The Zygan Emprise: Renegade Paladins and Abyssal Redemption (11 page)

The Temple was a stone building of two
storeys with wooden doors surrounded by shady cedar trees.
Shivering, Matshi pulled his robes tighter and waved for his
partner to follow him inside.

The temple’s ground storey was divided into
two discrete areas, empty except for lonely rough benches of pine,
and dimly lit by a few weak rays of sunshine that peeked through
fissures in the stone wall. At the opposite end of the room, was a
charred, stained stone structure. Across it, a man in colorful
robes, his back to Matshi and Ulenem, was bent over a table poring
over an unrolled scroll. The temple’s priest, no doubt, Matchi
estimated.

The odor of incense pervaded throughout the
chamber, and Matshi coughed to clear his throat. As the men
entered, the robed man turned to reveal an exceedingly long black
beard hanging almost to his waist. He walked up and greeted his
visitors with more than a hint of suspicion.

“You are the strangers,” he said warily in
Aramaic.

Matshi didn’t mince Ergaled words. “Clearly.”
He took a step closer, towering over the cleric. “Where is Yeshua?
Is he here?”

The priest calmly responded, “Who?”

“Yeshua Bar Maryam,” Matshi announced,
scanning the room as Ulenem drew his athame and started slowly
running his fingers across the shiny flat surface.

The cleric calmly studied the visitors for a
long moment, finally saying in Hebrew, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood,
by man shall his blood be shed.” After a pause, he added, this time
in Aramaic, “They are here.”

Matshi looked at Ulenem, frowning. They?

“Well, then,” the Chidurian ordered the
Temple host, “take us.”

The priest hesitated at first, but relented
after Ulenem placed the tip of his athame gently against the
cleric’s ribs. He led them carefully up a narrow flight of wooden
stairs at the rear of the building to a stuffy attic. From the
doorjamb, the Zygans could see the attic was filled with rows of
pine tables and benches, at which bearded old men sat reading
scrolls of parchment and papyrus under the anemic rays of sunlight
trickling through the gaps in the walls of oak and stone. In a
distant corner, sat our targets, Yeshua and Saul, their heads
together, studying a scroll.

“So much for Zygint contact metrics,” Matshi
muttered.

Ulenem pulled his partner back towards the
steps. “Saul has not killed him yet,” Ulenem whispered in Zygan.
“That is good—and stupid.”

“There are rules even for Benedict’s team, I
expect.” Matshi returned. “A public execution could be more
damaging to the timeline than Benedict intends.” He nodded at
Ulenem. “Why don’t we go say ‘hello’.”

With a lightness of step born of their
training as hunters, Matshi and Ulenem each crept to one side of
the ostensibly studious pair. Matshi observed a Zygan stun gun with
the knife point that, concealed from the others, was aimed at
Yeshua’s abdomen. Giving a visual signal to Matshi, Ulenem lunged
towards Sutherland’s arm and knocked the gun out of his hand.
Before Sutherland could spin around and fight back, Ulenem had
grabbed the Andart by the shoulders, pulled his arms behind him,
and snapped them briskly into the firm Zygan handcuffs called
cherukles. Meanwhile, Matshi had pulled Yeshua up and back out of
his chair, a harder task than he had expected. So slight in
appearance, Yeshua was actually quite muscular and very strong.
Matshi thought it’d be best to cheruklize his captive, too, just in
case. Having to stun Yeshua in front of the now wide-eyed scholars
to carry him out of the loft would raise even more questions than a
fancy pair of handcuffs.

All eyes in the attic were now focused upon
the Zygans and their prisoners. Ulenem once again had drawn his
athame, and rested it gently against Sutherland’s throat to
discourage any thoughts of intervention by his fellow scholars.

“Return to your studies,” Ulenem barked at
them. Most did so obediently, to his visible disgust.

Backs to the wall, the Zygans pushed their
prisoners towards the door, out of the attic library, and marched
them down the stairs; the Assassin and Saul in the lead, Matshi and
Yeshua following behind.

Midway down, Sutherland’s sandal caught on
the uneven wood and he stumbled forward. Ulenem reacted quickly,
but not quickly enough. As he fell, Sutherland ejected a
microstunner from his sandal with his toes. The Assassin jumped to
the side and reached in his robes to pull out his knife, but the
tiny missile caught half of its prey; Ulenem’s arm remained hanging
and frozen, useless, along with the right side of his body. The
Assassin quickly lost his balance and started tumbling down the
stairs. Sutherland had already rolled down to the landing, and with
an impressive gymnastic contortion, slipped his cuffed hands out
from under his legs to the front. Leaping to the bottom of the
stairwell, Sutherland whipped out a second stun gun from his robes.
He sprayed a dispersed laser blast at the adjacent floors,
ceilings, and walls, which, made of an extremely dry wood, ignited
fiercely and sent waves of dense smoke and flame up the passageway
towards the second floor.

Matshi had been able to hold his breath,
along with his captive, for the first few minutes, but Ulenem,
without full control of his torso, had tumbled helplessly down
directly into a wall of flame. Matshi’s choice was clear. Releasing
Yeshua, he raced down the stairs and leaped onto his partner,
rolling him out of the ring of fire onto a cooler area of ash and
stone. Alarmed, Matshi noted that the fire had already melted some
layers of Ulenem’s Ergaled cover, and his underlying green skin,
some of which was now charred to a dull gray, peeked through.
Though clearly in pain, Ulenem gazed up gratefully at his friend.
Uttering a curse in Izmal, the language of the Madai assassins, he
croaked, “Took them long enough to warm the place up.”

Matshi rubbed his partner’s hair and eyed the
rivers of flame creeping towards them, “Just let me catch the
bastard!”

“Already out the front door,” Ulenem said
ruefully. “Where’s the kid?”

It was Matshi’s turn to curse. He had left
Yeshua on the stairs, which had just collapsed into a flaming pyre.
Screams from the attic had grown louder, as the fire had spread to
and ignited the dry leaves and branches of the overhanging cedar
trees which had then set fire to the shake roof. The attic above
had become an inferno, showering torrents of ash and flesh, and
chips of wood and bone onto the first floor.

“He’s … gone,” Matshi said slowly, staring
with fury at the blaze. A burning wood beam crashed just inches
from their heads. “And we’ve got to get out of here!”

“Ergal!” cried Ulenem.

“Right here,” Matshi shuffled through his
robes. “Hold on to me.”

They X-fanned just as the entire second
storey of the temple collapsed on the floor where they had lain
moments before.

* * *

The Chidurian Enclave, Zyga—present day

Back in the kalyvi, we’d lost track of Matshi
and Ulenem after they’d Ergaled back in time. Getting the Trojan
horse through Wart’s loophole had been a stroke of good fortune.
There was a very good chance we’d be expected, and they would be
monitoring for our Ergals and DNA. Matshi knew to use my Ergal only
for emergencies so it couldn’t be picked up and tracked easily,
ruling out his sending us a continuous live feed. Even occasional
routine communications would be pushing our luck.

We had hoped that our men would find
Sutherland and be back out of Tyre in less than an hour, what with
time looping and all. Our worry grew after half a day had passed
and we hadn’t heard a thing.

“Second team?” Eikhus suggested
generously.

Spud snorted. “You would evaporate in five
minutes in that climate. You, as well, Nephil Stratum. No, if they
have
failed, so have we. We were fortunate to get the Trojan
horse in the first time. Wart will have surely sealed up that door
by now, especially if that troglodyte Platt has informed him he met
a Wart doppelgänger at Headquarters.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Eikhus, Nephil Stratum.
Rain check. For once I agree with Spud. We’ve just got to wait.
Matshi and Ulenem are fighters. I’m not giving up hope. They’ll
come through.”

Suthsi sighed, “Everybody loses sometimes
…”

“You’re always such a ray of sunshine,” I
muttered, adding more loudly, “If Matshi and Ulenem don’t succeed,”
I looked at Spud, who nodded, “
we’re
the ones who’ll go back
in.”

* * *

Phoenicia—two thousand years ago

“Where are we?” Ulenem opened his eyes,
wincing from the pain.

Matshi dabbed at Ulenem’s head with a cloth
soaked in verdar, a Madai antiseptic balm. “In our tent. Can you
move your arm?”

Ulenem carefully tried moving the stunned
part of his body. His reflexes were slow, but the motion was
fortunately there.

“I got the microstunner out, the bastard, but
a chemical unstun takes time until your body metabolizes the
poison.”

“Looks like I’m out of commission for the
rest of the day,” Ulenem grunted. “Bakari
^xv
hurts.”

“The verdar ointment will help you heal more
quickly. Just keep rubbing it on your skin.”

Ulenem tried to sit up. “Where are you
going?”

“We lost Yeshua.” Matshi’s eyes flashed. “I’m
not going to lose that bastard Sutherland!”

Ulenem lay back and grunted again. “This is
why we Izmalis don’t bother taking prisoners. Kill them before they
can get the advantage …”

“Sutherland?” Matshi snorted angrily as he
stood up to leave. “He’s a dead man walking.”

* * *

The villagers combing through the charred
wreckage of the temple didn’t pay much attention to the horseshoe
bat that glided through the burned naked branches of the once-proud
cedar trees. Blending in with the circling vultures, the bat
swooped in and out of the site, unnoticed. His surreptitious Ergal
scan of the fire residue was almost complete and there was still no
evidence of Yeshua’s DNA.

Matshi landed on a stable tree limb and hung
upside down watching the villagers as they mourned their family and
friends. How many such scenes of sadness had he witnessed in his
relatively short life? Tears,
dakris
,
beshun
. A
planet the size of Orion Alpha could be filled with the Universe’s
liquids of grief. And he was powerless to help. All of us were …
except the Omega Archon. He could put a stop to the madness of war,
and yet His Highness had always turned away and let the wars go
on.

That’s really why, Matshi admitted to
himself, he had left Mingferplatoi. There wasn’t any sense in
fighting when nothing ever really changed. The wailing of last
year’s Hutunye massacre survivors, now thousands of years in the
relative future, echoed in his ears, little different from the
cries of the sobbing mourners below. Sentient life had not much
evolved beyond the aggressive competitiveness of natural selection,
despite the intricate pacifist oratory of philosophers like
T’PlanaHath. And probably never would.

A new mourner caught Matshi’s eye. The young
man’s stride seemed a bit too chipper. Surprisingly free of the
dazed dullness of the rest of the villagers, the young man seemed
intent on vigorously combing through the ashes with a stick. A
polished stick. Unlatching from his perch, Matshi swooped by for a
closer look. It
was
a scanner.

Sutherland. Anamorphed. Matshi was pleased to
note that the man’s swagger seemed to ebb, as Sutherland, too,
apparently didn’t find Yeshua’s DNA. Clearly irritated, Young
Sutherland stood gazing at the ruins, scratching his head. Finally,
puzzled, he started off down the road.

Matshi swooped onto Sutherland’s shoulders as
soon as they were out of view of the villagers. Sutherland let out
a sharp cry and spun around, aiming for the bat with his stick. The
Chidurian quickly Ergaled into himself—at his fighting peak in his
own exoskeleton armor—and laid into Sutherland with all eight
arms.

No more the elderly teacher, Sutherland, the
young man, was a superb fighter, and, to Matshi’s dismay, was
grav-trained. The two men sparred in the isolated field for what
seemed like hours, before Matshi’s size and multiple limbs allowed
him to knock Sutherland out, stun him, and search him for any
additional hidden weapons. Holding the scanner stick under one arm,
Matshi grabbed Sutherland with the others and tractored him to the
skinos tent.

But Ulenem was nowhere to be found. Leaving
Sutherland safely stunned inside the chamber, Matshi stepped
outside and pulled out the borrowed Ergal to scan for his partner.
A muffled sound from inside the skinos caught his ears, and Matshi
dashed back in. Sutherland was still lying in his stunned position
on the floor, but his torso was now framed by a halo of crimson
blood from the fatal slice across his throat.

Matshi looked up to see Ulenem wiping his
blade with a smile of satisfaction.

“What have you done?!” Matshi shouted at the
Assassin.

“We don’t need him any more,” Ulenem answered
quietly.

“Didn’t you hear Spud? We bring him back
alive, we can interrogate him. Who knows what he’d tell us about
Benedict?”

Ulenem’s voice was cold. “Nothing. He will
tell you nothing.”

Matshi snorted, then stiffened when he
realized the true meaning of Ulenem’s words.
No, impossible… not
his friend …
His hand eased toward the Ergal. “You’re …”

“His job is done. Yeshua is dead,” Ulenem
said. A momentary flicker of sadness crossed his eyes, and then,
without visible emotion, he began once again. “And now …”

Matshi was ready for the attack, but the
flying blade from across the room still severed one of his arms.
Purple blood gushed as Matshi ducked and dodged the onslaught of
whirling blades from Ulenem and tried to get in a few blows of his
own. Ulenem somehow seemed to have an unlimited supply of weapons
hidden in his robes, and was no longer hampered by his earlier
paralysis. Matshi soon lost a leg to the knives, and began to feel
weakened by the loss of blood. Ulenem did not pause in his assault,
however. It was clear that Matshi’s death was his goal, and that he
would likely succeed.