SG1-15 The Power Behind the Throne (29 page)

How wrong could he be?

Iblis didn’t wait for permission to enter.

He swept into the dank smelly room. It was a sty, every bit as slovenly as its occupant. “How can you live in this filth?” he demanded of the tyrant. There was no ‘sire’ now, no unctuous bowing and scraping.

Keen was marooned in his chair, struggling to stand. His face relaxed visibly when he saw Iblis come through the door. The wolfhound at his feet stirred, opening an eye to see who disturbed its slumber. Its jowls curled back on yellowed teeth at the sight of the Goa’uld but its snarl settled quickly into a sigh and the dog closed its eye once more, content to sleep the rest of the day away.

Iblis smiled and closed the door behind him.

“Your mutt is neither faithful nor watchful, it seems.” The words sounded like one long sigh as he ghosted up behind the tyrant’s chair.

“He’s tired,” Corvus Keen answered gruffly.

“Indeed, yes, yes… Tired. Aren’t we all? Tired of incompetence. Tired of other people failing.”

“What do you want, Iblis? I am in no mood for games tonight.”

“Want? Like you, I want the world. Actually I want more. I want worlds. I want the stars. Even the way you talk reeks of indolence, do you know that? Be more specific with your questions, Keen. You never know which one might be your last. It would be a pity to die uttering a foolish question. What do you want
with me
? So much more pertinent don’t you think?”

“Can’t you go and play with one of your corpses? There must be fires to light and bodies to burn. I am in no mood for this.” The ridges along the top of the fat man’s skull had begun to ripple, his skin mottling with a turgid blue tinge as his face flushed.

“No, or rather yes, if we are being precise. I can and I will play with a corpse — but I won’t be going anywhere to do it.”

“Why is it your kind delight in riddles, Iblis?”

“Ah, you are quite right. I should speak as plainly as I would have you speak. Yes, yes, yes. I should speak plainly for the stupid fat man on his pretend throne.”

“How dare you!” Corvus Keen struggled to rise, his arms shaking from the exertion of trying to lift his colossal frame out of the chair. He was livid. Flecks of spittle sprayed from his mouth and his eyes blazed with anger.

“Kneel before your god and beg for your wretched hide. Do it. Now!” Iblis stared at Keen and saw the fear in his eyes.

“You’re mad…”

“No, merely weary. It is time to end this game.”

“You mean to kill me? You can’t hope to get away with it…”

“I can’t? Why ever not?”

“Because… because…” Corvus Keen spluttered, craning his neck to look.

Iblis reached out slowly and pressed his fingers into the flabby flesh of the half-breed tyrant’s throat, twisting them so that the nails dug in painfully. “Go on, I’m waiting to know why I can’t do this. Yes, yes, yes. I am waiting. So tell me before I wring your stupid fat neck for you.”

“I am… THE RAVEN KING!” Corvus Keen gasped, struggling for every breath he took. Keen’s eyes bulged comically in their sockets and the skin around them began to turn purple. Still Iblis’ fingers tightened their relentless grip.

“Why?” It was less than a croak. Keen’s hands were up at his throat trying desperately to wrench away Iblis’ fingers but the Goa’uld’s grip was like iron.

Iblis threw back his head and laughed. “Why?” he mimicked. “Why? Because I am your God.”

Iblis smiled. His smile widened, and widened, and did not stop stretching until it had transformed into a deathly rictus. From between its lips a gray scaly worm wriggled. The ridge of its spine was slick with blood.

Iblis’ eyes rolled up inside his head, the host body dead before the Goa’uld had fully extricated itself. All Corvus Keen could do was scream as the thing squirmed and slithered toward him, and then, lightning fast, whipped around his neck and in, through the skin as it wrapped around his spine and pierced his brain stem, taking control. The fat man convulsed in his chair, then sat up straight, sneering down at his own flesh where food crusted against flaccid skin.

For a long moment Iblis simply absorbed all that had been Corvus Keen and Zarif before him. So much hatred. So much anger. No wonder the human had allowed his body to crumble beneath him; it was nothing short of mercy that he was liberated from the mass of fat and blood. Iblis absorbed it all, all of the knowledge — his father, his blood, the step-sister he coveted, the daughter that might have been his, the brother he loathed, the mother he had burned and blinded — all the hopes and fears that had driven Corvus Keen. And he turned them into something more potent: power.

“Better,” he said, steel in his voice as he pushed himself to his feet. This form was at least interesting if not attractive, and for now it suited Iblis’ schemes.

He walked across to the window and surveyed what had become his new domain. It was not beautiful, but that did not matter, it was deathly.

And dreaming of death, soon it would be time to open the Stargate.

Now, at last, he could emerge from the shadows. The irony of this new body amused him. Instead of some beautiful butterfly emerging from its cocoon he was a swollen, bloated moth. But moths always had been the true kings of the night, Iblis thought, dragging the corpse of his last host toward the door.

Wheezing in his new skin, the Goa’uld cursed the arrogance of the man it had become and vowed to keep guards close to hand in future.

“You!” Iblis shouted, trying out his new voice. At the far end of the passageway a black and silver clad guard turned, about to spit a curse his way before he saw Corvus Keen dragging a dead man toward him. “Dispose of this thing before it stinks up the place.”

The guard looked down, recognizing the corpse despite the damage to its stretched face.

“He out-lived his usefulness. Be sure you do not.”

Teal’c walked toward the wreckage.

Jachin had been right, it had been disturbingly easy to derail the train. A single charge had blown out one of the tracks, buckling the iron rail so that when the engine hit it at full steam it was lifted and twisted and slipped the tracks. Within fifty feet the lead carriages had snaked out uncontrollably and gone over onto their sides, skidding and sliding through the grass and dirt of the embankment. That in itself would have been enough, but not for Jachin. The impact that turned the derailment into a wreckage was even simpler: the Kelani rolled an old flatbed truck down the slope of the embankment into the path of the sliding train. The gas tanks on the truck were full, promising an explosive impact.

Teal’c had stood side by side with Jubal Kane and watched the engine slide into the wall of flame only for the carriages behind it to jack-knife as the full horror of the crash unfolded. Now they walked toward the little man who had caused so much devastation. Jachin looked inordinately pleased with himself as he dusted his hands off. “Told you,” he said.

“Excessive, don’t you think?” Jubal frowned down at the ruined train as the shocked and wounded tried to claw their way out of the wreckage.

“Is it stopped or is it stopped?”

“It’s stopped.”

“Which is exactly what you asked for. The rest, as they say, is just a bonus.”

Jubal stared at the man. “The rest is not a bonus, the rest is a lot of wasted humanity. Sometimes you frighten me. Sometimes you just make me seethe.”

Jubal had sixty-eight guns with him. It was all the ghetto could muster — all that were willing to throw their lot in with him and make a stand against Keen. It was hardly enough to take on an army, but sixty-eight guns were enough to sound out one hell of a battle cry. They would shake Corvus Keen’s world to its rotten foundations before they were through.

“Who wants to stay forever young?” Jubal Kane said.

Teal’c believed he was talking to himself so did not answer. He stared at the wreckage, horrified by the senseless destruction and the unnecessary loss of life. He clenched his fist, needing the sting of pain as his nails dug into his palm to stop himself from lashing out at the idiocy of Jachin. Surely this was every bit as evil as anything perpetrated by the so-called enemy. How could it be anything less as far as the dead on the train were concerned?

“Come on, my friend, tonight we fight, tomorrow we break fast with hell’s demons.”

“I believe I have lost my appetite,” Teal’c said.

Jubal Kane laughed. “You know, the more I get to know you, big man, the more I like you.”

And the rain came down. Teal’c savored the cold on his upturned face. He could not dwell upon the tragedy of the prisoners. He had to set about the business of saving his friends.

The train had at least twenty Raven Guard on it that needed to be neutralized. Jubal gave the signal and his men streamed down from their hiding places along the embankment and fell upon the dazed guards as they stumbled along the side of the train, trying to work out what had happened and to stop the Kelani prisoners from escaping. Gunshots rang out brutally in the night. That was the signal chaos had been waiting for.

Teal’c ran from carriage to twisted carriage looking for any sign of his friends. Bodies lay broken and every bit as ruined as the wooden timber frames of the wagons. People crawled about on their hands and knees, moaning and groaning as they tried to drag themselves away from the wreckage toward the safety of the grass verge. The rain turned the dirt into sucking mud, making everything much more of a trial as people slipped and slithered and slid and fell, barely able to pick themselves up again. In the confusion it was impossible to tell friend from foe. The Raven Guard had lost their guns in the hysteria after the crash and panicked under the onslaught. Now, blinded in the rain and the red glare of the burning truck, they were crawling about, every bit as dazed and confused as their prisoners.

Teal’c stood over a wounded man who had fallen face first and was sucking up mud and rain with every breath he took. He would have helped him, only he recognized the man as one of the two who had come looking for him at Kiah’s house just before it had been set aflame.

“Were you the one who hit the blind woman?” he asked, kneeling down close enough that the struggling man might hear. He need not have worried. The man heard all right.

The fool tried to nod again, lying through his teeth to save his own skin. “It was Gant. He made me do it. I tried to stop him. You have to believe me.”

“I do not have to believe you at all,” Teal’c said. “But it is not my place to believe or disbelieve, neither is it up to me to dispense punishment. Jubal Kane,” he called, his voice rising above the agony of the wounded and the anger of the wreckage.

Kane turned to see who called his name.

With his free hand, Teal’c gestured for the ghetto warrior to come. “This is one of the men who burned your mother’s house.”

“No, no, please, no…” The guard struggled to rise.

“Shut up!” Jubal Kane snapped. And to Teal’c, “How can you be sure?”

“He is one of the two I saw leaving after she sheltered me from their search earlier in the day.”

“One of the ones that beat her?”

Teal’c nodded.

Without a second thought Jubal Kane stepped in and snapped the man’s neck in single savage motion. The brutality of it shocked the Jaffa. “That is the justice of the ghetto,” Jubal Kane said, as though intoning judgment on the damned. He turned his back and walked away in search of another Raven Guard to put down. Teal’c did not need to be able to read his mind to know what he was thinking: the second man who had tried to murder his mother could be among them. There was no mercy in the man’s face.

Teal’c found Carter first. She was sitting with her back against the underside of the train carriage. The wheels had long since stopped spinning but they were still hot enough for the rain to steam as it hit the metal. She had her arms up around the long axel and appeared to be using it to brace her back. Her face was covered with blood that streaked in tears of rain, like a fury torn from the stuff of nightmare and given flesh. She smiled up at him through the bloody tears as he hunkered down beside her. “It’s good to see you, Teal’c.”

“It is good to see you, too, Major Carter. Are you well?”

She saw his concern and touched her cheek. Her fingers came away wet with blood. “This? It’s not mine. I’m fine,” she assured him. “Starving but fine. Honestly.”

“That is good.”

She shook her head. “It’s horrible, Teal’c. This whole world is horrible. I never thought I could think that. But…” she grunted. “I don’t understand it. How can people do this to each other?”

Teal’c said nothing. He had no answer for the cruelty of humans. Instead, he asked, “What of Daniel Jackson and Colonel O’Neill?”

Carter shook her head again, as though trying to shake off some mental malaise and clear her mind. “The Colonel is fine, a few cuts and bruises, no broken bones. He’s looking for Daniel.”

“I should join his search, if you do not mind?”

“Help me up, we’ll go together.”

Teal’c continued his search moving from carriage to carriage, Carter at his side. The rain and mud made it difficult to tell one face from another, and mixed with the pain, it became impossible. Up and down the line Jubal Kane’s men moved with brutal efficiency. They dragged the unconscious black and silver clad guards out of the twisted wreckage and dumped them on the embankment, and marched the conscious few at gunpoint. A fight broke out, dying before it could become more than a flurry of fists, as fat Nadal pistol-whipped the Corvani guard, laying him out cold. With grim satisfaction Jubal Kane’s man finished him. It turned Teal’c’s stomach. War was one thing, but this, this was slaughter. It had no place in honorable war. It was the kind of monstrosity the Goa’uld had forced him to perpetrate as First Prime. The psychology of it was simple: they had been beaten, their families tortured and killed, treated like scum, made to eat scraps from the dirt at the feet of these men, and now the worm had turned. The punishments they inflicted on the guards were less cruel, less unusual, but no less final once meted out. More gunfire ran out, this time single shot execution style.