Deathbird Stories Part 21

Dis came from the earth that was his flesh. The rock that was his bone. The stone that was his home that was his essence.

The sunrise ceased. Night came again. Was.h.i.+ng up out of the earth, darkness flowed and roiled and the world went dark as Dis came from the rock.

The heel stone s.h.i.+fted shape and grew, and rising from the inanimate stone Dis took form. Hairless flesh as solid as mountains. The great corded legs ran like lava, flowing toward the sinister circle of Stonehenge. Flowed, and touched archway, trilothons, sa.r.s.en stone, slaughter stone, lintels, bluestone horseshoe...and they fed the body of Dis with their substance, and he grew. Ma.s.sive, enormous, rising into the night that oozed up from the earth, as darkness covered the world. Greater than the stones, taller than the huge branch-figures wherein had burned the human sacrifices. Two hundred, three hundred feet, towering over the awed and supplicating Wess.e.x People.

Dis, rock G.o.d, had come again as he had come one hundred years before, and one hundred years before that.

Words brought him. Needs brought him. Fear of not bringing him forth from his own body, the earth, had brought him. Belief had brought him. Now, again, as it had brought him once every century, to the low-fallen ones who wors.h.i.+pped him: not because he promised life after death, not because he promised salvation, not because he promised rich harvests and plentiful rain. Dis was not a G.o.d of promise. He was called forth because he would come, called or not. Because he was Dis, and his body was the very ground they walked, and they could do no other. Because it was necessary for him to stride the world once every century. There was no human explanation for his need...he was Dis...it was reason enough.

More. Darkness seeped up into the skies. The world was dark. He rose, greater and greater still. Stonehenge vanished to become his legs, his torso, his arms, the terrifying shape of his head. Stonehenge fed his bulk and he loomed over them.

A cry of hopelessness, low and animal, came from the Wess.e.x People. From the throat of the great priest and his a.s.sistants, and from the throat of the acolyte priest whose name was not yet recorded.

The great priest murmured his words, incantations he had been taught would keep Dis from harming those who wors.h.i.+pped him. There was no way for him to know: they had no effect, they were no protection. Dis had never desired their destruction, so they had been spared. Yet they believed. Helpless, yet they believed. And...

This rising was not like the others that had occurred in the thousand centuries since Dis had first appeared.

The great priest sensed it first; then the acolyte. The others were frozen, uncomprehending, waiting.

The great horned head of Dis turned; the rock G.o.d peered through the eternal darkness that flowed upward from the Earth, as if seeing the stars that were now hidden from all but his sight.

Then the face turned down and for the first time Dis spoke to men.

I will sleep.

They listened. Fear greater than the fear they had always known at Dis's coming gripped them. They had thought in their dim way there was no greater fear, but now Dis spoke. The sound of volcanoes. The sound of winds. Caverns. Pain. Vapor exploding through stone.

I will sleep and dream.

I will be safe.

I will give you a thing.

Possess it.

The holiest of holies.

I sleep within.

And Dis reached into his body, thrust his taloned hand as big as the biggest trilothon into his body of a rock that was flesh, and brought forth a mote of burning blackness. He held it up to his flaming eyes. Vistas of the underworld leaped and scintillated in the fire-pits of his eyes. The black light of the mote met the flames of his eyes and the light melted and merged and leaped and the fire entered the mote, and crimson became blackness and blackness became crimson, and then all was within the mote, and it pulsed, pulsed, waned, subsided, lay quiescent.

Then Dis bent and lowered his hand, laying the mote at the feet of the great priest.

Keep safe my soul.

I will come again one day.

Unending pain if my soul is lost.

This is my command.

The great priest feared to look up, but his words were to his G.o.d, to a.s.sure him the life of all his people would be spent protecting the holiest of holies.

But suddenly there was a bold sound from the throng of petrified wors.h.i.+ppers, and the great priest had a moment's presaging of terror as the young acolyte priest--who could not wait for succession, who l.u.s.ted after power now--broke from the ma.s.s of dark praying shapes, raced across the open s.p.a.ce and leaped onto the altar stone.

"No!" the great priest moaned.

"Great Dis!" the acolyte priest shouted, looking up into the face that his race's memory would never be able to describe without a shudder. "Great Dis, we have served you for centuries! Now we ask a boon! I, Mag, demand for your faithful ones who pledge to protect your sleeping soul, the boon of--"

None ever knew what token the acolyte might have demanded to raise himself to a position of power. The rock G.o.d reached down and darkness flowed from his taloned fingers. Black fire consumed the acolyte in an instant, and the pillar of black fire sparkled upward, thinned, became a lance-line no man could look into. Then Dis hurled the black fire into the ground, where it burned through and could be seen to s.h.i.+mmer. The sound of Mag's soul shriveling was a trembling, terrible thing.

Then Dis flowed back into the Earth, the rocks became rocks once more, Stonehenge solidified, and all that remained was the power stone, the black mote stone, at the feet of the great priest, whose body s.h.i.+vered and spasmed from the nearness of the G.o.d's vengeance.

And when Dis was gone, to sleep his sleep of ages, the Wess.e.x Folk saw there was a new rock in the Stonehenge circle. In its surface was imprinted the memory of a face that had belonged to one they'd known, contorted in agony beyond their ability to describe. But they would never forget: Mag, in the stone, striation lines of anguish, forever he would live in pain, dead inside the rock, forever blackly burning in agony, with his unvoiced demand.

They took the mote and kept it holiest of holies, and Dis slept.

Dis, most cunning, had separated himself seven times and one more. To let his flesh sleep with his soul was to permit the chance of destruction. His soul slept within the black mote of Stonehenge. But his flesh he cut seven ways, and there were seven risings, all on the same night. From the mystic number seven, from the seven unearthly risings, had come seven stones to match the mote. They came to be known as the Seven Stones of Power. They were known to the world, for Dis knew a G.o.d exists only if there are believers; and as he must sleep, for reasons known only to G.o.ds, he must leave behind a legacy for legend, by which he would be remembered.

The Seven Stones of Power: In Ireland, the Blarney Stone.

The Stone of Scone that came from Scotland and now lived beneath the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey.

Hajar al-Aswad, The Black Stone, the great religious symbol of Islam; kept sacred and safe in the Ka 'bah sanctuary, the Sacred Mosque in Mecca.

The Koh-i-noor diamond, which the Persians called the Mountain of Light.

The lost Stone of Solomon that had vanished from Palestine and which was said to be the most treasured possession of the Dalai Lama in Lhasa.

The Welsh Stone of Change--which some called merely the Plinth, for time and legends s.h.i.+mmer in the memory of the frightened--that had last been known to reside at the vacant seat of Arthur's Round Table, the Siege Perilous, the seat and Stone that could only be claimed by the predestined finder of the Holy Grail.

And the Amida of Diabutsu, the Great Buddha, in the Sacred Temple of Kyobe in j.a.pan-that-was.

These seven. And the soul mote.

Legend and the ways of men kept these potent stones secreted. Yet there were chips, and bits, and from them came the Great Seal of Solomon, the silver crescent of the Great Anthrex, the Talisman of Suleiman the Magnificent, and the Circle of Isis.

It was the seven stones, and the soul mote in which the essence of Dis dreamed his sinister dreams (of worlds where great lizards carried on commerce, where living light in the skies ruled creatures of flesh, where the G.o.ds drew breath that cleft the earth to its molten core) in which true power resided: sleeping.

The soul mote was buried at Stonehenge, and time pa.s.sed till even the Wess.e.x People were gone, and their having pa.s.sed that way was forgotten.

This is what happened to the black soul mote.

It was dug up by one who came in the night and was mad. And so, mad, he was not afraid. But his madness did not stay the terrible death that came to him, the flesh stripped from his body and eaten by things only partially human. But he had already traded the mote to one of Minoan Crete. That one pa.s.sed it for great wealth to a thinker of Mycenaean Greece from whom it was taken in ransom by a priest of Isis. The Egyptian lost it to a Phoenician and he, in turn, lost it in a game of chance that took all he owned, as well as his life....

From hand to hand it traveled, down through the centuries, with death and shapes in the night following its journey.

A thousand hands, a thousand men of cultures shrouded in antiquity. Till it found its way from an ocean floor to the hand of an adventurer who also worked in silver. He cleaned it and polished it and mounted it. Then women owned it.

And each woman became famous. The names are legend. But always they coveted more, and finally reaped their rewards in blood. The soul mote came across another ocean, where it went from the treasure hordes of Osmanski Cossacks to the coffers of Polish n.o.blemen, from the dowries of Parisian demimondaines to the chamois gold-sacks of English vicars, from the pockets of cutpurses to the New World.

And there it pa.s.sed from brooch to pendant, ring to lavaliere...

and was lost.

...and was found: by a Croatian workman who had no idea what it was, and threw it, with a spadeful of refuse, into the hollow center of the cornerstone of a great skysc.r.a.per.

And the building rose one hundred and fifteen stories over the sleeping soul of the great rock G.o.d Dis. Who knew the time was approaching.

Night hung crucified outside the ninety-fifth floor window of Stierman's office.

The night and the men in the room seemed as one. They both accused Stierman. His mouth was dry. He knew at least two of these seven were with the Organization. But which two were deathmen of that "business firm" and which were merely angry entrepreneurs, he did not know. But all seven had partnered him in the construction of the Stierman Building. And anyone of the seven could ruin him.

"We were all served today," one of them said. He slapped the summons from the District Attorney's office on Stierman's desk.

"You'll pay for this." It was the one with the reptilian eyes. He was frightening.

Stierman could not speak.

"How much did you skim off, Stierman? How much?"

That was number three.

The other four spoke all at once. "Do you have any idea what happens if this building falls?" "We're all in this together, but it's you, Stierman, it's you"' "Swiss account, Stierman? Is that where you put it?" "I oughta kill you, you sc.u.m!"

The building in which they sat was sinking. The foundations bad been filled with garbage, with substandard materials; the ground itself had been soft. The building was vanis.h.i.+ng into the ground. Nothing strange about it, nothing magical, merely inadequate building procedures. Frank Stierman had pocketed almost two million dollars from the construction costs of the building, and it had showed up in the final product.

The second floor was now below street level. Access to the Stierman Building was obtained by entrance through a hastily-cut door in the side of a second-floor office.

From the foyer and the bas.e.m.e.nts, one had to take an elevator upstairs to get out at the ground floor. The tenants had all vacated. The corporations and professional men bad fled. Stierman's seven partners were on the verge of ruin, and the insurance companies had already laughed in their faces.

"Speak up, you sonofab.i.t.c.h!"

Stierman knew he had to bluff it out.

At least till he could get out of the country. Brazil. Then Switzerland.

Then...anywhere.

"My G.o.d, you men have known me fifteen years--have you ever known me to do a dishonest thing? What the h.e.l.l's wrong with you?" Charm. Trust. Frank Stierman.

He's had an amazing career. Came out of nowhere. One of the biggest developers in Manhattan. Zeckendorf looks like a kid making sand castles next to Stierman. Trust him all the way. h.e.l.luva guy. Charming.

Sand in the cement. Quite a lot of sand.

Specifications cut close to the line. Quite close.

A little juice to the surveyors.

A little juice to the building commission.

A little juice to the councilmen.

Oversubsidized. Oversold. Overworked.

Trust and charm. Frank Stierman. It was working. The wide blue eyes. The strong chin. The cavalryscout ruggedness. It was working. Which two are patched into the Organization? Work, mouth, work this man out of the East River where fish eat garbage.

"Okay, so we've got a situation here. We've got a contingency we never expected. The ground is settling. Okay, we're losing the building. Maybe.

"And..."--he paused, significantly--"maybe not!"

They listened. He dredged lies from the silt of his mind. "I had half a dozen structural engineers in here today, land a.s.sayers, men who know what to do with this kind of situation. Now, I'm not going to tell you that we're out of the woods...Jesus, we've got some rough sledding ahead of us. But we know there was faulty workmans.h.i.+p in the construction, we know the d.a.m.ned contractors who sank the pylons shorted us on the quality of the fill...we know we're going to have some losses...but we're friends! That counts for a lot. We're going to have to--"

Dis stirred.

Frank Stierman, naked save for loincloth, found his back against a rock wall, found a bronze blade in his right hand, found himself staring across what had been the conference room of his office at a creature of scales and fish-gills that writhed on eight legs with a head of vapor and eyes in the vapor that burned into his own.

He screamed and threw the sword at the thing....

Seven men were staring at Frank Stierman. He had no idea what had happened, but he knew he had lost all ground. In the middle of an impa.s.sioned plea for reason and patience, he had suddenly fallen back against a wall, screamed like a madman, and lost all tonus in his face. Whatever Frank Stierman had been a moment before, now he was unreliable...perhaps insane. Seven men stared back at him, their resolve now solidified not by anger and suspicion but by the realization that they were dealing with a lunatic.

The connecting door to Stierman's private office opened, and a woman entered.

"Frank, can I see you for a moment?"

Stierman was trembling. The creature. That head, made of...of some kind of vapor...what was happening to him? "Not now, Monica. This is very important."

"I agree, Frank. Important. I have to speak to you now. "

"Monica, I--"

"Frank, don't make me talk here, in front of these men!"