Sun Read online

  Instead of military uniforms, they wore floor-length, blood-red robes, but not in the local style of the Egyptian humans. The robes the seers wore struck Loki as plainer, more monk-like, despite their shocking color. Truthfully, they looked like styles from the Pamir, only manipulated via color and cut for theatrical effect.

  They wore black belts covered in white symbols Loki did not know.

  Like the soldiers, they also wore the three-spiral symbol, or triskele, on their chests.

  Loki wished now he’d spent more time studying these fringe Myther cults.

  Although, looking at the numbers filling the square in front of him, he wondered just how well the word “fringe” described the group now occupying Cairo.

  The seers down on that patch of cleared dirt, unlike the soldier seers, wore collars around their necks, but of a kind Loki had never seen before. The collars made them bleed, leaving trickles of dried and wet blood down the backs of their necks, like a crown of thorns.

  Loki could only guess the collars were meant to inflict pain, not to suppress sight.

  He wondered also, based on the behavior of those frozen-faced seers, whether the collars did something to alter their minds. They clearly weren’t sight-restraint collars in the usual sense, given the strength of the shield being emanated from their collective aleimi.

  Regardless of the collars’ exact purpose, these seers felt like slaves to Loki.

  He’d noticed the seers in black military uniforms wore the same kinds of collars, and had the same, oddly glazed look in their eyes. Unlike their fellow soldiers who were human, they didn’t carry guns. Instead they stood still and erect at the edges of the military rows, protecting them with another shield too dense for Loki or his people to penetrate.

  The human in the black robes was speaking now.

  Loki’s eyes swiveled down to where he shouted at the crowd of Egyptians standing around him in an enormous half-moon. His blue eyes shone up in sharp contrast to the dark robes he wore. He was not from this part of the world.

  When he spoke, his voice was amplified artificially, likely by a virtual effect on the headset he wore under the robe’s hood.

  “Brothers and sisters!” he shouted. “We have taken this fair city back for the One God! We have taken it back from the vultures, the criminals, the sadists, sinners and degenerates! You are all to be witness to the dawning of a new age!”

  He held up his curved sword, his blue eyes blazing.

  “This kingdom is not for everyone, my friends.” His voice grew warning, echoing between the stone of the mosque and the cement walls and sidewalks of the square. “Those who are greedy, who would corrupt the purity of this world like they did the last, those bent on owning you and yours, on dividing up the spoils at our time of terror… they must be purified from these lands. They must be sacrificed for the good of the whole! Our time, the time of the common man, the common human, the common soldier of the One True God––it is finally upon us. Our time, brothers and sisters, has finally arrived!”

  He paused, holding up the sword, while the crowd as a whole tried to decide how to respond.

  Some cheered, but uncertainty lived there, in their lights and voices.

  Loki sensed a lot of fear. He saw mutterings as those nearest in the crowd looked warily over the row of human soldiers spread the length of the mosque’s stone walls, their eyes raised to take in the man whose thin, bare chest now lay exposed from the knife of his guards, his arms and legs tied open on the wooden X frame in the middle of the packed dirt.

  Blood trickled in places on the man’s chest, where the knife nicked him as it undressed him. He was breathing hard, panting, eyes wide––but he didn’t speak. He looked at the younger people on the ground, and Loki sensed he worried about them.

  It made Loki like him even more.

  “This will be our pact,” the man in black said to the crowd. “I know you have all held this wickedness in your hearts! I know you have aided our enemies. I know you have lusted after seers, after your sisters and brothers. I know you have lusted after power and money…”

  He leveled the sword in a wide arc, pointing it at all of them.

  “…Perhaps you have compromised with those who ran the old order,” he said, fixing his stare on individuals in the crowd. “Perhaps you only wished you could be given the opportunity to sell your souls. Perhaps you only wished you could afford to debase yourself in the fashion of the parasites and the scum who ruled these lands.”

  Mika moved up next to Loki, sidling between him and Rex.

  “Should we intervene?” she said, soft.

  Loki glanced at her, frowning. He understood her words, and the meaning behind them.

  He also knew exactly what was about to happen in that dirt clearing.

  They were about to witness an execution.

  Even so, when he glanced around at the row of seers on the square with their bleeding necks, the army of black and white clad humans behind them, the snipers he saw on the surrounding buildings, all of them wearing the symbol of the triskele, he could do the math.

  “We would be slaughtered,” he told her quietly. “And our friends down there would still die, only some of us might join them.” He gave her a flat look. “That, or we would end up in red robes and bleeding collars of our own.”

  Mika frowned. He felt her agree with him even as she bit her lip, clearly not liking the reality his words described.

  The black knight continued to speak to the crowd, his voice echoing on stone.

  “Repent!” he said. “Repent, my brothers and sisters in the blood! Repent, and the One God will forgive you your weaknesses! He will show you your place among the three races, just as he has those who bleed the blood of the Nephilim! He will show you justice. He will show you mercy. He will show you peace. He will help you to evolve to the next state in our journey to the Light, where the One True God awaits us!”

  Loki exchanged grim looks with Mika.

  Then, both sets of their eyes returned to the scene below.

  The human guards standing behind the black knight were approaching the man on the X-cross yet again. Although he knew to expect it by then, Loki winced unconsciously as they pulled out the knives, three of them approaching the bound man at once.

  He watched as they began to work, listening to the crowd as they let out cries of fear and consternation, as the black knight stood over them all, his blue eyes holding a serene satisfaction that frightened Loki more than the anger he’d seen in them before.

  This human had no empathy. He had no soul.

  The screams of the kindly-faced man on the cross went on for a long time.

  Longer than Loki could stand, longer than he could bear.

  Yet he stayed to the end, forcing himself to watch.

  And at the end, some three hours later, when the man on the X-frame was barely recognizable as human and they’d doused him with some kind of slow-burning fluid, Loki watched when they set him on fire.

  By then, he’d thought the man had no more screams to give.

  He’d been wrong.

  Still, Loki did not turn away.

  He was still watching when the human’s soul finally left him.

  Only then, did he take his eyes off the body that hung there.

  Only then did he go into the Barrier, to try and help his human cousin find his way home.

  “JERUSALEM IS GONE.”

  Jon watched as Loki wiped sweat from his brow, gazing out over some scene playing out to his right and the screen’s left. Clicking under his breath, the Middle Eastern seer looked back at the camera embedded in the hovering drone.

  “They destroyed it entirely. We are still not sure why. It may have even been symbolic. They used at least one nuclear weapon, turning the Holy Mount to rubble. There is nothing left, from what we have seen from images obtained from flyers.”

  Shaking his head and clicking, he added,

  “We do not dare go there in person. We are told they are still
slaughtering resisters on the streets. They herd the rest here, to fulfill these sick rituals. Not only Israelis and Palestinians, but all those who lie in their path between Israel and Cairo. They drive them on roads. They drive them mercilessly across the open desert. Those who fall or who cannot keep up are killed on the spot and left.”

  There was a silence.

  Taking another breath, Loki exhaled.

  “Truthfully, I get a very bad feeling from this thing,” he confessed. “The rituals we have seen here in Cairo, even apart from what was done to Israel… they are disturbing on multiple levels. Not only the killings themselves, but the words used to justify them. The passions and beliefs they are evoking, they are beyond simply apocalyptic––”

  “They killed the List humans?” Wreg cut in, incredulous. “Them, specifically? All of them?”

  “They are still in process with this now,” Loki said, a grimace touching his sculpted lips. “But yes. The List humans in particular have been singled out in a very obvious way. They are called agents of darkness… spawn of demons. There is some variation in the specific rhetoric used, but the meaning is clear.”

  Wreg’s voice remained disbelieving.

  “And you say they are human themselves? You are sure of this?”

  “Yes, brother. The seers they have here appear to be hypnotized in some way. The human leaders and priests pretend their seers to be willing adherents of their One True God, but there is something very wrong with them. I have yet to see one that appears to be acting fully of their own agency.”

  Pausing, Loki shrugged eloquently.

  “Following their invasion of Cairo, they freed the slaves being held by the Dreng, seer and human. They also freed those held by the local human despots––and stopped the slave markets. They claim that the slave trade will be finished entirely by the time they are done. They opened the gates to Dubai and Egypt. They killed, yes… many. In the beginning, it was mostly what you’d expect from any invading force. It was soldiers killing those with guns and other weapons, those fighting to keep them out. It was skirmishes for territory inside the city walls.”

  Pausing a second time, he added,

  “The executions in Dubai and Cairo started this morning. They are still going on, brothers and sisters. The way they are doing this, it will go on for several days.”

  “And they are only executing Listers?” Wreg said.

  After a slight delay, Loki shook his head.

  From the motionlessness of his face, it hit Jon that Loki was using sub-vocals to speak with them, which likely explained the lack of ambient sound, despite the wind whipping at Loki’s robes and headgear.

  Jon grew even more certain of it when he noticed the cluster of humans behind Loki on the same roof, pointing and staring at something to Loki’s right, their left.

  “Not only Listers, no,” Loki continued. “The first group is comprised of Listers. However, we determined this is likely today’s show only. They claim to be executing any whose souls they have determined to be ‘corrupted.’ This included a fair few Dreng seers and humans, if the prisoner cells are any indication, both here and in Dubai.”

  Wreg’s voice rose again. “Dreng seers? Then they are killing Shadow’s seers, too?”

  After another short delay, Loki nodded.

  “Yes, brother,” he said. “We theorize there is something in the light of the ex-Dreng seers that makes them difficult to recruit. Perhaps their light is too broken with the network down to lend itself to this hypnotism of theirs, via the collars we are seeing on the Myther seers. That, or they truly do see Menlim’s seers as their enemy. It is difficult to know.”

  Loki’s sculpted lips curved in a frown.

  “The means of death are ugly, my friends. Some of the ugliest I’ve seen. They use fire, but only at the end. They keep them alive for as long as they can. The captives are cut, beaten, have acid thrown on them. They are nearly flayed alive. They are forced to confess their sins, to pledge themselves to the One True God. They are subject to a kind of exorcism. Then they are drugged to keep them conscious, and doused in a slow-burning fluid…”

  Jon grimaced, fighting the bile rising in his throat.

  Apparently Loki felt the same.

  Revulsion touched his lips, a noticeable nausea.

  “…It is not pretty, brothers and sisters,” he repeated. “There is a kind of religious pornography to this thing.”

  “They are killing Listers like this?” Yumi said, her voice holding incredulity, laced with the same revulsion. She refolded her muscular arms. “Even the young ones?”

  “Yes,” Loki said simply.

  “You saw this?” Wreg said.

  Loki’s violet eyes shifted to him.

  “It is going on as we speak, brother. If I were to change the settings of this communication, you would hear their current victim screaming. It is a human child, a bare sixteen years of age, and female. They have already cut off most of her face.”

  Jon fought a more violent surge of bile.

  Looking away, he covered his mouth with a hand, forcing his light calm.

  There was a silence on the carrier side of the communication.

  They all stood together in a darkened communications room just off the CIC. The three-dimensional projection of the Middle Eastern seer hung in the air in front of them, showing a smoking desert city behind where the male seer stood on the roof of a white-washed building.

  Loki stood in the foreground, his skin dark from the sun, most of his body wrapped in a robe and scarves like a local human.

  Despite the sadness in his eyes and the revulsion in the set of his lips, he looked even more handsome than usual, Jon couldn’t help thinking. The desert style suited him, even with a HK33 rifle slung around his shoulders.

  Wreg gave him a mock annoyed look, cuffing his shoulder affectionately.

  Jon grunted, but his eyes flicked back to Loki. He knew Wreg was mostly trying to distract him from what the Middle Eastern seer had just told them.

  Even so, Jon couldn’t shake the sick feeling, or his horror at what he now knew was happening just outside their visual range on the other side of the world.

  He felt similar feelings on the seers around him.

  A heavier revulsion enveloped him from Yumi, one intense enough that he suspected she’d picked up on some of Loki’s sensory details with her light, in addition to what he’d said.

  Jon fought to not let those same images, smells or sounds reach him. He didn’t need to see it in technicolor surround sound. Making the whole thing even more visceral wouldn’t help anything; he could feel how shaken Loki was already.

  Given the number of wars the seer had seen, that disturbed Jon as much as anything.

  Revik and Allie had gone to the infirmary to see about her leg.

  Jon strongly suspected once they left there, they would disappear into Revik’s quarters––likely for a while.

  He wondered if he should try to head them off.

  Knowing Allie, she’d want to hear this in real time.

  No, Wreg sent at once, adamant. He turned, meeting Jon’s gaze, his full mouth curled in a frown. Leave them be, brother.

  Thinking about Wreg’s words, feeling the utter lack of compromise on his light, Jon sighed and nodded. He glanced at Yumi, who still frowned at Loki’s projection, and Anale, who stood next to her, her dark green and blue eyes as hawk-like and difficult to read as always.

  When none of them broke the silence, Jon did.

  “But there’ve been Mythers around for decades, right?” he said, trying to pull the group out of that heavier space. “They’ve had terrorists and extremists for ages, too. What’s the difference between these Mythers and those who’ve been setting off bombs in the United States, Europe and the Middle East for the last fifty to one hundred years? And how could this be worse than what was happening in Dubai before they got there?”

  Swallowing as he remembered some of the images he’d seen out of that city, Jon cleared
his throat, his voice strengthening.

  “They were executing people in the street in Dubai,” he reminded all of them. “Before the Mythers got there, this was already happening, right? Isn’t that part of the network coming down? Dreng followers losing their minds, killing indiscriminately? Could this be part of the same phenomenon? The same Mythers from before, but more crazy and extreme?”

  Loki looked at him with his violet eyes, his handsome face solemn.

  “What you say is true, little brother,” he conceded. “The killing has been bad since the network fell. But this thing with the Mythers does not feel indiscriminate to me. Nor does it feel to be the product of irrationality. There is purpose behind this. And they seem immune to the loss of the network, in a way we have not seen in any other group, even among our allies. They are acting as a military fighting force on a mission, not a crazed mob. There is religious fervor here, yes, but they are methodical. Strategic. The attacks on Dubai, here in Iraq, and in Egypt were definitely not spontaneous. They were very clearly staged and planned in advance of their coming here.”

  Jon frowned. He was about to speak when Anale broke into his thoughts.

  “You heard about New Delhi, brother?” she said, speaking to Loki.

  There was a pause, like a delay in the transmission.

  Then Loki nodded, exhaling in a sigh as he turned towards her.

  “Yes, beloved sister. I have heard of this. Brother Declan contacted me. He heard of this through their remaining government contacts in the States.”

  Jon frowned, glancing at Wreg in a silent question.

  His mate looked just as puzzled, a frown on his faintly scarred lips as he focused his stare on Anale. Whatever the comp-hack infiltrator was referencing, they must have missed it while they were picking up Allie and bringing her back to the carrier.

  Anale didn’t return their questioning looks.

  Neither did Yumi, who frowned from beside her, wrinkling the dark blue tattoo that covered most of her sternly beautiful face.

  “Could it be the same group?” Yumi said, her voice blunt, military-like. “Could they be taking over these underground bunkers of Shadow’s? In addition to these military moves you describe in Africa and the Middle East, shutting down quarantine cities?”