Kane’s biology has been manipulated to some degree.”
“He was complaining of the eye problem when we arrived,” Grant reminded them.
“In which case, it’s fair to say that the rejuvenation pit may have exacerbated that preexisting condition,” Lakesh proposed. “Think of when you have an eye irritation, how the eye will weep and that you may awaken with hard sleep crusting the lashes. Though extreme, Kane’s current reaction may be something similar.”
When no one said anything more to that, Rosalia spoke up, changing the subject.
“What about the girl?” she asked. “What was her name, Quav?”
Lakesh’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “Yes, you did mention Quavell. I’d quite forgotten in all the…excitement,” he finished, hitting the last word apologetically.
“She was with Brigid,” Domi elaborated. “Appeared at the same time via interphaser.”
“And presumably disappeared the same way,” Grant rumbled.
“But what would Brigid want with Little Quav,” Domi pondered, “and why would Balam let her leave Agartha?”
“And why did she run?” Grant added.
The group went silent as those questions hung heavily in the air. There were no easy answers; it seemed to be such a riddle and the reappearance and subsequent disappearance of Brigid was perplexing.
“Perhaps he didn’t,” Grant suggested quietly. “Let her leave Agartha, I mean,” he added when he realized everyone was looking at him, waiting for him to explain. “Maybe Brigid took her.”
