Sky Key. James Frey

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      Hilal moans while he sleeps. Whimpers and shakes. His head, face, right shoulder, and arm are burned from the incendiary grenade the Nabataean lobbed at him as he retreated underground.

      Eben pulled him to safety. Threw blankets on him, snuffed out the flames, tried to calm him, injected him with morphine.

      Hilal stopped screaming.

      The power was out when the attack came, despite the backup systems. Eben called Nabril in Addis on a hand-crank radio, and Nabril said the power failure was the result of a solar flare. A huge one. One like he’d never seen before. The strange thing was that it was concentrated there, on Aksum, just at the moment that Hilal was writing his message to the other Players. Just as the Donghu and the Nabataean knocked on the hut’s door. All of which was impossible. Solar flares disrupt wide areas, entire continents. They don’t have pinpoint accuracy. They aren’t aimed.

      Impossible.

      Impossible, except for the Makers.

      Eben considered this in the immediate aftermath of the ambush as he attended Hilal by lamplight. Eben had two Nethinim assistants, both mutes. They placed Hilal on a stretcher, hooked him up to an IV, took him seven levels beneath the surface of the ancient church. Eben and the Nethinim bathed Hilal in goat’s milk. The white liquid turned pink. Charred flecks of skin floated to the surface.

      They prayed silently as they worked. As they tended. As they saved. Bubbling skin. The crisp, sulfuric smell of disintegrated hair. The creamy waft of the milk-and-blood mixture underneath.

      Eben cried quietly. Hilal had been the most beautiful of any Aksumite Player in 1,000 years, since the legendary female Player Elin Bakhara-al-Poru. Hilal had the blue eyes, the perfect, smooth complexion, the straight white teeth, the high cheekbones, the flat nose and perfectly round nostrils, the square chin, and the tightly curled hair that framed his smooth boyish face. He looked like a god. All gone now. Burned away. Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt would never be beautiful again.

      Eben sent for a surgeon from Cairo to perform three skin grafts. An eye doctor came from Tunis to try to save Hilal’s right eye. The grafts were successful from a medical standpoint, but Hilal will always be gruesome. A patchwork of the formerly beautiful boy. The right eye was saved, but his vision will surely be affected. And it is no longer blue. Now it is red. All of it save the pupil, which is milky white.

      “It will never go back,” the eye doctor said.

      He was so beautiful. A king for angels. But now. Now he appears to be half a devil.

      Eben thinks: But he is our devil.

      It’s been nearly a week since the attack. Eben kneels next to Hilal in a plain stone bedchamber. A small wooden cross over the bed frame. A white porcelain sink against one wall. Some pegs for robes. A small chest containing fresh sheets and bandages. A hook on the headboard for the IV. There is a small cart with a heart rate monitor, wire leads, and electrodes. The Nethinim—both of them tall and strong, one a man, one a woman—stand attendant, silent, armed, just outside the door.

      Hilal has slept the entire time. He occasionally moans, whimpers, shakes. He is still on morphine, but Eben is already weaning him. Hilal has learned to live with pain, and while this pain will be more intense and permanent than what has come before, if Hilal is to continue with Endgame, then he is going to have to acclimate.

      To more pain. To disfigurement. To his new body.

      If he is not going to continue, then Eben needs to know. And for that, Hilal needs his mind to be clear.

      So he is being weaned.

      While Hilal has slept, Eben has prayed. Meditated. Remembered Hilal’s words: I could be wrong, Hilal said before the morphine took him. The Event could be inevitable.

      Eben knows this is not the case. Not after what the being said on the television. Not after the solar flare that pinpointed Aksum. The Makers are intervening. The only other possibility is that the Corrupted One somehow did it. The being that the Aksumites have been searching for all these centuries. Searching for in vain. The one called Ea.

      But even the Corrupted One does not have the power to control the sun.

      So Eben knows: it was the Makers.

      And Eben knows that this is savagery. They brought humans to life and they are supposed to oversee our near extinction, to reset the Earth life-clock and let the planet recover from the damage done, but They are not supposed to interfere with the Playing of Endgame. They made these rules, and now They break them.

      Which means that perhaps it is time.

      Time to see what’s inside the legendary, but very real, container.

      It’s been waiting since Uncle Moses faked its destruction and secreted it away and told the sons of Aaron to protect it at all costs. And never to look upon it or open it. And he commanded: Only break the seal on the Day of Judgment.

      That day is near.

      This is the end of an age.

      Soon the mighty Aksumites will take their charge and see what power rests between the gilded wings of the cherubim of glory. Soon Eben ibn Mohammed al-Julan will risk destruction for the sake of Endgame.

      Once Hilal returns to consciousness and clarity Eben will break the covenant with the Makers and see if the line of Aksum can give them a taste of their own medicine.

       FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, MAY 1981

      In March 1967, an intercept technician with the USAF Security Service intercepted a communication between the pilot of a Russian-made Cuban MIG-21 and his command concerning a UFO encounter. The technician has since stated that when the pilot attempted to fire at the object, the MIG and its pilot were СКАЧАТЬ