God War (2 page)

However, once the nine barons had been reborn in their original, lizardlike forms as the royal family of the Annunaki, old rivalries and prejudices had rapidly emerged, and the nine overlords were soon at war with one another for ultimate control of the territories once more. Stuck between the factions, a plucky group of human adventurers working together under the banner of Cerberus managed to turn the Annunaki’s plans back on themselves, destroying their mother ship and leaving the various overlords for dead.

Or so it had appeared.

Over recent months, several Annunaki had reappeared, including Enlil and the mad goddess called variously Lilitu, Lilith or Ezili Coeur Noir. Nearly ruined by the destruction of their womb ship, each of these old gods had struggled to gain a new foothold on the power they all craved. However, unknown to the Annunaki, things had become more complicated than they realized when Ullikummis, errant son of Overlord Enlil, had returned to Earth after a four-and-a-half-thousand-year exile.

Far from being a typical Annunaki, Ullikummis was a genetic freak whose DNA had been twisted beyond recognition at his father’s behest, turning him into a monster even among his own people. Heartless in the execution of his plan, Ullikummis’s father, the Overlord Enlil, had altered his son to become an assassin, a slayer of gods. Enlil had called the child his hand in darkness and sent him on a mission to destroy Teshub and gain the operational codes for
Tiamat
with which he might preside over the Annunaki. But the plan had backfired, and Ullikummis—along with his tutor, the disease-
ridden Upelluri—had been ambushed by Enlil’s brother, Enki. That brutal exchange had resulted in Ullikummis losing both feet at the keen edge of Enki’s sword and subsequently being disowned by his father, imprisoned in an asteroid and exiled into space. A by-blow child of rape, two contentions had driven Ullikummis to survive through the long period of his exile—that his father had orchestrated his downfall for his own insidious needs, and that his mother, Ninlil, was an innocent in need of rescue from this monster.

Now Ninlil’s genetic code was contained within the child known as Little Quav, whom Brigid Haight had enticed from Balam’s protection in the buried city of Agartha just six days earlier. The child seemed remarkably human, inquisitive and often finding pleasure in her own thoughts. Raised by Balam in the abandoned city, it was only natural that she should find joy in her own company, and Brigid had watched her at play in the cold, cavernous corridors of Fort Bensalem. The child would make a plaything of whatever came to hand, giving stones and material personalities and little voices when she thought no one was looking, frequently making up songs that she would sing to herself, endless loops of rhyming noises that—as often as not—were not words at all.

Although the child looked automatically to Brigid for compassion and comfort, she expressed no fear of Ullikummis, in spite of his monstrous appearance. Seeing the two of them together made for an incongruous sight: the girl not yet three feet in height with the tiny, birdlike build of the hybrids, while he was eight feet tall and as solid as living stone. Brigid had been surprised to see that, despite his appearance and eminent practicality, Ullikummis was capable of tenderness. He befriended the child by honoring her, the way a child will honor a parent, a man or a god.

In the curtailed week that Quav had spent at the rock-walled fortress, Ullikummis had lavished long hours speaking with her, patiently explaining her role in the Annunaki royal family, her destiny and importance to his own plans. He had done this both as a teacher and a friend, never once berating the young child for her impatience or because her attention span did not equal his.

Ullikummis was exceptionally patient, Brigid had observed as he conversed with the child, something she had not really credited before now. She had first met Ullikummis in her other life, when she had been a Cerberus warrior opposed to all things Annunaki. Ullikummis had returned to Earth in his space prison, landing in the wilds of Canada, and he had immediately set about building his own army within the structure he called Tenth City. While he was monstrous and harsh in his manner, looking back Brigid realized he had never been impatient. Even as he suffered an attack and seemingly ignoble defeat, Ullikummis himself had simply stepped back, hiding himself in the shadows and letting the Cerberus warriors see what they wanted to see, believing him killed in an incinerator explosion. At heart he was an assassin, his father’s one-time hand in darkness, and so his natural inclination was to step back, to merge with the shadows and let the world turn around him while things ran their course, secure in the knowledge he could strike when the time was right.

Brigid’s second meeting with Ullikummis had come in the Ontic Library, an undersea storeroom that housed the blueprints to reality itself. Ullikummis had accessed the library to amass more knowledge about his father from its sentient datastream, but his brutal incursion had damaged the structures of the library itself. Brigid had joined her then-colleagues from Cerberus in expelling Ullikummis from the incredible library before the damage proved irrevocable, and it had been her consciousness that had been melded with the living data to shore up the library’s defenses. Ullikummis had encountered her then, their astral forms meeting, but his perception had been so altered by the library that he had been unable to recognize her. It was only later, once the Annunaki prince was freed from the datastream, that he had realized who it was he had come in touch with—and he had decided at that moment that he needed to recruit this fearsome intellect for his own cause, lest she prove his downfall.

Ullikummis enacted a bold plan against Cerberus shortly thereafter, amassing his nascent army to attack and overwhelm their hidden base in the Bitterroot Mountains. Ullikummis had left the task of running the overthrown base in the hands of his first priest, a man called Dylan, whose primary job was to turn Brigid’s partner, Kane, into a military leader for his stone army. Dylan had failed, and Kane had turned on him and overthrown the briefly victorious regime of his enemies. But Ullikummis himself had already exited the redoubt with Brigid, bringing her to Bensalem, where he had brainwashed and reconstructed her mind for his own means. Brigid, an eminently capable woman of fearsome intellect, had tried to resist, but ultimately her personality had been broken down and remade in the form of her new self, Brigid Haight. Now Haight was Ullikummis’s new first priest, his so-called hand in darkness, as he had been for his father. And with her help, Ullikummis would bring about the next reign of the mighty Annunaki, an era over which he and Ninlil would preside.

Outside, through the open window of the rock-walled room, Brigid perceived the rays of the early-morning sun playing across the ever-changing ocean surface. It was barely dawn, the night chill still clinging heavily in the air. Gently pushing aside Little Quav, Brigid reached for the clothes that were draped over the stone chair at the end of her bed. Like everything else in Bensalem, the chair was constructed of rock and had a rough, weather-beaten look to it. As she took her single garment from the seat, two doglike creatures came wandering past the open door. They were huge, the size of lions with that same grace and majesty. Their bodies were rough, coated in a living stone that seemed to match the walls and the furniture of the room. One stared into the room for a moment, its nose in the air, and Brigid saw that it had eyes that looked sad and unmistakably human. She pushed the thought from her mind as she stepped into the leather leggings of the catsuit.

In a few moments, Brigid closed the front of the formfitting black leather suit she favored, stretching her arms out before her to affix its sleeves in place. The suit clung to her supple curves like a second skin, reflecting the faint red glow that emanated from the roiling veins in the walls. Now dressed, Brigid bent to retrieve the heavy fur cloak that she had tossed to the floor before retiring the previous evening, pulling it over her shoulders. Then, cinching the ties on the cloak, she stared across the room once more to Ullikummis, who waited in the doorway like some rudimentary statue from a primitive culture.

Meeting his hellish eyes, Brigid repeated Ullikummis’s words back to him. “The stars are aligned,” she said, knowing full well what it meant. “Thus it’s time.”

With a single nod, Ullikummis turned and left the room, his footsteps like pounding jackhammer blows on the hard stone floor. Little Quav remained in the middle of the room, abandoned and looking to Brigid for direction. The red-haired woman called Haight reached her hand down to take that of the hybrid girl’s.

“Come on, little one,” she said. “Time to meet with destiny.”

Together, Brigid and Quav followed Ullikummis through the cool, echoing corridors of the rocky fortress in some perversion of the family unit, the stone hounds trotting along at their sides like the family dogs. It was the closest Little Quav had ever known in her short life to being a part of a real family.

* * *

T
HE
THRONE
ROOM
was as simple as Brigid’s living quarters, albeit larger. There were few decorations on the rough stone walls, just patterns on the rocks like veins on a leaf, along with two thick, moth-eaten curtains that had been used to partition lesser sections of the room. The windows were open, as no glass existed in the fortress island of Bensalem. Several of the windows were narrow slits, while one was wider, a circular hole in the wall behind the rock throne itself. The throne was massive, and sturdy enough to accommodate the hulking body of Ullikummis. He sat there now, his magma eyes pulsing. Two of his faithful hounds curled around the throne, their rough stone bodies melding together in the half-light of the room.

Brigid entered with Quav at her side, her pace slower than normal in deference to the girl’s shorter legs. She looked across the room to where the raised platform waited. This was the parallax point, a key site in a network of linked locations that could be accessed via a teleportational device called an interphaser. The interphasers worked by accessing these naturally occurring hyperdimensional vortices, which could be found all over the world and beyond. Interphasers then opened a quantum window between the two points, allowing their users to step through the gateway to a place that may be a thousand miles or more away. While eminently adaptable, interphasers were limited in the points they could access, although Ullikummis had tapped them in a different manner to that seen before. By applying knowledge he had retrieved from the Ontic Library, that undersea storehouse of the rules governing reality, Ullikummis could fold space during the interphase jump, subtly shifting his destination point and transferring whole armies to specific places. It was through this technique that his attack on the Cerberus redoubt had been so successful two months earlier. Once the interphaser was activated, the journey itself was instantaneous and would be over in the blink of an eye.

The parallax point itself, like the rest of the room, was carved of simple rock, seemingly not shaped by hand but by the elements themselves. It stood two feet higher than the floor of the room, with twin circles marked out on its surface concentrically. The circles were carved channels no deeper than a knuckle joint, the widest of them reaching out to just a foot before the edge of the platform itself.

Ullikummis was concentrating now, reknitting the pathways so that he could utilize the interphase gateway in a subtly different way. Brigid watched as his bright eyes dimmed, his thoughts turning within himself.

“Come on, child,” Brigid whispered to Quav, keeping her voice low. “We need to be ready for when the time comes.”

Quav clung to Brigid’s hand as the flame-haired woman led her to the dais, helping the hybrid girl up over the low step. Then, instructing the girl to remain in place, Brigid strode from the platform to an area that was masked behind one of the thick velvet curtains. She pushed the drape back, stone rings holding it in place on a stone strut that ran from wall to wall.

Behind the curtain lay a series of shelves like a bookcase, each one constructed from the same rough stone as the rest of the nightmarish sea palace. There were weapons arrayed on the upper shelves: a heavy mace constructed of stone, a leather bag filled with throwing stones, a TP-9 semiautomatic pistol with several clips of bullets.

Brigid plucked up the semiautomatic, her favored weapon when entering a combat situation, checking its breech before loading a new magazine and securing the extras in a pocket sewn into the lining of her cloak. The TP-9 was a compact but bulky pistol with a covered targeting scope across the top, all finished in molded matte black. The grip was set just off center beneath the barrel, and in the user’s hand, the unit appeared to form a lopsided square, hand and wrist making the final side and corner. Satisfied, Brigid shoved the pistol into a hip holster, twisting it slightly to secure it.

Then Brigid crouched, reaching for one of two objects that waited on the lowest shelf of the wall unit, resting on the floor. The two items were identical in design, and it was impossible to tell them apart. Pyramidal in shape, the items stood twelve inches from apex to square base, and each side of the base measured twelve inches in length. The sides were plated in a shimmering mirrored metal, its surface curved randomly so as to reflect in a strange, almost disconcerting way. These were the interphasers, the teleportational units that could be used to access a parallax point and transfer a person or persons across the quantum ether.

Gingerly, Brigid picked up the unit to the right and carried it in both hands to the platform where Little Quav was waiting. Kneeling for a moment, she flipped open a hidden door at the base of the pyramid-shaped machine, and her slender fingers traced a quick tattoo across the control buttons revealed within. The interphaser bleeped a moment, chirruping to itself as it accessed the cosmic pathways that would be used for this journey outside of traditional space.