She took a step, and stopped. A stench turned her stomach. It was a foul miasma that contaminated the air itself. Flies buzzed around her.
“Ardhan…?” It was barely louder than her own heartbeat.
The stench grew thicker. Globules of thick, oily liquid bubbled along the walls, spreading out like blood stains, and leaving glossy black trails down the ancient, weathered stone. Rats poured out of the cracks in the walls and out from between the flagstones. Dozens, squealing and writhing with their fur covered in this bile. They fought, frenzied with bloodlust, biting and ripping at each other, and themselves. More spewed from the cracks and tore through the mortar until the walls boiled with screaming, slick-coated vermin.
The thrum deepened, shaking her in her bones. The rats devoured each other, gouging out eyes with their yellow claws, tearing off tails and ripping off flesh and fur, leaving bloody, twitching half-eaten bodies over the floor.
Ardhan cried out from the darkness. “No, please! Take her, take her! I serve you! Erin said we had a deal! Take —”
Then he was silent. No gasp, no cry, no final scream, just silence. And that was even worse. Ardhan was gone.
Billi switched to a double-handed grip, but against what? The rats dashed over her boots and clawed at her trousers before fleeing away, their claws skittering on the old stones.
Her ears ached as the noise drove hard into her mind. The bile was now pooling, and spreading across the flagstones. The ominous pulsing reached deeper inside. Then she realised what it was.
A heartbeat. Low, ponderous, steady and inhuman.
And coming from the far archway.
A shadow fell upon the distant wall, cast by the moonlight. It swelled, lumpen, malformed with peculiar, ill-formed limbs. A guttural snarl shook the dusty air. Each dripping footstep brought it closer to the corner and into view.
Billi hissed a prayer through her gritted teeth. She tightened her grip on her sword, as if it was her only salvation and yet, lurking in her heart was an awful, rising dread. She’d fought devils, faced down angels and nightmares from humanity’s earliest nightmares but this… this was older. An unfamiliar dread rose from the primordial depths of her soul. Something so old, so fundamental to her humanity that she couldn’t breathe.
There were beings that even Hell feared.
Billi took another step back. She should retreat, this wasn’t a fight she could win.
But that meant leaving Erin, Ivan and…
… and Templars do not retreat.
“Deus vult.” Billi planted her feet firmly, and drew back her steel.
The being hesitated. Its fingers curled as its massive heartbeat faltered. The thing took a step back, into the quivering shadows, the heartbeat fluctuating wildly. The shadows deepened around it, cloaking it even as its heartbeat faded until… until…
There was darkness, and silence.
CHAPTER 29
She entered the staircase. It wound downwards in a tight spiral barely wide enough for her. More tremors came in undulating waves. The temperature rose and dipped and the stones sweated one moment, were covered in frost the next. The treads themselves were covered in some weird slime that seeped up through the joints and cracks. But it was the pounding in her head that threatened to rip her mind apart. Billi gritted her teeth to stop herself from screaming but the pain was becoming unbearable. Her skin felt as if it was being stroked by burning brands and the thick, gagging smells invading her throat were suffocating, each breath was a pitiful sip, as agonizing as swallowing ground glass.
She couldn’t escape the pain. This was the reality of the Anunnaki, eternal agony without respite, without respite, without escape. There was no comfort or refuge to be found in love, in compassion, in being what it meant to be human. They mocked this blind, deaf and dumb ape, barely upright, with its woefully microscopic understanding of its place in the universe.
These beings revealed the truth to Billi, in its whole and total sinister glory. Life and death were banal to these living, sentient stars whose thoughts contained entire galaxies, whose minds did not reflect reality, but created it across dimensions incomprehensible to a mortal mind.
Billi tried to bring up a Christian prayer, an Islamic surah, anything that would allow her to hang onto her most basic, fundamental belief: that there was a divine order to things, the universe, and something beyond the universe cared. These star gods mocked her vanity. The idea of a benevolent god was a joke, theirs. Humankind, in its desperation, had fallen for this farce in its childish naivety.
Billi’s mind retreated into itself. She couldn’t absorb anymore. What hold she had on that slim thread to sanity was beginning to fray and madness beckoned, a swirling void where she could sink and be lost forever.
She stood at the precipice of that endless darkness, tottering as her hopes and dreams fell away. She needed to just take a step and she would find the only escape that existed, abandon herself, no longer be Billi, because Billi was nothing…
“Billi!”
Give herself up to the chaos because that was all there was.
“Billi!”
No more Billi…
“BILQIS!”
She snapped her eyes open and gazed into the desperate, grimly pale face of Faustus. He hugged her, crushing her with a desperate—despairing— strength.
She clung onto him, burying her face into his chest, feeling the trembling, terrified heartbeat. His panting breath was hot upon her neck but she couldn’t stop herself from shivering.
“Stay with me, Billi. Please stay,” he said. He was as terrified as she was, perhaps even more because he understood more, but he pushed that terror aside because of her.
“I’m okay,” she said, her chest heaving with a purifying sob.
Get it out of your system, Billi, or you ain’t no good to no one. Put on your bloody war face.
Billi grinned wolfishly as she tightened her grip on her sword.
Faustus laughed, despite his fear. “That’s more like it.”
She didn’t
