Stealing Sacred Fire (3 page)

The archaeologist bowed rapidly
a few times. ‘It was a sealed doorway, great one,’ he explained,
‘but the glyphs upon it indicated that something momentous lay
beyond. It has taken my people six weeks to cut their way through,
but the effort has brought great reward.’ He scurried forward and
laid a hand upon the jagged lip of the entrance. ‘It is a pity that
some minor destruction was involved, but we have saved the plaster
that bore the glyphs. It was extracted most carefully from the
wall. You may examine the fragments later, if you wish.’

The king made a dismissive
sound. ‘My translators will be presented with this material. What
lies within this place?’ He approached the opening, but felt oddly
reluctant to proceed. His ancestors had sealed this chamber
tightly. Was even he meant to ignore their efforts to keep people
out?

The archaeologist seemed
unconcerned by such thoughts. He stepped into the dark tunnel
beyond. ‘Come, come,’ he said, apparently forgetting protocol in
his excitement.

The king cast his eyes around
the edge of the opening, then took a single step through. Another
vibration coursed through his flesh; stronger this time, like the
echo of a great booming deep within the earth. He shuddered, and
sensed a wind against his skin, flying fragments of dust. He
blinked.

There was no wind now, and it
seemed no-one else had felt its passage. The archaeologist was
hurrying ahead. Nimnezzar followed, his flesh numb.

The short tunnel, which once
had been solidly filled in with stone blocks, led into a larger
chamber. Concentric rings were cut into the otherwise unadorned
basalt floor, and plain columns surrounded its perimeter. In its
centre stood what appeared to be an Egyptian sarcophagus, placed on
a raised dais. That, of course, could not be so. The shadowy
culture who had built this city had predated the earliest pharaonic
dynasties by perhaps thousands of years. The dais was covered in
rubble, its origin not immediately apparent. The lid of the
sarcophagus had been removed and now stood propped up between two
of the columns. Upon it was carved the representation of a winged
man, curving pinions arranged over his body. He had the long,
serpent face, the slanting eyes. It looked like a stylised
mask.

‘You said there were no tombs,’
said the king. He could feel his heart beating strongly. He felt
breathless.

‘We are not sure whether this
is a tomb,’ answered the archaeologist cautiously. ‘When we first
opened the sarcophagus, we thought it was full of rocks.’ He
indicated the rubble. ‘These that you see here. It seemed likely
that the artefact had once contained remains, which at some stage
had been removed and replaced with the rocks. We took them out,
hoping to find some clue as to had what been contained in the
sarcophagus. We found more than we hoped for.’

Slowly, the king approached the
open sarcophagus. He realised he was afraid of what he would see
within it. The case was at least six feet high. He had to go right
up to it to look inside, and he was a tall man.

‘It is lined with obsidian,’
said Rashid. ‘The ancients believed that the black glass had
magical properties, and would act as a containment…’

Nimnezzar’s guard waited
anxiously, sensitive, like hounds, to their king’s mood. They saw
him peer over the lip of the stone. For a moment, he stood
wide-eyed in apparent shock, then he uttered, ‘Mighty Allah!’ the
name of a god he had forsaken years before. He stepped back,
staggering as his heels met the rubble. He had seen someone — no
desiccated mummy, but a man lying as if asleep within the tomb.

The guards all gripped their
weapons more firmly, their bodies stooped into postures of
alertness.

The archaeologist hurried up to
the dais. ‘I know it is a shock to first behold it. Perfectly
preserved. Not even the rocks have crushed it.’

The king turned to him, his
eyes holes of dark fire. ‘It?’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you realise who
this is?’

The archaeologist cowered. ‘We
are presently engaged in translating the inscriptions found around
the edge of the casing.’

‘Look at him!’ roared the king.
He grabbed Rashid by his shirt collar and lifted him up bodily so
he could see into the sarcophagus. The king shook the smaller man
as if he were a child. ‘That is the noble countenance of a Watcher
lord,’ he said. ‘Be humble in his presence.’

He let go of the archaeologist,
who staggered back off the dais. The king summoned the senior
officer of his guard. ‘Come, Nerim.’

The officer stepped up beside
him and together they gazed down into the tomb.

The figure within lay as if
asleep, shrouded in a layer of rock dust. Through the dust, it
could be seen that he was robed in costly if rotted fabrics that
were adorned with jewels. A cloak of vulture feathers surrounded
him. His red hair was braided over his chest, glinting still like
bronze, even beneath the patina of crumbled stone.

‘He looks as if he could wake
at any moment,’ said the officer in a low voice.

Nimnezzar hunkered down and ran
his fingers over the inscriptions on the stone walls of the casing.
‘I know this sigil,’ he said.

‘Who?’ Nerim knelt down beside
him.

The king took the man’s hand
and pressed it briefly against the stone. His eyes looked feverish.
‘I know.’ He stood up once more and looked over the side.
‘Penemue,’ he said, ‘who gave knowledge of the bitter and the
sweet.’

‘Penemue,’ repeated Nerim, his
brow creased.

Nimnezzar shook his head in
wonderment. ‘If it is he who lies within this tomb, he was one of
the original rebel Watchers who fell from grace. For five thousand
years, he has endured the punishment of internment.’

The officer looked sceptical.
‘But how could the body remain preserved this long? It looks as if
it… he… was entombed recently. But that cannot be possible.’

‘No.’ The king looked at his
officer with feverish eyes. ‘Presuming, of course, that he is
dead.’

For a moment, all was silent,
but for the humming of the bare electric lights.

The officer leaned away from
the king; his knees cracked. ‘Not dead?’

The king stood up. He had been
waiting for this moment a long time, since the vision that had come
to him as a young man. In the vision, an angel lord had appeared
before him and told him of his sacred destiny. He was to reinstate
the line of divine kings, strengthen the blood-line that ran so
faintly within him. In his blood: a memory of ancient days, when
the rebel angels had ruled the land and built their hidden cities
beneath it. Nimnezzar had seized power, but still he lacked
knowledge. There had been no more visions.

‘Penemue,’ he said, and put his
hands against the edge of the sarcophagus. His voice was a low,
respectful whisper. ‘You, who are the father of Sargon, grandfather
of Naram-Sin, ancestor of Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal, and the
guardian protector of my family: hear me, Nimnezzar, spiritual son
of Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar. Honour the ancient contract…’

And there was movement in the
tomb. Dust stirred in eddies as if wind had somehow invaded the
sarcophagus. The dais began to vibrate, and some of the light-bulbs
in the room popped out into darkness. Several people in the chamber
uttered gasps of fear. The king gripped the stone, although his
officer retreated hastily.

‘Penemue!’ cried Nimnezzar.
‘The time of your sacrifice is ended. May your spirit come forth
from the furthest reaches of the universe and return unto your
body!’

A weird, eerie shriek sped
through the labyrinthine tunnels and vaults of the ancient city.
Stones fell from the ceiling of the chamber onto the heads of the
king and his followers. Fear gripped Nimnezzar’s soul. He wanted to
retreat, order his people to pile the rocks back into the
sarcophagus, but it was too late now. He had to continue and fulfil
his destiny. ‘Penemue,’ he said again; it sounded like a sob.

Below him, the eye-lids of the
Watcher opened slowly, revealing reddened, desiccated orbs within.
Nimnezzar saw an expression of terror cross the long, inhuman face.
Lips cracked open, eyes widened. And the city reverberated to the
silent vibrations of a voiceless scream of pain and despair.

The Midlands, England

His eyes opened and, for a moment, the
screams of carrion birds echoed around his mind; fragments of a
dream. He lay still for some minutes, his body tingling with
discomfort. Then an urge to move stabbed through him, and he sat up
abruptly in the bed, unsure of where he was. It felt as if he’d
been sleeping for millennia.

A figure moved into his line of
sight. His sight was unclear for he could see no more than a
shining outline. ‘Who’s there?’

The figure came forward, swam
into focus. ‘Shem. You are awake.’ The statement was almost a
question, as if the sleeper had made false awakenings many times
before, only to deceive those who watched him.

‘Salamiel.’ He held out his
left hand, and once Salamiel’s fingers curled around his own, he
realised how cold he was. ‘How long have I slept?’ He felt drugged,
unable to recall how he’d come to this place, and when.

Salamiel sat down on the edge
of the bed. He seemed reluctant to answer. ‘How much do you
remember, Shem?’

Shemyaza pressed a hand against
his eyes. ‘Enough.’

Salamiel stood up. ‘Let me
fetch you something to drink. Are you hungry?’

Shem nodded. ‘Whatever.’

After Salamiel had left the
room, Shemyaza lay back down on the bed, blinking at the ceiling.
Warmth was flooding back into his system. He was aware of the
summer afternoon beyond the window. The room did not face the sun,
and in fact was very dark, but the air beyond was full of summer
sounds; children crying out, the clear sound of traffic, birds. He
knew who he was, what he was: Shemyaza, spiritual king of the
Grigori, the descendants of angels. Many life-times seemed to
tumble through his mind. He had lived for thousands of years, yet
had not. He had been reborn, reshaped, remembered. Fallen
angel.

His history was the fabric of
legends, most forgotten now, and some so fragmented in the dreaming
mind of the world that the truth was lost or obscured.

Many thousands of years before,
in the most ancient of days, the race remembered as angels had
openly walked the earth, and were worshipped as gods by humanity.
They were known as the Anannage, the Sons of God, who harboured
dangerous and terrible secrets concerning the nature of the
universe and how to manipulate its subtle forces. Humanity, whom
they regarded as a lesser species, was often used as labour for
their clandestine work projects, forever excluded from the light of
the Anannage’s great knowledge. Their secrets were not for sharing
with children. Inevitably, change had devastated their closed
world. Shemyaza and a number of his colleagues had scorned the laws
of their people, which forbade intimate interaction with the lesser
race and, having been bewitched by the beauty of human women, had
taken them as lovers, revealing to them the forbidden knowledge of
the Anannage. The fruit of this doomed union was a long and bloody
conflict between different factions of the Anannage. Shemyaza and
his co-conspirators had been captured and punished. Some had been
buried alive beneath the earth, while Shemyaza himself had been
burned, his soul cast into the constellation of Orion where it had
been imprisoned for millennia.

The time of the Anannage’s glory had
passed, and they disappeared from the world. Their great
achievements were forgotten, their superior knowledge remembered
only as myths. In their wake, they left the surviving members of a
hybrid race spawned from the union of Anannage and human: the
Grigori. Shunned as demons, the Grigori went into hiding, but
continued to govern human affairs from afar. Now, they wielded
enormous power in the world, having great influence over both
commerce and government.

The end of the millennium
approached, heralding a time of great changes. The soul of Shemyaza
had returned to the earth, his consciousness thrust into the body
of a Grigori maverick named Peverel Othman. Shemyaza could not
remember much of Othman’s life, but enough to know he had committed
atrocities against human beings and Grigori alike. He had wandered
into a village named Little Moor, and there had discovered the
hybrid Winter twins, in whose veins ran Grigori blood, although
they had not known it. Their father, Kashday Murkaster, had been
driven from Little Moor nearly twenty years previously by the
Parzupheim, who were the governing body of the Grigori. Kashday had
been a rebel, and had used a human woman — the twins’ mother Helen
— to enact forbidden rituals. Othman, discovering this rotting nest
of past Grigori activity in the village, had sought to reproduce
Kashday’s dark work. He had coerced the Winters into helping him
and had rejuvenated one of Kashday’s elderly, human helpers — Emma
Manden — so that she could assist him. Then there was Daniel, a boy
unaware of his psychic powers. Othman had been prepared to
sacrifice him to achieve his aims. Othman’s schemes, however, had
failed. The only result of his activities in Little Moor was that
he remembered who and what he really was. Shemyaza had awoken after
a sleep of millennia among the silence of the stars. Daniel had
become his vizier.

Daniel, where was Daniel?
Shemyaza blinked at the ceiling, watched a single fly circle the
electric light. What had happened after Little Moor? What was he
doing here in this house?

Reconstituting fragments of
memory, he recalled being discovered by the Grigori. He had been
taken to Cornwall. He remembered how resentful he’d been of the
role that had been thrust upon him there. The Grigori had wanted
him to be their Divine King, who would lead them into the new
millennium and help reclaim their lost heritage. In the distant
past, Shemyaza had dared to rebel against his superiors, had tried
to initiate change in the world. But it had been so long ago.
Shemyaza had no interest now in the power struggles of his people.
However, the events that had taken place in Cornwall had changed
him. Almost against his instincts, he had reclaimed his kingship,
if not his kingdom. He had entered the underworld of Albion’s soul,
and there had awoken a slumbering serpent power, emplaced thousands
of years before by the first Grigori who’d made land-fall in
England. Soon after he’d emerged from the underworld, his mind had
retreated in upon itself; perhaps to recuperate or else to forget.
Why had he slept for so long?