Chapter Eleven

Alarms on Epona

Across the city the guards, on leopard-spotted horses, keep watch while the city's inhabitants prepare for the last meal of the day. Now, in the slowing warmth of late afternoon, the horse guards strident-horns are ringing out all over the city, as the Naxen shoal begin their attack. Their alarms bring guards streaming out of their barracks and heading out across the city towards the alarms as market places and tavern halls empty and children run for home.

Kyna, eating a bowl of thick stew in the Valkyr mess hall, leaps to her feet at the sound of the alarm and is about to rush out to help when Myrna places a hand on her shoulder. 'Not so fast, Kyna, the guards and the rest of the Valkyr will deal with it. Our task is to protect the Queen, come we must be at her side.'

Kyna follows Cailin and Myrna to the Queen's dining hall, where they find Tara pacing up and down. A guard is briefing her on what is happening in the city.

'Naxen raids in all the farthest corners of the city, my Queen, as far as we can ascertain, this is a well planned attack. A Naxen shoal must have used the water ducts to gain such widespread access to the city...'

'A Naxen shoal?' Kyna can't help but interrupt. She had only ever heard rumours of the shoal formations used by the Naxen.

'But they are thinly spread, my Queen, isolated into small groups. We will beat them back, it seems a futile plan of attack. They will suffer heavy losses at out hands.'

Tara stops pacing and shakes her head. 'Not futile, they are drawing our guards out to the edges of the city to distract us from their real objective... the Gate of the Twins. It is as we have been warned. I thought I had time to travel through before an attack... hurry, we must get to the gate before they breach it!'

Alarms on Earth

Agnes glances up from the screen in front of her displaying the hundred and forty four glyphs and, for a moment, her eyes rest on Dr. Daniel Jackson. He is busy comparing the labyrinth symbols on a range of coins from antiquity with the gate vortex symbol on the hoard coins. He intuitively glances at her at the same time and their eyes meet momentarily. Agnes smiles and Daniel, almost immediately overcome with shyness at her honest smile of approval, looks away awkwardly, busying himself with the coins, desperately trying not to blush.

'Any luck with that symbol?' she asks, trying to diffuse the silence.

'Um, no.. not really. Nothing is an exact match and yet they are almost an echo of it. As though the stargates were hidden in plain sight in our archaeological record. I am pretty certain the only gate tokens we have so far are the ones in the hoard. How about you, any luck yet?'

Agnes chuckles to herself at his unintended double entendre, 'Not yet, Dr, Jackson, but working on it.' This time she grins broadly at him and Daniel can feel the blush rise up his face. 'I meant with the symbols.'

'So did I Daniel. Why, whatever did you think I meant?' It's a relief to laugh about something else rather than dwell on the awful fate of Robert Bowden and Agnes can feel the pent up stress from earlier slip away. Before Daniel can think of a suitable answer a siren sounds and he looks out of the door of their office to see what's going when Jack O'Neill runs past with a detail of guards.

'Hey! Jack, what's happening?' Daniel manages to catch Jack's arm as he rushes past, pulling him to one side as the deafening alarm sends people running in all directions across the atrium of SG command.

'The dragon ring is missing, the doctor is certain he left it in the isolation unit, I went to check to see if it was still on the corpse of Rob Bowden and now his body is missing too.'

'Someone took the ring and the body?' What Jack is saying doesn't make any sense. 'The lift is the only one way out of here, surely someone would notice a body being removed?'

'You'd think so. Gotta go!' Jack runs off to catch up with his guards and Daniel relays the news to Agnes.

On Epona at the Gate of the Twins

Barble clears his gullet, breaking the sudden silence in the courtyard as the ripples fade on the water's surface. 'Nicely done, Gryst, looks like you've led us to the wrong pool, you'd better get in there and retrieve it while we work out where the real Gate is!' The sneering tone would normally have been enough to send Gryst into a rage but before he can answer, four Kin burst through a doorway in the courtyard, their blades drawn. As the Naxen and Kin start to fight, Gryst edges closer to the pool and peers in, in the clear water he can see the doublet resting on the bottom near the edge and so he slips into the pool and reaches down to pick it up. The moment his clammy hand closes around the coin there is a loud whooshing sound and the water around him starts to rise and turn, spinning into a giant vortex, engulfing him and cutting him off from the rest of the courtyard, through the wall of water he can hear the screams and shouts of the others as the Valkyr mercilessly cut them down and then he can see nothing except a blade reaching in through the vortex for him.