Heart of Stone (17 page)

Thex nearly banged his head on the
crystal in frustration “Damn it Arion, no, do you really doubt that
there is still room in my heart for you? Why the hell do you think
I’m here, duty?”

Arion wasn’t sure that
duty wasn’t part of it but...”W
ell okay
then, so get me out
!”

“
It takes a highly evolved human to do it Arion, one with a
ton of compassion, I don’t know who that is to be yet.  Tyra
offered but couldn't come today because she hasn’t learnt our ways
of travel yet and the cave entrance is blocked for the moment.
Simon had a prophecy this morning though and seems to think that
there are some other beings conspiring to get you out.”

“
Like who?
”

Simon took control of the
mind share. “T
rust me Arion.  I’d
tell you now if I could but certain things have to happen first.
Today’s visit was just to give you hope.  In the meanwhile
it’s time you sorted yourself out and readied yourself for re-entry
into this world.  Draw on the knowledge and light of the
crystals here, they have much they could teach you if you would
just link with them and ask.”

Arion wasn’t at all
pleased at the delay but Simon was right about one thing, he’d been
feeling pity for himself way too long. “
Okay Simon, but don’t mistake that for submissiveness on my
part. Fair-enough
?”

Simon laughed through the
mind-link. “W
e’ll see
.”

Sarah Brown huddled in the corner of
her cell, trying to keep warm.  It had been a week since she’d
been caught.  She missed her desert home. The first day had
been the worst.  They’d roughed her up quite a bit, accusing
her of spying.  She’d fought back, spitting at them and
scratching them deeply when she could.  In the end they’d
realized she wasn’t going to speak in anything other than
Pitjantjatjara.  Without a translator they were getting
nowhere and they knew it.  She was fluent in English, even if
it was her second language, but she’d wisely kept that little
tidbit to herself. Surviving out in the desert she’d learnt it was
best to let the prey underestimate you and what was an enemy like
these guys except prey. Patience and endurance were the true
weapons of any hunter.  So she endured, she ate the pathetic
food they fed her and she bided her time.  Eventually they’d
get used to her, then they’d make their fatal mistake.

She used her time to observe
everything about her enemy and her situation.  Her cell was
sparse with little more than a porcelain loo in the corner.
 Even that lacked for a seat. There was a mattress she’d
hauled into the far corner, where she could watch the door to best
advantage, and one measly woolen blanket that scratched her skin
like blazes but it was enough to give her some warmth.  The
walls were of the style of red brick she’d seen used on some of the
older-style buildings around Alice Springs and Roxby Downs. There
were no windows to speak of.  She knew she was underground.
 She remembered the exact route they’d taken her when they’d
brought her down here.  She practised that route in her mind
each day since, going over in detail all the passageways, doors,
fixtures and obstacles she could remember. She’d never been in an
elevator in her life but she remembered the glow of the button
lighting up the letter ‘G’ when they’d entered it and the number
‘23’ when they’d exited on this level.  She wasn’t exactly
literate, having wagged most of school to spend time with her
grandfather out in the bush but commonsense said that meant she was
on level 23, below ground.  How that was even possible she
didn’t know.

Her captors had a military feel about
them but it was obvious they did not belong to the government.
 Their ethics and demeanor did not match the profile she’d
come to know from the few Australian soldiers she’d seen in her
time.  Then there were their auras.  She couldn’t quite
make out what it was but something snarled in the darkness that
overlay each of her captors. It seemed to control them, fine
tendrils of darkness reaching into their very being.  They
moved as if they were heavy beasts, something much bigger and far
more dangerous than their human form.  She filed that
observation away, if she had to fight them she’d fight them with
that in mind, not as if they were what they appeared to
be.

Her greatest enemy right at this
moment was loneliness. Strange as it might seem to others the
desert was her constant companion.  Its vast skies, the wind
and heat, the constant movement of the sands, the creatures big and
small.  It all formed the fine fabric in which she lived. To
an extent it was her.  Being separated from her normal
surroundings left her feeling utterly bereft. She’d found some
small comfort, reaching her senses out through the brick into the
earth that surrounded the building she was in.  She’d
connected with something, she just wasn’t sure what.  It had
felt feminine and caring.  It had seemed to wrap around her
and hold her, reassuring her. Then it had left.  Somewhere in
her soul she felt it had gone to get help, at least that is what
she hoped.  Yet she couldn’t rely on that hope alone.
 She had to be ready for whatever opportunity came her way.
She knew it wouldn’t be long before her next meal was delivered so
she stood and stretched. She’d spent the last days here thinking up
moves to keep in shape. She knew she had to stay in condition, if
only to continue her lifestyle when she got out. She’d gone over in
her mind all the moves she’d seen the animals of the desert use to
defend themselves, everything from a red kangaroo’s punch, kick and
gouge to the stealthy moves of a praying mantis.  When she
wasn’t practicing her moves she spent the rest of her time walking
circuits of her cell, as if she was still in the desert. It was
kind of restful.

As she passed the door to her cell
something shimmered in the middle of the room and a man appeared.
Stunned, she paused for a moment then attacked.

Michael doubled over in pain from her
swift kick to his middle. Nails raked his undefended sides and
arms. Only his pack protected his back. “Shit Sarah, lay it off
will you. I come in peace. I was sent to rescue you.” The beating
stopped. Hell, he’d been expecting a wounded, frightened woman, not
a hell cat. Kiana chuckled at the back of his mind.

“The woman who lives in the
earth sent you?”

Michael had to think about that for a
moment then he twigged. “The goddess of the Earth, Ma we call her.
 She told us where to find you.”

“Us?”

“There are others but I’m
the only one who could make it through the energy field they have
around this facility. The others are of too high a vibrational
frequency to pass through it.”

Sarah looked at him puzzled. Surely
the man was talking gibberish.

Michael took in the expression on her
face. “Ah, yeah, right.  Look, I’ll explain all that later.
Hopefully by now Andrew and Anya are upstairs and can disengage the
thing.  In the meantime we need to get out of this cell.” He
looked around the room, trying for ideas.

Sarah grinned.  The opportunity
she’d been waiting days for was here.  “They’ll be here in a
moment to feed me. There will be two of them, there always is.
 They won’t be expecting you.  I’ll wait over there and
direct their attention to me.” She pointed to the wall opposite the
door.  “If you wait behind the door and come at them from
behind we might have a chance. But don’t underestimate them. I
think they’re more than they seem.”

“You’re not wrong about
that.” He handed her a couple of knives.  He wasn’t about to
give her a handgun or rifle until he knew she could use it. “These
any good to you?”

Sarah gave him an almost evil grin.
“You bet!”  She wanted to ask the man what he knew of her
captors’ other form but at that moment she heard activity outside
her door. She went to her position, concealing the knives by
wrapping her trusty blanket around her, pretending to cringe as she
waited for her captors.

Michael quickly armed himself with the
Mark XIX Desert Eagle he’d brought with him and took up his
position. He hoped the guards didn’t slam the door open and flatten
him.  As for the gun, it had been converted to work with an
anti-Din .50AE round.  It had a fearsome recoil and he’d need
two hands to control the damn thing but up against the Din there
were very few handguns up to the task.

The Din didn’t slam the door open.
 In fact they entered somewhat tentatively.  They’d grown
wary of the woman’s vicious nature.  One entered with the tray
while the other covered his back. The one with the tray paused for
a moment, taking in her cringing form.  “Finally breaking you
are we, that’ll make things easier. Be nice and we might even warm
your nights, with our bodies that is.”

Sarah fought not to roll her eyes and
instead maintained her frightened rabbit appearance.  If this
sleazeball thought he was ever getting that near her he had another
thing coming. On her first day in captivity the damned bastard had
near beaten her to a pulp while the other guy restrained her from
scratching him and now he was trying to get slutty? He put the tray
down in front of her and she sprang, near gutting him as the knife
she held sliced him through his belly. In a roar of pain he fell as
the Din in his aura materialized before her. She vaguely heard a
gun going off but had no time to observe her own horror as the
thing rose before her, its blazingly angry eyes intent upon her.
“Shit!” A shot rang out again and the thing vaporized into nothing.
Her eyes bugged as she stared at the place where it had been.
 The man she’d sliced was still writhing on the floor and the
other was dead on the ground.  She took a deep breath to
center herself then followed the man with the gun out into the
corridor.  “What the friggin' hell was that thing?”

Michael paused, peering around the
corner to see what was up the next corridor. “Explain later, for
now just believe me when I say that we have to assume that all the
other enemy in this facility are possessed in the same way. Now
follow me!”

Sarah groaned when she saw him heading
in the wrong direction.  “Not that way, lift’s down the
corridor this way.”  She pointed in the other
direction.

Michael was surprised she knew the way
out. “How you know?”

She pointed at her head. “It’s all in
here, I look at things.” As if that answered everything.

For the curious wondering at where
some of the ideas for this novel came from I’ve included the brief
notes below.

1525 was the year that the Inquisition
decided to eradicate the Alumbrados in Spain. Alumbrado means
‘illumined one’ and they most definitely have nothing to do with
the later infamous Austrian illuminati. The alumbrados held little
regard for the church or society’s laws believing that the only
thing that mattered was union with the all-pervading deity and that
was to be found within. The technical term for their disregard for
arbitrary social values is antinomian.

Tyra Aguila Goodwin - Tyra is a
warrior’s name, Aguila means eagle and Goodwin means god’s
protector. It seemed like a good name for a spiritual
warrior.

I-Wayan Agung is a typical Balinese
name and simply means great oldest son.

The name Alexios is derived from the
Ancient Greek for a defender.

The all-am-I mantra used in
the book is an English translation of the Sanskrit
Sarvam Aham
which can be
used in the same way.

The way names given for the particular
spiritual paths I loosely derived from Ancient Greek root words.
The paths are roughly comparable with the three pillars in the
kabbalah tree of life.

John Stevens has translated some of
Morihei Ueshiba’s works on the spiritual aspects of Aikido. “The
Art of Peace” is probably the best known and most readily available
of these titles. Part of this philosophy is compassion for your
enemy, trying to minimise harm to them and recognizing that they
are connected to and part of us.

The philosophy that absolutely
everything is one is called non-dualism in technical jargon. It is
found at the deepest levels within most of the world’s mystical
traditions including, but not limited to, some forms of radical
Judaism, gnostic Christianity, Tamil Siddhar yoga, Kashmir
Shaivism, within the traditions of some of the world’s native
peoples and amongst many modern new age thinkers.

The Malakim, the Din and the evil
Sakla I have drawn from ancient semitic and gnostic cosmologies,
with a bit of artistic license thrown in. In the original gnostic
cosmologies Sakla (Saklas, Yaldabaoth or Samael) was a fallen angel
or archon who tried to represent himself as the creator and ruler
of the world. He is blamed for creating the materialistic illusion
that most humans live in, that they are separate from the each
other, the all pervasive universal deity, the earth and everything
that lives on it. Din is a Hebrew spelling of djin or jinn and
basically means demon. The myth of them seems to have been common
across the semitic cultures. The idea of them inhabiting people’s
auras I got from Meg Losey’s accounts of what she reports having
seen as an energy healer in her book “Touching the light”. The idea
of evil reptilians was also drawn from a common conspiracy theory
about which there is plenty to be found online. They seem to
represent a psychological archetype for evil, tyranny and
power-hungry greed and materialism. The Tyrannosaurus is perhaps
well named as representative of this archetype. Many cultures have
a version; from Nordic gold hording dragons to Hindu snake-head
asuras like Rahu. Who really knows, maybe there is some memory or
fear embedded deep in our DNA or racial memory - at some level
we’re still small furry mammals running from the dinosaur in the
dark.