dozen farmers had followed, stepping from the rift in space to add their bodies to the burgeoning army of Ullikummis. They followed not because of the obedience stone—unlike Sela, they hadn’t received an implant—but because they wanted to believe that there could be this golden future, the one that Ullikummis, their stone-clad fallen angel, had promised.
Sela, like a number of others among the thousands-strong crowd, felt the call because of the stone that had been implanted in her head. Known as an obedience stone, it was a tiny chip from Ullikummis’s own body. He could grow these at will, tearing them from his body like buds from a plant. All of them had a droplet of rudimentary sentience, enough that they could speak to their hosts, bonding with them and influencing their thoughts. Accepting the obedience stone was traumatic, for the stone had to push through the skin to bond itself to the user, but this pain had come to be seen as a rite of passage among the faithful, a sacrifice they made in their devotion to the new god. After all, the faithful preached, the stone created a new way of understanding the world, a new life, and as such, it was a birth and any birth was characterized as much by pain as by joy, was it not?
The stone pulsed within Sela, hugging the lobes of her brain, its tendrils enveloping her mind. The stone brought an enlightenment, a freedom for the bearer. It was an entheogen, bringing to all people who used it a sense of being a part of their god. The stones acted as markers, too, the same way that the transponders were used by the Cerberus people, and it was through these locators that Ullikummis had reached out for his most faithful, opening the multiwindow of the quantum interphase jump in a way that had never been seen before. A hundred quantum gateways had all opened upon the same location—on this location. This, too, was something that Ullikummis had learned in the Ontic Library, accessing its sentient banks of knowledge to discover new ways to utilize the Annunaki technology. These were old secrets, things that had been forgotten millennia ago. Ullikummis could generate parallax points where there were none, and he could fold quantum space in such a way that he could jump between parallax points, ambushing even the most wary of opponents. The old ways were the new ways.
* * *
“DAMMIT!” ROSALIA CURSED as she and Grant prowled warily along the edge of the city, as close as they dared get to the massing army on the banks of the Euphrates.
Grant glared at her. “You want to keep it down?” he warned.
When he looked he saw that Rosalia was holding her left wrist and her teeth were clenched in pain.
“What is it?” Grant asked more gently, regretting his knee-jerk reaction.
“Stone’s playing up,” the dark-haired woman answered, breathing hard through her nostrils.
“Run that by me again?” Grant requested, clearly confused.
“I have the stone inside me,” Rosalia said, “you know that. Damn thing’s pounding against my nerve like a fucking metronome.” She winced, holding down hard on her wrist until the pain passed.
Like Sela Sinclair, Rosalia had one of the obedience stones implanted beneath her skin. But through her own subtle manipulations of her flesh, her stone had remained locked at her wrist, unable to attach itself properly and so bond with her. The stone was of a different variety to Sinclair’s, as it had come not from Ullikummis but from one of his faithful troops. Besides affecting a person’s thought processes, the stone was also used to operate hidden stone locks designed by Ullikummis within his bases, a little like a remote control opened a garage door.
In the earliest days of the Ullikummis religious movement, those with stones would identify those without by just being in their presence. That facet had become less important over time, as more people had joined the Ullikummis movement willingly, truly believing that a new and better world was coming.
Left unchecked, the stones would affect the thinking of anyone who had one, but Rosalia had assured the Cerberus people that she had hers under control. “It only works on the weak-minded,” she had dismissed contemptuously. However, few people knew how much effort Rosalia put in to maintaining the rock’s position beneath her skin, using a needle to cut into her own flesh daily to prevent it from locking there and so forming a more permanent—and dangerous—bond.
Now the rock inside her was drumming against her nerves like something alive.
“You’re all right?” Grant asked.
Rosalia nodded. “Just go.”
Ahead of them, the rift continued to swell, a great wound in the sky. Lightning crackled in its depths as it blurted out more people into the already swollen ranks of Ullikummis’s troops. Among them were the hooded security teams who had assumed the place of the Magistrates, their malleable flesh as hard as stone. There were so many people now that it seemed chaotic.
The buildings around them were not buildings at all. In fact, they were the jutting bones of Tiamat’s wings, reminders that the great organic spaceship had regrown her body from a seed. The structures had indentations and steps and hooded porches, but they had no doors or windows. These things had been grown over with bone, leaving just the ghost of a building that never was.
Grant indicated one of the lower buildings, where a run of steps jutted along its back wall. The steps ended midway up the wall, leaving a whole other story above them. The wall itself bent forward as if it might topple, and another nearby structure did the same, creating a narrow channel between the two at their closest points.
Grant was up the steps in an instant, with Rosalia following. She waited poised at the foot of the steps, keeping a sharp lookout for anybody who might spot them among the long shadows of the early-morning sun before she clambered up the steps after the ex-Mag.
Bolting to the top of the bone steps, Grant reached up with his free hand and grasped high on the wall where it met with the lip of the roof. Without slowing, he pulled himself up, his feet kicking out as he continued to move. In less than two seconds, Grant had flipped himself onto the roof, three stories above ground level. He crouched there, crab-walking to the far edge of the roof where he would have a better view of the massing army.
Rosalia followed a moment later. Her swift strides brought her up the pale steps at a run before springing toward the wall of the adjacent building and using it to kick herself higher and land on the rooftop with Grant, making just the bare minimum of noise. Keeping her head low, Rosalia hurried to join Grant at its edge.
Beyond the roof, they could see the quantum gateway hovering next to the Euphrates, its impossible depths churning with a swirl of beautiful colors. Grant and Rosalia watched in awe as Ullikummis turned to the people from the head of that vast column of loyal followers, raising his long, stone-clad arms. In a moment, the crowd fell to silence, two thousand or more people hushed without so much as a word. It was quite something to behold.
The stone giant stood on a hillock by the river, a raised mound of dirt beside the rippling surface. Brigid stood beside him, her red-gold hair shimmering with the sunlight, clutching the hand of the little girl in the indigo dress.
“Behold the tools of the future,” Ullikummis said, his voice carrying across the burgeoning group of arrivals. He indicated the dragon shape that stood behind him, its arrow-shaped head looming high above, his voice echoing through the abandoned streets. “Here is Tiamat, the engine that will change the world. Here is your future, waiting to be freed from terrible bondage.
“Will you stand with me as I free Tiamat?”
The crowd cheered in response, hanging on Ullikummis’s every word.
“Will you embrace the
