‘Please, not yet. Just a little longer,’ he muttered to the empty elevator.
Tamas had always been curious about how much Ereshkigal had influenced his mother’s interests and drive. Had the goddess injected her with some kind of natural attraction to this work? Because it had become a very fortuitous choice of career, as well as venue. The Facility, perched and isolated in the desert, filled with top-secret projects – some military, some private – was the perfect place to hide the extraterrestrial visitors his mother had been told by the goddess to expect. Tamas tapped his finger against the wall. As much as he yearned for the answer, there was no way he’d ever try to satisfy his curiosity. Ereshkigal wasn’t exactly the high authority on small talk.
Level eleven’s sole corridor was one of the complex’s original tunnels, a massive, arching passageway where white rock was still exposed and the floor had not been covered in concrete like most of the rest. Tamas knew every dip and rise in the packed-earth beneath him. The air always held a heaviness down here, cool but not unpleasant, blanketing the space around him and muffling the sounds of his footsteps. The glow from the strip lighting along the floor didn’t reach all the way to the domed roof, leaving it in shadow. He passed through the spiderweb-like laser pattern that spread from one side of the passageway to the other. The security system acknowledged and accepted the presence of the Facility director, and he continued on. A bolt of pain seared through his right temple, and Tamas braced one hand against the rough wall. The goddess did not intend for him to see the results of last evening alone. She was coming. The prickling of his nerves and the heightening hiss of the tinnitus told him that.
His mother had relished the pain of a Calling the way Benedictine monks once embraced self-flagellation The more it hurt, the better. Tamas did not share her zeal. With Ereshkigal’s last visit so recent, her return was bitingly sharp.
Before long, the solid mass of steel-reinforced concrete which marked the entrance to the main chamber of level eleven came into view. Two people stood guard at the entranceway, both clad in forest-green uniforms starched to within an inch of their lives. The last of Tamas’s tension left him. He knew the guards, ex-soldiers employed by his mother. Tamas approached them, his cheeks as cool as the tunnel air, his heartbeat steady. He’d known the two people in front of him, a dark-skinned man named Reuben and a Korean-born woman called Nari, long enough that his anxiety had nothing to feed on here.
‘Good morning . . . ah, good morning to you both.’
His voice was a little husky, but there it was. Proof that he was not always the bumbling idiot he’d been reduced to in his own hallway. Nari betrayed nothing, keeping her eyes on the ground. Reuben regarded Tamas for all of a heartbeat. ‘Good morning to you, sir.’
The guard gave Tamas a deep nod, then pushed in the access code, opening a smaller door set within the greater panel that blocked off the passageway. The door swung open, and Tamas felt the prickling air rush out at him from the chamber, brushing against him like static electricity. Tamas curled his shaking hands into fists, straightened his shoulders, and stepped into the hollow enormity of the level eleven chamber. The goddess smashed into the back of his skull the way a rabid animal might throw itself against its cage. He stumbled, but caught himself before anyone might consider coming to his aid. Taking deep breaths, he paused. Gathering himself. Concentrating on the physical world around him while he waited for Her to settle.
The chamber was a huge naturally formed cavern, one that had been here since before the time of the ancient Sumerians, the very first peoples to worship Ereshkigal Herself. As in the passageway, there had been no attempts to conceal the natural rock here, something Tamas thought made it all the more magnificent. Awesome stalagmites rose from the floor at various intervals, some as thick as oak tree trunks, others no more than saplings. Stalactites dotted the cavern roof like hovering swords. These formations were not strictly natural occurrences. They had appeared in a matter of months, not thousands of years. Beginning to grow from the moment the Syranians emptied their payload of Waters into the man-made pool at the heart of the huge space five years ago.
The largest cluster of stalactites hung directly over the well at the centre of the chamber. Tamas hesitated. Even from this distance, a good twenty metres, the pull of the Waters lapped at him. The liquid lay dark and utterly still in a circular containment area, about half the size and depth of the average swimming pool.
Last night, Tamas had stepped into those Waters and provided Ereshkigal with the fragile connection she needed to guide a gallu from her realm of Kur into the corporeal world of the humans. In the times of the ancient Sumerians, when the bridge between Kur and Earth still stood strong, the people had called the preternatural creatures demons and devils. It was a generalisation that was unkind to at least some of the gallu but he could vouch that it was hellish enough to bring one of them here. Even now the residual energy from the Meld rubbed like sandpaper against Tamas’s synapses.
Someone waved to him from across the chamber, catching his attention. Tamas returned Blake’s greeting. She stood a few metres in front of the largest of three modular rooms that had been built up against the rock, jutting out like three giant shoeboxes from the jagged rock face. Tamas headed towards her, making his way around his favourite stalagmite formation, running his fingertips over the bumps and bulges of it. She met him halfway. The Syranians called her the Technician. The somewhat cold moniker suited her.
‘Blake,’ he said.
