LITMIR.BIZ

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the child had hurt Balam, and he knew he had been played for a fool by the wily Ullikummis, tricked by the familiar face of Brigid Baptiste when she had appeared in Agartha. Balam had swiftly realized that Brigid was an agent for an antagonistic party, but with supreme irony, his very seclusion to protect Quav had also meant he was out of touch with developments in the wider world.

      Whether foreknowledge of the rise of Ullikummis would have changed things, Balam could not say. As things stood, Balam felt Quav’s loss like a scar, a wound on his own body that had cut far deeper than the bullet he had taken to the chest from Brigid Haight’s gun during the kidnapping. In this, Balam and Kane had shared a tragedy, for Kane had also been shot by Brigid in her new guise as Ullikummis’s hand in darkness. For Kane, that blow had cut even deeper. Physically, the bullet had left merely a bruise on Kane’s chest, failing to pierce his armor and hence his flesh. But he and the woman now calling herself Haight were linked, a spiritual bond that entwined both of them through time immemorial. They shared the bond of anam charas, or “soul friends,” and it seemed to carry over to different incarnations of the two of them, despite where they found themselves. To many, it sounded like mumbo jumbo, but Kane’s bond to Brigid was deep and semimystical, despite his own eminently practical nature.

      Kane moved through the arching doorway of a room, stepping quietly over the threshold. He could tell immediately that this room had a presence, something indefinable in the air that seemed to act as a warning. It stank of meat and burning, an almost physical wall of stench that made a person’s nose wrinkle and eyes sting. Kane had encountered numerous incredible situations in his life, from ghostly hauntings to alien possession, and he had developed something of an instinct for the unusual. Wary now, he scanned the room, the Sin Eater poised before him, tracking the movements of his eyes. This room was large—more than fifty feet in length—and square, with a high ceiling that added to the sense of space. Like the rest of the fortress isle, the walls, ceiling and floor were carved from the same slatelike rock, roughly finished with bumps and chips all around, everything left unadorned by decoration.

      There was a pit in the center of the floor, Kane saw, and it dominated the room with its unspoken sense of purpose. Kane stepped toward it without hesitation, still scanning the room for signs of anyone else. Balam hurried along behind him, stepping just inside the doorway and feeling the chill of the room immediately.

      Turning to Balam, Kane raised his empty hand, signaling that he should wait where he was. Then the Cerberus warrior continued on, remaining on high alert as he approached the pit. Twenty feet across, the pit was shallow and it was darker around its edges than the surrounding rock where something had charred it.

      Kane peered into the pit, already suspecting what he would see there. A deep pile of ashes was spread across the circular indentation, and amid them Kane could see a few bones, several of which were broken, viciously snapped in two. He had seen this before, months earlier when Ullikummis had first arrived on Earth and set up Tenth City, his first attempt at indoctrinating the peoples of the world. There Ullikummis had forced his recruits into brutal bouts of combat to determine both their physical prowess and their loyalty to him. A vast chimney dominated the skyline of that primitive settlement, and those who failed him had been cremated within its eerie confines. Here, once again, Ullikummis had burned those who had failed him, Kane realized, pilgrims who had risked the arduous journey through the narrow, chasmlike channels weaving through the sea fortress to meet their god.

      As he looked at the hard, pebblelike flecks among the ashes, something caught Kane’s eye. It was a bone, covered in ashes that rested along its length in a little mound. Leaning down, Kane poked at the bone with the nose of his pistol, pushing the worst of the dirt aside. The ashes fell away in silence. It was a bone, all right, no question of that. But when Kane looked at it more closely, he was surprised by the length of it. It looked like a leg bone, maybe a femur, but it was incredibly long. Furthermore, it bulged and featured a subtle twist. Kane had seen many skeletons in his days with Cerberus, but this was unlike anything he had seen before.

      “Balam?” Kane called quietly. “What do you make of this?”

      Balam shuffled over to join Kane, peering down into the pit where Kane nudged his pistol against his grisly find. “Leg bone?” Balam asked.

      “Yeah, but from what?”

      Unblinking, Balam looked at it and considered, recalling what he knew of human anatomy. “It looks human in the first instance, but there is something...untoward to its nature. As if it has been...”

      Kane glanced up at him. “Changed?” he prompted when Balam left the sentence hanging.

      “‘Changed’ is as adequate a word as any,” Balam agreed.

      “But how, and by what?” Kane asked, voicing his thoughts.

      “The Annunaki are masters of genetic manipulation,” Balam reminded him. “Ullikummis himself is a

      horror by their standards, but only because of the

      genetic changes wrought upon him at his father’s insistence.”

      “Yeah, I remember,” Kane said, nodding. That was not simply old information to Kane; his senses had been assaulted with flashes of Ullikummis’s memories each time he had made a teleportation jump over the past weeks—and so, in some sense, he had experienced much of the nightmarish surgery that had featured in the Annunaki prince’s earliest years. If nothing else, it had given Kane an insight into why the son hated his father with such fury.

      “Something’s changed these people,” Balam proposed. “Something altered them—”

      “Or tried to. Look at this junk,” he said, riffling through the ash with the muzzle of his blaster. “Someone’s been cooking up a storm, and I’ll bet you it was someone who wanted to destroy the evidence of his failures.”

      “The Annunaki do not have failures,” Balam stated wistfully. “They suffer disappointments, nothing more.”

      “Well,” Kane said, drawing his Sin Eater out of the sifting sands of ash, “someone’s had a shitload of disappointments in here.

      “And we should keep moving,” he added.

      With that, Kane stood and led the way through the huge room with Balam trotting along at his heels. Balam looked back a moment, staring at the black smudge of the pit that dominated the room. Death seemed to follow Kane, lying in wait wherever he went.

      * * *

      IN THE WEST COAST operations room, Lakesh studied the satellite view of the island of Bensalem and consulted several reference documents.

      “This island did not exist a year ago,” he stated, shaking his head.

      Brewster Philboyd looked at the map that Lakesh had brought up on his own computer screen. “This Ullikummis has pulled things out of thin air before now,” he said miserably.

      “No, not thin air, Mr. Philboyd,” Lakesh corrected. “Rock. He has an affinity to rock, it seems, and is able to employ a form of telekinesis to call on such to do his bidding. That was, by our best guess, how he created his Tenth City. The rock itself was pulled up from beneath the soil—bedrock.”

      “So, this island—he’s pulled it from the sea?” Philboyd theorized.

      “It seems probable.”

      Philboyd shrugged. “I guess even monsters need somewhere to live,” he said, nervously pushing the spectacles back up the bridge of his nose.

      “No,” Lakesh said, “there’s more to it than that. Look at the design. Almost circular, with the highest towers based in its center. This is the same design that the nine villes followed.”

      Brewster moved his face a little closer to the screen, watching the live feed from the satellite as the dark blurs of gulls passed through the overhead image. “That’s been cropping up a lot lately, huh?”

      “It is the open secret we never noticed,” Lakesh said cryptically. Seeing Brewster’s quizzical look, Lakesh smiled apologetically and cleared his throat. “This

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