Blackness dropped over them like wet pelt. Only the azure pulse of the crystalline mass illuminated the vault, throwing jagged blue spears across the flags. The limestone underfoot vibrated with a rising hum as mineral slurry rose through the lower drains.
“The final consecration,” Anu-Mer said, his tone carrying the metallic timbre of bronze singing against wet stone. He glided toward the core of the dormant titan. Fingers tipped with heavy signets reached for the mineral crust. Tendrils of pale fire hissed from the faceted core, lashing around his wrists, ribs, and throat. His skull jerked back, breath tearing from his teeth in a hoarse rasp.
The sensation drove behind Ishtarû's brow like a cold trephine. A foreign presence pried between her thoughts, cataloging and prying. Anu-Mer was attempting to siphon her, grafting her consciousness into the mechanism. The murmurs, usually a muffled trickle beneath the mud-brick floors, swelled into a shriek that scraped the lining of her skull. Her tongue went brassy with the tang of copper foil.
Beside her, Nin-šar let out a roar. “Zababa! To me!”
The heavy valves had dropped, but side shafts yawned open. Hooded figures dropped from the sill, clutching crescent polearms that caught the blue glare. Cult initiates rushed Nin-šar and the guardsmen. Bronze sheared against bronze. Zababa took an overhand chop on his bronze vambrace and drove his pommel into a throat. Nin-šar stepped inside a thrust, his leaf-bladed shortsword shearing through boiled leather.
The boyish body she wore swayed. The mental tide was raw, frantic data battering her synapses. Anu-Mer intended to overwrite her, fusing her clinical deductions into his ascent before the petrification cycle hardened.
A cold clarity took hold behind the migraine. Absorption required parsing. A mind forged in bronze tools, dry augury, and sacrificial grease could never calculate the architecture of modern science.
She ceased guarding her memory. She opened the floodgates.
Differential equations. Rate of change over infinitesimal intervals, limits approaching zero, curvature tensors. She drove the formal proofs straight down the invading link, forcing the raw mechanics of variable rates into circuits tuned for superstitious chant.
Wave-particle duality. The collapse of eigenstates under measurement, thermodynamic entropy, probability density matrices. The mental channel stuttered, the flow breaking into ragged white noise. Anu-Mer’s jaw clenched, his link to the core wavering.
Cellular pathology. The double helix unzipping under polymerase, sodium-potassium pumps across lipid bilayers, ischemic cascades, systemic organ failure. She jammed the empirical method down the conduit, demanding falsification, rigorous controls, and double-blind scrutiny from an altar designed for dogma.
The blue glow flared into jagged, blinding flashes. The chorus fractured into shrill static that stung her teeth. The prehistoric engine could not reconcile the contradictory inputs; its heuristic network, calibrated for cyclic ritual and obedient offerings, choked on ten centuries of empirical proof.
Anu-Mer screamed. The cords of radiance snarled and snapped against his flesh, charring linen and blistering skin. His neck cords strained until the veins blackened. Jerking violently, he twisted like an ox struck between the horns as the feedback loop ripped through his temples.
The shriek cut out cleanly. The hall went still, except for the scuffle of sandals against gravel and Anu-Mer’s wet wheezing. The blue luminescence leveled into a flat, steady glow.
The conduit remained open, but passive. The entire subterranean web—flues, aqueducts, and the core of Teneb-Ur—hung in her head like a surgical schematic. The murmuring clay obeyed her baseline.
A single thought, clear and unwavering, formed in her mind. She projected it with the full force of her will, a quiet roar that resonated through every conduit, every channel, every clay brick of Teneb-Ur.
*Close all gates.*
Deep in the mountain roots, the basalt floodgates groaned on their pivots. Counterweights slid through stone grooves, reversing the pressure. The caustic gray runoff pooling in the public sewers halted, stagnant, then drained backward into the sump cisterns. The petrifaction stalled.
Anu-Mer dropped onto the flags. The smoking burns across his chest smelled of singed wool and fat. His jaw hung slack, tongue fluttering in wordless clicks toward the roof ribs. The High Priest was an empty shell.
Ishtarû dropped to one knee, trembling, her peasant girl’s lungs burning for air. The subterranean core was silent now, attuned to her breathing. She had stopped the blight, but the hum remained locked behind her eyes, waiting for her next diagnostic.