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

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Moon-chaser said, “The Wetters—that is, the Floodhaven people—spent a lot of time and gold to reinforce the upper trail.”

  Avarnon-Set eyed him. “Be that as it may, what used to be an afternoon’s hike will now take us several days. If you follow, I can promise no protection. On the other hand, if you stay, Mount N’Zar’s quakes will bring this house down on top of you, if the rain doesn’t. Floodhaven sits above all that. By now, the liquid fire flows have widened. We’re cut off from the villages, which are rapidly flooding out anyway. Soon starvation will be a real threat. The elders of Floodhaven have prepared for all that.”

  Varkun asked, “Do you really think it can last that long?”

  Tsulia said, “It’s people like you who brought this evil on us, you dragon-worshiper!”

  Avarnon-Set glared at her until she cowered behind Tarbet’s soaked mantle.

  Moon-chaser smiled to himself, and openly slipped his arm around the Youngblood girl. What was her name?

  “What’s that smell?” Farsa asked.

  The Archon’s eyes seemed agitated by the question.

  To Moon-chaser’s surprise, Avarnon-Set answered her. “That, I’m afraid, is the body of the late Muhet’Usalaq.”

  Farsa nodded. “So it’s all true then, isn’t it?”

  “So what’s all true?”

  Moon-chaser’s sister stepped to the center of the room. “That E’Yahavah’s destroying the world, and the Lits were right all along.”

  Moon-chaser wanted to throttle her, but Sariya beat him to it. She and the Witchy Girls leaped at Farsa, knocked her down, and started kicking her while they screamed curses over her. Only when Sariya pulled a knife, did Moon jump in to hold her arm back from plunging it into his sister. Varkun joined in, tossing several Witchies away from Farsa’s bruised body.

  A loud crack exploded above their heads.

  “Enough!” Avarnon-set roared.

  Moon-chaser turned from lifting his sister back to her feet, and saw that the Giant held his automatic hand-cannon above their heads. He bared a set of enormous canine fangs, which seemed to change the shape of his entire head into something not even partway human.

  Tsulia poked out from behind the Archon, and shouted, “Farsa, you don’t know anything, so keep your mouth shut! The Archon’s here to save us now!” She looked up at Tarbet like an obedient lap pet seeking a treat.

  Varkun took Farsa from her brother, and led her to the back of the room. Moon returned to the Youngblood girl.

  The others began to murmur—some angrily, the rest in confusion.

  The Archon raised his hand to silence them. “It would seem that some of the Lit sects may have had a little insight into this disaster that we lacked. That does not mean they were completely right, or that this is the end of the world—we do not know what goes on elsewhere. If we go up to Floodhaven in a friendly way, and offer to work with them to survive, they may accept us in. I can think of no other alternative at the moment.”

  Avarnon snarled, “We leave at daybreak.”

  Moon-chaser asked, “What if there’s an earthquake during the night? Shouldn’t we leave now?”

  “We take risks either way,” said the Titan, his face seeming to shift its shape into something almost human as the fangs retracted. “I’d rather we start out rested. If another tremor begins, go out the nearest exit.”

  Tarbet intoned, “The blessing of E’Yahavah goes with us!”

  Moon-chaser noticed that everyone laughed except Tsulia and Farsa. What’s gotten into my sister?

  Q’Enukki surveyed the cataclysm now from inside the lunar orbit.

  Space all around them sparkled in a refractive glitter-dance as fields of radioactive dust carried along by the core fragments bombarded the Earth. The fallout absorbed into the planet’s atmospheric turmoil washed down, and redistributed into rapidly eroding, transported sediments. Waves of particles from Tiamatu’s outer core swept by, depositing in thin layers, often mixing with Earth’s own volcanic exhaust of similar materials.

  The edges of the globe-wrapping steam-blast harvested Tiamatu’s radioactive mineral dusts directly from space, mixing them with condensing water that rained the particles to Earth in highly energized states. The dust underwent “radioactive decay” from “parent” to “daughter” elements—or so came the language used for it by distant future magi, who imagined they could simply measure that decay ratio to determine how old the world was. In the chaos below, widespread acidic leeching of radioactive “parent” elements from deposits comprised of materials that were originally created with varying ratios of “parent” to “daughter” isotopes, mixed, making it impossible for the magi of time’s end to know the starting conditions, and thus to get reliable dates.

  The rapid stretching of space-time during the early creation week had also massively accelerated radioactive decay rates. The magi of Time’s End—who would assume that “parent-to-daughter product quantity ratios” always equaled “elapsed time,”—thus came to overly simplistic conclusions about the Earth’s age. Superheated deposits in the mantle-crust margins near runaway subduction and rift zones also made the electron orbital shells of elements the Time’s Enders would call uranium, iridium, and strontium more unstable, allowing subatomic particles to escape their nuclei at faster rates. This drove limited nuclear decay speed-ups, with rift jets blasting the intense heat produced, conducted by the steam, past escape velocity right into space.

  Q’Enukki broke free of the many word echoes from the mages at Time’s End, and focused only on the cloud-cloaked Earth. His eyes easily penetrated the shroud with growing clarity.

  Aztlan and the Great Dragonwood rotated away from Lumekkor and Far Kush, conveyed on their fractured continental cratons by the roiling mantle beneath the crust. The spreading fissure continued to separate Aertimikkor from lands north, on its speedy drive for the South Pole. Oceans roared further inland over the fractures, instantly blasting away into space as explosive steam.

  The Fire-drake Jungle plate slid north, crushing the Far Kush headlands into lands someday to become Italy and the Peloponnese. Ae’Ri also rolled north, as the triangle of Dudael—a sub-plate to be called India—rotated on a collision course with the giant plate of future Asia. Although these events took many months, for Q’Enukki it seemed a matter of minutes.

  The end was swift for coastal regions and ships at sea. Mammoth, gravel-laden tidal waves and tsunamis swept up the few remaining seaports with a bedrock-scraping thoroughness that left virtually no trace of their existence. The top-heavy super-ironclads of Lumekkor and Aztlan, built for cannon stability rather than seaworthiness in monster waves, quickly capsized in the maelstroms of World-end. They sank; most of them battered to bits and driven by boulder-blasting super-currents into the subduction zones, where layers of lava and silt buried them deep in the fiery abyss.

  In these violent early stages of the cataclysm, the oceans would not have been safe even for A’Nu-Ahki’s ship. Speeding walls of sediment-infused water reached further inland with each wave. Eventually, the rising ocean floors cycled them over the continental plates entirely—but not yet. Since civilization lay mainly along the coastal plains, not in jungle interiors, super-tsunamis obliterated most signs of it, dumping the dismembered leavings into hungry subduction zones. Planet Earth would be scoured of the old world until most traces of it were lost forever deep in the ocean trenches or under the magmas of reduced post-World-end undersea volcanism.

  Q’Enukki briefly saw that the oceans of New-world would present new challenges to post-World-end sailors. The Earth’s depleted atmosphere, thinner, and given to greater air pressure and temperature differentials, would raise storms and wind currents unlike any before.

  The future vision dissolved into salt spray before Q’Enukki could learn more, when cries from below drew his attention back to the present. The world of men had not yet completely perished with the coastlands. Flatlands farther inland, like Upper Assuri, Nhod, Seti, and the Lumekkor p
lains survived the first waves, only to fall to later ones. Panicking people drowned in flooding rivers, or fell in giant hailstorms, meteors, or to the earthquakes. A remnant scrambled for higher ground, to places like Akh’Uzan, where people still lived on stolen time.

  Tzohar means a pearl of purest ray. Throughout the twelve months that Noah was in the ark, he had no need of the light of the sun by day, nor of the light of the moon by night. For he had a pearl which he hung up: while it was dim, he knew that it was day, and while it glowed, he knew that it was night.

  —Rabbi Levi

  an ancient Midrash

  8

  Subduction

  Soaked, A’Nu-Ahki closed one of two sliding shutters to the chaos outside.

  Visibility from the aft conning shack barely extended to the stern tether chain. The rain drove in from the west through the window in a horizontal line. Nu had seen what he needed. The pan drain still showed white water. The marker poles embedded in the kapar cement wharves indicated that, aside from what had pooled in the basin, the waters made a furious run-off. After twelve days, he had expected no different.

  Securing the shutter latch, Nu turned and squelched forward through the loft mezzanine, pausing only to inspect the secondary and tertiary drogue stone winches, and the whirring quickfire windmill rotors.

  About a quarter of the way to the bow, he had to divert around the main drogue capstan, and the top of the hull pool bulkhead. A thick metal cable spooled up into the capstan, with its line let into the pool. It attached to a gigantic flat anchor stone submerged beneath the ship on a platform at the bottom of the drydock trough.

  The spool-like capstan and the hull pool were designed to secure the rock’s weight far enough aft of the ship’s center of gravity that when the waters grew deep enough to release the tethers, the trailing drogue would turn the vessel into a following sea, while the wind foil above the bows reinforced the effect. The forward window would then be sheltered from the wind by the ship’s mass, giving them a clear view in their direction of travel.

  The hull pool was a rectangular slot fifty cubits long by nine wide that ran down the centerline, starting aft from amidships between the parallel keels. Its bulkheads were as thick as the main hull at the water line. A’Nu-Ahki could just about peer over the pool’s rim if he stood on his tiptoes from the mezzanine. Usually he used a stepladder.

  Rushing water inside the pool echoed up against its inner walls. A dim green refraction from the superstructure lighting pearls angled down into the hole danced across the overhead. Nu looked up at the pool lid suspended above the giant slot. The rectangular steel plate hung over the long aperture by two thick drive screws embedded in the overhead, and turned by lever-handled wheels on either side to lower it into place and clamp the pool shut. A rubber-rimmed U-shaped indentation fit around the drogue cable, at the pool’s aft end.

  The lid protected against giant waves that could swamp the vessel in a greater than forty-five degree bow-to-stern trough. A’Nu-Ahki prayed each day that the thing would never need using. In case it did, each section of the ship had a crystal oracle set connected to both the bow and stern conning shacks, to issue emergency orders ship-wide. Khumi had also rigged an ingenious counter-weight device that would trip the wheel locks, and automatically lower the pool lid by power of its own weight, should the oil-filled leveling sensor show that the ship’s bow-stern pitch exceeded thirty-five degrees for more than fifteen seconds straight.

  A’Nu-Ahki circled the hull pool and went forward. When he reached the end of the mezzanine, he climbed the few steps into the bow conning shack. This small cabin, housed inside the armored bowsprit, and above the forward tether capstan, was almost identical to its aft counterpart. Varnished mahogany paneling gave it an elegance that now seemed more appropriate for a study, but Nu was glad for the softened atmosphere. The only difference between it and the aft shack was a rotating chair within reach of the oracle set, behind an ornately decorated, console-mounted lodestone compass like those used on naval or large commercial vessels.

  Nu slid the window shutter open, and poked his head out. He was only able to lean outside the sill because he now stood on the leeward side of the ship. At a little past noon the sky was midnight black. Most of what he could see he memorized during split-second lightning flashes. The steady storm roar hurt his ears if he kept his head outside too long. Nu saw much farther without the rain coming in at him—about to the nearest breakwater.

  A massive pile of debris had accumulated behind the great V-shaped stone berm. Roiling run-off heaped into a mountain of silt and foam behind it. A’Nu-Ahki wondered what it would do to the ship if the embankment gave way, and released all its flotsam on them at once.

  “Nothing I can do about that. Nothing I can do about much of anything,” Nu muttered to himself. He came to a new appreciation for Khumi’s insistence that they spend as much time on the culvert system as they had on the ship itself.

  A shock of cold water hit him in the face. The winds shifted from out of the west to the extreme southwest. Nu waited to see if this was merely a gust, or if the prevailing winds would actually change. After a half-hour of steady northward drive—more than twice the duration of the longest known direction-change the typhoon had shown thus far—Nu concluded that the storm had perhaps reached some new phase. Exactly what that meant for his ship and crew, he had absolutely no idea.

  Psydonu of Aztlan clutched a dissolving hillock in Upper Akh’Uzan to keep himself from falling off into the crashing run-off of mud-saturated water. He had held himself there, the last survivor of his stranded command vehicle, for what must have been days—though day and night looked much the same now. He reviewed in his mind the sudden reversal of realities, to figure out the crucial missing word-formula that had wrenched victory from his expectant hands.

  For a week, the Titan’s armored chariot had sheltered him where he had parked it on top of the rise. Then an adjacent ditch had undermined the softened crest. Psydonu had barely escaped when the chariot sank over the side. His command crew had not been so quick.

  The rain pelted his hail-bruised face as he mentally replayed his misfortune. Farguti had fallen to his attack—still good. Psydonu personally beheaded Ahgni—getting better. Things continued to go well even after Avarnon-Set and Uggu escaped up the Akh’Uzan Road. Then, at some point, all the good omens in the strange weather turned on him. The volcano erupted, with the earthquakes, and the darkness that fell out of the west. Days of slowly driving uphill followed; his armies scattered in a complete rout under the forces of nature gone mad without warning.

  No, not without warning, he recalled with a sinking realization.

  “It’s not fair!” Psydonu screamed into the tempest. “I spoke the right words, believing the prophecies! This isn’t the reality I called up!”

  “On the contrary,” spoke another voice, quiet, yet louder than the storm, “this is exactly the reality you’ve called up all along.”

  The Titan looked across the muddy torrent at another softening knob of higher ground. A white-hot leonine Kherub stood there, unperturbed by the driving rain. The nightmare end had arrived. This time Psydonu knew he would not swim, unscathed or otherwise, to any golden shore.

  The ground shook again, opening the mud in a sucking howl. Psydonu lost his weakening hold in the clay, and struggled wildly against the whirlpool that drew colliding rivers of drainage into the widening crevasse below. Bloated and bashed bodies of people and animals crashed into his flailing limbs, exploding their putrescence in his hammered face.

  Hope grew for a fleeting instant when, for a second or two, the bodies jammed up the whirlpool. A lurch in the soup beneath him told Psydonu that the reprieve was nothing of the sort. Another wall of mud and broken bodies sped his way.

  The Kherub’s man-like face smiled, looking on with feline patience at the Giant’s shrieking efforts to tread mud, when the new gush hit. The Terrible One stroked a great trans-dimensional lock and key in anticipation of
Psydonu’s final destination—a prison of compressed sedimentary stone hidden beneath deep layers of searing magma from the Earth’s fiery interior.

  Q’Enukki watched as the plate subductions—now surrounding the Great Outer Ocean—accelerated, while the splitting continental cratons drove over them like giant fractured pottery shards. Colder, electrically insulative ocean floors curled in toward the Earth’s outer core in massive sheets, displacing hot, lighter, conductive mantle material upward toward the rift fissures. The resulting disruption of core-mantle electrical current induced rapid reversals in the Earth’s polar magnetic field.

  The signature of these magnetic reversals froze in the hardening lava that spread from the bulged-up undersea chasms, particularly in the pole-to-pole line that snaked through what had once been the Central Channels, but which the Time’s Enders would call the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The polar flip-flops magnetically imprinted in long water-cooled stone ribbons parallel to the rifts, as the new ocean floors spread out from the erupting chasm wrapped around the globe.

  Horrendous energy losses weakened the Earth’s magnetic field during each polar reversal, severely compromising the planet’s ability to ward off cosmic radiation more and more with each flip-flop. Q’Enukki saw that this great protective shield against harmful solar energies would function at only a shadow of its former strength in the world to come.