TWELVE

 

Arkaim, Russia

 

A third mattress-sized trilo-pede squirmed up out of the river channel to join the other two. Their enormous shells bristled with spiny horn-like extensions, but it was the clacking mandibles that projected real menace. The four humans who had blundered into their subterranean domain were good for just one thing: food.

Lazarus started toward them, pausing long enough to shout back over his shoulder. “Get out of here. I’ll try to slow them down.”

Pierce turned away, arms wide in a herding gesture, though Fiona and Gallo needed no coaxing. They ran to the extent that the topography would allow it, but in the ambient glow from their headlamps, Pierce saw another of the creatures rising out of the river channel ahead of them. But something else came out of the river with it, a man-sized golem formed of smooth, fist-sized rocks and mud. It leapt onto the back of the nearest trilo-pede, slamming its underbelly down against the cavern floor.

Way to go, Fi! Pierce thought, intending to shout the words, but before he could follow through, the trilo-pede began thrashing, flinging pieces of the golem away like drops of water until nothing was left. Instead, Pierce said, “Bigger!”

“I don’t have anything to work with,” Fiona complained.

The ill-fated golem had bought them a few seconds, just enough time to slip past the creature. Pierce looked back, trying to gauge its speed, and saw Lazarus come up behind the monster and scramble onto its back.

The creature tried to throw him off, but Lazarus was not as easy to dislodge as a rough, hastily constructed golem. He reached down and seized one of the protruding spikes in each hand, but holding on wasn’t his intention. He flexed his legs, and then, with a howl of primal rage, he pulled. There was a sickening, sucking sound as the segments tore loose from the creature’s body in a spray of dark fluid, trailing long ropes of tissue.

The trilo-pede’s thrashing intensified, and with his handhold no longer connected to the thing’s body, Lazarus was hurled clear. He landed on his side, but somehow managed to turn the crash into a roll. Then he was back on his feet in an instant, brandishing a piece of trilo-pede exoskeleton the size of a car’s bumper. As the wounded creature struck at him, he thrust the end of the shell between the chattering mandibles, and with his full weight behind it, he rammed it deep into the trilo-pede’s body.

“George!”

Pierce turned his gaze forward again and saw the reason for Gallo’s shout. To his left, the river channel widened and flattened out, disappearing as the river spilled out onto the cavern floor, forming one enormous puddle that stretched from wall to wall. Water dripped and trickled from the walls, raining down from the stalactite-studded ceiling fifty feet overhead. The walls were riddled with gaps and holes where the flow had eroded the limestone, but none were big enough to accommodate a person. There were no other passages. This was the source of the underground river.

They had run out of cavern.

He looked back again, and saw Lazarus running with two of the giant trilo-pedes close on his heels.

“Fi, please tell me you’ve been holding back.”

The young woman did not answer, but her eyes closed and her lips began moving. Pierce wasn’t sure what she was attempting, or if she even knew herself.

Fiona was adept at creating golems, but the shortage-of-raw-materials problem had not gone away. The cavern was mostly solid. The river had long ago carried away or dissolved most of the rocks that might have been suitable for that purpose. Golems—the term had come from Jewish folklore—were an attempt to reproduce the Biblical miracle of Adam’s creation by breathing life into a body made of clay or loose soil. The emet incantation could animate a human or animal simulacrum, and to some extent, define its shape, but it couldn’t transform solid rock into something more pliable or cause a fully formed rock giant to step out of the limestone walls.

Which was not to say that could not be done. The Mother Tongue was the language of creation, the very words God had used to bring the universe into existence. In the past, Fiona had created Golems out of solid stone. A mountainside, in fact. But she had not memorized the phrases, and by the end of her ordeal, she had forgotten much of the Mother Tongue that had been revealed to her. She was relearning what she’d lost, but she was not there yet. Pierce had also seen Fiona change solid stone into something as ephemeral as smoke. Surely there was something she could do, something she could say.

“What about the sphere?” Gallo shouted, pointing to the ball of memory metal Fiona was still carrying. “Is there a way to use it?”

Fiona didn’t acknowledge the question, but a sudden chill rising up from the flooded floor of the cavern suggested that she was already working that angle. With a faint, almost musical crackling sound, the water underfoot crystallized. The ice crept up the walls like a time-lapse video of a spring thaw running backward. The walls froze. The steady dripping ceased as icicles formed on the stalactites.

Lazarus, the only one of them still moving, lost his footing. His legs shot out from beneath him and he landed flat on his back, sliding across the ice-slicked surface, out of control. The trilo-pedes pursuing him hesitated at the ice margin, probing it with their steak knife-sized leg tips, then they started forward again.

“Fi, I don’t think—”

A noise, like a series of explosions deep within the surrounding karst, cut Pierce off. The cracks and holes in the walls began spreading, opening wider like yawning mouths, as the water deep inside the rock froze and expanded. Huge chunks of limestone broke loose, spilling onto the floor all around them. The upheaval shattered the scrim of ice on the floor, and for several seconds, it was all Pierce could do to stay on his feet.

The tumult was too much for the trilo-pedes. The squirming giants twisted around and vanished back into the darkness. That was little consolation to their former prey, for at that moment the ceiling started crumbling as well.

Pierce threw up a hand in a hopeless attempt to shield himself as icicles and chunks of stone, some bigger than he was, started breaking loose and crashing down all around him.

“Get to cover,” he shouted, reaching for Fiona, intending to drag her out of harm’s way, but the cave-in was happening all around them. There was no outrunning it and no shelter.

Then something else broke through the canopy overhead.

Daylight.

We almost made it, Pierce thought, as a sliver of light grew and the ceiling above him started to fall.

But instead of dropping straight down and crushing Pierce and Fiona to oblivion, the rock shifted sideways, as if rebounding off an invisible force field. In the corner of his eye, Pierce saw more stones moving in defiance of gravity, coming together like building blocks. They formed a squat, blockish man-shaped golem. It spread its arms out, catching the last few pieces of falling rubble, but as it did, the friction of dry stone grinding together began to overwhelm the tenuous connections holding the construct together. Fiona threw a hand out, delaying the creation’s collapse long enough for it to take one lurching step toward the nearest wall, where it slumped in a mini-avalanche.

Lazarus was the first to grasp what Fiona had just done. He pointed to the newly created rock pile. “There’s our exit.”

They scrambled up the loose and uneven stone staircase, climbing the last few feet to reach the edge of the hole. The late afternoon sky was visible through it. Pierce helped boost Fiona and Gallo, then he took his turn, and Lazarus brought up the rear.

As Pierce’s head cleared the opening, the first thing he saw was a jumble of brightly colored fabric strewn out on the ground before them. The subterranean journey had taken them in a circle around the site of old Arkaim, and had brought them up near the banks of a small creek at the edge of the campground—or what remained of it anyway. Between the earthquake and the sinkhole collapse Fiona had triggered by freezing the groundwater, only a few of the tents were still standing. There was no sign of the campers and New Age tourists who had occupied them.

Pierce took a minute to get his bearings, then turned in the direction of the nearby parking lot. Despite everything that had happened, the expedition to Arkaim had been a success. The memory-metal sphere Fiona had recovered was the sort of artifact the Cerberus Group had been created to keep under wraps, even if they had no idea where it had come from or what its purpose was.

Time to boogie.

He was just about to reach for his phone to call Dourado and let her know that they were all still alive when he heard someone shouting. The words were in Russian, but sounded officious, which wasn’t surprising since the man shouting at them from the other side of the hole was wearing a dark military-style uniform. He was also holding a rifle, which was pointed at them.

Pierce had stashed the babelfish hardware in the backpack. Trying to take it out probably would have been the wrong thing to do, but he had a pretty good idea what the man was saying. Something along the lines of ‘You’re under arrest,’ or ‘Hands up,’ or maybe even ‘Go ahead, punk. Make my day.’

Crap.

As he skirted along the edge of the hole, the man unclipped a walkie-talkie from his belt and uttered a few harsh-sounding words into it.

Probably calling for reinforcements, Pierce thought. Double crap.

Dourado had warned him that the archaeologist in charge of the site—what was his name? Z-something—had reported Pierce to the cultural authorities. Pierce didn’t know if the man heading their direction was a policeman sent to deal with them or a soldier securing the site in the aftermath of the earthquake, but either way, it would be almost impossible to slip away with the memory-metal sphere.

“Fi, you got any more tricks up your sleeve?”

The Russian shouted again, probably ordering him to stop talking. Pierce waggled his hands in the air in a show of surrender. The man reached the edge of the sinkhole, glanced down into it just for a second before bringing his gaze back to Pierce. Then he stopped and looked down again, eyes wide in disbelief. He breathed a Russian curse as he brought the barrel of his rifle down and took aim at whatever it was he saw below.

Even though he knew it was coming, Pierce jumped a little when the first shot was fired. Lazarus however, seized the initiative. “Now. Run for it.”

Fiona and Gallo took off running, but Pierce hesitated, half-expecting the Russian to start shooting at them. The man never looked away from his target in the sinkhole, though.

That must be some golem, Pierce thought, glancing down.

It wasn’t a golem.

“Go,” Lazarus urged. “Get to the car.”

Pierce jolted into motion just as the Russian’s smoking rifle went silent, its ammunition supply exhausted. Pierce caught a glimpse of the man trying to replace the spent magazine, then the man simply wasn’t there anymore. Something had seized hold of him and dragged him down into the pit.

“Go!” Lazarus urged again.

A trilo-pede body came out of the sinkhole, then another and another, like the tentacles of a giant octopus, probing the unfamiliar daylight world—testing it, tasting it.

Pierce ran.

Fiona and Gallo had already reached the rented vehicle, and Pierce was nearly there as well when he spied two more uniformed men running across the parking area on an intercept course. Lazarus poured on a burst of speed and managed to reach the driver’s side door before the Russians could close half the distance.

Not that they were paying attention to the fleeing humans anymore. Both men were staring in astonishment at the creatures undulating across the grass, heading in their direction. The Russians opened fire, but the bullets didn’t seem to have any effect on the advancing creatures.

Pierce climbed into the passenger seat and Lazarus started the engine. The tires threw up clods of turf as the vehicle shot forward. Pierce looked over his shoulder, curious to see what would happen next, but Lazarus turned out of the parking lot and he lost sight of the battle. “You think the Russians will be able to handle those things?”

Lazarus shrugged. “They’re not so hard to kill.”

Pierce grinned. “Easy for you to say.”

“The longer the Russians spend dealing with them, the better our chances of making it across the border and into Kazakhstan, so maybe it’s better for us if they do have to work for it a little.”

Pierce knew Lazarus was right, but he still felt a little guilty for unleashing the monsters on Arkaim.

He allowed himself a long overdue sigh of relief. The world was safe again. Mission finally accomplished.

He dug out his phone to call Dourado and tell her the good news.