'Sweet Jesus!'
With great care they moved across the arena of death, and Gareth kept his eyes fixed on the distant entrance to yet another tunnel, wincing as dried bones broke beneath his mount's hooves. At last they reached the far side and Gareth swung in his saddle, looking back over the colosseum and its silent audience.
Forty-two thousand people, their bodies drained of moisture. He shuddered and followed the others down into the second tunnel.
The palace gardens were overgrown with weeds and bracken and only three of the old stones were still standing. One of these had slipped to the right, showing a jagged crack on its side. Shannow dismounted and forced his way through the undergrowth. 'Will the circle still. . work?' he asked, as Amaziga joined him.
'The stones are not important in themselves,' she told him. They were merely placed by the Ancients at points of great natural power.' Amaziga flicked the microphone into place and switched on the computer.
Shannow wandered away, eyes raking the wall surrounding the garden and the balconies that overlooked what was once a series of rose-beds. He felt uncomfortable here, exposed. One rifleman creeping along behind those balcony walls could kill them all.
Samuel Archer approached him. ‘I have had no time to thank you properly, Mr Shannow. I am grateful for your courage.'
Shannow smiled at the tall black man. 'I knew another Sam Archer once,' he said. 'I could not save him and I have always regretted that.' He glanced to the left, where Gareth Archer was sitting quietly lost in thought, his face a mask of sorrow. 'I think you should speak to him,' said the Jerusalem Man. Archer nodded.
Gareth looked up as the older man sat down on the marble bench beside him. 'Soon be home,' said Gareth. 'You'll like Arizona. No Bloodstone.'
'It is always hard to gaze upon the fruits of evil,' said Sam softly.
Gareth nodded agreement. 'Forty-two thousand people. Son of a bitch!'
'Do you study history, Gareth?'
'Battle of Hastings, 1066 AD; Second World War, 1939 AD; War of Liberation, 2016 AD,' said Gareth. 'Yes, I studied history.'
'I didn't mean the dates, son. You've just seen a multitude of the dead. Yet Genghis Khan killed ten times as many people, and Stalin murdered a hundred times more. Man's history is hip-deep in Bloodstones.
The dead that you saw chose to worship Sarento. They fed him their children, and the children of other races. Lastly they fed him themselves. I mourn for their stupidity, but there is nothing new about a leader who leads his people to destruction.'
There's a cheering thought,' said Gareth.
Amaziga joined them. 'Lucas says that we must wait four hours for a window home. It's almost over, Sam.'
Samuel Archer stared at her intently, noting the lines of anguish on her beautiful face. 'There is something else,' he said. She nodded and glanced round to look for Shannow, but the Jerusalem Man was gone.
'The Bloodstone is now in Shannow's world,' she said.
Gareth swore. 'Did we open the Gate?' he asked bitterly.
'Lucas says not. Yet the fact remains that it is free to reduce another world to dust and death.'
'You once told me about Sarento,' said Gareth, anger in his voice. 'You told me he wanted to see a return to the old world, hospitals and schools, care, love and peace. How could you be deceived by such a monster?'
Sam cut in. 'He did want all those things,' he said. 'He was a man in love with the past. He adored all aspects of twentieth-and twenty-first-century life. And he did care. Thirty years ago there was a plague.
The Guardians went out among the people with medicines and vaccines we hoped would eradicate it.
We were wrong. Many of us died. Yet still Sarento went out, until he himself succumbed. He almost died, Gareth, trying to help others. It was the Bloodstone that corrupted him. He is no longer the human Sarento we knew.'
'I don't believe that,' snapped Gareth. There must have been evil in him to begin with. You just couldn't see it.'
'Of course there was,' said Amaziga. 'As there is in all of us, in our arrogance, in our belief that we know best. But the Bloodstone enhances such feelings, at the same time as drowning the impulses for good.
You have no idea of the influence of such Stones. Even a small demonseed will drive a bearer to violence, unleashing the full force of the beast within Man. Sarento took into himself the power of an entire boulder.'
Gareth rose and shook his head. 'He knew the Bloodstone was evil, even before he did that. I'll not listen to excuses for him. I just want to know how we can kill him.'
'We can't,' said Sam, 'not while he has power. I used to believe that if we could deprive him of blood until he was weak and then attack him, we would have a chance to destroy him. Yet how would it have been possible? Whoever approached him would only feed him. You understand? He is invulnerable. He might have died here, on a planet drained of life. But now he is free to wander the universe, growing in power.'
There must be a way,' urged Gareth.
'If there is we'll find it, Gareth,' said Amaziga. 'I promise you that.'
Jon Shannow wandered through the deserted halls of Babylon, past columns fashioned from human bones and mosaics depicting scenes of torture, rape and murder. His footsteps echoed and he came out, at last, on to a balcony overlooking the garden. From here could be seen the original layout of the grounds, the walkways shaped like intertwined serpents, forming the number of the Beast. Nature had conspired to cover most of the walkways, and vines grew up over repulsive statues that ringed the six small pools. Even these were stagnant, and the fountains silent.
Shannow felt burdened by it all, the evidence of Man's stupidity laid out before him like an ancient map.
Why is it, he thought, that men can be inspired to evil more swiftly and powerfully than they can be inspired to good?
His heaviness of heart deepened. Look at yourself, Jon Shannow, before you ask such questions. Was it not you who put away the guns, pledging yourself to a life of pacifism and religion? Was it not you who took to the pulpit, and reached out your mind to the King of Heaven?
And what happened when evil men brought death and flames?
'I gunned them down,' he said aloud.
It was always thus. From his earliest days, when he and Daniel had seen their parents slain, he had been filled with a great anger, a burning need to confront evil head to head, gun to gun. Through many settlements and towns, villages and communities the Jerusalem Man had passed. Always behind him there were bodies to be buried.
Did it make the world a better place, Shannow? he asked himself. Has anything you have done ensured a future of peace and prosperity? These were hard questions, but he faced them as he faced all dangers.
With honesty.
No, he told himself. I have made no difference.
Twice he had tried to put aside the mantle of the Jerusalem Man, once with the widow Donna Taybard, and then with Beth McAdam. Believing him to be dead, Donna had married another man. Beth had grown tired of Jon Cade's holiness.
You are a man of straw, Shannow, he chided himself. A year before, when Daniel Cade first moved to Pilgrim's Valley he had visited the Preacher in the small vestry behind the church.
'Good morning, brother Jon,' he said, 'you are looking well for a man of your years.'
'They do not know me here, Daniel. Everything has changed.'
Daniel shook his head. 'Men don't change, brother. All that happens is that they learn how best to disguise the lack of change. Me, I'm still a brigand at heart, but I'm held to goodness by the weight of public opinion and the fading strength of an age-weakened body.'