Outlanders 13 shadow sco.., p.2
Outlanders 13 Shadow Scourge, page 2
The firelight illuminated the deep shadows behind the podium and they suddenly seethed. Hundreds of tiny eyes reflected the flames in crimson pinpoints. At first Falconer saw only a billowing mass of darkness, then it flowed into a chittering, nail-scratching stampede of rats. There were thousands of them and he bit back a curse of horror. Mama Minuit and her people used the torches to drive the rodent horde back, forcing them to scamper through cracks and splits in the stone walls. When the last of the vermin had fled, Falconer swung himself over the railing, ignoring how the ancient wood creaked beneath his weight. He dropped down into the chapel, beside a skull-split cultist. "Over here!" called Mama Minuit, gesturing with her torch. Her tone was full of victorious gloating. Falconer joined her by the podium. She stood over Ocajnik, grinning down into his blood-spattered face. He grinned back up at her, but in pain, his red-filmed teeth bared. He was the handsome man again, his well-formed hands pressed over the bullet wound in his chest. Falconer was shocked that he was not only alive, but still conscious. Mama Minuit spit at him. "Your faux flesh does not fool me, old man!" "I am ageless, I transcend all the ages of man. You cannot end me," Ocajnik grated. With a contemptuous smile, Mama Minuit removed the leather pouch from around her neck and upended its contents over Ocajnik's face. He howled like a dying dog, his tongue uncoiling from his mouth like a blue-black serpent. Wherever the dust settled, huge pustules erupted from the flesh and burst with a thick, white ichor. The stench of putrefaction arose, and Falconer covered his nose and mouth with his free hand. For the first time he felt fear. He didn't fear Ocajnik as a man feared a human enemy—it was the terror of an ancient evil spawned from an age at the dawn of mankind. He suddenly had the sense of unseen forces swirling all around him, and that he was but a pawn in a game he could never comprehend. "Oui," spit Mama Minuit. "An old one cannot be ended, but you can be contained." She lifted a foot as if to stamp on his face, but she checked the movement. "Your army has deserted you, parasite. You are alone again, trapped in the dark, dark sepulchre of the Earth." The flames from the pews began to spread, but neither Mama Minuit nor Ocajnik appeared to notice—or if they did, they didn't care. "This is my time now," Ocajnik said in a labored wheeze. "A world of eternal twilight, of skies and seas the color of blood...of shadows masking the sun." His face, then his body convulsed. In a rasping gargle, he hissed, "There is wisdom in the shadows—the old ones have returned, they who drank the blood of thy kind and feasted on thy flesh and owned thy souls. The spawn of the old ones covered the Earth, and their children endure throughout the ages. Thy race became foolish and spurned them, but their voices still whisper to you in the night." Mama Minuit threw back her head and laughed, and scorn and fury were in it. "The loa’s whisper to me and safeguard our spirits. They piss on you, Ocajnik. They promise the long night will soon end and the sun will shun you once more. Your reign of blood and plague will be over." As she spoke, the powder sprinkled over Ocajnik's face thickened, spreading over his body like a corrosive fungus, shriveling his flesh and turning it brown and dry. Ocajnik's lips twisted into a caricature of a mocking grin. He exhaled and hoarse words rode his breath. "Not so long as thy race of beasts lives. One day thy race will set me free again." Mama Minuit turned to Falconer. "The cross." For a moment, Falconer didn't understand what she meant, then he fumbled in a pocket and brought forth the small relic. He started to hand it to her, but the priestess gestured to Ocajnik. "Drop it." Falconer hesitated, then opened his fingers and the crucifix fell onto Ocajnik's chest. From it, but only for a sliver of a second, burst an aurora of unbearably bright, unbearably pure white radiance. When it faded, only a distorted carcass lay on the floor, a shriveled, monstrous imitation of man, with malformed ears and rat-like fangs. The yellowish-green eyes had lost their mad gleam and become dull and lusterless, as if the light behind them had been snuffed out like a candle's flame. The tiny crucifix sizzled its way through Ocajnik's chest, as if it had been heated and dropped on wax. The creature's mouth opened wide, far wider than was possible for human jaws. A thick fluid, a greenish mucus-like bile bubbled up over his lips. A fetid stench arose from his body, the vile, loathsome stink of decay. Falconer's belly roiled with nausea. He managed to repress the gag reflex, and as if from a great distance he heard his voice demanding faintly, "What is that thing?" Somberly, Mama Minuit replied, "He be not a living man. He had only a false aspect of life that deceived his followers, mebbe even himself. I never saw him as other than that... thing." "And the rats?" She shrugged as if the matter were of little importance. "They be his...or he be theirs. They carry his disease." Falconer suddenly came to himself as if he were waking from a trance. The fierce heat from the burning pews beat at his body, and flickering flames alternately lit and shadowed the dark face of the woman beside him. Softly she quoted, "`That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.”
Then, taking him by the arm, Mama Minuit led Falconer out of the church to where her people stood waiting. All of them silently watched as smoke and flame poured from the broken windows. "Now what?" asked Falconer, his words sounding strained even in his own ears. Matter-of-factly, Mama Minuit stated, "Once de fire bums down, we will collapse the walls and inscribe a seal upon the stone. That will trap him in the sepulchre." He gazed at the licking flames in silence. Then at length he declared, "He's dead." The tone of his voice made it sound more like a question. The woman sighed sadly. "How can one kill a creature who never truly lived? He be right, you know. This is his time. We paved the way for his return. We lost respect for life and returned to the path of savagery, acting like the beasts he claims we be. We forgot the ancient wars against the old ones and fought among ourselves, and his kind returned in crafty guises, "The ancient terrors of our ancestors have burst free again, overwhelming the world with madness and chaos, plunging it back into darkness. Nature is out of balance, an' if the balance is not soon restored, he an' those like him will rule the Earth again." Mama Minuit made a helpless gesture with the machete."C'est fini. It is finished."
Falconer struggled to comprehend the meaning of her words. He was a soldier, devoted to wresting a semblance of prewar order out of post-nuke anarchy. Little of what the voodoo priestess said made sense to him—or, he realized bleakly, he preferred it did not make sense. A fearful suspicion arose in him, the grim realization that World War III was more than a struggle between Russia and America for control of the world. It was a dim reflection of a war that had been fought long ago, the eternal battle of order against chaos, of shapes birthed in darkness reaching out to destroy the bodies and souls of humanity. Turning his face away from the roaring pyre of the church, he looked toward the lurid red sky, desperately seeking an unshadowed sun.
Chapter 1
The Amazon Basin, 175 years after skydark
Kane looked toward the sky, desperately wishing shadows would cover the bright face of the full moon. Then he ducked the cast-net, dodged behind a tree, put his head back and his chest out and ran as he had run few times in his life. From behind him he heard a savage cry of anger erupt from four throats. Copper-skinned men of short stature rushed after him. Their jet-black hair was twisted in intricate topknots at the back at their heads, and their near-naked bodies were tattooed with ornate spiral designs. They wore short mantles over their shoulders, layers of snakeskin glued to leather. Their fingers were colored a brilliant red, as if the entire lengths had been dipped in scarlet dye. All of them carried short-shafted clubs that sported razor-edged flakes of obsidian, like the teeth of saw blades. They also wielded long hollow tubes, all of them decorated with bits of gold and gems. As far as Kane was concerned, a blowgun was a blowgun, regardless of the ornamentation. Two of the Indians had stone- weighted nets made of tough, woven grasses slung over their shoulders. The grass braids were coated with an extremely adhesive glue. Kane knew they'd prefer to capture him as they had Domi and Grant, but their desire to take him alive didn't spring from a respect for human life. His heart pumped hard, and he felt his familiar angry repugnance at being forced into the role of prey. His many years as a Magistrate had accustomed him to being the hunter, not the hunted. He plunged through the canopied rain forest, realizing it was futile to hope he could continue to evade his pursuers as he had for the past few hours. This was their land, and they had lifetimes of experience in tracking quarry through the tangled green depths. But even standing his ground and shooting it out with the Indians would not free his companions. The most reasonable option was simply to surrender. That way he would be placed with Grant and Domi, and among the three of them they might find a way to escape—hopefully long before they were stretched out on a sacrificial altar and their hearts ripped out. But Kane was obeying instincts that had little to do with tactics—to survive long enough to find a place to turn and sell his life at a bloody price. He sprinted through the jungle, slapping leaves and vines out of his path. Each breath he took of the humid air was a labored gulp. He had been running, hiding and running again since late afternoon, trying to creep back into the city. The moist heat of Amazonia was more debilitating than the desert wastelands of Utah he had recently visited. There at least it was possible to cool down in the shade. Night brought no relief from the humidity here. Beneath the emerald-tinted roof formed by the intertwining boughs of giant parana and evergreen trees, the heat of the day was captured, making him feel as if he were taking a never-ending sauna bath. Kane's dark hair was soaked through with sweat, turning its sun-touched highlights completely black. His khaki shirt clung to his perspiration-filmed torso. The weight of the Sin Eater holstered to his right forearm was like having a child hanging on to his hand, and he struggled to keep from reeling to that side as he ran. Not too long before he had been chased—stalked, actually—through a Louisiana bayou by swampies who wanted his head for the reward it would bring. But his pursuers had been in as much danger from the mutated, lethal flora and fauna as he had been. The Amazonian Indians who pursued him were perfectly in tune with their environment, and wouldn't be tricked by the same gambits that had worked on the dull-witted swampies. There was comparatively little underbrush, only the great tree trunks looming in the green-filtered moonlight. Growths of creeper stems carpeted the jungle floor, but none of them snagged his pounding feet and they muffled his footfalls to dull thuds as he dodged and zigzagged among the giant boles. Abruptly he burst from the dense rain forest and saw the city below him, nestled in a shallow, egg- shaped valley. Three days before, the unexpected discovery of such a place in the jungle had surprised him, Domi and Grant. The records in the Cerberus database, as well as the brief reference in The Wyeth Codex had prepared them for something, but not for a little picture-book civilization with its neat collection of stone houses and tilled fields, all laid out as precisely as an estate garden. From the center of the city towered a pyramid. The sides rose in a staggered series of step-like ledges, and they looked as smooth as glass from top to bottom. Two smaller wings were on either side of its huge base. A flight of stairs climbed up the sleek center of the ziggurat to the flat top. There stood a sort of temple, a flat stone roof supported by square, intricately carved pillars around which serpents coiled. The little structure was open on all sides, allowing a view not only of the grotesque stone idols set within it, but of the huge brass bowl occupying its center. Elevated by a pedestal, it looked to be nearly four feet in height and perhaps six in diameter. Not having been permitted to climb the pyramid during his stay, Kane had assumed an altar of some type rested there. The bowl presented a mystery, but one he wasn't particularly inclined to solve. The silvery moonlight struck iridescent sparkles from the minerals embedded within the pyramid's exterior. Kane guessed it had been constructed of quartz shot through with bits of mica and gold ore. The entire structure loomed over a hundred feet into the sky. Faintly, from the direction of the ziggurat, he heard the rumble of drums and what sounded like a ceremonial chant. He didn't devote much time to admiring the city's beauty but set off down the gently rolling slope in long-legged bounds. He heard faint, spitting whispers, then the buzz of darts zipping past his ears like angry hornets. Although Kane knew the projectiles were tipped with a nonfatal neurotoxin, he still didn't want to be stung by one. He had already seen the narcotic effects of the darts on Grant and Domi. Only enormous good fortune and the fact he had stumbled at the critical moment over a tree root had kept him from being captured like them. Since then, he had tried and failed to return to the city without being seen. But he had crossed the path of a search party a couple of hours ago, and they had tracked him ever since. As yet, he hadn't chilled any of the Amazonians, although he had been sorely tempted. Only the memory of the hospitality shown to them by King Chaac stayed his hand—and the sense that he was only reluctantly going along with the wishes of the chief shaman, Cloud Minder. He had seen him engaged in an earnest, whispered conference with Chaac right before they said their goodbyes. Kane loped down the hillside, heading toward the city at an oblique angle, ignoring the darts hissing past his head. The warriors were losing the range, and he contemplated briefly turning and driving them back with a burst from his Sin Eater, but he didn't want to alert the entire native settlement. He dived through a narrow opening in a wall of shrubbery and swiftly surveyed the area. A dense thicket arose in a solid clump of greenery on the opposite side of the clearing. A massive boulder deeply embedded in the grassy earth paralleled the edges of the growth. A patina of moss covered most of the stone's gray, fissured surface. Kane glimpsed a deep depression where the end of the boulder overhung the hillside and he made for that. With a deliberately heavy foot, he ran toward the boulder, crushing the grass beneath his boots. Springing onto the rock, he ran along its length. When he reached the far end, he jumped down and doubled back, creeping along the far side of the boulder, hugging its base. When he reached the cavity, he crawled into it feet first, cramming his six-foot-one inch frame into a space that would barely fit a small child. With his knees doubled, he lay still and tried to soften the harshness of his breathing. His heart hammered in his chest and blood thundered in his ears. He was terribly thirsty, but he had been forced to drop the survival kit that contained his bottle of water. He had also lost his transcomm, so he couldn't even attempt to call Grant or Domi, although he knew their own comm gear had probably been confiscated. As he lay there in the shadow created by the jutting rock overhang, he performed a quick inventory. The three spare clips of ammo were still attached to his web belt, so counting the full clip in his blaster, he had eighty rounds to bring into play. He reached down to the Nylex handle of the combat knife in its boot scabbard. Pressing the positive-release button, he drew the fourteen-inch-long, double-edged blued blade. Absently he thumbed the razor-keen, tungsten- steel point. Kane swore silently at himself for being caught so flat-footed out on the forest trail. During the three days he, Domi and Grant spent among the Amazonians, they had done nothing to arouse his suspicions—which in retrospect was suspicious. His only consolation, and a very small one, was that Brigid Baptiste was safe in the Cerberus redoubt in the Darks of Montana, busy with another project. But even that small comfort turned cold when he recollected Brigid's warning to avoid the Indians who at last report lived in the area. Of course the last report was at least a hundred years old, and so hadn't seemed particularly pertinent when Kane first proposed the mission. The reasons for the trip to South America seemed simple and straightforward. The Cerberus database contained a record of a huge American military munitions depot hidden in the rain forest. There was also a nearby installation equipped with a gateway unit, and although it was computer indexed, it wasn't part of the official Cerberus network. "Gateway" was the colloquial term for a quantum Interphase transducer, otherwise known as a mat-trans unit. The gateways functioned by tapping into the quantum stream, the invisible, linear pathways that ran outside of physical space and back again at distant points.
