redoubt—the headquarters from which Kane and his companions had operated—Baptiste had gone MIA. Despite their best efforts, her current whereabouts remained unknown.
The gradient of the path eased for the last thirty yards, and Kane had returned his Sin Eater to its hiding place beneath the right sleeve of his jacket by the time the trio reached its foot. They walked three abreast, with the dog skulking at Rosalia’s side as they made their way along the last part of the dusty roadway that led into the hamlet itself.
A single thoroughfare dominated the village, running parallel to the thin river. People dressed in light clothes were walking along that main street, a few youngsters paddling at the stream’s edge. A bearded man in simple clothes was leading a mule down the street, its back laden with two great baskets full of the leaves of some edible root crop or other. It seemed normal enough.
As they neared the closest of the buildings, the companions could hear the tink-tink-tink of a blacksmith at work. Kane turned and saw an open-fronted shed beside the single-story house. Inside a man worked at shaping a horseshoe that glowed white-hot at the end of his tongs. The man peered up from his work as the companions passed, eyes narrowing as he watched the strangers entering the village.
“By my reckoning,” Kane told his companions, keeping his voice low, “our parallax point should be in the northwest corner of this place.” He pointed. “Over by that storage silo, maybe?”
Parallax points were a crucial part of a system of instantaneous travel that was employed by the Cerberus rebels. The process itself involved a quantum inducer called an interphaser, which could fold space upon itself, granting its user immediate teleportation to another location, either on Earth or beyond. Though portable, the interphaser units could only be engaged in set locations. The units tapped into an ancient web of powerful, naturally occurring lines of energy stretching right across the globe, much like the ley lines of old. On Thunder Isle the Cerberus crew had discovered the Parallax Points program, which encoded all the vortex points. The interphaser relied on this program, and new vortex points were fed into the interphaser’s targeting computer.
Frequently the specific sites of interphase induction had become sacred in the eyes of primitive man. However, over time many of these parallax points had become forgotten or buried beneath the rise and fall of civilizations. As such, they often turned up in the most unlikely of locations.
The Cerberus organization had several of the portable interphase units. When they had evacuated their redoubt headquarters, Kane’s team had taken one of the units for ease of transport while they went undercover. Right now, Grant carried the foot-high unit in its protective case inside the rucksack on his back.
Rosalia’s dog whined plaintively as the companions continued to stride along the dusty street. It was a simple path marked out on the ground by the basic virtue of repeated usage. A woman in her thirties sat in a weather-beaten rocking chair outside the front door to one of the tumbledown shacks, her fingers moving deftly as she knitted a pair of baby booties. Grant acknowledged her with a dip of his head, touching his fingers to his brow for just a second.
“Things don’t feel right here, you guys,” Rosalia said, her voice a whisper.
Kane looked over to her and a lopsided smile touched at his lips. “Weren’t you the one who was complaining about we ex-Magistrates skulking around like frightened schoolgirls?”
In response, Rosalia showed him her teeth in a sarcastic imitation of a grin. “Just an observation, Magistrate Man,” she said, subtly stretching her arms out as if to yawn. “Don’t jump at shadows on my account.” As she did so, she shifted two hidden knives that were located beneath her sleeves.
With the open stream running to the right of them, Kane continued on, making his way toward the crop silo he had pointed out a few moments before. “Keep the interphaser to hand,” he instructed Grant out of the corner of his mouth. “I want to be on our way as soon as.”
They were heading for a meeting high on the Californian coast. A coded message had been piped through to Kane a few hours before from their old Cerberus leader, Lakesh, providing them with coordinates of a meeting point where he hoped to set up a temporary base.
As the three of them rounded the corner of the silo and a simple lean-to building that stood at its side, Kane spotted a small chunk in the sandy dirt at the external edge of the silo itself. It looked like an ancient mile marker, a little hunk of rounded stone sticking up about eighteen inches from the soil. The marker sat in the lee of the lean-to, obscured by the shadow that the tall silo cast.
“Five’ll get you ten that that’s our parallax point,” Kane stated, indicating the marker stone half-buried in the ground.
As Kane spoke, a figure appeared from the far side of the silo fifteen feet away, striding into view before halting, his eyes locked on Kane and his teammates. The man was tall and wore a rough-hewn robe made of a dirty brown material that covered him from neck down to his ankles like a cassock. The robe featured a voluminous hood that the man had pulled up over his head, hiding his features in shadow so that only his eyes glinted in the fierce morning sunlight. His right fist was held loosely clenched at his side, and Kane could tell immediately that the hooded stranger was clutching something within that balled fist. The man’s fustian robe featured a red badge pinned to the left breast, and the insignia flashed as it caught the sun’s rays.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” the robed figure asked, challenge in his tone.
“We’re just passing through, friend,” Kane stated, feeling a disquieting roiling in his stomach.
Beneath the hood, the man closed his eyes for a moment, reaching out with uncanny senses. Kane and his companions watched as the strange figure shook his head infinitesimally as if confused by what he could feel. “Cannot…” the man muttered before opening his eyes once more. “This is a sanctified town, sirs,” the man said in an authoritative tone. “Are you faithful?”
Kane stared at the robed man in disbelief. “I…I…” How could he possibly answer that question?
“I suspected as much,” the robed man stated, his tone rising in fury. “Mr. Kane, is it not?”
Kane became aware that figures were massing behind him. Where moments before they had seemed to be wary of the strangers but simply going about their workaday lives, now the townsfolk appeared to be closing in, subtly blocking the street and hemming the Cerberus teammates in at the alleyway between the silo and the one-story lean-to beside it.
Kane took a steadying breath. “You seem to know me, but I don’t think I caught your name,” he told the robed figure at the farther end of the silo.
The hooded man nodded once in acknowledgment. “I am stone,” he stated.
Kane had heard the phrase before. It was something of a battle chant for an expanding class of warriors who fought in the name of a sinister being called Ullikummis. In speaking the phrase, the hooded figure had not merely confirmed his allegiance, but he had also entered a meditative state whereby his physical attributes would change.
Kane’s eyes darted to the subtle movement as the man unclenched his right fist and a simple cord of leather with a cuplike design at the farthest extension of its loop sagged from his hand.
“And you are an enemy of stone,” the hooded figure said. Even as he spoke, the leather cup whirled around the man’s arm as he launched a cluster of lethal projectiles at Kane and his teammates.
Chapter
