“Cannibals?”
“Jack and the Beanstalk.” Warren moved his torch farther down the wall and revealed another image of the large giant picking up men in his fists and eating them. “He warned Jack that he was going to grind his bones to make his bread.”
“I’d just thought it was something scary to say when I was a girl,” Naomi said. “I never really thought about the giant eating Jack.”
“That’s because you never saw the giant doing it. This gives a little more credence to that threat.”
Naomi moved to the next section. A woman stood in the middle of a forest. She carried a spear in one hand. A mysterious door opened in thin air behind her.
“Lilith?” Naomi asked.
Warren peered more closely, then brushed at the accumulated dust to better reveal the lines. “Maybe. Looks like a door behind her.”
“A miniature Hellgate?”
“Hard to say. But something.” Warren moved his torch and wiped the next scene clear. On it, the woman figure battled with human warriors, obviously beating them with ease.
“She fought them,” Naomi said. “The question is, did they come to see her as a friend or as a conqueror?”
“This is a room full of treasure,” Warren pointed out.
“So they revered her.”
“Or they were deathly afraid of her.”
The next image also showed the woman battling demons. She’d killed two of them and fought with the third. Her spear set poised to pierce the demon’s heart.
“If she’s one of the demons,” Naomi asked, “why would she fight them?”
“Demons fight each other,” Warren said. “Merihim had me kill demons in his name. To gain power and prestige among the demon hierarchy. Everywhere you go, it’s always about power. The Cabalists aren’t any different.”
The next image showed Lilith standing in front of a group of cheering warriors. She carried the black spear in one hand and held up a demon’s severed head by one horn.
“She became their hero,” Naomi said.
“Woman as savior. That’s another recurring theme in mythology. You have to wonder how much of this story got out and how much of it influenced so many of the cultures around the world.”
“They didn’t have telephones or the Internet back then.”
“No, but in those days traders traveled everywhere. There’s evidence that Vikings discovered the Americas long before Columbus claimed them. Some of the Eastern steppe tribes are related to the Celts. They could have carried the story back and forth.”
“Or other demons popped up in other places,” Naomi suggested. “Stories about them are far too prevalent to be one event.”
“I agree.”
The next image made Naomi gasp. The hair on the back of Warren’s neck stood up. Captured on the wall, Lilith—or the woman figure they assumed to be Lilith—ate the heart of a man she impaled with her spear.
“She’s a cannibal,” Naomi said.
“Not a cannibal,” Warren whispered hoarsely. “A cannibal only eats the flesh of the same species. Don’t forget that she’s a demon.”
He stared at the picture and wondered again what they were supposed to do in the building. A noise scuffed the floor behind him. He turned and shone his torch ahead of him.
Lilith stood there. She no longer looked virile and self-assured. Weariness draped her and bowed her shoulders. “Come,” she said. “I have need of you.” Her eyes flicked to the wall where Naomi stood with her torch on the incriminating images. “Ah, I see that they added a history.”
“This is you?” Naomi asked.
“Who else would it be?” Lilith snapped.
“You slew the demons?” Warren said, hoping to distract her from the image with the man’s heart in her hand.
“Yes. They were sent here before I was. They weren’t pleased that I was sent to do what they could not.”
“What was that?”
“Subjugate your species if I could. Prepare the world for eventual invasion.” Lilith stared at the images. “It was far harder than the Dark Wills believed it would be. And our presence here seemed to awaken the latent ability to use the arcane energy of this world.”
“That must have been disappointing,” Naomi said.
Lilith’s dark eyes flashed. “In the end, it’s not going to matter. You’ll all be dead or in servitude.”
TWENTY-SIX
Tensely, Simon watched the operation taking place in the operating room below. A nearby monitor showed a close-up of the actual work taking place. On the operating table, Leah looked small and vulnerable. He had second thoughts about his decision to stay and observe.
She asked you to be here, he told himself. You’re going to be here.
The doctors moved with economic efficiency. First they evacuated the eye socket again, opened up the tissue at the back, and inserted a string of nanobots that wired into the brain’s appropriate visual centers. Simon wasn’t sure what those were called. The surgeon had explained the procedure to him earlier, as had Eoin Murdoch. The particulars hadn’t stuck.
While the nanobots connected the neural pathways that restored Leah’s sight, the doctors prepped the implant that the next set of nanobots would build around. The implant was a highly sophisticated camera that the nanobots would weave into the eye as they rebuilt it from flesh and blood and the camera. The finished eye wouldn’t be completely human, but the construct needed something to work with. The outer layer of tissue would remove all chances of rejection.
The head surgeon looked up. “Lord Cross.”
Simon tapped the speaker control beside the observation window. “Yes, Doctor.”
“At this point we do have the option of installing a tracking module in her eye as well,” the doctor said.
Someone’s been talking, Simon thought irritably. Not everyone at the redoubt shared his trust in Leah. Many were suspicious of the fact that she knew more about them than they did about her. The lack of knowledge was an area of concern to Simon as well.
“No,” Simon said.
“She wouldn’t know unless someone told her,” the doctor persisted. “Whoever this woman ultimately works for, they don’t have equipment sophisticated enough to find what I could install.”
“I said no, Doctor. I appreciate you telling me this.” Simon knew the man
