Dragon City (10 page)

As he said it, Rosalia’s dog began to bark. Something was taking shape behind its mistress.

Chapter 11

Twenty-five minutes later, Kane led a party made up of Lakesh, Donald Bry and Reba DeFore toward the south end of the lodge’s vast grounds. The lodge itself overlooked the sea, a sheer cliff dropping down to the crashing waves of the Pacific, which hurried up a tiny sliver of beach seventy feet below. A weedy-looking fence ran along the edge of the cliff, just two horizontal wooden bars linked by a series of posts, reaching no higher than a man’s hip. The fence was a safety measure and nothing more—no one was sneaking up on the lodge via that harsh cliff face.

Kane had washed and dressed, though his hair looked untidy where it fell to past his collar and his jaw was dark with stubble that was almost a beard now. He was a tall man, imposing and well-built, his shoulders wide to accommodate his broad chest. He was built like a wolf, a muscular torso and upper body coupled with rangy limbs that could eat up distance with little effort. There was something of the wolf in his manner, too, the way he automatically slipped into the role of pack leader but seemed a loner all the same. He was dressed in black, wearing the shadow suit beneath a dark shirt and denim jacket, the latter frayed at the cuffs and hem. The shadow suit was the same one he had worn when Brigid had shot him less than a week before, and while it still retained its incredible properties to deflect both blades and light gunfire, the scars of that attack remained across its chest. Dark combat pants and scarred leather boots finished Kane’s ensemble, the latter an echo of his days as a Magistrate in Cobaltville, their familiar grooves a comfort in this time of upheaval. Kane’s dark hair was longer than he was used to, brushing at the nape of his neck and whipping around his face in the sea breeze.

Kane had secreted several familiar armaments among his clothing, including his faithful Sin Eater handblaster surreptitiously held in a hidden holster at his wrist and primed for swift access. Like his boots, the Sin Eater was a legacy from his days Cobaltville, something both he and Grant had kept after their sudden exile from the Magistrate division. Kane had brought one more thing, securely packed in a scuffed backpack hanging between his shoulders. It was this item that brought him and his companions out here on the beautifully kept lawn.

The foursome hurried briskly across the trimmed grass, making their way to what appeared to be a wholly unremarkable point a few hundred feet from the line of conifers that marked the property’s boundary. Kane slowed as he reached this spot close to the farthest reach of Shizuka’s territory, sweeping the area with a glance until he spied what he was looking for. There, incongruous amid the neatly trimmed lawn, a patch of burned grass perhaps twelve inches square waited, straw-yellow against the lush green.

Shirking out of his rucksack, Kane stepped across to the patch of faded grass and placed the scuffed bag down beside it. Then, with a swiftness that belied the care he was taking, Kane reached into the rucksack and brought out a metal pyramid roughly twelve inches square and the same measurement to its apex. With practiced efficiency, Kane tapped in the code at the control panel on its base and the pyramid seemed to vibrate, a movement so slight as to exist only on a subconscious level.

Still kneeling on the grass, Kane looked up at his three companions. “We’re ready to go,” he informed them.

Reba DeFore protested, telling Kane she still felt that this was a bad idea. “If your eyesight should get worse again…” she complained, but Lakesh stopped her.

“Kane is right,” he said. “This mayday signal is something that we cannot ignore. And he is the only one of us with sufficient combat training to handle the situation should it prove to take a turn for the worse. Even with his abilities compromised, I suspect friend Kane is still far more capable than you or I or Donald here.”

Bry laughed uncomfortably, nodding in agreement. “This jump will take you right into the heart of the Cerberus redoubt,” he advised Kane, all business once more. “You’ll arrive in the mat-trans chamber as normal, but the chamber itself and the ops room that it leads into it have changed beyond comprehension.”

“I saw it all—I remember,” Kane growled. “Lot of stone work.”

Bry nodded somberly. “Just keep in mind that, for all intents and purposes, you are leaping into the unknown here, enemy territory. We believe that the redoubt was evacuated when we left, but it’s not beyond the realms of credibility that Ullikummis or his troops have reacquired it for their own usage. Alternatively, with the security compromised as it is, there’s a chance that someone else may have taken up residence there. They may even be the ones who activated the beacon.”

Kane nodded. “Got it.”

For a few moments Kane worked at the base of the interphaser, tapping out a sequence of numbers so that the device could locate the destination point at the Cerberus redoubt. The interphaser worked by accessing specific locations called parallax points, which could be found right across the globe and beyond. While eminently adaptable, the interphaser still required a specific departure and destination points, opening a quantum window between the two points and allowing its user to step through that gateway to a place that may be a thousand miles or more away. Just now, Kane was setting the incredible device to send him to the parallax point located in the mat-trans chamber of the Cerberus redoubt in Montana, roughly seven hundred miles away. Once the interphaser was activated, the journey itself would take just a fraction of a second.

Kane moved back and watched as the interphaser came to life, an expanding lotus blossom of color emerging, top and bottom, from its silvery frame. The twin cones of light were like oil on water, dark with rainbow swirls glinting in their impossible depths, hooked fingers of lightning firing through the light like witch fire. The gateway was opening, carving a path through the quantum ether to the Montana redoubt.

Kane stood then, and as he did so Reba DeFore trotted over to his side and produced her ophthalmoscope from her pocket, holding it up to his eyes like a cop’s torch. “Keep still,” the ash-blond-haired physician told him.

Kane looked at her, staring into the bluish-white light of the ophthalmoscope. “All clear?” he asked.

“Your left pupil is entirely unresponsive,” DeFore replied matter-of-factly, “while the right eye is reacting slower than normal. How does it look from the inside?”

“It’s okay,” Kane said noncommittally. “I’ve been worse.”

Lakesh held his palm out, grasping Kane’s hand in a firm grip. “You be careful, my friend,” he said. “Brewster will be monitoring your Commtact feed and the transponder you carry beneath the skin. If anything happens, you are to return immediately, do you hear me? Immediately.”

Kane nodded. “I’ll be fine.”

“If things get hot, don’t go playing hero,” Lakesh warned. “You’re in no condition to do that.”

Kane looked at him, the steely gray of his eyes cold and full of a repressed fury. “Didn’t you hear? I have it on good authority that all the heroes are dead.”

Before Lakesh could think to respond, Kane had stepped into those twin cones of light and, in less time than it takes to tell, both he and the interphaser unit disappeared, winking out of existence in front of his very eyes.

“Godspeed, my friend,” Lakesh muttered under his breath. “Godspeed.”

* * *

W
HILE
TRAVELING
BY
interphaser was instantaneous, it conversely seemed to exist in a kind of nontime. It was this nontime that had affected Kane on the past few occasions he had accessed it. Now, yet again, he found his brain burning, a searing knife of heat penetrating his frontal lobe.

Within his eye, within his mind’s eye, something was stirring, history replaying itself like ancient video footage, the images flickering over and over. He watched now, a spectator to his own thoughts, as his hand—which is to say, the other’s hand—reached for something lying in the sand. It was a blade, short and curved like a scimitar, finished in glorious gold that shimmered in the bright sunlight pelting toward it from above. The hand grabbed it, and Kane saw that the hand—his hand?—was ridged with rock, like an armored glove cinched over his fingers.

There was sound now, too—music. It hurried to Kane’s ears, a series of notes played without breaks, like one note, rising and falling, the sounds like rushing water.

Kane—or whoever’s vision Kane was witnessing—lifted the knife, judging its weight, turning it over in one hand. Then he looked up from the ground, and Kane saw the arena around him like a gymnasium, targets and weights and beds of spears arranged along its walls, its sandy floor open to the elements. Off to the left, at the edge of a roughly marked circle, sat a creature dressed in simple robes, its skin coarse and scary and ridged. The creature sat in front of some kind of harp, propped upright in the sandy dust of the ground, its frame lined in pearlescent seashell, its taut strings the red of blood. The creature, an Igigi slave, plucked at the strings of the harp with its fine hands, claws running along the side in a swishing motion, creating not a tune really, but just a pleasing sound, running along the octaves with the fluidity of liquid, no rhythm other than the harpist’s own. Beneath the harp, where the dust had sprinkled against its underside, Kane saw the tassels at the bottom where the strings were tied through the frame, bloodred twists like scabs hanging in the air.

He turned, and Kane felt a sense of disorientation, even motion sickness, as the vision swirled around. There, pinned to a large target shaped like a hexagon, rested a woman, held upright, arms and legs splayed. She was naked, tears running down her cheeks as she watched the proceedings, but she made no noise. Her long dark hair fell to almost her waist, clinging to her neck and shoulders with sweat, strands brushing her olive breasts as she breathed hurriedly in and out, in and out. Her dark eyes glistened with tears as she watched the figure with the sword—Kane? Was it Kane?—take a step back, holding his empty left hand up to judge the distance more clearly. It was forty feet if it was an inch, maybe fifty feet; Kane couldn’t get his bearings. It was like a magic act, the magician’s beautiful assistant waiting on the target as certain death approached.

Then Kane felt his balance shift, felt the long knife hanging behind his head, held low in his hand for a moment as he readied to throw it. The girl whimpered, the noise distant and quiet like a creaking floorboard expanding in the heat. And with the swiftest of movement, the right arm came forward and the blade cut through the air like golden death, spinning over itself in a long, beautiful arc as it raced unerringly toward the human target.

There was a shock of blood then, and Kane wanted to turn away. The girl didn’t even cry out; she was dead as soon as the blade struck, her heart cut in two, an eruption of blood spurting from her chest, bones visible like teeth amid the redness.

Kane’s viewpoint—forced as it was, unable to turn away—stayed on the girl as she sagged against the target, the deep crimson of her life’s blood running down her torso and between her legs, vomiting over the sand at her feet. The golden scimitar remained in her chest, sticking out like some perverted crank handle that might grant her life if only she could wind it.

The eyes Kane looked with went closer, examining the butcher’s work on the young woman’s body. There were cuts on her body, Kane saw now, and bloody marks on the target here and there where others had presumably died. Kane wanted her to say something, to beg forgiveness, even though he hadn’t thrown the knife, only been a party to its deadly toss, mute witness in the body of the thrower.

“Good work, my son.” The voice came from Kane’s right.

Kane turned, or the figure he was now turned, and saw the speaker, recognizing him immediately. It was Enlil, his burnished red-gold scales rippling with the breeze as he watched from the side of the training area, a red cloak wrapped across his shoulders. He reached out then, holding his lizardlike hand in a gesture that Kane—or the thing Kane now was—recognized as a salute. “Well done, Ullikummis. The speed of your improvement staggers even me.”

Ullikummis. Visions of Ullikummis.

* * *

T
HE
MOMENT
PASSED
. The swirling pattern of the interphaser dissipated around Kane and he found himself looking around the mat-trans chamber, its familiar walls of brown-tinted armaglass shimmering into view.

Kane placed a hand to his head, rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his hand for a moment, feeling the pressure there. “What hit me?” he muttered.

Taking a deep breath, he looked around the mat-trans chamber. He had used this mat-trans unit numerous times in his role as a Cerberus field agent; at one point it had formed the main route in and out of the hidden mountain redoubt. The mat-trans was a system of teleportation developed by the U.S. military in the twentieth century, and a number of similar units were located across the country. The interphaser had been rigged to access this same point, allowing the Cerberus operatives to utilize the same location despite the differences in the technologies.

The chamber looked much as it always had, tiled walls and ceiling with its pocks and vents for expunging the gas created by matter transfer. The armaglass looked subtly different, Kane noticed, seeing the vinelike creepers that clung to the exterior like grasping fingers, each one made of rock. There was rock, too, along the edges of the chamber, running where the walls met the floor, piling high in the corners like sand in a beach house left open to the elements. Kane ignored it, reaching for the exit door, automatically powering the Sin Eater pistol into his hand from its hidden holster beneath his sleeve.