Advancing at a measured pace, the group moved along a corridor lit by torches. Bowls containing plants were suspended in the air by chains. The torch-holders seemed to be forged from the same metal as the bowls, something akin to bronze. Rich tapestries and frescos painted onto stone covered the walls on either side. They looked something like Egyptian hieroglyphs. The naïve-looking fresco told a story: worshippers prostrated themselves before an enormous creature with obscene aquatic twists, the same creature depicted in the sculpture they had seen earlier at the fountain below. People were offered as sacrifices to the monster (this image confirmed the diffuse impression Tess had picked up from her host), while tornados and luminous convolutions like the one that appeared over the Grand Banks filled the skies…
“Quantum disturbances?”
The next panel (Tess almost felt like she was reading a comic book) showed four warriors attacking the living god with bows and arrows…
“That was one hell of a fight,” commented Razovski in a low voice.
“Were you there?”
“Yeah. And old Bob was also part of our commando unit. We had a hard time, let me tell you.” He tapped his finger on the fresco. “That goddamned creature did everything it could to thwart us. It took us at least ten runs before we cornered it so we could take it…”
The five time travellers emerged from the corridor into an oval space ringed with arcades. In the middle of this room there was an altar surrounded by a smoke that hid its exact form. Aromatic torches had been arranged around it. The sweetish scent emanating from the fumes was somewhat heady, and Tess told herself that if she breathed it for long she might become nauseated.
A sinister-looking figure officiated behind the altar.
“Is that him, the famous high priest?” asked Rr’naal.
“Yeah,” replied Razovski, with a note of disgust. “He’s named Aktur. A real piece of work. But we’re not here for him.”
Aktur was not very tall, about five feet three inches. It was difficult, on the other hand, to evaluate his girth, masked by the long floating trains of his ceremonial dress. He wore a necklace of teeth and a horned headdress by way of a helmet. Bright stripes decorated his shoulders. His forearms and his face were covered in tattoos and scars. The glow from the torches gave him the gaze of a madman, intense and bright. Tess could not see Aktur’s feet but would not have been surprised to see goat hooves peeping out from the dark folds of his robes.
A dozen of his followers were prostrated in front of the altar, hands flat on the floor. They began to sing in chorus a throbbing chant, with harmonies that were unpleasant to the human ear. The chant swelled and fell, its tone rising and descending, but the fervour of the believers seemed to remain constant. Aktur intoned the responses when the choir marked a pause. His voice was impersonal and yet it commanded respect. No one seemed to notice the five intruders. Nevertheless, they prudently kept their distance, remaining hidden in the shadows of a gallery. All energy seemed to be concentrated on the priest.
There was something unhealthy about the ceremony taking place. Tess expected at any moment one of the believers would take a knife from their tunic in order to stab themselves in the chest or slit open their throat while gargling a final oath of fanatical loyalty. After a plaintive interlude, the chant reached a climax. Powerful, demanding, it expressed a growing passion and even monstrous unfulfilled desires.
“No use hanging around here,” muttered Razovski.
No one dared to contradict him, and the four novice agents followed him further into the shadows. They soon came to a series of lateral corridors. Tortured demons appeared in relief, sculpted on the walls. The group passed in front of a hideous face endowed with fangs and pointy ears. The place looked like something you might see on a ghost train ride at the fun fair. All that was missing were the spider webs and the howling of werewolves in the background.
Razovski pressed his hand to the grimacing face. There was a click and the wall slid aside with a long stony scraping sound. A spiral staircase descended into the depths. It seemed endless.
“Watch out, the steps are slippery,” warned Razovski, still leading the group.
The foursome started down the stairs after him, and the wall panel slid back into place, making the same sound as a tomb being closed up.
The further they descended into the entrails of the earth, the more the humidity grew, becoming oppressive in its omnipresence. It impregnated the air with an icy dampness. The stairway was badly lit, with a torch every thirty feet or so. There seemed to be a more generous source of light somewhere below, but they still needed to reach it. Faint sounds, difficult to identify, rose from the underground spaces. Was it the rustling and squeaking of famished rodents? Running water on stone? The whistling of an air current seeking a way out of this labyrinth? The three different noises combined to produce a dismal cacophony.
At the end of several long minutes, the agents arrived at the last level. Here, the torches crackled with a fiercer energy as they burned, and a strange sulphurous smell floated in the air. A corridor dug by human hands opened before the group. Tess turned back toward the stairs, already discouraged.
“Are we going to have to climb all the way back up on the return journey?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” her father replied.
They were walking on a muddy floor, punctuated in places by stagnant puddles. Drops fell one by one from the ceiling, seeming to count off the seconds. Algae had colonized a fetid, silty puddle where a few bizarre fish lay dying, their mouths gaping. Razovski pushed them away with his foot. Masses of slimy seashells encrusted the walls. Small crabs scurried hither and thither. There was a feeling of abandonment, as if the creatures who normally inhabited this space had fled, disturbed by the human intrusion.
The tunnel soon divided into two branches, and then there were more crossings at regular intervals. Razovski obviously knew the way. He took a left turn, then a right. He barely paused at all. At one point, he signalled to the others to duck into a recess. He’d heard something. Tess pricked up her ears and could make out the sound of footsteps splashing across the muddy floor. A patrol of five guards wearing red robes passed in front of the adventurers without seeing them. With their hoods and mesh masks, it was impossible to differentiate between them. This detail only intensified their menacing character. They had voluntarily sacrificed all individuality when they joined the sect that protected the temple’s security. The implacable manner of their progression and the absence of any hesitation in their movements indicated they were ready to fight and to die, if necessary, in case of an armed confrontation.
The rhythmic steps faded in the distance. Tess and her comrades emerged from their hiding place. Their exploration resumed, seemingly erratic, and yet Razovski knew where he was going. Arriving at a bend in the tunnel, he halted, indicating to the rest of the group with a peremptory gesture that they imitate him, and then he risked a glance around the corner at the tunnel that lay beyond. This passage ended thirty feet further on, at an intersection unlike the previous ones. Firstly, this one was guarded by four cult members in red dress, one for each branch of the tunnel. And secondly, a ray of light descended from the ceiling, forming an immaterial column at the very centre of the crossing.
Razovski retreated and gathered his troops for a brief huddle. “We’ve arrived at the location of the cube, but there are guards. Four guys. We can take them.”
Tess felt the blood of her receptacle boiling. The prospect of combat did not frighten him; on the contrary, the soldier who vegetated inside her seemed eager to put his skill with weapons to the test.
“We’re going to have to charge thirty feet across open ground, which means we’ll lose the element of surprise,” Razovski continued.
Tess shrugged her shoulders, as if to signify: “Makes no difference to me.”
Besides, she’d already bared her sword. Rr’naal had done the same. Dominika had removed her dagger from its sheath.
James said, “We have less than a quarter of an hour left.”
Razovski drew forth a short sword from the folds of his rags. He also possessed a knife, tucked into a sheath tied to his ankle. He gave it to James, the only member of the group without a weapon.
“Ready?”
He sounded like a coach delivering a pep talk to a sports team in the changing room before a match.
They nodded their heads.
Razovski charged forward, screaming like a thousand banshees, and his companions followed suit, running closely on his heels.
The guard posted at the other end of the corridor, just before the intersection, was taken by surprise, but he quickly directed the point of his weapon toward the band of furies bearing down on him.
Dominika threw her dagger without slowing. The blade planted itself into the guard’s chest, almost to the hilt. The man fell to his knees. He hadn’t had time to use his spear. The three other guards joined the fight at a run. One of them threw his spear toward the assailants. With a resounding cling, Razovski deflected the fatal trajectory with a backhanded blow of his sword. The next instant, he was in direct contact with the enemy, slamming into the guard with a metallic clash.
The three guards possessed both experience and plenty of courage, but they weren’t as good as their opponents. There was a flash of steel, and Tess severed the spear held by the cult member facing her. Rr’naal impaled him upon his sword. Razovski opened the belly of another adversary, whose guts fell into the mud in warm coils.
The last guard standing retreated slowly. Attacked on two fronts at the same time, he nevertheless managed to keep Rr’naal and James at a distance. Meanwhile, the guard who had fallen to his knees, with the dagger in his chest, took out a sort of trumpet which resembled a hunting horn and blew on it until his veins nearly burst. Tess slit his throat without hesitation. He dropped his instrument and raised his hands to his neck. The blood spurted in crimson cascades between his fingers before spreading, red on red, down the front of his robe. He tumbled to one side, face in the dirt. Tess was panting, filled with an intense feeling of satisfaction… which was completely unlike her. Killing gave her pleasure; no, it was stronger than that: it gave her joy.
The remaining guard stabbed James in the arm. The Englishman had been a little too bold and paid for it with a wound; a minor one, to be sure, but a hindrance for further combat. Razovski nudged Rr’naal and James aside, and then advanced toward the survivor, twirling his sword rapidly. The guard retreated further, until his back touched the damp wall behind him. In a burst of rage mixed with terror, he launched a final, desperate attack, his body thrusting forward. Razovski evaded the blow with the grace of a bullfighter, stepping aside at the last moment and spinning around to plant his blade in the back of his adversary’s neck. The point reemerged in the man’s wide-open mouth, like a second tongue. A cold, hard metal appendage.
James had rushed over to the light pouring down in the middle of the intersection. The beam was quite visible, its outline clearly defined.
“Hey?!!”
The Englishman was stopped dead in his tracks and then projected backward. He fell on his behind in a puddle of saltwater. Dominika meanwhile tried to place her hand inside the beam, but it resisted her attempt. It was like an invisible wall, or rather some kind of inviolable elastic membrane.
Razovski addressed his daughter: “Tess, I guess it’s all up to you.”
“Hurry,” added Rr’naal, “because there are more people coming this way.”
The Ganymedian had turned toward one of the four corridors. He could already see vague silhouettes moving toward them through the inky black shadows.
Tess felt a prickling in the hollow of her belly and within her chest. It felt like the stage fright of an actor before the curtain went up. It was as if all the threads of her existence were converging on this particular point in space and time.
“Go on, what are you waiting for?” Razovski urged her.
She really wanted to put him in his place, this father of hers. And what if she wasn’t the “Chosen One” after all? Would her life still have any meaning? She had been conceived for this moment, like a part made in a factory. It was her function, her utility. In theory, at least. There was still no proof that the genetic programming would work.
Tess stepped into the light.