Between each of the pillars stood a Jaffa guard, heads obscured by the sinister double-serpent helm of Neheb-Kau. Their armor was golden, and in far better repair than that of the other warriors he had seen. The God’s personal guard, Teal’c guessed. In fact, this entire chamber was as polished and well-maintained as Teal’c would have expected a System Lord’s property to be. He and Carter must be close to Neheb-Kau.
It told him much about the Goa’uld that he apparently chose to decorate the interior of his vessel as one might design a tomb.
The golden warriors remained motionless, but Teal’c was certain that if he so much as moved, their weapons would be on him. So he stood, mirroring their stillness, while water dripped from his skin and his ragged civilian clothes and pattered onto the gleaming floor.
Beside him, Carter shivered uncomfortably.
A hatch opened somewhere behind them. Teal’c listened, counted five Jaffa approaching him. One of them had a stride he recognized, a weight to his footfalls that he remembered from the Pit of Sorrows. Four of the warriors took up guard positions at his back, but the First Prime of Neheb-Kau continued walking, slow and unconcerned, until he was facing Teal’c and Carter.
His lined face creased in a grim smile. “Better,” he said in Goa’uld. “At least now, the slaves will not fear that specters walk amongst them.”
“Your hospitality is most…” Teal’c searched for the best word. “
Refreshing
.”
The Jaffa’s lip curled. “The least I could do.”
“Now that we are bathed, are we to meet Neheb-Kau?”
“The woman will. You cannot share her honor.”
“I see no honor in bowing to a false God.”
“And I see no intellect in insulting those who hold your life in their hands. I suppose that makes us even.” The Jaffa raised a hand, gestured to the guards behind Teal’c. “Take her.”
He heard the men move forwards. Perhaps these were different warriors than those he had encountered on the bridge, and not so well-trained, or maybe their closeness to Neheb-Kau was making them nervous. Whatever the reason, one of them stepped just a little too close to Teal’c as he moved towards Carter.
Teal’c whirled. He snapped his right arm back, his elbow hitting the First Prime hard in the chest, and then hammered his first forwards into the other man’s neck armor. The control for his helm was there: not only did the blow stagger the warrior, but it also set his serpent-head retracting.
The First Prime snarled in anger, recovering instantly from the blow Teal’c had given him and whirling his staff weapon around in a hissing arc at head-height. Teal’c ducked under the weapon, using his momentum to kick out and sweep another Jaffa’s legs from under him, then launched himself up again and barreled into a third.
Behind him, the man whose helm he had caused to retract stepped away, completely disregarding Carter. Teal’c heard a brutal impact of bone on bone — her elbow, he guessed, slamming with stunning force into the man’s temple. As he swung around to dodge another staff blow he saw the Jaffa she had struck stumble, clutching the side of his skull.
He kicked out again, into the man’s thigh, and as the Jaffa howled and fell Teal’c snatched the staff weapon from him. He whipped it about towards the First Prime, thumbing the activation stud, and caught a zat beam clean in the chest.
In an instant, the world was a coruscating storm of lightning and pain. Dimly, he felt the black marble floor hit him in the knees, but sensation was already fleeing him. He reached out, clawing at the air, pure anger keeping him conscious long seconds after his wits should have fled him, but holding on to them took more strength than he possessed.
The last thing he heard, before he tumbled headlong into darkness, was Carter shouting his name.
The
output of the Goa’uld zat’nik’tel pistol was not wholly electrical. Samantha Carter had subjected several captured weapons to rigorous experimentation months before, and had determined that the energy pulse they fired was more akin to a tuned resonance of the central nervous system than it was to raw voltage. Nevertheless, once the pulse had struck a target, it did tend to propagate very much as lightning would.
The clothes Carter was wearing when Teal’c had been shot were still saturated with water from the dungeon, and she was standing close by him. When the beam struck him, it had her off her feet too.
It was only a fraction of the zat’s full power, but it still paralyzed her for a second. As soon as she saw Teal’c hit the energy of the shot flooded through her, jerking her hard backwards as her muscles spasmed, filling her vision with light, her ears with a stuttering whine. She staggered, tried for a moment to regain her balance, but the strength had gone out of her. She sagged to the floor.
As she collapsed, Teal’c was already on his knees. She saw him fighting the effects of the beam, but there was never any hope of overcoming it. He reached out, skin still crawling with brilliant serpents of light, and then topped face-down.
“Teal’c!” she shouted, uselessly.
“Silence!” Carter looked up to see the zat’s head flick in her direction. “On your feet.”
Behind the weapon, the First Prime’s face was set hard. Carter tried to raise herself, gingerly, but her first attempt failed. Her muscles were still weakened by the residual energy. As she tried a second time, the man made an exasperated sound, put his gun away and reached down to take her arm.
He hauled her upright as his companions gathered around Teal’c.
Carter watched them lift him. “Is he all right?”
“He lives, for now.” The man released her, watching her carefully. To make sure she didn’t fall again, Carter guessed. His master had probably demanded she be delivered intact.
“What do you mean, for now? What’s going to happen to him?”
“That does not concern you.”
“Of course it concerns me!”
The First Prime raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps I should have made myself clear. His fate is utterly beyond your control, and yours hangs in the balance. Therefore, you would do better to focus on what is about to happen to you.”
The four Jaffa were standing around Teal’c, holding him upright. One of them pressed a control on his wrist armor, activating the transporter. As Carter watched, the rings dropped down around the little group, surrounding them in a cage of stone for a moment before light flooded down.
“No,” she breathed.
When the rings rose again, they were empty.
Carter found herself staring at the place Teal’c had been. For a moment, the suddenness with which he had been taken almost felled her, as brutal as the zat’s stray charge. She had been in the Jaffa’s company so long, since the Pit of Sorrows had swallowed them both and flung itself up towards the stars, that for a second or two she had to fight back a wave of panic.
The hallway around her felt very large, and very quiet.
She took a breath, straightened her back, and forced herself calm. The panic retreated. In a way, its threat had been a positive thing — the spark of adrenaline it had brought served to sharpen Carter’s senses. It was a lesson she had learned long ago; fear was not always the enemy, as long as it was kept on a tight enough leash.
And standing in the depths of a Goa’uld starship, an unknown distance from Earth, unarmed and alone and with no immediate prospects for escape, Carter knew she had to keep the leash very tight indeed.
“All right,” she said coldly. “What happens now?”
“You are to be presented to my master,” the First Prime replied. “The God, Neheb-Kau.”
Carter lifted her arms a little way from her body and looked pointedly down at herself, at her sodden jeans and stained cotton shirt. “Like this?”
“Better that, than with a hundred of Ra’s victims on your skin.”
The dust
, she thought. And the expression on the man’s face told her that he took no pleasure in the notion. She stored that knowledge away, along with the tiny measure of hope it brought her.
This Jaffa, this First Prime, seemed as repulsed by the Ash Eater’s works as she was.
“Since you put it like that…” She ran a hand back through her hair. Drying in the hall’s cool air, it was starting to stick uncomfortably to her scalp. “So. When does he want to see me?”
“He commanded that you be brought to him as soon as you were cleansed.” The Jaffa glanced warily up the hallway, towards the big golden doors at the far end. “Against my counsel.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “His curiosity is mighty. Now, walk with me. And do not try to escape again.”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” she said grimly. The gold-clad guards lining the walls were just as motionless as when she had arrived, but Carter knew just how fast their staff weapons could be brought to bear if she was foolish enough to try anything. If she was honest with herself, even Teal’c’s attack on the Jaffa was probably ill-judged. She had little doubt that these men would have cut down their own First Prime, without hesitation, if it meant protecting their God from danger.
Instead, Carter had decided to follow the basic military doctrine that, when faced with overwhelming odds, a soldier should retreat and gather as much intelligence as possible. Her life, and Teal’c’s, might depend on her discovering everything she could about their situation. Now looked very much like the time to start getting some answers.
The Jaffa was nodding her forwards. Carter set off, keeping her pace measured, as regular and unthreatening as possible, as she began to walk up to the golden doors.
It took longer to get there than Carter had estimated. The hallway was very long indeed. The First Prime’s footfalls matched hers the whole way. And as they passed each set of guards, the golden men dropped to one knee in perfect and practiced sequence.
Unusually, the doors did not slide apart when she reached them. Instead, they swung inwards, silent and heavy. Carter stepped through, into flickering gloom and hazy air.
The ceiling of this new chamber was somewhat higher than that of the hallway, but it still felt oppressive. It was a wide, square room, lit only by burning lanterns set into alcoves. The rear wall sloped oddly, and the centre of the floor was dominated by a low, stepped platform, topped with a golden throne. There was a door to either side of the chamber, each guarded by two more of the Jaffa Carter had seen in the hallway.
The air smelled of lantern-smoke and spices.
Behind her, the doors swung closed; Carter felt a slight brush of the air they displaced as they moved. A moment later the First Prime appeared next to her. ”Human,” he said quietly.
“Yes?”
“I say this not for your well-being, but for my own. Should the God choose to remove his mask, you may find the sight unsettling.” His voice lowered further. “You will keep your eyes longer if you do not react.”
“Unsettling?” There was something in the way he had spoken that Carter didn’t like at all. “What do you mean?”
“Pray you do not find out.”
Carter hated it when people made cryptic statements at her, then refused to follow them up. She was about to say so when a sound rang out through the room; a soft, metallic chiming. It rang three times, then silenced.
A door to Carter’s right, behind the throne, slid aside.
Through it stepped two more Jaffa guards. Then a pair of human slaves, one male, one female, naked but for loincloths and thick chains of gold at their wrists and throats. Their scalps were shaved, their eyes were ringed with kohl. They looked utterly terrified.
Behind these two walked the God, Neheb-Kau.
As his First Prime had hinted, the Goa’uld’s head was enclosed in glittering mechanized armor, gold and gleaming like the death-mask of a pharaoh. His shoulders were similarly adorned, and he wore a jeweled pectoral across his chest. The rest of him was concealed in long robes of silk, utterly black.
Next to her, the First Prime dropped to one knee.
The procession continued walking behind the throne. Behind Neheb-Kau paced a tall, robed man, his face gaunt and frowning, and behind him two more Jaffa. As Carter watched the guards spread out, taking position on either side of the platform. Neheb-Kau made his way to the throne and sat, carefully, while the slaves stepped behind him. The robed man stood to the God’s left, beside the throne.
Once everyone was still, Neheb-Kau raised a hand. “Kafra, rise. Introduce our guest.”
His voice was high, a thin rushing behind his mask, yet backed with the unmistakable echo of a Goa’uld parasite tugging at human vocal chords. There was a strangeness to it, a liquid, pestilent quality, and the hand he had raised was withered and skeletal, the flesh of it blackened like rotted fruit.
No wonder his First Prime — Kafra — had warned her about what lay behind that metal face.
“My Lord.” The Jaffa got up. “This is the human we discovered within the Pit of Sorrows. We found her with the First Prime of Apophis.”
Neheb-Kau’s mask tilted a fraction. “You are a long way from home, human.”
Carter had seldom felt further. “I know.”
“I wonder if you do.” The God leaned forwards, the silk of his robes whispering. “Perhaps I should explain your situation. You were discovered, armed, aboard my personal property, in the company of the First Prime of a rival System Lord. You attacked my Jaffa, killing one of them. My technicians tell me that you had attempted to access the control systems of the Pit of Sorrows during its journey, no doubt to prevent it reaching me.” He settled back again, and spread his ruined hands. “And now you stand before me, aboard my throneship, and do not even afford me the proper respect. Tell me, why should you not die now?
“Because I’m not your enemy,” said Carter. She hoped it was true. “Neither is Teal’c — he doesn’t even serve Apophis anymore.”
“He does not? How can this be?”
Carter wondered how far she should go with her explanation.
Not very far at all
, she decided. “He chose to work with us… With me, instead. Against Apophis.” She shrugged. “It’s kind of a long story…”