had waited five thousand years in cramped imprisonment. “Save us,” she cried. “Show us the glory of your utopia.”
Kane bit his tongue in disgust. Then he and Brigid stepped up to the meteor, their expressions fixed and solemn. There were two ideograms carved high on the surface of the boulder. Together they read Son Of Enlil. Enlil was the cruellest of the Annunaki royal family, and his rebirth in modern times had caused Kane and his Cerberus teammates untold hours of grief. That he had a son who’d returned to challenge him for his throne had been like a never-ending nightmare that only got worse and worse.
Kane placed his hand against the stone and bowed his head. He thought of how he had ultimately thrown Ullikummis into the sun, watched as his stone body hurtled toward the fiery ball in space, drawn by the sun’s gravity, burned up forever. “Warm our hearts, stone god,” Kane said aloud, and around him the acolytes and other pilgrims nodded and smiled in agreement at the seemingly innocuous sentiment. And burn in hell, Kane added in his mind.
Brigid took Kane’s place a moment later, staring at the rock. She had seen it before, over a year ago, shortly after it had landed here. Back then, this area had been an arable farmer’s field, surrounded by more of the same. The fields had been mostly root vegetables, with a simple farmhouse located amid them, close to the lone road. The house was destroyed now, the fields turned over to wildflowers, and this site—this abomination—had sprung up in place of the fallen meteor in the field. It sickened her—this failing by man to need leadership, to almost desire subjugation. Maybe the barons had been right all along.
Brigid stepped away, and her place was taken by two more pilgrims who pawed lovingly at the rock, this cradle of their stone god.
After conversing with the rock, each pilgrim was led to an enclosed space behind it. Kane and Brigid entered this area, not knowing what to expect. Two robed acolytes spoke to them in soft tones as they led them through a drawn curtain colored black like the wet slate. Behind this sat several simple desks and chairs, each of which was sectioned off by another short curtain that hung down only as low as a man’s waist. They were a little like the voting booths found in many twenty-first-century democracies. Kane was ushered behind one of the curtains with the acolyte while Brigid was directed to the desk next to it.
Once there, the robed acolyte—a young man with wide-set eyes and a shaven head—sat before Kane and addressed him in a calming, quiet tone. “Now you are expected to give life to god,” he said, reeling off the words as if they were entirely normal. “Have you been made aware of what this entails?”
Kane shook his head. “I must’ve missed that sermon.”
“No matter,” the robed man said gently. “It is a very simple matter.” He opened a small box located on the table—roughly the size of a travel sewing kit—and drew out an eight-inch-long needle along with something that reminded Kane of a shot glass. “We take a few drops of your blood—three or four is enough—which is your sacrifice to the stone god.”
Kane eyed the needle warily. “Is that thing clean?” he asked.
“We sterilize the sacrificial lances after each use,” the stone acolyte confirmed. “For the stone is clean and thus cleanliness is a sign of god.”
Kane nodded. “Okay. What do you need me to do?”
The acolyte drew the curtain across the little chamber for their privacy, then reached for Kane’s right wrist. Kane drew back his arm before the man could touch him; his Sin Eater was hidden there, disguised by the folds of the jacket.
“It is right to feel fear on first sacrifice, but no harm will come to you,” the acolyte soothed gently.
“Sorry,” Kane said, shaking his head. “Just have a thing about needles.” He held out his left arm—the one without the hidden blaster—pulling back the sleeve. “Go ahead.”
The acolyte brought the cup and needle down close to Kane’s wrist and instructed him to chant a prayer to the stone god. Kane recited the words he had heard at the congregation a few days before, when he and Brigid had enlisted in this ragtag pilgrimage.
“Ullikummis, lord of stone, grant me the presence of mind to recognize your works, and to embrace utopia when it descends upon us, healing all of mankind and washing away the sins of the past.”
The acolyte pricked Kane’s thumb with the needle and squeezed four droplets of blood from it.
“The bedrock of the world has slipped, but it can be corrected in time. Love shared, blessings shared, stone laid.”
Kane hated the chant but he couldn’t draw attention to himself—not until he and Brigid had found out exactly what was going on here.
* * *
IN THE BOOTH beside Kane’s, Brigid was going through an identical ritual, giving three drops of blood as she recited the prayer to Ullikummis.
Another visitor entered the third curtained booth, performing the same rite under the direction of another acolyte, and that same rite was repeated for every visitor, forty-seven people giving just a few drops of blood to show their devotion to their lord.
This blood was then removed and each little sample was added to a large chalice carved of stone that had been left rough around its edges. By the time Kane and Brigid emerged from the booths, the chalice was almost full to the brim, topped up no doubt by blood from the acolytes themselves. Three robed acolytes stood behind the stone chalice while the others manning the sacrifice booths stepped out to add their contents to the mix.
“Any idea where this is going?” Kane whispered to Brigid as they walked out of the booths and made their way toward the caldron pit where the other pilgrims were amassing.
Brigid put a hand up to disguise her mouth as she replied. “Probably just mumbo-jumbo,” she whispered back.
Kane didn’t like that “probably”—it rankled on him like a bad tooth.
The last pilgrim’s blood was added to the chalice, and then the lead acolyte, a man Kane thought of as their leader, held the chalice aloft and began to speak in a loud, portentous tone. “Witness,” he said. “You have all given of your lives so that the stone god may rise again. Everyone who has visited this sacred place, the cradle where god was born—everyone has given of themselves and their blood, a thousand devotees who would shed their own blood to make the world a better place. You have all given of yourselves to fuel his self. You have all given your love that his love might walk here among us today.”
Beside the leader, two of the robed acolytes began using shovels to sift through a pile of pebbles behind them. Kane had not noticed that before, hidden as it was behind the flaming pit, and for a moment he mistook it for coal or a similar fuel that might be used to stoke the fire. But then he realized—with a sinking feeling—what those stones were. While he was on Earth, Ullikummis had budded “stone seeds” from his own body—hundreds, perhaps thousands of the things had gone into circulation. The stones had different properties but they each connected the user to Ullikummis in some way. For many, the stones were simply used to generate obedience, lodging under their skin and driving away all thoughts but those that Ullikummis himself planted within a victim’s mind. For others, the ones whom Brigid had dubbed firewalkers, the stones granted limited periods of invulnerability, turning their own flesh into the stone hide of their master.
The strange stones were a tie to Ullikummis, and Cerberus scientists had learned that they were powered—brought to life, if you will—by the iron content in
