Path of the Tiger, стр. 13
‘NOOOO!’ Higgins howled, his voice shrill with both purple rage and utter horror as he saw the flash of sharp steel and then watched, helpless, as Shanakdakhete’s half-severed head tipped grotesquely back, unleashing a gushing torrent of bright red blood as she stumbled forward on suddenly jelly-like legs.
Spraying out blood like a smashed-open fountain in her death throes, Shanakdakhete used the very last reserve of her strength to stagger forward and hurl herself in a spectacular leap into the sinkhole, the trajectory of her diving body traced with a trail of blood droplets suspended in the cool air as she hurtled towards the sacred pool.
With a deep, plosive splash she hit the water and disappeared into the iridescent blue, and the last remaining trace of her body’s presence was a billowing cloud of crimson darkening the waters. Up above, Higgins drew his revolver from its holster with a rage-trembling hand, and without another word put a bullet through the soldier’s head, the booming report of the shot echoing with ominous resonance through the valley.
As the man dropped dead, the back of his skull blown out, splattering the river rocks behind him with a chunky, wet mess of blood and brains, Higgins spun around on his heels, his eyes wild with implacable wrath, his jaw quivering and veins bulging.
‘Kill the fucking thing,’ he snarled to the sniper. ‘Just fucking kill it then! Everything’s fucking well ruined now anyway!’
The soldier nodded and drew in a deep breath, which he held in his lungs as he prepared to take his shot.
‘Hurry you half-wit!’ Vasilevsky snapped from the other side of the sniper, his voice low and harsh with dire urgency. ‘Fire! Kill it, kill it now!’
The crosshairs of the soldier’s scope were locked with unmoving steadiness on the ancient woman’s forehead, so without further ado he released the air from his lungs and applied gradual pressure to the trigger.
But even as the firing pin within the rifle struck the primer of the bullet in the barrel, detonating an explosion that ignited the rapid-burning gunpowder inside the brass casing, which in turn propelled the bullet out of the barrel at murderous speed, the woman’s eyes flickered open. Brought back to the immediacy of the physical present from ten thousand years of deep meditation, of spiritual travel to the farthest reaches of infinitely distant galaxies, of melding her soul to the singular collective life-force of everything alive in the past, present and future, this ancient being – the quarks of whose mind and soul were connected as if via a trillion spiderweb strands to the very energy streams of the universe – took it all in within the tiniest fraction of a sliver of millisecond; the vastness of the spread of history, the tragedy of the past and the nightmarish precognition of the future that these men – and others like them – were determined, perhaps irrevocably destined, to usher in.
And with the crushing hopelessness and despair of it all, of the brutal end of all life and all living things that the men and their ilk would surely bring, she briefly lost her grip on the web-strands of cosmic power. In this instant she could not prevent that single atom of rage, of despair, of fury, of tragedy, from flying forth from her mind … and like a lone spark in house crammed full with flammable gas, that stray ember of uncontrolled emotion detonated an explosion that was like a million lightning bolts all striking one spot simultaneously. All the energy streams, tethered and woven in too intricate and complex a web for any mortal mind to even begin to comprehend, became unravelled in a chaotic molecule of a microsecond, and the fabric of space and time was ripped to shreds as godlike forces were suddenly loosed in a world-shaking cataclysm.
***
A few miles away from the sacred cave, Ao, sweating inside his furs from the exertion of bending his limbs like a contortionist and stretching his muscles to near tearing point, finally freed himself from the tangle of ropes that had bound him so tightly. Panting, he rolled himself over a few times until he came to rest against the trunk of a spruce, and, gripping the rough bark of the tree for support, he managed to stagger to his feet. Finally he was free, and he took a moment to savour this new liberty.
It was as he was leaning against the trunk, gradually catching his breath, that he felt it: a deep rumble beneath his feet, like the first stirrings of earthquake.
Then, in an instant, there was a titanic boom. It was not just the clap of some sort of thunderclap, though; no, something infinitely more powerful than that. The monstrous sound of it demolished his eardrums, and this stab of pain was accompanied by a tremendous, terrifying lurching sensation and a blinding flash of light … and then a strange, rushing sensation of speed beyond speed, and the surreal sight of the earth suddenly far, far below, with tens of thousands of uprooted trees and clumps of soil travelling upwards and outwards alongside him, hurled into the deep blue heavens in a bizarre inversion of a storm. In the mess of hurtling debris, Ao realised, with a gush of horror, that he could see his arms, legs and torso, all blown to shreds and scattered over many yards, flying upward and away from him at impossible speed. But as soon as this realisation hit, all thoughts of flight and gravity and terror were purged from his mind, and everything – even the Armageddon unfolding all around him – faded out into the warm, blissful oblivion of an all-encompassing white light that whispered to his very soul