The Last Hunter - Collected Edition (95 page)

11

“The rumbling is fading,” Mira notes as we near the top of the spiral stairwell. She pauses, placing her hand on the gray stone wall. Its surface is smooth, almost soft to the touch, no doubt as polished as it had been when it was abandoned. “Maybe they’ve passed?”

I lift my leg and take another step up, which at this point in the climb, feels like a small victory. Steps are supposed to make scaling heights easier, but they really just put all the strain on a few muscles and bones. Had we been scaling a wall, all of my muscles would be sharing the burden. “It’s just because we’re above them,” I say. “The shockwaves are moving down and out, away from the impacts. So the effect isn’t as severe if you’re above the source of the vibration.”

“Thanks for the sciencey, Einstein,” Mira says with a touch of sarcasm.

“Thank
you
,” I retort, “for making me feel like I’m back in school.”

“Please,” Mira says, about to launch into some kind of witty diatribe.

“Shut-up,” Kainda hisses. “Both of you. I swear you’re like a couple of children in need of a few lashes.”

My instinct is to look at Mira and share a knowing smile, but the fact that Kainda is likely speaking about the parenting style modeled for her, and which she might actually believe is appropriate, makes me frown. I’d never thought about the possibility of having children some day. And it’s still a long way off. But if we survive this war, and really do get married, will she want to raise our children as hunters? Or will their childhoods look more like mine?

A conundrum for the future,
I tell myself.

I look up to Kainda, who currently leads our upward charge. “What is it?”

She’s just around the bend and no longer climbing. As I follow the curved stairs up, I see the stone just beyond her change from a smooth and steady gray to a column of blocks. One more step reveals an archway.

“We’re there,” she says.

We gather at the top step, looking into the space beyond, but remain unmoving, like there’s an invisible force field preventing us from entering.

The chamber beyond the doorway is vast, with a flat floor and a domed ceiling, all carved right out of the solid stone. Beams of light stream through circular holes punched into the wall every fifteen feet.

“Is that daylight?” Mira asks.

“I think so,” I say and finally take a tentative step inside. The floor is as smooth as the walls in the stairwell. It’s almost soft under my feet. I scrunch my toes expecting to feel the threads of a rug, but it’s all solid stone. As my eyes adjust to the brighter light inside the chamber, I start to see details.

The room is largely empty save for a few pedestals that rise straight out of the floor. I walk to them and count seven. Mira kneels beside one of the protrusions and runs her hand over the top. I look for Kainda and find her walking around the perimeter of the chamber, looking at the walls between the windows.

“It’s indented,” Mira says. She moves to the next pedestal and touches the top. “They all are.” She stands, steps inside the circle and sits atop of the stone towers. “They’re seats.”

I step inside the circle and sit down across from Mira. She’s right. The indentations were worn by human backsides, which means these seats were used for a very long time.

“It’s like this was some kind of meeting place,” she says. “Maybe for leaders of some kind.”

“Or a secretive cult,” I add.

Mira frowns at me.

I shrug. “Just saying.”

A rumble rises through the nunatak, the stone seat and then my spine, reminding me why we’re here. I stand and head for one of the windows. It’s round and four feet in diameter. As I get closer, I see that it has been carved through ten feet of stone, at an upwards 45 degree angle. I put my face inside and look up. There’s a stone ledge blocking my view of the sky, but its bottom glows with a greenish hue—sunlight reflecting off the green jungle far below.

A breeze flows through the opening. As it washes over my face, I close my eyes and take a deep breath, expecting the sweet scent of a thawed Antarctica. Instead I get a perfume of decay, blood, feces and death—the scent of Nephilim. It’s so strong, I feel like I’ve just licked a warrior’s armpit. I reel back from the window, smacking the back of my head against the stone and falling to the floor, stunned.

“You okay?” Mira says, crouching behind me. She sounds more concerned than comical this time around. Probably a result of the disgusted look on my face. She must catch a whiff, too, because she suddenly groans and puts a hand over her nose. “Oh, God. Is that...them?”

I rub my head. “Eau de Nephilim at its finest.”

When I look up, I don’t see the window. Instead, my eyes focus on the wall between this window and the next. What I see is enough to make me forget all about the stink. “Whoa.”

Mira turns to the wall and holds up her glowing crystal, illuminating the scene. The entire wall, ten feet up to where the dome begins and all fifteen feet between the portals, is a collage of images and strange text, similar to those found in Egyptian tombs, but much more simplistic in style. But they’re also more complex than what is typically thought of as “cave paintings,” which is to say, these aren’t the paintings of a lone wandering artist, or even a collection of artists over time—this was a communal effort to create something permanent.

“It’s a record,” I say, looking at the vivid portrayal of a hunt. Ten warriors dressed in brown and carrying spears are battling a large animal. I point to it. “That’s a giant sloth, I think.”

The next picture over depicts a celebration. The dancing figures are lit by a bonfire’s glow and their shadows are cast on the wall. In Mira’s shifting blue light, they almost look real. The effect is really quite spectacular.

“Can you read the text?” Mira asks.

I shift my attention to the lines of text below the art and note that while the art is painted on, the text is carved right into the stone, a far more permanent medium. Whatever the text says was clearly more important to these people, but unfortunately, I can’t read a word of it. “I don’t recognize the language, but I’m guessing it predates anything we know about.”

“Wright once told me about a team of Delta operatives who discovered what they called “the mother tongue,” while on a mission. Said it was the language people spoke before the tower of Babel. He didn’t believe it, but...”

“Maybe that’s what this is,” I say. “Anything is possible, I suppose. But the real question is, what were they trying to tell us? What is this a record of?”

“The beginning.”

Mira and I both turn to Kainda. She’s still on the far side of the room, running her hand over the text and staring up at an image. As we head toward her, I ask, “Can you read the language?”

“I doubt anyone can,” Kainda replies. “Not anymore.”

“Then how do you know?” I ask.

She steps to the side, allowing me a full view of the image she’s been staring at. “Because, you’ve been there.”

I stop in my tracks. “No way.”

“What?” Mira asks.

I can’t answer. Not yet. The accuracy of this painting is blowing my mind. Every detail is exactly how I remember it. I turn to Kainda, “In all this time, nothing has changed?”

“It would appear so,” she says.

I step closer and reach my hand up, placing it on the big tree at the center of the image. I close my eyes and picture myself there again. It was so peaceful. Without pain. Or death. Or any of the horrible things that plague our world. That is, until Nephil found his way there.

“Where is this?” Mira asks, growing impatient.

I pull my hand away, feeling a great sense of longing and loss. “Edinnu.”

“Edinnu?” she says. “That’s...that’s the place you said was Eden, right? Where you met the angel?”

“Adoel,” I say with a nod. I point to the grassy hill surrounding the tree. “We stood right here.” I turn to the right and see several more of the massive murals. “This is a record of the beginning of human kind.
Before
the Nephilim.”

I walk slowly to the right, following the progression of time from Edinnu, to tribal life, villages, farms and eventually war. It’s right around that time that the images take on a darker tone, painted in blacks and reds. The style is also different. Evolved. I realize that I’ve probably just seen the records of a thousand years of humanity’s beginning. Maybe more. The artists painting at this point in the massive storybook might not have even known the names of those who came before them. They were just carrying on the tradition, maybe gathering as a group of leaders and artists, sitting in those chairs and deciding what image or collection of images best depicted their generation. Or century.

My stomach twists when the dark images resolve into blatant Nephilim images. Giants can be seen alongside men. Monstrous creations of man and beast, like the mythological creatures we discovered, and a mixture of violent and depraved acts performed by Nephilim and men alike.

With only two fifteen foot sections to go, the style disappears almost completely. The illustration is almost like a Jackson Pollock—smears of red, and black, and purple. I don’t miss the significance of the purple, a perfect match to the blood of the Nephilim. Perhaps there was a war, a final rebellion of men against gods. Perhaps it is the time when the Titans and the Nephilim fought for the world. The Titans were driven to Tartarus while the Nephilim claimed the world as their own.

Feeling heavy, I wander toward the final section and leap back when Mira holds her light to it. It’s a face. A black and angry face skillfully rendered. Yellow eyes. Double rows of glaring teeth. The whole thing burns with hatred and loathing. While I have never seen him in the flesh, I know this monster.

“Nephil,” I say.

“This is him?” Mira asks. “This is the big-wig Nephilim that wants to claim your body, wipe out humanity and live forever as a soulless world dictator?”

“Yes,” I say. I’m having a hard time looking at the image. I feel like he can see me through it.

Mira reaches into her cargo pants pocket and steps up to the image. She stands so that I can’t see what she’s doing, but I think she’s drawing. I understand that the image is offensive, but it’s also an archeological treasure. “What are you doing?”

Mira holds up her hand for a moment, revealing a small white brick about the size of a soap bar. “Chalk,” she says, “In case we had to climb. Never did.”

She puts the chalk back in her pants, claps the dust off her hands and leans back to admire her work. “There,” she says, smiling widely. She steps back revealing the marred image.

Mira has given Nephil, aka Ophion, the greatest enemy mankind has ever known...a handlebar mustache.

Despite my feelings about defacing this priceless record of ancient man, I smile. And then I laugh. Even Kainda finds it funny. Our laughter grows with each passing moment as the alteration drains our tension.

But the momentary distraction is interrupted by a thunderous boom and a violent quake in the Earth around us.

“They’re close,” Kainda says. Her hand has instinctually gone to her hammer, despite no one knowing we’re here.

I step toward the nearest portal. “It’s time to take a look.”

The window-tunnel is spacious by underworld standards, so it takes me only a few seconds to reach the top. I squint in the bright daylight as I reach the top of the angled tunnel. Although the sky above is blocked by the ledge five feet over my head, I can now see the more distant sky, and the gleaming, wet jungle below. When my eyes adjust, I quickly see that I’m at least eight hundred feet above the base of a vast, east-to-west valley that’s thick with jungle.