with its own attributes, its own natural weapons. Enlil rolled aside as the clawed hand reached for his face, only to find he had stepped out of the path of one attack and straight into another. This Annunaki was a broad-shouldered male with skin a canary yellow freckled with brown spots like rust. The yellow-skinned figure cuffed Enlil’s ear with a savage punch, the blow so hard it made the overlord’s head ring. Then the creatures were following up on their attack, the yellow one driving his knee viciously at Enlil’s gut while the red-scaled one got his arms around Enlil’s throat from behind and snapped him backward.
Enlil howled in agony as the knee struck his stomach. He was bent so far back by the one holding him that he couldn’t move with the blow, and so it seemed to rip through him in a paroxysm of straining muscles.
The yellow-hued creature came at Enlil again, drawing his arm back in readiness for a brutal punch to the face. Enlil watched that blow rushing at him, timing the attack in his mind before rolling his shoulders. Enlil’s move served to shift his weight just slightly, but it was enough that he dropped beneath the nasty blow, leaving it to strike at the attacker who still held him from behind by the throat. His captor, the red-scaled Annunaki male, fell down in a flurry of limbs, releasing Enlil as he did so.
Enlil fell, too, unable to keep his balance as he was drawn down by the creature that had held him. His left palm slapped against the tiled floor in a loud clap, and his bent knee brushed the surface of one of the water channels. Then he was up again, spinning back to his feet with the speed of thought.
“I am your master,” he repeated as more of the reanimated Annunaki crowded toward him. “You will bow down before me.”
Still close, the yellow-hued Annunaki pressed his attack on the traitorous overlord, lashing out with a high kick to Enlil’s jaw. The kick brushed against the
bottom of Enlil’s face, and he was driven up and back at the same time, plummeting down to the bonelike tiles once again in a swathe of billowing red cape.
The yellow Annunaki took a step toward him to renew his attack, but at that moment another lightning strike rocked the high rafters of the room and something large hurtled down from overhead, a boxy shadow in the darkness. It was a seven-foot-long section of one of the catwalks, its surface curved and bevelled, with no railings to prevent a user from stepping off. Now it tumbled through the air, crashing toward the floor beneath.
Enlil watched as the section of catwalk crashed down into the yellow figure’s back, slamming him hard across both shoulders and back of the head before he could even react. A shock wave reverberated through the room as the catwalk landed, chunks breaking away with the impact. The yellow figure dropped to the floor, moaning in agony as the catwalk pinned him in place. Blood leaked from the sides of his mouth as he tried to lift himself, but the section of catwalk was too heavy for one Annunaki to move.
Yet there was no time for Enlil to turn this momentary respite to his advantage. Already more of the Igigi creatures were swarming toward him in their stolen bodies, encircling him and cutting off any possible chance of escape. Not one of them spoke; they just stared at him through the slit eyes of the Annunaki, their hate burning in those putrid yellow depths.
Enlil pushed against the hard floor, struggling to stand. But he was too slow. Already another combatant, this one in a beautiful female Annunaki body covered in scales of cobalt blue, was lunging at him with deadly purpose. The Igigi drove both knees down into Enlil’s gut in a savage drop-blow before he could
clamber off the floor. Enlil slammed back to the tiles, his spine jarring with the bone-crunching impact. Without hesitation, Enlil’s arms snapped out and he grabbed his attacker by the throat, tightening his grip against the armorlike scale plate there.
“Look at me,” Enlil insisted, biting the words through clenched teeth. “I am your master.”
In response, the blue-scaled Annunaki hissed defiantly, spitting a glob of saliva into Enlil’s face. With a swift twist of his hands, Enlil snapped the creature’s neck, tossing her aside like so much worthless trash. They were not true Annunaki, Enlil sneered; killing them was easy. More than two hundred of the possessed bodies surrounded him, Enlil saw, and he struggled to his feet where a stream of water sparkled past him.
“I gave life unto you,” Enlil insisted, his tattered cloak swirling about him as he turned to face each of the slave class, piercing them with his indomitable gaze. “Tiamat is your mother, but I fathered you.”
He searched the crowd, eyes meeting and passing the glaring eyes of more than two hundred creatures who had spent millennia waiting for payback. Overhead, another great chunk of the ceiling peeled away like skin and crashed down, electricity playing across it like witchfire as it slammed to the plate floor behind the Annunaki forms.
“I am your master,” Enlil reminded them. “Without me, you are nothing, simply purposeless creatures.”
As one, the Igigi stepped toward Enlil, their minds working in unison, bringing their final, brutal judgment on this monster who had once ruled them. They were in uni-thought, the shared horror of spending over three thousand years without bodies creating a kind of melded mind, frayed and blurred, no longer able to differentiate between individuals.
Enlil’s shoulders shook as he struggled for breath, the exertions of this battle so soon after he had fought with Grant and his Cerberus colleagues draining his inner resources. Once again, lightning flashed overhead, lancing across the ceiling like a white-hot claw.
“I am Enlil,” the overlord stated. “Enlil the destroyer. The one known as Dagon, as Kumbari, as the Imperator. A hundred names for a million peoples, and every one of those peoples obeyed me.”
As one, the Igigi in their Annunaki shells took another menacing step toward Enlil, blocking him off on all sides, caging him in place.
Enlil glared at them, the power of his will lancing through his eyes like the hypnotic stare of the cobra. “You will obey me,” he told them, his voice firm despite his panting breath.
As one, the Igigi took another tentative step forward. And then, as one, they stopped.
Enlil turned to survey them, his gaze falling upon each in turn as more than two hundred lesser beings stood all around him, awaiting his orders once more. They had turned on him for a moment, three thousand years of torment twisting their minds, making them believe perhaps that they were his betters. But he was the overlord.
“Now,” Enlil breathed ominously, “we have work yet to do.”
Above, a triple flash of lightning hurtled across the ceiling of Tiamat’s birthing chamber, lancing down and destroying another clump of the birth pods that had been used to grow new bodies for the Annunaki. It didn’t matter. The Igigi would do.
Enlil had his army, eternally obedient. He was overlord for a reason.
* * *
GRANT’S TEAM rushed through the bone city of the dragon, the empty streets echoing with their footsteps. As they ran, Grant engaged his Commtact, a hidden radio transceiver that was used to communicate with his colleagues in the field and back at Cerberus headquarters. Most of the members of the Cerberus field teams had a surgically embedded Commtact. The subdermal device was a top-of-the-line communications unit, the designs for which had been discovered among the artifacts in Redoubt Yankee several years before by the Cerberus exiles. Commtacts operated via sensor circuitry, incorporating an analog-to-digital voice encoder that was subcutaneously embedded in each subject’s mastoid bone. Once the pintels made contact, transmissions were picked up by the wearer’s auditory
