Planet Hate. James Axler

custody of Balam until such time as she came of age. It had been a tentative solution at best, and Balam had been forced to return to hiding with the child so that she would come under no further scrutiny. Ullikummis was determined to bring his mother back to his side in his war against his father—the full nature of his scheme, however, remained unknown. While Ullikummis could not enter the secret city of Agartha without alerting the child’s watchdog, Balam’s longtime ally Brigid should be able to without raising any undue curiosity.

       For a moment Brigid stopped, searching the shadow-painted mountains as they towered above her. There was an access point near here, she recalled, a physical entryway that led into the ground itself. Her emerald eyes narrowed as she peered into the darkness, scouring the base of the mountains until she found the place she sought. It was lodged within her eidetic memory, the location still vibrant despite the rudimentary change in the mountains’ snowy covering.

       There was something else in her memory, too, appearing for just a fraction of a second as she delved for the hidden location in her mind’s eye—a series of golden circles disappearing into the blue, regular highlights of red and green dotted all around the pattern like a Julia set.

       Then, her red-gold hair billowing around her like a lion’s mane, Brigid made her way to a familiar indentation in the snow-covered foothills, her emerald eyes seeking the opening that was hidden in the shade. Her boots slipped for a moment on the shifting snow, and then Brigid had located the path, clambering down to a clump of rocks that waited like sentries, timeless and eternal.

       A few months ago the Ontic Library had gifted Brigid knowledge she had never accessed before, and it had opened her mind to new pathways into Agartha, places that had been hidden before. Standing at the hard rock wall, Brigid twisted her leather-sheathed body, and somehow an opening appeared in the wall where there had been none just a moment before. It was not a mechanical thing, nor a supernatural one; it was simply a way of looking for things that Ullikummis had taught her, a way to comprehend the world as the Annunaki did, no longer constrained by just three dimensions.

       Brigid stepped into the open mouth of the cave, and found herself in a tunnel, barely five feet in width with a low ceiling, its black basalt walls faintly lit by a ghostly blue luminescence. There was the distinct metronome sound of dripping as snowmelt plip-plopped down into a puddle that pooled along the floor of the tunnel. The puddle itself was so cool that, in turn, the water would freeze again, creating a glistening silvery sheen on its surface like some slug’s midnight trail.

       Brigid moved down into the tunnel, descending as it clawed a pathway beneath the surface of the Earth. As she went farther, the rough-walled tunnel opened up and the ceiling became higher overhead, the blue luminescence becoming fainter through its distance from her. Brigid closed her eyes, recalling the map of the area in her prodigious mind’s eye. As she did so, she thought she heard something—a voice—and she stilled her thoughts, filtering through the noises around her, the dripping echoes, until she could be sure. It was a child’s voice, joyful, laughing, awake with the crack of dawn and hungry to live and to play and to experience.

       Brigid opened her eyes and moved on down the incline, making her way toward the far exit of the tunnel. After a while, the tunnel widened even more, and then instead of a tunnel it was a chamber in its own right, a vast room whose shape was like a funnel with the narrow tunnel as its spout. High above, stalactites reached down from the ceiling like grasping talons, many of them wider than a man’s body. The child’s laughter was louder now, like a musical instrument being playfully plucked and strum.

       It took almost four minutes to stride across the vast cavern before Brigid reached a staircase hewn directly into the rock. The staircase was narrow and without sides, and went down another fifteen feet into a far larger cavern. More of that ghostly blue luminescence spilled from the high, arched roof, tiled here in square light panels like a child’s jigsaw of the sky, with some pieces still waiting to be placed. Beneath, a grand settlement stretched off through the enormous cavern, its squat, windowless buildings carved of the same black basalt as the cavern itself, radiating like the spokes of a wheel from a central tower—yet again, the towering-center-and-lower-surrounds pattern that had repeated itself throughout history. The outskirts of the settlement sloped gently upward to meet with the stone stairwell that Brigid was descending.

       The city was eerily quiet, not a single sign of movement across its vast entirety. Then, as Brigid reached the bottom of the staircase, a small figure came charging through the street in front of her, appearing from behind one of the black stone buildings, her short legs pumping as she hurried to greet the stranger. The girl was human in appearance and not yet three years old, wearing an indigo-colored one-piece suit and carrying a rag doll with red hair and a dress that matched the child’s clothing exactly. The girl had snow-blond hair hanging loosely to past her shoulders, and her large blue eyes were wide with excitement. Behind the little girl, another figure strode at a more languid pace, shorter than a man with grayish-pink skin and a bulbous, hairless head. Two huge, upslanting eyes dominated his scrunched-up face, black watery pools like the bottom of two wells lost in shadow. Beneath these, twin nares lay flat where a man’s nose would protrude, and a small slit of mouth held the faintest expression of pleasure, the corners turned up infinitesimally.

       “Briggly,” the little girl said, laughing as she ran up to the woman in the black leather armor.

       Brigid knelt on the floor, stretching her arms wide to clasp the girl and pull her toward her.

       “Welcome, Brigid Baptiste,” the gray-skinned creature acknowledged from behind the little girl.

       It was all so easy.

      Chapter 5

      “Just when you think it’s done it starts again,” Grant growled as he took a seat in Shizuka’s winter retreat. He was a large man, so large in fact that he made the seat he sat in look comical, like something out of a cartoon. Dressed in a skintight shadow suit, Grant was a well-built man with broad shoulders and skin like polished ebony. He still wore his long duster over the shadow suit, black Kevlar that looked like leather, and his dark eyes betrayed his exhaustion. His jaw was dark with the start of a beard beneath the drooping lines of his mustache, his hair close-cropped to his skull. “Damn snake-faces keep popping up every time we try to move.”

       Shizuka looked at him, gracing him with the slightest of smiles as the other people in the room made themselves comfortable. They had had all of two minutes to get reacquainted once Grant and his team had arrived via the quantum window opened by the interphaser, and the hulking ex-Mag made little secret of his irritation. There were seven other people in the room besides Grant and Shizuka, including four guards standing equidistant from each other in the corners of the large reception room.

       Located on a remote part of the coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the building was of classic Japanese design, reaching two stories aboveground with a pleasing curve to the roof like a folded ribbon. A simple wooden balcony surrounded the winter retreat, and several more guards from Shizuka’s loyal Tigers of Heaven patrolled along the balcony, keeping watch for any approach.

       “Tiger Isle has had a few castaways turn up on her shores over the past three weeks,” Shizuka explained, referring to the Pacific island home of her Tigers of Heaven. “Missionaries, they initially claimed to be lost, the victims of shipwrecks and the like. We offered them hospitality, but each one eventually revealed himself to harbor a hidden agenda to convert my people.”

       Shizuka was a beautiful woman, petite of frame—seemingly more so when sitting in front of Grant across the low table that rested in the precise center of the room. Dressed in a simple silk kimono, its wide sleeves swinging several inches below her wrists as she gestured, Shizuka had flawless golden skin accented with peach and milk. She had full-petaled lips beneath a stub nose and her dark eyes showed the delicate almond lilt of her Asian ancestry. Despite her small stature, Shizuka was a fearsome warrior, a full-blooded samurai who ruled her people with firmness tempered with mercy. She was also Grant’s lover.

       “One of these missionaries tried to push a stone into the face of my majordomo,” she continued in her trilling, singsong voice. “It was most strange.”