SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (4 page)

The oak on the handrail had silvered with age. The center of each step had been worn smooth by the passage of thousands of shuffling feet over the years. He went down. In the seconds before he knocked on the door his heavy breathing was the only sound in the place.

“Who is it?” the voice came from behind the door.

“Kelkus,” the grave robber said. “I have brought you something.”

“A treasure?” the old man said, opening the door a crack. Withered skin and the sharp angles of a nose peered through the narrow opening.

He nodded eagerly. “From the tomb of the Keepers,” he said, still clutching the bundle to his chest possessively.

The nose twitched. “The Keepers, you say? Now that might be something worth disturbing my studies for. Come, show me this treasure of yours.”

The huge door groaned inwards to reveal a crypt stripped of sarcophagi and the trappings of death. There was nothing holy or restful about the chamber. Where there ought to have been coffins stood a series of workbenches and crystal beakers bubbling on low flames. The grave robber had no notion what distillation was in the works; the various colors in the bell jars and beakers meant nothing to him. He was, after all, a historian, not an alchemist. He looked around the room, drinking it all in greedily. There was so much to see. Every angle and surface offered some peculiar delight or revulsion. It was impossible to take it all in at once, though he tried.

The chamber itself was big, stretching into the shadows where the eye could no longer see any details and everything was reduced to smudges of gray and darker gray. It was cold and poorly lit. Being subterranean, there was no natural light source. Instead, the chamber was illuminated by a dozen smaller ones, oil lamps and candles that guttered now in the draught that came through the open door. No single light lit more than a few square feet around it. Some overlapped, others didn’t, leaving large dark patches. There was a row of metal footlockers that looked decidedly militaristic and functional, and very out of place lining the crypt wall, and bookshelves weighed down with manila folders stuffed to bursting with papers, some old and yellowed others still fresh and crisp white. On one of the tabletops he could see what looked to be a blue-line drawing of some description, but the inking was far too intricate for him to decipher without being able to study it properly. Glass-fronted display cabinets were crammed full of relics and treasures, some genuine, more fake. He had an eye for fraudulent bric-a-brac and Kelkus had hoarded a world’s worth of it down here. There
were broken fragments of weapons strewn haphazardly among
the secular trophies from both the Corvani and Kelani heritage. The chamber was crammed with thousands of things the eye couldn’t possibly comprehend in a moment’s glance. Hundreds of thousands of things.

All the mundanity of the room kept his attention from the one truly spectacular — and equally revolting — scene that dominated the chamber. His stomach lurched. He stepped further into the room. The lights around him shifted and he saw them; four stone tablets identical to the one he carried. Each was suspended from the ceiling on a grid of chain. There was space for the fifth and final tablet to be hung. The centerpiece of the macabre display — he didn’t know whether it was an experiment or a supposed piece of art — was a man.

He was strapped down to a huge wooden wheel-like table, canted on its side so he appeared to be suspended, head down on his chest, arms pulled up in a painful vee along the spokes of the wheel.

The hooks and barbs of the chains lashed him to the table.. IV lines snaked down toward him, intertwined with the chains. They were fed by clear plastic bags on stands — they could have been pumping anything into the wretched man’s body, anesthetic, nutrition, unguents or life-giving antibiotics, it was impossible to tell. He wore a ventilation mask. The rasp of the respirator breathing for him filled the room. It hissed and blew with a slow, regular rhythm. In. Hiss. Out. Blow. In. Hiss. Out. Blow. The mask itself had filmed with moisture. It was a tiny detail, but it made the horror all the more human for the grave robber. He couldn’t understand why the man was being kept alive — if that was what was happening here.

“Now, what of this treasure?” Kelkus asked.

He turned, grateful for something else to look at. Kelkus’ voice was brittle but his flesh was anything but. He towered over the grave robber by almost a full twelve inches, and was twice as broad across the shoulders. He was a brute of a man with matted unwashed hair hanging down lankly across his face. It didn’t mask the spider web of shrapnel scars that ruined the entire left side of his face.

“Here,” the grave robber said.

“Give it to me.”

He did.

Kelkus peeled back the rag-cloth wrap slowly, almost reverentially, corner by corner to expose the stone tablet. He studied the markings. The grave robber didn’t need to look at them; he remembered precisely what was carved into the stone. The central image was a cross, a man being crucified in its cross-brace. It was a crude rendition of humanity, the face almost alien in its simplicity. Wrapped around the figure’s left ankle was a serpent. Its tail coiled up around the man’s leg to his waist, and seemed to emerge from a wound in his stomach. On each limb of the cross were representations of the elements, earth, wind, fire and water, and beyond them, more crude carvings, the words
lament, grief, mourning
and
suffering
, and a single symbol that marked eternity. The tablet encompassed the elements, time, and mortality all in one image. It was the final line of symbols that offered the proof Corvus Keen sought, the knowledge that this species came from beyond the stars.

Kelkus brushed his fingers over the tablet, feeling out every cranny carved into the stone as though he might somehow read its story in the language of the blind. He lingered over the image of the serpent.

“Now this
is
a treasure,” he said. “You shall be rewarded, of course. First, though, help me hang this.”

“Of course,” the grave robber said, wondering how he could possibly help attach the tablet to the chains without having to see the man on the wheel. He couldn’t. Together, they heaved the tablet into place. The hooks sank with surprising ease into the stone. As the first barb pierced the stone the grave robber felt a shiver of coldness thrill through his fingertips, almost as though the thing were alive. When the second barb pierced the stone it was worse.

“Oh yes, yes, yes, yes,” Kelkus crooned. He turned about in a full circle, repeating each of the lines engraved upon the five stones one after another as though voicing an incantation. In between the words he heard a crack, a deep, stone-tearing noise that couldn’t be anything else. The grave robber looked up, following the direction of the sound. He half expected to see the ceiling beginning to crumble and come down. A second later a fresh crack split through the heart of the fifth stone tablet, the fissure running through the center of the crucified man. A third rending crack cleaved the thing in two.

Something was moving. Coming out of the ruined stone.

“What is it?” he gasped, stumbling back a step.

“Divinity,” Kelkus said. “Bow down, little man, you are in the presence of the gods!”

He shook his head, denying the evidence of his own eyes. The thing Kelkus called a god slithered out of the ruined stone. It came an inch at a time, sinuous and sure, tasting the air. It took him a moment to realize what it was: a serpent. The serpent coiled around the iron chain suspended from the ceiling and climbed.

In a curious gesture that was almost tender, Kelkus pulled the breathing mask off the man and ran his fingers through
his matted hair. Then all pretense at tenderness disappeared as
he yanked the man’s head back, forcing his mouth wide open in a scream that lacked only the
sound
of agony. Everything else was burned in the dying man’s face.

As the serpent wound itself around the chains the grave robber backed away from the center of the circle, bumping into the table in his hurry to be out of the crypt. The ripple of motion along the iron links almost dislodged the snake. The creature hissed, opening its mouth impossibly wide. All he could think, staring at it, was that it had too many teeth. It was unlike any snake he had seen in his life.

And then it started to move again, coiling down the links until it reached the man’s hand, and down the length of his forearm, leaving a mucus trail behind it.

Kelkus yanked on the man’s hair again, forcing the wretch’s mouth wider.

The serpent’s tail lashed against his clavicle, and then with a sudden and shocking flurry of motion, reared up and plunged into the man’s gaping mouth.

The grave robber stared, trapped in abject horror. His muscles refused to obey his mind. All he wanted to do was run but they wouldn’t let him. The convulsions tore at the man’s emaciated frame, and then his head came up, eyes blazing cold gold, a new found strength in his bones, and he surely heard the voice of the dead as the man rasped, “I am your God, worship me!” He pulled free from the chains and rose from the table. There was no pain in his face now, only strength. Glory.

The grave robber fell on his knees and wept.

Kelkus knelt beside him, eyes burning as he surrendered to the revelation.

“I live to serve,” he said.

“Yes,” the god said, “you do.”

The Tok’ra emissary came through the Stargate less than an hour later. She was grim-faced and wore her grief like a crown as she walked down the ramp. Her descent was slow and measured, her curiosity had her eyes darting across the room, taking it all in. O’Neill knew the routine, this one was a soldier. It was in her bearing, the way in which she carried herself and, most tellingly of all, the way with which she familiarized herself with possibly hostile territory. She was scoping out potential exits before she had even entered the room. The woman made no attempt to mask her annoyance at the muzzles aiming at her as she studied the faces of the Tau’ri watching her. “Which of you is Hammond of the Tau’ri?” Her voice had that brusque metallic echo of the symbiote talking through its host. The inhuman resonance never failed to unnerve him.

Hammond inclined his bald head slightly, almost deferentially, and stepped forward. He began to greet the woman but was cut off by her puzzled frown. “Ah, I was led to believe you were a great warrior… you do not look so great.”

“Appearances can be deceptive,” O’Neill said, putting himself between the general and the emissary. He couldn’t help himself; something about the woman just irked him. “You, after all, look like a lady.” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop himself.

“That is quite enough, Colonel O’Neill,” Hammond said, cutting him off before he could talk himself into trouble.

“Quite,” the woman said. Jack detected the hint of a self-deprecating smile. It took him a moment to realize that she was agreeing with him, not Hammond. It was enough to have Jack reassess his immediate dislike: perhaps she wasn’t quite so irksome after all. “And you must be the one they call O’Neill.”

He grinned. “Nice to see my reputation precedes me.”

“Oh, it most certainly does. If you have accomplished half the things we are led to believe, you are most certainly a worthy ally.”

“Thank you, I think. You seem to have the advantage here, what with us being so famous and all. You, on the other hand are?”

Her smile broadened slightly. “I am Jerichau of the Tok’ra, I share this body with Selina Ros, my host,” she introduced herself. Jack pulled a face, making a show of trying to remember if he had heard of her. “We received your transmission, there is much we must talk about.”

“Isn’t there always?” Jack said.

“Can we talk somewhere…” Jerichau gestured toward the line of guns, “away from all of the weapons?”

“Of course. The briefing room,” Hammond said. “Teal’c, Doctor Jackson, Major Carter, if you would care to join us? At ease, everyone.”

The six of them adjourned to the solitude of the briefing room and settled themselves around the conference table. The lighting in the room was subdued. Jack pressed his palms down flat against the tabletop. He could feel the eddies of the air-conditioning blowing around them.

“Talk to us,” he told Jerichau without looking up. There was no preamble. Now was not the time for it. The Tok’ra obviously knew more than they would let on. They played their little games of politics about as well as Daniel played poker. He tried to put aside his natural mistrust but as long as they were playing with a loaded deck he was going to be suspicious — it was thinking like that that kept him alive.

“We have reason to believe that your visitor was indeed Tok’ra.”

“Go on.”

“Much is unknown and will remain so until we have the chance to examine the remains, but Nyren Var was working to recover a weapon of sorts. She has been out of contact for several cycles now. In her last transmission she reported that the Goa’uld were aware of the weapon and had sent Jaffa to hunt it down.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” Hammond interrupted. “Why would they need to hunt for a weapon? That’s a peculiar choice of words, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is, General, but no less accurate for it. The weapon in question is a living thing. A creature known as Mujina.”