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The banquet was a way for Lord Enlil to keep tabs on his fellow Annunaki, to check that they were not plotting against him—inevitably, they were—or trying to obtain control of the life circuits of the wombship, Tiamat. Which also, inevitably, they were. But while Enlil delved into the plans and peccadilloes of his fellow Annunaki, silently observing who was most comfortable with whom, whose conversations seemed forced or veiled in secret words and phrases, Nergal became increasingly annoyed that he was unable to return to his research. He took out his frustrations on Namtar during the three-day meal, cornering him while the other gods enjoyed and plotted.

  “You have no right to be here, child,” he snapped, clicking the long claws of his fingers together in a clack to release the hidden chemical agent he had secreted there. He watched in grim satisfaction as the chemical agent sprayed droplets over the other’s skin, seeping unnoticed into his pores. “Your mistress insults us all in sending you in her stead, an insult that will not be forgotten.”

  Young Namtar looked at Nergal with a mixture of confusion and innocence. “My mother was busy, my lord,” he placated, unaware that Nergal had introduced a nasty little poison into his system. “Better that I attend than that her chair be left empty.”

  “‘Mother?’” Nergal repeated uncertainly. “Ereshkigal is your…mother?”

  “Yes, my lord,” Namtar said with a bow. To Nergal’s horrified eyes the child was already looking off-color, though he knew rationally that his little touch of plague would not work so quickly.

  * * *

  BEING AWAY FROM the sunlight for so long had driven Ereshkigal mad. She had worked so long on her logic experiments that her eyes had gone dark. When she emerged, she saw not Annunaki but equations, things to be manipulated and formatted and balanced until they became new things, extrapolated from the old.

  Rumor had it she had killed several young, stolen from their eggs, tested to destruction.

  She emerged because of what had happened to her son, Namtar. She had discovered that he had been poisoned at Enlil’s banquet, and though the child had survived he was desperately ill, his once-lustrous skin patchy with the black sickness of plague.

  When she emerged, her eyes were black orbs, and she held a skull-headed rattle that spoke of her purpose with more clarity than all the words of Babel—a death rattle. She came to Enlil’s palace in Nippur, casting aside his servants and trained Nephilim warriors with vicious blows from her long-handled rattle.

  “Who did this to my son?” Ereshkigal asked as she stormed into Enlil’s throne room.

  Lord Enlil was sitting in his throne being fed figs in syrup by a scantily clad human female. She appeared ugly to Ereshkigal’s eyes, too thin, too smooth.

  Enlil peered up from his delicacies, eyeing Ereshkigal warily. “Mathematician,” he said, addressing her but somehow making it sound like an insult.

  “Don’t ‘mathematician’ me,” Ereshkigal spit, swiping at the apekin attendant with her rattle. The human woman went crashing to one side, skull caved in.

  Enlil was standing then, his arms up to defend himself. “Ereshkigal, you are clearly upset—” he began.

  Ereshkigal knocked him back with her death rattle, and Enlil found himself sitting once more in the throne amid a disarray of cushions. She held her hand out before her, chanting the words of the mathematical equation that could stop his heart, tapping out the rhythm on the rattle. Enlil felt it twinge, a jabbing pain in his chest as if he had been stabbed with a spear.

  “My son,” Ereshkigal hissed, standing over Enlil, “was poisoned at your banquet.”

  “Namtar?” Enlil looked surprised. The pain in his chest burned like lit oil.

  “Yes!” Ereshkigal repeated. “My son.”

  “Our son,” Enlil corrected. “But who—”

  “Is this another of your wretched schemes, my lord?” Ereshkigal spit, delivering the epithet like a curse, the way he had called her mathematician. “Kill your child as you did to Ullikummis when he failed you?”

  Enlil looked aggrieved, shaking his head heavily despite the agony in his chest. His heart would not beat. “No.”

  Ereshkigal stood over him with the death rattle raised, ready to rain down blows that would turn his haughty skull to pulp. But she stopped.

  “Namtar posed no threat to me, Ereshkigal, no challenge,” Enlil said, squeezing the words from breathless lungs. “I had…no cause…to hurt him. As…the child’s…mother…you must…know that.”

  “Then why?” Ereshkigal snarled.

  Enlil looked up at her through hooded eyes, the vertical slits of his irises narrowed to the finest of lines, like pencil marks on a plan. “You say that Namtar was poisoned?” he asked, checking the facts.

  “Yes, his skin is ravaged with great black welts,” Ereshkigal confirmed, “the scarabae sickness.” Scarabae was a disease that only afflicted Annunaki, a kind of skin cancer that was fed by the direct rays of the sun.

  “Nergal has been researching such things,” Enlil explained, choosing not to reveal that he was doing so for him. “Why he would…do such a thing…I cannot say.”

  The fury in Ereshkigal’s black eyes was like a raging inferno. “Look about you,” she finally growled, muttering a few words under her breath. Enlil felt the pressure in his torso ease, felt his heart beat again at last, a great thud against his chest walls. “You see the brilliance of my mathematics. Control over everything—even the endless Annunaki.”

  She stormed from Enlil’s chamber, seething with anger. A human retainer who was bringing water with which to wash Enlil’s feet had the misfortune to step in Ereshkigal’s way as she reached the twin, golden doors to the throne room. Ereshkigal said the other words then, the ones that triggered the hidden response in apekin’s bodies, their minds. Enlil watched in awe as the human keeled over, heart stopped, brain ceasing to function.

  Once Ereshkigal left the throne room, Enlil immediately left his throne and trotted across to join the fallen retainer, clutching at his own chest where his heart had been halted for over a minute. The human was dead. That Ereshkigal could do that to one of the apekin, could also now do it to an Annunaki—where would it end? The prospect filled Enlil—fearless Enlil—with trepidation.

  * * *

  THE WRATH OF gods is a horrifying thing to behold. In its aftermath, all fifty-seven apekin who had served Nergal lay dead, as did the six Igigi who had functioned as his researchers.

  Nergal stood in his laboratory workplace struggling to control his breathing as Ereshkigal came for him, striding through the mounds of corpses, her skull-headed rattle sweeping before her to clear the bloody way.

  “You killed them,” Nergal stated with incredulity.

  Ereshkigal stood in the lone doors to his laboratory, leaving him with nowhere to run. “Apothecary,” she said, “heal thyself!”

  And with that she threw the skull-topped staff. It sailed across the room, spinning over and over before slamming against Nergal even as he tried to get clear of its path. He dropped to the floor, whining with pain.

  Ereshkigal stalked across the debris-strewn laboratory toward Nergal, kicking him hard in the guts over and over. Then she reached down for the fallen rattle-staff, plucking it up as the physician leaked blood on his once-clean floor. Ereshkigal picked up the rattle and raised it, ready to club Nergal over the head.

  Nergal said something then, spit between desperate gasps. “I…didn’t…know…he was…your son,” he said.

  “Does that matter?” Ereshkigal hissed. “He was my vizier, he was due your respect as representative in my place.”

  Nergal looked at her from where he was doubled over in pain on the floor. “They say…that…Enlil…is his father,” he gasped. “I did it…because…of him. His…interference—” His words trailed off, the pain too much to work through.

  Ereshkigal lowered her death rattle very slowly, her eyes scanning the mess that had once been a research laboratory. Enlil held her in his power. He owned the land where her own research fac
ility was located. He took her as a mate when he wanted to, indulged her studies at his whim. To have an ally against him would prove useful.

  “Can you fix the damage you have done to Namtar?” Ereshkigal asked.

  “Can you…bring my…servants back…to life?” Nergal countered.

  “Yes,” Ereshkigal said, surprising and horrifying this master of plagues, “though you will not need them where we are going.”

  They left the laboratory together. To prove her fidelity, Ereshkigal raised Nergal’s dead, though they lacked that essential spark that they had had in life. It was still an awesome demonstration of how much she had learned about death and its reversion.

  In later years, Ereshkigal’s words would become known as spells, but they were not that—they were just mathematical sums; sums that involved rhythms and logic that only one of the eternal race could comprehend.

  Nergal joined Ereshkigal in her underworld kingdom beneath the banks of the Euphrates, developing his plagues for the day that they might utilize them. He knew better than to trust her, however, recognizing that strand of madness that lay within her. Her adherence to pure logic had corrupted her just as anything else might have when imbibed in vast quantities.

  Chapter 33

  The present, twenty-five miles south of Zaragoza

  Ereshkigal was emerging from the pool in her temple, blood streaming from the curves of her body, piercing Kane with her dark, lizard slash eyes. All around, the voices of the beyond-dead choir were rising in their funereal dirge, unidentified words echoing from the walls.

  “Círculo alrededor del cuerpo. Guarda silencio a moverse más,” Ereshkigal chanted, the words echoing across the cavern-like space of the blood temple.

  Kane stumbled at the words, dropping to one knee. He felt crushing doubt begin to take hold inside him, a weariness with life, with all he had seen, all he had done. So many faces flashed before his eyes—the faces of people who he had killed, lives he had cut short or negatively affected forever. So many hates built up, so much sadness he had left with his actions.

  Distant now, a background bed of sound like the rushing sound of a river heard from several fields away, the voices of the choir of the dead droned on, embedding their dirge in Kane’s thoughts the way the church bells had penetrated the minds of the people of Zaragoza, the way the death rattle had penetrated Enlil, focusing his mind on the words that Ereshkigal uttered.

  The world will be better off without me, Kane realized as Ereshkigal’s words droned on, echoing through the chamber.

  And in death you shall know new joys, something seemed to answer, a voice inside him.

  Ereshkigal was still striding toward Kane, her mouth continuing to form the eerie words of her chant.

  “Gire vida lejos. Gire aliento. Abrazo fauces del inf—” she sang, the words trilling from the walls, the ceiling, the floor.

  Kane’s Commtact was translating Ereshkigal’s words automatically, in fractured bursts ripped through with static as if it could not quite pluck her words from the air. It sounded like nonsense, and then the translation was cut short by Brigid’s urgent words piping directly into Kane’s ear.

  “Kane, it’s Cáscara—” Brigid cried. “I think she’s—” The communication cut abruptly.

  Ereshkigal was standing at the edge of the pool now, ripples of blood swishing around her calves and ankles, glaring at Kane in something that looked to be either anger, surprise or a mixture of both.

  “Die,” she said as the sounds of her grave-crossed choir rose and fell like the ocean waves. “Matar a ti mismo!”

  “Sorry, babe, I don’t speak Spanish!” Kane replied, lifting his blaster and firing. The doubts had left Kane the very moment that Brigid’s words had been piped into his ear canal, and he had known, instinctively, that he needed to clear his head, stop this psychic attack the only way he knew how. With a shot.

  A bullet came rocketing from the muzzle of Kane’s blaster, crossing the cavern in a fraction of a second and drilling into Ereshkigal’s left shoulder, just beneath her shoulder bone.

  Ereshkigal was knocked back with the blow, shrieking in agony as she tumbled backward into her pool in a flurry of bloody feathers and awkward limbs. The choir’s voices swelled.

  Kane primed a flash-bang he had pulled from his pocket in that moment—his last—before letting it roll from his hand.

  Ereshkigal’s second Terror Priest, Namtar, emerged from behind a pillar at the same moment, charging at Kane with a staff in his hand. The staff was a re-creation of the long-handled death rattle that she had used millennia before, when Namtar had been a retainer for his mistress and mother Ereshkigal. It featured a skull atop its crest. Namtar swung the heavy staff-rattle at Kane even as the Cerberus warrior turned to face him. Kane took the blow badly across the shoulders, sinking to his knees again with a blurt of pain.

  From the steps above, at the head of the stairs, Grant and Shizuka hurried to help Kane, shouting a warning that was lost in the cacophony of Ereshkigal’s echoing splash in the pool of blood.

  “You are dead, little man,” Namtar growled in Spanish as he loomed over Kane, brandishing the staff, “and you’ll never know the joy that you could have achieved.”

  At that moment the flash-bang exploded, filling the cavernous space with a sudden burst of light and sound.

  With his head reeling dizzily and his eyes narrowed against the dazzling burst of light, Kane kicked, clipping Namtar across the ankles even as the servant to Ereshkigal brought the heavy rattle down at his head. The rattle missed Kane’s forehead by less than an inch, crashing against the point where the side of his head met the floor with an echoing clang, clipping him hard as the choir wailed on. Kane dropped suddenly out of consciousness like a bullet train entering a tunnel.

  Grant had reached the foot of the steps by then and he leaped for Namtar, reaching for him with his left hand even as he aimed his Sin Eater up to blast him. Namtar reeled back as the first bullet struck him in the center of his chest, dropping the razor disc he had secreted in his free hand with a clang of metal. Then Grant struck him, tackling him like a football player. Both men went crashing to the ground, six feet away from where Kane lay trying to gather his wits on the shores of the pool.

  Shizuka followed Grant down the curving stairs, dropping a flash-bang in the face of Tsanti, the fallen Terror Priest whom Kane had met on the steps, as she hurried past his recovering form. Shizuka kept moving, leaving the flash-bang to erupt behind her in his face in a dazzling burst of light. Her attention was on the female figure who was just recovering from her fall into the pool of blood.

  Ereshkigal emerged once more with blood pouring over her body, the tail of feathers turned red with the blood. She looked angry, her eyes now black-on-black lizard slits, her skin became the reptilian armor of the Annunaki. But there was a dark depression in the skin just beneath her shoulder blade where Kane’s bullet had struck. The choir wailed on, their eyes screwed tight, their mouths taut in words that seemed to cause them pain to sing.

  Ereshkigal had imbibed the genetic material from the pool through her own pores. Her transformation into Annunaki was almost complete, and now she was close to invincible—only the bullet wound marred her beautiful, rippling scales.

  “Death to your world,” she snarled in a tongue not spoken on Earth in over four thousand years.

  Shizuka ran to meet her, swinging her sword from behind her in a long arc. As she reached the side of the pool, Shizuka’s sword came around to slash Ereshkigal across the chest, cutting upward in a lethal strike.

  Ereshkigal met the blade with her left arm, deflecting it in a shower of sparks as the metal struck her armored flesh.

  Shizuka grunted at the impact, twisting her body aside as Ereshkigal’s right hand came darting up to grab her. Ereshkigal’s hand snatched Shizuka’s leg just below the knee as she tried to leap away. Shizuka suddenly found herself dropping face-first to the floor. She landed at the edge of the pool, blood lashing across her fa
ce and chest.

  Ereshkigal still had hold of Shizuka’s leg as the samurai warrior twisted, trying to strike a blow with her sword. The razor-keen katana whipped against Ereshkigal’s leg, clanging as fire-forged metal met with alien skin as strong as it was. Shizuka groaned, feeling the blow resonate in her wrist as the blade met the unmoving limb.

  Then Ereshkigal spoke again, chanting those eerie words in Spanish.

  “Círculo alrededor del cuerpo,

  Guarda silencio a moverse más.

  Gire vida lejos,

  Gire aliento.

  Abrazo fauces del infierno.”

  Shizuka sank back to the ground, the pain of the physical attack too much. There was something in her mind, too, a kind of black cloud pressing against her thoughts. The black cloud had something within it, a deeper blackness, an absoluteness that was hard not to feel drawn to. Shizuka felt desire rise for that absolute darkness, craving it with all her heart. But no—she shook it away, forced it from her mind. That death would be dishonorable when there was a foe still to vanquish.

  Ereshkigal kicked Shizuka across the jaw then, knocking her to the ground beside the pool. Shizuka drifted into blissful unconsciousness, the dark thoughts receding like the tide.

  The choir around the pillars wailed once more, voices harmonizing in a kind of awful note like an animal in pain.

  * * *

  ACROSS THE DARK space of the temple, bullets and punches flew while razor discs cut the air. Grant emptied his Sin Eater’s clip in Namtar’s black-scarred chest before turning his prodigious strength on the Terror Priest. Namtar fought back, slashing Grant across the thigh with a blade.

  With a cry of determination, Grant punched Namtar in the face again and again, watching in grim satisfaction as the reborn Annunaki servant sagged back against the ground, unconscious. Then he turned to face Ereshkigal as she strode toward him, her jagged crown of bones looming above her in some sick parody of a halo.

  “Time to finish this, you snake-headed bitch,” Grant muttered, raising the Sin Eater to target Ereshkigal as she strode toward him. But before he could pull the trigger he felt something strike him from behind, right between the shoulder blades. He sagged down to his knees with a cry of pain, spots flashing before his eyes as he sank into the pool of blood.