It is certainly possible. I will not be able to control it. I will be no more. I cannot even guarantee that you and yours will live. But my sacrifice will be more powerful than Supay can understand. I would rather die, knowing that I have taken him with me into unbeing, than allow everyone to continue to fight and die, without hope of victory. Inti regarded him steadily, the sun-bright eyes unbearably difficult to look into. Will you do this, mortal?
Time continued to crawl past. Adam swallowed, feeling sweat trickle down his spine. “I can’t. There’s no possible way in which I could kill you.”
You have done so, before, Godslayer.
Oh, harah. There really is a backroom somewhere, where all the gods chitchat. “Tlaloc . . . I collapsed a ceiling on his body . . . he was weakened . . . “
And am I not? Inti stared into his eyes. But I understand. You believe that your weapon will be unable to kill me. A not insupportable conclusion, given the lack of effect on Supay and my poor Sayri so far. The god reached out, and touched a finger to the barrel of the gun. The grip turned blisteringly hot in Adam’s hand, and when he looked down, he saw that the image of a sun had been etched there. The tears of the sun, Inti said, with infinite weariness in his voice, are now yours to use as you see fit, Godslayer. I could not choose a more worthy mortal with whom to leave this burden.
Adam shook his head, minutely, and then with growing force. “I wouldn’t just be killing you, correct? I’d be killing the god-born who . . . carries you, too?” He cast around in his head for the name. “Quehuar.”
The sunblaze of the eyes didn’t fade, but the stance altered, slightly. Inti put his good arm against the pillar, leaning there, and when he replied, it was in a human voice. The resolute, stern lips moved. “I am . . . dead already, Godslayer. I would have died months ago, of starvation, if not for my god.”
Adam couldn’t help but picture, in his mind, the tale of Elijah, condemned to starve in prison, and sustained by bread brought to his cell by ravens, as Quehuar went on, swallowing hard. “We have both been fed by the sacrifices of others. We have been turned into parasites. Cannibals. Murderers, by proxy. Let us make something good out of all of that. Better us, and surety that Supay will be defeated, than so many others, without hope. And we . . . Inti can’t kill himself. He’ll be loosing his power. Willingly dissolving himself, rather than incarnating again. But we need . . . a push.” The man closed his eyes, and when he spoke again, it was Inti’s voice once more. Please.
“You’re surprisingly hard to argue against,” Adam admitted, tightly. “Yes. I’ll . . . help you.” And god help me for doing so.
Time began to flow again, and Adam’s stomach turned as Inti stood. I will meet death on my feet, the sun-god said, quietly. He turned his face away, and called, with so much love in his voice that Adam actually shook from it, Mamaquilla! Moon to my sun. Sister. Wife. For you. For our land. For our people. Keep them well.
The goddess had just enough time to look up from where she was trying to tie Supay with her lines of light. Just enough time for the luminous eyes to widen in horror. Inti! Beloved! No!
Supay turned, and Adam could see the exact moment of realization in the feral eyes as Adam stepped behind Inti, placed the barrel of the gun against the back of the god’s head, and asked, “Are you sure?” His voice was shaking. He’d killed before. But never in cold blood. This felt like murder.
I am, and I thank you for this, Godslayer. Do it. Do it NOW.
Adam felt, more than saw, as Supay began to leap for them.
He pulled the trigger.
Chapter XX: Kipuka
The notion of the destruction of the world is inherent to most mythology. As a theme, it derives primarily from an era in which a valley, a river, a few hundred square miles, was the entire world. It is difficult for human beings to have a true appreciation of the scale of the planet on which we dwell. If a flood, a fire, or an eruption affects us, then yes, egocentric little apes that we are, it is the end of the world. Or at least, of our world.
It is important to keep this concept in mind when examining the accounts of ancient disasters, and attempting to verify their historicity. There are, for example, multiple accounts of a great flood in Mesopotamian cultures. The earliest written account is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the eponymous hero is not even the hero of the flood story. The hero wants eternal life, and thus seeks out Utnapishtim, the man who saved humanity from the flood, and was rewarded with the secret to eternal life for it. When he finds Utnapishtim, the saga describes how the gods of Babylon conspired to punish mankind, but one god, Ea, refused to destroy all of their people. He whispered directions to Utnapishtim through the reed wall of his house, telling him to go to the river. To build a vast boat, like the covered apsu used on the river, and to lie to anyone who asked him why he had moved, and to say only that he had gone to dwell with his lord, Ea.
The gods flooded the river, and Utnapishtim loaded all of his family and as many living things as he could into his boat, and saved them from the flood. Later variants of the text say, no, it wasn’t just a river, but the whole world. (And so it was, to a culture that dwelled beside a river, and saw their lives, livestock, and livelihoods wiped out.) Utnapishtim finally landed his boat upon a mountain-temple—a ziggurat—as the waters receded. There, he made sacrifices and the gods, short-sighted as they seem to have been, turn out to have been starving for sacrifices for the entirety of the flood, as there have been no humans to make them! They descend upon his slaughtered sheep and his libations like flies. And then they squabble amongst themselves, trying to determine who the guilty god was, who permitted Utnapishtim to know of their plan. Ea calls his brethren to task for their short-sightedness, and belatedly, the gods reward Utnapishtim and his wife with eternal life, making them gods, and requiring them to live “where the rivers begin.”
Gilgamesh, for his part, never learns the secret to immortality. He’s done no deeds great enough to prompt a god to love him. And he fails to speak to a snake. Serpents, as the keepers of wisdom, were widely held to be immortal, and the ancients believed that they sloughed off their years with their skins. All chances at immortality lost, Gilgamesh returns home, disconsolate, and praises the works of mortals, in building cities. In building civilizations, the text tells us, humans achieve a kind of immortality.
This tale is familiar to Judeans under the far more pronounceable name of Noah’s Flood. In which the world ends in flood, one man and his family set out in a boat, and finally crash into a holy mountain. Literary plagiarism has a long history, it seems.
We must look at the rivers as the source of the legend. The rivers are where the god-touched Utnapishtim and his wife dwelled. A river boat is what he built. They were sent to live at the source of the waters. And archaeological evidence indicates that many of the cities in and around the Tigris and the Euphrates did suffer flood damage in or around 2700 BC, more or less just before the time in which Gilgamesh is said to have been king. The move from a flood that threatened a city—which was, to its inhabitants, the whole world—to an ocean that covered the entire world after forty days and forty nights of rain, is clear.
The gods of Babylon seem to have been arbitrary, short-sighted, and petty, not to mention careless with the lives of their followers. Then again, their followers were somewhat careless with their gods. After all, the godslayers came first to Babylon and Assyria . . . .
—Akakios Halkias. From The Great Deluge to Ragnarok: The History of the End of the World and Why it Won’t Happen in Our Lifetime, pp. 22-24. University of Athens Press, Athens, Hellas, 1946 AC.
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Maius 22, 1960 AC
In the early morning hours of Maius 22, the priests in the Inti Kancha, the great temple of the sun in Cuzco, moved in their appointed rounds, lighting fresh oil in ancient lamps and braziers, and polishing the altar, and the various relics gathered on its surface. The outermost walls of the temple had been sheathed in pounded gold foil centuries
ago, and still reflected the sun’s light blindingly on cloudless days. The interior was no less lavish, and the décor culminated with the sun-mask of Inti, which hung above the priests’ heads on the rearmost wall, behind the altar. Eighty pounds of heavy gold, pounded over a metal form into the likeness of a stylized human face, at the center of a circle surrounded by rays of light. The end of each ray held a human hand or the face of a jaguar. The lamps in the temple were all carefully positioned to reflect light back off the grinning mask of the Benevolent Sun, and thus, he perpetually shone down on his priests and any worshippers who might have come to his temple to beg for his guidance and mercy . . . even in the darkest hours of the night.
The worship of Inti was state-mandated, and had been since the first Sapa Inca, the legendary god-born Manco Cupac, who had begun building Cuzco in the 1190s AC. Currently, thirty-six million people worshipped Inti as the principle god among the many gods of Tawantinsuyu. Thirty-six million people greeted every dawn with at least a token nod towards a small sun-mask on a wall in their homes. While Diana and Artemis might be mentioned in the same breath as Mamaquilla, here, Apollo and Helios had no sway. The worship of Inti had been institutionalized for over eight hundred years.
The ground in Cuzco shivered. Those people who were still out drinking chicha and imported pulque from Nahautl might have felt the first tremors, but most of them were warm, happy, and elevated by the liquor and its fumes. One man fell off a barstool, but his friends attributed it to him not being able to hold his drink.
In Machu Picchu, at the summer palace of the Sapa Incas, Livorus was being kept in relative comfort. He still wore his ceremonial toga; it wasn’t as if his captors had brought his luggage from his hotel for him. He’d been permitted to read, and he trusted that the encoded dispatches in his travel case were proving entertaining reading for Tawantinsuyu’s intelligence services. The security breach couldn’t be helped, so he was disinclined to worry about it at present. So he sat, reading Caesar’s History of the Gallic Wars, a kerosene lamp at the desk providing just enough illumination for the pages. The light trembled across the page, far more than a flickering flame should, and Livorus raised his head. Studied the oil quivering in the glass base of the lamp, and saw ripples developing there. I didn’t hear artillery or a bomb blast. I don’t smell sulfur, so I don’t suppose there’s a summoner at work. And the region is notably active, in a seismic sense, as Dr. Sasaki has repeatedly pointed out. Livorus rose, smoothing his clothing, and moved to the door. Tapped on it, and waited for his guards to open it. “I believe we are experiencing earthquakes,” Livorus informed them, calmly. “I would like to take a stroll in a garden away from walls and ceilings until they pass.”
They gave him sardonic glances. “This is a ploy, yes? You think you can run away from us, in the darkness?”
“You may shackle me, if you wish, but I would greatly prefer not to be indoors for the next hour or so.” Livorus kept his tone completely calm.
“These walls are built to withstand earthquakes, Roman. They are all already falling in on themselves. Wedged tightly, so they cannot fall any further than they already are.” A slightly condescending smile for the nervous foreigner. “We know our land.”
“Yes. I’m sure you do. Still . . . a turn in the night air would surely do no harm?” Livorus offered his hands, just as the second, and much stronger quake hit—and this time, the guards looked down, in surprise, at the floor.
A younger man would have tried to take advantage, instantly. Leaped on them, attacked them in their moment of confusion. Livorus did not. He understood the value of patience. Understood that he did not know the palace’s layout, the guard routine, anything. Escape was exceedingly improbable from within the fortress. His best bet lay in getting outside the palace . . . and being locked in his room, with guards unresponsive to his requests, ran counter to that goal. “So,” he murmured, as the guards regained their footing. “About that garden stroll?”
The guards exchanged glances. “A little night air might do us some good,” one of them admitted.
As the ancient stone walls of the summer palace of Machu Picchu began to shake, the newer buildings of Cuzco, Ica, Ayacucho, Sicuani, and other cities in a roughly circular region began to shudder and collapse. The older the architecture, surprisingly, the better it held up, but the skyscrapers whipped back and forth like reeds in a high wind.
Back in Cuzco, the priests of Inti gathered near the altar, gesticulating. Earthquakes were the province of Mamapaca, the dragon goddess of the earth. For the earth to move suggested that the world of men was about to be punished for some misdeed. Oh, everyone understood plate tectonics. But it was hard not to think of the bump and jostle of continental plates as something fundamentally connected to the world beyond.
One of the priests happened to be looking up at the exact moment it happened. A third earthquake began, and this one was much, much worse than the first two. He saw the sun-mask of Inti tremble on the wall, and then the massive face, which had hung in the temple for eight hundred years, slipped from the secure fastenings that held it, and fell forty feet, slamming down onto the altar and floor. It had not been made in a single piece, but had been welded together with discreet seams. The soft, heavy gold had required bracing and support behind the face, to help it hold its shape. When the mask hit the ground, it broke apart, into a half-dozen fragments, but the priests, shouting in consternation, hardly had time to notice this, as the ceiling of the temple overhead began to cave in on them.
On the side of the mountain of Coropuna, the ushnu erupted upwards, the massive stones thrown like ejecta from a volcanic blast. A pillar of fire reached skywards, and astronauts working on the Libration space station and the L’banah moon base reported seeing an orb of what looked like fiery plasma rise, at high speed, from the planet’s surface. The ball of plasma actually hovered in orbit near the space station. It was hundreds of miles away, but the astronauts—rightfully concerned about gravitic disruptions to the delicate orbital placement of the station, not to mention radiation—took video and telemetry of the phenomenon, as best they could.
Only a small section of Earth’s night-side itself was affected; this included Tawantinsuyu itself, and a strip of the surface north into the Taino Islands and the eastern seaboard of Caesaria Aquilonis. Residents of Novo Trier, the Iroquois Confederacy, Crann Péitseog, Romaine, and dozens of other cities, were awakened as the night-time sky lit up as if it were noon, as a second sun had been born in the sky. People in Cuzco, already panicking at the earthquakes, and evacuating from their collapsing houses, screamed and pointed skywards. News crews scrambled to get footage that would have been called a clever hoax by residents of other nations, if not for the footage also streaming in, live, from outer space, Novo Gaul, and Nova Germania.
Beneath this newborn star, the tower beside the Coropuna ushnu collapsed in on the resigned figure of Apu, the mountain’s king. The god, though surely he felt the release of the power that held him there, did not move. He accepted his fate, and allowed himself to disperse, flooding the great machine of wires and spells that connected him to the land with his own energies. The only revenge he could take on those who had drained him was to destroy their works.
In Nazca, the energies from Inti’s death and Apu’s ripped through the wounded earth, setting off violent aftershocks, and the ley-lines conveyed the spiritual energy of two gods’ deaths to the tower outside of Ica, continuing in the near-instantaneous traverse of the circuit.
Clouds gathered overhead, and torrential rain began to fall. Inside the Ica tower, Kon, the god of rain, lifted his silvery head, and regarded the heavens with his gleaming blue eyes. Energies buffeted him, a tide that he could not resist. Could not ignore. The binding surrounding him snapped, but snapped inwards under the pressure, and he closed his sky-blue eyes, and released himself to the flood. Outside, the rain began to pool on the hardpan, and localized flooding tore at the earth.
Energy swept around the circle, pas
t Machu Picchu, and, like a tide, struck the tower outside of Cuzco. In it, Urcuchillay, lord of animals, lowered his llama-like head. The bindings collapsed inwards, and the raw tide of energy hit him. Dispersed him. Sent him into the flood with the rest. The tower collapsed, and Cuzco danced once more on its foundations. The ancient fortress of Sacsayhuamán remained standing, but hundreds of other buildings collapsed.
The energy continued around its circuit. The empty tower at Sicuani, where Mamaquilla would have been imprisoned, collapsed under the strain, the last point in the circle, but added nothing more to the total energies being loosed. The town around it was spared the scale of the devastation suffered in places like Ica and Cuzco, and the energies sped along the last line available, returning to the awakening giant that was Coropuna.
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Underground, Adam’s finger had compressed the trigger. He’d stood behind Inti, knowing that he couldn’t look into those sunblaze eyes, no matter how calm and resolute. No recoil in the pistol. For a moment, Adam didn’t even think he’d fired. Then he saw the golden, bloody mass that was the back of the god’s head, and Inti’s form sagged forwards, and Adam leaped forward to catch the body, as best he could. Heavy as an eight-foot-tall body should have been, Inti’s form was emaciated, and Adam levered him, gently, respectfully, to the ground. There’s no way to be forgiven for this, is there? he thought, numbly, inconsequentially, looking up again. Yes, a god, and no, not mine, and yes, he asked me to . . . but murder is murder, isn’t it?
As the body touched the ground, and Supay and Mamaquilla were both still in mid-motion, trying to reach Inti, a pillar of light and fire had exploded up from the body, and Adam barely flung himself out of the way in time. This wasn’t the gentle warmth of the sun on a lazy summer’s day. He threw his left arm in front of his face, just in time to save his vision, as streams of plasma exploded from Inti, like the prominences of a solar flare, blasting away at the stone overhead, vaporizing tons of rock in an instant. It should have carbonized every living being within that enclosed space, but somehow, the heat directed itself solely up, while Adam could sense waves of . . . something . . . moving through the earth, expressed mainly as vibration. He didn’t dare open his eyes. Didn’t dare pull his arm away from his face. But in his right hand, the gun remained, cocked and ready, and Adam was listening, intently, for anything that told him that enemies were approaching, even though he knew that it was futile.
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