No Such Thing As Werewolves (53 page)

There are a pairs of rubies near the center of the rejuvenator. They are the largest gems. Do you see them?

He did. Each was fifty or sixty karats, possibly the largest of their kind in the world. They were so large that placing his hands on them didn’t quite cover the gems.

“Now what?” he asked.

Close your eyes and use your will to probe the rejuvenator as if it were the mind of another. Once you’ve touched it, you will understand.

Blair suppressed the lingering fears about Mohn’s impending arrival. He gave himself completely to the task, focusing his will and
pushing
into the sarcophagus. There was a moment of resistance. Then he tumbled through, into another place.

He stood in an empty room similar to the Mother’s chamber, but the walls were lined with gemstones and veins of gold. It looked like the control nexus of a starship from some space opera. He glanced around wondering exactly what he was supposed to do now.

“Who are you?” came a melodic voice from behind him. He spun to find the woman from the sarcophagus, standing before him. She was breathtaking. The Mother in all her glory, or her consciousness anyway.
 

Piercing green eyes studied him as she repeated the question. “Who are you? What has become of Ahiga?”

He wondered idly how it was he could understand her language, but with their minds touching perhaps she’d already learned English. Or he’d learned whatever she was speaking.

“I’m, uh, Blair,” he answered lamely. What did one say to the progenitor of an entire culture, a woman tens of thousands of years old? “Ahiga is dead. He died protecting me and sent me in his place to wake you.”

“Has the enemy returned, then? Are we too late?” she asked, eyes widening in alarm. She took a step closer.

“Not yet, but their return is imminent. I don’t know if you understand astronomy the same way we do, but the sun has sent out a coronal mass ejection, the thing we believe will wake the enemy. It could happen in the next hour, or in a day. Two at most.” He answered as honestly as he could, trying not to gawk at the woman before him.

The Mother looked relieved, posture relaxing as she took another step closer. She was close enough to touch now, or whatever would pass for touching here. “Then all is not lost. Still, time is short. I must know of this new world. Will you mindshare with me?”

“I-what does that entail, exactly?” he asked, remembering the mindshare with Ahiga. That had been brief because the old man was dying. Would this be similar?

“I would taste your memories. All of them. Walk the footsteps of your life, seeing all you have seen,” she explained, stretching forth a delicate hand. It hovered near his cheek. “In exchange, I will grant you a portion of my own memory, a fragment of it. Ask one question, and if it is in my power to show you, then I will.”

“What is this place? How did you build it? Why?” Blair asked, all in a jumble.

“That is three questions,” she said, giving him a tolerant smile. “The answers are complicated, but I will show you my discovery of the first Ark many, many millennia ago. Lower your defenses. Share your mind with me.”

“Ok,” he said, steeling himself as her hand brushed his face. There was an immense heat that began where her fingers brushed his skin, and surged through his entire body like a bolt of lightening. He could feel her rummaging through his thoughts like so many folders in a file cabinet, sifting and weighting as she learned about his world.

Then the world winked out. He was elsewhere, as he’d been with Ahiga. But there was no campfire, no looming darkness. He was inside her memories, seeing what she had seen. A glimpse of the world as it had been in another age.

Chapter 77- The First Ark

Seeing through the Mother’s eyes was a fascinating experience. It was a bit like controlling Yasmin had been, except he could do nothing but observe. The Mother huddled in a small gully with several other figures, shivering beneath layers of crudely stitched fur. Fat flakes of snow fell from the sky, and judging from the thick dusting the figures wore, he assumed they’d been there for at least a little while.

“How much longer will that take? We cannot be here when night falls, or we will leave nothing but our own corpses for our pursuers.” a short, stocky man growled. He had thick, bristly black hair and a beard to match. His eyes were set deep into his skull, beneath a heavy brow, and he cradled a flint-tipped spear in one hand.

The man he’d spoken to looked up calmly with gray eyes. His hair was also dark, though it was more brown than black. His beard was shorter but just as tangled as the other man’s. He held a pair of rocks in his hands, one a small striker and the other something that made Blair gawk. That was a core.

Blair had spent a summer learning primitive survival skills back in high school. They’d used the same Stone Age technology as the Cro-Magnon of France, and Blair had spent maddening afternoons attempting to create workable stone axe blades from cores much like the one this man held. Based on the technique he employed, Blair could at least guess the rough moment in history when this memory had occurred. Somewhere between twenty and twenty-two thousand years ago, during one of the world’s harshest glaciations.
 

The man’s quick, sure strikes made a mockery of Blair’s pathetic attempts, quickly shaping the stone into a sharp wedge that would no doubt be affixed to the four-foot yew shaft propped against the rock face next to him. “If Set and his followers catch us and we are unarmed, then we will be just as dead. My last blade was lost saving
your
life, Sobek.”

Both names tickled at the back of Blair’s mind. They were familiar, but he wasn’t sure where he’d heard them.

“Patience. We have time yet,” the Mother said. Having words issue from a throat Blair had no control over was so odd.

“Precious little of it. They’ve dogged us for many days now. I still do not understand why Set is so persistent,” another woman said, rising from a bundle of furs piled between two rocks. She towered over the Mother’s comparatively tiny form, long red hair bound with a simple leather cord. She too carried a spear. “Osiris, you are chieftain now. We will follow where you lead, but Sobek is not wrong.”

“I know, Sekhmet,” he said, without looking up to meet her gaze. “That is why you will head to the top of the ridge and see if we are still pursued. Silently, like a cave lion.”

If Blair had a mouth, he’d be gawking openly. Sekhmet. Osiris. Sobek. The names were soberingly familiar. All three were figures in the Egyptian pantheon.

The redhead scrambled up the hillside in near silence, kicking loose little drifts of snow as she ascended. She was out of sight in seconds, moving with the grace of a life-long hunter.

“You know as well as I that our pursuers have not given up. What did you not wish her to hear?” Sobek rumbled. He folded his arms and stared a challenge at Osiris.

Osiris didn’t answer, didn’t address the challenge in any way. He turned to the Mother, staring her directly in the eyes. Blair’s natural inclination was to look away from that haunted gaze, but of course he couldn’t. He was merely an observer here.

“Isis, you speak for the spirits. The Valley of Hidden Voices is close. Will the spirits protect us if we enter?” Osiris asked, striking a final flake from his new blade and then affixing it into a notch cut in the top of the spear shaft. He applied a thick amber-like substance to it and then wrapped the shaft in a leather strip.

“You cannot mean to enter,” Sobek hissed, eyes narrowing as he took a step toward Osiris.
 

Osiris uncoiled like a viper, the tip of his new spear resting against Sobek’s throat before the smaller man could react. “I am chieftain now, Sobek. Not your rival. Not your far brother. Your chief. You will abide by my decision, or we will take your meat to sustain the tribe.”

“I am sorry, Osiris,” Sobek said, shrinking away from the newly made stone blade. Blair remembered just how sharp they could be. “But surely there is another way. If we go there, we will be damned. No one returns from the Valley of Hidden Voices. It is cursed.”

“Yes,” Osiris said, pulling his weapon from Sobek’s throat. He began wrapping furs around himself, clearly preparing to depart. “Isis, I would hear your words on this.”

He turned to address the Mother. Isis, the fabled wife of Osiris. She spoke. “The spirits will offer us no protection. If we enter the valley, we do so at great peril.”

“If we do not, then we are all dead,” Osiris snapped. He seemed to be on the verge of saying more, but Sekhmet’s silent form dropped into the camp.
 

“They pursue us still. They will be upon this place not long after the sun sleeps,” she said. She studied Osiris’s preparations for departure. Then she began gathering her own furs.

“All of you need to decide right now if I am truly your chief,” Osiris said. He straightened, gaze roaming their assembled faces.“

“We go where you go,” Sekhmet said simply.
 

Isis answered by reaching up and squeezing Osiris’s arm. Blair could feel the cool flesh. He could feel his own heart beating, or rather Isis’s heart beating.

“You are my chieftain,” Sobek snarled. He seized the last of his furs and threw it about his shoulders. “If you wish to doom us with this madness, that is your right.”

The long, low trumpet of a horn split the gathering dusk, from a mile or two away. That silenced the assembled group. They moved into a loping run as one, departing the gully and winding their way between two hills. How long they ran, Blair wasn’t sure. Since the experience was a memory, he had the sense that some details were skipped.

Clarity returned when the assembled group reached the crest of a tall hill. Isis turned in a wide circle, looking out over a frozen wasteland in a way that provided Blair with a wealth of information. There were no mountains to speak of, just a few hills and the occasional glacier. If his observations were right, these people had originated somewhere in France, and they were heading northwest. That could put them somewhere in modern-day England, though he was by no means certain of his conclusion.

“Spirits below,” Sekhmet breathed. She raised a trembling finger, and Isis’s gaze followed it.

A familiar pyramid stood in the valley below, ringed on three sides by glaciers. It was conspicuously free of both snow and ice, which probably accounted for the clear discomfort evidenced by Isis and her companions. They had a right to be superstitious.

Osiris began picking his way down the icy slope without a word. The others followed, with Isis bringing up the rear. Blair could sense her emotions, the memory of intense fear she’d experienced from her first sight of the pyramid. He didn’t blame her. She’d probably never seen a structure more complex than a crude debris hut, but now she was confronted with something that, in her mind, could only have been created by a god.

They reached the valley floor swiftly and headed toward the pyramid. As the last light of the sun fled the sky, the moon cut a hole in the clouds. It provided enough light to see, but the dim light made the pyramid even more foreboding. Blair wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to see what would come next.

Osiris had stopped near the mouth of the pyramid’s entrance, which was identical to the one he’d walked through just minutes before, back in modern-day Peru. These Arks appeared to be identical, at least on the surface.

Sobek and Sekhmet drew up short next to Osiris as Isis forced herself forward. The young shaman finally drew even with the others, but Blair could feel her desire to run. She nearly did when the shadows at the mouth of the tunnel stirred and a figure emerged.

It was roughly the same height as Isis but much broader of shoulder and had a heavy brow that overshadowed its eyes. Thick, dark eyebrows gave it a brutish look, and Blair realized with shock what he was seeing. Isis and her companions were modern-day Homo Sapiens. The figure that had emerged from the Ark was not. This was a Homo Neanderthalensis, commonly known as the Neanderthal.
 

Modern history taught that they’d gone extinct roughly forty thousand years ago, which was quite a bit earlier than what he assumed he was seeing. Either science was wrong, or this memory took place further into the past than he’d believed.

The Neanderthal approached slowly, raising a hand to beckon them forward. Its other hand clutched a golden staff that shone in the moonlight. The head of the staff bore a large ankh, a clearly Egyptian symbol despite the fact that this memory predated Egypt by fifteen millennia or more.

Osiris was the first to move, taking several steps closer. He clutched his spear tightly, keeping himself between the Neanderthal and his companions. “Greetings, Old One. Your kind is rare. I have not seen one such as you since I was a child.”

The Neanderthal said nothing, instead taking several steps back into the pyramid and beckoning for the others to follow him. Osiris did so, and the others followed.

Chapter 78- Too Late

“Fan out and set up a kill zone,” Jordan barked. Both squads of armor trotted down the last corridor, leaping off the sides of the ramp as they entered the central chamber.

By the time he reached the doorway, his troops had already assumed defensive positions in a rough line to either side of the opening. Their weapons swept the room as the soldiers looked for any opposition. There was none.