The Jewels of Cyttorak Read online

  JEWELS of CYTTORAK

  DEAN WESLEY SMITH

  Illustrations by Chuck Wojtkiewicz

  BYRON PREISS MULTIMEDIA COMPANY, INC. NEW YORK

  BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK

  The intense heat and mist-thick humidity smothered the jungle like a blanket tucked in tight on all four comers of a bed. All noises were muffled and everything was wet to the touch. Just simple breathing seemed harder than normal. Even the light of the sun fought to get through the thick air to warm the damp ground.

  Two brown-robed monks were the only life moving this hot afternoon, as they walked with their faces turned downward at the moist soil of the jungle floor. The thin, rough fabric of their robes clung to them, showing wet outlines of legs and arms. Sweat coated both their faces, dripping from their chins. Their eyes were blank, their pace measured, controlled through the thick heat.

  The path curved ahead of them like a snake winding its way around trees and brush. The two had walked this path every day for the past nine years, but always much earlier in the morning, just after dawn, when the mist and the air still had a slight touch of coolness to it.

  And before today they had always walked it with many others of their order. Never had they gone alone before. The others would be shocked if they knew.

  The two monks would be shocked if they understood their own actions.

  But they did not. They simply moved like zombies, one step at a time through the humidity, drawn to a task they were unaware of doing.

  The path turned upward and moved out of the jungle, twisting back and forth past rocks, climbing toward a stone temple half-built, half-carved from the face of the rock bluff. The temple dominated the valley below on clear days, seeming to rale over the world of real life in the jungle.

  On closer inspection, the temple looked ancient and was in desperate need of repair, but there was no one to repair it. The great structure had been built by an unknown people ages before the two monks were bom. No records or stories of the temple’s builders had passed down through the centuries.

  Only a name: Cyttorak.

  It was a sacred place, the temple of Cyttorak.

  A place of great power.

  A place that allowed mere men to feel closer to their god. Only the monks dared go inside, and only during the early morning hours. After that, not even the monks entered the sacred place.

  Until today.

  Now, the two monks blindly followed the path, not looking forward or upward at the temple of Cyttorak, only down at their feet, as if ashamed of what they were about to attempt. And they would have been ashamed, if they had been aware.

  But the power of Cyttorak had reached them. And now drew them to a task.

  They were to be the vessels that would carry the power of Cyttorak into the world.

  A hundred paces behind the two monks another monk followed, staying to the edge of the trail, ready to duck

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  behind a brush or tree at any moment. Unlike the two young monks being drawn to the temple, he was old, his beard gray. For his entire life, he and the other elders of the monastery had waited for this day. And worried about it happening.

  For centuries, the elder monks had guarded the temple, passing down the guard duty generation after generation.

  Now, during his time of watch, it was happening. Cyttorak was again calling to younger members of the order, as had been foretold. It was his duty to stop the calling by any means possible.

  Other elders would be following to help, but they might not arrive in time. Fear gripped him, but he forced it aside and moved on after the two young monks. He had spent his life preparing for this moment. He would not fail now.

  The temple held the heat of the day outside, stopping it at the door like an unwanted guest. The air inside was deathly still between the stone walls. It smelled of mold and ancient death. The high stone ceilings and massive construction gave any visitor the sense of immense power around them, looming like a dark figure in the night. It was a humbling feeling to the few who had seen the insides of the sacred place.

  The two young monks entered through the main arch and moved slowly down the central corridor of the temple, not glancing around. Sweat dripped down their backs and arms, but they felt no discomfort. Their eyes remained blank, not seeing their true location, not seeing anything.

  During the usual morning worships, they always turned right at the end of the corridor and into the large hall with its open windows and stone pillars.

  This time they turned left at that spot and stopped at the statue of a deformed creature sitting on a throne. The creature’s head was rounded and without neck. Snakelike bands wrapped around under its arms and extended into the air behind its head. Its chest was massive, its arms huge and ending in fists.

  The name of the creature was said to be lost in time and the passing of the temple’s builders. None of the younger monks could have imagined that the monster sitting in the huge throne-like chair was Cyttorak. If they had, they would have never entered the temple again.

  But the elders knew. And they knew that their duty, their life’s work, was to keep Cyttorak inside that stone temple.

  The two younger monks had accidentally discovered the temple’s secret late one morning. They had heard a noise near the statue as the order was leaving for the morning. They had stopped and investigated, thinking a village child had found his or her way inside the sacred place.

  They had accidentally, or so it seemed at the time, pushed on both arms of the statue’s chair at the same moment. The stone wall and statue of the creature had moved inward and back, opening a walkway that led downward.

  The two young monks had entered and moved down the stone stairs as the wall slid closed behind them. At the bottom of exactly one hundred stairs, they found a bitterly cold room and a sight that had scared them. They had quickly returned to the light of day and the heat of the jungle, but just the visit to the room had allowed Cyttorak to cross over between the two worlds and gain a small measure of control of their young minds.

  Over the next two weeks, Cyttorak solidified that control every morning when they came for their morning service, until finally the two monks would do as he bid.

  They would return to the room and set him free.

  As the two young monks disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel, the older monk stopped and stared at the opening, his stomach turning in fear. He knew what they would find below. He had never seen it. None of the monks now living had seen that room except the two young ones. Now he was about to go down into a place he had prayed to never enter: the sacred throne room of Cyttorak.

  He forced himself to take a deep breath to calm his shaking hands. He stepped to a hidden alcove and retrieved a large wooden staff. The elders had all trained for years in the art of fighting with the staffs, and there were many hidden along the path to this temple in case they were needed. He had always hoped to never have to touch one outside of the training room, but now that the solid wooden weapon was in his hands, he felt better.

  Quickly, he moved in past the statue and down the stairs after the two younger monks, hoping that he would be in time to stop them.

  At the bottom of the stairs, light from the outside sliced through the huge dark room from four round holes bored at angles through the rock above. Two of the shafts of light focused on the eyes of a gigantic statue of the same deformed creature that guarded the tunnel entrance above. It was as if the creature, through the shafts of light, always looked out into the world.

  The elder monks believed he did.

  And since finding the room the first time, the two younger monks had never lost the feeling of being watched. Now, directed by some unseen hand, they had returned to a pla
ce they had hoped to never have to see again..

  The other two spots of light focused on the monster’s hands, and the two huge stones he held in his palms. In his right a huge emerald, in his left an equally large ruby. Both stones were larger than a man’s closed fist and under the light both seemed to have a life and energy all their own.

  In reality, they were gateways to the mystic power bands of Cyttorak. The two stones, when touched by the same person, would allow Cyttorak to come through the barrier between his world and the human one. And with his power there would be nothing humanity could do to stop him from ruling the world. Nothing.

  But the young monks did not know this. Their eyes were blank, their bodies controlled by Cyttorak.

  They stopped, facing the huge statue of Cyttorak, as if worshipping their new god. Then the young monk on

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  the right stepped forward, both hands outstretched, reaching for the gems held out for him by the huge creature.

  “No!” the elder monk shouted from the doorway.

  The shout seemed to have no effect on the spell over the two young monks.

  With a quick step forward and a swing of the staff, the elder monk smashed the closest young monk in the head with the staff. The young man went down like a stone.

  Then, with a quick spin, the older monk knocked away one arm of one younger monk, obviously breaking it with the force of his blow.

  But the younger monk continued to reach for the emerald, as if he didn’t feel the pain from his smashed arm.

  “I said no!” the older monk shouted.

  But the younger monk was within an inch of touching the huge gem.

  With a quick swipe with the staff, the older monk tried to knock the hand away from the stone. But in his excitement and rush, he missed.

  And hit the emerald.

  The room exploded in green light.

  The elder monk stepped back.

  It was as if the room had suddenly filled with the anger of centuries. Anger, now fueled with the frustration of failure, released in a huge explosion by an errant hit with a staff.

  The energy increased quickly, burning the skin off the three monks before they could even feel the pain.

  The intense blast of the energy released from the emerald quickly boiled away their blood and then turned

  their bones to a fine dust that filled the swirling air of the room like the mist in the hot, thick air outside.

  The emerald grew brighter and brighter.

  Then suddenly it shattered into three pieces in a huge explosion that sent huge stones flying. The ground shook and rocks filled the stairway to the temple above.

  One large piece of the emerald was quickly buried in the stone wall of the hidden room.

  The other two pieces, fueled by the otherdimensional power of Cyttorak, were sent spinning through space and time into the future.

  After a moment, the dust from the monks’ bones settled and only one light shaft still shown down on the creature, now holding only a bright ruby, as if offering it to the first person who would come along and take it.

  It would be centuries, long after the temple had crumpled into a pile of stones and Cyttorak was only a long-ago memory, before Cain Marko came along and did just that.

  Sn the dead-of-night hours, the French Quarter in New Orleans was a place of danger and excitement. The party and business life of the day and evening still echoed through the empty spaces of Jackson Square. The laughter and the jazz were now only ghosts drifting among the tall old trees and vine-covered buildings. The heat and the humidity lingered over the rough pavement of the streets. Not even the darkness could push it back to a cooler time.

  The black shadows just outside the streetlights gave the park a feeling of secrets lost and danger to come. Tourists who walked near Jackson Park in the late hours walked quickly, sensing the danger, their hearts beating hard from the brush against imagined death. But it was that very closeness to the unknown, wrapped in the history of the old town, that brought them back the following year. Brought them back to the parties, back to the great Cajun cooking, back to the unknown danger just inside the nearest shadow or the closest hidden courtyard.

  Remy LeBeau, aka Gambit, knew every shadow, every alley, every courtyard tucked behind iron gates. For years he had been part of those shadows, a part of the very real danger the tourists had feared. New Orleans was his home, the streets of the French Quarter his back yard.

  And now, again, he had returned home, to the town he loved more than anything else in the world. But his return was not a joyous one. Something was wrong with his home city.

  X-HEN

  Very wrong.

  He just didn’t know what.

  A disturbing call from an unknown “friend” had brought him from the Xavier Institute in New York— Gambit’s new home among the super-team known as the X-Men—back to the Big Easy.

  The “friend” had said only that the power was no longer in the Guilds in New Orleans. That now a man named Toole controlled things. And Toole did not understand the old ways.

  The caller had hung up with no explanation as to how he had found Remy, or why he had even called. Remy knew he still had friends in the Guilds even though he was long ago outcast. More than likely it was one of them.

  So he had gone home, and now the night air of New Orleans again wrapped him in its friendly thickness, the heat holding him like a mother would hold a child as he searched for clues.

  He moved past Jackson Square and ducked into a shadowed alcove where he could watch the back entrance to a private club called the Bijou. The place had been there since before Remy was bom. The wooden tables were scarred with the bums of too many cigarette butts, the wooden floor warped from years of spilled drinks. Remy knew the air would be filled with a gray smoke that even during the early morning hours never seemed to clear. In the back room, a poker game would be going on continuously. In his memory, that back room had never been without a game.

  Twenty minutes later, Remy’s wait ended as a trench-coated figure appeared from the dark passage and stepped

  onto the sidewalk. He glanced both directions down the dark street and then turned to the right, away from the park, his hands deep in the pockets of his coat.

  Remy knew the guy only as “York.” A tall, heavy-set man with blond hair, York had moved down from Chicago when he was twenty and had managed to survive. He was now a small-time player who ran a bookmaking operation across the river. Sanctioned by the Guilds and ignored by the cops, York kept his nose clean, staying only with his book. His only vice was that he liked to gamble away his profits and most likely had been doing just that tonight, in the famous back room of the Bijou.

  Remy stepped from the shadow and quietly moved across the street behind the tall man, unheard and unseen. He had his own coat buttoned and his hand on two of his playing cards in his pocket, just in case York did something really stupid. Gambit had the power to charge any article with extreme kinetic energy that was released in a very destructive force on impact. A simple playing card, when charged and flicked, carried more destructive force than a bullet fired from a handgun.

  “Y’ever hear de streets are dangerous, man ami'V' Remy asked as he neared the large man.

  York spun, his right hand clearly holding a gun in the pocket of his trench coat.

  “Kinda jumpy dere, York,” Remy said, smiling at the big man.

  “LeBeau?” York asked, lowering his gun hand slightly, but not yet letting it go.

  And Remy didn’t let go of the cards just yet, either.

  “Y’expectin’ someone else?”

  York shook his head, then took a deep breath. “You just startled me. What are you doing back here? Bella?”

  The mention of his wife’s name jolted Remy. Bella Donna had recovered after being killed because he’d given her the sacred elixir of life. But when she awoke she had lost all memory of him. Now she had taken over as the head of the Assassins Guild. He was a thief, she an assassin.
The two Guilds were sworn enemies from generations back. No, he was not here for Bella, and until now he had managed to keep thoughts of her pushed back.

  ‘Won,” Remy said clearly and firmly. “Just a little of de information.”

  York had now dropped his hand completely, but Remy knew he still held his gun. But Remy also knew that York was too smart to move against him.

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” York said, glancing around at the dark street to see if anyone was watching.

  Remy knew that someone was watching, but he said nothing to the big man.

  “Toole?” Remy said.

  Even in the shadows and faint light of the street, Remy could see York’s face go pale. He quickly glanced again in both directions down the street, then stepped a half step closer to Remy.

  “The guy’s a monster,” York said, his voice a harsh whisper. “Came into town about a year ago when they started one of the river gambling boats. He controls his people like they were puppets and ignores the old ways completely.”

  “And nobody yanked his leash?” Remy couldn’t believe that the Guilds or the police hadn’t stopped the growth of a new crime boss. The power here had been balanced and working for such a long time, someone like Toole running loose could easily cause a bloodbath.

  York shook his head. “I heard they tried a couple of times, but the guy has power. Almost unnatural power. He’s like a cancer eating at things, LeBeau.”

  Remy nodded. “Where I find dis fellow?”

  York shook his head. “That’s another thing about him. People don’t find him, he finds them. Like a ghost.” Remy only snorted. “Where, mon ami?”

  York looked a little panicked for a moment, then recovered. “Best I heard was that he had a warehouse down the river a ways, armed like a fortress. No one gets in.” Remy laughed. He was a thief. And one of the best, if not the best there had ever been. His training was to get in places where no one else did, and do it without being seen.

  York again glanced around as if afraid someone might be watching, then turned to Remy. “Look, it’s been good seeing you, but I got to go.”