Gate of the Gods: Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

He glanced over to Ur’Nungal, who no longer seemed as big and muscular as before. The Lugal’s eyes looked as they had when he and Dumuzi were both frightened boys together, students of Suinne the moon god, who had squeezed from them his awful tuition. They had spent their entire lives practicing martial arts, and collecting women, to try vainly to restore what the moon god had robbed them of. Ur’Nungal’s eyes screamed that he, too, knew that something worse than even Suinne was in the tent with them.

  Asshur spoke. “How goes the battle for our mighty Ninurta?”

  That Asshur could even know that Ninurta was involved in the battle rattled the nerve of the Falcon-man once known as Dumuzi.

  Horahkti stammered, “I, uh, m-my father’s army was routed while he was away south, gathering reinforcements—a surprise attack. If you come to his aid now, we can crush the enemy between his fresh forces and yours. The enemy’s numbers cannot match even a third of your force.”

  “And where is the lovely Inana, my sweet Ishtar?” Asshur’s enormous, gray-yellow tongue licked lips cracked with crusty ooze.

  “On the ship, Lord Asshur.”

  Psydon said, “We have a plan that requires the wiles of Isis.”

  Asshur added, “After we depart for our own lands, you shall be Lord of this new river land, if you obey us, young Dumuzi. The Misori’Rayim shall call the line of you and your father, P’Harao’Aha—the Great House.”

  Horahkti did not want to follow these men, but he did not want to fight with whatever moved behind the mouth of Asshur or hid in the long shadows of Psydon. If Narnmer possessed a “Scorpion Spirit,” then Horahkti had a “Falcon Spirit,” and even his Falcon feared these men.

  “What do you want of me and my mother?”

  Asshur told him.

  171

  Pahn had remote control of Asshur, similar to that which old “Hi-Psy” fought to maintain over Psydon. The only difference was that Pahn floated comfortably overhead in the storm cloud. While High Psydonu, by nature, was a much more powerful Watcher than Pahn, he had to fight the crushing pull of the Abyssu to broadcast his weakening code signal.

  The Ancient Enemy long ago cut off access for Pahn’s gate-creature to any deeper level of reality than the fourth heaven. Even risking that level would expose their position to lower Enemy forces nearby. The Monster yearned for mobility; nor could it escape the gate-creature’s incessant pining over the loss of more than half of itself to the disconnected depths—or forever lost heights—depending on one’s outlook. Pahn wished the stupid thing would stop its screeching, but could not mind-lash the creature, lest it lose some of its remaining sensitivity. Squandering such an important tactical asset was not a smart move.

  The Monster might have scowled at the irony, were it not at present an incorporeal code pattern stored in the gate-sentinel’s buffer organelles. The impression of the gate-stairway model onto Kush and Nimurta’s thoughts had been a useful accident. In different ways, both men had opened themselves to direct Watcher suggestion. They had turned their hopes away from the Ancient Enemy while an Insurrectionist gate-sentinel slept nearby. Their dreams reflected their fears, and their fears, their motivations.

  Normally, Pahn’s kind, along with Seraf, Kherub, and other celestial sentients, could not directly read thoughts. They sensed bioelectric energy emission patterns that accompanied emotions, and heard spoken words echoing along fourth and fifth dimensional meta-surfaces; but that was not mind reading. The Ancient Enemy reserved that for himself—or nearly so.

  Gate-sentinels could not intentionally read thoughts either, but they were different in one sense. When they slept, they sometimes captured and broadcasted the dreams of other sleeping sentient creatures in close proximity to them. This was one reason they could reassemble damaged operating codes of other sentients so efficiently. It also gave a tactical intelligence advantage to whoever controlled the gate-sentinel. It enabled Watchers, or Monsters like Pahn who used to be Watchers, limited thought-receiving capability, whenever the gate-sentinel slept near sleeping humans.

  Kush’s desire to commune with the Watchers had only been fleeting at first, driven by discontent and fear. It had still been enough for En-Ki to exploit, and magnify into ever so much more, over time. Nimurta’s desire fully shifted only after the discovery of the Eridu Stone; another happy accident. This event had suggested to him an alternate history, which, by that time, pride had made him secretly want to believe over the Enemy’s version.

  Kush and his son had heard stories from childhood of the stepped tower observatories before the Deluge. That image combined in their dreams with a reflection of the gate-creature’s sense of purpose and shape onto their thoughts. Since sentinels contained transit nodes between dimensions, the men mindlessly assumed the ancient observatories must be “spiritual gateways.” With only the First Heaven visible to them, they associated the gates with the constellations, and valued a created medium over the message from their Creator written in that medium.

  The belief that the Gate of the Gods could actually connect Heavens, Earth, and the Abyssu by its stairways, with platforms serving as spiritual “transit nodes,” came from projections of a sleeping gate-sentinel’s dreams. En-Ki, and the sentient monsters serving him, like Pahn, had taken advantage of the situation. Lack of creativity only sharpened a sense of opportunism.

  Pahn’s kind had also observed how humans loved the idea that they could simply climb levels; it really did not matter what form the “levels” took or where they really went. This made the ziggurat’s abstract meaning versatile and communicable; a programmable template stamped onto humanity’s mass psyche. The mechanism would repeat its work in new ways, perpetually rebuilding fresh nightmares across generations to advance the same malignant end. Whatever new decorations men gave to its cultural forms by their own efforts could make no lasting difference. It was the very world-shape; En-ki’s new pattern for the human social machine.

  This template reduced the function of designed relationships into mere imposed activities. The redirection of a complex creation required it. Power for activity must replace designed relationships between people as the prime motivator for things to work. They must cut each mechanism of creation off from its original purpose, to re-fit them to multi-task for whatever the Plan demands.

  Kush, Assur, and Nimurta had each wanted power for different reasons. Kush wanted it simply because his ego demanded space to flex a personality even larger than his body. Assur resented how his father had favored the Khaldini. Nimurta, at first, had really feared that his mentor might not return, and concluded that his schooling made him best suited to establish order in the M’El-Ki’s place. After discovering their gate-sentinel-projected dreams, it took no great feat for Pahn’s people to get these men to discuss their thoughts. With players like P’Tah-Tahut, Inana, and Suinne in the wings, this had happened almost automatically.

  It got dicey for a bit, with the Enemy’s trap, but now the last sons of A’Nu’s Comforter had expended their strength. With Ninurta gone, they likely basked in a false sense of security.

  Pahn roused the army below him now to strike—an army almost four times the size of King Scorpion’s.

  172

  U’Sumi knew he must release P’Tah-Tahut soon, but wanted to do so only once his and Iyapeti’s war bands reached the end of the Styx lands. The M’El-Ki felt the need for added insurance. Each day of travel increased the sense that it would likely be necessary. Tahut easily established rapport with each Misori’‌Rayim tribe they met. He spoke their language so quickly, that U’Sumi felt hopelessly outclassed. Apprehension soon sank into despondency over ever being able to reestablish viable governance based on the Divine M’Ae of E’Yahavah.

  Rain poured as the combined war bands moved slowly northward into the eastern delta banks, through nome after nome thinned of peoples, many villages deserted altogether. U’Sumi and Iyapeti discussed the signs of where they really stood, nightly by the campfires. Victory lost its triumphal sense of accomplish
ment; much like the scattered villages had lost their signs of life. People they met in the liberated Delta settlements always used the name for the Styx River imposed by King Scorpion; the “River of Light,” as if they expected Narnmer’s return. It chilled the blood.

  It seemed Narnmer’s “generosity” to the chieftains who submitted to him outweighed any memory of the entire nomes he had slaughtered. Few seemed to appreciate their liberation. Raggedy bands of surviving nomads always looked first to Tahut, not to U’Sumi or the massive figure of Iyapeti.

  The troop met the crashing waves of the new sea by surprise, midmorning, when they passed through a deserted settlement encircled by a thicket of delta trees. The northern-most section of the village lay half-submerged. Just beyond, a row of poplars marched, slouching soldiers, off into the surf to drown themselves after terrible flashbacks from a war too horrifying to live with.

  After backtracking around a brand new bay, the war band turned east along the coast. Clouds fell again over the north and east by mid-afternoon. Only then did U’Sumi catch sight of a real army stretched across their path, horizon to horizon, like a black band between earth and the darkening sky.

  “To arms! To arms!” he called to his men. He collapsed his spyglass, and put it back inside his belt pouch. He loosened his hand-cannon for quick draw, thanking E’Yahavah that he and Haviri had spent their last day at M’Nopf melting and forming lead; and reloading finger-clip ring capsules with thunder-dust. U’Sumi would need to mix more if he ever made it back to White Rock—to T’Qinna. Stop it! Can’t think that way now!

  Iyapeti’s cavalry formed up alongside.

  A tiny knot of riders from the opposing force advanced into the empty scrublands between the two armies, under a flag of truce. U’Sumi grabbed his spyglass again, training it on the small party.

  Iyapeti said, “Who are they, and where did they come from?”

  U’Sumi turned the focus ring. “It’s Inana, with—oh my, didn’t see this coming—she’s flanked by Psydon, Assur, and Dumuzi, with a younger man I don’t know. Their forces outnumber us at least three to one.”

  “E’Yahavah is with us, Brother.”

  U’Sumi remembered all the times—especially during the Deluge—when he had said the same thing or something like it to Iyapeti or Khumi. It seemed an odd role reversal he had experienced with both brothers, late in life, but he welcomed it, especially now. It made the loss of Khumi and Tiva almost bearable. Executing Nimurta had also taken much out of him. So had the summary death sentence against the Khana’Anhu Chieftain who instigated mass desertion. Nimurta’s odd recall of the story of Typhunu lodged like a twisted dagger somehow.

  U’Sumi had killed many men as a soldier in his youth. The first, on the same day he slew the chimera monster-man, Typhunu, in a war he knew that history—assuming it continued—would never remember. Back then, command decisions had belonged to others, or it had been a matter of self-defense or preservation of those who could not defend themselves. Now, except in those rare cases when E’Yahavah told him directly what to do, he must make such calls, hoping the Divine wisdom he asked for still illuminated the process.

  Too often, it seemed that the only choices left to him were bad ones; differing only by their degree of badness.

  No set of scales existed on Earth big enough to measure that weight. No childish demand that life be simpler than it really is; no promises of total peace if only U’Sumi made good choices, fit the reality forming on the horizon. U’Sumi didn’t want peace—at least not now. He trusted his Maker, whether given a command to obey, or forced to reason things out by the wisdom given him. That wisdom told him it was better not to have total peace over some things in this life, even if he must choose them against greater evils. Evil was still evil. It was the best way right now to know that he still had a humanity made in his Creator’s image.

  Even E’Yahavah knew regret in the face of what Man, and all of creation, had become—and he created anyway, knowing ahead.

  “Total peace” was for Paradise.

  “Stay back here and command the army, Iyapeti. I’m going out to meet them.” He turned to P’Tah-Tahut, who had been given an onager more so that U’Sumi could keep a better eye on him, than anything else, “Tahut, ride out behind me. ‘Peti, have four of your bowmen with arrows fitted, but bows down. If I signal by scratching my head, have them fill P’Tah-Tahut with darts. There will be no further treachery this year.”

  U’Sumi hand signaled two of his brother’s horsemen to ride out on either side of him, and kicked his mount forward at an easy pace, with Tahut’s onager after him. He halted twenty paces from the truce party, which had stopped halfway between the armies.

  Thunder rumbled in the north, with approaching lightning flickering over the surf of the strange new sea on U’Sumi’s left. The wind moaned.

  Dumuzi spoke first; “Why ride you back to your own lands with Thoth, but not my father, O Son of Seti?”

  U’Sumi’s heart skipped a beat as he became aware that something beyond the human worked against him. Why would young Dumuzi use the same archaic epithet P’Tah-Tahut had advised for Nimurta’s tribunal? How could they have been in contact—certainly not in any human way? It may not have even been humanly intentional! Assur was old enough to recall a day when the Firstborn sometimes still used that title. Did Assur coach the youngster? If so, why? The Madness had taken Assur severely, according to En’Tarah-ana. One look told U’Sumi, now, that little of Assur remained in Asshur. The dead eyes said it all. How did I alienate you so fully, Assur, my Son?

  U’Sumi prayed desperately for wisdom and deliverance from behind cold, narrowed eyes, and a face of stone he hoped no man might read.

  The words that whispered into his mind came as cool, refreshing water from the mountain brooks of the Cedar Forest. “Do not fear them. Though I give them the Earth for a season—it is but a prison where they await their final sentencing. All that holds them together is a chain of rotting cobwebs. Speak freely in the office I gave you, my M’El-Ki.”

  U’Sumi said, “Ninurta has been captured, tried, and put to death for his crimes, according to the Divine M’Ae given to my father after the Deluge. The one you call ‘Thoth’ has repented of his sins.” He could almost feel P’Tah-Tahut quivering in the saddle on the onager behind him. U’Sumi slowly reached behind himself to the skin satchel strapped to his saddle pack, and brought it forward. Exposing the object inside, he tossed it onto the sandy ground between himself and the enemy truce party.

  The dry-salted, bashed-in head of Ninurta landed, staring up at Dumuzi and Inana like a shriveled, sightless mask.

  “So is the fate of those who shed innocent blood, and then dare to present themselves as divine beings to justify themselves.”

  Dumuzi’s face twisted. “I am Horahkti, the Falcon-headed; you have cruelly murdered my father, and usurped the throne of this land that is rightfully mine, Man of Seti!”

  Only then did Inana begin to wail leviathan tears.

  Asshur croaked, “Right should rule might. The mighty one of Seti has had force on his side, but young Horahkti here has justice on his. We shall do justice to Horahkti, I deem.”

  The voice of P’Tah-Tahut cried out, several nerve-wracked octaves higher than his normal speaking voice, from behind, “This is right a million times! Surely this is a time to put the bitterness of war behind us!”

  U’Sumi was not the least bit surprised that Tahut would risk the arrows rather than offend his true masters; nonetheless he refrained from scratching his head.

  Inana lapsed from her phony tears, and called out into the gathering storm, “Let the North Wind shift westward and bring news of justice from this divine council to my Osiru; that his son will rule in his place!”

  Asshur raised one hand, and shouted into the rising wind, “Surely, giving the throne to Horahkti seems right to all of the heavens! Thoth shall place the signet ring on him, and we shall crown him!”

  U’Sumi laughed at this. “Rea
lly? Are you people serious? I’ve killed the enemies of heaven in wars since before this world you walk on even existed. I stood in the conning shack inside the prow of the Boat of a Million Years—riding out the storms of primal chaos before any of you were born. Yet I will decide who rules in the place of your Asiru, not because I am greater or stronger, but because it is my prerogative under the Divine M’Ae.”

  Psydon looked as if he would speak, but he never got the chance.

  It felt as if the world flipped, end over end, in a sickening plunge. All the lightning of heaven exploded into a vast nest of flame serpents, shooting away to crisscross the skies amid the thunder of colliding worlds.

  173

  The enemy attack struck Pahn from out of nine dimensions at once, barring escape. The Monster fleetingly sensed High Psydonu’s transmission failure as consciousness codes from the attempted breakout withered back into the Abyssu spiral in what human ears would translate as a wail of terror. Time for the falling Watcher slowed to that dense hot fluid of the eternal moment of agony awaiting them all. This left the man, Psydon, slack-jawed in the storm, with a headful of half-congealed memories that were not his own.

  After that, events ripped four whole dimensions of reality away from the Monster like sheets in a cyclone.

  The gate-sentinel howled, and bolted, wrapping the universe around itself in wild, cycling streamers like a panicked horse. It dragged Pahn over a jagged meta-surface landscape between dimensions, until the gate-creature ultimately had no place to flit to because enemies surrounded them. The Monster felt much as a human might, inside some wildly spinning object with enough centripetal force to send it flying, only with more dimensions involved. The effect multiplied itself exponentially. Living code began to unravel from Pahn’s sub-etheric carrier wave in scrambled layers.

  The Monster transmitted free of the gate-creature under conditions comparable to a material creature hurling itself off the stone of some giant slingshot. It bashed through the sphere of enemy attackers, punching through more harsh inter-dimensional meta-surfaces. This sheared away stanzas of operational code like a “material’s” skin and muscles. Pahn only broke clear because of a weak spot in the enemy’s signal jamming.