emerged, and the nine overlords were soon at war with one another for ultimate control of the territories once more. Stuck between the factions, a plucky group of human adventurers working together under the banner of Cerberus managed to turn the Annunaki’s plans back on themselves, destroying their mother ship and leaving the various overlords for dead.
Or so it had appeared.
Over recent months, several Annunaki had reappeared, including Enlil and the mad goddess called variously Lilitu, Lilith or Ezili Coeur Noir. Nearly ruined by the destruction of their womb ship, each of these old gods had struggled to gain a new foothold on the power they all craved. However, unknown to the Annunaki, things had become more complicated than they realized when Ullikummis, errant son of Overlord Enlil, had returned to Earth after a four-and-a-half-thousand-year exile.
Far from being a typical Annunaki, Ullikummis was a genetic freak whose DNA had been twisted beyond recognition at his father’s behest, turning him into a monster even among his own people. Heartless in the execution of his plan, Ullikummis’s father, the Overlord Enlil, had altered his son to become an assassin, a slayer of gods. Enlil had called the child his hand in darkness and sent him on a mission to destroy Teshub and gain the operational codes for Tiamat with which he might preside over the Annunaki. But the plan had backfired, and Ullikummis—along with his tutor, the disease-
ridden Upelluri—had been ambushed by Enlil’s brother, Enki. That brutal exchange had resulted in Ullikummis losing both feet at the keen edge of Enki’s sword and subsequently being disowned by his father, imprisoned in an asteroid and exiled into space. A by-blow child of rape, two contentions had driven Ullikummis to survive through the long period of his exile—that his father had orchestrated his downfall for his own insidious needs, and that his mother, Ninlil, was an innocent in need of rescue from this monster.
Now Ninlil’s genetic code was contained within the child known as Little Quav, whom Brigid Haight had enticed from Balam’s protection in the buried city of Agartha just six days earlier. The child seemed remarkably human, inquisitive and often finding pleasure in her own thoughts. Raised by Balam in the abandoned city, it was only natural that she should find joy in her own company, and Brigid had watched her at play in the cold, cavernous corridors of Fort Bensalem. The child would make a plaything of whatever came to hand, giving stones and material personalities and little voices when she thought no one was looking, frequently making up songs that she would sing to herself, endless loops of rhyming noises that—as often as not—were not words at all.
Although the child looked automatically to Brigid for compassion and comfort, she expressed no fear of Ullikummis, in spite of his monstrous appearance. Seeing the two of them together made for an incongruous sight: the girl not yet three feet in height with the tiny, birdlike build of the hybrids, while he was eight feet tall and as solid as living stone. Brigid had been surprised to see that, despite his appearance and eminent practicality, Ullikummis was capable of tenderness. He befriended the child by honoring her, the way a child will honor a parent, a man or a god.
In the curtailed week that Quav had spent at the rock-walled fortress, Ullikummis had lavished long hours speaking with her, patiently explaining her role in the Annunaki royal family, her destiny and importance to his own plans. He had done this both as a teacher and a friend, never once berating the young child for her impatience or because her attention span did not equal his.
Ullikummis was exceptionally patient, Brigid had observed as he conversed with the child, something she had not really credited before now. She had first met Ullikummis in her other life, when she had been a Cerberus warrior opposed to all things Annunaki. Ullikummis had returned to Earth in his space prison, landing in the wilds of Canada, and he had immediately set about building his own army within the structure he called Tenth City. While he was monstrous and harsh in his manner, looking back Brigid realized he had never been impatient. Even as he suffered an attack and seemingly ignoble defeat, Ullikummis himself had simply stepped back, hiding himself in the shadows and letting the Cerberus warriors see what they wanted to see, believing him killed in an incinerator explosion. At heart he was an assassin, his father’s one-time hand in darkness, and so his natural inclination was to step back, to merge with the shadows and let the world turn around him while things ran their course, secure in the knowledge he could strike when the time was right.
Brigid’s second meeting with Ullikummis had come in the Ontic Library, an undersea storeroom that housed the blueprints to reality itself. Ullikummis had accessed the library to amass more knowledge about his father from its sentient datastream, but his brutal incursion had damaged the structures of the library itself. Brigid had joined her then-colleagues from Cerberus in expelling Ullikummis from the incredible library before the damage proved irrevocable, and it had been her consciousness that had been melded with the living data to shore up the library’s defenses. Ullikummis had encountered her then, their astral forms meeting, but his perception had been so altered by the library that he had been unable to recognize her. It was only later, once the Annunaki prince was freed from the datastream, that he had realized who it was he had come in touch with—and he had decided at that moment that he needed to recruit this fearsome intellect for his own cause, lest she prove his downfall.
Ullikummis enacted a bold plan against Cerberus shortly thereafter, amassing his nascent army to attack and overwhelm their hidden base in the Bitterroot Mountains. Ullikummis had left the task of running the overthrown base in the hands of his first priest, a man called Dylan, whose primary job was to turn Brigid’s partner, Kane, into a military leader for his stone army. Dylan had failed, and Kane had turned on him and overthrown the briefly victorious regime of his enemies. But Ullikummis himself had already exited the redoubt with Brigid, bringing her to Bensalem, where he had brainwashed and reconstructed her mind for his own means. Brigid, an eminently capable woman of fearsome intellect, had tried to resist, but ultimately her personality had been broken down and remade in the form of her new self, Brigid Haight. Now Haight was Ullikummis’s new first priest, his so-called hand in darkness, as he had been for his father. And with her help, Ullikummis would bring about the next reign of the mighty Annunaki, an era over which he and Ninlil would preside.
Outside, through the open window of the rock-walled room, Brigid perceived the rays of the early-morning sun playing across the ever-changing ocean surface. It was barely dawn, the night chill still clinging heavily in the air. Gently pushing aside Little Quav, Brigid reached for the clothes that were draped over the stone chair at the end of her bed. Like everything else in Bensalem, the chair was constructed of rock and had a rough, weather-beaten look to it. As she took her single garment from the seat, two doglike creatures came wandering past the open door. They were huge, the size of lions with that same grace and majesty. Their bodies were rough, coated in a living stone that seemed to match the walls and the furniture of the room. One stared into the room for a moment, its nose in the air, and Brigid saw that it had eyes that looked sad and unmistakably human. She pushed the thought from her mind as she stepped into the leather leggings of the catsuit.
In a few moments, Brigid closed the front of the formfitting black leather suit she favored, stretching her arms out before her to affix its sleeves in place. The suit clung to her supple curves like a second skin, reflecting the faint red glow that emanated from the roiling veins in the walls. Now dressed, Brigid bent to retrieve the heavy fur cloak that she had tossed to the floor before retiring the previous evening, pulling it over her shoulders. Then, cinching the ties on the cloak, she stared across the room once more to Ullikummis, who waited in the doorway like some rudimentary statue from a primitive culture.
Meeting his hellish eyes, Brigid repeated Ullikummis’s words back to him. “The stars are aligned,” she said, knowing full well what it meant. “Thus it’s time.”
With a single nod, Ullikummis turned and left the room, his footsteps like pounding jackhammer blows on the hard stone floor. Little Quav remained in the middle of the room, abandoned and looking to Brigid for direction. The red-haired woman called Haight reached her hand down to take that of the hybrid
