God War Read Free Page B

irrevocable, and it had been her consciousness that had been melded with the living data to shore up the library’s defenses. Ullikummis had encountered her then, their astral forms meeting, but his perception had been so altered by the library that he had been unable to recognize her. It was only later, once the Annunaki prince was freed from the datastream, that he had realized who it was he had come in touch with—and he had decided at that moment that he needed to recruit this fearsome intellect for his own cause, lest she prove his downfall.
    Ullikummis enacted a bold plan against Cerberus shortly thereafter, amassing his nascent army to attack and overwhelm their hidden base in the Bitterroot Mountains. Ullikummis had left the task of running the overthrown base in the hands of his first priest, a man called Dylan, whose primary job was to turn Brigid’s partner, Kane, into a military leader for his stone army. Dylan had failed, and Kane had turned on him and overthrown the briefly victorious regime of his enemies. But Ullikummis himself had already exited the redoubt with Brigid, bringing her to Bensalem, where he had brainwashed and reconstructed her mind for his own means. Brigid, an eminently capable woman of fearsome intellect, had tried to resist, but ultimately her personality had been broken down and remade in the form of her new self, Brigid Haight. Now Haight was Ullikummis’s new first priest, his so-called hand in darkness, as he had been for his father. And with her help, Ullikummis would bring about the next reign of the mighty Annunaki, an era over which he and Ninlil would preside.
    Outside, through the open window of the rock-walled room, Brigid perceived the rays of the early-morning sun playing across the ever-changing ocean surface. It was barely dawn, the night chill still clinging heavily in the air. Gently pushing aside Little Quav, Brigid reached for the clothes that were draped over the stone chair at the end of her bed. Like everything else in Bensalem, the chair was constructed of rock and had a rough, weather-beaten look to it. As she took her single garment from the seat, two doglike creatures came wandering past the open door. They were huge, the size of lions with that same grace and majesty. Their bodies were rough, coated in a living stone that seemed to match the walls and the furniture of the room. One stared into the room for a moment, its nose in the air, and Brigid saw that it had eyes that looked sad and unmistakably human. She pushed the thought from her mind as she stepped into the leather leggings of the catsuit.
    In a few moments, Brigid closed the front of the formfitting black leather suit she favored, stretching her arms out before her to affix its sleeves in place. The suit clung to her supple curves like a second skin, reflecting the faint red glow that emanated from the roiling veins in the walls. Now dressed, Brigid bent to retrieve the heavy fur cloak that she had tossed to the floor before retiring the previous evening, pulling it over her shoulders. Then, cinching the ties on the cloak, she stared across the room once more to Ullikummis, who waited in the doorway like some rudimentary statue from a primitive culture.
    Meeting his hellish eyes, Brigid repeated Ullikummis’s words back to him. “The stars are aligned,” she said, knowing full well what it meant. “Thus it’s time.”
    With a single nod, Ullikummis turned and left the room, his footsteps like pounding jackhammer blows on the hard stone floor. Little Quav remained in the middle of the room, abandoned and looking to Brigid for direction. The red-haired woman called Haight reached her hand down to take that of the hybrid girl’s.
    “Come on, little one,” she said. “Time to meet with destiny.”
    Together, Brigid and Quav followed Ullikummis through the cool, echoing corridors of the rocky fortress in some perversion of the family unit, the stone hounds trotting along at their sides like the