“Come on, Magistrate Man,” Rosalia hollered, “our ride’s here.”
Kane’s fist snapped out as he punched another of the villagers on the jaw. The woman’s head snapped back with an audible crack as something broke in her neck. Then he was leaping up into the air, booted feet kicking out to connect with the chest of a man wielding a pitchfork. The man toppled back into the dirt, and finally Kane could see a clear path to where Rosalia, her dog and Grant were waiting. Behind the beautiful Mexican woman, Kane saw that familiar blossom of colors as the interphaser carved a door in the quantum ether, opening an impossible corridor through space.
Kane’s empty left hand lashed out, slapping into the head of another grizzled local and casting the man aside in a tumble of flailing limbs. Then Kane was clear, ducking beneath a swinging length of hose pipe as he made for the alleyway.
Up ahead, Rosalia walked gradually backward, making her way to where Grant was waiting by the functioning interphaser.
“Damn unfriendly locals,” she said with irritation.
Grant shook his head. “Whole bunch of them are stoned,” he told her. “This Ullikummis thing is way, way out of control.”
“You two always attract this much trouble?” Rosalia asked as a breathless Kane appeared at the end of the alleyway, blasting shots from his Sin Eater behind him to force the angry locals to retain their distance.
“Kane has a knack for it,” Grant admitted, with a hint of reluctance in his tone. “Still, it does kinda look like we’ve been promoted to the New World Order’s most wanted list.”
“Let’s move,” Kane said breathlessly as he hurried down the short length of alleyway toward the burgeoning lotus blossom of light. A moment later he had leaped into the upward-facing cone of light, with Grant, Rosalia and Rosalia’s dog stepping to follow him.
An instant later the twin cones of light collapsed and the triangular interphaser unit disappeared along with Kane and his companions. The angry locals were left scratching their heads as they found themselves alone in the alleyway, finding no trace of the targets of their hostility other than the fallen forms of the hooded figure and three farmhands. It was as if Kane’s team had never existed.
Chapter 3
Snakefishville smelled of flowers. Their heady, luscious scents swirled through the air like urgent whispers in a hospital ward.
“Name and purpose of visit?” the Magistrate on the south gate asked, sounding bored. He wore a hooded robe of coarse material with a simple belt around his waist from which a small bag hung, bulging but no larger than a man’s fist. A small red-shield insignia, the familiar symbol of Magistrate office, shone at his left breast as it reflected the morning sunlight.
A petite woman stood in front of him, head down in supplication. She had white hair and a chalk-white face, and she wore a loose summer dress whose hem shimmered just above her bone-pale ankles. “Mitra,” the chalk-white woman said, “here to give thanks to our lord and master, as is his holy right.” Her name was not Mitra, and while she planned to visit the newly built cathedral in the center of the ville, she had no intention of giving thanks, holy right or not.
The Magistrate nodded, barely glancing at the woman who had called herself Mitra. He gave a brief, formal smile as he ushered her through the wide gate and into the vast compound that made up the walled ville. The south gate was wide enough to accommodate three or four of the Magistrates’ tanklike Sandcat vehicles driving side by side, a huge opening in the high-walled city of the ville. The white-skinned woman was just the latest of a whole crowd of refugees who had been made to wait at the gate while the Mags processed them. She’d waited two full hours in the warming June sun, beads of sweat forming at the back of her neck where her pixie-short hair brushed at its nape, but curiously she had not seen a single person rejected from entering the ville.
Within, garlands of flowers had been strung across the high walls and on the facades of the towering buildings that lined the ville’s central thoroughfare, their pink-and-white petals fluttering in the warm summer breeze. The woman who had given her name as Mitra peered at them as she strode through the main gates and entered the busy street, letting the bustling crowd flow around her as she admired the pleasant juxtaposition of the natural and the artificial. Behind her, the two Magistrates continued their work at the surveillance booth by the gate, wearing fustian robes over the black armor of their office, smiling as they welcomed newcomers to the ville on this day of worship. Buzzing honeybees flitted from flower to flower along the decorative garlands, delving lustily at their sweet contents before moving on in their restless dance through the warm air. There were other people on the street, dressed in light summer clothes, hurrying to and fro just like the bees, their clothing bright and clean in the midmorning sunlight.
The white-faced woman stood still for a moment, feeling out of place as she watched the people hurrying by all around her, each with a purpose, a destination. Her name was Domi and she didn’t belong here.
The last time Domi had been in Snakefishville—the last time it had been called Snakefishville—it had all been very different. As one of nine magnificent walled cities dotted across North America, Snakefishville had lost its ruler when the hybrid barons had evolved into the Annunaki Roverlords two years ago. Baron Snakefish himself had transformed into cruel Lord Utu. Without the baron’s influence, the ville had fallen into confusion and, most recently, it had been all but destroyed by a subterrene, an underground engineering device that replicated the effects of an earthquake and sent the towers of Snakefish crashing down into a crater. When Domi had last visited here four months ago, what little remained of the ville itself looked like something from a nightmare. All that had remained of its once-majestic buildings were a few rotten struts clawing the skies at awful angles, and the wrecked streets were filled with the decaying bodies of the dead.
Yet now, just a few months on, the ville was miraculously reinvigorated. And not just reinvigorated, Domi reminded herself—renamed. Like all things Annunaki, Snakefishville had been reborn, this time as Luilekkerville where freedom was everything and its citizenry considered themselves carefree.
Domi didn’t like it. When things changed rapidly like this it was seldom for the better, she knew. The guards on the gate were all too friendly, far too welcoming for Magistrates, and Domi could tell with a glance that neither was combat-ready.
Luilekkerville’s buildings were universally lower than those of Snakefishville, and the towering Administrative Monolith that had dominated the center had been replaced by a two-story cathedral. But the cathedral’s tower strove higher, reaching up over the new-built city, a circular stained-glass window dominating its front like some all-seeing eye, its panes made up of reds and oranges and purples, just like the old disk on the Administrative Monoliths.
Different but the same, then, still following the old street map that had been created during the Program of Unification, the same regimented plan on which each of the nine villes had been based. A child of the Outlands, Domi had never felt comfortable caged inside the high walls of the villes. They did something to people, she felt sure, muddled their senses and made them susceptible and docile—gave them “tanglebrain,” as she called it. Recently, her friends in Cerberus had begun to suspect that there was more to the ville blueprints than met the eye, that the symmetrical design of the cities—with their towering structures that peaked at the center—created some kind of sigil, a magical symbol that could genuinely affect a person’s thinking. Cerberus archivist Brigid Baptiste had told Domi that such symbols were commonplace back before the nukecaust, that an ancient political organization called the Nazi Party had used one as a rallying point to recruit their members, a symbol called the swastika.
