I started to answer but stopped short, almost gurgling.
"Will.. .."
My tongue felt too sleek in my mouth, and freezing sweat erupted and rolled on my upper lip and crawled over my chest. It was just as terrifying to remember your own name as it was to forget it. My forehead heated with the molten millennia, and I drove the heel of my hand against my brow, digging.
I knew myself.
I cleared my throat and tried once more, but couldn"t get my tongue around the taste of sweetness.
It had been so long since I"d spoken my real name that it took a while to find it, but then I remembered who I was, and what I had done, and had to do again.
I whispered, "Seth."
She didn"t hear me, "Is something the matter?"
The acknowledgment of my true nature staggered me, and I reached out to keep from stumbling. Wind bucked madly outside and the oak rafters moaned.
The surge of myself made me powerful for an instant, and then intensely sad and lonely. The time had come again.
"My name is Will Gardner."
"You seemed .. . distracted .. . or.. .."
"Not at all."
She led me into the study where her husband Fredrik Grant sat sipping wine and grimacing through the 206 Tom PicciriW windows at the Citadel glowing in the distance. The room, like the man himself and the ten thousand desert acres he owned, seemed to breathe the very law of survival. Dry and primitive, with an air of savagery tempered by objective. Dozens of rifles with convertible magna-fire, mini-frag launchers, and laser rangefinder digital compa.s.s a.s.sembly stock lined the walls, old style and new collapsibles, set beside medals representing successful wars fought around the globe.
After leaving the military, he"d formed his own private regiment of nearly two hundred men, remnants of armies, mercenaries, and death squads from several nations. Scattered over his land were towers and tunnels and units latched deep into cliff dwellings. He patrolled the school system and sent his men out as far as Durango and Picotown, waiting for the Tenfew to preach their message in university dormitories, airports, funeral homes. Black vans and buses rolled out among the cities and returned to the complex, one after the other, depositing new believers in the Tenfew Citadel. Dozens of them daily, perhaps more. They"d go on to become priests, acolytes, nuns, the dancers in their veils and robes, and those who lived continuously in grotesque fountains and pools--brothers and sisters of the well.
An ex-Marine Colonel with a cracked Militia father, Grant had learned early to dig in deep and gather as many guns to him as he could. But it hadn"t helped him save his children, and the realization had broken him as surely as if he"d stepped on a Bouncing Betty or b.u.t.terfly fragmentation mine. He was old but still had strength, and although they"d never get rid of all the scar tissue, if he kept taking care of himself, he could add another two or three decades to his already aching hundred years. He"d had skeletal transplants to stave off the osteoporosis.
"h.e.l.lo, Will," he said.
"h.e.l.lo, Fred."
There were a number of framed photos of Jeffy piled on his desk, facing outward, as if Grant meant to use them to lure me into his vengeance against the Children of the Well. Alongside were pictures of his daughter, Elaine. Both teenagers were blond and blue eyed smiling with only a hint of the world"s ancient concerns in their faces, so young that I could feel the ashes stirring thickly in my veins.
He said, "You were right when you warned me off Schaffer. The ineffectual cretin ruined the entire a.s.sault and failed to get Elaine out. You"ve already seen what his unrealistic promises did to Jeffy."
"I"m sorry."
"The government doesn"t realize what maniacs these Tenfew cultists are.
I don"t give a d.a.m.n if they are a recognized religion sanctioned by the world order." He leaned back, as if to drawn me in further toward him, so that the photographs of his children would be inches from my nose.
The padded flesh around his eyes fell in on itself.
"I"ve watched them grow these last fifty years. Runaways, the hungry, the d.a.m.ned, they s.n.a.t.c.h whoever they can and absorb the numbers. I remember when the Tenfew were just a small gathering in a hut, digging a well where there was no water."
"But there was."
"Yes," he admitted, "and now there"s a honeycomb city of one hundred thousand nestled between those cliffs. I need you to prepare and lead the next mission."
He continued on for a while, but I could no longer quite connect myself to the man I had been five minutes ago. In the much larger truth, that small segment had already drifted into the overwhelming ocean of my name and duty.
"I lost six men bringing Jeffy out. Schaffer planned it too d.a.m.n poorly."
"You were foolish to go in with force."
"They had my children," he groaned, his rage so much a part of him that it barely slipped into his voice, He talked about love and murder and failed predawn raids. At one point I cackled, because I like to laugh, and he reared away, startled and turning for a moment, before telling me more.
"Omega and Beta squads each had transmission, but not all the cameras worked."
"Show me the film."
He keyed the pad at his desk and the 3-D Silicon graphics ONYX workstation came alive, giving a fairly accurate modeling and simulation of what had occurred that night Schaffer had attacked the Few.
That scene filled the room until we were inside it, and we sat watching them come down in front of us through the cliffs, gazing over the compound, four of them stupid enough to break radio silence and whisper in awe at the Citadel. Grant growled and looked like he wanted to stand up and kick Schaffer in the face.
Beta squad made a couple of crude comments on the beautiful fountain dancers, translucent girls who lay naked rolling in the pools washing their pigment off, splashing and arching their backs in joy for the Well, giggling, some making love. Omega team mimicked the chants and songs they heard. Somewhere inside myself the a.s.sa.s.sin I"d been grew disgusted with their performance.
Soon Schaffer clambered into the complex, cut the throats of two unarmed, smiling acolytes, and used the weapon subsystem M78 close-combat optic to sight the next objective. We could see the wavering shades of green come through on the thermal scope as he crawled and propped the rifle in the dirt, utilizing infrared pointer illuminators to weed out the chest cavities of two Tenfew priests wandering past lost deep in prayer. The squads ran rampant through the waterfall dormitories until they hauled the non resisting Jeffy Grant out of the geyser where he hummed to himself, and dragged him from the foaming room. Omega team led, carrying the boy, while Beta squad followed and set off a few poorly-placed and improperly timed charges.
Six cameras went dead at that moment, and Schaffer and the other five men dragged Jeffy from the Children of the Well, never turning back to check on what had happened to the others.
The scene ended and we sat in silence, sipping wine.
The ethereal glow of the Citadel slid into the room, igniting the darkness with a haze.
"I"ll get you the best, not mercenary filth like these," Grant said.
"How many men will you need?"
"None."
"What?"
"I"m going alone."
"It"s impossible. You"ll never get Elaine out by yourself. There"re too many of them, and they toil on that abomination of a temple day and night. You"ll need point men, a backup team.. .." He drifted off, unable to finish, realizing he sounded as inane as any other frightened old man. I got a vague and distanced sense of heartache. Wearily, he asked, "Can you do it before the month is out?"
"I"ll leave within the hour."
He shook his head and threw his gla.s.s at the wall, and fell back in his chair without a word, hardly breathing. Sandra Grant appeared in the doorway and he told her, "Show, Mr. Gardner out."
His hands were soft and weak and trembling, like those of a keeper of sheep. I knew he hadn"t been the one who ordered Schaffer"s death.
Mrs. Grant led me down the hall and past Jeffy"s room, the machines louder than before because the staff had turned up the volume to make up for the fact they couldn"t do anything for him. When I shook hands with her, I recognized her angry clench, full of conflict and resolution, thick with the world and full of responsibility and choices, and realized that she would have the strength to murder her son.
"Thank you, Seth," she said.
Four paths ran into the city of the Tenfew, like four rivers churning among the cliffs, choked with pilgrims seeking salvation and sanctuary. The black vans and buses eased forward, lined up by the dozen while a sea of people roamed in the dust. Others drove up in overheated cars packed and strapped with goods, ready to turn over all their possessions to the Well. I walked among them, filing past the aides and acolytes, the bleached-bone pale nuns who carried huge earthen jugs of water, letting the thirsty drink and washing the faces and backs of the severely sunburned.
Organization meant nothing, though symbolism still did. Carved into the cliffs for all to see were the G.o.ds of the Tenfew, Children of the Well.
Every deity of the pantheon appeared happy and weak. Ten beings who ruled the earth and sky and moon, most of them slack-jawed, hollow-eyed, so horribly thin and bent they looked as though any child of the Crusades could beat them to death. Only the first two and the last mattered, the rest were aspects and scarecrows: man with his unbearably stony glare, and woman stooped as if listening to whispers.
And at the end, the other man, trailing out of step behind the rest, jigging a mischievous jig and seeming much weaker than any of them despite his being the evil one.
The temple stood thirty stories, and they worked on it the way the Jews had slaved in Egypt, except they did it smiling. I couldn"t tell what it represented, if anything. Somebody had become much more aesthetic, or simply gone insane across the years. Unlike the building of the pyramids or Stonehenge or the heads of Easter Island, this had nothing to do with the calendar or position of the stars, not even with ego.
Maybe we were all losing our touch.
It didn"t take long to find the blood on the stones and steel, where mishaps had occurred and kids had been crushed. It didn"t slow the fervor of the devoted.
Like all temples, this one was alive, and its hunger continued to grow.
I had power but didn"t know what it might be-perhaps only memory, perhaps chance.
I looked for guards, weapons, sentries, automated or human, and saw nothing. Maybe Schaffer"s men had simply blown themselves up with one of their last charges. The pale, wet priests wore sopping robes and vestments, and ushered the pilgrims into the fountains where they bathed in the cooling shadows of the towers and obelisks of the Citadel. Nuns danced in the water among corpses of the drowned that tumbled and heaved in the pools. Maybe they"d finally found the means of building a religion capable of crossing the horrifying barrier between life and death--or maybe they"d simply forgotten just who was still alive and who was already dead.
The hymns grew deafening along with the gut-shot wailing of the wind. I felt comfortable in the sun, listening to their familiar rhetoric, appeals, and litanies.
They sang and prayed to the Well, danced and preached and pontificated to the Well, called up and called down and called over the Well, but after three hours of searching the insane city I still couldn"t find the d.a.m.n thing.
Eventually a girl who could have been Elaine Grant, if it mattered anymore, with a beatific smile so wide and empty it had almost worn out at the edges of her mouth, approached and brought me a jug.
"Drink from the Well."