Path of the Tiger, стр. 12

that it was nearly debilitating, but not in a manner that was crushing at all; no, indeed, it was like the most potent orgasm she had ever had, multiplied by a factor of ten and purified from that base experience, and imbued with an element she could only think to call supremely sacred.

Inside the darkness of her hood, Shanakdakhete’s bright eyes darted across to Higgins and Vasilevsky. She watched them passing the telescope between them and discussing their plan. Straining her ears – which could hear things that human beings could not, for she was not quite human; no, like the being down there in the root-cloak, she was beyond human – she did her best to pick up the words passing between the two men.

‘The foul temple is already destroyed,’ Higgins whispered to Vasilevsky. ‘So we do not need her to get us inside. The forces of time and geology have already done for us what the beastwalker would have.’

‘I’ll give my man the signal to end its miserable life then,’ Vasilevsky murmured. ‘And then we’ll release the black pigeon. After that we send the men into the sinkhole to capture the thing down there.’

‘Throttle the life out of the prisoner, quietly,’ Higgins suggested. ‘We cannot risk spilling her blood here, lest it awakes what sleeps.’

‘But just in case that vile thing does open its eyes … then we go with Plan B,’ Vasilevsky said. ‘Get our sharpshooter over here and get him to line the thing’s ugly face up in his sights. Any hint of it awakening, and we blow its brains all over the back of that cave wall.’

Higgins nodded grimly and called one of the troops, a thin young American man who carried a different rifle to all the others: it had a longer barrel, and there was a telescopic sight mounted on it. Higgins then whispered some instructions into the young man’s ear. The soldier saluted crisply and then got into position on a flat rock just above the stream and got the ancient woman’s forehead lined up in his crosshairs.

Shanakdakhete realised that she had to act, and she had to act immediately. Her life would end in a matter of seconds; this was an inevitability that could not be changed. The only choice she had now was what to do with these final moments.

She had never planned, of course, to help her captors anyway. She knew all too well that regardless of what choice she made when the moment to act came, they would kill her as soon as her usefulness to them expired, and that they would release the black pigeon – the one that would carry word to their masters to slowly torture her friends to death – into the sky.

There was no room now for doubt, no space for hesitation, and not a second more could be spent on contemplation. The future of not only her kind, but indeed of everything rested on the choice she had to make in this moment, this atomic, slivered intersection of time and space. Should the Mother fall into the hands of these monsters and their demonic masters … no, no, it was too horrific a scenario to even begin to contemplate. She had to act, and she had to act this very instant.

Even as her super-senses – enhanced by the near-immortal blood that flowed through her veins, and the quarks in it that had well over fifteen hundred years ago so utterly altered her DNA and genetic material – detected the subtle flutter in the air behind that was the precursor to motion, as a soldier prepared to move in for the kill, she threw her heavy hood off with a toss of her head; she would at least die with the sun on her face.

Higgins saw what was about to happen, and with a howl he charged in her direction. His roar, however, was not directed at Shanakdakhete, but at the soldier standing in front of her with his bayonet-equipped rifle, oblivious to what was unfolding just behind him.

Everything from that snick in the endless reel of time onward seemed to happen in slow motion. The rays of the late morning sun struck the surface of Shanakdakhete’s proud, square-shaped face, immortalising in a beautiful moment her prominent cheekbones, her broad nose with its flared nostrils and her full, dark lips. The light gave her teak-coloured skin the dazzling glow of burnished copper, and her hair, a dense, spherical mane of springy black streaked with licks of grey, exploded from the hood like a three-dimensional halo, and as she threw her head back and opened her jaws wide, the golden sunlight lit up with blinding brightness the whites of her teeth and her large, intelligent eyes, protruding from their sockets with vengeful fury.

Expelling every last cubic ounce of air from her lungs in a great cry that resounded through the valley and boomed through the cavern below, she screamed out a sacred warning in an arcane language that had been forgotten by most of humanity over ten thousand years ago. And as she howled out this cry, she lunged forward and swung her chains in a clumsy attack at the soldier in front of her.

The man was, like his compatriots, an elite fighter, and his martial skills had been honed to perfection over many years of rigorous training; indeed, they had been worked to the point that actions and reactions to various attacks were encoded in his muscle memory, and he did not even have to think to counter her move with brutal precision and deadly speed.

And it was because of this very fact that Shanakdakhete attacked with just enough clumsiness to give him warning of her swinging of her heavy chains.

‘No!’ Higgins screamed as he sprinted toward the pair of them, his hands outstretched with futile impotence. ‘Don’t spill her blood, stop you fool, stop!’

But his words fell on deaf ears, for even as he was roaring them out the soldier was reacting