“Holy shit,” he muttered.
It looked nothing like a cow, or any other kind of animal, and yet he could see how an ancient poet, grasping for the words to describe it, might have made such a comparison. A large, bulbous body, was perched atop what might have been legs, and spiraling protrusions that, without too much imagination, could be compared to the long horns of an ox or water buffalo. However, as Fiona had suggested, the creature looked more like a golem — a rough approximation of life — than like an actual living thing.
He tore his eyes away from it and shone the light down the slope. The gunmen were still there, though there were fewer of them. All of them were clutching their eyes, and groping about in the unique pantomime of men recently struck blind. After a few seconds however, the man furthest out swung his rifle in Pierce’s general direction.
“Time to go,” Pierce shouted.
He grabbed Gallo with one hand, Fiona with the other, and was just starting to move when the shot was fired. The round sailed past them. The man had probably seen nothing more than a bright blur, but that was enough to give him an aim-point. Pierce didn’t dare turn his headlamp off. Darkness, and what they might blunder into, was now the greater danger.
As they reached the nearest fissure, the fusillade began in earnest. Puffs of dust erupted all across the mountain. The surviving gunmen were firing blind, trusting in an overwhelming volume of lead to make up for their blindness. Eventually, they would hit someone.
Or something, he thought, and then he made a mental note to come up with a better name for the light creatures. Anything but cows.
As they skirted the edge of the fissure, Pierce spotted the creature again, meandering along the far side, eight-feet tall and half again as long. It resembled nothing less than a behemoth made of shifting sand. Pierce could feel its energy, like invisible feathers of static electricity brushing his face.
Too close, he thought, adjusting course to give it a wide berth. But he knew that if a random bullet struck the creature, piercing its shell, they would probably all be vaporized.
As if to underscore that threat, another flash lit up the mountain.
The source of it was behind them, well out of their line of sight, but Pierce felt his entire body glow red for an instant. The light revealed a path through the maze, but as it faded, night blindness returned with a vengeance.
“Can either of you see?”
Fi replied first. “Not much.”
Gallo’s admission was even more succinct. “Nope.”
“Okay. Looks like it’s going to be the blind leading the blind.” He closed his eyes, trying to remember how the world had looked in that instant of brilliance. Fortunately, the flash had given them another reprieve from the shooting, but how long it would last was anyone’s guess. “Single file behind me. Gus, hang on to me. Fi, you hang on to her.”
They started forward again, with Pierce counting the steps to the end of the fissure, and then taking a few more just in case, before starting upslope. If he remembered correctly, there was one more fissure ahead, thirty or forty yards—which is it, Pierce? It matters! — and then just a very steep climb to the top.
Something brushed against his face, the touch softer than a breath, and he froze. The sensation lingered. His skin began to tingle, like tiny insects crawling across his face.
Gallo felt it, too. “Stop. We’re too close to one of those things.”
Pierce turned his head back and forth, trying to see around the haze. He knew the creature was somewhere close, no more than ten feet, but try as he might, he couldn’t pinpoint its location. “Back up. We’ll circle wide, give him lots of room.”
“Wait,” Fiona said. “Let me try.”
She began chanting, her voice so soft that it sounded more like faint musical notes than words. After a few seconds, the tingling stopped. After a few more, she stopped singing. “Okay. Follow me. But keep your eyes shut. I think it’s going to get pretty bright.”
The chain reversed, with Gallo now pulling Pierce along, as Fiona took the lead. Pierce squeezed his eyes closed, taking Fiona’s admonition seriously, but the warning also triggered a memory planted in his head since childhood.
“Shekinah,” he whispered. “I know what they are.”
“Trying to concentrate here, Uncle George.”
Pierce held his tongue and followed along in silence. He climbed with careful, deliberate steps, turning when Gallo squeezed his hand, signaling a change of direction, but his mind was in another place, another time, pondering the nature of the strange light creatures.
“We have to climb,” Fiona said. “But whatever you do, don’t look back.”
Pierce opened his eyes and felt a measure of relief at his ability to see anything at all. There were still a few dark blobs, but he could make out a nearly vertical cliff face. The base of the cliff was strewn with boulders and debris, some pieces worn smooth by centuries of weather, others jagged and sharp, cleaved off from the wall during the recent earthquakes. The fractures formed a natural yet irregular staircase leading up the cliff. High above, a shadowy depression marked the location of a cleft in the rock, perhaps the entrance to the Cave of Moses.
Fiona, still in the lead, scrambled up the staircase and plunged into the cleft. Pierce envied her youthful agility, but then Gallo, who was only a couple of years younger than he was, ascended almost as nimbly. Pierce gritted his teeth, reached down into his reserves, and started up the wall.
Another wave of gunfire erupted in the distance, dashing Pierce’s hope that the gunmen were all dead or otherwise incapacitated. It seemed impossible that the three of them had been spotted, and the absence of any nearby impacts suggested the gunmen weren’t even trying to hit them.
Then what are they shooting at?
The answer, as unbelievable as it was obvious, gave him the impetus to reach the mouth of the cave an instant before one of the bullets found its mark, releasing a brilliant eruption of cleansing light.
The angle of the cave opening protected the three huddled figures within from full exposure, but the flash revealed the interior of the small cleft, a space large enough to hold them all.
What Pierce saw in that instant made him forget about the gunmen’s suicidal actions.
He raised his head, shining his headlamp into the depths of the recess. The LED flashlight was a mere candle flame compared to the brilliance released with the light creatures’ destruction, but it was enough.
The walls of the cave were covered in strange symbols.
They weren’t Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the later hieratic alphabet, or any other form of writing Pierce recognized. He wasn’t even sure it was writing. The symbols might have been intended as decorations. Many of them were illegible, worn down by the passage of time, scrubbed away by the action of wind and sand swirling into the little recess. He doubted it would ever be possible to reconstruct the message. But the symbols were not what had caught his eye. A larger relief had been carved into the rock on the back wall.
From a distance, it appeared to be a representation of the sun, a circle with lines radiating from its underside, but there was something inside the circle, a pair of humanoid figures that looked like kneeling angels, facing each other, heads bowed and wings extended toward one another.
“Oh my God,” he whispered. “We got it all wrong. We don’t need to find the sun chariot.”