STARGATE SG-1 29 Hall of the Two Truths (16 page)

“Be gone, old woman,” Sha’re interrupted her. “Do not bother us further. Crawl off into some dark shadow and die.”

As much as Daniel despised the creature on the ground before him, he found Sha’re’s words harsh. And perplexing.

“Isn’t it a little difficult to die here? I mean, if we’re already dead —?”

“I speak of the Second Death, Dan’yel. The death from which there is no return.” Sha’re pointed at the creature on the ground. “See, she has the look about her of one who will perish before her journey to the great Hall is complete.”

“I have been cursed!” the woman cried out, managing to look pitiful again. She turned to Daniel this time, the glowing in her eyes now gone and her voice normal. “Please — I implore you. Help me.”

Bits and pieces of information were coalescing in Daniel’s mind. The Second Death. The fetid smell. The diminished body.

“It is a curse, isn’t it?” He knew now. It too was straight out of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. How many times had he pored over the texts as a graduate student, searching them for clues in support of his theories? “You’ve been forgotten, haven’t you? Someone has erased your name from history. Obliterated your memory. No one will ever know who you were, or what you did in life. There is no afterlife waiting for you. Not anymore.”

He couldn’t help the note of satisfaction that had crept into his own voice as he’d realized the woman’s fate. Here was justice at last, or at least a sliver of it. Someone was finally being punished for their part in the crime that had been committed against Sha’re.

“Yes,” the woman nodded, tears streaming down her face. “It is as you say. And now I will perish. Become nothing. Nothing
.
” She curled into a ball and wept again.

Daniel looked at Sha’re whose hard gaze was fixed on the former handmaiden. “It is nothing less than you deserve.” Her voice was like ice. “May your bones become as dust.” She turned away and strode back toward the rocks.

The Goa’uld looked up at Daniel. Her red-rimmed eyes only made her that much more hideous to look at and he wanted nothing more than to follow in Sha’re’s wake. But he could not. The old woman held his gaze and he felt as if he were truly seeing the host, not the symbiote within. It was the only thing which kept him from turning his back on her and walking away as well.

“Please.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Gone were the hysterics and breast-beating. It was the singular voice of a being in pain. In need. “Please,” she entreated him again. “Help me.”

“SAMANTHA, please. Reconsider.”

Sam ignored Martouf’s plea and continued the steep climb up the hill, sweating with the effort. The coat was long gone, abandoned a good klick back. Now the landscape was comprised of dead grasses and, on occasion, leafless trees, stunted and twisted in their growth. It was little wonder, considering she’d noticed an intensifying sulfuric odor hanging in the warming air.

It was even worse here. Every breath she took made her want to gag on the smell of rotten eggs — and something else. It was an odor she recognized, but could not place. Not that she really wanted to; her stomach was roiling enough as it was.

Sam could hear Martouf breathing hard behind her as he scrambled up the incline in her wake. The hill itself was more or less barren, save for the mat of ground-hugging grasses that had once grown over it. The path was strewn with rocks, and she’d slipped more than once in her boots. She’d considered ditching those as well — her sandals were tucked in the knapsack on her back — but even though they were overly warm, she figured they offered the better protection.

It took her longer than she would have liked to reach the summit. As she took the last few steps, she came to an abrupt halt, assaulted by a blast of furnace-hot air and a gut-wrenching stench. Both emanated from a vast chasm that was spread below her, the floor of which was covered in a churning, undulating liquid.

Then she heard the sound. It was both human and inhuman at the same time, a painful, wretched noise that made her want to cover her ears to block it out. The pit, she realized, was roiling not only with liquid but with bodies. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, were crowded together, barely able to move, their cries rising up on the heated air of the sulfuric mud-pit in which they were trapped.

Sam stood there, stunned. She’d seen similar images in depictions of the damned as imagined by artists over the centuries. But to stand on the edge of such a scene, to hear the lamentations of those who were abandoned to so cruel and desolate a place —

Then the true horror struck her. Her team was down there. This was the punishment Martouf had warned her about. These were the ‘Enemies of the Gods.’

Sam wheeled on Martouf, who was now standing beside her, looking as horrified as she felt.

“Where are they? How do I get them out?”

He looked mournful. “I have tried to tell you, Samantha. You cannot help them. Their fate has been decided. Their sentence carried out. No one has ever escaped from the Pit of Mutu. If you were to attempt to rescue them, their fate would become yours as well.”

“I won’t accept that. There has to be a way!”

Frantic, Sam turned back toward the pit, her eyes scanning for a familiar face. There were so many, and they kept in constant motion, climbing over each other or attempting in vain to scale the sheer rock face that surrounded the pit on all sides. Geysers of steam would sporadically shoot high into the air and there would be a cry of anguish from those standing in its vicinity as it rained boiling sulfur down on them. She realized with revulsion that the stench she smelled was that of burning flesh.

She tried looking for Teal’c. With his golden tattoo, he might stand out amongst the others, but there were many Jaffa in the pit — those who, like Teal’c, must have defied the Goa’uld. The rest, though, were humans of all cultures and races. The three faces Sam was so desperate to find were impossibly lost in the midst of so many.

Then she saw the colonel’s hat. In that sea of writhing bodies his brimmed baseball cap suddenly stood out. There was no sign of the others, but at least the colonel was alive, even if he was in this hell hole. Now she had something she could do.

Off to her right, Sam noticed that the path led to a narrow footbridge spanning the vast crater. A sadistic catwalk over the theater of the damned, it offered a better view of the interior of the pit and could take her closer to where the colonel was stranded.

“Samantha, no!” Martouf called as she set off at a jog toward it. “You cannot save him!”

Raw fury pumping adrenaline through her veins, she shouted back at him. “I can try! So either help me or shut the hell up!”

The bridge was simply made of corded rope and wooden planks, but it was sturdy. Grasping the rope handholds on each side, Sam strode across it until she was as close to the baseball cap as she could get.

“Colonel!” Sam waved her arms in the air, wondering if it was even possible for him to hear. “Colonel O’Neill! She called his name again and finally he turned.

Her joy at finding him faded as she saw his face. Angry red lesions marred his cheeks and forehead where the heat and sulfur had scalded him. His clothes were burned away in places, revealing bare and blistered skin. When the colonel raised his arm, the flesh was eaten away down to the very bone.

Sam’s heart lurched. Even if she could save him, she wasn’t sure how long he would survive, not with such terrible wounds. But she wasn’t about to leave him there to die in some Goa’uld’s demented version of Hell.

Looking around, her hope sank. It was as she feared: all sides of the pit were sheer drops. Even a professional climber would have found it impossible to find any sort of foothold going down or coming up. If she was going to do this, she was going to need a rope.

Except she didn’t have one. Neither did Martouf, who’d followed her out onto the bridge. He had nothing with him except his canteen of water — and a knife.

An idea took hold of her. It was crazy. Impossible. Movie-stunt stuff. But it was the only chance she had of rescuing the colonel. Besides, considering what bad shape he was in, she needed to act now. Time was as much a consideration as anything else.

All of which meant it was worth the risk.

Sam eyed the bridge, making the calculations. It was long enough, but she’d have to cut it at just the right point to avoid being submerged in the pit herself. Although, considering how hard she was going to slam into the wall on the opposite side of the canyon, maybe the pit was the better choice.

“I need your knife.” It wasn’t a request. “And you need to get across the bridge and wait on the other side. We’re going to need your help pulling us up.”

It took a few seconds for Martouf to catch up to her plan. His eyes widened.

“You cannot be serious? You will die!”

“Yeah, well, been there, done that. At least, that’s what you keep telling me. Now give me the knife.”

Martouf put his hand protectively over the weapon and shook his head.

“I cannot allow you to do this, Samantha. It is insanity. Please. Just come with me. Let us leave this place.”

“I’m not leaving here without Colonel O’Neill,” she insisted. “This has a chance of working — a slim one, granted, but one I’m willing to take. So give me the damned knife or, I swear, I’ll gnaw through the rope with my teeth.”

With great reluctance, he handed her the weapon.

“Now take this, and go wait over there.” She pointed to the opposite cliff, handing him her knapsack. For a moment she thought he was going to argue with her again, but he said nothing and instead crossed the bridge and positioned himself on the rock ledge on the other side. He suddenly seemed quite far away and she realized again just how huge a swing she was going to have to make.

“Yeah. That’s gonna leave a mark,” she muttered aloud.

Looking down she saw that the colonel had managed to stay in close proximity to the bridge in spite of the surging tide of suffering around him. Sam tried not to look at anyone else. The piteous cries of the others, echoing off all sides of the canyon, were overwhelming and she did her best to tune them out. If this worked, it was entirely possible some of them could escape by the same means. Maybe she would be rescuing more than just the colonel.

To have enough length to reach the bottom of the pit, she would have to sever the bridge halfway between its midpoint and where it was anchored on the near side. If she did it right, she could leave the last rope hanging by a few weakened threads in order to give herself enough time to scramble back toward the middle, thereby reducing the arc of her swing and the impact with which she would hit the opposite wall. She regretted giving up the coat now. It would have cushioned her a little at least.

First, though, she needed to make sure the colonel knew what she was planning. The closer he could get to the far side of the pit, the easier it would be to help him up. Sam knew that there’d be a swarm of victims trying to clamber up the bridge-turned-ladder as soon as it fell. She’d have no way to keep them off once they started, and she was concerned that their combined weight would cause it to break, trapping them all in the pit. As much as she wanted to rescue as many people as possible, her first priority was Colonel O’Neill.

“Sir!” This was going to be the hard part. Once he realized what she had planned, he’d order her to leave him there. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time she disobeyed a direct order.

When she finally had his attention, Sam pointed toward where she hoped the bridge-ladder would ultimately come to rest. “Colonel, I need you to go
there
,” she shouted, pointing with both arms for emphasis. “I’m going to get you out, sir!”

But instead of a vehement head-shake, he only nodded his understanding. Part of her was relieved that he hadn’t, for once, argued.

Although another part wondered why.

Not that it mattered. She was going through with it, regardless of what he said. Maybe he knew that.

The knife was sharp and it easily cut through the first two non-weight-bearing ropes. She lashed the loosened end of one of them around her wrist to give herself something to hold onto when the bridge began to tilt. Sam figured her next cut would make that happen.

She was right. The bridge pitched suddenly, anchored now at only three points. Sam held tight to her rope to keep herself from sliding off and with her free hand reached carefully up to cut the other handhold rope. The bridge tilted back the other way and leveled out again, leaving her clinging to the wooden slats and rocking precariously back and forth. Two anchors down. Two to go.

There were shouts from below. Sam peered over and saw another geyser shoot up, high into the air. And another. And another. The mass of people in the pit began to heave and dip like a giant wave as they fled from scalding steam and scorching water. The upward draft of hot air sprayed across Sam, stinging her skin like tiny needles.

The bridge swayed slightly in the super-heated currents and Sam hung on, closing her eyes against a sudden onset of vertigo. Part of her dreaded what she was certain she would see when she opened them again. The renewed and amplified cries of those below were already assailing her ears.

Then she heard him. How the colonel’s voice stood out from all the others, she wasn’t sure. Maybe its familiarity made it rise above the plaintive din. But he was calling for her. Calling for help. Calling her name.