SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (17 page)

Carter looked up from the steam. The clash of hot and cold brought out the startling blue of her eyes. She started to say something when a cry of alarm cut her short. O’Neill turned to see what all the commotion was about. Over by the jagged edge of the fissure the battered and bloody shape of the Mujina crawled hand over fist across the ice. The creature slumped forward, spilling its burden beside it. It took O’Neill a heartbeat to realize that not only had the creature clawed its way up through the debris of the landslide, somehow it had dragged another man up with it. “Well I’ll be damned.”

“Is that…?”

“Yep. That’s one resourceful little bastard, that’s for sure.”

O’Neill finished off his warm water with one long swallow and wiped the wetness from his lips with the back of his hand. He put the metal cup down. “Come on, Carter. Let’s go join the homecoming committee.”

Jahamat was
the first to the Mujina’s side.

The leader of the Corvani expedition hunkered down
beside the creature. When others tried to approach he waved
them back. The creature spoke to him. He had to lean in so close that he could feel the warmth of the Mujina’s shallow breath prickle his inner ear.

“
I can help you
,” the creature whispered, so faint the words might have been nothing more than the promise of the arctic wind.

“How?” Jahamat asked. He felt something stirring in his blood. He laid a hand on the creature’s heaving chest and felt a palpable thrill surge up through his fingers. He licked at his lips. “Tell me.”

“
I can show you the way to the stars… I can open up worlds to you… I can give you what you crave
.”

The words were in his head. He could see them with his mind.

“You? You can barely lift your head from the ice.”

The creature moved then, with surprising strength. It came around beneath him, wriggling around on its back so that it looked up into his eyes. “
All is not as it seems, Jahamat. The eyes see what they want to. The mind interprets what it is shown, but the mind is influenced just as easily as the eye. It is all down to expectation.
”

It wasn’t just the words that were inside his head; the creature was. He could feel its invasive presence rooting deeper and deeper, touching memories and emotions long since buried as it sought something else, something more profound. He understood then. The creature was hunting for his essence, the thing that made him
him
.

Jahamat knew fear then. Deep. Instinctive. Primal.

He looked down into the eyes of the creature and saw a blazing intelligence that shocked him, and in that moment of realization something of the creature’s mask slipped and he saw the nothingness beneath. There was a flat plane where it ought to have worn a face. It had a ragged sucking hole for a mouth and black pits eyes. The folds of skin flapped as it breathed. And then, almost as quickly as it had been revealed, the truth slipped away behind another mask of need and he found himself looking down at the almond eyes of a woman.

“
I can be anything you want me to be
,” she said. It said. Jahamat found himself thinking of the woman in his arms as an ‘it’ not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’; a sexless thing, despite its haunting beauty.

“I name you ‘Monster of the Anima’,” he breathed.

“
Isn’t that where all monsters are born?
” the woman’s smile was beguiling.

“Get out of my head, demon. Get out of my head now or I will cut your throat while you lie there crooning your sweet deceits.”

His hand trembled against the Mujina’s skin. He looked up. They were all looking at him. He saw the confusion in their faces. They were only party to half the conversation and the part they heard made no earthly sense.

“
Don’t tell me you would walk away from the stars? I know you better than you know yourself, Jahamat. You question, you doubt but you would no more walk away than you would surrender me to my captors. Oh, yes, the people that brought me here are no friends of mine. They would snare me and chain me and parade me around as though I were a trophy they had claimed. They ripped me away from my homeworld and seek to use me, to transform me into a weapon to conquer galaxies. And I am that, Jahamat. I am an army. I am death, eater of worlds. I am hope, breaker of dreams. I am everything, from the beginning, the alpha, the zero point, rushing through time to the end of days. I am it and it is I. How can I bring you the stars? How? Because I am made of the stars. Their dust hardens my veins. I do not bleed, I crack and flake. I do not weep, I calcify. I am not of this place. You know that to be true, don’t you, Jahamat? You can feel the alienness in my touch. Your blood sings with the thrill of it. You understand even if you do not understand. And you believe me.”

The words rushed around inside him. What they said, what they promised, was so heady he did not dare believe, and he wanted to deny it. He wanted to say: “I believe no such thing.” But it was a lie. He did. He believed. Instead, ensnared, he breathed, “The stars? Truly? You can deliver the heavens? How? Show me?”

“
There is a gate, beneath the ice. It opens to everywhere you can imagine
.”

“Show me,” Jahamat said. He had been mistaken. The woman’s eyes weren’t almond, they were hazel. Her skin wasn’t the flawless pale porcelain he had thought but rough and pitted with the scars of acne and the first gray of stubble. A man looked up at him now. A man with the face of a fighter.

“
Tell me you want it. I need to hear the words
.”

“I want the world,” he said. And he meant it.

“
More
,” the creature goaded.

“I want the heavens. I want the stars. I want it all.”

“
And I can help you
,
my hungry warrior,
” the Mujina promised.

He liked the sound of that: the hungry warrior. That was exactly what he was. He tasted the rightness of it in his mind. “I don’t even know what to call you.”

“
Oh, but you do. You already named me. But before the world you may call me Mujina.
”

“Come then, Mujina,” Jahamat said. “Show me this gate between worlds.”

“
Patience, my hungry warrior. Patience.
”

A hard sun beat down on the ice.

As the day wore into dusk a shallow film of melt still clung stubbornly to the surface. It would freeze again before the sun was out of the sky. The residual heat was never going to be enough to thaw the glacial mound beneath the camp, not all at once.

It had taken the better part of the day, but the camp was gradually beginning to show signs of returning to normal. What surprised Daniel was the seeming disregard for what had happened. It wasn’t that the soldiers were untouched by the loss, but rather that they viewed it as just part of life. The human animal was remarkable like that; it was all part of that extraordinary resilience and tenacity that had allowed it to spread throughout the galaxy.

The camp illustrated it all on a microcosmic scale. He could see the triumph of spirit as the rescuers fought the elements to recover buried instrumentation from within one of the collapsed igloos. Six of them clawed away at the ice even as a second smaller tremor rippled through the heaving ground. It was a peculiar sensation. The horizon appeared to roll, all of the disorientation rising up from beneath Daniel Jackson’s feet. All around him, men from the camp worked together without a word. There was an almost hive-like mentality to it, with Jahamat as the queen bee in the center of it all.

Jack threw himself into the heart of it, risking his own safety without so much as a second thought, which was so like him. But Daniel noticed the way he seemed to gravitate toward Jahamat as the need for help moved across the temporary settlement. That almost certainly meant O’Neill’s efforts were far from selfless acts of heroism. He was ingratiating himself, being seen to be at least one man’s savior. Daniel watched Jack a little while longer. There was a lot to be admired in the man. Indeed he was not dissimilar to the Mujina in the way that he inspired those around him to want to please him. The notion of Jack O’Neill as an ancient mystical creature brought a smile to Daniel’s face. Jack was about as
un
mystical as they came.

And yet the Asgard had named an ill-fated ship after the man.

The more Daniel thought about it, the more he realized what a fair comparison it actually was.

Across the camp, Sam and Teal’c labored hard and with no less disregard for the risk. Rather than join them, Daniel hung back slightly from the rescue efforts, watching the others watching the Mujina. There was something Messianic in the way they responded to the creature, even Teal’c.

It was fascinating to see.

Daniel turned his attention from the worshippers to the worshipped for a moment, and again felt that haunting sense of the Messianic. He thought of all the charismatic leaders he had ever encountered, from the icons on the silver screen to the demagogues who owned their people heart and soul. All of them, he reasoned, possessed that same Svengali-like surety and owned that same connection with their subjects.

The memory of Orwell’s Oceania was not one he wanted to live out in reality.

He could all too easily imagine John the Baptist on the beaches, making his impassioned speeches to crowds hungry to understand his new message of hope; or, at the other end of time, Kennedy promising to end the escalation of the Cold War on the balcony of Berlin’s Rathaus Schöneberg. Omar al-Bashir, Kim Jong-Il, Ríos Montt and so many of the world’s oppressive regimes, Batista and Stroessner, Pol Pot and Nikolai Chauchescu, Ho Chi Minh and Bin Laden, and even Saddam Hussein; men with the power to coerce men to kill for them, or die for them and what they believed in. It was all too easy to transfer the Mujina’s charismatic magic to them, and understand the implications of what was already happening here in the few hours since their capture.

“He’s not the Messiah,” Daniel muttered beneath his breath, holding off on the obvious Pythonesque end of the quote. None of the others were close enough to appreciate it anyway.

Down in the heart of it O’Neill turned, shading his eyes against the sun. Daniel did likewise, following the direction of his gaze. Behind him, through a deep vee slashed into the ice-mountain, he saw a lone man silhouetted against the sky. It was impossible to see his face from this distance, but his excitement was almost palpable, even from so far away. He came running down the mountain.

Daniel knew precisely what it meant: they had found the Stargate.

* * *

The echoes of the blasting caps had finally silenced. Jahamat’s men had blasted open the cave network but they didn’t have the heavy machinery to lift the naquadah ring so for now, at least, it was still anchored in place. Jahamat assured them they would be back, with the machinery, when the time came. In the mean time they were ensuring that the cave wouldn’t remain hidden any longer. Even now, away from the gate, the look of almost reverential awe on each of their faces made it appear as though they were in the grip of some holy revelation. Rapture. Daniel wondered if they had even the slightest idea of what the Stargate represented, what it actually
was
, or if they simply thought they had discovered some ancient artifact.

Both Jahamat and the Mujina walked toward them. Daniel had no liking for the way the creature had attached itself to the Corvani leader. It leaned in and whispered something in the man’s ear. Daniel had heard those same whispers himself and knew just how seductive they could be. The Mujina was no doubt telling Jahamat exactly what he wanted to hear — but in a way that served the Mujina and the Mujina alone.

The way the Corvani’s smile spread across his face sent a shiver of trepidation down the ladder of Daniel’s spine. There was nothing even remotely healthy about the expression.

O’Neill followed the pair of them, a few paces behind, as though he expected to be challenged every step of the way but intended to get as close as he could before that happened.

And then, seeing the gate and the look of absolute rapture on Jahamat’s face, Daniel began to understand what the Mujina was promising him. He didn’t need to read the creature’s lips. It was an obvious promise given the usual dreams of a military man. Words of conquest. Promises of glory. All of that and more. To abuse the cliché, the Mujina was offering power beyond imagining, untold worlds and the kind of triumphs reserved only for the greatest generals of history.

And the Stargate was the key to all of it.

Thanks to the Mujina’s treachery, they had found it after all the centuries it had lay hidden in the caves beneath the ice. All sorts of scenarios played out across Daniel’s imagination in the time it took him to walk a dozen steps forward, none of them happy.