SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (19 page)

Had he not been chained, he would have reached around and snapped the man’s neck.

* * *

It was an unknown dawn when they came for them.

Teal’c rose groggily and shuffled toward the light docilely. His skin crawled with the grime of the cell. Six men stood guard at the door. Teal’c appraised them quickly. They were
big men, overly muscular which meant that they would be slow
if it came to a fight. They carried weapons — batons. Teal’c assumed that they must deliver some sort of charge, rather like a zat’ni’katel, otherwise they would be almost useless even in close combat. The shortest of the six bore the worst scars. Teal’c narrowed his eyes, trying to discern some sort of tribal pattern to the wounds, but they appeared both random and sadistic in nature. He had been cut for the sake of pleasing. The guard saw his scrutiny and grinned viciously. Light streamed in as they pulled the tarpaulins back to reveal the bars of their cage. He looked at the faces of his friends. They were frightened but alive.

Samantha Carter looked the worst. Her face was waxen, the luster gone. She tried to smile as she looked back at him with bloodshot eyes but there was nothing to smile about. She had lost a lot of weight. Her bones stood out starkly beneath the skin. Teal’c counted the meals in his head, judging that they had been prisoners in the dark for a month, maybe more, kept drugged up and undernourished. Being kept in captivity like that was obviously going to take its toll on the humans. Perhaps, as a woman, Carter’s metabolism functioned differently to O’Neill and Daniel Jackson’s? He nodded slightly in Carter’s direction. The others were not much better. Indeed all of them stank of sickness and from being cooped up in the prison wagon for so long. There was no surprise in that.

He saw Jahamat through the bars of the cage. The man looked inordinately pleased with himself. The Mujina stood beside him, no longer dressed in the remains of the evac suit. Now the creature wore a crisp black uniform, closely cut to follow the lines of its body. There was a single silver embellishment on the chest, a silver spread-winged bird.

“Bring them out here,” Jahamat ordered.

The guards responded with unnecessary vigor, grabbing the prisoners and pushing them bodily out of the cage. Daniel Jackson stumbled and almost fell, his legs buckling from disuse. After a month or more of drugged-up captivity the muscles had no doubt begun to atrophy. Again Teal’c appreciated the ruthless efficacy of the Corvani’s leadership. He had effectively neutralized them all without lifting so much as a finger. There had been no beatings, no brutality, only weeks of inertia. It was incredible what evils time alone could work on the flesh.

Teal’c moved cautiously down the steps to the gravel. He took a moment to look around him, fixing landmarks in his mind. There was not much to look at. They appeared to have been brought in to some sort of monastic cloister. He saw the pitted stone of a bell tower. The climbing ivy had reached within grasping distance of the lowest gargoyle. The stone demons were a peculiar detail that didn’t really fit with the rest of the architecture. Indeed their stone appeared to be considerably newer — less weathered, the pitting hadn’t had a chance to work itself deeply into the leering faces or crack away parts of the furled wings. He followed the line of the tower down, and then swept his gaze across the red clay tiles of the roof. He counted twenty-one windows. There was no uniformity in either shape or size. How many eyes looked down silently on them while they stood there, exposed? None or a hundred, it did not matter.

There were a dozen arches, and hidden in the shadows they cast a dozen more. Behind them, almost invisible in the shade, were four doors. One almost certainly led up to the bell, while another was actually two huge double doors twice Teal’c’s height and more than twice the span of his arms across. It dwarfed the remaining doors into insignificance. The cloister was actually a horseshoe in shape, though trees walled the open end of the shoe. He counted a dozen genuses, none of them familiar. The verdant wall was comprised of so many hues of green it was impossible to differentiate them.

There was a fountain in the middle of the square, at its center an idealized sculpture wrought in bronze. It was the usual heroic lies of rippling muscles and strong features. The kind of face that a hero ought to wear, not one of the thousand other real guises they more often did. Water rippled over the bronze muscles, lending them the sheen of sweat and the illusion of action. The artist had added dozens of small birds in various stages of flight around the base of the fountain. There was something dynamic about them that truly did suggest the illusion of flight. The man standing proud in the center was no doubt a rendition of Corvus Keen, Teal’c surmised.

A second wagon and a third pulled up, and more prisoners were dragged from them.

“Line up, and think yourself damned lucky the Great Keen has taken an interest in you personally,” Jahamat barked, walking the line. He stopped in front of Teal’c, a slow smile of cunning spreading across his lips as he looked the Jaffa up and down. “If you were not of interest to the master you would already be on your way to one of the facilities. As it is, there is a chance yet that you might find a place within our new bright and bountiful empire.”

Teal’c caught the fact that he said ‘our’, not ‘his’. Already the lackey’s rebellion had taken on such a level of arrogance that he dared flaunt it in front of all of these men loyal to Keen.
Or are they loyal to Keen?
It was an obvious question, given the nature of the creature; perhaps the Mujina had already bought their souls for Jahamat?

The prisoners shuffled listlessly into line. Most moved with a drugged lethargy, their heads bowed so that the only thing they saw were their scuffing feet. Teal’c kept his head stubbornly held high. One of the guards walked up behind him. He heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel, and then felt the sudden crippling surge of electricity lance through every muscle and tendon right down into the bone as the man delivered the charge with cruel precision. “Head down,” the guard rasped. Teal’c complied. He had seen enough and this wasn’t a fight he needed to win.

They were led in single file, not toward the great double doors, but toward one of the smaller ones. It opened into what could only be termed a secret garden — a garden hidden within the cloister’s courtyard. The trees were the first thing he saw. They had been sculpted to resemble tears. It was a curious inversion of what he had expected. Teal’c heard the raucous caw of a blackbird somewhere in the weeping leaves of the downcast trees. Ahead of them, he saw the high topiaries of a hedge maze. In the corners more of those ugly faced demons had been carved — this time in the leaves. The motif was as chilling as it was curious, with the wind stirring their leaves and lending the illusion of movement as it sighed through them.

“Time to play a game,” a bloated ball of a man called out as he waddled toward them. “Try to think of it as fun.” Teal’c wondered if this was the man, Keen, that Jahamat was so eager to topple. He heard barking. “Those are my precious dogs,” the fat man said, inclining his head slightly. A look of beatific calm spread across his face. “They are hungry. Can you hear it in their voices? They haven’t been fed for two days. Now all they want to do is eat. They will, soon enough. What’s going to happen is this: you are going to run the maze. There are a number of secret passageways and tunnels out, for the more industrious of you. For the less, ah, shall we say, intelligent? Yes, why not. For the less intelligent of you, well your role is purely to feed my hungry dogs. I shall be up there,” he pointed toward a veranda overlooking the maze. “Enjoying the spectacle. Those of you that escape; we shall meet again. Those of you that don’t; die knowing that you are doing a good and noble thing, sacrificing yourself so that my dogs can grow fat.” He laughed at that, as though it were quite the funniest thing in the world.

It was a pointless cruelty that spoke volumes about their captor.

Teal’c tried to catch O’Neill’s eye but the man was not inside his own head. He saw Daniel Jackson shuffle his feet. When he looked up he too was gone. The overzealous guard walked over to Daniel and with an ugly sort of tenderness applied his taser. The shock of the electro-muscular disruption drove Doctor Jackson down to his knees. His head went down but he didn’t cry out. When he looked up again Teal’c saw the thin ribbon of blood dribble down his chin where he had bitten through his lip.

“Separate them,” Jahamat told his guards. Carter and O’Neill were dragged off toward different entrances into the maze. Jahamat looked at Teal’c then, and saw through his feigned weakness. “You cannot save them all,” he promised. “You do realize that don’t you, Jaffa?”

Teal’c said nothing.

“It does not matter. Throw them into the maze.”

Rough hands grabbed the prisoners and propelled them forward. Teal’c saw more than a dozen openings in the hedge maze; each no doubt followed its own possible path toward the middle. The walls that divided them had grown to more than twice his height, cutting out much of the light and transforming the cramped passageways into murky alleys of leaf and branch that seemed to be collapsing in on themselves.

“Now run.”

* * *

Corvus Keen braced his hands on the granite rail, digging his fingers into the stone as he stared down at the Kelani dying in the maze.

Some had the strength and wherewithal to run, others simply stumbled into the dogs and fell as though begging at their sharp teeth. The animals fed with delighted savagery. One though, one did not bow down. Keen watched with fascination as the black skinned warrior faced two of his wolfhounds with his bare hands. “Kill him, my children,” he whispered, the words barely making a sound. Stone flaked from the railing as he dug his fingers in deeper, worrying them into the weaknesses in the hard granite.

Beside him, Iblis watched with grim fascination as the hounds attacked. The warrior’s balance was impressive. No, it was more than impressive. It was familiar. The Goa’uld recognized the precision of the open-hand fighting technique the man used: Lok’Nel, one of the ancient Jaffa martial arts.
Where would he have learned such a thing?
Iblis wondered. The man appeared to sway as the first of the beasts launched itself, the movement subtle enough to shift him away from the momentum of the attack without causing the dog to realize what was happening. He reached around with shocking speed and snapped the creature’s neck, tossing the carcass aside.

Keen howled as though it had been his own bones that had been broken by the man.

The black warrior turned to face them, the sun glinting gold on his forehead. Iblis recognized the First Prime’s glyph immediately. It answered one of the questions he had, but presented countless more. Iblis watched the second dog die with the same economy of movement and effort, the Jaffa channeling the attacker’s aggression into its own downfall. It was almost artistic, like watching a ballet of brutality being played out for them. He followed the Jaffa as he fought his way through the maze with calm efficiency. While others screamed and stumbled and fell into the hedges and tried desperately to claw their way through them, the Jaffa simply walked the maze, looking left and right, listening and calling out and listening again for any response to his shouts.

What Iblis had not expected was to see the Jaffa risk everything to save a human female, but that was exactly what he did. He found her lying on her side, one of Keen’s wolfhounds slavering over her as it prowled around her, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. He brought his hand down on the animal’s spine, driving its legs out from under it, then scooped up the woman and carried her in his arms toward one of the bolt holes out of the maze. It was almost touching to see such tenderness amid all of that pain and suffering and fear.

The Jaffa did not leave the maze.

Instead he turned and went in search of another of the Tau’ri. Even from this far away Iblis could hear the Jaffa shouting: “O’Neill? Daniel Jackson? O’Neill?” over and over again.

“Tell me, Great Keen, are these perhaps the prisoners brought to us from the arctic expedition?”

“I suppose so,” the fat man said, quite disinterested in where his amusements came from, only that they died for him. Watching his precious dogs die was obviously taking the edge off all of the suffering he was inflicting. The irony that the ultimate proof the human craved was right there in front of him, stalking his damned dogs through his death maze, appealed to Iblis. It was every bit as twisted as the tortures Corvus Keen dreamed up. The man’s ignorance merely sharpened Iblis’ own amusement.

“This makes things more interesting,” he said to himself. A Jaffa fighting side by side with the humans? A First Prime turned Shol’vah no less. It had to be. There could be no other rationalization of what he saw. Such curious things came through the Chappa’ai.

“No. No it doesn’t,” Keen disagreed, thinking the Goa’uld was talking to him. “This makes things anything but interesting. I am bored now. Kill them all, Iblis,” he turned his back on the maze and walked away.

“As you wish, Great Keen,” the Goa’uld said. He
would
kill them, certainly, but not quite yet.

* * *

Iblis found Kelkus lurking in the doorway. The man had a disturbing habit of skulking, no doubt learned from his years spent sneaking around in the dark in search of his ‘great discovery’. He was a broken man in many ways, but what hadn’t broken was stronger now, the cracks in his psyche papered over with the satisfaction that he had succeeded in bringing his god back into the world. His reward for finding a worthy vessel for the Goa’uld was to stand a step behind him as first disciple. He was no mere lackey though. Much of what the Goa’uld was doing here depended upon the madness of Kelkus. The man was a genius — of sorts. Twisted and depraved but brilliant all the same.