“I am,” he said coolly. “I just came back to see how you were doing.”
She stepped back and stared at him. “But when I left you, you were—”
“I healed up—my own way.”
Kolabati sensed Moki close behind her. She turned and was relieved to see that he had lowered his rifle. She manufactured a smile for him.
“Moki, this is Jack, a very old and dear friend.”
“Jack?” His gaze flicked between her and the newcomer. “The Jack you said you once loved but who died in New York? That Jack?”
“Yes.” A glance at Jack’s face revealed a bewildered expression. “I … I guess I was wrong about his being dead. Isn’t that wonderful? Jack, this is Moki.”
Kolabati held her breath. No telling how Moki would react. He’d become so unpredictable—unbalanced was a better word—since the changes had begun.
Moki’s jaw was set and his smile was fierce as he thrust his open hand toward Jack.
“Aloha, Jack. Welcome to my kingdom.”
Kolabati watched the muscles in Moki’s forearm bulge as he gripped Jack’s hand, a wince flickered across Jack’s features before he returned the smile and the grip.
“Thank you, Moki. And this is my good friend, Ba Thuy Nguyen.”
This time it was Moki’s turn to wince as he shook hands with the Asian.
“You’re both just in time,” Moki said. “We were about to leave for the ceremony.”
“Maybe now that they’re here we should stay home,” Kolabati said.
“Nonsense! They can come along. In fact, I insist they come along!”
“You’re not thinking of going outside, are you?” Jack said.
“Of course. We’re heading uphill to the fires. The night things do not bother us. Besides, they seem to avoid the higher altitudes. You shall have the honor and privilege of witnessing the Ceremony of the Knife tonight.”
Moki had told her about the ceremony he’d worked out with the Niihauans, a nightly replay of last night’s bloody incident. She wanted no part of it, and Jack’s arrival was a good excuse to stay away.
“Moki, why don’t you go alone tonight. Our guests are cold and wet.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “How about a rain check on that? We’re kinda beat—”
“Nonsense! The awakened fires of Haleakala will dry your clothes and renew your strength.”
“Go yourself, Moki,” Kolabati told him. “After all, the ceremony can go on without us, but not without you.”
Moki’s glare spelled out his thoughts: Leave you here with your reborn lover? Do you take me for a fool? Then he faced Jack.
“I shall be insulted if you do not come.”
“A guest must not insult a host,” the tall Asian said.
Kolabati noticed a quick look pass between Jack and Ba, then Jack turned to Moki.
“How can we refuse such an honor? Lead the way.”
Kolabati held on as Moki bounced their Isuzu Trooper up the rutted jeep trail toward Haleakala’s fire-limned summit.
“What sort of a ceremony is this?” Jack said from behind her.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” Moki said.
“I mean, is it traditional, or what?”
“Not entirely. It has its traditional aspects, naturally—ancient Hawaiians often made sacrifices to Pele—but this variation is one of my own devising.”
Jack and his silent Asian companion were two jouncing shadows in the rear as Kolabati turned from the front seat to face him.
“Pele?” said Jack’s shadow.
“Hawaii’s Goddess of Fire,” Kolabati told him. “She rules the volcanoes.”
“So what are we doing—throwing some pineapples and coconuts over the edge?”
Moki laughed as he turned onto Skyline Trail. “Pele has no use for fruits and nuts. She demands tribute that really matters. Human tribute.”
Jack’s laugh was low and uncertain.
Kolabati said, “He’s not joking.”
Jack said nothing then, but even in the dark Kolabati could feel the impact of his gaze. She heard his silent questions, asking her what she had come to, what had brought her to this. She wanted to explain, but couldn’t. Not now. Not in front of Moki.
The quality of the road improved as they approached Red Hill and the observatory. Moki pulled to a stop a quarter mile from the summit and the four of them walked under the cold gaze of the unfamiliar moon to the crater’s edge.
And there, half a mile below them, a sea of fire. The boiling center of the crater, the terminus of a delivery tube from the planet’s molten core, was alive with motion. Bubbles rose on the storm-tossed surface and burst, splattering liquid rock in all directions. Geysers of molten lava shot like whale spume, hurling red-orange arcs a thousand feet into the air before joining the steady downward flow to the sea in a wide fan of fiery destruction.
Even here, thousands of feet above, with the reversed trade winds blowing cold against their backs, the fire stroked them with its heat. Kolabati watched Jack hold out his hands to warm them, then turn his wet back toward the fire. The wind had an icy bite at ten thousand feet. He must have been freezing. The Asian, too, rotated his wet clothing toward the heat.
“I’ve figured out why Pele is so huhu,” Moki said, shouting above Haleakala’s roar. “She’s seen her people abandoning the old ways and becoming malihini to their own traditions. She’s sent us all a message.”
Jack was staring down into the fire. “I’d say she’s one very touchy lady.”
“Ah!” said Moki, glancing off to their right. “The other celebrants arrive. The ceremony can begin.”
He strode away toward the approaching Niihauans. Their elderly alii raised his feathered staff and they all knelt before Moki.
Kolabati felt a cold hand grip her arm: Jack.
“He’s just kidding about this human sacrifice stuff, isn’t he? I mean, I keep expecting Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour to show up.”
Kolabati could barely meet his eyes. “I wish he were, but he means it. The group over there, the ones wearing the feathers and such, they’re the last of the purebred traditional Hawaiians from the forbidden island of Niihau. Moki confronted them last night and told them he was Maui.”
Jack’s eyes widened. “He thinks he’s an island?”
“No. He’s mad but not that mad. Maui was a god who came up here ages ago, right where we’re standing, and trapped the sun and forced it to make the days longer. When Moki told them he was Maui, the Niihauans didn’t believe him. One of them stabbed him in the chest with a spear.”
Jack glanced over to where Moki stood talking with the Niihauan alii.
“You mean tried to stab him in the chest.”
“No. The spearhead sank to its full length right here.”
She reached out and touched a spot over Jack’s heart.
He gave her a quick look, then stared again at Moki.
“The necklace?”
Kolabati nodded.
“It didn’t work that way when I wore it.”
“It’s never worked that way. Something’s happened to it. It’s been activated, stimulated in some way that I don’t understand.”
“I do,” Jack said, still staring at Moki.
“You do? How can you—?”
“That’s why I’m here. I need that necklace. There’s someone back in New York who might be able to set the world right again. But he needs the necklace to do it.”
The thought of giving away the second necklace to a stranger jolted Kolabati. She turned to look at Moki and held her breath as she saw a middle-aged Niihauan rise and step toward him with a raised knife. Moki stood firm, showing no fear. In fact, he gestured the man forward. The Niihauan stepped closer, and in a blur of motion raised the knife and plunged it into Moki’s chest.
Jack cried, “Jesus Christ!” while Ba stiffened and muttered something unintelligible.
Kolabati watched the rim with fatalistic distaste as Moki staggered
back a step, then straightened. He grasped the knife handle with both hands, and slowly, deliberately, his body shaking convulsively, withdrew the bloody blade from his chest. The Niihauan looked on in openmouthed amazement, then raised his face and arms toward the sky. Moki gave him a moment, then rammed the dripping blade into his heart.
As the man screamed in agony, Jack turned away, cursing under his breath. Kolabati continued to watch. Human sacrifices had been part of her childhood. When you are born to a priest and priestess of a temple where humans were regularly thrown to rakoshi, it became a matter-of-fact event. In their case, a necessity—the rakoshi had to be fed. But this was different. This was obscene, serving no useful purpose other than feeding Moki’s delusions.
As she watched Moki lift the Niihauan’s corpse and hurl it into the fire, a sacrifice to the false goddess, Pele, Jack turned to her.
“How the hell did you get involved with this maniac?”
“A long, sad story, Jack. Believe me, he was nothing like this before the sun and the earth began to betray us.”
Inside she mourned for the Moki who had been, the Moki she sensed was irretrievably lost to her.
“I’ll have to take your word for that. But right now he’s got to be stopped. And one way to stop him is to get that necklace from him.”
“More easily said than done when you’re talking about a man who heals like Moki.”
“I might have a way.” His eyes bored into hers. “Will you help?”
She nodded vigorously. “Of course.”
But don’t expect to walk out of here with Moki’s necklace when we get it back.
TUESDAY
Passages
WFPW-FM
JO: Hey, we’re back. You probably thought we jumped ship like most everybody else in town, didn’t you. Not us, man. We lost our power for a bit there. As we’re sure you already know, the whole city’s dark.
FREDDY: Yeah, but we’ve got a generator going now so we’re staying on the air, just like we promised.
JO: Trouble is, we won’t be able to bring you much news. The Internet is shaky again and the wire services are shutting down. But we’ll stay on and do the best we can.
FREDDY: Yeah. Semper fi, man.
Dinu Pass, Romania
“I think we’re lost, Nick,” Bill said.
They were tipping and grinding and scraping along what passed for a road in these parts as Bill fought the wheel of the Romanian equivalent of a Land Rover—rust-streaked, an odometer in kilometers, creaky, ratchety steering, failing brakes, and a leaky exhaust system. But it seemed damn near indestructible, and its thick glass so far had proven itself impervious to the bugs that had swarmed them in the Ploiesti area. Not too many bugs around here, though. Not many humans or animals around to feed on.
Bill squinted ahead. Sheer mountain walls towered on either side, closer on his left, but the formerly seamless blackness beyond the flickering, dancing headlights was showing some cracks. Morning was coming. Good. Although traveling east had made the night mercifully short, he was tired of the darkness. He had a blinding headache from the car’s carbon monoxide–tainted air as well as the tension growing in his neck; his left leg and right arm burned from fighting the creaky clutch and stubborn gearshift; and he was sure they’d missed a crucial turn about ten kilometers back.
And he’d begun talking to Nick. Nick hadn’t deigned to reply yet, but the sound of his own voice gave Bill the feeling that he wasn’t completely alone out here in a remote mountain pass in the heart of a benighted country where he spoke not a word of the native language.
“We’ll never find our way back home again. Unless it’s in a pine box.”
Joe Ashe had piloted them into Romania in great time, riding the jet stream all the way. The field at Ploiesti had been deserted except for one of Joe’s East European pilot buddies—apparently the Ashe brothers had a global network of kindred spirits—who had this beat-up old land rover waiting for them.
They’d assumed Bill would wait until daylight before setting out. But dawn, such as it was these days, had been nearly three hours away. And three hours seemed like a lifetime. Sure, it was 6:02 A.M. local time, but the clock in Bill’s body read only midnight. He was too wired to sleep, so why not put the time to good use? The Romanian rover looked sturdy enough—more like a converted half-track mini-tank than a car—so he’d loaded Nick into the passenger seat and headed out into the darkness.
A foolish mistake, Bill realized now. He glanced at his watch. Eight o’clock. According to the Sapir curve, the coming day would be about half an hour shorter than the shortest day of the year in the dead of all the Decembers that had preceded the celestial changes.
Bill shivered. A new kind of winter had come. A winter of the soul.
“I know what you’re going to say, Nick. You’re going to say, ‘I told you so.’ And maybe you did, but I guess I wasn’t listening. Doesn’t matter now, though. We’re stuck out here in the middle of nowhere and we’ll just have to wait until the light comes and hope to find somebody who can tell us how to get to this keep place.”
Nick, ever polite, refrained from an I-told-you-so.
Bill scanned the terrain ahead for a level place to park and noticed the road widening. Great. He could pull to the side and wait for the light. Then he saw the white shapes ahead. As he got closer he realized they were houses. A cluster of them. A village.
“Maybe there is a God after all, Nick,” but he knew Nick didn’t believe that. Neither did he.
Bill almost wished again for the old days when he did believe. Because he’d be praying now for help, for direction, for the Lord to inspire his hands on the wheel to guide them to the right road and lead them to their destination.
But those days were gone. His god was dead. Mumbled words would not bring help from on high. He was going to have to do this just the way he’d always done things—by himself.
As he followed the road on its winding course among the houses, he felt no lessening of his sense of isolation. What had appeared to be a village was really no more than a collection of huts, and those huts looked beat up and run down. As the headlight beams raked them he saw how their white stucco walls were scarred and chipped, noted the gaps in the thatch and shakes covering their roofs. Hard times had come to this place. He didn’t have to search the huts to know the village was deserted.
“Now we’re really lost.” Fatigue settled on him like a ratty blanket. “Lost in the middle of nowhere. If there is a God, he’s forsaken this place.”
Then he saw the flames. On the far side of the village, flickering fitfully in the fading darkness. It looked like a campfire. He drove toward it, steadily picking up speed.
A fire meant people and that meant he wasn’t completely lost. Maybe he could still salvage this trip.
But suddenly he saw nothing ahead—no road, no grass, no earth, only emptiness. He stood on the brakes, tumbling Nick into the dashboard as the rover swerved and skidded to a stalling halt at the edge of a precipice. A hole, dammit! Another one of those bottomless holes!
No, wait. To his left, vague and dim, an ancient bridge of some sort, with stone supports plunging into the pit. It coursed across the emptiness—a rocky gorge, he saw now; not a hole—toward the campfire. And now that he was closer and the sky was lighter, Bill realized the campfire wasn’t outside. It was inside, glowing through a tall open gate set within a massive stone wall that seemed to spring from the mountainside. He could make out human forms standing around it. Some of them might even be staring back at him. On the structure’s leading edge, a thick, sturdy tower rose a good forty or fifty feet above the top of the wall. The whole thing looked like a small castle, a pocket fortress. He felt a smile spread over his face—how long since he’d really smiled?
He was here. He’d found it.
The keep.
Bill let out a whoop and pounded the steering wheel.
“We made it, Nick!”
>
He restarted the vehicle and headed for the causeway, intending to drive across. But when the headlights picked up the worn and ragged timbers, he stopped, unsure if he should risk it.
“What do you think, Nick?”
The question was rhetorical, but Bill noticed that Nick seemed more aware than he’d been a few moments ago. Had the impact with the dashboard jostled his mind? Or was it something else?
Maybe it was all the bugs swarming around the keep. He hadn’t noticed them before, but he could see now that the air was thick with them. Perhaps because the only people in the pass were clustered around that fire inside. But why were the doors open? And why weren’t the bugs running rampant through the place, chewing up the inhabitants?
One thing Bill did know was that walking across the causeway now was impossible. They’d be ground beef before they traveled twenty feet. Of course, they could wait. But Bill couldn’t wait, not another minute. He hadn’t come this far through the dark simply to sit here with his destination in sight and wait for dawn. Screw the bugs. He was going across. Now.
“All right, Nick. Here goes nothing.”
He put the rover in first gear and edged forward, fixing his gaze on the timbers directly ahead. Not so easy with the bugs batting against the vehicle with increasing frequency. A bumpy ride, but smoother than the ridge road they’d been traveling. A glance ahead showed a group of figures clustered in the gateway of the keep, watching him.
“Stop.”
Bill slammed on the brakes. Nick’s face was pressed against the side window. His voice was as lifeless as ever, but Bill sensed real emotion hidden within it—almost excitement.
“What is it, Nick? What’s wrong?”
“I see them. Down there. Little pieces of the sword.”
He was pointing down to his right, below the base of the tower, down to where its rocky foundation melted into the gorge, fifty feet below. Bill could barely make out the bottom. How could Nick see little pieces of metal?