But if Alexander was right about the radiation poisoning, they were all dead already. So what difference did it make?
With her lungs filled like a balloon about to burst, Fiona pressed her lips together and let the strange word vibrate from the roof of her mouth.
“Om.”
41
Fickle luck decided to throw King a bone. In addition to being broad and relatively intact, the passage was lit at intervals by battery-operated emergency lights and exit signs. He sprinted down the corridor, glancing back every few seconds to see if the basilisk was following. The third time he did this, he saw that it was.
The thing was a moving wall of darkness, filling the height and breadth of the hallway, rolling forward like a ponderous but unstoppable tsunami of night. One by one, the emergency lights were engulfed in its mass and the scant illumination behind King dimmed.
He put on a fresh burst of speed, taking a left turn at an intersection-as indicated by the arrow on the exit sign-without slowing, and once again, briefly lost sight of the basilisk.
A few more turns brought him to the exit, or rather the place where the exit door had been. Now, there was just a gaping hole where the entire wall had collapsed inward. He picked his way across the rubble, painfully aware that the delay was erasing his lead, and vaulted through the opening into the night.
Muted light issued from the breach in the wall, and as he ran out across the courtyard, he glanced back, waiting for the moment that the light would be eclipsed by the basilisk’s bulk.
Several seconds passed, but the light did not change.
Something was wrong. The basilisk wasn’t following him anymore.
King felt a new rush of fear as the realization hit home. If it wasn’t chasing him, that could only mean…
“Fiona!”
The entity had no memory of its past, but it comprehended this new threat.
The manifestation had nearly reached the man who carried the last fragment of its consciousness, but that was no longer the entity’s primary concern. The word resonated through every particle of its physical being and it understood what would happen if the speaker of the word was not immediately silenced.
The entity was not defenseless. The word stimulated it in a way that the creatures of this world would understand as pain, and just as pain triggered a violent, instinctive reaction in those fragile beings of flesh, so too did the harmonic vibrations cause the entity’s essence to respond with furious intensity.
Raw matter spiraled into the entity and was changed. Its mass increased…doubled…and doubled again.
The steady hum of the word faltered as the world around the entity shook, but the reprieve was short-lived. The speaking resumed and the pain returned.
Though it did not understand the subtleties of intangible realities, the entity experienced fear.
Filled with primal desperation, the entity turned the manifestation away from its pursuit and summoned it back with a new purpose.
42
As a vibration rumbled up through the ground, Suvorov threw his arms around Julia and tackled her to the ground. The reaction was instinctive. He barely knew the woman and she meant nothing at all to him, but protecting her felt like the most natural thing in the world.
He’d felt the same way about assisting King. Despite the fact that the man was notionally the enemy of his country, despite the fact that King had killed Kharitonov, Suvorov knew that King was motivated by something profoundly superior to patriotism or a desire for revenge. King was risking himself to help others, to save a world of strangers, and that was something Suvorov could not help but admire.
He had emptied two magazines into the basilisk before it disappeared into the passage after King. The bullets had definitely slowed the thing down, and that made him think that it might be possible to kill it. It would surely take more rounds than they had, but he wasn’t going to let that fact prevent him from taking action.
Then the quake had started.
He covered Julia with his own body as the walls of the Louvre groaned under the increasingly violent shaking. The earlier tremor had already collapsed the roof overhead, eliminating the danger of anything falling on them, but now pieces of debris were breaking off and falling at an angle, like raindrops being driven sideways by a fierce wind. Suvorov felt chunks of marble and wood strike his exposed back before bouncing away and tumbling into the pit. Then he felt Julia and himself sliding into the crater as well.
He frantically scrambled for a purchase and his fingers curled around a piece of metal jutting from the wall of the crater.
Pain tore through him. He felt as if his left arm had been wrenched from its socket. It was not just the combination of his own weight with Julia’s; he felt impossibly heavy, like his clothes were made of lead. Julia, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, seemed to weigh a ton, and he could feel her slipping.
A scream pierced the ominous rumble and Suvorov glimpsed his teammate, Konstantin Vasileyev, tumbling down the side of the pit. The Spetsnaz’s fingers clawed at the rough slope of the crater but to no avail. Vasileyev slammed into the slowly gyrating mass of debris at the center and was smashed flat against it like an insect against the canopy of a fighter jet.
Suvorov thrust the horror of his comrade’s demise from his mind and focused on saving himself and Julia. He wrapped his legs around her, squeezing tight to prevent her from slipping further, and then released the embrace of his right arm and reached for the metal protrusion.
Ignoring the agony in his left shoulder, he heaved with all his might. A sustained exertion got him only a few inches before exhaustion forced him to relent, but thankfully, the sloping crater wall afforded enough resistance to keep them from sliding back. After a few seconds of respite, he tried again.
The ceaseless ordeal seemed to drag on forever, though in reality it took only about a minute. As soon as he got his upper torso level with the protrusion, he was able to heave Julia up and over the lip of the crater. The black hole’s gravity still tugged at him, like sandbags tied around his ankles, but without the additional burden of Julia, he was able to scramble the remaining distance to join her on the flat ground at the pit’s edge.
The earth still shook beneath them and pieces of rubble peppered them like hailstones, but through it all he could hear a faint humming-Fiona, Alexander and Sara, clinging together precariously at the edge of the crater, but still sounding the atonal chant that would, if the big man was to be believed, render the black hole dormant.
A series of loud reports alerted him to a new danger. Chesler, about twenty yards away and clinging with one hand to an upright column, was firing his pistol into the shadows.
No, not shadows, Suvorov realized. The basilisk.
He could barely make out the dark shape as it slid from the ruins of the museum and began oozing along the crater rim.
It got King and now it’s coming back for the rest of us, he thought.
The basilisk seemed to recoil from the impact of Chesler’s rounds. Suvorov felt sure he could sense its frantic need to advance, and suddenly he understood. The quake had started at almost exactly the same moment that Fiona and the others had begun to chant. The black hole knew what they were doing and was desperate to stop them.
Chesler’s pistol clicked empty and he hastily hit the release and let the spent magazine fall. The metal arced away at an impossible angle and bounced down the side of the crater. Chesler fumbled another magazine from his shoulder holster, but before he could insert it into the pistol grip, a dark tentacle snaked toward him.
Suvorov grimaced as the SVR operative was vaporized. The chant was working, but if the basilisk reached Fiona and the others, all would be lost. And he was the only one left who could stop it.