The cathedral remained silent for almost a minute, the robed figure at the altar standing there with his hand still held high, the red-filtered sunlight playing through his outstretched fingers. The congregation began shuffling just a little, a few of the children becoming restless as they waited for what was to come next. Domi watched, eyes narrowed as she traced the red lines that played across the hooded figure’s cassock like bloody veins.
Finally the robed figure spoke, his voice loud in the echoing chamber of the cathedral. “Friends,” he began, bringing both hands up to his head and pushing back the white hood of his robe. Beneath, he was middle-aged, a square face, clean-shaven with the hint of a tan on his balding pate, a ruddy redness to his cheeks. “Utopia is here, opening before you like a flower in the springtime, paradise on Earth.”
Domi turned her head a moment, saw the beatific smiling faces of the crowd to either side of her. The members of this congregation were pleased; they felt safe with these words.
“And what has brought about this utopia?” the man in the white robes asked rhetorically. “Not a baron, that’s for sure. We need no barons here, now that we have god. But what is god? you may ask.”
The priest left the question hanging in the air for a few seconds, and Domi heard the mumblings of several people around her as they whispered the familiar answer, speaking it quietly to themselves.
“God is love,” the white-robed priest announced, spinning around at the altar and sweeping his arms through the air to encompass every person in the vast audience. “This is god, this thing you feel here, among your fellow men and women.”
“And children!” a voice shouted from over to Domi’s right, and several of the audience members laughed with embarrassment. It was a child’s voice, a little girl, excited and restless at the communion.
“Indeed.” The priest smiled. “Children, too. We mustn’t forget them.” He turned, waving to the part of the audience where the girl’s voice had emanated from before turning back to address everyone. “I don’t think she’s going to let me forget them anytime soon,” he said with the faux secrecy of a true showman.
Some of the audience laughed at this, several applauding just for a moment.
Up on the podium, the white-robed figure was turning once again, raising his arms to indicate the rough-hewn walls of the cathedral. “God promised to bring heaven to Earth, and so he has. You are safe, well fed, you are loved. He demands nothing in return, your strength is his strength.
“Our love is rock, and a rock never breaks.”
Domi felt her breath catch in her throat. The rock god was the thing that had almost destroyed Cerberus, had killed her teammates and left Brigid Baptiste among the missing, possibly dead. His name was Ullikummis and his influence now stretched to whole villes, reshaping them to worship him. And such was his power, Domi realized, that now his people need not even speak his name. He was rock, and rock was love. Domi felt the cobra-creeping fear in her belly as she looked once more at the joyful faces of the congregation all around her. Ullikummis was in their hearts now, his bloody form of salvation sweeping them up like the tide.
For just a moment a breeze blew in from the open door behind Domi, and it seemed Arctic-cold despite the warmth of the June morning. Domi sank into her seat, listening to more of the preachings of this priest of the New Order.
Chapter 4
There came a warm sensation in Kane’s eye and his vision blurred for a scant second. When it cleared, a monstrous child-thing was standing in front of him, his lizard-slit eyes staring into his own. Kane recoiled and tried to pull himself away, but the thing with lizard eyes continued to stare, holding his gaze.
Kane studied him.
His flesh was dark and calloused, hardened like something hewn from stone. He stood as if uncomfortable, limbs held awkwardly, the shoulders hunched as though his back was in pain. He wasn’t standing in front of him, Kane realized with a start—he was standing in a tall square frame of glass, a mirror. The mirror was set into a wall carved of stone, the glass turning dark and smoky at its edges, a decorative affectation to the design. The wall itself was of a bright stone the color of sand, and a crimson band had been painted through it like the bloody slash of a knife. The wall radiated heat as fierce sunlight played across its surface. They were indoors, but it was still bright, with square, open windows lining the wall opposite the mirror.
Where am I? Kane wondered.
The statuelike figure in the mirror smiled, a frightful rending of the rock that clad his face, his primitive features turning him into something even more hideous. It took a moment for Kane to recognize it, or at least he thought that he did. Though a child, the creature was tall—towering even—yet he still carried himself with the awkwardness of a child getting used to the changing shapes of his forming body. The tall child turned from the mirror, trudging down a flight of steps and into the darkness. It was cooler here, as they went underground, away from the sun. Kane seemed to be seeing all of this, yet he was traveling with the monstrous child, as if he was a part of him, as if the thing in the mirror was him. It was like a dream, a vivid story that Kane was being swept up by.
The child walked and Kane remained with him, feeling the weight of his stone cladding, the hideous aches that fought for attention in his muscles. He felt stretched, pulled almost to breaking point, his muscles screaming as if shot through with influenza.
His feet—which is to say, the child’s feet—clomped heavily on the brick floor, stone on stone as he descended the steps. Strange noises flittered to his ears from the foot of the stairs, and Kane marveled as they entered a vast laboratory set in the windowless room there. Clay containers hissed and burbled, naked flames playing on their bottoms and sides. The flames were mostly blue or orange, but Kane noticed that two of them were a fearsome green and a disarming lilac, neither color natural. A plain wooden bench waited in the center of the room, a high side table next to it like a bedside cabinet. A network of glass tubes ran along one wall, multicolored liquids turning to gas or being refined into solid lumps of crystal at various apertures along its glistening, sleek lines. A figure stood there amid the bubbling tubes, his back to the child, his green scaled flesh the color of jade. Kane looked at the figure with fascination—it was an Annunaki, the enemies of mankind. Kane tried to leap, to attack this hated enemy, but he was unable to move, still watching events as though watching a stage play.
Without warning, the scaled figure turned and Kane saw a strange apparatus masked the top half of his lizardlike face. The apparatus was made of circles of glass, lenses on metal arms that could be brought in front of his eyes to magnify his vision, one in front of another. The lens arrangement stood out almost six inches from the Annunaki creature’s face, and some of the metal arms remained in the upright position, the lenses not in use by its wearer. Behind the magnifying lenses, the creature’s eyes were as green as his skin with twin vertical slits down their centers in the bottomless black of the grave. The monster admired the stone child who was Kane for a moment, gazing up and down as though admiring his handiwork.
“You’re looking tall,” the creature with the magnifying lenses stated. Kane got the indefinable impression that this Annunaki saw him not as a living creature but as simply a slab of meat on which to experiment, a chef meeting a farm animal.
After a brief exchange, the child lay on the wooden bench, a slab of meat on the butcher’s block, and Kane seemed to be lying there with him, two as one. Then the Annunaki with the strange eyewear checked at some solution that was bubbling close to Kane’s ears, and he heard the hiss of steam as some superheated liquid expanded and tried to escape its container.
“Calm yourself, child,” the jade-scaled Annunaki instructed, his tone soothing. “I can hear your breathing from all the way over here.”
“I’m sorry, Lord Ningishzidda,” the child said,