Ark(25)

Her last words chilled the blood in my veins: “Before this demon is loosed from your womb, you will wish for death.”



I drank the wine. It was bitter and tasted of oils and herbs and death. My stomach cramped and clenched and my bowels turned to water. Irkalla mixed the wine again the next day and the day after that. Every day the pain worsened, until I could not move from my bed; I screamed until my voice was raw and ragged, and then I screamed silently.

Still the child remained in my womb.

Irkalla mixed the wine again and again. I prayed to every god I knew—save one—for the child to die. It was a child—I made no equivocation about that. What I did was as much murder as if I had stabbed it with a knife, but what I had told Mirra was true: this child was a demon, a monster. I could not, would not, bear the child of that evil king.

After a week of unbearable agony, my loins burst open and clots of blood and tissue flooded the bed beneath me in crimson, stinking waves. If I could have screamed aloud, the sound of my voice would have carried to my father’s ears, hundreds of miles away. As it was, all that emerged from my throat was dry, rasping gasps; all the agony that had gone before was as the trickle of a stream before a flash flood. The pain that I had endured in the preceding seven days was nothing, nothing at all compared to what I experienced at that moment.

I wept hot silent tears and begged Ereshkigal to take me.

I begged Enki and Enlil to take me.

Finally, when I had pleaded with and cried out to all the gods of my people, I begged Elohim to forgive me.

All I received from all the gods and from The One God was silence.

The child had no name, no grave. Irkalla burned the effluvia in an urn beneath a window, sprinkling sage on the crackling, foul-smelling flames to dull the scent of burning blood.

The following week, Mirra’s head was brought to me in a wicker basket by a grim-faced guard.





5





Wipe Them Out





“So God said to Noah, ‘I have decided to destroy all living creatures . . . yes, I will wipe them all out along with the earth!’” Genesis 6:13 (NLT)





Hands fumbled at the manacles binding Japheth to the wall.

Japheth ignored them, thinking them hallucinations or dreams. Exhaustion, hunger, and thirst had sapped his strength, but not nearly so much as the disgust and horror of the temple prostitute’s death. Japheth had thought himself fairly desensitized to gore and death from a lifetime of making war, but the girl . . . he could still taste her blood in his mouth, could still see her eyes fly wide with shock and pain as her life fountained out of the gash in her throat to bathe him crimson. Those weren’t what caused the nightmares though. What Japheth saw every time his eyes closed was the face of the priest and the black flood of possession spreading through his eyes, occluding the whites and pupils and irises, until there was naught but black shadow in his gaze.

The hands pulled at Japheth, and a voice buzzed in his ear, but the words were dull and distant and unintelligible. Pain cracked through Japheth’s face as a fist connected with his cheek and sent him spinning to slump against the wall.

“Get up, you fool!” Japheth heard Zidan’s voice whispering furiously in his ear. “They’ll find us in a moment, so if you want to be free of this house of hell, you’d best get moving.”

The throbbing in his cheek cleared the haze from Japheth’s mind. He blinked his eyes and staggered to his feet; the body of the temple prostitute was still lying on the floor, her eyes wide and glassy, the blood dried in a sticky pool around her body. Japheth knelt and tried to shut her eyes, but she’d been dead too long. Instead, he tore a strip of cloth from the hem of her dress and laid it across her face.

Take her soul unto yourself, Elohim, Japheth prayed. She did not deserve this death.

“Leave the whore,” Zidan growled, “We have to go, now.”

Japheth span and thrust his face into Zidan’s, eyes blazing. “She died so that demon-priest could send me a message. Show some respect.”

Zidan was unfazed by Japheth’s fury. “You’ll join her in the afterlife, if we don’t leave. I could only buy so much time, and it’s nearly gone.”

Zidan tossed a guardsman’s dirty tunic at him, and then thrust the hilt of an iron short sword into Japheth’s left hand and a small buckler into his right. Not waiting for an answer, the mercenary crept out of the antechamber and through the darkened temple. A lone torch flickered on a far wall, and the air was blessedly clear of incense.

Japheth got dressed and grabbed his weapons. Just as he was about the follow Zidan out the door, a glint of something on the floor caught his eye: his pendant. He caught it up and, in doing so, felt an energy course through his body. Maybe Elohim was watching him after all.

The temple wasn’t deserted; Japheth could see priests and temple guards roaming along the walls. From behind a thick pillar came a low, feminine moaning and a porcine grunting, and as they passed the pillar Japheth saw pale buttocks flashing with desperate thrusts in the gloom. The pig-snorts of pleasure escalated to a final, feral growl, and the priest dismounted the prostitute, who snatched a handful of coins and scurried out of the temple.

The priest lowered his robe and cast a furtive glance around the temple, allowing Japheth a brief look at his face in the midnight darkness: Mesh-te.