The Swords of Babylon

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Russell Cayman wandered through the chaotic dust-thickened ballroom, an eerie wraith in the dark. Otherworldly, the stench of death and human flesh clinging to him like a thick toxic miasma. His step was sure and he had eyes for only one thing.

The bones of Kali, Goddess of Evil.

She hung before him, wired to the wall in all her glory. Cayman had rebuilt her skeleton full-size and then used iron wall hooks and industrial wire to keep her in place, spread magnificently across the wall and looking down on him from a superior position.

On them.

Cayman dragged the half-dead body of a local man behind him, fingers wrapped in his long blood-matted hair, the slithering sound of his last passage punctuated only by the occasional tattoo of his boots striking the floor in response to intense spasms of agony. Cayman stopped when Kali loomed over him, the sight of her dirty gray bones a soothing balm to his scorched eyes.

“My Goddess.” He knelt. Around him tiny shadows shifted — the denizens he lived with, all squatting in the dark like creeping Gollums — in the once-empty mansion that had belonged to the secret group known as the Shadow Elite. The ballroom was where most of them had so painfully died, so Cayman found it fitting that Kali should reside here, pressed up against the dried patches of their life blood.

“I bring you… a sacrifice.”

He threw the body at her feet, watching as the twitching man bled out. He enjoyed taking and killing the locals in this area of Vienna, sometimes offering them to Kali, other times feeding them to the rats and adding their tenderest pieces to his saucepan.

He had grown into a culinary genius.

When the man stopped twitching, Cayman moved forward, kneeling in the pool of still-warm blood, and supplicated in front of his god. He leaned over and kissed Kali’s feet, held the cold bones against his cheek. At last he felt whole again, nourished, part of a family. Cayman’s real mother had dumped him into a ditch and driven away when high on drugs. Kali would be his guardian, his overseer, for life.

His cell phone rang for the first time in weeks. He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t surprised. In most ways he was fully expecting the call. Cayman kissed the cracked bones one more time before standing and moving away to a far corner, at the center of a sticky network of spider webs.

“Yes.”

“Have you been expecting me, Russell?”

“Yes, sir, I have.”

“Good. Where are you now?”

“The old mansion.”

“In Vienna? How excellent. Then you must come to me at once.”

Cayman acquiesced. He had always known there existed one single man, one indistinct figure who ruled them all. The true leader of the Shadow Elite. “I’ll set out as soon as it’s light, Mr Block.”

“And Cayman?”

“Yes, Mr Block?”

“Make sure you bring the bones of Kali with you. With her help… we will once again rule the world.”

Cayman was in no position to argue with the once and future king of the world. He softly agreed and finished the call, staring up one more time at the immense skeleton wired to the twenty-foot-high wall.

“We have one more night, my Goddess.”