Jack cried, "Jesus Christ!" while Ba stiffened and muttered something unintelligible.
Kolabati watched the rim with fatalistic distaste as Moki staggered back a step, then straightened. He grasped the knife handle with both hands, and slowly, deliberately, his body shaking convulsively, withdrew the bloody blade from his chest. The Niihauan looked on in open-mouthed amazement, then raised his face and arms toward the sky. Moki gave him a moment, then rammed the dripping blade into his heart.
As the man screamed in agony, Jack turned away, cursing angrily under his breath. Kolabati continued to watch. Human sacrifices had been part of her childhood. When you are born to a priest and priestess of a temple where humans were regularly thrown to the rakoshi, it became a matter-of-fact event. It was a necessity—the rakoshi had to be fed. But this was different. This was obscene, serving no useful purpose other than feeding Moki's delusions.
As she watched Moki lift the Niihauan's corpse and hurl it into the fire, a sacrifice to the false goddess, Pele, Jack turned to her.
"How the hell did you get involved with this maniac?"
"A long, sad story, Jack. Believe me, he was nothing like this before the sun and the earth began to betray us."
Inside she mourned for the Moki who had been, the Moki she sensed was irretrievably lost to her.
"I'll take your word for it," Jack said. "But right now he's got to be stopped. And one way to stop him is to get that necklace from him."
"More easily said than done when you're talking about a man who heals like Moki."
"I might have a way." His eyes bored into hers. "Will you help?"
She nodded vigorously. "Of course."
But don't expect to walk out of here with Moki's necklace when we get it back.
TUESDAY
1 • PASSAGES
WNEW-FM
JO: Hi. We're back. You probably thought we jumped ship just like most everybody else in town, didn't you. But we didn't. We lost our power for a bit there. As we're sure you already know, the whole city's dark.
FREDDY: Yeah, but we've got a generator going now so we're staying on the air, just like we promised.
JO: Trouble is, we won't be able to bring you much news. The papers can't roll their presses and the wire services are shutting down. But we'll stay on the air and do the best we can.
FREDDY: Yeah. You're stuck with us.
DINU PASS, RUMANIA
"I think we're lost, Nick," Bill said.
They were tipping and grinding and scraping along what passed for a road in these parts as Bill fought the wheel of the Rumanian equivalent of a Land-Rover. It was rust streaked, its odometer was in kilometers, it had creaky, ratchety steering, failing brakes, and a leaky exhaust system. But it seemed damn near indestructible, and its thick glass seemed impervious to the bugs that had swarmed over them in the Ploiesti area. Not too many bugs around here, though. Maybe because there weren't many humans or animals in these parts to feed on.
Bill squinted ahead. Sheer mountain walls towered on either side, closer on his left, but the formerly seamless blackness beyond the flickering, dancing headlights was showing some cracks. Morning was coming. Good. Although traveling east had made the night mercifully short, he was tired of the darkness. He had a blinding headache from the carbon monoxide-tainted air as well as the tension growing in his neck, his left leg and right arm burned from fighting the creaky clutch and stubborn gear shift, and he was sure they'd missed a crucial turn about ten kilometers back.
And he'd begun talking to Nick. Nick hadn't deigned to reply yet, but the sound of his own voice gave Bill the feeling that he wasn't completely alone out here in a remote mountain pass in the heart of a benighted country where he spoke not a word of the native language.
"We'll never find our way back home again," he said. "Unless it's in a pine box."
Joe Ashe had piloted them across the Atlantic and Northern Europe in great time, riding the jet stream all the way. The field at Ploiesti had been deserted except for one of Joe's East European pilot buddies—apparently the Ashe brothers had a global network of kindred spirits—who had this beat-up old land-rover waiting for them. They'd assumed Bill would wait until daylight before setting out. But dawn, such as it was these days, had been nearly three hours away. And three hours seemed like a lifetime. Sure, it was 6:02 a.m. local time, but the clock in Bill's body read only midnight. He was too wired to sleep, so why not put the time to good use? The Rumanian land-rover looked sturdy enough—more like a converted half-track mini-tank than a car—so he'd loaded Nick into the passenger seat and headed out into the darkness.
A foolish mistake. Bill realized that now. He glanced at his watch. Eight o'clock. They'd covered thirty miles in two hours—the majority of them coasting along the road north from Ploiesti, the last few crawling along this ridge road. According to the Sapir curve, dawn was due at 8:41, after which there would be eight hours and thirty-eight minutes of sunlight today. Which was about half an hour shorter than the shortest day of the year in the dead of all the Decembers that had preceded the celestial changes.
Bill shivered. A new kind of winter had come. A winter of the soul.
"I know what you're going to say, Nick," he said. "You're going to say, 'I told you so.' And maybe you did, but I guess I wasn't listening. Doesn't matter now, though. We're stuck out here in the middle of nowhere and we'll just have to wait until the light comes and hope to find somebody who can tell us how to get to this keep place."
Nick, ever polite, refrained from an I-told-you-so.
Bill scanned the terrain ahead for a level place to park and noticed the road widening. Great. He could pull to the side and wait for the light. Then he saw the white shapes ahead. As he got closer he realized they were houses. A cluster of them. A village.
"Maybe there is a God after all, Nick," but he knew Nick didn't believe that. Neither did he.
Bill almost wished again for the old days when he did believe. Because he'd be praying now for help, for direction, for the Lord to inspire his hands on the wheel to guide them to the right road and lead them to their destination.
But those days were gone. His god was dead. Mumbled words would not bring help from on high. He was going to have to do this just the way he'd always done things—by himself.
As he followed the road on its winding course among the houses, he felt no lessening of his sense of isolation. What had appeared to be a village was really no more than a collection of huts, and those huts looked beat up and run down. As the headlight beams raked them he saw how their white stucco walls were scarred and chipped, noted the gaps in the shakes covering their roofs. Hard times had come to this place. He didn't have to search the huts to know the village was deserted.
"Now we're really lost," he told Nick. The fatigue was settling on him like a ratty blanket. "Lost in the middle of nowhere. If there is a God, he's forsaken this place."
Then he saw the flames. On the far side of the village, flickering fitfully in the fading darkness. It looked like a campfire. He drove toward it, steadily picking up speed.
A fire meant people and that meant he wasn't completely lost. Maybe there was still hope of salvaging this trip.
But suddenly there was nothing ahead—no road, no grass, no earth, only emptiness. He stood on the brakes, tumbling Nick into the dashboard as the rover swerved and skidded to a stalling halt at the edge of a precipice. A hole, dammit! Another one of those bottomless holes!
No, wait. To his left, vague and dim, an ancient bridge of some sort, with stone supports plunging into the pit. It coursed two hundred feet across the emptiness—a rocky gorge, he saw now; not a hole—toward the campfire. And now that he was closer and the sky was lighter, Bill realized that the campfire wasn't outside. It was inside, glowing through a tall open gate set within a massive stone wall that seemed to spring from the mountainside. He could make out human forms standing around it. Some of them might even be staring back at him. On the structure's leading edge, a thick, sturdy tower rose a good forty or fifty feet above the top of the wall. The whole thing looked like a small castle, a pocket fortress. He felt a smile spread over his face—how long since he'd really smiled?