Bloodstone Page 24

  The streets were wide and elegantly paved, the houses built of white rock, many boasting colorful mosaics. Statues lined the avenues, heroic figures in the armor of Atlantis. Although Babylon was a relatively new city, many of the statues and ornaments had been looted from an Atlantean site, as had much of the stone used in the buildings. The riders moved on through an open market square with rotting fruit displayed in the stalls: brown, partly collapsed apples, oranges covered with blue-gray mold. Slowly they rode on, passing a tavern. Several bench tables were set outside the main doors, and on them were goblets and plates of mildewed bread and cheese.

  Not a dog or a cat moved in the silence, and no flies buzzed around the decomposing food. In the clear sky above them no bird flew.

  Gareth eased his horse alongside the mount carrying his mother and Sam. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “You will,” she promised him.

  On they rode, through narrow streets and out onto broad avenues, the hoofbeats echoing through the city. Shannow loosened his pistols in their scabbards, his eyes scanning the deserted homes. Ahead of them was a huge coliseum five stories high, colossal, demonic statues surrounding it, images of demons, horned and scaled. Shannow drew back on the reins. “Where now?” he asked Amaziga.

  “Lucas says that beyond the coliseum’s arena is a wide tunnel leading into the palace. The grounds beyond that contain the remnants of the stone circle.”

  Shannow gazed up at the enormous building. “It must hold thousands,” he said.

  “Forty-two thousand,” said Amaziga. “Let’s go on.”

  The central avenue led directly to the bronze gates of the main entrance; they were open, and Shannow rode through into an arched tunnel. Many doorways opened onto stairs to the left and right, but the trio rode on and down, emerging at last into what had been a sand-covered arena.

  Now it boasted a new carpet. Corpses lay everywhere, dried husks that once had been human. Shannow’s horse was reluctant to move on, but he urged it forward. The gelding stepped out gingerly, its hoof striking a corpse just below the knee; the leg snapped and fell away.

  Shannow looked around as the horse slowly picked its way across the center of the arena. Row upon row of seats, in tier upon tier, ringed the circle. Corpses filled every seat.

  “My God!” whispered Gareth Archer.

  “No,” said Shannow, “their god.”

  “Why would he kill them all? All his people?”

  “He had no more use for them,” said Amaziga, her voice flat, cold, and emotionless. “He found a gateway to a land of plenty. What you see here is the result of his last supper.”

  “Sweet Jesus!”

  With great care they moved across the arena of death, and Gareth kept his eyes fixed on the distant entrance to yet another tunnel, wincing as dried bones broke beneath his mount’s hooves. At last they reached the far side, and Gareth swung in his saddle, looking back over the coliseum and its silent audience.

  Forty-two thousand people, their bodies drained of moisture. He shuddered and followed the others down into the second tunnel.

  The palace gardens were overgrown with weeds and bracken, and only three of the old stones were still standing. One of them had slipped to the right, showing a jagged crack on its side. Shannow dismounted and forced his way through the undergrowth. “Will the circle still … work?” he asked as Amaziga joined him.

  “The stones are not important in themselves,” she told him. “They were merely placed by the ancients at points of great natural power.” Amaziga flicked the microphone into place and switched on the computer. Shannow wandered away, eyes raking the wall surrounding the garden and the balconies that overlooked what once had been a series of rose beds. He felt uncomfortable there, exposed. One rifleman creeping along behind those balcony walls could kill them all.

  Samuel Archer approached him. “I have had no time to thank you properly, Mr. Shannow. I am grateful for your courage.”

  Shannow smiled at the tall black man. “I knew another Sam Archer once,” he said. “I could not save him, and I have always regretted that.” He glanced to the left, where Gareth Archer was sitting quietly lost in thought, his face a mask of sorrow. “I think you should speak to him,” said the Jerusalem Man. Archer nodded.

  Gareth looked up as the older man sat down on the marble bench beside him. “Soon be home,” said Gareth. “You’ll like Arizona. No Bloodstone.”

  “It is always hard to gaze on the fruits of evil,” Sam said softly.

  Gareth nodded agreement. “Forty-two thousand people. Son of a bitch!”

  “Do you study history, Gareth?”

  “Battle of Hastings, A.D. 1066; Second World War, A.D. 1939; War of Liberation, A.D. 2016,” said Gareth. “Yes, I studied history.”

  “I didn’t mean the dates, son. You’ve just seen a multitude of the dead, yet Genghis Khan killed ten times as many people and Stalin murdered a hundred times more. Man’s history is hip-deep in Bloodstones. The dead that you saw chose to worship Sarento. They fed him their children and the children of other races. Lastly they fed him themselves. I mourn for their stupidity, but there is nothing new about a leader who leads his people to destruction.”

  “There’s a cheering thought,” said Gareth.

  Amaziga joined them. “Lucas says that we must wait four hours for a window home. It’s almost over, Sam.”

  Samuel Archer stared at her intently, noting the lines of anguish on her beautiful face. “There is something else,” he said.

  She nodded and glanced around to look for Shannow, but the Jerusalem Man was gone. “The Bloodstone is now in Shannow’s world,” she said.

  Gareth swore. “Did we open the gate?” he asked bitterly.

  “Lucas says not. Yet the fact remains that it is free to reduce another world to dust and death.”

  “You once told me about Sarento,” said Gareth, anger in his voice. “You told me he wanted to see a return to the old world, hospitals and schools, care, love and peace. How could you be deceived by such a monster?”

  Sam cut in. “He did want all those things,” he said. “He was a man in love with the past. He adored all aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. And he did care. Thirty years ago there was a plague. The Guardians went out among the people with medicines and vaccines we hoped would eradicate it. We were wrong. Many of us died. Yet still Sarento went out until he himself succumbed. He almost died, Gareth, trying to help others. It was the Bloodstone that corrupted him. He is no longer the human Sarento we knew.”

  “I don’t believe that,” snapped Gareth. “There must have been evil in him to begin with, you just couldn’t see it.”

  “Of course there was,” said Amaziga. “As there is in all of us, in our arrogance, in our belief that we know best. But the Bloodstone enhances such feelings at the same time it drowns the impulses toward good. You have no idea of the influence of such stones. Even a small demonseed will drive a bearer to violence, unleashing the full force of the beast within man. Sarento took into himself the power of an entire boulder.”

  Gareth rose and shook his head. “He knew the Bloodstone was evil even before he did that. I’ll not listen to excuses for him. I just want to know how we can kill him.”

  “We can’t,” said Sam, “not while he has power. I used to believe that if we could deprive him of blood until he was weak and then attack him, we would have a chance to destroy him. Yet how would it have been possible? Whoever approached him would only feed him. You understand? He is invulnerable. He might have died here, on a planet drained of life. But now he is free to wander the universe, growing in power.”

  “There must be a way,” urged Gareth.

  “If there is, we’ll find it, Gareth,” said Amaziga. “I promise you that.”

  Jon Shannow wandered through the deserted halls of Babylon, past columns fashioned from human bones and mosaics depicting scenes of torture, rape, and murder. His footsteps echoed, and he came out at last onto a balco
ny overlooking the garden. From there could be seen the original layout of the grounds, the walkways shaped like intertwined serpents, forming the number of the Beast. Nature had conspired to cover most of the walkways, and vines grew up over the repulsive statues that ringed the six small pools. Even these were stagnant, and the fountains were silent.

  Shannow felt burdened by it all, the evidence of man’s stupidity laid out before him like an ancient map. Why is it, he thought, that men can be inspired to evil more swiftly and powerfully than they can be inspired to good?

  His heaviness of heart deepened. Look at yourself, Jon Shannow, before you ask such questions. Was it not you who put away the guns, pledging yourself to a life of pacifism and religion? Was it not you who took to the pulpit and reached out your mind to the king of heaven?

  And what happened when evil men brought death and flames?

  “I gunned them down,” he said aloud.

  It always had been thus. From his earliest days, when he and Daniel had seen their parents slain, he had been filled with a great anger, a burning need to confront evil head to head, gun to gun. Through many settlements and towns, villages and communities the Jerusalem Man had passed. Always behind him there were bodies to be buried.

  Did it make the world a better place, Shannow? he asked himself. Has anything you have done ensured a future of peace and prosperity? These were hard questions, but he faced them as he faced all dangers—with honesty.

  No, he told himself. I have made no difference.

  Twice he had tried to put aside the mantle of the Jerusalem Man, once with the widow Donna Taybard and then with Beth McAdam. Believing him to be dead, Donna had married another man. Beth had grown tired of Jon Cade’s holiness.

  You are a man of straw, Shannow, he chided himself. A year before, when Daniel Cade had first moved to Pilgrim’s Valley, he had visited the Preacher in the small vestry behind the church.

  “Good morning, Brother Jon,” he said. “You are looking well for a man of your years.”

  “They do not know me here, Daniel. Everything has changed.”

  Daniel shook his head. “Men don’t change, Brother. All that happens is that they learn how best to disguise the lack of change. Me, I’m still a brigand at heart, but I’m held to goodness by the weight of public opinion and the fading strength of an age-weakened body.”

  “I have changed,” said the Preacher. “I abhor violence and will never kill again.”

  “Is that so, Jonnie? Answer me this, then: Where are your guns? In a pit somewhere, rusted and useless? Sold?” His eyes twinkled, and he grinned. “Or are they here? Hidden away somewhere, cleaned and oiled?”

  “They are here,” admitted the Preacher. “I keep them as a reminder of what once I was.”

  “We’ll see,” said Cade. “I hope you are right, Jon. Such a life is good for you.”

  The sun broke clear of the clouds above Babylon, and Jon Shannow felt the weight of the pistols at his side. “You were right, Daniel,” he said softly. “Men don’t change.”

  Gazing down on the garden, he saw Amaziga, Gareth, and Sam sitting together. The first Samuel Archer had been a man of peace, interested only in researching the ruins of Atlantis. He had been beaten to death in the caverns of Castlemine. In this world the black man was a fighter. In neither had he won.

  Amaziga said there existed an infinity of universes. Perhaps in one of them Samuel Archer was still an archaeologist who would slowly and with great dignity grow old with his family. Perhaps in that world or in another Jon Shannow did not see his family gunned down. He was a farmer, maybe, or a teacher, his sons playing around him, happy in the sunshine, a loving wife beside him.

  A whisper of movement came from behind, and Shannow hurled himself to the left as a bullet ricocheted from the balcony, screaming off into the air. Spinning as he fell, Shannow drew his right-hand pistol and fired. The Hellborn warrior staggered, then tipped over the balcony wall. Drawing his left-hand gun, Shannow rose and ran back to the hall entrance.

  Two Hellborn warriors were crouching behind pillars. The first, shocked by his sudden appearance, fired too swiftly, the bullet slashing past Shannow’s face. His own left-hand gun boomed, and the man was flung back. The second warrior reared up, a knife in his hand. Shannow’s pistol slammed down, the barrel cracking home against the man’s cheekbone, and the warrior fell heavily.

  Shots sounded from the garden. As Shannow ran through the hall, a rifleman leaned over the gallery rail above him. Shannow fired but missed, the bullet chipping wood from the rail. He ducked into a corridor and turned left down a stairway and right into another corridor. There he stopped and waited, listening for sounds of pursuit.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and two men ran down. Stepping out, Shannow shot them both, then ran for the garden. Halting in a shadowed archway, he reloaded his pistols. There were no sounds from the garden.

  Guns in hand, he moved swiftly out into the sunshine, scanning the balconies.

  No one was in sight.

  Creeping silently through the undergrowth, he approached the circle of stone. The sound of voices came to him as he neared the circle.

  “The Lord has left us,” said a deep voice, “and you are to blame. We were ordered to kill you, and we failed. Now that we have you, he will come back for us.”

  “He’s not coming back,” Shannow heard Amaziga tell them. “Can’t you understand what has happened? He’s not a god; he’s a man—a corrupted, ruined man who feeds on life. Have you not seen the coliseum? He’s killed everyone!”

  “Silence, woman! What do you know? The Lord has returned to his home in the valleys of hell, and there he has taken our people to enjoy the rewards of service. This is what he promised. This is what he has done. But my comrades and I were left here because we failed him. When your bodies bleed upon the high altar, he will return for us, and we shall know the joy of everlasting death-life.”

  Sam’s strong, steady voice cut in. “I understand that you need to believe. Yet I also see that the demonseeds embedded in your brows are black now and powerless. You are men again, with free will and intelligence. And deep down you are already questioning your beliefs. Is that not true?”

  Shannow heard the sound of a vicious slap. “You black bastard! Yes, it is true, and all part of the test we face because of you. We will not be seduced from the true path.”

  Shannow edged to the right to a break in the undergrowth and stepped out onto the walkway some fifteen yards from the Hellborn group. There were five in all, and each held a weapon pointed at his three companions. The Hellborn leader was still speaking. “Tonight we shall be in hell, with servants and women and fine food and drink. Your souls will carry us there.”

  “Why wait for tonight?” asked Shannow.

  The Hellborn swung to face him, and Shannow’s guns thundered. The Hellborn leader was hurled back, his face blown away; another man spun back, his shoulder shattered. Shannow stepped to his right and continued to fire. Only one answering shot came his way; it passed a few feet to his left, smashing into the stone head of a statue demon and shearing away a horn.

  The last echoes faded away. Shannow cocked his pistols and moved to join the trio. Amaziga was kneeling beside Gareth. Blood was staining the olive-green shirt he wore as Shannow knelt beside him.

  “Jesus wept, Shannow!” whispered the young man. “You really are death on wheels.” Blood frothed at his lips, and he choked and coughed. Amaziga pulled out her Sipstrassi Stone, but Gareth’s head sagged back.

  “No!” screamed Amaziga. “Please, God, no!”

  “He’s gone,” said Shannow.

  Amaziga reached out and stroked the dead boy’s brow, then turned her angry eyes on the Jerusalem Man.

  “Where were you when we needed you?” she stormed.

  “Close by,” he said wearily, “but not close enough.”

  “May God curse you, Shannow!” she screamed, her hand lashing out across his face.

  “That’s enough
!” roared Sam, reaching down and hauling her away from him. “It is not his fault. How could it be? And if not for him we would all be dead.” He glanced at Shannow. “Are there more, do you think?”

  “There were two inside I did not kill.” He shrugged. “There may be others.”

  Sam took Amaziga by the shoulders. “Listen to me, Ziga. We must leave. What will happen if we activate the gateway early?”

  “Nothing, save that it uses more Sipstrassi power. And I have little left.”

  “Is there enough to get us back?”

  She nodded. A shot ricocheted from the walkway, and Sam ducked, dragging Amaziga down with him. Shannow returned the fire, his bullets clipping stone from a balcony.

  “Let’s go,” said Shannow calmly.

  Amaziga reached down to touch her son’s face for the last time, then stood and ran for the stone circle. Sam followed. Shannow backed after them, eyes scanning the balconies. A rifleman reared up; Shannow fired, and the man ducked down.

  Inside the circle Amaziga knelt behind one of the stones and engaged the computer. Shots peppered the ground around them. “They’re circling us,” said Shannow.

  Violet light flickered around them …

  Shannow holstered his pistols and strode out onto the hillside above Amaziga’s Arizona home.

  Shannow sat on the paddock fence for more than an hour, oblivious to the blazing sunshine. The desert here was peaceful on the eye, the giant saguaros seemingly set in place by a master sculptor. His thoughts swung back to the rescue of Samuel Archer. So much death! The girl Shammy and all the other nameless heroes who had followed Sam. And Gareth. Shannow had liked the young black man; he had had a zest for life and the courage to live it to the full. Even the sight of his twin’s corpse had not kept him from his path, a path that had led to a bullet fired by a Hellborn warrior who had seen the destruction of his race and had not understood its meaning.

  Amaziga’s unjust anger was hard to take, but Shannow understood it. Every time they met it seemed that someone she loved had to die.

  Sam strolled out. “Come inside, my friend. You need to rest.”