Truth Engine (26 page)

Ullikummis turned, ignoring his fallen foe, searching the floor for the one that truly interested him. There, with her vibrant red-gold hair like the rays of the setting sun, lay Brigid Baptiste, the apekin who had tricked and subsequently expelled him from the Ontic Library. Baptiste had a memory like no other. Her ability to file and recall facts was truly exceptional, even to one of the Annunaki, whose shared memories reached countless millennia back to the dawn of their race.

Ullikummis had turned then, the final vestiges of the hydrochloric acid still burning at his face and chest, scanning his loyal subjects as they stood over the group of captured Cerberus rebels. Infiltration had been easy,
their defeat a matter of time rather than in any sense a challenge.

Dylan had stepped forward at the stone god's beckoning, bowing his head in subjugation to his acknowledged master. Dylan, who had taken the title of first priest, was a man easily impressed with simple favors, meaningless tributes from the ones he considered his betters.

“You shall be tasked to turn them,” Ullikummis had explained, his voice rumbling through the tunnel. “A life camp, whose role is to open their minds to the new lives they will lead.” Then he had indicated the unconscious woman with the red hair. “All except this one,” he said. “She is something special—she will form a key part of the future.”

Dylan had nodded once with reverence, acknowledging his master's instructions in silence. Ullikummis had foreseen even then that Dylan would be replaced, his position as first priest coming rapidly to its end.

Now Ullikummis stood on the windswept shore on his self-raised island of Bensalem, staring out across the crashing waves of the Atlantic, the woman at his side. She seemed small in comparison to him, her figure a slender mixture of curves, where his was rough surfaces, jutting spikes. She had changed her clothes, dressed in some ensemble she had found among the discarded raiment of his new slaves. She stood now in black, appropriate enough in its connotations to human beings and their primitive fear of the dark. She was a dark creature now, the black leather clinging to her like a second skin. Her fire-red hair whipped around her head in the wind that blew in from the sea, and a cape of fur was cinched around her shoulders, the pelt of a dead thing.

“My father conceived me as his hand in the dark
ness,” Ullikummis said, “his all-consuming hate made manifest.”

The woman watched the sea with emerald eyes that seemed to mirror the color of the waves, her hair echoing the red-gold rays of the sunset.

“Now I have you, my own hand in darkness,” Ullikummis continued, “my own hate made flesh.”

The woman with the fire-red hair nodded, a thin smile on her lips as the waters of the Atlantic sloshed against the jutting rocks of the island, crashing there in big, foam-tipped breakers.

“Brigid Haight,” she agreed, the smile widening on her stone-hard features.