It is said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But sometimes the only way to unravel a horrific event is to re-live it, to open old scars. It is a path not into the light but into deep, abysmal darkness; to the burned-out grave of the Nek… and what lies beneath.

PREACHER, PROPHET, SOLDIER, SPY

Mine 3, The Nekropolis, Brimstone

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Ed held out a tumbler of translucent liquid. “Mucus?”

Given the unblinking stares from the Xi’An standing around the shrine I took the glass, snarling at Ed through a forced smile. “Funny.”

I cautiously tipped the glass a few degrees, watching the viscous fluid resist the change in orientation, then leaned into his shoulder and asked “What is this stuff really?”

Ed gave me a sideways glance, one eyebrow cocked up for a moment before he nodded at the tumbler. “Mucus. Really. Polymer gel secreted by the Jīnshǔ kuài, a rare Xi’An gastropod.” In response to what was doubtlessly a dead-blank look on my face, Ed clarified. “Snail slime. It’s a delicacy. Drink up.”

The line of green tortoise-faces raised their glasses, clearly waiting on my lead. Ed reached over and tinked his glass against mine. His grin was malevolent.

“There will never be an eighth Ed,” I hissed, and threw back the glass. The group followed suit with a rumble of throaty gullet-sounds I took for approval. I didn’t utter a word, terrified that if my teeth unclenched the contents of my entire digestive tract would spray across the jade heads evenly spaced around the shrine. Odds are that would be some kind of insult.

Despite his obvious amusement at my expense, Ed got down to business, speaking to the group in some ancient Xi’An tongue, ‘formal Zhou’ he called it. The nasal, wet-sounding speech was supposedly the language of the enlightened, the highborn; not the trashy Guóyǔ spat out by the unwashed masses. To my ear it sounded like a frog hocking up a lunger. I caught a few words here and there, phrases laced with that curt, head-forward nod they do, followed by a hand gesture in my direction and the word ‘Jiàoshòu.’ More nods; I tried to return the gesture as best I could. Then I remembered the translator and tapped the device stuck in my right ear.

“— the course of a forensic examination, the Doctor discovered something curious, which he brought to my attention.”

Ed had convinced me to stick as close to the truth as possible, at least until we had some idea what all this shit meant. We wouldn’t lead with all of the details, but we’d be straight about the ones we did share.

With both hands Ed presented them with an envelope that contained a print of the futhark, which they accepted with equal formality. Apparently the act of reducing something to print gave it additional gravitas in Xi’An culture, made it a tad bit more valuable than just a block of digits in a memory brick. I watched carefully as they unwound the ribbon closure and pulled the holoprint into view.

Now I don’t speak turtle and I sure as hell don’t know my way around a Shū lā, but one thing I’m damn good at is poker. I saw spines stiffen up under layers of silk and brocade hanfu, watched eyelids draw back and nostrils flare. One of the Xi’An, a lower-ranking member of the group standing to my immediate right, even sucked in a tiny croak. The holoprint hit the reptiles like a bad river card smacks a guy who just went all in.

From the center of the group Dàshǐ Kuang glared and made a dismissive gesture. His entourage bowed, backed away and scuttled off. In a moment only the three of us stood in the company of the Xi’An’s revered dead.

A Dàshǐ was a cultural and religious ambassador of sorts, at least thats how it was pitched. But Ed had explained beforehand that Kuang was part of an order that, in Xi’An society, crossed various lines of authority; preacher, prophet, soldier, spy. It goes to reason that if you trust a guy to deliver the word of the gods, he was good to go with state secrets as well.

I was willing to bet that Kuang had some knowledge of the whole futhark thing, likely more than he wanted to tell. But I watched him lean forward, murmuring softly as he lit a tapered joss, and it struck me that he wanted to know more. There was about to be some horse-trading and unless I missed my guess, Kuang was deciding how much he was willing to ante up.

“Mòrì,” he said softly, still facing the shrine. A curl of smoke rose from the freshly lit incense.

Ed nodded, his voice somber. He paused for a moment, then said for my benefit, “Doomsday.”

Kuang turned, his face as inscrutable as those of his carved-jade ancestors. “The Shèngjīng of Chong Whey,” watching my expression he paused, sighed and re-set. “The scriptures of a revered prophet, speaks of the end times, the apocalypse, an event harbingered by the opening of the Ménhù.”

The translator hiccuped on the last word, a reference too obscure for its database. I looked at Ed.

“A portal,” he said with a ‘more or less’ waggle of his hand. “Metaphorically a door, Mén, but back in the day Ménhù Dìyù was one of those terms that appeared in a number of religious writings. In English it would be something like the Gates of Hell.”

Something like— I damn near swallowed my tongue. “That’s not one of those terms that has a bunch of other meanings, is it?”

Ed shook his head slowly, expression dour.

If that left hook hadn’t been enough, Kuang followed it up with a roundhouse right. “We believe the Ménhù is here.”

For a moment the sense of surreal threatened to overwhelm me. Part of me wanted to laugh at the joke but nobody else was smiling. Then again, I was in a mineshaft below the Nek , talking with seven Eds in one brain and a six-foot turtle dressed in Kung-Fu movie robes. Why should the Gates of Hell seem at all implausible?

“Let me get this straight.” I tried to regroup but couldn’t manage the words, much less the concept. “You think a gateway… to Hell… is going to open up… right here?”

Kuang gave me a long, hard look, then turned to Ed. Something passed between them, unspoken but tangible. Kuang turned back to the shrine; it was Ed who spoke.

“Look, prophecy, religion, scripture, these things are a lot more literal in Xi’An culture than they are with mankind.”

“What aren’t you telling me Ed?”

He chuffed. “To get that answer you gotta tell me, are you in or are you out?”

“In or out of what Ed?”

He looked me in the eye, his demeanor turning to stone. “Everything Doc; down the rabbit hole, take the red pill, talk to the man behind the curtain. But…” he paused, “when I say there is no going back, I mean there isn’t even a waver. You try to get off this train once it pulls out of the station, you even talk about the train to anyone, and things will go bad. Brutally bad. And there will be nothing I can do to stop it. Do you follow me?”

I tried to swallow but my throat tightened up. I’d seen a lot of Eds, watched that whole Jeykll-and-Hyde shift from academic robot to fetish sociopath, but I’d never seen anything like this. Ed didn’t move, didn’t raise his voice, but the vibe that emanated from him scared the shit out of me. I wanted to run and not look back; couldn’t begin to imagine how I’d deal with Lazlo, who was already getting pissed with my delays.

My eyes swept the mined-out cavern, transformed by the Xi’An into something of a church. Ornate statues. Old books in glass cases. Candles by the hundreds. A whole lot of work went into this for a reason beyond my grasp. I had to know.

“I’m in.” The words fell from my lips like somebody else had spoken them.

Kuang turned as if surprised by the suddenness of my decision. Ed nodded at him then looked back at me. “So here’s the deal. Kuang wants you to go get the code, the rest of the data you got out of that guy’s head. Bring it here and you become part of the Big Picture.”

I nodded, reticent to appear uncertain. Kuang just stared back at me with those dark, still eyes. It was the kind of moment that called for some brilliant disclosure of cleverness and planning on my part and I had nothing. Instead I reached down and twisted the heel of my left boot, rocking it open to reveal a small compartment. The tiny data shard fell into my palm. I tossed it to Ed. “It’s all there.”

Ed openly gaped. “That’s it? The key to the End Times and you hid it in your boot?”

I shrugged.

Muttering under his breath, Ed held the shard up to the light as if it were a gem, then handed it to Kuang. With even less ceremony it disappeared into the folds of the Dàshǐ’s silk robe.

Deal done, it seemed; no signing a contract in blood required.

Without a word Kuang walked past me, toward the mining elevator that had brought us down the fifty or sixty meters below the charred surface of the Nek. A forceful glare from Ed told me that a polite invitation wasn’t forthcoming so I took off after Kuang and followed him to the open-cage lift. But instead of rising back to the surface, the platform dropped into darkness.

I watched the shaft’s old depth markers rise past us, tritium numbers that glowed in the dark. One hundred meters, two hundred, three… As we descended, the frozen cold of the planet’s core overcame the inexplicable heat of the Nek. My breath began to fog.

I didn’t look at Ed, instead asking the question aloud. “So do you realy buy into all this Gates of Hell stuff?”

Ed seemed to ponder the question for a moment. “Do I believe in it? Yeah, I guess I do. At least I’m not ready to dismiss things that people described long ago looking through a lens of limited science and understanding. Go back far enough and a light bulb would have been described as magic. A big part of what we priests do involves taking things on faith.”

Without warning, the darkness of the mineshaft peeled away as the elevator descended through the roof of a massive underground cavern. The walls of the old mine hub stood several hundred meters apart, maglev rails extending off into a dozen side-tunnels. Most of the chamber was damp and gloomy save where lights blazed in a circle around lab-coated Xi’An who moved among dozens of consoles wired together on the ground below. In the center of the chamber stood a claptrap array of metal arms that held emitters in a spherical pattern.

My heart stopped, images of That Night surging like someone had ripped the bandaid off my memory. In the center of the emitters a tiny ball of energy sputtered, incandescent tendrils flickering outward in all directions.

“Then again,” Ed added, “we’re not stupid either.”