The SONG of SHIVA (44 page)

On the shadowy horizon two dark storms approached. Twin galaxies poised for cataclysmic battle. Cold, hard, primordial, and elemental. Ancient manipulators. Old as the cosmos. Immortal. Capable of defining the fearful symmetry of existence. Godlike mirrored antipodes composed of soulless energy. Residing in this hidden place beyond both good and evil, beyond any human concept of virtue or vice and forever acting out this eternal dance of motivations beyond the ken of mortal men. From the beginning, manifesting in a variety of guises. Whispering in the darkness. Inspiring and conspiring. Promising fruit from the garden of immortality, surcease from sentience’s fearful
memento mori
,
that soul-devouring threat of absolute annihilation.

And man, tiny and terrified, utterly enthralled, had listened to the whispering ― and believed. Miracles and prophecy. Promises of eternal life. The age-old wish to look upon the face of God ― and live. And all of it a lie ― the work of conniving influences. Manipulators. Soulless energies.

A sharp report snapped in the distance. Then another. A dog snarled then barked viciously. Lyköan awoke atop the water tower, flat on his back. Cold metal. The great dance of the elementals driven back into the hidden realm. In front of his eyes swirled a star-strewn sky. A shiver ran up his spine. Hairs erect on the back of his neck, he bolted upright. Plucked gooseflesh rushed up each trembling arm. In slow motion, the thirty-six slid off his knees and an eternity later clattered on the tarred roof below.

Another burst of gunfire. Glass breaking. Blossom barking. He reached for the ladder, but slipped over the edge of the roof. A desperate grasp. Swinging out into open air by one arm he smashed face first into the side of the tower, barely grabbing a rung with the other hand. Positioning hands and feet on the outside of the rails he slid to the roof below. His nose was bleeding all over the front of his shirt.

Excited Thai voices arose from the fire escape landing. Picking up the rifle, he ran to the parapet wall. Inside the apartment Fremont was cursing. Nora’s high-pitched shouts were unintelligible. A door slammed. The Thai voices became muffled. More gunfire. Blossom yelped. Then silence.

Peering over the edge of the roof and seeing only darkness below, he raced down the fire escape ladder and dropped to the landing outside the shattered glass of the darkened apartment window.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Honoré de Balzac :
Le
Comédie
humaine

Returning to the apartment, Lyköan lurched into the open doorway, adrenaline buzzing in his ears. Leaning a shoulder against the doorjamb, he stared into the darkness. Inside, starlight glinted off an object on the floor beside an overturned table he had missed during his first pass through only minutes before. Entering the room once more, he picked up the flashlight, felt the ribbed cylinder sticky in his bloodstained hand. A dazzling halogen beam answered his click of the power button, but as he swept the room, nothing the beam struck moved or made a sound. Between the front door and the glass-toothed fire escape window he counted seven bodies. Thrown like a rag doll against the wall a few steps away, the open eyes of a familiar face stared out into empty space, pupils fixed, lips curled, frozen in a final accusation. Stooping over the figure, he closed the man’s eyes with his fingers.

Christ, Felix
―
I’m sorry
.
You didn’t deserve this. And it was all my fault.

Dragging the flashlight beam from Fremont’s face, he hurried into the nearest bedroom, stepping over two more bodies lying just inside the doorway, their ghastly heads swollen like misshapen melons, faces unrecognizable. Details of the recent firefight had already begun to morph into metaphor, imprecise recall dulling the fierce crackle of small arms fire, the terrifying cries of terminating mortality that had been so real, so immediate, only moments before.

From the safety of the dreamlike
mukti
shadows he had crushed these skulls as easily a practiced chef cracked eggs ― and with as much remorse. Mere objects of a secondhand brutality now, removed from his involvement, caught in an imperfectly recollected past of flashing gunfire that fixed each black and white photograph-like image in a phantom memory. Panting in the stillness, he swept the flashlight over lurid stains soaking into the carpet, over the pockmarked walls and a ceiling splattered with even more savage designs.

Must’ve used the rifle too
.

The other bedroom had its own tale to tell. On the floor beside the unmade bed, thin shards of snow-white bone protruded from a shattered skull. Lyköan recognized her immediately. Sucking in a whistling breath he ran over, letting the air rush out in a mournful mixture of lost hope and rejected prayer.

Noooooo
…

Dropping down beside the silent figure, a madman’s leer warping his features, he whispered into the dead dog’s ear.

“I know you did your best, girl. Everything you could.”

Placing a hand behind the shattered skull, he stroked her still warm coat affectionately. Blood had already begun stiffening the fur into clumps of thick wicks, ghastly music box tines, thorns playing mournfully across his open palm.

“You were protecting her, weren’t you? Where’s she gone, girl? Where’d she go?”

It was a ridiculous question that only voiced a greater mystery. Nora wasn’t anywhere in the apartment. Not hidden in a closet or under a bed as Lyköan had returned hoping to discover. Which meant she hadn’t been here when he had first come crashing through the fire escape window either. That seemed certain. But why not? Where was she?

With the odor of mortality heavy in his nostrils he drew his head away from Blossom’s ear and, returning to the front door, cast the flashlight beam into the hallway. Between the doorway and the stairwell at the end of the hall lay five more corpses.

Came right to our fucking door. Knew exactly where we were. How?

He still had no satisfying answer when, ten flights of corpse-strewn stairs later, he stumbled out of the building’s emergency exit. Panic rising with his pulse, he ran from one cooling vehicle to the next, pushing back bodies slumped behind steering wheels, shining the flashlight into slack faces and empty back seats, kicking over every corpse that lay face down in the street. Nothing and no one he recognized. The self-satisfied sneer that had animated him when he had laid these bodies down had disappeared, replaced by a confused scowl

Where the hell is she?

He shouted her name. The cry echoed hollowly into empty air and faded away. Flashlight dancing wildly, he retraced his steps, franticly pulling bodies from vehicles onto the street, a sickening crack as each skull struck the pavement, accompanied only by his own labored breathing. After he had made certain every vehicle was empty, he went back and examined the bodies again.

Nothing here but another truckload for the removal crews
.

Head spinning, perspiration running down his face, he dragged a weary hand across his eyes. The rooftop foray had backfired. That was obvious. While he had been looking out, the enemy had been peering back. That must be it. Everything had its reciprocal. How stupid he’d been. All he’d gained in return was confirmation of what he had long suspected: That out here in the hinterlands of the physical universe the dark machinery of unseen powers ― of which the newly emergent
Pra Yee Suu
was only the latest example ― and held every advantage.

Pandavas had been wrong. While something like his Artifact did exist, it was only one of a multitude of hidden despots that had apparently set up shop in these parts ― only the most recent in a long line of whisperers in the cobwebbed darkness. And once again, thanks to a lunatic mystic’s meddling, the battle was being waged at humanity’s expense. What the genius doctor had failed to consider, however, was that a usurper could prove far worse than the tyrant it hoped to replace. Wouldn’t be the first time.  

They let us believe anything we want, especially self-anointed saviors like Pandavas. Belief is the universal currency
―
so much better for business. Calms the jitters in an ignorant prey.

Hidden in eternal darkness lay the explanation for every one of life’s exasperating imponderables. Of course you had to know where to look and that had always been the hardest part. The explanation for why nothing in existence was ever inviolable. Why every philosophy withered in the light of personal experience. How every aspect of reality could be used as an instrument for asserting power, yet leave those
in
power forever beyond the light of suspicion.

Pandavas had been the perfect foil, a slave to his superior intellect, a believer in his personal importance. Permit him access to a few simple secrets of the universe and he had considered himself a prophet. That was enough. Fuck, it was everything! Once laid prostrate on this latter-day road to Damascus with the blinding revelatory light in his eyes ― like an injured animal knocked senseless crossing a modern highway, completely ignorant of what had hit him or from which direction the blow had come ― without a second thought he had instinctively bowed before the thing displaying that divinity. He hadn’t recognized the light for what it really was. How could he? What mortal had
ever
fathomed the mad ambitions that drove the gods?

But Lyköan had an inkling. On the rooftop he had stared into creation’s heart, seen it exposed for what it truly was, and in that instant ― tasting the bitter fruit of total understanding ― he had been utterly enlightened and transformed. It seemed so obvious now. That before the baking of the first mud brick in the embered firepits of Zawi Chemi; before Gilgamesh had laid the cornerstone of Eridu; before a single stone had been dragged to Newgrange mound or chalk-stained hands had drawn the compass of the pyramids, throughout all of human history, one or another of these sly, invisible entities had been directing the action. And mankind had only dimly been aware of their existence. From force-of-nature paganism to New Age seminar-spiritualism, the deception had been total, and universal ― ever so subtly washing over and coursing through every human heart and mind. The God-gene.

Emerging from the fog of universal confusion, Lyköan now stood astride the terrifying truth: That long ago ― perhaps simultaneous with the first sentient truly human thought ― these powers had singled out their prey. And ever since, through fear and ignorance, through manipulated conjecture and intuition had directed the mad cascade of human history ― while in the dark abyss they waged eternal war with one another.

Even before the great Sumer flood there had been gods. Gods with names like An, and Shangdi, Enlil, Ningirsu, Dagan, Ishtar, Pangu, Enki, Dyaus Pita, Marduk, Tishpak, Teshùp, Surya, Marut, Tèshub, Apsu, Tiamat, Baal, Yahweh, Cronus, Mummu, Arinna, Zeus, Ah Kinchil, Ahuramazda, Mithras, Ometecuhtli, and Allah. The list was long and included every charlatan that, lurking in the outer darkness, had ever ruled upon the plain of history. Pandavas’s Artifact? Just another name.

And Pandavas just one more true believer.

Thoughts exploding like Independence Day fireworks, Lyköan headed back upstairs, a long procession of instigators leering at him from the shadows: Isis, Krishna, Gabriel, Menes, Minos, Sesostris, Zarathustra, Numa, Gautama, Jesus, Peter and Paul, Shu-Sin, Elagabalus, Erdaviraph, Mani, Mohammed, Joan of Arc, George Whitefield, the Bab, Joseph Smith, Siyyid ’Ali-Muhammad, Mary Baker Eddy, L Ron Hubbard. Every inane concept the human mind might conjure up had been permitted so long as the hidden truth received obeisance and retained control. While behind the perceptual veil, mad ambitions were eternally flitting through the darkness and using human souls to achieve their ends.

Rather than the instructive, purifying Shiva who would bring about a spiritual cleansing, Pandavas had summoned something else ― something less ― something ugly and petty ― and quintessentially evil. 

So if it really wants me dead, why am I still breathing?

Like the poet’s swan down-feather, sitting on the full tide swell, the event horizon seemed to hang suspended, teetering between past and future, the impending cataclysmic contest as yet undecided. Lyköan felt himself simultaneously exposed and cloaked. In this same instant how many other uchronia sat similarly suspended? They had become almost palpable, spinning off the nexus of his gyrating thoughts, an infinite stream of alternate progressions fading into the lost and irresistible passage of time. What multitude of other perplexed Egan Lyköans stood struggling with almost identical threats across vast stretches of the limitless multiverse? Could even one of them succeed? Breaking away from these maddening thoughts, he glanced at his watch.

Impossible. Already after three in the morning.

Where had those hours flown? On the floor in the corner of the room his double-bud was singing.

* * *

Nora awoke confused, hot points of light slicing painfully inside her skull, a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth. She opened her eyes. Shadows spun nauseatingly in front of her face and she immediately shut them again. Close by, excited voices were jabbering unintelligibly. Beneath her ear an engine rumbled. Above her head wind was whistling past an open window like fingernails on a chalkboard. Wishing to blot out the noise, she tried raising her hands to her ears only to find herself bound hand and foot, heels pulled tightly to her wrists behind her back. Instinctively, she cried out, but a wide piece of tape across her mouth muffled the cry. Panic rising in her throat, she struggled against the restraints.

“Coming around at last are we? Here, let me help you, love.”

That voice, oddly familiar even through the pounding headache. Slipping the knot binding wrists to heels, a gruff hand pulled her to a sitting position.

“There you go, Doctor. None the worse for wear, I trust. Give the chloroform a minute or two to settle out of your system...”

Starlight flashed into the vehicle as it raced through an unlit intersection. Nora’s eyes widened. The voice was Whitehall’s alright, but it was coming out of the mouth of Whitehall’s son, a man with hardly a hint of grey in his full head of hair, barely a wrinkle on his smiling face. And dressed in a breezy summer suit he looked more like a prime-of-life executive on his way to an after hours dinner engagement than the point man for what had obviously been a military operation.    

“Now, now, doctor,” Whitehall chuckled, “don’t look so surprised. You shouldn’t be.”

Nora could only glare.

“Are you wondering how we found you?”

Not the question
she
would have asked first, but it would do.

“You can blame your lover-boy, dearie,” Whitehall explained impishly. “Chap pressed his luck, I’m afraid. Placed a bit too much faith in his newfound talents. A serious mistake. Not his first by any means, but costly.”

Outside, the headlights pushed through a dark and silent urban canyon. Sitting awkwardly behind the driver, Nora shifted painfully in her seat, hands grown numb. Next to the driver a helmeted guard braced a rifle like a child’s toy upright on his knee. Both men wore uniforms without insignia. Silent now, eyes on the road ahead, neither seemed interested in the backseat conversation. Nora leaned her head against the seatback trying to push the sweat-soaked hair out of her face. She cursed into the tape.   

“I beg your pardon, something you’d like to say?” Whitehall asked. “Only if you promise to keep a civil tongue now. Agreed?”

Nora nodded. Whitehall ripped the duct tape from her mouth. Swallowing the pain, Nora glowered back, blew the hair from her face, snapping the wet strands aside with a flick of her head. Whitehall acknowledged the display of uncommon pluck with a wink.