Outlanders 14 hell risin.., p.28
Outlanders 14 Hell Rising, page 28
All three people knew they looked upon antiquity given shape and form, a place so old that even whispers of its existence could only be measured in millennia."
Chapter 28
The hoist lowered the small skiff over the side of the Cromwell. Under the watchful eye of Quayle—and the barrel of an MP-5 subgun—Fand and Kane scaled a rope ladder to the skiff. After they were seated, Quayle tossed Kane a big box-batteried xenon flashlight. It could project a beam of three million candlepower.
Quayle swung over the rail, and climbed down with surprising agility for one of his mammoth bulk. Hanging from his belt were three empty sacks, made of a dense black fabric. They were sealed with Velcro tabs. Also thrust through his belt was his cutlass. Still keeping the Fand and Kane in front of his blaster, he started the outboard motor clamped to the squared-off stem with a single yank of the pull cord. He gunned the throttle, the prow riding on a rush of foam.
The small craft was barely eight feet long, having contours similar to a bathtub, but it skimmed across the sea smoothly. The wind was biting and Fand rubbed her bare arms, but she made no complaint. She knew it wouldn't have done any good.
Quayle piloted the boat expertly over the breakers at the mouth of the stone stairs. Waves lapped over the sides, soaking their feet, the salt spray stinging their eyes. Quayle kept the small craft on course, seeming to know instinctively what swell could pile them up against a boulder.
He steered the skiff slowly to the foot of the stairs, between dark ramparts of rock. Then the hull grated on stone, and he cut the engine. He tossed a mooring line to Kane, who climbed out and looped it securely around a rock.
Fand and Kane preceded Quayle up the weather- eroded stairway, climbing between the black walls rearing above them like permanent thunderclouds. Not speaking, the three people scaled the crude, time-pitted stone slabs, picking their way carefully. In some places the steps were slippery with lichens and kelp. They made their way up the steep slant, boot soles slipping and sliding on the wet rock. It leveled off at the mouth of the paving-stone path that wound around a vista of ruins
Massive stone blocks twice as high as Quayle lay in scattered profusion, many of them sheathed in verdigris-eaten bronze. Paving slabs were cracked and upended, all draped with strands of seaweed. They sniffed the dank sea smell and waded ankle deep through fetid ooze. Quayle seemed as awed as Fand and Kane, but he wasn't so entranced that he forgot to keep them before the barrel of the autoblaster. Inscribed on several monoliths, beneath the dried crustings of muck, they saw the squid motif.
"What's with the octopus symbol?" Kane asked, surprised by how hushed his voice sounded.
"It's a kraken," Quayle replied blithely. "A monster variety of squid. Extinct long ago, but there were allegedly sightings of them in historical times Every Atlantean outpost had its own sigil, identifying it with the ocean—whales, sharks, sea horses."
Fand raised a questioningly eyebrow, "I had no idea you were such an expert, Captain."
"I'm full of surprises, Sister." He smiled with cruel triumph. "As your little slut-spy Morrigan learned. I daresay I've performed more research on the subject of Atlantis than anyone in the past two centuries."
The three of them walked to the silt-coated edifice they had seen from the ship. It was partly fallen in, but the portico, upheld by four marble columns, was still intact. Along the edge of the roof, a row of horn- headed stone gargoyles leered down—statues of monsters of bygone epochs, half human and half beast. The mixtures, thought Kane, of Atlantean legends.
There was no gate, no door. The portal stood open and empty. Quayle motioned to Kane. "If you would be so kind as to light our way, sir."
They went beneath the linteled arch into dimness and a brooding silence. The xenon cast an almost solid rod of white before them. Kane walked carefully on the bare, slimy stone floor, unconsciously slipping into the pointman's persona despite the circumstances. His eyes roamed from side to side, searching every nook and corner. He sensed nothing but ancient, bygone times, the shadows of long-gone presences.
The corridor was completely empty, even of debris. It was featureless, unbroken by either window or doorway. The passage ended after twenty yards, and an unrailed stairway plunged down into impenetrable darkness. Kane stood at its head, the incandescent beam of the flashlight illuminating only the first few steps.
Quayle prodded Fand hard in the small of the back with the bore of the subgun. She uttered a short cry of annoyed pain, and Kane took the first step down into the yawning blackness. He experienced the shuddery sensation of striding down the petrified tongue of a gargantuan sea monster, descending blithely into its gullet.
The light gleamed on a strange, sleek, glossy substance coating the walls, suggestive of ceramic or enamel. He assumed they were below sea level now and the composition of the walls kept out the water.
The stairs ended in an oval chamber, and by casting about the light, Kane saw the rubble of decayed furniture, scattered rags of tapestries, moldering heaps of trash and scatterings of rotten, soggy wood. Mixed in with the wood was a litter of oddly shaped metal bits, like the clasps and locks of jewelry or storage boxes.
At the far end of the chamber, rising on a pedestal, was a small statue of a kraken, tentacles curving up and over its cylindrical body. It appeared to be made of the same slightly reflective ceramic substance as on the walls. On closer inspection, the kraken and the pedestal itself seemed to be molded out of the wall that backed them, as if it were all one continuous piece.
Kane shone the xenon all around and with a cold sarcasm announced, "Congratulations, Quayle. You've discovered the city dump of Lyonesse."
He expected his voice to echo, but it didn't, as if the chamber had sound-absorbing qualities.
With his characteristic grunt, Quayle motioned Kane to move aside. "Keep your light on the statue," he ordered. "If you shine it in my eyes, I'll open fire very indiscriminately. Even if I can't see you, in these close quarters I'll kill at least one of you."
Kane didn't bother with a response, watching as Quayle carefully inspected the kraken, running his fingers all over the tentacles. After a few moments, he declared with a great deal of satisfaction, "Ah."
Quayle had the index finger of one hand inserted up to the first joint into a raised sucker ring of a tentacle. He threw a preening smile toward Kane and Fand as if he expected congratulations.
"So?" Kane demanded. "The arm is hollow."
Still smiling, Quayle removed from a jacket pocket a small sphere, holding it between thumb and forefinger. With a slight start, Kane recognized it from his jump-dream communication with Fand. He realized it bore the same glassy sheen as the walls of the chamber.
Quayle placed the bead of orichalcum into the sucker ring, fitting it perfectly on the molded rim. He tapped it and the orb disappeared. The sound of it clicking and rolling down the hollow tentacle was easily audible.
From the saucer-shaped eyes of the kraken beat a slow pulse of uncolored light. The wall to which the statue and pedestal were attached shivered, then began to rotate, turning a U curve on invisible pivots. Stale, fetid air gusted out, ruffling Kane's and Fand's hair and causing even Quayle to reflexively lift a hand to his nose. With the barrel of the MP-5, he gestured to the opening. "Ladies and prisoners first."
Squaring his shoulders, the short hairs at the back of his neck bristling, Kane stepped through the opening, the flashlight striking dull reflections on the glossy walls. The room was huge and long and filled with darkness. Dim shapes towered all around them in the gloom.
An immense statue loomed in the center of the chamber, rearing from a plinth of greenish-black stone. The effigy dwarfed everything else in the room, rising at least twenty feet high. It possessed humanoid legs and hips, but the upper body had the form of the kraken, with six tentacled arms, three on each side. The beaked head sported little nubbin horns, and the eyes in the blank face were fist-size gemstones.
"Belial, I presume," Quayle said with a quiet geniality. "Here is where his sons were made."
Kane followed the short sweep of the subgun's barrel and saw a dais of the same black-green stone, crafted into the likeness of many loopings of heavy chain, fantastically interwoven. The length of chain swarmed with monstrosities. The links were grotesque faces, deformed heads sporting stubby horns. A pair of chains crossed above the dais, and where the two strands intersected hung a face of horror, with fanged mouth agape in a demonic howl. Absently, Kane noted the dark, circular hollow behind the molded tongue.
The floor of the dais was a many-faceted convex disc of red-tinted crystalline stone, like semi-opaque quartz. He estimated it as at least five feet in diameter. Suspended above it by ceramic chains was an identical crystal disk, but this one was concave.Fand murmured a few words in Gaelic, her tone full of loathing. Kane glanced toward her and saw she was not looking at the statue or the dais. Spreading out from a corner, piled high in a pyramid, were dozens, perhaps even scores of yellowed skulls. Almost all of them appeared to be malformed, with back-sloping foreheads and bony ridges jutting out over empty eye sockets. Twisted little knobs projected from the craniums—some of them blunt, others long and curved, like the horns of a ram.
"The birthing ward of the Firbolgs," Fand said in an unsteady whisper. "Unholy mixtures of animal and man."
Kane tried to control the nausea leapfrogging in his belly. He thought of Jacko, of the hybrids and even of Fand, who was herself a hybrid. The obsession to toy with the very essence of creation hadn't begun with the Totality Concept or even the Nazis.
Kane shifted the flashlight away from the stacked, grinning skulls and played it over a recess in the wall. A figure sat there, on a seat of the glassy stone roughly hewed into the likeness of a chair. It appeared to be the cadaver of a man wearing ornate armor, the fleshless head tilted back with the mouth hanging open. The helmet and metal corslet had a waxy sheen, as if they were lacquered with the same substance as coated the walls.
He didn't devote any time to wondering who the man might have been or why he was sitting there. His eyes were drawn to the naked broadsword lying at the corpse's feet. Though the metal was dulled, the blade was well over three feet in length. Kane didn't linger over it. He swept the xenon beam around, pretending to be fascinated by the friezes and geometric forms carved on the walls.
"I don't see your balls, Captain," Kane deadpanned.
The big man boomed out a laugh, but not in appreciation of Kane's wit. "That's because you look, but you do not see."
Quayle's gaze was fixed upon the monstrous effigy of Belial, smiling up at it beatifically. Kane followed his cyclopean stare, casting the flashlight onto it. The brilliant beam struck little twinkles of incandescence on the swarm of tentacles. Embedded in each one of the sucker rings gleamed orbs of orichalcum.
"What are you going to do now, Balor?" Fand demanded. "Pry them out and ship them back to England—and blow your entire country to atoms?"
Quayle threw her a mocking glance. "Hardly my country."
Fand waved to the sphere-studded tentacles. "The beads of orichalcum are highly unstable. Without the proper machinery, you'd be far safer transporting a boatload of plutonium."
Quayle patted one of the black bags at his belt. "As long the beads aren't exposed directly to the sun and don't absorb solar rays, the safety factor is acceptable."
Fand snorted disdainfully. "That's what Morrigan wanted you to believe."
"I've done my own research."
"Not nearly enough of it. Otherwise, you'd know it takes only one bead of orichalcum to trigger a chain reaction."
Quayle frowned, but he said nothing.
Fand went on in a rush, "If one bead detonates, it will touch off all the others in the vicinity, regardless of whether you have them in a sunless and airtight container or not. It'll be a firestorm of the likes not seen since the cataclysm that tore the world asunder and sank Atlantis and all her colonies millennia ago."
Quayle squinted with his good eye, gesturing to orbs on the statue's six arms. "Why didn't those ignite during the cataclysm?"
"Several reasons," Kane spoke up. "First of all, the stuff this vault is made out of probably acts as shielding, like vanadium alloy or lead. Not only can light not penetrate, but neither can whatever radiation the orichalcum emits."
"Not to mention," said Fand, picking up Kane's thread of theory, "there is a million square miles of ocean between here and where the Atlantean homeland was supposedly located, near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Lyonesse wasn't spared the tsunamis or earth changes, but its supply of orichalcum was protected."
Quayle shifted his feet uncertainly. "Morrigan wanted me to take the beads back to England so I'd destroy it?"
"Exactly," Fand said decisively. "She was willing to sacrifice herself if it meant turning Britain into a cinder."
"And you don't want that to happen?"
"No. I am a protector of life, a creator of it, not a destroyer." Fand softened her tone, trying to smooth out the edges, substituting compassion for arrogance. "Even if the orichalcum could be restricted only to England, I would still try to prevent such a catastrophe. Now that Strongbow no longer rules England, now that the Imperium is no more, our two nations with their intertwined histories should become one people. The divisions should end between us. Don't you see that's the only logical course to take, Aubrey?"
Kane watched Quayle's face during Fand's brief appeal to reason, and saw indecision registered on it. But with her use of his name, his head swiveled swiftly toward her. Both of his eyes glinted gimlet hard.
"Aubrey," he echoed, stretching out the syllables, Awww-braaay. "And Morrigan called me 'my captain.'" He glared at Kane. "And what do you call me? Evil-eye? Balor? The fat bastard?"
Kane kept his own suggestions to himself. Still staring into his face, Quayle took a quick sidestep and slammed the frame of the MP-5 against the side of Fand's head. She went staggering across the chamber and fell, long arms and legs asprawl.
Kane made a blind, instinctive lunge for Quayle, and the man pounded the butt of the subgun into the pit of his belly. As he folded over in the direction of the sickening blow, Quayle jacked up a knee against his chin. It was like being kicked by a redwood.
Kane fell onto his side, dropping the xenon flashlight as he did so. It fell over, the beam glancing in sparkling pinpoints from the gemstones in the idol's eyes.
"Get up!" Quayle roared, kicking him on his injured thigh. "Get the fuck up! Get up and start pulling the orichalcum out of those fucking arms!"
Fiery agony spread up and down Kane's leg, as he forced himself to his elbows, teeth clamped tight on a cry of pain. He grated, "Pull your own fucking arms, Aubrey."
A full-throated shriek filled the chamber, reverberating like the echoes of a gong. Blood streaming down her face, Fand bounded toward Quayle, the broadsword held in a two-fisted grip. Her golden eyes seethed with the wild fury of the Fand who was one with the hills, the winds and the gray seas of Erin.
The mad Fand.
Chapter 29
She screamed a torrent of enraged Gaelic, and swung the huge sword like a cleaver. All Kane could think of to do was scramble out of her way.
The point of the sword snagged in the loose folds of Quayle's throat, but it only pierced the outer flesh, drawing a fine thread of blood, bright against the stark pallor of his complexion.
He backpedaled as fast as his bulk would- allow, bringing up his MP-5. He squeezed off only a single round before the sword swept across and clanged loudly against the barrel of the blaster, ripping it from his hands and sending it flying. It clattered end over end onto the crystal-floored dais.
The one shot took Fand high in the chest. Kane saw a scrap of the combat vest fly away, exposing the metal mesh beneath. The pile-driving impact rocked her back on her heels and drove most of the air from her lungs. As she staggered, leather-shod feet rasping for purchase on the floor, she hurled the broadsword straight up, point first.
Kane shot out an arm and his hand closed around the hilt. He spun around to face Quayle, whose white face was twisted in fury as he drew his cutlass. Kane hefted the broadsword with one hand. Although the weapon seemed as heavy as lead, he gave two short strokes to loosen his wrist.
As he stared at Quayle, for just an instant, a fleeting microsecond, the man's bleached flesh and uniform rippled away, like water sluicing over a pane of dusty glass. He saw Balor facing him, his gray beard plaited into two thick braids upon his chest. The image faded almost immediately, but Kane growled, "This was a long time in coming between you and me, Evil-eye."
Quayle's eye flickered in momentary confusion. His chalk-colored lips twitched and whispered, almost to himself, "Kane? Ka'in?"
Kane lunged. Quayle met the attack by hacking wildly, his blade gleaming brightly in the illumination shed by the xenon. The cutlass engaged the broadsword with bold cross strokes and furious thrusts.
Kane kept his sword from being knocked out of line as the two men circled each other, the blades ringing together with an almost continuous clangor. He made use of the heavier broadsword to drive Quayle backward.
