The fire was dead.
Jax was gone.
ALEX FRANTICALLY SEARCHED AROUND THE CAMPSITE, hoping against hope that he was wrong and that Jax was actually close at hand. He screamed her name as he looked. Panting in panic, he realized that he wasn"t mistaken. She was gone.
He searched the site, looking for the footprints of intruders. He didn"t see any. At the trail, he found a partial print left by her boot. It was headed in the direction of the mountain.
With a sinking feeling of icy dread, Alex knew what she had done, and why.
He s.n.a.t.c.hed up his pack and threw it on. He left the tent and the gear they had gotten out. He took time only to grab the water bottles. Her pack was leaned up against the rock where she had been sitting. He left it and took off up the trail.
Before he had gone far, a man suddenly appeared directly in front of him in the trail. He was big, perhaps in his early twenties. He looked like he belonged in a biker gang. His matted brown hair didn"t appear to have ever seen a brush. Alex froze. The man grinned wickedly.
"Radell Cain has a message for you," the man said in a deep, gravelly voice.
"I have a message for him," Alex said as he drew his gun.
He put a bullet in the center of the man"s chest.
Birds took to wing at the resounding bang.
With a look of stunned shock on his face, the man crumpled to the ground, groaning. The sound of the single gunshot echoed through the woods to reflect back from the mountain up ahead.
Ben had taught him to quickly fire two or three rounds into the center ma.s.s of a threat, and if warranted, more. The man was seriously wounded. There would be no help for him out in the middle of such remote woods. The only thing that would find him would be the coyotes. Alex had a limited supply of ammunition; he wasn"t going to waste any on a man who clearly wasn"t going to present further threat or last long.
He stepped over the gasping, dying man and hurried up the trail.
As the morning wore on, Alex only pressed on harder. Instead of climbing down and then up to cross small gullies, he bounded across. Instead of climbing down short drops, he jumped down. He knew that he had to be careful or he could break an ankle and then he would be helpless, but he couldn"t make himself slow down. He knew that he was in a race to stop Jax before it was too late.
He kept thinking of her asking him to promise that he would never doubt that as long as she drew breath she would always love him. He felt a lump rising in his throat as he ran. The limbs and brush he flew past turned to a watery blur.
He was furious at himself for not catching on to the things she"d said. He"d thought that it was because she was upset at hearing about all the deaths that morning. He should have known it was more. Having been sleepy was no excuse. Excuses couldn"t undo it if he lost her.
A few hours of grueling effort brought him to the base of the plateau that rose up out of the forest. Catching his breath, he looked up the rugged series of cliffs toward the top. Squinting into the iron gray light, he couldn"t see anything beyond the edge other than the wispy limbs of trees.
Jax had said that the ascending rift in the rock was in her world a road up the side of the cliff to the top. While not a road, the trail led to the craggy edge of rock that looked like a natural formation, yet went up along the face of the cliff at a steep angle. It looked like it might go all the way to the top. If it didn"t, if the lip of rock ended, he was going to find himself awfully high up with nowhere to go.
Alex couldn"t see that he had a choice and so he didn"t give it a whole lot of thought. He simply started climbing.
There were places along the way that at first looked impa.s.sable. In each case, though, he quickly found a way to pa.s.s. In other spots he had to climb over gaps in the narrow outcropping, but along much of the sloping, weathered rock ledge it widened to several feet, and in spots at least six or seven feet, where it presented no trouble at all, except that it sapped his strength to climb so fast at such a steep angle. His thigh muscles burned from the effort. He panted for air as he pressed on, refusing to slow for anything.
In a little more than an hour, he was getting near the top. As he came around a protruding rock face, two burly men were waiting. Alex took a hurried step back, at the same time drawing his gun. Without hesitation he fired at the closest man charging toward him. The bullet must have gone through his heart, because the man faltered and dropped.
The second man put a boot on the downed man and leaped over him, diving toward Alex. Alex pressed the trigger twice in rapid succession. He didn"t know if his bullets found their mark or not, because the man was still crashing in on him. As the man"s arm came out to tackle him, Alex dodged aside, seized the man"s hair, and used his forward momentum to help heave him out over the edge. The man stumbled, trying to stop, but he was moving too fast. He screamed all the way down.
Gun held in both hands, Alex pressed his back against the rock wall, catching his breath. He looked out over the edge and went weak in the knees at how close he had been to going over the side with the a.s.sailant.
The man on the ground wasn"t moving. Alex didn"t like the idea of not having the gun fully loaded as he went into an unknown but definitely hostile situation, so he quickly pulled a box of ammo out of his backpack. With his thumb he forced four more sh.e.l.ls into the magazine, filling it to capacity. Seventeen rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber gave him eighteen rounds in the gun plus the rest of the loaded magazines if he needed to reload in a hurry.
While eighteen rounds sounded like a lot, he knew that if there were enough men coming at him even that many sh.e.l.ls wouldn"t last long. He didn"t know what choice he had.
Gathering his wits, he hurried the rest of the way up the trail to the top, where it flattened off considerably. Even so, it wasn"t exactly flat. Beyond an expanse of forest, jumbles of rock rose up to make the top of the ma.s.sive plateau a series of rocky layers.
While from a distance it might have looked flat on top, up close the stacks of ledge, the sheer granite faces, and the squared-off breaks in the stone had a hauntingly man-made look to them, even though the plateau was obviously entirely natural. A person with a good imagination could make more out of it than layers of rock. With some imagination it looked almost like an extensive, complex structure.
Now that he had made the top, Alex wasn"t sure what to do. He searched around the area where the sloping rock ledge had emerged on top, but there was no man-made trail. While the trail below was used by the security force to get to the mountain, they apparently rarely or never climbed to the top. It didn"t look to him like anyone had ever walked across the delicate pale lichen and deep green mosses.
He finally decided to follow the exposed ledge that created a natural trail through the woods. In one low, damp place, he spotted Jax"s boot print. Deeper in, he came to a curious depression leading into the rock jumble.
Before going into the narrow chasm, he pulled a box of ammo and four magazines from his pack. He put the box of ammo in the front pocket of his jeans and the spare magazines in his back pockets. As he moved into the tight opening in the rock, he found that it wound into gorges that eventually rose perhaps a hundred feet in places.
The natural trail through the rock led him into a narrow cleft. High above, he could see that the smooth sides revealed only a long slash of leaden sky. Alex went in deeper. The rock overhead that must have once stood taller yet had toppled over in the distant past, possibly during earthquakes, so that it now lay across the cleft and acted as a roof. The deeper Alex went, the gloomier it became.
The farther in he went, the more the jumbled, weathered rock turned into a dark labyrinth. Alex stuck a hand into his pack, searching blindly for a flashlight. He found it and pulled it out.
When he switched on the light and pointed it ahead, a man was standing in the narrow pa.s.sageway through the rock. Alex went for his gun.
"If you want to see her alive, you need to follow me."
Looking at the man through the iron gunsights, one eye over each of the two outer dots and the center blade of the front sight rock-steady over the bridge of the man"s nose, Alex hesitated.
But for only an instant.
He pressed the trigger. The gunshot inside the confines of the rock pa.s.sageway was deafening.
"I don"t negotiate with murderers," Alex said under his breath as he stepped over the corpse and made his way deeper into the maze of rocky crags.
"Seventeen left," he counted to himself as he hurriedly followed what was becoming like a cave running deeper into the mountain. With his flashlight he had to check that each side branch he came to was clear. He stuck to what seemed the main crevice running through the mountain. In places the huge slabs of granite had shifted over millennia or even tipped and fallen, leaving many spots a tight squeeze to get through. In other places he had to climb over rubble from when the rock overhead had collapsed.
Alex didn"t know how long he had been running when he realized that up ahead he saw natural light. As he continued on, the light grew steadily brighter.
When he rounded a slight bend in the fissure through the mountain, he spotted something out ahead in that area of light. He rushed ahead, trying to make it out.
His heart came up in his throat.
It was Jax.
ALEX COULD SEE JAX STANDING in the middle of a broad area of white sand. The place looked to have once been a cavernous dome but the center of the roof seemed to have eroded away and partially collapsed over time to leave a room that was open to the sky. Here and there boulders that looked possibly to have once been part of that domed ceiling sat littering the room.
Jax, standing in the center of the sand under that opening, watched him come. He could tell that her hands were tied behind her back. Tears stained her face. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth.
With his gun held in both hands and at the ready, Alex inched into the open area. As he emerged from the pa.s.sageway through the rock, hundreds of men came into view. They stood silently around the outside near the walls or in other caves and cracks leading into the room. They were all watching him. None made a move.
They were dressed in clothes that would be familiar anywhere-mostly jeans and oversized T-shirts with words on them. A number of them wore baggy, knee-length shorts and sandals, just like a typical guy at the mall or out getting a pizza. Alex spotted what looked like knives under the shirts of some. He was sure that all of them had weapons concealed somewhere on them.
Despite their ordinary dress, they weren"t especially well groomed, with ratty hair and scraggly beards or stubble. Alex supposed that even that wasn"t too out of place anymore with their everyday outfits. They all had hard eyes and wore grim expressions. They looked like thugs. That, too, was a rather conventional look that seemed to be cultivated by many men and had become accepted.
Walking down the street these men wouldn"t warrant a second look from most people. Any one of them, carrying a knapsack, could walk unnoticed through any airport. Seeing them gathered all together as they were, though, on a remote wilderness mountaintop, looked bizarre in the extreme, as if they had all been transported there from the bleachers of a basketball game.
Alex knew that they were chameleons, killers intended to fit in and be unseen-until they struck. That, in itself, was what was so frightening about them. They would be invisible out among innocent people.
A glance back showed that the way he had come in was now blocked by dozens more men just like them.
"Alex," Jax said in a shaky voice, "give them your gun."
"No."
"Please . . ."
"I"m not-"
"You can"t hope to change things," she said. "Don"t make it any more difficult than it already is. Please?"
The audience of killers all silently watched. Alex knew that even if he hit his target with every round, and he managed to reload with every one of his spare magazines, he wouldn"t have enough bullets to take out all the men gathered. When he ran out of ammo, they would have him. But he knew that in reality it would never come to that. They would all simply rush him at the same time. They"d be on him before he could empty the magazine in his gun.
"Talk to me, Jax. What"s going on?"
"Give them your gun, or they"ll just hurt me until you do, or take it away from you after you run out of bullets."
As if to demonstrate, one of the men heaved a fist-sized rock. It struck Jax in the back of the shoulder. She cried out as she went to a knee, bent by the pain of the blow.
Alex put two rounds into the man, dropping him almost instantly. None of the other men so much as flinched at the loud sound or the flash.
Dozens of other men all around the cavernous room lifted rocks to show him that he had no chance to change the outcome. Jax staggered back to her feet. If all of those men threw those rocks she would be stoned to death before he could do anything effective to stop them. Alex"s vision was red with rage. He wanted to strike out at all of them.
But he knew that doing so would only get Jax hurt.
Violating a rule that had been drilled into him from the first time he had learned to shoot, he squatted down, laid the gun on the ground, and slid it across the granite toward Jax. It stopped right before the area of sand.
Ben had always told him that you never give up your gun. But a gun was merely a tool of self-defense. If it couldn"t defend him, or protect Jax, then it ceased to be a tool and became nothing more than a useless hunk of metal.
Alex was enraged that he had no choice but to give up the weapon.
He was ashamed of himself for not thinking of something to keep it from coming to that.
He reminded himself that it wasn"t over yet. He might have had to give up his gun, but he wouldn"t quit as long as he had breath in his lungs.
Sedrick Vendis stepped out from behind some of the men in a dark cave opening to the left and walked out to retrieve the weapon. He picked it up and stuck it in his waistband.
"That"s better, Alex," he said with a smirk. "Sorry I missed the show at the hospital. I hear it was quite the event."
Alex ignored him. "Jax-what"s going on?"
"I"m saving your world," she said in a voice choked with emotion.
Alex had thought as much.
He strode to the edge of the sand, close to her. Sedrick Vendis casually backed up a few steps to stay out of his immediate reach. Somewhere inside it pleased Alex that, even alone and without a gun, surrounded by hundreds of men, they considered him dangerous.
He intended to prove their fears warranted.
To Alex"s left, another man stepped out from the darkness beyond the men watching. He was tall, with slicked-back blond hair and thick features. He wore dark slacks and a simple white pullover shirt with short sleeves and an open collar. He looked like he might be about to go out for a game of golf. He was maybe forty, but looked to be in good shape, as though he could take care of himself if he had to.
If Alex had his way, he was going to have to.
As he approached, the man"s piercing blue eyes never strayed from Alex. He stopped ten feet away, smiling at Alex in a knowing manner.
"How nice to meet you at last, Lord Rahl Lord Rahl."
He emphasized the t.i.tle in a way obviously intended to mock Alex for having written it on the painting.
Alex was pleased to know that the t.i.tle had hit a sore spot. "Get to the point."
"Ah, the direct approach." He shrugged. "Very well."
Alex was distracted by another man coming out from the shadows to stand not far from Jax. It was Yuri. The pirate was still wearing the same dirty clothes and a grin that showed his yellow teeth.
"I"m Radell Cain," the tall man said, drawing Alex"s attention back. He swept an arm out, indicating the area where Jax stood. "This is the gateway, in case you hadn"t guessed." He crooked his fingers. "Come, have a look if you would be so kind."
As Alex followed the man, Jax"s eyes tracked him the whole way. He stopped where indicated, at one of the boulders sitting before the area of sand. The flat top of the rock, several feet square, was angled toward him. It was smooth although somewhat weathered-looking, as if it had sat in that spot exposed to the elements for a thousand years.
Alex was startled to see that it had what looked to be a petroglyph drawn on the flat area of the light-colored granite. The darkish lines had a reddish cast to them. It almost looked like it might have been done with blood.
Alex was even more shocked to see what that drawing was. It was a simple scene of a forest, composed of ten trees, much like the scenes Alex liked to paint.
Below the drawing was a small slot in the stone.
Alex was beginning to understand.
"Rather like one of your quaint little paintings," Cain said, smiling without amus.e.m.e.nt as he gestured dismissively at the drawing on the stone.
"What do you mean?"
Cain shrugged. "Rather outmoded, pa.s.se-as opposed to the new reality my vision is ushering in."
"If you have invited me here to discuss art, I"m afraid that you aren"t qualified to speak on the subject."
"No, I don"t care what you know about art, I only care about what you know about the gateway."
Alex shrugged. "Not much."
Cain"s humorless smile returned. "Well, since you wanted me to get to the point, here it is. I want this gateway functioning, and I want it functioning right now. I"ve followed your family long enough, waiting for the right time to come. With you, it finally has. The Law of Nines is now fulfilled. I"m through waiting.
"Yesterday I gave you a small sampling of what I can do if I need to. If you don"t cooperate, I"m going to rain death and destruction down on this world the likes of which you can"t imagine. Yesterday, where I killed one, tomorrow I will kill thousands. I can send men into schools, shopping centers, hotels, restaurants, workplaces, sporting events, and . . . well, I think you get the idea."