At’Lahazh’s fleshy brow relaxed. “Not as severe as in the fleet. I’ve kept most of my forces with me in Aertimikkor, beyond the quarantines. A third move north to Far Kush on the jungle roads.” The High King of Aztlan laughed. “Uggu’s spy astras based at The Pillars and Uggu-stavaar do not even search for the greatest shift of military might in history! Our token Great Neck Division stays on continual maneuvers from Bab’Kusha to Firth Dracan, keeping Lumekkor’s intelligence assets busier than any ten armies!”
Psydonu ran a finger through the black curls of his beard. “I hear Samyaza’s followers are on another rampage, and Lumekkor has shipped more troops to Zhri’Nikkor. How go your talks with the Archon, my love?”
Pandura smiled. “Dear Tarbet is cooperative as ever. But Avarnon-Set needled me about our trade and travel restrictions—even to the point of offering ‘technical aid’ for a problem he cannot possibly solve. You may be right about moving up our timetable. Still, they did not forbid me a visit to the Shrines of the Sacred East. I saw Paru’Ainu—the Gateway to Aeden—with my very own eyes! It is a beautiful and mystifying place. I could feel the very power of creation pour from its crystal waterfalls!”
Psydonu’s glassy too-far-apart eyes widened before he ended the transmission. “That flow shall cleanse us of our plagues, and restore us our heavenly birthright. I have seen it in a vision! We are children of the stars!”
Pandura felt a teardrop when her orb went silent. Paru’Ainu was a monument far more desirable than the one to which she now returned. She had shared that briefly with Tarbet, without going into any revealing details, as they visited in the Archon’s suite high on the towering Isle of the Dead between the Waterfalls of Palqui. She had battled her own heart to keep him from finding her growing secrets. That depressing memory plunged her with the astra into the hazy brown air space above Northern Aztlan.
Outside the view-port, dark vapor phantoms hung across the land, lovers long dead, haunting out silent revenges against her from the belching crematoriums. The airship descended further into the murk.
Pandura whispered, “Tarbet’s orb broadcasts almost had me living in his magical kingdom of peace and plenty. How I wish I could join you there, and not resist your advances—perhaps soon.” Then she shifted in her seat, feeling the unnatural lumps under both her arms, and knew it could never be.
Aside from the fact that her titan lords positioned their forces to invade Tarbet’s homeland, she doubted the good Archon would appreciate the kind of rendezvous he had enjoyed with her on the Armistices Ship, now. Even Psydonu only called her “my love” out of pity these days. Pandura could not imagine the Archon showing her anything better when she sported three bulging tumors to replace the breasts she had sacrificed last year to a cancer far less visible, but far more immediately threatening to her increasingly desolate life.
Sutara awoke in the crook of her husband’s arm from a fitful sleep; on a straw mattress just inside the ship’s opened cargo hatch. It was Iyapeti’s night to guard the drydock area. Suta had decided that she didn’t want to sleep alone.
The hatch overlooking the menagerie compound made a decent lookout perch. Vandalism had increased in the last few years. Iyapeti dozed with one of U’Sumi’s old hand-cannons by his side. Everyone figured the animals would be noisy enough to wake the watch if there was real trouble.
Suta sat up and watched the ghost shades below. At first, she thought a cloud had passed over the moon, until she heard whispering in the shadows. A rustle, a sheep’s frightened bleat, then an ominous red glow by the giant barn made her shake her husband. Several figures clad only in telltale red thongs scurried away from the fire glow. Belkrini!
Iyapeti stood, took aim at Belkrini’s arsonists, and fired several rounds. The fleeing wraiths vanished into the shipyard debris.
The menagerie and its pens were already ablaze before Sutara and her husband even reached the bottom of the ramp. Cattle and onagers bolted through the burning stockades, followed by sheep and goats.
“Help me move the big doors!” Iyapeti yelled, as he rushed toward the warehouse, which had two large wheeled panels.
Sutara followed, and slid the menagerie’s bay door open at her end. A horrendous wind nearly sucked her in through the opening. She looked up to find the roof already half consumed by cyclones of flame and smoke.
Iyapeti rushed inside, and dipped his cloak in the watering trough to cover his head and mouth. Sutara did likewise. They ran through the rows of cages, and opened as many as they could. The panicked animals either froze, or scrambled for the doors. Suta paused to shake free some of the fear-stricken ones, but soon found that she had no time.
A horrific explosion from further inside almost knocked her from her feet. The roof collapsed over the aviaries, killing most of the fowl there, but letting some fly free into the night with the sparks. Iyapeti pushed through the inferno to the cages on the other side of the cave-in, but soon the heat and smoke threatened to overwhelm him. Sutara tried to follow, but the flames forced her to retreat toward the big sliding doors.
“‘Peti, get out of there!” she yelled, collapsing into a coughing fit.
Another portion of roof fell in, and her husband disappeared. Suta kept screaming his name from the door, until the smoke made breathing impossible. A sudden wall of super-hot air blasted her to the ground, forcing her to crawl away toward the water tower.
She stopped at the nearest tower leg to catch her breath. Suta’s head swam, while the inferno roared in her ears. Hands clutched her shoulders from behind, and pulled her to her feet.
Belkrini’s arsonists must have returned to add abduction to their crimes. Rumors told how the Trogs sometimes stole young women from their homes and took them back to their cave city. There, the abductees fell under the Fire Seer’s spell, and remained with him willingly whenever authorities came to investigate. Sutara had no idea how Belkrini controlled their minds, and was terrified of finding out.
The hands spun her around. Iyapeti’s big soot-smeared face looked down at her, as he carried her to the water tower’s far side.
“I thought you were buried!” Suta cried, when he placed her on her feet by the tower ladder.
“I got out through the culvert door. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine now. What do we do?”
‘Peti surveyed the disaster. “The blaze is too big for us to control. We’ve got to get a hose onto the water main!”
“They’re all in the storage locker inside the menagerie!”
“Not the natron solution lines!”
“Will they fit?”
“I don’t know! Let’s get one and see.”
Suta and ‘Peti ran down the drydock and dragged back one of the natron hoses used for setting the waterproof kapar cement shell on the ship.
The inferno blossomed into rosy death-flowers, and began to spread to one of the other storage sheds. Iyapeti climbed the water tower, hose slung over his shoulder, to the spigot platform. However, when he reached the release lever, he threw up his hands, and almost dropped the line.
“The spout’s too small for the hose coupling!” he called down.
“Wait! I have an idea!”
Sutara scrambled up the ladder. When she reached the platform, she began to tear her skirt into thin strips. After she had four of them, she told her husband to pull the hose up over the spigot, like a sleeve, and to hold it there. With two of the linen ties, Suta made slip nooses around the hose, sealing it to the water tower’s spout. She then took two thicker strips, and secured the hose coupling handles around the sluice lever stems on either side, so the weight of the line would not pull the connection free.
Iyapeti climbed down from the tower and closed the hose nozzle. At his signal, Sutara released the sluice lever and watched gravity fill the line. Then she joined her husband back on the ground.
Rather than try to put out the blaze directly, they soaked the ground and other nearby structures. Fortunately, a stone culvert ran
behind the far side of the inferno, beyond the hose’s reach. Only when Iyapeti made a good firebreak did he turn his spout onto the fire itself. It was useless. The flames were too high. Finally, they satisfied themselves with re-wetting the fuel barrier until the fire exhausted itself toward dawn.
Before the sun cracked over the pass, Suta saw the others running across the meadow to their aid; T’Qinna and U’Sumi followed by the bounding figure of their striped sphinx-cat, Taanyx. Khumi or Tiva must have seen the last of the fire from the Tacticon’s old suite when they got out of bed. By the time they arrived, they could do little but stand by the coals.
“It’s all my fault!” Iyapeti said, when his father approached him with a face as ashen as the menagerie. “I fell asleep!”
“We all sleep down here,” U’Sumi said. “There’re not enough of us to maintain a three watch per night, military guard—not in the long term, not without loss of sleep causing accidents.”
A’Nu-Ahki shook his grayed-raven head and said, “With only a few months left—all that work, gone!”
The pre-dawn silence enveloped them in its thickening mists. Soon, between the smoldering wreckage and the fog draping down from the mountain pass out of the Haunted Lands, none of them could see more than a few cubits in any direction. Scuffling noises penetrated the sound-muting murkiness punctuated by occasional pops from the barn’s smoking embers. Everyone instinctively moved closer together.
Fleeting shadows flitted through the gray vapors amid the hazy giant silhouettes of cranes and sheds, always in the corners of Suta’s eyes.
Then T’Qinna’s sphinx-cat began an ominous moan.
Sutara heard something snap, and turned.
Menacing shapes writhed like phantasms in the foggy culvert meadows.
Modern man has no real boundary condition for what he should do; he is left only with what he can do. Moral “oughts” are only what is sociologically accepted at the moment. In this setting will today’s unthinkable still be unthinkable in ten years?
—Francis A. Schaeffer
How Should We then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture
3
Maneuvers
A’Nu-Ahki turned at Sutara’s cry.
Dots of small animals and livestock came together like a single organism in the grasses between the outer culvert and the drydock. Brooding goat-like ovines, a variety of cattle, onagers, birds, scampers, and lilituan night-beasts—all possessed of one mind—converged on the humans, and stood before them in the silent smoky mists.
A’Nu-Ahki stepped among them, and picked up a singed finch that had landed at his feet. Surprised that it did not fly away at his reach, he checked the small blue linen tag around its leg. “It’s one of the prime long-billed males,” he said, meaning that the bird belonged to one of T’Qinna’s two most genetically mixed groups from the aviary.
Another finch flapped down on Nu’s shoulder. It had the yellow tag of the second genetically mixed group—the short-bills. By its markings, A’Nu-Ahki saw it was female. Immediately he and the youngsters began to rifle through the beasts in a way that would have scattered any other animals. They found that at least a pair each of the best specimens from all the creatures receiving T’Qinna’s special attention had gathered at their feet.
They also discovered others they had never seen before—like the eerie, huge-eyed lilituans, named for sad-eyed Lilitua, the estranged wife of Qayin, and native to the far northeast regions of Y’Raddu.
The sun rose, and started clearing the fog. Clumps of animals, some in small herds, others in the predicted pairs, stretched well beyond the inland shipyard, all the way up into the hilly forests of the Haunted Lands Pass.
A’Nu-Ahki said, “Whatever beasts we can make a final selection for, we might as well load aboard the ship.”
After a long day of gathering and driving, carrying and leading the creatures aboard ship or back up to the fortress, the family again gathered around the telescope for their near-nightly ritual of observing the sky.
Two pinprick lights grew that were not a normal part of the heavens.
A’Nu-Ahki slid the cover back over the telescope’s eyepiece, and said, “Tiamatu’s divided carcass draws near for her unclean offering.”
Farsa avoided people whenever she went down to the academy ziggurat for her Girl’s Elixir. She wanted her use of the Guild’s mood-altering potion kept secret because she hated it whenever people compared her to Tsulia—who, everyone knew, took it to stop being such a timid Orthy princess, unable to think for herself.
Farsa’s need was the opposite. She thought about things too much—not too little—the academy marm had even said so. Consequently, today her emotions sank into a pit—as if the people in her life all held her head underwater. Varkun, Moon-chaser, and Sariya (who was still a “Speaker to the Helpers”) each pressed Farsa in different ways, but it was all the same.
She needed to bump into Tiva on the trail down to town about as much as she needed to have her eyeballs sucked out by hummingbirds.
It was Farsa’s worst nightmare. If I start rambling like a lunatic, I might tell her too much! How would she react if she knew that I was once in love with her—that I still fantasize about her! Farsa’s relationship with Varkun was only tolerable, at best, these days. She already knew that Tiva had frowned on Sariya. Holy Watchers, I’m in love with a hard-tied Lit girl!
Tiva paused on the trail to greet her. Farsa felt her old friend’s dark eyes pass through her like wildfire, and dared not meet them with her own. They stood uneasily before each other for several awkward seconds.
Farsa finally forced herself to look up and meet Tiva’s face. It was like removing a blindfold in devastating sunlight. It hurt. It revealed. I’ve gotten it all wrong. Her eyes… We could never… even without Khumi. She still cares for me, but not like that… Not ever like that… Hope died.
“Heard you folks had a fire,” Farsa finally said, to ease the tension.
Tiva nodded, and laughed. Her perfect black curls didn’t even fall over her rich dark face. “Yeah, Belkrini’s Flame-Trogs decided to remind us that we’re preparing for the wrong World-end.”
Farsa scowled at the sudden reminder of why Tiva could never have loved her, and lashed out before she could stop herself. “That’s what I just don’t get about you people! You Lits fling arrows at each other like the Basilisk’s spawn, instead of supporting each other!”
“Hey, we didn’t go down to Belkrini’s cavern and stop up its mouth! Nor have we ever done anything to attack Nestrigati’s Floodhaven, or my father’s altar! We haven’t bothered you Hollowers none, either.”
“I wouldn’t mind being bothered a little—not by you at least.” Oh Watchers, why did I say that? Farsa quickly added, “I mean I can’t see you leaving us for that kind of stupidity, anyway. I just don’t understand you, is all. I know we did a mean prank once, and I’m really sorry about that. But, I helped you get away from your father. I notice you’ve never gone back there. Look, we just want to live how we want! Is that so bad?”
“That depends. What if what you want isn’t what you need; and life just drives you too fast to see the misery for what it is?”
The question caught Farsa off guard. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing the old Tiva would have asked. “I guess you musta heard I split up with Sariya, and went back to Varkun.”
Tiva’s dark eyes burned. “No I hadn’t, and I can’t say I’m happy for you either way. He’s a murderer, you know. He killed Sutara’s mother.”
“He did not! Besides, he’s not a dragon-worshiper any more, Tiva. He’s changed. The Helpers at the Wisdom Tree changed him.”
“Farsa, your ‘Helpers’ aren’t helping you. Come with me. At least meet Khumi’s family. What harm could it do?”
Farsa smiled, and shook her head. “I can’t figure myself out, Tiva, much less you. You say my lover’s a murderer, and my choices are all bad, but instead of being mad at you, I’m just relieved th
at you’re still trying.”
“Come with me. There’s not much time—a few weeks at most!”
Farsa shook her head. “I wish I could, you know. But it’s just not realistic. I don’t know much, but I do know that the house of A’Nu-Ahki doesn’t do the concubine thing and still frowns on polygamy—unless the old man has a fourth son I don’t know about. What would I do there?”
Tears filled Tiva’s eyes. “For something as important as your life, Farsa, I’m sure that A’Nu-Ahki would make some kind of exception—even on the polygamy thing! I know he would!”
“For something as important as my life?” Farsa didn’t know what else to say that could still be said aloud. Tiva’s tears made Farsa want to hold her so bad that her entire body ached. No, Tiva, I can’t put you through that. Even if I could, I can’t put myself through it. It wouldn’t be fair to you. You belong with Khumi. “I’ll see ya around, Tiva. It’ll be okay. Thanks again for the offer, but no. I just don’t see how it could work.”
Morning rose on the island of Burunatu, off the rocky southeast coast of Far Kush’s Great Neck headlands, where Lumekkor’s Assuri Ocean Fleet had just pulled into anchorage the night before. For three days, only four squadrons of monitors would patrol the seaways between Near and Far Kush, and keep watch eastward along Assuri’s coast.
The new rotation of super-clads and escort ships would wait while their commanders debriefed the new captains. A harbormaster had carefully studied this peacetime procedure—a sailor himself, who now skirted east of the Sea of Gebur in his outrigger, to circle the South Kush Alliance mainland toward Dudael with a promissory note for lots of Aztlan gold. He dared not put ashore in the much nearer port of El M’E, or even farther south, at Sidrin, for fear of the warning his contacts had given him.
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 8