light, but Martin could make out Len Ward and Claire James beating the drums. He noticed Harrow Cougars emblems on the skins.
He saw so clearly, every detail, the eyes of the others gleaming in the candlelight, and he recognized their youth in their scent, the young, powerful smell of his son, the blooming scent of the girls, and he saw them, really saw them—and he knew that only at a few moments in his life had he ever seen people with this clarity, this love, and the abiding compassion that he felt now.
Michael Ryan, the Cougars’ star tackle said, “Hey,” and looked up at him with those strange, shadowed eyes they all had.
Then Pammy began to clap. Trevor threw his arms around his dad. Except for the drummers, they all clapped.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Dad,” Trevor said, “please try to understand” Tears streamed down his face. Martin embraced him. Then a girl he thought was called Crystal something came over. She had a mirror in one hand and a candle in the other.
A face looked back at him. It was dirty, wet, thin and covered by a day’s old growth of beard. It was the face of a street person, a hobo, somebody from the lower depths, a miner in the dark of the earth.
The eyes looking back at him gleamed darkly, very darkly, in the yellow candlelight. In fact, they were as black as coals, his eyes, just like those of the kids around him, and his son.
His soul seemed to fill the air of the tent, to mingle with their souls, and it was like picking up a song you’d known always, and singing again.
Martin understood, now, what had been done to him—the same thing that had happened to these kids when the light tried and failed to take him.
Something was gone, though. It had certainly taken something. Not his essence. He was still Martin Winters. He felt lighter, though, and far more in touch with the world—not the world of streets and companies and archaeological digs, however. Rather this world of the here and now. The rain, the trees, the kids in the tent.
He was alive, Martin was, more alive than he had ever been before.
They hadn’t discarded him, not at all. Rather, they had done to him what natural human societies had always done to their shamen and their priests, their healers. They had made him face death, and so come free.
That was the difference. The kids in this tent had not been captured by the light, but rather made free by its failure to capture them.
Martin was free, too. Trevor was smiling at him. His son’s face was soaked with tears. It had been a near thing out there. It had been real. He might not have made it.
“Thank you,” he said to them all, and to his son. Trevor came to him, and leaned against him, and instantly the exhausted boy was asleep in his father’s arms. Martin slept, too, and the lives of the kids swept on, racing toward the destiny that awaited them, now, in just a matter of hours, that would bring them new life, or extinguish forever these last few sparks of the human soul.
PART THREE
Abaddon
And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.
SEVENTEEN
DECEMBER 20
TERROR
GENERAL SAMSON HAD GOTTEN THE summons back in the daily packet from Abaddon. As usual, it had been choked with demands and threats. But this time, on top of the bundle that had been thrown through the small, highly stable gateway that was here beneath the geographic center of the Northern Hemisphere on all three worlds, was a sheet of thick yellow paper.
He had known instantly what it was: a summons from Echidna.
He now sat miserably on a packed bus, on his way to the sort of meeting from which one should not expect to return.
He had come back not only to his own beloved form, the marvelous darkness of his scales, the proud flash of his bright red eyes, but also to a world where he did not need to dose himself with antiallergen, then remained rigidly shifted for hours, all the while itching like mad in every stifled scale on his body.
He didn’t want to die. But more, he was afraid of torture. And they would torture him, of course, as a lesson and warning to others. It would happen in some auditorium full of laughing, cheering underclass, delighted to witness the abnegation of an overlord.
They would rip off his still-living skin and make him dance in the cold, and kids would come up and rub salt into his white, exposed musculature. They would roast his haunches and force him to attend the banquet dressed, no doubt, as a clown.
It was she, that damned high-born Captain Mazle, she and her accursed father who had engineered this.
He had hoped that a victory over the humans would bring him real wealth at last, and the power that went with it.
Instead, the starving billions who were marked to go swarming through the fourteen huge gateways when they opened tomorrow would instead have to be kept here, and their rage and their rebellion would only become worse.
And he, of course, would have no souls to sell.
But he wasn’t defeated, not just yet. He might be able to talk his way back to earth, because even if he couldn’t open the gateways to the people of Abaddon, he could bring back all those millions of souls, full of memories of love and joy, treasures that were not available to anybody here.
