Читать книгу God War - James Axler - Страница 9

Chapter 1

It was a little after dawn in Luilekkerville on the West Coast of what used to be known as the United States of America. The morning air still fresh and cool against his face, Minister Morrow rubbed his hand over his clean-shaved jaw and looked up at the golden ball of the sun as it rose over the cathedral. Placed in the exact center of the ville, the cathedral towered over the buildings around it, dominating the skyline.

The ville itself had the air of a construction site, half-built edifices poised along the straight streets, as if patiently waiting in line for their builders to return after a good night’s sleep. So much had changed here since the days when this walled settlement had first grown up from the ashes of bombed-out Snakefishville. Back when it had been ruled by Baron Snakefish, the gates had been kept locked, the high walls patrolled by the Magistrates. Those were things of the past now. These days, under its new and hopeful name, Luilekkerville’s gates were ever open, the new Magistrates welcoming all visitors that they might perhaps join the congregation. Minister Morrow took heart in that, feeling in part responsible thanks to his imparting of firm moral guidance to the newcomers to the ville, encouraging the work ethic that had seen so much rebuilding over the ruins of the old.

A balding middle-aged man with ruddy cheeks and a square face, Morrow was dressed in his simple robes of office: a fustian cassock with a wide hood that could be pulled forward to hide his face in shadow. He was an Alpha, first priest in the New Order that had dedicated itself to a better world under the stone god who had returned from Heaven to spread his message of peace. The god’s name was Ullikummis, but that hardly mattered. What he brought—what he was even now in the process of bringing—was utopia, Heaven on Earth.

Human society had suffered more than two hundred years of blight, first with the nuclear conflict that launched the twenty-first century and wiped out billions in what seemed a determined effort at mutual destruction. Then came the Deathlands era, a hundred years of radioactive hell that only the strongest could survive, clawing their way through the debris as they struggled to reassert some measure of order on the chaos. And then, approximately one hundred years ago, the Program of Unification had finally restored order to the ruined United States in the form of nine settlements called villes, each one named after its baron, who served as its absolute ruler. But even these villes were far from utopian. Unknown to most citizens, their rulers were engaged in a strictly regimented purge of the past, obliterating the details of humankind’s advances prior to the nukecaust.

In their way, too, the villes were exclusive. Each housed a set number of individuals: five thousand aboveground, a further thousand in the Tartarus Pits at their lowest levels. Perimeter walls kept out the so-called outlanders, who were often viewed as dangerous in their nonconformity and many of whom were still affected by residual radiation from the nukecaust. If the baronies had been designed to provide some kind of respite, they had failed, ultimately sinking into chaos when the barons fled.

What Ullikummis and his adherents promised was a truly better tomorrow, a new society unlike anything seen before in the short history of humankind. What was more, the proof of this claim was already visible. The truly faithful, those blessed by the touch of Ullikummis himself, were able to channel his power, turning their flesh into something with the impenetrability of stone; Morrow had seen them in action. These people, the Stones, were the military arm of the new regime, the new Magistrates of the bright promised future.

As his ministerial robes billowed about him in the wind, Morrow stared at the towering structure of the cathedral. Its circular scarlet window dominated the spire like a cyclopean eye, and Morrow smiled. The future was here, so close he could taste it, smell it on the air.

His congregation was large, and even though the cathedral could seat more than eight hundred, it was frequently filled to brimming when he called the faithful to prayer. And not just with the people of the ville itself, but others, outlanders from the surrounding lands who came from near and far to pledge their commitment to the dream of a better world.

This day, however, Minister Morrow would have a special message to impart to his congregation. As he headed toward the always-open entrance to the towering cathedral, he saw the familiar figure waiting inside among the wooden pews. The man was in his late thirties and had the strong build of a farmer, his loose shirt buttoned low. His name was Christophe, and he was one of more than a hundred who had built the cathedral when Luilekkerville was just beginning to emerge from the debris of the old barony. These days,

Christophe helped Minister Morrow with the upkeep of the church, working as a handyman.

“Our love is a rock,” Christophe said by way of greeting.

In response, Minister Morrow nodded. “What brings you here so early, Christophe?”

“Woke up early,” Christophe told him. “Strange dreams, and then I couldn’t get back to sleep. There’s something coming,” he explained vaguely.

“I felt it, too,” the minister agreed.

“Then what should we do, Minister?” Christophe asked.

Morrow looked out across the interior of the vast, empty cathedral, its seats lined up in blocks, all of them facing the central dais, and he knew just what to do. “Ring the bell,” he told Christophe. “Call the faithful. Call them home.”

* * *

“GOOD MORNING, Haight.”

Brigid Haight opened her eyes, the last whispers of the dream leaving her in that familiar whirl of colors, blue, gold and green. Across from the simple cot that she slept in—its bedding made up of an untidy blanket rolled in on itself beneath her head to provide some form of pillow—waited the great giant Ullikummis, her lord and master. He stood eight feet tall, his body formed of rock dark as mud with a weather-beaten look to it that made one think of the ocean batting against cliffs. Veins of magma hurried between the plates of his chest and along the joints of his arms and legs, their orange glow shimmering in the dark room like the ebbing rays of sunset. His tree-trunk-like legs ended in two flaring stumps, the feet long since hacked away in a vicious battle with his uncle, Enki. His body was unclothed, for he needed none. Indeed, he simply was, needing no adornments for his powerful form. Pointing struts reached up from his shoulder blades, forming twin ridges like the horns of a stag, mismatched and pointing inward toward his head in great scything curves. The head itself seemed ugly, misshapen, its ridges hard and uneven. Formed of rock like the rest of him, Ullikummis’s was the face of nightmare, dark stone eroded by weather rather than carved with the delicacy of a statue. A slash of mouth waited grimly beneath a flattened nose, twin eyes burning with magma like pits beneath a thick brow. Humanoid in form, the creature known as Ullikummis was entirely hairless.

He stood in the doorway, the familiar charcoallike muster of his body wafting to Brigid’s nostrils as he waited there, so tall he dominated the room before he had fully entered. A child stood before him, a girl no more than three years old, her long, wispy hair reaching midway down her back in feathery waves of a blond so pale it was almost white. She wore a simple dress, its creamy yellow somehow enhancing the paleness of her skin. The girl was called Quavell or Quav, named after her mother, and she was a hybrid of human and alien DNA. But Ullikummis called her only by her true name, the name of the programmed template hidden within her genetic code—Ninlil, the name of his mother. He stood now with his stone-clad hands resting gently on the girl’s shoulders, protective, possessive.

Seeing Brigid’s confusion, Ullikummis spoke again, his voice rumbling like the grinding stones of a mill. “You seem ill at ease, my hand in darkness.”

Brigid shook her head momentarily, willing the feeling of sleep from her body. “I dreamed of shapes...” she muttered, “colors.” Her words seemed confused, as if she was trying to describe a thing just out of sight.

She was a beautiful woman in her late twenties, with porcelain skin and vibrant red hair that ran down her back in a cascade of tangled curls. Twin emerald orbs peered from beneath dark makeup that had been smeared like a black shadow across her eyes. Her full lips were darkened to the harsh purple of a bruise, and her cheeks seemed narrow and drawn. While those full lips invoked a tender, sultry side, her high forehead hinted at her formidable intelligence. Brigid pushed the blanket away from her naked body, revealing the trim, slender form of a trained athlete, strong but remaining enviably feminine.

They were inside a sea fortress off the East Coast of North America. The fortress had been named Bensalem by its originator Ullikummis, who had drawn it alone from the depths of the ocean stone by stone, shaping it with the power of his formidable will the way a sculptress might carve a pot. The placement of the fortress had been paramount, sitting atop a hidden parallax point—one of a network of nodes across the globe that served to function as access points for a teleportational system.

Brigid’s room itself was small and cold with a narrow opening in its stone wall that served as a window. Through this, she could hear the waves crashing against the high stone sides of the island fortress, feel the billowing breeze from the ocean and smell its briny aroma as the sun rose. The walls of the room were hard rock, rough and unfinished as if a cliff face had been sheared away. Embedded within those walls, faint lines of

orange-red glowed in jagged rents, each no wider than half an inch and splayed across the walls like the shards of a shattered windshield. Throbbing and pulsing, those orange rents seemed uncannily alive.

As Brigid shrugged aside her covers, feeling the cold dawn air on her skin, Ullikummis spoke again in that voice like grinding millstones. “The stars are aligned,” he said. “The day is upon us.”

Her body revealed, there were bruises there, too, circles in the deepest purples and blues as if her mouth had been made up in sympathy. The white-blond girl, Little Quav, trotted across the room to Brigid as she pulled herself from the bunk, an innocent smile in her eyes. The girl tottered a little, neither walking nor running but instead a kind of combination of the two as she hurried over to Brigid’s arms. “Brigly,” she said, excitement in her voice.

Brigid held her arms open, encircling the girl as she sat at the edge of the bunk. The hybrid girl felt warm as she pressed against Brigid’s breasts.

“Good morning, munchkin,” Brigid said. The epithet seemed strange to her, distant, like something made of mist.

The girl had been with them for six days now. Though fearless, she had cast Brigid as a mother figure in the echoing stone fortress. That was only natural; to an extent, Brigid had been a mother to her since her birth almost three years earlier. Little Quav’s hybrid mother had died shortly after childbirth, leaving the child orphaned. A key player in the genetic arms race between humans and Annunaki, Quav had been in danger from the very moment of her birth. For her own safety, the hybrid child was entrusted into the foster care of Balam, the last of a race known as the First Folk. For the past few years, Balam had raised the child as his own in the abandoned city of Agartha, hidden deep beneath the Altyn Tagh region of Tibet. However, as she had become older and hence more self-aware, the outwardly human Quav had begun to question the obvious differences between herself and her foster father. She had delighted in the few contacts she had had with people, understandably feeling a kind of instant kinship with them after her time with Balam. Brigid had been one of those people; she and Quav had met on brief occasions where the girl had formed her attachment. Haight had been known by another name then, however—her birth name of Brigid Baptiste, and she had worked for the Cerberus organization tasked with the protection of humanity from the alien machinations of the insidious race called the Annunaki.

The Annunaki were a race of aliens who had first visited Earth many millennia ago, back when humankind was still hiding in trees from saber-toothed tigers. With their strange, reptilian appearance and incredible technology, the Annunaki had been mistaken for gods by the primitive local populace, an error that they had reveled in, encouraging their worship as false idols, and they constructed their vast golden cities of Eridu, Nippur, Babylon and others on the virgin soils of Earth. Though hailed in Sumerian mythology as gods, the Annunaki themselves were in fact a near-immortal race from the planet Nibiru, whose group memories were passed on—complete—to their descendants and the others of their race. By the time they arrived on Earth, the Annunaki had become bored with their lives, gripped by a self-destructive ennui engendered by the nature of their vast shared memories. With no individual experience in living memory, it was hoped that the conquering of this new planet would stave off the crushing boredom of their lives—and for a time it had. Here were new territories to control, new creatures to toy with and experiment on. For a while, the gods had warred, battling for territory, for supremacy, for the adulation of the primitives that littered the planet all about them. But finally—perhaps, inevitably—they had become bored with their new playthings, and Overlord Enlil, the cruelest of their number and the master of the city of Nippur, had unleashed a great torrent to wipe the planet of the scourge of humankind like a spoiled child tossing aside his toys. This torrent had been enshrined in man’s history under various names, most notably as the Great Flood of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Enlil’s plot failed thanks to the deceptions of his own brother, Enki, and the Great Flood did not wipe humankind from the face of the planet. Thus, while the Annunaki retreated into the shadows, humanity flourished. For the subsequent four thousand years, humanity reigned until, on January 20, 2001, a devastating nuclear holocaust had been unleashed by the antagonistic powers of East and West. This war, and the subsequent Deathlands era of privation that followed, had in fact been part of a long-term plan by the Annunaki to reassert their own dominance over the indigenous race, thinning the herd before reemerging two hundred years after the nukecaust to finally take their place as rulers of the world. That audacious plan had involved the creation of artificially evolved bodies in the forms of the hybrid barons, of whom Little Quav was the ultimate progeny. Each of these hybrids had been prepped to accept a genetic download from the starship Tiamat, literally a mother ship for the Annunaki.

However, once the nine barons had been reborn in their original, lizardlike forms as the royal family of the Annunaki, old rivalries and prejudices had rapidly emerged, and the nine overlords were soon at war with one another for ultimate control of the territories once more. Stuck between the factions, a plucky group of human adventurers working together under the banner of Cerberus managed to turn the Annunaki’s plans back on themselves, destroying their mother ship and leaving the various overlords for dead.

Or so it had appeared.

Over recent months, several Annunaki had reappeared, including Enlil and the mad goddess called variously Lilitu, Lilith or Ezili Coeur Noir. Nearly ruined by the destruction of their womb ship, each of these old gods had struggled to gain a new foothold on the power they all craved. However, unknown to the Annunaki, things had become more complicated than they realized when Ullikummis, errant son of Overlord Enlil, had returned to Earth after a four-and-a-half-thousand-year exile.

Far from being a typical Annunaki, Ullikummis was a genetic freak whose DNA had been twisted beyond recognition at his father’s behest, turning him into a monster even among his own people. Heartless in the execution of his plan, Ullikummis’s father, the Overlord Enlil, had altered his son to become an assassin, a slayer of gods. Enlil had called the child his hand in darkness and sent him on a mission to destroy Teshub and gain the operational codes for Tiamat with which he might preside over the Annunaki. But the plan had backfired, and Ullikummis—along with his tutor, the disease-

ridden Upelluri—had been ambushed by Enlil’s brother, Enki. That brutal exchange had resulted in Ullikummis losing both feet at the keen edge of Enki’s sword and subsequently being disowned by his father, imprisoned in an asteroid and exiled into space. A by-blow child of rape, two contentions had driven Ullikummis to survive through the long period of his exile—that his father had orchestrated his downfall for his own insidious needs, and that his mother, Ninlil, was an innocent in need of rescue from this monster.

Now Ninlil’s genetic code was contained within the child known as Little Quav, whom Brigid Haight had enticed from Balam’s protection in the buried city of Agartha just six days earlier. The child seemed remarkably human, inquisitive and often finding pleasure in her own thoughts. Raised by Balam in the abandoned city, it was only natural that she should find joy in her own company, and Brigid had watched her at play in the cold, cavernous corridors of Fort Bensalem. The child would make a plaything of whatever came to hand, giving stones and material personalities and little voices when she thought no one was looking, frequently making up songs that she would sing to herself, endless loops of rhyming noises that—as often as not—were not words at all.

Although the child looked automatically to Brigid for compassion and comfort, she expressed no fear of Ullikummis, in spite of his monstrous appearance. Seeing the two of them together made for an incongruous sight: the girl not yet three feet in height with the tiny, birdlike build of the hybrids, while he was eight feet tall and as solid as living stone. Brigid had been surprised to see that, despite his appearance and eminent practicality, Ullikummis was capable of tenderness. He befriended the child by honoring her, the way a child will honor a parent, a man or a god.

In the curtailed week that Quav had spent at the rock-walled fortress, Ullikummis had lavished long hours speaking with her, patiently explaining her role in the Annunaki royal family, her destiny and importance to his own plans. He had done this both as a teacher and a friend, never once berating the young child for her impatience or because her attention span did not equal his.

Ullikummis was exceptionally patient, Brigid had observed as he conversed with the child, something she had not really credited before now. She had first met Ullikummis in her other life, when she had been a Cerberus warrior opposed to all things Annunaki. Ullikummis had returned to Earth in his space prison, landing in the wilds of Canada, and he had immediately set about building his own army within the structure he called Tenth City. While he was monstrous and harsh in his manner, looking back Brigid realized he had never been impatient. Even as he suffered an attack and seemingly ignoble defeat, Ullikummis himself had simply stepped back, hiding himself in the shadows and letting the Cerberus warriors see what they wanted to see, believing him killed in an incinerator explosion. At heart he was an assassin, his father’s one-time hand in darkness, and so his natural inclination was to step back, to merge with the shadows and let the world turn around him while things ran their course, secure in the knowledge he could strike when the time was right.

Brigid’s second meeting with Ullikummis had come in the Ontic Library, an undersea storeroom that housed the blueprints to reality itself. Ullikummis had accessed the library to amass more knowledge about his father from its sentient datastream, but his brutal incursion had damaged the structures of the library itself. Brigid had joined her then-colleagues from Cerberus in expelling Ullikummis from the incredible library before the damage proved irrevocable, and it had been her consciousness that had been melded with the living data to shore up the library’s defenses. Ullikummis had encountered her then, their astral forms meeting, but his perception had been so altered by the library that he had been unable to recognize her. It was only later, once the Annunaki prince was freed from the datastream, that he had realized who it was he had come in touch with—and he had decided at that moment that he needed to recruit this fearsome intellect for his own cause, lest she prove his downfall.

Ullikummis enacted a bold plan against Cerberus shortly thereafter, amassing his nascent army to attack and overwhelm their hidden base in the Bitterroot Mountains. Ullikummis had left the task of running the overthrown base in the hands of his first priest, a man called Dylan, whose primary job was to turn Brigid’s partner, Kane, into a military leader for his stone army. Dylan had failed, and Kane had turned on him and overthrown the briefly victorious regime of his enemies. But Ullikummis himself had already exited the redoubt with Brigid, bringing her to Bensalem, where he had brainwashed and reconstructed her mind for his own means. Brigid, an eminently capable woman of fearsome intellect, had tried to resist, but ultimately her personality had been broken down and remade in the form of her new self, Brigid Haight. Now Haight was Ullikummis’s new first priest, his so-called hand in darkness, as he had been for his father. And with her help, Ullikummis would bring about the next reign of the mighty Annunaki, an era over which he and Ninlil would preside.

Outside, through the open window of the rock-walled room, Brigid perceived the rays of the early-morning sun playing across the ever-changing ocean surface. It was barely dawn, the night chill still clinging heavily in the air. Gently pushing aside Little Quav, Brigid reached for the clothes that were draped over the stone chair at the end of her bed. Like everything else in Bensalem, the chair was constructed of rock and had a rough, weather-beaten look to it. As she took her single garment from the seat, two doglike creatures came wandering past the open door. They were huge, the size of lions with that same grace and majesty. Their bodies were rough, coated in a living stone that seemed to match the walls and the furniture of the room. One stared into the room for a moment, its nose in the air, and Brigid saw that it had eyes that looked sad and unmistakably human. She pushed the thought from her mind as she stepped into the leather leggings of the catsuit.

In a few moments, Brigid closed the front of the formfitting black leather suit she favored, stretching her arms out before her to affix its sleeves in place. The suit clung to her supple curves like a second skin, reflecting the faint red glow that emanated from the roiling veins in the walls. Now dressed, Brigid bent to retrieve the heavy fur cloak that she had tossed to the floor before retiring the previous evening, pulling it over her shoulders. Then, cinching the ties on the cloak, she stared across the room once more to Ullikummis, who waited in the doorway like some rudimentary statue from a primitive culture.

Meeting his hellish eyes, Brigid repeated Ullikummis’s words back to him. “The stars are aligned,” she said, knowing full well what it meant. “Thus it’s time.”

With a single nod, Ullikummis turned and left the room, his footsteps like pounding jackhammer blows on the hard stone floor. Little Quav remained in the middle of the room, abandoned and looking to Brigid for direction. The red-haired woman called Haight reached her hand down to take that of the hybrid girl’s.

“Come on, little one,” she said. “Time to meet with destiny.”

Together, Brigid and Quav followed Ullikummis through the cool, echoing corridors of the rocky fortress in some perversion of the family unit, the stone hounds trotting along at their sides like the family dogs. It was the closest Little Quav had ever known in her short life to being a part of a real family.

* * *

THE THRONE ROOM was as simple as Brigid’s living quarters, albeit larger. There were few decorations on the rough stone walls, just patterns on the rocks like veins on a leaf, along with two thick, moth-eaten curtains that had been used to partition lesser sections of the room. The windows were open, as no glass existed in the fortress island of Bensalem. Several of the windows were narrow slits, while one was wider, a circular hole in the wall behind the rock throne itself. The throne was massive, and sturdy enough to accommodate the hulking body of Ullikummis. He sat there now, his magma eyes pulsing. Two of his faithful hounds curled around the throne, their rough stone bodies melding together in the half-light of the room.

Brigid entered with Quav at her side, her pace slower than normal in deference to the girl’s shorter legs. She looked across the room to where the raised platform waited. This was the parallax point, a key site in a network of linked locations that could be accessed via a teleportational device called an interphaser. The interphasers worked by accessing these naturally occurring hyperdimensional vortices, which could be found all over the world and beyond. Interphasers then opened a quantum window between the two points, allowing their users to step through the gateway to a place that may be a thousand miles or more away. While eminently adaptable, interphasers were limited in the points they could access, although Ullikummis had tapped them in a different manner to that seen before. By applying knowledge he had retrieved from the Ontic Library, that undersea storehouse of the rules governing reality, Ullikummis could fold space during the interphase jump, subtly shifting his destination point and transferring whole armies to specific places. It was through this technique that his attack on the Cerberus redoubt had been so successful two months earlier. Once the interphaser was activated, the journey itself was instantaneous and would be over in the blink of an eye.

The parallax point itself, like the rest of the room, was carved of simple rock, seemingly not shaped by hand but by the elements themselves. It stood two feet higher than the floor of the room, with twin circles marked out on its surface concentrically. The circles were carved channels no deeper than a knuckle joint, the widest of them reaching out to just a foot before the edge of the platform itself.

Ullikummis was concentrating now, reknitting the pathways so that he could utilize the interphase gateway in a subtly different way. Brigid watched as his bright eyes dimmed, his thoughts turning within himself.

“Come on, child,” Brigid whispered to Quav, keeping her voice low. “We need to be ready for when the time comes.”

Quav clung to Brigid’s hand as the flame-haired woman led her to the dais, helping the hybrid girl up over the low step. Then, instructing the girl to remain in place, Brigid strode from the platform to an area that was masked behind one of the thick velvet curtains. She pushed the drape back, stone rings holding it in place on a stone strut that ran from wall to wall.

Behind the curtain lay a series of shelves like a bookcase, each one constructed from the same rough stone as the rest of the nightmarish sea palace. There were weapons arrayed on the upper shelves: a heavy mace constructed of stone, a leather bag filled with throwing stones, a TP-9 semiautomatic pistol with several clips of bullets.

Brigid plucked up the semiautomatic, her favored weapon when entering a combat situation, checking its breech before loading a new magazine and securing the extras in a pocket sewn into the lining of her cloak. The TP-9 was a compact but bulky pistol with a covered targeting scope across the top, all finished in molded matte black. The grip was set just off center beneath the barrel, and in the user’s hand, the unit appeared to form a lopsided square, hand and wrist making the final side and corner. Satisfied, Brigid shoved the pistol into a hip holster, twisting it slightly to secure it.

Then Brigid crouched, reaching for one of two objects that waited on the lowest shelf of the wall unit, resting on the floor. The two items were identical in design, and it was impossible to tell them apart. Pyramidal in shape, the items stood twelve inches from apex to square base, and each side of the base measured twelve inches in length. The sides were plated in a shimmering mirrored metal, its surface curved randomly so as to reflect in a strange, almost disconcerting way. These were the interphasers, the teleportational units that could be used to access a parallax point and transfer a person or persons across the quantum ether.

Gingerly, Brigid picked up the unit to the right and carried it in both hands to the platform where Little Quav was waiting. Kneeling for a moment, she flipped open a hidden door at the base of the pyramid-shaped machine, and her slender fingers traced a quick tattoo across the control buttons revealed within. The interphaser bleeped a moment, chirruping to itself as it accessed the cosmic pathways that would be used for this journey outside of traditional space.

Brigid stepped back as the interphaser began its automated ignition sequence, reaching for Quav’s hand as the unit came to life.

In his throne, Ullikummis dropped out of the meditative state he had been in, his eyes resuming their fearsome glow like the lighting of a fire.

“The final sequence begins,” he stated, the words rumbling through the throne room like distant thunder. “The endgame has arrived.”

The three-year-old child known as Quav grasped Brigid’s hand, squeezing it tighter as Ullikummis—genetically her son from four millennia before—drew himself out of the throne and strode across the room toward the raised platform containing the parallax point. Around them, the interphaser seemed to be splitting apart, a cone of many colors launching all around it, widening as it clambered upward through the room and, nonsensically, mirroring this action deep into the floor, the sight replacing the stone tiles there. Witchfire crackled within that dark swirl of colors, firing across its depths like lightning.

“I am the bringer of death,” Ullikummis chanted, “the destroyer of souls, the alpha and the omega, the vanishing point. I am the Godkiller.”

With those words, Ullikummis stepped onto the raised platform, the dogs trotting obediently along at his heels as he joined Brigid Haight and the girl who would be Ninlil amid the glowing quantum portal of the interphaser. The jump had begun.

* * *

THE CATHEDRAL BELL was chiming in Luilekkerville, a continuous droning clang pressing against the silence. Inside, the cathedral was packed. Almost one thousand individuals had crammed themselves within its confines, listening to the bell’s droning as Minister Morrow strode proudly among them, a broad, toothy grin on his heavily jowled face. Many of the congregation had seats but some were forced to stand, piling in through several doorways where the shadow of a man—elongated and alien—stretched into the aisle beyond through some quirk of the architecture. Every last building in the ville had emptied, disgorging its occupants, young or old, to attend this special service.

“Alone we were weak, lost, we were victims,” Morrow intoned as he strode up to the cathedral’s central plinth. “Alone we were afraid. Those who grew up here, who witnessed the fall of Snakefish, will recall the feelings of real fear that gripped them as their world collapsed about their ears.”

There were voices of assent from the congregation, calls of support and a hubbub of agreement from farther back among the swilling crowds.

“But together,” Minister Morrow called, thrusting his clenched right fist in the air above his head where everyone could see, “together we are strong. Together we cannot be defeated. Together we are the heralds of the glorious future, together we are the heralds of god.

“Each one of you here today is my brother, my sister,” Morrow continued. “Each one of you is a part of the future body, each one of you a building block for eternity.

“We are strong because we are stone!” Morrow shouted, opening the fist he held straight above his head. Revealed within, a rock rested on his palm, just three inches across and dark as a shadow. As the congregation cheered and whooped their support, the rock began to glow, at first faintly in a soft peachy orange, before rapidly becoming brighter until it was burning a lustrous red as rich as lava.

“We are stone,” Morrow chanted, and the people of the congregation took up the chant, shouting their allegiance to the glorious future of Ullikummis.

In Morrow’s hand, the stone glowed brighter still, illuminating the altar where the minister stood, painting his simple robes in rich scarlet and vermilion.

“We are stone,” Morrow called, and a thousand voices echoed the same words back to him. “We are stone.”

As the voices became louder, calling in time with the chiming bell, the air began to change above the minister’s head, poised as he was at the very center of the towering structure. The air seemed to take on a tangibility as a swirl of color began to form, small and faint at first but unmistakably present all the same.

The congregation continued to chant as the swirl above the minister grew bigger and more pronounced. The colors pulsed and swirled, dancing with one another like the aurora borealis, changing as they swam in the air. And somewhere deep in the midst of that multihued pattern, pencil-thin fingers of lightning began to crackle and flash.

Morrow continued to chant, his open hand raised in the air, brandishing the glowing stone like Prometheus bringing fire from the gods. The stone felt hotter now, not burning but like the feel of another person’s skin, lover to lover.

“I am stone.”

The crowd continued to repeat the phrase over and over as the wormhole opened behind their leader, widening like a circular window into the quantum ether.

Unknown to the congregation, all across the country, dozens more of the wormholes were opening as the faithful were called by Ullikummis, a widely scattered flock of believers called into service by their savior.

In Luilekkerville, the hole in space was as tall as a house now, taking up two stories of the cathedral’s innards, poised like a disk in the center of the massive enclosed space, like an eye looking into the infinite. The colors swirled and clashed and witchfire flashed across its depths, the call of Ullikummis echoing from the infinity rent to tug at the souls of the chanting congregation.

Suddenly, Morrow turned to face the expanding circular disk, seeing it properly for the first time where it swirled behind him. His lips continued to mouth the chant—“We are stone”—but the sound died before it left his throat, snatched away by the swirling elemental forces that he was staring into. Minister Morrow looked into the abyss, his human eyes trying to make sense of the fractal patterns of the quantum ether, as he led his congregation into its shining depths. The disk looked like a bruise, blacks and purples and indigo blues all mixing together as it grew larger and larger, a hundred other shades swirling within its tesseract depths.

And if the end of the world had a color, then this was it.