Hell's Maw (18 page)

In the days when she was young, before her presence had become known to man, Ereshkigal would sit naked in the courtyard of the Royal Palace of Nippur soaking up the sun, reading and filling in books with long and complicated sums in her precise, spider-thin script. The sums would often run over several pages, and Ereshkigal could often be found switching these pages with one another until she smiled anew, creating a whole new mathematics out of the detached pieces of the old.

Lord Enlil found her sitting on a stone bench by grapevines that climbed against the south wall of his
courtyard one afternoon. He considered her a strange child, but pretty. The vines were rich with fruit, great bulbous green grapes the size of eyeballs, drooping from every straining stem.

“You seem pleased with your labors,” Enlil said in a duo-tonal voice that seemed to echo as if spoken through a metal pipe.

A member of the Annunaki Royal Family, Enlil was a tall figure, muscular with scales like metal plate, colored like bronze washed in blood. He had a towering crest over his head and his golden eyes were almost hypnotic as they gazed at this female who was a few years younger than he. Enlil had taken to wearing a red cloak over recent months, long enough to brush his ankles and dyed once a week with sheep's blood to retain its lustrous color. He felt it augmented his appearance as a ruler and a god to the simple race whose planet this had been. This was his palace, all golden walls and stone carvings, potted plants growing in long troughs along every wall and rooftop, bringing green to every alcove, every shadow in celebration of his godhood.

Ereshkigal did not peer up from her work as she swapped another page around, replacing it with a new leaf whose calculations ran in a curving line so swiftly had she desired to get them written down.

Enlil waited, watching a gull pass by overhead, listening to the way the wind whispered through the columns that supported the covered section of the courtyard. “Ereshkigal,” he said after a moment. “I said that you seemed pleased. Have your labors borne fruit?”

Ereshkigal looked up at Enlil, acknowledging him for the first time with a brief nod of her surf pale head. “My lord,” she said, before returning to her calculations.

Enlil sat down, taking up a position beside her on the stone bench. It was hot to the touch, and he wondered
how it must feel against her naked form. His eyes roved over the muddled sheets of calculations, then followed the curve of her legs, her buttocks, the swell of her breasts. “It looks complex,” he said, his lizard's eyes still fixed on her breasts.

“Logic has no complication,” she replied without looking up. “It is merely a case of fitting the parts together.”

Enlil wondered about fitting
their
parts together, but chose not to voice that. Although he could not know it, before the decade was over, Ereshkigal would be carrying his child, Namtar, who would be considered by the apekin to be the god of death. Instead he said, “What does your logic reveal?”

Ereshkigal looked up then, fixing Enlil with her luminous eyes. “That there is an equation written into all living things on this planet,” she said with some excitement. “It informs them of how and when to grow, and also when to stop. Otherwise, the apekin might keep growing to heights of twenty or thirty feet or more. Can you imagine that?”

Enlil flashed her his smile, perceiving the humor in her example. “All living things must have their limits, and all must be careful not to exceed them,” he observed.

“But, you see, the equations can be bent,” Ereshkigal whispered confidentially, though there was no one else in the courtyard. “I believe that they may be altered to generate new results.”

Enlil was intrigued. “What kind of results?” he asked. He had been at war with his relatives, on and off, since birth, vying for power, fighting over one spit of land or another. He had considered breeding a creature that might tip the balance in his favor, an assassin, his hand-in-darkness. Perhaps this equation, if it could really be used to alter the genetic makeup of a living creature, might hold the answer to his desires.

“I am uncertain as yet, my lord,” Ereshkigal admitted with the honesty of a child. “Death, perhaps.”

“Death?” Enlil questioned.

“A formula for life is a formula also for death,” Ereshkigal explained. “It needs only to be reversed.”

“And you believe that this is possible?”

Ereshkigal nodded slowly, flipping to one of her reams of notes. “There should be a way, a formula, with which one could instruct a body to die,” she said. “It's mathematics, pure mathematics. You simply need to know what the input is, numerator to denominator, you see?”

Enlil thought that he did. “So you might kill the apekin with—what? An instruction?”

Ereshkigal looked at him thoughtfully. “They are our playthings, are they not?” she said. “I shall take some to my lab and experiment awhile. Perhaps I will be able to introduce new deaths to them.”

“New deaths,” Enlil repeated, rolling the words around thoughtfully in his head. “Could this be applied to us, the Annunaki, do you think?”

A smile materialized on Ereshkigal's face as if this thought had not occurred to her before. “It depends on how robust the equation is, I suppose,” she said.

Enlil eyed the girl more warily. She was still a child really, barely out of her teens, and all she seemed to enjoy were her formulae. She would bear watching this one, in case she should turn on him or make a bid for his throne. “I would contend that such experiments necessitate prime facilities,” he proposed. “Not the tiny suite of rooms you have here but something more suited to your purpose.

“Come, dear Ereshkigal. Let us draw up a map for your new laboratories,” Enlil said solicitously. “Somewhere out of the sunlight where you might better concentrate.” He knew just the spot—below the ground, well away from
the terrain of Lords Marduk, Zu or Lilitu, who had been sniffing out his weaknesses over recent months. Let the girl work out of sight for a while and create her death formula for him.

Traffic on roads. Hustle. Bustle.

The Zaragoza streets were busy with land vehicles. Spain, it seemed, had progressed further than the bombed-out United States of America in its climb back to a livable society after the nukecaust. There were small one-man mopeds, larger two-man wags with plastic coverings that left the sides open and full-on automobiles carrying whole families to and fro on the road network of the walled ville.

Grant was glad he wasn't driving. Sitting in the back of the Pretor patrol Wheelfox—a kind of abbreviated Sandcat with a single, centrally mounted, gyroscopic rear wheel that was four feet high, providing admirable maneuverability and stability—he watched as the driver weaved through the traffic, avoiding snarl-ups and ignoring the constant bleat of honking horns.

The patrol Pretors were amiable on the journey through town. Both had removed their helmets, housing them in the well between the driver's seat and the passenger's. Both men were in their thirties, the one to the right wearing a pencil-thin mustache and perfumed hair oil that gave off a lavender scent, the one to the left sporting a shaved head that had begun to regrow with a five-o'clock shadow to match.

“You're not from around here, then?” the man in the passenger seat asked in passable English, the Spanish
accent loaning his words a cheerful quality. “American, right?”

“I'm American,” Grant confirmed, “but she's from New Edo.”

“An island in the Pacific,” Shizuka elaborated when she saw the uniformed Pretor frown.

“You vacation here, get mixed up in some mess,” the driver said, glancing behind him even as he steered around a stalled moped on the four-lane roadway.

“Yeah,” Grant said. “A whole lot of mess. Your colleagues asked if we could help out.”

“Real honor,” the Pretor in the passenger seat remarked. “Juan C doesn't partner up easily.”

“We'll remember that,” Grant said with a nod and a forced smile.

The Wheelfox drew to a halt outside the hospital complex, dropping Grant and Shizuka at the main doors, a triumph of glass and metal. The hospital was a large, white-stoned monstrosity that took up a city block and was surrounded by a desert of tarmac populated by shrubs in bricked-in pots and abutted by a multistory parking garage. Corcel and Cáscara were waiting for them in their own patrol vehicle and came striding across the tarmac toward the jutting porch when they saw the Pretors pull up.

“Feel better?” Corcel asked, eyeing Grant and Shizuka and handing them both a clip-on badge—a Magistrate-style shield finished in metallic blue. He and Cáscara wore similar shields attached to their belts, although theirs were gold.

“Cleaner anyway,” Grant said, taking his shield. “What's this?”

“Your jurisdiction. These are temporary,” Corcel told them both as they clipped them to their clothes—Grant's to his belt, Shizuka's to a lapel on her jacket. “Don't start
throwing weight around that you don't have, and don't go arresting anyone without my say so, you understand?”

“What about shooting a suspect?” Grant asked with mock seriousness.

“I'd advise against that also,” Corcel told him in a voice that suggested he hadn't gotten the joke.

“I managed to get a few insights into who this Ereshkigal is,” Grant said.

“The name of some old goddess,” Cáscara said, “so most probably a gang leader with a sick sense of humor.”

“I'd go for the former,” Grant told her solemnly. “Goddess. Drawing from experience.”

Cáscara's perfectly shaped eyebrows rose in surprise. “Do you meet a lot of old goddesses, Grant?”

“More than I'd like,” Grant told her. “Long story. Series of them, in fact. Let's say that most of those old myths have some basis in reality, and over time a lot of them are refusing to stay dead.”

“It appears that you live a very interesting life with these Cerberus people you mentioned,” Cáscara said archly.

“
Interesting
's one word for it,” Grant said as they passed through the revolving glass door and into the hospital's lobby.

* * *

I
NSIDE
,
THE HOSPITAL
had the universal smell of all hospitals, a mixture of vinegar and citrus fruit and recycled air masking an underlying stink of sweat and sickness.

The hospital lobby was meticulously clean to the point of sterility and was lit by overheads, bright but not overpowering. The gold finish of Corcel's and Cáscara's shields caught the light of the overhead fluorescents in firework flashes. People were waiting on side benches that had been placed in two semicircle patterns around some
potted plants, while trolleys were wheeled through containing files and vials.

A young woman dressed in white, with olive skin and hair a midnight black so dark it was almost blue, glanced up at the Pretors' approach from where she had been filing a printed chart behind the long, bar-like desk. “Can I help you, Pretors?” she inquired, speaking Spanish.

Corcel flashed the woman a dazzling smile. “A group of people were brought in from an incident at the Hotel Retiro last night,” he explained, adding a case number. “Would you be able to guide us to them?”

“Certainly,” the administrator told him before consulting a computer. Swiftly, she gave Corcel a floor and two room numbers that associated with the survivors of the weird attack. “Three survivors, the others are in the morgue.”

“We'll find our own way,” Corcel told the white-clad woman as she began to look around the lobby for someone to help.

“As you wish, Pretor,” she said.

Corcel led the way to an elevator bank located roughly behind the lobby desk.

“I'll handle the interviews,” Corcel stated. “Right now you two are the most reliable witnesses we have. Hopefully, this will change that.”

Grant nodded. “I'd like to check in on the bodies that were brought in,” he said.

“Here, I'll show you,” Cáscara said.

“You guys come here a lot?” Grant asked as they waited for the elevators to arrive.

“It can be an unfortunate necessity in our line of work,” Cáscara answered, her expression solemn.

“Yeah, I remember,” Grant said, recalling his days as a Magistrate in Cobaltville. He thought, too, of his more recent experiences with Cerberus and tried to count the
number of times he had ended up waiting in the medical area of the Cerberus redoubt while one or other of his colleagues recovered from injuries sustained in the line of service. He had waited on Shizuka in that situation more than once and knew that she had waited on him at least as often as he had her. Risks of the business, he lamented.

“Oftentimes, it seems that we are shuffling the cards at the fringes of life and death,” Corcel said, his thoughts mirroring Grant's. “And yet we never seem to know who'll be dealing our next hand.”

While they waited for the elevators, Grant outlined what he had gleaned about Ereshkigal from his discussion with Cerberus. “In essence, the Annunaki are bad business, and Ereshkigal sounds like the baddest business they got,” he concluded.

“Sounds delightful,” Cáscara deadpanned as the first elevator arrived and its doors inched open. “Morgue's downstairs. Shall we?”

Grant nodded, following the female Pretor into the elevator just as the second one arrived. Shizuka joined Pretor Corcel in the second elevator, riding up to the third floor while Grant and Cáscara descended to the basement.

* * *

T
HE THIRD FLOOR
featured pale walls and the same antiseptic smell that permeated the whole building. Shizuka wondered if anyone had ever opened a window here—it felt as though they hadn't, not once since the construction of the building over a decade ago.

A nurse on call waited at the near end of the corridor, just to the right of the elevator bank. She was young, with long blond hair that she had clipped back so that it fell away from her face. Shizuka guessed she was beautiful when she had had enough sleep and her white uniform wasn't showing the creases of a two-day-long shift. Right now, however, she looked something beyond tired.