If They Come Again Val Emmich

The Fallenis a  new, pulse-pounding thriller from Eric Van Lustbader, the New York Times bestselling author of the Jason Bourne series and The Attestation.

The End of Days has been predicted for the last ii thou years. Now, without alert, it is upon us. In a hidden cave in the mountains of Lebanon, a man makes a fateful discovery. He will bring what has been forbidden for thousands of years out of the darkness and into the light: the Testament of Lucifer.

In Istanbul, Bravo Shaw, caput of the Gnostic Observatine sect, is warned by Fra Leoni of the state of war between Proficient and Evil, waged to a standstill since time immemorial. Now an unfathomable danger has arisen: Lucifer'due south advance guard, the Fallen. Humankind is in danger of existence enslaved by the forces of evil.

Bravo, Fra Leoni, and Bravo's blind, brilliant sister, Emma, are the commencement and concluding line of defense confronting the chaos unleashed by the Attestation of Friction match. All roads pb to the Book of Deathly Things: the Testament of Lucifer. But if Bravo and Emma get privy to its dreadful secrets they very might well forfeit far more than only their lives.

In the sequel to his internationally bestselling The Testament, Lustbader delivers a new trilogy that explores organized religion, politics, and civilization, that plumbs the depths of morality, that, finally, asks usa to consider what it really means to be man.

The Fallenwill become available May 2nd. Please bask this excerpt.

PROLOGUE

Baatara Gorge Waterfall, Tannourine, Lebanon

"Is information technology time notwithstanding?"

The shadows surrounding the four men were angular, formal, and, therefore, mysterious, beyond Val'south ken. They contained the muscular quality of the stone itself, aboriginal and, therefore, inscrutable.

Michel shook his head, his thick lips pouty. "Val, y'all listening to me?"

They were the verbal contrary of the shadows plant in twilit cities, which were constantly in motility like fish around a sunken send. These shadows were unmoving, impenetrable, and hid the scissure in the mountainside from which, at their backs, the Baatara cataract shot similar tenthousand cannons. The roar was visceral, the air shivering and shuddering from the spill's kinetic energy. On either side, beyond veils of spray, stone blocks, square and rectangular, rose up at the vertical, as if stacked by some child-giant.

Michel's Charles de Gaulle nose lifted in the air like that of a hound scenting prey. "Do you odour that?"

Michel's two men were clad in armed services camo fatigues and blouses, and high hiking boots with thick safety soles. They had been smoking endlessly since they made the last leg of their climb up onto this lip of stone hidden behind the waterfall. Now they paused in their puffing and joke telling, sniffing the heavy air themselves. Finding nothing, they returned to the butts of their cigarettes and their obscene jokes. They needed to get equally much nicotine into their systems equally they could now. Val had given strict orders that there would exist no smoking once they entered the cave, which opened before them like the immense jaws of a prehistoric creature.

Val, his back to the cataract, made no reply. He was sitting so far back on the rock lip his clothes were soaked through and clung to the sunburned skin of his neck and arms like a second skin. He liked the feeling of beingness submerged and withal not, equally if he were occupying two realities at once, the one overlapping the other.

He stared attentively at the black that filled the cave mouth. Except for the expanse just inside the lip, the blackness was utterly impenetrable, like a night without either moon or stars, a night close with a lowering deject ceiling and so thick it appeared solid equally stone.

Michel opened his mouth, closed it again out of deference to his client, the man paying him and his men a minor fortune to brand this expedition, which, so far as Michel could tell, was a wild-goose chase. Apart from the scat and, occasionally, the basic of modest mammals, they had found no artifacts in whatsoever of the caves they had been exploring for the past viii days. Used to the activeness of regional and sectarian wars, his men were restless. He could sense their discontent. They wanted something to shoot dead, or, declining that, a target to shoot at. They wanted to olfactory property blood. That'south what mercenaries were all virtually. Michel was a bit different; moving up the food chain into management would do that to you, he supposed. He had learned the value of patience. Still, he glanced back at Val and wondered when he would give the bespeak, when they would enter the cave that had never been mapped, the very presence of which had surprised even Michel, who knew this function of Lebanon like the spread thighs of Chloe, his current girl of choice. Val was smart also as clever—then smart he had hired Michel and his cadre for a spelunking mission because in this 24-hour interval and historic period, with Lebanon a hotbed of religious intolerance and murderous violence, heavily armed mercs were far more valuable than a scattering of professors and archeologists or whomever his client normally hung out with.

For Val, the incessant roar of the cataract was acting on him similar a temporal trampoline, flinging him backward and forward in time. Showtime, he was a kid, entering the cave he had been literally dreaming of since he was a boy of five. So immature, he hadn't understood its significance, nor had he when he reached his adolescence. And yet the dream had continued to stem his sleep, the precise configuration of the cave rima oris becoming as familiar to him as the rhythm of his ain jiff just before he fell comatose.

Now the trampoline returned him to last dark and his overheated hotel room with its wartime blackout curtains drawn securely across the smoke-and ash-streaked windows, as he talked to Maura on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, telling her that this was it, that tomorrow he would acme the area of the cave, explore it, and at last find Rex Solomon'south mine.

"And all considering of your dream?" Maura knew plenty not to express mirth. She never laughed at his bouts of well-nigh clairvoyance; why should she? They all became realities, from her automobile existence stolen to the offer of a plum job as an animator that she never saw coming, existence certain she had not survived the interview. At the callback she became a believer in Val'due south gift.

"Yeah," Val breathed into the phone in the shallows of last night. "That cave has been calling to me ever since I was a child."

"What do you think information technology wants with you?" Maura's voice was soft, blurry, sensual. They had simply finished making love over the intercontinental connection.

An insane question merely Maura would ask. "It wants me to notice the true undercover of Male monarch Solomon. You know that's why I took this consignment in the starting time place. The Knights of Saint Clement desire the king's hoard of gold. Merely I'm convinced Solomon had a cloak-and-dagger more vital, more valuable, than mere gilt."

"You're talking about the shadow figure yous saw in your room when you were five."

"It told me it was my fate to find the Testament of Lucifer."

"The Book of Deathly Things."

"Yep. The offset of the Unholy Trinity. I was meant to bring the Testament of Lucifer back from the darkness into which information technology had been cast so long ago."

Maura had shivered. "But actually, Val, Friction match? Fifty-fifty if information technology were real—"

"Information technology is existent!"

"Even more reason not to become into this cave. I hateful, what if you do find the volume? It's the Devil's holding. We're Catholic. We believe in the Resurrection and the Low-cal. This is a darkness you shouldn't touch."

"What would yous take me exercise if I find it?"

"Destroy it. Val, please. You lot must, at all costs. If it really is the Testament of Match it's a dreadful thing. It mustn't be brought into the light."

The cataract's trampoline launched him forward to the present. He glanced at his chronometer: almost time. He needed to clear his heed of his hotel room, of the long-range sex he'd experienced with Maura, of Maura herself—the odour of her, a mix of lime, hibiscus, and plumeria so powerful he was once again engulfed past it.

His nostrils flared in order to rid himself of her, and he smelled it—whatsoever scent Michel'southward truffle-hunting nose had picked up. Without rising, Val frog-hopped a pace closer to the cave rima oris. His sopping clothes at present felt cold and clammy. He sniffed again, inhaling more of the humid atmosphere this time. There was no doubtfulness nearly it. No doubt. The smell was emanating from the cave.

"In that location's definitely someone in there," Michel whispered as he hunkered down next to Val.

"Or something," Val said, optics not moving from the cave mouth. "Recent reports have put a leopard in the vicinity."

"Worse for united states, information technology could exist a wild boar," Michel said. "I myself have seen 3 in this region over the years."

Without turning, Michel gave a hand point, and his two mercs brought their AK-47s into the fire-set up position. One of them licked his lips. There were no more jokes or smokes, no talk at all. These men were hardened professionals. Whoever was in there wasn't going to get the best of them. They'd be bullet-flayed to kingdom come. The men were looking frontwards to beginning what to them had get an assault. Action, at concluding!

The lite was failing, glassy gold into inky indigo, every bit if the heaven itself were falling. For Val, who had dreamed of this moment virtually all of his life, in that location was no need to check his chronometer again. His inner clock, by which he had set sheet into the sometimes frightening and not altogether wholesome world of adults, told him information technology was fourth dimension to movement. He rose off his haunches, having seen this moment play out in his dreams since time immemorial, at least equally he sensed information technology. Before the age of five he had no memories at all. Every once in a while he harbored the cool notion that he had been built-in that historic period.

Michel followed him. His two men, with no palpable signal from their leader, flanked out on either side. At the border of the darkness, they turned on their headlamps, adjusting the beams. Michel did the aforementioned, but Val, rejecting the engineering science, fired upward the first of a one-half-dozen phosphorus torches he had brought and was carrying in a safe gasket-sealed quiver at his left hip.

Together, the 4 men were swallowed by the cavern mouth.

The blackness outside the narrow beams of lite and the phosphorus glow airtight around them and then heavily it was as if they had immediately sunk to the bottom of the sea. A dozen paces in, Val realized that the air was unlike. The cataract's humidity had died abroad behind them, supplanted past a desert-like aridity. The soft tissues lining their nostrils were sucked dry so chop-chop and completely the men were instantly assaulted by sinus headaches.

The torch illuminated the cave walls, the limestone more or less identical to that of the caves they had explored previously. The ceiling here was not virtually every bit low, withal, and the men were able to walk upright, rather than crouched over, "like beetles," equally one of the men had said with an unmistakable quaver.

"The odour," Michel said in Val'southward ear, and Val nodded, the odor unmistakable now, stronger. An element within information technology amused a vague retentiveness as it worked its way from Val'south nose into his encephalon. Something familiar. Had he been somewhere he had smelled information technology before? It seemed that way to him, the notion more firmly embedding itself in his consciousness the deeper they penetrated into the cave.

There was no animal scat here, no piles of tiny bones, white equally the confront of the moon. Only darkness, desolation, and an unspeakable loneliness. The manner now slanted down, and with their descent came a stirring in the air that brought the odor to them at what surely must have been total forcefulness.

"Animate being, vegetable, or mineral?" Michel whispered beside him, nearly choking on his words. "What the hell is it?"

Once more Val shook his head. He gave no respond to Michel, only as he had provided no respond when, on the tertiary day, after visiting eight caves, Michel had said to him, What are you lot looking for?

The Testament of Friction match. Those were the words that had formed in Val's mind, but he didn't vocalism it. Why would he? Information technology would but confuse Michel, and the concluding thing Val wanted was for Michel to lose confidence in him, for Michel to think his mission was one driven by idiocy or vanity. Val, an excellent gauge of character from the time he had been a child, knew that Michel wouldn't tolerate either, and who could arraign him? Not Val. He wouldn't have tolerated them, either.

In one case again he was hurtled dorsum in time, to the 24-hour interval before he left for Lebanon.

"You can't become," Maura was maxim, gesturing to a suitcase on the bed in their Paris flat in the Marais. "What you're looking for—"

Val, grinning and shaking his head simultaneously, said, "I have to go, Maura. I take to find it. Don't you run into? It's my life's purpose."

He could feel the edge of her anger protruding from her like a blade and backside it, propelling information technology, her anxiety for him. Then he took her in his arms, kissed her tenderly, as he would a child awakened by a nightmare, which was a mistake; Maura hated being treated like a child.

She pulled away from him, and he said, "No. Not like this. We can't office on a sour note."

She tossed her head, impatient, angrier than ever. "You say that it was promised to you lot, Val, but the Devil's hope . . . do you know how insane that sounds?"

"Have my visions ever been incorrect?"

"And that's what terrifies me the well-nigh: that it'due south all true, that Friction match somehow chose you, whispered in your ear." She shuddered.

"The Attestation of Lucifer does exist: I was never more sure of anything in my life." But now he experienced a sudden stab, non of doubt about his mission, only of the nature of its purpose. For a moment he was surrounded by a bubble of clarity. Maura was smart—more, she was far shrewder then he was. Could she be correct about this? Was he really in danger, or would the shadow figure protect him from all harm, as it had promised?

"Val," Maura said, her arms around him. "Retrieve for a moment. What is the Devil's promise worth? The Church teaches us that Lucifer is a seducer and a liar. Zippo he says tin can be trusted."

And merely like that, the bubble of clarity burst, and once again Val'southward mission was all. "The promise of power beyond mortal ken," he whispered into her ear, in the honeyed tones of Match himself.

" 'Beyond mortal ken,' " she repeated. "You come across? This promise you say . . . it'due south not . . . it's imitation, Val. It has to be. This Volume is non for mortal eyes, yours or anyone else'due south." Her gaze had locked with his. "I'grand begging you not to become. I'm and so agape it won't end well." A silence as profound equally that he had experienced in his childhood room closed its fist effectually them.

There was silence now, as he was hurled dorsum into the present, but information technology was of an altogether dissimilar kind. Information technology was the silence of something alien, unknowable, holding its jiff.

The Book of Deathly Things, purportedly conjured for King Solomon, through the arcane piece of work of his cabal of alchemists.

Michel looked around, the beam of his calorie-free swinging from left to correct. "Val, at present you must tell me why we really have come here. It has to do with Male monarch Solomon, yeah?"

"I'g looking for signs that these caves were inhabited by a sect of Canaanites," which was a truth his guide could accept.

Michel pursed his lips. The tip of his nose was most touching the limestone wall, as if he felt information technology was the source of the foreign odor. "Wasn't it the Phoenicians?"

"Phoinikies is Greek for purple." Val stood further back, the amend to proceeds perspective. "The Greeks, who were everywhere iii thousand years ago, called the Canaanites Phoenicians because of the purple dye they manufactured from murex seashells." Michel's men remained at the center of the cave floor, peering into the emptiness beyond the light of their headlamps. "It was the Phoenicians who gave the Greeks twenty-two magic signs chosen the alphabet that the Greeks codified into a written language. Eventually, information technology became the Latinized alphabet."

Did the Canaanites know of the Book of Deathly Things? Was information technology three thousand years old, like the twenty-ii magic symbols that formed the alphabet? Where had those symbols come from? Were they role of the Testament of Lucifer, the language it was written in in fiery cuneiform? Val stirred, as if these thoughts caused a restlessness, driven by a sense of his long journey's finish at last close at hand. Was information technology Lucifer he had heard when he was v? Was it Lucifer he had smelled? Was this the same smell? How could it be? Val asked himself equally he led the way downward, always down, the floor of the cave steepening. At the same time, the ceiling rose so high that finally information technology was beyond the reach of fifty-fifty the torch's blue-white fluorescence.

After a few moments, he paused, sensing some unfathomable change in the deeply shadowed surround. He shone the torchlight on the left-hand wall and something like a galvanic shock passed through him. He moved the torch nearer so that he could better distinguish the images painted on the limestone: armed horsemen, warriors in chariots of gold, a procession leading to a seated dark-bearded personage of obvious great rank, a circlet of gold around his head. Backside him rose a shadow, taller, thinner, simply somehow more majestic, even, than the king.

Knowledge, long cached in his psyche, burst forth, staggering Val. The Book of Deathly Things.

"How old d'yous remember these are?" Michel said. "And who the hell are they kowtowing to?"

"Impossible to say for certain," Val said as he played the torchlight over the paintings. "The pigments are rich; it's equally if they were painted yesterday."

"But they weren't?" Michel was asking a question.

"No." Val peered more than closely. "No sunlight to fade the pigments, and the fashion is unquestionably Phoenician." The phosphorescence flickered, and he pulled a 2d torch from his quiver, lit it as the first guttered out. He squinted. "The king could be David or Solomon. The Phoenicians built temples out of their fragrant cedar for both of them." He leaned closer. "But see here, this seal. Solomon's seal."

Michel'south eyes opened broad. "King Solomon's mine. Rivers of aureate! Then that'due south what you lot're after!"

"Don't be foolish. King Solomon's mine is a affair of fiction."

Nevertheless, Michel'southward two mercs abandoned their posts, moving nearer, lest they be left out of the action. Their faces projected their greed as if information technology were a moving image thrown on to a theater screen.

Val snorted. "Solomon's rivers of aureate occupy the aforementioned fantasy space as El Dorado." But now he knew that to be a prevarication, for he suspected that here lay the portal to Solomon's mine. The wall painting was far more fascinating and frightening than he let on, for the thin, shadowy effigy behind the king was property out an object. Autonomously from its seeming to be round, Val could not what the object might be: a ceremonial platter, a royal disc, something other? On it was incised a golden square. Inside the square was a white-black triangle with bloodred trim. The oddest feature was that this sigil appeared to be depicted iii-dimensionally, like an G. C. Escher drawing: a single uninterrupted surface over all three dimensions. Val squinted, his nose but millimeters from the painting. Information technology seemed incommunicable; he had never encountered any Phoenician paintings—or from any ancient civilization, for that matter—that depicted three dimensions, permit lone in this meta-geometrical fashion. Something primitive deep in his lower belly contracted, and the odor from his childhood sleeping room came to him again more assertively. This so exhilarated him that he could scarcely depict a breath.

"Look at this, Michel. Have you ever seen an object like this?"

His guide frowned. "I couldn't say."

"The ane the shadow figure backside the male monarch's chair is handing to King Solomon."

Michel turned from the painting to stare at Val. "What shadow? At that place'southward zilch behind the king, except this weird circular writing that looks like a combination of Greek, sort of, and mathematical symbols." He peered a bit closer. "Information technology looks like a language older than the human race."

Val and Michel kept descending, the way steepening fifty-fifty more. The mercs followed, somewhat reluctantly, throwing covetous glances over their shoulders, as if they idea Solomon's golden lay backside his image.

For his part, Val was deeply disturbed. It seemed impossible that Michel hadn't seen the shadow continuing behind Male monarch Solomon on the wall painting. Had Val imagined it? Was information technology just a smudge or the shadow of one of the mercs backside them that had been there for a moment, then, as the merc moved, was gone? Both of these explanations were, of course, possible, simply deep in Val's gut he knew the truth. The shadow was there; it had been handing Male monarch Solomon a disc or a sphere covered with writing so bizarre that—Michel was right—it looked older than the homo race. That shadow threw Val dorsum in time to his childhood chamber. He shivered, both in fear and in apprehension.

A yard yards farther the basis abruptly leveled out.

"What the hell is going on?" A degree of awe had entered Michel's voice, turning it wavering, fluty, every bit if he were speaking underwater. "This isn't like whatsoever cave I've e'er been in."

"No," Val said. "This part is man-fabricated." Iii thousand years ago, something buried deep in his listen told him, but, again, he did not give voice to the thought.

Michel squatted down, his hand running beyond the limestone surface. "It'due south smooth," he said, almost overcome. "Like the flooring of a room."

And instantly Val was hurtled back to his childhood sleeping room. It was the night of his fifth altogether. He had gotten a tricycle, a plush Babar, a huge Star Wars Lego fix, from which he'd already synthetic the Death Star more than once, having destroyed it with a Lego Tie Fighter, just like Luke.

Autonomously from the dim multi-colored glow of Val's slowly revolving flying-saucer nighttime-lite, all was dark as he lay in his bed, far besides excited to sleep. He cradled Babar, whispering to the elephant-king, whose storybooks his father read to him nightly in their original French.

A breeze crossed his face, like a afar challenge. He turned his head, saw a stirring of the Star Wars curtains, heard the chirruping vocal of the cicadas through the now open window. He had seen his mom close information technology simply before turning off the lite, under the mistaken notion he might catch a cold, equally if the dark air current, mild as information technology was in Apr, in some way had sinister designs on him. Outside, a pockmarked total moon rode on a sea of clouds similar a ship, an unearthly transport, spilling its light across his bedchamber floor. And then the odor came to him—animate being, vegetable, mineral? None of those. Something other, and he looked to the moon, the unearthly transport, and wondered what it had brought him.

That odor. Forwards again, slingshot through time, into the nowadays, continuing on the verge of the cavern's vault, at the sill of his childhood bedroom, the two overlapping until they became one and the same.

"What are you doing?" Michel tried to grasp Val's arm, to pull him back, but Val shook him off, ran toward the heart of the cavern.

Michel was stymied. He was alarmed by Val's action, however reluctant to physically restrain his client. He turned to his mercs. "How big is this thing?"

"Fucking huge," one said.

"Impossible to see the far end of it," the second ane said.

"Christ." Michel ran a hand through his hair, was appalled to find information technology moisture with sweat. "Go after him," he ordered. "Keep the fucker from harming himself."

He drew his 9mm Glock, placed his forefinger alongside the trigger guard, followed in his men's wake. His olfactory organ twitched, and he began to experience an itching in his brain from the scent, which was now so strong it overpowered even the extreme dryness of the cavern that had produced the headache that was making his vision pulse and his inhalations painful.

Earlier he had gone a half-dozen paces, he saw the fierce bursts from an AK-47, heard the deafening thunder-similar detonations, echoed over and over over again. He sprinted forward, calling to his men, then shouting Val'southward proper noun.

Another burst of fire, this time and then close it nearly blinded him. He almost stumbled over 1 of his men who lay twisted and motionless. Michel knelt down, reached out, and virtually immediately flinched abroad. It seemed to him equally if every os in the man's body had been broken.

Michel quickly made a visual survey of the immediate expanse but saw no 1, nada moving. Everything withal as death. He gingerly reached for the corpse with his free mitt and turned the trunk so the caput was facing him. He sprang to his feet, cursing and starting to cry all at in one case. The man's face was gone, as if eaten abroad past acid. But there was no acrid on earth that could eat through skin, viscera, muscle, and cartilage so quickly, leaving just the blank skull. Had his confront been ripped off? But there was no blood, no ribbons of peel and muscle at the edges. It was as if the face had only melted away.

Michel stood and backed abroad, pressed his throbbing temples with fingers and thumb. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, hoping what he had seen was a hallucination, possibly brought on by inhaling that terrible odor. But even as he turned back, he felt his gorge rise at the sight of the impossible carnage.

Whirling, he pressed deeper into the cave, his Glock pointed alee of him, his forefinger itching to pull the trigger the moment he came upon whatever it was that had massacred his homo in such a way.

Val turned his head toward the shadow, or what he thought was a shadow but might only have been movement inside shadows—a deeper blackness in the darkness beyond the aurora of his torch.

And once more he was swept dorsum in time to his childhood bedroom on the nighttime of his fifth altogether, the cicadas' tuneless song, the total moon, and the shadow inside the shadows of his room. The curtains flickering and twisting. The flooring from window to bed barred with shadow and moonlight turning the bedroom into a kind of cell from which there was no escape.

In his sleeping accommodation the shadow within the shadows moved; in the cavern the shadow within the shadows moved, their movements seemingly synchronized, overlapping, condign one, annihilating time and space. At once, Val felt immensely heavy, as if gravity, having been summoned, was streaming into the cave, pooling at his anxiety, immobilizing them. He tried to move just could non.

As if intuiting his distress, one of Michel's mercs appeared at his side.

"Do you see it?" Val whispered. "There, in the shadows, moving from right to left."

The merc squeezed the trigger on his AK-47, sending a spray of bullets in the management of the movement. At almost the aforementioned instant Val yelled, "No! Don't shoot!" just his vox was drowned out past the rapid gunfire.

"Stay here," the merc growled, and sprinted toward the shadow.

Michel advanced into the cavern and came upwardly beside Val. He seemed oddly out of breath, as if he had stitch the mountain path they had taken to get to the cave. When Val shone the phosphorus torchlight on him, he saw that Michel was sweating profusely.

"What's going on?" Val said. "What'due south happened?"

At that moment, they both started every bit the merc a dozen paces ahead of them burst into flame. It wasn't that he was on fire and so much equally that he had, in the space of a heartbeat, turned into a pillar of flame, the heat so intense his trunk's galvanic system had been short-circuited. The merc didn't writhe, didn't and so much as flinch, but stood directly equally a sentinel while the flames consumed him utterly, and his charred bones collapsed in a heap.

"Jesus God! Whatever's in here, you want no office of it!" Michel cried, but when he grabbed Val'southward arm to pull him into a retreat dorsum up to the cavern oral cavity, which seemed every bit far abroad every bit Beirut, Val shook him off.

"Get if yous want to," he said in a steely vocalism, "simply I'm staying."

"How tin can you lot . . . ?" Michel was adequately goggle-eyed. "Pym was killed, besides. You'll end up like both my men."

Val shook his caput, his gaze never leaving the patch of blackness where the shadow at present existed, for the moment unmoving. He was close to the Testament. This was the childhood promise fulfilled. "Whatsoever is here, whatsoever this is, won't impairment me."

"How can you say that?" Information technology was clear Michel was losing his composure. The two deaths—the style of those deaths—had come shut to unhinging him. He was a professional soldier of fortune, and information technology was true that he had seen many deaths, every bit well as caused more than than a few. But this—this was something completely beyond his experience. His brain worked on pure rationalism. He didn't believe in ESP or telekinesis, UFOs or aliens, past lives, reincarnation, or power spots. What, and then, was he to make of the fashion of his men's deaths deep inside this godforsaken cave? He didn't know. He had no respond, but fear and greed were at war inside himself, and information technology was suddenly clear to him that greed was winning.

"Fair alert." He licked his lips, which were as dry every bit the Gobi. "We're on the edge of King Solomon's mine. I don't know how much golden is in the cavern across our sight, merely I'chiliad not leaving without my share."

He started forrard, and Val called out to him to stop, to stay where he was. But Michel had defenseless the fever; greed suffused him; he was deafened and bullheaded to annihilation else. Y'all are meant to be hither, Val heard inside his head, but he isn't.

Val made a lunge for Michel, one concluding attempt to foreclose him, just the guide shook him roughly off, kept going deeper and deeper into the blackness, his Glock trained at something in the shadows beyond his ain dazzling axle and the sputtering torchlight.

Val opened his rima oris to brand one final attempt to salvage Michel. Simply and then the shadow inside the shadows stirred and it was every bit if it spoke to him, and he was struck impaired.

The shadow within the shadows barely moved, but the air effectually Michel seemed to rip autonomously, as if shredded by the hand of God. And every bit if Michel had ventured to close to the Burning Bush-league he too burst into flame, an incandescent candle flaring in the cavern. And by that flare, for just the flicker of an eye, the shadow within the shadows revealed its shape, just as information technology had then many years agone in Val's chamber in the fifth year of his beingness.

Val, center beating like a trip-hammer, stood his ground. He knew every bit sure as he knew humans inhaled oxygen that he would not be harmed. Abruptly freed from the lock of gravity, he advanced into the darkness. He was taking the modest detour around Michel's remains, a pile of charred bones withal smoking like the dregs of a pyre, when his torch guttered and extinguished.

Dropping it, he reached in the darkness for his quiver, fumbled out another torch. He was about to ignite it when the cavern suddenly blazed with light. Information technology wasn't similar any light he had seen before—and yet he had. Once.

In his childhood bedroom the window was wide open; his sleeping accommodation was filled with the cicadas' shrill song and the moonlight, striped past the moving curtains caught by a strange wind. So his revolving night-light winked out, so that but the moonlight illuminated his room. And and so, a breath or two later, the blaze of light . . .

Just the same as this lite at present that filled the cavern and chased skittering shadows beyond the flooring, along the curved walls. He was in a kind of cathedral, hewn out of the naked rock, and as he blinked, trying to take it all in, and failing, the shadow within the shadows stepped out into the unearthly low-cal, and Val saw information technology. At last, he idea. Information technology has come to me at last.

Copyright © 2017 by Eric Van Lustbader

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Source: https://www.torforgeblog.com/2017/04/06/sneak-peek-the-fallen-by-eric-van-lustbader/