The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4)

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  On Burunatu, the debriefings were at their mid-morning break, on the sunny veranda of a whitewashed villa overlooking the harbor. Nobody saw the object streak down out of the sky—it was moving many times the speed of sound, so nobody heard it either. The harbor, ships, the port town, in fact the entire island dissolved into a blinding white-hot inferno.

  Almost a day and a half out to sea, the fleeing harbormaster, who had sold the fleet rotation information, saw the mushroom of fire on the northern horizon. Not long afterward, a howling hurricane of steam blasted his ship, giving him blister burns, and almost swamping his small vessel.

  Psydonu’s first “sacred arrow” had hit its target.

  The second arrow, aflame with Aztlan’s Fire of the Gods, struck Lumekkor’s North Central Sea anchorage at the Southern Lumekkor port of Akko. Not nearly as many of Uggu’s capital ships were in port as were at Burunatu, but it mattered little. By the time the Central Sea super-clads could make it south to Kush, the invasion would be well underway, and well screened both by fleet and astra sky cover.

  Psydonu’s final arrow fell on the gigantic astra base and bunker complex outside Kushtahar, incinerating a vast aerial defense fleet with a garrison of combined Kushtim and Lumekkorim soldiers over five hundred-thousand strong. By the time an oracle message reached Uggu’s command headquarters at Bab’Tubila, Aztlan’s Deep Ocean Fleet was approaching the shores of Near Kush.

  The cargo ships ferrying At’Lahazh’s amphibious assault had the protection of three of the largest steel super-clads afloat.

  An unusual quiet settled over the tall forest up by the Haunted Lands Pass. Animal sounds usually kept the walker company on his long hikes, but not today. Moon-chaser rarely ventured down to the villages any more. Too many angry fathers of lost virginity were ready to lynch him. Varkun’s big dragon-cult connections at Sa-utar kept heat off the production of Grove Hollow’s cash crop, however.

  Moon laughed, and talked to himself to compensate for the unusual woodland stillness. “No production to it! I just go on my walks, and bring back a satchel full of heaven’s droppings to cash in with Varkun’s people. The Hollowers get their magic fruit, Sariya gets her stupid Witchy Girl sacraments, and Varkun gets his profit margin—though what fun he and Farsa have with it living like hermits is beyond me!”

  Moon did not like that his sister had gone back to Varkun, but he figured it was better than Sariya and the Witchy Girls leading her around by the nose. “Whatever happened to Farsa, anyway? She’s so not the lioness I used to know. Eh, it’s not my problem. At least I get to live in a tree mansion with enough silver to support Tsulia, be Speaker to the Helpers, and favorite stud of Akh’Uzan’s dreaming daughters!” Only then did he notice that his voice had grown steadily shrill and loud, as if somehow the deep forest silence sucked his voice into an emptiness of its own.

  As for what he had just told himself, that particular rationalization had actually ceased to satisfy him years ago. The thought of being a “stud” reminded Moon that he shared the same stigma as most young men his age at Grove Hollow.

  The horror of five years ago kept replaying in his mind like a relentless orb drama. It had been his single attempt to settle down—his one, shattered start at what his never-present father might have called “being responsible.” It had seemed so perfect.

  He and Tsulia had bought Khumi and Tiva’s giant tree house, after the youngest son of A’Nu-Ahki had returned to Pahpo. Moon-chaser had considered home and hearth for the first time in his life—the dream of having a son to teach the ways of the forest to, and introduce to the Helpers.

  How Tsulia had wailed that night. The screams still made Moon shudder, even down the ever-lengthening corridor of memory. Some images never go away, no matter how much he drowned them in dragon-fire.

  Her labor pains had come in panting shrieks that were mild compared to those that followed right after she gave birth.

  Moon-chaser had held up the abomination he fathered, years after taking the Temple “Red-sore Elixir.” Unfortunately, Tsuli saw it before he could hide it. Her panic had etched permanent lines on her dusk-olive face that had aged her two hundred years that night, mere days before the Comet had destroyed Tiamatu as though obliterating Moon’s hopes.

  For two whole days the Thing had howled, alone and starving; its mother too terrified to feed it. Tsuli had no way to know which of its mouths could actually take nourishment, and which could only make noise. Then there were the teeth; no baby had teeth! Moon-chaser recalled them biting his arms until the water ran red, while he held the creature under the stream until it stopped thrashing. Never would he forget its mad-monkey grip—its eyes bulging with demonic hate—while Tsulia shrieked on the bank.

  Between the Monster, and Moon’s infidelities, he wondered why Tsuli even stayed with him. She certainly was flame-nymph enough to have any man she wanted at the Hollow, but she never strayed.

  Then it hit him; she had stopped being afraid and hesitant about the Helpers right after the Monster. She even spent more time up at the Wisdom Tree nowadays than he did.

  He giggled like the nervous girl his wife used to be. “Guess she believes in something now. She’ll be all right as long as she believes in something. Everyone has to believe in something positive.”

  Moon-chaser, on the other hand, used the psychoactive fungus now mostly to forget. I never wanted to start a stupid Watcher cult!

  Under the highland coniferous forest south of Mount N’zar, wide patches of moss spread in a rich carpet. Here Moon-chaser’s crop grew best. The giant sloths that lived up in the nearby pass went there to fertilize the ground, as if the great father of all slothdom had designated the area as the official sloth latrine. Moon visited weekly to check on things, following the game trail to one of the muddy watering holes where his mushrooms grew.

  Entertaining dark thoughts after eating a seer’s button wasn’t smart, but he could do nothing about the memories any more than he could regurgitate the now half-digested fungus. I never even could tell if that thing I drowned was my son or daughter, he realized, as he ran a trembling tanned hand through his long sandy hair.

  A palpable shadow passed overhead, while Moon helplessly felt the mushroom’s advancing power like a mountain-sized boulder rolling down to crush him from out of the pass.

  “Go on and vulpin’ scare me!” he shouted to the half-present entity behind the seer’s button. “What’s left? Walking corpse men, gryndels shooting fire from their eyes, giant wasps crawling all over me until I scratch myself raw—I’ve done it all!” Still none of it compared to the real terror from deep within—the final abomination; of which the creature he and Tsuli had spawned was but a brief tangible shadow.

  As Moon went deeper into the forest, other shadows grew.

  A needle-studded snake deep inside his bowels seemed to wrap itself around the base of his spine. Again, the darkness passed overhead, and he knew that someone or something watched him from close above. He told himself that it was just the mushroom. However, this time Moon-chaser, prankster supreme, master of fantasy, and Speaker to the Helpers, could not convince himself that he walked alone under the green murk.

  The Forest had eyes.

  He gave a jittery laugh as he approached the watering hole clearing, hoping a little sunlight through the trees might lift the oppression. Moon-chaser stopped when he saw the woolly elephants drinking. They had trampled his mushrooms during their lazy mud bath, having wandered up out of the Haunted Lands. There had to be twenty of them!

  A range of dun-colored mountains broke through the forest, behind the mammoths, and dwarfed them. Whip-like necks shot up, telescoping calm alert eyes. The great behemoths pressed into the clearing among the mammoths, and peacefully joined them at drink. After them came two biped wyverna dragons, and a pod of duck-billed swamp drakes.

  Moon-chaser’s uneasy “I’m being watched” sensation exploded into panic. It was unnatural that these beasts shared the spring!

  The shadows pas
sed again over his head. He felt, more than heard, an eerie song drift gently down through the trees. Moon-chaser looked up and caught a glimpse of the Terrible Ones that hovered just above the forest, calling to their beastly charges. The animals all paused in their drinking, while one of their frightful guardians flashed a black, hostile eye at Moon-chaser—a gaze that penetrated to the core of his sanity, and burnt up what little remained. The eyes of the wyvernas and behemoths followed those of their shepherd, and marked Moon as an enemy.

  Moon-chaser’s throat would ache for the rest of his days because of the screams he made while running back to Grove Hollow without stopping. His nightmares would forever carry in them the unnerving calm of the drinking animals, their burning eyes, and a brooding vision of that terrible face that flashed down at him from eternity’s edge.

  Another round fired from the sculpted serpent-head muzzles of the one-cubit cannons on Psydonu’s flagship. The projectiles seared north to the crumbling shore emplacements on the coast of the Kushtim Straits.

  The fleet had steamed up the Assuri Ocean, hugging the primitive shores of Ae’Ri and Dudael. Thousands of cutters now landed troops into the Gihunu Estuary, south of the smoking ruins of Kushtahar—five armies that would speedily join up with At’Lahazh’s main amphibious Elyo legion in their sweep along the Khavilakki coast toward Ayar Adi’In.

  The Titan stood in his flag bridge, overseeing the most massive surprise naval assault in history. He wondered for how many thousands of years the children of Earth would sing of his feat this day.

  A signalman brought him word that the shore forts had capitulated.

  “Excellent!” Psydonu said, patting the lad on the back.

  The young man flinched. The lumps Psydonu felt beneath the signalman’s tunic revealed why. “We’ll soon put a stop to those tumors, my good boy,” the Titan said.

  The Signalman smiled and gave the Titan a confident salute.

  “Ready my cutter!” cried the Lord of the Sea to the ship’s captain. Psydonu then descended to the main deck, near a row of davits, to address the arch-straticons, straticons, and brigade sub-straticons that would command his drive inland.

  He climbed aboard the cutter, and stood at its beam, where he could look down over his gathered pennant officers on the main deck.

  Psydonu shouted, “My followers, today we begin the final step to world unification! I, who swam the Primal Chaos unscathed to the golden shores of Aeden, have seen it all in a vision…” For a split second, Psydonu recalled that his original “golden shore” vision had lacked the golden shore part—unlike all his subsequent ones.

  He also remembered the occasion of that vision. Half a century ago, Psydonu had imprisoned A’Nu-Ahki the Seer and one of his sons. The Seer had refused to confirm Psydonu as the prophesied Seed of the Woman, and forced him to create an alternate reality where A’Nu-Ahki had done the opposite. An unshakable reality because my words have creative power, Psydonu reminded himself, as he continued his speech.

  “Not only do we capture the Sacred East, and secure our military hegemony; we actually march to our own roots, and to our destiny. The long-awaited sign has come!” He shrieked in an inadvertent falsetto. “The Eyes of Tiamatu draw near! The Army of E’Yahavah A’Nu and Tsey’Us shall rush over the lands as a World-end of water to cleanse the earth! Onward we go, to liberate the Holy City! Then we press on to material Aeden, where we shall cleanse our plagues, and take our place again by the sons of the gods!”

  His officers broke into wild cheers, glassy eyes locked upward to their deliverer. Each drew ceremonial scimitars and sliced open their palms to lace their weapons in pledges of blood.

  Psydonu raised his arms to quell their fervor. “By tonight, the remains of Kushtahar will fall or be cut off by siege. Our first objective, before taking the Holy City of Sa-utar, is to secure bases from which to gain sky dominion over the region. A central place exists with several old drone fields from the Century War, about halfway between here and the Holy City. While At’Lahazh takes his prong along the coastal plains and lowlands, around Ayar’Adi’In and Erdu, we shall secure a strategic astra fortress from which the entire region falls under airstrike range; the Valley of Akh’Uzan!”

  Varkun glanced at the swimming faces in the crowd that milled around the public orb in the Archon’s Quarter of Akh’Uzan Village. He bit another fingernail. Why did they insist I come all the way down to town?

  Farsa hung like a limp vine on his other arm, her oily hair falling over her thin pallid face.

  “Where are they?” he demanded for the hundredth time.

  Farsa peered up at him with bleary eyes just alert enough to show her annoyance. “Stop it, Vark. They said they’d come. They weren’t vulpin’ crazed about using me as a go-between. They might make you sweat.”

  “Mindless bynt,” he mumbled under his breath.

  Varkun looked around again to be sure none of the faces in the crowd belonged to the one man he feared more than his Sa-utar connections. That face burned in his memory—with the curse issued by its bearer.

  “As for you,” the Sorcerer had said to Varkun many years ago, “within three weeks of the day you see my face again, you shall be a dead man.” A wizard, seer, or prophet—whatever this nameless elder was—he had bested Varkun’s power on a night when even the sons of A’Nu had submitted to his will. And all over some scatty bynt named Tiva!

  Varkun remembered standing beneath the light of the celestial disk, between his heavenly guardians. Nevertheless, the Wizard had shown powers even over the Helpers! All of Varkun’s glory had fled before that terrible face, whose voice still rang like an insane bell in his head.

  “What did you say?” Farsa asked, twirling a lock of her stringy red hair around her finger.

  “Never mind. Watch the orb! Your almighty Archon is coming on.”

  “He’s not my almighty Archon.”

  The large quickfire-and-glass ball displayed a scene with Archon Tarbet, in full ceremonial regalia; dancing the Iyu’Baaliat with a troupe of cross-dressed Temple boys at Uzaaz’El’s Festival of Lights. An Orb pundit gave a relaxed chuckle when the Archon missed a step, and fell into the adoring arms of two neophytes that helped him back into the dance.

  “The young people’s Archon, that’s who Tarbet is,” the Pundit said. “Few of the Fathers have understood the youth as he has.”

  Another commentator agreed. “Well, he is, after all, the youngest to hold the Archonate since Atum-Ra himself. It’s only natural.”

  “What do you think he’ll say when people ask why he’s up at the Festival while war rages in Kush, on our side of the Strait?”

  The Second Pundit answered, “It speaks of how contained the Kush situation really is. We’ve been given daily revelations on it, and independent sources agree that it’s simply a seaway dispute between the Sons of Kush on both sides of the water. Archon Tarbet has communed with Pandura of Aztlan, and she assures him that any military action by Aztlantim forces has been without Temple knowledge or sanction. It remains to be seen if there really is any direct Aztlantim involvement or if their Far Kush vassals are just flexing their muscles for a bigger piece of the Central Sea trade pie…”

  “I don’t know,” said the First Narrator. “My sources tell me that Aztlan’s fabled Deep Ocean Fleet has been seen in the Kushtim Straits, and that landings have been made.”

  “Well, the Archon’s dance is over. I’m sure he’ll enlighten us.”

  The two robed pundits in the orb picture approached a sweating Tarbet, and held their voice-enhancers to his face at a respectful distance.

  “Please tell us, O Father, is there any news on the Kush situation?”

  Tarbet’s eyes glowed personal warmth, his tan face, winsome smile, and prominent chin projected confidence. A tight braid of lightly frosted brown hair capped his head at just the right angle, like a fortress tower about to topple. The Archon smiled. “Lumekkor is responding, and our military forces are on alert. There has been some f
ighting off and on—mostly skirmishes.”

  The Orb Pundit asked, “Has Aztlan stated their intentions?”

  “I’m communing with Pandura on an hourly basis, and she has assured me that she is bringing the matter up with At’Lahazh and Psydonu. We will have this worked out soon. Our scheduled unification talks are still on, and there’s no reason to think that the City-States of Seti are in any imminent danger. This is a localized conflict between the Sons of Kush.”

  “What about rumors of an information blackout in the lower Gihunu Valley, and in southern Khavilakki?”

  “Rumors only,” the Archon said, stroking his chin. “We’re sending troops south along the coast, and on the Inland Highway to Akh’Uzan, Erdu, and Ayarak, just to be safe. There’s no reason to think this will erupt into a full-scale war, but our reserve troops are on full alert just in case. I want to reassure everybody that the markets are holding—there’s no general commercial panic over this, as there would be in a serious conflict. We are still in a shower of divine favor, my children. Offer prayers for the situation in Kush, but do not become discouraged or fearful over strange rumors.”

  “Thank you for your encouraging words, Revered Father.”

  The orb cut to a bit of sacred theater out of Erdu, involving a dancing pack of singing gryndels wearing female undergarments.

  Farsa rolled her eyes. “Now I’m really gonna puke! Look, there’re your contacts—over there, by the feed market.”

  Varkun rushed toward them, and dragged Farsa along.

  Two men from his coven at Sa-utar stood by the feed store, eying his approach. Varkun almost made it to hand-shaking distance, when a late middle-aged man stepped between them and stood still, eyes aflame.

  The face!

  Varkun slid to a halt, screamed, and bolted in the opposite direction.