SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (25 page)

It was such a potent thing. They adored it, but even that was not enough to mask their terror; they feared it every bit as much as they adored it. The Mujina contented itself with that duality. But it knew it wasn’t enough, not when there were worlds out there, thousands upon thousands of them, that could both love and fear it. The thought was potent. Toxic.

In its mind the Mujina imagined worshippers spread all across the galaxies, infinite in their devotion, thousands upon thousands of their bone churches erected to glorify it, their icons fashioned in its own shifting image. There was glory in that, but more, it would be able to help them all; every story of suffering and pain it heard could be soothed. All it wanted to do was use its gifts to help.

And one day it would find her. It could go to her if she could not find her way back; they could still be together.

Then it would not be alone.

It had carved the faces of its saviors into the bones of the altar, to honor them; to the Mujina the faces of O’Neill, Carter, Teal’c and Daniel Jackson were nothing short of icons. And then, it had rendered
her
beauty in bone — an exquisite recreation of its Madonna. Its love and its weakness. A terrible, fatal beauty etched into the dead of this place. All of the carvings were loving representations, they could be nothing less, after all these were its most cherished disciples: the ones who had set it free.

The Mujina rose slowly and walked across to the door, content to let the devotions begin for another day.

The city
beyond the railway tracks was a desperate place.

It wasn’t merely the architecture of despondency, the weeping brickwork with its bullet striations and the crumbling façades with no building left behind them, it was so much more. The spray painted ravens marked the beginning of the ghetto, the spread-winged birds looking down upon the Kelani like so much carrion. The desperation was ingrained in every face Teal’c saw. Every line was weathered in hard, none of them down to laughter. Sallow-faced women hunched over cracked and broken stoops scrubbing at the bald stone with wire brushes as though they could scour the despair out of their lives.

He walked the streets for hours, not sure what he was looking for. He had no idea how he was supposed to find the old woman, Kiah.

With the night drawing in, a young girl in a tight red dress half-skipped half-walked down the center of the road, following the remains of the white line. No one else looked at her. That in itself interested Teal’c. He watched the people not watching the girl. A boy, all skin and bones and broken promises sat hunched over the curb playing with a tin soldier, his rat-at-tat death knells gunning out to punctuate the rhythm plated by the wire brushes. Across the street a hag beat away at a hanging rug with a stick, great clouds of dust billowing out with each whack. She coughed up a lungful of phlegm as Teal’c walked past her. She watched him with an ugly sneer on her lipless face. Teal’c nodded to her. The hag ignored him, taking her aggression out on the threadbare carpet. An off-white pigeon settled on the rope beside it. Two more settled on the broken glass that topped her wall. Teal’c studied the birds with a detached curiosity. They showed an almost domesticated disregard for humanity. More birds settled along the guttering of some of the nearest tenements as he walked down the center of the street.

He felt rather than saw the curtains twitch and the curious stares behind them.

Teal’c followed the girl in the red dress.

It felt like the only thing he could do — and part of him was sure she was leading him to wherever these people wanted him to be, so it made sense, too. She looked over her shoulder as she neared the corner, to be sure he was following as she skipped across the street and disappeared between two tumbledown houses. Their windows were boarded up. The doors hung drunkenly on broken hinges. Behind the houses, the girl in the red dress squeezed between slats in one of the broken fences. Teal’c was more than twice the size of the opening. He didn’t need to worry, before he could stoop to peer into the gap three men emerged from the building opposite. They were roughly dressed in layers of dirty rags and coats. Each wore at least five coats, one on top of another, like armor. Not that any amount of wool could have saved them from a bullet or shrapnel form a bomb blast. The coats bulked them up, but even so, none of them were a match for the Jaffa’s powerful physique.

“You’re not welcome here, stranger,” one of the men growled. He stepped forward, crossing his arms over his chest defensively. Teal’c studied the man.

“I was told to seek out Kiah,” he said, watching all three faces for any flicker of recognition the name might bring.

“Were you now? And who would have told you to do that, eh?”

“Her daughter.”

That earned a sharp exchange of looks from the men. The second sniffed, hawked and spat as he stepped forward. He brushed his coat aside to reveal the stock of an old shotgun. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was a weapon just the same. “You were in the compound? How’d you escape?”

Teal’c looked down at the wad of phlegm on the cobbled stone at his feet. “She helped me.”

“Did she now? And tell me, why would she want to do a thing like that?”

Teal’c said nothing. Instead he maintained steady eye contact with all of them, weighing up the threat they posed. None of them looked particularly well nourished with their stark cheekbones and hollow-eyed stares. If it came down to a fight the first blows might hurt, but the second, third and forth would be lacking strength — meaning they would attack with an explosive burst of fury or not at all. Teal’c looked down at their thighs; the muscles appeared relaxed, not tensed. “I was told to seek out Kiah in this place because she might help me. You are not Kiah so I am not looking for you. Take me to her and I shall not harm you.”

The leader laughed. It was an open and surprisingly honest sound. He looked at his partners in crime. The second man shrugged. The third had what looked like an old pair of night-vision goggles dangling around his throat and a pistol tucked into the rope belt keeping his trousers up. They were dressed for war. “Well would you listen to the big fella? Maybe we should teach him a lesson in manners, hey boys?”

Still Teal’c said nothing.

“Nah,” the third man finally spoke up. “If Namaah’s willing to stick her neck out to get this joker out of the compound, I reckon he’s worth taking to Kiah.”

“You always did have a soft spot for that girl,” the leader said, but Teal’c noticed his casual stance and knew the risk of fighting was past. Violence was easy to read if you knew the signs to look for. He turned back to Teal’c, “So what do we call you, big fella?”

“I am Teal’c, son of Ro’nak.”

“That’s a right mouthful. What say we call you Bob?”

“I am Teal’c.”

“Okay, big man, it was just an idea. Keep your hair on.”

* * *

 
“Jubal Kane what brings you to old Kiah?” The woman inclined her head oddly, following the sounds on the old wooden boards of the stairs with her ears. It took Teal’c a moment to realize she was blind.

“Namaah sent us a little helper,” the leader said. His voice was different now, softer. Deferential. This old blind woman was obviously important to them. That in itself made Teal’c curious. What could an old woman with no eyes offer to their war effort? She did not look like a warrior, neither did she carry herself like one. He knew enough to understand that looks could intentionally be deceptive and that warriors could not rely on strength alone. Because of that, he did not dismiss her.

“Did she now? Well come up here and let me get a look at you. Don’t be shy.”

The others stood to the side, pushing Teal’c up the middle of the staircase toward the waiting woman. She held out her hands. She had surprisingly strong hands, thick with calluses. They were worker’s hands, shaped by honest graft. Teal’c took them and raised them to his face, allowing the old woman to feel out his features. Her rough fingers lingered over the gold of his tattoo. “Strong bones,” she said, appreciatively. “But, tell me, what is this?” Again her fingers returned to the gold of his tattoo.

“It marked me as First Prime of Apophis.” His lip curled. “Though that was another life.”

“Ah, we each of us have those,” Kiah said, with surprising compassion. “But I did not ask what the markings meant, I asked what they were.”

“My apologies, ancient one,” Teal’c said, earning a splutter of laughter from Jubal Kane. “It is a tribal marking of my people; as we approach manhood we are thus tattooed to mark our service to the false gods. It is the ‘honor’ of First Prime to have his inlaid with gold.”

“Barbaric,” Kiah said, but she didn’t take back her touch. “A slave brand, that is what you are saying, yes?”

Teal’c followed the train of her thoughts; she was drawing a parallel between his tribal tattoo and the raven brand used by Corvus Keen to subjugate the Kelani and mark them as outsiders. She was, in other words, letting Jubal Kane and his cronies know that they were not so different. They both had their supposed masters who profited at the expense of their people. He nodded. “Yes.”

“There is no honor in these brandings. These are not badges of war, no matter what they tell us. They are marks of hate meant to show the world we are less than we are.”

“Your people carry their own brand,” Teal’c said.

“Not ours.” She spat on the floor. “The raven was a plague carrier in the not-so glorious past of our people. The bite of the fleas they bore carried the blood plague. It decimated our people. To use the raven now is to bring back memories of that black time. It tells the world we are unclean.”

Jubal grunted. “And that Corvus Keen is a bloated parasite feeding on the corpses of decent people.”

“They hide us away here and turn our homes into a ghetto, thinking they will break us. They do not understand that all of this only makes us stronger.”

Teal’c bowed his head in agreement. “As it is with the Jaffa.”

“This city is our home. Our parents and our grandparents gave everything they had to carve this place out of the dust. He knows that. He knows all of it. And yet he spurns everything they were — everything he is — his heritage and his inheritance, in his quest to expunge us from history. It isn’t as though he is anything more than I am, or Jubal or Jachin here. He was always one of us. That is my greatest shame.”

Teal’c realized she was talking about Corvus Keen himself.

“You have no reason to be ashamed, mother,” Jubal Kane said. “You did not make him the way he is.”

“Didn’t I?” the old woman said, bitterly.

“Of course not.”

“But he is my flesh and blood, sweet Jubal. How can I not blame myself or wonder how it might have been different? Everything he uses now, all of the history he throws in our faces, he learned at my knee. He is my son every bit as much as he is your brother.”

“Which means he isn’t your son at all, because he is no brother of mine,” Jubal said. “The day he put your eyes out is the day he lost the right to call himself that. You didn’t put the sickness into him, mother. You didn’t make the monster. He was born wrong.”

The old woman had no answer for that.

And Teal’c understood now exactly why this blind woman was so important to the resistance fighters hiding out in the ghetto, and why Namaah hadn’t been willing or able to flee with him.

Kiah was the mother of the tyrant.

She was a symbol, every bit as much as the raven or the gold tattoo.

* * *

Teal’c hid in the darkness. Every nerve and fiber bristled. He wanted to fight, not hide, but the old woman had insisted he trust her. He did not feel like he had a choice. She led him into the bedroom and lifted a trap in the floor, ushering him down. He had to crouch, curling his legs in to his chest as she lowered the floor over his head. Less than a minute later he heard the floorboards groaning as heavy feet walked slowly across them. They seemed to linger for a perilously long time directly over his head. He did not dare breathe. His tell tale heart beat against his chest, so loud he thought they must surely hear it. The voices raised. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, but the tone spoke volumes. They knew the old woman was sheltering the fugitive and they would find him. She could play her games and hide behind her kinship with Keen, but there would be no mercy for her treachery. If they could prove she had sheltered the man everyone and everything she held dear would be taken away from her.

Teal’c flinched at the sound of the slap and her old body slumping to the floor. It took every ounce of restraint he had not to erupt out of his hiding place and tear the man limb from limb. Instead, he let his rage smolder. There would be a time for reckoning. The man would be held to account for his cowardice.

And then, even as he expected the light to invade his hiding place as the trap door came up, they moved away.

He risked opening the trap a crack and saw the woman lying on her side sobbing. He slipped out of his hiding place and moved across to the window. He crouched low, careful not to be seen, and watched as the two Raven Guard walked out into the street. He let his silent fury burn both of their faces into the back of his mind so that when the time came he would know them and they would pay.