The mantle swells rose, forcing the globe-wrapping chasms to widen further. The eruption rift slicing through the South Kush Alliance-Firedrake Jungle plate sheared away the northeastern-most part of the tectonic slab, which broke into smaller plates in the shock of its own violent motions, and that of several asteroid impacts. The largest fragment rotated northward, eventually to become the Arabian Plate. One branch chasm dropped off into the confined Central Sea Abyssal, where it crossed the western end of the Assuri subduction zone.
This brought the end of the world-wrapping geyser plume much nearer to the south of Akh’Uzan than the pole-to-pole rupture along the Central Channels and through the Aztlan Sea. The prevailing winds shifted northward on one side of the plume, and southward on the other. It also slowed the ocean flood rise toward Akh’Uzan by providing a temporary rift uplift zone that counteracted the sinking caused by the subducting Assuri Abyssal Plain.
Even so, the ocean floors still rose, and with them, the invading sea.
The tiny cave stank of urine and feces. Outside, the storm howled as a billion gryndels unleashed from the regions of the damned. Somewhere near a week had passed since Farsa departed Q’Enukki’s Retreat with the others, under Avarnon-Set’s leadership. From a promontory overlooking the old castle, they had watched a quake slide A’Nu-Ahki’s ziggurat mound into the fortress, crushing through it and its walls, to run it all over the main trail cliff on the other side, only minutes after they left. They could not return downhill anymore even if they had wanted to.
The only positive thing Farsa saw in it was that the Titan inspired more fear in the others than either her brother or Varkun, which kept Sariya and the Witchies in line. Farsa was sure she had gotten at least two broken ribs from when Sariya and the Witchy Girls had attacked her at Q’Enukki’s Retreat. She coughed up blood sometimes, and ran a fever off and on.
Not far up the mountain from Q’Enukki’s Retreat, the trail had forked east into a series of switchbacks—the most direct route to the ridge. They had made it more than halfway up, until winds on an exposed stretch of trail had blown about twenty of the Hollowers off into the ravine. The others had taken shelter in the cramped cave for almost two days now, while prevailing winds ripped in from the west with growing fury.
Farsa huddled next to Varkun, afraid that the volcano on the mountain’s far slope would bring a landslide to seal them in. However, she feared this far less than the storm winds snatching her away to fall and die alone. At least here, their body heat would keep her warm until she suffocated.
Varkun rubbed against her, lost in some kind of introspective dementia. He muttered and cackled to himself, “Twenty-one days! Twenty-one days—two more makes twenty-one—I’ve come this far, if I can just get through two more days! Yes, my masters, then will the curse be broken…”
Farsa had no idea what he babbled about, and had long ago ceased to care. She had too many internal conversations of her own.
“Dying here wouldn’t be so bad,” she whispered. “I just don’t want to die alone, or flying helplessly through the air.”
Farsa looked at Varkun again. He rambled on quietly about the numbers two and twenty-one. Maybe he’s trying to lay odds on our chances.
Whatever Varkun’s view about his own survival odds, they became much poorer in Farsa’s mind when Avarnon-Set turned his wolf-ape head away from the mouth of the cave, and made an announcement:
“The wind’s shifted. It’s steady from the south now. The mountains shelter us. It’s time to move on!”
A lurch through the hull interrupted A’Nu-Ahki’s prayer, followed by the creaking of wood on wood. A rattling followed, as several chain rungs unwound from the fore and aft capstans to adjust the tether depth. Nu put his petitions for Sutara’s peace aside for the moment at the sudden rolling of the deck. He jumped up from his couch and rushed into the galley.
“I think we’re afloat!” U’Sumi shouted, who had raced forward from feeding the livestock.
“Let’s go to the aft shack, and check the runoff,” Nu said. “Khumi”—he motioned to his other son—“go to the forward shack, and see what things look like from there.”
The three men climbed the mezzanine ladder in the galley, and split off to their destinations.
When Nu opened the stern window, the noise of the storm almost threw him back. The winds were now from the south, near perpendicular to the portal. He scanned what little was visible outside, and noticed that the pan drain water had pooled for the first time, its surface now level with that of the hull-trough, and the ship’s waterline. Even so, barely enough water had accumulated to do more than shift the vessel in its drydock brace.
Nu closed the window, and turned to his son.
U’Sumi asked, “Do you suppose the oceans have reached us?”
“Too soon. If we went to the chart room, and looked at a relief map of Upper Akh’Uzan, we’d find a better explanation. The hills arc out from the mountains on either side of what used to be the Village Brook. The gap is probably plugged with hardened lava to make a natural dam.”
“We’re in a lake?”
“That would be my guess.”
U’Sumi’s eyes narrowed. “What happens if this dam breaks? We never expected N’Zar to explode! With heavy winds from the south, and the water getting deeper, our stretched tethers will allow the ship to drift northward. If the water level suddenly drops, it will land us off-center on the drydock braces. The girders could even catch inside the drogue pool or dash into the hull and lay us over if it happens fast enough!”
“That’s not our only concern, Son. The sinkhole we saw on the starboard side is likely still growing, and undermining the integrity of the dock. Khumi says on second thought that we probably should have built right from the trough on cushioned berms, but so much for hindsight.”
“What do we do?”
A’Nu-Ahki braced a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Don’t panic; E’Yahavah didn’t bring us this far to leave us shipwrecked. He had us make the ship with nine watertight compartments. This could mean we might need to use the seal doors. We’d better start practicing watertight integrity drills.”
The warbling call tone sounded on the oracle set. Nu pressed a lever to acknowledge the hail.
“Pahp, ‘Sumi,” said the crackly voice of Khumi from the bow shack, “you’d better come up here and see this!”
A’Nu-Ahki raced forward through the superstructure, terrified that the breakwater had shattered, and a mountain of debris would slam into the bows at any second.
U’Sumi followed, calling after him.
Nu climbed to the forward shack to find the window closed. Khumi hunched over the compass console, following the moving dial with his eyes. The three-hundred and sixty-degree directional indicator rotated slowly, as though the ship made a starboard turn. A’Nu-Ahki opened the window, and verified that the bow still faced the berm. The tether was secure, and the berm system intact, still holding back the Earth’s rabid foaming. He closed the shutters and examined the compass again.
At that point, U’Sumi joined them. “What’s going on?”
“Check out the compass,” Khumi said.
They all watched, mystified, as the dial continued to execute its non-existent course change. After almost an hour, the movement stopped of itself, but not before “north” nearly faced south. The compass wobbled in its new orientation, rotating in about twenty degree cycles to either direction.
“Could something be wrong with the compass?” U’Sumi asked.
“Not likely,” Nu said. “I calibrated it myself just a couple weeks ago. I think it’s the Earth, rocking like a drunkard somehow.”
“Then there’ll be no way to know our heading, once we release the tethers.” Khumi’s wiry compact body seemed wound-up tight as his voice.
“Not unless it stops before then.”
“Hey, what difference does it make?” U’Sumi’s casual smile was as relaxed as his brother was tense. “E’Yahavah’s destroyin
g it all anyway.”
A’Nu-Ahki glared at his middle son. “It makes a good deal of difference! The cardinal points are the only references we are likely to have in New-world. Or are you forgetting that we have a holy charge concerning the bones of Atum-Ra—to measure the lands, and bury his sarcophagus at the center place, where future generations can connect to their roots?”
U’Sumi shrugged. “So we’ll measure the lands with new cardinal points. I still don’t see the problem?”
Nu smacked the back of U’Sumi’s head a little less playfully than usual. “I don’t know whether you noticed, but the sun and moon were well outside their courses before the rains blew in. It’s not about the old world, but the new! If the sun winters as far south as I saw it in the sky just before the rain, we’ll see extreme seasonal changes unlike anything this world has ever had! I’d rather be able to predict those well in advance, and if you’re wise, so will you!”
By the close of World-end’s second week, over two thirds of all land-based life on Planet Earth had died. Q’Enukki watched over dissolving Akh’Uzan, mindful of the tiny ship moored in the new highland lake formed by hardened lava runs clogging the gap between the foothills. He glanced at other locations too, picking up disturbing impressions from future peoples, places, and events. These were only hopeful in that they reminded him that the cataclysm would not be the end of all things, but it was a strange hope.
Straggling remnants of humanity, and higher animals from inland regions, managed to reach a temporary stay of execution provided by elevation. The very rivers that used to be the world’s lifelines now exploded like the hardened arteries of a dying old man.
Most inland human artifacts met the same fate as the majority of land-based life—normal biological decay or deposition in surface sediments, which were soon scoured away by the Deluge’s violent retreat phases. The first such phase relocated the artifacts by sheet erosions, usually dumping them into the nearest subduction trench. Later cutting erosions, and then decades of tidal and tectonic plate instability continued, even after it became safe for humans to resume life on land at higher elevations.
Glutted water tables ate away wide clumps of forest vegetation—including whole stands of trees, especially in the drowning deltas of Zhri’Nikkor and Ae’Ri, where giant lycopod mats grew that drifted out to sea and became the Floating Lands. The scattered tribes of stunted Qingu often committed mass suicide by jumping into the ocean to feed the teeming leviathans. Violent folding of their vegetation mat islands crushed others. Most of the Floating Lands beyond the continental shelves, over the deep ocean abyssals either swamped, or flipped over in the speeding waves of multiple asteroid impacts. Still others swirled under in giant maelstroms.
The giant lycopod moss-vine mats proved no life raft for humanity, or anything larger than insects and small amphibians. Whatever birds and flying dragons inhabited the Floating Lands—and most everywhere else—deserted them in a chaotic migration call unlike what any winged creature had ever felt before. They died by the millions in the magnetic confusion that the ongoing polar flip-flops played on their internal navigation organs, which had summoned, and then destroyed their direction-finding ability over ocean. Most fell in the torrents and drowned.
Many of the Floating Lands, once buried by other sediments, became the vast Carboniferous coal fields burned as fuel by the dim people of Time’s End. Q’Enukki watched the newly deposited sediments separate rapidly into thinner layers, according to the weight of transported material, before they crystallized as slates, shales, and sandstones.
Rivers where the lycopod moss-vines were not indigenous also produced floating vegetation mats, when torrents ripped whole stands of trees from their roots, and washed them downstream in great logjams to the tidal waves and tsunamis. Vast root-entangled carpets of undergrowth floated with the logs, carrying exhausted animals using them as rafts. Walls of ocean water dredged the shallow continental shelf sea floors to re-deposit sediments in crushing layers over the river-transported forest mats.
When the waves retreated, animals fled from newly washed-in mats onto enormous sediment banks, leaving footprints in the calcium brine-saturated silt, or laying eggs in panic into hastily scraped holes. The overtaxed inland water tables could not redirect drainage around the vast mounds of mud, sand, and pulverized seashell. More ocean-born silt dropped onto these shallow sandbars with every new super-tide, reaching further inland each time and rapidly preserving the footprints and egg clutches under intense pressure.
Pooling rivers then deposited more floating mats of uprooted woodland over these crystallizing silt layers, which in turn covered the original lowland forests with more ocean sediments, as sea levels rose.
Stump-heavy waterlogged tree trunks deposited vertically, through many sediment layers. Later flood run-off would cut away these vast woodland graveyards to reveal a hardening layer-cake of forest remains, silt, more forest remains, and more silt—but few tree roots. The mats that escaped burial floated out over endless oceans as seeders for the new world, also carrying insects, amphibians, and small semi-aquatic reptiles that would survive to be the dominant life forms for a short time after the Deluge.
So much of Earth’s rain forests died in one week that the global ecosystem’s carbon dioxide-to-oxygen conversion machinery literally disappeared overnight. The atmosphere’s life-giving oxygen and organic carbon, tied up in this vast amount of plant material, became more coal, oil, natural gas, and various soil oxides, that would find use again fueling and lubricating the monstrous machines of the People at Time’s End.
Robbed of most its replenishment capacity, with gases chemically trapped through rapid fossil formation, limestone precipitates of carbonate-saturated rains, and those converted to petroleum, Earth’s atmosphere lost much of its original volume. Close-passing asteroids gravitationally pulled sheets of air into space in fiery split layers.
Then the Shadow struck.
More terrible than the dark storms, it reached for him like a groping black hand from out of the future. Q’Enukki’s disorientation became panic, as the echoes of spoken words reached him in multiple languages from the crushing layers of unfolding ages. He tried to sort through the mind-twisting information flow, but could only salvage that somehow a terrible presence would suppress different expressions of the same essential truth. Multiple myths from myriad civilizations would grow more adept with time at reinventing history to serve the shortsighted goals of transient overlords.
Behind the Shadow, an enormous ziggurat loomed, at times made of baked brick, primitive even by Q’Enukki’s architectural standards; at other times it gleamed with steel, glass, and quickfire—a form of building too tall and vast to comprehend. The Shadow remained the same, no matter how often the tower flickered back and forth between its varied forms.
As best Q’Enukki could tell, the Ziggurat somehow launched an all-embracing world system contorted by the Basilisk to erase—or at least distort—knowledge of E’Yahavah in the realm of human ideas. The dark tower would continue in one form or another, until destroyed by the great second World-end of fire that Q’Enukki now saw as a faint light at the end of a long black tunnel through the layered ages.
At the tunnel’s end lay another city, which sat on a hill as a beacon against the Shadow’s tower of delusion. Yet the Second City seemed eroded and beaten down, as corrupted in its own way as the Shadow Ziggurat. However, where the Second World-end’s fire would destroy the Ziggurat of the Shadow, the City on the Hill would be refined and remade. Here there was no ziggurat.
In this City on the Hill at Time’s End, two men watched the great burning, and even themselves directed the flames from heaven. Q’Enukki could not at first see their faces. One figure moved off toward some kind of temple gate, beyond sight. The other remained outside. The fires of World-end lit up the streets of this future holy city, which, soiled and destitute, lay in the ruins of its own infidelity, like an adulterous wife broken in her shame.
T
he man outside the temple mount stood before a pile of burning corpses—bodies of soldiers, statesmen, religious zealots, common thugs, and specially-trained assassins—hundreds of dead, so that the darkened air reeked with their smoke. Around the burning ones lay the charred skeletons of still others—blackened skulls of enraged teachers who had lost control of themselves, fanatical pilgrims incensed by the message of the man at whose feet their ashes now scattered in the hot winds. Q’Enukki looked up from the smoking bones to the now visible face of the one who stood over them.
The eyes that stared back at him were his own.
Farsa stayed close to Varkun for warmth and protection, though she got little of either from him. Breathing was hard. One of her broken ribs jabbed her diaphragm. She had lost track of the time since their climb had started up again from the cave.
Many more of her companions had since succumbed to mudslides or bad footing. She had seen so many of her life-long friends fall screaming to their deaths that it no longer even touched her. Though too exhausted and in pain for rage, she could not escape the devouring terror of dying alone. It seemed that the Voice of Comfort had forsaken her. I suppose I had it coming. I probably messed things up again somehow. I always do.
“The Helpers are still with us!” Varkun kept shouting. “The winds stay from the south, so the mountains protect us from the worst of it!”
If this is protection, then what’s it like on the other side? Farsa wondered. If that offer of hope beyond death is still open, I’m your girl!
Nevertheless, the “Voice” her heart cried for kept silent.
Moon-chaser also ranted about how the Helpers would soon lift them all out of the storm in their light-disks, once they reached Floodhaven. Of course, Farsa reminded herself, Moon has time now to play Speaker to the Helpers, with Tsuli hanging all over the Archon, and his little Youngblood slut lost in that landslide that almost took him with her! What a turd!
The Tides of Nemesis (The Windows of Heaven Book 4) Page 19