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drfate · 4 years ago

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Dr. Fate: In the Dungeon of the Damned

An old school Dr Fate novel by Rex F Dorgan

Chapter 5 – The Return

“Inza! Thank Anu Ormazd the Annunaki hid you. I’m glad you didn’t have to see… all that.” Kent held Inza’s shoulders firmly but lovingly as he stared into her deep green eyes.

“Oh, Kent, no! My crystal prison became exponentially more faceted and variegated – but not opaque. I saw everything. I saw you DIE!” Inza said, her voice rising and then ending in a choking sound, as if she was about to start sobbing.

“Well technically I wasn’t dead, Inza; my soul was still with my bod-“

“The amulet fell from your chest! The amulet knew you were dead. And I did, too!” Now Inza was starting to cry in earnest.

Kent hugged her and lightly stroked her back. “Now, now, darling, it’s okay, it’s all right now. I – I had to do it. It was the only way.”

Inza pulled her head back to face him. “The only way? You had to do it? You planned that?”

“Yes, dear. It was the only way.”

“The only way was to DIE?”

“Yes. Shhh, let me explain,” he said soothingly, again stroking her back, but again she pulled away. This time she said nothing, just stared at him, waiting for this so-called explanation.

“Getting past the gates was the first challenge. Luckily, I was well-acquainted with Ishtar’s descent into Kur – both the legend and the fact of it. So I was prepared on that front. And the fact that it was Ishtar who made the famous descent reminded me of her meh, her adornments, and one in particular gave me an idea. Each bead of her necklace can contain any single thing, no matter how large. And like Ishtar, my meh – my personal objects of power – are seven in number, which is what was required to pass through the seven gates. So I inscribed each bead with a rune representing the item of power I was to place into it, and then put my amulet, helmet, cloak, and my clothing into these seven beads, bonded them to my tongue, and commanded them to fly into action as soon as I opened my mouth. The spell was cast in advance, so that while Nergal’s nth metal manacles could prevent me from casting spells once they were placed on me, they couldn’t stop the magic I had already performed. I didn’t see those manacles coming – that part wasn’t in any of the stories about Ishtar. So I was lucky I took the precaution to work the spell in advance.”

“But my great fear was that I would be overpowered by Nergal – and this proved to be the case – and then he would possess my meh, especially the Amulet of Anutu. I couldn’t let him possess the amulet – he would be capable of doing things with it that are far beyond me, far beyond almost anyone – and all of them bad. And if he outright destroyed me, as seemed likely, nothing could stop him from doing so.”

“My only hope was to force him to kill me only by stealing my life-force, and to force his hand I bonded the amulet magically to my heart, so that he couldn’t destroy my body in order to claim it – the amulet would prevent it, or he would destroy the amulet, if that’s possible. But if he took my life-force directly, the symbiotic link to the amulet would be broken in a way the amulet wouldn’t attempt to prevent, because it is unprecedented magic known to Nergal alone. I needed for my body to be intact and ready to attack when Nergal’s own body rejected my life-force, as I hoped it would, and then he would be at his weakest!”

“You see, the reason Nabu was in suspended animation for two millennia – instead of just dead – was because Nergal had tried and failed to steal his vital force, his bāštu. When Nergal failed to do so, he thought it was because he simply wasn’t strong enough at the time to take on the life-force from so powerful a being as Nabu, so he placed the life-force in a sealed chamber and propped up Nabu’s comatose body near it, planning to return and steal the vital force when he deemed himself strong enough to attempt it again. But it was Nergal’s own body that rejected the life-force – his own body successfully preventing the alien bāštu from ‘poisoning’ him. It was Nergal’s own overwhelming power that prevented his ability to gain Nabu’s, and the stronger he made himself, the stronger the resistance to Nabu’s bāštu grew.”

“And so it was with me as well. My life-force is at least half-Cilian, as I breathed in Nabu’s when I released it in the Temple during my discovery of him. It saved my life then, by being strong enough to overcome the poison gas killing my body, as well as my body’s own resistance. And it saved my life just now, by being strong enough to ‘poison’ Nergal and partially disable him, but also, ironically, by being too weak to overcome Nergal’s body’s own incredibly powerful defences. Which were in fact what incapacitated him. He had a severe allergic reaction to me!”

“And he won’t be back?” Inza asked.

“When Nabu defeated him, he left Nergal’s soul to fate. Judgment would come, Nabu determined, or he would be a revenant; Nabu felt that was not for him to decide at that time. He was hopeful for Nergal’s redemption. This time not only was Nergal’s body destroyed and all his atoms cursed to repel one another forever, but I also cursed his soul to a reckoning. He will likely be consigned to the Pit.”

Kent embraced Inza once again and held her close for a long while. When he finally released her, and stared lovingly into her eyes once more, he said, “And now, it’s time to get out of here.”

“We’ll need Neti for that – when they brought me here…” Inza began.

But Fate smiled and cut her short. “No, we won’t. I’ve seen to that, but speaking of Neti, where is that demon…?” Fate walked to the edge of the palace hillside and peered over. He saw Neti walking stiffly but as fast as he could toward the Seventh Gate, the Helmet of Thoth in one hand, the handle of his cage-cart in the other.

“So that’s where my helmet’s gone to,” Fate said, and with the slightest gesture the helmet was ripped from Neti’s grasp and flew up to Fate’s open fist. “I’ll need the items in that cage as well,” he said, and the cage flew away from Neti as if magnetically repulsed by him. “And I need you to stay put, Neti,” Fate shouted down to the demon, who seeing Fate unexpectedly alive, had started running toward the gate. Fate reached out his hand and an odd quiver of distortion raced through the air toward Neti, enveloping him in its bubble. The demon ran and ran, but he remained in place. The cage-cart lay abandoned outside the warp bubble.

“You’re just going to exhaust yourself, Neti, so you might as well just stop running. You’re in a spacetime loop that prevents you from gaining ground,” Fate shouted at the demon.

Turning to Inza, he said, “Ready to go, dear?”

“What, and leave all this?” Inza asked, laughing, and she swept her arms about her, as if to embrace her surroundings. Only a few truly lost souls remained. Most of those that had not been decimated in the battle had been released when Nergal’s hold on them vanished with him. The palace was in ruins; the ground below the dais was literally scorched.

“Yes, sorry, dear, but the holiday’s over. Back to the grind of morning coffee and strawberries and crossword puzzles in the Tower,” Fate replied with a smile as he slipped his helmet back on his head. “Okay, let’s go,” he said, sweeping his wife up in his arms and flying off the dais and down toward Neti. Inza kicked a leg out dramatically and planted a kiss on Fates shining helmet. “My hero,” she mooned. Fate laughed. God, he’d missed this woman.

They landed in front of Neti. Inza smiled and wagged a finger at him while Fate added wings to the wheeled cart so it could float along behind them.

“You can’t get out of here without me,” Neti said. “I’m the key.”

“Oh no, you’re not. You’re only the gatekeeper. You’ve had everyone fooled for millennia, but, you see, I am the only non-Cilian who can read their language, a skill I picked up to understand what Nabu had inscribed in my helmet, knowledge imparted to me by the helmet itself. And the writing above the front of each gate says, essentially, ‘The Key is Your Sacrifice is the Key’ – and it says this on both sides of the gate. So Kur may have been built to be ‘The Earth of No Return’ for the dead, but clearly Nabu left open a way out of Kur for those living souls, and bodies, forced to do business there. Your role was to touch each sacrificial item and then touch the gate, transferring its aura. You lied about this, Neti, and Nergal perverted this cleansing ritual by using it to strip visitors of their power and their dignity, and to confiscate their sacrifices. But this means that the gate can be opened with these imitation objects I created, since they were what I ‘sacrificed,’ and the ritual sanctified.” Fate pointed to the cage containing the counterfeit power objects.

He turned to Neti. “This warp bubble will dissolve when Inza and I are safely returned to the world of the living. You’re going to remain behind as the new King of Kur. You’re not the key, and I’m taking all of my phony meh keys with me, so I suppose you’re stuck here. You might as well enjoy your new title. You’ll only have a few residents remaining, but surely it’s better to rule in Hell than to serve… in Hell?”

“No!” screamed Neti, who had enjoyed the benefits of Nergal’s reign and was not at all interested in ruling over a few dozen sad old ghosts by himself. But Fate and Inza wandered away, arm in arm.

Coming to the Seventh Gate, Fate said, “If I guessed correctly, then my blue bodysuit should open this gate, since it was the last thing I gave up.” He pulled the suit from the gilded cage and pressed it against the massive lock on the gate, which swung open. A few ambitious souls tried to escape with them, but were repulsed by the gate’s magic, which only worked to the will of the bearer of the sacrificial item.

They repeated this ritual six more times, using the knock-off meh to open the remaining gates.

Finally, they passed through the First Gate, and Fate flew himself and Inza up the stone stairway and out of the mouth of Shanidar Cave, then back toward Ur and the Temple of the Annunaki.

Once back in the Temple, Fate quickly set about restoring the statues of the Annunaki, the broken columns, collapsed ceiling, and ruined walls. He even added a spark of melammu to each of the statues, so that when this temple was discovered (again) in the next few years, as he intended for it to be, these statues would have a little bit of extra magical appeal when they thrilled and awed humankind.

He extended the temple beyond the apse where Enlil’s statue stood, creating an entirely new room, a chapel dedicated to Anu, with whose help Fate had survived the god of death – and for that matter, his own death – and helped Earth survive in the process. On the ceiling he put a relief of the equatorial night sky, the seven spheres, and the planets representing the Annunaki; in this sky-map, Marduk represented Mars instead of the disgraced Nergal. On the floor he placed a lapis and emerald mosaic of Ki, the Earth. On the walls he set sconces containing large lozenges of ember (all of which would magically vanish from the temple at the first approach of new ‘discoverers’). Then he knelt, said a quick prayer to honour his divine benefactor, and then he and Inza sealed the temple and started their journey back to the Tower they called home.

When they returned to Salem Tower, Fate and Inza were a little surprised at how much damage had been undone by Nergal’s passing. Many of the priceless artifacts in their home had their own magical integrity that caused them to reassemble themselves once freed of the dark energy keeping them in pieces. Many of the non-magical artifacts the couple had long ago lost any affection for, and those Kent just scattered into motes of microscopic matter that he hoovered out into the forest air outside. Some Inza wanted to repair by hand; others she left for her husband to repair, manually or magically – it was up to him based upon his level of interest in the project.

What claimed Fate’s immediate attention, however, was using the Eye of Merlin to find the missing magicians interrogated by Nergal – Zatanna, Constantine, and Etrigan – and to release them from whatever prisons Nergal had bound them in for safekeeping, as he seemingly had future plans for them. Fate found Zatanna trapped as a background character in a four-color panel of an old issue of Action Comics in a pop culture museum in Nashville. Constantine had been fittingly imprisoned twisted up in a cigarette paper inside a pack of Camel Straights in an unplugged vending machine from 1978, which had been packed away in a corner of the basement of a pub in Sheffield. Etrigan had been imprisoned inside an action figure that bore his likeness that lay in one of the middle strata of a commercial landfill in Mexico.

Finally, his friends and allies rescued, the Temple and Tower restored, and some semblance of normality returned to their lives, Kent Nelson and Inza Cramer sat down to a quiet candlelit dinner. Inza had insisted that her husband wear a suit, her favourite suit, the dark blue one he wore the night he revealed to her that Doctor Fate and Kent Nelson were the same man. (This was after the couple had been reunited in America, years after her studies, and his duties, had forced the young lovers in Egypt to go their separate ways – reunited by, of all people, Wotan!) She had worn a jade gown then, and she wore it now. It was his favourite dress, as well; it brought out the green in her eyes, he said.

At the end of the dinner, after Kent insisted on carting their plates away by hand, they sat quietly, enjoying one another’s company by the light of the three long tapers Inza had lit. They had long ago reached that point in their relationship where they didn’t need to speak to communicate everything. Companionable silence was as pleasant as their playful banter, or professions of love.

After a while, Inza broke the silence with a smile. “What?” Kent asked, with that moony schoolboy-crush smile that she never grew tired of loving and mocking. “You really don’t know what tonight is?” she asked. Kent thought a while. “The spring equinox! Do we set our clocks forward or something?” he asked, laughing. “You’re the worst!” she said, throwing her napkin at him.

“What?” Kent asked again. Inza huffed. “You’re finally starting to act your age. 112 and senile, that is! No, the spring equinox was yesterday. But today is the anniversary of the spring equinox of 1920. This is the 100th anniversary of your meeting Nabu, and the 85th anniversary of the day we met!”

“Oh,” Kent thought. “That’s right – March 20. But it’s not our wedding anniversary – I would’ve remembered that!”

Inza rolled her eyes and laughed. “Okay, you got me there. I admit: you’ve never missed one, and it’s been a long time!”

“So finish your coffee, Dr Nelson,” she said in a come-hither voice that put Ishtar’s breastplate to shame. “Your gift will be waiting for you in our bedroom.”

She rose and sauntered off in the very same sexy stroll that had caught his eye in a marketplace in Alexandria so long ago. He wanted to jump up and grab her there and then and carry her off to their bed, but he waited instead, tempering his desire with the sadness of the occasion, for it was also the anniversary of the death of his father. That’s life, he mused, always bittersweet.

But he was a lucky man, because in his case the sweet far outweighed the bitter. He stood up and walked slowly to the bedroom, following the trail of discarded clothes that would lead the Doctor of Archaeology once more to his greatest find.

#drfate #doctorfate #doctor fate #dr fate #jla #jsa #justice league #justice society #fantasy #fiction #dc comics #superhero #supreme sorcerer #master mage #kent nelson #inza cramer #nabu

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drfate · 4 years ago

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Dr Fate: In the Dungeon of the Damned

An old school Dr Fate novel by Rex F Dorgan

Chapter 4 – The Dungeon of the Damned

Doctor Fate steeled himself for Nergal’s imminent attack.

Nergal had dispatched his statue-minions in what Fate assumed was a puppet-pageant staged by the death god for his own amusement, or at most an exercise to get the measure of his opponent, and Fate had disposed of these pawns as the game demanded.

And now, the scrimmage played out, the prologue completed, the opening feints dodged and countered, Fate had no doubt that Nergal would at any moment come bursting through a door, or ceiling, or dimensional portal, and then the real contest would begin, and Earth’s greatest sorcerer would be in for the fight of his life.

But the seconds ticked by into minutes, and the minutes had become almost an hour before Fate had to admit to himself that he was going to have to be the one seek out Nergal. He found this a bit perplexing; Nergal had already gone to the effort of seeking him out, had launched the first attack, and had then laid an elaborate trap to further toy with him. It seemed the next step; outright, full-force attack was a foregone conclusion.

But what if, thought Fate, reassessing the situation, the trap was not for spectacle or reconnaissance after all, but had been a serious effort on Nergal’s part to destroy him? What if Nergal was lying low now because the magic required to raise powerful gods from the dead in the form of their animated stone idols, complete with all their own life-force and eldritch power, while still maintaining complete control of them, had exhausted his powers? This thought had actually not occurred to Fate because his battle with the Annunaki idols had not taxed his own power that greatly, his battle with Enlil and his tapping into the amulet to dispose of Zuen notwithstanding. So many combatants in such a confined space had actually made it easy for Fate to use them against one another, and to use their own powers against themselves. Nergal had had to expend enormous amounts of mystic energy to pull off his trap, whereas Fate had simply to, more than anything, use his wits to triumph. The thought that Nergal was depleted whereas he himself was not gave Fate hope: there might be limits to Nergal’s dark magic after all, and those limits might be within the outer bounds of Fate’s own power.

But that hope was tempered by the most obvious implication of his enemy’s failure to appear: Fate would have to seek Nergal out – and to do so he would have to confront him in the death-god’s own realm, where Nergal controlled the battlefield. For Fate knew exactly how to find him, how to enter the death-god’s dark realm – and what it would cost him to do so. Nevertheless, if, as he suspected, the battle in the Temple of the Annunaki had wearied Nergal more than it had Fate, then there was no time to waste in confronting the god of death while he was at less than full strength.

Fate dropped to his knees in contemplation and prayer. He called out to Anu to steel him for what lay ahead and, as if in response, his mind was filled with the image of his beloved Inza, the mere thought of whom had always given him all the strength he needed. He rose, and prepared to exit, when he turned instead and went over to the remains of Ishtar’s statue. There in the heap of rubble on the ground, lay her meh, the adornments, her weapons – the means by which she directed her power and the source of much of it. Fate picked the lapis necklace out of the rubble and undid the clasp holding the slender gold chain – as slight as spider silk – together to form the necklace’s three loops. He pulled off seven beads, and, with a pinpoint beam of golden light from his finger, etched a pictograph on each one, and dropped these beads into a pouch in his belt. Then, without further delay, he bounded up into the air, passing like a ghost through the temple roof, flying north and east with the speed of a fighter jet.

Nergal would be in his palace in the underworld dimension of Kur, a realm for lost souls established by none other than Nabu as one of his first tasks on Earth. Humankind had in those early days of civilization learned the ways of necromancy long before it was ready to deal with the consequences of what it unleashed, and thus early civilization was haunted by lost souls inappropriately summoned from the the Pit or even the Blessed Realm back to Earth, with no way back to where they belonged. Ghosts were a huge problem, and Nabu needed to give humans back control of their world from the spirits that were threatening to overrun it.

To solve this problem, Nabu established what was, in essence, a home for wayward spirits. He found a monstrously large cavern underground in the mountainous region of what was now north-eastern Iraq, on the border with Iran and Turkey. He then located the cavern’s exact analogue on an Earth in another dimension that in its Cambrian era had seen all life on it, intelligent and otherwise, destroyed in a disastrous cosmic accident – and which was now on its surface a barren hellscape with a poisonous atmosphere. Nabu magically linked the two caverns together, creating a dimensional portal between the two, and established seven magical gates to separate them. He rescued a fallen spirit, Neti, and granted him freedom from the Pit in exchange for Neti’s eternal commitment to guard these gates.

Nabu then christened this new realm by combining the Sumerian words for Earth, Ground, and Darkness to create the name Kurnugû, meaning “Earth of No Return.” This was later shortened to simply “Kur.” To manage this land of the lost, he recruited Ishtar’s sister Ereshkigal, a sorceress with an unusual talent for necromancy and an equally unusual empathy for the abandoned souls of the dead. Ereshkigal took these lost souls under her wing; deep underground – in this cavern linked in Earth’s dead twin world – she gave them a home. She built a palace for them and attempted to restore some of the comforts of home, even magically displaying on the cavern ceiling a daytime scene and the night sky, alternating the scenes to match the sky of the outside world.

Then Nergal came, killed her husband Gugulana, and usurped her kingdom. Here, away from the prying eyes of his sorcerer peers – where none, not even “gods” could come and go – he was free to continue his efforts to make himself the greatest power in the world by any means necessary. Ereshkigal was consigned to the role of consort, his “wife,” but more truly his slave.

And then Ishtar – called Innana by the Sumerians at the time – learned of her sister’s plight and hatched a scheme to attempt to save her. Her misadventure was recounted in The Descent of Inanna, one of the oldest recorded myths in history, which describes how Inanna made her way past the seven gates but was then taken captive, only freed by the intervention of the mighty Enki.

But many of the particulars of Ishtar’s Descent were recorded incorrectly in later versions of this story – the ones which survive to the present day, whose authors were manipulated by none other than Nergal himself. In these stories, Ishtar, not satisfied with being queen of Heaven and Earth, desires to claim dominion over the Underworld as well. These versions have her being captured and killed by Ereshkigal, only to be restored to life by the intervention of Enki and the (unwilling) sacrifice of her husband Dumuzid, who takes her place. In these versions, Ishtar is deemed guilty of – and judged and convicted and sentenced to die for – the crime of hubris.

But in fact, Ishtar travelled to Kur to rescue her sister from the virtual slavery to which Nergal subjected her and the other denizens of the underworld. And Ishtar was not killed, although Nergal came close to having this done, but was rescued by Enki before she could be executed. And while Dumuzid did in fact travel to the underworld after Ishtar had been released, it was not to take her place but to avenge his wife’s honour by thrashing Nergal in battle. Dumuzid was never seen again. Nergal denied all wrongdoing, claiming that Dumuzid never made it to the underworld and had perhaps simply abandoned Ishtar, but many, including Nabu, suspected the worst.

So it was that with this story of Ishtar’s journey to the underworld in mind that Fate swiftly travelled now to the secret gateway to Kur, hidden inside a cave in the Zagros Mountains, where Ishtar had made her descent.

He flew stealthily, invisibly, undetectable on all but the seventh plane, and in less than an hour, Fate’s destination was in view – Shanidar Cave in the Bradost Range of the Zagros. Shanidar was famous for the Neanderthal skeletons discovered by archaeologists there, but for Fate it was better known as the entrance to the underworld. For a seemingly innocuous stone slab on the floor in the northwest corner of the cave was in fact a hatch concealing a stone staircase that led 999 steps down to the first of the Seven Gates of Kur.

Fate landed on the side of the mountain from which the cave’s mouth beckoned. There was no one present, but he nevertheless stepped behind a small group of boulders, where he spread out the lapis beads he had taken from Ishtar’s necklace on the flat top of a massive, chest-high rock in the centre of the group of boulders. He removed his helmet, his cloak, his amulet, and other possessions and laid them out on the rock as well. One by one he tapped the golden inscription on each bead and a flash of light lit the enclosure, the bead glowed as if lit from within, and then the glow died down. When he finished, he scooped the beads up in his right hand and breathed in deeply, covering his mouth with his hand as he did so. His lungs were his weakness, and as he took a long inhalation, he blessed the air to protect them for his journey into the poisonous realm beneath. Then he walked slowly into the cave, found the stone hatch, with a gesture moved it to one side, and descended the dark staircase. He commanded the hatch back into place behind him.

Entering the belly of the beast, Fate was now determined to pick up the pace, so as to give his enemy as little time as possible to prepare for him. He trotted down the 999 stairs instead of flying; he didn’t want to use any magic that might alert Nergal to his presence. Soon he was facing the First Gate, and Neti came out to greet him, carrying a carved stick with a skull for a handle, its slender end tipped with a silver point. He was smirking. “The living are not allowed past these gates,” the demon said.

Fate said nothing but proceeded up to the gate, examining it. Its power was obvious, even on the third plane. Nabu, as usual, had outdone himself. These gates could not be stormed.

Fate gestured to Neti that he wished to proceed.

The demon laughed. “The last living being to pass these gates was a goddess,” he sneered. “And do you know what became of her?”

Fate nodded.

“Then you know I’ll need one of your possessions – or should I say, one of your defences? – before you can pass.”

Fate nodded again.

“A mute, eh?” the demon snickered. “Someone cut out your tongue? Enki sent a band of eunuchs with their tongues cut out to rescue Ishtar that time, you know. The God of the Cosmic Ocean was that afraid that Lord Nergal might torture some forbidden magic knowledge from his emissaries that he had that done. They were all so frightened of Lord Nergal, those mighty Annunaki, like little rabbits. All of ’em but Nabu, and look what happened to him. Heh heh heh.”

“So,” the demon continued when he had stopped chuckling to himself. “Queen Ishtar started with the crown, so I suppose we’ll take that fancy battle helmet first.”

Fate removed his helmet and handed it to Neti. The demon looked inside and was delighted to see the carvings therein. “Speak of that devil Nabu!” he exclaimed. “This is his handiwork. See?” Neti pointed to the archway above the gate. It was inscribed with Cilian writing, as was the inside of Fate’s helmet. “No one knows what any of that means. The cagey old man got it from somewhere very old, though, I reckon – it’s powerful, powerful magic runes whatever else it is.”

The demon was fascinated by the helmet, and studied its interior for a long time. Finally, he looked up and realized he had not studied its owner’s features, which were themselves fascinating. “What kind of creature are you with gold hair and sapphire eyes? Never seen a man like you, nor spirit neither. Did Nabu make you? Or call you from some other realm? Has Nabu returned, like Nergal? That would be a great battle, now – but Nergal is more powerful than ever, much more powerful. Nabu had better watch out. You his messenger?”

Fate did not answer. Interestingly, Neti had come from a time so ancient that the humans he terrorized, probably Ubaidians or early Sumerians, were not yet even aware of northern Europeans.

“You are a mute, then,” Neti said. “If you’re from Nabu, tell him it’s pathetic to see him sinking to Enki’s level, sending me proxies with their tongues cut out.” He drew forward a silver cage on wheels, opened it, dropped the helmet inside, and bolted it shut. Then he approached the gate and put his hand on the lock; the gate swung open.

“Legend has it I have the keys to the Seven Gates,” the demon snorted. “Wrong! I AM the key. Only my touch can open these gates, and it can’t be forced, and it can’t be done without the travellers leaving behind a gift of personal power.”

Fate stepped forward to pass through the gate, and Neti followed behind him, dragging the silver cage-carriage. In another 999 paces, they came to the Second Gate. Fate turned to face Neti. “Here, Ishtar relinquished the beaded necklace she draped over her breasts. I reckon that cloak will do for you.” Fate removed his cloak and handed it to the demon, who looked it over approvingly. “Melammu,” he said. “It even affects us spirits, you know. Even in Faerie, it will command respect. Doesn’t thrill us like it does the man-monkeys who worship it, but they’re easily amazed, amused, and abused, aren’t they?”

Fate didn’t respond. Neti spit and approached the gate. “This stinks of Nabu. Just like him to send a mute, knowing I’ve been down here for millennia with no one to talk to and no news of the upperworld!” he said with disgust. They once again passed through the gate, but this time Neti led, in more of a hurry now that he’d determined he would not be entertained by this particular visitor. At least not until Nergal got his hands on him.

At the Third Gate, Neti said, “Here Queen Ishtar had to relinquish her most powerful weapon – her lapis sceptre. That was quite a beauty. Powerful, too. Nergal was even a little afraid of it. ‘Make sure you take away her sceptre,’ he said. ‘Do it early. Don’t give her the chance to sneak that thing in here.’ For someone who rules by fear, he can be kind of a coward at times.” Nergal snickered. “I shouldn’t be saying that, but you can’t talk and even Nergal can’t see or hear in here. Well, he used to be a bit of a coward. Not so much for a while now. But like I said, he’s way more powerful now than he ever was. That kind of makes a man, or a god, less fearful.”

Neti looked at Fate but couldn’t read his expression, which seemed impassive, stony and stoic. “Now, where was I?” he asked no one in particular. “Oh yes, most powerful talisman. Ishtar. Sceptre. So for you that would be that amulet around your neck.”

Fate touched it and raised his eyebrows as if to ask, “This? This amulet?”

“Yeah, that, you stupid mute!” said Neti. “You think you’re fooling anyone? Like Nabu did? I know what that thing is. I can’t even see its power on the seventh plane, and I’ve been looking since I first laid eyes on you, but I’ve seen it in action. Nabu built these gates with it, and he was near dead himself when he was done using it. That thing has cosmic level power. So… hand it over.”

Fate pulled the amulet over his head and handed it to Neti, who place it in the cage. ”Nergal is going to be very happy about this,” he said, smiling widely. The demon then walked up to the gate and, placing his hand on it, swung it open wide. Fate and Neti passed through, side by side.

When they came to the Fourth gate, Neti said, “Here Ishtar surrendered her breastplate. What an odd piece of work that was – a singing breastplate! I’ve heard of the famous talking mace, but I suppose that could be useful in battle – especially if you’re Ningirsu and probably dumber than the average mace. But a breastplate? ‘Come hither, young man,’” Neti said I a mocking voice. “Men fall for tricks like that. Stupid monkeys.”

Fate again remained quiet, looking forward impassively, although he turned slightly red, which Neti didn’t notice. His run-in with Ishtar was too recent, and too embarrassing.

“So you don’t have a breastplate, Mute, being a man and all, but you do have a belt. I’ll take that, if you please.”

Fate removed the Belt of Gilgamesh and handed it to the demon, who admired it before placing it in the cage.

“I’m starting to think Nabu didn’t outfit you after all,” Neti said. “That helmet, that cloak, that amulet! This belt. These are some powerful toys. Far too powerful to be dressing up a messenger in. Did you steal these off ol’ Nabu? Did you beat him in battle? Nergal did, but even so Nabu still got the better of him. You’re making me curious, Mute. Did you kill him? Or just find his dead body and steal these goodies off him?” The demon was smiling wickedly. “It would serve the old bastard right, for giving me this job. ‘Saving me from Hell,’ he said. “By making me gatekeeper to a different Hell? Bastard, serves him right if you took him out.” Neti twisted his head back and forth, studying Fate’s features, looking for a sign that he had guessed right about Nabu’s fate. But Fate remained stone-faced. Neti sighed in disgust, grabbed his cage-cart, and dragged it through the gate, with Fate following.

Another 999 steps, another gate.

“The Fifth Gate,” Neti announced. “Here Ishtar had to give up her gold ring. She could cast illusions with it, very convincing. Even fooled some of her fellow ‘gods.’ Couldn’t fool me, or any spirit, however. We don’t look on the first plane too much – things are much more interesting on the higher planes. So, I suppose this is where you part with those things on your hands – those gloves.”

Fate removed the golden gauntlets from his hands and gave them to Neti. The demon tossed them in his cage. “Melmamu. That seems to be all these things have going for them. Well, I suppose that’s better than a ring that was only good for fooling men.” Neti bolted the cage shut again, opened the gate, and the pair walked on to the Sixth Gate.

“Here Ishtar gave me her gold bracelets. Made from the shackles that once bound the mighty demon Lamashtu. They were designed to make those that wear them compliant slaves; they even worked to some degree on Lamashtu, and that was one powerful bitch of a demon. But Ishtar reversed their magic and turned it outward – she could make any man into her slave by flashing them in front of him. Men!” the demon scoffed. “Has there ever been anything weaker-willed?”

Fate almost smiled at this and again blushed a little. This time Neti noticed. “You know what I mean. You are one of those monkeys, I think, despite your strange hair and those weird eyes. Weak creatures, the lot of you. Except Nergal. But I reckon he stopped being a man a long time ago. Okay, so what do you have left?” Neti asked. “I suppose it’s time I took those boots.” Fate complied and handed over his melammu boots. Neti tossed them into the cage, locked it, opened the Sixth Gate, and the two walked on, Fate walking the next 999 steps barefoot.

They came at last to the Seventh Gate. It was larger than the rest, and more ornate; it also appeared to be made of some substance altogether different from the other gates, which had all been constructed of some silvery metal. The Seventh Gate was pitch-black, a black as dark as anything he had ever seen, and yet it glowed with a strange, fierce radiation.

“That gate is made of pure negative energy, contained in its own little gate-shaped universe. Nabu really outdid himself with this one. Even if you could get through the other gates – and I’m not saying you, or anyone, except Nergal, could – this gate would stop you. Nothing can touch that gate and live. It sucks you into its universe where you are instantly annihilated.”

Neti turned to him and flashed a hideous, leering smile. “This is where Ishtar had nothing left to give but her robe. It was a powerful artifact, make no mistake. It allowed her to walk on air, walk through walls, through worlds even – it was a sheer as a silk veil, and it turned reality itself into a veil that she could pass through like it was smoke. Here, I made her give it up. She refused. I wouldn’t let her pass. Eventually, she gave in. She stripped – not seductively at all, not that that would affect me or anything, but you’d have thought she would have tried. Seduction was her great power, right? No, she was very reluctant, and I guess feeling too powerless and humiliated to try. I reckon most of her power was contained in her meh; stripped naked she was almost powerless, and certainly helpless before the power of Nergal!”

Neti continued to leer wickedly at Fate, looking for his reaction. As before, Fate said nothing. He just faced Neti with the same cold stony stare as before.

The frustrated demon sighed and said, with a little disgust, “I was trying to be subtle. I can see that won’t work with a stupid mute like you. You have nothing left but that suit now. Never seen anything like it, in any of the worlds. Looks damned uncomfortable. Like armour made from the pelt of some weird hairless blue monster. It also looks magical. Anyway, it’s all you have left. You’ll have to hand it over if you want to pass the final gate.”

Fate had been expecting this from the minute he knew he would have to enter the underworld to save Inza. He knew he would have to enter Kur naked and defenceless, with no weapons, seemingly helpless. But he would not be helpless: his helmet and amulet and cloak enhanced his power, but were by no means the source of it, or even the greatest part of it. He peeled off the celestial body suit given him by Nabu from the neck down, sliding first one arm out the neck hole and then the next, pulling the elastic material down over his chest and stomach, and then he lifted one leg at a time out of it. He handed it to Neti. The demon was appraising him and laughing. “Well, Mute,” he said, “at least now we know you’re not a eunuch as well.” Fate would have liked to have laughed at this, but the situation was too demeaning. Whatever the origin of this ritual, with Neti as his proxy, Nergal seemed to use it to not only disarm but also degrade his opponents.

Neti put the suit in the wheeled cage and then rummaged through the cage contents as if looking for something. Fate stood facing the gate expectantly, but Neti made no move to open it yet. Instead he pulled something from the cage. It was a set of manacles linked in a loop of chains; Fate saw that they were intended to lock a captive’s wrists at the waist, with one chain in front and the other in back, like a belt.

“Nergal insists,” Neti said, smirking even as Fate looked alarmed. The demon grabbed Fate by the left wrist, but the super-sorcerer twisted his wrist upward and then smacked the demon with a backhand across his face. Neti went skidding across the gravel path on his bottom. He jumped to his feet, shouting angrily.

“And that’s why Nergal insists on you upstarts wearing these! I will not be endangered doing the job Nabu gave to me and me alone. You will not pass the Seventh Gate until you put these on!” Fate wanted to remind Neti that he had been complaining bitterly about his job assignment just an hour ago, but he said nothing, and instead offered his left wrist to Neti to be manacled. The demon slapped the cuff on Fate’s left wrist and bolted it shut as tightly as he could, but the metal felt soft, strangely pliable, like rubber. The demon then ran one of the chains behind Fate’s back and then cuffed his right wrist. This cuff too felt soft and malleable, and the chains drooped as if they were half-melted. Neti ran the other chain in front of Fate’s waist and fastened it into the left cuff. “There,” he said. “I believe that will hold you.” Fate felt an immediate pulse of energy rip through his body and the manacles tightened and hardened, and the chains shrank until they were taut around his abdomen and lower back.

Fate tested the chains. They held firm. He pulled harder, straining, but he couldn’t break or even twist the metal.

Neti laughed. “Those manacles ‘read’ your body to learn how strong you are. Then they adjust their level of strength to be strong enough that you can’t break them. Then they harden like cooling iron. They learned how strong you were the minute they read you and made themselves just a little too tough for you to break. Have fun trying, however.”

No matter, thought Fate, my true power is in my magic, so he attempted a spell to release the manacles, but to his dismay nothing happened.

Neti had watched Fate’s fruitless attempts to escape by means of magic. “Oh did I not mention that these manacles can adjust to match your strength because they’re made of nth metal? And what’s the most important thing to know about nth metal?”

Neti seemed to be expecting an answer, but Fate remained silent, although inside he was alarmed at this development.

“Oh yes, Mute. You have no tongue. Well the most important thing to know about nth metal, if you’re a sorcerer at least, is that it resists and repels magic. How do you think we rendered Ishtar totally powerless, so that she was no threat to Nergal? Those same bracelets. Whatever else you might have been before, you’re just a man, now. And you have to face the most powerful being in the world. Heh heh heh. I don’t know what you came here for, but you’re not going to get it. You came to the land of the dead, and dead you will be very soon, Mute!”

This was a development Fate had not prepared for. Stripped of his strength and magic, he had yet another trick up his sleeve, so attempted to use his ability to manipulate matter at the atomic level – but the nth metal was impervious to this Cilian technology, as well, and the manacles had been magically contrived to prevent him using it on his own molecular structure. It appeared that he was, in a way he had not been for almost a century, as helpless as a normal man could be.

Neti bolted his wheeled cage shut, then walked up to the enormous Seventh Gate and put his hand on the keyhole. The gates swung open. Neti poked Fate in the back with his stick and said, “March on, Mute. Nergal is going to love this!”

They entered the enormous cavern that was the land of Kur. Its dome was a kilometre in height, and its expanse was so wide across that the naked eye – the only kind Fate had left to him now – could not see its far walls. It was packed with gloomy-faced spirits in various forms of dress or undress; it was easy to distinguish between those that had been well-off in life and those that had lived lives of difficulty and poverty, and between those that sucked up to Nergal in this life and those that did not. What a horrible place, thought Fate, that with everything else they had to bear in this dismal realm these poor souls couldn’t even escape the social inequities of Earth, or slavish obeisance to tyrants.

He also noticed that there were countless deformities among these souls. Their bodies were ectoplasmic, and reflected their personal essence, but this was not the Pit; these souls were for the most part simply lost, misplaced by the stupid misuse of necromancy by amateurs in the early days of wizardry on Earth. Deformities and hideousness, though common in the Pit, should not be the norm here. And yet, they seemed to be.

On the other hand, there were many exquisitely beautiful creatures, women and men alike, among the ranks of these lost. Too many. Such beauty should have been even more rare here, as it was far more difficult to recall a being from the Blessed Realm than the Pit. Fate had assumed all the Annunaki had been recalled from the Blessed Realm and marvelled again at the power Nergal would have had to exercise to pull their souls from that formidable fortress. He wondered how many other noble souls he had stolen and enslaved here.

In the distance now Fate could see a mesa rising from the floor of the cavern; it appeared to be two hundred metres in diameter, if not more. Spreading across its peak was an enormous palace, which was an odd mix of Babylonian and Early Greek architectural styles. It was meant to resemble one of the great ziggurats of Babylon or Borsippa, but it was not tiered in the same manner, and more than anything resembled an overwrought ant hill.

“There, Mute,” said Neti, “is Ganzir, the Palace of Nergal. I wager you’ve never seen anything like it in your life.”

That is true…, thought Fate, but not in the way you mean. He had to remind himself that Neti had been down here a long time, and had never even seen the epic structures of Mesopotamia, let alone present-day Dubai, Shanghai, or even grand old New York. But Neti’s point was well-taken, if not taken as intended: this palace was like nothing he had ever seen before. Its ugliness was monumental, as was the ambition that had raised it.

They came to a staircase carved into the side of the mesa. Let me guess, thought Fate, 999…

“999 steps up, Mute,” said Neti, grinning his hideous grin at Fate and pointing up the staircase. “Although I suppose you have already guessed as much.” The pair ascended the stairs. Without his super-strength or magic, Fate found the ascent taxing. He might have the body of a 35-year old man, but when they had finally reached the summit, he felt every one of his 112 years. He was winded and sweating profusely. And, as befit a helllscape, Kur had the heat and humidity of the American Gulf Coast in August. It even stank like a refinery.

He bent over to catch his breath, but Neti poked him with his pointed staff until he started moving again. The chains didn’t help his progress. Nth metal is usually almost weightless, as his helmet and amulet showed – its most typical use, Neti’s belief aside, was to defy gravity, not magic. And yet these manacles seemed calibrated to manipulate gravity to increase their weight, adjusted again to the strength of the captive they bound, so as to discourage any attempts at flight. Fate supposed that their weight would also increase with any increase in the speed of his movements, as well. Nergal would have wanted to maximize their petty brutality in any way he could.

As they approached the palace entrance, the spirits around him and Neti grew into a particularly ghoulish crowd; these spirits seemed as deformed and depraved as any he’d seen in his epic journey to the Pit decades ago. They reached out for him and some even managed to reach him, clawing at his arms or pulling at his hair. Neti swatted them away with his stick, and if they persisted, he poked them with it; the silvery tip caused them to howl as if stuck with a cattle prod. Metals are particularly vexing to spirits, Fate knew; he supposed he should keep this knowledge top of mind for the remainder of his stay here, a stay which, unfortunately at the present moment looked like it might be very brief. Then the image of Inza flashed into his mind’s eye and he felt a surge of good old-fashioned human adrenaline coursing through his veins to give him courage and strength and make him alert.

They came to the threshold of the palace entrance, which was at least thirty metres wide and twenty metres tall. “In you go, Mute,” Neti said, prodding him forward with his staff. Fate entered the hall, which was enormous. The ceiling was as high as the ziggurat itself; it was not a residence but a show of power, after all. In the middle of the floor of this enormous space was a dais ten metres high and perhaps thirty metres in diameter, and upon this dais sat an enormous throne. There were no drapes the colour of a late Rothko or chandeliers made of human skeletons in this palace, as Hollywood might have imagined a Palace of the Damned, but instead a great deal of gold (or brass) scrollwork and crystal and purple velvet and even what appeared to be chrome; the aesthetic was not Schoolgirl Goth but Mobster Arriviste.

The massive figure on the throne stood up and, spotting his new guest, laughed a booming and yet somehow still shrill laugh at the plight of the captive Fate. The assembled throngs – servants, sycophants, and social climbers alike – all started laughing as well; tittering at first, becoming more full-throated and fake-jovial as they became assured by Nergal’s smile that this was the proper response.

“Bring him here!” boomed the voice, and in response two winged creatures snatched Fate and Neti from the floor and dragged them through the air, setting them down on the dais facing the throne.

Nergal’s aspect was even more terrifying in person, and without his powers it was all Fate could do to keep fear in check; puluhtu oozed from Nergal like rot. Although he was sitting, Fate guessed Nergal stood three metres tall, and his massive shoulders were probably half that wide. His skin was bluish grey and his face more hideous than what he had seen in Merlin’s scrying glass. His hands were not human but resembled long-nailed claws, and while there was a discernible thumb on both paws, there were only four fingers in total on each. Even Nergal’s unbelievable power could not undo what his essence revealed to the world at large. Fate wondered who had bestowed this curse on him; he suspected Ishtar, early in her dealings with him, before his power would have been strong enough to repel it, so that it grew with him and became a part of him.

“You are not what I expected, at all. You are a man, not a demon from another world, as we all know now that Nabu was.” Nergal said, stroking his scraggly beard and eyeing him.

“He is like no man I have ever seen,” said Neti.

“He is coloured like a barbarian from the northern wastes,” said one spirit in a haughty tone, apparently more recently arrived to this place than Neti, but still a few millennia behind on her current events.

“Silence!” Nergal roared. From the dais to the main floor, the room was immediately hushed.

“Those barbarians have been ascendant for several hundred years now in the world of men,” Nergal said. “At first I was disgusted to see this; it was unnatural and repulsive. But I quickly warmed to these men. They are as bloodthirsty as any of their kind are, but they seek ever more efficient ways to kill. I realized in a very short time that I owed my very renewed existence to these barbarians.”

Nergal continued. Fate tried not to make a move, not even blink, for everything he learned now might be of use when the inevitable battle commenced.

“Nabu the Treacherous, Nabu the Demon, tricked me. Somehow, I still know not how, he destroyed me even after I had triumphed and turned him into a living statue. But he only destroyed my body; he left my soul to fate. And fate dictated that I should wander the ruins of Babylon forever, as punishment for my hand in its destruction. So for ages my wasted, almost mindless soul drifted over this land, a revenant with no purpose, not even to terrify. Stupid and insubstantial as a shadow. Djinn mocked me, for they could see me; men could sense me and were repulsed. And then, thirty years ago exactly, that changed. A major war started here, greater than any that had happened since the invasion of the Persians, but it was far, far greater in its scope than even Xerxes’ destruction of Babylon. On one side of this war there were over 300,000 men! But on the other side, the side of the barbarian invaders, there were 700,000! A million men in all! 50,000 soldiers died, almost none of them barbarians, and another 100,000 of the local people died.”

“It was a bloodbath, and I was there to bathe in it! First, the events slowly permeated the thick fog of my revenant consciousness; my purpose, my reason for existence, was flowing like a river around me – Chaos! Misery! War! DEATH!”

“My intelligence grew as the conflict raged, until my essence once more had a mind worthy of the term. And then… it was feeding time! Bodies dying everywhere, and there I was, ready to lap up all the life-force of the expiring humans around me! It was a feast that was of short duration but enormous in the quantity and variety of victuals!”

“From the desert dust I reconstituted my body and infused it with my soul. I found a home in a ruined compound that had belonged to one side or other in that war, and bided my time. The sanctions put in place by the victors against the local population led to another million deaths, and for an entire decade I feasted, and plotted more war and destruction. I would love to say that it was my magical machinations that led to the second, even greater war, the one still ongoing in some measure, but the invaders didn’t need my meddling to plot their return.”

“But… when they did, the death and destruction and terror was on a scale even I could not believe. It took every ounce of my power just to feed, there were so many opportunities to suck away the life-force of the dying! My power grew, and grew, and finally these barbarians had given to me that thing I had worked all my life for – the thing I literally died for – enough power to make me the ruler of this world. And now, it is finally time to assert myself, and so I struck out at the one being who might have a prayer of stopping me – Nabu’s apprentice, and the current unworthy owner of the Amulet of Anutu. Which is now mine,” and here he gestured to the golden cage.

“And look at him now!” Nergal scoffed, gesturing at the naked, helpless Fate. Some of those in attendance laughed; others just bowed their heads in pity, or in despair. Fate noticed that those avoiding his gaze were the crippled and misshapen. In particular, his attention was fixated on an old woman who somehow seemed very familiar.

Nergal noticed Fate staring at the old woman and said, “Oh, I forgot my manners. Manners are very important to the invading barbarians, you know! I’ve socialized with many of them. I take a different form to do so, of course. I can change my appearance in defiance of fate – sometimes for hours at a time!” Nergal made it sound like a boast, but it was a profound admission of perhaps his one weakness.

“May I introduce to you, ‘Doctor’ Fate, the famous Ishtar, goddess of beauty and love!”

Fate couldn’t help himself. He knew his jaw had dropped open and his face had become a mask of disgust and quickly returned his feature to their stoic stoniness, but the damage was done. The old woman was rightly described as a hag; her face was a mess of wrinkles and moles, some of them sprouting unsightly black hairs. She was short and hunchbacked, and her fingers were twisted and gnarled and there was no doubt that she was afflicted by an ectoplasmic form of arthritis.

But worse, as if to highlight her grotesquery, she was dressed in a sheer gown, so that her shrivelled, drooping breasts, her wrinkled potbelly, and her withered legs were all visible. The debased goddess averted his gaze, her face downcast in shame.

Fate told himself he should not be shocked at the extent of Nergal’s cruelty, but he was. For as long as he had lived and with all that he had seen, unnecessary, seemingly mindless cruelty still always surprised and outraged him.

“Oh, and while I am making introductions, or perhaps I should say re-acquainting you, let me re-introduce you to rest of the ‘mighty’ Annunaki,” Nergal said with a delighted sneer. He pointed to a young man, a boy really, skinny as a concentration camp survivor, who dragged his broken lower half behind him as if it were the tail of a snake. The look on his face was one that signalled he had moved on from abject humiliation to complete despair.

“This fine specimen of manhood is none other than Ningirsu, the mighty, once the strongest man, or ‘god’ alive. Apparently, he hasn’t been eating his Wheaties, has he, barbarian?”

Fate stared on in silent disgust as Nergal moved on to the next object of his mockery. He pointed to a blind old man, who stumbled and tripped when Nergal called him forward. The sycophants laughed as if they had never seen anything so amusing.

“Meet Utu. Well, you’ve already met, before, but this is the real Utu – the god of the sun, blinded by his own arrogance. Once he thought he was the light of the world. And now he lives in complete darkness. Ha ha ha ha ha.”

Nergal turned to Fate and, flashing a wicked grin, said, “I just love ectoplasmic bodies – so malleable. As malleable as the minds of barbarian warlords.”

The death-god then commanded a man-sized drooling baby, complete with diaper and rattle, forward. From the symbols on the rattle Fate knew this to be –

“Zuen. Now a lunatic. Fitting for the moon god, no? Drools incessantly. Can’t form a coherent thought. Shakes a mean rattle though – and those temper tantrums! Trapped somewhere in that big idiot body is a functioning soul with a functioning mind, but who knows where? Even I don’t.”

Despite Nergal’s baiting, Fate held his pity, and his anger, in check.

“Oh, now this is a splendid former ‘god’ – Enki!” said Nergal as a gaggle of his fawning acolytes led around a man clad only in a loin cloth and sandals with a bald head and no features – no eyes, ears, nose, mouth. His face was as smooth and empty as the Phantom Stranger’s.

“Enki humiliated me in front of this very court once, by ‘rescuing’” – here Nergal made air quotes, something he did a lot, actually, an annoying habit he might have picked up from a NATO general, or a defence contractor, or from watching too much American TV – “that proud slut Ishtar from the punishment phase of her trial. Now I’m not sure what there is to him – I suppose he can still feel – I reserve the right for all my slaves to know when I’m beating them – but what’s a man, or even a ‘god’” – air quotes again – “without some kind of tether to the world? Other than the lash, I mean.”

Fate continued to wear a mask of outward equanimity while inside he was seething with rage. He started to wonder if his triumph over the Annunaki had been so relatively easy because most of them were disoriented by the fact of having a somewhat functional body, even if it was made of limestone.

“And I’ve saved the best for last,” Nergal continued, repaying Fate’s nonchalance with a flippant air of his own. “Enlil. King of the ‘gods.’ Well, king of this band of grotesque freaks, certainly.”

Trotted out in front of Nergal – literally trotted out, as he was prodded from behind by Neti and his metal-tipped staff – was a hideous dwarf. His head was so large and his neck so slender, he could barely keep it raised as he was made to romp around in front of Fate like a demented child. Like Enki, he was wearing only a loincloth, and his body was covered by patches of animal fur and bald spots, as if he had mange. His forehead protruded like a thick shelf from his skull, and it was covered by a single bushy brow. His eyes were tiny, as were his ears; his nose was wide and long. He could barely keep his tongue in his mouth as he had no lips and only a few teeth, and his tongue was very long. He was the most hideous humanoid Fate had ever seen. He felt a hot wave of simultaneous revulsion, pity, and anger wash over him like a hot wave. And yet still he remained calm, still, and impassive in the face of the death-god.

Fate thought before now that he had taken Nergal’s measure. He thought the war-god/death-god was thoroughly corrupted by his lust for power, and perhaps some desire for revenge on those who had snubbed him. But Fate saw now that others had not avoided him all his life not out of snobbery or pettiness, but because Nergal was sociopathic, psychopathic, his ambition driven by his cruelty and not vice versa. Nabu had clearly seen this; why had Fate only just now come to this realization? It didn’t matter. This knowledge would make his task easier, if he could somehow figure out how to complete it.

Nergal shooed the Annunaki away, and then said, “Oh, and let me introduce you to my wife.” He didn’t use air quotes when he spoke the word ‘wife,’ but he said it so contemptuously that he didn’t need to. If not for the stage-like setting of the dais, Fate would have missed her. Because the figure brought before him was the height of a Barbie doll. Like many of the other souls rendered grotesque by Nergal, she bowed her head, refusing to look at anyone. The mob jeered and laughed.

“May I present to you Ereshkigal,” he said. “The Queen of Kur. Kur - a delightful domain wherein dwell the happy souls of the ‘gods’ of Sumer, Assyria, Akkad, Babylon. Hundreds of gods, with thousands of names back on Earth. Many – oh, all right, most – of whom I liberated from Earth so that they could live as gods should live, in their own realm, like the gods of Olympus and Asgard. And sadly, many of them were forced to live here in a kind of limbo, while I, their king, was away on business for a few millennia. But I have returned to my rightful place and my subjects are once again living in the happiness I designed for them. Aren’t you happy, gods of Kur?”

A small group of those assembled were fanatically loud in their affirmative reply Nergal’s question, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the generally low energy, low volume response.

Nergal paid no mind. He would punish those who were insufficiently enthusiastic later.

“Well, then, Fate, that’s it for introductions now. I wanted you to see how well your mentor’s friends are doing in my kingdom. I’d introduce you to the truly important denizens of Kur, but we have the slight matter of your execution to attend to. Oh, that reminds me! I have a special guest here to witness the painful death I have planned for you.”

Without looking, Nergal raised his right hand and beckoned with his finger. The crowd around the throne parted and an enormous crystal lozenge, like a giant baguette-cut diamond, drifted through the air and stopped a dozen feet from where Fate stood. Inside this crystalline case was none other than his own beloved Inza. She was still clothed in the sheer black sacrificial gown that she had been wearing when last he saw her, so her death, should he not prevail, was assured. Or worse, she would live on to be abused and tormented by Nergal.

On seeing Fate, she started pounding the walls of her crystal cage, but while he could see her screaming “Kent! Kent!” with tears streaming down her face, her cries were soundless, muted by her prison.

“A nice little prison for such a feisty little bitch, no?” smirked Nergal. “She is in need of a good deal more discipline than you have been giving her, Kent. Oh yes, I know all about you, Kent Nelson. I may have missed the opportunity to influence the invaders’ leadership ranks in order to start that second, glorious war you barbarians brought us, but I have since become very friendly with them. We’ve prolonged the war indefinitely and spread it to half a dozen new countries since! I’m happy to say that I’ve had a hand in that! We’re working on a way to have a war the size of those two you had back in the twentieth century, but we’re afraid we’d just kill everyone at once and too quickly for me to do a proper harvest of their vital energies. It’s a problem, but we’re hard at work on solving it!”

“So yes, I have learned everything the barbarian spy agencies know about you, Doctor Fate/Kent Nelson. Even so, I had to torture a few sorcerers to find out about your tower, hiding in plain sight in the middle of a city as it was. Constantine? Zatanna? Etrigan? Names ring a bell? They didn’t give you up. But I still have them locked away for safekeeping. I plan to ‘eat’ them after I’m done with you. Seems no one misses them much. No, some fellow named Wotan was only too happy to betray you. Not much of a friend, was he? I killed him, so you can thank me for that. He seemed a little too ambitious for me to let live. His life-force was very potent, and tasty. And he had quite a collection of artifacts and books. All of which I now possess.”

Fate tried to remain still and silent, but Nergal was chipping away at his resolve with every word out of his mouth.

“Now, where was I? Oh yes, Inza, the lovely Inza. So beautiful I can’t just stick her in cell, or even a cage. I wanted the whole world to marvel at her lusciousness.” Nergal slurred the last word; it snaked around in his mouth like lubricious ooze. “So, I created this wonderful container for her. My minions called it the Crystal Crypt, but that’s not exactly right. I prefer Chrystalis, because she will be transformed more than killed. Through the kind of discipline that you have not seen fit to exercise, despite it being your marital duty. Yes: it’s time I took a second wife, because mine is no longer up to the task, and, well, you won’t be needing yours, since you will be DEAD and all.”

Still Fate remained silent. His mouth was the same flatline it had been throughout. But he could feel his face burning with anger, and his eyes flashing hatred.

Nergal laughed. He had finally gotten a rise out of the helpless sorcerer’s apprentice.

“So, I’ve talked and talked, and you haven’t gotten a word in edgewise. What say you to all of my marvellous works and pomps? What say you to all my marvellous plans?”

Neti stepped forward and addressed Nergal solicitously, “Master, if I may. The poor fool is a mute. I think perhaps Nabu had his tongue…”

“Shut up, you fool!” sneered Nergal. “Of course he’s not a mute. He whimpers like you’d expect from a servant of Nabu. ‘What have you done with Inza? Inzaaaaa!,’” Nergal did a whiny but otherwise perfect rendition of Fate’s own deep, stentorian voice, then turned back to address Fate. “I asked, slave of Nabu, what do you think of my plans? Speak, damn you!” he boomed.

Fate opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Instead he exhaled deeply, as you would when you have been holding your breath a long time, and instead of words seven lapis beads etched with gold buzzed like fireflies from his mouth and swirled quickly above his head, like a halo.

“What is this?” demanded Nergal, his voice thundering through the cavern. He stood and started to raise his hand, intending to strike Fate down with one magic blast.

But it was too late. One by one, but so quickly as to be almost instantaneous, the magic beads burst in a flash of golden light and noise, like firecrackers, and helmet, amulet, cloak, and clothing fell from the air above him onto Fate, where they seemed to dissolve on, and then conform to the shape of, his body. Instantly donning his uniform in this fashion – with the exception of the lapis beads, of course – had been a ritual Fate had performed almost daily since Nabu had first given these magical garments to him as a young man. The entire process was done in the blink of an eye – which was all the time needed for Fate to twist his torso just enough to allow his bound right hand to touch the buckle of the Belt of Gilgamesh, doubling his body’s super-strength. He ripped free of the shackles that prevented him from using his powers as if they were made of sun-rotted plastic instead of a superhard magic-dampening metal. The manacles flew apart into shrapnel, the nth metal ripping through the ectoplasmic bodies of some of Nergal’s attendants who had stood as close as they could to Fate, so as to be seen by their leader as they mocked and tormented the captive sorcerer.

Fate shot skyward like a rocket and vanished, only to reappear face to face in front of Nergal, where he shot a bolt of eldritch energy directly at the death-god at point-blank range. Nergal staggered but then quickly responded with a blast of his own that Fate dodged, but which shattered several columns down on the floor below, causing a portion of the ceiling to cave in.

Fate’s first thought was to secure Inza, but when he looked for the crystal case in which she had been trapped, it was nowhere to be found. He flew through the crowd, scattering the souls he knew to be aligned with Nergal (the pretty fawning ones) and protecting with force shields those who were obviously oppressed, the enslaved and the humiliated.

But having regained his composure from Fate’s surprise escape, Nergal materialized in front of the flying hero and swatted him off the dais and onto the palace floor. At the last minute, a stunned Fate recovered enough to dematerialize down into the floor even as Nergal leapt from the dais to come crashing down on top of the spot where he had been, determined to grind him into the dirt.

Fate flew back up, shooting up through the marble floor no more than five metres from Nergal. There was still no sign of Inza, but also no sign that Nergal was involved in her disappearance, or that he had even noticed she was missing. Best keep him on the defensive, keep him preoccupied, whether he knows where she is or not, Fate reasoned; if I can.

“Grab him!” Nergal shrieked to his ghost-minions, and fear of the death-god overcame fear of the intruder and the slave souls rushed Fate, tearing at him as if their fingers were talons. Fate shot upward and closed his cloak around him and remained still. An oddly beautiful but fearsome light radiated from him and the baffled souls fled from him in a kind of awestruck bafflement – not terror, exactly, but retreat in the face of too much glory. Even Nergal’s threats couldn’t pierce the herd from rushing away mindlessly. Fate’s melammu garb was too fearsome, even for the ghosts of gods.

“Grrrr, worthless spooks” Nergal growled and grumbled in disgust as he tore a pillar loose, charged it with mystic energy and swung it like a bat at Fate, who dematerialized his body into energy, letting it pass through him.

“Impossible!” said Nergal, baffled. “That stone should have smashed you – it was cursed with a spell to prevent dematerializing.”

Fate said nothing. His knowledge of Cilian molecular manipulation, combined with his telekinesis, were among his few advantages against Nergal, and he didn’t intend for the death-god to start to understand his secrets.

“No matter. You are far outclassed here, Nabu-slave,” Nergal scoffed, one eyebrow arched to match the upturned lips of a sneering half smile. “You know this. Look around you – I command an army of the ghosts of gods, and you are simply a flesh and bone magician, albeit a clever one. I am the king of a pantheon, and you are the medicine man of a tribe of primates!”

“You’re delusional, Nergal,” Fate said contemptuously. ““This is not a demesne of demigods but a dungeon of the damned! These souls will turn on you the second they have an opportunity.”

“It is you who are the delusional one, calling yourself ‘Fate.’ I held the Tablet of Fate, the real Fate, in my hands once, and I will do so again. The entire cosmos will be filled with those who worship me. As for these ghosts, I will give them new bodies, grander bodies than the flesh cages they once wore, or the stone idols some of them wax nostalgic for.”

Nergal raised a fist and images of robotic soldiers and armed drones appeared. “You barbarians are even now making these bodies for me by the thousands. Imagine them all controlled by the ghosts of gods. Magic and the death-science you barbarians have perfected – a marriage made in… Kur.”

“Made in Hell, you mean,” said Fate contemptuously, but Nergal’s plans had left him even more shaken than he had been. Without him, Earth stood no chance against Nergal. And he himself stood very little chance either.

But what chance he had, Fate was determined to take. While Nergal was boasting, he shot out a giant hand of mystic energy, tore the pillar from the ghoul-god’s grasp, and shot it toward him like a missile. Nergal just laughed, expecting the marble column to crumble into gravel when it hit his body.

But instead it passed right through Nergal, and stopped abruptly. Fate had dematerialized it. But then, with a quick mental command, the column solidified. Nergal howled. The pillar was being crumbled into gravel all right – but inside the death-god’s internal organs. Even soft rock, even against an almost invulnerable god, could cause significant pain as it displaced his internal organs, however slightly.

“That’s impossible!” Nergal raged. “I am protected against dematerialization spells. No one can break my protection spells. You are pulling some trick, but no matter – your tricks will cease when you do, very soon.”

Fate had taken advantage of Nergal’s intestinal distress to open, on either side of the death-god, twin wormholes that led to cosmic regions dominated by massive black holes. Nearby objects flew into the twin vortices, but their focus was Nergal himself, whose form was being shredded like confetti and sucked into these cosmic sinkholes as if by a massive vacuum cleaner. As Nergal strained against their tidal force, Fate blasted him with eldritch bolts that shook his massive frame.

But then slowly – but inexorably – Nergal’s form reconstituted itself, bits of him flew backward from the vortices as his body reassembled, and the wormholes grew smaller and smaller until they vanished entirely.

Fate was stunned. He knew he couldn’t match Nergal with force, so he hoped to leverage the greatest forces in nature to aid him. But Nergal could overcome nature itself.

Nergal grinned as the realization of the death-god’s true power was finally dawning on the all-too-human sorcerer. “My turn,” was all he said.

And luckily for Fate he said it because the split-second it had taken for him to do so was just enough time for Fate to put up the strongest shields he could muster. And then Nergal let loose with a blast of energy so powerful that those shields began to dissolve almost instantly.

“Hell-fire??!!” Fate boomed, a question that resolved into an exclamation that resolved into an expletive.

“Drawn straight from the Pit itself,” Nergal said with a smirk.

“Impossible!” Fate shouted over the din of distorted noise, the noise of a million souls in torment, the sound of nature itself being tortured by the infernal energy as it ripped through the air, and through the fabric of reality itself.

“We keep saying that about things the other does, today,” Nergal said, almost casually. “I’m feeling edified. How about you? Ha ha ha.” And the death-god resumed his focus and redoubled his attack.

Fate had tried to do otherwise, but the anticosmic energy had almost entirely depleted his shields, and only his cloak was saving him from incineration. He had to use the Amulet of Anutu. Its creation-force was the only thing strong enough to repulse hell-fire. He prayed to Anu Ormahzd that he was likewise strong enough to use it.

Pressing his right hand hard against the amulet, Fate focused all his will on reinforcing his shield. He was vaguely aware of souls around him being singed out of existence, of the palace collapsing behind them, of the roof of the cavern itself shaking as if to follow suit. But he ignored all that and focused on the shield in front of him, pushing back against the diabolical energy levelled at him, and for a second the blast was pushed back, just a bit. But then Nergal dug in and the hell-fire advanced on him again. Fate countered with more energy from the amulet and his shield bulged anew; Nergal chanted the hateful language of the chthonic elders, and the hell-fire likewise surged. The energies were locked in a cosmic struggle, divine light versus infernal fire, positive versus negative life energy, good versus evil, that took on a life of its own, and then exploded.

Nergal staggered backward, momentarily dazed, but Fate was blasted off the hilltop to the far cavern wall. He felt himself slipping in and out of consciousness when a force like a giant invisible hand snatched him up from the cavern floor and whisked him back to the mesa containing the remains of the palace, and a towering, triumphant Nergal. Before he lost consciousness entirely, he performed one last spell, one last Hail Mary pass, and prayed that it would be enough.

When he finally came to, Fate found himself rendered completely immobile. His arms were stuck at his sides as if glued there; his legs were likewise “stuck together,” and he couldn’t move his head, his mouth, even his eyes. He could only stare ahead at Nergal and the cavern ceiling, which was still glowing.

His body floated at a 45-degree angle about a foot from the ground, not two metres from Nergal. The death-god had removed Fate’s helmet and was examining it.

“Hmmhh,” Nergal snorted. “This is Nabu’s work. But he wrote it in what he called the First Tongue – he never shared it with the rest of us, not even the Annunaki. No telling what it does, but seems not to have been much, or not enough, at least. Because here you are, without it, and without hope, either.” Nergal tossed the helmet behind him, where it clattered and skid across the palace floor. “I’d crush it like a pomegranate, but it’s nth metal, and it’s Nabu’s handiwork, and so it would just fight me and it’s not worth the trouble. Might as well punch a ghost.”

“But you,” Nergal continued, as he walked over to where Fate floated in the air, arms frozen at his side, his body stiff as a board. “You I can crush like a pomegranate, and there’s not any hope for you that you’d spring back into shape if I did.”

Fate summoned every bit of willpower left to him and struggled to move his arms, his hands, just one finger, but it was no use. He was completely paralyzed. He couldn’t move a muscle, but he could feel; Nergal apparently had plans for him that would, he was certain, involve substantial amounts of pain. He could think, but he couldn’t work magic, nor could he use his powers of molecular manipulation; the processes of will that made his powers work were as paralyzed as his body.

Nergal bent over Fate’s floating body, sneering viciously, no longer toying with him but moving in for the kill.

“Fool – you should have let me blast you to oblivion. Instead you have shattered my palace and destroyed, or caused me to destroy, half the souls in my kingdom. For that I intend to make you suffer.”

Nergal passed his hand over Fate’s lips; he felt control of his neck and facial muscles returning. Apparently, the ghoul wanted to hear his screams and see the agony on his face.

“Now you know what humans feel like when your wars ravage their cities,” Fate replied.

“No, not really. I think they actually care about their families, their ‘loved ones.’ I only care that you have decimated my army and smashed up my beautiful palace,” Nergal replied with disgust. “And you will pay dearly for what you have cost me. I don’t know where or how you have hidden your concubine, but when I rip her out of whatever hole you have put her in, I’ll be sure she sees your mangled corpse. I’ll be sure she watches as my crows eat what flesh I don’t flay from your bones.”

“Inza is in a place where you will never find her,” Fate growled.

“Oh, I will tear that information from what’s left of your mind, and then the things I will do to her... But we’ve wasted enough time. You made the mistake of showing me the full power of one of your little toys, and I will have it now. I’m speaking of that amulet.”

“What’s stopping you?” asked Fate.

“What indeed!” said Nergal as he closed in on Fate and hovered, almost drooling, over the Amulet of Anutu. “Certainly not you. You’ve established that you are not worthy of it, and it’s time you relinquished it to your master.” Nergal’s paw moved in to seize the amulet.

“You’re not my master,” Fate said in a deep voice, without a tinge of the fear Nergal was expecting.

“Then who is? Nabu? Ha!” the death-god sneered as he grabbed the amulet.

“No,” Fate replied. “Anu. He from whom all light and all life and all power flows.”

Nergal snorted contemptuously and then tried to tear the amulet from Fate’s chest, but, unexpectedly, Fate’s body was wrenched forward with it. Fate howled with pain, but the amulet surged with light.

“What have you done??!” Nergal demanded, sounding almost hurt, as if Fate had betrayed him.

“The amulet is welded to my heart by rite of a soul-graft. You will have to kill me to take it, but the amulet will prevent you, by keeping my heart alive and filling me with any power needed to resist our parting. If you continue to try to tear it from me, I will just grow stronger, until I can break your spell, and with the power I’ll have then, I’ll break you!”

“Your body couldn’t withstand the power you would need that thing to feed you in order to break me!” Nergal snapped haughtily, and confidently.

“That may be true,” Fate said. “Let’s find out.”

Nergal again tried to tear the amulet from Fate’s chest, managing to shred the gold band that held it around Fate’s neck, but this time the amulet rebuffed the death-god with a blast of energy that blasted him backward and nearly caused Fate to pass out again from the pain.

Nergal drew back, scowling, appraising the situation, and then suddenly a smile crossed his face, and he stood up and approached Fate again, laughing.

“You fool! You forget who I am! I don’t have to tear apart your body to kill you. I know the secret to stealing the life-force from any living being. I’ll draw your bāštu out of you like a vampire sucking your blood! I certainly planned to eat your life-force anyway. You’re no match for me, but you do have considerable power that when added to my own will make me nearly unstoppable. And with that amulet, I will be unstoppable. No force in the cosmos will stand against me, a being who can call forth both hell-fire and raw anutu from the well of creation itself!”

Fate looked alarmed, as if he had not considered this. At every turn, Nergal was able to match Fate move for move. And now it appeared to be checkmate.

The ghoul-god raised his arms above his head and chanted. Fate knew Nergal didn’t need to bother with such an elaborate ritual when casually feasting on humans; but with Fate, he was apparently pulling out all the stops, ensuring he would imbibe the super-sorcerer’s full vital-force quickly and completely.

Voices joined to Nergal’s, quiet at first, then growing. Whether these voices came from Nergal’s chanting slaves or from demons he had summoned to aid him, Fate couldn’t tell; but they grew louder until it sounded like the buzzing of giant half-human flies.

And then Nergal completed the formal ritual, shaking and shouting the words, “Shiimti! Ati Me Peta Babka!”

Fate’s life-force, his bāštu, was torn from him in a way that the death-god could not tear away the amulet, flying in a ghostly silver-white cloud into the lips and nostrils of Nergal, who sucked it in greedily. The amulet fell from Fate’s chest and clattered on the ground. Fate’s body slumped as it slid into death, his mouth opened wide and the light in his eyes departing as he stared into oblivion.

Nergal smiled with pleasure. Fate’s bāštu was potent indeed! Much more powerful than he had thought. He raised his arms in triumph. This world was now his. All worlds were now his!

And then, he burped. And belched. And coughed and retched as the white cloud expelled itself from the death-god’s lungs, and his hulking form bent over in spasms of intense pain such as he had not felt since he had ceased being merely human.

The cloud rushed as if sucked by a magic vacuum cleaner into Fate’s open mouth and nostrils. The super-sorcerer’s lungs pumped up and down, in and out, three times and then, Nergal’s binding spell broken as the death-god’s attention was refocused on his own debilitating pain, Fate summoned the Amulet of Anutu back onto his neck, the Helmet of Thoth back onto his head. He flew up, hovering in front of the doubled-over Nergal, and called forth from his personal dimension Sharur the mace of Ningirsu and Zag the shield of Zuen, and flying at Nergal, smashed the side of his hideous face with the mace.

“Attack! Attack! Attack!” Sharur sang, and when Nergal responded with a blast of dark energy, Zag repelled it back at the death-god.

“How? What did you do? I’ve never…” Nergal stopped in mid-thought, even as Fate continued his attack.

“Yes, you have. When you tried to steal Nabu’s life-force.” Fate replied.

“He was too great for me to consume at that time. No one is too great for me now, and certainly not you! You are no Nabu!”

“I was his apprentice,” that is true, Fate said. “But I was also his son. Think about that for what little time you have left to think about anything, cruel one!” Fate accelerated his efforts, pummelling Nergal and repelling his attacks until the death-god was reeling.

Then Fate suddenly dropped the mace and mirror-shield and, pressing hard against his amulet, both said a prayer of supplication to Anu and deployed the secret knowledge that Nergal could not counter, because it was not magic but advanced Cilian technology channelled through telekinesis that he now deployed against the staggering god of death. Fate willed Nergal’s molecular structure to fly apart and used the resulting energy to set up a repulsion field that would prevent them from ever reassembling, capped by a spell of rebuke. At the same time, with his prayer to Anu, he focused the amulet’s magic on forcing Nergal’s soul to judgment.

But Nergal was not so easily overcome. He resisted with all his cosmic might, and his form shook with the effort. His huge smile spread across his face as he felt himself once again overcoming Fate’s willpower. But Fate touched his belt and redoubled his strength, and with a huge boom and a massive flash of light Nergal’s form was blown apart like a supernova. His soul lingered, fighting, but it dissipated like mist in the light of Anu until the last iota of the death-god’s darkness was forever drowned out.

When Fate once again came to his senses, the light from Anu’s amulet was still just dying down. He looked up and assumed he was dreaming, or dead. Staring at him, calling him by his human name, was none other than Inza. And the pain and horror of being Nergal’s hostage was nowhere to be seen on her face. There was no room for it beside all the love and courage and hope streaming from her.

Surrounding her, at once a mob and a nimbus, were the souls of the Annunaki. But not as Nergal had rendered them, hideous and piteous, but as they had revealed themselves in battle with him: tall, strong, beautiful, godly.

Ishtar stepped forward. “When you engaged Nergal in battle, we knew it would be lost if your beloved was not secured; Nergal destroys us by destroying what we love. We had little power here, but what we did have we joined together, and we employed magic Nergal had never bothered to learn. For you rightly pointed out to him that in terms of sheer power, sheer physical strength, and strength of will, he was unbeatable; but he grew lazy and never had much imagination to begin with, so he could, in the end be outfoxed where he could not be outfought. We used Nergal’s own crystal cage to hide your beloved, by instantly growing the crystal into a fractal so complex it grew as translucent as air, and the refracted image of Inza with it. And we did this on all seven planes, each of us dealing with a separate plane for the first six, and all of us working our magic together on the seventh. Without worry about Inza to distract you, you were far stronger, and without Inza’s safety to use as a weapon against you, Nergal was much weaker.”

Enlil stepped forward to her side. “But that was the last of our power, even as it was the best use we ever made of it. We have none left to keep us here, and I feel – I fear – we are being called back.”

“Go then back to the Blessed Realm,” Fate said. “I don’t know how Nergal could have pulled you from there in the first place, but return to its peace with my profound gratitude and the gratitude of all who live.”

“You misunderstand, Kent Nelson,” Ishtar said. “We were not in that place. We were great during our lives, but most often we were not good. Marduk was good. Nabu still is good, I suppose, wherever he is. But we were vain, we were pompous, we lorded it over the people as gods. We were, as Nergal rightly decreed of me, guilty of hubris. We have been in the Place of Atonement for all these many years since our deaths.”

“Then I was wrong about where you had been,” Fate said gently. “But I’m not wrong about where you are going. Look!”

Their forms were growing thinner, but they were also growing larger, becoming more beautiful, and becoming suffused with melammu. The seven-pronged star that was the symbol of Anu whirled like a wheel among them, each spoke reaching out and touching them one by one. And at the topmost, triangular-headed spoke loomed the figure of Nabu. “It’s time to come home,” Nabu said, and the wheel grew and the Annunaki grew with it, and both faded as they grew larger and dimmer until only a faint image lingered in the air, and then it was gone.

Inza ran to Kent and hugged him tightly, and soon she was sobbing uncontrollably. He held her in his arms, breathing her in, feeling her warmth, her humanity, the love radiating from her like a magical aura. This, he thought, this is my Blessed Realm.

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drfate · 4 years ago

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Dr. Fate: In the Dungeon of the Damned

An old school Dr Fate novel by Rex F Dorgan

Chapter 3 – The Temple of the Annunaki

Doctor Fate stood alone on the deserted arid plain. It was the dead of night here, and the stars overhead seemed far fewer than when he was a boy. Even here, he thought. Light pollution. It sounded like a kind of heretical oxymoron, like “plague of compassion.” But then, as Nabu had long ago instructed him, too much of anything, even goodness, can be a bad thing. It may have been Nabu’s own “plague of compassion” that had left Nergal unchecked to terrorize the world, after all.

With a wave of his hand a foot of dirt was swept away from the ground in front of him, uncovering a stone hatch two metres wide. Gesturing again, the massive stone slab rose up and to the side, revealing a staircase leading down into darkness. Torches on the wall were suddenly lit by cold flame emanating from the fist-sized jewels they held. “Ember,” Nabu had called the magic golden gems. They looked like amber, held light – hence, ember. In later years, Kent Nelson would mentally refer to the old mage as “Nabukov” whenever he thought of the ridiculous puns and neologisms made by his beloved teacher in the many new languages he mastered with unrivalled ease.

He descended the steps and soon arrived at the towering bronze door where he and his father had once – fatefully – stood. Before everything changed forever.

Fate had materialized outside the temple instead of arriving inside because he had detected a protective force field surrounding the temple compound – everywhere except this very door. He didn’t know whether he could penetrate that field – Nergal’s power was truly formidable – but even if he could, it would just alert his enemy all the sooner, and likely leave Fate himself depleted by the effort. This was one trap that the mouse couldn’t outwit simply by choosing a different door.

But he didn’t open the door in the expected way, either; instead, he dematerialized and passed through it. There were spells to dematerialize by means of sorcery, of course, but they would immediately signal anyone on alert for magic. Fate instead used the advanced Cilian science of matter and energy control that he alone of all non-Cilians knew. This knowledge, this skill, was one of the few cards Fate had up his sleeve with which to confront Nergal, but it was a powerful one.

Inside the temple it was as bright as daylight. He recalled how learning to dim the ember was the first spell Nabu taught him, and how pleased both teacher and student had been when he mastered it on his first try.

Unexpectedly, the temple was not, as his tower had been, demolished. In fact, it was in exactly the pristine condition in which Fate had himself last left it. All trace of Nergal – and Inza – was gone, as if the wretched death-god had never been there.

And yet, his helmet was nagging him to be on alert, and Fate’s own sensitivity to magic informed him that powerful spells had recently been cast here. Whether this was simply residue of Nergal’s battle of wills with Fate over the Eye of Merlin, or some other wicked mischief, he would simply have to wait to determine.

But he didn’t have to wait long. A grating noise, like stone grinding stone, arose from all directions save the door behind him – from the galleries where the statues of the Annunaki stood, to be specific, and from the front of the temple, the area that would be called the chancel were it a Christian cathedral, where the statue of Enlil stood alone, signifying his position as leader (if only nominally) of the pantheon. With his extraordinary vision, Fate quickly surmised that the statues of the Annunaki were moving – stirring, as it were, slowly, as if from a long sleep.

Suddenly, so suddenly that he had no time to react, from behind Doctor Fate on his left the grinding sounded like a small avalanche and he was struck from behind with such force that he was driven like a missile into a column, which shattered and collapsed, with part of the ceiling and earth above it, on top of Earth’s greatest sorcerer. “Down you go, demon!” a deep voice boomed as Fate was covered in several tonnes of stone and dirt.

Fate flew up from the rubble, dust and debris flying from him as if he were a living cyclone. His cloak and uniform had protected him somewhat, as had the protection spell that the amulet always encased him in, added on to his own relative invulnerability as well… and yet, he had been struck with such force that his back and left arm, which had borne the brunt of the attack, throbbed with pain, and he struggled to catch his breath.

The source of the attack was in front of him, taking his measure. “Ningirsu!” Fate exclaimed. “God of strength.” Not Ningirsu, exactly, but his three-metres-tall statue. The Sumerians believed their gods were literally embodied in their statues, Fate recalled Nabu telling him, and the Helmet of Thoth now broadcast to Fate’s mind images of a ceremony where the Annunaki would inhabit their idols with their souls and lifeforce for ceremonies during which the faithful honoured them.

It seemed that Nergal had perverted this ceremony for his own ends – turning the Annunaki into his stone slaves. But what power in all the cosmos could steal their souls from the Blessed Place – and provide their idols with sufficient life-force to reanimate them at full god-power? His dread of Nergal was growing – contrary to his hope that whatever had brought him back from extinction had done so recently enough that the ghoul-god was still just recovering his strength, it seemed that Nergal was somehow as powerful as he had ever been, perhaps even more powerful than ever.

Ningirsu seemed surprised that Fate had himself recovered so quickly. “The demon is mightier than we thought – that blow would have killed a hundred oxen!” he said, seemingly to no one.

But a curious thing happened, a voice – not an audible one, but a telepathic one, which nevertheless had its own pitch and character – replied to the god-statue. “He wears Nabu’s amulet! If he has defeated Nabu and stolen that great talisman from him, then he is powerful indeed!”

Of course! In Ningirsu’s hand was the weapon that had pierced Fate’s shields enough to nearly cripple him – Sharur, “smasher of thousands,” the magical mace more powerful than the spear of Mars or the hammer of Thor. And its power came not simply from its ability to “smash,” but from the magical, “talking” intelligence that advised its user on tactics and strategy even in the midst of battle. The mace with which Ningirsu had defeated the demon Asag and had won the all-powerful Tablet of Fate back from the demon thief Anzu (at the behest of Nergal). Ningirsu was “talking” to his own weapon.

And said weapon was now advising Ningirsu to charge again. “He must be defeated quickly, or all is lost!”, the mace was advising its owner.

Fate tried to explain himself but neither Ningirsu nor his magical weapon could apparently “hear” him. Ningirsu’s speed was even greater than his own, and before Fate could make a move, the stone giant was upon him, seeking to crush him in his hands. He tried to dematerialize but found he couldn’t, and the helmet explained in its wordless way that Ningirsu’s touch was his greatest power: in his grip, no magic worked, and one was forced to one-on-one combat with the son of Enlil, with only one’s strength, speed, and durability to aid in the battle. Since few could match him in strength, Ningirsu almost always won such battles. His fight with Nergal was the obvious exception.

Given time, Fate was certain he could overcome this powerful charm of Ningirsu’s, but he knew the other Annunaki were stirring, and he had to move quickly. Also, the god of strength was quite successfully crushing the life from him.

But Fate was hardly powerless. He tried prying the giant hands off his torso, but the giant’s grip was fantastically strong. So he focused instead on the one giant finger covering his abdomen, pushing it out of the way just long enough for him to touch the buckle of the Belt of Gilgamesh.

A sudden surge of vital force rocked through Fate’s superhuman muscles, doubling his strength and durability. His back and arm no longer hurt, and he felt so energized he felt as if he could, on pure strength alone, take on Solomon Grundy. With a mighty heave and a loud grunt of his deep booming voice, Fate pried himself free of the strength-god’s grip and, twisting the stone wrist quickly, wrenched Ningirsu’s arm behind his back. Flying at full speed, Fate propelled the hapless Ningirsu forward, slamming him into the temple wall, then driving him three metres past the wall, finally leaving the living statue trapped in the earth behind the buried temple wall.

Ningirsu struggled to pull quickly himself out of the dirt trap into which he had been encased, but when he turned to face Fate, he realized it was too late. Fate held in his right hand Sharur, which was pleading with Ningirsu to be rescued from the grip of the demon. Fate wasted no time flying right at Ningirsu’s statue, pummelling it with the god’s own mighty weapon. With each blow both Ningirsu and Sharur cried out. Fate felt terrible for the physical and psychic pain he was inflicting on both, but he sensed the other deities were now descending from their pedestals and knew he had little time to waste. Cracks appeared in the statue, then bits of its body flew off as Fate continued his rapid-fire attack, even as he sensed the life-force in the statue being rapidly depleted. Then, with a mighty swing that would have done Ted Williams proud, and an anguished cry from Ningirsu and his magical weapon alike, Doctor Fate smashed the statue-god into a hundred bits of rubble. Fate watched on the higher planes as both Ningirsu’s soul and borrowed life-force rose from the heap of crushed stone – but then, to his extreme dismay he saw both being sucked downward, spiralling through the ground like water down a drain, as the sound of a howling wind, the sound of a soul in torment, screamed in his skull. Nergal was not only reclaiming the life-force he had lent the statue – he planned to continue to enslave the hapless god’s soul, as well.

But Fate had no time to ponder what this meant. A voice like a whiplash tore through the air at him. “You shall pay for what you have done to Ningirsu, and to Nabu, demon!” It was Utu, the sun god, accosting him and advancing slowly toward him from the gallery to his left. And then from his right he heard another, cooler voice, growling, “You dare bear Sharur, and wear the Amulet of Anutu! For this you will die!” It was Zuen, god of the moon. And simultaneously, both gods blasted him with bolts of energy, Utu with the blazing golden power of the sun, Zuen with his frigid, silvery sub-zero moonlight.

The Cloak of Melammu would protect him momentarily, but these were not insignificant blasts of energy. These ancient gods, whom he had always regarded as merely sorcerers with outlandish egos based on what he had heard from Nabu, were powerful indeed. Aside from Zeus, they were each easily a match for any of the Olympian deities.

Rotating his body like a twister, Fate spun until the twin energy spells, directed to track him like heat-seeking missiles, combined and negated one another, dissipating as the stone gods who cast them watched despondently. Then Fate shot a blast of magic energy at Utu, driving him back. He started to do the same to Zuen when he saw that the moon-god’s statue had raised his magic silver mirror-shield Zag in front of him. Images from the helmet told him that the Shield of Zuen could repulse any attack, sending an enemy’s magic right back at him.

Utu stepped forward, and, straining mightily, summoned a furious blast of heat energy and directed it at Fate. Earth’s greatest sorcerer simply vanished, rematerializing instantly a few metres away, in time to see the blast directed, as Fate had orchestrated, right at Zuen’s magic shield. The blast instantly incinerated Utu’s statue, exploding it in a cloud of charred gravel and dust. Again Fate saw the life-force and soul rise up toward the ceiling, only to see both magnetically sucked down through the floor as the defeated god’s soul screamed in defiance.

Fate turned toward Zuen, who was smiling at Fate; his body was glowing as energy seemed to be streaming into him. Of course, thought Fate, recalling what Nabu had once told him of the moon-god: Zuen had the ability to draw into himself the power of all the Annunaki save Nabu himself – the pleroma, Nabu had called it. Fate had wondered why Enlil and Enki, the most powerful of the Annunaki, had not yet engaged with him. A quick glance revealed that they had descended from their pedestals and had been about to join the battle, when Zuen had drawn their power from them, leaving them frozen in mid-attack.

Fate had to act quickly; Zuen only had the power of three remaining Annunaki to add to his own, since Utu and Ningirsu had been dispatched, but that would still be a formidable force. As it was, the moon-god had great power of his own, and, when deployed correctly, an almost unbeatable weapon. As the power of the other Annunaki flowed into him and he prepared to strike, the look on Zuen’s face was one of premature triumph. He was daring Fate to attack.

Fate accepted the challenge. Tapping his amulet, he drew forth a stream of magical energy equal to that which Zuen was now marshalling. Before the moon-god could act, Fate lashed out with all his might. The power of Anu channelled through that of Utu slammed into the shield, which instantly repelled it back toward Fate. “You are doomed, demon,” said the god of the moon.

But Fate had been counting on Zuen trying to repel the blast. On its way back at Fate it seemed to pause in mid-volley, roiling for a fraction of a second and scorching the very air around it, and then it slammed back at Zuen with redoubled force, instantly blasting the statue-god into a pile of dust. Once, decades ago, Fate had been in a similar situation presented to him by Johnny Thunder’s powerful Badhnisian Thunderbolt, who at the command of Johnny’s evil other-dimensional doppelganger, had created a monster called Repello-Man [AUTHOR’S NOTE: in Justice League of America #38]. Repello-Man had seemed invincible, but Fate had cast powerful bolts of reverse-magic at it. Had Repello-Man not acted at all, Fate would have been destroyed by his own magic, but the creature had used its power against Fate and the reverse magic had instead been attracted back to the monster and destroyed him. Fate had cast the same hexbolts, although far more powerful, against Zuen, counting on the moon-god to use his shield. Even protected by the additional powers of Enlil and Enki, the raw power of Anutu destroyed him.

Zuen’s scorched shield clanked as it struck the ground. Fate was unsure if even the shield could survive that blast, but he had no time to find out now, for as soon as Zuen’s spirit and life-force had departed hellward, his soul screeching in agony, the two most powerful of the Annunaki had had their own power restored and were now aiming their magics at Fate.

“You have struggled to best our younger, less powerful members, demon – but now you face the Powers Primordial!” boasted Enlil’s statue form. “I am god of the skies, my brother god of the seas. You have no chance, devil!” With that, the stone god shot a blast of magical lightning directly at Doctor Fate.

Over the years, Fate had withstood similar magical blasts from Captain Marvel, Black Adam, mighty Zeus – even the great wizard Shazam himself. Enlil’s blast was in a league with the most powerful he had endured. The blast shook him. His cloak shimmered with the energy it had barely repelled. “My next blast will be double the strength of that one, demon!” Fate would normally have dismissed such a claim as a toothless boast, but Enlil seemed not at all wearied from delivering his first blast.

But Enlil would have to wait, as Enki had joined the fray, drawing a huge blob of water seemingly from thin air into a giant fist, with a speed and grace that even Mera might envy, which he then tried to slam into Fate before the super-sorcerer could brace himself. At the last minute, though, Fate dematerialized, and the huge water fist passed through him and instead slammed into Enlil, knocking the sky-god’s animated statue into the temple wall. The thoroughly soaked limestone statue, its weight more than doubled with the water it had absorbed, struggled to rise.

Undeterred, Enki again drew a huge globe of water from thin air, but this time he shaped it like a thick pelt with a roaring lion’s head. “You can’t stay a ghost for long, I’ll wager,” the sea-god sneered. “This waterskin will attack you like a lion and won’t stop until it has a hold on your body, and it will then choke you to death as it crushes you to pulp!” Gesturing forcefully with both hands, he hurled the wall of water at Fate.

As rapidly as the water-wall rushed toward Fate, however, the shield of Zuen, which Fate had summoned, flew into the sorcerer’s grasp just in time to repel the waterskin back at Enki. It hit Enki’s statue and knocked him to his knees, where the sea-god scrambled to regain mastery of his own spell, even as, like Enlil, he struggled to stand with the crushing weight of his own thoroughly soaked stone skin. The water seemed to have washed away the shield however, for when the raging airborne tide subsided, the shield was no longer in Fate’s grasp.

Fate turned to face Enlil, who was now standing, although still having difficulty manipulating his waterlogged form. The angry sky god, his eyes raging with blinding electrical power, raised both arms to draw together a mighty lightning blast. With blinding speed, he dropped both arms, directing a bolt of magical lighting at Fate that would have impressed Zeus. But Fate simply teleported out of the path of the bolt and instead it struck the statue of the struggling Enki. The steam created by the water that had thoroughly soaked the statue caused it to explode, the way overheated sap will explode a tree struck by lightning.

“No!” Enlil cried as he saw his brother destroyed by his own magic. Enki’s life-force and soul struggled mightily to resist the downward pull of damnation but could not pass the ceiling and were ultimately sucked underground. There was no wailing, though; Enki’s spirit remained stonily proud to the last.

In a fit of rage, Enlil again raised his arms skyward but this time the amount of energy he drew from who-knows-where was staggering. His form was enveloped in the white-hot light, his water-soaked visage glowing as it reflected the huge energy ball forming around him. With cat-like quickness, the sky-god hurled the lightning blast at Fate. “Live through that, demon!” he shouted.

But the shield of Zuen materialized in front of Fate at the last minute, retrieved from Fate’s private dimension, where he had hidden the shield until the last moment, so as to cause an overconfident Enlil to lash out carelessly.

But even Zuen’s shield strained under so mighty a blast. Fate was blown backward, again smashed into a wall like a leaf in a hurricane, but he held the shield in front of him steadily, adding to it his own powerful magic. The bolt reversed course and instead hit Enlil with its redoubled force, blowing the water-soaked stone statue to bits. Enlil’s soul and life-force did not even struggle, but instead just accepted their fate and were sucked underground like a brief rain shower in a parched desert.

Fate fell to his knees. As much as he had tried to preserve his own power for his showdown with Nergal, withstanding Enlil’s blast had drained him somewhat. So he was unprepared when a swift backhand from a giant stone goddess knocked him over. By the third or fourth blow, however, Fate had recovered enough to grow to the size of Ningirsu, grabbing the goddess’s wrists and rendering her immobile.

“You pack quite a punch, Ishtar. I didn’t know that about you.” Earth’s mightiest sorcerer said, with a manner he realized was uncharacteristically flirtatious, at least for Fate if not for Nelson.

“Then you forget that I was the original god of war before Nergal stole that role from me. Seduction and strategy, like war and strategy, go hand in hand. And like the saying went in old Sumer, ‘All’s fair in love and war.’” Ishtar raised her head proudly and went on. “I was the precursor to Athena as well as Venus – and I was – I am – greater than either. The others called you a demon, but I see you are just a man. A powerful man, but like we Annunaki, just a human being elevated by magic. You are not immune to lust – or to bloodlust. My twin charms even now are conquering your soul.”

Doctor Fate, despite his half-Cilian life-force, was indeed a man, and he realized that Ishtar’s power over him was much greater than he had expected. He’d let his guard down and her spell had penetrated his defences. He felt himself swooning under her sway.

Before him no longer stood a mere statue, but a living, breathing goddess in the form of barely clad female perfection. Ishtar wore the seven meh, or talismans, of power for which she was famous. She was dressed in a diaphanous silvery silk robe; upon her head, she wore the Shugurra, the crown of Heaven; a double strand of lapis lazuli beads she wore around her neck, allowing them to flow over and between her breasts, where they seemed always to be undulating and writhing with light. Each bead could contain a garment, or a piece of furniture, or a weapon, or an item of jewellery. Most often, she used the necklace to transport her wardrobe and the contents of her bedroom, setting up her boudoir wherever she chose.

Undergirding her chest was a magic breastplate that whispered a seductive siren song in a voice and language only men could hear, shaped like the head and wings of a dragon. (Even in his half-hypnotic state, Fate was reminded of the eagle-bustier covering Wonder Woman’s breasts.) She wore a golden bracelet around her wrist, a golden ring on her finger, and carried a lapis sceptre, the rod of power, in her hand.

From her perfectly formed facial features to her slender neck, to her ample breasts as large and firm as melons, to her almost flat, only slightly rounded waist, to her broad hips and long, tan legs… she was perfection. And yet she was constantly changing, assuming the form of every beautiful woman Fate – Nelson – had ever seen – only in each case improved ever so slightly, perfected as it were – as if she were searching for the ideal form to render him helpless. As it was, Fate could barely move. What a fool he’d been – Enlil had not been the most significant threat to him, nor even Zuen wielding the power of the pleroma. No, Ishtar was clearly in her own way the greatest among them, able in time to subdue any human, which explained why her cult had in some form or other lasted to this very day. In love and war, she clearly was the conqueror.

However, Ishtar’s visage and body continued to change, seemingly to evolve; she seemed to believe that she had not yet found the perfect form for capturing the soul of this mighty sorcerer and rendering him helpless. Until at last she did.

Facing the demi-god Doctor Fate – facing the man Kent Nelson – stood the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her hair was the colour of smoky flame streaked with sun-lightened gold; her eyes the colour of emeralds; her breasts were large and full, unusually so for a woman with so taut and slender a waist; her hips were perfectly rounded and her legs were both shapely and strongly muscled. She was deeply tanned, as if from long hours of work in the hot sun, or from the sunbathing regimen of a pampered movie star, as hardy as a servant girl and yet she regal as a queen. Ishtar had found the perfect form with which to capture his soul.

And yet, this was her undoing. For the soul of Doctor Fate had long ago been captured by the original of this illusion, this pale reflection. For Ishtar, having probed the depths of his desire, was unwittingly displaying the face and body of Fate’s – Nelson’s – own wife, Inza. And in so doing, reminded Fate of his purpose in being there, shattering Ishtar’s spell completely.

The goddess couldn’t see his face behind his helmet, but she knew Fate was smiling confidently at her, and she grew alarmed. She tried to put up magic shields, but it was no use; she knew now that yes, she had taken his measure correctly: he was a man. And yet, she had completely miscalculated somehow, entirely underestimated him: he was also something else, something more. And his power was greater than she had supposed. As Ningirsu had warned, he had stolen Nabu’s amulet, and Nabu was missing. This creature, whatever he was, had been powerful enough to defeat Nabu, who, Enlil’s ego notwithstanding, had always been more powerful than all the Annunaki put together.

But in the end, she was undone by her own divine specialty: she had been defeated by love.

She could feel Fate’s power now starting to surge through this stone body that, clumsy as it was, had been a welcome respite from her soul’s recent torment. When the demon-man’s spell hit and the statue started to crumble into dust, she swam her soul as fast as she could to the temple ceiling, clawing at it for release back to what Fate supposed to be the Blessed Realm, but Nergal’s spell held and she felt her soul sucked back to the netherworld where she had been captive now for weeks? months? eons? She shrieked like a banshee, like a harpy, like a Fury, as dozens of pale ectoplasmic hands pulled her down into darkness. Her meh – her talismans – her tiara, her necklace, bracelet, slippers, ring, breastplate, sceptre – fell clattering to the ground.

Doctor Fate looked around at the destruction of what had been, for a time, his childhood home. If he faced Nergal and survived the encounter, he promised himself that he would return here and undo the destruction, the desecration of the place. But then he turned angrily on himself in his interior monologue. There is no ‘if,’ he scolded that part of him that was already half-defeated. You will survive because only if you do will Inza live. Inza – and perhaps all of humankind, all life on this world and many others, as well. Armed with Fate’s own life-force and the Amulet of Anutu, even the Spectre might not be able to stop Nergal – and no one had seen or heard from the Spectre in years. He would defeat Nergal, somehow; he had to. As humiliating as Ishtar’s spell over him had been, as much as it pained him to realize he could be so easily compromised by simple human appetites, she had done him a profound service by reminding him of how precious Inza was to him, so precious he desired her more than the goddess of desire, that his love for his wife trumped all the power of the Goddess of Love herself. Save Inza, he told himself now, that is all that matters; save Inza, and if you do that, you will save the world.

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