Gasping for air, dripping blood and sweat, and thoroughly bloody sick of this ridiculously sized penis-extension of a sword, I crash to the bottom of a flight of spiral stairs. I bounce off one wall, spin into a broad room. Kayla is already there. The rest of MI37 follows swift on my heels. Hermann and Volk come last, taking a lot of the important-looking structural components of the stairs with them. Ominous cracks spread through the rock walls. Hopefully there’s an alternative exit.
“Did we lose them?” I call back to Felicity.
“Like fuck.” The constant threat of death seems to be damaging the part of her that normally controls her language. That said, I can see at least three gashes on her that look like they need stitches. If she wants to curse, I think she has an excuse.
I wish I had time to comfort her. Personally, I’m finding the imminent death thing is actually distracting me a little from, well… the other imminent death thing, I suppose. But I’ve had less time to be morose about the new threats.
“Is this it?” Hermann asks. “Or another of your dead ends.”
And well… I take the time to take stock. We’re in a broad room. It’s not deep though. And… well, there is a massive oval door to help give the place an ante-chamber sort of feel. The door itself resembles the one that got us into this whole mess. Lying on its side covered in swirling paisley patterns.
“Oh crap,” I say. I seem to have developed bad associations with doors that look like that.
Behind us, the sound of fighting encroaches. Another deafening roar widens the cracks in the walls.
“The door,” I say, pointing. “How long?”
“Oh,” Clyde looks about, shrugs, “erm, well the last one took us a couple of minutes and we, sort of, in a manner of speaking, by which I mean, very directly and in all the obvious ways, we were assisted by Tabby’s, erm…”
“Computer,” she finishes for him, acidly. She holds the two halves aloft once more. I have no idea why she’s still holding them.
Another boom of ugly steel-based death resonates above us.
“What about this feck?” Kayla asks.
I spin around to see who on earth she could be talking about. I only catch a blur as she whips into motion. Then she’s across the room, reaching around a corner. There’s a shrill scream and suddenly she’s dragging a small spindly man back across the floor toward us.
The man is stark naked, and unfortunately one of the first things I get to learn about him is that he has been completely shaved. Not a speck of hair on him. Anywhere. Bright blue tattoos swirl over his body, matching the patterns on the door. I also quickly learn that they cover him completely. Some tattooist needs to learn when to stop.
“Yes!” Tabitha cries as Kayla drags the man kicking and screaming across the floor. “All makes sense now.” She turns to Clyde, a victorious expression on her face, but it sours as soon as she lays eyes on him. She turns back to Kayla, grimacing. “Key. He is. For that door.”
The man wrestles and twitches in Kayla’s grasp but can’t get free. She shoves him toward the door.
“How the hell is he a key?” I say to Tabitha. This seems like a fundamental idea I’m missing.
“No clue,” says Tabitha. “But read in my database before…” another acid glance at Clyde, “cryptic then. Makes sense now. A man is the key.”
Oh hell, that’s about as good an explanation as I usually get.
Kayla shoves the man closer to the door, pulls her sword. “There you go,” she says. “Feckin’ open it.”
The man stares at her, shaking. A string of syllables that make about as much sense to me as my DVR instructions spill out of him.
“I don’t think he speaks English,” I say.
“Bet he speaks feckin’ this.” She brandishes the sword.
“Clyde,” I say, “you don’t happen to know any nifty translation spells do you?”
Clyde shuffles his feet, looks anywhere but at Tabby.
“Database,” she mutters in a voice that could grind granite.
“Sword it is then,” Kayla says, sounding a little too cheerful for my tastes. She takes a step toward the tattooed youth.
He takes an instinctive step backwards.
Another vast tremor shakes the building. I stagger a step. Suddenly Kayla’s sword isn’t the only weapon pointed at the youth.
He puts a hand on the door. It glows. Yellow light cracks through the deep bronze carvings. It seems to linger at certain points. Geometric patterns illuminated. Networks of hexagons and swirling lines.
And it seems to collect too, pooling on the youth’s body, swirling around his tattoos. The light glows, grows, is nearly blinding. I take one hand off my sword handle to shield my eyes. The youth is glowing like a lightbulb, his head thrown back. The door itself looks almost on fire.
Then the light flares, too bright. The world a shade of yellow that is almost white. Someone lets out a cry caught between pain and bliss.
When my eyes recover the light is gone, the youth is nowhere to be seen, and the door is grinding open.
“There,” says Kayla, “told you he’d understand the sword. Universal feckin’ language.”