“No human could ever navigate tesseract space,” Balam said with the wisdom of the ages. He was ancient, the last of the Archons who had dwelled in secret on planet Earth for many centuries. While he admired Kane, Balam felt sure the human was being foolish. No son of the apes could possibly enter the
multidimensional space and maintain his sanity. Some things were simply not meant for humankind.
“I insist you remove yourself from the chair. Do so now, before you lose everything on this fool’s errand.”
Kane took a steadying breath, and as he did so the chair seemed to oscillate in time with him. “Balam, can you still see what I see? Are we still linked?”
Balam nodded his heavy, bulbous head. “We are.”
“Then I’m going to need your help,” Kane explained. “Tune into my frequency, or whatever it is you do with that freaky brain of yours. You’re going to be my navigator.”
“Kane, I can’t possibly...” Balam began.
“The stakes are too high for that shit,” Kane growled.
“What you’re suggesting,” Balam said, the tension clear in his usually calm voice, “is entering dimensional planes that humans have no equipment to even perceive. The dangers are too great—you will be overwhelmed in a matter of seconds and I cannot possibly give consent to that. It is suicide, plain and simple.”
“Do you know what they used to say about me back in Cobaltville, back when I was a Magistrate?” Kane asked.
“Is this a rhetorical question?” Balam replied in confusion.
“They used to send me up front on exploratory missions,” Kane continued. “They said I had a point-man sense, that I could sniff out danger before it happened. That point-man sense kept me alive, and it saved more than one of my colleagues.”
“Friend Kane, with my sincerest respect, the words you are speaking are idiocy,” Balam argued. “Whatever your abilities may be in our world, you will be
entering a separate plane of reality with no markers or even a frame of reference.”
“And that’s why you’re going to be my navigator,” Kane said. “Chair’s the engine—you’re the map reader.”
Kane clenched his teeth once again as another wave of hideous power emanated from the space navigation chair, firing through every cell of his body as it responded to his mental command. Kane was shaking violently in his seat, and Balam was forced to step back as a burst of static electricity zapped across the cube-space. The ex-Mag clenched the arms of the chair with such strength that his fingers dug into the armrests. Then Balam saw a lopsided smile cross Kane’s lips.
* * *
W
ITHIN
HIS
FRACTURING
mindscape, Kane saw the different levels of space open up within the battle of the gods. The Annunaki were multidimensional, but it was only now that he began to truly see that. They were shapes and colors and smells he could not describe, things that clashed and morphed and changed. Behind them, the hexagonal chamber of
Tiamat
appeared as solid as it ever had, and Kane clung to it to retain his sense of space. The humanoid figures of Enlil and Ullikummis struck out at each other, their battle raging on the physical plane he knew.
“Lakesh,” Kane said, trusting his Commtact to carry the words, “I’m going to need you and Brewster covering my ass for the string-theory shit, okay?”
Close to Kane’s ear, Lakesh’s voice gave assent. “Okay, Kane, we’re with you in spirit.”
“Grant?” Kane said, trying a second time as Brewster patched through the communication. “I want you up here ASAP. You and Rosie have got a couple of gods to execute. You read me?”
“I read you, man,” Grant grumbled, “but you’re asking a lot. We haven’t had much success offing the Annunaki before now. What makes you think things’ll work out different this time?”
“Because you have a man on the inside,” Kane said. “Literally. I’m going into their soulscape to finish this once and for all. But time’s ticking, and I’m going to have to start this party without you.”
“That’s cool,” Grant said. “We’ll be there as soon as.”
Kane’s final instruction was merely voiced, engendering the disconcerting feeling of speaking to someone in the same room as he was and yet thousands of miles away. “Balam?” Kane asked. “You have your eyes on, my friend?”
Kane could hear Balam take a steadying breath, even over the sounds of conflict in the hexagonal chamber.
“I will do my best, Kane,” Balam assured him. “But I apologize if—”
“Save the apologies for my funeral,” Kane told him.
For a moment, the twin figures before him raged and fought, Enlil swinging his son’s rock body by one arm before being tossed aside by a flick of his mighty son’s wrist.
“Okay, people,” Kane said, steely determination in his voice. “We’re doing this together. On three.”
With that, Kane’s astral form charged forward beneath the towering arches of the room inside the belly of
Tiamat,
lunging forward as the Annunaki batted at each other with all their might.
“One...”
As he—ran? floated? swam?—Kane looked past the battling figures, relaxing his eyes and seeing the sparkling lights once more, swirling around one another as they, too, clashed in the folds of enhanced space.
“Two...”
And in that moment Kane dived into the midst of them, allowing his form to be pulled and reshaped as it entered another plane of existence.
It was a moment that belonged in the history books.
“Three!”
It was the splitting of a man’s soul.
Chapter 15
Big things and little things, all of them vying for space, like a whirling mosaic that Kane could just barely make sense of, and only then if he looked at it from the corner of his eye.
The universe expanded before his eyes, a dark blanket dotted with stars. And the two figures danced on the universe, their movements as practiced as an ancient ballet, each one taking his role.
Which was Ullikummis?
Which was Enlil?
Kane could no longer tell. Now they were just two dancers whirling through the cosmic winds, playing each other at the great game of the gods.
For a moment, Kane stopped, holding his hands out before him. The limbs were transparent now, ephemeral things with no consistency. As he looked at the fingers of his right hand, seeing the stars shining through each one, they began to grow, elongating and expanding until they were no longer fingers at all, just a blot on his vision like a sty.
“Hold yourself together, friend Kane,” Balam instructed, seeing all that Kane saw via the psychic link they shared.
“C-c-can’t,” Kane said, struggling with the word.
“You are seeing the universe from another angle,” Balam told him reasonably, “but you must stay focused or the enormity of it all will overwhelm you.”
Kane bit down hard, feeling the sensation of his teeth crashing together in his mouth, bringing himself back from the brink of madness. The multiple images of time and space whirled before his eyes, static and ever-
changing, a continual contradiction.
Enlil took on a shape Kane recognized, though he appeared more like a Chinese dragon now, a serpentine line of red-gold scales capped with his sneering face. He lacked substance as Kane understood it, dancing through the universe like a constellation.
Kane turned—his head? his body?—and saw the rock figure of Ullikummis hurtling across the skies like a meteor shower, treading across the blanket dotted with stars before bombarding his father with the multiassault of his component parts, each rock bearing the Annunaki prince’s face.
Kane turned once more as the two figures whipped past him, seeing the sun properly for the first time.
“Hold focus,” Balam instructed, his voice a steady presence at the edge Kane’s consciousness.
Kane watched the sun, saw the dancing flames licking across its surface, reaching out to space only to scuttle back at the very last second, never daring to overextend their reach, like waves on the shore.
And then he was on Earth again, but no longer inside
Tiamat.
It was a ville now, perhaps Cobaltville, where he had grown up, or maybe one of the eight others, all of them strictly following the same design. People were running toward Kane, screaming in fear.
“Molecules,” Balam said.
“What?” Kane demanded.
“They are molecules, the debris of the battle,” Balam explained. “Your mind is finding a way to interpret what it is experiencing. These are sights no human has ever witnessed.”
Kane watched the screaming mob come running toward him, charging about and past him, knocking into him as he held his place, a rock in the human tide. They were running from something, he reasoned, and so he stepped forward, making his way through the crowd of faces as they surged by.
There, behind them, was the thing that everyone feared. Two great gods striding the skies, their arms gripped together, two hundred feet above Kane’s head. Their legs stood like impossible skyscrapers, reaching past the walled limits of the ville, lancing up to dizzying heights. Their faces were lost in clouds. But Kane recognized them as Enlil and Ullikummis, battling at whatever level this was.
They were gods, Kane felt now. They battled as gods, running across space, reaching into the very building blocks of the universe with the urgency of their fury.
“Don’t let yourself become overwhelmed,” Balam reminded. “Interpret and act, that’s all you can do now.”
Lightning danced across the clouds—
Krak-a-boom!
Krak-a-boom!
Krak-a-boom!
Each snap darted between the two colossal figures like the reaching fingers of a lover.
Kane searched around him as the crowd surged by, looking for some way to be a part of this war of the gods, some way to be more than an insect in the presence of the almighty.
* * *
O
UTSIDE
T
IAMAT
’
S
walls, the armies clashed, a thousand voices raised in hate. Numerous figures battled on the streets of bone, lone Annunaki facing down a dozen human beings, rending them to pulp with their brutal, relentless attacks. Pockets of humans succeeded in toppling one or two of their enemy through use of the stone weaponry with which Ullikummis had armed them.
Sela Stone watched from a doorlike recess of a wide column structure. The column twisted upon itself, around and around like an antelope’s horn. Bloodshed was all around, the white bone walls and cobbles of the streets awash with red. In her hand, Sela held the Colt Mark IV, its familiar weight providing scant reassurance. She had seen through the veil that Ullikummis had weaved before her and before the eyes of his faithful followers. Though she could not know it, the obedience stone that had been planted inside her months before had become dislodged when she had taken a savage side blow from one of the Annunaki soldiers. Her hair was matted with blood, thick, sticky, semidried gouts of it mixing with her short hair.
With the loss of the stone’s grip had come revelation, ironic as it was. The drumbeat, that brutal charging drumbeat, had disappeared from her thoughts where, for the past six weeks, it had raced in her head with all the power of thunder, impossible to ignore. Without its incessant noise, she was beginning to regain her composure, remember what it was to be Sela Sinclair and not Sela Stone, no longer just another “stone wife” in Ullikummis’s cheerless army. But still there were plenty of faithful to take up arms in the battle for control of
Tiamat.
All of them fought as if their lives depended on it, and the evidence was all around that in many cases it did—here were the dead bodies of her fallen colleagues, sprawled in street after street, in some places three or four deep.
And what were they fighting for? A promise? Was that all it took? Was that all any war took, ultimately?
Sela turned as a howling Annunaki dashed along the street, a narrow bone club hoisted in one of its gray-scaled hands. The club looked to have been fashioned from a leg bone, gouts of flesh still clinging to it near the grip. As he ran by, the Annunaki turned his head warily to check his surroundings, spotting Sela hiding in the shadows. His eyes narrowed and he halted in midstep, turning to face her, the club raised in one clawed hand.
Standing in the doorway, Sela willed him to move on, to leave her. She was still ordering her thoughts, still trying to remember what it was to be without the merciless drumbeat. “Go,” she whispered. She wanted no part of this war now, not until she properly comprehended what it was she was truly fighting for.
The gray-skinned Annunaki took no notice of her whispered instruction. Instead, he drew the club back and charged at Sela, reaching her in two long steps and swinging the simple weapon at her head. Sela ducked, her old U.S. Navy training kicking in automatically despite the lethargy that gripped her mind. The club cut the air, smashing against the back wall with the awful clanking sound of bone on bone.
Without raising her head, Sela’s right hand snapped out—the one with the pistol in it—and she slammed the nose of the Colt Mark IV against the kneecap of the Annunaki, squeezing the trigger as it struck. The pistol kicked in her hand, and the Annunaki listed to one side as the cartilage of his knee was shattered. The Annunaki were tough, their scaled skin acting like proxy-armor, but at point-blank range even they could not shrug off a bullet, not one so deftly placed.
Sela watched the Annunaki loll against the wall, falling forward as his leg bent, spitting a furious hiss from clenched jaws. Sela moved swiftly, extricating herself from the falling figure and dancing away in a quick two-step, the muzzle of her gun trained on her enemy.
The Annunaki recovered himself in an instant, clawing against the wall to hold himself up. He shouted something at Sela as his eyes met with hers, and though she could not understand his words the intent in its rage-filled eyes was unmistakable.
Around the two combatants, the sounds of battle reverberated from the hard walls, screams of dying and chants of determination. For one brief instant the battle cry went out:
“For Ullikummis!”
And then it was lost once more to the general hubbub of war.
Sela shifted her aim with the Colt, snapping off a shot at the gray Annunaki’s head as he leaped from the shadow-dark recess. He ran with a loping gait now, favoring his left leg. The right leg seemed intact, but the blackened hole where the bullet had pierced it was evident on one side, the shattered remains of the kneecap poking through the fleshlike fingernails pressed against the rubber of surgical gloves. Annunaki blood was oozing from the wound, tracing a line down the scales of the gray warrior’s leg, an unguent-like substance seeping out from the bullet hole. Sela blasted her pistol again, sending another shot at the charging Annunaki even as he swung the bone baton at her head.
Two of her shots struck the hobbled warrior in the face, a third skipping off his cheekbone in a blinding shower of sparks. More bullets lashed against the bone walls behind the Annunaki as Sela continued pumping the trigger, trying to fell the broad-shouldered beast. At the same time, the Annunaki’s club raced through the air, slamming against Sela’s side with a crack of her ribs. She fell, toppling over herself as she crashed to the ground.
Then the Annunaki was looming over her, struggling to hold himself upright where his knee had been torn apart. Sela looked up, bringing the Colt pistol around in an automatic response.
Sela squeezed the trigger at the same moment as the gray-faced Annunaki brought his simple weapon down on her skull. From nearby, the chant of “For Ullikummis!” drifted to Sela’s ears once more, the human army waging battle against the deadly aliens through the mazelike streets of
Tiamat.
“For humanity!” Sela shouted as the Colt pistol kicked in her hand.
* * *
K
ANE
DUCKED
as the debris from another lightning blast hurtled to the ground, great chunks of impossible architecture smashing into a million glistening pieces as they struck the floor. The buildings around him were elaborate, more so than the ones he recalled from Cobaltville and the other villes. They towered into the heavens, bloated minarets like crowns atop each one, swirling glyphs and curlicues running up their towering columns in patterns of archaic beauty, all the colors of the rainbow held in every surface, every atom. It was mesmerizing to look at, an image so absolute that it transfixed the human eye. But then, it wasn’t the human eye, was it?
Kane remembered how he had come to be here, how he was interpreting the wealth of data that was cast toward him in the many levels of the astral world,
trying to make sense of this incredible multiangled war through the dimensions of string theory.
Kane turned away, shaking off the unsettling feeling that he was being drawn in by the colors of the architecture. Everything here was different, multifaceted in such a way that new angles existed that Kane had never seen before, new twists in the cosmic spectrum.
The ex-Mag stepped out of their path as the horrified crowd hurried past, staggering against one of the
rainbow-colored walls. It had begun as a vision of a ville, but the whole structure was changing, warping in on itself as Kane looked, each building becoming impossibly detailed, detail within the detail, worlds within worlds. The wall beside him seemed to be changing even as he looked at it, swirling in a miasma of rushing colors, its shapes, its very density altering over and over like a flick book of mismatched imagery.
Kane blinked forcefully, trying to hold on to his sense of perspective. “You were a Magistrate, damn it,” he told himself. Magistrates only dealt in absolutes.
Sound was rushing past his ears, a hush-hushing sound like breakers on a beach, the coughing of wind through the mountains. Kane tried to steady himself against that wall as the great shadows of gods moved through space above him, shock waves reverberating through the landscape with each collision.
It was all too much, all too big, Kane realized. He was losing himself to the enormity of the god war, losing his sense of being as he strode in a landscape that man was never meant to see. As he looked at his hands, Kane saw them expand once more, saw his fingers bloom with ghost images, widening and lengthening until they seemed to claw into yet another dimension, bending into an angle that he could not yet perceive.
“Keep it together,” Kane whispered to himself. “Just for a minute. Just till it’s over.”
Above Kane, the towering shadow that was Enlil tossed another lightning bolt at his impossible foe, a hurricane fighting a mountain. The space that was Ullikummis staggered, and the skies seemed to shift with him.
Ullikummis spoke then, and his voice boomed across the skies like a thunderclap. “You made me your Godkiller, Father,” he called, “and now I come to execute the one pretender god who knows only violence and hate. Now I come to kill-execute-assassinate you-father-Enlil-Overlord-living shape.”
Kane turned away, bringing his hands up to his head, cursing the way his brain throbbed against the casing of his skull. He was hearing the words—some words—but they were many words now, breaking into streams of alternatives like a catalog of synonyms.
* * *
I
N
THE
STOREROOM
in Agartha, Balam watched wide-eyed as another burst of static electricity emanated from the semisentient chair where Kane squirmed, shooting across the cube-shaped room in a fearsome white streak. Kane shook violently in the chair as the electricity struck against the wall of the massive cube container, dissipating in a circular red glare that fizzled and faded in a matter of seconds.